Why Does Your Business Need Marketing?

There is only ONE reason why your business needs marketing:

If people can’t see you, they’ll pick your competitor!

Without customers, your business would not survive. To attract and retain customers, your business needs to understand the value of marketing. People are unlikely to simply walk into your business and buy something from you if they don’t know who you are, what you are selling and why they should choose you over the competition (who are already using marketing to get noticed).

Many smaller businesses don’t place enough importance on marketing. They often see it as something that requires a lot of money and fancy advertising campaigns. But you don’t need the budget of Coca Cola to market effectively. For example, with no money you can allocate a couple of hours of your time to promote your business through your social media channels. 

With a small amount of money, you can place a print advert or a website banner. 

Whatever you do, however, you need to be consistent. And here’s why: before any of your marketing is acted on, your prospects need to go through five stages: Recognise, Read, React, Remember and Repetition.

Recognise:

When someone first spots your advert it flags you up in their sights. They see you, take a quick look and then most likely move on. 

Read:

The second time someone spots you they pay more attention – they read what you’ve got to offer and understand you a bit more. 

React:

Generally when someone spots your advert for the third time they get a sense of déjà vu. But, even though the process of recognition has started, and they may like what you’ve got to offer, the timing may not be right. Other priorities such as a boiler to replace, or Great Uncle Ray’s 100th birthday present to buy, might mean their cash is used elsewhere. At this stage however, you are on their radar.

Remember:

While your marketing communications are important to you, this isn’t always so with your prospects, even if they specifically requested them. They may lose or misplace them, throw them away, accidentally deleted them or spill their coffee on them. There may also be the slim possibility that you haven’t encouraged them to take immediate action. So, to help them remember, the key weapon to your marketing success now is Repetition.

Repetition: 

Bear in mind that your marketing communications are in competition with so much other marketing, that to convert your prospects into buyers, you need to keep in touch with them, repeatedly, before they will finally be motivated to act. Repetition builds familiarity which in turn helps build credibility and encourages people to do business with you.