Marketing is a vast field, and it is common for beginners to get overwhelmed. The truth is that even marketers who get overwhelmed are too focused on specific things that they do not think about new or different aspects of marketing. Whether you have been in the field for many years or are just getting started, keeping the following things in mind will help you tremendously.
Colour Psychology and Its Effects
Colour has a massive impact on humans. It can change our mood, make us take specific actions, or cause us to feel specific emotions. Marketers can leverage this in marketing if they understand colour psychology. It studies how different colours affect our behaviours, perceptions and emotions. It also studies and explains how marketers can use their understanding of it to create more effective advertising, branding, and product design strategies.
Some of the core principles of colour psychology include:
- The relationship between colour and branding
- Cultural and social influences on colour perception and meanings
- How colours affect consumer behaviour
- How colour affects our visual priorities
Marketers should understand that colour psychology, although effective, is not an exact science as its results can be influenced by numerous factors, including cultural backgrounds and personal experiences.
Customer Experience Marketing
Customer experience marketing entails designing and delivering stellar, positive, and meaningful customer experiences and interactions at all points customers interact with a business. It also covers doing the same throughout their customer journey.
Customer experience marketing requires businesses to shift their mindset from acquisition to long-term relationship building. Doing the latter requires creating the experiences described above, community building, and personalisation throughout all communication channels.
Community building helps businesses secret stronger customer relationships, making it much easier to turn them into brand advocates later and enhance loyalty.
Personalisation requires that businesses see customers as individuals and not as a monolith or single demographic. Using data analytics, businesses can learn as much as they can about customers and then use this information to provide highly personalised experiences across various touchpoints. These include emails, on their ecommerce website, or at the store when checking out.
Using Emotion in Marketing
Like colour, emotions are a significant driver of our actions. Businesses that put effort into understanding human emotions tend to perform much better with their marketing efforts. One of the most commonly used tools for this is emotional storytelling.
People love a good story. It could be a story about a business or its products and services and they will resonate with it as long as it is compelling. Facts and figures only tell a part of the story, but it is the compelling storytelling that is likely to resonate with an audience.
Another powerful tool is creating scarcity and urgency. The fear of missing out is a great motivator and is why this strategy works as well as it does. Businesses can create a sense of urgency with limited-time offers or limited-edition products to make people respond as expected to their marketing campaigns.
If you use this strategy, do so sparingly. Its effect wears off if you do it too many times, and there is always the risk of your audience perceiving you as inauthentic when you do this.
Using Data and Analytics for Decision-Making
Businesses now collect so much information on their customers, campaigns, operations and much more that there is no excuse why marketers should not be using it. When using data for decision-making, marketers should avoid vanity metrics. Likes and shares are great, but they often do not paint the whole picture. Additional data like customer engagement rates, web analytics and conversion rates are much better metrics to use to make marketing decisions.
Data collected from A/B testing can also be crucial in helping marketers understand what is going on with their online assets. Instead of guessing how a specific landing page or article headline will perform, why not A/B test them? The good news is that you can A/B test almost any marketing material to get data that helps you understand which one performs better so you know which actions to take next.
The last type of crucial data for decision-making is customer feedback. Successful businesses survive because they meet customer needs and provide exactly what they need. The best way to get the data you need to do this is by asking your customers.
These overlooked aspects of marketing can make a huge difference to your campaign and business. They can give you a more complete understanding of your marketing campaigns and their performance, informing news strategies and helping you find areas of improvement.
