Marketing – does every business really need it?

Your Enterprise Business & Finance/ISME Magazine - April 2007

Ask a room full of owner managers about their marketing needs and more than a few will reply:

‘Our business doesn’t need marketing’
‘I tried some advertising before that didn’t work’
‘I don’t have the budget’
‘It’s something we’d like to get to but we are ok as we are’

Or
‘Marketing is only for big business with big budgets’

So if many successful businesses don’t see a need for marketing, is it a business necessity or just a nice to have.

The fundamental problem with marketing is the difference between what it actually is and what people think it is. Sounds like a branding issue or a communication problem, ‘is there a marketer in the house?’
Ironic isn’t it that the profession responsible for brand positioning has an image problem itself. One reason for this is that marketing and advertising are seen as one in the same; with many business owners concluding that marketing is not for them as they don’t need or can’t afford advertising. But marketing is much more than advertising. Marketing is the summation all of your business activity that impacts on your customers and should inform everything you do to attract new business and keep on to existing business.

Most businesses have a logo, a stationery pack, a sales brochure and a website. Others will supplement this with spots of advertising. However without an annual marketing plan with clear objectives and targets, this is little more than a series of disconnected activity leaving business owners wondering if any of it is working for them.

So my message is that every business regardless of size needs to ensure their marketing activity is at the centre of their business, that it is planned and co-ordinated to ensure efficient implementation and more importantly that it yields results.

If you are developing brochures and websites just because everyone else is, you’d be better saving your money. Adopting a marketing culture in your business will allow you ask the fundamental questions and make informed decisions about what you really need for your business. It will give you the confidence to implement marketing campaigns or not based on what will make a real difference and not because you feel under pressure to keep up with others.

Effective marketing is all about ensuring everything you do meets your customer’s needs. This impacts on all areas of your business from the Managing Director to office staff to delivery staff to the quality of your premises to the way people answer the phones. So I would contend that once you open for business, seek customers to sell your product to, you are in the marketing business, even if you don’t call it marketing.

While many SMEs may not have a specific marketing budget set aside, they already spend on everything from sales to customer services to promotional items. So the good news is you don’t always have to find a new budget for marketing, it is more likely to be a case of using existing budgets in a different way.

I would therefore argue that marketing in SMEs is less about having a separate marketing department or budget and more about adopting a marketing approach to doing business and along the way getting as much as possible from your existing resources.

By co-ordinating all of your activity into a marketing plan your business will:

• Have a road map to future development
• Have more insight into your customers needs, present and future
• Anticipate the changing needs of customers and put you in a position to respond to these needs by targeting the client base with the right offering at the right time at the right price
• Gain from increased awareness and visibility of your overall business and your products sold
• Standout from the crowd through the development of your brand
• Have a unifying point across your business where all staff know how important customers are and how they can play their part in your success story
• Give you consistency in how your business is presented to the marketplace

"If you make a product good enough, even though you live in the depths of the forest the public will make a path to your door, says the philosopher. But if you want the public in sufficient numbers, you would better construct a highway"

- William Randolph Hearst

That highway is your marketing plan, equally important for all businesses regardless of industry, size or budget. So, yes, every business does need marketing.


First published Your Enterprise Business & Finance/ISME Magazine - April 2007