The 7 Marketing Functions: Key Steps to Business Success

Have you been frustrated by your marketing, either because you feel it lacks direction or simply isn’t worth the investment? This isn’t uncommon, as many people tend to see marketing as a series of individual efforts and actions (like posting on social media or running an ad) rather than the interconnected system it must be to support your success.

If done correctly, this system has seven steps to follow whenever you’re promoting your business and its services. Let’s explore what they look like, why things often fall apart, and how to fix that tendency.

What are the 7 Functions of Marketing?

We need to reiterate just one more time: marketing is a process. It is the process of packaging a product or service you have to offer and delivering it to your audience in a way that generates a profit… enabling your business not just to sustain itself, but to grow and grow reliably.

The seven functions that enable you to do so are as follows:

1. Marketing Information Management (MIM)
2. Product/Service Management
3. Pricing
4. Promotion
5. Channel/Distribution Management
6. Selling
7. Financing

Let’s break down what each of these processes involves.

Marketing Information Management (MIM)

MIM is simply the research that gives you the data you need to know about your market and its specific characteristics—who your target market is, who you’re competing with, and what trends the overall industry you operate in has followed. 

This information is powerful, as it replaces any assumptions or guesses you may have used to inform your decisions with cold, hard facts. Use it to find out who your ideal client is, what your clientele are apt to be experiencing, and who your business is up against. The answers to these questions will determine how you proceed with the following steps.

Product/Service Management

Using the data you collected through MIM, you would then adjust your products or services to best align with your target market's priorities. You wouldn’t try to sell someone a space heater in the desert any more than you’d sell bottled water to a fish. Use the data you gathered to ensure you’re selling something that people will be willing to pay for.

Pricing

Speaking of, you need to set a price that strategically communicates your value to your audience and claims your market share. It also determines how profitable your business will ultimately be. It is key to find the balance between being too expensive to invest in and too cheap to trust to attract as many prospects as possible. 

Promotion

This is the part that most people think of when they think about marketing. Your promotion is all the communication you share with your target audience… your blogs, advertisements, search engine optimization, and social media activity.

This is utterly crucial to get right. After all, a tree that falls in the forest will indeed make a sound… but if nobody’s there to hear it, nobody knows that the tree fell. The same can be said of your business offering. You could provide the best, but if nobody knows about it, you won’t close any sales. Promoting your business is how you tell people about your business and what you offer.

Distribution

This describes exactly how and where your business delivers its products and/or services, whether you operate a physical storefront, have one on your website, or provide services for which a sales team generates leads to sign up. Whatever your distribution method, it needs to be frictionless and straightforward. Otherwise, your competitors would likely be too eager to accommodate the needs of your lost prospects.

Selling

You’ve spent a lot of time and effort so far getting your prospects ready to convert. This is where it all becomes worthwhile, and you gain a customer.

Since this is the culmination of your efforts, you must have a sales process that establishes your value and a sales team with the skills to close these deals and kick-start revenue generation.

Financing

Of course, you need to know how you plan to bankroll your marketing, and you need payment options that help convince prospects to sign on the dotted line. Hopefully, it’s clear why both are necessary, but we’ll review the reasons now.

In terms of budgeting, most marketing efforts you engage in will have a financial cost. You need to know what is available to spend out of your business’ overall budget, as well as how that breaks down from month to month, to ensure you don’t run into the red by being too ambitious in your marketing.

In terms of payment options, this itself is a sales tactic. The easier you make it for a prospective customer to access your services, including in your terms of payment, the more likely you are to close a sale.

Overlooking These Functions Deters Your Marketing Success

The most common issue many businesses face is that people tend to skip steps or overly focus on certain aspects of their marketing process. From the outside, the problem is apparent: after doing no research, a business puts out ads that get a lot of attention—sure—but don’t actually describe the product/service being offered or provide the audience with any next steps to learn more or actually obtain it. Great promotion is supposed to be effective, but it can only be if the marketing information management, distribution, and selling aspects also pull their weight.

Fragmented marketing efforts like this are why many business owners assume that marketing just isn’t an effective strategy for them… doing it incorrectly has given them a skewed perspective and soured them to the task.

Managed Service Providers Can Be Some of the Worst Culprits

Take IT services, for instance. Modern MSPs are inherently distribution experts by the nature of their remote support approach. Unfortunately, many assume that “proactive IT services at a predictable rate” should sell themselves, and otherwise fail to follow through on all the other marketing functions. This is particularly unfortunate, given the significant impact effective marketing practices have in their particular industry.

We’re here to help. We’ve spent the last few decades operating as a managed service provider and have funnelled all that knowledge and experience into our own marketing platform, JoomConnect, which marries your website with professional service automation tools like ConnectWise and Autotask. 

In addition, we’ve invested significant time in creating, stress-testing, and fine-tuning marketing campaigns and deliverables to help other IT providers promote their services. In doing so, we’ve designed a fully integrated marketing system that we are happy to help you implement.

Ready to learn more? Sign up for a completely FREE, no obligation demonstration to see how it all works. Give us a call at 888-546-4384, or visit our website to claim a time.