Are the old-school marketing strategies enough for our business or do we need the new ones?

Running a business used to be simpler. Now it’s ain’t even close to that. WE are compelled to focus on customers – who are diverse and fragmented, with high demands and little patience. And businesses who can’t keep up with this fall by the wayside soon.

To score high in the competition, it is essential to remain visible. Yes, you guessed it right – it means strong marketing! But unfortunately that’s no easy feat either.

Because marketing is not limited to a handful of TV channels, radio stations, magazines and newspapers. These are all traditional channels and a whole new slew of unconventional mediums have sprung up to reach consumers. Ugh!

There are multiple Online platforms, Social media channels and Apps that are trending now. And we as business entrepreneurs have to make foray into these. Traditional channels are not to be given a miss but we have to seamlessly integrate a whole new range of skills and capabilities in our marketing arsenal.

But, while doing this – there is a point of CAUTION. Do not get lost in the sea of buzzwords and marketing gimmicks. Identify your marketing needs and create strategies that serve your marketing purpose and hit the bull’s eye.

However, irrespective of what our business is, there are few new-age marketing strategies that should come into our kitty soon. The key ones are listed below:

1. Customer Experience Model
: Whether we accept it or not, customer experience is the new yardstick of successful marketing. No longer is it possible and sensible to keep both these separate from each other. Marketers are now required to use tools like CRM software to engage with customers, track their preferences and frame constructive marketing messages to meet their needs and interests. Effective customer engagement will become a baseline for marketing success. It will ensure that customers who are (already bombarded with information) value our messages more.

2. Omnichannel Approach:
Website for purchase, email for inquiry, tweet for complain – this is the ideal scenario for any customer. And this is precisely what we are supposed to render. Do not panic! It’s not that difficult as it sounds. We have CRM software solutions that empower businesses to execute appealing omnichannel campaigns.

How? Let’s find out –


New-age CRM systems
provide a compelling combination of Sales, Marketing and Customer Service. So businesses get the advantage to manage sales, marketing and customer service together from one platform. All interactions happened throughout these stages are streamlined and orchestrated in one central repository. Customer-facing agents across departments can easily find out at what stage every customer is in. This empowers them to engage in a consistent, integrated, valuable and personalized way with the customers and provide extraordinary experiences to them at all touchpoints.

3. Social Media Route: Social media is an instrumental part of marketing — something that seems to have finally sunk into our consciousness. So without further ado, let’s kick off social media marketing. There are million tactics that one can follow.

i. Push your social profiles: Increasing your Facebook friends and Twitter followers is a challenging job at hand. Simplify it by promoting your profile everywhere. Preparing a slideshow? Include your Twitter and Facebook profile links at the end.

ii. Capitalize upon hashtag themes:
#ThrowbackThursday is one of the most popular hashtag themes floating around. Use this and a couple of similar more for building your network. Post regularly and participate in these hashtag discussions to grow your social media following in a snap!

iii. Do Competitor Analysis: It may sound like a broken record but competitor analysis is a golden rule that is applicable for social media too. Regularly monitor the social media profiles of your closest competitors to understand the kind of posts they come up with. See what works in their profile, which kind of posts get maximum share and likes and try to embrace those ideas.

4. Video World: Engaging with the millennial has introduced a new form of marketing i.e. video. Millennial love it since it offers a unique combination of education and entertainment and prefer it to conventional television and radio mediums. If you have millennial as your targeted audience, there is nothing like videos. Create interactive videos and put them on your website and simultaneously upload them in your company Youtube channel. Soon you will see a massive engagement rate that otherwise would have been hard to achieve.

5. Big Data Goldmine:
Those who have used it will surely agree that Big Data (which includes structured and unstructured information), is a goldmine for marketers. Till last year, many businesses have averted using Big Data for their marketing campaigns. But not anymore. 2016 will witness Big Data move to the forefront of marketing and those who incorporate it into their marketing decisions will emerge as the real winners.

To see yourself as one of them, make the first move now. Implement new-age CRM tools that make mining and managing Big Data easy. Get the crucial insights out of the chunks of streaming information and use them to alleviate your marketing campaigns.

Final Thoughts

The spate of new marketing tactics have not risen abruptly. The groundwork was prepared before and these new tactics came into the picture last year itself. Its just that now they are no more ‘optional’ but ‘compulsory’ for every business. Embracing them does not mean that we have to bid adieu to the conventional tactics that we have successfully carried for decades. We just have to add these innovative and creative ones to the arsenal to make our marketing more effective and deliver value to our targeted customers when and where they need it.

Above-listed is my innovative marketing ideas. Have I missed any? What are your new marketing ideas? Which trends do you think will define marketing in the coming times? I would love to hear your predictions.

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