The 7 Functions of Marketing (With Examples)

When you walk into your favorite coffee shop and already know what you’re ordering, that’s marketing quietly doing its job.

It’s the reason the brand feels familiar, the vibe feels right, and you somehow ended up following them on Instagram without even thinking about it.

But marketing is so much bigger than a clever ad or a great logo.

It’s everything that gets your audience not just aware of what you sell, but genuinely excited about it.

Because marketing touches so many parts of a business, the discipline is broken down into seven core functions—each one essential in shaping how a brand shows up in the world.

Whether you’re a marketer sharpening your strategy or a founder trying to grow with limited resources, these seven pillars are the backbone you build on.

In this post, we’ll break down all seven marketing functions, show real examples, cover the best channels to activate them, and share how to run it all more effectively.

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What Are the 7 Functions of Marketing?

The seven marketing functions are the building blocks that help your business connect the right products with the right people and keep them coming back. 

Here are the seven stages for marketing campaign management 👇

• Promotion: Covers everything from advertising and PR to social media, email marketing, and influencer campaigns. The goal is to grab attention, build awareness, and bring people closer to making a purchase
• Selling: Involves talking to potential customers, highlighting what makes your product valuable, and helping them decide to buy
• Product or service management: Focuses on ensuring your product or service meets customer needs. It includes research, updates, and improvements based on what people want and what your competitors are doing
• Marketing information management: Collects and analyzes information about your audience, competitors, and industry trends
• Pricing: Finds the right balance between what customers are willing to pay, what your competitors charge, and what helps you stay profitable
• Financing: Covers how you budget and fund your marketing efforts. From setting aside money for ads to investing in tools or product development, financing ensures you have the resources to bring your marketing communication strategy to life
• Distribution: Ensures your product actually reaches your customers, whether it’s online, in a store, or delivered directly; the goal is to make access easy, efficient, and convenient for your audience

1. Promotion

At the promotion stage of product and service management, you convey the right message at the right time across various channels with a successful marketing strategy.

Brands use promotional marketing campaigns to spark interest around a new launch. They also use it to keep the buzz going after the launch.

Here are some channels you can use in your promotion strategy. 

• Advertising: Paid placements on platforms like Google, YouTube, Instagram, TV, or even print ads are great for building reach fast
• Social media: Organic posts, Reels, Stories, and Lives on Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, and wherever else your audience scrolls daily 
• Influencer marketing: Collaborating with trusted voices, like niche creators or large personalities, who already have your audience’s attention 
• Content marketing: Educational and engaging blogs, videos, tutorials, and case studies that subtly promote while providing value
• Email marketing: Direct communication through newsletters, exclusive offers, product announcements, and helpful tips
• Events: Webinars, product launches, pop-up shops, or trade show booths where people can experience your brand in real time
• Public relations: Media coverage, podcast interviews, and press releases to get third-party credibility and wider attention
• Sales promotions: Promotional strategies like discounts, limited-time offers, referral codes, or loyalty programs that nudge people to take action

You can either keep all this data in spreadsheets or centralized within ClickUp for Project Management. 

ClickUp gives your marketing teams a scalable system for collaboration, visibility, execution, and tracking. Let’s see how. 

Think of ClickUp Tasks as a task management platform that you use to manage every moving piece of your marketing campaign. 

When you run the multi-channel promotion, each task, like ‘Launch Instagram ads’ or ‘Finalize email copy,’ can be broken down with clear descriptions, owners, deadlines, and subtasks. You can even track time spent, attach key assets, and add priority labels so your marketing team always knows what’s urgent.

When you need to see the bigger picture, milestones, and what the next tasks are for the progress of the project, you can use ClickUp Views. They allow you to visualize your tasks in List, Board, Calendar, or Gantt formats. 

2. Selling

At the selling stage, your marketer’s job is to guide the prospective customer from “this looks interesting” to “I need this.” One of the seven marketing functions, selling involves understanding customer demographics, communicating value, and building trust along the way. 

The widely used selling strategies are:

• Direct sales: One-on-one conversations that can happen in person or on call, where reps tailor the message to each customer’s needs
• Product demos: Live walk-throughs to help people see exactly how the product works and how it solves their problem 
• Consultative selling: Asking questions, understanding pain points, and offering solutions, not just pushing features 
• Objection handling: Responding honestly to common hesitations like pricing, timing, or features 
• CRM follow-ups: Using platforms like ClickUp or Salesforce to conduct CRM campaigns for managing leads and tracking conversations

With ClickUp Automations and AI Agents, you can automate how the leads are qualified. 

For instance, once a lead fills out a form, you can automatically create a task, assign it to a specific sales rep, and set a due date based on priority. 

After a demo call is marked as complete, you can trigger an automated task to send a follow-up email and attach a relevant case study. 

You can build automations to change task statuses when deals move down the funnel (like from ‘Lead Qualified’ to ‘Demo Scheduled’), or alert your team via email when a hot lead needs attention. 

If your marketing team is still on the fence, this video will help you understand the benefits of ClickUp Automations. 

3. Product or service management

Product or service development is all about ensuring what you’re selling actually meets your audience’s needs, today and tomorrow. This function extends beyond the launch, focusing on gathering feedback, improving existing offerings, and sometimes creating something entirely new. If you’re not evolving, your competitors will. 

Here are some product and service management strategies worth using:

• Market feedback loops: Create open lines of marketing communication for customer feedback, such as surveys, NPS scores, support tickets, and user reviews, to understand what’s working 
• Testing and validation: Test extensively before a big rollout. Run beta programs, A/B tests, or soft launches to ensure what you’re building resonates with real users
• Feature updates and enhancements: Use feedback and data to make regular product improvements. It can be anything like fixing bugs, improving usability, or adding features
• User and market research: Balance broad market trends (what the industry is doing) with direct user insights (what your customers are asking for) to guide smarter decisions

Turn ideas into roadmap tasks 

Ask Brain to ‘Create a Q3 content roadmap for SEO, influencer marketing, and email campaigns for my SaaS product.’ You will get tasks or subtasks, complete with deadlines, owners, and priorities. 

Ask questions about existing plans

Not sure what’s already planned? Ask Brain:

What features are scheduled for September?
What are the Product Hunt activities planned for the product launch?

Summarize product or campaign plans

When you’re working on complex roadmap docs, you can ask Brain to summarize critical information. This is useful for exec updates, stakeholder syncs, or internal newsletters.

4. Marketing information management (MIM)

MIM is a key function of marketing because it ensures marketers use timely, relevant, and accurate information to develop products, stay competitive in the market, and monitor campaign performance. 

Here’s what you can use for MIM:

• Analytics platforms: Use tools like Google Analytics, Mixpanel, or Meta Insights to see what content is working, where people drop off, and how they engage across channels
• Market and competitor research: Stay informed with industry reports, customer reviews, and competitor audits to spot trends and adjust your positioning in your sales and marketing strategy
• Data segmentation: Break down your audience by location, behavior, or purchase history so you can personalize emails, offers, and ads more effectively 
• Dashboards and reports: Create real-time dashboards to help your team quickly understand what’s working
• CRM tools: You can also use CRM platforms like ClickUp to help you store and manage customer data, track sales activity, and personalize outreach based on past behavior

Within ClickUp’s CRM Project Management Software you can assign follow-ups, track deal stages, and collaborate with your team for effective marketing management. 

Firstly, to help your team sort and filter contracts based on persona, behavior, or funnel stage, use ClickUp List View. You can add custom fields such as lead source, last engagement data, customer segment, purchase stage, etc.

Additionally, you can even build a customer base to store and analyze contracts, customers, and deals. To track related work, consider adding links between your tasks and documents. No to-and-fro between different tools. With this CRM, you get all 7 functions of marketing in one tool. 

5. Pricing

The pricing stage is where you decide what your product or service should cost (obviously), and why it’s worth it.

It’s a balancing act: covering your costs, staying competitive, and reflecting the value customers perceive. Get it right, and your pricing strategy supports both market growth and healthy profit margins. 

Here are some product pricing strategies you can use:

• Value-based pricing: Set your price based on what customers think it’s worth, not just your costs or competitors’ prices. This works especially well for unique or premium products where perceived value matters most
• Cost-plus pricing: Add a set margin on top of the cost of producing your product. It’s simple and reliable, but you need to watch out for market changes
• Penetration pricing: Launch with a lower price to build market share early, then raise it once you’ve won over customers with pricing tools
• Competitive pricing: Price your product similarly to comparable ones on the market. This is ideal for categories targeting price-conscious consumers 
• Bundle pricing: Combine products or services into a package deal for a better value than buying separately
• Dynamic pricing: Adjust prices in real time based on demand, inventory, or time of day; places like airlines or rideshare apps do this often

6. Financing

In marketing, finance plays a core strategic role, guiding how resources are allocated, campaigns are prioritized, and ROI is measured. 

Take experimentation in product management, for instance. Every growth team wants to test new channels or creative strategies. But without guardrails, A/B tests can quickly spiral into expensive guesswork. 

The finance department defines safe, pre-approved spend limits—so teams can explore freely, without risking overspend on marketing plans.

Here’s how finance supports marketing: 

• Pricing input: Marketing and product may suggest pricing, but finance models margin impact, payback periods, and bundling strategies
• Attribution modeling: Finance works with marketing ops to ensure the revenue being credited to campaigns is accurate
• Capital efficiency storytelling: In startups and growth-stage companies, finance and marketing jointly tell a narrative of efficient growth (e.g., “We scaled pipeline 2x with CAC down 20%”)
• Creative vendor oversight: Finance reviews retainers, software contracts, and freelance agreements—ensuring spend matches impact

Here, for everyone to be on the same page, the marketing team and the financing marketing department, you need a single source of truth.

7. Distribution

The distribution stage is where you get your product or message to the audience, through the right channels, at the right time. That could mean delivering digital content, managing partnerships, scaling influencer reach, or coordinating retail logistics. 

When creating the distribution strategy, you take into account the channels driving the most conversations. You also answer a critical question, is our go-to-market motion aligned across sales, marketing, and operations?

Here are the core components of this stage:

• Shipping and logistics: Managing how physical products move, from storage to the doorstep. Think order tracking, packaging, delivery partners, and stock levels
• Digital delivery: For software, e-books, online courses, and other digital products, distribution channels are instant and global
• Retail placement: Getting your products on physical shelves, whether that’s in a supermarket, boutique, or temporary pop-up store
• Direct-to-Consumer (D2C): Selling straight to your target customers through your website or app, cutting out the middleman
• Omnichannel: Creating a seamless experience across online stores, mobile apps, social platforms, and brick-and-mortar stores

You use ClickUp Dashboards to track how this rollout is performing across marketing emails, in-app announcements, and community engagement. Real-time dashboards convert distribution from a black box into a controlled, data-driven workflow. 

ClickUp connects marketing, sales, ops, and logistics in one workspace. Dashboards give everyone, from the marketing manager to the sales manager, a shared source of truth on how distribution is progressing.

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Why These Functions Still Matter

The tools may have changed—TikTok instead of TV, AI instead of interns.

However, the fundamentals of marketing haven’t. The seven functions of marketing remain relevant because they represent the core responsibilities required to connect a product with the right audience in a meaningful, profitable way. 

Each function answers a critical business question. 

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Seven Marketing Functions: From Strategy to Execution With ClickUp

Now that you’ve got a clear view of the 7 marketing functions, it’s time to turn strategy into action.

And that’s where ClickUp comes in. If you’re mapping out your product roadmap, tracking leads, analyzing campaign data, or coordinating your next launch across channels, ClickUp gives your team one place to plan, organize, and execute every part of the marketing process.

From automations and ClickUp Brain to CRM and custom dashboards, you’ve got everything you need to market smarter. 

Sign up on ClickUp for free today! ✅

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