For a lot of people, even thinking about marketing is an unpleasant experience, and summons up associations of sleazy and untrustworthy used car salesmen, doing their best to abuse their clients’ trust in order to close the sale and line their pockets with their ill-gotten gains.

The reality, however, is that marketing is a fundamentally important part of business, in general, and avoiding all marketing out of hand is a surefire way to ensure that you never achieve even a fraction of your overall business potential.

In fact, marketing is so essential for business success, that not only should you not avoid it, it could even be well worth your while signing up to do an online marketing masters degree.

Here are a few key reasons why you shouldn’t see marketing as a dirty word.

Marketing is simply the art of displaying your services to your client base in an attractive manner

Marketing is often treated as a bit of a mysterious arcane art, impossible for mere mortals to comprehend. While the various techniques involved in marketing can certainly be complex and strange to the uninitiated, however, marketing itself, as a concept, is remarkably straightforward.

Marketing is, ultimately, nothing more than displaying your services to your client base in an attractive manner, so that they know what you have on offer, and know how your services can be of benefit to them.

Good marketing relies on well-written copy which summons up an appealing narrative, attractive photos, and ads designed to place your product in front of the kind of people who might be interested in buying it.

Considered this way, marketing isn’t very ominous at all.

The best marketing doesn’t involve dishonesty

A large part of the reason why many people have a bad feeling about marketing, is that they view marketers as being inherently dishonest. Unfortunately, some unscrupulous marketers do lie, but as a general rule, dishonest marketing ruins careers and doesn’t form the basis of an effective, long-lasting marketing strategy.

The best marketing should be honest, not only because it’s the right thing to do to tell the truth, but also because customers give their trust to people and brands who have proven themselves truthful, reliable and trustworthy over time.

Focus on the benefits of your product or service, but don’t lie.

“Marketing”, in a sense, is inevitable in all areas of life — you may as well do a good job of it.

Depending on how you define and conceptualise it, it could be argued that we do some form of “marketing”, more or less constantly, in just about every area of our lives.

When we want to attract a romantic partner, for example, we try to present ourselves in our best light, in a way that we hope will be appealing, and we make our interest known.

When we want to be selected for a job among hundreds of candidates, we “market” our skills and the ways in which we could be an asset to the company.

“Marketing” is, in this sense, a natural part of life. You may as well do a good job of it.