Before You Market, What Do You Need To Understand About Marketing?
July 4, 2019 by ThySista
Filed under Business, Opinion, Tech/Internet, Weekly Columns
(ThySistas.com) Marketing is a very powerful tool in the business world. It’s how you get your brand out there, and entice more interest than any other selling tactics you could employ. All in all, it’s invaluable to your business model, and it’s something we’ve been doing since time immemorial. If you have something to sell, you’ve got create a buzz – even stone age man and woman knew about this!
But it’s also quite a complex and tricky idea to get down, and there’s a lot of ways you could fail. After all, there’s a lot of levels to marketing, and starting out as a brand new business, you’ve got to be able to compete with the best of them. The modern day and age has brought a lot of new marketing tools into our toolbox, and thus, it can be hard to keep up.
Before you drum up a marketing campaign, it’s time to understand the basics of marketing. A lot of entrepreneurs forget about them, so let’s go into a bit of detail.
You Need a Story
Your marketing campaign needs to have a theme to it. Once it does, you can start to tell a story with what you’re selling, and how you’re going about it. And seeing as human beings have been story tellers for a very long time, it’s what the market is going to respond the best to! 
The first thing to do is to research the market. Then, you can come up with the right theme and the right story for your market. You’re also going to need to take a look at your product. Combining these two factors means you can ask yourself some questions: What is its main purpose? Why would it be useful for that purpose? Who would use it? What kind of daily mishaps could it put a stop to? How is it different to the other solutions on the market? Once you’ve managed to answer all of these, you’re going to be left with a cheat sheet of details.
Ultimately, know who you’re selling to; once you do, you’ll be able to work out the kinds of stories they lap up the best. For example, if you’re selling to young families with young children, focusing on tales of children’s happiness is usually the best way to a parent’s heart. Be a little suggestive at the same time – would the parents in question get a good night’s sleep if their kids were able to play with the fun, immersive, and energetic toy you’ve innovated?
At the same time, the kid in question is going to see a toy that’s glitzy and colorful, and it’s very likely to go straight to their heart. There’s a lot of angles a story can come from!
One Size Does Not Fit All
Marketing is something that needs to be personalised, and that’s very important to remember. You need to be able to fit your company and your brand into a marketing template, and the results need to make sense on the other side. They need to target the right people, with the right tone and attitude, and there’s little room for mistakes. A bad advertising campaign can be costly in more ways than one, and it certainly doesn’t provide any kind of legitimacy to your new and growing business.
It’s why a lot of online marketing ideas can fail – websites all use the same platform, and there’s a lot of common trends amongst the users of this platform, but there’s little to no originality in how to approach them. Different websites attract different people, and just because the internet means we can potentially reach millions and billions of people at once doesn’t mean you’re ready to do so.
You’ve got to be able to adjust, even if you are using someone else’s ideas as a basis for your own. For example, the way you market a children’s toy store is not going to make any strides on the people who are in need of a lawyer’s service! It’s why plenty of specialised companies, such as elitelawyermanagement.com, crop up all over the world. There’s a market for marketing in general, and sometimes, you need a professional to get to the heart of the market. It’s a lot less costly that way.
For Fast Results, You’ll Have to Spend
Speaking of costs, when it comes to marketing, money is key. The more funding you have, the better your production value. And the better your production value, the more people you’re going to impress. And, you guessed it, the more people you impress, the higher your rate of customer conversions.
But this conversion is slow. You’ve got to create waves, and you’ve got to build a backlog on Google. That takes time.
So, to ensure you get some results, from even just a month of marketing, you’re going to have to spend some money. If you don’t, it’s going to take a lot longer to build a customer base, and any kind of considerable following on social media. Even if Facebook now offers business pages, you’re still going to have to cough up to attract people towards them – website banners, being featured in the search list – as rarely does a business page ever generate traffic just by existing.
Do You Understand Marketing?
It’s a tricky game that a lot of people have no idea about it. It can be simple to learn at the beginning, and get more and more complicated as you try out different marketing methods. It’s hard to know what will work when you make a decision, and it always feels like a gut punch when you monitor your analytics on the other side.
So, make sure you know where marketing comes from, and its most basic of principles. After all, the better your research in the beginning, the better your results after 3 to 6 months of sticking to a campaign. You’ll be going in with a clear and level head, after all!
Staff Writer; Shelia Jacobs
