Choosing the best marketing method for your business means weighing up a range of different factors. Primarily, you need to think about the size of your business, and what type of marketing will serve it best. Moreover, you need to have a strong understanding of your target demographic, and whether or not you’re focusing on a local area, or are launching more of a national or international campaign. Tailoring your campaign to a specific type of business, and knowing the kind of scope and cost that a particular campaign will possess also represent important factors that need to be considered before making a significant investment in marketing.
1 – Size of Business
A small business generally requires a marketing approach that builds brand awareness, and sells a particular product or service in the most cost effective way possible. One way of achieving this aim is to use viral marketing to build awareness online through videos, social networking pages, and inventive email campaigns. At the same time, a viral effect can be created through direct mail postcards to homes. For larger companies, it’s best to have a platform campaign that brings together a number of different methods. These methods might include viral marketing, traditional print ads, and buying time on television and radio broadcasts.
2 – Demographics
Knowing your demographics is a crucial part to choosing the right marketing method. A young demographic may not be as well served by a traditional print, television or radio campaign, and might instead be targeted through online adverts and social media marketing. Making your brand stand out online works particularly well if you perform market research on the kind of keywords that audiences respond to, or have been successful in the past. Having a mailing list and market research broken down by consumer preferences can also help you to target different parts of the same demographic.
3 – Type of Business
Think carefully about what kind of marketing campaign will work best with your specific brand values. If selling a product, what are its unique features? Do these need to be conveyed in a visual way through adverts, or are you selling more of a service that can be communicated through testimonials and postcards describing services that are sent to homes?
4 – Know Your Scope
It’s also important to think about the kind of scope that you want for a marketing campaign, and how this can be tied to your budget. An international campaign will require changes in language, and an emphasis on a brand logo, slogans, and images that can be easily adapted for various markets. By contrast, a local business need to find the right kind of appeals for a community, and need to be able to strike a tone that accepts that a target market knows what other businesses are being competed with.
5 – Getting the Best Value
The ultimate goal of any marketing campaign is to get the best possible value for the money spent. In this context, it’s a good idea to think about how you can monitor your conversion rate, as well as the amount of positive value built around your brand. Online marketing works well, in this sense, as it can be analyzed through metrics that measure click through rates and conversions on a website. Moreover, sentiment analysis, which looks at how your brand is being discussed on social media forums and elsewhere on the Internet, can be used to build better relationships with a target market.
Author Bio: Liam Ohm is a frequent writer throughout the marketing world. He highly recommends Field Marketing at ukims.co.uk for intelligent and innovative field marketing campaigns.