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Even award-winning marketers armed with seven-figure budgets can’t predict exactly how marketing will change in the future. The best any of us can do is to take calculated risks backed up with carefully crunched numbers. We also have to plan our marketing tactics effectively. However, we also need to remain flexible to adapt to new trends, taking cues from customers and responding appropriately.
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Marketing Tactics You Should Adopt
Here are six marketing tactics that have become indispensable to the marketer’s toolkit.
1. Establish a presence on all platforms
In the past, it was a sufficient marketing tactic just to have a website. But now the urgency is to have a presence on all platforms. This is because more people own a mobile device today than a toothbrush. (Shocking but true!.
Moreover, as potential customers use their devices more frequently for a greater range of tasks, more consumer-facing companies are gearing up to make use of mobile. There’s no doubt about it. Customers are going look for your services on their smart phones and tablets. If you do not have a mobile-friendly website then you’re likely to turn away a large chunk of them without even knowing it.
2. Focus on content marketing
Online marketers have realized that you have to build valuable content for users rather than for search engines. This one marketing tactic alone will bring you higher rankings in search engine results.
Content marketing is the new link-building technique. This is a marketing tactic that requires a constant infusion of interesting content on your website. Moreover, your content needs to speak to individuals and communities.
For example, you could post videos on troubleshooting products like the how-to videos on maintenance for Keurig coffee makers. Or you could use your blog to form a unique bond with your community of buyers the way Petco does. Their marketing tactics include sharing tips and telling touching stories about pet lovers and their pets.
3. Develop multi-channel campaigns to increase response rates
One of the boards in my son’s playschool classroom has a quote by Confucius. It goes like this: “I hear, I know. I see, I remember. I do, I understand.”
Your marketing tactics need to build on these words of wisdom. In other words, your strategies should revolve around eliciting a response from your target audience.
Fabrice Dekerf, managing director of Germaine Agency, sums it up this way:
“All communication must serve one purpose in order to get the target group into some kind of action. Print advertising that doesn’t have a clear action outcome is wasted money. Interaction between the message in print and online is for me a no-brainer. Focus on the target group and give them via different channels the opportunity to interact. Print as an old fashioned way of doing image-campaigns may still be working to a certain degree—for retail brands, luxury goods, and older audience. But this only works as a marketing tactic when you build in an interactive platform. Only then will you stay relevant to the customer.”
4. Make engaging with social media a primary marketing tactic
Social media usage is growing at an astonishing speed. In fact, if Facebook were a country, it would be the fourth largest country in the world.
As users learn and adapt, they change their media habits. Marketers have a hard time revising their marketing tactics quickly enough to catch up. What’s more, conversations on social media today are largely dominated by photos and videos. Additionally, the new axiom for companies of all size is “engage or die.”
The following four rules are essential for establishing marketing tactics that work across the board on social media:
- Listen: Employ tools to monitor activity
- Engage: Find ways to respond
- Measure: Define metrics and weigh performance
- Adapt: Optimize for the next phase
5. Use analytics to measure the results of your marketing tactics
In order to develop successful marketing tactics, it is crucial to understand the behaviors of your target audience. Only in this way can you position your brand. This is what you must do to initiate campaigns that will actually reach customers where they are most likely to look.
Data from Google Analytics, Facebook Insights, QR code analytics, and your own automated or manual tracking methods can help you understand which content is triggering the best responses. These metrics will help you guide your marketing tactics and give direction to your overall marketing efforts.
As we have often discussed here, creativity backed with analytics is far and away the best marketing tactic marketers have ever uncovered.
6. Tap into smart marketing tools
You can also implement tactics such as interactive marketing. But what is interactive marketing exactly? It’s a two-way approach to marketing that focuses on interaction and collaboration.
For example, instead of simply talking at your customers with a one-way stream of marketing, an interactive approach makes it a group activity. With this strategy, businesses can focus on building relationships and having meaningful interactions that go beyond the often cold and impersonal approach of traditional marketing.
For example, on WordPress, you can express your thoughts and ideas online and invite readers to respond. Also, take advantage of social media dashboards like HootSuite and Buffer that publish tweets and comments on your behalf.
Tools like MarketMeSuite help you target leads and influencers while engaging and promoting your brand on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. These are marketing tactics that can take your brand closer to your goals.
Keep in mind, too, that when you have a small team and each member is wearing multiple hats, marketing tools enable you to create the right amount of noise at the right time. You can automate your marketing tactics, listen to conversations, notice trends more easily, and respond.
Tactics to Fold into Your Overall Marketing Strategy
In a nutshell, these steps will be helpful when planning your marketing strategy:
- Detail specific activities
- Identify the audience to which each activity is targeted
- Assign responsibility for each activity to team members
- Plan the metrics for success
- Prepare to make adjustments as necessary
In the future, marketing will revolve around providing an experience. As we witness the convergence of interactive marketing tactics with interesting content deployed on different platforms, the idea is to increase your brand appeal. This you can do through entertainment, rewards, and education. With persistence, your brand will rise and stand out from other players in the market.