The Significance of Marketing

Ten Reasons You Can’t Afford Not to Market Your Manufacturing Business

It’s hard too emphasize the significance of marketing. From hot new startups to an old
family manufacturing operations, every type of business can benefit from the improved sales and
heightened brand awareness that a great marketing campaign can offer. Clarify the objectives behind your
marketing strategy with these ten important benefits. Simply put, if you’re not marketing your business,
you’re not making progress. No matter how great your product or service is, without any marketing efforts,
you’re more likely to stand still and be ignored than to move forward and find customers or clients.

Marketing is a broad term, and one that both manufacturing business owners and customers are quick to
confuse with other terms like advertising and public relations. Try to think of marketing itself as a big
umbrella, with fields like direct sales,advertising, and public relations all tactics that make up different
parts your marketing strategy. Some of the world’s most well-known and celebrated companies – from
Coca-Cola to Apple – have succeeded using two surprisingly simple tactics: making great products and
marketing them well.

Marketing isn’t rocket science, but it isn’t necessarily straightforward either. Read on and you’ll discover ten
reasons to market your business, as well as helpful tips to help you take action and start developing a
marketing strategy today.

1. You’ll make more sales “No sales, no company.” –Mark Cuban
When people know your business exists, they’re much more likely to become your customers. If your
marketing campaigns are doing their job properly, you’ll start to see an increase in sales shortly after you
get started.

2. You’ll increase awareness “Your brand is what people are saying about you when you’re not in the room” –Jeff Bezos

Sometimes your best customers might see your marketing efforts hundreds of times before they buy anything. A lot of people see an ad, brochure or online recommendation and, instead of buying straight away, remember the brand name for future reference.

Raising awareness plants your business’s brand, its product or service, and its benefits in the mind of your target audience. By raising awareness through marketing, you’ll build a huge audience of potential customers who know who you are, know what you can offer, and know exactly where to find you. Don’t feel bad if your marketing campaigns don’t drive increased sales right away, as raising awareness is often just as important.

3. You’ll learn your metrics “What gets measured, gets managed.” –Peter Drucker

Whether you’re marketing a product or your manufacturing capabilities, knowing your metrics is the key to keeping your marketing campaigns profitable. If you can pinpoint exactly how much your average customer is worth, you know exactly how much you can afford to spend acquiring each new sale.

Once you’ve calculated key performance indicators like your cost per acquisition (CPA), or lifetime customer value (LCV), you’ll find it far easier to launch other marketing campaigns and optimize them for profitability. Launch campaigns, get as much data as possible, and trust your metrics. Once you’ve got the data, you’re in the power position to grow your business and increase sales.

4. You’ll make customers trust you “if people believe they share values with a company they will stay loyal to the brand” –Howard Schultz

Who do you trust more: your friend or a complete stranger? The more well-known your company becomes, the more people will trust you. The more people trust you, the more likely they are to buy your products and services. Building trust isn’t something that can be done overnight. Think of the companies that you trust. Generally, the companies we trust the most are the ones we’ve been exposed to – either through advertising or by doing business with them – for years.

The earlier you start marketing your business, the longer your target audience will have known you. Start early and build a relationship with your target market that forms an image of sturdiness, reliability, and honesty and people will respond by trusting your business to live up to its image. There’s a reason people pay more for Coca-Cola or Pepsi than they do for a bottle of store brand cola. They’ve spent years forming a bond with the brand, and as a result they trust it more.

5. You’ll build a social asset “Even when you are marketing to your entire audience or customer base, you are still simply speaking to a single human at any given time.” –Ann Handley

What could you do with a list of one million potential customers? As the expert direct marketers love to say, the money is in the list. By marketing your business now, you can build a powerful social asset that you can sell products to tomorrow.

Whether you opt for an mailing list or a Facebook Page, giving your audience a way to connect with you gives you a powerful platform for selling products and asking your audience important questions. Every great business has a social asset that it can market to, be in the form of an online database or an offline address book. Start building your social asset today and in a few years you could have a powerful list for promoting your products and increasing your sales.

6. You’ll learn your marketplace “Good Marketing makes the company look smart, great marketing makes your customer feel smart.” –Joe Chernov

When you first start your business, your target marketplace can look as vast as the ocean. Once you start marketing, you dive below the surface and instead of seeing a massive expanse of blue water, you start to see different communities, subcultures, and a huge network of different connections. Marketing opens your eyes to the reality of your industry.

Once you start your own campaigns, you begin to notice what your competitors are doing. This information helps you develop your own campaigns, learn more about your target audience, and get a better feel for your industry. You also start to learn why customers chose you. By polling your customers, you can learn what drove them to your product. Don’t keep your head above the water forever. Once you start marketing, you’ll see your industry for what it is – a massive network of opportunities that are waiting for you to seize them.

7. You’ll discover what works “Give them quality. That’s the best type of advertising.” –Milton Hershey

Have you ever seen an advertisement and wondered how anyone could possibly be persuaded by it? A lot of the best ads look and feel like the worst. By marketing your business, you quickly learn which types of advertisements and marketing tactics are effective, and which ones aren’t effective.

There are hundreds of marketing tactics you could use to find customers. From old-fashioned direct mail to search marketing, experimenting with different marketing methods helps you find the ones that work and focus on them. Stay focused on acquiring data to help you learn how to test different advertising campaigns and marketing methods until you discover the best tactics, headlines, and target audiences for your business.

8. You’ll develop an ‘ideal customer’ profile “Your most unhappy customer is your greatest source of learning” –Bill Gates

There’s a customer waiting out there for every business. Great marketing makes it easy for them to find you. Over time, as you build a database with the information you’ve acquired from your marketing campaigns, it also becomes easier for you to find them.

Your ideal customer profile includes demographics like location, industry, size of company, perceived value/use of your product or service, growth/expansion potential, and occupation/position and personal information of your contact (to name a few). Once you’ve marketed to hundreds or thousands of customers, look at your data and search for patterns and characteristics that you could use to profile your ideal customer. The more you can learn about the people you’re marketing to, the better. Use polls and surveys to learn more about what your customers are looking for and use their data to better target your marketing campaigns. Open Google Analytics and find the regions where your business achieves the highest conversion/hit rate. Dig deep into the data you generate from your marketing campaigns and spot trends and details that you can use to hone in on the type of people that matter the most to your business.

9. You’ll learn how to test and optimize “In the modern world of business, it is useless to be a creative, original thinker unless you can also sell what you create.” –David Ogilvy

Knowing how to test different headlines, images, and advertisements is one of the most important skills you can possess. A headline that sounds great in your mind might barely engage your audience, while another that sounds contrived and silly could be the perfect eye-catcher for generating leads and making sales. If you can’t test and optimize, you’ll never know which headline is the winner and which is the loser. Some of the world’s biggest companies launch marketing campaigns with hundreds of different images and headlines to be tested, all in order to find the one combination that produces the optimum return on investment.

10. You’ll build a powerful brand “If your business is not a brand, it’s just a commodity” –Donald Trump

Some marketers set out to sell more products. Others set out to build a brand that’s easy to remember. The smartest marketers set out to do both at the same time. The ultimate goal of your marketing campaigns should be to have customers come to you. Big brands like Caterpillar and John Deere don’t need to remind people that they exist because their customers already know them and trust them enough to make them part of their daily lives.

Branding is what separates your business from your competitors. It’s what makes customer choose you instead of someone else. It’s your business’s style, reputation, and culture all rolled into one. Brands are essential, and without marketing your business you’ll struggle to develop a memorable, powerful brand.

What’s your favorite marketing tactic?

From old-fashioned sales letters to search engine marketing campaigns, there are hundreds of ways to market your business. Which marketing tactics have you had the most success with in your business?

Excerpts of this article written by Kasia Mikoluk June 28, 2013