Marketing isn’t always a straightforward topic. While the basics of marketing are generally easy to grasp, many new business owners struggle with rolling out effective marketing strategies of their own. To make matters worse, many of these business owners don’t even know where to begin when it comes to marketing their business. Fortunately, the internet is a vast resource that assists you in answering these questions, and we are here to help.
We found some of the most frequently asked questions related to marketing. These questions will cover a wide variety of marketing topics for your benefit. We’ve answered these questions simply, but effectively so that hopefully you can take the information here and apply it directly to your business and your existing marketing strategies.
So, without further ado, here are eleven of the most frequently asked marketing questions and eleven answers that can help you improve your marketing game TODAY.
Why do I need Marketing?
Let’s start with the basics. Why does your business need marketing? Put simply, marketing is what allows your business to become an exchange. Marketing puts your business in front of audiences that are willing and desiring to buy. Without marketing, your product is just an item on a shelf. With marketing, your product is the must-have, an item or service that fits a need for your customers. Your products and services are the steak, but marketing is the sizzle. Marketing is what gets people excited about what you have to offer. It is what stokes their desire to engage with your business and to exchange their hard-earned cash for what you are promising them in exchange. You need marketing because frankly, there is no business without it marketing. Marketing is an essential tool for any business, but that doesn’t mean it has to be complicated. While it is an intricate process, there are simple steps you can take to meaningfully step up your marketing game.
Where can I learn Marketing?
We get it, running a business is no easy task. Fortunately, we live in an era where running a business is more feasible than ever before. The internet and the digital age provides boundless opportunity not only for what we can sell and to who, but how we can learn as individuals and grow our businesses. The internet is an endless sandbox of tools, tips, and instructions for how to market your business successfully.
Whether you are a business veteran or a novice, there are always new tips and tricks to learn. Personally, we recommend the Marketing Classroom. The Marketing Classroom is a resource designed to teach you how to market your business without flushing away your savings. The Marketing Classroom has instructional videos and lessons designed for YOU. However, the internet is filled with plenty of other resources whether you’re looking to learn the very basics of marketing or even the most complex of techniques.
Can I do my own Marketing?
To answer this shortly, yes. Marketing may be difficult at times, but it is completely within the realm of possibility. However, marketing isn’t something you can master after reading an article or two. Marketing is something that takes time and effort. The real question here is how much of your own time and effort you are willing to put forth. It takes time not only to learn the practices and rules of marketing but to integrate them into your existing business efforts.
Before you decide whether or not to perform your own marketing, take a look at the following aspects of both your life and your business:
- Do you know enough to effectively market your business on your own?
- Do you have the time and determination to know what you don’t already?
- Are you already overwhelmed by your existing business duties?
- Are there alternative options that suit you and your business better?
Take advantage of the tools at your disposal and if you don’t know how to utilize them properly, then as for help.
Do I need to hire an external Marketing team?
As your business grows, so will your marketing needs. A part-time intern can’t handle the weight of an expanding full-time company. Additionally, in the case of businesses with few or no employees, your responsibilities grow exponential as your business grows. You may have been able to handle marketing your business on your own for a while, but an expanding business can quickly become overwhelming.
A great advantage to using an external marketing team is that your marketing duties can be taken largely off of your own plate. An external marketing team is trained to give you results without giving you a large hassle. External marketing teams are also dedicated entirely to marketing, something that you are unlikely to be able to do on your own. If your business is growing and your personal efforts aren’t marketing your business well enough to sustain that growth, it may be time to reach out and bring in the professionals.
How can I improve my Marketing?
Practice makes perfect. It’s a cliched old saying, but it applies in this scenario as well. When looking for ways to “improve” your marketing, you need to access what component of marketing are you actually trying to improve. Are you trying to improve the efforts on your end or the results that they bring in. While your end and the results frequently go hand in hand, many people try to improve results without really assessing the weaknesses within their current marketing strategy.
The best way to improve your marketing is to go searching for holes within your existing strategies. Don’t be afraid to disassemble your own strategy to find the kinks. When you can pick out the areas of your strategy that aren’t pulling in desired results, you can identify the areas necessary for improvement. Find where you are not connecting and do some research. How are others connecting here? What do the experts say? What could I be doing/what should I not be doing?
How can I practice Marketing with Social Media?
Remember that Marketing is a multi-faceted concept. There is no one method of marketing. Rather, an effective marketing strategy is comprised of dozens of strategies that all work towards a common goal, furthering your business. Social Media has quickly become one of the top outlets for marketing within a very short span of time. As a result, many companies and businesses find themselves blindsided by it. Social Media can seem daunting, especially when there are so many dominant platforms out there.
Fortunately, social media is a great playground to test out your marketing strategies. Social Media is home to billions of real users, worldwide. To make things even better, many social media marketing strategies can be exercised for free, right from your computer or phone.
The best way to practice marketing with social media is to get started. Take a look at what similar companies or industries are doing and apply your spin to it. Engage with followers and other users. Utilize memes and images. The best way to understand what your potential leads engage with is to put content out there and adapt to the users’ reactions.
Is traditional Marketing still relevant?
Traditional marketing, contrary to popular belief, has not gone the way of the dinosaurs. The same basic principles that guided the industrious of the print and television ages still guide those in the digital age. What has changed is how we implement those principles into the current slate. Taking out an ad in the newspaper isn’t effective at targeting desired demographics anymore. Instead, those ads need to be placed on streaming services or social media sites. The ad itself doesn’t change much, but the delivery continues to be adapted and refined to meet the needs of younger generations and the latest technology.
The core principles of product, price, place, and promotion are unchanged. Anyone who tells you different is either lying or delusional. However, the definition of success for any of those for principles has changed. The game is still the same, but the playing field has been altered drastically. Don’t kid yourself, traditional marketing is still here and it is still relevant.
Do I need Internet Marketing?
Smaller business often make the mistake of assuming that they don’t need social media or internet marketing. While the majority of the world has gotten on board with utilizing the internet as a marketing tool, there are still those who are resistant. Many people make the mistake of thinking that their business is not successful or large enough to really need or develop an internet presence. This is far from the truth.
In fact, the internet is an essential tool to use despite the size or scale of your business. Internet Marketing controls how well your business ranks on search engines. It informs potential customers of who you are an what you offer. The Internet is also the fastest way to connect to and engage with potential customers. The internet affords your business the opportunity to meet customers where they are, instead of having to wait for them to come to you. Internet Marketing gives your business an unimaginable reach compared to marketing strategies that are resistant to it.
How can I measure the success of my Marketing campaigns?
Success can take many forms when operating a business. After all, your personal idea of success would vary greatly from Jeff Bezos’. So, it can be a confusing matter to try and make sense of the success or failure of your marketing results. Is success measured by clicks back to your website? Is success the number of leads generated? Many people seem to think that success is only measured in sales. While sales is a key element of success, it doesn’t necessarily reflect the success of a marketing campaign.
Successful marketing campaigns can best be evaluated by examining the amount of interaction. If your ad is placed on the timeline of a million Facebook users, but only two are actually clicking on it, there is probably an issue with your ad. If three-thousand people follow your ad back to your website, but only one buys, there may be an issue with your pitch. The more you work with your marketing campaigns, the more you can assess them and isolate the specific failures within them, leading to greater overall success.
What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimization is an essential component of managing a website. Search Engines are the bottleneck between users and websites. When you create your website you unwittingly agree to play by the rules that they have set. These rules are enforced by search engine algorithms that scan each page of the web and assess what content is quality and what is less so. The more you cater to these algorithms, the higher your website ranks among its competition on the results page of a search engine.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process by which you optimize your website to meet the criteria set by these search engine algorithms. The more thoroughly you perform SEO, the higher your website ranks, and greater become the results you are likely to see.
How diverse should my marketing Strategies be?
Diversity is key to marketing, especially when you are targeting a wide variety of audiences. The strategies that work for a younger demographic most likely won’t universally appeal to an older demographic. Make sure to implement multiple strategies across a variety of platforms to achieve optimal results. Don’t be afraid to shake up your strategy or try new things, odds are those attempts will tap your business into a greater audience.
Conclusion
Marketing can be tricky, but it isn’t meant to be impossible. There is no shortage of the potential questions or concerns you can have, but there is no shortage to the number of answers either. The best way to understand marketing better is by making a commitment to your marketing education. Continue to experiment with the outlets available to you and engage with users on their level.
