If you are in anyway related to the world of business – be it as the owner or a professional or even as a business management student/aspirant – there are these questions that you may find interesting to reflect upon:
Do you really know what your customers want? Do you really think your customers trust your products? When was the last time you really saw a customer tweeting about your product or service? Was it really a complaint or compliment?
The answers to all these questions lie in the concept called ‘Marketing’.
As a matter of fact, how you market your business determines if the enterprise will be successful or not. This is because, ‘Marketing’ is a tool used to create and maintain demand, relevance, reputation, competition and much more. Without it, your business is likely to close down due to lack of sales.
So, why is marketing important? Let us check out these 9 reasons why you really do need it.
- Marketing Is a Powerful Way of Engaging Customers
It is important for your business to engage its customers. Marketing is a tool to keep the conversation going.
Engaging customers is quite different from pushing your offers. Engaging requires providing your customers with relevant information about your products and as well as your business. In other words, it is all about creating fresh content.
You should tell your customers what they don’t know. Let it be interesting and worth their time.
Social media happens to be one of the best platforms where you can engage your customers. A few organizations even use ingenuous short videos and other humor-laden tricks to engage their customer base.
By engaging your customers, marketing grants them a sense of belonging.
- Marketing Helps to Build and Maintain the Company’s Reputation
The growth and life span of your business is definitely compatible to your business’s reputation. Hence, it would be apt to state that your reputation determines your brand equity.
A majority of marketing activities are normally geared towards building the brand equity of the company.
Your business’s reputation is really built when it effectively meets the expectations of its customers. Such a business come to be considered a responsible member of the community. And, the customers become proud to be associated with your products.
So it is that, marketers use effective communication, branding, PR and CSR strategies to ensure that a business’s reputation is maintained.
- Marketing Helps to Build a Relationship Between a Business and Its Customers
Businesses really need to build a relationship of trust and understanding with their customers. But, how does marketing establish this relationship?
These marketing research segments should be based on demographics, psychographics, and consumer behavior.
Segmentation helps the business meet the needs of its customers and thereby gain their trust. The product team ensures the business delivers what is promised at the right time. This makes the customers brand loyal.
And, loyal customers will have the confidence to buy more products from you! This trust and understanding between the business and its customers really make your commercial activities more fruitful.
- Marketing Is a Communication Channel Used to Inform Customers
Marketing informs your customers about the products or services you are offering them.
Through marketing, the customers get to know about the value of the products, their usage and additional information that might be helpful to the customers. It creates brand awareness and makes the business stand out amongst competition.
There is stiff competition in the market and you need to be a constant voice to convince the customers. So, you must inform your customers of discounts and other competitive tricks you intend to use.
Through these communications, marketing helps your business become a market leader.
- Marketing Helps to Boosts Sales
Marketing makes use of divergent ways to promote your products or services. Once a product has been advertised, it is 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.
And, when customers are happy about your products or services, they become your brand ambassadors without your knowledge. In fact, they will spread the word and your sales will start to increase.
So, you must ensure that you offer high-quality products and services to complement your marketing efforts.
- Marketing Aids in Providing Insights About Your Business
Every marketer recognizes the need for targeting the right audience. However, it is imperative that 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 best for you.
And, once you have tested those different sets of messaging on your target audience, you will find a feasible baseline for your marketing efforts.
It actually acts as a metric and provides the insight needed to make you avoid guesswork.
- Marketing Helps Your Business to Maintain Relevance
Every marketer is aware of the need for disrupting a potential consumer’s opinion about other products. But don’t make a mistake of taking this chance for granted.
A majority of businesses assume that they will always remain the client’s favorite brand just because the client has never complained. This actually is quite a wrong mindset. You will need to find ways to remain at the top of the client’s mind.
In fact, every relationship needs to be maintained. And, marketing helps your business to maintain a good relationship with customers by making you remain relevant.
So, don’t focus on gaining new customers before addressing the need to retain the present ones!
- Marketing Creates Revenue Options
During the startup phase, your options are sparse since you are mostly cash-strapped. This limits your options.
As your marketing strategies start generating more customers and revenue opportunities, you will begin having more options. Having options is comparable to having a nice war-chest.
Indeed, having options will give you the courage you need to penetrate new markets. You will then have the freedom to start letting go of customers who are too demanding to your sanity and well-being.
And, without marketing, you will be forced to continue working with clients that have outgrown and do not pay you well.
- Marketing Helps the Management Team to Make Informed Decisions
Normally, every business is confronted with problems such as to what, when, for whom and how much to produce. And, a complex and monotonous process determine your business’s survival. As a result, businesses heavily depend on marketing mechanisms to make these decisions.
Why should you depend on marketing mechanisms? This is because, 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 Winning Against Your Business Rivals?
As you will be aware, your competitor is actively marketing their products; this should tell you why marketing is important. In fact, the only way to gain a competitive advantage over your competition is aggressive marketing.
Nonetheless, you don’t have to be sleazy or negative while marketing against your competitor. You should simply conduct research on what your target market is expecting, and then find ways to deliver better products or services.
And, if you are offering a product or service that is new to the market, you need to be more aggressive and strategic.