Marketing is easily one of the most profound parts of building a successful company and a lasting brand legacy. A quality product is essential, but without an audience, that product can only take you so far. If you want to make your business grow, you’ll need a quality marketing strategy informed by data and executed by professionals. Here’s what you need to know in order to build a business that’s here to stay.

Social Media Marketing

One of the most crucial elements that you’ll need to understand about modern marketing is the importance of using social media to your advantage. Social media provides an unparalleled audience that accounts for approximately half of the global population. This alone is compelling, especially for online retailers that can take full advantage of an audience of that scope. However, any business stands to gain a tremendous amount of exposure, not to mention the increasingly crucial online presence.

Social media platforms also encourage marketing via a whole host of small business marketing tools. For starters, you can pay for advertising space like any traditional marketing platform, but this is just the beginning. Social media also offers users a surprising amount of insight into the effectiveness of a given post, and that kind of data makes a great addition to the market research toolkit. Everything from engagement statistics to likes and shares can help paint a picture of how well or poorly you existing initiatives have been received, helping to form a valuable conclusion about how best to proceed.

Market Research

Recent advancements in AI such as machine learning and natural language processing can help to transform social media into an even more potent marketing tool. Sentiment analysis is a form of market research characterized by having AI scour social media posts related to a given business in order to determine in greater detail how the public feels about that company. This can be done to a lesser degree by a social media manager, but an AI can do that kind of research at an unprecedented rate that makes it a truly viable option for market research.

However, none of these modern advancements in market research has yet to usurp the position of the most ubiquitous form of market research, the humble survey. While there are many digital marketing tools that can provide similar services, consumer surveys conducted by PR representatives remains a tried and true method of getting essential market data in order to create marketing and business strategies.

Branding

Creating a compelling brand is an essential part of marketing, because the brand is a sort of style guide that can, or at least should, influence every other aspect of your company’s marketing endeavors. The brand of a company is essentially the personality of that business and, as such, will naturally ripple out and affect advertisements, press releases, and more. The company’s brand is, in isolation, a series of aesthetic choices that serve to immediately distinguish your business from others in the same industry. However, somewhere within your company’s name, color palette, and logo lies a personality, one that will serve as a narrative throughline throughout your various marketing campaigns. Marketing is, at the end of the day, an exercise in telling a story, one that pertains to the values of your company and the quality products and services that it has to offer the public.

A mascot can serve as a literal face for your brand, but it is worth noting that there is a time and a place for silly cartoon mascots. While it’s appropriate for, say, a car insurance provider to have a talking lizard as a mascot, the same can’t be said of a medical facility that needs to match serious circumstances with a serious tone. The same can be said of various other aspects of a marketing campaign. The content of advertisements needs to adhere to a similar set of rules. Comedic advertising is at an all time high, but it’s simply not appropriate or effective for every business model.

Expertise

Marketing is a complex field comprising several different subcategories of tools and techniques, each of which constitutes a necessary for any successful business. Because of the importance of marketing and the difficulty it entails, it is standard practice among all industries to outsource marketing to marketing agencies. Marketing agencies bring several advantages to the table that make them the default choice for various businesses. For starters, they simply have more resources that they can levy against a given problem. This includes both financial resources and employees, and those employees are truly phenomenal assets in their own right, because they have spent time and energy studying and perfecting their craft.

Beyond the accolades of a given marketing agency, there is also the simple matter of fact that a business owner can’t afford to invest their time and energy into managing a full fledged marketing campaign. If you can’t afford to hire a marketing agency to field this important aspect of your company, you will at least need to hire a dedicated marketing professional as a part of your on site staff. This will allow someone with expertise to handle this important issue so that your attention can be spent elsewhere in order to keep the company as a whole running smoothly.

Public Relations

Public relations is not marketing in the traditional sense, but the two are not only similar in terms of purpose, but also deeply interconnected. For starters, PR firms can help a business gather crucial market data for use in marketing campaigns. In addition, press releases are functionally similar to advertisements or social media marketing. Likewise, spokespeople are an alternative to mascots; both serve to give a more personal feel to a given company, but they approach it from different angles. PR isn’t marketing as such, but the two compliment each other, and making adequate use of both of them will serve your company’s public image well.

In order to create a business with a lasting legacy, you’ll need to give the public a reason to remember it. Marketing is your most essential tool for becoming a part of the public consciousness. These tips will help you get there.