Advantages
1. Promotes Your Business to a Target Audience - You can’t sell your products or services without appealing to the people most likely to buy those products and services. That group is known as your target audience, and a marketing strategy is the most effective way to reach that all-important group. If you have targeted this group correctly, you know their habits, behaviors, wants, and needs, and you also know where they like to hang out on social media. This information shapes the methods you will use to promote your business.
2. Helps You Understand Your Customers - You have to do market research before you develop a marketing strategy, and that research can provide you with reams of data that you can use over and over to help refine your product development and to keep up with trends and shifts in your target audience’s behavior.
3. Helps Brand Your Business - Your marketing strategy isn’t just about boosting leads and converting them into buyers, it’s also about expressing the culture, values, and purpose of your business. The process of communicating that vision to your audience is the essence of branding.
Disadvantages
1. Costs of Marketing - Although the digital revolution has somewhat evened the playing field, the truth is that small business is still at a disadvantage, when it comes to grabbing their share of eyeballs through their marketing efforts. Big data has great value, but accessing that data is expensive, and you have to keep analyzing that data to stay abreast of buyer trends. Launching a marketing campaign on your website can also be expensive, Television and radio advertising spots are also costly, and even local advertising space is at a premium, because there is so much competition for the local audience.
2. Time and Effort May Not Yield a Return - Big brands can afford to spend time and effort working on a marketing campaign that fails, because they have the resources to regroup and move on. As a small business owner, however, the return on investment on a marketing campaign may be low, and that means you have spent months crafting a strategy that did nothing to help your bottom line. Even the most well planned marketing campaigns fail, and at the small business level, that can set you back for months.
3. Production may lead to negative externalities - When succeeding of Marketing and firms are always trying to maximize their profits, they may ignore external costs like damages to the environment.
