Effective Marketing Strategies

Food for thought?
Do you think customers know and trust your products or services enough? Do you know what your customers really want? When was the last time a customer talked about your product or service? Was it a complaint or compliment? When was the last time a customer referred your product or service? Does your company have a reputable brand?
The answers to all these questions lie in marketing.
How you market your business can determine if the enterprise will be successful or not. Marketing is a tool used to create and maintain demand, relevance, reputation, competition and more. Without it, your business is likely to close down due to lack of sales.

I’d simply like to define marketing as efforts made by an individual or a company to boost the buying or selling of its product or service.


Why is Marketing so Important?

Marketing isn't simply an important part of business success – it is the soul of the business. Everything else in the business depends upon marketing. Check out these few reasons why marketing is so important to every business.


1: Marketing announces the existence of your business
First things first, potential customers must be aware of the existence of a new business and the product or service it offers before even trying to convince them to patronize such business. Imagine you are starting a new business and no one knows about it? Who then will patronize your product or service?

No matter how wonderful a product or service is, if it is not known, then it is as good as dead ab initio.

With marketing, you can shout and announce a new product or service to the world!


2: Marketing Is a Communication Channel Used to pass Information to Customers
Marketing informs your customers about the products or services you’re offering them.
Through marketing, the customers get to know about the value of the products, their usage and additional information that might be helpful to the customers. It creates brand awareness and makes the business stand out from competition.
There’s stiff competition in the market and you need to be a constant voice to convince the customers. Inform your customers of discounts and other competitive tricks you intend to use.
Through communication, marketing helps your business become a market leader.


3. Marketing Is an Effective Way of Engaging Customers
It is important for your business to engage its customers. Marketing is a tool to keep the conversation going.
Engaging customers is different from pushing your offers. Engaging involves furnishing your customers with relevant information about your products and your business as well. It’s all about creating fresh content.
Tell your customers what they don’t know. Let it be interesting, helpful and worth their time.
Social media is one of the best platforms where you can engage your customers. Some organizations use short videos and other humor-laden tricks to engage their customer base.
By engaging your customers, marketing gives them a sense of belonging.

4. Marketing Helps to Build and Maintain the Company’s Reputation
The growth and life span of your business is positively correlated to your business’s reputation. Hence, it’s fair to say your reputation determines your brand equity.
A majority of marketing activities are geared towards building the brand equity of the company.
Your business’s reputation is built when it effectively meets the expectations of its customers. Such a business is considered a responsible member of the community. The customers become proud to be associated with your products.
Businesses/marketers use effective communication, branding, PR and CSR strategies to ensure that a business’s reputation is maintained.

5. Marketing Helps to Boosts Sales
Marketing utilizes different ways to promote your products or services. Once a product has been advertised, it’s already on the radar and this increases your chances of selling it.
Customers may want to try your products or services and this will trigger a purchase decision.
When customers are happy about your products or services, they become your brand ambassadors without your knowledge. They will spread the word and your sales will start to increase.
Ensure you offer high-quality products and services to complement your marketing efforts.

6. Marketing Aids in Providing Insights About Your Business and what it offers
Every business marketer needs to understand the need for targeting the right audience. However, you must have the right content to share with your audience. Your marketing strategies can help you establish what business messaging will convince the target audience.
At this point, you have to test different messages and see what works.
Once you have tested different sets of messaging on the target audience, you will find a viable baseline for your marketing efforts.
It acts as a metric and provides the insight needed to make you avoid guesswork.



7. Marketing Helps Your Business to Maintain Relevance
All business owners and marketers need to understand the need for disrupting a potential consumer’s opinion about other products. But don’t make a mistake of taking this chance for granted.
Most businesses assume that they will always remain the client’s favorite brand because the client has never complained. This is a wrong assumption. You need to find ways to remain at the top of the client’s list of options.
Every relationship needs to be maintained. Marketing helps your business to maintain a good relationship with customers by making you remain relevant.
Don’t focus on gaining new customers before addressing the need to retain the present ones.


Marketing Strategies?

It is becoming more obvious by the day that businesses which want to remain competitive will need to up their game when it comes to marketing.

Effective marketing can be approached with the following methods

1: Digital and Social Media Marketing
Nowadays, businesses are being careful about what type of marketing strategies they invest in. When you have a limited marketing budget, it is important that you spend it wisely to make the most off your money. Marketing through social media is one of the most versatile and cost-effective strategies that businesses can use to reach their target audience and boost sales over time. If you run a small or medium scale business in this day and age and you do not have a ‘’strong’’ social media presence, then you’re on a long thing. I can tell you for free that you are a step backward.

2: Use of Influencers
Influencers are people with the ability to influence potential buyers of a product or service by promoting or recommending it due to their high number of followers and social media presence.
There are people/organizations that have the power to influence a lot of prospective buyers and customers about a product or service.
Just imagine someone like Davido, or let’s say Pastor Adeboye or a Tinubu comes out to tell people to patronize a particular product or service, such product or service is as good as sold out.

You may not be able to afford or connect with big influencers to influence the sales of your product or service but the one you know or can connect with can do something. For example, you know someone with so much followers on social media, or someone who belongs to a group or association with so many members, or someone who runs an organisation that brings hundreds of people together constantly.

3: Referrals
Simply put, referral marketing is spreading the word about a product or service through a business' existing customers.
Referral marketing (also known as word-of-mouth marketing) is a powerful tactic and one of the best marketing drivers for sales and conversion. Referral marketing is exactly what it sounds like: a person telling another person about a product, leading to the purchase of that product due to the recommendation.
Referral marketing works because potential customers trust the opinions of “real people” more than they trust traditional advertising and that is why you have to make sure that your existing customers are satisfied with the services you render so it can be easy for them to refer it to others.

4: Discounts and Promotions
Offering discounts and promotions the right way for your business can be a powerful weapon in your conversion arsenal to drive customer patronage and loyalty. The fact is that there are multiple businesses that offer the same products or services as yours, so, you have to find ways of making it look like your customers are gaining something special when they patronize you. You can introduce promos at the slightest opportunity – this works magic. But hey, be careful not to go about it hazardously so it doesn’t become unprofitable.

5: Signage
Signage for your business is integral to brand identity. It helps to enforce that strong statement about what your business stands for, how it should be perceived, what it represents. It may also communicate all necessary contact details. It’s very important for businesses with facilities to have them branded as that serves as on-the-go signage. it’s equally very important for businesses with a physical space to have a sign board.

What more?

Marketing is very important for ‘’our’’ businesses. The content of this article is one that I personally need to implement more on the businesses I run because, it allows businesses to maintain long-lasting and ever-present relationships with their audience. It is not a one-time fix; it is an ongoing strategy that helps businesses flourish.


Gboye Daniel
IG: gboyedaniel
24th October, 2019