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What is Marketing?
Marketing connects businesses to their target audience to promote products or brands. It involves understanding customer needs, researching market trends, and forming effective strategies to create, communicate, and deliver value.
By utilizing various tools, marketing aims to establish a strong brand presence, attract potential customers, and ultimately drive sales while cultivating lasting relationships that contribute to long-term success.
Evolution of Marketing?
Marketing has come up a very long way. Let us see the exciting journey of marketing through its timeline:
Why marketing is essential for our business?
Marketing is essential for any business as it serves as the bridge connecting a company’s products or services to its target audience. It is vital in creating awareness, generating interest, and driving demand.
Effective marketing strategies help businesses stand out by highlighting their unique value in a crowded marketplace. Establishing customer loyalty and trust is essential for increasing sales and revenue.
Traditional Marketing: Marketing that uses offline methods to promote our brand, such as newspapers, tv ads, brochures etc.
Modern Marketing: Marketing that uses online technology methods to spread our brands, such as social media marketing, content marketing, influencer marketing, affiliate marketing, and brand and product marketing.
For example: If you’re launching a new skincare product, spreading the word about your brand is essential. Traditionally, it was done through commercials. In today’s digital era, you can create ads, email campaigns and engage in influencer marketing to create awareness.
Marketing helps us to understand a customer’s perspective about our brand, like our product’s strengths, weakness by tracking the performance.
Marketing Fact:
Tommy Hilfiger introduced one of the earliest virtual reality (VR) marketing campaigns in 2015, allowing users to experience a virtual fashion show.
Types of marketing?
This digital world holds enormous types of marketing, which are very powerful and impact our business.
Social Media Marketing:
As technology developed, social media became a powerful tool for people to interact worldwide. In that way, business people use social media to make their brand reach globally.
Digital media like FB, Instagram, Twitter, Linkedin and YouTube are great for promoting products/services to a broad audience. With their tools and features, businesses can increase brand awareness, drive traffic, and boost sales.
It includes,
=> Brand profile creation, optimization and maintenance.
=> Build audience by posting interesting product-related content.
=> Engage the audience by responding to your comments and by conducting an exciting contest.
=> Build a reputation in social media.
Marketing Fact:
Chris Messina introduced the first Twitter hashtag (#barcamp) in 2007. Hashtags have since become integral to social media marketing campaigns.
Influencer Marketing:
Influencers are social media celebrities with a strong fan following. With their consistent effort and hard work, they have gained a trusted network in a specific niche like fitness influencers, lifestyle influencers, food influencers etc.
The influencers are classified as follows:
=> Nano-Influencers (1k – 10k followers)
=> Micro-Influencers (10k – 100k followers)
=> Macro-Influencers (100k – 1M followers)
=> Mega-Influencers (1M+ followers)
When a brand reaches out to influencers for a free or paid collaboration, they promote the product or service with various creative formats like video, audio, and content-based ads.
By doing influencer marketing, we can quickly reach a broad set of audiences and build a base set of trustable customers.
Marketing Fact:
While not in the modern sense, soap manufacturers in the late 1800s and early 1900s would use testimonials from doctors to endorse their products, laying the groundwork for influencer marketing.
Content Marketing:
Content marketing creates and distributes engaging and meaningful content to the target audience. Content marketers help to attain new customers and maintain existing customers.
By delivering evergreen content, we can build trust among the audience.
Content marketing helps educate people about our product and helps to drive people to our website. It makes them comfortable enough to purchase and build authority among others in the industry.
Creating content with proper SEO(Search engine optimization) grabs enormous traffic to your website, resulting in sales and revenue.
Content marketing is of many types, that includes:
=> Blogs
=> Brochures
=> Copywriting
=> Podcasts.
Email Marketing:
Email marketing is one of the oldest and traditional ways of marketing. We use email marketing to keep customers informed about our products through newsletters, promotions, and updates.
Email Tips:
=> It is advisable not to send lengthy emails as it may cause customer frustration.
=> An email should have an appealing design structure to encourage customers to open their inboxes.
=>Create your email with exciting and engaging content to capture your audience’s attention among other emails in their inbox.
Types of Emails:
=> Welcome Mail: After subscribing to the newsletter, customers should receive an email as a warm invite to the brand.
=> Promotional Mail: Regular email updates are a great way to keep customers informed about sales, offers, and discounts to ensure their satisfaction and loyalty.
=> Pre-purchase Mail: Sending follow-up emails to customers who abandon a product before a purchase can help encourage them to complete the purchase.
=> Post-purchase Mail: After purchasing, we can send them thank you mail to make them feel good and happy about the purchase.
Affiliate Marketing:
Affiliate marketing is a digital strategy whereby individuals (affiliates) collaborate with companies to promote their products or services. Affiliates can earn commissions by directing traffic and generating sales through unique tracking links.
This modern collaboration leverages influencers, bloggers, and content creators to spread the word organically. Affiliates craft compelling content across platforms like websites, social media, and videos, smoothly integrating promotional links. When users click these links and make purchases, their audience receives a percentage of the sale.
Affiliate marketing is a flexible and innovative way to earn income with a global reach.
Marketing Fact:
HubSpot, founded in 2006, pioneered inbound marketing for SaaS. Their content-focused approach provided valuable resources to attract potential customers.
How to select which marketing channel suits your business?
Before selecting a marketing channel, we have to analyze certain key qualities. That is,
- Target audience: Analyze your audience, their habits, and the medium they are most active.
- Goals: Identify your business goals like brand awareness, increase traffic, sales and revenue, and engage customers.
- Marketing options: Surf all available marketing channels and their uses and benefits.
- Analyze Competitors: Check out the competitors in which media they are getting more benefits.
- Budget: Fix the funds required to sign up for the channel and the resources to access them.
- Test Experiment: Experiment with all the media and check your tracking results.
- Measure Results: Track your methods, plans and performance by analyzing the results.
- Optimise: After analyzing the results, optimize your channels with all the improvement needs.
- Stay Flexible: Stay focused on your plans and seek professional advice for levelling up in-game.
Select the channels that will fit your company/brand by following these metrics.
Future of Marketing:
The future of marketing will likely be about using technology to understand people better and connect with them in ways that feel personal.
You may receive personalized ads and messages, similar to how your preferred music app recommends songs that suit your tastes.
There will be more videos and cool interactive stuff. You can see things in your room through your phone before buying them.
Brands will also try to be good for the planet and society, and they’ll listen more to what you care about.
So, marketing will be all about making you feel special, using cool tech, and being responsible.
Artificial Intelligence and Marketing: The Future Is Here
Marketing Tips:
- Create Interactive Quizzes: Design interactive quizzes or polls related to your industry or products. People love to share their results, leading to increased engagement.
- Surprise and Delight: Surprise your customers with unexpected gifts, discounts, or personalized messages to create a positive emotional connection.
- Use GIFs and Emojis: GIFs and emojis can add a playful and relatable element to your online communication for better traffic.
- Personalize Your Communication: Address your audience by their first name in email marketing or customize content based on their preferences for a more personalized touch.
FAQs:
- Is marketing just advertising?
Nope, advertising is just one slice of Marketing. Marketing involves everything from creating products that people want to decide how to sell them and keeping customers happy.
- How can I adapt my marketing strategies to changing trends?
Keep yourself updated on industry trends, consumer preferences, and technological advancements.
- How can I reach my target market?
Customize content to match your audience’s preferred platform for genuine connection and higher engagement.
