Are the marketing habits your company currently engages in helping or hindering your brand?
As with most things, there’s a good and a bad side to marketing habits. In her article, “It’s Time to Put an End to Marketers’ Bad Habits”, Senior Editor Natasha D. Smith discusses how, in marketing, it seems that some companies maintain the mentality that if something seems to be working, that’s how it should stay – even though the marketing world and its consumers are constantly evolving.
Smith’s article suggests that we need to adapt our strategies. In certain cases, we may need to change an outdated method to appease our demographic. In fact, a drastic change from your old method is likely to produce results you were looking for but not achieving previously. However, that is not to say that we need to disregard more traditional methods, like direct mail or radio, as they are still top performers in eliciting responses.
Marketers need to remember that one of the worst marketing habits is thinking that one size fits all. Michael Nevins, Spongecell VP of Global Marketing, suggests that you should use list data to customize your marketing strategy to fit the needs of your consumer. In addition to gaining insight from your customer list data, marketing should also focus just as much on customer retention as it does on new client acquisition. Efforts should be made on winning a current customer for life, not just working through a one-time sale. As cited in Smith’s article, Ted Pyror suggests that marketers “Keep up the creativity. Engage people. Creative content matters. If you’re supplying people with content and information that they enjoy getting, they need or are interested in, then that’s when you can engage them.”
One innovative brand that demonstrates how to adapt to the needs of the consumer is Lay’s. Although they were never short on a client base, their campaign ‘Do Us a Flavor’ integrated social media into an already working marketing campaign. The company is active on Twitter and Facebook with 403 thousand followers and nearly 7 million likes, respectively. Lay’s has engaged customers with their ‘Taste Spuds’ segment and celebrity appearances on YouTube, in addition to sponsoring BuzzFeed videos. Their contests for new flavors and flavor swaps have gained the brand a lot of attention. and the wacky flavors that win the contests drive consumers to try them, no matter how weird the flavor may be.
In summary, examining your marketing strategy and focusing on how you can bring a new light or method to the table is vital. Focus on your customer and the types of marketing that entice them, rather than sticking to the type of marketing that is cheapest or what has been done the longest. To echo Ted Pryor, creativity is key and when you’re able to supply that, your customer is engaged and interested rather than seeing your content as clutter.
Do you know your customer profile? If not, we recommend West Coast Data Services for a customer file analysis. For more info, email sales@a-names.com.
By Karin Robe