Why learning marketing is essential

Why is it essential for us to learn marketing? In reality, marketing is in taking action around us every day. We are nearly continuously exposed to various offers and presentations made by businesses. The offers occur in many ways. They are presenting themselves through our senses. Some make it through sights (such as billboards), sound (such as radio /audio ads), combination of both, even through smell (such as aroma of food), and also taste (as in food samples).  Sometimes the offers are alluring us through our own thought, such as our feeling of happiness or joy.

They take form as ads on TV, road side billboards, ads on websites, discount offer on emails, ads on YouTube, They are part of a business’ acts to sell products and services. The offering the businesses make is intended to meet consumer’s needs.

While it seems that businesses are doing so only to make sales, marketing is actually making consumer’s life better. It makes better products or services available for consumers.

On business’ side, marketing also helps businesses to be more profitable. It helps to make selling easier by reaching consumer more accurately.

In today’s market, a strong customer relationship is necessary for business sustainability. Marketing also helps in this aspect.

Here’s why even a small , personal business must learn marketing.

1. It makes it easier for consumers to fulfill their needs

When a need arises and recognized, a person would usually seek relief to fulfill the need. A need has specific characteristics or specifications. These characteristics are unique to each person. In a more broad sense, they are unique to each consumer or market group.

To make offers to reach a specific consumer group, businesses use marketing strategies that cater to the unique properties of the needs. With marketing, businesses learn the characteristics of the needs and the customer behavior to design unique ways to reach the said customers.

The offers presented to the specific customers are already designed and tuned not only to be effective, but also to provide the most suitable match for the targeted customer’s needs.

The offers are not just some random presentations displayed to just anybody. They are specifically prepared toward the needs of a specific target market. Each offer has a value preposition a business tries to present in expectation to meet a consumer’s demand.

This makes it easier for the customers to match the specifications of the need with available offers. It will take less effort for the customers to find the most suitable choice. Many businesses have also gone further to help the customers with a guide to find the right choice. The guide, though, might be inclined toward their own products.

Thus marketing helps with better offering and convenience for consumers.

2. It makes effective target consumer reach for businesses

The market is a vast place, while a business’ resource is limited. Most businesses cannot serve all kinds of market. Their resources must be utilized optimally to serve only the markets where they can perform best.

Buyers differ in their wants, resources, locations, buying attitudes, and buying practices. With these differences in aspects, the market is too broad to view as one common target. There are too many points a business must give attention to if it wants to serve all of them. With limited resources, a business cannot serve all buyers.

By segmenting the market (categorizing the market by certain aspects), a business can see which market it will have the strongest power in and be most efficient to penetrate. Thus the cost for providing the products and reaching the consumers will be more efficient.

One note: Affiliate marketing segment is known as niche marketing (concentrated marketing) category. It is where a business targets a very specific segment or niche.

After selecting which markets to serve, businesses can then devise marketing strategy and set budgets to reach the targeted customers. With specific marketing plan and efforts, businesses can reach the customers in the most cost-efficient way. This in turn will save overall cost, increase profit, while also lowering product cost to the consumers.

3. It helps building a strong customer relationship

To maintain and grow customer base, businesses must really know their customers. Knowing customers well will give guidance on where the market is going. They must learn about the customer’s needs, wants, demands, and what the customers expect from them. This means they must build a strong relationship with the customers. A strong bond with the customer will allow businesses to succeed in the market for a long period.

Through marketing, businesses can (and will have to) learn to care for their customers. They must know about what the customers need and want, now and in the future.

They must be able to see from customer’s point of view, knowing what they actually need and want. They must also cater to their complaints, their extra demands, and other requests. Thus by learning how to care for the customers, businesses will get close with their customers and a strong relationship will be formed. And in the current digital age, it is very easy for the customers to provide feedback such as complaints and reviews about a product.

There is no other way for companies now except to build a strong and close relationship with the customers. A close customer relationship must be taken seriously.

4. It helps businesses to sustain and thrive in the changing market

The market is not static. It is continuously evolving. Sometimes changes occur at a short time (for example: changes due to the Covid-19 pandemic).  As a business always tries to maintain sustainability, it must see and follow where the market goes.

To survive and succeed in the market, businesses must watch, learn and predict what changes the future would bring. This way they can learn not only to  make products or services that suit customer’s demands, but also how to deal harmoniously with them and develop customer loyalty.

Customers are adopting new technologies and have increasing demand for more features. There are also changes in consumer’s perception on a product category or a product line, emergence of new consumer group and decline of long-standing  consumer groups (maybe as their classic consumers age). These are some of the factors that should be predicted on the horizon along a business journey.

Other highly increasing factors to consider are the demand for practical shopping, payment facility, digital payment /financing.

Another example of change is how customers get involved in affecting product or service quality. They can now easily submit reviews, suggestions, referral, complaint, or even directly involve in design of a product (customized for their liking).

Marketing helps businesses to learn and be aware of these changes. While the future markets are not totally predictable, marketing helps businesses to deal with the upcoming changes much better. Maintaining customer loyalty has become very important than ever.

5. Conclusion: marketing is a must for a business

Thus, with marketing, businesses will learn how consumers act in seeking products they need. They can learn about which markets to serve, and how to enter the target market. Thus they can make effective use of resources for the marketing efforts.

Businesses will also see factors that affect consumer buying behavior, buying decision,  and also post-purchase behavior.

By knowing latest marketing situation,  businesses will also see the increasing amount of customer involvement in shaping a business’ overall product offering.

In all, these marketing aspects help businesses to devise a suitable marketing plan for the target market, and to thrive in the ever changing market.

Thus for a  business, big or small, marketing powers and steers a business in dealing with the roads ahead by providing guidance which way is best to go. And it helps to helps the business to sustain and thrive effectively.

Overall, marketing helps a business to thrive and gain loyal customers, and to sustain in the long run.

It is an essential tool not only for big businesses, but for all, including sole proprietorship.

Have a happy marketing journey.