When planning a marketing strategy, you need to keep in mind that your business won’t remain of the same capacity, renown and network of contacts for long. As your operations expand, the expectations will rise and you’ll have to find a way to deal with newly-arisen situations. Therefore, when choosing which marketing trends and principles you should abide by, you need to plan for longevity. Here are six tips that can help you out in this regard.
Adjusting to trends
Just because your last year’s strategy was a resounding success, it doesn’t mean that it has to be so this year, as well. The world of digital marketing is constantly evolving and it’s becoming more than clear that failing to implement these changes or pivot to a more successful plan might doom your business. This is why you need to be on a constant lookout for the newly emerging marketing trends that you can exploit to your own advantage. As of lately, personalization, P2P (person-to-person) marketing and focusing on the generation Z are just some of the things worth keeping a track of.
Researching your target demographic
At the end of the last section, we hinted at the prospect of researching your target demographic in order to discover patterns of behavior that you can turn to your benefit. You see, the above-discussed generation Z is horribly underrepresented in surveys and studies, seeing as how they are considered by many to be a low-purchasing power demographic. What you need to keep in mind is the fact that the times are definitely changing and the teenagers nowadays have much larger funds on their disposal than the millennials or baby boomers had when they were their age. Therefore, every single demographic deserves a fair portion of your attention.
Using adequate channels
The next thing we need to cover as the follow-up to the last two sections is the importance of using adequate channels for your business. For instance, 55 percent of the above-mentioned teenage audience uses voice-search on a daily basis, whereas only 41 percent of their adult counterparts do the same. This is not only an indicator that they’re ushering in a new era in the field of a search engine use, but also a showing that they’re more tech-savvy than their predecessors. They’re more open to non-textual formats, they’re more responsive to the AR and they might even be more susceptible to the VR.
Picking the name with growth in mind
The choice of the name of your company will greatly influence your marketing efforts, starting from the product package designs and then all the way to the issues revolving around your word of mouth (WOM) referrals. Even if this wasn’t too complex, to begin with, you also have the trademark law to look out for, as well as the prospect of infringing on someone else’s intellectual property. For these very reasons, it’s incredibly vital to register a company as soon as you find a suitable business name. By this, we mean something that’s both suitable and legally available.
Combining digital and traditional marketing
During the first year of your business, you might find it much easier to stick to the email marketing (with the incredible ROI of 4400 percent), social media marketing (which has a low-cost entry fee) and digital marketing in general. As your company grows, you might be expected to invest a bit in your traditional marketing efforts, as well. Of course, your several-months-old startup may not be able to afford to direct a TV commercial, but a billboard, flyers and telemarketing are different things altogether.
Look for tools that help with automation
At the end of the day, as your company grows, you’ll be forced to hire more people. Now, the bigger staff means a more complex logistic, a larger overhead and more problems in general. Still, you don’t have to hire proportionally to the increase in workload if you have the ability to find the adequate tools for automation. A single person armed with an AI-backed analytical tool can be much more effective than a massive team, while most of your social media responses (and corporate functions, in general) may be automated.
Conclusion
The reason why we went for these six trends is due to the fact that they can be easily integrated into any business system, regardless of the broader context or scenario. Knowing your audience, working with adequate tools, keeping up with the world of marketing and keeping your overhead low are just some of the tips that simply can’t fail. Aside from being highly intuitive, they are also capable of providing you with some immediate results, which can reassure you of being on the right path.
