Most business leaders see marketing as a necessary evil, that is primarily a set and forget task. You have to do something in order for people to be able to find your business and purchase your goods and services. So when they launch the business they create a website and social media accounts, but then fail to leverage them to their full potential or keep them up-to-date. Is marketing really that simple? Is its only purpose to drive sales?
Why undertake marketing? What role does it play in the business?
Marketing is actually a far more complex beast than just advertising your products and services in order to increase sales.
As a matter of fact, before you even have your product or service finalised, you should be engaging the services of a marketer.
Great marketing starts at the inception of your business. It should begin with market research and analysis to determine if your business is even viable. Once viability is determined, a good marketer will identify and assist you in understanding your ideal customer. This information should then be used throughout your product & service development, to tailor products for your ideal customer by ensuring that your price point and offering is commensurate with sales targets, and that product design and aesthetic is suitable for your ideal customer, and much much more.
Once marketing has helped you to clarify your ideal customer and tailor your service and/or product to them, marketing research and analysis is used to help determine the best way to distribute your product/service. Should it be via an online store, a physical shop, throughout department stores - and if so, which ones?
Only at this stage does marketing become about sales and advertising.
How do you reach your ideal customer to tell them about your products/services?
What messaging is going to resonate with your customer?
What does your customer’s purchase journey look like?
Once you have established what the customer journey looks like, then it is time to create the different sales and marketing resources you will need in order to create the customer purchase journey, and push live this journey (launch your website, ads, email marketing automations and internal sales resources).
Now that you have your purchase journey live, your marketing team will also be able to assist you with the language and responses that you will need for your customer service, and customer retention and reengagement strategies.
Why do most business leaders consider marketing and what common problems can marketing solve?
For most business leaders, they completely miss leveraging marketing throughout the planning stage of their business - particularly when it comes to product & service development. For most business leaders they only consider marketing when:
- They are first launching a new business, have established their products and services and want a website and social media presence.
- When they have been in business for some time, but sales are slow, and the “always on” marketing they are currently doing isn’t driving enough sales.
- When they are rebranding or launching a new product or service.
- When there has been a capital investment in a business, and they have funds that have been allocated for activities resulting in growth.
Short term vs long term marketing strategies
Each of the above mentioned reasons why business leaders consider marketing is generally because they have a problem at that moment and they want a short term solution. Marketing does offer opportunities to turn on a tap and drive sales quickly, but this often comes at a substantial cost.
Isn’t prevention better than a cure?
If you had an always on, long term marketing strategy, couldn’t you ensure a more predictable and stable growth trajectory? Would you find that consistent growth compounds, just like interest in a term deposit, and your position within your industry becomes cemented over time?
While there will always be a time and place for short term marketing strategies, and in some instances like rebranding and product/service launches, they are completely appropriate, these strategies should work in conjunction with a long term marketing strategy.
Your long term strategy should look at the goals you have for your business over the next 1-5 years (and beyond). They should work to reduce the cost of your short term strategies when you run them, by ensuring that your cornerstone marketing components (like your website) are optimised for customer experience and search engine optimisation, which will subsequently reduce the cost of things like your Google ads, by improving your Quality Score and will drive higher conversion rates, due to excellent UX (user experience).
Whether you need assistance with a short term marketing strategy to solve a problem, or if you have been operating short term strategy to short term strategy and realise you need to have a long term strategy for your business to achieve its goals, The Brand Shop can help.
