Most business owners and leaders recognize the value and necessity of marketing. At its heart, marketing is the way you introduce your company to potential customers, present them with value, and ask for their business. It serves a deeper function within organizations, however. We’ll look at the immense value of communicating and analyzing marketing internally and the positive results that can come from this.
Marketing Provides Vision to Employees
First, it’s important to realize that there is no downside to taking the time to let all employees know your marketing strategies and branding elements. In fact, it has two massive upsides. Slogans and brandmarks can serve as mini-mission and vision statements to focus staff on their duties. It can also turn every employee into a brand ambassador who can evangelize to their family and friends, reinforcing your advertising and providing free publicity.
Marketing and Sales Efforts Go Hand-in-Hand
It’s generally understood that marketing feeds sales, but many businesses only take advantage of this indirectly, putting advertising efforts out into the media and hoping sales increase. It’s to every company’s advantage to coordinate internally and get the marketing team to educate the sales team about the latest initiatives. This provides salespeople with ammunition to help close deals in the forms of on-brand talking points, well-branded presentations, and consistent messaging. This is another example of a simple effort that has no downside. If your marketing and sales departments are working in bubbles and not interacting, get them together on at least a bi-weekly basis. Promoting this synergy should lead to more organic interaction as well.
Marketing Allows Insights to Internal Strengths and Weaknesses
Let’s get into the more analytical power that marketing can provide inside an organization. As you look through post-buy data of your ad campaigns, compare them to revenue to determine return on advertising investment. You should be able to chart some areas of greater success than others. Look at demos or forms of media where you under-performed and consider adjusting future strategies to improve.
Marketing Makes Budgeting More Accurate
Taking an in-depth look at return on advertising investment will also give you a clearer idea of how to budget for the next quarter or year. In most industries, revenue fluctuates with buying trends, but the hard costs of labor and materials do not. Marketing, however, does flow seasonally and correlates to revenue. Factoring marketing expenses into budgets makes them more accurate and easier to justify.
Don’t consider advertising an outside force. It can improve staff focus and morale, boost sales, and provide you with useful data. All these tools go to making your business more successful!
