The marketing process

                                                          

Hey there! Hope everything's going well. 

Ever wondered what differentiates a successful product from an unsuccessful product?
Although success is a subjective term, we are talking money (profits) here.

Let's talk about the marketing process and observe a few awesome companies to address that question. The marketing process can be considered to be a four step process :

1) Objective → 2) Strategy → 3) Tactics → 4) Financials

In this blog we will go step by step through this process and learn about each step in detail.

Objective : We try to answer the question 'What are we trying to accomplish?'. That's literally all we do in the objective stage, figure out our 'what'. We do this by further researching the 5 C's of marketing.

The 5 C's of marketing are :

1) Customer : Who will benefit from our product/service?

2) Company : What is the brand image and goal of our company?

3) Competitor : Who are our competitors, and how can we be different?

4) Collaborators : Who are going to work with us to create, improve and market our product/service?(investors, content creators, etc)

5) Context/Climate : What are the external factors that are not controlled by our business? (economic trends, laws, etc).

Strategy : In this part of the marketing process, we try to figure out how we will execute our objectives. Strategy can be further broken down into three parts segmentation, targeting, positioning.

1) Segmentation : A segment is a group of people that share one or more similar characteristics. We can divide consumers into segments based on behavior, demography, psychographics, geography.

2) Targeting : Targeting is all about choosing the segment that we want to serve, and we believe that our product/service will solve this segment's problems.

3) Positioning : After deciding the target audience we establish our value proposition for our target audience. Positioning is all about coming up with our value proposition for the consumers.

Tactics : Tactics are what help us execute our strategy and reach our consumers. The 4 P's of marketing i.e. product, price, place, promotion help us establish our tactics.

1) Product : What is it that we offer our consumers?

2) Price : What price does the consumer have to pay to purchase our product?

3) Place : Where can the consumer find my product?

4) Promotion : How will the consumer get to know about my product?

Financials : 'Show me the money!' This is the final stage of the marketing process and it's all about figuring out about our financial success with our product and marketing campaign. There are three metrics that help us determine our financials :

1) Margin : This is simply the about calculating the profit by subtracting the cost from revenue.

2) ROI (Return on investment) : This is another way to calculate profitability. It basically focuses on the revenue compared to the amount invested.

3) CLV(Customer lifetime value) : The total monetary value a customer provides throughout his entire journey with our product. This metric is more relevant for subscription based models.