How Can Marketing Improve Business (6 ways for growth)

A superior marketing strategy and marketing plan gives your business a competitive advantage.

That’s because marketing is one of the key functional elements of any business.

• Marketing improves business because the job of marketing is to: 1) gain customers, and 2) retain customers.  
• Marketing is the key functional area of a business that communicates with customers and drives sales. 
• Marketing activities enable the business to earn sales revenue to support the operations and administrative functions.

After all, marketing is core to your customer value proposition, your communication recency, frequency and style, and of course marketing IS your sales funnel.

But marketing doesn't exist in a vacuum.

You have to have a business model first. And once you get this worked out, marketing can do its magic.

Let’s review some ways marketing can improve your business.

How Marketing Can Help a Business

Marketing can help a business in an unlimited number of ways. From gaining a new customer to increasing the number of transactions to promoting new products, core to marketing’s most important jobs is to analyze, manage and cultivate the customer base.

Here are 6 important functions of marketing:

1. Marketing creates awareness in the marketplace

Marketing plays an educational role for your business. Remember, for consumers to show an interest and eventually buy your products and services, they need to understand what you are selling. Only then will they pay attention to what you are offering. This is why good, clear communication is a key area of marketing.

2. Marketing promotes your customer value proposition

Differentiation in the marketplace is what sets your business apart. And what makes you different is the seed of success for the value you are providing to your customers and prospects. It has never been easier, nor faster, to communicate your value proposition to the marketplace. And with evolving digital marketing technologies, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and new opportunities to learn more about your ideal customers, you have many options for your business to quickly find message market fit offering you more chances of finding new customers.

3. Marketing builds your trusted brand

Having a robust marketing plan and strategy in place lets you build your company’s identity that customers will know. Even more important is that it becomes part and parcel of your business activities. While it is best practice to update your marketing strategy, your brand identity should stand firm in the mind of the customer. Marketing offers a solution for business problems, and more importantly, marketing sustains your company’s brand and identity through well executed strategies and tactics.

4. Marketing increases customer engagement

Customer and prospect engagement is an important way of gauging how well your products and services are received in the market. And with today’s customers looking for a positive customer experience, it’s no longer about simply selling a product and forgetting the customer after the sale has been made.

Customer engagement is a fine art. Therefore, your goal is to keep people positively talking about your brand even after a product launch or sale. Plus, since not all feedback is always positive, it’s your job to turn the customer’s experience around. Solid marketing ensures customer concerns get resolved quickly, thereby installing and in some cases, even reviving, confidence in your brand.

5. Marketing acquires new customers

To state the obvious; you can’t make sales if no one knows your company or items exist. And while a physical store may attract local customers, expanding your reach is only possible through marketing. For instance, direct mail campaigns and online  advertisements can create awareness and attract new customers.

6. Marketing creates scalable growth

One of marketing’s key areas is data driven marketing. More specifically, marketing uses analytics to keep sales department accountable and advertising honest. This is done through careful business analysis of the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) in marketing.  At this phase marketing makes use of all the data and uses marketing insights to scale and grow the business.

For example, after message-market fit has been found, marketing learns from the campaign and scales the next test up. That is, instead of communicating an initial test to 100 potential customers, now it's time to go bigger and do another market test to 1,000 potential customers. If this test proves successful based on the data, marketing’s next job is to decide whether to scale up the test to 5,000 customers, or go bigger to 10,000, 50,000 or even 100,000+ customers.

This is where marketing magic truly happens!

Marketing Improvement Ideas

To reap all the benefits marketing has to offer, your business must become agile. Here are three valuable tactics to consider to improve your marketing process.

1. SEO

SEO can be an effective solution to a businesses online visibility concerns. Properly-executed SEO consists of the following:

• Mobile-first optimization
• Relevant keywords
• Current and up-to-date content
• Quality backlinks that occur naturally as a result of producing great content

For instance, including the right keywords attracts users to your website and encourages them to interact with your content longer. Currently, “near me” searches have become popular, doubling over the past year. Therefore, by adopting your Google  Business Profile (formerly called Google My Business), you increase the probability of your business ranking highly in local search results. Research is showing that most customers discover a company online, implementing SEO has never been more necessary.

2. Influencer marketing

Influencer marketing is the process of working with individuals who have a large following and influence on social media to market your brand and products. If this marketing type is new to you, you might probably wonder, does it work?

• 89% of marketers reported that ROI was almost and at times better than other marketing efforts
• 70% of teen Youtube subscribers stated that they trusted their favorite Youtube influencers more than they did conventional celebrities.
• A Twitter report revealed that 49% of consumers made purchases based on influencer recommendations.
• The Influencer Marketing Benchmark Report 2020 found that about 4/5 of the marketers who participated in the study planned to include influencer marketing in their budget.
• More than 51% of marketers reported that influencer marketing provides better quality customers.

The above statistics prove beyond doubt that influencer marketing can be good for business and is worthy of a test. We recommend a careful selection of these content creators before going ahead with this strategy. Doing so ensures that the influencer’s beliefs and aesthetics match with your brand. Moreover, you must be realistic in your choice. For instance, if you run a small business, approaching a micro-influencer rather than an A-list celebrity is more attainable.

3. PR marketing

When it comes to building your brand’s reputation, PR marketing is a fantastic and under used strategy. What’s more, press mentions are a form of low cost marketing. Media mentions can appear in different ways, including reviews and blogs or broadcasts.

One campaign that got this marketing type right is the National Health Service(NHS). In 2019, the NHS initiated the #Missingtype campaign to build awareness and highlight the importance of blood donations. This challenge garnered 689 media mentions reaching about 347,619,784 consumers. Moreover, the campaign resulted in 478,480 engagements.

Your Strategic Marketing Partner uses PR in all our marketing strategies. PR offers a low cost method of creating awareness, generating lead flow and can be a great SEO strategy for long term results. Plus, we often use PR in our new product announcement strategies.