Marketing in business 

Marketing in business means the company’s measures aimed at promoting the sale of products or services, communicating the company’s value proposition and also building the brand. As a concept marketing became common about 100 years ago, after which, in addition to service production, marketing departments and sales networks have also been used more commonly.

Marketing also means getting to know the customer’s needs and creating added value for them through advertising. Marketing can refer to a concrete need or the customer’s values ​​(for example, ecology, product life cycle as a means of marketing). In this way, it is possible to attract the customer to buy the service or product of the marketing company. Human-friendly H2H marketing, on the other hand, aims to talk to the customer and customer-oriented marketing is focusing on individuals instead of the masses. Account based marketing or ABM is a way of targeting a marketing message to a target company or customer who knowingly or unknowingly needs your company’s product or service. Marketing is also the company’s internal marketing, which targets its own employees. Effective marketing helps the customer to understand instead of direct selling. Strategic marketing aims to develop the company’s marketing in a holistic, creative way.

Different marketing options

There are more marketing options every year and it can be difficult to choose the right methods for marketing in your business. Traditional advertising, such as newspaper advertising, has been accompanied by digital marketing online, aka internet marketing. This option includes a countless number of different options. Today, modern marketing is above all data and measurement and, of course, digital channels. It’s also worth checking out why product-focused marketing alone may no longer be enough.

The most important distinguishing factor between traditional advertising and digital marketing is the very precise measurement of digital advertising. You can measure every person who has seen your ad and the actions they take, for example on your company’s website or on social media. Although many things have changed, one thing remains true: A good ad is still a good ad. Yes, and aggressive marketing is not worth it.

With digital marketing, you can measure, for example, these things:

How many people:

• Saw your ad
• Saw your ad several times
• Looked at your company’s homepage
  • Contact information
  • Videos
  • Blogs
• Visited your company’s website
• Saw you webinar
• Contacted your company

As you can see from the list above, the effectiveness of digital marketing can be measured very precisely. This helps in particular to invest in the most effective channels. You can track which of your marketing measures have brought customers to your website and also how many of these customers have finally contacted you. This way you can leave inefficient channels out of your selection and continue to invest only in those channels from which you get customers to your pages and eventually contacts from them. Marketing research tells you what your target group likes and dislikes.

Did you know: Drip marketing helps you squeeze even more benefits out of your marketing, with automation.

Marketing in small business operations

It is often thought that marketing is expensive and that a small entrepreneur has no opportunity to acquire customers with digital marketing. This is wrong.With the right marketing decisions in your business the costs stay low. You can start digital marketing with very small investments and advertising budget, for example on social media or Google. You can start advertising with even a few dozen dollars and increase your investments in light of the results. This way, you can familiarize yourself with digital marketing, even if at the beginning you don’t intend to spend assets on advertising, or to get results.

In any case, it is worth planning the basis of the marketing plan, so that the measures taken are consistent right from the start. Accurate planning of marketing, for example using the annual marketing wheel, also increases cost efficiency. Careful target group research also ensures that the advertising campaign is not aimed at the wrong target group. It is also important to define a unique selling point, or USP, for each target group. This helps to stand out from the competition.

Practicing digital marketing is more important every year. The better you understand digital marketing, the better results you will get with it. Choosing a partner for digital marketing speeds up getting results considerably, and this is also how you learn more about digital marketing with the help of experts. You would probably also benefit from digital marketing training.

Digital marketing in business

Marketing in digital channels is becoming more common at a considerable speed and probably everyone already knows that their customers are moving strongly to digital channels and even making purchasing decisions there at an accelerating pace. The importance of salespeople and experts in sales is not going away for a long time. Still, it should be noted that customers are constantly looking for information online and contact experts only after they have familiarized themselves with several different options.

At this point, it’s good for your company to be in front of the customer’s searching eyes in digital channels. The different stages of the sales funnel are also easy to follow with the help of digital marketing. Also remember that the company’s website must be optimized and well designed so that the traffic directed there is not wasted. AB testing helps you find what works and what doesn’t. Conversion optimization increases what works and reduces what doesn’t.

The most common marketing methods in digital marketing are:

• Social media
• Advertising on Google
• Google Search Engine Optimization
• Banner advertising/display advertising
• Email marketing
• Advertising on YouTube
• Blog Marketing

You certainly know what Google is, but do you know all the useful services it can offer your business? Most often, companies start digital marketing with Google advertising or social media advertising. Google is a good way to find customers if your service or product is already known to the general public. This way, customers already know how to search for service providers online and you can advertise to all these customers. If, on the other hand, your service is new, or customers are not actively looking for it online, then in this case social media is a good way to proactively bring your services to the attention of your customers.

You can therefore use social media to advertise to all your potential customers, even if they are not looking for your services online. This is a good way to raise the awareness of the company among your best target group. Digital customer acquisition works.

Digital marketing is becoming more common

Most of your customers are probably already online and are searching for your company’s services by googling them at some point in the buying pipeline. If you have already managed to do social media marketing for your potential customers at this stage, there is a good chance that the marketing done by your company has caused the customer to google your company. If, on the other hand, the customer does not know your company, how could he know how to search for your company? And how do you get new readers to your blog posts? You can influence this with banner advertising and social media advertising.

So stand out from your competitors and target your customers even before they look for services in your industry online. Right now is a good time to start marketing online, because the competition in digital marketing is constantly increasing. In a year’s time the competition will already be tougher and it will be more difficult to get results with digital marketing. You can see this, for example, in the prices of Google advertising, with the prices having risen steadily in the last years.  Getting the same customer to your company’s website will cost significantly more in the future. Google is still profitable as long as you avoid Google marketing mistakes.

B2B marketing in business, its own specialty

B2B marketing has developed in giant strides in recent years. Of course, modern B2B marketing makes use of data, and a lot of it is needed. On the B2B side, purchase paths and interactions leading to a sale are often more multidimensional and less clear than on the consumer side. It may take several months for a deal to be created, up to a year in large stores.

Marketing automation, CRM systems and their integration with marketing automation tools, various reporting tools such as Power BI and much more help B2B marketing today. One of the key terms in B2B marketing is inbound marketing. This term, launched at the time by HubSpot’s founders, is actually its own, broad marketing strategic perspective.

Along with inbound, Account Based Marketing has been an interesting approach for B2B marketers. Where inbound focuses on acquiring and nurturing brand new leads, Account Based Marketing focuses on growing important existing customers.

How should you start marketing?

The most important thing in marketing is to decide on the marketing channels and the marketing budget and start doing it. It is also worth defining the target group, and here creating customer segments and buyer personas (or customer personas) is a great tool. Your choice of marketing methods are also influenced by what kind of business you are. Do you sell a B2B service, products to consumers, or do you perhaps have your own Amazon online store? Are you perhaps targeting customers from abroad? You need to consider these things when planning marketing in your business.

We recommend also using an analytics tool to monitor traffic on the website. Analytics also help to monitor which marketing channel works best. Most marketing tools are free or inexpensive. In addition, there are also very expensive tools such as HubSpot.

You can start digital marketing yourself, or choose a partner to help you get results and develop quickly. Marketing is continuous development and testing of channels, as well as measurement. If you are not yet monitoring the results brought by marketing on a monthly basis, I recommend asking for help from a partner familiar with digital marketing and start measuring right away.

Feel free to contact us if you want to receive results online already in the next few weeks.

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