I’m going to show you how to make good marketing easily with simple basics in this six-part Marketing 101 Crash Course series.

This is not about following bro marketer tips, or chasing get rich quick schemes. It’s about learning how marketers build authentic connections with their customers and gain brand awareness in a way that feels genuine, classy, and allows for a win-win situation for both customers and the brand.

It doesn’t matter if you’re trying to sell clothing, just opened a storefront, offer coaching services, or even dog food. On the surface, those things sound really different. But there are basic marketing practices that can be used to successfully promote any of those services or products no matter how different they are.

Understanding the basic marketing fundamentals will help you do that. There are a lot of gurus teaching specific marketing tactics like how to run Facebook ads, or be successful on Instagram, or win at Pinterest. But the reality is, those are just tiny elements of marketing. If you’re in this for the long haul, then you need to know how to do more than just execute individual tactics. This is true if you’re trying to learn more about marketing because you want to build a new career, or make a job transition, or even if you’re an entrepreneur trying to start your own business or agency.

You need a strong foundation to find success with marketing over the long-term. Without it, you become stuck when things don’t work. A foundation allows you to pivot, make the right decisions, and get back to a place of success.

USE WHAT YOU ALREADY KNOW

Marketing can sometimes feel like rocket science. It’s a complicated industry with many different moving parts and the technology is constantly changing. But you’re exposed to marketing all the time, whether or not you even realize it. The average person is exposed to 6000 to 10,000 ads daily. Every single day, at some point, you are interacting with marketing with branding with advertising. The more you bring that awareness to the forefront of your thoughts, the easier it becomes to recognize good or bad marketing. That helps you see it and learn from it so that you can use that insight in your own strategies.

MAKE A REASONABLE MARKETING PLAN

Doing this will help you become a better marketer almost instantly. You wouldn’t start building your dream home by buying lumber and throw pillows. You’d start with a blueprint and plan based on the vision and goals you had for your completed house.

So why start your marketing by following a single tactic that some guru told you that you had to do or else? Creating a marketing plan helps you get a big picture view of exactly where you need to focus your resources (time and money) so that you can be efficient. This saves most people a lot of stress and frustration in the long-run. Quick wins feel good, but long-term success takes research and planning.

LEARN THE 4 P’s

You may have heard of the four P’s of marketing before, maybe you haven’t. Let’s walk through them really quickly.

Product or service

This is about what you selling and what people can purchase from you. It’s also about asking yourself if you’ve packaged it in a way that will make it easy for them to get to a place of saying yes to the sale. In a traditional business, a product could be a consumer packaged good or a service like legal, medical, or lawn care services as an example. Also, if you’re an influencer your product could be access to your audience and the reach you can provide the brands who sponsor you.

Place

This is in reference to where your products and services are actually going to be available for sale. Are they going to be purchased online, offline in a retail store that you manage, in a retail store owned by a distributor?

It’s important to understand where your ideal customer wants to purchase whatever it is that you have to offer. For example, small items like gum or mints are sold next to the cash registers at stores where people are purchasing other items. They are seen as complementary and something that a buyer will easily say “yes” to tossing in their cart without much additional thought. Yet other items require a lot more thought in the minds of consumers. You may not even find them available in stores as the marketing strategy has them available online only where customers can dig deep into looking at all the product details before they make a decision.

Price

This is how much you’re going to sell your products or services for. There are typically two ways that people will think about pricing their products and services. The first is cost-plus. This is where you take the total cost of raw materials and goods that you use to make your product and add a little extra on top for profit. If you’re selling a service you’ll look at things like hours, time, office overhead, etc to determine your base cost. The other way to determine your pricing is based on perceived value. You can raise the perceived value through good marketing messages and making it crystal clear so that people understand why they should buy from you.

Promotion

With promotion, you’re thinking about what messaging you want to share and where you want to share it. Traditional marketing through magazines, newspapers, TV, radio, etc still exist. You’re likely exposed to them everyday without thinking much about it. There are also modern channels digital ads, content marketing, blog posts, etc. Some of those options will be better than others depending on what you want to promote. Things like the size of your budget or the timeline in which you need results should guide the channels you decide to use.

Leverage technology and real-time interactions

We’ve really moved from a landscape where marketing was more of a push activity to one where marketing is a pull activity. Modern marketers focus on generating demand. Good marketing is about becoming a magnet. You can leverage technology and real-time conversations or engagements with your audience to make that happen much faster.

When’s the last time you’ve had conversations with your audience or done research online to see what are people saying about your industry? If you’ve already got an audience of followers on Facebook, or Instagram or YouTube you can ask them questions. Brands sometimes avoid interacting with their audience on digital, but you should be in the comments and DM’s having conversations to find out exactly what it is people want. Embracing that is going to make you a better marketer times much faster.

Drive your audience to make decisions

If you want to be the kind of person who can sell absolutely anything you need to understand how to get people to decide. Most marketers do that through their CTA, which stands for call-to-action. You can put out lots of content and hope that people pick up the hints you’re throwing out about what you’d like them to do next. Or you can get really clear and help guide them down a path of further engagement or making a purchase.

You also need to learn how to create content that will help your audience know, like, and trust you. We do business with people that we trust. We want to buy things from people and brands that we actually like. When you’re focused on this, that’s going to make it easier for you to get a yes faster as you try to win clients, increase conversions, or make the sale.

This is the end of Part 1 for this crash marketing serious on marketing basics and fundamentals.

Have a question? Leave a comment below and let me know what it is you want to learn about marketing and how becoming a better marketer would change your life.

The post How To Promote Just About Anything: Marketing 101 first appeared on Ashley Baxter.