Marketing can be defined as an act of promotion or advertisement of selling products or services. It is the process of exploring, creating, and delivering value to meet the needs of the consumers by understanding the target consumer market and particular businesses. It has evolved into a new form especially due to the excessive use of social media. Due to the boost in the use of social media, it is easier for businesses to market and advertise their business or the products and services offered by them. It affects both businesses and consumers in a significant manner.
How does marketing influence business?
In the words of Peter Drucker: “Because the purpose of business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two–and only two–basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs. Marketing is the distinguishing, unique function of the business.”
Marketing doesn’t just “impact” a business – it is the function that saves a company from closing down.
Marketing has various benefits for business such as –
- Increasing Opportunities
Marketing your business can have a huge impact on new businesses by creating large barriers for them to enter a well-established market. The new companies, brands, and businesses marketing, and advertisement can play a significant in making consumers aware of the products and services they are offering.
- Sales Assistance
While a company can sell out its products to larger customers. With the assistance of various marketing tactics, they can significantly improve their brand awareness and make their product more visible to a larger audience, which in turn increases both sales and revenue. Marketing can help in identifying the buying behavior of consumers as well.
- Market Awareness
Whether you are a new company or an established one, they need to create awareness about their product to boost their sales and revenue. Making use of correct marketing tools can help businesses in reaching out to more customers, therefore, creating awareness about the product.
- Strategy Formulation
It has a huge impact on the functioning of the business. A business marketing strategy is what you offer, how you offer, and whom you offer. Whenever a company forms a marketing strategy they are thinking about the future success of the business. They make sure that they understand consumer needs, and what they want and they know how to communicate well with the target audience so they understand the offer they are offering.
source- STATE OF MARKETING, 8TH EDITION, SALESFORCE
- Lead Generation
Inbound marketing has immensely modernized the way businesses undertake marketing and selling operations. It greatly helps in creating awareness and spreading the message about the product.
Current Marketing Trends
Marketing trends are very essential to boost business. Some of the hottest trends in the market which can surely boost the business are –
It means that consumers interact with the brands through chatbots and voice assistants. It is most commonly used in marketing campaigns. Artificial Intelligence and Machine learning are the reasons behind conversational marketing. In a recent study by IBM, it was found that more than 70% of users want instant answers to their queries.
source- STATE OF MARKETING, 8TH EDITION, SALESFORCE
This is where conversational marketing can help them reach out to customers effectively and efficiently. It is a powerful way of driving sales and returns on investment (ROI). Brands using this can have a positive impact on their businesses.
- Influencer Marketing
In no sense, influencer marketing has gained significant attraction in the past one to two years. brands use online influencers for their marketing campaigns through social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook. It includes influencers creating content by interacting with the product or services offered or with the employee of the business. Influencer marketing yields better results than conventional celebrity endorsements. They can easily interact with their followers which results in better engagement. Influencer marketing plays a significant role in consumer behavior and psychology such as recommendations. In recent times we have seen various brands like beardo, and Muscleblaze use influencers on Instagram to market their product. The influencers create content about the product and services offered which creates an online marketing campaign for the businesses.
- Highly personalized content experience
The content you post can have a significant impact on the development of the business. Personalized content can result in better consumer interaction. Big businesses like Netflix, Amazon, Spotify, etc. are some successful examples. If we take the example of Netflix, it automatically suggests movies and web series on the search history of the user, and the same is done by Spotify. Facebook makes use of an algorithm that determines the kind of content that should be shown on the user’s feed. Amazon makes use of users’ browsing and purchasing history while displaying products when we log in to it. Spotify Wrapped is one of the music streaming service’s most effective content marketing initiatives. Every year, around the New year, Spotify subscribers receive a wonderful compilation of all the songs they’ve listened to. The compilation is presented with graphics in vibrant colors and is divided into genres, years, musicians, and more.
Users then have the option to share their wrapped playlists on social media, which is a crucial component that has caused the campaign to trend on social media every year since its beginning.
SOURCE- https://newsroom.spotify.com/2021-12-01/the-wait-is-over-your-spotify-2021-wrapped-is-here/
- Adoption of Automation
Automation in marketing is making use of technology to automate marketing and advertising efforts. The covid-19 pandemic has significantly increased the use of technology and automation not only in marketing but in other sectors of the business as well. It may sound complex but automation in marketing is simple. Automated email sequences in sales and the upload of social media posts are all examples of Automation in marketing. Marketing automation allows businesses to scale their efforts to reach out to larger customers. More than 30% of business owners claim that marketing automation help with time-saving. Their marketing team no longer needs to waste time repetitively focusing on tasks and can focus on optimization and content creation. Nissan gathers relevant data about its customers, including the time at which each vehicle was purchased. Six months after the automobile is acquired, they can utilize the purchase date to automatically send a reminder email to schedule the first service visit. This is an essential component of Nissan’s strategy because maintenance costs collected after the sale of the vehicle make up a significant part of Nissan’s overall earnings.
By understanding, consumer behavior marketers can fill in the gap of how consumers buy a product and identify the product that is needed ad the obsolete products.
Studying consumer behavior can help marketers to present the product in a way that yields higher consumer attraction. Understanding consumer behavior is the key secret to reaching out to more customers for brand recognition, engaging with the clients, and converting those into potential buyers.
How marketing influences consumer decisions?
The primary responsibility of a marketing department is to grow the market share by acquiring and keeping new clients. The best way to do that is by monitoring, evaluating, and controlling consumer behavior. Modern marketing strategies easily handle this duty. Let’s examine the how and why in more detail.
- Constant advertising
Regularly held marketing initiatives have a significant impact on consumers’ purchase decisions. They pick one brand over another just because they saw the first one’s advertisement more frequently. Customers tend to trust some businesses more than others simply because they have better blogs, and more visually appealing material and employ opinion leaders who help customers associate with the company favorably.
- Emotional connection
Instead of informing consumers, modern marketing aims to convince and build strong emotional bonds with brands and products. Even if people can’t recall where or when they saw a specific advertisement, they may still experience a specific emotion when they look at a product at a store, such as happiness, comfort, or confidence. It occurs because the advertising they watched caused their brain to detect a particular emotion. The brain immediately connected the product with a certain emotion when they first viewed it. When buyers select from a variety of comparable products from various companies, this relationship will operate flawlessly.
Nike advertises in a way that makes its customers comfortable. Its tagline, “Just Do It,” speaks for itself. Allowing everybody and everyone to come up with their meaning of the term makes it straightforward but to the point and helps the business build relationships with its customers. The audience is emotionally connected to this slogan.
- Setting the scene
We believe that each of our social, professional, and informational settings is distinct. But in reality, we all live in a world of marketing where everything is offered for sale and purchased. It’s not good or bad; it’s simply the new commercial reality that dictates what you’ll wear tomorrow, how you’ll address your boss, and how much of your income you’ll spend on eating out. With a few notable exceptions, it is generally applicable to everyone, from a young wealthy nerd who is only 20 years old to a family in their late 30s. If you give it some more thought, you’ll realize that most of the material you encounter each day attempts to sell you something, such as a good, idea, an emotion, a political viewpoint, a way of acting, etc. Marketing strategies and tactics in all their forms and guises are what produce this entire environment.
- Setting trends
Take, for instance, the blogs of modern businesses. Rather than being sales tools, they appear to be thematic media. Companies work to position themselves as the go-to resource for information about a given industry by disseminating their knowledge of it to consumers. In this approach, they produce a ton of content, including viral material that shapes consumer trends and purchasing patterns. Today, public perception and reputation are even more valuable than actual goods. If it has a worthwhile message to convey and is effectively promoted, even a plain chicken egg can become viral and break Instagram records.
Source-Instagram
Because it informs, equalizes, supports, engages, sells, and expands a business’s operations and offers, marketing is crucial for enterprises. It is equally important in the sense that it greatly influences the potential consumer behavior of the individual. If done correctly marketing can create a huge influence on both businesses and consumers.
Blackcoffer Insights 45: Dhruv Sharma, Rukmini Devi Institute of Advanced Studies
