The marketing ecosystem is a dynamic and ever-changing one. Millennials continue to steer social media usage with 90.4 percent of that demography being active on social media in 2019, followed by 77.5 percent of Generation X, and 48.2 percent of Baby Boomers.
That’s why entrepreneurs must get acquainted with new developments in cyberspace so that their marketing team can leverage the active usage of social media ideal for each demography being targeted.
By the time you are through with this post, you will have an in-depth understanding of marketing, its purpose, and its types. Lastly, you will be armed with the 7 things you should know about marketing.
Table of Contents
What is Marketing?
According to HubSpot, marketing refers to any actions a company takes to capture viewers to its products or services through targeted high-quality messaging.
The goal of marketing is to deliver individualised value for prospects and consumers through content, with the long-term goal of demonstrating product value, strengthening brand loyalty, and ultimately increasing sales.
Consequently, as an entrepreneur here in Nigeria or elsewhere, you will have to learn the marketing ropes sooner or later. However, you can hire a team to handle your marketing activities, but as an entrepreneur, you also need to understand marketing and its intricacies.
Purpose of Marketing?
Marketing as a business activity involves different sections such as product creation, advertising, sales, and distribution methods. The mission of marketing is to get people interested in your products or services as an entrepreneur.
And this can happen through market analysis, research, interest, and customer attraction through the deployment of educational and helpful messaging to your target customers.
One additional goal of marketing is to convert a higher percentage of your leads into customers. This is the overarching purpose of most marketing campaigns.
Types of Marketing
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Internet marketing
This involves the establishment of an online presence for your business.
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Blog marketing
Blog marketing involves creating and publishing educational content through blogs, micro-blogging sites, etc.
It’s important to note that blogs are no longer the exclusive preserve of writers and authors alone.
In a recent study by HubSpot, 56% of marketers who use blogging say it is still effective and 10% of marketers say blogging generates the biggest return on investment.
Brands now write and publish content about their business and industry to inform, educate, and nurture potential customers who browse the internet for information. According to DemandGen, 50 percent of lead nurturing campaigns feature blogging and social media.
Read also: Business Blogging: Setting up, Maintaining and Promoting
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Search engine optimisation (SEO)
SEO is the systematic process of organising, and optimising the content on a website, so that search engines can easily pick them up, and display them at the top of their results pages.
Read also: 10 SEO Tips to Improve your Website Ranking
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Search engine marketing (SEM)
Search Engine Marketing is a concept that involves the marketing and promotion of your business using paid advertisements that appear on search engine result pages (SERPs) for the purpose of getting higher exposure.
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Social media marketing
Entrepreneurs in Nigeria can use social networks like Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, LinkedIn, and similar social networking websites to build and create impressions on their audience over time.
Recent reports by HubSpot reveal that Instagram is the second-best-performing social media platform for marketers.
Read also: 5 Social Media Hacks to Improve Brand Engagement
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Video marketing
These are visual content created and published by businesses to inform, educate and entertain prospective target audiences. For instance, It is estimated that a whopping 1 billion videos will be uploaded in 2022.
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Influencer marketing
This marketing type engages regular individuals with a large following and can influence potential buyers. Marketing activities are built around these individuals to push the company’s message to a larger market; while compensating the influencer.
7 Things Entrepreneurs Should Know About Marketing
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Marketing evens out the playing field
More than ever, modern marketing is quickly becoming a less expensive tool to deploy. With the wide appeal of social networking platforms and the adoption of email as an important communication tool, you can easily reach out to your consumers more cheaply and easily than, say, 20 years ago when email penetration was lower.
Today, you can deploy smart digital marketing campaigns to even out the playing field; especially if your competitors are big brands. This aspect of marketing can give you a tremendous advantage.
Secondly, for smaller-sized organisations, you can nimbly give each customer personalised attention via various marketing channels.
Read also: How to Create a Successful Digital Marketing Campaign
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Marketing communicates and informs your consumers about your brand
At its base level, marketing is a powerful tool for educating your potential customers so that your customers would understand what you are selling, how it benefits them, and how they can pay for it.
New research by HubSpot reveals that nearly 40% of marketers believe content marketing is a very important part of their overall marketing strategy.
This assertion is correct because marketing can help you effectively communicate your unique selling proposition to your customers engagingly and interestingly, without appearing offensive.
It’s important to note that before the average customer can buy something from you, they need to understand what it does, and how it works – none of this is about you – it’s all about your customer.
So, communicating with, and educating your customers is a form of results-driven marketing that will get them to know, like, and trust you. This is called the KLT factor.
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Customer engagement creation
You simply can’t talk about marketing without first understanding your target audience. When you understand your audience, you can identify ways of engaging them regularly.
In the digital world, customer engagement is essential for entrepreneurial success; it grants you the ability to communicate your message and engage your customers and potential customers on different networks where they congregate.
So instead of having buyers come to your physical storefront, you can interact with them through several touchpoints, and platforms like e-commerce, YouTube, and so on; where they can seamlessly engage with your business.
Marketing can help you acquire customers, but beyond that, marketing can also help you keep them engaged.
So, how do you keep your audience engaged?
i. By telling them what they do not know.
ii. By creating epic content to highlight the benefits and uses of your products and services.
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Build and maintain your brand
The beauty of marketing is that it is meant to sustain your online presence, which is tied to your brand awareness.
As a result, you can build your brand, and maintain customer relationships through your brand messaging. You need to invest in this as an entrepreneur, improve and give attention to it daily so your brand identity can last in your audience’s mind.
Creating a commercially acceptable brand perception is possible with marketing, which can improve the reputation of your brand by constantly surpassing the needs of your customers.
In addition to that, smart marketing can help you create a long-lasting relationship with your customer which will help your brand flourish and grow. And to achieve all these, you need to avoid inconsistent brand messaging as this can be frustrating to your target audience. Therefore, your brand messaging has to be consistent across all your marketing channels.
Read also: Business Branding Tips: How to Brand your Business to Stand Out in Nigeria
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Maintain relevance in a crowded marketplace
According to recent data by Gartner, 58 percent of marketers believe that branding plays a critical role when making a purchase decision for prospects.
As an entrepreneur in a noisy and crowded marketplace, maintaining brand relevance and staying top-of-mind is among the many things you can achieve through marketing.
Now more than ever, buyers have more information at their disposal; so this means to stay relevant, your marketing efforts should aim to engage them with helpful content because their decision to purchase from you, or not purchase from you, is hinged on this. Therefore it is imperative that you create content that your audience is eager to consume.
Creating relevant content like blog posts, case studies, and product videos can help you play an active part in your buyer’s research, and position your brand as an authority. Because if you do your job right, your content should consistently pop up at every intersection of that research process.
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Predictably boost your sales and revenue
When you deploy marketing properly, over time the sales of your products and services will be guaranteed. Without marketing, your impressions would be low, and no one would purchase your products; most likely because they’ve never heard of them.
Once a product has been advertised, this predictably increases the chances of selling it. This is so because marketing can compel your customers to try your products and services as they move through your sales funnel.
To cap it all, when marketing is mixed with a great product and service, the end result is happy customers who become your informal brand ambassadors, spreading the word about your business.
So, complementing your marketing efforts with a high-quality product and customer service is a great way to stand out from the competition.
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Gain insights through data analytics
Targeting the right audience is an essential part of marketing and you must have the right content to share with such an audience.
This is where marketing analytics comes in. Marketing analytics can provide data and insights to help you make informed decisions.
And these decisions will enable you to carry out informed marketing campaigns, and content creation decisions that will give you the best ROI.
With these data sets, you can identify segments of your audience who don’t engage with your current campaign and develop future campaigns with these audiences in mind.
Although data is important, new research by Wharton estimates that 57 percent of marketers are incorrectly interpreting data and likely getting incorrect results.
Consequently, to forestall this; proper data interpretation and strategic application of insights acquired from marketing should not be trifled with.
This is so because, the end result is that your chances of increasing sales and consumer engagement will be greatly improved.
On the flip side, the downside to incorrect data crunching is that it will cost you revenue loss as it won’t deliver any usable results due to wrong analysis.
Be that as it may, with marketing data, you can identify changes in the market, track customer engagements, and examine sales and market trends to make accurate decisions on the practices to engage.
Conclusion
Your competitors are actively marketing their products and services, which buttresses the important role marketing plays in the lifespan of any business.
Therefore, to gain an advantage in the marketplace, and rise above the sway of the competition; you have to deploy aggressive, yet strategic marketing techniques.
Now, this is not a call to engage in negative practices, it’s simply a call for you to conduct deep research on the needs and desires of your target audience.
This way, you will find viable ways to deliver a better experience of your products and services to them.
However, if your product or service is new to the market, you then need to deploy aggressive and strategic marketing tactics to occupy a greater part of your audience’s mind.
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About Author
- Princewill is a tech copywriter, content strategist and ghostwriter based in Port Harcourt. When he's not writing, you can catch him playing a game of table tennis with his friends. He's available for blog and content writing projects.
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