Marketing is all around us. It makes customers aware of your business, products, and services and ensures that they will think of you when they are looking to spend their money.
Marketing your business can ensure that potential customers know who you are and know to trust you.
Many small businesses, however, may consider if they need marketing. It can be a great expense for small businesses and many small business owners might think that the expense isn’t worth the potential benefits.
However, marketing can be beneficial for businesses of all sizes. In this article, we will look at six reasons why small businesses need marketing and how it can benefit your small business.
1. Gets Your Business Out There to Potential Customers
For small businesses, it can be very difficult to get your name and brand out there to potential customers.
The first step in making a sale is to make sure that your customers know that you exist. If your customers don’t know about you, they can’t purchase your products or services.
Thankfully, marketing can help you establish your business and get the brand and products offered by your business out there.
If you’re a small business, you can’t rely on customers finding you as there are so many competitors there. Even excellent businesses with the best products can get lost when there are so many other options.
Effective use of marketing can make your business stand out from the crowd and make customers take notice of you.
2. Let Customers Know What Products And Services You Offer
This relates to the last point but is worth a point on its own. When you own and manage a small business, you will have spent a large amount of time and money on personally developing your products.
You know what the products are and what makes them so good and marketing can help you get this knowledge in front of your customers.
It’s not enough for customers to know about your brand, they need to know about your products as well.
You can use marketing to not only introduce the products but to also teach potential customers why they should choose your products or services over those of your competitors.
Marketing allows you to control what information your customers see about your products.
Use it to highlight the best aspects of your products, whether this is a particular feature, the price point, or the sustainability of the product, for example.
3. Marketing Can Establish Trust With Your Customers
Unlike larger corporations, small businesses need to build a direct relationship with their customers.
This means creating loyalty that can in turn become a returning customer that will repeatedly come back to your business for more products and services.
A customer will only follow your brand and come back for more if they trust you. For small businesses, however, building that trust can be difficult.
You won’t have the reputation and background of bigger and more established businesses so you need to find another way to build your reputation and trust with your customers.
This is where marketing can help. Marketing can help establish your brand as one to trust by building the image of the business.
Customers are more likely to trust a business that they see advertised than a company they’ve never heard of before. You can use your marketing to introduce individual products and services as something to trust.
4. Marketing Can Help You Learn About Your Customer Base
When you create your business and products, you will probably have a general understanding of who your main customers are.
You will probably have an idea of the demographics of your target audience but in many cases, these demographics are not the ones that will actually buy your product or service.
Many marketing tools will allow you to see exactly who your customers are. You can get information about not only the customers who buy your products but also those that interact with your marketing.
This data is invaluable for small businesses as it allows you to further tailor both your products and your marketing.
For example, if your market shows that your marketing isn’t hitting a certain demographic then you can try and change your marketing so that it does.
If you prefer, however, you can instead concentrate on the demographics that are reacting to your marketing.
You can also use marketing as a quick and easy way to get feedback from your customers.
This can come in two forms. The first is more indirect and can be gauged by which forms of marketing are receiving more attention.
For example, if some of your marketing focuses on the features of a product while others focus on sustainability, you can see which of the two gets more attention.
This will help you understand what your customers value more.
It’s also possible to get more direct feedback as well. When you market your products on social media, you leave your posts open to comments from customers.
This is a great way to get direct feedback from customers that you can then use to improve your marketing and your products.
5. Increases Sales
Ultimately, the main reason why any business of any size markets its products and services is that they want to grow and sell more.
The four reasons we discussed before this point are all important and great advantages of marketing, but they are secondary to this point. Marketing increases sales and that’s the main reason why businesses use it.
Although marketing is expensive, the number of extra sales and revenue it brings into your business should make it worthwhile in the long run.
Marketing doesn’t always have an immediate impact on your sales but over time, it will.
For example, if your business sells bespoke wooden furniture, a customer might not buy a new kitchen table from you just because they’ve seen your marketing.
However, if the customer’s old table becomes damaged and they need a new one, they may remember your marketing campaign several months later.
6. Helps To Grow Your Company
The key to growing your company is to increase your revenue and number of customers.
Doing these without marketing is almost impossible. Effective marketing campaigns will drive sales and help you learn more about your customers, which in turn helps your business to grow.
Without marketing, you will need to rely on repeat customers, word of mouth, and customers finding you. These are notoriously more difficult to achieve and more fickle than marketing is.
Final Thoughts
In this article, we listed six ways that marketing can help your small business and why it is essential.
We explained that marketing can help you promote your business and let potential customers know that you exist and can also introduce specific products and services to them.
Marketing can build trust and loyalty with your customer base and will also help you learn about them and target future marketing and products to be more effective.
However, the most important benefit of marketing is how it can increase your sales and business growth. Increasing these without marketing your business can be very difficult.