In this article we share A Marketing Guide to Promoting Yourself in the 21st Century.
Marketing has been one of the cornerstones of running a business ever since the dawn of the industry. Without it, the public would not know what you offer and why they should use your service. For most of the 20th century, marketing was easy, and most companies had got it down to an exact science.
Depending on your budget, all you needed was the resources to occupy space with your marketing materials. You could do this with posters, on TV, or on the radio so long as you are informative about your business and why people should use you over the competition. However, marketing has changed a lot in a very short space of time.
Digital tools and smart technology have meant that the marketing strategies of the previous century are now outdated. In the modern era, you need to use several different tools to get your message across. So, how do you market yourself in the 21st century?
Table of Contents
Viral Marketing
Remember when you had to be super informative in your marketing materials? Well, all of that has gone out of the window in the last few years. Instead of creating an advertising campaign that keeps your intended audience informed, the goal in recent times has been getting your marketing tools shared between as many people as possible using viral marketing.
A viral marketing campaign is a tool that uses the speed and mass audience pull of a social media site to your advantage. It only takes a person a second to decide if they find something worth sharing to their friends and other platform users.
As such, the aim of a lot of viral marketing strategies is to create a funny or quirky video to get people talking. Doing so shares your marketing materials around the web much faster than they would otherwise get around. The only information you would need to include in a strategy like this is your company name.
Less Formal
There was a time when you would never think of making a joke at one of your customer’s expenses. However, social media has made this a desirable trait for a lot of modern businesses. The younger generation is far more likely to head to social media to find entertaining content. That is where you can come in.
Many big companies now choose to have someone running their social media accounts. This means that there is always someone there to answer any customer queries or questions that they may have regarding your business.
Although, a lot of businesses have found that these social media experts are better used to getting people’s attention. Again, it is all about getting people talking about you in the online space. Therefore, you can afford to be less formal when talking to customers on social media than you would in person.
PDFs
The constant stream of content on the internet means that you do have to use certain strategies to differentiate your business. While a company website is always essential in the modern marketing landscape, you can also benefit from having some PDF documents around on Google.
Almost every search engine will yield hundreds of HTML sites for your search criteria, all of which have the same layout and effect. However, a compressed PDF document is varied enough that it makes people pause when opening the link.
This diversity in online marketing content can ensure that you reach a wide array of potential customers. Of course, you will need to fill your PDF content with helpful information and use SEO tools to ensure that your materials actually show up in a search. However, these documents may be more appealing to certain demographics on the web than a standard company site.
What was once intended as an easy-to-use communication has now become a marketer’s dream. Email is one of the most communication methods in the 21st century, which means that almost everyone has an account that they need to check every day.
As a result, many modern businesses can use this technology as a way to grab people’s attention. Some retail stores even use email as a way to provide a customer receipt. Not only does this strategy help to reduce paper waste, but it also puts the company name and brand in your eyeline the next time you log into your account.
This type of exposure is difficult to achieve, which is why some companies are even happy to engage in spam email campaigns to get your attention.
Also, emails can be used to gain customer feedback. A quick follow-up email to a customer can help you receive some much-needed feedback and cements your brand name into their email inbox forever.
SEO
While a quick email might be enough to get your company’s name in the minds of your customers, most people use the internet to search for the services they need rather than a specific company. How can you ensure that they choose your business and not a competitor? The answer is search engine optimization.
Whenever someone uses a search engine, the results bring up a list of thousands of results based on relevancy to the words used in the search bar. SEO aims to use this knowledge to provide your website with enough keywords associated with your services so that your site appears higher on the search rankings.
Most people do not want to spend time clicking through all the search results, so placing higher in a search engine’s results page helps to ensure that your company receives more business. The more visitors to your company website, the more sales you are likely to make.
Summary
The 21st century has brought about a lot of changes to the marketing world in just over twenty years. What’s more, every new marketing strategy in the future is likely to evolve from one of these existing concepts. That is why it is definitely worth researching and becoming familiar with how to promote yourself in the 21st century.
Join The Logo Community
We hope you enjoyed A Marketing Guide to Promoting Yourself in the 21st Century. If you would like more personal tips, advice, insights, and access to our community threads and other goodies, join me in our community.
You can comment directly on the posts and have a discussion with Andrew, the Founder of The Logo Creative.
*TIP – We recommend Skillshare to learn online. There are tons of classes for everything including graphic design, web design, marketing, branding and business-related courses. Get a free trial with our link and you won’t regret it Trust us!
