Marketing: What Is It and Why Is It Important?

Written by Coursera Staff • Updated on

Learn more about marketing, how it works, why it's important, and the different traditional and digital efforts that companies use to gain a bigger audience.

[Featured image] A marketing team discusses marketing strategies.

Key takeaways

Marketing involves promoting a company's brand, products, and services to target audiences using strategic messaging efforts.

  • The basis of marketing is understanding your target audience and key competitors.

  • Successful marketing typically requires a marketing strategy, which is often based on the four Ps: product, place, price, and promotion.

  • Marketing is important because it builds relationships with customers, increases loyalty, and can improve sales.

Learn more marketing and why it's important. Afterward, consider enrolling in Google’s Digital Marketing and E-commerce Professional Certificate, where you’ll have the opportunity to learn how to attract and engage customers through digital marketing channels like search and email.

What is marketing?

Marketing is everything a team does to promote a company's brand and product or services. This can include publicity, advertising, relationship building, merchandising, and securing distribution channels.

The basis of marketing is understanding a company's target market and major competitors, and then creating a marketing strategy to guide initiatives and efforts to reach that market more effectively than competitors. The four Ps of marketing—product, price, place, and promotion—serve as an important foundation to any marketing strategy, because they will inevitably inform positioning, messaging, channel distribution, and more.

Marketing has always relied heavily on research to create an informed strategy and targeted campaigns. Today, that involves marketing analytics—or data that keeps marketing teams updated about the success of various campaigns, changing audience needs, channel effectiveness, and more.

Learn more: AI in Marketing: How to Use It to Enhance Your Marketing Efforts

Why is marketing important?  

Marketing is crucial to gain customers and increase sales. Effective marketing will help you with the following:

1. Informing customers.

Consumers in a competitive market need to understand why they should choose your business over another. Marketing helps inform customers about what you do and how it solves a problem they have.

It’s important to set your brand apart from competitors to give customers what they want. Through marketing, provide details about your product, brand, mission, and values, and how it will improve the customers’ lives. 

2. Engaging customers.

The idea of marketing is to be memorable to consumers after a transaction. You cultivate relationships with the people who have interacted with your business to turn first-time customers into long-term customers to sustain your business.

An excellent place to start is social media. Social media followers are more likely to look at a brand's website or app after following the brand for some time. Social media marketing lets you keep in touch with your clients by retargeting them after purchases and views with social media posts or stories. 

3. Building your brand's reputation.

A marketer should understand the value of reputation since it may impact whether a consumer reaches out to your business. Marketing can strengthen your company’s reputation since it spreads your mission and what you offer. 

4. Boosting sales.

A product or service that isn't known tends to be more challenging to sell. You can use different marketing techniques to attract potential customers and expand your target market. Email marketing can be a great way to generate revenue by sending emails highlighting new releases and social media marketing to post updates about upcoming sales. Online listings can also help local consumers find you and can build awareness.

5. Growing your company.

Effective strategic marketing typically increases revenue for your business. A successful business educates customers, keeps them engaged, establishes a good reputation, and strategically sells to them. Marketing is a tool that helps most companies thrive by acquiring new customers.

Traditional vs. digital marketing efforts

Modern-day marketing teams often employ a combination of traditional and digital marketing efforts.

Traditional marketing refers to offline marketing methods, including direct sales, television, radio, and mail. This option may still be suitable for some businesses and audiences.

  • Print marketing: Advertising in newspapers, magazines, billboards, and local publications are examples of print marketing. You can make these ads look very appealing and get the brand's message across to a target audience. 

  • Event marketing: Event marketing allows you to create advertising materials to showcase at industry events, such as seminars, conventions, and conferences. Creating booths and materials such as banners and signs can help attract attendees to learn more about your company and its products.

  • Telephone marketing: Telemarketing, also known as telephone marketing, is a way to sell products or services via the telephone. Business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) use cold calling or warm leads, where a personal connection has been made and trust has been built. A telemarketing strategy allows you to interact with prospective customers and explain how your product can address their challenges. 

Digital marketing outlines how you will market your business online and through social media channels.

  • Email marketing: Email marketing may yield a high return on investment (ROI). It keeps your customers informed about any upcoming promotions and more, by delivering value right to their inboxes. Email marketing is beneficial for its scalability because you can implement it on a large scale to target a larger audience.

  • Content marketing: Content marketing involves producing, creating, and disseminating content targeted at a specific market. The content could be videos, blog posts, social media posts, guest articles, or podcasts.

  • Social media marketing: A social media marketing strategy uses platforms like a company blog, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and Twitter to interact with customers, increase sales, and drive traffic to a website.

  • Influencer marketing: Influencer marketing involves using people with a platform or audience to promote brand messaging. Influencer marketing relies on celebrities, content creators, advocates, and even employees to get the word out on behalf of the brand.

  • SEO marketing: An SEO marketing campaign targets users based on the specific keywords and phrases they use to search. An advantage of keyword marketing is connecting marketers to their target audience with the right advertisement at the right time. 

Different marketing career paths

All industries require marketing professionals, so reflecting on your interest in a particular field—for example higher education or the biomedical sciences—can lead to creative or strategic marketing work you may enjoy.

Within the larger area of marketing, there are different marketing careers to explore depending on your interest, experience, and skill set. Consider some of the examples below to start:

Learn more: How to Get into Marketing without a Degree

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