Good marketing practices added to your business plan matter now more than ever!
A strong, concise, and clear marketing strategy is a big driving force behind running a successful business and executing your business plan. It makes no difference if your business is selling business to business or business to customer, it is important to remember that you are still dealing with people and aiming to meet your potential audience’s needs.
Modern marketing is more important than ever before. It is essential that companies keep up with the latest trends and technologies in order to remain competitive and profitable and also highlight their strong points via marketing. Today’s market is saturated with a miscellany of innovative products, services, and business models and this is exactly why right now would be the perfect time to reset your business along with executing a strong marketing strategy as your business can not thrive and grow on innovation alone.
Looking into different types of marketing instruments:
Print marketing vs. Digital Marketing
Print marketing:
Print marketing is a form of advertising that uses printed media, such as magazines, brochures, business cards, banners, direct mail postcards, or catalogs but also pavement signs or even table talkers and suits to nearly all kinds of business niches. The actual marketing instrument depends on the business you run (e.g pavement sings / table talkers for restaurants) and print marketing as a whole is simply an age-old, well-established and proven marketing instrument. Print marketing was used before digital marketing was put into effect and has always ruled the advertising industry. While many companies may turn to only digital marketing, print marketing is the original form of marketing and many large organizations and companies still turn to it today.
With print marketing, advertisers and businesses can still reach their target audience but it happens with a different approach than it would digitally. For example: If a tourist attraction company wants to use print advertising, not only do they focus on who their target audience is; they focus on where their target audience will physically be and what they most likely will be reading. In this case, the tourist-attraction company will most likely share some business cards or brochures at a nearby hotel or motel.
Studies show that being able to see an advertisement while simultaneously touching it increases the participant’s ability to remember it later on. For instance, when magazines provide perfume samples with their advertisements, they are there for more than just to let the audience know what the product smells like; it is also there to help them remember the ad and the brand!
Digital Marketing:
Simply put, digital marketing is a way of promoting and selling brands using digital technology such as the internet, television, or mobile phones.
There are multiple and highly effective forms of digital marketing out there, but the most common ones are social media, SEM/SEO, targeted ads, and newsletters. Digital marketing shows its effect in allowing advertisers or business owners to quickly and directly reach their audience and potential clients where they are at digitally, right at their fingertips on their computer screens or mobile phones.
With today’s technology, consumers see more targeted advertisements in their daily lives than ever before, even if they don’t realize it. Most digital advertisements are curated and targeted at a specific audience, this means that consumers will mainly see ads that they are interested in and that are relevant to them.
Now that the digital world and e-commerce is growing and progressing so speedily, online marketing has to grow just as quickly. This means that digital marketers are always researching and predicting new trends, along with learning and staying on top of new algorithms and trying new strategies to stay ahead of their competitors. It’s basically played out as a game, if a company is growing because of its digital marketing strategy, they are winning!
There are multiple reasons as to why businesses can benefit from digital advertising. Firstly, It is relatively low in cost to create content and advertise online. Secondly, it is easy to test and tweak marketing strategies and campaigns.
Marketing experts believe that print and digital marketing can go hand in hand. While both serve a similar purpose (To market and promote your brand), they do so with different intentions. Digital marketing intends to provide you with quicker and possibly more concise results, while print intends to be more memorable. The two can coexist with one another and if planned out and executed correctly, they can boost your marketing strategy!
Is it time for a business reset?
Starting up a business takes courage, investment and comes with a lot of trial and error. Keeping up with a business plan along with executing a marketing plan can be difficult to keep up with, and this is why many entrepreneurs hire a business coach in order to keep them accountable in reaching and working towards their goals, along with a marketing expert that they can trust to keep up with marketing trends and executing or tweaking their marketing strategy
