What are the 5 major steps in a marketing process?
The marketing process is how companies provide valuable products or services to customers and build strong relationships with them to get value from customers in return. Then the marketing process extends to designing a marketing strategy based mainly on the needs of the desired customer.
Understanding the market and customer needs
Understanding the market and customer needs is the first step in a marketing process. Innovative products or outstanding services do not usually arise from thinking only of financial returns. The correct course of events begins with an understanding of the market and the needs of the customer to make the most appropriate decision before starting the steps of product development, and only then the creative competition appears.
Perhaps the most famous example of this is one of the famous companies today such as Uber, which did not seek to develop new cars with the latest models and amazing capabilities but thought and studied the needs of the customer. After studying the market, it became his main vision to provide a solution to the problem of finding a taxi anytime and anywhere in the world when needed.
Conducting marketing research
The
marketing process involves “market study” or as we call it “market research” which is a technical study based on collecting data that allows entrepreneurs to identify the intentions, desires, and needs of customers, as well as many important details about the performance.
Understanding the market and customer needs is to initiate the compilation of the available data. You likely have data that you can use, and you can review past surveys of customers who are interested in the same services or products you offer or intend to start working on.
There are two ways to obtain such information :
The first research and survey process: When you conduct such research, collect and analyze information.
Secondary search and survey process: When the search process is done through a third party, and such results are available to those who want to access and view this information. Some examples of this include academic studies and reports that are verified by private companies.
Plus there are customer interviews, call logs, and support services, all of which will open up a good source of information for you. You will not need to finance extensive and costly research campaigns. Once you've ensured that you have all the data on the Internet at your disposal, you can set a budget for researching data you don't have and more advanced answers to the questions you have in mind.
Market research is done by answering a set of questions through interviews, answering via email, or via social media.
Here are the main next steps:
Determine the main objective of the study or research. Are you doing this for a specific product or your business as a whole?
Who is your target audience? Are they your real customers or potential consumers, for example?
How many people will be interviewed?
Determine the questions to be asked, the simpler and more direct the better.
Conducting research through the selected channels.
Extract the collected data.
Analyze answers and plan the next steps based on this data.
Create A Marketing Plan
The basic step in the marketing process is to create a marketing plan, Every successful company needs a well-thought-out business plan to determine its course of action. Marketing strategy is an essential part of that plan. It shows a lot of important information, including how the company will differentiate itself from the competition and what goals the team is striving to achieve. A complete and effective marketing strategy can reveal many opportunities by studying new customer segments, following changes in pricing strategy, or by distinguishing a brand from the competition.
How to develop a successful marketing plan to help you in the marketing process?
There is no doubt that the success of any marketing campaign depends on the quality of the marketing plan developed. Here are the most important steps that you must follow to design a successful and effective marketing plan.
Define your business mission
Your first step in writing a successful marketing plan is to define your mission. Be specific in your goal for this marketing plan. For example, if your business mission is to “make a travel booking an enjoyable experience,” your marketing mission might be to “attract and educate an audience of travelers about the tourism industry and convert them into users of your company’s reservations platform.”
Key Performance Indicators
KPIs are metrics that help you set short-term goals within your mission and communicate progress to stakeholders.
In the previous example, let's say you're setting up a marketing plan to attract an audience of travelers to book their flights through your company. In this case, your KPI will be Page Views. As tracking your website visits will be an indicator of how successful your marketing plan is. Not only that, the conversion rate is another KPI, which indicates the number of people who have booked their flights through your company. There are many performance indicators by which you measure the success of your marketing plan.
targeting and segmentation
Define your target audience personality (the buyer persona) is a description of the buying mindset of the buyer you want to attract.
This can include :
- age
- gender
- location
- family size
- job title
The personality of each buyer should directly reflect the current and potential customers of your company. Therefore, all business leaders must agree on the personality of the buyer that the company aims to attract through the marketing plan.
Identify your competitors
Knowing your competitors is one of the most important parts of a marketing plan, which will help you make the right decisions in this regard. So, before you start writing and preparing your marketing plan, conduct an analysis of your competitors, and get to know their strengths, the gaps in their business, and the strategies they follow in their marketing campaigns.
An important step in a marketing process. When a company intends to launch a new product, create a marketing campaign or make any modification or change in its strategies, you must analyze the market in which you are operating to obtain important and valuable information that can help it to ensure the success of its business.
For example, if you intend to launch a new product in the market, conduct new research of this type. This study can help you in identifying details regarding the amount of money that potential customers in the market can pay, the advantages of the product, the size of the market, the color or method The customer wants to get the product, and other details. These details can help the entrepreneur find a point of balance so that your customers as well as your business can get the benefit.
Marketing Mix
In the wide world of marketing, the concept of “marketing mix” lives, which contains four elements, all of which start with the letter P, hence the other name for this marketing mix (4Ps)
1- Product
2- Price
3- place
4- Promotion and advertising
They must always be in a state of equilibrium so that the company or organization can reach its ultimate goal, which is to arouse the desire to buy and sell among people.
Product
The first pillar of the marketing mix is the product or service, that is, what your company offers to its audience.
But this pillar does not only talk about the product but also includes the value that it can bring or achieve to consumers and customers.
When you define and clearly explain the characteristics of a product, it becomes easier to design attractive and useful strategies for the target audience.
To provide a unique and complete description of your products or services, we remind you of several useful and important details:
- The aspects that your product or service can satisfy and provide to the public and consumers.
- The way or manner in which the product or service can satisfy these requests (its functions, features, benefits).
- How can people and customers use it and benefit from it?
- Detailed characteristics that characterize a product or service: name, formal or semantic description.
- The qualities that distinguish the product from those offered by competitors.
Price
The second pillar of the marketing mix is the price, which is one of the important pillars that determine the extent of demand that the product will witness. It is also responsible for the perception and impression that potential customers will have about the product or service in the market.
During the pricing process for the product, it is important to set a price that secures your profit and, at the same time, is compatible with the purchasing power of customers and in line with the average prices of similar products in the market, and that this price must also be consistent with and consistent with What you provide to customers of value and benefit.
When a product is scarce in the market and offers a lot of benefits, such factors are reasons that justify a possible increase in the price of the product.
Factors that determine and influence the price of a product or service:
- Production costs, labor, and raw materials.
- The value and benefit it brings to the consumer.
- Competition and products that compete with yours.
- Factors and influences that may always play in price changes and fluctuations, such as festive seasons, distinguished customers, geographical areas, purchasing power…etc.)
Place
The third pillar of the marketing mix is the space or place. This pillar is responsible for how the potential customer or consumer reaches the products or the brand. That is, this pillar is directly related to the distribution and sales channels.
Determining space is much more complicated than opening a virtual or physical store. This process involves identifying the places where people who may have an interest in your products or services are located and presenting them in places that will be visible to them and can be purchased.
The first step to identifying distribution channels is to discover the places that potential customers use to search for your products and services:
Are they using social media or social media? e-commerce sites or points of sale and physical stores?
Next, you must determine the logistics necessary to fulfill these requests and secure products and services.
We leave you with some questions that can help you determine the element of place or space:
Is it necessary to increase the number of members of your sales team?
What tools and equipment do I need to have to distribute products in the best places?
What aspects and points can be allocated in each of the channels to obtain positive results or increase such results?
In the case of online business, it is useful to invest in the field of advertising, so that potential customers can learn about your products and services and your brand, at the moment they need what you offer, and through the appropriate channel that they use constantly.
Promotions and advertising
The fourth pillar is promotion. This pillar is not related to special offers, but to the business, promotional actions, and marketing of the brand and the products it offers.
It is necessary to put in place the appropriate and correct procedures and actions that make the potential customer know your product and see it as the effective and beneficial option to eliminate all the problems he suffers from.
Here are some of the ways you should go and help you run your promotional business:
- Determine the best promotional channels: the social media that potential customers use frequently or identify the places that the potential audience frequents and resides in.
- Find the most recommended days and times to promote and market your business
- Check out the actions and actions that can give you the best results, and discover the best types and formats of content that can help you present your business and products in the best possible way: Image: text, video…etc. Also, pay close attention to the language you use.
- Take a look at what your competitors are doing to promote their products and services, and discover the strengths and weaknesses of each of their strategies without imitating them.
This information that we have mentioned can help you to get a better idea of the type of action so that it can generate the best results and influence your target audience.
To reach more focus on marketing strategies, and take into account many important issues and aspects, including the nature and characteristics of the target audience, the positioning and positioning of the brand in the market, and the issue of dividing the audience into market segmentation, three other pillars appeared in addition to the four pillars that existed
The marketing mix is now made up of 7 elements:
https://assemblo.com/guides/what-are-the-7-ps-of-marketing/
Relation management
There is an organic link between the Public Relations Department and the Marketing Department and their activities, and this relationship may be clear about identifying suppliers, their positions, and their impact on the sales and raw materials market. The marketing department is an executive department.
Combined strategies between marketing and public relations:
The relationship between marketing and public relations is a direct complementary relationship, and to achieve this integrated relationship for the problems of any institution, it is necessary to work to achieve its goals through a common method, work program, and an integrated framework that combines the two activities within the institution, which depends on major steps, which include reviewing the current situation For the institution and its products and services from the point of view of consumers, define and define the desired location for the company and its products and services, and develop appropriate objectives, policies, and strategies for marketing and public relations. A detailed work program and a timetable for its implementation must be determined.
Marketing is not complete without public relations:
Public relations play a major role in marketing, and many cases enable public relations activities to complete the marketing objectives of the organization. How public relations complement marketing many, for example, the contribution of public relations to promoting the brand and the company’s products and services or promoting its quality. In this way, it contributes indirectly to the efforts made by the company to promote its products, services, and solutions, or public relations may contribute to the events of some Changes within the institution, for example, it may intervene to improve the nature of the institution’s dealings with its customers in a way that helps to win more customers, (that is, in these ways, it contributes to marketing, but indirectly.)
Marketing cannot succeed if it does not work with public relations for many reasons, the most important of which is that marketing alone is not able to confront the increasing attacks from consumers against companies and their objection either to the quality of the product or whether the use of the product is safe, and the increasing government control over the company’s products and the growing interest People with the contents of the purchased materials and what goes into their manufacture or composition have become more intense than before, forcing those concerned with advertisements to justify everything they say in the advertisement according to the needs of the public.
The visual, audio, and print media, including newspapers, magazines, and websites, have become more critical of institutions and interfere in their work than before. For this reason, marketing cannot stand alone in the face of the conditions in which it operates, and here comes the role of public relations to communicate with these means to clarify the picture and provide appropriate explanations. according to need.
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