Fifteen Tips for Marketing Success

Whether you’re a seasoned Marketer or new to the field, the following fifteen tips will help you as you proceed on your journey.  These tips are equally valid for small scale businesses and large scale multinational corporations.

1. Set Goals: Setting clear goals for your Marketing Campaign gives direction to your effort. It also enables your team to align their work to the targets articulated by you. The goals you set must be SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time-bound).
2. Cross-functional co-ordination: The success of your Marketing campaign will depend on how well your team understands the concept and how well they are able to deliver on your promise. This means you should involve the various teams in the initial and final stages of your project. A cross-functional meeting may get you some great ideas and also foster support for your chosen campaign.
3. Track Performance: After setting your goals, it is important to track how far you achieved your targets. This enables you to conduct a variance analysis and devise remedial strategies to bring performance on track.
4. Focus: You need to focus your marketing dollar on channels and approaches that optimize Return on Investment (ROI). For example, if you use call tracking and find out that one particular media channel is not yielding results, you need to reallocate to higher return channels immediately.
5. Be Creative: Endowing your brand with a personality and then vividly connecting that personality with a positive experience in your customer’s mind is what defines successful marketing.
6. Be Concrete: A concrete analogy works very well for brand recall. For example if I tell you that Facebook has 1.79 billion active users as of the 4^th quarter of 2016, you are not very likely to remember this number. However, if I tell you that the number of Facebook users far exceeds the total population of the United States of America, then you are much more likely to remember this.
7. Be Authentic: The digital consumer is able to determine the genuineness of a product claim. Hence, being sincere in your marketing is the only way to achieve sustainable success. A false claim can get viral negative publicity which needs to be avoided at all costs.
8. Use interesting images and videos: If your audience is primarily focused on images, then capitalize on this opportunity. Interesting videos on YouTube or pictures on Instagram could go a long way in attracting your audience.
9. Be Interactive: Your consumer should not be a silent recipient of your message but an active partner. The partner can be involved by soliciting ideas for improvement. When consumers are involved in the production process, they like the product better and are more willing to pay a premium price for it. For example, Threadless manufactures shirts and has consumers submit designs which are voted on. The design that receives the maximum number of votes is produced.
10. Break Trial Barriers: Some potential consumers may hesitate to try a product because of the up-front price commitment. If you are confident about the worth of your product, it may be a good idea to offer free samples or trial offers to the potential consumer. Avidtrak, for example, offers money to customers when they set-up a new account. This offer is free of any obligation to purchase.
11. Differentiate and Personalize: If a message is personalized it has far greater impact than a generic one. Understanding your customer’s unique likes and dislikes and catering to them in a personalized manner is what will differentiate your marketing from the crowd.
12. Be Consistent: The message and brand image that you project needs to be consistent across media channels. For example, if you are promoting yourself as a producer of a luxury good, then offering discounts on a particular media channel would dilute your brand image.
13. Build Relationships: At the heart of Marketing is building a relationship with your target audience. Follow your audience closely on social media and intervene when needed with your genuine advice. Compliment your online Marketing with offline community building work.
14. Get the First Mover Advantage: New media channels emerge with new marketing possibilities. Identifying new opportunities early gives you the first mover advantage in the field. First movers generally gain greater credibility, brand loyalty and trust than those who come later. Try not to follow the crowd but make use of new possibilities.
15. Be Patient: Real results take time to show up. For example, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) work typically requires around 3 months before a significant and steady impact can be felt. Similarly content marketing effort can take upto 18 months for tangible results to show. Building relationships requires even more time so please be patient and keep your long-term goal in mind.

This is not an exhaustive list but it is intended to give the top fifteen critical aspects of marketing that you can’t afford to overlook.