Does marketing have good or bad connotations?

Marketing is activities of a company associated with buying and selling a product or service.
People who work in marketing try to get the attention of target audiences by using slogans, packaging design, celebrity endorsements and general media exposure.

Marketing is everything a company does to acquire customers and maintain a relationship with them. Is this necessarily a bad thing?

Even the small tasks like writing thank-you letters, returning phone calls and emails promptly and meeting with a past client for coffee can be thought of as marketing.

The ultimate goal of marketing is to match a company’s products and services to the people who need and want them, thereby ensuring profitability.

Vocabulary

brand / make / label
consumer
distribution – delivering the product to the customer
end-user – the person, customer who is the ultimate (and so real) user of a product
launch – lanzar
E-commerce – buying and selling of products or services over the Internet.
E-marketing – promotion of products and services over the Internet
market research
market niche – Small but profitable segment (segmento) of a market in which a company is a specialist
market share
inbound marketing – marketing activities that draw visitors in, rather than marketers having to go out to get prospects’ attention.
packaging
engagement rate – A popular social media metric used to describe the amount of interaction (likes, shares, comments etc.) a piece of content receives. Interactions like these tell you that your messages are resonating with your fans and followers.
keywords – the topics that webpages get indexed for in search results by engines like Google
product range/line – products of a particular type manufactured and/or sold by a company
product positioning – consumer perception of a product as compared to it’s competition.

product placement – a form of advertisement, when a company pays for a product to be seen in films and TV programs.
corporate image – The way society views a company.
trademark – special symbol, design, word etc used to represent a product or firm
sponsor
lead – A person or company who’s shown interest in a product or service in some way, shape, or form. Perhaps they filled out a form, subscribed to a blog, or shared their contact information in exchange for something.
landing page – A landing page is a website page containing a form that is used for lead generation.
conversion rate – The percentage of people who completed a desired action on a single web page, such as filling out a form. Pages with high conversion rates are performing well, while pages with low conversion rates are performing poorly.
bounce rate – The percentage of people who land on a page on your website and then leave without clicking on anything else or navigating to any other pages on your site. (to bounce = rebotar)

Marketing Acronyms

ROI – Return on Investment – The formula for ROI is: Gain from Investment minus Cost of Investment

SEO – Search Engine Optimization – The practice of enhancing where a webpage appears in search results.

LTV – Lifetime Value – A prediction of the net profit attributed to the entire future relationship with a customer.

CAC – Customer Acquisition Cost – Your total Sales and Marketing cost.

CTR – Clickthrough Rate – The percentage of your audience that advances (or clicks through) from one part of your website to the next step of your marketing campaign.

CTA – Call-to-Action – a text link, button, image, or some type of web link that encourages a website visitor to visit a landing page and become of lead. Some examples of CTAs are “Subscribe Now” or “Download this PDF document Today.”

B2C (Business-to-Consumer) – sells to consumers (Amazon, Apple)

B2B (Business-to-Business) – sells to other businesses (Google)

API – Application Programming Interface – a series of rules in computer programming, which allow an application to extract information from a service and use that information either in their own application or in data analyses.
It’s kind of like a phone for applications to have conversations. Example: The inglespodcast app in itunes and Android.

Discussion
What’s the most annoying thing that marketers do in order to sell you stuff?

Which, if any, of these advertising methods would you take notice of:
website banners
email spam
phone calls – telemarketing
street advertising
TV/radio commercials
fliers on you car, in your postbox
newspaper/magazine ads
word of mouth
pre-roll ads on YouTube
podcast ads

Why do you think marketing has become so much more important in recent years?

Reza strongly objects to any public money being spent by councils or government on advertisements merely reminding you how good they (supposedly) are. What are your feelings on this?

*Dispones de más PODCAST en inglés publicados en los cuadernos anteriores
a los que puedes acceder directamente así como al índice de su contenido.