It’s impossible to underestimate the importance of marketing to any company, such are the benefits conferred, the customer feedback obtained, and the increase in brand awareness that effective marketing can bring.
It’s important, therefore, to both have a good understanding of what marketing is, the various forms that it can take, and how it can be best used in order to grow your business and increase your return of investment. Read on to learn more about the various reasons why marketing is important for just about any company.
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What Is Marketing?
Marketing is simple to define but hard to explain. At its most basic level, it’s simply the promotion of your business/goods/services, including the accompanying market research and advertising.
In practice, however, it’s so much more than that.
Marketing is engaging in banter with customers and clients on Twitter. It’s sharing a meme on your Facebook page. It’s buying pay-per-click advertising on the right websites. It’s diving into Google Analytics to figure out who’s engaging with your brand and when/where they’re doing so. It’s all of these things and much, much more.
Here are some common (online) marketing techniques:
SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
A relatively recent marketing innovation that rose concomitantly with search engine giant Google, SEO ensures that your online content ranks as highly as possible in online searches, thereby enabling more organic engagement with potential customers. A well-optimized blog or article is worth far more than the same blog promoted via paid advertising, as consumers are more likely to trust a non-sponsored search engine result. As in the modern age, many people connect marketing with SEO, it is also one of the key reasons why the importance of marketing should never be neglected.
Internet Marketing
‘Internet marketing’ sounds like a vague term, but it is as simple as having an online presence. Simply having a website for your company is internet marketing, and enables other forms of marketing, such as…
Blog Marketing
Blogs are no longer the province of travelers and diarists – they are an effective marketing tool that are excellent at promoting products and services without being too obvious or on-the-nose about it. Marketing via blogs is so popular and effective that big companies are willing to pay top dollar to have their products subtly promoted in influential blogs.
Mail Marketing
So-called ‘old media’ or mail marketing is doubtless in decline in an increasingly digital world, but it’s not dead just yet. Magazines, circulars and letters still have their place, particularly when targeted at older, less tech-savvy consumers.
Social Media Marketing
With the rise of the Meta family (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp) and other social media platforms like Twitter and Snapchat, social media marketing has become a powerful tool in the arsenal of any business serious about online marketing. Interacting with customers on social media provides engagement, personalization, brand loyalty, word-of-mouth advertising and much more.
Search-Engine Marketing
Distinct from the abovementioned ‘SEO’ marketing, search-engine marketing is simply paying for your webpage to be ‘stickied’ at the top of relevant search-engine results. Somewhat crude marketing in comparison to the many more subtle methods available online, but it can nevertheless be effective under the right circumstances. Search-engine marketing is related to…
Paid Online Marketing
Whether a targeted YouTube ad that pops up halfway through a related video, a sponsored Facebook post or an advertisement on Reddit, sometimes simply paying for advertisement space is the best way of getting your company out there.
Why Marketing Is Important
We’ve touched upon the sheer breadth of what marketing means (but not nearly enough!); it’s time to look at why it matters. Let’s have a closer look at the importance of marketing for any company.
Marketing is, as we’ve already seen, so much more than simple advertising. It’s about more than saying “we’re selling X product” and hoping people pay money for it; it’s about feedback, engagement, brand awareness, building customer loyalty, and much more. Let’s take a look at the biggest reasons why marketing is so crucial to your business and its products/services.
Marketing Provides Engagement with your Customer Base
One simple reason for the importance of marketing is that it provides engagement with your customer base. Business is a conversation between a company and its clients, and marketing is often the line of communication between that company and those clients. It’s not simply about advertising products and telling your customers why they should buy said products; it’s about establishing a dialogue with them, caring about their wants and needs, and listening to what they have to say. It’s a way of making your company relatable, more than just a faceless entity grubbing after someone’s hard-earned money.
Like any dialogue, marketing is a continuous one, and it needs to evolve with the times. Social media has become an excellent, unobtrusive and seemingly organic way to engage with customers without beating them over the head that you are, ultimately, a company trying to sell them something.
Marketing Helps you Retain Customers
No empire is too big to fall, and companies must strive to always be engaging with their existing customer base in order to stay relevant and au courant with their wants and needs.
That’s why marketing is important not only for attracting new customers, but retaining old ones. Relationships are not self-sustaining, and you should never take existing ones for granted. Nurture your relationships with existing customers, listen to them (and particularly their complaints) and tailor your marketing approach (whether website ads, mass marketing, questionnaires or another method) accordingly. Happy customers are loyal customers, and they help with free, organic word-of-mouth advertising.
Marketing Helps you Stay Relevant
No business should rest on its laurels, not even huge, seemingly eternal companies like Coca-Cola or Apple. Marketing is always necessary all of the time, and one reason for this is to make sure that your business is part of the cultural conversation. If you’re constantly putting out marketing (of any variety) then you’re going to be in people’s minds, and when they come to need a product or service that your company happens to offer, chances are that you’re going to be the first option that pops into your head. This alone proves that the importance of marketing cannot be underestimated. Make sure to keep two fingers on the cultural zeitgeist and make yourself a part of it!
Marketing Helps to Personalize your Advertising/Products for your Clients
The personal touch goes a long way when marketing, and personalization is all about tailoring both your advertising and your product to individual customers.
A very simple example of this is an email that’s addressed to a customer by name, rather than a generic mass mail. If you receive an email, which one are you more likely to open and engage with? Personalization matters.
It’s possible (and even desirable) to go much deeper down the personalization rabbit hole. The advent of social media and analytics has meant that advertising can be tailored to individual consumers to a much greater degree than before – cross-website ads based on a consumer’s purchase or search history, location-based advertisements, and even allowing a customer to choose the sort of advertisements they see all help to build a relationship that feels more intimate and authentic than your standard advertiser-consumer relationship.
Analytics
Analytics have never been more important – or more accessible – than in the web 2.0 era. The sheer amount of raw data regarding consumer preferences, and purchasing/browsing habits arm the modern company with all the information necessary to make the most out of their advertising campaigns. A company that plays the analytics game well is one that guarantees the maximum return of investment possible, and one whose future marketing campaigns are as precise and incisive as a scalpel.
On a macro level, analytics can be used to measure the growth of one’s company, thereby informing future development decisions, and can be used to measure current market trends and predict how they’ll change in the future. All of this is key information to keep your business expanding and thriving.
Marketing Opens up New Lines of Revenue
Particularly important to newer or start-up businesses, marketing is a valuable tool for broadening one’s horizons and, to borrow from the modern vernacular, ‘level up’. The more optimal your marketing is, the wider your company can cast its net and the more diverse your clientele will become. This is important for those aforementioned smaller companies, as it means that you can move beyond a market (and customers) that you’ve outgrown and that may no longer offer you the kind of revenue or business that you need.
Marketing Pushes Sales
This sounds incredibly obvious, but effective marketing does, of course, lead to higher sales, which proves the importance of marketing for just about any company. Strong use of analytics can help to tailor marketing to the right people, which brings new customers through the door and thus leads to new sales. Even consumers who are extremely cynical and suspicious of any form of advertising may be converted to new clients, provided that they are approached in the right way.
Marketing Can Help Build/ Maintain your Business’ Reputation
Your business’ reputation is crucial to whether or you can retain existing customers and attract new ones. If you have a poor reputation amongst your target consumers, after all, then those consumers are simply going to take their business elsewhere.
This can be avoided by maintaining strong PR – invest in the local community (or online, if that’s where the bulk of your business takes place) with sponsorships, charity initiatives, competitions or any other activities or events that can push your business’ profile. Positively interact with existing or potential customers as much as possible. If a disgruntled customer calls you out on Twitter, deal with the complaint as quickly and effectively as possible – and let people see you doing so. People feel valued and appreciated if their complaints are taken seriously, and other people who see this can rest assured that they will receive similar treatment if they’re ever in the same position.
Marketing Helps Direct your Staff
Marketing is not simply for the benefit of your customers – it can also be hugely beneficial for your staff, in more than one way.
Firstly, members of staff who can see that your company’s marketing is having the intended effect on customers (or potential customers) are more likely to feel motivated and appreciated, which will lead to higher employee satisfaction and lower employee turnover. They’re also more likely to be more invested in your marketing, which will ensure better marketing, which will ensure happier employees, and so on.
Secondly, effective marketing informs your company’s managerial decisions and helps determine the company’s direction. The wealth of data generated in this day and age will ensure your managers are as well-informed as possible to make the best decisions for your business.
It Helps you to Outperform your Rivals
As important as your own business’ marketing undoubtedly is, it’s always worth keeping an eye on what the competition is doing. Is their rip-roaringly funny Twitter account attracting thousands of likes and retweets a day? What are they doing on Facebook? Are their pay-per-click adverts suddenly popping up everywhere?
You don’t need to copy your rivals’ approaches exactly, but assessing their approaches and how consumers react to them can result in some valuable data, which in turn can inform the nature of your own marketing campaigns. So always remember the importance of marketing if you want to succeed in the competitive market environment.
Marketing Helps with Brand Awareness
How immediately recognizable is your company to the average consumer? Do you have a logo that’s as readily identifiable as, say, the Nike swoosh? Do you have a slogan like Apple’s “it just works”? All of these are about brand awareness, and building brand awareness is a key part of any company’s success.
Marketing can be key in ensuring that consumers recognize your brand, and prioritize purchasing it over those of your competitors. Approaches such as product placement, inserting your ads into relevant YouTube videos and even simply engaging with consumers on social media can all help with building brand awareness.
Conclusion: Why Marketing Matters
We hope that this article has shed some light upon not only what marketing is, but exactly why it’s so important to any business hoping to grow and attract new customers. After understanding the importance of marketing, remember that it’s always possible to refine your marketing strategies, and the approaches that you can take towards it – particularly in the digital age – are almost limitless. It’s just a question of deciding which approach works best for you and your business!
