Marketing, in Simple Terms

I decided on this basic marketing blog post because I have heard so many people say ‘I don’t know anything about marketing’ which I think is untrue. Any one who talks about a product, service or even an experience with a brand is marketing.

Fundamentally, I believe marketing is the process of creating value for your customers.

Marketing doesn’t stop there though and there’s so much more to it. Any action to create a relationship with a customer is marketing. Networking at events, thank you emails, webinars, meetings with clients, lunch and learns, social media posts, blog articles, websites, Facebook pages, etc. All these come under the marketing umbrella. 

The main aim of marketing is to ensure that your methods aim to match the brand, product or service to an audience who desire the same thing.

Below are some of the main avenues in marketing that you can take to begin marketing your brand.

Create content to provide value to your audience by solving their problems. By doing this, you build trust and authenticity. There are many ways to use content to drive a customer action and the method I prefer is to generate long form content (like a blog) that talks about a main topic in your industry and repurpose the key points of that topic. People are always on the go so having ‘bite’ sized content works well. Facebook carousel posts and multi image posts on Instagram work well with this concept of displaying bite sized content.

To me, this is the most dynamic method of marketing your brand. There are multiple facets to social media marketing. Through social media, you can build brand awareness as well as demonstrate how your product or service can solve problems. One of the most powerful capabilities of social media is that you can engage with your audience as well as target new customers easily. Remember to test content and see what resonates best with your audience. Sometimes this means developing content specific to your social media channels. Oh, also, it is FREE!

Video has become such a key factor in many marketing activities. Not only is YouTube one of the largest search engines, but other social media platforms have also incorporated video capabilities in them. Instagram with IGTV, Facebook with Facebook Live and Twitter with Live just to name a few. This means that these platforms recognised that video is an integral part for their users so they added video capabilities in their applications, so if possible, try and create video content.

Off late where people want to do two things at once, having a digital audio marketing strategy comes into play. Spotify and Pandora are great avenues for doing so. In addition to this, with more smart speakers at home, it’s become very easy for someone to say; ‘Hey Alexa, can you tell me where the closest bakery is?’ That could be where customers will search for your brand soon so remember to start thinking about how to reach this audience as well.

Influencer marketing is quite a popular method as well. Influencers who already have a following in your industry can post about your product or service to their audience. Influencers are sources who their followers trust and could work as a great avenue for your brand. One example of influencer marketing is the WHO partnering with ‘dude with sign‘ to spread awareness about staying safe during the covid-19 pandemic.

A widely used and highly effective marketing method is email. Almost everyone checks their email on a daily basis making it a very reliable method of marketing. A unique aspect of email marketing is the freedom it gives the owner of the database. Sometimes social media platforms go through an approval stage which can limit certain types of messages sent out. Being the owner of your email database means there is no limitation to what you want to send to your customers.

This is a very technical avenue but one worth implementing since everyone ‘google’s’ everything they need. SEO is the process of managing content among other tactics to help improve your website’s rankings and displaying it higher on the results page. After all, The Best Place to Hide a Dead Body is Page Two of Google. The higher you rank on google, the faster it is for people to find you. By doing this, you will be able to attract an audience that are interested in your brand, the conversations your users have as well as the product or service your company sells.

Pay Per Click (PPC) sells product or services directly to specific searches. This method also offers great reports to view the amount invested and to check your ROI.

There are many more avenues in marketing with the above being the best and easiest methods to get started with providing value to your customers.

That brings us to the end of this blog post and should answer a few questions you may have had. This may help you understand marketing and some of the avenues you can use to market your brand, product or service. Feel free to reach out to me via schranz@schades.ca if you have any questions or require additional information.

Till next time, peace.

-Schranz