Hello, and welcome to Marketing 101, your guide to understanding the core principles of marketing.
Whether you're an experienced entrepreneur, an inquisitive student, or someone with the responsibility for moving your organization forward, this series is here to provide you with the foundational knowledge and practical skills necessary for planning and implementing effective marketing strategies and campaigns.
The Basics of Marketing
Let's begin by simplifying the essential aspects of marketing:
What is Marketing?
Marketing is the strategic process of communicating with your target audience in a way that ultimately leads to opportunities to sell or provide your products or services. It entails understanding your customers’ characteristics and needs, establishing a powerful brand, crafting persuasive messages, and delivering those messages effectively.
Why is Marketing Important?
Marketing serves as the conduit between your business or non-profit, and your target audience. It's instrumental in building brand recognition, developing and nurturing customer relationships, and ultimately driving sales and/or engagement.
In layman’s terms, marketing is how you communicate who you are, what you do and your value to those who will purchase and utilize your products or services. Without marketing it’s easy for a product, service or brand to be overlooked and misunderstood.
Top 5 Marketing 101 Actionable Steps
Now, let's explore a set of practical steps you can take to begin (or re-energize) your marketing journey:
1. Know Your Audience:
Start by gaining an understanding of your target audience. This involves analyzing the demographics, interests, and unmet needs of your selected audience, to be able to tailor your marketing strategy for maximum effect. This is a continuous process, so don’t spend so much time on this step that you never move forward.
One easy way to get started with knowing your audience is by answering the following questions:
Are there any characteristics that would make your product or service more appealing or valuable to one group more than another?
For example, the target audience for AARP is primarily seniors. They typically don’t make marketing material geared towards teenagers.
Boat makers tend to place their ads near lakes and larger bodies of water. There just isn’t much need for a boat in the Sahara desert.
2. Craft a Value Proposition Statement (VPS):
Your VPS should address how your organization, and its products or services, can satisfy the specific needs and desires of your intended audience. If you can define what distinguishes your product or service from that of the competition, that is an advantage. However, what is more important to your audience is how you can serve them.
Here are some examples of Value Proposition Statements we use for McCord and Cargile.
"Empowering Small Businesses and Non-Profits to Thrive: Our Strategic Marketing Solutions Drive Growth, Build Stronger Communities, and Amplify Your Impact."
"Tailored Marketing Excellence: Elevate Your Small Business or Non-Profit with Personalized Strategies That Fuel Success and Make a Lasting Difference."
"Fueling Success, Igniting Impact: Unleash the Full Potential of Your Small Business or Non-Profit with our Customized Marketing Strategies and Expert Guidance."
For each the goal is to help the customer visualize what we can help them achieve if they choose to partner with us.
3. Choose an Effective Mix of Marketing Channels
Select platforms and channels that align with your audience's preferences. This should include the social media channels that are targeted to your audience, and possibly well-planned email marketing campaigns and paid advertising.
4. Create Compelling Content
Focus on developing content that engages and resonates with your audience. While it is important to have content that informs your audience about your products and services, you need to capture and keep their attention with interesting and entertaining content, as well.
The content you create can be used in blog posts, videos, and social media posts. It should include both topical, thematic material, as well as some content that remains consistent.
Here are some examples for you to compare. Which of these titles are you most likely to click on?
Topic: Local SEO Optimization
Uninteresting Title: "Understanding Local SEO"
Compelling Title: "Dominate Your Neighborhood: A Comprehensive Guide to Local SEO Optimization"
Topic: Influencer Collaborations
Uninteresting Title: "Working with Influencers"
Compelling Title: "Beyond the Follow: Crafting Powerful Influencer Partnerships That Drive Real Results"
Topic: Small Business Branding
Uninteresting Title: "Branding for Small Businesses"
Compelling Title: "Building a Standout Brand: Essential Strategies for Small Business Success"
5. Measure Your Success
Set clear, measurable goals for the results of your marketing, and use key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics to monitor the impact of your marketing endeavors. Tools such as Google Analytics are very helpful in this process.
Here are some examples of Marketing KPIs you can start with:
Website Traffic: The total number of visitors to your website within a specific period.
Example: If your website had 1,000 visitors in a month, that's your website traffic. If the following month your site has 500 visitors, this tells you that you need to assess what you are doing differently that is resulting in such a significant decrease in traffic and stop doing it. If the following month your site has 2,000 visitors then you want to assess what you are doing that is resulting in the increase and do more of it!
Social Media Followers: The number of people following your social media accounts.
Example: If your Instagram account has 500 followers, that's your social media followers count. Track these numbers on a monthly basis to see if they are increasing, decreasing or staying the same. A decrease in numbers is an indicator of an issue with your content. An increase shows the content you are posting is relevant, interesting and valuable.
Organic Traffic: The number of visitors to a website who arrived through unpaid search results.
Example: If 1,000 people visited your website, 300 came from paid ads and 700 came through search engines, the organic traffic is 70%. If you are not seeing any organic traffic, this is an indicator that should review and assess the content on your website and social channels.
Real World Examples
In upcoming posts in this series, we will draw insights from the marketing programs of real-world organizations to deepen our understanding. In the meantime, begin to give some thought to the marketing approaches of the following organizations, and what makes them effective:
CocaCola
Microsoft
Apple Computers
Nike
UPS
United Way
Chevrolet
Feel free to share your thoughts with us in the Comments section below, or on social.
Tools and Resources
Your marketing efforts will be aided significantly with the right tools and resources:
- Social Media Management Tools: Consider platforms such as Hootsuite or Buffer for streamlined social media post scheduling and management.
- Email Marketing Platforms: Explore options such as Mailchimp or Constant Contact for your email campaigns.
- Content Creation Tools: User-friendly tools such as Canva and Adobe Spark can simplify the process of creating visually appealing content.
What to Expect from the Marketing 101 Series
Each entry to this series will contain the basics for each topic, the relevance of each topic, real world examples and actionable steps. Some of the topics we will be covering include:
Branding Basics
Digital Marketing
Content Marketing
Email Marketing
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
This series is not for the advanced marketing practitioner. Here we are speaking directly to those who are seeking a starting point to reduce the overwhelm that comes with the many, many options available to organizations, in the realm of marketing.
This first installment in our Marketing 101 series lays the groundwork for your marketing journey and gives you an understanding of who this series is for, how it will be structured and what you can gain from it. Our goal is to help you gain the knowledge to craft effective marketing strategies, and take actionable steps to implement them. It is to give you key concepts to carry with you as you’re creating and executing on your strategy. Use this series as a reference you can refer back to whenever needed until you establish your own base of knowledge and processes for marketing.
So, are you ready to explore the world of marketing at a deeper level? Stay tuned for more Marketing 101 posts, where we'll delve into the various aspects of marketing in much more detail (and perhaps a bit of fun). Feel free to share your thoughts and questions in the comments section of this post, and together let's embark together on this marketing journey!