Why marketing

That is why you should invest in high-quality marketing services. Without effective marketing strategies, your business will most likely stagnate. Even though your loyal customers remain your priority, you should also focus on targeting new customers.

A business requires more customers to stay afloat. Marketing Equalizes the Playfield You ever wondered how new businesses succeed in taking the world by storm? Thanks to technology and the internet, every business has access to all the resources it needs to thrive. Even after taking the world by storm, a new business needs to stay consistent in its marketing efforts to remain relevant. Conclusion Marketing is an essential part of running a successful business.

You have to get the word out, so customers know where to get your products and services. Acquiro Business Solution Pvt. All right Reserved By Emily -- Friday, 28 Feb, Related News.

What is a performance management strategy? Thursday, 18 Feb, What is diffrence between Sales and Marketing? Tuesday, 02 Feb, What are the main differences between Sales and Business Development? Monday, 08 Mar, Thursday, 01 Jan, The more advertising seeks to intrude, the more people try to shut it out. Last year, Disney won the applause of commercial-weary customers when the company announced that it would not screen its films in theaters that showed commercials before the feature.

More recently, after a number of failed attempts, the U. This concern over advertising is mirrored in a variety of arenas—from public outcry over cigarette marketing plans targeted at blacks and women to calls for more environmentally sensitive packaging and products.

The new marketing requires a feedback loop; it is this element that is missing from the monologue of advertising but that is built into the dialogue of marketing.

The feedback loop, connecting company and customer, is central to the operating definition of a truly market-driven company: a company that adapts in a timely way to the changing needs of the customer. Apple is one such company. Its Macintosh computer is regarded as a machine that launched a revolution. At its birth in , industry analysts received it with praise and acclaim. But in retrospect, the first Macintosh had many weaknesses: it had limited, nonexpandable memory, virtually no applications software, and a black-and-white screen.

For all those deficiencies, however, the Mac had two strengths that more than compensated: it was incredibly easy to use, and it had a user group that was prepared to praise Mac publicly at its launch and to advise Apple privately on how to improve it. In other words, it had a feedback loop. It was this feedback loop that brought about change in the Mac, which ultimately became an open, adaptable, and colorful computer. And it was changing the Mac that saved it.

Months before launching the Mac, Apple gave a sample of the product to influential Americans to use and comment on. It trained over 4, dealer salespeople and gave full-day, hands-on demonstrations of the Mac to industry insiders and analysts. Apple got two benefits from this network: educated Mac supporters who could legitimately praise the product to the press and invested consumers who could tell the company what the Mac needed.

The dialogue with customers and media praise were worth more than any notice advertising could buy. It is accomplished through experience-based marketing, where companies create opportunities for customers and potential customers to sample their products and then provide feedback. It is accomplished through beta sites, where a company can install a prelaunch product and study its use and needed refinements. Experienced-based marketing allows a company to work closely with a client to change a product, to adapt the technology—recognizing that no product is perfect when it comes from engineering.

This interaction was precisely the approach taken by Xerox in developing its recently announced Docutech System. Seven months before launch, Xerox established 25 beta sites.

From its prelaunch customers, Xerox learned what adjustments it should make, what service and support it should supply, and what enhancements and related new products it might next introduce.

The goal is adaptive marketing, marketing that stresses sensitivity, flexibility, and resiliency. Sensitivity comes from having a variety of modes and channels through which companies can read the environment, from user groups that offer live feedback to sophisticated consumer scanners that provide data on customer choice in real time.

Flexibility comes from creating an organizational structure and operating style that permits the company to take advantage of new opportunities presented by customer feedback.

Resiliency comes from learning from mistakes—marketing that listens and responds. The line between products and services is fast eroding. What once appeared to be a rigid polarity now has become a hybrid: the servicization of products and the productization of services. When General Motors makes more money from lending its customers money to buy its cars than it makes from manufacturing the cars, is it marketing its products or its services?

When IBM announces to all the world that it is now in the systems-integration business—the customer can buy any box from any vendor and IBM will supply the systems know-how to make the whole thing work together—is it marketing its products or its services?

The point applies just as well to less grandiose companies and to less expensive consumer products. Take the large corner drugstore that stocks thousands of products, from cosmetics to wristwatches. The products are for sale, but the store is actually marketing a service—the convenience of having so much variety collected and arrayed in one location.

Or take any of the ordinary products found in the home, from boxes of cereal to table lamps to VCRs. All of them come with some form of information designed to perform a service: nutritional information to indicate the actual food value of the cereal to the health-conscious consumer; a United Laboratories label on the lamp as an assurance of testing; an operating manual to help the nontechnical VCR customer rig up the new unit. There is ample room to improve the quality of this information—to make it more useful, more convenient, or even more entertaining—but in almost every case, the service information is a critical component of the product.

On the other side of the hybrid, service providers are acknowledging the productization of services. Service providers, such as banks, insurance companies, consulting firms, even airlines and radio stations, are creating tangible events, repetitive and predictable exercises, standard and customizable packages that are product services.

A frequent-flier or a frequent-listener club is a product service, as are regular audits performed by consulting firms or new loan packages assembled by banks to respond to changing economic conditions.

As products and services merge, it is critical for marketers to understand clearly what marketing the new hybrid is not. The service component is not satisfied by repairing a product if it breaks. Nor is it satisfied by an number, a warranty, or a customer survey form. What customers want most from a product is often qualitative and intangible; it is the service that is integral to the product.

Service is not an event; it is the process of creating a customer environment of information, assurance, and comfort. Consider an experience that by now must have become commonplace for all of us as consumers. You go to an electronics store and buy an expensive piece of audio or video equipment, say, a CD player, a VCR, or a video camera. You take it home, and a few days later, you accidentally drop it. It breaks. Now, as a customer, you have a decision to make.

When you take it back to the store, do you say it was broken when you took it out of the box? Or do you tell the truth? The answer, honestly, depends on how you think the store will respond. But just as honestly, most customers appreciate a store that encourages them to tell the truth by making good on all customer problems. Service is, ultimately, an environment that encourages honesty. Marketers who ignore the service component of their products focus on competitive differentiation and tools to penetrate markets.

Marketers who appreciate the importance of the product-service hybrid focus on building loyal customer relationships. Technology and marketing once may have looked like opposites. The cold, impersonal sameness of technology and the high-touch, human uniqueness of marketing seemed eternally at odds. Computers would only make marketing less personal; marketing could never learn to appreciate the look and feel of computers, databases, and the rest of the high-tech paraphernalia.

On the grounds of cost, a truce was eventually arranged. Very simply, marketers discovered that real savings could be gained by using technology to do what previously had required expensive, intensive, and often risky, people-directed field operations.

But having moved beyond the simple automation-for-cost-saving stage, technology and marketing have now not only fused but also begun to feed back to each other. The result is the transformation of both technology and the product and the reshaping of both the customer and the company.

Technology permits information to flow in both directions between the customer and the company. It creates the feedback loop that integrates the customer into the company, allows the company to own a market, permits customization, creates a dialogue, and turns a product into a service and a service into a product.

The direction in which Genentech has moved in its use of laptop and hand-held computers illustrates the transforming power of technology as it merges with marketing. Originally, the biotechnology company planned to have salespeople use laptops on their sales calls as a way to automate the sales function. That was the initial level of expectations—very low. In fact, the technology-marketing marriage has dramatically altered the customer-company relationship and the job of the sales rep. Sales reps have emerged as marketing consultants.

Armed with technical information generated and gathered by Genentech, sales reps can provide a valuable educational service to their customers, who are primarily pharmacists and physicians. For example, analysis of the largest study of children with a disease called short stature is available only through Genentech and its representatives.

Sales reps can use their laptops to access the latest articles or technical reports from medical conferences to help doctors keep up to date. The laptops also make it possible for doctors to use sales reps as research associates: Genentech has a staff of medical specialists who can answer highly technical questions posed through an on-line question-and-answer template.

When sales reps enter a question on the template, the e-mail function immediately routes it to the appropriate specialist. For relatively simple questions, on-line answers come back to the sales rep within a day.

The marketer will have available not only existing technologies but also their converging capabilities: personal computers, databases, CD-ROMs, graphic displays, multimedia, color terminals, computer-video technology, networking, a custom processor that can be built into anything anywhere to create intelligence on a countertop or a dashboard, scanners that read text, and networks that instantaneously create and distribute vast reaches of information.

The marketing workstation will draw on graphic, video, audio, and numeric information from a network of databases. The marketer will be able to look through windows on the workstation and manipulate data, simulate markets and products, bounce concepts off others in distant cities, write production orders for product designs and packaging concepts, and obtain costs, timetables, and distribution schedules.

Just as computer-comfortable children today think nothing of manipulating figures and playing fantastic games on the same color screens, marketers will use the workstation to play both designer and consumer.

The workstation will allow marketers to integrate data on historic sales and cost figures, competitive trends, and consumer patterns. At the same time, marketers will be able to create and test advertisements and promotions, evaluate media options, and analyze viewer and readership data. And finally, marketers will be able to obtain instant feedback on concepts and plans and to move marketing plans rapidly into production. It should be the vehicle for bringing the customer inside the company and for putting marketing in the center of the company.

Whatever you decide to do, make it creative, and make it visible. People like working with and purchasing products from companies that seem empathetic and human. People do not like dealing with stiff, robotic, automated customer service machines or out-of-touch ads that seem to have little to no understanding of current trends. Do not present yourself as a faceless organization who has an unwavering facade of professionalism unless that is absolutely necessary.

Instead, run your social media accounts and advertising campaigns as if you are an individual. Some people will see through the facade, but as long as it comes from a place of genuine caring, your customers will be appreciative. Once you have run your marketing campaigns and have begun gathering data on what your customers respond the best to, you can analyze that data to decide the best steps for your company in the future. You will likely have some idea of the kinds of products that your customers respond to, so you should try to expand your business based on that information if you have the means to do so.

Many small business owners are always looking for ways to expand, and if you are ambitious, it could benefit you to be looking for ways to expand as well.

Marketing is arguably the most important part of running a business. After all, even if you have a product to sell, you will not be able to sell it unless people know that it is available. If you are a small entrepreneur without a formal education or a staff of employees, like many people are, these tips are a great way to start on your journey of learning how to market your company. Small businesses are vital to local economies because of the competition and sense of community they provide, so never underestimate how important your business may be to the business ecosystem.

Christmas is that time of year when folks unpack their old Christmas ornaments and Sending out emails and resumes is often an arduous task. Skip to content. Market Saturation Starting a business is easier than it has ever been. Analyzing Markets Another benefit that has come with the total computerization of most aspects of business are the ways that companies can conduct market research.

Building Trust Customer loyalty is one of the best ways to keep a consistent stream of income flowing. Search Engine Optimization One aspect of digital marketing that has risen to prominence through the invention of the internet and various search engines is search engine optimization.

Finding Leads Another type of software that can help your business in terms of digital marketing is software for finding leads. Social Media Growth Another new marketing frontier that many companies have begun to tackle recently is social media.

Brain Space One of the most common reasons that people neglect returning to a business is that they simply forget to keep returning. Boosting Sales Perhaps the simplest and most important benefit of marketing is the most surface-level one. Humanize Yourself People like working with and purchasing products from companies that seem empathetic and human.