Back in the old days, like 1990s, I learned marketing from a crusty, old-school marketing prof. He made it clear that "marketing" was different from "sales and promotion." Marketing is the on-going process of evaluating markets and a company's performance in those markets. I use a lot of those lessons in my own business because these 30 year old lessons still apply, even if common practice conflates "marketing" with "sales."
The marketing process has phases depending on the product life cycle. At each stage, the iterative process seeks to establish a few different benchmarks.
Identify underserved market niches
In market-speak, this is an external scan. The marketer looks around to find places where buyers aren't getting the products they want at the prices they can afford. These niches identify places where a new product might find traction.
Identify available resources that might be used to address those niches
This is an internal scan. It's a hard look at what the organization (you) can bring to the effort. In mass market applications, you hire more help, buy or rent production facilities, and provide those things needed to bring a new product to life.
Determine how well existing products serve their current market niche
This stage applies to existing products. Pre-production products - those still in design and development - aren't serving any market, but tracking early adoption, mid term adoption, and late term adoption can provide insight into how improve a product so that it performs better (by some arbitrary definition of "better"). Mature products are hard to re-fresh, which is why most companies resort to changes in the packaging rather than more expensive and risky changes in the actual product.
Application for Creators
A lot will depend on specific kinds of products. Most people find themselves in the position of having created a product, then trying to find a place to sell it. The classic "solution in search of a problem" situation.
Many times, the impetus to create the product grew from dissatisfaction with the existing marketplace so those products find a natural home. Small businesses, one-person operations, often find that a single product is all they can manage. The success or failure depends on how well that product serves the market, how efficiently the organization serves the market, and - the hard one - how large the actual niche is.
The key metric becomes "market penetration." How much of an existing market can you reasonably expect to sell to? Advertisers talk about "reach" for how many eyeballs they can put their messages in front of. Marketers talk about "how many people can we sell to."
The hard lesson for new creators: Your product will not work for everybody.
Figuring out how many people in a market and how many of them might buy your product is the first step in marketing.
If you need to sell to "almost everybody in the world who wants it," it might be time to rethink your five-year plan. If you only need a tiny percentage of the people in your niche, then your chances of success go way up.
Application for Artists
If your product is one of the arts, this process gets streamlined greatly. It doesn't get easier. Just simpler.
Artists will create art whether or not there's a market for it. Writers, photographers, painters - anybody who makes a thing that satisfies some internal need - will produce the thing. They'll produce it regardless of almost anything else.
As a writer, I'm going to write a story. Like most writers, I wrote the first one and then looked around to see where to sell it. The answer? No where. Markets had high barriers to entry, relied mostly on luck for success, and favored established producers over new ones.
When the technology changed, I gained access to a market - an online space with low barriers to entry, minimal required investment, and people who might be interested in my stories. Podcasting (not ebooks) opened the door to a new market.
Having learned marketing by then, I did my own scans to evaluate various market niches and to critically examine the skills I might bring to bear to serve those markets. It became clear that "novels in a series" had the best probabilities of success. More people read novels than short stories, making novel markets more robust. The "in a series" qualifier surfaced when I realized that heavy readers (those who read 5-10 books a week) didn't look for a book. They looked for an author with a catalog of work that could keep them entertained for a few days. I also realized that the established publishing models punished the series reader by removing book one from bookstore shelves before book three could get there.
That's just one example. Other artists have similar kinds of problems. Photographers, painters, sculptors, jewelry makers, ceramics ... anyone who makes art has the same set of problems. Who buys that kind of thing, how do you make your product available to them, and how likely are they to buy it.
The apocryphal Steve Jobs quote - "Real artists ship" - underscores the issue. You need to earn enough from your art to keep doing it. You need to ship it to people who'll pay for it.
That fundamental truth is the foundation of any business. Producing a product or service is - fundamentally - a creative effort. Being aware of marketing fundamentals can help you get to the point where you no longer need to subsidize that creation by trading your labor on somebody else's product in return for the money you need to support your own.
The key is understanding how the fundamentals apply to you and to that thing you create.
JMO. YMMV.
Image credit: Amelia Guo, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons