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What is Marketing? Definition and Guide

Marketing | by Patricia Jones
What is Marketing? Definition and Guide

Businesses rely on sales and revenue. True. But, what works from behind to trigger sales and take it to the next level is Marketing. No wonder, businesses, both in the B2B and B2C space, focus so much on the Marketing Department. According to a recent BCG study, Marketing demands 70% of total focus, whether in terms of financial investment or heads. Because it’s the fundamental that creates the base of your business. 

The basics of marketing start with identifying customer needs. Because that’s what helps you craft your product and services. No matter what business you are in without knowing customer needs you will never be able to reach out to them. Whether you are a marketing guy or an owner yourself, being aware of the customer needs helps you build a trust connection between you two. This sense of trust is going to pay you in the long run, because your customer will remember you as a brand that resonates with their needs. 

Does the customer trust your product? Enter Marketing

Ever wondered why most of your customers talk about how you make them feel? They talk about the problems, they talk about customer service ( both excellent and poor), and sometimes how the brand has improved over time or been downgraded eventually. Precisely, everything boils down to how you make your customers feel. That’s what is marketing. It creates awareness, builds a brand experience, and lets your customers build a perception of your brand. Thus, marketing is a crucial segment in any business and makes sure that the customers are aware of your brand, stay engaged, and make a buying decision every time you launch something.

What’s a Marketing Plan

 A marketing plan is a small but crucial segment of a business plan that facilitates creating and maintaining demand, reputation, relevance, competition, etc. Marketing is pivotal both in B2B and B2C space and without an in-depth knowledge of this, it is a little too challenging to manage and run a profitable business in today’s world.

Marketing is a continuous effort to create, communicate, and deliver value to your audience. This includes the creation, distribution, and management of messages that reach consumers with those messages using various channels including advertising, public relations, sales promotion (push), direct mail and online communications (pull). Takeaway: Marketing is not just advertising – it’s also customer relationship management (CRM).

Marketing is about finding new customers, not just selling to existing ones

Marketing is all about understanding your customers and their needs so you can create value for them—and make more money in the process.

A well-strategized marketing plan aims at creating value for your audience. It’s not always easy, but it’s worth doing because:

  • You don’t need to sell as much if you have a large customer base that wants what you offer
  • You will have less competition from other brands trying to sell the same thing (or even something similar) as yours

Marketing moves the buyer into action – from awareness to understanding through to the purchase and use of a product or service. As already mentioned it’s about understanding their needs and wants, desires and dreams. It’s about what they fear or desire, what makes them happy or sad. From moving from awareness to understanding through to purchase and use of a product or service- the entire buying journey is impacted by various levels of marketing. A well-strategized marketing plan helps in making a strong impact of a product in the customer’s mind, who eventually makes a purchase decision. Precisely, marketing is a strategy to make a place in your customers’ hearts, so that they do not forget you once the purchase is done.

Marketing is much beyond advertising!

A well-defined marketing plan aims at nurturing your customer base without even expecting them to make a purchase. It comes with a long-term goal and makes sure that your brand creates a loyal customer base over time. It helps in crafting stronger brand advocacy which pays off eventually. 

What’s marketing automation and why it is relevant

Marketing automation is a powerful tool for improving your customer experience and generating leads. It helps marketers to create personalized and automated campaigns, run those, and get accurate reporting about the campaign performance in a superb short time. Simultaneously, it helps them improve the overall performance of your business and helps increase engagement with existing customers as well as attract new ones through targeted marketing campaigns.

CRM software with marketing automation features comes with an array of tools and functionalities. It aims at streamlining processes throughout the buying journey. You can automate the process of marketing, including the creation, distribution, and management of content.

Marketing automation helps optimize your time spent on marketing activities by automating repetitive tasks so you can focus on the things that matter most. These tools take care of things like scheduling emails or sending out social media updates based on historical performance data so they’re more accurate than ever before.

By automating repetitive tasks like email writing and campaign creation, your team members can dedicate more time to high-value activities such as developing new products/services and analyzing customer feedback data. This continuous improvement leads to better business outcomes over time. Additionally, automated workflows such as lead scoring algorithms provide companies with greater control over customer conversion after sign-up. This reduces the risk of trying new tactics and justifies investing in this technology now rather than later when costs may increase significantly.

The evolution of the marketing automation

Over time marketing automation has undergone several alterations, modifications ad more. This marketing automation, as of now, is one of the most crucial features of CRM Software that’s extremely powerful for improving your customer experience and generating leads. It’s basically a super effective technology that automates the marketing process, thus freeing up enough time to focus on key jobs, such as creating engaging content, sending out emails, setting up landing pages, and others which in the long run helps develop an impact of your brand on the people’s mind.

Marketing automation is nowadays being used widely by a lot of business owners or managers looking to do better with their marketing efforts. Since the objective of marketing is to deliver value to your audience, your aim should be to do it through various channels, including online and offline channels such as email marketing, social media posts and word-of-mouth recommendations, and more. With effective automation features, each of these things is automated and in line, where neither customers nor the marketer suffer from delayed conversations or so. 

 Marketing automation and B2B SaaS: How connected they are.

Marketing automation features aim at enhancing your customer experience and getting you a steady channel to get you leads. It allows you to automate marketing campaigns. This way, you can save a good deal of time in work and invest more time like creating great content or designing compelling landing pages. In recent times, , marketing automation has become a key part of B2B SaaS businesses because it helps companies grow their sales while reducing costs significantly.

Marketing automation is the use of technology to automate repetitive tasks in your marketing processes. It helps you to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of your marketing efforts by automating many tasks that are traditionally done manually, such as emailing or calling customers.

How Marketing automation impacts your ROI

The focus of marketing automation is to deliver a superb experience to your customers by automating key sales activities always on time. As a result, it increases customer lifetime value (CLV), which means it increases the probability for your customers to spend more time with your brand. The more time your customers spend with you, the more they drive your revenue growth. And, at the same time, you get enough time for cross-selling and upselling, thus bringing home more revenue at the end of the financial year. In addition, it also helps reduce churn rates so that new customers are more likely to stick around longer than they would have been before using CRM/marketing automation software.

Funnel Making & Making Customized Campaigns are Easier with Marketing Automation

The latest concept of sales and marketing campaign design is not unknown to you. Especially if you are a marketing guy, you already know how important is data for funnel marketing. In fact, a data-backed marketing funnel is more realistic and eventually drives more results that can be used to market your brand more effectively. But, creating funnels is not everything. With Marketing automation, things are triggered automatically, whenever someone purchases something or signs up for an email list. What’s more! With appropriately done marketing automation software you can create and send emails based on specific criteria such as time of day or location of the recipient. And that too with zero manual involvement on your part.

The Final Takeaway

The emergence of marketing automation is quite a game changer in B2B SaaS. It takes marketing to a new height by introducing automation in the process. As a result, marketers are now more open to creating better customer experiences which further impacts CLV and sales. Today, marketing automation is not just an illusion, but an excellent way to build your brand and generate more leads, which is essential in today’s competitive market.

Comments (1) Comments

  1. There is evidently a bundle to realize about this. I believe you made various nice points in features also.

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