What is the marketing process?

The marketing process is all the steps a company takes to analyze market opportunities, identify a target customer, and create a multifaceted marketing strategy to interact with those customers and qualify leads for the sales team. The goal of the marketing process is to make potential customers aware of the company's existence and build the brand's identity so that the company can sell to those customers.

If you don't have a marketing process, or even a marketing research process, it's time to take a deep breath and start drawing one up. Why? Because marketing processes are the foundation that informs all of the other efforts in your business, from the pricing strategy to the positioning strategy to the go-to-market strategy. Consistent with this, they help businesses better understand their customers' needs and wants, which, in turn, help them to better develop products and services that best meet their customer's needs.

By going through the process of researching the market, identifying the target audience, and developing a marketing strategy, businesses can create campaigns that resonate with their customers and ultimately drive sales and growth. Ultimately, market processes help businesses to track and measure the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns, allowing them to optimize their strategies and tactics to get the best possible results. This, in turn, helps businesses to save time and resources by focusing their efforts on the channels and tactics that are most effective.

While marketing processes can vary widely depending on the company and the industry, they generally have four phases:

Defining the brand. The first step is to define who you are as a company. It's not good enough to simply say, "IT services." You need to spell out what problem you solve and why it is that you do what you do.

A well-developed brand should be able to answer the following questions:

• Who are my customers?

• Who are my competitors?

• What problem do I solve?

• How am I different from others who solve this problem?

• What kind of personality do I want my brand to have?

Creating a customer profile. You can't create a marketing strategy without knowing who your customer is, and that's where a customer profile comes in. That is why creating a customer profile is the second step of a good marketing process.

A good customer profile breaks down the following common aspects about individual customers:

• Age

• Education level

• Gender

• Job title

• Interests

• Needs and pain points

• How they currently solve their problem

Developing a strategy. Now that you know who you are and know who your customer is, you can put together a comprehensive marketing strategy. This marketing process should be integrated, meaning all marketing channels -- video, blog posts, social media, print, and the like -- are working together to communicate the same message.

Tips for developing a strategy include:

• Explore marketing partnerships

• Have a myopic (narrow) focus

• Evaluating and adjusting the strategy

Evaluating and adjusting the strategy. The last step is to track your data and produce actionable reports based on marketing analytics that tell you which channels are working the best for you and which aren't. The most effective way to do this is by using marketing software.

Tips for evaluating and adjusting your strategy:

By following these steps, companies can develop a comprehensive marketing process that helps them create products or services that meet customer needs, build brand awareness, and achieve their overall business goals.