As a business owner, making sure you have all the right systems in place is key. How can your business operate or hope to survive without them? Along with accounting systems, HR systems and others, marketing is now recognised as an essential component of a businesses’ key systems. It’s taken a good number of years, but marketing is more important to get right than ever.
Why?
The positive benefits of marketing will be evident as you build your brand, raise your visibility among diverse audiences and gain a competitive edge over the competition. Without a doubt, every business should understand the benefits of marketing and the types of marketing strategies that will help gain you a solid customer base.
Here are six benefits of having a marketing strategy:
1. Growing your sales
When you employ good marketing tactics, you will make more sales. Fact.
It’s not just about attracting new customers either. While the common misconception is that marketing is all about targeting new customers, a well-designed marketing strategy will also encourage more sales from your existing and past customers. That’s only good news when it comes to planning your business future.
The core benefits of marketing strategy understanding are that it makes you more memorable, easier to find when customers need what you sell and more visible when people want to know more about what you do. The benefits of marketing are many, but when it comes to increasing sales, marketing is the tool in your business management toolkit that you should never be without.
2. Using and managing your reputation
Having a positive reputation in this super-connected world is proving to be a critical differentiator. Fact.
Your business reputation is very important. As you market online and through advertising, being transparent, engaging with customers and using smart tactics will enhance your reputation positively. Building your brand reputation is one of the marketing benefits that smaller businesses either overlook or dismiss.
Today, consumers will often thoroughly research every product and service they want to buy, so reputation matters more than ever. Not only that, but there’s a whole marketing type known as reputation marketing — using the positive reputation of your business to promote it.
Big businesses use positive reputation brand content and a monitoring strategy to ensure they maintain their reputation. But when it comes to developing brand value, the right marketing strategies are extremely effective even for smaller businesses. It’s a tricky subject to get right, but if you’re aiming to strengthen your reputation, it’s hard to beat the marketing benefits of highlighting and using your positive reputation as a marketing asset. When used correctly, your reputation will mean higher levels of trust from your target audience, attracting better talent to your team and more profits.
3. Audience marketing benefits
Good marketing helps you gain data and metrics to learn more about your target audience(s), so you can be more targeted in your strategy and advertising. Fact.
A targeted marketing strategy based on data about your customers is one of the best ways to develop multiple revenue streams from segmented audiences. Once you have a solid understanding of your audience, you can target them to match their specific needs and pain points.
You start by breaking your target audience into well-defined segments. Once you know what each of those segments is looking for, you will be able to send marketing messages that will be more likely to resonate. Your audience will be more responsive because you’re finding and presenting marketing messages that target their precise requirements. This kind of marketing benefits you and your customers alike.
4. You earn trust
Great marketing strategies help to build trust, which is like gold. Trust will keep your customers invested in your products, services and brand. Fact.
Without trust signals, your business will be less likely to make sales. You can use a great marketing strategy that gets people to your website, but if they see something that makes them feel uneasy about trusting you, they’ll leave your site and look elsewhere.
Trust is essential when it comes to business. With a marketing approach to trust that utilises all of the reasons consumers can have confidence in you, your business reinforces those trust signals. It’s like a perpetual motion machine that feeds itself while generating what it needs. Put simply, when you’re looking at the benefits of a marketing strategy, growing your trust indicators is one of the most useful.
5. Knowing what works
Effective marketing strategies help you determine what works and what doesn’t. Fact.
When you have a series of campaigns, the metrics can help you assess what to do, when to do it and what to stay away from. One of the easiest marketing strategies to use that showcases this is email marketing. While social media took the wind out of email marketing’s sails for a while, it’s now considered one of the best tools for effective marketing.
Partly, that’s because it is straightforward to conduct A/B testing on marketing emails. By segmenting your email output and using slightly different content for each audience, you can see what works and what doesn’t. So if your email open rates are low when you use the subject line ‘Special Offer This Week’, but they’re higher when the subject line is ‘Guide to our Best Weekly Bargains’, then you know what works.
6. Learning the marketplace
A core outcome of the marketing process is that you will learn more about the marketplace in which you are operating. Fact.
It is essential to not only know the customers but understand your marketplace as well. Of course, having different brand personas is more important than ever so that you can position your products and price them to extract maximum value from the marketplace.
However, as with everything when running a business, the more you know, the easier it is to identify opportunities. For small businesses, especially, knowing everything about your marketplace is essential. That means knowing more than simply who your target market is. It means knowing your local, national and international competitors.
It also means knowing the trends and industry events that may change your business model and the consumer trends that may dictate buying behaviour. With the right marketing, you can earn high-value insights in your marketplace and actionable data about financial forecasting.
The benefits of marketing strategy fine-tuning
There is a supporting cast of additional benefits to using good marketing tactics. The above six are some of the main reasons good marketing can help your business succeed. Today’s marketplace is very competitive, so your business must be aware of the benefits of marketing while making sure you put in place the systems to support your marketing efforts.
Taking the time to invest in your marketing will reap great rewards. Fact.
If you want help to streamline your marketing budget so that you can earn all of the benefits of marketing without the financial headaches, contact the team at Big Red Cloud today. With our easy-to-use accounting software for accountants, bookkeepers, and SMEs, as well as your free trial, you can be sure that you’ll never accidentally overspend on your marketing.
