Originally posted on https://newtohr.com/the-new-world-of-marketing/

 

In business, things can change fast. One minute, everything’s running smoothly. The next, you’re at a risk of losing everything. Whether your competition step-ups their game or the market crashes, there are a lot of changes that you can’t control.

One of them is the marketing environment. It often changes faster than we can all get to grips with. But, luckily for us all, it’s also one of those changes that we can track, adapt to, and even benefit from.

If you feel like you’re lagging behind in the marketing world, here is a little debrief on what you need to know about modern marketing.

Digital Marketing

Marketing is way more than just PR and advertising now. Yes, many of the new methods of marketing can be technically classed as a form of PR or advertising, but there are so many different techniques available that it can be hard to keep up.

That doesn’t mean you have to stick to your old tried and tested ways and fall behind because of it. If you know a bit about your business image and how to promote yourself, you’re off to a good start.

But now, you need to get stuck into the digital world. Affiliate marketing, blogger outreach, and content marketing are all ways to create a bit of buzz about your business.

Reviving The Classics

PR and advertising are the two staples of marketing. They’re often the two forms that we all start out with. But, these days, they look a little different.

Classic PR still works, and networking can get you far, but it’s not the only option you have. You can also get a lot of the same benefits by focusing on Digital PR, promoting via social media and connecting with bloggers rather than the traditional press.

Connecting With Customers

Building a personal connection with your customers is a lot easier now than it has ever been. Whereas before, advertising was very much a ‘you shouting about your business’ one-way communication method. Now, it’s a conversation, with multiple streams of conversation.

Instead of calling up the cable network and dropping half a mil on a TV ad, you’ve got the option to place interactive adverts online, and connect with your customer like never before. With social media advertising, you can even take on their feedback too. Now, advertising is very much an ongoing conversation; one that both you and your customer will benefit from.

There are plenty of other ways that we have taken a fresh perspective in terms of marketing. This includes combining the old with the new. For example, combining SMS marketing with drip marketing. This is something that companies like Slybroadcast and Drop Cowboy do. Merging different advertising methods is one of the best ways to achieve success in the current day.

Doing Things Your Own Way

One of the best things about modern marketing is the idea that you can do it all your own way. At one time, there were rules. If you wanted to do well, you had to manage your PR like this and your advertising like that. But now, your choice of marketing is there to be customised.

The important thing is to try a few things and get a feel for what techniques and what platforms work best for your business, the market you’re in and the audience you’re trying to reach.

Tracking Your Visitors

In the good ol’ days you’d probably be running a small business like a Mom ’n’ Pop store. Your customers would be your friends and neighbours. You’d know what they like, what they don’t like, what they buy and when they buy it. Chances are you’d have everything bagged up and run through the register by the time they’d got to the counter.

It was a simpler time back then, when if we wanted to know about our customers, we’d just ask them. There was no need for CRM, profiling or visitor tracking.

Those days are gone. 

If you run an online store or use e-commerce in any way then you’ll know the importance of knowing your customers and repeat visitors in an impersonal online world.

Use a marketing automation platform to take advantage of all of the visits you get, giving you access to useful and actionable information including:

• Seeing which pages are most popular and generate the most leads.

• Identifying existing customers and leads when they visit your site (and alerting sales teams).

• Seeing what your existing customers are looking at / browsing.

• Seeing what pages viewers keep coming back to allows you to quantify their interest and convert them into a lead.

User Experience

Finally, user experience also plays a critical role when marketing your website in the current day and age. A lot of people think their website design doesn’t impact their online exposure, but this could not be further from the truth.

Yes, you can have an amazing website or the greatest marketing campaign but if your website is not hitting the mark, it will all be worth nothing!

Your website must be quicker than the competition, easy to navigate, and be laced with trust signals. This forms a crucial part of your marketing campaign. This post of the best website builders will help you if you need to improve your current site.

So there you have it: the new world of marketing. Make sure you embrace it and you combine it with your print marketing campaign to get ahead.

© New To HR