Introduction To Marketing

September 19, 2013

There are thousands of articles out there that are meant to serve as introductions to marketing. Many of those articles are great. What I wanted to accomplish in this article is to introduce the concept of the 4-pillars of a marketing campaign.

So in this introduction to marketing article, I want to introduce marketing with the concept of the 4-pillars of a marketing campaign.

Here is the 4-pillars of marketing:

1) The costs of the marketing efforts.

2) The scale of the people you will reach.

3) User targeting.

4) Conversion of people who learn about your business to becoming paying customers.

Here is a short video introducing marketing with the 4-pillars of any marketing campaign:

Marketing Costs and Understanding Customer Acquisition Costs

The costs of your marketing efforts can be quite tricky to measure because they are not always clear and distinct. For example, sometimes the true cost of your marketing effort is the time it takes for a particular marketing technique to begin to bear results. So you have to take into account the time it takes to get clients, and the man effort that is required. Conversely, once your marketing efforts begin to show results, the customers might not come all at once. For example, in case of SEO, once a page ranks in Google for a particular search term, it will continue ranking in Google for a long time and bring visitors to your site. And it is impossible to know for how many months or years that page will rank in Google and continue to bring you clients. Here is a full tutorial on understanding your marketing costs. Here is a video on marketing costs:

Understanding Your Target Market

One of the most important things that you can do in any effort is to correctly identify your target market. The target customer can be understood in two ways: demographics and psychographics. Demographics are objective things like income level, education level, sex, marital status, age, geography, etc. The psychographics are subjective things like a person’s needs, interests, desires, consumption patterns, etc. The more you understand about the demographics and psychographics of your target audience, the easier it will be to understand how to market to them. Here is a tutorial for how to identify your target market.

Scale Of Your Marketing Efforts

The next important factor is to understand the potential scale of people you will be able to reach. Try to leverage large platforms like Google search, YouTube, Yelp, or any of the other large sites which can drive people to your site who are a part of your target market. When you start, your marketing reach is usually pretty small. And for that reason it is especially important to be able to leverage another large platform to drive people to your business.

Lastly, Conversion

Once you get people to come to your site, you don’t want them to just look around and leave. Instead, you probably want them to perform some action like buying something, or signing up for something, or clicking somewhere. So you must work on your sales conversion funnel and optimize it with Ab testing. Here is a tutorial on AB testing.

And here is a tutorial on how to optimize your sales funnel.

Marketing Techniques

There are many specific marketing techniques you can try. There is online marketing, offline marketing, and numerous specific marketing campaigns you can try within each. Online marketing is notorious for social media marketing, marketing by getting press in large publications or blogs, search engine optimization, and a number of other techniques.

And here is an online marketing video tutorial:

Offline Marketing

Offline marketing is great because you get to meet people face to face. Each time you meet someone face to face, there is a bigger chance to create a bond, and lay the foundation for a long-term business relationship. Here is an article about the benefits of marketing your business with business cards and networking.

How To Get Referrals

You can get referrals online and offline. There are three kinds of referrals. First, there are social referrals where your friends either recommend you a service, or you ask them for advice on which service might be best to use. The second type of referral is a professional business network referral. And the third type of referral is a paid referral. Here is a more in depth article on how to get business referrals.

Further Marketing Resources

For more business-starting resources, please take a look at our business planning mobile apps. Here is the iOS business plan app and here is the Android business plan app. Additionally, here is the iOS marketing app. And here is the Android marketing app. And here are our business apps on the Kindle. And here is an article where I give the argument that our Android apps are the best business apps on Android.

And please check out and subscribe to my YouTube channel where we cover many marketing topics.