Digital marketing is a sub-set of marketing which uses the Internet, and online platforms to drive a marketing strategy. Digital marketing channels offer opportunities to reach small audiences with a high degree of personalization, thus growing businesses even with lower budgets and a better understanding of those audiences.
Key Advice
Description
When to Apply
Advantages of Following It
Don’t build a business based on product features.
Building a business solely around product features can limit long-term growth and customer engagement. Instead, focus on solving real problems and providing value to your target audience. When developing a new product or business concept.
1. Greater customer satisfaction through problem-solving. 2. Flexibility to adapt to changing customer needs.
1. Risk of limited market appeal and relevance. 2. Potential difficulty in differentiating from competitors.
Don’t wait to have a product to build an audience.
Building an audience before launching a product can create a ready customer base for your offerings. Engage with potential customers early on, gather feedback, and build anticipation. During the pre-launch phase of a product or business.
1. Pre-existing audience for product launch. 2. Opportunity to validate ideas and gather valuable insights.
1. Risk of launching to a cold market with no initial interest. 2. Missed opportunities for early feedback and improvement.
Don’t focus on what you can’t control.
Concentrating on factors beyond your control, such as market fluctuations or external events, can lead to frustration and hinder progress. Instead, prioritize actions within your influence. When developing strategies and making business decisions.
1. Increased focus on actionable strategies and solutions. 2. Reduced stress and improved decision-making.
1. Wasted energy on factors that cannot be changed. 2. Potential inability to adapt to unforeseen challenges.
Don’t procrastinate on testing your assumptions.
Procrastinating on testing assumptions can lead to delays and missed opportunities for improvement. Regularly validate your assumptions through research, experiments, and feedback. When developing new products, features, or strategies.
1. Early identification of incorrect assumptions and adjustments. 2. More efficient development processes.
1. Risk of building products or strategies based on flawed assumptions. 2. Delays in achieving business objectives.
Don’t give up control over your pricing strategy!
Surrendering control over pricing can affect profitability and sustainability. Maintain pricing autonomy to adjust strategies, respond to market changes, and optimize revenue. When establishing or reviewing pricing strategies.
1. Flexibility to adapt pricing to market conditions and customer feedback. 2. Maximization of revenue and profitability.
1. Potential loss of control over revenue generation and profitability. 2. Difficulty in responding to market fluctuations.
Don’t rely on an OPP as your primary distribution strategy.
Depending solely on an OPP (Other People’s Platforms) for distribution can lead to vulnerability and limited control. Diversify your distribution channels to reduce risk and increase resilience. When planning distribution and marketing strategies.
1. Reduced dependency on a single platform or channel. 2. Improved reach and access to diverse audiences.
1. Vulnerability to changes or policies of the OPP. 2. Limited control over distribution and customer relationships.
Don’t forget to tell your story.
Storytelling is a powerful tool for connecting with audiences and conveying your brand’s values. Share your journey, mission, and vision to create meaningful connections with customers. Throughout brand development and marketing efforts.
1. Enhanced brand identity and emotional engagement with customers. 2. Differentiation from competitors through storytelling.
1. Missed opportunities to build brand loyalty and connect with customers on a deeper level. 2. Potential difficulty in conveying brand values and mission.
Seven principles for a successful digital marketing strategy
Let me tell you a few fundamental principles to build a digital distribution for your digital business, which I’ve learned at a costly price over the years, after many trials and errors (you don’t have to).
There are seven via negativa (not to do!) principles I’ve learned:
Don’t build a business based on product features.
Don’t wait to have a product to build an audience.
One of the most common misconceptions is that if you do have an advanced and more technological product, you win!
That’s completely off. And business history shows over and over again that often products that succeed are those that have been able to control distribution processes at the point of becoming market leaders (except a very few cases). So if you’re still holding to this belief, you might want to reconsider.
Don’t wait to have a product to build an audience
Most entrepreneurs wait the moment they launch to build an audience around a product or service. However, that is a colossal mistake and risk. A launch relies on something that needs you to be right to work out.
What if you are wrong? (as most time happens). All the effort and time in building that product and service will be wasted. Instead, you need as early as possible to build an audience, learn from it, and gather as much feedback as possible.
Don’t focus on what you can’t control
Do you have control over your strategy? If yes, focus all your attention to it. If not, give it up and focus on what you can control. This is a simple principle, yet a few can execute it.
Think when your business depends primarily upon something that is out of your control (a single large customer that can break it). It means that a single event can break it quickly. So how do you cope with it? You need to gain some level of control where you can.
Don’t procrastinate on testing your assumptions
While it might take a few hours to draw a business model, especially with business model tools, like the lean startup. It might take a few years to find a successful model. That is why you need to experiment a lot, discover and combine the building blocks and assemble them, so you have a scalable business.
The cases in which you might stumble on a successful business model, right away are very few.
Another big misconception is about monetizing your business.
Taken by the start-up frenzy, many might make up excuses such as “I’ll focus on users’ growth for the coming years.” Yet the monetizable side of a business model is among the riskiest pieces of the puzzle. Thus the sooner you start experimenting with it, the better.
Don’t give up control over your pricing strategy!
Most entrepreneurs that are starting out (especially in digital) might give up control over the pricing of their product or service, due to a lack of proper distribution. Think of the case of a store built on top of Amazon.
Or a Hotel that joins in a large platform where other hotels are showcased (like Booking).
While it does make sense to expand your customer base.
Those platforms are interested in pushing as much as possible transactions, without caring for the single distributor. Thus, they will push on pricing, commoditization of your product, and aggressive pricing policies to promote their business agenda.
If you didn’t take the time to build proper distribution, chances are you’ll have to follow the agenda, of the platform that has a strong distribution network. That platform will squeeze your prices (and eat your margins) and make your service a commodity until it is too late!
Don’t rely on an OPP as your primary distribution strategy
When you lose control over your distribution strategy, you also end up commoditizing your product. That happens because you need to rely on OPP (other people’s platforms) for distribution, which makes your long-term strategy very vulnerable, and your positioning extremely weak.
Don’t forget to tell your story
I didn’t list this as last because it’s less important. Instead, this is one of the critical ingredients for building long-term success. People want to relate to your business story; they want to know its “why,” and its reasons for existing.
This is the distinctive nature of your digital business and what makes it unique among the others. To make sure a story isn’t just about you. It’s about your community. Indeed, a business is often the result of a real problem and discomfort you might have experienced in the first person.
I started FourWeekMBA because I had a discomfort about how the whole model of traditional business schools and higher-level education worked. That discomfort gave me the vision to build this community. It’s what drives me, and surprisingly, many people part of the community share my same pain, and they can relate to my story.
Yet, as an entrepreneur, I also offer a solution, and this is where value is created. Without a story, you might have a company that makes (momentarily) money, but do you have a long-term business model? I doubt it.
Are there shortcuts?
I wish I could tell you so. While there are some hacks, you can test along the way. Most of it is hard work combined with vision, focus, and strategy.
Building your distribution platform is hard, and it requires time. But once you’ve taken the time to do that, that is when you have a solid business, a reliable brand, and an active audience and community ready to support you in the long-run.
Let me articulate. In investing, when you make a risky investment, you want to hedge that with another that has a negative correlation or at least has the potential to cover up for the high risk you’re taking on the other hand.
In other words, the premise of this strategy is that you can take as much risk as you want if you’re properly hedged against it.
A hedging strategy for digital distribution
On the digital distribution side for me, a hedging strategy is about investing on two opposite distribution channels, that might well seem disjointed, but instead are highly related:
Why is SEO the risky side? You don’t control that channel. If tomorrow Google comes up with an algorithm update, or it decides that suddenly your site isn’t worth it, or better yet, it determines the time is on for it to take over your niche (take the example of Google Travel) your whole distribution is in jeopardy.
That doesn’t mean SEO is not a proper distribution channel. Quite the opposite, Google is still among the best channels to grow your business quickly. However, betting on SEO alone has high potential rewards but also high intrinsic risks as you can’t and will never control Google.
So how do you hedge that?
Simple, you attract as much organic Google traffic as possible and convert that in email subscribers. Over the months, those subscribers will become your community, to which you’ll be building a long-term relationship.
Building up a community by tapping into an existing distribution channel (you don’t control).
While email marketing will serve you as:
A hedging strategy to avoid to base your whole distribution strategy on Google’s algorithm changes.
A way to build your community from scratch through direct conversations.
The channel that enables you to convert non-paying subscribers in repeat customers for your business.
You do have control over your email list because you can set the pace of the conversation, decide the stories to tell and have meaningful interactions with your audience. This is critical.
We’re missing a last piece of the puzzle for a successful long-term distribution strategy.
Over time reduce the dependence from channels you don’t control
Distribution is one of the key elements to build a viable business model. Indeed, Distribution enables a product to be available to a potential customer base; it can be direct or indirect, and it can leverage on several channels for growth. Finding the right distribution mix also means balancing between owned and non-owned channels.
It’s fine to use SEO to build up traction for your business. Or to use a single distribution channel for that. In the end, initially, you need to be highly focused, and you can’t afford to master too many channels at once.
Thus, having all your eggs in one basket is risky, but okay. Many digital businesses have 70-80% of their distributionstrategy based on SEO. Yet, over time, you need to balance the other channels. Why? You’ll have financial resources, and the competence to expand and broaden your focus.
Thus, when SEO or the other main distribution channels has become a flywheel that requires less and less of your attention. You can finally spend your effort in balancing up other channels (for instance, social media or video marketing).
But remember, if you don’t control those channels you’re broadening up, you still need to hedge them against your newsletter, or anything where you have complete control over. Never forget that!
Build your digital distribution strategy
A distribution channel is the set of steps it takes for a product to get in the hands of the key customer or consumer. Distribution channels can be direct or indirect. Distribution can also be physical or digital, depending on the kind of business and industry.
A digital channel is a marketing channel, part of a distribution strategy, helping an organization to reach its potential customers via electronic means. There are several digital marketing channels, usually divided into organic and paid channels. Some organic channels are SEO, SMO, email marketing. And some paid channels comprise SEM, SMM, and display advertising.
Venture capitalist, Dave McClure, coined the acronym AARRR which is a simplified model that enables us to understand what metrics and channels to look at, at each stage for the users’ path toward becoming customers and referrers of a brand.
The Amazon Flywheel or Amazon Virtuous Cycle is a strategy that leverages on customer experience to drive traffic to the platform and third-party sellers. That improves the selections of goods, and Amazon further improves its cost structure so it can decrease prices which spins the flywheel.
In business, vertical integration means a whole supply chain of the company is controlled and owned by the organization. Thus, making it possible to control each step through consumers. in the digital world, vertical integration happens when a company can control the primary access points to acquire data from consumers.
An entry strategy is a way an organization can access a market based on its structure. The entry strategy will highly depend on the definition of potential customers in that market and whether those are ready to get value from your potential offering. It alls starts by developing your smallest viable market.
Where scientists use labs to test their hypotheses through experimentation. Entrepreneurs build business model experiments to test their businesses ideas in the real world.Business experiments help entrepreneurs test their hypotheses. Rather than define the problem by making too many hypotheses, a digital entrepreneur can formulate a few assumptions, design experiments, and check them against the actions of potential customers. Once measured, the impact, the entrepreneur, will be closer to define the problem.
In the Lean Startup, Eric Ries defined the engine of growth as “the mechanism that startups use to achieve sustainable growth.” He described sustainable growth as following a simple rule, “new customers come from the actions of past customers.” The three engines of growth are the sticky engine, the viral engine, and the paid engine. Each of those can be measured and tracked by a few key metrics.
Brand building is the set of activities that help companies to build an identity that can be recognized by its audience. Thus, it works as a mechanism of identification through core values that signal trust and that help build long-term relationships between the brand and its key stakeholders.
While it’s important to prioritize on traction in the short-term, it’s key to gain control over time, and where control can’t be achieved, release the focus, and go back to those digital channels where over time you can gain more control.
In this way, you can build a solid pipeline and digital business.
When, and what part of your digital marketing strategy does it make sense to automate?
Automating aspects of your digital marketing efforts can save time and money while improving the functionality of your business.
Increasing efficiency is one of the key goals in any successful business, yet automation has many drawbacks to take into account. And it can also result in short-term efficiency, and long-term lack of impact. That is why it’s important to balance automation always with the human in the loop.
There are however, certain tasks, such as social media posting, PPC campaigns, emails, landing page content, and lead generation that can be enhanced by the process of digital marketing automation.
What is Automation in the Digital Marketing Industry?
Automation is the process of using different tools, services, and software to automate repetitive, complicated, or time-consuming activities.
In digital marketing, automation gives businesses more time to grow and operationalize communications so that companies can take care of themselves without the need for constant attention.
How Can Your Business Benefit From Digital Marketing Automation?
Your business can become more productive, improve campaign management, increase marketing ROI, measure performance more accurately, and generate more leads by automating some of its digital marketing processes. When your business decides to manage and run your marketing campaigns using a clearly defined process, and it’s critical to understand the limits of automation, and the boundaries, so where automation should not be used within your business.
In general, a good rule of thumb, is not to automate things that are the core of the business. For instance, if your business is a magazine, you do not want to automate content generatio. Quite the opposite, you want to personalize, curate, research and create as much as unique content, to make it very very hard to copy.
If you automating that, the risk of creating a negative impact on the business is real.
Instead, by automating processes such as up-sells, cross-sells, personalized reminders, appointments, and follow-ups, you can develop a more effective sales strategy.
All of your prospects and customers will receive a level of attention and care that is unrivaled by competitors as automation creates a more personalized connection between your brand and customers.
By combining automation with convincing, attractive lead generation strategies and lead magnets, your business will increase opportunities to make additional revenue out of marketing investments.
You no longer need to hire more employees to execute planned strategies for each marketing department. A small team of digital marketing experts can set up all processes and guide your marketing department.
Once functions have been automated, your marketing processes will be set for the weeks and months ahead. Now, your core team can focus on in-house creativity and potential new projects.
What Processes Can be Automated?
Everything from sending follow up emails, to upselling products and answering customer support calls can be automated these days.
Here are some functions most businesses use automation for:
Publishing social media posts
Sending out emails via targeted campaigns
Website widget content
Online advertising placements
Data management
Data analysis
Key Highlights
Principles for a Successful Digital Marketing Strategy:
Don’t Build a Business Based on Product Features: Instead of relying solely on advanced features, focus on distribution and market leadership.
Don’t Wait to Build an Audience: Start building an audience even before you have a product, to gather feedback and validate assumptions.
Don’t Focus on What You Can’t Control: Concentrate on areas you can control, and if possible, gain control over crucial distribution channels.
Don’t Procrastinate on Testing Assumptions: Continuously experiment and refine your business model based on real-world feedback.
Don’t Give Up Control Over Pricing Strategy: Maintain control over pricing to avoid being squeezed by platforms and distributors.
Don’t Rely on OPP as Primary Strategy: Avoid over-reliance on other people’s platforms for distribution; build your own distribution channels.
Don’t Forget to Tell Your Story: Develop a compelling business story that resonates with your community and customers.
Hedging Distribution Strategy:
Use a “hedging strategy” by investing in two opposite distribution channels: SEO (risky) and email marketing (hedging).
SEO is high risk due to external factors like algorithm changes; mitigate this by converting organic traffic to email subscribers.
Email marketing provides control over communication and community-building, acting as a hedge against external risks.
Balancing Distribution Channels:
As your business grows, diversify your distribution channels to reduce dependence on single platforms.
Balancing between owned and non-owned channels is essential for long-term sustainability.
Digital Marketing Automation:
Automation can improve efficiency in digital marketing.
Automate repetitive tasks like social media posting, email campaigns, PPC management, and lead generation.
Balance automation with personalized, unique content to maintain brand uniqueness.
Benefits of Automation:
Improved productivity and campaign management.
Increased marketing ROI and accurate performance measurement.
Enhanced lead generation and customer communication.
Allows teams to focus on creativity and innovation.
Account-based marketing (ABM) is a strategy where the marketing and sales departments come together to create personalized buying experiences for high-value accounts. Account-based marketing is a business-to-business (B2B) approach in which marketing and sales teams work together to target high-value accounts and turn them into customers.
Ad Ops – also known as Digital Ad Operations – refers to systems and processes that support digital advertisements’ delivery and management. The concept describes any process that helps a marketing team manage, run, or optimize ad campaigns, making them an integrating part of the business operations.
Venture capitalist, Dave McClure, coined the acronym AARRR which is a simplified model that enables to understand what metrics and channels to look at, at each stage for the users’ path toward becoming customers and referrers of a brand.
Affinity marketing involves a partnership between two or more businesses to sell more products. Note that this is a mutually beneficial arrangement where one brand can extend its reach and enhance its credibility in association with the other.
As the name suggests, ambush marketing raises awareness for brands at events in a covert and unexpected fashion. Ambush marketing takes many forms, one common element, the brand advertising their products or services has not paid for the right to do so. Thus, the business doing the ambushing attempts to capitalize on the efforts made by the business sponsoring the event.
Affiliate marketing describes the process whereby an affiliate earns a commission for selling the products of another person or company. Here, the affiliate is simply an individual who is motivated to promote a particular product through incentivization. The business whose product is being promoted will gain in terms of sales and marketing from affiliates.
The bullseye framework is a simple method that enables you to prioritize the marketing channels that will make your company gain traction. The main logic of the bullseye framework is to find the marketing channels that work and prioritize them.
Brand building is the set of activities that help companies to build an identity that can be recognized by its audience. Thus, it works as a mechanism of identification through core values that signal trust and that help build long-term relationships between the brand and its key stakeholders.
According to inbound marketing platform HubSpot, brand dilution occurs “when a company’s brand equity diminishes due to an unsuccessful brand extension, which is a new product the company develops in an industry that they don’t have any market share in.” Brand dilution, therefore, occurs when a brand decreases in value after the company releases a product that does not align with its vision, mission, or skillset.
The brand essence wheel is a templated approach businesses can use to better understand their brand. The brand essence wheel has obvious implications for external brand strategy. However, it is equally important in simplifying brand strategy for employees without a strong marketing background. Although many variations of the brand essence wheel exist, a comprehensive wheel incorporates information from five categories: attributes, benefits, values, personality, brand essence.
The brand equity is the premium that a customer is willing to pay for a product that has all the objective characteristics of existing alternatives, thus, making it different in terms of perception. The premium on seemingly equal products and quality is attributable to its brand equity.
Brand positioning is about creating a mental real estate in the mind of the target market. If successful, brand positioning allows a business to gain a competitive advantage. And it also works as a switching cost in favor of the brand. Consumers recognizing a brand might be less prone to switch to another brand.
Business storytelling is a critical part of developing a business model. Indeed, the way you frame the story of your organization will influence its brand in the long-term. That’s because your brand story is tied to your brand identity, and it enables people to identify with a company.
Content marketing is one of the most powerful commercial activities which focuses on leveraging content production (text, audio, video, or other formats) to attract a targeted audience. Content marketing focuses on building a strong brand, but also to convert part of that targeted audience into potential customers.
One of the first mentions of customer lifetime value was in the 1988 book Database Marketing: Strategy and Implementation written by Robert Shaw and Merlin Stone. Customer lifetime value (CLV) represents the value of a customer to a company over a period of time. It represents a critical business metric, especially for SaaS or recurring revenue-based businesses.
Customer segmentation is a marketing method that divides the customers in sub-groups, that share similar characteristics. Thus, product, marketing and engineering teams can center the strategy from go-to-market to product development and communication around each sub-group. Customer segments can be broken down is several ways, such as demographics, geography, psychographics and more.
Developer marketing encompasses tactics designed to grow awareness and adopt software tools, solutions, and SaaS platforms. Developer marketing has become the standard among software companies with a platform component, where developers can build applications on top of the core software or open software. Therefore, engaging developer communities has become a key element of marketing for many digital businesses.
A digital channel is a marketing channel, part of a distribution strategy, helping an organization to reach its potential customers via electronic means. There are several digital marketing channels, usually divided into organic and paid channels. Some organic channels are SEO, SMO, email marketing. And some paid channels comprise SEM, SMM, and display advertising.
Field marketing is a general term that encompasses face-to-face marketing activities carried out in the field. These activities may include street promotions, conferences, sales, and various forms of experiential marketing. Field marketing, therefore, refers to any marketing activity that is performed in the field.
interaction with a brand until they become a paid customer and beyond.
Funnel marketing is modeled after the marketing funnel, a concept that tells the company how it should market to consumers based on their position in the funnel itself. The notion of a customer embarking on a journey when interacting with a brand was first proposed by Elias St. Elmo Lewis in 1898.
Funnel marketing typically considers three stages of a non-linear marketing funnel. These are top of the funnel (TOFU), middle of the funnel (MOFU), and bottom of the funnel (BOFU). Particular marketing strategies at each stage are adapted to the level of familiarity the consumer has with a brand.
A go-to-market strategy represents how companies market their new products to reach target customers in a scalable and repeatable way. It starts with how new products/services get developed to how these organizations target potential customers (via sales and marketing models) to enable their value proposition to be delivered to create a competitive advantage.
The term “greenwashing” was first coined by environmentalist Jay Westerveld in 1986 at a time when most consumers received their news from television, radio, and print media. Some companies took advantage of limited public access to information by portraying themselves as environmental stewards – even when their actions proved otherwise. Greenwashing is a deceptive marketing practice where a company makes unsubstantiated claims about an environmentally-friendly product or service.
Grassroots marketing involves a brand creating highly targeted content for a particular niche or audience. When an organization engages in grassroots marketing, it focuses on a small group of people with the hope that its marketing message is shared with a progressively larger audience.
Growth marketing is a process of rapid experimentation, which in a way has to be “scientific” by keeping in mind that it is used by startups to grow, quickly. Thus, the “scientific” here is not meant in the academic sense. Growth marketing is expected to unlock growth, quickly and with an often limited budget.
Guerrilla marketing is an advertising strategy that seeks to utilize low-cost and sometimes unconventional tactics that are high impact. First coined by Jay Conrad Levinson in his 1984 book of the same title, guerrilla marketing works best on existing customers who are familiar with a brand or product and its particular characteristics.
Hunger marketing is a marketing strategy focused on manipulating consumer emotions. By bringing products to market with an attractive price point and restricted supply, consumers have a stronger desire to make a purchase.
Integrated marketing communication (IMC) is an approach used by businesses to coordinate and brand their communication strategies. Integrated marketing communication takes separate marketing functions and combines them into one, interconnected approach with a core brand message that is consistent across various channels. These encompass owned, earned, and paid media. Integrated marketing communication has been used to great effect by companies such as Snapchat, Snickers, and Domino’s.
Inbound marketing is a marketing strategy designed to attract customers to a brand with content and experiences that they derive value from. Inbound marketing utilizes blogs, events, SEO, and social media to create brand awareness and attract targeted consumers. By attracting or “drawing in” a targeted audience, inbound marketing differs from outbound marketing which actively pushes a brand onto consumers who may have no interest in what is being offered.
Integrated marketing describes the process of delivering consistent and relevant content to a target audience across all marketing channels. It is a cohesive, unified, and immersive marketing strategy that is cost-effective and relies on brand identity and storytelling to amplify the brand to a wider and wider audience.
The marketing mix is a term to describe the multi-faceted approach to a complete and effective marketing plan. Traditionally, this plan included the four Ps of marketing: price, product, promotion, and place. But the exact makeup of a marketing mix has undergone various changes in response to new technologies and ways of thinking. Additions to the four Ps include physical evidence, people, process, and even politics.
Marketing myopia is the nearsighted focus on selling goods and services at the expense of consumer needs. Marketing myopia was coined by Harvard Business School professor Theodore Levitt in 1960. Originally, Levitt described the concept in the context of organizations in high-growth industries that become complacent in their belief that such industries never fail.
Marketing personas give businesses a general overview of key segments of their target audience and how these segments interact with their brand. Marketing personas are based on the data of an ideal, fictional customer whose characteristics, needs, and motivations are representative of a broader market segment.
Meme marketing is any marketing strategy that uses memes to promote a brand. The term “meme” itself was popularized by author Richard Dawkins over 50 years later in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene. In the book, Dawkins described how ideas evolved and were shared across different cultures. The internet has enabled this exchange to occur at an exponential rate, with the first modern memes emerging in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Microtargeting is a marketing strategy that utilizes consumer demographic data to identify the interests of a very specific group of individuals. Like most marketing strategies, the goal of microtargeting is to positively influence consumer behavior.
Multichannel marketing executes a marketing strategy across multiple platforms to reach as many consumers as possible. Here, a platform may refer to product packaging, word-of-mouth advertising, mobile apps, email, websites, or promotional events, and all the other channels that can help amplify the brand to reach as many consumers as possible.
Multi-level marketing (MLM), otherwise known as network or referral marketing, is a strategy in which businesses sell their products through person-to-person sales. When consumers join MLM programs, they act as distributors. Distributors make money by selling the product directly to other consumers. They earn a small percentage of sales from those that they recruit to do the same – often referred to as their “downline”.
The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a measure of the ability of a product or service to attract word-of-mouth advertising. NPS is a crucial part of any marketing strategy since attracting and then retaining customers means they are more likely to recommend a business to others.
Neuromarketing information is collected by measuring brain activity related to specific brain functions using sophisticated and expensive technology such as MRI machines. Some businesses also choose to make inferences of neurological responses by analyzing biometric and heart-rate data.
Neuromarketing is the domain of large companies with similarly large budgets or subsidies. These include Frito-Lay, Google, and The Weather Channel.
Newsjacking as a marketing strategy was popularised by David Meerman Scott in his book Newsjacking: How to Inject Your Ideas into a Breaking News Story and Generate Tons of Media Coverage. Newsjacking describes the practice of aligning a brand with a current event to generate media attention and increase brand exposure.
A microniche is a subset of potential customers within a niche. In the era of dominating digital super-platforms, identifying a microniche can kick off the strategy of digital businesses to prevent competition against large platforms. As the microniche becomes a niche, then a market, scale becomes an option.
We can define pull and push marketing from the perspective of the target audience or customers. In push marketing, as the name suggests, you’re promoting a product so that consumers can see it. In a pull strategy, consumers might look for your product or service drawn by its brand.
Real-time marketing is as exactly as it sounds. It involves in-the-moment marketing to customers across any channel based on how that customer is interacting with the brand.
Relationship marketing involves businesses and their brands forming long-term relationships with customers. The focus of relationship marketing is to increase customer loyalty and engagement through high-quality products and services. It differs from short-term processes focused solely on customer acquisition and individual sales.
Reverse marketing describes any marketing strategy that encourages consumers to seek out a product or company on their own. This approach differs from a traditional marketing strategy where marketers seek out the consumer.
Remarketing involves the creation of personalized and targeted ads for consumers who have already visited a company’s website. The process works in this way: as users visit a brand’s website, they are tagged with cookies that follow the users, and as they land on advertising platforms where retargeting is an option (like social media platforms) they get served ads based on their navigation.
Sensory marketing describes any marketing campaign designed to appeal to the five human senses of touch, taste, smell, sight, and sound. Technologies such as artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and the Internet of Things (IoT) are enabling marketers to design fun, interactive, and immersive sensory marketing brand experiences. Long term, businesses must develop sensory marketing campaigns that are relevant and effective in eCommerce.
Services marketing originated as a separate field of study during the 1980s. Researchers realized that the unique characteristics of services required different marketing strategies to those used in the promotion of physical goods. Services marketing is a specialized branch of marketing that promotes the intangible benefits delivered by a company to create customer value.
Sustainable marketing describes how a business will invest in social and environmental initiatives as part of its marketing strategy. Also known as green marketing, it is often used to counteract public criticism around wastage, misleading advertising, and poor quality or unsafe products.
Word-of-mouth marketing is a marketing strategy skewed toward offering a great experience to existing customers and incentivizing them to share it with other potential customers. That is one of the most effective forms of marketing as it enables a company to gain traction based on existing customers’ referrals. When repeat customers become a key enabler for the brand this is one of the best organic and sustainable growth marketing strategies.
360 marketing is a marketing campaign that utilizes all available mediums, channels, and consumer touchpoints. 360 marketing requires the business to maintain a consistent presence across multiple online and offline channels. This ensures it does not miss potentially lucrative customer segments. By its very nature, 360 marketing describes any number of different marketing strategies. However, a broad and holistic marketing strategy should incorporate a website, SEO, PPC, email marketing, social media, public relations, in-store relations, and traditional forms of advertising such as television.
Gennaro is the creator of FourWeekMBA, which reached about four million business people, comprising C-level executives, investors, analysts, product managers, and aspiring digital entrepreneurs in 2022 alone | He is also Director of Sales for a high-tech scaleup in the AI Industry | In 2012, Gennaro earned an International MBA with emphasis on Corporate Finance and Business Strategy.
