What's the purpose of marketing?
Marketing is one word for multiple objectives. Marketing helps find and funnel potential customers into loyal customers. All the aspects of marketing include different components that work together strategies for success.
Through marketing, you generate awareness, interest and action, and sales.
Increase brand awareness
Marketing and market research are essential to building and growing your brand and increasing brand awareness.
Think McDonald's, Coke, Google, Apple, and Target. These iconic brands have become popular—so popular that everyone instantly recognizes their name, logo, and overall image. McDonald’s golden arches, Target’s red bulls-eye, and Apple's bitten apple are iconic.
But this awareness didn’t happen overnight. It takes strategy, consistency, time, and money to get to this level of brand awareness. The more customers see and recognize your brand, the more customers you will attract, and the stronger your brand awareness will become.
Increase sales
One of the biggest goals and benefits of marketing campaigns is to increase sales. The more you get your name out there, the higher your chances of converting leads into sales.
It's hard for a consumer to buy a product they don't know about, and marketing boosts your chances of being the product they think of when they are in need.
Marketing is big business. Marketing is essential in bringing attention and creating excitement about new product launches.
It also is important to tell the story of your brand and what the new product is all about. Marketing makes your new products more attractive, appealing, and memorable. Marketing new products creates demand among your target audience if done strategically.
Promotions include traditional marketing campaigns like press releases, television advertising, radio advertising, billboards, newspaper advertising, magazine advertising, and print catalogs.
Online promotions include websites, blogs, social media marketing, and other virtual initiatives. The best way to promote new products is to know your target audience and reach them where they spend time.
Retain customers
Retaining loyal customers is just as important as converting them. Once you have their first order, it is important not to forget to keep them in your sales funnel for future sales.
A sales funnel is simply the buyer's journey. It is a marketing strategy that funnels customers through a five-stage journey. The funnel starts with a really big audience considered as your prospects, and as time goes by, will eventually become a smaller group of very targeted repeat and loyal customers.
Providing these customers, in addition to a great product or service, at the beginning with excellent customer service, email messaging, social media campaigns, informative blogs, how-to tips, membership programs, exclusive sales, and other value-added promotions will gain their trust and retain them for future business. Remember, people like to do repeat business with people they know, like, and trust.
Draw new talent
As your business grows, you will likely grow your talent team. When your brand is well-known and marketing strategically, talent looking for quality jobs will want to work for you.
Now, more than ever before, companies are including their inside-the-scenes culture in their branding as part of their overall storytelling. They use testimonials from employees to share their thoughts and feelings about what it is like to work at a company and why they are happy there. Finding the right long-term talent can be as strategic as finding long-lasting loyal customers.