Marketing is everything you do to attract prospects to your business. As you might imagine, it encompasses many of your business’ characteristics and actions.
Are You Ready for Marketing?
Being ready to think about your company’s marketing first requires that you care for yourself and your employees. It requires attention to your business’ mission and an understanding of what makes your business singular from others. Before anything else, successful marketing requires time spent on self care and the inner workings of your company. Good habits for your business will cultivate the curiosity, creativity, leadership and openness of you and your employees. They will create a company culture that appeals to potential customers.
From Branding to Marketing
These initial steps contribute to the branding of your business, which ties seamlessly into marketing. Your brand, whether deliberately or not, is present in every aspect of your business. Marketing requires a strong identity. The brand is the identity of you and your employees, how you act and what you represent. Your brand informs the communication of your marketing process. With a comprehensive understanding of your brand, your target market becomes easier to identify. Once you can recognize the group you are trying to reach, it’s much easier to figure out how to reach them.
Creating a Meaningful Experience
Now that you’ve spent time developing your business’ foundation, you’re ready to approach your marketing tactics. Memorable marketing is a meaningful experience. Creating that meaningful experience requires that your business educate, engage, and entertain.
Educate
There are many ways, from the briefest to the most extensive, to communicate who you are. When potential clients see a logo, for example, it will give them a visual understanding of who you are. It can communicate a lot of information from details as seemingly insignificant as font, size and color. You might find a space to communicate a tagline, your values, your tone and your brand commitment.
Choose carefully any of the words you use to describe who you are as a business. Make sure they represent what you do and what experience you create for your customers in specific terms. Communication is most effective when you have a particular audience in mind. When you’re thinking about how you educate your potential customers, refer back to what you’ve discovered about who makes up your ideal market. Inform them with language and details they can relate to. Take relevance into account. How does your information also respond to the time frame in which it’s going out and what events are important to your audience? You can tailor your information to seasons, current events, societal trends and industry trends, anything from the world around you.
Emotional Connection
Effective marketing engages your potential customers emotionally. The kind of information you use to educate your audience should make them feel emotionally connected. Think about the experience you’re providing your customers. A marketing campaign that shows a business that cares is much more effective than just having the loudest and most in-your-face advertising.
This doesn’t mean trying to come across as caring. Potential customers can often pick up on fake or forced care. It’s about exhibiting what is happening naturally within your company. It’s about your business being a comfortable environment that your employees enjoy going back to, one that gives a pleasant experience to everyone you interact with. This is what you want to display naturally to every potential customer you reach.
You begin with an outreach process, to try to communicate with and draw in initial customers. However, don’t forget about how you treat those customers that then keep coming back. They can provide you with a wealth of information, like what first brought them in, what’s working to keep them and what makes them recommend your business to others. Follow up. A follow-up survey reminds those customers you care about their opinions and how your business is helping them in their lives. It allows them to participate in the growth of your company. It communicates to those loyal customers that you value them. This continued sense of connection will help you be the company your customers recommend to others. Your customers can thus be an integral part of your marketing process if you take time to care about them.
Channels
The next part of engaging is about the channels you use to communicate. The channels are the spaces you use to market your business. In the previous description of loyal customers, these customers become a marketing channel. Blogging is a particularly effective marketing channel. It shows you care, gives potential customers information free of charge and helps you establish yourself as an expert in your field. There are billboards, television advertising, company websites, just to name a few. With today’s technology, there are likely avenues many business owners haven’t heard of yet and might never know about.
Your marketing channels should be considered carefully. While it may seem like being the loudest and most omnipresent will get you the customers you need, such a widespread approach is not necessarily the answer. Your prospective clients will likely be able to see the thoughtlessness of your approach if you throw your logo up everywhere you can, without any consideration. Instead, go back to your target market.
Consider your target market and their habits. In what ways do they most often consume information? This will take research, but you can also examine what you and your employees already know. You can think about what your team uses and where you go for similar services. Your research about channels should include what’s trending on the channels you’re considering, be it online or otherwise. What is most popular? Is what you have to offer in the same realm as those things? Where might your potential customers be most likely to respond to advertising by your company?
Timing is also important. Be consistent because, consciously or subconsciously, your customers will notice. A company that delivers timely messages, even on the most informal of channels, shows dependability. It might be the first communication you have and therefore your customers’ first impressions of you. With consistently timed messages, you can show your potential customers right from the start that you know how to set expectations and deliver desired results reliably.
Entertain
This doesn’t mean you have to make your potential customers laugh, just that you perform. Your entire marketing approach is a performance, so act and plan accordingly. Follow the conventions of the channel you choose to market on unless there’s a compelling enough reason not to. There’s plenty of room for creativity, which you should absolutely take advantage of, but it isn’t about printing a novel on a billboard. Many types of messages simply won’t be seen if presented on the wrong channel. So familiarize yourself with the conventions for your communication channels.
This aspect also incorporates the work you do to engage and educate. It involves taking time to find out and deliver what your audience appreciates. You can entertain with the right information and references to societal trends and news. Your choices for words and images also work towards having entertaining marketing, as do your tone and delivery.