Part of running your own company is tending to countless factors as they change in real time, and one of the most influential factors is your business’s marketing strategies. Marketing is the single best way for a business to get its name out there in order to attract new customers and, more importantly, to generate brand loyalty and repeat business. Modern marketing requires modern solutions, and digital marketing is the future. Here are the tips you’ll need to know about marketing in the digital age.
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Bringing In Potential Employees
In order to keep your business operating smoothly, you’ll need to find the right hires and keep them satisfied. One great way to do so is to invest in luxury accommodations for potential employees and make them a selling point during the recruitment process. This is a way of marketing your company not to customers, but to prospective employment candidates. For example, you can take out a pool loan in order to have a pool installed on the premises of your place of business. This will make your company more appealing to workers, and that can help get them in the door and keep them motivated. Benefits such as healthcare and paid time off are also valuable tools in this department. The general rule of thumb is that anything you can offer future hires in order to sweeten the pot will pay dividends.
Hiring a Marketing Team
Marketing is a complex and nuanced field, so it’s not exactly feasible for you as the leader of your company to handle the marketing yourself. Moreover, it shouldn’t be spearheaded by any individual person, and it should be managed by a team of experts. Hiring a marketing team means knowing what to look for, and that entails getting to know potential marketing hires. An accomplished marketing professional should have concrete examples that they can show you in order to prove their worth. More importantly, you’ll need to weigh the pros and cons of using an in house marketing staff or outsourcing the work to a marketing agency.
Generally speaking, marketing firms are the preferred option, because they bring more expertise and, more importantly, more resources to the table. This means that a marketing agency will produce more effective ads using their expertise, and it will be much more cost effective when you’re not footing the bill for each and every expense. However, a marketing agency will necessarily be much more costly than in house marketing workers as a result of those advantages. Therefore, it can become a matter of settling for less until your budget allows for an upgrade to a better solution.
Hiring your own in house marketing staff can still be viable, but you’ll need to ensure that your team is sufficiently qualified, if not more so. Look for candidates that have an education that prioritizes business administration and marketing itself. Beyond that, you’ll need to vet potential candidates for certain pertinent skills, and quantifiable industry experience is always a plus. Your marketing team will need to communicate not only with you, but also your financial advisors in order to create a compelling strategy that never goes over budget.
Using Social Media Marketing
A surprisingly essential marketing hire will be your social media manager. Social media marketing has dominated the modern business landscape, and there are a few key reasons for this. First and foremost, social media offers companies greater visibility and reach than traditional means of marketing, and this is because of the staggering number of global social media users. However, it takes an international retailer to take full advantage of that figure. Social media still has plenty to offer businesses that can’t tap into that massive audience. This takes the form of the suite of marketing tools that social media platforms have to offer. It starts with paid advertising, but this is merely par for the course.
Where social media marketing truly excels is in the bog standard features of social media itself. For example, regular social media posts are free of charge, but they can still be deployed strategically as a part of your marketing campaign. They can serve a purpose not unlike press releases, but at a fraction of a fraction of the cost. These posts can also allow you to flesh out your company’s brand identity, something that becomes increasingly important in the age of relatability in marketing. Perhaps the most important advantage of social media marketing is that it gives you free access to essential market data. Social media platforms provide a wide variety of metrics that can paint a picture for you of how your campaigns are being received by the public, and that can serve as a roadmap for your next project.
This kind of feedback is so essential that AI is now being used to comb social media comments in order to form a more complete overview of how consumers feel about your company. This is called sentiment analysis, and it can take full advantage of the kind of feedback social media has to offer in a much more timely fashion than any human being could. Perhaps most important is the fact that this kind of feedback is potentially much more honest than conducting a survey, so it may grow to supplement traditional market research once it becomes more affordable.
Influencer Culture
Much like traditional celebrity endorsements, attaching a famous influencer to your marketing projects is a great way to compel consumers. However, the rules are a bit different. For example, these influencers are typically independent content creators, and one of the most effective ways to use that to your advantage is the humble sponsorship. This is a pretty hands off approach, and it can offer you great returns with minimal risk. An influencer can become associated with and an advocate for your brand without being directly connected to it, and that serves to protect businesses from the potential for backlash. When and if a scandal occurs, you can simply pull out of the partnership with nothing to worry about.