10 terms you should know about marketing

1. Marketing

Marketing is a collective term for the set of activities that a business organization undertakes in order to promote the buying and selling of its products and/or services. This set of actions increases the buzz around the company and its offerings, attracts more customers and makes them interested about the company’s products and services, and ultimately, aims to increase the sales. Marketing can be done for all kinds of businesses, such as sole proprietorships, partnership firms, private companies and public companies.

2. SEO

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is different from search engine marketing. SEO involves optimizing the content on the company’s website, so it organically features higher on search engines.

3. Marketing strategy

A marketing strategy refers to a business entity’s or an individual’s plan of action to spread awareness about its products and/or services to its prospective and existing consumers. The aim of a marketing strategy could be to convert potential leads into active consumers, or to retain existing consumers. It involves various aspects, such as the business’s brand messaging, its action plan involving its value proposition, and what it does with the data points that it has on the intended target demographic.

4. Target audience

The target audience for any business is the group of people who will be interested in using the product or service being marketed. These target groups can be segmented based on geographic, demographic, psychographic or behaviour-based parameters.

5. Marketing mix

A marketing mix is a list of ingredients that are required to create the right marketing strategy. The ingredients here refer to certain concepts, practices and procedures.

6. The 4 Ps of marketing

The 4 Ps of marketing are the product, the place, the price and the promotions made to the product visible to the public eye. Companies can make use of these four factors to identify what their consumers expect from them, and recognize how an existing consumer base reacts to the products or services that the company offers.

7. The 5 Cs of marketing

The 5 Cs of marketing (company, customer, collaborators, competition and climate) essentially point to a framework that companies use to understand the current environment in which they operate. It allows them to analyze certain key factors such as the advantages, the disadvantages, and the challenges they face. This, in turn, enables companies to formulate a marketing strategy in accordance with these key factors for maximum success.

8. SWOT analysis

A SWOT analysis is a straightforward yet effective tool that companies can use to assess where they stand in the industry and in the sector they belong to. An acronym for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats, SWOT analysis has been established as a tried and tested method to appraise a company’s position. But the beauty of SWOT analysis is that it can be used for a variety of purposes, including assessing a marketing campaign, an individual, and even a country.

9. Porter’s 5 forces

First conceptualized by Micheal E. Porter of Harvard University, the framework of Porter’s 5 forces is basically a method that’s used to analyze the competition of a business. According to Porter, one of the main reasons that led to the development of this analysis framework was the lack of thoroughness of the SWOT analysis. So, he identified 5 major forces that are capable of impacting the profitability of a business. These forces are industry competition, threat of new entrants, power of suppliers, power of buyers and the threat posed by substitute products.

10. BCG matrix

The BCG matrix is a framework developed by the Boston Consulting Group (hence the name BCG). It is also known as the Growth Share matrix, and it is designed to help companies get better at strategic planning over the long term. It also makes it possible for companies - and practically, any other kind of businesses as well - to review their product portfolio, identify the areas in which they need to invest and make decisions about developing new products or discontinuing old ones.

The BCG matrix works by plotting market growth against market share. There are 4 categories of products according to the BCG matrix, namely stars (high growth + high market share), cash cows (low growth + high market share), question marks (high growth + low market share), and dogs (low growth + low market share).