Marketing for businesses isn't just a luxury

Even in 2025, marketing is still undervalued by a lot of businesses. When a business is in trouble, it's often the first department to lose members, I can tell you that from experience.

Back to my original point, marketing is not always seen as important as other teams within a business. Sales bring in revenue, operations deal with the day-to-day running of the business and finance handles the money.

Marketing fills the gaps that are missing in the below business functions, including:

• Brand Awareness

• Lead Generation

• Customer Retention

Good customer service and products to a degree can help with brand awareness and retaining customers, however marketing is key to assisting to those things, along with reinforcing a brand's message through paid ads, social media posts and email marketing, all of which contribute to revenue.

Marketing is more than posting on social media

It really is, it's not 2010 anymore.

Marketing is a core component of business development. Whether it's from implementing brand values, connecting departments across the business with a CRM system or introducing a new website.

Yes, we do post on social media, but there's a strategy behind it. What you may see is a brand jumping on trends, but it's more than that, social media is catered to a business' audience to raise brand awareness, educate, entertain and drive traffic.

Marketing and Business Decisions

Marketing should be involved in business decisions or at least consulted. The marketing team should never be told what to do, they should be invited to conversations and given the opportunity to give their expertise (and opinions).

I've seen so many bad decisions made since I started in marketing in 2017 and most of which, were decided without marketing.

Marketing aren't mind-readers, but we are chronically online, have psychology knowledge and know what our audience wants. Who better to ask?

Supporting Other Teams

Marketing can support other area of the business, and I don't mean by giving the team jobs no one else wants to do, like administration, making hot drinks for visitors or packaging hundreds of client gift hampers for Christmas.

I used to waste valuable time in a previous role, washing dirty desk tidy wheelie bins for events because they'd been stored in a dusty loft. True story!

By supporting other departments, I mean solving problems. Like if enquiries for a certain product or service has declined, marketing can investigate that, by doing some market research, reviewing the website page and creating valuable content to help increase leads.

Equally, maybe the wrong types of enquiries are coming in. If they are, talk to your marketing team!

Or are the same questions being asked over and over? Let your marketing team know and they can create educational content, update the website page and help clients understand and remove the repetitive questions that are frustrating the sales team.

Utilise your Marketing Team

If your business is lucky enough to have a marketing team, use them well. Let them guide the business strategically. Marketing is a skill, its is best learnt through experiences and working alongside business leaders who embrace it and allow them to be involved and kept updated with the latest business goals.

Who better to help grow the business than marketing? (spoiler alert: it's not the sales team)