Every successful business thrives on good marketing strategies. Though most would recognize that marketing is important, not every business trusts the idea that placing marketing on their top priority would increase their revenues.
Like in any businesses, lead generation is utilized by marketers to help determine customer satisfaction. Lead generation is the process of attracting potential customers by having similar interest to a certain business in the form of blog posts, coupons, free trials, and content offers. This alone is not enough. It also important that the information gathered would be utilized help address customer’s needs.
By putting marketing as a priority, it's easier to piece together what the end users want and what the company offers. It's important that potential customers are informed that the product or service you offer is what they want to purchase. Influencing the customer to consider the company’s product results is a better outcome, rather than relying on sales alone.
In an article by Ranjita Ghosh, there are three tips to implement a marketing-first approach:
In a marketing first company, company leaders recognize that marketing can change the outcome by giving customers much more importance than the product or service being offered. When leaders consciously adapt this strategy it transcends to the organization changing the conversation and providing marketers an avenue to provide insights on matters that need to be changed to provide better outcome.
Ghosh explains, “As companies become more sensitive to their reputations in the market, their focus must shift from internal-centric messaging, which highlights capabilities, to external outreach, which champions value. This perspective cannot arise from any other organizational function, nor can it be spread throughout the company by anyone other than the leadership team. This is a culture shift. Unless the organization begins to think differently, the changes won't last.”
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Marketing must come first. Through marketing, potential customers are attracted to a product for purchase because their behavior towards a product are influenced making a company’s product or service profitable.
Ghosh says, “Launching marketing programs to influence sales, create positive customer impressions and build mindshare in the industry. Link these programs to clear outcomes like funnel generation, order-booking and, where applicable, revenue itself. When marketing carries hard targets, the game changes.”
It is also emphasized that sales and marketing departments should not be isolated, instead, they should collaborate to increase revenues and boost visibility. Since marketing focuses more on providing a better customer experience, marketers can generate out of the box ideas that could influence increase in sales.
When marketing is properly utilized, the relationship between companies and consumers are improved. In marketing, market mapping is used to study various market conditions to determine current market trend and other variables that affect customers and products. This help maintain a company’s competitiveness in the market while providing better products and services compared to their competitors.
Marketing does more than just providing data based on observation on customers. It helps determine the kind of response that the company should undergo to keep them interested. The strategy is not only to find customers who would purchase a certain product from a company but to give them a good experience that would elicit positive response to the company.