Marketing is no easy task in any corporate setup. It is, after all, a discipline that relates to delivering value to the customer. With the ever-changing landscape of marketing methods, even the most traditional marketing experts will find difficulty coping. Specifically, there are marketing elements that some may overlook in their strategy. 

Marketing Funnels

Albeit the rise of this marketing model in the digital world, marketing funnels have their roots within the traditional marketing fashion. In marketing parlance, funnels mean the stages that a target demographic will undergo to purchase products and services from the business. Marketers often idealize this strategy as a journey of potential targets from brand awareness, then conversion, up to sales. 

In the aspect of e-commerce, marketing funnels prove to be one of the most important models as it brings success through results. Revenue models of e-commerce businesses utilized and emphasized the shape of the funnel model. In the earliest stage of the funnel, e-businesses need to exert tremendous amounts of effort and resources to spread awareness. This is to target a segment of the demographics in which businesses consider it a segment. 

Throughout the model funnel, the process of sales conversion happens by piquing the interest of the customer and inducing decision-making processes. Marketers execute this stage of the funnel by launching a series of informative and persuasive marketing campaigns. The process also narrows down the large demographic target profile into a pool of client leads and, eventually, actual customers.

Brand Message and Theme Alignment

Brands are intangible aspects of the business that helps customers identify and associate them with. It also helps distinguish the business from its competition within the industry. 

Maintaining and establishing a brand is a marketing key element that most small-ventured entrepreneurs often disregard. It’s also a common corporate mistake that even medium-sized firms and large corporations commit throughout their marketing campaigns. This is because the brand establishment is a core element in the overall business aspects that requires pouring time, resources, and effort to succeed. 

A lot of these brand mistakes boil down to how marketers fail to propagate their message to their audiences and customer pool. As with the basics of effective discourse and communication 101, there will always be a disconnection between the marketer’s intent and the audiences’ understanding. Marketers can also fail in brand establishments by not understanding the demographics properly or not reaching enough audience to channel the message. 

All marketing campaigns will be up for naught if a marketer cannot break the dissonance and misunderstanding of the corporate brand. Thus it is imperative to understand the target demographics better and appropriate the brand, theme, and message to them.

Word of Mouth

Who doesn’t want free stuff? Even marketers like it when they don’t need to flush out resources into promotional campaigns. But the truth about free marketing comes with a misleading price that people often misconceive. In the actuality of operations, free marketing is the fruit—a by-product, even—of an established brand. Free marketing is one of the optimal situations where the brand established works in the marketer’s favor. This is also where marketers take advantage of the oldest basic marketing tool, word of mouth.

From the book Basic of online marketing, there is no doubt that the current era of marketers has long minimized the priority of word of mouth. This is because a lot of online marketing specialists argue that while the impact of WOM’s traditional measure is effective, it is not efficient in spreading reach. 

This is where mainstream specialists underestimated this marketing element in the new setup. In actuality, the power of word-of-mouth marketing is significant in mind mapping a certain perspective onto the community. Word of Mouth marketing strategy can create the storm of bandwagon and customer-business intimacy as it did on the traditional setup. While online marketing campaigns are automatic and cost-efficient, WOM marketing is best at utilizing the existing community to build both the brand and trust. 

Testimonies now play a larger role in extending the reach of the brand in a community-based online environment. In effect, when influencers and social media personalities share their positive reviews on the brand, they unconsciously become a free marketing tool. Their positive feedback on the product helps accomplish marketing objectives such as brand awareness, interest, and even sales conversion. 

But for influencers to deem a product worthy of positive feedback, the key is establishing a brand with a compelling story and personality. The business should also put effort into the quality so that the product delivers what the marketing brand promises. Lastly, businesses need to exert effort in distinguishing influencers that share the same values as the firm and if they can bring marketing impact or not. 

Online Presence

The internet is becoming an inevitable aspect of everyone’s daily lives, with over a billion active users every day. With an online movement rapidly integrating into society, there is no reason for any businesses to integrate their operations in the digital world. 

Part of the modern problems that traditional small businesses face is the lack of presence in the growing sphere of the internet. As a rough estimate, there are millions of SMEs around the world without having an online channel. The number means millions of business owners are sticking to the traditional marketing efforts that come with a lot of online trade-offs. Among these trade-offs are opportunity costs of chances for the businesses to reach more people and expand brand awareness. 

As a component of marketing campaigns, maintaining an online presence provides another window of platform for the ever-growing community. Marketing specialists achieve this through opening various social media outlets, starting referral programs, and executing campaigns that induce audience engagement. Adapting a website is also a preferable means of establishing a presence. By employing websites as a platform of transactions, the business can tweak and personalize their content more, which will align with both the brand and the consumer base. However, utilizing the power of the web requires the aid of web designers, SEO experts, and content specialists to achieve marketing goals. As it stands, website owners need to compete with other existing websites for them to have traffic and audience reach in their content. 

Personalization of Marketing Promotion

Rather than generalizing, marketing sought to specifically bring the promotional campaigns to their customers. Specific campaigns manifest in concepts like target segmentation of an overall broad market in general. In this way, businesses can further tailor their marketing campaigns toward their target segment and then another specific campaign into another. 

While traditional marketing calls for simply segmenting a broad market, online marketing steps up the game through improved personalization. The concept here is trying to personalize every promotional material for a more effective way of marketing. 

Marketers in the current era spend ridiculous time analyzing the market more than producing the actual marketing materials for the campaign. This is because online marketing tools are present in displaying analytics, data, and information that would better help marketing specialists decide. There are also marketing-related tools like Google Console, Google Analytics, and MailChimp that are becoming prevalent in automating some of the marketing work. 

Moment of Truth

As Lafley of Proctor and Gamble coins it, moment-of-truth marketing is direct marketing that marketers use to portray an impression of the product in the customer’s mind. In most cases, this type of marketing aids in changing a customer’s perspective of the product. 

These moments of truth happen when they allow customers to experience the product firsthand. In a way, this marketing element is in itself a conversion method that is similar to the funnel methods. Some successful examples of MOT marketing came from the Japanese’s rigid and collective corporate groups. The quality of the product eventually compensates for what the resources in the marketing lack. These Japanese products speak for themselves in terms of superiority in product quality and durability, establishing themselves as a reliable brand even in today’s modern household setup. 

The moment of truth element can shine through even in the current era of marketing. Many subscription-based services and products adopt free trials as subscription features. This allows their potential buyers to experience the product and goods firsthand and retain them on a long-term basis.

Price Optimization

Hailing as a modern strategic business management tool, price optimization allows businesses to forecast consumer behaviors on products with various price points. This is in itself a good analytical tool because of how much it predicts consumers’ willingness to purchase at different levels of price. 

Price optimization also predicts the demand curve of the product, assuming that the business had given the price at their desired amounts. Such forecasts make this strategic management tool a simulation assuming ceteris paribus. Currently, there are mathematical software programs that would meticulously calculate predictions based on various relevant factors aside from price. 

Models comprising price optimization are useful, especially from the marketing perspective. Price models help in properly naming the price of the business’ product. It also aids in tracking the effects of price change. Furthermore, a projected visual forecast of consumer behavior against the price helps marketers understand how consumers put their perceived value on the product.