Why Marketing Is Not the Job for the Lazy Marketers are faced with more and more challenges to get their message out to target audiences.
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Recent polls by TrackMaven showed the decline in engagement across social platforms. The study was examining major established social marketing platforms -- Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn -- and found that even one of the fastest-growing platforms on the market, Instagram, has seen a drop as large as 25 percent in just one year.
This is not a huge surprise as advertising penetrates all parts of our daily lives and we find new ways to escape it, ranging from ad-blocking apps and extensions to simple psychological "tuning out."
So, marketers are faced with more and more challenges to get their message across. It is not merely enough to increase budgets, we have to start looking at engagement and attention. So what are some of the options?
Target your market.
In order to be effective, your message has to be appealing and authentic. By talking directly to your customers, your message can appeal to their deeper senses.
How to do it? You've got to figure out exactly what your target market looks like. Go beyond demographics, because, you know, 18 to 35 years old women in United States have very diverse sets of backgrounds, interests and needs.
Related: 4 Low-Cost Marketing Strategies Every Business Should Know
What do they do for work and fun? What are their interests? What are their favorite media channels? Where do they get their information from? How do they consume content? What are their struggles, needs? What prevents them from solving a specific problem? Create an ideal customer profile.
Talk to them in their language, show that you understand their struggles, and -- hey -- you can solve their problem for them. Only when your audience can feel as if you're talking directly to them, you can hope for a sale.
Be the thought leader.
One of the greatest benefits of content marketing is that you can position your company as a thought leader in your industry. This positioning could very much be an additional differentiator for your offerings.
Create and curate content that blows away your audience with usefulness and practicality. Make your website a mecca for industry-related content; this will you give you a huge leverage in the market. Yet, be truthful and don't use your newly-found leverage to bash your competitor; that won't go over well and will ruin your hard-earned reputation.
Related: How to Make Time for Social Media Marketing
Move into new realms.
Depending on where your audience likes to spend time online, get in there. Explore new channels to reach them.
For example, Snapchat as a promotional platform was met with huge hesitation from the marketing community. Yet, those who did see an opportunity to be a first mover built huge followings, and even businesses, on Snapchat. Some especially creative entrepreneurs found a way to leverage Pokemon Go craze to promote their businesses.
Yes, the rage will probably calm down soon, but you used that quick spurs of interest to your benefit. Snapchat might be thrown down by some new hot thing next year, but while the attention is there, you've got to take advantage of it. The only requisite here is to be quick and creative. So, the sky is the limit. Learn how to use these new, trendy or even obscure channels to create new spaces where your message is not lost in the noise, unlike those of Facebook and Twitter.
Related: 6 New Social Media Marketing Tools the Experts Use. You Should, Too
Overall, digital marketing becomes more and more competitive and the spaces get more and more noisy. The only way to truly stand out in the sea of offerings is to be different in your offerings, authentic in your messages and creative in your channels.
