Marketing is your business’s connection to prospects, customers, and stakeholders. It shows external audiences what you’re all about and can make a huge difference when you launch a new product or service.
However, marketing that gets stale can negatively affect your business’s longevity. Consider, for example, if car companies still ran the same campaigns that they used in the 90s — clearly their sales would nosedive.
On the flip side, a good marketing campaign can reinvigorate a tired or underperforming product or service. Consider the turnaround that clothing brands like Champion and Crocs have made in the past year. They succeeded because they understood market trends and have fully embraced the future of marketing.
Here are a few ways to use marketing to refresh your current campaigns and protect your business longevity.
Stay on Trend
Trends in marketing shift on a near-weekly basis. What may have resonated with customers during your last campaign may not necessarily work again next time. A good marketer should always be cautious of previous success and should reinvest the same effort and resources into learning about their consumers before every campaign.
Staying on trend is even more difficult in digital marketing spaces. Consumers are exposed to much more branded content while online, and it’s easy to look out of touch if you don’t understand digital marketing well. The best way to overcome this is to consider taking a digital marketing course that will teach you how to understand trends and respond to key analytics.
By staying on-trend, you can ensure that your business receives intermittent marketing “boosts” that will increase sales and help your business remain relevant and positioned for long-term success.
Going Green
You may have noticed that every major brand is currently running a sustainability campaign. That’s because, globally, 64% of people agree that climate change is a major issue — as far as consumer trends go, that’s a strong one.
So, you should immediately start posting pics of solar panels on your Instagram, right? Not so fast. You need to gain a solid understanding of how to produce green content first. That’s because consumers are becoming increasingly aware of “greenwashing” — a dishonest approach to marketing that deceives audiences into believing that your business is sustainable when it is not — and they will call you out if they suspect your business to be guilty.
Instead of greenwashing, you should run a green campaign that sticks to the facts. This might sound boring, but customers will appreciate the honesty, and you can always find ways to point out the sustainable practices that already exist in your supply chain, business operations, or financial investments you make into fighting climate change.
Publishing authentically green content will ensure that you remain relevant in an increasingly climate-conscious world, and will help convince decision-makers to invest in more sustainable practices.
Brand Identity
If you’re looking for a takeaway this is it: consumers value authenticity. So, now more than ever, you must create an authentic and recognizable brand identity. Consumers can tell when a brand’s identity is too good to be true, and they will not hold back on social media if your brand or business fails to live up to your marketing.
You also need to be aware of basic intellectual property law. It might sound mundane, but IP laws protect any ideas that are “creations of the mind” like artwork, designs, names, trademarks, or copyrights. As a business seeking to bolster its longevity, you cannot afford to step on someone’s toes and risk an expensive appearance in court.
On the flip side, you need to get your elbows out if you suspect someone else is copying your content or is infringing on your trademarks or copyrights. The way you defend your IP depends on the country you operate in, but you should be well prepared to protect the brand image you’ve created. This will ensure that your long-term goals aren’t derailed by competitors, and will help you maintain a clear, authentic identity.
Planning Ahead
It used to be that the content you published in previous years mattered little to your current marketing campaigns. You could pull down billboard adverts, and magazine adverts would eventually run out of circulation. But, to the delight of some and the horror of many — the internet never forgets.
This means that a good chunk of the content you post today should still be relevant in 5 years. This kind of future-oriented content is known as “evergreen”. Evergreen content should never go out of date and should always be relevant to your target audience. This might sound impossible but is quite straightforward:
- Keep it Simple: the further you dive into nice knowledge, the more likely your blog post or video content will become irrelevant or outdated.
- Stick to Fundamentals: choose to highlight “how-to” guides or product features that are fundamental to your business operations or product
- Approach Trends with Caution: some trends like climate change are probably here to stay. Others are more reliant upon events and news. Choose which trends you’ll feature with care.
- Utilize Analytics: the evergreen content on your site should direct a good amount of traffic to your page. To do this, you’ll want to identify and utilize keywords that give you the most bang for your buck.
By utilizing evergreen content, you can ensure consumers keep returning to your website and you’ll lay a solid groundwork for your long-term marketing goals.
Conclusion
Marketing is more than a sales tool. Good marketing can help you spot new consumer trends and can help build a brand image that is strong enough to last the test of time. To ensure that your next marketing campaign protects your business longevity, you should consider leveraging analytics from digital marketing and can create a wealthy supply of evergreen content to ensure your business is easy to find online.
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