What Is Marketing? Learn 4 Principles of Marketing

Today’s consumers have access to more information and choices than ever before. Capturing their attention with an effective marketing strategy can make all the difference to the success of your business.

But what is marketing, exactly? And what tools should you use to build a modern marketing strategy for your business? Learn the basics of what marketing is and how to leverage marketing tactics for your business in the guide ahead. 

What is marketing?

Marketing is the strategic process of promoting your products or services to your target audience. It involves understanding customer needs, defining your value proposition, and communicating through various channels to drive awareness, engagement, and sales.

The term “marketing” encompasses a broad range of strategies designed to help you identify, reach, and convince prospective buyers. 

These marketing strategies include: 

• Market research: Understanding your target audience is a key step toward building any marketing strategy. Uncover details like their demographics, pain points, and where they browse online. When you more deeply understand your ideal customer, you can more effectively create customer-focused marketing content that speaks to their needs—not yours. 
• Advertising and promotion: Connect with consumers by advertising a product or service yourself, or hiring an advertising agency that will create a campaign that aligns with your goals.
• Social media strategy: Reach potential buyers where they spend their time by creating conversations about your product or service on social media. 
• Public relations: Reach out to media outlets to broaden the reach of your brand.
• Customer acquisition and retention: Build relationships with consumers and the media to expand the reach of the message. Effective customer acquisition strategies balance attracting new customers with keeping existing ones engaged.
• Print marketing: Connect with prospective customers via signage, newspapers, magazine ads, and other traditional distribution channels.
• Digital marketing: Reach consumers via internet marketing on social media, video platforms, search engines, blogs, and other digital marketing channels.

While the end goal of your marketing practice is to sell your products or services, a great marketing plan is about much more than the point of purchase. It’s about positioning your product in the public consciousness and creating brand loyalty built on lasting relationships with your customers. 

Marketing vs. advertising

While advertising is a crucial component of marketing, it represents just one piece of a comprehensive marketing strategy. Marketing encompasses the entire process of bringing a product to market and maintaining customer relationships, including product development, pricing strategies, and distribution planning.

Meanwhile, advertising specifically focuses on creating and placing targeted paid content and earned media campaigns across various channels in service of your overall marketing strategy.

You can think of marketing as the complete blueprint for business growth, with advertising serving as one of many tools to execute that plan.

Why marketing is important

The importance of marketing extends beyond getting immediate sales. A solid marketing strategy drives the success of your business by connecting products with the right customers at the right time. Without effective marketing, even the best products can fail to reach their potential audience or generate sustainable revenue.

Marketing matters for businesses of all sizes because it:

• Drives customer demand: Marketing creates awareness and interest in your products, turning potential customers into active buyers. 
• Informs purchase decisions: Through educational content and clear messaging, marketing helps customers understand how your products solve their problems, making them more confident in their buying choices.
• Builds brand reputation: Consistent marketing efforts establish your brand’s identity and values, differentiating you from competitors and creating lasting impressions in customers’ minds.
• Nurtures customer loyalty: Ongoing marketing communications keep your brand top of mind, encouraging repeat purchases and turning satisfied customers into brand advocates.
• Fuels revenue growth: Strategic marketing investments typically generate returns of $5 for every $1 spent, making it one of the most effective ways to scale your business sustainably.

How success is measured in marketing

Measuring marketing success helps you understand what’s working (and what’s not), so you can optimize your strategy for better results next time. To that end, it’s essential you track some key marketing metrics. 

Typical metrics you can use to gauge the success of your marketing efforts include:

• Total revenue: This is the total amount of money coming into the business. The more people are receptive to your marketing efforts, the more revenue you’re likely to generate.
• Sales growth: This measures your ability to increase revenue over a fixed period of time. This is calculated by comparing sales revenue from different periods, such as year-over-year or quarter-over-quarter. 
• Customer loyalty: You can use multiple metrics to measure customer retention, including customer lifetime value (abbreviated as CLV or LTV), which measures the profit margin a company can expect to earn from an entire relationship with an average customer; repeat purchase rate (RPR); and customer loyalty index (CLI).
• Return on marketing investment (ROI): This is total revenue generated divided by the amount of money you’ve invested in your marketing campaigns. Current industry benchmarks show that successful marketing campaigns typically achieve a 5:1 return on investment.
• Conversion rates from online marketing: These rates show the percentage of users that interact with your advertising and eventually make a purchase. The average ecommerce conversion rate hovers around 2.5% to 3%, although top-performing businesses often achieve rates of 5% or higher.

The 4 Ps of marketing

Marketing professionals often refer to the components of their marketing mix as the 4 Ps of marketing. Achieving the right combination of these elements is the key to successfully marketing your business.

1. Product

A product is what a company offers to its customers. That can include an idea, a service, or a physical or digital item. As a marketer, it’s your job to take the product and assess its unique selling proposition (USP). That means considering how the product can fulfill a need in the market or solve the pain points of your customers. Essentially, your USP is the secret sauce that makes a product stand out from its competitors. A clear value proposition also helps communicate why customers should choose your product over alternatives.

2. Price

Marketing and product pricing strategies go hand in hand. No matter how talented your marketing department is, it’s difficult to sell a $10 banana (too expensive compared to the rest of the market) or a $1,000 car (customers might wonder why it’s so cheap).

Pricing your products isn’t quite as simple as slapping a price tag on them. Successful marketers research competitors’ prices and understand how they can justify a higher product price—or ensure that a lower price won’t convey that their product is inferior to similar products in the market.

For example, cosmetics pioneer Helena Rubinstein raised prices of products that weren’t selling well to make women perceive them as more desirable. Getting creative with customer perception like that is a useful way to approach pricing. There are a number of proven psychological pricing strategies for you to test out for your business. 

3. Place

Place is where and how a company distributes its product. Will it sell exclusively online, through a physical storefront, via partnerships, or through a combination of distribution channels? Modern businesses increasingly adopt an omnichannel approach, ensuring customers can purchase products wherever they prefer to shop—whether that’s online, in-store, through social commerce platforms, or all of the above.

Marketers then drill down to figure out how that product will be positioned in its place. For instance, if you're marketing potato chips, you’ll need to consider where exactly on the shelf and where exactly in your online store those chips will be placed. That process involves considering visual merchandising, or the way you visually position products in your store to best highlight them and attract customers. 

Retailers often charge promotional, advertising, and stocking fees to feature products in a more prominent place in their stores. Grocery stores, for example, charge “slotting fees” to place products at eye level (or a bit lower, at a child’s eye level) so shoppers can easily see and grab products as they go through the aisles. Companies spend billions annually on trade promotions and slotting fees to secure prime retail positioning.

4. Promotion

The fourth P is the way all these components are integrated into a comprehensive marketing strategy through promotion. 

Your promotion mix can take many forms, including these popular strategies: 

• Free trials or a free gift with purchase: Incentivize customers to try or buy a product.
• Sponsorship of a sports team or event: Attach your brand to an activity or pastime that your target customers follow, thereby building brand awareness.
• Traditional or digital advertising: Reach audiences with a hard sell or memorable story that keeps a product or company in consumers’ minds. This approach might include traditional advertising channels like billboards or print media, or digital advertising channels like social platforms or podcast ad spots.
• Guerilla marketing: Use the element of surprise or unconventional marketing methods to attract attention to a product (e.g., projecting the number 30 on landmarks worldwide to promote an album titled 30).
• Viral marketing: Create a hook or angle so catchy that word spreads on its own, without needing to spend money to fuel it.

Types of marketing

There are two primary categories of marketing: inbound and outbound. Inbound marketing is a technique that draws your target audience to your business. Outbound pushes your messages out, usually via paid advertising. 

Beyond these core approaches, businesses like yours can employ various specialized marketing types to reach specific audiences and achieve distinct goals. Learn more about these different types of marketing below.

Traditional vs. digital marketing

Understanding the differences between traditional and digital marketing can help you allocate resources effectively and reach customers where they’re most engaged.

Traditional marketing uses established offline channels like print ads, television commercials, radio spots, billboards, and direct mail. These methods offer broad reach and can build brand awareness quickly, though they typically require larger budgets and provide limited tracking capabilities.

Digital marketing leverages online channels including search engines, social media, email, and websites. Digital approaches offer precise targeting, real-time performance tracking, and often lower costs per impression. Small businesses especially benefit from digital marketing’s accessibility and measurable results.

The most successful businesses today use an integrated approach, combining traditional and digital tactics to maximize reach and effectiveness. For example, a clothing brand might use Instagram ads to drive online sales while also investing in billboard advertising in key markets to build brand recognition.

Inbound marketing

Inbound marketing is the process of building a relationship with your customer base. You can develop these relationships through email campaigns, compelling content marketing, shareable social media, or even great web design. Inbound is generally a non-intrusive type of marketing where you are meeting the customer where they’re already looking for solutions.

Inbound marketing examples include:

• Influencer marketing: Brands leverage the power of an individual with an engaged following to promote their brand and influence potential buyers. In influencer marketing, a celebrity or content creator might be paid to feature a product on their Instagram profile, be photographed in public using a product, or appear in a traditional TV ad. The influencer marketing industry is projected to reach $33 billion by 2025, reflecting its growing importance in marketing strategies.
• Viral marketing: A phenomenon named for how quickly and broadly a message can spread, getting a product to go viral is the dream of many marketers—but the formula for virality is difficult to get right. Successful viral campaigns are deeply in touch with their target audience, who feel strongly enough about the product to share it with their own networks. For example, the fast-food chain Popeyes launched its chicken sandwich in 2019 with a campaign that is a prime example of virality: The campaign used a single, two-word tweet to spark a war of words with competitors, creating a word-of-mouth campaign so large that the product sold out nationwide within days. 
• Search engine marketing: Marketers can make a product more searchable, and therefore more visible to potential customers, by using specific keywords and phrases in the product description or on the webpage. These kinds of practices, known as search engine optimization (SEO), enable search engines like Google to recognize a product and increase the chances that it will appear more prominently in the results of your target customers’ searches. You can also use search engine marketing (SEM) tactics to buy spots on search engine results pages to increase the chances of reaching the right prospects. 
• Content marketing: Content marketing helps you build credibility by positioning your brand as a resource for information and advice relevant to your niche. As a content marketer, you can employ tactics like storytelling, actionable tips, and educational guides to build a relationship with your target audience. Research shows that 70% to 80% of marketers actively invest in content marketing, making it one of the most widely adopted strategies.
• Social media marketing: Marketers use social networks like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X, and LinkedIn to raise consumers’ consciousness about a product. Social media marketing can help you build interactive relationships with your audience where they already spend their time. With social commerce sales expected to reach $2.9 trillion by 2026, social platforms have become essential for driving both direct sales and brand awareness.

Outbound marketing

Outbound marketing involves a more direct approach than inbound tactics. With outbound marketing, you’re demanding the attention of potential customers, typically by using more fine-tuned targeting techniques that reach them directly. 

Typical examples of outbound marketing include:

• Targeted advertising campaigns: You can run print or digital ads on a variety of channels. For example, you can finely tune who your ads target with Facebook or Google ads. 
• Cold calling or cold emailing: These are often costly and time-consuming approaches, but they can be effective in certain industries, such as B2B tech companies aiming to acquire new enterprise accounts. 
• Direct mail: For most of us, our email inboxes and social feeds are much more saturated with ads than our physical mail boxes are these days. Direct-mail marketing taps into that by investing in eye-catching flyers, postcards, and catalogs—mailed directly to your target audience’s doorstep.

Relationship marketing

Relationship marketing focuses on building long-term connections with customers rather than pursuing one-time transactions. This approach recognizes that retaining existing customers costs significantly less than acquiring new ones, with studies showing it can be five to 25 times more expensive to attract a new customer. Returning customers also spend 67% more on average than new customers.

Successful relationship marketing strategies include personalized email campaigns, loyalty programs, exclusive member benefits, and exceptional customer service. For example, a coffee shop might use a mobile app to track customer preferences and offer personalized drink recommendations or birthday rewards. These efforts create emotional connections that transform customers into brand advocates who provide repeat business and referrals.

Brand marketing

Brand marketing establishes and promotes a company’s overall identity, values, and promise to customers. Rather than focusing on individual products or campaigns, brand marketing builds the overarching narrative that shapes how people perceive and connect with your business.

Effective brand marketing creates consistency across all touchpoints—from your logo and visual branding to your messaging tone and customer experience. This unified approach helps businesses stand out in crowded markets and command premium prices. For example, consider how outdoor clothing company Patagonia built its brand around environmental activism, attracting customers who share those values and are willing to pay more for products that align with their beliefs.

Emerging marketing trends in 2025

The marketing landscape continues to evolve rapidly, with artificial intelligence, advanced consumer insights, and sophisticated data analytics reshaping how businesses connect with customers. It’s helpful to stay updated on emerging trends like these so you can find new ways to improve your business’s marketing plan.

AI-powered marketing

From content creation and SEO optimization to predictive analytics and chatbot interactions, AI-powered marketing tools are transforming every aspect of the marketing process. AI applications like these help marketers work more efficiently while delivering more personalized experiences. Recent data shows 70% to 80% of marketers already use AI to optimize their campaigns, with adoption rates climbing steadily.

Data-driven marketing

These days, marketers use sophisticated analytics to track customer behavior, test creative variations, and optimize campaigns in real-time. This approach enables precise targeting and measurable results, with businesses seeing average conversion rate improvements of 10% to 25% when implementing data-driven strategies.

Neuromarketing

By applying neuroscience principles to understand consumer behavior, neuromarketing offers deeper insights into purchasing decisions. By studying how brains respond to marketing stimuli, businesses can create more compelling messages and experiences. For example, neuromarketing research helps explain why certain colors, words, or layouts drive better results, which can help you design more effective marketing campaigns. 

Start marketing your business today

Marketing is a creative, relationship-driven discipline. The most successful marketing campaigns understand their target audience, craft powerful messages, and find creative ways to deliver those messages. Ready to boost your brand’s credibility and more effectively promote your products? Start building your marketing plan today.