Marketing Materials – The First Rung on the Sales Ladder written by Guest Post read more at Duct Tape Marketing
There can be a lot of motives when it comes to marketing.
Some campaigns are created to increase brand awareness. Some are created to generate leads. And some are created to generate direct sales.
Despite the original motive of the marketing campaign, in the long run, there is only one end game — more conversions.
No matter what each business classes as a conversion, that conversion is the reason why millions are spent on marketing each and every week across the globe.
But what marketing materials actually work?
Engagement
Each day hundreds of marketing campaigns are thrust in front of us.
Open a newspaper and there’s an ad for a new mattress. Load up your laptop and there’s an ad for some trainers you at last week. Look out the window and there’s a billboard for the latest teeth whitening product.
Everywhere we look there’s marketing, much of which we won’t notice. All of this marketing that goes unnoticed is either not very good or is poorly targeted.
The first step of any good marketing campaign is engagement. If you don’t get the right things in front of the right people then how can you ever expect them to convert?
In today’s society, there are of course many ways that you can reach people with your marketing.
A spokesperson for the digital marketing agency, Panoptic Media, said: “The fact that it’s now possible to reach anybody in the world with our marketing efforts is an incredible thing. Digital campaigns can be as targeted or as broad and diverse as we like, and from a marketers perspective this opens up many doors for us and our clients.”
But what about marketing that doesn’t happen on the internet?
Many people will have you believe that offline marketing is a dying art, but that’s not the whole story.
There are still many ways in which marketers or business owners can utilize ‘old-school’ marketing.
Take event marketing, for example. There is still a lot of value in building relationships on a face-to-face level, and there are marketing materials that can help with this.
For example, a recent study by digital print experts Purely Digital showed that people are far more likely to engage with marketing materials such as leaflets and scratch cards than a wristband or sticker.
User experience
Having managed to get the initial engagement it’s then crucial to provide a high-quality user experience. If the marketing material (no matter what it is) proves a challenge for the user then anybody who initially engages will soon lose interest, which is a potential opportunity lost.
User experience is something that has become more and more important with the evolution of technology.
There are now many more options out there for each individual. If you engage with a piece of marketing and it’s difficult to interpret or find what you’re looking for then you have the option to move on — and this is extremely true online.
Google prioritizing UX
Nowadays Google is placing a great deal of importance on UX. It used to be the case that with a few high-quality links and some well-written meta and title tags you’d be able to earn yourself a reasonable standing in the SERPs.
Increased competition has meant that this is no more.
A website needs to provide the user with an experience that makes people want to come back. What happens when a user is actually on a site now plays a big role in how Goole perceives that site.
The Conversion
As mentioned, the user experience is key. But it’s also important that businesses don’t forget the initial reasoning behind their marketing campaigns — the conversion.
Getting the conversion from a marketing campaign links in heavily with the user experience.
A good marketer will be able to plan a user experience and journey that leaves the conversion an inevitability.
For the best in the business, leaving things to chance is not an option. Whether it’s a marketing campaign that begins with putting flyers through doors or a highly specific remarketing campaign online there are certain things that can be done to boost conversion rates across the board.
One of the major things that can lead to high conversion rates is ensuring that your marketing targets the right people.
Panoptic Media added: “One of the major problems we often see when people come to us is that they aren’t sure who they’re targeting, or who they should be targeting.
“It’s often the case that people target too wide an audience. It’s always that case that if you’re trying to market to everybody, then you’re actually marketing to nobody.”
When it comes to selecting marketing materials it’s not a case of one or the other.
A good marketing campaign should take somebody on a journey. And whether that journey incorporates one, two or much more different marketing materials and avenues, as long as the user gets what they’re expecting at the stage of initial engagement then there’s no reason that you won’t get the conversion.
About the Author
Aaron Watts is an Outreach Executive who works for Sheffield based Digital Marketing Agency Ignition Search. He is extremely focused and passionate about boosting SERP rankings and driving good quality traffic to and websites. “Good traffic is traffic that interacts and subsequently converts”.
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