Basics of Marketing are often taken for granted not only by young professionals, but sometimes by much more experienced marketers. As a young marketer I often feel like Alice in Wonderland – there is so much choice, so many great ideas and I kind of want to execute all of them at once. What I feel is that I am not the only one and even way more experienced professionals sometimes fall in the same trap.

There seems to be a lot of attention on getting the newest thing – design, analytics, productivity tools. Even tools to manage other tools. Therefore I thought it was a good idea to go back a bit and start with the important whys we sometimes forget about.

A friendly reminder to all of you just starting your way on your own business or as a digital marketer for a company about what some of the basics are:

1.Marketing Basics 1: Market.

No matter if you are inheriting a well developed marketing plan or you have to build everything from scratch, think about your market. Who are you looking for? Who are you targeting? Answering this question might be simple, but very often we forget about it or make assumptions based on half intuition, half wrong data ( Check out my new favourite book Thinking Fast and Slow to find out how our mind tricks us into wrong intuition)

2. Marketing Basics 2: Product.

Is our product competitive? Even the best marketing strategy and an army of fancy expensive analytics tools won’t win the battle, if unhappy customers are flooding the internet with negative reviews and pointing  your unkept promises. In the digital era we have no right of selling a bad product, no right of delivering low value. The marketplace chews and spits out such businesses with no compromising.

3. Marketing Basics 3: Price.     

And i don’t mean pricing against a competitor or bringing endless discount callouts in your marketing. Do we meet our promises and deliver for the money we asked for? Just ask yourself – would you buy the product you are marketing. if yes, why? If no, why not? Then, combine it with insight from your customers, think about the offer – what you did right, so that they bought from you. Answering these questions will bring the right message you must focus on in your marketing.

These are three of the basics I thought about and I find really useful  to start a discussion about. Feel free to ad more in the comments and share your experience. Let’s talk basics.