Why You Need Marketing?

What is marketing? In the simplest terms, marketing is communication. You are using a variety of tools and resources to explain to your customers why they need your product or service.

This communication can be in the form of advertising, blogging, newsletters, or pretty much anything else you can think of that reaches your target demographic and talks about your offerings. If you want to get more complex, marketing is research, public relations, social media, customer relationship management, search engine optimization, and so much more.

Before you can attempt to sell a product or service, you must first determine which segment of the population would be interested in purchasing it. Once you’ve figured that out, you need to establish how to reach them, be it via television ads, social media, email or a combination of multiple mediums.

You must ascertain how much people will be willing to spend to obtain your product or utilize your services. Evaluation of competition is crucial during this stage of the process. What is your value proposition? Understanding your demographic may be the most important determinant of success.

Learning their values, where and how they shop, what messaging resonates with them, and why they need what you’re offering.

Just like it sounds, offline marketing is any marketing that is done offline. Print media such as magazines and newspapers, brochures and other hardcopy collateral and events are just a few of the offline techniques that businesses are still using today.

The offline methods you choose to employ will depend greatly on the business you are in and the services or products you are offering. This relates back to the market research. Understanding your audience will help you determine which offline channels will be the most effective for promotion.

Whether you operate as business to business or business to consumer, there are plenty of opportunities to get in front of your customers.

From social media and email to website content and SEO, digital marketing can be a relatively inexpensive and simple way to reach your demographic. It is also a great way to track the effectiveness of campaigns and incoming leads. Online marketing allows you to reach a wide audience and tailor messaging to help customers connect with your brand.

Creating consistent content that keeps your existing and potential customers engaged can result in improved customer loyalty and increased sales.

In order to be effective, marketing efforts need to be tracked and analyzed to evaluate the return on investment (ROI). This is much easier with digital marketing efforts; however, it’s important not to discount the offline methods. Determining what works and what doesn’t is an extremely valuable tool to ensuring the growth of your business.

After all, you don’t want to spend your entire marketing budget and not be able to provide feedback on how it impacted the business. Keep in mind, ROI may not necessarily be a monetary metric. The return on a marketing initiative could be brand awareness, customer insights or any other information that may not lead directly to an increase in profits.

Knowing the goal before launching a campaign and gauging results against that goal is necessary to evaluating effectiveness.

Marketing, and doing it correctly, is essential to growing your business. Odds are, you will need to  implement a combination of both offline and digital strategies to increase revenue and you may need to test a few different methods before you get it right.

Even then, marketing strategies are constantly evolving, and the same ideas won’t continue to work forever. It is important to keep your eye on your customers and continue to develop tactics that appeal to your audience. Marketing is the key to customer engagement and your customers are what help your business grow.