You have been around business long enough to know about what good marketing means to a business. What you also need to know about marketing is not just the how to keep track of marketing trends.
You have just witnessed a huge change in marketing trends. Think about what is happening to newspapers. Advertising is one way to market yet newspapers are folding because business is taking their advertising budget to the Internet. The trend is away from brochures and ad space and toward the Internet.
If you are going to be smart and keep track of marketing trends, then you must also watch for the trends that take place on the Internet. Five years ago very few companies were using blogs in their business to keep in touch with customers. Today there are tens of thousands of businesses using blogs in a variety of ways to market their products or services.
One recent marketing trend is using Social Networking for business. Twitter was not around three years ago and today entrepreneurs are tweeting to promote their services and products. Facebook used to be for college kids. Today businesses have their own private groups of customers and clients with whom they keep in touch.
To be absolutely clear, no matter how good your product or service, clients and customers will not find you unless you tell them that your service exists. You need to promote and you need a marketing strategy to get you there.
You need a marketing strategy to keep you on track for what you want to accomplish in your business. Today there are so many options for promoting your business you could get lost, spending all your time and budget on promoting with little time and money for doing your business.
Your marketing strategy includes everything you do, from the way you answer the phone to your customer service, to your invoice format. However, to maintain some kind of order and not be completely overwhelmed, I separate marketing into those things that are clearly promotional such as advertising, your brand, press releases, teleseminars, special events and promotional tweets.
It is easy to become confused about marketing terms because they are often used interchangeably. The fact is they refer to different but similar activities.
Advertising, for example, is bringing a product or service to the attention of your customers and clients, potential and current. Advertising usually focuses on one particular product and can consist of print, signs, email, brochures, blogs, teleseminars, radio, social networking, web sites, and direct mailings.
Promotion is how you keep your service or product in front of your clients. It involves publicity and ongoing advertising. Blogs are very good for promoting an event or service. So are social networking sites such as Twitter, Linked In and Face Book. Press releases, websites, affiliate programs, samples and free products are all part of promotion.
Public Relations include ongoing activities so that your business has a strong image to your clients and potential clients. Public relations activities help the public understand just what you do or what you sell and how that will help solve their problems. Public relations is often conducted through the media including traditional newspapers, radio and television as well as internet radio, teleseminars, and social networking.
Viral Marketing is any marketing technique that encourages Web sites or users to pass on a marketing message to other sites or users, potentially creating exponential growth in your business. For example, Hotmail, now owned by Microsoft, promotes its service and its own advertisers' messages in every user's email notes. Other names for viral marketing include: fission marketing, organic marketing, referral marketing (borrowing a term used long before there was an Internet) and buzz marketing.
Your priority remains, however, how you are going to solve the problems of your clients and fulfill your customers needs. Marketing covers a wide range of activities to help you let your clients and customers know that you are the person they need to contact.
Author Resource:-
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