November 21, 2022
No two marketing plans should be alike. What works for one brand isn’t right for everyone. While it’s okay to look at what your competition is doing, copying their marketing plan makes you look weak and uncreative. What you need is a marketing plan that tells consumers who you are, what you stand for, and what you offer them that is better than the others.
To build a marketing campaign that does everything you hope for, and takes you farther than you imagine, you need to embrace the four key aspects of marketing that catch your intended audience’s attention. They are:
- Content
- Digital
- Experiential
- Social
Take a closer look at what these areas can do for your company or brand.
Four Important Areas of Marketing
Before you build your marketing plan, brainstorm ideas. Sit down with the decision makers and come up with the things you want to emphasize to consumers, and how you think you can tell or show them more about your company or product. Once you have many ideas, rank them. After that, you’ll want to see how the four areas of marketing fit your ideas.
- Content
Content marketing is defined as “marketing that tries to attract customers by distributing potentially useful content to the target audience.” It’s probably one of the types of marketing that’s most familiar to you. It’s the photography you have on your website. It’s your press releases, blogs, product descriptions, and website content. Content marketing can also be newsletters, flyers, and pamphlets you hand out or mail to consumers.
When you’re launching a new product or service, you likely start with a website. It’s going to have your contact information, product or service descriptions, and an “about us” section. All of that material is part of your content marketing plan.
Done well, and content captures attention and provides the information consumers want. But, some companies take shortcuts. They copy and paste information from one page to another or use keyword stuffing and other frowned-upon tactics to try to catch attention. They don’t have unique content, and that impacts what consumers think of you. It can even tank your website ranking. If you want to be at the top of search results, unique, well-written, informative content is key.
- Digital
Digital marketing is a form of marketing that focuses on access to your product or service through digital means. People are likely going to use the internet to find your business, and digital marketing touches on that. It’s marketing that specializes in showing off your company on computers, tablets, and phones.
Some of the branches of digital marketing include UX/UI design where you work on different versions of an app or website to make it the very best. Digital marketing includes e-marketing, mobile marketing, and live streaming.
Suppose you’re a new café and have built a website that gives pertinent information, but your customers want more. They want to be able to order meals for pick-up when they’re on the go. You need to set up a way for consumers to order online, see your daily specials, and sign up for a newsletter for exclusive prices, holiday specials, and coupon specials. Digital marketing can help you with your digital design, build a prototype, and use UX/UI to discover what users think and fix glitches.
- Experiential
Experiential marketing is an important type of marketing. You can tell consumers about your brand, product, or service, but how do you prove it? Think about warehouse stores like Costco. They have a product to sell, so they’ll use coupons in a book that’s mailed to members (content marketing), but they also partner with a company that does food demos to show you how delicious items are. If you’ve ever been to Costco, you know how much this can do for an impulse purchase. That’s experiential marketing at its best.
Experiential marketing delves into more than sampling. It also covers pop-ups, mobile tours, virtual events, and PR stunts. Years ago, Birds Eye frozen foods set up a pop-up restaurant that provided restaurant-quality dinners to guests. They could either pay or share a photo on social media and get dinner free. It paired experiential marketing and social media marketing and was a huge success.
Guerilla marketing is another form of experiential marketing. It’s cost-effective (when considering reach) and delivers results.
As an example, Netflix set up a 3-D virtual billboard for the premiere of Resident Evil. It looked like part of the building, and there was just a dimly lit room with a zombie trying to smash its way out. When it does, it looks like the zombie is about to jump on pedestrians below. It was an effective visual effect that drew plenty of attention from those on the street, but people filmed it and shared it online, too, increasing the reach without spending more.
- Social
Finally, there’s social media marketing. This form of marketing is specific to social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. Statista reports that there are almost 4.6 billion social network users in the world. The U.S. has the largest share of this market. In the next two years, it’s expected that social media ad spending will increase from $181 billion to over $200 billion. Social media marketing works!
Social media marketing includes areas like social media content in your Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter posts. It includes the video streams you often see on YouTube. It can also include partnering with influencers to help spread your message.
Think about some of the products you’ve purchased after seeing a TikTok video or sponsored ad on Facebook. We’ve all done it. Something catches your eye and makes you wonder if it’s really that good. Skura Style’s antimicrobial, fast-drying sponge is one that gained a lot of attention promising that it wouldn’t smell as long as you toss it out when the image on the back of the sponge disappears. Soon, those sponges were topping lists as being the real deal, and even Bon Appetit’s Test Kitchen showered the small company with high praise.
The other thing social media marketing can help with is PR. If you make a wrong move, it can be detrimental to your brand, but you can also build a strong social media PR strategy to use it to your advantage.
Several years ago, an ABC affiliate stated they had a “mix-up” where they called the 2018 Olympics in PyeongChang, South Korea “P.F. Chang 2018” in a broadcast graphic. Viewers roasted the news station, but P.F. Chang’s PR team took advantage of it and ran to social media asking consumers to share what P.F. Chang game they’d dominate. People around the world flocked to share how they’d dominate competitions like the “DanDan Noodles game.”
DIY Marketing Isn’t Always the Right Fit
For some small businesses, marketing is a challenge. Office employees have plenty of experience with billing, customer service, and scheduling, but marketing is a specialty that requires an expert. If you lack that expert, you have to consider the total cost of wages, benefits, and coverage during vacations and sick days.
Even if you have a stellar marketing person, can they really do it all? It’s easy to ask your graphic designer to also take over the social media accounts, UX/UI mock-ups, and copywriting, but you risk losing that valuable worker to the extra workload, especially if you’re not doubling that worker’s salary. Leave your graphic designer to that job and bring in additional help.
Avoid excessive stress and hire a marketing team that encompasses all aspects of marketing. Factory 360’s team specializes in content, digital, experiential, and social media marketing. Let us know how we can help and what your budget is, and we’ll work with you on a plan that delivers results.
