Marketing a company can take many forms these days. There’s a lot of different ways you can advertise your brand and your business, and any products or services you offer, but it would seem that not all marketing efforts are equal.
After all, word of mouth is as popular as ever, but not so much out on the street. Instead, it’s across social media and review forums, where people can post a link and talk about just how wonderfully the product worked for them.
You also need to make sure you’ve got top ranking on search engines, with Google owning the SEO game at the minute. You’ve got make sure what you say on your website is relevant, and that any subsequent content you post is what your customer base is looking for. And you can’t do that without some proper market research!
But the market takes many forms these days as well. No longer can you own a shop front and expect to make the bulk of your earnings there – you need to be online as well, with a hyper-accessibility, and a delivery service that favors the convenience of the customer.
So, with all of this in mind, it’s time to go through the question: Is marketing getting harder and harder?
- Photo by Elio Santos on Unsplash
There’s a lot of guidebooks on the subject, but you’re definitely going to need some experience with modern marketing to try and make it big!
Social Media Really is a Whirlwind
It’s the portion of the market every single business out there wants to conquer, considering its incredible reach and constant user presence. In truth, we’ve never seen advertising abilities like it! Companies can reach out with their own pages, build a following from a user list of a billion different people, and have a website all ready to go without even needing to make one themselves. Posting daily status updates, or ‘tweeting’ 3 or 4 times a day, is a great way to get your page noticed by a digital algorithm – no human middleman is even needed.
But then comes the idea of the influencer. These are the people who have a huge fan base on social platforms, and not necessarily because they’re selling something – they don’t need a physical item or digital service to offer, other than their own personality and presence. They’re personalities people flock to, and they’ve always got a strong social media presence. As we can constantly see on Twitter, brands are taking a page out of their books.
If you reach out to the right influencer, with a product that relates to what they do (or what they post about), you can corner the market in just a couple hundred or couple of thousands of dollars. And considering that you’ll usually be reaching out to 100,000+ plus people, that’s an incredibly cheap price tag.
But the hard part is finding the right influencers. People who have the right reputation, who are well known even in the mainstream (newspapers, radio, TV, etc.), and don’t have a long and shady history with sponsorship deals already. What an influencer has done in the past can stick to them like glue, and it’s essential to know the details before associating a brand with someone.
Companies Can Exist Simply to Market
It’s always been a part of the business cycle. If you want customers to walk into your store – to buy what’s on your shelves, or to sit down and order from your tables – then the customers need to know you exist. Not only that, but they need to know what you offer, and the kind of prices they’ll be looking at. A lot of work goes into a single advert out of an entire marketing campaign, and a lot of small businesses exhaust their resources to tick every box on the checklist.
This is why it’s easy for new business models to arise; the kind that makes it their business to know the market, and solely focus on its daily trends and changes. This is the kind of thing businesses like yours might be just a little too busy to do on your own. And that might just work out in your favor, in the face of a relative inability to market your product. Don’t waste your time with half-hearted measures!
There are even a few companies out there who make a business out of knowing which marketing agencies are worth their salt. Websites such as Sortlist.com fall into this category – if you need to reach out to an expert, to outsource your marketing efforts to get bigger and better results from them, this might just be the place to start.
So, even if you’re struggling to get a hold on the marketing world, there’s plenty of resources out there to fall back on. With the new directions, marketing has been taking over the past 20 or 30 years, a lot of businesses and other entities have gotten lost along the way! Because of that, we’ve innovated ways to make our advertising needs much friendlier to approach.
Marketing Needs a New Approach
So, marketing is getting a little bit harder, if only for all the time and energy that needs to go into understanding your market and who is already present in it. But it can be a lot easier to conduct as well, with a lot of the work being taken care of for you. Of course, to have a smoother ride with a marketing plan and its resulting campaign, you need to know where to look.
Make sure you’re using more than one approach when it comes to advertising your business. Your brand is going to need multiple forms of media to fall back on, and it’s going to need to have a constant presence to stay at the top of the search page (and on people’s minds). It seems that the digital age brings about shorter and shorter attention spans, so you’ve got to have your finger on the button.
Share Your Thoughts