TL;DR
- Marketing is blogs, emails, IRL events, partner co-marketing & more
- Digital marketing starts with content auditing & strategy
- Great content is often the key to successful marketing
What the heck is marketing? In this information age, marketing is what’s required for many companies to shine. Marketing is the practice of planning, executing, measuring, and optimizing all types of creative marketing initiatives. Marketing often aims to remove all possible friction from a buyer’s journey.
You likely have many questions about marketing, and that’s pretty neat. Keep scrolling to learn everything you want to know about marketing in 2025.
What is marketing?
Marketing uses one or many strategies to educate, engage, and inspire potential and actual customers. At the core of many successful marketing strategies is great content.
Marketing can produce results that matter when the strategy is aligned with key business objectives. Marketing takes many forms, for example—
- Creating memorable and engaging social media posts that grab attention
- Publishing a weekly newsletter that educates and provides product updates
- Running live demos at a conference to raise awareness and collect user feedback
- Organizing a joint online or offline event with an industry partner
Digital marketing produces much of what you consume on the internet—this masterpiece included! 😂 Your customers’ time matters—a lot—and that’s why your marketing output needs to be consistently excellent.
How does marketing work?
A marketing effort may be structured as a series of campaigns that support near-term milestones and long-term business priorities. If you’re looking for the basic steps to create and execute a marketing strategy, then check this out—
1- Conduct a content audit: Your first step is to conduct a content audit to assess the strengths and weaknesses of any existing digital content.
2- Create a marketing strategy: You can use the audit results to help create a marketing strategy that maps to the most important business goals.
3- Find resources: Procure the necessary resources—mainly humans, money, and time—to execute your marketing strategy.
4- Create content: Have fun creating great content in the formats identified by your marketing plan.
5-Execute your strategy: Host an event or run a contest or otherwise implement your marketing strategy.
6- Measure marketing performance: Collect data on a regular basis to learn how your marketing efforts are performing.
7- Analyze the data: Evaluate the relevant data to spot trends, areas for improvement, and core strengths.
8- Optimize your strategy: Use the results of your analysis to improve your marketing strategy to better meet customer needs.
9- Refresh your marketing strategy: Reevaluate your marketing strategy on a routine basis to ensure that it’s meeting your most important business and customer needs.
Pros and cons of marketing
Marketing can enable organizations to meet many different business goals, which is pretty awesome. But marketing can have some drawbacks, too, which are important for any organization to understand.
Let’s dive deep into all the pros and cons of marketing.
What to love love about marketing
- High ROI potential: Marketing can be among the most profitable ways to grow a company. Choosing tactics with high ROIs—like blog content and email marketing—can maximize the profit potential of your marketing.
- Customized and adaptive: Marketing initiatives can be highly customized to address an organization’s unique business challenges. Marketing strategies can (and should!) evolve over time as preferences and needs change for all stakeholders.
- Creative yet valuable: The best marketing content is a joy to consume. Marketing at the precise intersection of art and business captures the best of both worlds.
How marketing can do better
- Time to positive ROI: What’s the fastest way to boost sales performance using marketing? Probably via paid advertising. Organic marketing can require 3-6 months before your investment return becomes positive.
- Accuracy of measurement: Measuring the ROI of a marketing campaign or strategy is notoriously difficult. The formula to measure marketing ROI has many variables, which vary by the asset or tactic being analyzed.
- Total duration: The other bad news about marketing is that you may always need it. Your organization will likely always have goals, customers will continue to want to engage, and you typically need marketing to satisfy these needs.
The hardest part of marketing is usually getting started. A marketing strategy set in motion can begin to meet urgent stakeholder needs, generate useful data, and produce positive ROI over time.
Examples of great marketing
Marketing can take so many different forms. Let’s get some more clarity by focusing on four specific examples of marketing done exceptionally well—
- Consensys Signal: This email newsletter is published by the leading Ethereum software company. It’s jam packed with useful information, but phrases like “yes, you may need a blockchain” make it fun to read, too.
- Celsius Network: The (now defunct 🤦♀️) digital asset lending platform stands out for creating an explainer video on “blockchain banking” that uses storytelling to be memorable. The animated style of the video further engages anyone who loves cuddly teddy bears.
- Dogecoin: The ultimate meme coin not surprisingly has an engaging website. Dogecoin.com is informative while staying fully in character—visitors to the homepage are greeted with announcements like “Such core wallet 1.14.6 released! Much upgrade, plz!” The infamous style of Dogecoin is key to the vibrancy of this community.
How to get started with marketing
Are you curious about how to begin your marketing journey? Getting started with marketing usually requires making several key decisions to guide your efforts. Here are some crucial questions to ask—
- Who will plan your marketing strategy? You can devise your own marketing strategy, hire an in-house professional, or work with a marketing consultant or agency.
- Who will execute the marketing strategy? Same deal here—you can choose to execute the entire strategy yourself, hire freelance writers and creators, or outsource to a consultant or agency.
- How will you pay for marketing? Finding a way to afford marketing usually means making a business case and allocating part of your existing budget.
- Are you prepared to succeed at marketing? Excelling at marketing may prolong its necessity. It’s smart to ponder if you feel prepared for this commitment.
Is marketing right for you?
You may still be wondering if you need marketing or if it’s worth the expense. That sounds logical. The high ROIs of successful marketing make the option attractive to many people with business objectives 🙋♀️. Marketing is rooted in providing value to stakeholders, and forms the core of many enterprise growth engines. You may not need marketing, but your target customers do.
