Do you know what your customers want? Do you think your customers trust your products? When was the last time you saw a customer tweeting about your product or service? Was it a complaint or compliment?
The answers to all these questions lie in marketing.
How you market your business determines if the enterprise will be successful or not. Marketing is a tool used to create and maintain demand, relevance, reputation, competition and more. Without it, your business is likely to close down due to lack of sales.
So why is marketing important? Check out these 9 reasons why you really do need it.
1. Marketing Is an Effective Way of Engaging Customers
It’s important for your business to engage its customers. Marketing is a tool to keep the conversation going.
Engaging customers is different from pushing your offers. Engaging involves furnishing your customers with relevant information about your products and your business as well. It’s all about creating fresh content.
Tell your customers what they don’t know. Let it be interesting and worth their time.
Social media is one of the best platforms where you can engage your customers. Some organizations use short videos and other humor-laden tricks to engage their customer base.
By engaging your customers, marketing gives them a sense of belonging.
2. Marketing Helps to Build and Maintain the Company’s Reputation
The growth and life span of your business is positively correlated to your business’s reputation. Hence, it’s fair to say your reputation determines your brand equity.
A majority of marketing activities are geared towards building the brand equity of the company.
Your business’s reputation is built when it effectively meets the expectations of its customers. Such a business is considered a responsible member of the community. The customers become proud to be associated with your products.
Marketers use effective communication, branding, PR and CSR strategies to ensure that a business’s reputation is maintained.
3. Marketing Helps to Build a Relationship Between a Business and Its Customers
Businesses need to build a relationship of trust and understanding with their customers. How does marketing establish this relationship?
Marketing research segments should be based on demographics, psychographics, and consumer behavior.
Segmentation helps the business meet the needs of its customers hence gaining their trust. The product team ensures the business delivers what’s promised at the right time. This makes the customers brand loyal.
Loyal customers will have the confidence to buy more products from you. The trust and understanding between the business and its customers make your commercial activities more fruitful.
4. Marketing Is a Communication Channel Used to Inform Customers
Marketing informs your customers about the products or services you’re offering them.
Through marketing, the customers get to know about the value of the products, their usage and additional info that might be helpful to the customers. It creates brand awareness and makes the business stand out.
There’s stiff competition in the market and you need to be a constant voice to convince the customers. Inform your customers of discounts and other competitive tricks you intend to use.
Through communication, marketing helps your business become a market leader. This post explains more about how to gain a competitive advantage.
5. Marketing Helps to Boosts Sales
Marketing utilizes different ways to promote your products or services. Once a product has been advertised, it’s already on the radar and this increases your chances of selling it.
Customers may want to try your products or services and this will trigger a purchase decision.
When customers are happy about your products or services, they become your brand ambassadors without your knowledge. They will spread the word and your sales will start to increase.
Ensure you offer high-quality products and services to complement your marketing efforts.
6. Marketing Aids in Providing Insights About Your Business
Every marketer understands the need for targeting the right audience. However, you must have the right content to share with such an audience. Your marketing strategies can help you establish what business messaging will convince the target audience.
At this point, you have to test different messages and see what works.
Once you have tested different sets of messaging on the target audience, you will find a viable baseline for your marketing efforts.
It acts as a metric and provides the insight needed to make you avoid guesswork.
7. Marketing Helps Your Business to Maintain Relevance
Every marketer understands the need for disrupting a potential consumer’s opinion about other products. But don’t make a mistake of taking this chance for granted.
Most businesses assume that they will always remain the client’s favorite brand because up to now the client has never complained. This is the wrong mindset. You need to find ways to remain at the top of the client’s mind.
Every relationship needs to be maintained. Marketing helps your business to maintain a good relationship with customers by making you remain relevant.
Don’t focus on gaining new customers before addressing the need to retain the present ones.
8. Marketing Creates Revenue Options
During the startup phase, your options are sparse since you’re mostly cash-strapped. This limits your options.
As your marketing strategies generate more customers and revenue opportunities, you’ll begin having options. Having options is comparable to having a nice war chest.
Having options will give you the courage you need to penetrate new markets. You will have the freedom to start letting go of customers who are too demanding to your sanity and well-being.
Without marketing, you will be forced to continue working with clients who you have outgrown and are paying you peanuts.
9. Marketing Helps the Management Team to Make Informed Decisions
Every business is confronted with problems such as to what, when, for whom and how much to produce. A complex and tedious process determine your business’s survival. As a result, businesses heavily rely on marketing mechanisms to make these decisions.
Why should you rely on marketing mechanisms? These mechanisms serve as a reliable link between your business and society. They cultivate people’s mind, educate the public and convince them to buy.
Why Is Marketing Important in Beating Your Business Rivals?
Your competitor is actively marketing their products, doesn’t this tell you why is marketing important? The only way to gain a competitive advantage over your competition is aggressive marketing.
However, you don’t have to be sleazy or negative while marketing against your competitor. Simply conduct research on what your target market is expecting, and then find ways to deliver better products or services.
If you’re offering a product or service that is new to the market, you need to be more aggressive and strategic.
