Marketing is the strategic art of selling a product to a target audience encompassing various tools and gimmicks. Marketing is like the backbone of any industry. You may have excellent products and services at excellent prices and excellent durability but the advantages of all the above are nullified if you don’t have the right strategy to lure the target audience into buying the product. This tool can also be powerful enough to sky rocket the sales of an average product if strategized in the right manner. At the end of the day, it all boils down to a lot of planning, strategy and research.
The past year has been a rather testing one. It’s been a year of changes in several aspects all around the globe and these changes have somewhat gotten us all together in a rather strange way. Industries and businesses have either seen the last of their days in the markets or blossomed with excessive demand. Marketing has a lot to do with this too.
For decades together, a popular style of marketing has been - Physical marketing. These styles range from newspapers and magazines to billboards and even door to door marketing done by sales promoters and often managed by Brand Activation Agencies. These styles while being a great success in the days they were implemented are somewhat dwindling in their effectiveness in a world today. A virus-infected world today has not only deprived us social beings of physical contact but has also instilled a constant paranoia. Today, we live in a world of limited physical contact which has taken us away from the shelves and more at home glaring at our screens. This makes a lot of the physical styles of marketing redundant too. Thus, it is only pragmatic to do away with the physical forms of marketing and move onto the hybrid form of - Phygital Marketing (A mix of physical and digital).
Technology has been a boon to man in several ways and also a major tool for the non-physical part of marketing. Firms and businesses have slowly shifted to various digital marketing tools to target their right audience not only because of its efficiency and cost effectiveness but also because it’s the safest option of marketing in the times of a global pandemic. Right from social media to performance marketing to data platforms, this generation is using it all.
Social media has proven to be an extremely successive tool in marketing and it’s unintentionally used by several for marketing their brands too. There’s been a surge in the number of social media bloggers whether that is on Instagram, twitter or even Youtube. Most people tend to use these online platforms as an informal portfolio of sorts. These applications have an inbuilt feature of insights and analysis that gives people details as to the reach of their content and the engaged audience. This enables brands to strategize their sales and come up with ideas of marketing depending upon the algorithm of the audience engaged. Brands also market their products through the posts of these social media influencers and even as pop-up advertisements between few posts on the feeds of the users. Experiential Marketing has become an integral part of online marketing for video conferences and virtual events too. Due to the inability of brands and organizations to host events and conferences for marketing their products, companies have shifted to online platforms to do the same. There are now virtual conferences and campaigns aimed at the marketing of products.
However the one thing that this style of marketing generally lacks is the presence of a valid CTA(Call To Action) that can lead the consumer to the end of the marketing funnel. Not only this, but ways in which brands can market today and reap the benefits after the pandemic is over which is by collecting owning their consumer - this done by collecting consumer data.
These testing times have caused brands to now shift some of the newer styles of marketing as mentioned below-
Digital partnerships- These are one of the most commonly used methods. This method involves collaborations among two or more brands or influencers. It is done on virtual platforms and social media specially so as to gain a larger audience to market their products to.
Channel partnerships: This is where brands collaborate with other brands to leverage their audiences and gain mutual benefits for both parties.
D2C Marketing- This marketing style is the most effective as the brand can communicate directly with their consumer. Not only talk to them but make them feel special and pampered as this can control the entire consumer journey from the Ad to the Unboxing experience.
Retargeting/Re-marketing – This method involves collecting consumer data, segregating them in sylios and these showing customers repeated advertisements on social media platforms and various other websites they browse in order to lure them into purchasing.
Today, when a deadly virus is forcing as all to physically distance ourselves and also alter our entire lifestyle in general, man still seems to have found a way out. The human brain has the potential of creating things beyond the ordinary imagination. When we are forced into difficult situations with not many options, that’s when we actually tend to get closer, a unity in a strange way. It’s in these times that we are forced to think of alternatives and of ways outside the box and so happened with marketing too. It was time that we moved on from the long used traditional physical marketing to online platforms. There’s an online equivalent for most of the physical tools whether that is newspapers and magazines into their digitized subscriptions or door to door marketing into online advertisements and calls. With changing times, brands must re evaluate their marketing strategies and include more methods which are suitable in today’s world to ensure growth. Change is our only constant and it so happened with marketing too!
Comments
Post a Comment