What Is Business Marketing?

Perhaps no other business function is more misunderstood than that of marketing. Most businesses view marketing as simply a fancy advertisement or a new company catalog. Few realize that marketing is arguably the most important aspect of business growth. A successful marketing strategy can mean the difference between business won or lost and ultimately whether a company is able to connect with its customers. In order to increase market share, a company must have a solid marketing plan and a solid sales team to capitalize on the leads generated through those marketing efforts. So, how does marketing help put businesses in front of customers? When it comes to understanding marketing, it’s important to look at the how and the why. What does the company do and how can a company best get this message out to its customers? This is the ultimate message and purpose of marketing. It’s meant to take the best qualities of a company and condense it into a clear and concise message to its customers. There are several different types of business marketing initiatives and they are best explained below.

Brand marketing initiatives

When companies want to illicit loyalty and immediate recognition of their products, they adopt an aggressive brand marketing strategy. An effective brand marketing strategy includes providing a clear message recognizable by the company name, logo, symbol or even catch phrase. It’s ultimately meant to illicit an emotional response in the customer in order to entice them to purchase. Successful brand marketing means customer will immediately identify with the company and recall past experiences.

Online marketing campaigns

Regardless of whether it’s a business or the general consumer, all use the internet to locate and identify needs. This includes using keywords and phrases to search for appropriate matches. A large portion of marketing success is to be able to isolate these keywords and phrases so that search engines like Google immediately bring up the company in question. A successful online marketing campaign includes marketing a business through its website or blog. A company may choose to use search engine optimization companies in order to isolate those important keywords and phrases in order to make it more likely those searches will result in matching it to the company.

Direct mail, telemarketing and email campaigns

When it comes to reaching large volume customers in a short period of time, companies call upon the benefits of direct mail, telemarketing and email campaigns. These marketing initiatives are best accomplished by using business to business data lists that provide companies with essential contact information on key players within a given industry. Commonly referred to b2b data lists, these lists are available in an easy to use database. They provide not only phone numbers but also email and company addresses and essential business information about key players in a given industry.

Each of these marketing initiatives by themselves will achieve certain results. However, used together, they accomplish much more. A successful brand marketing strategy is always used in combination with online marketing, email, telemarketing and direct mail campaigns. By combining each of these approaches and using them together, a company can not only shorten the time it takes to reach customers, but also incentivize them to return and remain loyal.

Internet marketing takes advantage of the unique ability of the internet to reach a wide audience for products or services that are for sale. It is basically the process of advertising something over the internet. The techniques for internet marketing have changed as the internet has shifted over the last few decades, but the basic tools are still the same. Internet marketing firms utilize banners, images, links, articles, and search engine optimization to drive traffic to their sales sites in the hopes that some of the people who visit the site will purchase one of the items that is being advertised.

One of the businesses that uses internet marketing quite a bit is called online affiliates. These are websites that provide marketing for a company in return for a commission when items that are being advertised are sold. There are thousands of affiliate marketers who create web sites and work to drive traffic to those sales sites. Affiliate internet marketing allows people who are talented at online advertising to make money through commissions without ever purchasing a product to sell. The product's manufacturer receives a great deal of internet marketing for his or her product, while the affiliate marketer receives payment every time a product is sold.

There are many internet marketing strategies in use today. Some marketing firms utilize newsletter e-mail services to advertise their products. Others focus on creating sites that will draw high rankings on search engines. The idea is that if a potential customer is looking for a certain kind of product or service through a search engine, the customer will already be interested in the products on the marketing page that they are led to through search engine results. The placement of banner advertisements on pages that draw a large amount of internet traffic is another popular internet marketing technique.

Internet marketing strategies have begun to find ways to take advantage of the large number of web consumers who spend time on social networking sites. Internet marketing has to be done a little differently on these sites to draw the best results. Internet marketing firms are creating social networking pages and interacting with other social networking consumers to advertise their products through a friendly, word-of-mouth sort of way.

No matter what technique is being used, internet marketing is a business that is growing exponentially. People are becoming more comfortable with shopping online. Internet marketing tries to help people find the products they need and purchase them on the internet.