What The Hell Does Marketing Actually Mean?

Don’t be put off by the terms that get thrown around when it comes to marketing. The truth is you don’t need to have a marketing degree to know the ins and outs. The truth is a lot of people in marketing these days have taught themselves, this is due to the fact that there are lots of easy-to-follow material out there to help you such as books, websites, articles, forums, videos etc. Essentially you want to be creating shareable content and advertorials to draw in potential customers. Acceler8me offers marketing strategy consulting that’s why we thought it’d be a good idea to help our readership out with a clear definition of what marketing actually means.


Marketing is a collection of strategies that businesses do to attract Reactive Sales – customers that come to you. You also have Proactive sales – which is when a salesman sells to you. With this in mind please forget the following term that is thrown around by a lot of marketing graduates that is – Branding.

Don’t get me wrong branding is important in areas such as retail, especially if you have to choose between two products in front of you, an example being choosing either Coca-Cola or Pepsi. However, in startup land, you have no money and therefore you need to focus on sales, cash in the till not branding at this point, you can focus more on this later down the line.

 

All marketing needs to have is a Return of Investment (ROI). This means that you need a method in place, an example being, a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) or another method to manage how many leads are coming in from certain activities. You can then adjust these as fit, to see what changes will affect your reactive sales and or your lead generation. Marketing can be as much as changing a user interface, the images on your website to pay per click advertising or SEO. At the end of the day, it is a huge mixture of activities that you use to essentially get customers to buy from you.

 

Here are some terms you will hear in marketing terms that are important;

 

– SEO, SEM and PPC

‘SEO’ stands for (Search Engine Optimization) and in simple terms this involves increasing search traffic to your website, an example would be changing your graphics to grab the attention of potential customers, this is related to organic results (coming up automatically on the search engine when people are searching for your service/product directly).

 

You may have also heard the term ‘SEM’ which stands for Search Engine Marketing, also known as paid search, which means you use specific methods to going the extra mile and drawing in customers through videos, more expensive graphics etc.

 

Lastly, PPC stands for Pay-Per-Click advertising. A company might use this if they only want to pay the advertising company everytime a customer clicks on their ad to purchase via your website. You see these a lot pop-up on search engine sites.

 

– Social media marketing (SMM)

You would use this method to promote your business on social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc. This method has become increasingly popular in the 21st century, as around 97% of companies have social media platforms.

 

– Digital marketing

This is similar to the term of marketing of products or services but you are using digital technologies, such as sharing content on the Internet, phones, display advertising.

 

– AdWords (Google AdWords)

This is an advertising service provided by Google for businesses wanting to display ads on Google, considering it is the most successful search engine in the world and would be most beneficial to use. The AdWords program enables businesses to set a budget for advertising and only pay when people click the ads. The ad service is largely focused on keywords, for example, if you are selling protein shakes your keywords would be things like; weight loss, fitness, protein, juice etc.

 

– Adwords ReMarketing

– Standard remarketing is an AdWords feature that allows you to show ads to your past visitors as they browse websites and apps on the Display Network. You may have come across these when you browsing the web and an ad pops up teasing you about that new car you were dreaming about selling.

Dynamic remarketing, also a feature of AdWords that lets you show ads to past visitors that have any products or services they viewed on your site.

 

– Content

This means creating informative, interesting, relevant and relatable content to attract, entice potential customers to your site. It is also a great way to reassure your customer about your services and address any queries they might have. Your objective here would be to engage with your target audience (You can read more about finding your target audience here: LINK)

 

If you take anything from this article take away the fact that if you don’t know something then use the resources out there to find out. In this day and age, you can find out anything. Also, don’t be afraid to ASK for help, this is where we come in, we offer in-depth consultations which can act as your 101 guides to marketing. We can help you come up with a method on how you are going to lead your customers in and a strategy that will help you continually manage your marketing tools.

 

Get in touch with a member of the team today!

 

Brad Channer,

Director, Accler8me.