Variety is still the spice of life. I love chicken, and I am sure that you do love it too. There many ways to enjoy chicken: lemon and herb, curried, roasted, fried, BBQed, stir-fried etc. Time passes by, generations come and go, but every day we are still looking for the optimum chicken recipe. In the same way, Marketing is here to stay, and, much like chicken, we constantly have to find new recipes while still enjoying the traditional.
We can define marketing as a business activity that we do in order to promote and sell a product or service. It involves research and advertising. Whatever the method, the desired result is to end up receiving money for your goods or services. There are many ways in which we do marketing in our modern business world, but the desire is still primitive, that of making money – we begin at point A expecting to arrive at point B. With Brandjam, you can identify your target market immediately and then look for ways that will get your business from point A to point B in the shortest time possible and without wasting your time, money and creative ideas on a misdirected strategy. In today’s business environment, once a target market has been identified, then the strategy becomes a direct path that leads to the point of sale.
Things to consider when thinking about Marketing:
- Your product
- Target market
- The strategy/strategies
- Possible weaknesses [Gaps] in the marketing strategy
- Service costs
- Evaluation of Marketing Strategy
- Execution
How do we evaluate a marketing strategy?
- Listing the objectives
- Market analysis
- Linking brand equity with Financial Metric [Solid proof that your marketing is reading the desired audience]
- Budget [How to stay with the budget]
- Anticipated impact
- Ability to deal with positive or negative feedback
- Reviews
Social media has given us a new way in which to enjoy Marketing. Same purpose, same function, but now it comes in an array of new flavours:
- Facebook – it is a permanent interactive webpage with recurring advertisements
- Twitter – the strongest way in which to tout your product and services. The benefits of tweeting is what I could call ‘relay marketing’ which is the result of tweets and retweets by followers
- Pinterest – Has the option adding a price tag
- Instagram – very handy in showing just how a product can be enjoyed
- YouTube – where you can take you time is constructing you video message put you product through its paces
Same marketing, different flavours indeed, and with these new flavours comes the need to become Socially Responsible with your touting. Marketing responsibly involves the creation of a posting schedule, strict control of content, consent from client to post and shying away from imposing one’s beliefs onto the consumer. It becomes important to review our understanding of Marketing in order to be able to keep renewing our skills and refreshing our love for selling the same products and services with a new flavour.