If no one knows about your business, how do you grow?

You may have the absolute best product or service available, but if your target audience doesn’t know about it, it might as well not even exist. This may seem like a hyperbolic statement, but if your business does not invest in marketing, you not only risk the inability to grow your brand, but even the possibility of not achieving success at all.

In today’s marketplace, consumers are savvier than they’ve ever been. They seek (and have come to expect) customized solutions to their problems and fulfilment of their desires. They are looking for customer service, faster response times and an overall great customer experience.

For brands to meet these needs, marketing needs to be part of your business plan. It should not be considered something that’s simply “nice to have,” but instead a vital and fundamental investment.

Regardless of the size of your business, small, medium, and large organizations reap benefits from marketing because it helps:

• Inform and engage your target audience
• Build trust and credibility
• Develop a reputation
• Sustain your business
• Increase sales
• Grow your business
• Understand the competition
• Gain valuable insight about what works best for your business

Before you begin

It should first be said that investing in marketing should be viewed like any other investment in your business. You’ll want to understand the ROI. To do so, you need to start from the beginning and track efforts:

• Define your target audience
• Set a goal
• Develop a plan
• Gather data and measure results

Different methods may work better than others depending on your business, product / service, or target audience. Take time to understand what your customers need so you can properly invest time, energy, and budget.

That said, let’s explore the benefits so you can see how important it is to develop a marketing strategy to win new clients, wow current customers and gain an edge over the competition.

Benefits abound

If you’re advertising your business, you may be wondering why you need to do marketing. It may seem that the two concepts have the same objective: alerting customers to your brand, product, or service. Advertising, however, is only one component of marketing that sends out a message about what you offer. Developing a marketing strategy takes into consideration the audience and their needs, allowing for the creation of campaigns that better define your brand, product or service for the audience.

Inform and engage your target audience: There is so much trying to grab the attention of today’s consumers. To win them over, your target audience needs to know why they should choose your business over the competition. Marketing efforts can educate them far over what you might showcase in an advertisement.

For example, content on your website such as blogs, photos or a video provides insight to your service or product as well as the unique aspects you have (and the competition doesn’t).

Allowing customers to comment, sign up for a newsletter or interact with content engages and draws them in. These are all parts to providing a superior consumer experience that will keep your brand on people’s minds.

Build trust and credibility: Providing content shows your expertise. Making your marketing message consistent across all channels makes your brand reliable. Research shows that people who read and understand what you do are likely to share it and 70 percent of customers are more likely to buy something when they see content about a product or service shared by a friend.

Develop a reputation: Reputation is everything to business. And these days, so much of business is entwined with the Internet that Forbes states, “We live in a world where your online reputation can be your strongest asset or your biggest liability.” It’s worth noting that 86 percent of consumers read reviews for local businesses (that stat jumps to 95 percent of people aged 18-34) and 60 percent say negative reviews turned them away.

Be sincere in your approach and use well-thought-out campaigns and high-quality, well-designed marketing materials to build a solid reputation as a professional brand that takes business seriously.

Sustain your business: Advertising is often a one-off event. People may see your ads and engage but forget about you when the commercials stop running. Marketing efforts allow you to engage with potential and existing customers over longer periods of time. Maintaining relationships helps turn consumers into loyal customers that sustain your business.

Increase sales and grow your business: Marketing extends your reach much further than simply advertising and consumers need to know about and understand your product or service before they make a purchase. Today, nearly half (47 percent) of buyers view three to five pieces of content before engaging with someone in sales.

Using marketing to create social media posts, newsletters, blogs, videos or other content creates value for consumers. When they understand why your product or service is worth their purchase, they engage and your sales increase.

Gain valuable insight about what works best for your business and understand the competition: Marketing efforts allow you to gather data. You can see exactly how many people read an email, blog, or social media post. Additionally, once you begin focusing on marketing efforts, you’ll likely start noticing what your competitors are doing as well.

Knowing your business metrics allows you to see exactly what works and what doesn’t, and it becomes the key to your brand growth, giving you an edge on the competition.

Help for your marketing efforts

At Ebani Advertising, we know that often businesses get so mired in doing the business they do best that they sometimes neglect marketing. Our expertise is marketing and we’ve got a team that can assist with everything from defining your target market to gathering and measuring analytics.

Let’s work together to understand your audience and set some goals. Companies that do are 429 percent more likely to report success than those who don’t. And 81 percent of those successful, goal-setting marketers achieve them. Justgive us a call so we can assist with a marketing strategy that will to move you closer to success.