How many different marketing techniques could you name? Broadly speaking, ignoring the sub-types (like say Guerrilla Marketing), here is a list many of which complement one another and intertwine:
1- Content Marketing: The essence of marketing is propagating content towards a target audience and creating a response and emotion – need or want. Think corporate brochures, but also think more modern and digital techniques as described below. Even media marketing is a type of content marketing. Why did they have a blast in Las Vegas in The Hangover and not in Saskatoon?
2- Program Marketing: Devising programs and incentives to attract one’s target audience to one’s goods or services. Every large corporation has programs to entice its customers or channels to engage and get involved. The goal here is to create a win-win mix.
3- Mail Marketing: Mail as in postal mail. Higher budgeted perhaps, but more and more special and exclusive. American Express occasionally sends out electronic goods to its top borrowers. A corporation I worked for mailed out wine bottles to top customers, while another sent PlayStation Controllers with the promise of a console to follow if certain requests were met. Even simple invitation and seasonal cards are part of this type of marketing. The word ‘chachka’ comes to mind here.
4- Internet Marketing: sub-types include SEO (Search Engine Optimization) where a name, website, key word(s) or description is propelled towards the top of a search engine results (search for ‘best drink in the world’ and lose faith in the Internet when Vodka comes up). E-mail marketing including spam and legitimate opt-in mailing list to an interested targeted audience. With the latter getting the frequency is paramount. Sending too many messages will result in consumer dissonance and legitimate opt-outs, while too few messages lose their efficiency and certainly might leave a potential unfulfilled. Newer and prevalent marketing types that are related are Mobile Marketing (the returning Beavis & Butthead have an exclusive mobile presence on Virgin Mobile phones) and Social Media Marketing, which has transformed Facebook or Twitter from places where people connected to places where brands grab and measure audiences. Adobe, for example, has an active and dedicated group dedicated to measuring, monitoring and engaging buyers, customers and happy/unhappy users on Social Media.
5- A favourite of marketers is Event Marketing. Companies appear and participate at relevant fora where the company’s target audience might be present. Marketers target both horizontal (usually competitive or complementary goods and services) and vertical (value chain) potentials for their business. There is a whole outsourced industry that has sprung up to facilitate event marketing from hospitality and transportation to banners and printed material.
Clearly, all sales are part of the marketing mix (and vice-versa) whether they are inbound, outbound, internet-based or face-to-face. Marketing is about relevancy of material and message.
Perhaps a future article will deal with analytics and monitoring software that has sprung up around marketing. These include the data processed, measured and sold by Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and others.
Do any of these marketing types not belong here? Could you add more?
Great article, thank you again for writing.
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