Marketing is an integral part of any business organization, as it determines whether it will be successful or not. When proper marketing strategies are implemented, they ensure that your brand creates and maintains demand, reputation, relevance, competition, and much more. Every organization needs to understand marketing strategies and how to employ them to properly advertise their business. On that note, what’s marketing and its importance?
Marketing refers to the activities that a company undertakes in promoting the buying or selling of its products or services. It includes market research, advertising, selling, and the delivery of products to customers. In simpler terms, it is the process of getting people to be interested in a company’s products or services. The process pertains to various aspects of a business ranging from product development, distribution channels, sales, and advertising.
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Importance of Marketing
Marketing is important to every business enterprise, and this is why businesses adopt various marketing strategies. The benefits of marketing include:
1. Increasing sales
Marketing is a great way to educate the target audience about your products and when they are well-informed, your sales will increase. Customers will know the value of your products, their usage, and additional information, thus creating brand awareness.
2. Creating revenue options
When businesses use various marketing strategies, it helps to increase business profits. One strategy is to reduce costs and make the products more affordable to consumers. Reducing costs ensures consistent sales, even with smaller profits.
3. Setting better business goals
Marketing strategies such as those for enhancing the popularity of your brand motivates the company to conserve its reputation. Clear goals and objectives will be set for employees to acknowledge their targets.
4. Building brand reputation
Marketing builds the reputation of your brand, but you must ensure to provide products of outstanding quality that are useful to the consumers. By meeting the expectations of your customers, you will also build your business reputation.
5. Improved decision-making
Marketing involves knowing your audience, and this way you will know what details and lines to use to convince them to buy your products. You will know the appropriate marketing actions to use on your target audience.
6. Relationship building
Through segmentation, businesses can meet the exact needs of their customers and deliver the promise at the right time. This creates brand loyalty as customers have confidence in your products, hence trust is established, and your commercial activities will be more fruitful.
7. Maintaining business relevance
Marketing helps to keep your products on top of the customer’s minds and enhance their opinion about them. This way, you will ensure that customers do not lose interest in your products and maintain your business relevance.
Different Marketing Tactics that can Help a Brand Gain Advantage
There are various marketing tactics that a business can use to attract an audience to its products or services. The aim is to deliver exclusive value to consumers and prospects through quality content that has a long-term goal of strengthening brand loyalty, demonstrating product value, and ultimately boosting sales. Differentiating your brand from the competition requires you to employ certain marketing tactics that will make you stand out from the rest.
1. Competitor Research
Competitor research is the first step you should take as you embark on identifying and implementing the right tactics. This way, you will identify product gaps in what your competitor Is offering. You will also identify ways to achieve brand and product differentiation by asking yourself what others are not doing that you can do. Some of the areas that you can research about your competitors include:
- Product and service offerings
- Their distribution channels
- Competitor content impact and presence
- Their staff numbers and caliber
- Their annual report
- How their website and social media platforms and their activity
- How they use IT
- Their customer satisfaction levels
- The reviews that customers give on competitors’ products and services
- SEO research to find out which of their content ranks highest in SERP
- Whether they innovate
This is just a simple list to get you started, as there is a lot more that you need to understand about your competitor’s impact in the areas of your business. You will also want to know who their customers are, their strengths and weaknesses, and how they advertise, among other things.
2. Solve Real Problems for Customers
To identify the problems that you need to focus on solving, you have to generate detailed buyer personas. These buyer personas will provide you with an insight into the main interests, goals, challenges, and pain points of your customer base. The insights will help you to uncover vital problems that your competitors are not solving. Once you identify these unsolved problems, you can come up with various approaches to solve them. However, you must validate your plan of attack with your consumers before implementing it.
3. Deliver World-Class Customer Experience
Customer experience is quickly becoming more important than product and price, thus every company should highly focus on it. It makes your customers happier, and they will have a higher level of brand loyalty, stick around longer, and can become brand advocates. When you provide a world-class customer experience, it leads to heightened levels of customer satisfaction, thus reducing customer churn rates and ensuring business survival.
4. Generate and Nurture Brand Advocates
Brand advocates aka “brand ambassadors” or “brand evangelists” are people that love your brand a lot and can be used to promote it to family, friends, or colleagues. Since they are convinced of the value that you provide in the market, they begin to promote your brand. A large percentage of consumers trust brand recommendations from friends more than from other forms of promotion. It provides a form of free advertising that is very effective.
5. Customer Support Differentiation
The quality of your company’s customer care and support has a direct impact on the overall customer experience. If your customer service is not excellent, then there is the risk that you will fall behind the competition. Consumer expectations are growing and if you deliver excellent customer service and embrace the best practices then you will differentiate your brand.
6. Be an Expert in Your Space
If you portray expertise in your space, then prospects and customers will turn to you for advice. It will make them look for your content to find solutions to their problems. One way to paint yourself as an expert is to produce content that provides a unique value that others are not offering the market. This is a great way to differentiate your brand.
7. Social Listening and Monitoring
Social media platforms have become one of the main sources of information about brands by consumers. This is where they will also vent their negative comments across the web if they have a bad experience. The way consumers use social media lately has more power than ever, and it can dictate the future and direction of your company. You can use the information on these platforms to differentiate your brand.
Examples of Companies that have Used the Tactics:
Some of the notable companies that come into mind when you think about branding are Coca-Cola, Mcdonald’s, and Starbucks since you know exactly what their brand image looks like. Other major players in the business world are also worth mentioning because of their exemplary use of branding strategies. Here is a list of them with their unique branding success strategy.
- Tesla – Brand purpose
- Apple – Brand values
- Amazon – Brand positioning
- Starbucks – Brand vision
- Tiffany – Brand voice
- Harley – Brand Personality
- Nike – Brand tagline
What to Watch Out for When in a Marketing Competition
You need to always watch what your competitors are doing when you are in a competitive market. Find out the type of customers they are targeting and see if you can match or exceed that. Be aware of the new products they are launching and determine whether you have something to counter their innovation or if it will affect your current brand position.
You should also seek to know what financial resources they have to see if you can uniformly compete with them. Finally, you need to be aware of any new entrants into your field of business and try to figure them out before they become a threat.
Author Bio: Taylor McKnight is a Digital PR Specialist representing clients across all business niches. He also enjoys content writing and marketing among other PR activities.
