Marketing is the process of making potential prospects interested in your business’s services and products. It plays a vital role in product and market research, sales, and advertising.
This field focuses on consumer and market behaviors, along with the monitoring of commercial management as a way to attract, engage, obtain, and retain clients by addressing their pain points and creating brand loyalty.
Let’s discuss why marketing is essential for your business, the four Ps, and what it all means for you.
Or click here to cut to the chase and hire a digital marketing freelancer.
Why Is Marketing Important in Business?
Marketing is crucial in business because it creates brand awareness, increases website traffic, boosts revenue, and helps develop your brand image. Let’s discuss these in detail now.
Increases Brand Awareness
Marketing helps your business gain visibility. Even with the best product globally, your company will fail if the right customers don’t know about it. Marketing prevents these kinds of brand missteps.
The perfect marketing campaign can make your business unforgettable and get clients to start trusting your brand, become loyal customers, and tell their social circle about your products.
Creates Traffic
Boosting traffic to your business website means growing the number of qualified leads and ultimately increasing sales, which is what digital marketing helps you achieve. And a digital marketer is one of the most effective types of marketers you can hire today.
But you must write an accurate job description to hire the right person. Our guide on a marketer’s job description can help you do that.
Boosts Revenue
Every company wants to increase its revenue, and marketing can help. It boosts revenue by creating effective email campaigns, optimizing the business’s website for greater visibility, doing competitor and market research, and performing split testing and marketing experiments to develop the best strategy for your brand.
Helps Create a Brand Image
Establishing a high degree of trust in your brand leads to repeat purchases and greater client loyalty. Not only does this lead to higher revenue, but it also results in positive customer reviews and referrals, which are considered one of the most potent types of brand promotion. One goal of marketing is to encourage this type of user-generated content, so your brand can spread via word of mouth.
Monitors Important Metrics
Monitoring performance metrics is critical for assessing the effectiveness of current business strategies. Marketing teams can help optimize your existing campaigns by informing you about things that need improvement, creating new approaches, and keeping track of their progress.
What Are the Four PS of Marketing?
The four Ps of marketing are product, price, place, and promotion. EJ McCarthy coined the idea in the 1960s, and it explains how marketing interacts with every stage of a business.
P Is for Product
Simply coming up with a product isn’t enough for business success. Instead, you first need to perform market research and answer questions like:
- What’s your target audience?
- What are their pain points?
- Is the market fit for this product?
- Who is going to be your product’s closest competitor?
- What messaging will boost sales, and on which media?
- How can you change the product to increase your chances of success?
Marketing teams use these crucial questions to understand the demand for a product and improve its quality. They use surveys and focus groups to help inform the businesses about improving their service.
P Is for Price
Marketers compare competitors’ product prices or use surveys to estimate how much your target audience is willing to pay for your product. If the price is too steep, you’ll end up losing potential customers. If it’s too low, you stand to lose more money than you gain.
Luckily, marketing teams can use consumer analysis and industry research to calculate a reasonable price range.
P Is for Place
Marketing teams can use their analysis and understanding of your target consumer base to suggest how and where to sell your products.
That’s because some products and services sell better using e-commerce sites than via brick-and-mortar retail locations and vice versa.
P Is for Promotion
Promotion involves print or online advertising, events, referral strategies, and discounts that marketing teams use to boost awareness and interest in your product.
You’re likely to come across strategies like PR campaigns and social media promotions during this marketing phase.
Now You Know What Marketing Is for a Business
Marketing is more than just the act of selling and promoting products and services. It also includes competitor and market research, brand image development, and monitoring key metrics.
And as you can see from the four Ps of marketing, it also intersects with almost all business areas, which is why it’s crucial to have a good marketing team on board. If you’re a small company in its initial stages, you should hire a freelance digital marketer instead of a conventional full-time employee.
That’s because digital marketing is one of the most effective forms of marketing today. And it might be cheaper to pull off than conventional marketing. If you’re wondering about the cost of hiring a marketer, check out our blog post, “How Much Should I Pay A Marketing Consultant?”