Are You Covering All Marketing Bases?

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When you are busy running your own business, it’s easy to miss opportunities to better market products or services. While many marketing channels are available, business owners tend to focus on just one or two that they are familiar with and seem to work.

To help ensure you are covering all marketing bases, here are the key marketing activities you might want to spend time on. The list is drawn from Mallory’s list of the top 15 marketing careers.

Advertising

Advertising is the promotion of a product, service or brand to potential customers. Available channels include Google Adsense, placements on websites and magazines, social media ads and email marketing.

Objectives of advertising are to inform, persuade, and to remind. Advertising is also used for brand building, creating demand, increasing sales and expanding the customer base.

Your ads can be personal or impersonal one-way communication depending on the medium used. Print advertising that involves the use of newspaper and magazines are impersonal. The same applies to outdoor advertising and broadcast advertising requiring the use of radio and TV.

But there are highly personal advertising mediums as well. These include digital advertising such as on social media or other cookie-based mediums like Google AdSense and YouTube.

Brand Management

Brand management is about controlling how your brand, product or service is being portrayed and perceived. If done effectively, it increases the value of associated products or services. Consumers become aware of your brand and respond positively to it.

Campaign management

A marketing campaign is a discrete set of marketing activities. Thinking about marketing in terms of a “campaign” is useful since you can measure the costs and returns and assess overall effectiveness.

Successful campaigns can be repeated while unsuccessful ones should be modified or abandoned. You can try different channels and see which ones produce the best return on investment, measured by the increase in revenue divided by the cost of the ad campaign. Software is available to help you to monitor the progress of your campaign on various paid and organic channels.

Content Creation

Examples of content are words on a webpage, images and text for ads, images and video, and information products such as books and courses. Content creation is the process of producing these things.

Many businesses benefit from producing content on a regular basis. Ideally, you can set up an efficient process that brings in appropriate expertise at a reasonable cost. Good content can be essential for business success, whether content is a product in itself or is used for marketing.

As a business manager, you want to avoid spending too much time on creating content yourself. The challenge is to achieve this while retaining quality control over what is produced.

Customer Success Management

If a customer has a bad experience in being served by your business, you stand the risk of losing not only that individual but other potential customers through public feedback. Customer success management is about ensuring the customer experience is good and you receive repeat business if possible and endorsements.

Managing customer success requires you to identify room for improvement in your products and services. You can earn public endorsements and increase your customers if you manage the ones you have well.

Engage with them through their contact information and be willing to render after-sales services. Have an efficient customer care center. Share useful information that will encourage them to maintain a relationship and become an asset for the business.

Promotions

Promotion, a subset of advertising, includes activities such as contests, customer referral programs, giveaways, and organizing special events. This is an often-neglected area of marketing because of the obvious costs. But advertising and promotion experiences can be valuable to your business.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

High rankings in Google and other search engines is the purpose of SEO. Once your website is up in the rankings, you receive a constant flow of traffic and potential customers. But it’s highly competitive and takes considerable SEO effort, especially for new sites. You can refer to SEO guides on how to do it or hire an expert.

Social Media Marketing

Advertising, brand management, customer management and SEO can all be aided by social media marketing. Having a strong social media can benefit almost any business and some enterprises rely on it.

Maintaining social media channels properly can, however, be time consuming and a distraction from your core business. Having a strategy for social media marketing is important to make it work for you. As with all marketing activities, you want the returns to more than justify the time and money spent.