Marketing and Advertising Fundamentals

Marketing your product is extremely important. The four important factors and fundamentals in every marketing approach is:

1) Cost of the marketing
2) Scale of the people you will reach
3) Precision of targeting, meaning how accurately you will reach your target market
4) How well the people who learn about your product or service convert into doing whatever actions you need them to do

Popular Marketing Channels

Marketing is always better if you are creative with your approach and understand your consumer. Nevertheless, there are some very standard ways to think through the different marketing techniques. You can try and see what might work for you. Here are common ways products can be marketed. Not all work for every product, so you have to think through which approach works best for your venture.

1) Social recommendations - with the rise of the social web, people often like to pass on quality content and products to their social networks. The types of products that do well are things that are simple, social and fun. Serious subjects that are not so fun do not typically do well in social marketing.

2) PR articles and blog mentions - things that do well are innovative and different products and services that publications tend to think will be interesting for their readers. Also, connections in the blogging and PR world really help here.

3) Being easily discoverable - whether you are a store on a busy street, or an Internet site that ranks in the top-10 search results of Google for many searches, there is an art to becoming discoverable. There are many ways in which a company can be discovered, and you have to plan through them strategically.

4) Paying to advertise to bring in new customers - this is a very reliable way to advertise. This advertising method is available to businesses that have a strong business model, bring in considerable revenue, and can afford to spend some of that revenue investing in advertising which brings in more paying customers. This is why it is very nice to have a strong business model when you plan your company.

5) You can try reaching out to acquire customers and spreading the word about your business. This is close to a direct sales approach. It is expensive and it does not scale well, but it can work very well because a strong effort can go a very long way.

6) In general, try to always think about what other bigger platforms, sites, or companies have access to your users and try to think about partnerships or any other ways to get some of those people to your product or service. A small part of a bigger player's customer base can be a big lift for you.

Some Marketing Notes

Just getting many people to come to your store or website is not enough. If they are not your target users, you will experience a very low conversion rate and a big part of your marketing efforts will be wasted because the people will simply leave, get irritated, and not come back. If you want visitors to turn into customers, what you want to always do is try to market to your target audience.

Sometimes having a large volume of people who learn about your product or service can benefit you if you are trying to raise general awareness or are in a stage of your business where you are looking to grow and scale the company.

Online Marketing

For almost any business, a part of promoting that business happens online. For that reason we try to cover the topic of online marketing in significant detail. We have guides for topics such as choosing the domain name for your website, setting up your website, and a discussion of different types of online marketing you can try for your business.

Marketing By Type Of Business

Different businesses need marketing plans that best suit those individual businesses. For that reason we created a unique article that goes over the common marketing techniques for different types of business. Take a look at our article named marketing by business type.