My colleague Janet Pribanic and I have worked in marketing for a number of years, alongside business owners from across the country. Something that has always staggered us both about the marketing industry is how few businesses are actually investing in marketing their company. There seems to be a consensus amongst small businesses that they can’t afford to invest in a marketing strategy, a notion which could not be more wrong. If you have a business, be it small, medium or large, and you are not investing in marketing, here are just a few (of many) reasons why you must start as soon as possible.

It Works

The first and most obvious reason why you should start investing in marketing campaigns is that they work, and the money which you will invest most certainly will come back to you. Marketing is about exposing your company to a wider range of people, it is about growing your brand and letting people know who you are and what products and services you offer. If you are not telling people about this then you are running the risk of them finding you, and in today’s commutative market, that is a chance with low probabilities.

Competition

If you have a furniture store in West Virginia, and there are 3 other stores nearby who are all investing in marketing campaigns, you can all but guarantee that you will have the least market share of the 4. Marketing helps you to keep up with the competition if they are already investing in this, and better still you can take over the competition if they are not investing, when you are. Surely it makes sense to do all that you can to keep up with the competition.

Inexpensive

Marketing is actually not as expensive as many owners think, and because of the volume of different ways that you can market your company, there is a strategy for all kinds of budgets. Think about something such as social media, instant access to millions of people in a click of the button, here you can invest a small amount and get great returns. Equally there are strategies like email campaigns and promotional marketing which don’t have to cost a lot for you to see the benefits. Speak with a marketing professional about your budget, and you will see that you can easily put together a campaign which will work for you.

Targeting

The reason why many strategies offer a high ROI is that we live in a world where we can target the marketing at particular demographics. In the past you may have placed a billboard with the hope of people seeing, these days we can promote ourselves straight on the news feeds and inboxes of the type of people who we know will like our products and services. The results of this are more traction and higher sales growth, you’d be foolish to miss out on such an opportunity.