Want to know EVERYTHING there is to know about Marketing? #1 | Marketing Magic Mondays

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It’s Monday which means it’s time for Marketing Magic Mondays!

If you’re interested in marketing and enjoy learning, then I highly suggest you hit that subscribe button.

So let’s get started.

What is Marketing?

Marketing is everywhere and in everything we do, whether it be for ourselves or to help others.

Do you have a business? — Then you need marketing.

Have a product or service? — Again — Marketing.

Do you want to raise awareness about something? — You guessed it — you need marketing.

But what is marketing, and why is it so confusing?

At its most basic level, marketing is targeted communication to promote, sell, and attract people to your business.

Marketing is literally you telling the right people about what you’re doing. So why the confusion?

First and foremost, marketing is a jargon-heavy industry, and many buzzwords fall under the term ‘marketing’.

Because of the amount of jargon, many marketers will advise a different strategy for the same product.

If you’ve started your business in the last 12 months, you’ll have been told that you “need” social media, or a blog, or to build a funnel, or develop a lead magnet.

Chances are, you’ve tried it, but it hasn’t really worked as well as you hoped it would, right?

Well, that’s because marketing is a system that branches off in many directions, and there’s a right way to do it and a wrong way to do it.

If I were to list out all the things that fall under the category of marketing — we’d be here for hours, so here are a few examples:

• Advertising
• Public Relations
• Social Media Management
• Data Analysis
• Website Development
• Search Engine Marketing

The list goes on!

(And we haven’t even touched on the actual TYPES of marketing (I’m saving those for their own videos).

But back to this one…

Remember: marketing is targeted communication to promote, sell, and attract people to your business.

As I’ve said, that’s the most basic definition, and in today’s Marketing Magic Mondays, let’s focus on two key terms from that definition — communication and targeting.

The 4 Types of Communication

There are four types of communication, and here’s a quick breakdown of them:

1. Verbal Communication is when you speak with someone, “Hey, buy my product.”
2. Non-Verbal Communication is to do with mood, emotion, and body language and accounts for 70 to 93% of all communication.
3. Visual Communication — GIFs, animation, images, and infographics are all types of visual communication, and according to the Index of Learning Styles, 65% of people are ‘visual learners’ (it shows, not tells)
4. Written Communication — this is everywhere, especially online and within business. It’s your social media posts, emails, blog articles, descriptions, and in so many other places. So if you’re interested in written communication, then come back on a Thursday where I break down Copywriting and what that can do for your business.

The way you decide to communicate with other people can have a massive impact on your business. Get it wrong, and you’ll end up back at square one. Hit square one enough times and your business will suffer, and you may need to close it down.

When you get it right, you’ll see growth, profit and your business will thrive.

To make sure you get it right — remember the other key term from our definition?

Your communication needs to be targeted.

Why does your communication need to be targeted?

To understand what I mean by targeting your communication — we should explore what a Target Market is.

A target market is a specific group of people that share certain characteristics that you’ve decided to target with your products and services.

Firstly, it isn’t as easy as that, and I’ll cover how to target your audience in another video, but for now, let’s look a little deeper into the different ways to target the right audience.

There are four key ways to identify who you want to sell your products and services to; we call this your Market Segment.

Your market segment is when you get a really deep understanding of who you want to sell to, or is extremely useful if you have more than one target market in mind.

The four categories are:

Geographic

Geographic segmentation is when your product and service is targeted at people living in a specific location:

Pros of Geographic Segmentation for your marketing strategy:

1. Cost-effective method to find the most potential for your products and services
2. Understand user distribution based on variables like climate, location, population.
3. It helps reduce the money you waste by only advertising to those relevant to your business.

An example of Geographic Segmentation:

Segmentation of Urban vs Rural: If your business supplies farm equipment, it would be pointless to target and advertise to people in an urban environment. You need to promote where the right people see it, so a rural area.

Demographic

Demographic segmentation breaks down your target market into identifiable characteristics:

Pros of using Demographic Segmentation in your marketing strategy:

1. Improved Personalisation — Showing the same product differently to each group you’re targeting.
2. Improved Product Relevance — making sure that people targeted are shown products that are relevant to them.
3. Improved Advertising Effectiveness — You waste your budget by advertising to a generic audience. By targeting your audience, you remove waste and increase your sales.

An Example of Demographic Segmentation:

Segmentation by Family: when marketing items like Toys and Sweets, businesses tend to create advertisements that appeal directly to children. They also typically place this method of communication where children will be — such as kids animation channels on TV.

Psychographic

Your psychographic factors will help you characterise your target audience based on their personalities, dreams, aspirations, interests, and more. The idea here is to show them how your product and service will help them achieve their desires.

Pros of Psychographic Segmentation in your Marketing Strategy:

1. Explores unique factors that drive purchasing choices, helping you better understand your target market and create a broader marketing approach.
2. By understanding your customers’ motivations, you can adopt a strategy that works for multiple target markets.
3. It takes time to develop a personality trait, so using psychographic segmentation will create a long-lasting marketing strategy.

An example of Psychographic Segmentation:

Segmentation by Attitudes: A luxury mobile brand that specialises in customisations will use attitude towards technology and lifestyle to sell their mobiles. This could include using specific colours, activities, and clothing styles within their advertising materials.

Behavioural

Behavioural segmentation helps you understand where your customer is by monitoring what they are buying, their loyalty to brands, the upcoming special occasions, and what benefits they’re looking for.

Pros of Behavioural Segmentation in your Marketing Strategy:

1. It helps you target the right customers by understanding the different approaches your customers may want at different stages of the buyer journey.
2. Improve the customer experience by listening to what they want and acting accordingly.
3. It is cost-effective as you focus on budgeting for the right things that appeal to your target audience.

An Example of Behavioural Segmentation:

Buying on Occasions: This is often the first step in behavioural segmentation — what are your customers buying for special occasions. For example, are they booking fancy restaurants for Valentines Day? Buying gifts of flowers, chocolates, or jewellery? Etc.

Now, I’ve only touched the tip of the iceberg on target marketing and segmentation. Still, I hope that you now understand why you need to target your communication by giving you this overview.

Imagine Your Business Is You, And Your Marketing Is An Umbrella

You represent the business; the handle represents the product/service; each spike represents the different ways you communicate, and the tip represents your customer.

When you have targeted communication that is explicitly created based on the segmentation of your target audience, all of those channels make their way to that group.

They become aware of your product. The more they see it, the interest in your product increases. The customer will then start to consider buying and using your product. They will then buy your product and use it — if they like it, they’ll tell their friends, and you will have new customers too!

However, if the spikes on your umbrella are broken, then none of that communication will get through. As you can see, the broken spikes go past your customer, so you don’t gain interest in your product, to begin with.

So remember, marketing is simply targeted communication that helps you sell more products, raise awareness of your business and causes, and I’ll see you next time.

Resources

• Index of Learning Styles
• Target marketing in the health services industry: the value of journeying off the beaten path
• Mehrabian’s communication study — eBook
• Evaluating Different Bases for Market Segmentation — Geographic
• Segmenting customer brand preference: demographic or psychographic
• Behavioural Segmentation in the Australian Wine Market Using Conjoint Choice Analysis

Originally published at https://www.spwcopywriting.com on July 26, 2021.