I could have sworn that marketing wasn’t so complicated back in the day. Create a killer commercial. Make a radio ad that gets stuck in people’s heads. Cater to the top magazines when it makes sense.
But now we’ve got all these TV channels, billions of web pages and hundreds of thousands of “APPs” along with DMP’s, API’s and SDK’s. Did I lose you? Technology has definitely made marketing that much more difficult to understand.
What could once be considered marketing was identifying the buyers needs and communicating said benefit. Now we’re supposed to build enveloping experiences that engage consumers. In a land of wannabe experts selling snake oil here are four principles to guide your marketing efforts.
- Formulate The Objectives Of Your Business
In the day to day of marketing there’s far too much to keep up with. Trust us when we say that everybody is on the struggle bus, not just you. Every marketer feels pressure to be “cutting edge” and pitch progressive techniques for any ad campaigns and/or proposals.
The mark of a good marketing campaign is that it reaches a goal set by the client. You have to define what you want to achieve.
However,: Awareness, sales and advocacy capture business – it’s rare that a one size fits all approach will work. (That’d be too easy, wouldn’t it?)
- Identify Any Emerging Opportunities
Marketing executives are busy people (don’t we know it). Between watching over clients’ marketplaces, furiously grabbing at new business opportunities, collaborating with product people and running promo campaign after promo campaign, it’s a little unreasonable to also expect them to keep up with emerging technology and strategy.
It’s essential to have a separate team dedicated to watching out for and identifying emerging opportunities.
- Separate Your Strategy and Innovation
Innovation teams and strategy teams are usually made up of senior execs – the so called “best people”.
However, strategy is way different than innovation. Good strategy achieves specific goals and have a good track record. Innovation focuses on creating something new and don’t always work. It’s messy and requires experimentation. A lot of experimentation.
- Build Open Assets in the Marketplace
Remember the days ad agencies could create advertising campaigns that would get attention and drive sales? Well today, effective promo campaigns probably lead to an Google search, where behavior can be tracked and retargeted by competitors.
Successful brands need to do more than sell, they have to build a community. In the digital age, branding is incredibly important.