Marketing refers to activities a company undertakes to promote the buying or selling of a product or service. Marketing includes advertising, selling, and delivering products to consumers or other businesses. Some marketing is done by affiliates on behalf of a company.

• Marketing refers to all activities a company does to promote and sell products or services to consumers.
• Marketing makes use of the “marketing mix”; product, price, place, and promotion.
• At its core, marketing seeks to take a product or service, identify its ideal customers, and draw the customers’ attention to the product or service available.

Marketing as a discipline involves all the actions a company undertakes to draw in customers and maintain relationships with them. Networking with potential or past clients is part of the work too, and may include writing thank you emails, returning calls and emails quickly, and meeting with clients. Marketing seeks to match a company’s products and services to customers who want access to those products.

Product: Before they can prepare an appropriate campaign, marketers need to understand what product is being sold, how it stands out from its competitors, whether the product can also be paired with a secondary product or product line, and whether there are substitute products in the market.
Price: Price refers to how much the company will sell the product for. When establishing a price, companies must consider the unit cost price, marketing costs, and distribution expenses. Companies must also consider the price of competing products in the marketplace and whether their proposed price point is sufficient to represent a reasonable alternative for consumers.
Distribution: The distribution of the product. Key considerations include whether the company will sell the product through a physical storefront, online, or through both distribution channels. When it’s sold in a storefront, what kind of physical product placement does it get? When it’s sold online, what kind of digital product placement does it get?
Promotion:  Promotion is the integrated marketing communications campaign. Promotion includes a variety of activities such as advertising, selling, sales promotions, public relations, direct marketing, sponsorship, and other types of marketing. Promotions vary depending on what stage of the product life cycle the product is in. Consumers associate a product’s price and distribution with its quality, which has to be taken  into account when devising the overall marketing strategy.