Really -- Marketing is easy. Almost anyone can do it, but the question is, “Where do you begin?” If you start researching, it’s easy to get overwhelmed. There are lots of options on how to “go-to-market”, and even if you know your program will only be “social media”, for example, there are still lots of choices. That’s why our Lead Strategist, Aruna N Inalsingh, taught “Marketing Techniques for Promoting Business” at FIT. It’s a hands-on series of classes to help businesses get started with marketing. Now that the course is over, Aruna plans to offer this course as a series of Impel Digital webinars.
As you are aware, most people who start a new business know that in order to find some customers, they’re going to need to invest time and money into marketing. But not everyone knows exactly what marketing is and how to choose what would work for them. Many people think marketing is synonymous with advertising, and to be fair, ads are part of most successful marketing campaigns – but only part!
Marketing is about establishing an identity for your business, and introducing that identity to the world. It’s about knowing your brand values, and designing branding that serves as a visual representation of those values. It’s about running a Facebook ad campaign, but it’s also about how you respond to the comments on those ads.
To be successful in marketing, in addition to knowing your brand and your audience, you have to be confident about how your business can fulfill a need that your customers have – even if they didn’t realize they had that need before you told them about it. You also have to know your competitors. What are they doing? What are their strengths and weaknesses? Where are their blind spots?
Of course, we just filled those last two paragraphs with a lot of “marketing speak”. To boil it down to simple concepts, business is all about sales and profits.
You can only make sales if:
- People know who you are
- People know what you do
- You remind people regularly and consistently about 1 and 2
- You live up to the expectations you’ve set
Good marketing is about getting these four points across in an effective way.
To be effective, a marketer or marketing team has to bring to bear a combination of creativity and analytical thinking. Not only does good marketing rely on clever ideas and well-written copy, but also it relies on knowledge of the market and being able to look at the data to analyze how effective a given campaign was.
In today’s world, we have the benefit of data-driven marketing, backing up creative ideas with a knowledge of SEO and analytics. You need to see what works, and figure out why it did. Then you need to see how you can make your campaigns work even better next time. That’s the goal in marketing – to just get better and better, so that you bring in more and more business.
If you’re a business owner or marketing professional and you’d like to learn more about how to approach marketing, you’ll have the chance to do that with our marketing webinars. By the time you complete the series with Aruna, Mark, and Tom, you’ll have your marketing plan ready for rollout. Please let us know if you want to be alerted when these webinars are scheduled. We’d love to share our knowledge with you.
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