It takes a certain amount of marketing innovation to win customers today. When developing a competitive marketing strategy, conducting effective research is a key step. You need to assess your organizational capabilities and advertising activities. In this course, you'll learn how to assess an organization's core capabilities and how to conduct a marketing audit. This course also describes how to conduct an internal analysis as part of the process of developing competitive marketing strategies. It explains the types of questions you may need to ask about your organizational resources and capabilities. And it describes areas to consider when doing a marketing audit and looking at innovation activities.

The marketing mix is a collection of elements that uses advertising to satisfy customers' needs and meet business objectives. We all buy products - we read the advertisement and we check the competition. The company can advertise the product and then send it along the distribution channel. In this course, you'll learn about a few elements of the marketing mix: product, price, and promotion. You'll learn how marketing is involved in developing new products and about the stages of the product life cycle. You'll also learn about pricing, including how to approach product pricing. Finally, you'll learn about promotional techniques, including the importance of distribution and having a robust distribution model.

Successful marketing is about optimizing the value you offer customers, as well as the value you get from them in return. Understanding its function will help you better understand the relationship that companies need to build with their customers. Knowing how to effectively advertise and use each distribution channel will help you stand out from the competition. In this course, you'll learn about the key functions of modern marketing and its link to overall corporate strategy. You'll also consider the role of advertising and distribution in digital marketing. Finally, you'll learn about the foundations for creating a marketing strategy and making the most of each advertisement in your distribution model.

An effective marketing strategy takes time and money. It's vital to get things right, and this requires proper marketing planning. The elements of the traditional marketing mix form important strategic cornerstones of any marketing activity. However, this traditional marketing mix fails to address two very important aspects of marketing: planning and people. In this course, you'll learn about strategic and tactical planning and the kinds of market research that support it. You'll be introduced to the basics of budgeting for, developing, executing, and evaluating a marketing plan. And you'll learn how companies can engage all their employees in developing their own marketing roles.

Although using an advertisement may be an important aspect of your marketing strategy, there's much more to marketing than just finding the best way to advertise your products or services. There's also the vital process of how your product gets all the way from the producer into the hands of your target customers - the product distribution. This process has changed immeasurably with the invention of the Internet, and, just as with online advertising, it brings about a whole new range of concerns related to ethics. In this course, you'll learn about the importance of an effective distribution model and selection of a distribution channel. You'll also learn key distribution strategies and systems, how to select and manage distributors, online distribution opportunities, and e-marketing.