The What, Why And How Of Marketing Your Business

From creating a business plan, to a network strategy, lots of small and medium enterprises continue to fail and close their doors. Often times, this happens because of bad management or not having an audience targeted marketing plan to actually bring revenue to the company. In this article, I am going to walk you through the basics of marketing that all entrepreneurs and business owners should master to hopefully reach the goals and growth needed for their business.




What Is Marketing?
There are tones of definitions to the word marketing, and in the fast-moving world of business, it’s understandable that definitions rarely stay the same. But in short terms, marketing has been described as the process of interesting potential customers and clients in your products and/or services.

As a practice, it consists in coordination of four elements called 4P's:

• Identification, selection, and development of a Product,
• Determination of its Price, 
• Selection of a distribution channel to reach  the customer's Place, 
• Development and implementation of a Promotional strategy.

The marketing concept is a philosophy. It makes the customer, and the satisfaction of his or her needs, the focal point of all business activities. It is driven by senior managers, passionate about delighting their customers. It is founded on the belief that profitable sales and satisfactory returns on investment can only be achieved by identifying, anticipating and satisfying customer needs and desires.

Why Marketing Is So Important?
Are you starting a business, or are you already an entrepreneur? Either ways, if you are serious about building a brand and achieving success for your organization, you have to start marketing you business if you are not doing it yet. Marketing is a very important aspect in business since it contributes greatly to the success of the organization. Production and distribution depend largely on marketing. There are lots of benefits in having the right marketing strategy for the good product and not pushing more some products and disregard their wants and the value they can really bring to the customer. Here are some important reason why marketing is important:

• Marketing Promotes Product Awareness to the Public:  You cannot afford to just let people find out about your business themselves. You have to advertise, promote and educate the public about the goods of your business. This is why a company must invest in marketing so as not to miss the opportunity to be discovered and sell its products. It’s good to have a great product but if nobody knows about it, you will make no profits. 
• Marketing Helps Boost Product Sales:  If your company aims to increase the sales percentage and double the production, the marketing department must be able to come up with effective and strategic marketing plans. This is critical not only to generate sales, but also to build a brand and a strong reputation for a company. 

Business Marketing Plan
The most effective way to grow and expand your business is by focusing on organic growth. And basically, you can increase organic growth in four different ways. They include:

• Acquiring more customers
• Persuading each customer to buy more products
• Persuading each customer to buy more expensive products or up selling each customer
• Persuading each customer to buy more profitable products

To achieve all these goals, and bring your business to success, you need to develop a proper business marketing plan, and then gauge its performance for your business growth. Here are some points that your plan should have:

• What Are Your Business Marketing Goals:This is simply what you want to achieve through your marketing plan. It can be sales, growth, reputation or something else. 
• What Is Your Target Audience: It is important to have and know the target for you marketing campaign, this will not only identify the scope and range of your marketing but also prevent you for marketing your product to the wrong audience and therefore wasting your money and not getting the results that you have set for you business marketing. 
• What Business Marketing System To Use: Internet has made business marketing a whole new concept, apart from the conventional advertisement systems in newspapers, magazines; internet or online marketing is the most used marketing system, since it is inexpensive when examining the ratio of cost to the reach of the target audience. In fact, companies can reach a wide audience for a small fraction of traditional advertising budgets. Internet marketing ties together the creative and technical aspects of the Internet, including design, development, advertising, and sales; it includes Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Search Engine Optimization (SEO), banner ads on specific websites, email marketing, and Web 2.0 strategies like social and mobile applications.

 Famous Internet Marketing Strategies
In the variety of solutions that offers the web, and depending on the marketing goals and target audience, these forms of marketing prevail:

• Search Engine Marketing: It is a form of Internet marketing that seeks to promote websites by increasing their visibility in search engine result pages through the use of, paid placement, contextual advertising, and paid inclusion. It is different from Search Engine which aims at "optimizing" web site pages. Other parts of SEM are Social Media Marketing (SMM) and Social Media Optimisation. 
• Affiliate marketing: Where a third party advertises products or services on behalf of a retailer in return for an agreed commission for a sale or lead. This method has proved very popular due to its' "pay for performance" model which allows a large number of affiliates to be taken on, but only rewarding those which return results.  
• Email marketing: It is a form of direct marketing which uses electronic mail as a means of communicating commercial or fund-raising messages to an audience. It involves sending email messages, adding advertisement in email messages. 
• Pay Per Click: It is an Internet advertising model used on websites, where advertisers pay their host only when the ad is clicked.

One last important thing is to not forget to track your marketing efforts. You will be spending money and energy on your marketing so its worth the investment to make sure everything is working as planned. If not don’t be afraid to change your strategy and make some adjustments to your marketing plan.