Marketing principles
Marketing principles
Marketing principles refer to channeling the gap between service and product providers to service and product seekers. Also known as a way of satisfying needs.
The Marketing Mix or the “4 P’s” or the marketing principles are: promulgation
- product
- place
- promotion
- price
The concept of “the 4 p’s” has been replaced by the concept of the “7 p’s” they are
- product
- price
- place
- promotion
- people
- positioning
- packaging
These are employed to satisfy a target market’ or target demographic (the pool of potential customers).
Example:
- Product: Procter and Gamble introduces a new toothpaste designed to taste good and fight cavities. Logo and packaging designed in bright colors to appeal to kids of elementary school age to encourage more tooth brushing.
- Price: $2.00, and discounted by means of coupons
- Promotion: television and radio commercials, magazine and newspaper ads, and a website; these use bright colors and happy music, perhaps an animated cartoon character for a fun and family-friendly attitude
- Place (or distribution): Supermarkets, drugstores and discount stores such as Wal-Mart, the Internet has become an increasingly important place to conduct online shopping.
Target demographic:
- Mothers with kids who make toothpaste buying decisions for the family
Creating utility
The American Heritage Dictionary defines utility as “the quality or condition of being useful”. Utility is further defined as any quality and/or status that provides a product with the capability to satisfy the consumer’s wants and needs. Marketing is responsible for creating most of a product’s inherent utility.
There are four basic types of utility:
- Form utility: production of the good or service, driven by the marketing function. For example, Procter and Gamble turns raw ingredients and chemicals into toothpaste.
- Place utility: making the product available where customers will buy the product. Procter and Gamble secures shelf space for the toothpaste at a wide variety of retailers including supermarkets and drugstores.
- Time utility: making the product available when customers want to buy the product. Also the U.S. drugstore chain Walgreens has many locations open 24 hours a day, and since the 1990’s has placed most of their newer stores at major intersections.
- Possession utility: once you have purchased the product and you have rights to use the product as intended, or (in theory) for any use you would like.
A fifth type of utility is often defined along with the above four types:
- Image utility: the satisfaction acquired from the emotional or psychological meaning attached to products. Some people pay more for a toothpaste perceived to be more effective at fighting cavities and whitening teeth.
Marketing Management Process
- analyzing market opportunities,
- selecting target markets,
- designing marketing strategies,
- planning marketing programs,
- organizing, implementing and controlling the marketing effort.
What is Marketing Research
Marketing research is the process of collecting valuable information to help you find out if there is a market for your proposed product or service. The information gathered from market research helps budding entrepreneurs make wise and profitable business decisions.
The key to any successful business is to understand what it is that your customers want and giving this to them in a way that is profitable for you.
Many entrepreneurs make the mistake early on of thinking that they know what their customers want without ever asking them. This can result in some very expensive mistakes later on.
> Types of market research
There are two main types of market research you can carry out for your business:
- Primary Research (otherwise known as ‘Field Research’): this is information you gather first hand yourself through exercises like customer questionnaires or polls.
- Secondary Research (otherwise known as ‘Desk Research’): this means collecting and analysing information that is already available and has been collected by someone else e.g. reports, statistics, websites etc…
It is important that you carry out both types of research to help you decide if your business idea is viable.
>Market Research Activities
Examine existing products / services
Look at other similar products / services on the market:
- Can you learn from them?
- What do they do well?
- What do they do badly?
- How is your product going to be better than everything else that is available?
Examine your target audience
Look at your target customers:
- What are their needs? A questionnaire is a good way of finding out what your customers want.
- You could also talk to someone who is an expert in this area. For example, if you are producing a piece of craft, how about talking to a successful craftsperson in your area? You might learn many valuable lessons.
Carry out a product demonstration
You could show your product to some of your target customers and ask them for feedback before you start selling it.
Keep an eye on the market
Even after you begin selling, keep an eye on what is selling well and what is not selling for you.
- Perhaps you should drop the products that are not selling and concentrate on the ones that are?
- Ask your existing customers if there is anything else that they would like to buy from you.
What is Content Strategy
Content strategy is the piece of your marketing plan and development that refers to the management of pretty much any tangible media that you create and own — written, visual, downloadable — you get the picture.
Content Strategy You may have heard how important content creation is, but as we’ll get into throughout this post, it needs to have a well-planned purpose. Thus develop a content strategy, there are some key things to consider:
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- Who you’re creating it for
- The problem it’s going to solve for that audience
- How it will be unique
- The formats you’ll focus on
- The channels where it will be published
- How you will schedule and manage creation and publication
Why Do Marketers Need to Create a Content Marketing Strategy?
Content strategy marketing helps businesses prepare and plan for reliable and cost-effective sources of website traffic and new leads. Think about it — if you can create just one blog post that gets a steady amount of organic traffic, an embedded link to an ebook or free tool will continue generating leads for you as time goes on.
The reliable source of traffic and leads from your evergreen content will give you the flexibility to experiment with other marketing tactics to generate revenue, such as sponsored content, social media advertising, and distributed content.
And your content will not only help attract leads — it will also help educate your target prospects and generate awareness for your brand.
6 Steps for content strategy Creation
1) Define your goal.
2) Conduct persona research.
3) Run a content audit.
4) Determine a content management system.
5) Brainstorm content ideas.
6) Determine which types of content you want to create.
Marketers filter pages to high vs low quality on sites
As a marketer and as an SEO, there is a process that we can use. We do not have access to every single one of these components that Google can measure, but we can look at some things that will help us determine this is high quality, this is low quality, maybe I should try deleting or removing this from my site or recreating it if it is low quality.
In general as a marketers, we are going to urge you NOT to use things like:
A. Time on site, raw time on site
B. Raw bounce rate
C. Organic visits
D. Assisted conversions
Why not? Because by themselves, all of these can be misleading signals.
So a long time on your website could be because someone’s very engaged with your content. It could also be because someone is immensely frustrated and they cannot find what they need. So they’re going to return to the search result and click something else that quickly answers their query in an accessible fashion. Maybe you have lots of pop-ups and they have to click close on them and it’s hard to find the x-button and they have to scroll down far in your content. So they’re very unhappy with your result.
Bounce rate works similarly. A high bounce rate could be a fine thing if you’re answering a very simple query or if the next step is to go somewhere else or if there is no next step. If I’m just trying to get, “Hey, I need some pressure washing tips for this kind of treated wood, and I need to know whether I’ll remove the treatment if I pressure wash the wood at this level of pressure,” and it turns out no, I’m good. Great. Thank you. I’m all done. I don’t need to visit your website anymore. My bounce rate was very, very high. Maybe you have a bounce rate in the 80s or 90s percent, but you’ve answered the searcher’s query. You’ve done what Google wants. So bounce rate by itself, bad metric.
Same with organic visits. You could have a page that is relatively low quality that receives a good amount of organic traffic for one reason or another, and that could be because it’s still ranking for something or because it ranks for a bunch of long tail stuff, but it is disappointing searchers. This one is a little bit better in the longer term. If you look at this over the course of weeks or months as opposed to just days, you can generally get a better sense, but still, by itself, I don’t love it.
Assisted conversions is a great example. This page might not convert anyone. It may be an opportunity to drop cookies. It might be an opportunity to remarket or retarget to someone or get them to sign up for an email list, but it may not convert directly into whatever goal conversions you’ve got. That doesn’t mean it’s low-quality content.
THESE can be a good start:
So what I’m going to urge you to do is think of these as a combination of metrics. Any time you’re analyzing for low versus high quality, have a combination of metrics approach that you’re applying.
1. That could be a combination of engagement metrics. I’m going to look at…
- Total visits
- External and internal
- I’m going to look at the pages per visit after landing. So if someone gets to the page and then they browse through other pages on the site, that is a good sign. If they browse through very few, not as good a sign, but not to be taken by itself. It needs to be combined with things like time on site and bounce rate and total visits and external visits.
2. You can combine some offsite metrics. So things like…
- External links
- Number of linking root domains
- PA and your social shares like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn share counts, those can also be applicable here. If you see something that’s getting social shares, well, maybe it doesn’t match up with searchers’ needs, but it could still be high-quality content.
3. Search engine metrics. You can look at…
- Indexation by typing a URL directly into the search bar or the browser bar and seeing whether the page is indexed.
- You can also look at things that rank for their own title.,Google Search Console and see click-through rates & at unique versus duplicate content.
So if I type in a URL here and I see multiple pages come back from my site, or if I type in the title of a page that I’ve created and I see multiple URLs come back from my own website, I know that there’s some uniqueness problems there.
4. You are almost definitely going to want to do an actual hand review of a handful of pages.
- Pages from subsections or subfolders or subdomains, if you have them, and say, “Oh, hang on. Does this actually help searchers? Is this content current and up to date? Is it meeting our organization’s standards?”
Tactics To Increase awareness and encourage purchases
Tactics that social media related to Increase awareness and encourage repeat purchases, is complicated. Whenever your Facebook following is under 10K, you will have to make a choice. Do you want more engagement per post or more clicks to your website? Think about it.According to a study from Hubspot.com, if you have smaller following, posting twice a day will actually result in about 50% fewer clicks per post.This means that, your total number of clicks will still be higher than if you were posting only a few times a week, but your engagement per post will be reduced.Conversely, if you post a mere 1-5 times a month, your clicks per post will almost double. This is one of the fastest ways to get more traffic to your site, set set a goal and get posting.
6 Tactics to use:
- Share Breaking News Updates
- People want to be informed about news as it happens. When a story breaks, post an update to your audience on Facebook. Posts that included “breaking” or “breaking news” received a 57% higher engagement over posts that were not identified as breaking news.
- Keep people updated as the story develops. When news organizations posted multiple updates in quick succession during a news event, they saw a 10% increase in engagement.
- Use a Conversational Tone and Include Analysis
- Facebook is a people-driven platform. Let your audience know there’s a person behind the posts by having the Page editor use a personal tone. Posts with a personal tone or clever language receive 120% above average engagement.
- Posts with analysis receive +20% referral clicks. Five-line and 4-line posts with analysis receive +60% and +40% more engagement, respectively.
- Start Conversations by Asking Questions and Responding
- Posts that include a prompt for conversation or a question receive 70% above average engagement.
- When readers ask questions, use the “reply” feature on comments to answer back. Posts that include responses from the news Page receive 14% more comments than posts which did not include replies from the Page. Learn more about the “reply” feature
What to be noticed:
- Share Stories Visually with Photos and Videos to Grab Users’ Attention
- Photos receive +50% likes than non-photo posts.
- Change your cover image frequently to tell your evolving story.
In addition to standard images, graphics and comics can be very effective.
5. Reward Your Audience with Exclusive Content
- Post “sneak peeks” or behind-the-scenes content that rewards your audience on Facebook.
- Use Page Insights to Learn What Content Your Audience Cares Most About and Iterate
With Pages Insights, you can:
- Assess the performance of your Page, see which countries/cities like your Page the most, learn what content resonates with your audience, and optimize how you publish to your audience to grow your reach and engagement.
- View feedback (likes, reach and people talking about this) on each individual post to better understand what content your community finds most appealing.
- To learn more, go to www.facebook.com/insights or click See All in the Insights section of your Page.
Other ways to gain the desired attraction:
- Target Posts to Bring Your Message to the Right Group
- Page targeting enables you to publish stories into the News Feed of audiences who are going to be most interested in the content, without inundating those who may not. Targeted posts will still be visible to everyone on the Page Timeline, but will only be distributed to News Feeds of those targeted.
- This can be a powerful tool for crowd-sourcing content: What if one of reporter is looking to interview Spanish-speaking women who live in New York City? You can target an update to fans that fit that demographic.
- Use Engaging Thumbnails for Link Stories
- Links with thumbnails received +65% likes & +50% comments
- Links with thumbnails and teasers receive 20% more clicks than links without.
- Enable Your Community to Participate Through Crowdsourcing Content and Commentary
- Your community wants to be part of the conversation and content-creation process. Use your Page as a tool to crowd-source commentary or reactions to news events, and feature the best user content on your website, on-air or by simply re-sharing their post on your Page.
- Use a clear and simple prompt: When asking your community for content, make the prompt clear and explain how the content may be used. If you use their content, follow-up with a reply thanking them for their commentary or post.
Tactics for whom may concern:
- Vary Your Post Type – Users Don’t Engage the Same Way with Every Post
- People want to see different types of content, so keep them on their toes.
- Don’t limit your posts to status updates, links, polls or photos – but mix it up. Pages that vary their post types see 9% higher engagement overall.
- Use Pages Manager App to Update on Mobile
- You can use the Pages Manager mobile app to update and respond to your readers while you’re on the go.
- The app also makes it easy to track your progress and Page growth from your mobile device.
- Optimize Your Page for Graph Search and Mobile
- Ensure that your Page description is complete and up-to-date. This will help your Page surface in Graph Search and will be the first thing readers will see on mobile Pages.
While the majority of reader interaction with your content will occur in News Feed, pinning posts will ensure visitors to your Page will see the most important stories on both desktop and mobile.
Marketing Affiliation
Affiliation Is a type of performance-based marketing in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought by the affiliate’s own marketing efforts. The industry has four core players: the merchant (also known as ‘retailer’ or ‘brand’), the network (that contains offers for the affiliation to choose from and also takes care of the payments), the publisher (also known as ‘the affiliate’), and the customer.
How Does Affiliation Marketing Work?
Affiliorama has one of the best answers to this complex and common questions, explaining just how the affiliate marketing ecosystem runs.
How Affiliate Marketing Works – A Step By Step Visual.
Rae Hoffman has a great visual explanation for how the affiliate marketing process works, from the initial signup to the paycheck delivery.
A (Short) History of Affiliate Marketing.
This feature from Skimlinks highlights the history of affiliate marketing, starting back before the days of the internet.
Affiliate Marketing Scams
To some, affiliate marketing has a clearly negative connotation as a sleazy way to make money online.
The big, ugly affiliate marketing scam. The title of this one says it all. Be sure to also check out Sorry, affiliate marketing actually isn’t a (big, ugly) scam for a counterpoint to some of the issues raised here.
Affiliate Marketing with Integrity (A Conversation with Pat Flynn).
This one is actually a video ,that provides some interesting insights into how Pat Flynn became a successful affiliate marketer.
Avoiding Affiliate Marketing Scams.
Rae also has some great insights on how to avoid getting scammed when starting off in affiliate marketing, as well as her suggested reading list.
Extra Money Answer.
Shawn Collins has authored a fantastic multi-part series detailing his affiliate marketing success story.
Pat Flynn Income Reports.
Pat Flynn is a successful affiliate marketer who also happens to be one of the most transparent. Each month he published a detailed accounting of his business, explaining what factors were responsible for his wins and losses.
The Rise of Ngo.
This multi-part series from Charles Ngo is one of the most honest. In-depth accounting of an affiliate marketer’s successes and failures. Getting through all eight parts will take you a while, but is worth the time.
An Interview with Super Affiliate Richard Bonner.
Tyler Cruz and Richard Bonner offer up some candid thoughts on the volatility of the industry, a love / hate relationship with Facebook, and what a day in the life of a successful affiliate marketer looks like.
Affiliate Marketing 101: Learning the Lingo.
This article on Affiliorama gives a good rundown of the jargon you’ll come across in the affiliate industry.