Marketing Strategy

Marketing is Art and Science

Marketing is Art and Science

Modern marketing is equal parts art and science.

Marketing teams create beautiful graphics and compelling copy lines after they know their customer and the audience of each platform used to deliver the message. Identifying the customer and appreciating the platform audience both require analytical data. Marketers use data to determine customer preferences and behavior. Companies with strong data-driven teams can pinpoint where a customer is in their purchase journey based on the behavior and profile of the individual customer, grouped with the data of hundreds or thousands of past customers and brand interactions.

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Marketing for Consumers with a Short Attention Span

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Marketing for Consumers with a Short Attention Span

Today’s consumers have an extremely short attention span. The title of this post is technically too long for modern consumers - to make a point, obviously.

According to medical research, over the last 20 years, the average attention span has dropped from 2 1/2 minutes to just 45 seconds. Our smartphones and technology are decreasing our attention span. Consumers are inundated by information and it’s changing their behavior across all industries. As marketers, once we learn about our customers, we adapt our practices to match their behavior and potentially influence it. Knowing that consumers only pay attention to ads for 45 seconds or less, we create shorter content clips that get the point across faster. This is true across all platforms, but particularly on social media.

Startup Marketing v. Large Company Marketing

Startup Marketing v. Large Company Marketing

I recently gave a presentation about Consumer Behavior to a group of Freshman business students at UT Dallas. Consumer Behavior is one of my favorite marketing topics. Customers are (or certainly should be) at the center of a marketing plan and typically even a larger business plan. Overall consumer trends and macroeconomic factors impact so much of how customers behave that some of the best marketing organizations I deal with now rely heavily on data to make informed decisions. This data can be sourced from different tools, but most of those tools cost money. I talked about some of the tools that bigger clients and my previous larger employers used, plus some of the tools that everyone uses, regardless of size.

Performance Marketing v. Brand Marketing: What is the Right Combination?

Performance Marketing v. Brand Marketing: What is the Right Combination?

Good marketing contains multiple components that consider both the long-term and short-term success of your business. Performance marketing is the short-term, easier to measure marketing tactics that include, pay per click ads, discount offers, etc. Brand marketing is the long-term, brand building efforts that can be more difficult to measure. Examples of brand marketing are TV, radio, and sponsoring the lanyards at an event. Healthy marketing includes both performance and brand marketing. Building brand awareness takes time, effort, and/or monetary investments in the brand. Depending on the type of business and the market you’re entering, it can be more difficult to build brand awareness and you may need to lean on performance marketing before your brand marketing efforts pay off.

Brand marketing is accretive, which means that it builds upon itself over time. Each brand marketing action helps to form the overall brand experience and the brand equity with the customer. Many household brands have built their name and reputation with long-term investments in brand marketing. It’s hard to separate the Coca-Cola product from the Coca-Cola brand at this point and a lesser brand might not have gotten away with a misstep like New Coke.

How Do I Determine Which Opportunities are Right for My Business?

How Do I Determine Which Opportunities are Right for My Business?

When you’re planning your marketing efforts, it’s important to determine which actions best align with your brand vision and values. It’s important to know when to say '“YES” and when to say “NO” to the projects that come across your desk and the platforms where your brand can be found.

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Create an Online Course for Your Business

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Create an Online Course for Your Business

If you offer a service that you sell online, you might be thinking about offering a course or a portfolio of courses. These courses can help you sell your other products and services, as well as offer a somewhat passive source of incremental income. There is a lot of upfront work that goes into creating your course. However, once you do that work, your course should only need to be updated when some piece of information changes or if your want to introduce a new concept or module.

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How Do I Help My Brand Stand out in a Noisy Market?

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How Do I Help My Brand Stand out in a Noisy Market?

Do you ever feel like you are screaming into a wind tunnel? No matter what market your brand and business are in, consumers are inundated with so many messages every day that it can be difficult to stand out. Even if your market isn't highly competitive, your customers are still seeing tons of messages from the many brands who sell them other products and services. You want your brand to be remembered. You want your audience to hear or see your messages and think, "Yeah, that's me! That product could really help me."

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How Do I Create a Consistent Content Strategy?

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How Do I Create a Consistent Content Strategy?

Consistency is more than doing or saying the same thing again and again. It's also showing up where and when your potential customers expect to find you. If you create consistency in your messages, presence (both online and off), and schedule, you can form long-term relationships with your clients and customers that will generate incremental business over time.

Consistency should start with your branding. Your message should be present throughout and solidified within your website and any physical presence that you have. Your topics and individual articles can branch a bit further with the messages that you create and share through your email communication and your other customer outreach, but the underlying message should be the same across all channels and customer touchpoints.

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Marketing Mix - The 4 Ps of Marketing

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Marketing Mix - The 4 Ps of Marketing

At Silver Shade Group, we help our clients with all different kinds of marketing solutions. Sometimes we edit or create print collateral, sometimes we write digital content, and sometimes we create brand or product launch strategies. In every case, the work comes down to the same basic concepts and questions. Who is my customer? What do they want to buy? How can I get my products in front of them at the right time? How do I price my products and services so that those customers will make a purchase? If you can answer these questions, you're on the path to a successful product launch, brand refresh, website update, or strategy session.

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Digital Marketing for Non-Digital Businesses

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Digital Marketing for Non-Digital Businesses

Nowadays, everyone is online. Whether you do business online or not, your customers are looking (searching) for you there. They want to know as much about you and their potential experience as possible before they walk in your door or pick up the phone. They want to interact with you via social media or email or another platform. Your customers are also looking for information, sometimes even from the front door or parking lot of your shop. If you don't provide that information, it will come from either generic search results or your competitor.

If you create a strong website that provides information about your business and your industry at large, you'll gain greater access to your audience and the ability to communicate with them directly. Your website should educate your clients about the experience they will have with you and the products and services that you offer. Whether you sell online or not, a website is always an opportunity for education.

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Do I Need a Digital Marketing Strategy?

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Do I Need a Digital Marketing Strategy?

A digital marketing strategy is a plan to increase brand awareness or grow sales using digital channels. Digital channels include everything from your own website and email campaigns to social media and blogs. A good digital marketing strategy helps you reach your customers wherever they want to interact with you by providing several opportunities to learn about, interact with, and possibly even purchase from your business. You can hire a marketing pro to create your digital marketing strategy as part of a larger marketing plan or on its own. Either way, your professional will most likely provide you with a comprehensive plan that leverages your website, email list, social media, and outreach.

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What Social Media Should I Use to Promote My Business?

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What Social Media Should I Use to Promote My Business?

Social Media planning is important for any entrepreneur or small business trying to build a following for their products and services. If you know how and where to spend your time and create a social media strategy around your business, you can leverage your social media presence to increase your brand awareness and grow your audience. If you operate without a strategy, you can waste valuable time and resources on a platform that does nothing for your business.

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Review Your Marketing Efforts and Plan for Next Year

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Review Your Marketing Efforts and Plan for Next Year

Tracking your marketing campaigns while they run is always a good idea. Tracking campaigns allows you to make changes midstream, especially for social media and other digital campaigns. It is also a good idea to compare all of your campaigns at the end of the year to measure the results against one another and determine what you want to run again v. what was not beneficial. December is a great time to review what worked and didn’t work in your marketing for the current year and to create a plan for the year ahead. If you do the comparison review first, you can use the things you learned this year to make next year even better for your business.