In today’s modern marketing world, businesses of all kinds have cornered the ways to disrupt and attract customers from one competitor to the next. With information so readily available, anyone can track who and how a business attracts and maintains customers. Unfortunately, there’s no golden secret to uncover; when it comes to effective marketing in the age of the Internet—the only way to make your marketing profitable is to make it pop.
There are many ways to make your marketing stand out from competitors. It is important to keep your marketing and your message consistent across channels and media. So what’s the best way to maintain consistency?
Define Your Brand
Defining your brand is by far the best way to maintain consistency throughout your marketing efforts. When marketing a product or service, it’s imperative that your brand message remains unwavering in its appearance and overall connotation. If you don’t know where or how to begin defining your brand, start with the logo. Your logo is the representative of your brand, choose colors, shapes and images that you and your team agree will best represent your organization.
When designing a logo it is important to consider hiring a designer. Although this may not be the least expensive option for acquiring a new logo, it is definitely worth the investment. Logos are the face of a company, and represent the integrity and backing of a company’s products and, or services across marketing channels.
Once you are happy with your brand standards, the next step is to look at what your competitors are doing, and disrupt it!
Disruptive Marketing and Your Business
How many times have you heard that in order to make your marketing disruptive you have to change your entire business model? The truth is, you can disrupt the competitive market of your business by simply watching what your competitors do, and taking a different approach. You simply can’t expect to stand out by using the same marketing tactics and techniques as everyone else in your industry.
Taking steps towards unique marketing may seem like a challenge, but when you utilize the creativity of your team and organize productive meetings to brainstorm marketing ideas, you are not only contributing to the success of your business, but to the strength of company culture as well. Throughout this process, encourage your marketing team to identify exactly what it is that differentiates your services from the pack. Is it price, packaging, resources? Perhaps it’s a combination of distinctive factors that make your offerings a noticeable choice for your target audience.
Finding Your Target Market
The next step to truly making your marketing stand out is defining your target audience. In order to do this effectively, it is critical that each member of your organization has a full, unified view of what your business does. Work together to develop a mission statement, and business summary. What purpose do your products and services serve? What is the goal of selling them, and how are they beneficial?
The next obvious step is to answer who these products and services will benefit. This is where your team needs to do online research and listen to the people who are already connected to your business. A great way to do this is by listening to the social media channels your organization participates in.
Get involved in different forums and groups that relate to your brand. Answer questions in these groups, monitor conversations, and before long you will start to notice the people who can benefit from your business. Do research and find out who these people are, what are their job titles, and what kind of companies do they work for?
From this ground work, you will find that it is not only possible to discover your ideal audience, but also to begin prospecting and putting your unique marketing campaign to action.
Stay in Front of Your Prospects
Once your brand is defined, your message set, and your target audience is in cue, it is time to execute your campaign. No matter what tactic or path you choose to take, the only certain thing in successful marketing is that you must stay in front of your prospects. Did you know that the average person is hit with over 3,000 marketing messages a day?
If you want to stand out from competitors, it is vital that you deliver your message over multiple channels and media forms (based off of your target audience), in a consistent and informative way. Don’t berate your prospects with annoying advertisements and obvious gimmicks, rather entice them to learn more through providing continuous, useful information. You know that you can help your audience, based off of the online research accomplished in the previous step. Now, it is up to you and your marketing team to show your potential customers’ how you can benefit them.
The Greatest Challenge
With online marketing being the obvious choice, the greatest challenge brand’s face is making their marketing pop. Knowing what needs to be done, and having the resources to do it are two entirely different things. Many organization’s face the harsh reality that although they have all of the weapons in their arsenal, they lack the man power to go to battle.
Unfortunately, continuously reaching your target audience through consistent messaging and content offerings is simply too time consuming for a small- or medium-sized marketing team. Luckily with technology advancements at an all-time high, savvy marketers are utilizing online software such as social media dashboards and marketing automation platforms, to better manage the efforts and success of their marketing.
If you have not employed these tools to boost marketing, or accomplished any of the steps, your efforts are at a high risk of becoming lost in the vast sea of marketing messages, which are floating around your best prospects on a daily basis. In order to truly make your marketing stand out, be noticed, and essentially drive sales, it is important that you take the necessary steps to achieve sensational marketing.
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- Business Management - Marketing/Sales
John Foley Jr. is the CEO of interlinkONE and Grow Socially. John and his team help printers get on a strong path to marketing success. Their approach includes software solutions, consulting, Website development, marketing audits, and strategic marketing plans. interlinkONE’s software solutions for the print industry include their marketing automation platform, MAX, and ilinkONE V8. Learn more about MAX: Marketing Automation. Executed. by visiting MarketWithMAX.com, John at JohnFoleyJr.com, and his companies at interlinkONE.com and GrowSocially.com.