What Is Marketing? A Complete 2024 Marketing Overview

To attract customers and grow revenue, every company relies on a professional Marketing team. So what is marketing? What areas does marketing cover? What role does marketing play for businesses? In the article below, The7 will walk you through marketing basics all the way to the most popular marketing formats today. So what are you waiting for — let’s dive in!

What Is Marketing?

Marketing is the process of understanding customers’ wants and needs. In other words, it’s a set of communication and advertising activities aimed at determining what products can be produced at the right price, which are then sold to the market based on a predetermined pricing strategy.

According to Wikipedia, marketing is an extremely broad field of activity that includes:

• Marketing combined with communication strategy.
• Design.
• Brand development.
• Pricing.
• Customer psychology.
• Market research.
• Identifying potential customers.
• Measuring effectiveness.

So what’s the core of marketing? It’s a genuine understanding of what customers want and care about, in order to persuade them to buy your service. That’s the foundation for long-term company growth. To succeed, a business must constantly seek to understand customer needs, then use that understanding to add value through the topics customers actually care about.

According to Philip Kotler — the “father” of modern marketing — the definition of marketing is: “Marketing is the art of discovering, creating, and delivering value to satisfy the needs of a target market. Marketing identifies unmet wants and needs. It measures and quantifies the size of the identified market and its profit potential. Marketing also helps a company pinpoint which segments it can serve best, while designing and promoting the right products and services accordingly.”

What Role Does Marketing Play for a Company/Business?

By now you probably have a decent grasp of what marketing is, right? So what is the role of marketing, and why does every business need to invest in it? The sections below will give you the most detailed answer:

An Effective Way to Attract Customers

Attracting customers based on a target market is an extremely important goal for any company/business. Attracting customers is completely different from selling to them — it’s about providing customers with information about your business and new products/services.

Marketing consulting is the job of marketing specialists who work to attract customers and keep them engaged with the company/business. Your organization needs to let customers in on appealing details about your product/service that they don’t already know. Provide engaging content that persuades and satisfies customers, making the time they’ve spent with you worthwhile.

Building Relationships Between Companies/Businesses and Customers

Researching customer behavior and psychology to build a relationship with the public is essential for businesses. Modern communication and marketing help reputable businesses/companies satisfy customer wants and needs, thereby building a solid relationship and trust with them.

Once that relationship is established, the production department can ensure the service is delivered exactly on the committed timeline. This contributes to making customers more loyal to your brand and products.

Loyal customers are always ready to buy from your business again, eventually becoming a long-term, dedicated customer group. In other words, people buy the benefit a product delivers, not the product itself. Customer understanding and trust help a company/business generate more revenue as well as other tangible benefits.

The Right Marketing and Advertising Approach Boosts Sales Effectiveness

Full-service marketing applies many methods to distribute, promote, and deliver services/products — for example, promotions and discount strategies. Once advertised, a business’s product gets more opportunities to sell, while also sparking curiosity that makes customers want to try the new feature of that service/product.

When customers are satisfied with your business’s new product/service, they may become repeat buyers and unwitting brand ambassadors, recommending your product to many other people. As a result, your company’s revenue starts to climb. That said, make sure the quality of the service/product you deliver lives up to the effort behind your marketing.

Helps Businesses Maintain Relationships with Existing Customers

Most businesses believe they’re always the brand customers love. That mindset is a mistake. To maintain a relationship with your customers, you need to find ways to stay top of mind for them.

Online marketing makes this goal simple to achieve by helping businesses maintain relationships with their existing customers. You shouldn’t focus so heavily on finding new customers that you neglect retaining the ones you already have.

Opens Up More Revenue Options

In the early stages, a company/business usually has very few options because it doesn’t yet have much budget. Marketing strategies help your organization gain more potential customers and more opportunities to earn additional income — which in turn gives the company more options.

Having more options gives you the courage to push deeper into new markets. At that point, a business can afford to walk away from customers who demand too much or simply aren’t the right fit for the organization.

Given this important role, what areas has marketing and advertising branched out into in order to drive sales for companies/businesses? Scroll down and keep reading!

The Marketing Mix and the 4Ps of Marketing

While learning about marketing, you’ve probably come across the concept of the “Marketing Mix.”

So what is the marketing mix? The 4P marketing mix is built around 4 core elements: Product, Price, Promotion, and Place. When rolling out marketing strategies, marketers need to focus on developing these 4 factors.

The 4P marketing model also has variants such as 7P or 9P. That said, these variants are generally developed as extensions of the core 4P framework. Let’s break down these core factors with The7:

Product

First, a business needs to answer the question, “What product am I selling — is it a physical good or a service?” From there, marketers rely on their professional expertise to determine:

• What is the business’s flagship product line? Should new product lines be developed? For example, if you’re a car manufacturer, should your business also build crossovers, pickups, family cars, and so on?
• What steps does the product packaging process involve?
• What does the product maintenance and warranty policy look like?
• Are there return/exchange policies in place?
• …

Overall, marketers need to understand every aspect of a product’s design, uses, and features, along with other important information. Only then can they market the product comprehensively and effectively.

Price

Pricing isn’t just about setting a product/service’s sale price — it also involves determining a price that fits the market. When marketing on price, marketers need to find answers to the following questions:

• What’s the market rate per unit of the product? To answer this, marketers need to research the market, competitors, market pricing, and what customers are willing to pay, then arrive at the most suitable price for the product.
• When is the right time to discount the product, and how should it be rolled out?
• Should the product price be adjusted at set intervals?
• What payment methods should be offered to consumers? For example, when selling high-value products like cars, manufacturers should offer installment options rather than requiring customers to pay in full upfront.

Promotion

For a product to sell, a business first needs to let people know it exists. When promoting a product, businesses need to keep the following in mind:

• Which online/offline channels should the product be promoted on?
• Which channel will promote the product most effectively? (Online/offline channels, events, brick-and-mortar stores, etc.)
• What message should be conveyed so customers remember the product longer and are more inclined to buy?

Place

A product should be distributed at the right time and in the right location to reach customers most effectively. This raises the question: Where should the product be distributed? Should you use online or offline distribution channels? Where can customers actually get the product?

Marketing and Commonly Confused Concepts

In the marketing field, a few concepts tend to cause confusion even though they frequently go hand in hand. Let’s look at what they are.

Traditional Marketing vs. Modern Marketing

Traditional marketing and modern marketing are two terms that come up quite often. Depending on market conditions and different stages, each of these marketing strategies delivers its own distinct effectiveness. Here’s how The7 breaks down the difference between these two marketing concepts:

Key Differences

– Traditional marketing:

With this strategy, a business manufactures the product first, then determines the market segment afterward. As a result, traditional marketing focuses on producing and supplying familiar products already established in the market.

The weakness of traditional marketing is that it fails to forecast the future and doesn’t clearly define the target customer group or the marketing strategy needed to attract them.

– Modern marketing:

This marketing approach emphasizes conducting market research before starting to manufacture the product. Modern marketing shows its systematic nature through the following aspects:

• Analyzing and researching every stage and field
• Forecasting risks and situations that may arise in the future
• As you can see, modern marketing has an edge over traditional marketing in that it helps build connections between commercial businesses.

Similarities

Traditional marketing serves as the foundation — a basic marketing method that later evolved and expanded into modern marketing forms. Modern marketing has a broader scope than traditional marketing. This approach both boosts business performance and identifies customers’ real needs, allowing a business to improve or develop new products that bring customers even greater benefit.

Marketing vs. Branding

Marketing can influence a brand either positively or negatively. As a result, businesses need to choose marketing methods and strategies that create a positive impression of their brand in customers’ eyes — for example, by fostering approachable conversations and showing empathy for customers’ problems.

However, ads that appear at the wrong moment can interrupt a user’s website or program experience and make them lose their goodwill toward the brand. Constantly running ads or plastering banners and logos everywhere doesn’t automatically make customers pay attention to you. What matters is that the marketing strategy fits the moment to deliver the best possible results. That said, a genuinely compelling ad can still capture customers’ attention even when it interrupts their movie or music experience.

Marketing vs. Advertising

As analyzed above, a well-crafted ad can still create a positive effect even if it distracts users. To pull this off, you can experiment with ad formats that tell a story, are humorous, or evoke strong emotion.

In 1984, Apple achieved huge success by weaving a compelling story into its ad. However, major brands like Apple or Starbucks tend to run ads very rarely — because they understand that almost nobody actually likes ads.

Ads that auto-play on a website create an unpleasant experience for viewers, leading them to develop an aversion to both the ad and the brand behind it.

That’s why, when running advertising campaigns, businesses need to invest real effort into creating a genuine connection with customers.

Marketing vs. Sales

Sales and Marketing are two terms that often go hand in hand, yet they revolve around different activities within a business.

Sales

A sales team’s main job is to reach out to and persuade users to buy. They need to work with the marketing team to build strong, long-lasting relationships with customers. However, sales staff don’t offer any product evaluations or ask questions about who their target customers actually are.

Marketing

Marketers, meanwhile, focus on finding and attracting potential customers, providing them with valuable information about the product and brand.

In addition, marketers also need to run surveys and gather customer feedback on products. From there, marketers select the products best suited to keep producing and expand further in the future. In other words, the marketing team helps raise customer awareness of the brand and its products.

What Does Marketing Cover? The 15 Most Popular Marketing Formats in 2024

To better understand what marketing is, let’s look at the different areas (formats) this activity covers. Marketing, communication, and advertising come in many forms, serving customers’ ever-growing needs. These can be grouped into 15 main types of marketing:

• Outbound Marketing
• Traditional Marketing
• Inbound Marketing
• Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
• Digital Marketing
• Social Media Marketing
• Content Marketing
• Email Marketing
• Video Marketing
• Influencer Marketing
• Affiliate Marketing
• Word of Mouth Marketing
• Event Marketing.

Outbound Marketing

What is Outbound Marketing? This is marketing through TV, print media, email, and phone calls. This marketing format is called “Outbound” — meaning it’s a small piece within marketing’s much larger framework, since the brand pushes its message out to all consumers en masse regardless of whether they want, need, or accept it.

Inbound Marketing

In the Vietnamese market, Inbound Marketing is one of the less commonly mentioned marketing terms. So what is Inbound Marketing? Essentially, this format focuses on attracting target customers rather than interrupting them.

Inbound plans mostly center on Digital Marketing, since it naturally occurs during the shopping process when consumers search on Google.

The focal point of this marketing format is creating a valuable experience that positively influences the business and its audience, in order to generate potential customers.

Buyers come to your website because your content offers them real value. Once customers arrive, you draw them in with connection tools (a chat window or email), delivering a great experience while promising further value.

Traditional Marketing

Traditional Marketing refers to promoting a brand through entertainment and media channels that existed before the internet.

Because information wasn’t readily available or easy to access, this method relies largely on outbound tactics. Interaction with consumers mainly happens directly, in-store.

Examples include TV ads, print ads in newspapers/magazines, billboards, flyers, and magazine placements.

Digital Marketing

In contrast to traditional marketing, Digital Marketing is a solution that brings businesses many benefits. This method leverages modern, advanced technology to reach buyers of quality products/services in many different ways. This marketing type primarily uses the internet or electronic devices.

Businesses/companies leverage digital channels such as social media, search engines, websites, and email to connect with both current and future customers, while also boosting the business’s credibility in customers’ eyes.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

Search Engine Marketing, abbreviated SEM, is also known as search-engine advertising. This format encompasses marketing activities that ensure your new, quality service or product gets shown on search engine results pages (SERPs).

When a customer enters a specific keyword, Search Engine Marketing lets your company/business appear at the top as a search result.

There are currently 2 types of SEM:

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO) — which gives you unpaid search results.
• Pay-per-click (PPC) — for sponsored SERP placements.

To do SEO, you need to get familiar with Google’s (the search engine’s) ranking factors and content production.

As for PPC, you need to work under an online business model where you’re prepared to pay for placement on the search engine you’re targeting. Among these, Google Ads advertising or Display Advertising is a popular choice among users today.

Content Marketing

Content Marketing is an important tool within Digital Marketing and Inbound Marketing. This format’s activities include creating, publishing, promoting, and optimizing content for a company/business’s potential customer base, while also letting customers find the information they need on a marketing blog or website.

Social media marketing involves creating promotional content about a business’s products and brand on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

To help customers solve the problems they face while shopping, your business needs to identify what they care about when buying, then build and manage content accordingly.

Social Media Marketing

For your post content to connect smoothly with your target customer group, create content that’s interesting, useful, and fits the standards of that particular social platform. Thanks to social media, information about your product/service reaches customers in the fastest way possible.

Video Marketing

This is a form of content marketing. You can think of Video Marketing as conveying ideas through videos shared on social media, YouTube, and websites. It helps raise customer brand awareness while driving conversions that lead to closed sales.

Some video applications even let you nurture, evaluate, and analyze how promising a customer is based on their business activity.

Email Marketing

This is a way to connect with customers by sending promotional information or useful content to people who have subscribed to your company/business’s newsletter.

To strengthen the relationship with consumers, businesses need to personalize the marketing messages they send and nurture recipients with valuable, useful information. To use this format, your organization needs to build a list of consumers you can email.

Specifically, through an information form on your website, you use an email marketing service or automation software to send emails, then simply track and monitor email performance.

Influencer Marketing

What is Influencer Marketing? This is a marketing process that works through influential individuals, helping businesses tap into engaged communities on social platforms.

Influencers are people with significant influence within their community; they can help your company promote your product/service to the audience you want to reach.

To get started with this marketing format, you need to identify the type of influencer you need, then target influential individuals and draw up a list of relevant criteria, such as:

• Scale of influence.
• Activity level.
• And the influencer’s interest in your business’s product/service.

Next, look for suitable influencers on social platforms (using agencies or influencer marketing platforms). Finally, maintain the relationship with these influencers so they continue giving your company’s product/service room to be promoted.

Affiliate Marketing

What is Affiliate Marketing? Affiliate marketing is a model where services are marketed through online channels and product distributors. In this model, affiliate marketers get paid by suppliers once a customer buys the item they promoted.

If you already have marketing tools with high engagement on social media or high traffic, Affiliate Marketing lets your business make the most optimal use of them.

Choose a brand that fits the product you’re selling, or a complementary service that isn’t a direct competitor, to promote to your customers.

Word of Mouth Marketing

What is Word of Mouth Marketing? This is arguably the most trustworthy marketing format today, where customers promote a company/business’s service or product to other people.

To drive more word-of-mouth activity, you need to focus on developing the best possible service and delivering top-tier products to customers.

In addition, before satisfying your own goals, you need to satisfy consumers’ wants and meet their needs. Once that happens, buyers become more loyal and trusting enough to connect other potential customers — their friends or family — to your service.

Event Marketing

This involves planning, then organizing and running an event or program to promote a business’s product/service and brand.

Events can take place either online or in person. Your company can act as the event organizer, or take part as a sponsor or a traditional exhibitor/marketer.

Many organizations also use their experience and expertise to take part in events as speakers, sharing useful information with the event and its target audience. In return, that organization’s brand becomes known to attendees.

On the other hand, some events offer on-the-spot promotions to attract attendees and turn them into buyers. Their purchasing actions prove that your company’s marketing campaign is on the right track.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

The term “SEO” is no longer unfamiliar to marketers today. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) refers to the set of methods used to improve how a website ranks on search engine results pages (SERPs).

Customers today typically research product information online through search engines like Google.

That’s why SEO is considered a solution for attracting customers organically — giving consumers the initiative to search for information themselves, rather than passively encountering a product/service the way they do with ads.

Print Marketing

Although online news sites are increasingly dominant, plenty of target customers that businesses want to reach still maintain the habit of buying print newspapers and magazines. That’s why “Print Marketing” remains a format worth considering.

Businesses can boost their brand’s reach by sponsoring publications that run articles related to their product/service, thereby capturing the attention of customers who regularly read newspapers and magazines.

 

By now, you have a solid understanding of what marketing is, right? In an era where technology keeps advancing and social media usage keeps growing, marketing is an indispensable part of any company/business that wants to grow and cut costs. That’s precisely why businesses with specialized products/services need to invest even more heavily in marketing activities.

If you don’t yet have marketing experience, don’t worry — let The7’s Online Marketing Service help your business. We offer solutions for:

• Digital Marketing Services
• Online Advertising Services
• Marketing Strategy Consulting

Every marketing plan here starts from genuine customer insight, which is how we build effective marketing strategies applied across every touchpoint.

Beyond explaining what marketing is, The7 also publishes many other articles. Follow our blog and keep up with more useful, valuable information. And if your business needs detailed marketing strategy guidance and a partner to run comprehensive Digital Marketing effectively, connect with The7 today!

Learn more about marketing through these articles:

• What Is Digital Marketing? 10+ Digital Marketing advertising formats every marketer should know
• What Is Affiliate Marketing? Concept, pros and cons, and how to implement it A-Z
• What Is Content Marketing? 45 of the latest content trends for 2024