Marketing is such a ubiquitous business term, such a staple of what you’re expected to include as a part of your operations, that it’s hard to disentangle it from your central service. Before you even get into business properly, when you’re still working on your business plan, you might even start to think of some ideas about what your marketing would look like—who it would target, and how it would go about doing that.
It’s easy, then, to think about marketing in general terms. What about the specifics, though? As you might have thought about what kind of marketing would work specifically for your business, what kind of marketing is particular to your industry?
Industry-Specific Marketing
With different industries aiming to serve completely different audiences, working in entirely distinct fields, it makes sense that the marketing would change based on the service being offered. For example, someone in software wouldn’t need to make themselves seem appealing in the same way that someone in construction would—the needs of the client are entirely different. This means that the associations of quality are different. What’s expected of a business then shifts completely. One industry might prefer to be looked at as being hands-off and as unintrusive as possible, while others would benefit from taking care of every aspect of any given process.
This also means that marketing around these different industries has led to different resources being available. Marketing experts who work within different areas mean that there are professionals like Rsmconnect.com that are entirely dedicated toward construction marketing. The skills that would be needed to make successful marketing content here are different to what might be needed in other areas.
The Basics
However, while the outward appearance of the marketing content might change, and the specifics that lead to successful marketing could vary, is there a baseline of basic skills? For example, could you boil any given example of marketing down to the point where it’s indistinguishable from marketing from another industry?
There are aspects of your business that will be the same as every other business, across industries. You have a product or a service that you want to sell to audiences, and your marketing is there to promote that product. As simplistic as this might seem, it’s a core truth that ultimately leads to all marketing sharing in the same goal, and this means that there are going to be similarities in the psychological tactics that you use to try and sway new customers toward your brand.
So, there might be some basic throughlines after all. However, the way that these basics can be adapted and morphed into multiple forms depending on the needs of the particular brand gives way to an incredible variety of outcomes. There are so many differences along this spectrum that it can be difficult to see the basic continuity between any form of marketing as a connective tissue.
The Role of Interaction
There’s an aspect of marketing, especially in the digital age, where your audiences can be seen as participants in the process rather than straightforward recipients. With the presence of social media marketing, for example, your content can be commented on and shared.
A successful piece of social media marketing will see people sharing it across multiple pages to entirely new audiences. Therefore, in order for this marketing to be successful, you’ll want it to successfully pique that discussion. Furthermore, having the opportunity to interact with your customers in the comments can mean that this more spontaneous discussion can become an extension of the marketing itself.
This is extended through the presence of user reviews. While this is an aspect of your brand awareness that’s outside of your control, positive user reviews can function as marketing in themselves. Therefore, you have a situation where your audiences are creating marketing for your brand without any sort of prompting, though many businesses also prompt for reviews because of the advantage that it can have.
This idea of the audience as being an important, independent factor in the world of marketing can transcend these industry lines, affecting the way that any brand engages with their audience. This isn’t even a new idea that has only come with digital marketing, it’s present as well with word-of-mouth marketing. The value of a positive user experience means that they’re more likely to tell their friends about it, potentially improving both your awareness and your reputation. This makes quality of service a priority for absolutely every business.
