Do you know that marketing your product is more important than the product itself, Surprised? But that’s the truth. While the quality of your product is important to sustainable business, poor marketing in a digital era of social credibility and brand recognition can make your product irrelevant.

Grant Cardone, CEO of CardoneCapital said, A business will fail because of these two reasons;

• People don’t known.
• People forget about you.

Read the above points again this time slowly.

As you create a strategy in growing your business, Keep in mind that in marketing, growth and consistency is key if you want to build a lasting brand because at the end of the day, It’s not the best product that wins but the best-known one that wins.

Types of Marketing

• Search Engine Optimization: Abbreviated “SEO,” this is the process of optimizing content on a website so that it appears in search engine results. It’s used by marketers to attract people who perform searches that imply they’re interested in learning about a particular industry.
• Blog Marketing: Blogs are no longer exclusive to the individual writer. Brands now publish blogs to write about their industry and nurture the interest of potential customers who browse the internet for information.
• Email Marketing: It’s one of the most effective digital marketing strategy of sending emails to your prospects or customers. This content can serve to generate website traffic, leads, or even product signups. 
• Social Media Marketing: Businesses can use Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and similar social networks to create impressions on their audience over time. 78% of sellers who use social media sell more compared to sellers who don’t use social media.
• Search Engine Marketing: This type of marketing is a bit different than SEO, which is described above. Businesses can now pay a search engine to place links on pages of its index that get high exposure to their audience. (It’s a concept called “pay-per-click”)
• Video Marketing: While there were once just commercials, marketers now put money into creating and publishing all kinds of videos that entertain and educate their core customers.

Whether offline or online your buyer go through the same journey that you need to know of as a business owner. This is referred to as The buyer’s Journey

1. Awareness: Your first aim is to provide value to your buyers. Make them realise that they have a problem.
2. Consideration: The buyer defines their problem and researches options to solve it. They will then decide if your product can solve their problem.
3. Decision: The buyer chooses a solution. It’s human nature to want to take something with you if you find value for it.

The 4 Ps of Marketing

Let’s quickly talk about this, In the 1960’s, E Jerome McCarthy came up with the 4 Ps of marketing: product, price, place, promotion.

1. Product: Let’s say you have a product or service to market. The questions you need to answer are;  what’s the demand for my product?, who/where is my target audience?, is there market right for my business?, what platform is suitable for marketing my product?, what value those my product add?. The answers to these questions will enable you understand the demand for your product or services and how best to increase quality.
2. Price: You will have to do some comparison here. Check out your competitors to known how much your audience are willing to pay for your product or services. Price is too high, and you’ll lose out on a solid customer base. Price is too low, and you might lose more money than you gain. So use your research and customer analysis to fix a good price
3. Place: how and where will you sell your product? You have to decide whether you want to have a physical store, do home delivery or have an e-commerce site. This may need to be factored into your price also.
4. Promotion: This P probably is the most important. This includes any online or print advertisement, event, or discount you or your marketing team creates to increase awareness and interest in your product, and, ultimately, lead to more sales. methods like public relations campaigns, advertisements, or social media promotions will be employed.

Hopefully, my explanation will help you understand why marketing is important for your business. Marketing intersects with all areas of a business, so it’s important you understand how to use marketing to increase your business’s efficiency and success.

Finally in creating content for your marketing strategy keep these words in mind;

The goal is not to sell to people what you have, the goal is to make them believe what you believe – Simon Serek.

Next Blog Topic: How can i take my business online without a site?
So before you finally decide whether or not you need an official site for your business, you can still take your business online.
I will be talking on this in my next short blog post within the week.

Xoxo.

Victor Yakubu