A key ingredient in any business looking to thrive is a clear-cut understanding of its market. Who is your target audience? What are their buying habits? What do they want? It is important to read the consumer’s mind and be on top of their needs. You can do this with specialized strategies that are clearly defined to fulfill these.
If there are CMOs in financial services, despite being established and being considered heavyweight businesses, then so should you. Here are other vital roles that marketing will fulfill in growing your company:
Marketing understands and communicates with your audience.
Marketing is a great tool to communicate with your audience. It is more than just selling or advertising, although these are what naturally stems out from a great marketing program. Marketing seeks to build a deep relationship with your audience that the product becomes a natural fit or a solution to their needs.
Marketing puts value into the customer rather than just sells to them.
We’ve all had experiences with a narcissist in our lives — someone who is more interested in promoting how awesome he or she is without taking time out to find out what it is we need or how we are feeling at a given moment. Bad advertising is something like that. That is why we don’t care much about screaming banner ads or barely pay attention to tuneless radio jingles. So effective advertising stems from good marketing.
Marketing keeps the focus on the customer, not the business.
We’ve seen businesses rise and fall because, in the beginning, they created a product to fill a need or to solve a problem. The focus was on the customer. But as the company grows, they fall into the trap of shifting the focus to the business, how to become more profitable, how to outrank the competition and other goals. But at the same time completely forgetting all about their customers, the one whom they made the product for in the first place. If you want to keep growing as a business, you need to keep your customers at the forefront of every decision and strategy.
Marketing has a conscience.
This is because marketing seeks to be as human as possible. Ever wonder why advertisements with shallow messages like men impressing women might be amusing but do not make a strong impact? At the core of every human being, we know we are much more than that. That is what good marketing seeks to do, make the world better, be good teachers to the next generation, and take care of the planet we live in.
Imagine what a strong brand you will have if your marketing is effectively able to fulfill all these roles. Sometimes, all it takes is a continuing conversation with your customers. Asking how they are and how they are feeling are effective engagement methods and marketing tools that many businesses often overlook. Sometimes, the only way to make a business grow is to make sure it provides the needs of its target audience, serves the community at large, and makes the world a better place for everyone.
