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What is Marketing? Marketing is the act of creating awareness and interest in a brand or product. The goal is to get customers to purchase your product or service. There are two types of marketing: Direct and Indirect. Direct marketing involves advertising directly to consumers through various media such as television, radio, print ads, billboards, etc. Indirect marketing refers to the promotion of brands through other channels such as word of mouth, social media, etc. Direct marketing is usually done through paid advertisements. In contrast, indirect marketing is free and relies on word of mouth. This type of marketing has become more prevalent than direct marketing over the last couple years because it does not cost companies money. Instead, they use resources from volunteer employees. These volunteers will talk about their favorite products and services to people at school, work, and places like restaurants. As you can imagine, this method is very useful for the company. It saves them money and also produces higher quality leads. You may ask why do I need marketing? Do the things that we learn from marketing apply to my business or organization? Why should I care? Well there's no doubt that the world would be better off if everybody followed all of the rules that are taught by marketing, but when you think about it in practical terms, most people don't follow any rules, especially when it comes to marketing. People are always looking for ways to make money without working hard so they'll always try to find an angle for getting free stuff with little effort on their part. If you were going to market someone though, wouldn't you want them to actually know how you came up with that idea? Wouldn't you want to teach them something new, so they could duplicate your success? That's just something marketers do everyday, it's called teaching people how to sell themselves; afterall who wants to hire someone else to do the selling for them right? When thinking of marketing, the first thing that probably pops into mind is television commercials. Sure, TV commercials have been around since the beginning of time, but did you know that most businesses started way before anyone ever thought of using television to advertise? Most businesses used word-of mouth to start spreading the word about their products. This means that marketing isn't solely dependent upon advertising. People would go out of there way to help others because they wanted to share their knowledge and experience with other people. Today, many people prefer to spend much less on traditional marketing methods and instead focus more on sharing ideas online through blogs, forums, and discussion boards. You might even read some books written by famous businesspeople. Although these individuals didn't pay thousands of dollars to publicize the books on TV and Radio shows, they still managed to build a sizable audience. |
