The term “marketing” encompasses a wide range of activities, goals, and strategies. If you are not an expert in the field, it can be a lot to try to understand. In this blog, we are answering some commonly asked questions about marketing to help with some of the confusion out there. Let’s get into it!
What is the difference between advertising and marketing?
While advertising and marketing are sometimes used interchangeably, they are not the same thing. Advertising is the paid promotion of a company, its products, or its services in order to distribute information and gain potential customers. This can include things such as paid social media posts, billboards, and sponsored content. Advertising is only a part of marketing.
Marketing is all the activities a brand engages in to promote itself, its products, or its services. This can include advertisements, but also content marketing, logo creation, interior branding, building a website, organic social media content, blogging, and so much more.
Why is marketing important?
In today’s fast-paced, oversaturated world, marketing is essential to get your company’s name out there and obtain customers. Even if your product is better, your customer service is faster, or your company has better values, competitors will win every time if consumers don’t know you exist.
What is a marketing plan?
A marketing plan is a document that defines a marketing strategy for a company in order to reach their targeted audience and to track their marketing strategies over a period of time. This plan includes research, goal-setting, and positioning oneself in the competitive landscape and consumers’ minds. Marketing plans can be broken down into goals accomplished by campaigns and objectives and specific strategies and metrics to achieve them.
What is social media marketing?
Social media marketing is the combination of paid and organic social media content that a brand posts to promote itself and its products/services. This content can be focused on one social media platform or across several. It can include a consistent posting schedule, social media campaigns, boosted posts, sponsored content, paid advertisements, and more.
Unfortunately, there is no definitive answer for this one. While social media is essential to many companies’ marketing strategies, different social media platforms work best for different companies. For example, a B2B company may find more success on LinkedIn, whereas a B2C company may have better luck on Instagram. This can also change depending on what a company is selling or who its audience is. The key is to find the platforms that work best for your content while reaching your target audience and focus on those!
What is a marketing campaign?
A marketing campaign is a set of marketing activities designed to achieve a pre-determined goal over a set period of time. This can include organic content, paid advertising, events, or even a new product launch. These activities are usually related or centred around a theme in order to complete objectives and move a company closer to its goal.
This goal may be to spread awareness about the company or a product line, answer a question or solve a pain point, gain leads or potential customers, appeal to a new audience, or so much more. Defining metrics to ensure your goal is measurably met is a crucial component of a successful marketing campaign.
What is content marketing?
The goal of content marketing is to provide valuable, genuinely helpful information to consumers for free, in order to create a relationship with them based on trust, which eventually leads them to make a purchase. This content might include blogs, organic social media posts, information on your website, how-to videos, or even FAQ pages. All of these content types are focused on providing what the consumer needs rather than making a sales pitch.
What is SEO?
Search engine optimization, or SEO, is comprised of the actions your company can take to improve search engines’ ability to read and index your website content and, therefore, your ranking on the search engine results pages (SERPs). This can include technical SEO, keywords, structured data, backlinks, internal links, content quality, and so much more. Ultimately, SEO can make or break your website’s visibility.
Do you really need a blog?
While not every company needs a blog, it can provide many benefits. Blogs allow companies to integrate keywords into their content, build topical authority in their field, and provide consumers with helpful information. This can help with your website’s SEO and SERP ranking while also building relationships with potential customers and leading them toward making a purchase.
What is interior branding?
Interior branding has to do with a company’s integration of its logo, aesthetic, brand colours, brand values, etc., into its location’s interior design. This can help a company’s space feel cohesive with its overall brand identity and create a positive customer experience. Plants or a moss wall could align with environmental brand values, furniture or lighting could contribute to a cozy aesthetic, or a well-placed logo or brand colour could help create consistency and recognition.
We hope this blog helped answer some of your questions about marketing. If you have more questions or need assistance with your marketing, our experts are happy to help. Contact unLOCKEd today or check out our website!
Author: Sarah Murphy
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