The kind of business a company is in doesn’t really matter. All businesses depend on customers and clients. Without them, there’s no point staying in business. And so, one of the biggest challenges that will confront a start-up business is attracting customers. This is why a good marketing plan is needed. Anchored essentially on how to create interest for the product and draw people in, marketing will help pave the way to establishing a company in a position of strength in the market where it plays.
What Is Marketing?
In a large scale perspective, marketing may be described as almost anything that a company does to get the customers interested in its products, service or the company itself. It may use any or a combination of available communications resources and platforms which may include, advertising, online marketing, research, branding, direct selling, any special promotional events as sales or discounts and a host of other innovative schemes geared towards getting people interested in the products a company is selling.
In this extremely competitive, fast-moving business world, it is no surprise for definitions to vary from one company to another. But, in short basic terms, we would define marketing as the process of drawing the clients’ and customers’ interest towards a company’s products. In actual practice this would be happening in coordination with four components referred to as the 4 P’s.
The 4 P’s
Product: It involves the identification, choice and development of a product generally determined from a perceived need as bourn out by research.
Price: Depending on how a product is seen by the market and how the company may want to position it vis-a-vis competitors, it may be priced high or low, or in between.
Place: This refers to a geographical site or distribution channel where targeted customers will most likely see the product and buy. For packaged edibles for instance, the most plausible place would have to be the supermarkets.
Promotion: Its development and execution is based on what is deemed and proven to be relevant to a consumer. Whatever the nature of its relevance is, it has to be compelling enough to, at the very least produce in the potential customer an interest in the product, if not to take action at the point of sale and pick it up. This is where the different media, traditional (print/radio/TV) or below the line (direct selling, text messaging, phone calls, direct mail, etc.) will generally play a role.
Why We Think Marketing is Crucial to Business
The 2 Key Reasons Why Marketing Is Important;
- It promotes awareness for the product. A company cannot afford to let customers find out about the products for themselves. There is need to advertise and educate them about the product’s values.
- It helps boost sales. If a company is to grow, the marketing guys must come up with an effective, efficient marketing plan, not only to bring in sales but to strengthen consumers’ brand loyalty for them to keep buying the product.
Philosophy
To us, the concept of marketing is almost a philosophy. What it does is make the customer and satisfaction of her needs the focus of all business activities. In a company, the passion, push and drive for this emanates from top management, its senior managers, the brand and marketing groups and the sales people. The idea of marketing is based on our strong belief that profitable sales growth and gainful returns on investment are achieved only through identification, anticipation and satisfaction of a customer’s needs and wants.