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A few years back, marketing departments didn’t really do much beyond create advertisements or billboards and spread ads through social media sites and advertising websites.
Nowadays, however, marketers use all sorts of information to help them formulate an effective business strategy. They look at customer reviews, compare prices, check out competition, and more.
This article will talk about some ways that savvy marketer use data in their daily work.
As mentioned before, there are several different types of marketing used for various purposes. Some of the most common types include: advertising, sales promotion, media relations, market research, and public information or educational campaigns.
Advertising is probably one of the most well-known forms of marketing. It’s when an organization markets their product by spending money to tell people about it. For example, if you own a restaurant, you would advertise your restaurant by putting up posters, handing out business cards, and/or creating an online profile (of yourself as owner) on social networking sites like Google+, Facebook, and Twitter.
Sales promotions or giveaways are another way that most companies market products. This is typically done at a lower price so that potential customers will buy the item since it is being offered free with purchase.
A business’s overall marketing strategy is determined by their mission, value proposition, target audience, and how they will achieve these through different mediums and strategies.
After all, your message and media platform is what shapes your company’s reputation and attracts or repels customers.
Your messaging and media strategies are two separate but related components of the larger marketing mix.
One without the other does not work!
If you have no message, people won’t know who you are or what you offer, and if you don’t have a medium for delivering that message, then it is wasted effort.
That being said, let’s take a closer look at some ways that marketing information can be used to inform the marketing strategy.
A marketing strategy is defining yourself as an entity that offers a service or product that people will spend money to use. Yours comes down to what you offer, how you offer it, and where you place your emphasis when promoting this service.
The first step in developing a successful marketing strategy is deciding what type of business you want to run. This could be something like offering yoga services or running personal trainerships, or producing and distributing movies and TV shows.
The second part is figuring out what position you should take as an organization – are you the provider of the service, the supplier of the products, both, or neither?
And lastly, determining whether your focus should be internal (employee-focused) or external (market-focused) is important.
Internal promotions typically have direct benefits for the employee that perform the job well and help them grow in their career, while external promotions may pay extra attention to telling others about your company and its services.
A well-marketing strategy is one that is consistently carried out, so it has a pattern or structure to it. This way, you can tell how much influence each element of the campaign had on the company’s success.
Marketers use statistical information to determine what parts of their campaign are working and which ones aren’t. They look at past experiments to see what components worked and didn’t work, then they apply those lessons to future campaigns.
Information gathered from online and offline sources can be organized into numbers to help inform the next steps in the marketing process.
These numbers can include: sales data, competitor research, reports about demographics or behavior trends, and studies about public opinion of brands and products.
Using this information, marketers can develop strategies for new products, advertisements, and marketing initiatives.
As mentioned before, not every element of marketing is considered creative or advertisement-focused. Some integral parts are more business related, such as accounting, leadership, management, and communication skills.
These types of skills are important for marketers that want to advance their career beyond being a content creator!
Market researchers use statistical information to determine how well an item will sell by studying past sales data and creating theories about why people bought it before.
Business owners use analytics to make informed decisions about what products and services to offer next.
And senior level managers assess the effectiveness of current campaigns and strategies with statistics.
So what are these advanced marketing techniques? What are the most popular ones used by professionals today? In this article we’ll talk about some of them – from the basics to the more complex.
A way to improve your marketer skills is by looking into how other professionals use marketing information to inform their strategies. You can learn from others’ mistakes, as well as their success.
There are many ways you can apply what we refer to as marketing intelligence or marketing knowledge. Some of the most common sources include:
Interviews with successful business owners and marketers
Reading through past articles and blogs written by expert marketers
Surveys that ask about people’s buying habits and behaviors
Watching YouTube videos related to marketing
Some of these resources are free to access, while others may require an expense (such as hiring a consultant for help).
As mentioned earlier, trends are defined as changes that occur more frequently than not. This definition makes sense because if something is no longer happening, then it’s changing from the previous state of affairs.
Trends can be positive or negative depending on whether or not people perceive them as good or bad. For example, using social media to market your business was considered too casual for businesses years ago.
Now though, almost every company uses some form of social media to promote their product or service. Therefore, it’s seen as integral part of modern day advertising. On the other hand, staying off-grid and avoiding technology is still very common even among older generations.
So what happened? People got used to it. Technology has become so ubiquitous now that using it to advertise is just standard practice.
And while some may argue that there’s too much technology around us these days, most agree that we’re at least exposed to enough of it to know what works and what doesn’t.
A popular way to identify your market is to determine what types of products and services you already have. What brands you know and like are important markers for if you want to join their crowd.
By looking at your current inventory, you can determine whether there is an underserved need or not. If there is, then you should develop new ways to sell them, which will make up part of your business strategy.
Alternatively, if there isn’t anything missing, you could try developing newer versions of those things, creating a new product line or category.
The more specific your market analysis is, the better informed your decisions will be. You won’t get very far thinking that all markets have something to offer anyone else, but which ones they do may change depending on how much money you’re willing to invest in advertising.
