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Published:
June 6, 2017

Marketing For Dummies

Overview

Pump up your business with the latest, greatest marketing techniques

This updated edition of Marketing for Dummies will walk you through the latest marketing technologies and methods, including customer experience, retargeting, digital engagement across all channels and devices, organic and paid SEO, Google ads, social media campaigns and posts, influencer and content marketing, and so much more. You’ll discover what works, what doesn’t, and what is best for your business and budget.

  • Learn the marketing and sales strategies that work in any economy
  • Discover how to engage customers with trust and enthusiasm
  • Understand post-pandemic changes in consumer attitudes
  • Discover new tools and technologies for finding customers and inspiring loyalty
  • Adapt your brand, pricing, and sales approach to make your business more valuable
  • Avoid common marketing mistakes and learn how to measure the impact of your efforts

In a post-pandemic, up or down economy, it’s harder than ever to meet highly complex and ever-changing customer expectations. The top-selling Marketing For Dummies covers basics like sales strategy, channel selection and development, pricing, and advertising. We also teach you complex elements like personalization, customer behavior, purchasing trends, ESG ratings, and market influences. With this complete guide, you can build a business that not only competes in a challenging market, but wins.

For small to mid-size business owners and marketing professionals, Marketing For Dummies lets you harness the latest ideas to drive traffic, boost sales, and move your business forward.

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About The Author

Jeanette Maw McMurtry is a psychology-based marketing expert providing strategy and execution for brands in all industries. She is a Chief Marketing Officer, speaker, and instructor on all aspects of successful marketing. Her blog, jeanettemcmurtry.com, shares insights and tactics for engaging B2B and B2C purchasers’ unconscious minds and tapping into the psychology of choice. She is the author of the previous edition of Marketing For Dummies.

Sample Chapters

marketing for dummies

CHEAT SHEET

You can read a dozen books on marketing strategies for current times, or you can read Marketing For Dummies, 6th Edition for everything you need to know about engaging today’s complex consumers, succeeding at e-commerce, winning the SEO game, driving sales through email, social media, and direct mail campaigns, using diverse channels effectively, and much more.

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Articles from
the book

Here are some things you can begin to do for a new marketing campaign for your small business. Before you hire professionals, see what you can do yourself. Compare your approach to that of your competitors When you compare your marketing approach to competitors, you easily find out what customers like best. Make a list of the things that your competitors do differently than you.
Marketing can do amazing things for a business if the process is creative and innovative. Here are some simple techniques to add creative energy to all your marketing efforts: Brainstorming: Think of 100 new ideas for marketing your business and then use the best 10, or even just the best one. Just do something new and exciting every now and then to keep things fresh!
One thing you need to evaluate before launching your marketing campaign is whether the marketing is growing, flat, or shrinking. When faced with a flat or declining market, consider the following adjustments: Reduce retail stores and other major investments to avoid losses. Look for ways to move your sales online to expand your market reach beyond your current borders.
Today, one of the most common benchmarks for how a brand is doing is its Net Promoter Score, or NPS. This is primarily a score on how highly you rate for customer referrals, yet it’s something many consumers look for when choosing between brands. In short, the NPS is an index that ranges from –100 to 100, which shows the likelihood of customers to recommend a company’s products or services to others.
Sometimes you’re forced to slash your marketing budget, whether you want to or not. But advertising less doesn’t have to mean pulling in fewer customers. Following are some ideas for cutting your marketing expenses with minimal damage to your customer base: Eliminate advertising in media that don’t produce as well.
Merchandising strategy, the selection and assortment of products offered, creates the foundation of competitive advantage or disadvantage for retailers. The more creative the product offerings and marketing strategies, the greater advantage you have over other retailers.Following are some general strategies and ideas that may get you thinking in new ways about your business.
SEM is search engine marketing and encompasses all things that you do to make your page more visible on organic search lists. SEO is search engine optimization, a subset of SEM, and is what you do to maximize the number of visitors to your site by making sure it’s one of the top listed sites on all searches. HubSpot defines the different tactics as follows: SEM involves tactics like paid search or pay‐per‐click advertising.
Although the term growth hacking may be relatively new to this generation of marketing, the concept isn’t. It’s just a highly concentrated process for reaching out to your networks to build direct leads and increase your visibility and position in a marketplace by linking to others’ social and digital assets and creating collaborative opportunities.
Humans seek and form hives in all areas of our lives. Our social hives are usually made up of people who dress like we do, like the same entertainment, humor, and activities, and have the same religious and political viewpoints and affiliations. Professionally, our hives are made up of people who do the same line of work, have similar achievements, and so on.
Learning from other marketers’ mistakes is always better than making your own. This information presents ten all‐too‐common marketing mistakes businesses of all sizes make and how to avoid them so you can keep your sales and marketing efforts on track. Making assumptions Assuming that you know your customers, their preferences, their loyalty to you, and the competitive environment in which you operate is one of the most costly mistakes you can make.
Who does what, when, and where? Such organizational questions plague many sales or marketing managers, and those questions can make a big difference to sales force productivity.Should your salespeople work out of local, regional, or national offices? Should you base them in offices where staff members provide daily support and their boss can supervise their activities closely?
Daily, humans constantly strive to find and associate with happiness, which is something you need to account for in your marketing strategy. Happiness is not only the greatest achievement people seek in life, but it’s also a magnet for brands that truly understand its power.Coca‐Cola has emerged as the beverage company in a league all its own and also one of the top brands globally for sales, loyalty, and brand respect.
A good marketing plan is a credible marketing plan. The best content is newsworthy, actionable, frequent, clear, consistent, attention‐grabbing, persuasive, and accurate — no small undertaking. In fact, a lack of content is one of the biggest challenges facing CMOs today and is the thorn in their side when it comes to using their marketing technology efficiently.
Being innovative can give you a strong competitive advantage in your market. A competitor’s major new product introduction probably changes the face of your market — and upsets your sales projections and profit margins — at least once every few years. So you can’t afford to ignore new product development. You should introduce new products as often as you can afford to.
Consultative selling is just what is says it is: consulting versus selling. Consumers, clients — everyone — prefer to be informed and involved rather than sold anything. Consultative selling involves providing information and insights that help your customers achieve their goals for budget, performance, and so much more.
A brand is not just a symbol, statement, or status. It’s a partnership in which consumers invest their personal equity as the relationship grows. The equity consumers have in a brand is not just the money they’ve spent on products but also their emotional investment.People become emotionally invested in a brand when they Experience service or quality that surprises them by exceeding all expectations Are recognized and rewarded for their business and loyalty Evangelize about a brand experience or product in the real world or online Refer others to the brand and encourage them to purchase as well When all the above happens regularly, your emotional equity in a brand goes up and so does the price to switch.
Times, technologies, channels, and needs have changed and so, too, has the way you connect, market, engage, and sell to your customers. With all this change, the gap or differences in the various generations is getting wider as people’s attitudes, perspectives, and the way they live, shop, and engage with brands is redefined by technology, media channels, and social trends.
If you can successfully execute effective marketing strategies to drive traffic, and lots of it, you can start to monetize your website through paid advertising. The best way to get advertisers for your site is, of course, to build a site worth advertising on because of the interesting content, experience, or community that you’ve built.
Your existing products have some degree of brand identity and a certain amount of customer loyalty already. Often, the best investment in your marketing strategy is to boost the strength of your brand image or improve your design or packaging. Doing so takes advantage of any existing brand equity, which is easier than starting from scratch.
Whether you staff or outsource online chat or call centers, you need to integrate the messaging and tone of your direct‐marketing campaigns with the experience and service that happens when a customer actually calls you. And even today, many still use the phone. So you need to include phone numbers in your direct‐response mechanisms.
You can read a dozen books on marketing strategies for current times, or you can read Marketing For Dummies, 6th Edition for everything you need to know about engaging today’s complex consumers, succeeding at e-commerce, winning the SEO game, driving sales through email, social media, and direct mail campaigns, using diverse channels effectively, and much more.
Successful marketing produces profitable sales. Here are some ideas for those moments when you decide you really need to concentrate on how to boost sales to a higher level: Sell to super customers. Someone who writes a blog about your industry, gets quoted in an industry magazine, or presents at an industry conference is a super customer (that is, someone who influences many other buyers).
Traditionally, advertising has been all about promoting prices, conveniences, brand reputations, price advantages, and other appeals that the conscious mind processes. Yet people don’t always get far enough into advertisements to process the value of a given offer if the ad, content, posts, experience — whatever the medium is — doesn’t first appeal to their unconscious mind.
In order to get noticed, you need to push the boundaries of traditional marketing. Guerilla marketing is one way you can do this.Guerilla marketing, also known as ambush marketing, is all about ideas that are outside the boundaries and take competitors and customers by surprise — competitors, because you did something that took attention or market share away from them, and customers, because you did something fun and engaging that exceeded routine expectations or experiences with competing brands.
The two biggest e‐commerce outlets are of course Amazon and eBay, and both are great for marketing your products to the masses. But they’re different. Amazon offers you a retail structure and will often fulfill your sales as well as offer your products on its site for a fee. eBay is mostly a marketplace provider and offers you the tools to help you better promote your products to its site visitors.
ESP surveys — this is where marketing research gets tricky. It goes without saying that asking the unconscious mind a question and getting a solid result is a difficult thing to do. But a big reason for doing surveys is to uncover the emotions that drive the decision process and ultimately choice and loyalty. Asking questions about how customers feel is a good start.
Although it’s always wise to check with your attorney before making any final decision concerning special offers and how you market them, you should be familiar with the following list of the more common and serious illegal pricing practices, as indicated by the federal laws of the United States. Make sure you never get fooled into engaging in any of the following: Price fixing: Simply put, price fixing is where businesses that compete with each other discuss and agree on prices to take fair options away from consumers.
Upgrading an existing product might fit nicely into your marketing strategy. Some products are so perfect that they fit naturally with their customers, and you should just leave them alone — for example, the original formula for Coca‐Cola or another food that has a taste and effect that transcends generations.
With the advent of all the digital channels and data‐driven insights we have today, marketers face a new set of challenges. One of the biggest challenges is how to manage, produce, and effectively deploy all the content needed to reach target audiences with relevant messages across an expanding array of digital and even traditional channels.
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