Marketing Aspects | Phimation

An in-depth look at the aspects of marketing

There are many markets and many customers, with many needs and situations. Marketing strategy outlines the high-level approach by defining:

Target market and customer - whom you want to buy from you
Value proposition - how you make your customer’s life better

Product definition - what you’re selling (especially any “extras”)
Positioning - how your product differs from alternatives
Pricing - the pricing structure (e.g., subscription v freemium v single-buy)
Channels - how you will get your promotional messaging and your product to your customers

Marketing Strategy

Systems and Technology

A “tech stack,” whether simple or complicated, is necessary for marketing. The basic system functionality you need:

Email - communicate with your list of contacts and see who is engaging
Landing Pages - easily set up pages to target a specific audience or offer

Lead Nurturing - set up “workflows” to educate prospects about their needs and your products
Blogs - a place for you to offer articles on a regular basis
Social Media - a way to easily manage your social media posts
Lead Scoring - a way to identify prospects who are showing buying behaviors
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) - a repository for customer information
Analytics - The ability to evaluate engagement data

People

Although marketing departments often start with just a single person, there are several roles needed when a company commits to generating marketing-driven revenue:

Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) - Defines the strategy and provides marketing insight to assess the data and choose the right tactics to use

Marketing Director - Oversees marketing campaigns and projects
Marketing Manager - Carries out marketing campaigns and projects
Marketing Administrator - Carries out tasks associated with campaigns and projects
Specialist - Someone with expertise and experience in a specific area of marketing
Agency - A group of specialists who cover multiple areas of marketing

Campaigns and Tactics

Campaigns are “recipes” of marketing tactics designed to get a specific outcome. For example, if you want to generate new leads, your campaign could include a combination of:

social media ads
paid search
PR
online content offers

Or your campaign could include:

paid search
trade show exhibiting
direct mail
follow-up emails

Or a dozen other combinations of marketing tactics. Which is what marketing so challenging, and why it is more art than science.

Experiments

Nobody knows The Answer for what will work at this time for your business in your markets with your offer. We can speculate. And some hypotheses will be better than others. There are likely recipes that will be more successful, but it will likely take a lot of experimenting to discover them. This is an important skill in marketing today.

Project Management

It used to be that you needed to know marketing to manage marketing campaigns. Now, you can gather experts-for-rent and use off-the-shelf tools to get a lot of maketing tactics done. But someone has to play traffic cop with all of that work, so project management is an important skill in marketing today.