What marketing mediums are out there? I was asked that question at one of my speaking events. I liked the choice of words – marketing mediums and not advertising mediums. Marketing medium has a much wider meaning than advertising medium – usually advertising mediums can be bought for money and they are institutionalized – you buy space or time from some entity. Some of the examples of marketing mediums are: referrals, your own website, testimonials, article in a newspaper, TV ad, radio talk show, emails, mobile ads and messages, networking and speaking events, the list goes on!
The good thing is that lots of the marketing mediums are for free or like referrals – cannot be bought. Which is why the most trusted marketing medium is ‘Recommendations from people I know’ (Nielsen study, 2013)
When choosing the marketing medium that you want to use in your business, you need to think of the following factors: what comes naturally to you, who are your ideal clients and where they are, what is your message and which medium will convey it the best and how much money are you willing to spend.
There are probably a lot more factors that are individual to your business, but let’s just analyse those mentioned here. I’d like to give you a line of reasoning on how you could choose the marketing medium that works for your business.
What comes naturally to you? If you are not a speaker, speaking engagements is not going to work for you. If you are not much of a writer either, blogging is going to cost you money, but is still a good option. Branded website can be done by a professional, you can probably also go to some networking events and see how comfortable you are with meeting new people and talking about your business. The point here is that there are so many marketing mediums out there that you can definitely find something that works with your strengths.
Who and where are your ideal clients? If your clients are professionals who work in corporations and your product is relevant only to their work life and not personal life like increasing efficiency, creating great advertising or accounting, your online marketing medium of choice would naturally be LinkedIn over Facebook. Just because the same professionals are on Facebook on the weekends and evenings, doesn’t mean that they are looking for messages to improve their work.
What is your message and which medium will convey it best? It will be very difficult to convey the juiciness of a steak or do justice to a piece of exquisite jewelry by using a medium that does not allow you to convey images. Whereas describing how your client felt after a great massage session with you, can easily be conveyed by words. Especially if the words are written by your client in a testimonial.
How much money are you willing to spend? Spending money does not guarantee results, but it opens up the choice of marketing mediums. If you’d like to experiment with Google Ads or Facebook Ads – the amount of money you are willing to spend is controlled by you and you can have a very small budget and still make some headway. Some other marketing mediums like ads in newspapers, magazines or even banners on website, come with a up-front cost of designing the ad and the cost that you need to pay for placement.
What are your favorite marketing mediums that give you the results? How did you find out that they are right ones for you? If you are struggling to identify what would work best with your natural style, book a Complementary Confident Marketing Breakthrough Session here.
