Marketing 101: Tips That Every Marketer Needs to know

As a marketer, there are some things – tricks of the trade, let’s call them – that you need to keep in mind to get the best out of your efforts. You have to know how to start, perpetuate and conclude your marketing endeavors to make them work.

You have to know which means, channels, techniques and methods to use.

There's a lot, in a nutshell. But don't worry, we've got you covered!

Marketing 101: Tips every marketer should know
1. Time is of the essence

Quite literally, in this sense.

One of the main factors that can decide the efficacy of pretty much any marketing activity is the time at which it is executed. The same type of activity done with the same fervor can be effective if done at the right time and useless if done at the wrong one.

Basically, if you pick an appropriate time for marketing your wares to your customers, you’ll be able to get more exposure. For example, a billboard advertisement for winter clothes won’t hit as hard in July as it would in January. Actually, in July, it may not hit at all.

The same goes for the time you pick in 24 hours. If you want to run an advertisement on the radio, pick the rush hour when a lot of people will be listening to it. If you want to go digital and do some promotional emailing, pick a time when people will be on their computers and looking at their inboxes, i.e., the typical 9 to 5 shift. Since you optimize all the ways to land in your audience’s inbox, you’ll be able to improve your email sender reputation.

Since there are literally innumerable products/services that you may have to market, and since there are many different marketing methods themselves, there aren’t any absolute rules of thumb that we can enumerate here. Take this as a general tip.

2. Seek out & target the right audience

Just as choosing the right time is necessary for getting positive outputs from your marketing efforts, the same goes for the audience.

The purpose of marketing is to promote your offerings and get them to sell more. Of course, there can be other motives there as well, but generally, this is more or less the entire purpose.

You can only get your offerings and wares to sell better if you pitch them to the right people. What has, for example, a 50-year-old farmer got to do with a cutting-edge VR device clearly geared toward young adults?

There are multiple levels and categories that you have to level your audience down to. You first have to decide their geographical location, their gender, their age range, their spending range, and the like.

Consider yet another example.

Adidas is a brand, yes? And not only a brand but an expensive one at that. Imagine a store that stocks Adidas shoes as well as some good old Crocs. Now obviously, the method and the audience they will target for advertising their four-figure-price-tag Adidas shoes won’t exactly be used for the 30-dollar Crocs.

I think that did bring into perspective the stuff that we’re trying to point out.

To learn about your audience and to evaluate them properly for your marketing campaign, here are some things that you can do:

1. Do some general research about the type of people that are likely to purchase your offerings. By “general research,” we refer to just looking up online sources and garnering information from there. Do a Google search if we want to be more direct.
2. Directly ask your audience about themselves. This is not a too-weird move. You can simply write emails to them, have them fill out a form on your website, or you can contact them through LinkedIn by using a LinkedIn email finder.
3. Use an all in one marketing platform to target audiences and save time.

Which brings us to our next tip.

3. Work smarter, not harder

Nowadays, almost every other task that you have to do in marketing can be fully delegated to software/apps/tools.

In the presence of these tools, it is somewhat unwise to make all the avoidable effort yourself.

So our next tip is: work smarter — not harder, i.e., using the sources available to you to quickly take care of the otherwise time-consuming tasks.

Since there are many parts of marketing that this applies to and since there are a lot of online tools available, we’ll talk about a few of the latter for a few of the former.

…that means we’ll talk about a couple of different tools that can be used for some of the popular marketing methods. This will automatically give you an idea of what you have to do in your particular situation.

1. Content marketing: In content marketing, you can use various online tools for steps like idea generation, content creation, content optimization, and content optimization. To be a little specific, you can use tools like ChatGPT to get ideas, Jasper to create content, and Paraphraser to optimize it.
2. Email marketing: In the same way, you can use tools to create emails, automate the sending process, and garner insights about your blasts, etc. Mailchimp is a good tool that can be used for all of those. In the realm of Marketing 101, mastering the art of email marketing emerges as a crucial skill, providing marketers with a powerful tool to engage, nurture, and convert leads effectively.
3. Social media marketing: There are various tools that you can use for your social media marketing. You can use tools like Hootsuite to create your social media content and schedule publishing. You can also use it to analyze the performance of your SMM content.

These were some examples of how online tools can play an assistive part in some of the more popular types of digital marketing. Depending on the type of marketing you want to do, you can use tools like these to streamline the overall process.

Conclusion

The tips that we’ve mentioned above are quite broad and general — but helpful nevertheless. If you haven’t been using them already, you should definitely start.