The Importance of Marketing for Business Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

The Importance of Marketing for Business - Essay Example But Nike’s marketing success has more to it than just promotional hype. Nike gives its customers far more than just good sports gear. They make sure the customer doesn’t just wear his Nikes, he experiences it. Nike doesn’t just market sports shoes or athletic wear; it markets a way of life (Kotler). The Nike examples proves that through smart and innovative marketing businesses can create value for customers, build strong customer relationships and capture value from them in return. The importance of marketing to businesses: Helps businesses create value for customers: Marketing helps a business in creating value for its customers. Most companies today implement customer driven marketing strategies which allow them to create value for target customers. The process can be better understood through the following diagram: 1 Companies today identify and select marketing segments, develop products and marketing programs targeted to each and focus on the buyers who hav e more interest in the values that they create the best. They then decide on a value proposition by differentiating the market offering and positioning it in the minds of the target customers. Helps businesses create lasting relationships: The customer relationship management part of marketing is about maintaining and building profitable business relationships by delivering superior customer value and satisfaction. Just as companies are being very choosy about which customers to serve, they are serving the chosen customers in a more lasting way. Marketing today has become an art of finding, retaining and multiplying profitable customers Relating Directly: Apart from helping companies connect more deeply with their customers, marketing also helps companies connect to customers more directly. It helps customers buy virtually everything without going to a store through telephone, online, mail order catalogs etc. In fact, such has been the success of direct marketing that some companies such as Dell only use the direct channel to sell their products (Kotler). Social CRM: Marketing also helps businesses build strong, lasting and profitable relationships with customers through social media. The benefits that businesses achieve by effective use of social media are: 1. By effective use of social media companies can quickly build a network of core customers and supporters (Richardson). The feedback that loyal customers can provide is extremely valuable to businesses and can sometimes lead to major improvements in how a business offers a product or a service. Networks of loyal followers such as these can also help the company find new customers by referring the company’s product or service to others if they are pleased with what they have found. 2. Social media also helps a company attract more traffic to its website. The more traffic the company’s website continually obtains, the higher its ranking grows amongst the search engines (Richardson). High ranki ng with the search engines, in turn, helps the company attain better online exposure and visibility. More traffic to the company’s website also helps the company spread information about new products and services quicker 3. Apart from attracting useful feedback social