Marketing Fundamentals For Business Success
As an entrepreneur, your goal is to make your business as successful as possible. However, there seems to be a never-ending mountain of tasks on your to-do list. As such, you might not have enough time to prioritize marketing initiatives. Or you might have little experience as a marketer.
Not to worry! This blog is specifically designed to help educate business owners on the fundamentals of marketing. Here, you will learn about the importance of marketing, how to develop a marketing plan, and digital marketing techniques that you can incorporate.
Importance of marketing your business
There are five essential functions that an effective marketing plan fulfills:
1. Raise awareness
Marketing informs the marketplace that you’re in business. It educates potential consumers about your products or services. At the same time, you convince consumers how they will benefit from what you have to offer.
2. Engage with consumers
People enjoy doing business with people. After all, 90% of consumers claim that customer service will affect whether they choose to do business with a company or not. Marketing allows you to communicate and strengthen relationships with your consumers.
3. Build brand identity
By marketing consistently and regularly, you’re building a reputation for your company. People will draw connections on how you present your brand and how you treat your consumers. Positive brand identity will motivate people to support your brand.
4. Increase leads and sales
The end goal of any business is to make a profit. You need customers rolling in to sustain your business. Marketing achieves this by capturing people’s attention and encouraging them to purchase your products or services.
5. Stand out from the competition
Good marketing will give you an edge over your competitors. This is done by proving yourself as the most authoritative brand and winning consumer’s trust. As a result, you generate more customers and the cycle repeats.
As you can see, marketing is what drives your business. At the very core, you need a strong marketing plan to achieve fruitful results. The tactics you implement will affect your ability to reach new customers and maximize the lifetime value of existing ones. So how do you create an effective marketing strategy?
Develop a marketing plan
Marketing is not a short process. It spans throughout the entire business, from designing the product/service to deciding the price, where to sell it, and how to encourage people to buy it. Think of it as the 4Ps of marketing: Product, Price, Place, and Promotion.
Before you put your marketing plan in motion, start by answering these questions:
What are your business goals?
Think about where you want your business to be in the short term and long term. Setting a SMART goal will be beneficial here.
What is your company’s mission statement?
Are there any values that you wish to uphold as a business?
Who is your target audience?
Describe their demographics and psychographics in as much detail as possible.
Who are your competitors?
Are there any businesses offering the same type of products and services in your area? Keep a close eye to see what techniques they are implementing. Often, you can learn from their mistakes and avoid them.
Why should customers buy from you?
Identify your strengths and weaknesses. Then, list out the advantages that you have over your competitors. These will be your unique selling points.
Once you’re able to develop a sound foundation for your marketing plan, it’s time to decide which marketing tactics will most benefit your business.
Digital marketing techniques
Digital marketing is an umbrella term that covers a wide range of marketing initiatives. In this section, we will introduce you to the most common types.
Content marketing
The purpose of a content marketer is to create fresh and relevant content for their audience. This includes website copy, photos for social media, corporate videos, blogs, podcasts, and many more.
Content marketing is useful as it helps inform your audience about your business. For example, you can create a video to demonstrate how to use your product and how they will solve their problems.
Email marketing
With over 3.9 billion email users around the world, email marketing can be incredibly effective. This is especially so amongst Millennials, wherein they rank email as their top method of communication. In addition, over 80% of business professionals believe that email marketing increases customer retention.
Social media marketing
Did you know that 44.8% of global internet users use social media to search for brand information? Social media platforms like Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, are increasingly helpful in gaining organic reach. Not only is it practical for building brand awareness and getting your content in front of new people, but it also helps develop a community.
One of the advantages of marketing on social media is insights to track your performance. For example, when you make a post on Instagram, you can access Instagram Insights to view essential metrics such as:
Engagement
This is the number of users interacting with your social post. An engagement includes likes, shares, retweets, replies, and comments. This metric is helpful as it allows you to see how followers are responding to your content.
Impressions and reach
Impressions refer to the total number of times your post was displayed on users’ news feeds. Reach indicates how many users saw your post. When you see a spike in impressions and reach increase, it most likely means that your followers shared your post or your hashtag game is #OnPoint.
Link clicks
Social media is a great platform to drive users to your company website. Link clicks track the number of users who clicked on your link from your social post or profile. This metric effectively signifies which types of content are getting the most users to visit your site.
Video marketing
As of 2020, over 85% of businesses are using video as a marketing tool. Furthermore, Google reveals that watch-time for shopping-related videos on YouTube grew in the U.S. by more than five times over the past two years.
Video marketing is excellent because it gives you the ability to showcase your creativity. Types of video you can create are 360-degree tours, webinars, vlogs, and more. You also get to choose from various platforms to upload your promotional videos — for example, your website, social channels, and video hosting sites like YouTube or Vimeo.
Social advertising and Pay-Per-Click (PPC)
Businesses often incorporate paid advertising such as Facebook Ads, LinkedIn Sponsored Posts, or Promoted Tweets on Twitter to boost their marketing campaign. This is an effective strategy, but only if you have the financial resources to invest in it. If you’re putting a lot of work into your social media marketing, imagine what better results you will see with the help of paid ads.
PPC advertising allows marketers to display their content directly to searchers. It’s a cost-friendly investment because you only have to pay when a user clicks on your link.
Paid advertising is useful for the following reasons:
Reaches a wider audience
Paid advertising means your post could be instantly displayed on hundreds and thousands more people’s feeds. This includes new prospects who have yet to hear about your business.
Valuable investment
Paid advertising is typically very cost-effective when you compare it to your Return On Investment (ROI). In addition, you get full control over how much you wish to spend.
Enhances targeting
With paid advertising, you get to really hone into your target audience. The social platforms help display your ads to people who fall under your specific criteria (which you get to set when launching an ad). This includes their geographic location, age, gender, interests, and more.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO is what drives traffic to your website. Essentially, it helps you rank well on search engine results pages like Google so that users can visit your site. SEO strategy involves creating content with relevant keywords, improving your website’s user experience such as page speed, and ensuring searcher satisfaction by providing direct and accurate information.
As over 68% of online experiences begin with a search engine, SEO is undeniably a component you need to prioritize in your marketing plan.
Put your knowledge into action
Now that you’re no stranger to marketing fundamentals, it is time to put your knowledge into action. Remember, every successful marketing campaign begins with a solid plan. As the saying goes: If you fail to plan, you plan to fail. Make sure you ask yourself the critical questions with as much detail as possible. What are your business goals? Who is your target audience? The more information you include, the easier it will be down the road.
These marketing techniques, combined with your entrepreneurial passion, will give you the vision and vigour you need to market your business successfully.
FAQs
Which social media platforms are most effective for marketing my business?
While you should consider the platforms with the most active users, i.e. Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, it’s vital to note that each platform has its own unique purpose. For example, Linkedin is a professional networking site targeted specifically at working individuals. As such, you should focus on the channel where your target audience is most active. Spend some time to learn about their demographic and their behavioural patterns. You might even find certain best times to post on social media to reach them.
Is email marketing still effective?
Email marketing continues to rank as the top few marketing techniques. Just because more people are getting on social media does not mean that email is less impactful. In fact, there are more active email accounts than active accounts on any social media platform in the world. If your target audience is Millennials, you should consider prioritizing email marketing since it is ranked as their preferred choice of communication. Email marketing also allows businesses to create more personalized messages for their consumers.
What is SEO, and why is it so important for marketing my business?
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of continuously improving your website to gain authority and rank high on search engine results pages. The whole point is to increase visibility on the Internet so that prospective customers can learn about your business. When executed correctly, you can expect more e-traffic on your website.
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