How to market your brand?
Marketing is most likely the term which is used for making your product or any insight reach out there, in the market! The goal of any organization or brand for making their product reach out to a group of people in the most effective way requires not any marketing but effective marketing. Now the full disclosure on this topic can’t be conveyed in a single piece and can’t give you all information on marketing that would take an entire class. Basically if you want to expertise in this art, you got to study that in detail and put a full strategy in place, follow it to the tee and stay on the track of this lesson. However, it’s going to give you the tools to simple marketing techniques tailor made for fashion or any business.
Today we’re going to learn a few concepts that should get you started and those are niche marketing or targeting, advertising, social media marketing and guerilla marketing! However, guerilla marketing is not something which is extra popular these days but here we are talking about effective marketing and guerilla marketing has always been one of the safer go-to’s when it comes to marketing for a long time and will always be.
Niche Marketing at this moment, due to advances in technology, the concept of niche targeting has become incredibly vogue in the last two decades or so.
What is niche marketing?
“Concentrating all marketing efforts on a small but specific and well-defined segment of population”
Let’s start from the new beginning of it. Targeting is a single most important concept in marketing. No target no aim makes sense! In the past we settle for the old buzzword, the demography of your primary consumer range, usually this amount to age, gender and sometimes income status but it was often incredibly vague in marketing today means vast to vast and the message is often lost and the target doesn’t feel unique or special. They don’t know that you’re talking to them so today we should focus on niche marketing in the current highly saturated market. Now, making a customer profile always helps you in tracking down the people you have to convey your product and maintain a good interaction with them so write down an example of a person that you would like to sell your brand to the finest detail the exact individual who will buy or buy into your brand. What do they look like? What are they? What are their hobbies? Rather where do they hang out? Where do they live? What music do they listen to? What languages do they speak? What’s their ethnicity? What’s their age, their gender etc. When you’re writing all these attributes down you become hyper. You become hyper focused on the individual that you’re selling to and it is easier to track those individual that are those individuals down or at least the individuals close to the target which is pretty good. We need this core group target because they are going to be the most excited about the brand because you’re speaking directly to them. That’s the power of their voice is what your voice! The voice of your brand should be and the power of niche marketing or niche targeting is relating to individuals that you’re about them. Even with other products making similar other brands, making similar things because it makes your target feel special on the end. Giving them the impression that you care about them and what they think. Eventually, how they feel it becomes magnetic and others will latch on to it. It also becomes easier to get a co-sign or a sponsor from somebody in that community!
You don’t need the one big cosign to start your brand a few well-placed micro influencers can be way more effective because they understand you are watching them and as a result, they are way more excited to promote your brand right which may lead to the bigger co-signers.
It has gotten so popular that even beginning to target this way, it becomes more personal and creates intrinsic ties to your brand. Now targeting affects all of your marketing strategy, it is the most important thing in marketing your customer profile or as marketers like to say your buyer persona should be like a friend and also easy to spot if you described it well. If you don’t have that friend your social media, your social media promotions on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter become highly customized and tailor made for your market, your traditional advertisements and promotional campaigns become more focused and strategic. The voice of your brand shines through becomes solid and knows how to speak to the people you are trying to reach and the lifestyle of your brand will eventually sell people in that target to the idea. In fact, with niche targeting and niche marketing you can effectively create your own army of your own trendsetters! You don’t need trendsetters of big areas. You can create your own trendsetters that become the foundation of your brand spreading the message for you. Add in a well-designed product and you can create buzz that people within your target want to talk about with people outside of your purview so don’t worry about the numbers you get initially. A few highly engage followers can go a long way if you’re patient ask yourself would you rather have 10,000 followers with little interest in your brand or a thousand die hard followers that have high interest that are going to share and be excited about your brand
Point is the numbers don’t always tell the truth you can use these small numbers to make an incredibly well positioned brand but it’s not easy! Don’t mistake of thinking that this is easy but by putting it into action is harder.
So, now that we know how niche targeting can be effective we need to begin to apply to some other marketing tactics that will spend brand awareness now we all know the simple ones and they are self-explanatory but just to make sure we are covering at all they talk about advertising we are getting into it.
Advertising is a visual or auditory form of marketing communication and can be defined as;
A form of business communication for marketing and used to encourage or persuade an audience (target audience, viewers, or listeners; sometimes a specific group) to continue or take some new action
Generally, the desired result is to drive consumer behavior with respect to a commercial offering, although political and ideological advertising is also common. In Latin, ad vertere means “to turn the mind toward.”
Often used to direct you target to your brand and persuade them to buy promotions are often synonymous with advertisements but in street fashion this usually amounts to giveaway his contest and the like you guys know what that is.
Social media has been serving as an essential pillar of marketing at the present age. However, with the power of niche marketing or niche targeting, you can make highly effective and targeted campaigns social media marketing.
For example their promotional tools have become highly advanced in recent years via ads on Facebook. Twitter, Instagram or even YouTube. You can leverage these to create even more effective campaigns while you can reach people around the world it’s possible with social media. It’s important to use the most important asset in your business at this early stage, your local community! Start with the people around you in your town if the reach is too small then your city if that too is small then your state only expand as you feel necessary. Don’t try to make things too big before they happen. You’ll set yourself for disappointment! One of the great things about starting a small business is that you can create organic growth and eventually you don’t have to put so much thought into how you’re going to target but where you’re going to target next.
Guerilla marketing is the last tactic in this insight.
What is Guerilla Marketing?
· Unconventional
· Entertaining
· Thought Provoking
· Cost-Effective
A more complex; requires a bit more creativity but it’s actually quite fun. Guerilla marketing is a form of marketing that creates brand awareness with limited resources not a lot of money and high memorable engaging experiences in this form of marketing. It’s not necessarily directing the people to buy your brand but to engage and talk about it; the secret sauce is getting people to tell their friends and associates about the experience that your brand is basically marketing without them. Knowing they’re actively marketing for you through word of mouth. A simple form of guerilla marketing tactic is the blind-folded taste test you’ve probably seen this before you know somebody’s blind-fold takes part in a test in a highly populated area and guesses which drink as beverage is better or they try to guess what drink it is. The most important of the experiences is not the actual taste test. It’s who sees it and who the person tells after the experience is over its memorable if you didn’t expect to part and you’re more likely to talk about it later is the point. What’s great about guerilla marketing today is sometimes these can become viral campaigns because everything has become shareable due to the powers of social media contrary to what you may believe virility when things go viral it can be quantified by local domestic and global reach so If you’re only getting people in your vicinity that’s okay, as long as the message is getting out an engagement.
If high among your target or people who joined in on this experience to create a marketing campaign or guerilla marketing campaign you have to know what makes your target tick, what gets them excited what could get them to engage, that’s why you need to know your target because every brand is different and acquires different tactics and approaches. You can’t just blind-fold taste test everybody right by knowing who you’re trying to reach it becomes easier to study their movement and create campaigns in their vicinity that they’re likely to engage with or pay attention to or more importantly share or way more importantly directing them to your brand. Just make sure your brand is visible during these campaigns. They have to know it’s coming for you because nothing is worse than make it a good campaign and nobody actually knows where it came from that is a recipe for disaster!
The point is marketing should be the other creative element to your brand and when you get pretty well-versed in it, it can become quite enjoyable! That’s how every career is started, goes into marketing and you start loving it of course this can be circumvented if you’ve already made a name for yourself in the business world. Maybe you want a few contests, or maybe you have some famous friends that can reach a large swath of people in a short amount of time. We don’t want to put out things there. We don’t want to put out things just for luck and because most of us don’t have the luxury of knowing these famous people! We have to start from somewhere and even the Great’s started from somewhere using a lot of tactics.
Talk about for instance James jeb iya of supreme targeted skaters, NYC’s first and then expanded. Hiyoshi Fujiwara was one of the first Japanese to send hip-hop records in Tokyo and solidified his base through that. We don’t want to become a success nigo! The guy who started babe went to the clubs playing hip hop and gave shirts to his friends and entertainment that he eventually met by going to these clubs. Stussy started with surfers, Jim Takahashi of undercover started punk loving youth, Jeff Stape is an expert in branding and created a niche from the beginning and then expanded.
The point is like all these individuals you have to be honed in focused and willing to put a-bit of money not a lot first to create effective market campaigns don’t just put your brand under somebody’s YouTube and hope that people will check it out if you feel it fits your brand to a tee, reach out to them and go from there even if it is a person by person.
So, summing up, that’s certainly not it for marketing. There is so much more to cover in fact you could checkout Seth Godin book “Purple Cow” which does a great job of unlocking the potentials of creating effective marketing campaigns or just effective businesses. All in all, The Game isn’t just getting eyeballs; but getting eyeballs that care!
“Make your marketing so useful people would pay for it.” -Jay Baer