By: Lilyana Hilaman
Why Marketing is Essential for Your Business
All successful businesses have one thing in common: they know how to market. Most people have heard of marketing and understand what it is, but many don’t understand just how important it is. With so much technology at our fingertips and media consumption flowing, marketing is one of the smartest ways to engage with customers and ensure success.
Marketing is how a company promotes the buying and selling of their products and services and communicates and engages with customers. More importantly, marketing is understanding customer preferences and offering them solutions. Marketing is a relationship between the consumer and the business, with open conversation.
There are many different ways to market. One of the most powerful marketing forms is digital marketing, including social media marketing and search engine optimization (SEO). Social media marketing is utilizing a presence on social platforms as a means to connect with customers, often through sharing posts and stories that keep followers engaged and up to date on what your business is doing, while also promoting sales. SEO improves the quality and quantity of traffic to a business’s website through search engines by non-paid means.
Let’s take a look at what marketing does and how it can take your business to the next level:
Visibility
With marketing, businesses can get their name out into places where it didn’t exist before. By utilizing marketing techniques, you can spread brand awareness and turn your business into a well-known name, increasing your reach. The popularity of social media creates the perfect opportunity to build visibility. By utilizing a presence on multiple platforms and generating a following on them, you can remain relevant and spread awareness of what your business offers to a broader reach.
Credibility
By increasing a business’s visibility, it increases its credibility. When you become well known, it creates a sense of trust and comfort when customers shop with you. If no one has heard of you and knows nothing about you, they will not feel comfortable entrusting you with their money or time. By creating a sense of credibility, it allows customers to feel secure and confident.
Engagement
Marketing improves customer engagement by providing more opportunities for a business’s products to be seen. With social media marketing, posting encourages engagement from those that follow because they want to keep up with the latest promotions, products, and changes. Search engine marketing also promotes engagement by producing your website in relevant searches for customers to see. With increased visibility and credibility, you can improve and drive engagement through your marketing strategies.
Appeal
Marketing determines how the customer perceives a business’s products or services. With effective marketing, a customer will understand why a product is useful and why it’s desirable. This will make your business more appealing because customers will know that you offer something that they want or need. By creating effective marketing strategies that create appeal, you also drive sales.
Connection
Through marketing, you connect with a customer. Most customers want to feel like they are seen and are kept in mind when a product is made. They want to know that what they are buying is right for them and that the company they are buying from cares about them. With effective marketing, you can check all of these boxes while promoting your product. With social media marketing, you’re able to open a more authentic and raw means for interaction with your customers, allowing them to see who you are and what makes you special.
Relationships
Marketing is an important way to create a relationship with a customer. In many cases, marketing is the first way that a customer is introduced to a business, and what they see will make or break whether they create a lasting relationship with your business. If you can effectively utilize visibility to create credibility, engage with the customer, and create appeal, then you have a better chance of connecting with and gaining a loyal customer.
Sales
Each of these benefits to marketing help to drive sales. The more effective your marketing, the more sales. It allows you to sell yourself to the customer, quite literally. When marketing works, it helps bring in more customers and more traffic, creating a long-lasting reputation while increasing profits. Marketing is what makes your business valuable to the customer.
Utilizing social media and SEO are some of the most direct ways to market to customers, and also produce lasting results. If you are still not marketing, you need to start. By implementing a strong marketing approach, you can leverage a digital presence to promote your business and products, and also bring more awareness to your brand. Creating a marketing strategy can only help, and the benefits that you see with it will be more than worth it.
