What comes in your mind when you hear the word “Marketing”? For some people it’s the art of convincing people to buy your product or service, for some it’s just a method of getting people’s attention and for some it’s an authentic and very easy way of communicating with their potential and current clients.
The way you will lead your marketing strategy depends on what is the definition of marketing for you. According to marketing experts, it’s the art of making people see what you want them to see. Now, it can be a message you’re trying to deliver, a service that you’re offering, a product that you’re trying to sell or a brand that you’re promoting.
It wasn’t a long time ago when the modes of marketing were quite limited. Brands used to utilize traditional marketing modes like print media, telephone marketing aka telemarketing and direct email marketing. These sure were considered the latest and cutting edge marketing technique at that time but the tables have turned now. Since social media marketing came around, all these old marketing techniques were declared obsolete.
Today we’ll talk about the 6 pillars of marketing that you need to be familiar with in order to improve your marketing game. We’ll be talking about marketing in general and not just about social media marketing so you can get a more in depth idea of what is the soul of marketing.
Social listening and market research is the key.
Doesn’t matter if you’re working with traditional methods or social media marketing, social listening and market research is the key to a successful marketing campaign. Now, for those who don’t know what social listening is, it’s the response that you get from people in form of comments, questions or suggestions as a result of a marketing campaign.
Social listening helps you understand what your potential customers want to see in your brand, what points aren’t clear to them and how much they like what you’re currently presenting to them. This will not only help you in compiling the results of your camping but will also help you in improving your brand.
Doing market research is as much important as social listening is. Doing market research will give you a detailed insight of what marketing techniques and methods your competitors are using. It will help you stay one step ahead of your competitors and improve your marketing strategy.
Spark conversations and movements
Showing people what you have to offer is easy; establishing a connection between them and your brand is the real thing. In order to maximize the effect of your marketing campaigns, you need to focus on providing your clients with high quality content. The type of content which makes them feel that you’re not just trying to tell them what you have to say but you’re also interested in what they have to say to you as well. Sparking a conversation with your potential customers is easy; all you have to do is make content which is compelling enough to contact you and ask “tell us more about what you are offering”.
Inspire your audience to do something positive, something good, through your content. You can do that by making posts about planting more trees or support save planet movements. This will improve the brand image and will make people fall in love with the positivity you’re spreading through your posts and articles.
Judge by relationships, not impressions
It’s a naked truth that users like to see videos more than they like to read the information in a post. That’s why it’s very important that you post creative and attention grabbing videos with good voice over and editing. Videos are not only a better way to get Instagram algorithm’s attention but it’s also the most efficient way to convey your message to the audience. Make sure to focus on brand identity but don’t forget to also make videos about social issues, trends and movements because they help you get more popular among users. Enhance your video quality every time by learning what you did wrong last time and improve your content constantly.
Stay calm
What do you do if an emotional client comes on your post or your article and comments something totally inappropriate? There are two options here. Either you can lose your mind; give that user a piece of your mind and then block them from further commenting. OR, you can choose to stay calm and ask why they have developed that negative opinion about your brand.
Not losing your cool will help you get to know more about why that user is angry and whether it’s a genuine issue he’s angry about or it’s something superficial. Either way, not losing your cool will not only make you look like a brand that even cares about users who aren’t very nice, but it will also help you improve the brand quality if the user’s issue is genuine.
Always judge the relationship you have with all your clients and think rationally instead of forming opinion on impression.
Test new innovative ideas
Always give something new to your users and they will never leave your side! This is one of the golden rules in marketing. Everyone wants to see something new and refreshing every single day. If your marketing campaign focuses on new and innovative ideas for content, then you can rest assured because it will definitely succeed.
Innovation is something that inspires others and sparks the imagination in them. It makes them see the possibility of creating something elegant out of simple things. Always come up with new ideas for visual content and exciting new topics for your articles. Creative posts and informative articles on hot issues and latest technologies will attract more audience. It will also increase brand authority and brand image among the audience.
Allow your marketing team to implement creative ideas regarding content and its orientation to enhance the effect of your campaign.
Speak the language of your audience
Yes! This exactly means what you’re thinking right now but it has another meaning as well. Let’s discuss the obvious meaning first. Let’s say that you launch your marketing campaign in USA but most of your audience is from China town which prefers Chinese. What will you do then? It’s important to always care about all types of audience when planning a campaign.
Although this was just an example but if you’re planning to take over the market then you got to have the ability to communicate with all sorts of communities. Now, you can do that by designing your posts in different languages and translating your articles in different languages as well.
Some people might say that it will just be a futile effort and that it will only increase your expenses. But, it will show your potential clients that your brand is versatile and supports all the communities no matter how small or how large they are.
Provide value if you want attention
You can’t expect to get success just by launching a great marketing campaign! Your brand has to be extremely good for your marketing campaign to be a hit. Sure marketing helps a lot in developing a brand’s image and its authority but for that you have to deliver value first.
You will get nothing except negative customer reviews and bad image in market if your brand doesn’t deliver value. Delivering value is the single most important thing that your camping depends on. It’s a wild goose chase to launch campaigns for a brand that doesn’t care about its customers and doesn’t deliver value. You’ll just be wasting your content and creative ideas on coming up with ideas for such a brand.
Always put yourself in customer’s shoes and think “why would anyone trust on my brand?” if you can find at least 5 reasons then it means your brand is good enough. And if you can’t find the reasons, well it would be better to reconsider before spending any budget on marketing campaigns.
Conclusion
You’ll observe a lot of people when you come in the marketing field and you’ll see what people expect from brands, what they like and what they hate etc. Good marketing is all about utilizing all those experiences and then coming up with a strategy that hits the customers in the right spot. You need to be creative and highly efficient in marketing field as the competition is increasing every day. To make sure your brand always stays one step ahead of your competitors, always stick to the basics and never forget these pillars of marketing.
