Sunday, December 11, 2011

Why You Need to Take a Multi-Channel Approach to Your Marketing

Marketing Promotions is one of the most important things you can do to create interest in your business. In addition, how you present yourself in your marketing is going to have a significant bearing on the size of your customer base, and the public perception of your business. It will affect the type of customer that your business attracts. More significantly, marketing will be one of the key factors that determines whether or not your business continues.

Marketing is absolutely essential, and probably one of the most crucial things you can do to make your business successful (obviously, delivering high quality products or service is also pretty fundamental). So you need to understand the marketing basics and the importance of a multi-channel marketing approach.

The Target Audience
Think about who your business customers are. Before commencing your marketing tactics, ask yourself the following questions:
- Who your desired customers are.
- Where do they live?
- What do they drive?
- How much money can my customers spend?
- What do they value?

What you are doing by asking these questions is clearly identifying who your target customers are and establishing some important baseline information about them (incidentally, this process is called ethnography in anthropology). This is an essential first step in putting your marketing strategy into action.

To keep things simple, your target audience is the people that you want to buy your product, blended with the people who will buy your product. It's important to have both of those pieces of information before you break out of the gate for your next campaign.

Multi-Channel Approach
How do you listen to music? For most of us, it's a healthy blend of iTunes, YouTube, the radio in the car, the television and Pandora. Musical artists know this, which is why they work so hard to make sure their work is featured on all of these platforms.

You should adopt this strategy with your business. While it's a fact that many people nowadays go first to the Internet for information, this doesn't mean that your business can't feature on Main Street as well. You also don't want to ignore your potential local customers in order to attract international customers, who may not be paying full attention to your message.

This is where a multi-channel marketing approach pays dividends. The marketing savvy business owner should look to expand their customer base through paid PPC marketing, organic SEO and natural platforms across the web. They're also going to hand out business cards, post flyers, run specials. They may also hand out coupons and just about everything they can to make sure that their business is front and center in the eyes of every person in their local area.

Keep Your Brand Steady
One of the most important things you need to do is maintain a consistent image. Whatever marketing channels you use, and however tempting it is to represent your business as different things to different customers (e.g. as "trendy" to young people and "refined" to the older audience), you need to keep in mind that your advertisements can be seen by anyone. The brand needs to remain recognizable.

Read More: artsoft

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