You’ve poured your heart into your product or service. You’re excited to bring it into the world. Now, all you have to do is get potential customers as excited as you are. But how?
With tens of thousands of products, brands, and businesses competing for our attention every day, what inspires someone to choose yours? Effective marketing holds many of the answers. As Gary Vaynerchuk, entrepreneur and CEO of VaynerX, put it, “Great marketing is all about telling your story in such a way that it compels people to buy what you are selling.”
Learn the basics of marketing, how to apply foundational strategies to grow your business, and how to start building a brand that attracts customers.
What is marketing?
Marketing is a strategic approach to determining what customers need and how you can best communicate that your product or service meets those needs. What you’re selling is obviously important, but who you’re selling to—and how you reach them—is just as essential in making this equation add up to success. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg: Product development, pricing strategy, marketing channels, and your target audience all factor into your complete marketing strategy.
Marketing vs. advertising vs. PR: What’s the difference?
If marketing sounds similar to advertising or public relations (PR), that’s because they’re closely related components of the marketing funnel. In other words, all advertising or PR initiatives are marketing, but the marketing umbrella covers more than those two things. Here’s how they differ:
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Marketing. Marketing is the entire strategy you utilize to cultivate an organic audience. Posting helpful content or engaging with your audience on social media are both marketing. So are advertising and PR. But think of them as specific states within the wider country of marketing as a whole.
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Advertising.Advertising is a paid tactic within a broader marketing strategy. It focuses on promoting specific marketing messages—often around products, offers, or building brand awareness—through paid placements. This includes traditional formats like print, radio, and billboards, as well as online advertising like Google Ads, sponsored social media posts, and display ads.
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PR. While advertising and marketing help widen the reach or deepen the influence of your brand, PR manages its image. PR focuses on supporting your brand reputation and boosting trust and credibility with your audience. Think hosting an event at a conference, getting featured on a podcast, or writing a press release.
Why is marketing important for small businesses?
A great marketing strategy can help a business on any level. For small business owners in particular, it can help you cut through crowded spaces, attract new customers, keep the ones that already love you, and drive growth. These are just a few ways marketing can help you:
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Raise brand awareness. Even if you have the perfect product for someone, they can’t buy from you if they don’t know you exist. Consistently putting your message out there helps you get on potential customers’ radars. It helps them understand what your business stands for, what makes it stand out, and why you’re the best choice to meet their needs.
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Build brand loyalty. Once someone makes a purchase, marketing helps deepen the relationship. The trust and connection you build through thoughtful marketing can turn one-time buyers into brand advocates, generating the kind of word-of-mouth growth that money can’t buy.
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Achieve greater relevance. Today’s consumers expect more than generic messages. In fact, Salesforce found that 66% of customers expect companies to understand their unique needs and expectations. Good marketing listens to customers first, then speaks directly to their pain points, goals, and desires.
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Increase sales. Of course, all of this ties back to your bottom line. A well-executed marketing strategy increases conversions by turning attention into action. From choosing the right marketing channels for your business to crafting compelling copy, your marketing elements work together to generate more revenue and support growth over time.
Marketing 101: How to get started
- Understand the 4 Ps
- Get to know your target audience
- Select your marketing channels
- Track relevant KPIs
- Assess and evolve
Marketing doesn’t have to be a massive undertaking—once you understand a few marketing basics, you can start small and build your efforts over time as your business grows. These key principles can help you get started:
1. Understand the 4 Ps
At the core of any solid marketing strategy are the components of what’s known as a marketing mix: product, price, place, and promotion. They work together to shape how your brand connects with customers.
Product
Of course, you have something to sell, but marketing helps clarify why someone should choose your offering over the rest. That’s where your unique selling proposition (USP) comes in, communicating how your product solves a specific problem or meets a particular need better than your competition.
Take the example of SURI, an electric toothbrush brand founded by Gyve Safavi and Mark Rushmore. The duo saw a problem: more than one billion toothbrushes end up in landfills every year. Their solution? A sustainable toothbrush with a recyclable, plant-based head. That clear mission and product positioning became a compelling part of their marketing story.
Price
Setting the right price means finding the sweet spot between profitability and attracting potential customers. There are many pricing strategies to explore, from straightforward models like cost-plus pricing (calculated by adding up business costs with a markup for a profit) to value-based pricing (price is determined by how much customers are willing to pay for your product or service).
While there’s no one-size-fits-all strategy, typically, ecommerce businesses use methods like product bundling or loyalty programs to increase how customers perceive value and boost customer retention.
Place
This refers to where you sell your product. Is it exclusively online? In retail stores? Choosing where you sell depends on where your target audience shops and customer behavior. For example, if you’re considering selling through physical retailers, keep in mind they often charge fees to stock your product.
Promotion
Promotion is probably what comes to mind first when you think of marketing—getting the word out there. It includes your messaging, advertising, social media, blog posts, and any method you’re using to tell your target audience about what you’re offering.
2. Get to know your target audience
You have to understand who your customers are, what values matter to them, whether they prefer shopping online or in person, and what drives their buying decisions to make meaningful connections. How do you uncover these insights? Market research. You could go about this a number of ways, including collecting customer feedback through online surveys, interviews, and focus groups.
For example, before launching SURI, Gyve and Mark took this step seriously. “We ran a lot of surveys,” Gyve says on an episode of the Shopify Masters podcast. “We started with cheap surveys, any survey we could get that were not friends and family. We used SurveyMonkey, Attest, and then we did in-person interviews.”
Their research revealed a lack of brand loyalty, low consumer awareness of existing toothbrush brands, and an appetite for a better, more sustainable option—all of which helped shape SURI’s product and branding strategy.
3. Select your marketing channels
Now that you understand your audience on a deep level, it’s time to choose the most effective marketing channels to reach them. Depending on your research, you may skew more toward digital marketing, physical channels like billboards, or a mix. Ask yourself:
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Where am I most likely to reach my audience?
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Where do they spend their time—whether in real life or online?
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What type of content do they engage with and why?
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What channels make the most sense with my business goals and budget?
You can select channels from two key kinds of marketing: inbound marketing and outbound marketing. Inbound marketing generally builds relationships with your customers, while outbound marketing reaches out to them.
Common inbound marketing examples include:
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Content marketing (blogs, videos, podcasts)
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Social media marketing (Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, LinkedIn)
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Email marketing (newsletters, promotional emails)
Common outbound marketing examples include:
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Digital advertising (Google Ads, display ads)
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Outdoor advertising (billboards, flyers, transit ads)
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Traditional advertising (TV, radio, print)
4. Track relevant KPIs
Before diving into executing marketing tactics, it’s important to define what you want to get out of your marketing efforts. Clear, measurable marketing key performance indicators (KPIs) help guide your marketing strategy and allow you to make smarter decisions over time by seeing what works and where there’s opportunity for improvement.
Some common metrics used to assess marketing success include:
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Customer acquisition cost (CAC). This helps you see how well your marketing dollars are working by identifying the total cost of acquiring a new customer. It’s calculated by taking your total sales and marketing costs. You divide that number by the number of new customers gained over the same period of time.
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Marketing return on investment (ROI). This measures how well your marketing investments are paying off. It’s calculated by dividing your total revenue over a period of time and dividing it by your total marketing cost.
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Conversion rate. Whether you’re looking to get more clicks, email newsletter signups, or purchases, conversion rates measure how well your marketing efforts are turning interest into action. You can calculate your conversion rate by dividing the number of times a specific action happened (like newsletter sign-ups) by the total number of interactions with your marketing content (the number of times people entered their email into a pop-up) over a period of time.
5. Assess and evolve
Marketing is an ever-evolving part of any business. Once your marketing efforts are put into action, you can analyze data to see what’s getting you closer to any goals you’ve set—and how you might be getting in your own way.
Remember SURI? It’s a great example of using data and analytics to develop its brand, particularly in the pre-launch phase of its product development. The team used A/B testing to craft the most compelling website and email marketing content.
“Before we launched, we had multiple landing pages that we were testing,” says Gyve. “We were doing fake ads to emails to just see what worked and how to refine the concept further.” Through A/B testing, SURI identified what led to the most conversions and further refined its messaging.
Marketing 101 FAQ
What is the number one rule of marketing?
One of the most basic principles of marketing is to know your audience on a deep level through market research. What are their needs? What are their pain points? What drives their purchasing decisions? Understanding the answers lays the groundwork for your marketing strategy.
What is the most successful form of marketing?
There is no magic formula that applies to all businesses, and sometimes it takes testing and learning to find out what truly works for yours. Based on your market research, you can start to identify the kind of marketing that will most likely reach your audience, whether it’s on social or on the radio.
When do you need to start marketing your business?
While any marketing at any time is most likely better than no marketing, kicking off your efforts in your pre-launch phase could prove to be fruitful. Marketing campaigns like email sign-ups or teaser videos on social media can help build excitement, tee up early brand awareness, and give you insights you can use in future marketing as well.
