The term marketing literary means going to market to sell goods or services. Marketing is the process of creating interest in the products/services that a company is providing among the potential customers. Marketing involves researching, promoting, selling and distributing the products or services. It is all about anticipating needs and wants of the customer in future and a detailed study or market research is required.
Any Marketing whether online or offline consist of four elements which together form a Marketing Mix. The four components are:
First – Product: A product is anything that is offered to the market to satisfy a want or need of a customer. Products are merchandise in retailing, in manufacturing products are purchased as raw materials & sold as finished goods and in project management, project deliverables is treated as product. The specifications of the actual goods or services and its relation with end-user’s needs and wants are included in marketing aspect of the product. The product also includes warranties, guarantees and support.
Second – Pricing: It is the process of deciding a price for a product which may include discounts. The price may not be in terms of money always rather it can be anything which is exchanged for the product or services for example time, energy. Price is the only revenue generating element, all the rest are cost centers. Pricing can be either manual or automatic process, by which prices can be applied to purchase or sales orders.
Third – Placement (or distribution): refers to the channel by which product reaches the customer. It is sometimes called Place. Most of the times there is a chain of organizations involved which pass on the product to the next, finally reaching the end user. This is referred as channel. Each of the elements in the chain has its own specific needs.
Fourth – Promotion: consists of advertising, sales promotion, publicity and personal selling. Here the information about a product, product line, brand or company is propagated. Promotion can be in the media such as TV, radio, newspapers, internet and mobile phones. Other forms of promotion where customer is not aware that promotion is taking place are sponsorship, endorsements or personal selling.
These are the four elements of marketing popularly known as 4 Ps of marketing.
Internet marketing is the recent method that has been adopted by many, taking advantage of the immense impact of internet on day to day life. Systematic internet marketing has been instrumental in bringing more people to the website of the company, increasing customers for the business and developing branding of the company and products. Internet marketing is the online method of marketing which is very cost effective and efficient. With internet marketing strategy one can target the specific market and position the business in such a way that those looking for specific company or offers can easily find them. This is the first step of the sales process, very vital for the success of online marketing but one has to remember traffic marketing is not sales. The attention should be turned to selling to the interested customers once they get there. After all successful marketing is to increase sales.
Summary: This article gives in-depth overview of marketing whether online or offline. The precise meaning of marketing is described. The essential elements of marketing are product, pricing, placement and promotion which together form a marketing mix. It can be seen that all the four elements are equally important to make a complete marketing plan. Marketing is all about attracting and retaining strong base of satisfied customers. Internet marketing can bring interested customers to the website of the company, but it is the ways to have higher conversions to real deal in business, that’s going to help business to flourish. This can be done with proper online marketing strategy
