Marketing activities are a major factor that helps determines the success of your
business. The importance can never be overemphasized as without efficient
marketing activities, your brand is as good as anonymous.

To fully optimize it, a brand must categorize their marketing activities. Marketing
activities categories are grouped following the company’s goals or objectives.
These classifications are what will guide the use of marketing activities efficiently.
Below are some pointers that can help you kick-start your marketing activities
checklist:

  • Carry out market research

By carrying out market research, it will help you identify your target market, lower
the risk of failure and it can also serve as an avenue to test your product.

  • Target Market
  • Identify with a product/service
  • Prioritize Customer Experience
  • Establish a solid distribution channel
  • Run promotions
  • Pricing – don’t be overpriced or underpriced

The next section of this article will identify some marketing activities brands can
utilize to improve sales, publicity and overall growth of their business.

Target Audience

When it comes to marketing, reaching everybody can be a wild chase. Your
messages are most likely to be lost when targetted towards everybody. A target
audience helps restructure your campaign and approach towards a specific group of
people who are perceived to be more likely to be customers.

These groups of people share similar demographic traits like age, gender, location,
educational background, etc. Learning to identify your target audience as a
business can help craft marketing strategies and define your core customers.

Instead of spending money and resources to satisfy every consumer, defining a
target audience allows for more intentional, direct and personal outreach to those
most likely to purchase your product or service. To do so, one must think about the
specific needs of your product or service fulfils.

It is paramount to identify the needs your product/service satisfy, and then
determine who has those needs. And the more specific you can identify your target
audience’s demographic, the more effective you can advertise to them.

The major drawback of a target audience is that businesses may become too fixated
on the defined target audience that they miss out on other potential consumers.
Even well-researched and detailed target audiences may mistakenly exclude people
who are interested in the product or service.

Hence, it is advisable to use target audiences as baselines, not the only channel. As
your product and service offerings begin to expand, it is essential to continuously
reevaluate your target audience analysis.

Market Approach

Starting and running a business is not easy, so it is important to use a marketable
approach to reach your target base. There are several approaches you can utilize to
get a positive reach on your brand. Some of them include:

  • Social media
  • Blogging
  • SEO
  • Infographics
  • Influencers
  • Affiliate programs
  • Email marketing

As a brand, identify one or two approaches that best suit your brand’s
aim/objective and prioritize on it.

Competitors

All businesses face competition, it is now left for a brand to position their brand in
the mind of their customers. A competitor can come in form of a new business
offering a discounted price for the same product/service you render. It could also
be a product/service you should leverage on before another brand takes it up.

To stay afloat, you must identify your competitors and monitor how they operate
their businesses. This will help you know where to improve on, what market
approach to use, etc.

Digital Marketing

Most purchasing these days begin online. Brands are gradually moving from
conventional marketing to digital marketing. A digital marketing campaign has
several components that work hand-in-hand to make your brand grow. With digital
marketing, you can review analytics and physically oversee the growth of your
brand.

Some digital channels include:

  • Social media
  • Company websites
  • Email marketing
  • Corporate blog
  • Search engines rankings
  • Online display advert

Below is a simple guide to walk you through digital marketing and how it should
be applied to help your brand:

  • Draft a digital marketing strategy
  • Create a content marketing strategy
  • Generate a digital advertising plan
  • Develop a social media strategy
  • Leverage Email marketing
  • Create a search marketing strategy
  • Use search website analytics
  • Employ conversion rate optimization to drive growth to your brand

Direct Marketing

Direct marketing gives a brand the room to directing promote their product/service
to their target audience. This approach yields fast result as you get review almost
immediately from customers.

Forms of Direct Marketing include:

  • Brochures
  • Catalogues
  • Fliers
  • Newsletters
  • Postcards
  • Coupons
  • Emails
  • Targeted online display ads
  • Phone calls
  • Text messages
  • Marketing Strategy

A carefully and well-planned marketing strategy should be fundamentally rooted in
a company’s value proposition, which summarizes the competitive advantage a
company holds over rival businesses.

Whether it’s a print ad design, mass customization, or a social media campaign, a
marketing asset can be judged based on how effectively it communicates or shows
a company’s core value proposition. Market research can be very helpful in
charting the efficacy of a given campaign and can help identify untapped audiences
to achieve the main goals and increase sales.

Brand Positioning

This is simply positioning your brand in the mind of your customer. Regardless if
it is a returning customer or a prospective customer, brand positioning is very
important to every business to help them grow.

Whether or not a company is proactive about developing a position, Brand
positioning happens. It is now left for the company to take an intelligent approach
toward positively influencing its brand positioning in the sight of its target markets.

To help position your brand well, below are some steps to efficiently position
yourself in the market space:

  • Examine your brand’s current position
  • Identify your competitors – Never underestimate your competitors
  • Compare and examine your competitor’s brand positioning
  • Create a unique positioning idea – Strategic Positioning
  • Execute crafted brand positioning approach

Note that to successfully execute your brand positioning approach, you much have
a brand positioning statement.

A brand positioning statement is a statement or two that states your brand’s
uniqueness to your customers. You can create a great positioning statement in the
following ways:

  • Identify your target market
  • Define your market
  • Craft your brand promise
  • Sell your brand promise

Bear in mind that no brand has the power to position anything in the minds of
customers. Hence, it is important to examine the essence of what your brand is all
about and evaluating it with what your customer’s want. Also know that every
customer has their idea of your brand in mind.

So, to ensure your brand rings a bell, you must start from within your organization.
Every member of your organization that comes in contact with customers must
portray a perfect expression of your brand position. Hang everything that
represents your brand on a wall, entry point etc.

Advertising

Advertising is a major part of marketing; it is aimed towards communicating
between the band and the customers. So, to truly communicate with your target
market, you must inform, persuade and remind your customer what your brand is
about. A sense of originality is one of the perks that come with advertising.

Consistent advertising ensures that the brand’s position reaches the target audience,
hence, improving awareness.

To successfully executive a positive advertising campaign, you can follow the
below steps:

  • Set your goals
  • Identify your target market
  • View your brand from an unbiased perspective
  • Test run and Track your Advertising Campaign
  • Timing
  • Seek out skilled-hands
  • Try low-budget advertising options

Sales Promotion

To boost profits and gain traction over your competitors, you must review your
brand’s sales and marketing strategy. A perfect way to do this is to prioritize areas
that need improvement and use it as a foundation for an effective marketing
strategy.

Sales promotions further pique the interest of potential customers to consider your
brand. The idea with sales promotion is to get your target market to try your
product/service. This can be achieved via:

  • Discounts
  • Free shipping
  • Special offers
  • Coupons
  • Trial periods
  • Loyalty programs
  • Branded gifts

As a brand, if your sales promotion is aimed at customer retention, you can offer
rewards points. This is more appealing to customers to keep coming back.

As sales promotions you can try out is Coupons. Coupons can be sent to customers
through email, and text message. It can also be used to stimulate customers joining
a mailing list.

Visual Marketing

The visuals linked with your company ranging from colours, logos, videos, picture,
etc. all encompasses your visual branding. These visual elements are major parts of
any marketing campaign for your brand.

As part of a larger marketing strategy, it helps you depict certain subjects and
concepts that would otherwise be harder to approach by using only text. Talking
more on Presentations, a slide show might help get your message across.

Below are some of the visual marketing content that brands can use:

  • Data Visualization
  • Videos
  • Images
  • Infographics
  • Reviews

Every business needs to be very efficient in the execution of the market activities
in other to achieve their goals and grow to be a very successful venture. Ensure to
analyse the right target audience, know your competitors in other to orchestrate the
right strategy. Never underestimate the importance of researches and how you will
utilize digital and direct marketing to achieve your company’s goal.