The Importance of Marketing for the Success of a Business

The heart of your company’s success lies in its marketing. Most aspects of your business depend on successful marketing. The marketing umbrella covers advertising, public relations, promotions, and sales. Marketing is a process by which a product or service is introduced and promoted to potential customers. Without marketing, your business may offer the best products or services in your industry, but none of your potential customers would know about it. With marketing, sales may stay strong, and companies may have to close.

Getting Word Out

For a business to succeed, its product or service must be known to potential buyers. Unless your business is known in the community and communicates readily with your customers, you must use marketing strategies to create awareness of your product or service. With marketing, your potential customers may be aware of your business offerings, allowing your business to progress and succeed. Using marketing to promote your product, service, and company provides your business with a chance of being discovered by prospective customers.

Higher Sales

Once your product, service, or company gets on the radar screen of your prospects, it increases your chances that consumers will make a purchase. As awareness becomes a reality, it is also the point where new customers start to spread the word, telling friends and family about this amazing new product they discovered. Your sales will steadily increase as the word spreads. By employing marketing strategies, these sales may have happened; with sales, a company can succeed.

Company Reputation

The success of a company often rests on a solid reputation. Marketing builds brand name recognition or product recall within a company. When a company reaches the public’s high expectations, its reputation stands firmer. As your reputation grows, the business expands, and sales increase. The importance of your company is built through active participation in community programs, effective communication--externally and externally--and quality products or services created or supported by marketing efforts.

Healthy Competition

Marketing also fosters an environment in the marketplace for healthy completion. Marketing efforts get the word out on the pricing of products and services, which reaches the intended consumers and other companies competing for the consumers’ business. Unlike companies with a monopoly on products and services that can charge almost any price, marketing helps keep pricing competitive for a business to win over consumers before its competition does. Without competition, well-known companies would continue to sell, while lesser-known or new companies would stand little chance of ever becoming successful. Marketing facilitates healthy competition, allowing small and new businesses to enter and grow in the marketplace.

Considerations

Although marketing is hugely important for a business’s success, it can also be expensive. A company might spend as much as half of its sales in its first year on marketing programs. After the first year, a marketing budget can reach as much as 30 percent--sometimes more--of the annual sales. A marketing program that gives your company the best chance is a healthy mix of different forms of marketing, such as website development, public relations, print and broadcast advertising, design and printing for all print materials, trade shows, and other special events.