Marketing Tips, Insights, and Trends
Your Sales Double Agent: Marketing and Branding’s Covert Benefits
Author: Kaitlyn Wilcoxson Category: B2B, B2C, E-commerce & Retail, Healthcare & Life Science, Industry, Marketing, Membership Marketing, Nonprofit, Technology & SAAS Date: August 23, 2023
Investing in marketing and branding services is critical to your business success. Results of Bain & Company and Google’s Measurement Maturity Survey show that the top 100 businesses with the most mature marketing programs are four times more likely to exceed business goals, increase market share, and boost revenue than the 100 least mature marketers (1). One of the reasons print and digital marketing strategies are successful at increasing sales is because they help your target audience get to know your brand and what they can expect from you, bringing you the right people at the right time. Thriving companies that have harnessed the power of marketing to accelerate sales understand the ability it has to increase brand awareness and educate potential customers, but did you know that sales and marketing go hand in hand in other ways as well? Marketing strategy has some (not so) secret benefits.
Marketing Builds Thought Leadership
Thought leadership is when an entity, whether it be a person, brand, or organization, shares content to help position themselves as experts in their field and build credibility in their industry. The tools of marketing and branding services – emails, blogs, videos, social media outreach, etc. – help to lay the foundation for thought leadership.
Content creation and marketing is a highly effective way to bolster a brand’s reputation, which naturally leads to growth and increased revenue for your business. According to the 2020 B2B Thought Leadership Impact Study, 89% of decisionmakers believe that thought leadership content can help change their perception of an organization, while 42% say they’re willing to pay a premium to companies that produce content over those that don’t (2).
Planning, creating, and sharing relevant, insightful content as part of your marketing strategy that helps your target audiences get to know you empowers you to generate awareness and encourage customers to act, which ultimately brings in revenue. In fact, nine out of 10 B2B buyers say online content has a moderate to major effect on purchasing decisions (3). And brands that leverage content marketing have a sales conversion rate that is six times higher than those that don’t (4).
One basic form of content marketing that builds thought leadership is maintaining and cultivating a blog. This easily attainable tactic has been known to increase leads by 67% (5). Considering it takes an average of nine to 13 touch points to make a sale, using content creation to build thought leadership and brand awareness as part of your marketing strategy can go a long way to successfully guide your customer along their buying journey, especially in a complex sales process that requires more education and explanation than a simple one.
Marketing Collects Valuable Data
The data you gather through your marketing strategy services can inform profitable business decisions. Leveraging marketing services automation enables you to create an effective marketing infrastructure that turns data into intelligence. Marketing automation can radically enhance sales and marketing strategies, improve data analysis, and support profitable decision making that allows businesses to scale faster. It also captures and examines your sales and marketing data to help you make decisions that refine and enhance your selling systems over time. Companies that use marketing automation report faster growth than non-marketing automation users with most adopters generating a return on their investment within the first year (6) and 63% outperforming their competitors (7).
The business value of marketing and branding services cannot be overemphasized. Print and digital marketing services help build brand awareness and boost your reputation among your target audiences, as well as provide invaluable insight into your customers. Investing in digital marketing consulting services is one of the most profitable decisions a business can make, and it is too important to trust to anyone but the best. We can help you build an infrastructure that will arm your salesperson to engage in smoother conversations, build stronger relationships, and convert faster. Please contact us today to get started.
(4) https://neilpatel.com/blog/38-content-marketing-stats-that-every-marketer-needs-to-know/
(5) https://www.smallbizgenius.net/by-the-numbers/branding-statistics/#gref
(6) https://business.adobe.com/blog/
(7) https://findstack.com/resources/marketing-automation-statistics/