The 7 Functions of Marketing

You’ve probably heard that marketing is important, but did you know that there are 7 functions of marketing? If you’re like most business owners, you’re wearing a lot of different hats. Other than customer service, finances need to be checked, customers need to have a great experience, and operations still need to run. So, among all those responsibilities, everyone says that you need to “do marketing”. Like most owners, you hope and pray that your social media post and one-and-done website will bring in the traffic. Don’t forget that you’ve heard that Google Ads are needed and AI can help too.

Feel overloaded and out of the loop? Welcome to the club. Also, you have spent a lot of money getting the site up, those “amazing” social media posts, and getting those confusing paid ads going, but nothing is producing results. Oh sure, a few likes on social media help, but the leads aren’t coming in. Fake it until you make it works sometimes, but you have employees and a budget.

Most marketing plans fail not because of lack of effort, but because of a lack of understanding of all that marketing entails. Only one part of marketing is promotion, which includes ads, content, and social media. Because owners forget the other six functions, budget gets wasted, efforts don’t sync up, the results don’t justify the investment, and everyone gets a sour taste in their mouth and thinks “marketing just doesn’t work”.

Because marketing is vital for all businesses, it’s easy to let that sour taste of marketing efforts in the past deter you from pushing forward. However, it’s better to know what all the functions of marketing are before dismissing it altogether. In fact, there are parts of marketing that you already do in your business but probably don’t even realize it. Remember, marketing is about delivering value to the customer. There are many ways to do that. When you coordinate all your marketing efforts, delivering that value becomes clearer and more profitable.

So, let’s get into what the 7 functions of marketing are:

1. Market Research
2. Product or Service
3. Price
4. Promotion
5. Selling
6. Placement or Distribution
7. Financing

It’s easy to think that these are obvious, but this guide will go through why each is important to the others and how, when focused together, they can bring your marketing plan up a notch and help your business grow. Just like you can’t build a house with just walls and no foundation, your marketing plan won’t be complete without all seven.

Some businesses start because they have a talent and they see the need. However, the most intelligent decisions are made after gathering data and information. Just like a war is won when an intelligent leader with accurate information guides all military efforts, your business needs to have information to make informed decisions. So, what information do you need to gather?

The marketing information and research function includes:

• Customer data: Demographics, behavior, preferences, feedback, and buying patterns
• Market data: Trends, demand, seasonality, cultural shifts, and emerging opportunities
• Competitive data: Positioning, pricing, messaging, channels, and what’s working for them

Another way to organize your market research information is to use the S.W.O.T. framework, which stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Strengths are what your business does well; weaknesses are what your business needs to work on. Next are opportunities external to your company that could be beneficial, and threats are external forces (including competitors) that would slow your progress.

We all have the same 24 hours in a day. However, how that time is spent is what makes all the difference. Knowing how to spend the time to make that difference is where information from research comes in. It helps business owners know what product or service to promote, how much to charge for it, where to offer it, how to position that product or service in promotional messaging, and how much budget is needed to make it become profitable. Without research, a lot of businesses make expensive guesses. 

• Before launching a new product or service, ask current clients and run opinion polls to know if what you’re trying to offer is what they’d buy.
• Look at competitors to see what they’re offering and, most importantly, what they’re not offering to identify possible unmet needs of clients.
• Read reviews on Reddit and other social media platforms to understand what is most important to your client base.

Data-driven marketing is better than guessing. Going with your gut only goes so far. Without getting enough of the right information before making a business decision, you could make the same mistake that many others have made. Those who don’t study history are doomed to repeat it.

Now that the research is done, the next step is to either create your product or service (or “offering”), improve it, or deliver it better to exceed your customer’s needs and stay competitive. After all, if what you offer doesn’t deliver value to your customer better than your competitor, they’ll choose your competitor.

The offering function includes:

• Designing and defining what your offering is
• Determining all features of the offering and timeframes for completion
• Building creative branding standards for positioning and how to package the offering
• Consistent upgrades to your offering from feedback and sales data

Your product or service can’t improve based on the opinions of one person. The way to improve is to use some of the marketing information management that we talked about before. You can’t improve your product unless you gather feedback and information to know which feature or part of your offering needs to be improved. The cycle of create, gather data, and make improvements is continuous.

• Create: Offering new sub-services based on observed needs and customer feedback
• Improve:  Upgrades to your offering by doing it faster or more efficiently
• Delivery: Creating an experience that your customers won’t forget

Being able to deliver an experience that won’t be forgotten, improving your product to be better than the competition, and creating what your customers want is what will create brand loyalty and keep new customers rolling in.

With the research framework in place and your offering established, you need to set a price that will make your company money, at a point your customers are willing to pay, is competitive, and equals the amount of value the customer receives from your offering.

The pricing function includes:

• Customer data: Knowing what the perceived value is of your offering and if customers are willing to pay
• Internal data: Understanding the costs to bring the offering to the client ( C.O.G.S. or cost of goods sold)
• Market data: Monitoring shifts in supply and demand to know when to charge a premium, offer a discount for retention, price points to penetrate a new market, etc.
• Competitive data: Studying competitor pricing and market norms

How much you charge is how people will judge your offering. If your price is too low, your product can be seen as cheap, lacking in quality, and not worth purchasing. If your price is too high, fewer people will be able to afford to pay for it, the product value will be seen more as a luxury, but fewer people will risk investing. 

1. Package or bundle discounts to draw people into longer contracts or to purchase more of your product
2. Dynamic pricing to underbid the competition
3. Holiday or time-sensitive deals to attract more business when people are more willing to spend additional funds
4. Increasing or decreasing pricing to avoid problematic customer bases
5. Subscription tiers to appeal to different customer segments

Pricing needs to make the company money and has to deliver enough value to the customer. If done correctly, your company makes money and grows. However, done incorrectly, you sell nothing and the business fails.

Promotion is the function of what most people think of when they hear the word “marketing”. This is how your customers learn about your products, the information conveyed, what creates interest, and creates that desire to purchase your product or service.

The promotion function includes:

• Advertising: Paid ads, whether digital or physical.
• Content Marketing: Blogging, white papers, images, and videos.
• Search Engine Optimization: Connecting, fixing, and upgrading digital content.
• A.I. Optimization: Answer engines, generative engines, experience, and LLMs
• Social Media Marketing: Images, content, hashtags, followers, and comments.
• Email Campaigns: Newsletters, promotions, and automated sequences
• Person-to-Person: Events, PR, influencers, partnerships, and sponsorships.

The goal of promotion is to be the hook that catches the eye of potential clients and creates interest in making a purchase. Where and how you promote has to be based on sound research to know your target audience and methodological product management to have the right product. If promotion is done before the other functions, promotion just becomes more noise in people’s lives. 

• YouTube ads announcing a sale for a store in a geotargeted area
• Social media dad jokes to help people feel happy when thinking of your brand
• Bottom-of-funnel event for a specific demographic who are ready to buy
• Monthly newsletters emailed to maintain brand awareness

Promotion is how potential clients first see your brand. Still, the message needs to be guided by data, relevant to the product, and methodically integrated with the other six functions of marketing. A message that doesn’t resonate with clients will only be unwelcome noise and won’t deliver any value.

For a business, selling is where the rubber hits the road. It takes all the research, product, pricing techniques, and promotion ideas and converts them into actual revenue. It takes all the interest, time, and money invested and moves into value delivered to the customer.

Aspects of selling include:

• Engagement with potential buyers
• Defined scripts, processes, and gauging interest
• Building relationships of trust
• Use of specific promotional materials
• Designating a group to be subject matter experts and handle objections, answer questions, offer demos, and guide decisions

How companies sell has many different tactics. From the acronym ABC (Always Be Selling) to “not taking no for an answer”, major industries have spent billions of dollars trying to perfect and subsequently sell this process. Overall, people can tell if the salesman is genuinely trying to deliver value to the customer, or simply trying to hit a sales quota.  Being the personal, helpful representative who makes the buying process easy typically does the best.

• A customer service representative taking inbound calls to finalize orders
• Getting clients’ information at a trade show or expo
• Video call presentational slide show showing the value of the product to the client
• Internal training on how to be brand representatives

Selling is when customers pay for value delivered. Leads come from great promotion, value representing pricing, and a product customers need based on sound market research. Even with the best product, awkward sales processes are what prevent leads from turning into customers.

Now that your customers have paid for your product, how is it going to be given to them? Also, is the product or service delivered to them where they want to receive it? Well, distribution is where that happens.

Distribution includes:

• Processing the orders to indicate the offering has been purchased
• Quantity to know if the complete product is in stock
• Storage to hold the finished product
• Logistics to get the product to the customer

The time it takes from the customer purchasing the offering to receiving their goods or services can either greatly increase or decrease customer loyalty and satisfaction. If the product is always out of stock, if your calendar is booked months in advance and you can’t offer a service, or frequent issues with processing a payment can make your customers flee to your competitors. Inconvenience is a deal breaker.

• Smaller warehouses next to markets to faster turnaround time
• Third-party software to deliver notifications and track progress
• Real-time inventory checks provided to the selling dept to set customers’ expectations
• Offering your product or service in-person, online, or at retail locations

Promising the moon and not delivering it on time and where promised will lose the business customers. The perfect product and amazing promotion tactics mean nothing if the customer doesn’t get the value delivered to them. Distribution is bridging the gap between expectations and reality.

Every type of business, including non-profit organizations, exists because the entity received funding of some type. Even those who volunteer need to have some type of materials to complete the task, whether it be shovels to dig or plastic gloves to distribute food. Without financing, no organization would exist, and it makes all other marketing functions possible. Financing helps pay for research, product development, sales staff, promotion materials, test pricing, and distributing the offering to customers.

The financing function in marketing includes:

• Investing in people, materials, and facilities.
• Prioritizing where money needs to be spent
• Tracking investments to legitimize costs
• Process of receiving credit payments from customers

Marketing doesn’t work if there are no finances. The best promotional campaign won’t be seen if no money is paid for it to be shown. Without revenue, nothing is invested into product or offering development, no sales team to bring in new clients, and no sales will happen.

• Justifying giving a raise to the highest performers in the sales department
• Allocating more funds to purchase sophisticated market research
• Buying advanced materials or tools to improve your offering
• Hiring a bilingual digital marketing agency to improve SEO

Marketing without finances is just ideas and aspirations. Every entity has a budget, and a lack of sound financial decisions guarantees even the best strategies fail.

As a quick guide, here is a brief recap of each of the 7 functions of marketing and an easy way to remember the role of each:

• Research identifies a need
• Product fulfills the need
• Pricing establishes value
• Promotion announces value
• Selling pays for value
• Distribution delivers value
• Financing funds everything

The 7 functions of marketing are a framework to help organize your marketing efforts. Realizing that each function supports and works with all others is something business owners and marketers alike seem to forget quite frequently. However, small businesses are constantly running from one obligation to another and simply don’t have time to do it all alone.

When you can’t do it alone, marketing experts can help you with every step to complete every function. The right marketing agency can do the research, create a personalized strategy, execute each variable, and track the results.

Our experts at Burning Ox Marketing have helped hundreds of businesses, especially small business owners, with the 7 functions of marketing. We help take the heavy marketing load off your shoulders so you can focus on running your business.

If you’re ready for strong, bright marketing, contact us today so we can get your marketing plan started.