Marketing your business is essential as a modern entrepreneur if you want to enjoy long-term success. Gone are the days when building a better mousetrap caused people to beat a path to your door if those days, in fact, ever existed in the first place. In a world that’s increasingly digital, that means focusing on marketing essentials from days past, such as the 4 Ps, customers first, and quantifying returns to optimize performance, while learning new tricks from digital marketing.
In today’s post, we’ll focus on the breadth of marketing essentials necessary for success.
Traditional marketing essentials
Marketing has been around forever; since the first day someone tried to barter or sell excess produce or hire services. In fact, money was invented as the grease to allow exchange between people who had something and people who wanted that thing. Hence, an exchange is really the basis of marketing and the reason you need marketing to build success.
The discipline of marketing is much younger, less than 100 years. Born of economic theory and psychology, marketing blends notions inherent in both parent disciplines. In a world consumed with online entertainment, information, and social connection, digital marketing frequently replaces traditional promotional tools such as TV, radio, and print.
The good news about this transition to digital marketing is the relatively low cost associated with digital when compared to traditional media. That said, you must still dedicate a marketing budget and build a marketing strategy to support your brand. You must also learn a new set of marketing essentials relevant to the digital world. In today’s post, we discuss just a few of those marketing essentials.
Marketing essentials in a digital world
Because digital marketing occurs on digital platforms such as websites, social media platforms, and through electronic mail, firms must develop a certain level of comfort not only with the new tools and tactics available online but learn to think differently about their marketing in cyberspace. Digital marketing is more than just traditional marketing in a digital form, it requires a major shift in thinking if a firm wishes to succeed. For more on how digital and traditional marketing differ, check out this post.
Embrace social media
Social media plays a critical role in your digital marketing efforts, or at least it should.
That’s because social media works to both amplify your message (allowing you to reach new potential customer groups) while acting as non-commercial communication — more like a conversation between friends than an ad. Social media marketing also allows firms to build close relationships with customers that generate loyalty, trust, and advocacy from average users.
A robust social media presence across multiple platforms (those where your personas spend the majority of their online efforts) translates into increased sales from new customers and repeat purchases. Having an active presence across relevant social media sites isn’t enough, however. You must work toward building a community around your sites with engaged users, not simply followers. Content marketing is key to building this community not only in terms of building engagement and offering value to your community but building an emotional connection between your market and your brand. Come up with great ways to take your social media marketing forward, dedicating necessary resources of time, money, and talent to building and executing a well-crafted social media campaign then monitoring performance to optimize your results.
Web design
Web design is a key aspect of digital marketing that requires an entirely different skillset from back in the days of traditional marketing. Your website is the backbone of your digital marketing; acting as a source of information for customers and prospects, while also offering a virtual storefront or links to help customers make purchases.
But, designing your website, while challenging, isn’t the end of your website efforts. Instead, SEO (search engine optimization — the key to getting found online) requires the creation of valuable content on a consistent basis if you want to show up when users search for products you sell. Learn more about SEO with this comprehensive SEO guide from MOZ, the leader in SEO.
Hire experts
Digital marketing requires a diverse set of skills from writing and journalism to the more technical skills required for digital, such as HTML/CSS. You also need tools and most tools have a cost associated with them. Thus, hiring experts not only provides much-needed skills but spreads the cost of digital tools across a wide range of customers rather than the entire expense falling on your shoulders
This means you need to focus on finding people with the right skills, experience, and knowledge to help your brand. For instance, Groovefunnels Free System Review is an absolutely essential way to find out all about developing a free sales funnel builder and shows how to work on the important task of attracting more people to the business then nurturing them through to a sale.
UX
One of the key elements of a successful digital marketing campaign is user experience (UX). UX represents the usability of your site, such as ease of navigation, load speed, and a smooth checkout process, as well as the readability of your site. Including lots of white space, a variety of content, such as video, images, and text, as well as creating content that’s chunkable by adding headings, subheadings, and bullets to allow for scanning improves UX design.
There are loads of examples of great UX design, but focusing on the experience your customers have is essential, so testing with representatives of your market is essential. A great UX design is a marketing essential if you wish to spread the word and market your business passively.
Conclusion
You need to do as much as possible to take things to the next level in terms of your company’s digital marketing. There are a lot of tactics to consider when it comes to making the right marketing decisions, and these are just a few of the ideas that might help improve your digital marketing. Focus on doing what you can to have the best and most diverse marketing strategy possible with these and other marketing essentials.
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Hausman and Associates, the publisher of MKT Maven, is a full-service marketing agency operating at the intersection of marketing and digital media. Check out our full range of services.
