It seems like a rhetorical question, but it isn't.
In an age where general information on any topic can be found, it may seem trivial to have to dig into the depths of the web to find the answer to a simple question like " What is marketing for ?".
There is no longer just one marketing
But it is not banal , because there is no longer just one marketing, or rather, there are many sub-categories.
This is why I wanted to write this article: to express my thoughts on the usefulness of "different marketing" in small and medium-sized businesses .
My answer, right away
Beyond all the university fluff that brings up the 4 Ps, the 3 Cs, Pulcinella and Dr. Zhivago, my answer when asked what marketing is is that it is the work done to:
increase the number of customers
increase turnover per customer
Point.
Everything else is visibility , everything else is waste . In a small and medium business there is no need to "brand" because you will never be a brand. Instead, you need to differentiate yourself to find new customers and increase the turnover per customer.
The Types of Marketing Available to You and What They're For
For a small and medium-sized business, the types of marketing that we use every day in the agency (and that give tangible results) are:
Strategic Marketing : study of customers, market demand and competition.
Lead generation : creating hot or cold contacts to establish an initial connection with potential customers.
Email marketing : the use of email to convince your customers to buy again or to convince leads (see previous points) to make their first purchase. The offline equivalent is sending postcards, phone calls, visits, in short, anything that advances the relationship with the potential customer.
Google Ads : The use of Google's paid advertising.
SEO : the optimization of your website and the creation of links (I'll make it simple for you) to help index your content in Google and make it visible in the first 10 search results for the subjects/topics that interest you.
Social Media Marketing : choosing the right social media to create your community and advertise.
Retargeting : Building online “chase” paths that create a memory of who you are and help move customers forward in their purchasing journey.
In addition to the types of marketing described above, there are also off-line activities , such as participation in fairs and events, the use of a sales network, flyer distribution, etc.: however, these activities without the previous ones described above have poor results and are therefore not the subject of this article.
Strategic Marketing
🎯 Purpose of this type of marketing: to understand which of the following channels are used by your customers to find products/suppliers/services, to understand if there is an opportunity to sell and differentiate yourself.
Studying your customers is a strategic marketing activity that helps you understand when , why and how often customers buy your products or products like yours. Reread the sentence carefully because every word is weighted.
Once you understand how customers get information when they decide to buy or when they have a desire/problem, you need to understand how large the market is for your products/services.
Once this is done, you need to analyze the competition especially to understand how not to overlap in the same way in the minds of customers. In short, you need to differentiate yourself.
Within strategic marketing there is also the large branch of web marketing:here you can find an article that summarizes it in addition to the paragraphs below.
🔍Recommended readings:
Lead Generation
🎯 Purpose of this type of marketing: to create online and offline strategies to generate profiled contacts (i.e. those whose contact details you have and sometimes other useful information) who are more or less interested, which can then be processed with other types of marketing to turn them into customers.
Online lead generation is done with inbound marketing, that is, by intercepting people who search through Google or industry portals or other search engines and giving them a reason to leave you their contact details.
The reasons why people decide to leave you their contact details can be varied and depend on the industry and your company: free content such as e-books, discounts and coupons, teaser products, free trials, tests and quizzes, etc.
🔍Recommended readings:
Email Marketing & Co.
🎯 The purpose of this type of marketing: to communicate at a low cost to people who can become customers or to customers ... and yes, emails work and are still read and valid as a marketing tool.
When you have the contacts of an interested person, after having understood what is the best means to communicate with them, you must essentially make them understand that your company is the right one, thanks to a sequence of correct contents .
What are the right contents? Legitimate question: those that demonstrate what happens after the purchase, create authority, form contacts and create trust. I won't go into detail because they are the "secrets" of connection managers , if I write them here why have I studied like crazy?
This is true whether you use WhatsApp, call on the phone, or send paper material. The important thing is to measure the progress of people from the status of "cold contacts" to "contacts ready to buy".
To bring customers closer to the moment of purchase, marketing automation is often used , which is the use of software that sends your messages in sequence (mainly via email, SMS or Facebook Messenger) to people depending on the interest shown (e.g. opened an email, visited a specific page on your website, added products to the cart of your e-commerce, etc.)
🔍Recommended readings:
Google Ads
🎯 The purpose of this type of marketing: to intercept and chase people who are in the purchasing phase and are getting information on Google .
This type of marketing is designed to intercept and create a connection with people who are now looking for products or services like the ones you sell. Keep in mind that the importance of using Google Ads depends on the sector, and a market and customer study should always be carried out to understand if people in your sector use Google to start the purchasing process.
Using Google Ads means advertising on search engines , and is often associated with advertising on vertical search engines (such as Booking.com or Amazon) and the use of Bing (which collects approximately 10% of web searches in Italy.
It is not a panacea and requires significant investments. Take a look at the recommended insights on the subject.
🔍Recommended readings:
The SEO
🎯 Purpose of this type of marketing: the same as Google Ads
The difference with using Google Ads is that the search engine result does not say "ad", and that often (perhaps also for this reason) the traffic you receive on your website using SEO is more qualitative and interested (and therefore converts more in terms of leads and sales).
SEO is a world, not even impossible to approach, and to understand it better I refer you to the insights below.
🔍Recommended readings:
Social Media Marketing
🎯 The purpose of this type of marketing: to intercept both latent and conscious demand (that's how it is now) when they are on social media to increase the number of people who come into contact with your company, become leads and then purchase .
Social media is used to create a community of people who are interested in your same topics or products, get closer to them and give quick answers when they need you.
I will write a post on how to choose social media for your business, but the golden rule is: you have to be where your customers are and you have to focus on the social media mainly used by them (maximum 2) avoiding following trends and wasting energy.
However, to sell it is essential to advertise ourselves , just like with Google, targeting different messages to people depending on how ready they are to buy.
You're starting to realize that all of these types of marketing are related to each other!
🔍Recommended readings:
Retargeting
🎯 Purpose of this type of marketing: no one buys at the first stimulus anymore , you have to divide people by proximity to the moment of purchase and distribute content consistent with their phase (initial, comparison or verification).
This is another fantastic world that most worthy entrepreneurs ignore the importance of. More than links here you need a book I recommend to you .
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