why is marketing important for business?

Asking a Marketing Consultant why marketing is important you are going to get a long list of reasons why marketing is important for any business.  However, not everyone sees it this way.  Often, when things get tough – and the pandemic was a perfect example of this – the marketing budget gets cut.  Often it should be the last thing to go, but in reality, it is the first.  Or when work is super busy and things are going well, business owners think they don’t need to do any marketing, but then realise this is a mistake when it gets quiet again.

How you market your business often determines who successful you will be.  Marketing is a tool used to create and maintain demand, reputation, brand awareness, increase sales and so much more

So, why is marketing so important for your business?

1 – Marketing helps build and maintain a company’s reputation

By undertaking marketing consistently, in all the right channels to the right audience helps grow people’s awareness of your business.  Not only does it get your brand name out into the public domain, but if you keep shouting about what you do consistently over time more and more people will hear about what you do and how great you are.  You build reputation though word of mouth, great reviews, more enquiries, people talking about you online and offline.  Without marketing, you stop being heard in all the right places. 

2 – Marketing is an effective way of engaging with customers

If we keep what we’re doing to ourselves, work in a silo and don’t shout about what we do, then we’re not effectively engaging with potential customers or clients.  By sharing press releases, news, information, content on social media we are constantly opening the conversation with potential customers.  We can talk directly to them, engage with them, have conversations, make them feel special and part of our business journey. Our potential customers then grow to know, like and trust us, which is so important in business. 

They get to learn about what you do, why your products or services are special, how you can help them, why you’re the expert. 

If people hear about you, connect with you they are more likely to buy from you in the future.  

3 – Marketing helps boost sales

Effective marketing can help boost your sales through promoting your products or services.  Marketing and sales work had in hand, but marketing is a bit softer than direct sales, which is quite direct.  Think of marketing more like sharing information across as many places as possible to the right audience.  Showing off your products or services.  Promoting what you have to offer and why you stand out from competitors.

By effectively marketing products or services, you are looking to trigger a purchase decision in your target customer.  If you do this strategically and effectively this will have a positive impact on your sales, which then has a knock on effect to your turnover and profit!   

Those are three of my top tips for why doing marketing for your business is so important.  The list could go on and on, but these are three important things to keep in mind if you want to encourage a colleague to improve or develop your marketing, you’ve not been doing marketing for a while or even worse none at all!