7 Reasons Why Marketing Matters

Marketing is an integral part of any business. Still, many hate marketing for a variety of reasons. However, marketing is an essential process that identifies customers’ needs and wants. Also, it communicates the value of your products or services to them. When you market your business, it allows you to build customer relationships. Moreover, done right, it helps propel your business toward massive growth.

Problem: Many leaders don’t fully appreciate why marketing matters. They know it’s essential, but they have trouble understanding why the investment is necessary. And that’s especially true if marketing doesn’t present ROI relative to company growth.

Opportunity: Fortunately, the days when marketing didn’t have metrics are in the past. Company leaders can obtain reporting showing the success or failure of marketing efforts. And that’s actionable data.

Resolution: As a result, company leaders should sharpen their focus on marketing. Moreover, they should seek to understand why marketing matters thoroughly. With data analytics, there’s no reason leaders can’t see—measurably—the impact of marketing.

Why Marketing Is Important

As noted, marketing is vital to a business because it allows you to build customer relationships. Building customer relationships is an essential part of any successful marketing campaign. So, realizing what marketing creates and leaning into it helps you grow the size of your business. Of course, you don’t want to make the common business growth strategy mistakes.

Also, marketing helps you identify new opportunities for growth and monitor customer satisfaction. When you find new growth opportunities, it provides a way for your business to grow in ways that wouldn’t be possible otherwise. Monitoring customer satisfaction helps you effectively refine your marketing strategies to reach them.

Marketing provides valuable insights for your business by generating ideas to improve your products or services. You’ll learn what customers want from you and what they don’t like about your offerings by marketing yourself. With this information, it’s much easier to sell a product or service more effectively, so consumers respond favorably to it.

Further, marketing is a powerful tool for customer retention. When customers experience issues with your brand, it’s crucial to help them through it and minimize dissatisfaction. A dissatisfied customer could spread bad reviews about your business online. And as we know, it can damage your company’s reputation in the long run. Aside from those top-level thoughts, the following are key reasons why marketing matters.

1. You Need to be Discoverable Online.

Do we have to say it? We live in the digital era. As a result, your brand has to have a digital footprint, and marketing makes sure you promote it. In other words, your prospects, leads, and customers have to discover you online and on social. The reality is that your prospects will engage with you online long before they engage with you directly.

Remember, the first person you want to think about is your customer. They might find your site and see what your products or services offer them. And that means developing a solid buyer persona so what you have to say resonates. Marketing is the bridge toward creating a meaningful customer relationship, experience, and journey.

2. You Need to Orchestrate Engagement with an Omnichannel Mindset.

Your business needs to be a part of many different channels, not just one. The short of it is that having a digital presence means the fragmentation of earlier marketing methods. In other words, your brand must have a website, appear on social media, and also across multiple channels. For instance, it could mean appearing on webinars or podcasts. It could also mean interviews in news media. In short, your marketing team and brand must have an omnichannel mindset and approach.

The digital world means your potential customers are not only in one place. Even if many of your leads exist on LinkedIn, marketing there isn’t good enough. The digital world means your leads and customers continually migrate to different places. An omnichannel approach in marketing allows for increased exposure that leads to familiarity and, ultimately, trust.

3. You Need to Ruthlessly Guard Against Letting Insider Language Creep Into Your Content Instead of Using the Language of Your Prospect.

We must always focus on the customer on our list of why marketing matters. As mentioned, your priority should be first and foremost your customer. And if your leads and customers don’t understand what you’re talking about, they’ll go elsewhere. In other words, your acronyms and buzz words may not cut it with customers. So, it’s vital in marketing to ruthlessly guard against language that isn’t theirs.

An easy way to understand this concept is that you sell cars with window stickers—not the detailed owner’s manual. In other words, your content should be straightforward. If you ask your marketing team about SEO, they’ll know that you must keep things simple. And if you ask them about the content they create, the less is more approach (i.e., simple) is vital. People don’t have time to understand industry jargon and gratuitous buzzwords.

4. You Need Market Intelligence Through Behavioral Analysis to Inform Sales Processes.

Market intelligence is a critical part of any business. What does that mean? If you want to be competitive, you need to understand customer behavioral analytics. More information about your competition and a better understanding of your customer allow for tremendous success.

First, it allows companies to learn and make smarter decisions. However, market intelligence also means understanding your customers’ behaviors. Of course, for that, you need the power of technology. When you use behavioral analysis, it informs sales processes. As a result, it helps increase pipeline velocity, close rates, and retention.

5. You Need a Comprehensive Database Strategy.

We’re not just speaking about having a CRM. A comprehensive database strategy is an integral part of marketing. Along with powerful single spine technology, a strategy gives you vital data. For instance, it helps you monitor customer satisfaction. And it provides opportunities for you to follow up at the right time.

The reality is that CRMs have come a long way. Because of technology, marketing and sales teams can now use predictive analytics. Of course, this also helps you promote offerings in relevant ways for the customers. If you don’t communicate effectively with your customers, it could lead to a decrease in sales.

6. You Need to Measure What Works and What Doesn’t Constantly.

Marketing is about continuous analysis. You need to measure what works and what doesn’t constantly. Moreover, it’s vital to adapt as new data is available. This is because the landscape of marketing continually changes due to external factors. For instance, changes include evolving customer preferences, shifting markets, competitive forces, changes in technology, and more. If you don’t monitor your metrics regularly and adjust accordingly, staying ahead of the game isn’t easy.

It could mean your competitors capitalizing on the customers that lost interest in you because your brand failed to understand. It will also mean you’re not optimizing your marketing budget as well as possible. Finally, it’s important to note that data’s unbiased. There’s no human bias in the numbers. So, rely on data information—even if it goes counter to your instincts. In the digital era, data informs action. And that, of course, helps affirm why marketing matters for your company.

7. You Need to Take a Global (Or Holistic) View of Your Brand.

Your products or services need to be good enough to convince people to buy from you. However, that’s not all; it means you need to take a global (or holistic) view of your brand and lead generation. Further, the same holds regarding your thought leadership, content marketing, and conversion activities. Remember, in the digital world, borders don’t technically exist. And that means the whole digital ecosystem is for the making of opportunities.

Moreover, when your marketing team finds new connections that fit your customer personas, you can source new qualified leads. Of course, that results in more sales-qualified opportunities that fuel your growth. And who doesn’t want that? So, remember that it’s vital to take the 50,000-foot view to start effective marketing. Then, shift it to a sharper focus on your ideal customer. However, stay open to marketing and customer changes. Everything’s always fluid.

Marketing is more than just a strategy in support of your business drivers. It’s an absolute necessity for any business today, and the reasons mentioned above are why marketing matters. It helps you grow your company in new ways based on emerging markets and opportunities. Marketing allows you to identify new growth opportunities and monitor customer satisfaction.

Market analysis provides valuable data on how consumers react to different aspects of a marketing campaign—both online and offline. Further, it helps companies make better decisions when considering price points, production methods, advertising channels, and more. And that then allows the company to adjust when they market future products or services. So, lean into marketing and give your team the resources they need for success.

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Ben Stroup is Chief Growth Architect and President at Velocity Strategy Solutions where he helps leaders design, develop, and deploy smarter business growth strategies. Ben is a futurist, disruptor, and data champion. He leads a team that takes a structured learning approach to business challenges, which allows them to assist leaders in bridging the gap between ideas, innovation, and revenue—taking ideas from mind to market.

Velocity Strategy Solutions is an on-demand, next-generation business strategy and management consulting firm which provides clients with a relentless focus on data, execution, and results that positively impact the bottom line. Velocity delivers integrated people and revenue strategies combined with a disciplined approach to growth architecture that elevates the capacity of leaders, teams, and organizations to succeed and win more.