The purpose of marketing is to attract and convince the consumers that your product and service is better than others and get them to buy it. Businesses need customers to survive and marketing is one way to create customers.
Many businesses make an error when they view marketing as an inevitable expense. This perception makes them focus on marketing only when there is an urgent need, marketing just a little bit or nothing at all. Marketing too little is worse than not marketing at all because you are just throwing your money away. Be intentional with your marketing. Don't make the ever-common mistake of throwing a bunch of stuff at the wall to see what sticks. Have a marketing plan, a clear path for execution, and evaluate the data to research how each marketing entity is performing.
Marketing must be viewed as an investment for continued business success. From creating a brand to increasing sales, marketing can accomplish several milestones. While some strategies provide immediate returns, some provide long-term returns, the benefits of which you can reap as long as your business exists.
If you are among the many businesses that view marketing as an expense, then here are some reasons that may persuade you to change your thinking:
Marketing Makes a Brand out of your Business
A brand is the perception of your customers about your business. A good brand can even outlive the business. Good marketing strategies help build brand awareness but understand that merely brand awareness is not enough. You need to be the name that customers think of when they need the products or services that you offer.
Marketing helps you at every phase of the creation of a brand for a business – from building brand awareness to promoting the brand and ensuring that it stays in the minds of customers.
When good marketing teams up with an excellent product/ service offering, the result is the birth of a brand. Continuous marketing is essential to keep your brand closer to people.
Marketing Serves as a Valuable Brand-Customer Communication Channel
One of the secrets to creating a lasting brand is constant brand-customer communication. Maintaining customer communication maintains your brand relevance and reputation. Authentic brands evolve to such positions by keeping their communication open.
Marketing is a powerful tool to make such brand communications happen. With effective marketing techniques, you can keep customers updated about your product/ service/ company.
With efficient strategies, you can ensure that only authentic brand information, and not false/ fake/ malicious news, reaches your customers.
Without proper communication, you can easily give away your brand position to competitors. It can be difficult to earn your brand relevance back once you lose it.
Marketing Produces Intangible High-Return Results
Not all marketing strategies produce instant results. Paid marketing campaigns are effective for realizing instant brand reach and awareness, but a wholesome marketing strategy is one that utilizes both paid and organic advertising efficiently.
Strategies such as content marketing and SEO (Search Engine Optimization) create assets that work for you long-term. For example, good SEO creates a website that attracts, engages, converts, and retains customers for you 24/7.
Excellent content marketing increases your brand awareness, builds your inbound links, and elevates your brand credibility. These results may take time to become visible, but they keep working in the background to deliver revenue-building opportunities.
The results of these strategies often overcompensate the cost of investment. For example, engaging your customers requires continuous efforts, but the cost is less compared to the cost of losing customers and trying to re-acquire them.
In Conclusion
Marketing is an investment, but only when you apply timely strategies and keep reinventing strategies. With such an approach, marketing can yield great results.
Planning such an approach can happen only when you reframe your thinking regarding marketing.
When you view marketing as an investment, you choose strategies that best fit your business needs. You optimize strategies and budgets to get the maximum return.
If you build a well-thought-out marketing plan, based on analysis and not guessing, focusing stringently on the execution, the thought process should be, "I'm going to INVEST $2,000 to make $8,000."
Every big player, in every community, understands and uses this philosophy, why shouldn't you?