The 7 Functions Of Marketing & Why They’re Important
Want to develop a more successful marketing strategy? Then it’s important to know the seven functions of marketing.
Understanding the seven marketing functions is vital for any successful marketer or business. Get these functions right, and they will help you make more sales and expand your business growth.
Far too many marketers don’t understand the different functions they need to deliver. By having a clear understanding of this, knowing what KPIs to hit becomes a whole lot easier. It will also help you achieve a better return on investment for your marketing campaigns.
The seven functions of marketing are:
- Promotion
- Selling
- Product management
- Pricing
- Marketing information management
- Financing
- Distribution
We’ll break these down in more detail below.
- What are Marketing Functions?
- What are the 7 Functions of Marketing?
- Why are the 7 Functions of Marketing Important?
There’s a lot involved in marketing. Marketing functions are the specific responsibilities and areas of focus that marketers need to do.
Each of the functions of marketing is a broad pillar that includes various tasks, responsibilities, and strategies for a marketing team to work on. Running a successful marketing campaign gathers all of these considerations, which need to work seamlessly together.
Sure, every business may have the same overall goal from its marketing team – to increase sales. While this is true, there are several different strategies and operations that go into achieving this. Successful marketers need to combine a variety of tactics and operations in order to achieve their goals.
So, no matter how big the business is, what you sell, or who your marketing strategies are aimed towards, the seven functions of marketing you’ll focus on are:
- Promotion
- Selling
- Product management
- Pricing
- Marketing information management
- Financing
- Distribution
We will explore each of these functions of marketing in more detail below.
What are the 7 Functions Of Marketing?
Here are the seven functions of marketing and why they are important for any business.
1. Promotion
Promotion is all about developing brand awareness. This function of marketing is focused on introducing a brand’s products or services to its target audience, making them aware of the brand’s existence and what they offer.
Promotion is the most common function of marketing, and it can incorporate a wide range of marketing strategies and channels. Promotional strategies can include:
And more.
Promotion is often seen as the beginning of any marketing relationship between a brand and its audience.
Promotion serves the purpose of generating awareness and excitement around a brand. In order for promotion to actually generate customers, it needs to be used alongside the other marketing functions.
2. Selling
Selling is a function of marketing that is focused on generating potential customers from your promotions and brand awareness campaigns. This area of marketing is all about communicating with your potential customers and chasing down sales leads.
The selling marketing function needs to be done strategically and carefully. It’s all about building relationships with prospects, sharing the right content with them, and communicating with them in a way that turns an interested lead into a customer.
To get this right, marketers need to be subtle. They can’t try to just shove sales down their prospect’s throats.
The selling function of marketing involves introducing prospects to your product or service, educating prospects about what you have to offer, answering any questions about your brand, and differentiating your brand from the competition.
A key strategy here is understanding your product positioning in the market. What kind of value do you offer? What sets you apart? Why should a customer choose you?
Understanding and effectively communicating this is necessary for successful selling.
3. Product Management
Product management is a function of marketing that covers the development, design, and improvement of products and services. While this may sound like the role of a product designer, marketers need to ensure the finished product meets all of the needs and standards of their customers.
This process involves having a deep understanding of your customers, their interests, and their pain points. Then examine the delivered product and ensure it meets these standards.
Here are some of the most common and important product management strategies for marketers:
- Competitor analysis: An essential part of marketing is understanding the competition, what they’re doing, and what they offer. This will help you develop a product that is better than theirs or to find a gap in the marketplace that they aren’t fulfilling.
- Customer communication: Gaining insights from customers and understanding their exact needs and feedback before implementing new product changes.
- Feedback: Marketers need to gather feedback in order to continually improve their products and make more informed decisions. This includes gathering feedback from both inside and outside the organization.
- Collaboration: When you release or make changes to a product, it’s important to collaborate with other teams in your organization. Marketers need to lead this collaboration, generate ideas across the different teams, and prepare the company for a smooth product release.
To sum this up, product management is a vital role for marketers as it ensures the right products are released that match your customer’s needs. It’s also essential that enough buzz and value are generated around these products.
4. Pricing
Establishing the right price for a product or service is a tricky business. You need to understand the difference between cost and value and ensure your pricing strategy is strategically aligned with your market positioning and competitors.
While pricing is not always solely up to marketing professionals, it’s important that marketers play a central role in a company’s pricing strategy. This includes doing thorough market research, understanding the target market, following industry trends, and ensuring the product’s pricing matches your target audience’s marketing perspective.
Pricing and marketing are closely linked because a lot of value is often communicated through the brand.
For example, an expensive product will need to be marketed as high-end, premium quality, rare, or luxurious, while a cheaper product could be marketed as affordable, accessible, and offering great value. Whatever the case, this needs to align with your target audience and what they want from your brand.
5. Marketing Information Management
These days, marketing efforts need to be closely tied to data and analytics. An essential marketing function is gathering and storing data to base your campaigns around. This is necessary for understanding your target audience, their demographics, interests, behaviors, and more.
While data is important for creating marketing campaigns and promotional strategies, it’s also important for driving key business decisions. The more you understand your customers, the better you will be able to guide your business.
Some of the most classic ways to gather this data are through surveys, reviews, and market research reports. However, with so much data available online, marketers today can access highly detailed analytics about their audience. This can include data from social media reports, your website analytics, and reports from your marketing tools.
For example, you could look at email marketing metrics and KPIs to help you understand audience behavior. Or, you could look at social media reports to understand your audience’s locations. It’s also vital to understand how your marketing campaigns perform so that you know what to do more and less in the future.
Market research is the foundation of any successful marketing strategy. To do this properly, you’ll need to know how to gather and analyze data. This is why marketing information management is one of the most critical marketing functions.
6. Financing
One of the most important functions of marketing is securing funding for your campaigns. While there are many free and affordable marketing ideas, marketers still need a budget for things like ads, marketing tools, and team members. This means marketers need to ensure they have enough budget each year, or quarter, to run the necessary campaigns and stay ahead of the competition.
This can be one of the most tricky of the seven marketing functions because business owners want to see a strong return on marketing investment. Good marketers are able to show that their marketing budgets help to increase revenue, helping the business achieve an upwards trajectory.
The last thing any marketer wants is to invest heavily into a campaign and see little to no return on investment. Again, this is why performing enough marketing research is so important.
7. Distribution
Finally, marketers need to connect the company’s products or services with its customers. This is what distribution is all about. This can be done online or offline, through channels like:
- Online stores
- Retail stores
- Wholesale stores
- Catalogs
- Sales calls
And more.
This is one of the functions of marketing, as it’s a marketer’s job to match the right distribution strategy with the company’s target customers. You have to know where the most prospective customers are and how to reach them.
Marketing teams need to collaborate across departments to get distribution right. The entire process involves understanding the sales funnel, the most profitable and operationally sound distribution channels, and deeply understanding the brand’s target demographic.
Why are the 7 Functions Of Marketing Important?
Understanding the seven functions of marketing and getting them right is important for any company to achieve successful marketing results. The goal of marketing is to help a company increase sales, and each different marketing function works towards achieving that.
Many marketers run campaigns without fully understanding the effect this has on the entire business. In order to develop a more strategic and successful marketing plan, businesses should understand the different marketing functions and know the various tools and tactics needed to execute them.
This is important for developing a more well-rounded marketing plan that achieves a wider range of marketing opportunities.
Conclusion
Before you run your next campaign, make sure you understand the seven marketing functions and know what your campaign is set out to achieve. Ultimately, this will help you optimize your campaigns smarter and achieve a greater impact with each marketing effort you put in.
All of your marketing efforts should be set out to achieve something. By understanding this, you can adjust your tools, budget, and strategy in a more optimal way. This will help you achieve better results – making it easier to grow your business.
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