Well according to Merriam-Webster, marketing is the act or process of selling or purchasing in a market. Ok. But what exactly does this mean? In real words, marketing is a way to promote or sell a business or a product. It’s that simple!
There are many ways that you can market a product. Let me give you a couple examples… Think back to those summer times when you would get your lemonade ready and set your table up outside. You would draw on the big poster board your mom bought you saying, “Lemonade 25 Cents.” Once finished you held your sign and stood out front of the table for 4 hours and only had 5 customers. Usually it’s because they thought it was adorable seeing a child selling lemonade and not because it tasted good. (It usually didn’t.) But at the age of 7 you were a marketer.
Now you are where you are today, and I’m sure you’re still marketing. You may be a salesman trying to sell the latest car or trying to persuade a company to sign with you for a huge deal. You may be trying to market yourself. You even see marketing everywhere. Ever go to the mall and get stopped by a young man trying to sell you hand lotion or asking if you want a free sample of a new brand of tea?
It happens everywhere and we don’t even think about it. You market every single day. You sell yourself to people that you first meet because you want them to like you. You sold yourself to your significant other (otherwise you wouldn’t be together).
Face it. Marketing is contagious. I won’t bore you with more examples, but I wasn’t to tell you why you need marketing in your life. Without marketing, you wouldn’t really know how to successfully run a business or even how to make friends. If you didn’t know different ways that you could sell yourself to others, and then you would be lonely and miserable and well, probably not get to far in life. You have to sell yourself to your future employer or otherwise you won’t have a job.
Marketing is simple. Just take a piece of paper and write down about 10 things that you identify as positive about yourself, company, or product. Make sure too that you write down 10 things you could see improvements in too, because no one is perfect and no one likes to listen to people talk about just their “perfections.” That’s boring.
People like to listen to the improvements that you see that could be done. It shows that you want to make your product or company better. Next you should figure out a way that you can work on these improvements. Maybe your lemonade sign isn’t marketing well because all it says is, “Lemonade 25 Cents.” There’s no color or pictures. Nothing. How about you put some color on that sign and draw a picture of lemonade and lemons and mock picture of your stand? Now it is more eye catching, especially if it’s colorful! Now hold your sign up and maybe you will get 20 customers instead of 10.
You need marketing. It’s very important. Like I said, if you didn’t, you wouldn’t be able to sell anything, including yourself. It’s essential to your life so your company or product grow be bigger and better.
