Innovation and marketing success go hand-in-hand. That said, ecommerce and digital media have changed the entire marketing scenario. Thus, innovative ideas have become more important than ever before. Naturally, the significance of marketing and the importance of innovation within it is projected to grow in the future too.
Whether it is a startup or one among Fortune 500 companies, innovative marketing schemes are used by all businesses. Irrespective of what size they are, with marketing, brands differentiate themselves from their competitors as they offer something ‘distinct,’ adding value for your customers. By leveraging innovation and creativity as efficient tools, brands build their identity, enhance awareness, and distinguish themselves from others in the same industry.
Several global brands constantly experiment with emerging and latest marketing trends and tactics. Some of them work really well, or at the very least, they do for a limited time. However, some do not offer any scalable return on investment (ROI) or yield substantial results. An even bigger problem:
Various businesses succumb to incorrect marketing tactics for all wrong reasons, thereby wasting valuable time, money, and most importantly, credibility in the marketplace.
In order to stay relevant to their customers, marketers should be at par with their competitor’s tactics, at least to some extent. You might give them many good experiences, but it just takes one bad one to turn them away. So the key is to not keep bombarding or pestering them. Rather, draw their attention with rightful marketing tactics.
So why is a systematic approach to a marketing plan needed? The reason, quite simply, is to keep you right and relevant. It is the path you, as a business, must follow to grow your business and satisfy customers. So what does it take to build successful marketing ideas that will deliver blockbuster success, and how does your growth marketing agency ensure that?
What are the Secrets to Ensure Marketing Success?
Thanks to the limited time and budget constraints, startups need help fitting into the whole marketing scene. But it is no excuse as according to a survey, 70% of tech-based startups fail to gain traction within the first 20 months. The major factor is the significant gap between marketing and sales. Naturally, you wouldn’t want to be a part of these infamous statistics. To ensure that, a practical and solid plan is needed.
Who would not want more signups, leads, and subscribers without spending much? Although getting all those results might look impossible in many cases, one can make a significant difference with their marketing if one gets creative with their approach. Spending tons of money to ‘wow’ your customers is not at all necessary. Some out-of-the-box thinking will take you farther than your money ever can. So let us see what they are and how they can scale up your business with measurable results:
Secret #1: Give Marketing Top Priority
One of the primary reasons why any person chooses your brand for buying a product or service is efficient marketing. The process of marketing begins at the beginning, and it continues forever. It starts with making sure that your brand’s service and product fill a need for prospects in order for them to buy. The next step is pricing to ensure that the business derives profits from sales and that the customer discerns the price to be less than the value of benefits they are getting.
With effective positioning, potential customers can easily engage with the dealership to evaluate the service or product. The last step is promotion. At this stage, the business communicates about its existence and the benefits of the services or products with its prospects in order to attract them to contact them to learn more.
When it comes to marketing ideas, there is no dearth of ideas. However, the ability to identify which of these ideas will derive maximum traction is what will set you apart from your contemporaries. Marketing delivers measurable impacts, and marketing is about growing tenfold in a short duration instead of growing 10% in a long period.
Almost all marketers can pull off 10% growth over time. However, in reality, it is different from what businesses demand these days. As competitors keep rising every now and then, if you take time before even making it to the top, you will witness your potential customers going to someone else. The path to having a successful marketing campaign comes with its frictions, and one of the best ways to get rid of these frictions is to have a good workflow.
The full completion of product/service, price, positioning, and promotion is what defines successful sales. As a matter of fact, most businesses are marketing businesses. Therefore, to ensure success, marketers must always focus on marketing.
Secret #2: Don’t Confuse Advertising with Marketing
If asked, many would fail to state the difference between marketing and advertising. Also, to be honest, both terms are closely related to each other, yet they differ in different ways. In simple terms, marketing can be defined as the means of communication between a brand and its target audience. So it is the activity or process of creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that hold some value for clients, customers, and society at large.
Marketing is all about market segmentation, target group identification, and market analysis. With this, you can adopt a suitable strategy for the purpose of customer engagement and product promotion. The crux of marketing has four primary elements:
- Product
- Price
- Place
- Promotion
On the other hand, advertising can be defined as a form of marketing communication that companies use to promote services and products. So it is one of the subsets of marketing. Simply put, if marketing is a whole pie, advertising will form an important slice of that pie. The five elements that define advertising are:
- Awareness
- Knowledge
- Liking
- Preference
- Conviction
- Purchase
In conclusion, we can tell that advertising is just a part of the marketing strategy and usually occurs in the last stage of the strategy.
Oftentimes, people are under the misconception that marketing is limited to advertising, resulting in overlooking important marketing steps. Thus, they miss control over their marketing strategies.
Secret #3: Don’t Base your Marketing Solely on your Opinions and Desires
Often, dealers who consider themselves their own boss tend to exploit their power and freedom of choice as the boss. Unfortunately, it means they overlook the opinion of the target audience. Did you know that their role is crucial in determining the failure or success of convincing the real boss – the customer – who buys their products or services?
Often, dealers are found imposing their opinion on their potential customers. This is incorrect. If you fail to consider the value and application of your service or product from the point of view of your customers, you will fail to convince them to buy your service or product.
Customer-centric marketing leverages personalized products, content, messages, and more to ensure that consumer receives exactly what they expect. Prioritizing your customer’s needs helps establish a better relationship with your audience, thereby increasing retention. It is because customers like getting special treatment. With a customer-centric marketing approach, companies do not tell their shoppers what they need. Rather they curate their strategies all around the interest of their target audience.
A good example is Southwest Airlines, infamous for its poor customer support. However, they were able to mend this stereotype by offering a customer-centric marketing approach that their customers look at. While they don’t fill the plane with big sets, TV screens, or fancy meals by charging extreme prices, they provide cost-friendly pricing by not charging the customers for things like baggage or the choice of changing travel dates. This is exactly what has put the airlines at the front.
By giving customers what they seek and not what marketers think they want, brands can attract customers and witness higher conversions.
Secret #4: Learn All you can About your Potential Customers
Identifying your potential customer base before the launch of your business venture or product is the key to successful marketing. Knowing them better helps you modify your service or product idea based on the requirements of your potential customers. Also, efficient application of all the marketing and advertising resources can be achieved by properly defining your business’s target market. Irrespective of the business, customer profiling aligns with all of them, giving you a competitive advantage so that you can engage in proactive communication with your potential customers and serve them in the best possible way.
An in-depth analysis of your chosen potential customers is an important element of survival in the business, and business owners must learn everything that is possible about who their potential customers are, what they want to purchase, why they want to purchase, how they want to purchase, and when they want to purchase. You can do that by:
- Familiarizing with Demographics
Developing a demographic profile of your customers is the first and foremost step when it comes to defining your target market. Some of the basics that you can start with are gender, age group, location, occupation, marital status, and annual income. For example, a cosmetic brand launching an organic cosmetic line identify its customers as young girls and women between the age of 25 to 40.
- Evaluating the Psychographics
After familiarising yourself with your potential customer’s demographics, you must evaluate their psychographics. It includes social norms, personality traits, lifestyle, values, and interests to make your service or product launch successful. A prospect’s lifestyle can make a huge difference in determining the success of your brand. For example, a cosmetic lover would love products that have organic ingredients in them.
- Researching Successful Competitor Brands
Conducting research on your successful competitor brands in the industry is one of the simplest ways of identifying your potential customers. That said, you must not limit yourself to a mass market. Niche marketing is quite promising, so always consider your competitor’s target market and search for niche markets where you can market your products. For example, big hotels might not require a cost-efficient oven, but small-scale hotels would be interested in purchasing it.
- Analyzing your Product
Conducting a product analysis is another way to know your prospective clients. First, define your product’s advantages and then analyze who would want to buy it. For example, let us consider that your product is a massager that relaxes the muscles and is ideal for people with muscle and joint pains. Considering these advantages, you can evaluate your customer base as people suffering from back pain or injuries.
Secret #5: Make Marketing a Regular Activity
Regular marketing activities are one of the key factors that help determine your business’s success. To put it simply, having a good product or service is not the only thing you must have. Without effective marketing activities, your brand won’t come under the radar of your target audience, resulting in an ultimate loss. Marketing activities can be defined as a process that creates efficient communication, exchanging, and delivering something that adds value to the customer.
Understanding your customers’ requirements and aligning them with the latest market trends is a part of the larger marketing activity. Moreover, it is important to effectively reach out to more people to boost productivity and sales. All of these can be efficiently achieved by efficient marketing activity.
To achieve this, you must learn how to screen out the customers who do not want your products or services. Dealers have every right to decide which prospect will make a purchase. This way, they can eliminate all the undesirable prospects early on and focus more on the customers genuinely looking to purchase.
Efficient marketing activity is key for businesses to establish long-lasting relationships with end-users and clients. Moreover, it helps in finding the hidden potential of your service and product.
With efficient marketing activities, one can understand the customer better and get more leads for their services or products as it becomes important to provide them with a personalized service or product. Establishing a healthy and strong relationship with your customers results from regular marketing activities and ensures the success of your business.
Secret #6: Know and Appreciate the Value of your Existing Customers
Often, dealers become so focused on acquiring new customers that they overlook or ignore their existing repeat customers, which can be disastrous, especially if you are a small business. While few businesses can survive without repeat customers, some absolutely cannot. It is because repeat customers give you a wealth of opportunities.
It is always convenient to convince your repeat customers to buy products from you in the future. So the longer they stay connected with your brand, the greater their lifetime value. This way, they can become reliable and strong advocates of your brand who can bring in new customers your way.
Existing customers come with good feedback as they offer a great reference and referral service. However, since they cost less and are a source of extra business, their unwarranted exit can result in significant damage. When customers are upset, they will complain to at least five to nine others who can be prospects. This will massively damage the business’s reputation.
Secret #7: Create a Positive Identity that is Distinct from your Competitors
Every customer does a comparative analysis of products/services or brands to come to a conclusion of what they should buy and what they should not. If you want them to pick your brand over others, it is important to give them not just one but multiple reasons. Understanding your competitors well and positioning your service or product accordingly will help you achieve your target sales.
It all comes down to your product or service creating an impression on your customers long after the sales process. Building your brand identity positively is the process of shaping that impression in the customers. Being an encapsulation of what your brand is and does, a brand identity can motivate the buyers and enhance their loyalty towards you. Thus, for a successful future of your brand, building a positive identity that is different from others is essential.
Brand identity has five elements. They are:
- The ‘Face’ of Your Business
Your brand’s logo is your business’s face for every purpose and intent. However, it should not be limited to just looking interesting or aesthetic. Logo contribution to your brand identity is associated with the public instantly visualizing your brand when they see it.
- Credibility and Trust
When you have a brand identity, it does not just make your service or product memorable. It also puts you in an authoritative position in the industry. When you establish a face and maintain it over time, it develops credibility among your customers.
- Advertising Impressions
Whether the ad is in its print, preroll commercial on YouTube, or online ad, everything incorporated in your business ad is considered your brand identity. A brand with a face and industry credibility is properly equipped to promote itself and leave a solid impression among its potential buyers.
- Your Company’s Mission
When you create an identity for your brand, you give it something to stand for, ultimately giving your company a purpose. Companies have mission statements, and to have one, it is important to first give your brand identity.
- Generating New Customers and Delighting Existing Ones
A brand with a face, trust, and a mission attracts people who agree with what it offers. As these people get associated with the brand, the same brand gives them a sense of belonging. A good product or service gets you customers, but a good brand will get you brand advocates.
Secret #8: Consider the Overwhelming Power of Emotion on the Buying Process
The whole purchasing journey of the customer is governed by emotional forces. However, many marketers focus their energy on setting the price and fail to address the real emotional reasons people will make the purchase. They must have a good idea about the emotional connection with their prospect and how it will help in making a sale. Your entire marketing program should revolve around acknowledging the emotional issues in order to get suitable customers.
When it comes to making a purchase, the usual human thinking process begins with an emotional need that convinces one to consider buying a product or service to fill it. Often the search and evaluation of product or service options are quite emotional, and the pricing comes much later.
If we were to speak the truth, the price issue comes in the end; the customer expresses their wish to know the price to justify their emotional decision. As a matter of fact, when someone asks for a quote, it is a strong indication that they are going to buy it.
These are the secrets to a successful marketing strategy. The bottom line here is that with a happy customer, you can develop an ever-expanding pipeline to the success of your business.
Concluding Lines
If you want to scale up your business and grow your follower base, you must stand out not just in terms of the service or product you offer but also with distinct marketing ideas. Primarily, you would need a mindset that is focused solely on marketing. Did you know that brands that consider marketing activities as an investment instead of an expense are more likely to succeed? Yes, it is true indeed.
However, just like any other activity that needs regular commitment, you must give 100% to your marketing activities. We hope this blog helps you with growth marketing strategies marketers must grasp while developing suitable strategies. Happy reading!
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