Now is the perfect time to work on your strategic marketing plan for the upcoming year.
All businesses, regardless of the industry they serve, need a solid marketing plan to achieve their marketing objectives. Here are a few marketing strategies you can integrate into your next marketing plan to boost your brand and engage your audience.
Adding to Your Brand Identity
Put emphasis on social responsibility and reputation
Corporate Social Responsibility enables businesses large and small to affect positive change. Essentially, it is when companies choose to do something, not only because it benefits the bottom line but because it also builds consumer trust. Social responsibility in marketing focuses on those who want their purchases to make a positive difference. More and more consumers believe businesses should be good citizens, balancing their money-making operations with activities that benefit society.
There are a variety of ways that a brand can highlight its social responsibility and thereby boost its reputation. You could promote that your packaging is recyclable, run promotions that spread awareness of societal issues, donate portions of proceeds to charity or have one-for-one donation campaigns for a needy cause. Company-sponsored community events and activities can go a long way in creating awareness of your business, providing networking opportunities, and improving your reputation in your community.
Become recognized as a positive force towards diversity and inclusion
Diversity and inclusion have become vital parts of modern business as the benefits of having diverse talent on a team have become increasingly apparent. And while it is easy to recognize the importance of having a diversity-and-inclusion policy for your business, often, these characteristics need to be more evident to the public.
One way to emphasize that your business is diverse and inclusive is through your advertising. Ad campaigns that feature individuals of varying races, body types, ages, and sexual preferences can put a public face on your business’s workplace policies. This can help your business resonate with larger audiences and lead to more people trusting your brand.
Digital Marketing Trends to Embrace
Incorporate a conversational marketing approach
Conversational Marketing is a dialogue-driven approach to marketing. It uses real-time conversations to engage website visitors and moves them quickly through the buying journey. It creates an authentic experience that builds relationships with customers and potential buyers.
Through the use of chatbots, marketers can encourage two-way conversations with website visitors. They can send out offers, and their visitors can have an open, always-on channel that is purpose-built for their response.
Conversational SMS technology has excellent potential as an effective marketing channel. SMS marketing done right allows for effective two-way communication with the buyer. The messaging style should be engaging, friendly, and subtly or casually promotional. When you have genuine conversations with your prospects and customers, you build an affinity between them and your brand.
Use dynamic interactive content to boost your audience engagement
Grabbing your audience’s attention can be challenging at times. Interactive content cuts through all the internet noise and gives your audience something refreshing and unexpected.
Interactive content is any content that conveys its message by encouraging user participation. It allows the user experience to evolve from passive consumption to active engagement. Interactivity can appear in the form of calculators, quizzes, videos, and animated infographics. It helps marketers of all industries better connect with their audiences.
Market to Your Customers’ Expectations
Deliver a cohesive customer experience
The customer experience encompasses a wide range of activities, from the moment of an initial search for a product or service to purchase and follow-up care. In most cases, a diverse range of technologies supports the customer’s experience through each phase.
Begin by mapping your buyer’s journey. Understanding the buyer’s journey helps you to gain insights into your customer personas. Enabling you to design end-to-end service journeys across digital and live channels, allowing customers to interact at all levels with your brand and receive a cohesive experience.
Meeting customer expectations with a personalized experience
Personalized marketing strategies can help you leverage your data analysis and digital technologies to deliver individualized messages and product offerings to your current and prospective customers. Customers hunger for brands and products that understand their needs and are made especially for them. These days, customers feel frustrated when their experience is impersonal.
This method is most effective when you target specific moments in the customer’s journey – for example, sending a bonus thank-you gift for first-time purchasers. You can offer an exclusive discount to people who abandon their cart. Send updates about the remainder of their order and extend an open-door policy for any questions they may have for partially fulfilled orders.
Personalization is all about presence. When you make your business available to prospects and customers at every stage of the sales funnel, you become a trusted brand they will likely engage with in the future.
We hope this article has provided you with additional strategies to incorporate into your next marketing plan. If you need help devising a marketing plan, IGM Creative Group can help. Reach out to us, and we will help design a plan using the best strategies to grow your business and brand.
About IGM Creative Group
IGM Creative Group provides advertising solutions, marketing strategy, web development, and professional SEO services to Fortune 500, mid-market and small businesses.
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