Marketing is a broad and varied field. Using the correct marketing techniques for each situation will make you more successful overall.
If you're going to market your product or service, there are three basic things you have to do: heighten awareness of it, demonstrate its value, and pull the trigger on sales. A suitable medium will help you do all three.
Here is an overview of the things we will be talking about:
1) The Future of Marketing Techniques Revealed
2) The purpose of revamping your marketing techniques
3) How to choose a suitable medium for applying your marketing techniques?
4) Get granular on your target consumer with marketing techniques
5) Diversify your marketing channels with marketing techniques
6) A/B test your marketing techniques
7) Understand B2B buyers vs B2C buyers in your marketing techniques
8) Marketing Techniques in 2021
The Future of Marketing Techniques Revealed
It's easy to forget that marketing techniques are essentially a science. We don't think of it that way. It seems more like an art, which is mostly what it is. But like all sciences, it has evolved, and its methods are now well established.
For example, if you want to sell more of something, how do you go about it? It might seem like there are as many ways to answer that question as there are products out there to sell. But they all boil down to marketing techniques.
A marketer who doesn't understand these strategies is like a physicist who doesn't understand gravity or an astronomer who doesn't understand orbits: he may know enough to get by, but he won't be able to predict the most important events with any accuracy.
To be clear, we are not talking about evolutionary strategies for developing better products or improving your marketing techniques. Those strategies depend on your circumstances and need no general rules; they will always remain more art than science.
What is the Purpose of Revamping Your Marketing Techniques?
In the early days of the Web, many people thought they were making a revolution. They were going to replace advertising with content, and they would give users unbiased information about products they could trust.
This revolution has been thoroughly squashed. Most users understand that content is advertising, and Google and Facebook dominate the Web. Content isn't what pays your bills; it's something you do for users to get their attention so you can show them ads. The rest of this essay will be about doing that well; if you don't care about that, feel free to skip it.
The point of marketing techniques isn't to make better ads; it's to make better companies. The purpose of every business is not to make money; it's to do better businesses. If you can do better enterprises, you can make money; but making money is not the purpose of business.
How to Choose a Suitable Medium for Applying Your Marketing Techniques?
In 2021, the marketer's question will be: how to reach the most significant number of customers? But for us, it is already a reality. Do you have to ask which medium has the best chance to get a specific customer?
There are billions of people on Earth. You could try to reach each one of them individually. Or you could find out who they are and then try to get them with marketing techniques.
Customer identity is not an obvious thing. You cannot get it from a credit card, driver's license, or an address book. People change addresses, get married, change their names—in short, they are hard to pin down. We know it. But you want to reach them anyway.
Why? Because everyone has their tastes and inclinations, you can learn from studying their history of purchases and other behavior. And because if you know who someone is, you can speak directly to them in a way that is relevant to them—and that will be more effective than any ad campaign or marketing technique.
The advertising industry will try to keep things as they are in 2021 because it makes money from advertising campaigns aimed at the whole population without regard for identity—so-called mass marketing.
A newer form of marketing technique is viral marketing where people pass on information about a product/service through internet memes and chain e-mails rather than traditional marketing techniques.
Get Granular on Your Target Consumer with Marketing Techniques
Marketing techniques in 2021 will be about understanding the granular needs of each consumer. Almost every product will be customized to fit each person's unique taste.
A few years ago, people talked about the big data revolution in business. The idea was that big data would make it possible to extract insights for all kinds of decisions in areas like retailing or advertising.
The real revolution is just beginning. Personalization has made it possible to get granular insights about each person's tastes, and this data is now cheap enough that you can use it to personalize almost any product or service.
It used to be that you had to ask people for information when you wanted to create a tailored product. But now, you can gather very detailed knowledge about them and use it to create uniquely valuable products for each person you meet.
You don't have to guess how they want something; you can figure out precisely what they want and tailor your product accordingly with enhanced marketing techniques.
Diversify Your Marketing Channels with Marketing Techniques
Your marketing plan for 2021 should be divided into two distinct areas, online and offline. The online portion should be subdivided into three separate channels, organic search, social media, and affiliate marketing.
The organic search channel can be further subdivided into SEO techniques, PPC advertising, and content marketing.
The social media channel can be subdivided into Facebook marketing, Twitter marketing, Instagram marketing, Snapchat marketing, Pinterest marketing, Tumblr marketing, and YouTube marketing.
To avoid the possibility of being dependent upon anyone channel or tactic to bring in the revenue, you should have a presence on all three tracks plus have some affiliate marketing tactics in place on all of them as well.
That way, if one channel is blocked by your competition or another event that causes that channel to become less profitable or even just temporarily unprofitable, you will still have other sources ofs coming in to replace it.
A/B Test Your Marketing Techniques
The A/B test is the most important idea in business. It is more important than any other idea that has come out of the digital age, except maybe the Internet itself.
Let us first see what an A/B test is. The A/B test is a way to make decisions when you don't know what you are doing. It works like this:
You have some new ideas for marketing techniques or some new techniques for improving some processes. It could be an ad campaign, a new way of organizing your business, or a new payment system for your customers. Whatever it is, it has two possible outcomes - call them A and B - and you want to know which one will work better.
The problem is that you don't know which one will work better - if either of them will work better - because things usually work differently in practice than they did in your head.
While you were coming up with the idea, your brain was running all kinds of simulations, trying them out on different audiences, seeing how they would react. But now, there isn't time for simulations; you have to decide whether to proceed with your idea immediately, without any further experimentation.
It's an obvious idea: if you're unsure what to do, test two options and see which one works better. The tricky part is knowing what to try. It can't be something random; you need to start with something you think will work.
Understand B2B Buyers Vs. B2C Buyers in Your Marketing Techniques
To succeed in business, you need to know how people buy. In a B2C business – a company that sells to consumers – the buyer usually has a budget and a goal and is trying to make tradeoffs among various alternatives. In a B2B business – a business that sells to other companies – things are more complicated.
In particular, there are two kinds of B2B buyers, divided by their attitudes towards risk. They call them "operators" and "planners."
Operators buy things they think will help them execute their existing strategy better. This is what we imagine when we think of someone making strategic purchasing decisions: someone who knows what he wants and has goals and decides which product will help him do it better.
Planners buy things they think will give them options for new strategies in the future. When we picture someone buying something genuinely novel, we picture someone planning: thinking about what new directions the company might take and trying to figure out how those directions would change their needs for products or services.
Marketing Techniques in 2021
Optimize your homepage for a specific keyword
The first thing your potential customer sees when they visit your site is the homepage. If you don't optimize it for a specific keyword, you'll never make it onto their radar.
Say you run bed and breakfast in the French Quarter of New Orleans. A lot of people search for "French Quarter B&Bs." You could optimize your homepage for that keyword, and as long as Google doesn't change its ranking rules again, no other site will rank higher than yours.
If you're ambitious, you could optimize for more than one keyword, like "New Orleans bed and breakfast" or "French Quarter lodging." Or even better, different variations on those keywords: "bed and breakfast New Orleans," "French Quarter B&B," and so on.
It isn't just search engines, either. You'll be able to do the same thing with social media -- find all the people talking about some topic and post an answer they can share with their network. This will probably replace most advertising; Facebook won't feel like it needs to sell your eyeballs to advertisers when it already has them hooked on your friends.
Declutter your homepage
Your homepage is the primary landing page for your visitors. It's where they first go when they arrive at your site. And if you want to make the most money, it should be as clean and inviting as possible. Your homepage should be clear, simple, and short.
People are visiting your homepage to learn something. If you clutter it up with stuff they don't care about, you are wasting their time. And if you are wasting their time, they will stop visiting your site.
Get rid of distractions and calls to action that aren't necessary. A homepage should contain only content your audience cares about.
Use a blog to inform people about what you do
People use blogs as part of marketing techniques. Blogs are an inexpensive and effective tool for reaching out to new customers and establishing yourself as an expert in your field. They can help you find new clients and make you look like a leader in your industry.
A blog is a great way to learn how to market yourself and your business, and it's also an excellent way to build trust with future customers. Blogging is beneficial if you're starting and want to build up your client base.
How do you get people to visit your blog?
You write things that interest them.
How do you know what interests them?
Talk to them.
Find out what they are interested in, and then find out what they think about it. If there is no blog or Web site or mailing list or podcast where they have that conversation, start one.
Blogging has its roots in old-style journaling, but it's become a new way to market things. Whenever someone gives you their attention by reading one of your posts, that's called an "attention event." The more hits your posts get, the more attention events happen in total.
Contribute to industry curated content
The right message to the right person can make all the difference at the right time. To give everyone an equal chance of reaching their audience, industry groups sponsor "curated content."
The industry curated content will be free and available everywhere. It will allow companies to meet customer needs in a much more satisfying way than the current model, which is based on impersonal one-way communication through mass media.
Industry curated content is not just another way for companies to promote their products. It is an opportunity to understand customers deeply, quickly, and in a way that builds honest loyalty. Companies may pay for this service in various ways, but at its heart, it is a service provided for free by the consumer.
Encourage users to follow you on social media
If you want people to use your product, encourage them to follow you on social media. That is the most basic of all marketing techniques. A product without a marketer is a non-starter. Your social media platform doesn't have to be a separate entity—just a page on your website that allows users to follow you.
Use a "follow" button or a badge that lets users show their interest in following you on Twitter, Google+, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr, and other sites. With some platforms, such as Facebook and Google+, creating an account before using them for marketing techniques is essential.
The purpose of your social media presence is not just to sell products or services or even yourself but also to create an attractive personality. Your personality attracts readers and viewers, who tend to buy from companies they associate with people they like. So be likable: be funny, be thoughtful, be charming.
Make sure that your product is associated with your personality and your personality with your product.
Test quality of followers on social media, then engage with them
Testing for quality is a particular skill to develop if you want to succeed in marketing techniques. There is so much talk about the importance of social media marketing, but how many companies know what they are doing? A little bit of testing goes a long way.
What do we mean by "quality"? You can't just look at numbers on social media or websites. You need to check the quality of the people engaging with you. You want people who are likely to buy your product or service and who are also influential.
Using new software that analyzes the content of tweets on Twitter, valuable data can be obtained on an individual social media user's interests and opinions. This information can then be used to target specific followers with more useful ads.
This is an example of how valuable qualitative data on social media users is becoming. Businesses are starting to realize that they can gain helpful information about potential customers by studying their social media accounts.
How Deskera Can Assist You?
Whether you are a sales manager or running your own business, there are tons of duties and responsibilities that you have to fulfill. Using the Deskera CRM system, you can manage your contacts, leads and sales deals. You can use the CRM system to manage all customer data and manage your leads, sales negotiations and deals.
Doing so will help you to save the time taken in transferring customer data between the different systems. Having a good CRM system will help you manage your financial and sales reports and be prepared to kick-off your meetings.
Deskera can also assist you with real-time updates about your business like cash flow status, customer satisfaction, inventory management, sales, purchases, purchase orders, customer tickets, customer satisfaction, managing leads, revenues, profit, and loss statements, and balance sheets.
Moreover, it would also help in integrating sales methodology across different platforms onto one system so that you have a consolidated list for email campaigns, leads management, and sales pipeline to mention a few.
It will also help you to sync between your orders, payments, taxes, refunds, product variants, sending out invoices and reminders, facilitating invoice management, and even undertaking follow-ups and advertisement campaigns.
Such a consolidated platform will help you to improve your sales through building effective sales compensation plans and also facilitate faster and well-informed decision-making. It will help you in strengthening your opportunities and being braced for the threats.
Deskera books and Deskera CRM will also be able to ensure the highest customer satisfaction and thereby an increase in net revenues and net profits.
Wrapping Up
The purpose of this guide is to help your business succeed in the new marketing techniques environment. You can use it to evaluate potential strategies or tactics or to create your own.
The most important thing to understand about marketing techniques is that it is constantly changing. The techniques that worked in the past will not necessarily work in the future, and some of the new methods will be radically different from anything you have seen before.
Key Takeaways
Many marketing techniques are being used today. Most of the methods are still being used in 2021, but better techniques have replaced some.
The following marketing techniques are still in widespread use and should be tried in most cases:
- Make your product cheaper
- Make your product bigger (volume discounts)
- Add to the product line
- Get a celebrity to endorse your product
- Give away tiny samples or have a coupon campaign, preferably both
- Open a new store in a new location, preferably a high-traffic one with excellent visibility
At Deskera, the marketing techniques are split into two different disciplines: advertising and public relations. The former aims to persuade people to buy now, before they have thought too long about whether they need it. The latter aims to convince them to buy now, after they have realized that they do need it.