Hi, I’m Libby, one of the newest additions to the Focal Point Team. I’m a recent college graduate with a degree in Digital Technology and Culture (which basically means I learned about all different art forms that someone can perform on a computer), not exactly the definition of marketing. I did minor in business administration where I took a handful of courses in the marketing industry, but I knew that didn’t qualify me as a marketer. Over the past month and a half, I’ve learned the basic ins and outs of marketing and here’s a quick rundown.
Traditional Marketing
Traditional marketing covers any type of marketing that isn’t online. In my experience, the most prevalent traditional marketing strategy is TV and radio advertising. Of course, I knew that commercials didn’t magically appear on TV, but I had no clue as to the process behind getting an ad on TV before starting this position in late November. Here are my key takeaways:
- Understand your business’ brand. You can’t effectively market your business if you don’t know your values, goals, etc.
- Maximize your budget’s potential! Be sure to balance your company’s budget along with the best placements to ensure viewership. Sometimes there are placements that would offer great exposure, but they come with a high price tag. Every now and then, you’re better off placing something that may not be quite as extraordinary but has the potential to get more eyes on the ad (The best bang for your buck).
- Demographics! They play a key role in which ads are placed in which spot. Be sure to take your target audience into consideration before just placing ads with the highest ratings.
- Get to know the representatives. It’s crucial to build relationships with the people who are putting your ads on their stations.
Digital Marketing
We already have a great blog post about Digital Marketing Terms that You Should Know, which was something I referred to often when I first dove into digital. There are a million different terms that all sound like they’re from the Star Wars universe: CPC, OTT, Geofencing, etc. The list goes on and on, but it’s important to have a basic understanding of the terminology associated with digital marketing to be effective for your business. Here are my key takeaways:
- Understand demographics and psychographics. You can generally target audiences with traditional marketing, but you can pin-point nearly anything with digital marketing. If you don’t have a clear idea of the types of people you want to view your ads, your campaign will be a mess. Adversely, it’s important to make sure that you’re not targeting with too many limitations. For example, if you’re advertising in a relatively small geographical area and you create your target market as women, ages 18-24, who enjoy the outdoors, have a pet, and like to read, your ad isn’t going to reach enough eyes to be cost effective. It’s all about balance!
- Campaigns and their objectives! Campaigns aren’t exclusive to digital marketing, but they are fundamental. A campaign is an ad, or a set of ads, aimed to accomplish a certain goal. For example, your company may want to run a campaign to advertise a specific promotion or sale to lead people to make a purchase.
- Pacing is imperative. It’s a check in that marketers do to make sure the ad campaign is running correctly. You can do damage control if your ad is showing up on irrelevant sites or check that it hasn’t spent more of the budget than intended. All in all, pacing ensures your campaign(s) are doing what they’re supposed to and if they’re not, fix the issues.
Social Media Marketing
Social Media Marketing is pretty obvious, it’s just advertising on social media platforms. This is a great way for businesses to market themselves because social media usage has skyrocketed over the past decade and there are people across all demographics and psychographics on each platform. Here are my key takeaways:
- Know which social platforms are best for your business. Every platform is a little different and provides a different experience for ad viewership. Do some research on the type of advertisements that each platform offers to get a feel for what’s best for you.
Hint: Facebook is almost always a great tool! - Plan, plan, plan! Typically, social media for businesses will be planned about a month in advance. This means that you’ll probably be using some sort of calendar system to plan posts and then a scheduling system to send out those posts on a certain day at a certain time. However, this strategy isn’t the end all be all for social media marketing. There are platforms that are much more spontaneous like TikTok or Snapchat. These platforms will require your business to act in the moment for the sake of authenticity. While it’s important to plan the messages you know you want to portray in advance, be prepared for some impromptu posts as well.
- Understand your company’s tone. When switching between different platforms that each have their own respective lingo, it’s easy to lose your brand’s authentic tone of voice. Be sure to stay vigilant and true to the persona you want to portray.
This is a very basic and surface-level list regarding the depth of marketing. There are nooks and crannies of traditional, digital, and social media marketing that I haven’t touched. However, this is a great start if you’re planning to take on all of your company’s marketing efforts. I hope this blog post has sparked a few ideas for you to market your business better and strengthen your company!
