Marketing should never be thought of as optional for a business. As Jordan Brady puts it, marketing is capitalism’s carbohydrate – absolutely needed for life.

What is up to you is how you market – your tactics in other words.

Every business has a unique recipe of tactics for marketing success but make no mistake, every successful business does indeed need to market itself.

“Wait,” I hear you say. “What about Tesla? They don’t run ads!”

Running ads is just one marketing tactic. Tesla does market though.

Those awesome stores in malls: marketing.

The CEO and his tweets: marketing.

Launching a Tesla into space: marketing.

The value marketing brings to a company

Imagine your company is a video game character like Mario from Super Mario Brothers.

Just like in Super Mario Brothers, you walk through the level and gather the coins and power-ups. Those coins and power-ups are leads and new business. 

Got it?

Now think of playing this game not alone – but alongside 20 other characters. Those characters are your competition.

Are you going to play the game differently?

You bet.

Most likely you’ll run instead of walk because you and the 20 other characters are trying to get to those coins and power-ups first. Because once your competition has them, they’re gone.

Makes sense, right?

Well, marketing is the fuel you need to run faster – the carbohydrates. Marketing allows you to get to the coins and power-ups (leads and new business) before your competitors, because you’ll be seen first or more often.

This is the primary value marketing brings to a company. And not marketing yourself is just as silly as walking through a video game instead of running when you’re playing against 20 other players. You’ll never win.

The benefits of a marketing strategy

Here’s the good news. Just because you need to market yourself doesn’t necessarily mean you need to advertise or start doing dances on TikTok.

What it does mean though is you need a marketing strategy.

You need to figure out your unique mix of life-giving carbohydrates to enable your company to run faster through the game of business than your competition.

That could be a mix of blogging, podcasting and ebooks for some.

It could be paid ads, influencer marketing, and conferences for others.

And this mix is constantly changing and evolving.

At Umault, we review and update our marketing strategy at least once a quarter.

But what’s most important is that we do have a documented marketing strategy – even if that document gets updated…a lot.

Don’t know where to start? LinkedIn Learning has great courses on developing a marketing strategy. And if you’re into video marketing like we are, we have a guide: Everything you ever wanted to know about B2B video marketing.

Good luck and go fast.