Do you know that marketing goes way beyond understanding your brand, a whole lot depends on how your customers perceive you, and your ability to define the way in which your brand is perceived by your customers.
Running your own marketing requires a mix of creativity, talent, objectiveness, and empathy. The idea of marketing may not interest you, but it is a skill everyone needs to master.
We tag it as risky if it’s done wrong, it will cost you a lot of money, time, customers and market share.
Marketing requires expertise and technical know how. While it is a lot safer to get professionals to handle your marketing, here are a few tips to set your organization’s marketing in the right direction.
1. Identify Your Target Market
Before you begin marketing, you need to decide to whom you are going to sell your products or services.
Targeting your market is simply defining who your primary customer will be. The first step in identifying your target market is understanding what your products/services have to offer to a group of people or businesses. To do this, you have to understand every detail about your product, its features, it’s benefits and what makes it unique, By knowing what your product/service has to offer and what will make customers buy, you can begin to identify common characteristics of your potential market.
To identify your target audience you can also check out your competition.
Find out who they are targeting, Who are their current customers? Don’t go after the same market. You may find a niche market that they are overlooking.
You should also segment your target audience to help you identify the best market for your brand. One way to do this is by using the Market segmentation approach, i.e. Segmenting your audience based on Geography, Demography, Psychography, and Behaviour. (age, location, gender, income level, education level, occupation, personality, lifestyle e.t.c)
Defining your target market is the technical part. Once you have identified your target audience it is much easier to figure out which media you can use to reach them and what marketing messages will resonate with them. Instead of sending direct mail to just anyone, you can send it only to those who fit your criteria. Save money and get a better return on investment by defining your target audience.
2. Explore Digital Marketing
If you are yet to explore digital marketing, your business is probably a light-year behind your competitors since about 56% of the Nigerian population are already online.
For starters, you can build a company website, create social media accounts (Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter), learn Google ads and YouTube advertising, create an email list and start your company blog.
Note that sometimes, you don’t need to put your business on all social media platforms. Therefore, identify the one which your target market can be found mostly and focus on that as being on so many can be overwhelming, unnecessary and make you divide limited attention.
Digital marketing has a wide scope and is dynamic, attend seminars, take online classes, and do your best to stay ahead of the game so you’re not left out.
3. Use Technology
We all know how technology plays a major role in the success of any company, with just a click of a button consumers can gain meaningful insights about companies and their products through the use of the internet.
You have access to multitudes of data from around the world you can use to enhance your marketing skills.
Marketing might seem too tedious to deploy, Technology can be great leverage, ensure you use it to increase your overall efficiency and stay on top of your competition.
You can explore apps like Canva for designs, MailChimp for email marketing, Wix for building your website, Hootsuite for managing social media accounts and Trello for managing your team.
4. Set a Marketing Budget and Expectation
A marketing budget is a guide to ensure that you are staying on target with estimated costs vs. the actual costs.
It is only wise to set a marketing budget so you don’t end up spending more than budgeted, although budgets vary with industries and aims, the general rule of thumb is allotting 5 -10% of your revenue to marketing, but while you do this be sure to clearly highlight your goals, expectations and deploy your marketing spend in line with them.
A marketing budget should include all of the prices that you expect to pay for each type of advertising you do. This would include slide banners, website development, ongoing maintenance and search engine optimization. It could also include video ads, commercials, native ads, trade shows, press release, mailings, and other publications, etc.
Marketing is a fundamental ingredient for growth and profitability. Many companies fail simply because they do not allocate enough money for marketing. When done properly, marketing brings back solid returns.
Finally, note that marketing thrives on consistency and effectiveness, so while you might not get it right in the first month, it’s okay to learn from your mistakes and adapt.