Marketing has evolved over the years from being just about promotion to being a strategic function within a company. If your marketing is lingering in the content-creation or lead generation trenches, you should know that marketing leadership can add strategic value and build growth potential unlike any other discipline at the executive level. Here’s five reasons why.
1. Focusing on the long-term
A growing company needs to continually evaluate their strategic direction in the context of customers – what customers need and how the company can meet those needs. But it’s not just a single example customer, it’s a view of the customer in aggregate that is critical. By taking the overall market into account, strategic marketing can help focus your company for the long term, rather than continually switching focus from one customer demand to the next.
Strategic marketing can force a considerable amount of cooperation and coordination between departments on how a product is created, marketed, and sold.
2. Identifying new opportunities
Continual market evaluation and customer analysis means that marketing sees things the rest of your company does not. This includes emerging market trends, unmet customer needs, and even new customer segments. By identifying new market opportunities, marketing can help your company gain a competitive advantage by being the first to address them. By meeting unmet needs and serving new customer segments, strategic marketing can increase your revenue streams by diversifying its sources of revenue and reducing its dependence on a single product or customer segment.
3. Evolving an organization
Marketing holds pivotal information not only about the customer but also in many issues of corporate strategy – what markets to compete in, what segments to target, what products to develop, what partners to work with, what areas to grow in, and so on. As a result, marketing leadership can force a considerable amount of cooperation and coordination between departments on how a product is created, marketed, and sold in a way that is strategic. This leads to a more efficient organization with precise strategic direction and higher revenue-growth potential.
Strategic marketing can reduce the likelihood of customers switching to your competitor and increases the amount of revenue generated from each customer over time.
Marketing builds brand equity by creating a consistent brand image and messaging across all channels. Brand equity is the value that a brand adds to a product or service beyond its functional benefits. One of the primary benefits of brand equity is to increase pricing power. When a brand is perceived as high quality, trustworthy, and reliable, customers are willing to pay a premium for products and services associated with that brand. This leads to increased profitability and a stronger bottom line.
5. Creating customer loyalty
A superior customer experience can differentiate a company from its competitors. This can lead to increased brand loyalty, reduced churn, and a larger market share. Marketing is responsible for creating a positive, seamless, and consistent experience across customer touchpoints from initial awareness to post-purchase support. This can reduce the likelihood of customers switching to your competitor and increases the amount of revenue generated from each customer over time.
Driving long-term growth
If your company is a scale-up or even an established company and you don’t have a marketing leader at the executive table, you’re missing a tremendous opportunity. A strategic marketing executive can drive business growth. And their expertise is increasingly critical in today’s competitive business environment where a company must continually adapt to changing market conditions and evolving consumer behavior.
If you don’t have a marketing leader with executive influence, you may want to ask yourself why.
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