The 3 Stages Of Marketing Every Business Needs To Follow

If you’re a marketing firm, the idea is to help build a business up the right way, establishing an online presence and reaching the right audience. If you’re a business owner, the idea is to get sales in. You don’t care how it happens, you want the phone ringing, clicks to the site and sales coming in. That’s understandable, but you have to understand that a process needs to be followed for a successful campaign to take place. Even if you can get sales fast, following the process helps to make your budget more cost-effective.

A hypothetical example would be if a company follows the marketing process correctly, they can get 100 clients with a $2,000 budget. On the other hand, if they did not follow the process correctly, it may take them $5,000 to $10,000 to get those same 100 sales. This is why you have to trust in the process and it begins with:

1. Creating a brand presence: This is the longest, most tedious and oftentimes, most expensive stage of marketing but it’s also the most important. This is where you are creating content, building a new website, landing pages, blogs, videos, images, sending out press releases, creating social media profiles, listing your business on dozens of directory sites including Google and more. You are not currently marketing, you are building a presence online that will ensure that if anyone researches your company, they will find plenty of information, showing them that you are a professional, reliable business that they can trust.
2. Introduction: The introduction phase is where you utilize tools like social media and Google marketing to establish yourself as an authority in your industry. This includes things like running ads on social media, SEO, email marketing to a highly targeted audience and more. The idea with this phase is to show your brand to new customers, letting them know that you exist and that they would benefit from taking some time to visit your site and learn more about you.
3. Promotion: The final stage of marketing focuses on showcasing a promotion, a reason for the consumer to shop with you. By now, if you’ve followed the steps for branding and introduction correctly, the consumer has heard of your business multiple times and when they see a promotion you are running, they are excited to receive the news and more likely to take advantage of it. You can inform them of this promotion via email, social media ads or display with retargeting as well.

You may not love the idea of following these steps, but the companies that do see the most success and bang for their buck with their marketing efforts followed these steps and showed patience. Ignoring these steps results in wasted budget, loss of sales and having to start over again. Get started on the right foot and make sure that your business is branded the right way.