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What Is The Purpose Of Marketing? The Key Reasons Businesses Invest In Marketing

Published April 4, 2022
/ Updated July 23, 2024

Marketing is important because it generates ideal buyer awareness, interest, desire, and action in a brand and its offerings.

Through marketing, you can bring your products and services to potential customers, just as you would use invitations to gather guests’ attention to a party.

Think of your party as the product and the invitations as marketing.

Your product is the party. Marketing is the invitation to attend.

– Nathan Ellering

Without marketing, you can’t sell your product. This is why businesses invest in marketing strategy.

This guide will discuss why marketing is crucial to generating revenue for your business.

What Is The Purpose Of Marketing?

One of the most important reasons businesses market their products and services is to drive profitable customer action.

The purpose of marketing is to influence profitable customer action.

– Nathan Ellering

Organizations and brands embrace marketing to ensure their continuous overall success. Some purposes of marketing are introduced as follows:

  1. Marketing ensures that brands, organizations, and companies can generate revenue. Experts can achieve this by implementing several techniques to drive traffic, convert leads, improve sales, and move the organization forward.
  2. Marketers often focus on marketing initiatives that lead to revenue via a marketing funnel approach. Professional marketers often create results for lead indicators, which proposes that as the ideal audience carries out a leading desirable action, profitable action follows.

For instance, enterprises with an online presence must appreciate the importance of website traffic as a lead indicator of revenue generation.

For an online business, it is impossible to influence purchases without website traffic.

zero website visitors = zero purchases = zero revenue = zero business growth

If there is no visitor, there can be no purchase. This results in zero revenue, leading to poor business growth. In contrast, the high conversion rate of visitors into customers is crucial to the success of a business.

many website visitors = business opportunity for many purchases = revenue generation = business growth

Good marketing aligns with the objectives of the business.

How Does Marketing Improve Business Growth?

There are four crucial means through which marketing promotes business growth.

4 crucial means through which marketing promotes business growth:

  1. Voice of the market (research): Through marketing, businesses can acquire market information, which in turn drives the business forward. In other words, marketing involves research that ensures a brand’s services are tailored to meet customers’ demands.
  2. Market penetration (acquisition): Marketing serves as a fundamental tunnel through which the business can reach the target audience and convert them into customers.
  3. Enablement (positioning): Marketing enables all departments and teams within the company, including customer service and sales, to actualize business growth. This is achieved by unifying all business units around messaging and resources that align with strategic objectives.
  4. Customer success (retention): Marketing also empowers buyers to remain long-term customers. Marketing serves all areas of the funnel with tailored experiences ranging from unaware audience members to repeat purchases from existing customers.

What Are The 5 Main Purposes Of Marketing?

Marketing is a multi-purpose phenomenon that serves strategic business growth in many ways. Let’s take a look at the five main purposes of marketing.

Marketing Exists To:

  • Capture Attention
  • Generate Buzz
  • Educate
  • Convert
  • Empower
  • Enable Teams
  • Increase Value

Marketing exists to:

1. Capture Attention & Generate Buzz

Gaining attention is a primary purpose of marketing. When people are aware of your brand or products, you sell more.

Conversely, if your target does not know about the products and services you offer, then you cannot expect to do good business.

Through marketing, you can easily target the right audience and create traffic that can significantly boost the growth of your business.

Marketing can help you showcase your company, products, and services and create avenues that can capture the attention of your potential audience.

2. Educate Prospective Customers Toward The Purchase

Marketing can provide relevant resources (or means) to educate prospective customers about your products, the quality of services you provide, and the problems your offerings solve.

This naturally encourages more informed decisions, which in turn drives your business forward. After all, customers are drawn to brands and products they know a lot about, giving them more perceived control over their decisions regarding the products and services.

During a buyer’s journey, it is essential to provide them with all the needed details that will influence their purchasing decision. If prospective buyers are not getting the required information from you, they may resort to competitors to answer their questions.

3. Convert Leads Into Paying Customers

In order to achieve the desired result from marketing, you have to ask for the conversion.

A conversion is achieved when the prospective customer does the desired action.

This conversion could be for a lead indicator such as a website visitor becoming an email subscriber. Alternatively, it could also be a direct ask for the audience member to buy your products or services, whether this is in a physical store or through conversion copywriting on a website, for example.

Marketing must always nurture a prospective buyer down the funnel toward the lag indicator of revenue generation.

4. Empower Colleagues & Enable Teams

A marketing strategy is not just a way for you to bring customers to the table; it also gives your company direction.

With a marketing plan, your company gets frameworks to help all business units succeed. Marketing-led enablement may include target audience personas, brand voice, visual identity, product positioning, and all supporting marketing collateral necessary to make sales.

5. Increase Customer Value, Additional Use Cases, & Long-Term Repeated Purchases

Customer loyalty is an intentional objective for marketers.

There’s an old marketing quip that it’s twice as expensive to gain new customers as it is to retain the ones you’ve already got.

Loyalty comes by providing valuable experiences to your clients. This isn’t necessarily about creating value for the business quite yet, but more so about creating value for your customers, specifically.

In other words, good marketing will ensure that the visitors you manage to convert into customers can develop a sense of loyalty and trust your brand and products enough to use them repeatedly as long as they provide them value.

The Importance Of Marketing For Businesses: 10 Reasons To Invest

Businesses need to understand the importance of marketing and give it the attention it deserves. Below are ten reasons why it is essential to invest in marketing:

10 Reasons To Invest In Marketing:

  • Attention
  • Engagement
  • Reputation
  • Conversion
  • Build Relationships
  • To Inform
  • Enablement
  • Data Collection
  • Research
  • Innovation

1. Attention

Getting the target audience to pay attention to your product or services is one of the main objectives of setting up an enterprise. What better way is there to gather people’s attention on a new—or existing—product than marketing it?

2. Engagement

All businesses want people to know about what they offer and ultimately engage more with the product or service.

As you keep displaying your products and services, people become aware of them, registering in their minds. As a result, when the need for such goods or services arises, your products will be remembered and recommended. In the long run, the engagement your business receives increases.

3. Reputation

Generally, people are more likely to purchase a trusted product or service that has been tested and is popular in the market. This is precisely what every business out there needs: a positive, burgeoning reputation, which marketing can help achieve.

4. Conversion

As people start paying attention to your business, you attract more visitors. A good marketing strategy will ensure that those visitors are converted into loyal customers, which drives up sales and revenue.

5. Relationships

When marketing brings the desired results that customers seek, there is an improvement in the relationship between you and your customers.

The trust they develop in your products and services ensures that they relate more with what you can offer while sticking around for the long term.

6. Inform

Marketing your products will tell the public about what you offer. After all, people will only purchase products that they know about.

Marketing creates brand, product, and problem awareness.

7. Enablement

Marketing empowers stakeholders with frameworks and resources that can help in generating revenue.

8. Data

The marketing process involves publishing, measuring, learning, and iterating. In this way, marketing can help you gather data that you can use to improve your product, conversions, and customer experiences.

9. Research

Marketing enables you to dive into the market and learn the demands of the larger audience. With this research, you can optimize and evolve accordingly with the market demands.

10. Innovation

Marketing focuses on tasks that increase sales, and these comprise the products and services aligned with the clients’ needs. Through this, marketing assumes a comprehensive role, including the famous 4Ps of marketing.

What Is The Purpose Of A Marketing Department?

If the purpose of marketing is to drive profitable action, then the purpose of a marketing department is to deliver marketing activities that make the objective reality. Marketing departments achieve this by leveraging individual marketers’ skillsets to publish content and create experiences that lead to desired target audience behaviors.

For marketing departments, this often means documenting a marketing strategy that aligns with strategic business objectives against which marketing activities are executed.

In this sense, a marketing department is primarily responsible for understanding company goals and aligning their efforts to the company goals.

Marketing Department Responsibilities Often Include Strengths In:

  1. Business strategy
  2. Writing
  3. Designing
  4. Publishing
  5. Measurement

What Is The Main Purpose Of Marketing?

Every business needs a good marketing strategy to gather the public’s attention to the products and services they offer. With this, enterprises do not only educate their customers on what they offer, but they also tailor their efforts—through the application of several marketing strategies—to what the customers need.

References

Andaleeb, S.S. and Hasan, K. (Ed.) (2016) Strategic Marketing Management in Asia, Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Bingley, pp. 527-552.

Jones, D. G. B. (1994). Biography and the history of marketing thought: Henry Charles Taylor and Edward David Jones. In R. A. Fullerton (Ed.), Explorations in the history of marketing. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press.

Shaw, E. H. , & Jones, D. G. B. (2005). A history of schools of marketing thought. Marketing Theory, 5(3), 239–281.