Running a successful business is all about getting people in the door and keeping them there, but a solid product or service and meaningful fulfillment system will only get you so far. A smart advertising team can better market your company to your preferred demographics and find you customers in segments you never even thought of. Often, that means keeping abreast of new technologies and innovations in the advertising world. With the following three tips, you can supercharge your marketing presence.
Social Media
An online presence has become a necessity for practically any business operating today. Even if you have a slick and presentable website, that might not be enough for the job. That’s why it’s important for your marketing team to understand social media trends and ensure your company maintains a strong online presence on various platforms. The main ones that your business should be focusing their marketing efforts on are Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and LinkedIn. Pinterest, Tumblr, and Google+ might be worth considering as well.
It can be tough to juggle all of the different platforms and posting schedules, and so your marketers need to take advantage of all of the tools they can. Tools like Buffer can help you unify your social media presence on a single platform. It also allows you to schedule posts. Some tools even allow you to track the data regarding certain posts—like the number of clicks and likes—so that you can know what works with your audience.
When it comes to finding the right tools to use, know that there are so many to consider! Here are just a few:
- Sprout Social: allows managers to delegate tasks to different individuals on the social team
- Hootsuite: allows you to schedule posts on multiple social platforms and measure analytics
- BuzzSumo: allows you to find popular content to post or to get new ideas from
- CrowdBooster: delivers real-time data regarding your content
- Visage: helps you to design perfectly optimized social media graphics
- Audisense: allows you to find new target audiences
Talk with your marketers and have them analyze their needs. Together, you should then be able to find out which social tools would be best for them to use. Although there are some free ones out there, you should definitely plan on investing some of your company’s budget this way.
When it comes to providing your marketers with physical tools, you might want to consider getting them smartphones for work use. You wouldn’t need to get every marketer one—perhaps just one or two for your entire marketing team. Doing so would allow your employees to post to Instagram and other platforms as well as engage with your business content’s audience without having to use their own devices.
Visual Marketing
With so much information out there, it can be a lot to expect your potential clients to read through your sales pitch or even an informational blog. That’s where visual marketing can come in. Visual marketing covers a range of different advertising options that can be consumed with a simple glance, and it can cover everything from meaningful infographics to trending memes. Your team should think of what will draw the increasingly distracted eyes of your prospective clients. There are a number of free or inexpensive tools that let you mock up visual designs quickly and easily.
For quality’s sake, however, don’t let price be too big of an issues for you. If you want your marketers to deliver the best content, you have to give them access to the best resources you can get them—like Adobe Creative Suite that has Photoshop, Premiere Pro, and InDesign which are key tools that anyone working with visual marketing tactics should know how to use.
Creating videos and taking pictures is a huge part of visual marketing. To do it the right, though, your marketers have to have access to good equipment. That means high-quality cameras, lighting umbrella kits, green screens, microphones, and tripods.
Another necessary piece of equipment is a laptop. You don’t want just any laptop, however, because you want to get your marketers laptops that allow them to do absolutely everything that they need them to do. For example, the Microsoft Surface Pro and the Apple Macbook Pro are popular among graphic designers due to the features that they have and how they allow them to do their job with ease. Because of that, look for the following qualities in the ones that you’ll be considering:
- An i7 Intel Core processor
- 16GB of RAM
- High capacity storage
There are many other features to consider, but those are the basics. Ask your marketers about what they need in order to find the best one for them.
Educational Opportunities
It probably doesn’t need to be said, but the rise of the internet and social media has forever changed the marketing landscape. If there’s any lesson that businesses should have learned, it’s that the tools you need to reach your customers are never static. That’s why continuing education is critical in this field. Not only do your marketers need to know the basics of marketing in itself, but they should also master the particulars that have to do with your company’s industry.
When it comes to the legal sector, for example, there are special services for law firm marketing retreats that firms can send their marketers to so that they can learn more skills. Because lawyers and attorneys are catering to a very specific niche, those who are doing their marketing need to understand how to reach their audiences.
As for tech companies, however, throwing huge—often elaborate—educational conferences is pretty popular. Qualtrics, for example, does this with their X4 Summit every year where business professionals can come and learn about brand management and marketing strategies from speakers who come from all over. For their 2018 X4 Summit, Qualtrics even had networking opportunities that involved skiing and a warehouse party where food trucks catered and Maroon 5 played a private concert for those attending the event. Although the Summit was extraordinarily fun, marketers and business professionals walked away inspired and ready to improve their branding efforts.
Look to see if there are any such retreats or conferences available in your particular industry and, by doing so, you’ll help your marketers learn about the specialized demands of your field and stay ahead of the curve.
Another educational opportunity that you could consider is to have professors from local business schools come and talk to your marketers. If they are struggling in a certain area, ask the professor to present on that specific topic.
Because it’s extremely important for marketers to stay on top of current information, it would be wise to give them time for learning. For example, you could let them have one hour every week to take online classes or to read up on blogs (like Moz.com) where they can get updated on the latest trends and changes in the industry.
A business could live or die on the quality of its marketing. That’s why it’s important to surround yourself with a team that you can trust and make sure they have all of the resources they need in order to succeed.
