The Marketing Centre South Africa will be hosting two one day Strategic Marketing Workshops on 31 January 2020, ensure that you don't miss out on this opportunity to set a solid strategy for 2020.    Smart businesses know that they can’t separate their approach to lead generation from their approach to brand building. You can’t hope to generate leads and drive conversions indefinitely if you aren’t also continuously planting seeds of awareness and building the credibility of your brand. 

  If your product or service isn’t a brand, angel investors won’t give you a second look. We’ve all heard the stories of ideas that have been literally cooked up in someone’s kitchen that have become multi-million dollar bestsellers. But for the most part, those are consumer-facing brands. Brands that are household names that roll off the tips of our tongues such as Coke, Shield and so on. But what if your company operates in the B2B space? What if your company is a supplier of machinery, for instance, that will never actually been seen by consumers? Why is branding important then when most likely your B2B brand will never become a household name and never intends to be? The short answer is that having a strong brand adds value to your company. A brand is much more than a company’s name and logo. A brand is a framework that operates as a value creator. By Simone Girling, Regional Director

Introduction Every business wants to grow, but not always for the reasons you might think. For many business owners, the ultimate purpose of growth is to place their company in an attractive position to sell. Because this is the goal of many of the business leaders we partner with at The Marketing Centre, it’s also become an important consideration for our Marketing Directors.

What a lot of business people don't understand is the difference between marketing and marketing tactics. Tactics are elements of marketing - the visible stuff that first comes to mind when you say the word marketing. It's the ads, billboards and posters, social media, emails and newsletters. These elements will have absolutely no meaning or result if they have no clearly defined goal or purpose.  ALL businesses should be working towards one common goal - improving their bottom line. To market successfully you need a yard stick, there needs to be a measure of what success looks like - this, is your return on investment, or ROI.