mitrobeHelp your agency or company become more aggressive. Cultivate a marketing orientation so you can clearly serve your customers.
Marketing is everybody’s job
Johnmiracle Ejikeme
- Do clients be counted for your corporation?
- Do you observe their behavior, be aware of their needs, and paintings to talk with them?
If so, you already think like a marketer.
What is Marketing Orientation?
Marketing orientation enables you to create and preserve consumer relationships that are important to your corporation’s success.
As such, advertising is anyone’s activity—not just the obligation of 1 branch or a collection of experts.
You can help your company turn out to be greater competitive, through cultivating an advertising orientation.
A corporation has an advertising orientation while anybody works to:
- Understand the customer.
- How do our customers behave?
- What do they need?
- What’s affecting their lives?
- Satisfy the customer’s wants and needs.
- Develop market-differentiated products and services.
- Provide these products not just for customers’ stated requirements, but for their unexpressed needs as well.
- Create awareness and interest in your organization’s products, services, or ideas.
- Produce engaging content and make connections with customers.
A marketing orientation doesn’t require technical expertise. Instead, it’s a continual focus on the question:
Why should someone buy our product, adopt our idea, or try our service instead of someone else’s?
Even if you run an internal service team, such as information technology or human resources, you can use marketing techniques—your customers are others in your organization.
The Complacency Trap
Do you think of marketing as something that’s “nice to do” but not necessary? This thinking can be a dangerous trap.
Guard against Complacency Trap
There’s no substitute for what we make or do. Technology has made innovation faster, and product life cycles shorter than ever. Customers will replace any product or service that doesn’t remain relevant.
We can always cut costs.
That may yield short-term profit gains. But this strategy isn’t sustainable over the long term.
Population growth and wealth expansion will continually give us new customers. Every industry goes through cycles of expansion and contraction.
Organizations that continuously work to provide better value to customers are the ones who will survive downturns.
Marketing’s multiple roles
Marketing encompasses several primary communication functions, including:
- Branding
- Advertising
- Public relations
It’s essential to know how these functions work together. Even if you don’t communicate with customers directly now, you may, in the future.
Social media is opening new ways for customers to communicate with all parts of your organization.
Internal vs. external marketing
In the past, marketing was assumed strictly as an “outward” activity—consisting of efforts to persuade customers to buy.
However, marketing skills can be of use internally too. A marketing mindset helps you identify your coworkers’ needs, create solutions for them, and communicate persuasively.
After all, your colleagues and team members are your first audience—they won’t support your efforts if they don’t feel engaged by your vision.
To market a new idea or project to colleagues:
Emphasize values and beliefs. Rather than just stating facts, help your colleagues make emotional connections to your innovative ideas.
Do something unexpected. Creatively capture your audience’s attention and imagination.
For instance, if you’ve signed on a major new customer, arrange a team tour of the customer’s business.
Design materials that fit the purpose that goes beyond emails, memos, and PowerPoint to share information. For example, print up sweatbands and T-shirts to promote a new volunteer community service day.
Have fun. Studies show that people remember messages better when humor is involved.
For instance, when you present a new business process, include some jokes about the old processes’ notorious sticking points.
Push vs. pull marketing
Marketing communications aim to influence the consumer in one of two ways:
—they “push” or they “pull.”
In push marketing, you “push” the product out into the marketplace by directly soliciting customers to buy from you.
Examples of push marketing include:
- Mass emails
- Direct mail
- Incentives for retailers to stock your product
Be cautious with push marketing.
Customers are increasingly resentful of intrusive direct-sell tactics and skeptical of aggressive product claims.
In contrast, pull marketing engages the customer and creates a desire to use the product. Such marketing efforts aim to “pull” the customer closer to the brand.
Examples of pull marketing include:
- Advertisements
- Social media content
- Coupons or promotions
- Charitable initiatives which associate your brand with good deeds
Push vs. Pull Marketing Orientation Concept
When done skillfully, pull advertising builds a talk between your clients and your brand.
It creates demand, and that’s in the long run healthier on your commercial enterprise than really pushing products.
Develop your team’s an advertising and marketing orientation.
Too often, teams perform their characteristic narrowly, without understanding the customers the corporation serves.
Or they work near their clients and recognize them in detail—but fail to share precious insights with the rest of the employer to help your team increase a marketing orientation.
mitrobe
