- By: Mark Jakobsen
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What’s the point of marketing?
Seriously why do marketing, surely marketing is just colouring in within the lines? Or so an old Director used to frequently ask me.
The reality is marketing is a complex discipline that will help your business to grow. We’ve taken a look at these benefits and have condensed them down into five key ones, as follows:
Gives you the information you need about your market
Good marketing is based on research. Firstly, it helps to understand who your customers are. Marketing allows you to understand how to position your product or service to them to maximise the impact. It can also let you know if your product doesn’t fit the market, allowing you time to go back and adjust it so your customers will want to buy it.
Marketing will also allow you to understand the competitive landscape. Uncover your rivals and identify their strengths and weaknesses so you can go to market with a strategy that helps to position your product as effectively as possible against them.
Generates awareness around your Brand
Customers need to know about you, how else will they know to buy your products or services?
Marketing helps to enable customers to recall and recognise your brand under different circumstances. Plain and simply, the more people who know about you, the more people will buy from you.
In the longer term, it can also have the positive impact of increasing customer loyalty as well.
Provides the information your potential customers need to engage with you
You can divide this into pre-sales and post-sales communication.
Before a customer has made a purchase, they want to know which product will best suit their needs and fulfil what they are looking for. Here you can position your product, highlighting the unique selling points to differentiate it from your competitors and ensure it stands out. Your customer can then be comfortable that they have the right information they need to make an informed decision about why they should purchase from you.
Post-sales, marketing allows you to keep the conversation going to create a relationship with them. Considering repeat customers spend on average 67% more than new, it makes sense to try and keep them.
Strengthens brand loyalty
Why is brand loyalty important? As we’ve just stated returning customers spend 67% more than new. And when you also factor in the cost of attracting a new customer (anywhere from 5 to 25% more expensive) it’s a no-brainer that you should look after your current customer base.
To build up loyal customers, you need to look after them, engage with them and ensure they maintain their confidence in you and your product. If you’re lucky they may even turn into advocates who end up promoting your product to their friends, family, and work colleagues.
Arms your sales team with the tools they need to make the sales
You need to remember that sales and marketing are two sides of the same coin, they are intertwined so much that they work best when there is harmony between them.
In B2B, your sales team are going to need customer presentations, case studies, whitepapers, and other thought leadership content to help engage customers and get them across the dotted line. As it is marketing’s role to produce these, ensuring both teams work closely together will ensure each piece of collateral produced is optimised to the task in hand to maximise its impact.
Marketing will also help to generate the leads your sales team need and will play a part in whether you wish to do awareness or lead generation marketing. Something we’ll cover in a future blog.
Are you convinced?
So there you have it, marketing is not about selling. Although it is a part of it. Marketing is about the entire process and that’s why we are so passionate about it. It needs to be at the core of your company to drive it forward.
The types of marketing vary from company to company, and within different industries. But it is important to ensure you are using the right types to reach your customers, which is where our marketing assurance comes in.
If you would like to know more and see how we can help to supercharge your marketing drop us a line.