Marketing is a principal value driver that helps your business thrive. Marketing and sales are two sides of the same coin:
- Marketing is everything you do to reach and persuade prospects
- Sales is everything you do to close the business
To perform at a higher level, the branding and marketing presence of your company needs to be implemented just as effectively as it is envisioned in a thorough marketing plan, with accurate and timely information. Designed right and executed properly, marketing not only adds significant value to a company but helps make the sales process seamless and less challenging. A company generally can’t be successful—and create value—without both, or when they don’t work well together.
Even in today’s digital age, content is king and queen; it’s the message that prepares the prospect for the sale. And that message should focus on the needs of the prospect and solving his/her problems, not the features of the product or service.
Modern marketers have more tactical options at their disposal than ever before, including advertising, public relations, social media, relationship marketing, brand marketing, email and direct mail, and many more. These need to be monitored to measure the effectiveness of each channel.
A marketing plan is a road map of how you will share information on your business, its products, or services. It must be reflective of the overall strategic business plan, including sales, financial, operational, human resources, legal and other business value drivers. The marketing plan should include everything from the target market to the step-by-step processes for coordinating and building marketing strategies and tactics.
Developing the marketing plan requires a clear vision of how your company will attract customers that can create and build value and match what your company does best with the customers’ needs.
A 2017 study performed by Hinge Research Institute concluded that high-growth firms invested 43% more effort toward marketing than no-growth firms and saw 74% more impact in key metrics such as number of new clients acquired, revenue, profitability, brand awareness and number of leads generated. It’s useful to know that the numbers bear out what we’ve instinctively known all along: developed properly and implemented consistently, marketing works!