A Comprehensive Guide To The Importance Of Marketing

Updated 12 September 2023

Marketing helps businesses increase brand awareness, customer engagement and sales through promotional campaigns. It is a valuable tool for new, growing and established businesses to stay competitive and maximise their return on investment (ROI). Regardless of the industry you work in, marketing can help you accomplish many business functions. In this article, we discuss the importance of marketing for a business and how it contributes to business development and growth.

What Is The Importance Of Marketing For A Business?

Businesses understand and value the importance of marketing, as it helps accomplish their three primary goals, which are customer needs, social responsibilities and profits. Multiple business functions, including strategy, research and development, finance, sales and marketing, information technology, customer service and human resources, contribute to profits. While some functions have a limited role, marketing helps businesses in a number of ways.

Marketing aims to help businesses grow efficiently and reach their highest potential ROI by promoting their brand, products and services. Marketing promotions usually focus on boosting content engagement, increasing sales of products and services and growing brand awareness. Marketing helps a business in the following ways:

Increasing brand awareness

Brand awareness refers to an individual's ability to recognise a business and identify distinctive qualities of its products, services, culture and reputation. It helps the end-user differentiate between similar products that competing companies offer. Brand awareness is important because consumers often want something with which they are familiar. A consumer who is used to a specific toothpaste brand, for example, may purchase a familiar product even if it is more expensive when compared to an unfamiliar product that may be cheaper and has the same ingredients.

Marketing efforts focus on creating brand awareness for a business in the early stages or when it introduces a new product or service. Marketing ensures that a brand does not fade from a customer's memory, creates trust and fosters a loyal relationship. A company can choose the right marketing strategies and techniques to increase brand awareness based on its target customer base. Some effective marketing techniques that help create brand awareness are:

Advertising
Hiring a brand ambassador
Choosing an image or logo representing the company
Creating a catchy slogan
Campaigning on print and social media

Enabling engagement marketing

Engagement marketing uses content strategically to engage customers and create effective and meaningful interactions. Unlike traditional marketing, where a company would reach a potential customer, engagement marketing encourages voluntary consumer participation. When a potential customer begins interacting and communicating with a company, the company responds to their queries, fulfils their needs and simultaneously achieves organisational goals. Engagement marketing combines email and social media marketing and uses automation to create new programmes for internet users.

Engagement marketing uses continuous interactions to help the user make a purchase decision and become a repeat customer. Companies hire specialists who analyse the behaviour of internet users and create marketing strategies to promote their products and services. Users may recommend their products and services to people in their network. Some popular engagement marketing techniques you can incorporate in a business include:

Campaigns in professional and social networks
Campaigns in messaging platforms
Surveys
Live chats on a website
Video chats for customer queries
Email newsletters
Chatbots
Co-browsing systems
Website analytics to study customer behaviour
Knowledge bases like manuals, guides and documents

Allowing personalisation

Personalisation is when businesses customise experiences for individual customers. Email communication to a customer may address them directly by name. Customers may receive special promotions based on their relationship with the business if they are life or premium members. Consumers are more likely to read an entire email if a business addresses them directly. Email service providers may also mark random marketing emails as spam.

Another way you can use personalised marketing is by letting customers choose which advertisement they want to view. For example, if a business is paying for an ad on a streaming service, they may give viewers the option to choose between two ads based on a short preview. This allows the ad experience to feel more personalised, building loyalty and interest. If your business wants to personalise its marketing strategies, consider:

Creating customised messages
Sending targeted emails
Targeting customers based on location
Promoting similar products
Marketing on social media

Increasing sales

Both marketing and sales can identify potential customers, communicate with them and convince them to buy a company's products or services. Marketing is necessary for a sales team to reach the right customer quickly. With its shared goal of revenue generation, marketing is crucial for increasing sales. Though an organisation can sell its products directly to customers, marketing helps create awareness about new and existing products to a larger customer base, directly impacting sales. An organisation that aligns its sales and marketing functions is more likely to be successful in selling its offerings to generate a net profit.

Aligning promotional campaigns to business objectives

The goal of an organisation's marketing campaign may be to improve brand reputation, create demand, gather market analytics and enable sales. A marketing campaign works towards these goals in a scalable and repeatable manner. A marketing team executes these campaigns by identifying user needs, identifying target segments and creating and nurturing demand which can directly impact revenue. A well-planned marketing strategy can increase conversion rates. Marketing metrics can help business owners and management staff optimise investment on the most effective tools that can help them reach their business goals.

Increasing online visibility

More and more companies adopt marketing strategies to increase their visibility on online platforms. The right marketing strategy can create trust for the brand, as online campaigns are more transparent with little scope for manipulation. Marketing can connect with a potential customer instantly and increase the scope of a user sharing the product within their network.

Creating a level playing field for every business type

A large and a small company may be rivals selling a similar product or service. Marketing helps small businesses compete with big businesses and large retailers. With extensive use of social media, customers prefer to build a relationship with a brand. They may no longer choose a product based on price or the company's size. An informed customer considers multiple factors like reliability, ease of use, popularity, brand image, social acceptance, online reviews and affordability. Effective marketing can address these aspects and create a level playing field for every type of business.

Aiding decision-making

Marketing analytics can provide data and numbers to help professionals make informed marketing decisions to achieve the greatest ROI. A business may use marketing analytics to identify audiences who previously did not engage with their business and develop future campaigns that specifically target those audiences to engage them. Strategically using information from marketing analytics may help maximise a company's chances of increasing sales or consumer engagement. Businesses can also use marketing analytics to document their growth and share statistics with investors or board directors.

Other ways to use marketing analytics include:

Identifying market changes
Tracking customer engagement
Examining sales and market trends
Widening customer base

An effective marketing strategy can position a company's product and present it to the right audience. Market research can identify the right market segment for your product and help you identify potential customers by studying demographics, customer behaviour and buying habits. With sufficient data, marketing strategies can help you identify similar audiences across a wider geographical area and enable you to work with a large customer base.

What Are The Most Popular Marketing Tools?

Marketing aims to help businesses grow efficiently and reach their highest potential for ROI by promoting brands, products and services. Marketing promotions usually focus on boosting content engagement, increasing sales of products and services and growing brand awareness. Marketing and promotions can use traditional, digital or mixed media. Some traditional and digital marketing channels include:

Postal mail
Billboards and posters
Articles in print magazines and newspapers
Lead generation and conversion
Email
Social media
Digital ads
Blog posts

Marketing may also use market research and analysis to determine where to target content and analytics. This can help accurately track performance and user engagement. For example, completing and analysing market research may help a company determine where to place promotional ads. Later, marketing and sales analytics can provide information about the effectiveness of those ads and the platforms where you placed them.