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How Specialized Marketing Consultants Can Benefit Your Business in New York City
Marketing plays one of the most important roles in how businesses can connect to their targeted audience that may be interested in the products or services that they provide. In a hyper competitive market, such as New York City, businesses find themselves in situations where they struggle to differentiate themselves against hundreds of competitors that offer similar services. In order to set their business up for success and to stand out amongst the crowd, businesses leverage marketing tactics to get a leg up on their competition. Marketing is a fairly broad area of focus and in today’s world, there are a large number of different marketing tactics and strategies that can be implemented. If you find yourself in a situation where you need to market your business more effectively and are looking to get help with a specific field of marketing, consider hiring a marketing consultant that has specialized marketing skills.
Marketing is a business activity that focuses on promoting your business to those that may be interested in what you offer. The end goal of marketing efforts is to foster a relationship with the consumers that builds a level of trust and entices them to want to purchase from you and even potentially become an ongoing customer. Since marketing is very dependent on relationships in order to be effective, businesses should first understand their customers and what types of marketing may resonate with them to help influence a sale, lead, or conversion. A fundamental first step with developing a marketing strategy is to first research your audience to learn who they are, what they want, and how they may currently perceive your brand. It is important to first know who your customer is before you can figure out how you can market to them.
The evolution of marketing over time has changed how businesses go about acquiring customers. Direct, in-person communication has always been a component of marketing as it is the purest form of connection between your business and a customer. However, as time and media have evolved, so have marketing tactics that need to be grounded in the reality of today’s world. With the evolution of the printing press and the development of the printing industry, businesses began to use printed marketing, such as newspaper advertisements, to get in front of readers that consume printed content on a regular basis. As car ownership began to proliferate, businesses began to adapt by marketing via billboards that are located near roadways that have significant amounts of traffic and potential customers that pass through. Since the invention of the internet, brands have adapted into leveraging digital marketing tactics that can maximize exposure for their businesses with this new technology.
Given how much change, evolution, and innovation occurs over time, businesses should be mindful of different marketing tactics that may be more effective for certain audiences than others. Users consume media in a variety of different ways, including print, television, and digital media. In an ideal world, businesses can leverage marketing across all of these touch points to maximize their exposure in reach. However, taking a specialized approach to marketing can be most appropriate when you want to invest your time, money, and resources into the areas that can drive the most visibility for your business. This means understanding where your audience spends most of their time and how you can plan to reach out to them within these environments. As you begin to look into different marketing tactics and strategies, considering hiring a marketing consultant that can specialize in different forms of marketing. If you are interested in learning more about the different approaches to specialized marketing, continue reading for a breakdown on how marketing consultants can operate within these different marketing fields.
Advertising
Advertising has played a significant role in both overall marketing efforts, but also New York City’s culture and identity over time. Madison Avenue has become an impromptu way of saying ‘advertising in New York City’ due to the large number of advertising agencies that are located in that area of New York City. The relationship between New York City and advertising has grown so strong that one of the most well-known areas in New York City - Times Square - is filled with a large number of advertisements in different mediums from a wide number of brands. With these things in mind, it is understandable how people can connect New York City when they think of the word ‘advertising’. Given this important relationship between advertising and New York City, it goes without saying that businesses located in NYC must invest into advertising to establish themselves in this competitive market. However, it is important to understand the different types of advertising that may be right for your business depending on your needs and who your customer is.
As previously discussed, marketing has evolved over time, along with specific advertising methods. As this evolution has occurred, there are new forms of advertising that have emerged over the years that may be more effective for some businesses depending on the types of customers that they are trying to attract. Advertising through print, such as billboards or magazine ads, is an established area of advertising that can get exposure for your business’ taglines and messaging within areas that are capturing eyeballs. Since its invention, television has captured a large amount of consumers, who are exposed to advertisements each time their watched program goes to a commercial break. Finally, since the emergence of the internet, digital marketing and advertising has evolved to show advertisements on websites and social media platforms that are capturing a large amount of users that invest their time on their digital environments.
As you begin to look into advertising for your business, consider hiring a marketing consultant that specializes in advertisements. You can even find consultants that specialize within unique areas of advertising, such as print, television, or digital. As we previously mentioned it is imperative that you understand your audience and where they spend their time before you can commit to advertising. Once you identify these audiences, a marketing consultant that specializes in advertising can help to determine what areas of advertising you should invest in. It is also worth being mindful of your overall advertising budget and is recommended that you plan your marketing budget to maximize your advertising reach while staying within your defined budget.
Branding
Effective branding is a fantastic way to ensure that your brand name and your image is sometimes all you really need in order to effectively market to your ideal consumer. If your business can foster a well positioned perception of your brand, your brand name can become synonymous with your offered product or service. An example is how Kleenex offers tissues, but they have become so well known to this point that some customers will refer to any tissue as a ‘Kleenex’. If this sounds like something that may be something that your business desires, consider hiring a marketing consultant that specializes in branding and branded marketing.
A marketing consultant with a strong experience in branding can understand your product, competitors, and your ideal customer to determine a plan to make your brand stand out. The advantage of working with a consultant like this is that they can bring a level of expertise to help make you stand out amongst your competition and to foster a relationship with your customers that can make your brand name replace your product or service in the customers’ eyes. These marketing consultants oftentimes have strong, hands-on experience working with brands to develop logos, taglines, and other messaging that will get out in front of your intended audience.
SEO/SEM
Search engines, such as Google and Bing, have emerged over the last several decades as a trusted area where individuals go to find something that they need. The companies that built these search engines developed them with the intention of helping users to fulfill the needs that they are actively searching for a solution to. As more and more people turn to search engines, resulting in billions of different searches occurring per day, businesses have begun to factor in these search engines into their marketing efforts. Marketing that specializes in search engines is referred to as ‘search engine optimization’ (SEO) and ‘search engine marketing’ (SEM).
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a form of marketing that intends to best position your website to rank within Google’s list of unpaid listings as a user performs a relevant keyword search. Businesses often turn to search engine optimization when they are looking to establish an organic presence without having to pay for their specific positioning within the search engine results page (SERP) listings. A digital marketing consultant that specializes within SEO tends to have strong content writing and technical development skills to implement SEO strategies.
On the other hand, search engine marketing (SEM) is a similar form of marketing that is done specifically through the bidding for positioning to appear as an ad for specific keywords. Unlike SEO, SEM is dependent on your ability to pay for your paid listings within the search engine. A digital marketing consultant that is specialized in SEM may have similar skills set to someone that does SEO, but has more experience with managing advertising budgets and campaigns. In some cases, search marketing consultants are well rounded in both areas of SEO and SEM.
Email Marketing
Nearly every person nowadays has an email inbox, similar to a mail box for their physical address. As customers begin to interact with businesses and sign up for email notifications, opportunity exists to effectively market your business directly into their email inbox. Email marketing is a fantastic way to continue to re-engage existing customers and to notify them at times when you need their attention. Email marketing is a form of digital marketing that seeks to inform subscriber customers about recent news, updates, and sales from your business. If you are in a situation where you have an established database that includes customer emails, consider leveraging an email marketing consultant to determine how you can get your word directly into their inboxes.
An email marketing consultant can help your business with the development of an email marketing campaign that supports larger business needs and priorities. For example, if you are a retail company and need to inform your existing customers about a potential product launch or a sale, email marketing represents a prime area to get into an area that is already capturing the customer’s attention. These consultants can work with your marketing and creative teams to put together email titles, imagery, and other taglines to influence email opens and then potential conversions. If you already have a database that lists out existing customer emails, leverage an email marketing consultant to take this list and then use it into their email marketing campaigns.
Event Marketing
New York City is host to a large number of events all throughout the year. In some instances, these might be local events that aim to attract local residents that live in the five boroughs, while other events, such as the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, attracts attendees that come to New York City from all over the country and world. Given the appeal of events in New York City, businesses will often wonder how they can leverage these events to market themselves and gain more customers. That’s where event marketing comes into play.
One of the major advantages of event marketing in comparison to some of the previous forms of marketing is that it is reliant on the relationship that you can foster with customers in person at these events. Some events, such as trade shows, will provide an environment for businesses to showcase their product or service to attract event attendees that may be of interest. An event marketing consultant should have the skills to help make your brand stand out at an event and can come up with innovative ways of drawing in potential customers.