Table of contents
- Introduction
- The term “business growth”
- What is marketing?
- Meaning of the word “marketer”
- Types of marketing
- Importance of marketing to business growth
- Conclusion
Introduction
Before starting a business, it is important to understand why marketing is needed for your business to grow. No matter the size of the business, it is key to identify how the marketer will tailor a plan to suit the business entire strategy. By determining if your business will grow or not. It will help in building and maintaining demand, relevance and reputation of the business. Without it, the growth of your business will likely be stunted or the business is likely to be close down due to the lack of sales.
Marketing isn’t just an important part of the business success instead it is business itself. It will help the business to become a brand in the market. This will also affect other factors necessary for the growth of your business. It lays the foundations of your business, helps to secure loyal customers, and identify yourself in a diluted marketplace. A great marketing plan will cover many areas of an organization and help to push sales, engage customers and ultimately grow the business.
The term “Business Growth”
Growth is important for the survival of anything including business. Why? It will help in acquiring new assets, attract new talent and fund investments. It also drives business profit and performance.
Business Growth means a stage in your business that calls for expansion and additional options to be able generate more income. Business growth is a function in the lifecycle of your business, growth trends in the industry, and desire by you for equity value creation.
This will help to boost credibility of your business. It allows you to expand your supply base, also helping in increasing the stability and profits of your business. However, to be successful and sustainable, business growth has to be strategic and has to happen for the right reasons. Before you decide to grow your business, you will need to consider if your business is ready to grow.
It is the function of availability of resources and often calls for up front investment. Whether an acquisition or business investment, it pays to be more conservative in projecting returns over time. To be able to choose the right business growth capital, it comes down to the following points:
- The size of the capital raise.
- The cost of capital.
- The flexibility of capital.
- The term structure of capital.
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What is marketing?
You should that without the customer, your business won’t exist and when your business is not existing, forget anything about marketing. Meaning that marketing is planned in relation to the needs and satisfaction of the customer.
Marketing is the process whereby you build an understanding relationship between your business and your customer or client. Meaning that our lives are built on relationships with other people, and is these relationships that play a key role in the brand we allow into our lives. It is also the operational process through which products and services are moved from conception to the end customer. This includes the involvement of the 4 P’s of marketing:
- Identification, selection and development of a product,
- Determination of its price,
- Selection of a distribution channel to reach the customer’s place.
- Development and implementation of a promotional strategy.
Understand very clearly that marketing differs from selling. Because according to the words of Harvard Business School’s retired professor of marketing Theodore C. Levitt “Selling bothers itself with the tricks and tactics of getting people to buy your products with their money. It is not bothered with the values that the exchange is all about. And it can not, as marketing does, view the whole business process to consist of a tightly integrated effort to discover, create, arouse and satisfy your customer needs.”
In other words, marketing has less to do to get customers to pay for your product. As it does with developing a demand for your product and also able to fulfill your customer’s needs.
Meaning of the word “Marketer”
A marketer has a responsibility to create a relationship between your customer and your product or service.
This relationship is built to maintain huge demand of your products for supply. As well as to advertise properly your product or service to invite demand sales. He/she is expected to be knowledgeable about the market trends and the changes happens around them.
The marketer is expected to have depth knowledge on 3 sectors of market research. This include the following:
- Market information: This centers around the quantitative aspect of the market research. This will include price, supply, and demand in the market place.
- Market segmentation: Segmentation means to deal with the various customer fragments and their fragmented choice or preference.
- Market trends: The name suggests the diver changes that occurs in the market place. And how this influence your product requirement, level and quality of competition in the market place.
A marketer has the responsibility to design a method on how to go about marketing your company’s product. There are decisions that need to be taken in order to make profits in the longer run. They include the following.
- Which kind of groundbreaking entry route to use in the market?
- What is the entire demand and supply for the respective product in the market place?
- The best time for the entry of specific products?
- What are the best means to advertise your product?
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Types of marketing
Marketing is a major department in your organization, whether big or small. Most times, it is often associated with sales because it brings about awareness of your company’s product, to get and convert potential customers. Without these sales, there will be no revenue and your company will shut down. That’s why marketing is very important to your company.
Digital marketing
This type of marketing is the direct opposite of traditional marketing. Leveraging on technology that didn’t exist traditionally, in order to reach more potential customers in new ways. Digital marketing integrates all marketing efforts that uses an electronic device or the internet. It performs excellently well and leverages on digital platforms like social media, email, search engines, and other websites to connect with your current and prospective customers.
Content marketing
Content marketing is a key ingredient in inbound and digital marketing. The content is what allows customers as well as search engines, such as Google, to find the information they need on the web concerning the company’s products and services.
By definition, it means creating, publishing, and distributing content to your target customer. Social media networks, blogs, visual content, and premium content assets, like tools, ebooks, or webinars are the components of content marketing.
The goal of content marketing is to help your customers during their buyer’s journey. First, identify common FAQs and concerns they may have before they are ready to purchase anything. Then, create an editorial calendar, this helps you create and manage your content. And helps to have a content management system to make publishing easy.
Search engine marketing
Search engine marketing, or SEM, has to with all the activities in the effort to ensure your business’s products or services are visible on search engine results pages (SERPs). When a customer types in a certain keyword, SEM enables your business to appear as a top result for that search query. The two types of SEM include search engine optimization (SEO) for organic search results and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising for sponsored SERPs.
To get started with SEO, you need to familiarize yourself with search engine ranking factors and produce content for search engines to index.
To get started with pay-per-click SEM, you need work with the search engine you’re looking to purchase placements with. Google Ads is a popular choice. There are also ads management tools that will help you in creating and managing your PPC campaigns.
Brand marketing
Brand marketing involves building your brand’s public perception and forging an emotional connection with your target customer through quotes, storytelling, creativity, humor, and inspiration. The main goal is to bring about thought-provoking and generate discussion that will make your brand be remembered and associated with positive sentiment.
To start brand marketing, you need to deeply know and understand your buyer persona and what they relate with. You need to consider your position in the marketplace and what will make you standout from your competitors.
Affiliate marketing
This is a kind of marketing whereby a website receives commission for each customer they refer through the promotion of an affiliate product. The website, often known an affiliate, will only get paid when their promotion leads to a sale.
With a website that generates traffic or an engaged network on social media or elsewhere, affiliate marketing is another great way to generate income. Choose a product or brand that closely aligns with what you sell. But does not in any way compete with you and promote it to your customers.
Word of mouth marketing
Word of mouth marketing means customers’ recommendations of your products and services. And this is the most trusted type of marketing today.
Social media marketing
Social media marketing is creating content to promote your brand and products on various social media platforms. Such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Remember your audience as you create your contents.
Importance of marketing to business growth
To engage customers
Your business needs to engage your customers. Marketing is an instrument that will keep the conversation going. Engaging with your customers is quite different from pushing your offers. It involves feeding your customers with relevant information about your products and services.
It’s all about creating fresh and engaging content. You do this by telling your customers what they don’t know. And let it be interesting, educative and worth their time. One of the best platforms where you can engage your customers is on social media. Short videos and other humor-laden tricks are used by many organizations to engage their customer base.
Build and maintain the company’s reputation
The growth and life span of your business is positively correlated to its reputation. Hence, it’s important to state that your reputation determines your brand equity. Marketing activities are done to build the brand equity of your company. The reputation of your business is built when it effectively meets the expectations of your customers. With such, a business is said to be considered a responsible member of the community. At this point, your customers will be proud to be associated with your products.
Build a relationship between the business and its customers
There is need to build a relationship of trust and understanding with your customers. How can your marketing efforts help to establish this relationship? Demographics, psychographics, and consumer behavior are the areas where your marketing research segment should be centered on.
With segmentation, your business will meet the needs of your customers, hence, gaining their trust. Your product team will ensure the business delivers what’s promised at the right time. Thereby turning your customers into brand loyalists. These loyal customers will have the confidence to buy and keep buying more. Thereby, building trust and understanding between your business and your customers.
Boost sales
Marketing uses various methods to promote products or services. Once your product or service has been advertised. It’s already on the wish-list of the customers. And this will help increase your chances of selling it. The customers may want to try your products or services. But with marketing there will be a trigger in their buying decision.
When they are satisfied with your products or services. They will become your brand ambassadors even without your knowledge. On their own, they will help to spread the word and your sales will start to increase. Just ensure your business offer high-quality products and services to complement your marketing efforts.
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Communication channel
Marketing is what informs a customer about a product that a company is offering. Marketing will make the customers to know about the value of the products and services. How there are used and additional information that might be helpful to them. It builds brand awareness and helps your business to stand out.
There’s always stiff competition in the marketplace. There’s a need to be a constant voice that customers hears everytime. This informs them about discounts, bonuses and other competitive tricks you intend to use. With communication, marketing plays a major role in turning your business into a leader in the market.
Provide insights about your business
The marketing department of organizations, do understand the need to target the right customer. However, there’s a need to also share the right content with the customers. The marketing tactics used by you, will help to establish your business messaging that will convince your target customer.
At this point, you must have tested various messaging and see what works. Once you have tested various sets of messaging on the target customer. This will help you find a viable baseline for your marketing campaigns. This will act as a metric and provides the insight needed to make you avoid guesswork.
Maintain relevance
Every marketer understands the need to disrupte a potential customer’s opinion about other products. But don’t make the mistake of taking this opportunity for granted. Many businesses assume that they will always remain the client’s favorite brand because they feel that the client doesn’t complain. That’s a wrong mindset. Your business always need to find ways to remain at the top of your client’s mind. This is achieved by engaging them with content.
You must understand that every relationship needs maintance. And marketing will help your business to maintain a good relationship with customers by making you remain relevant. Don’t focus on just getting new customers, also address the need to retain the present ones.
Create revenue options
During your startup phase, there were limited options since you were majorly cash-strapped. This limited your options then. As your marketing strategies generate more customers and revenue opportunities, you’ll start having options. Having options is compared to having different choices of clothes to wear.
Having options will give you the courage and boldness you need to penetrate new markets. You will have the freedom to start letting go of some customers, who are not contributing to the well-being of your business. Without marketing, you will be forced to continue working with clients who your business have outgrown.
Help management team to make informed decision
Every business you know has these problems confronting itt. Like what, when, for whom and how much to produce. Your business’s survival is strictly determined by the complex and tedious strategy carried out by you. That’s why businesses heavily depend on marketing efforts to make these decisions.
And you should depend on marketing efforts. This will serve as a reliable link between your business and the society. They will help to build up the mind of people, educate the public and convince them to buy.
Conclusion
Understand that your competitors are actively marketing their products. Doesn’t it tell you why you should do marketing? The only way to have competitive advantage over your competition is do aggressive marketing.
While marketing against your competitors, afford been negative. Research on what’s the expectation of your target market. This will help you deliver better products or services. And when you’re offering a product or service that is entirely new to the market. It calls for more aggressive and strategic marketing.