The history of human civilization is filled with various dramatic evolutions and the world of marketing is no exception. Marketing is a way of life in which an organization’s assets are mobilized to develop, encourage, and delight its customers while making a profit.
There are several approaches to marketing such as traditional print, radio, television, direct mail, and telephone mediums to the recently established online channels of email, social media, pay-per-click marketing, search engine marketing, and mobile marketing.
A QUICK HISTORY OF MARKETING APPROACHES
- Production Orientation Era (1800s – 1920s): Tailored efforts towards the quantity of the products over their quality as commercial enterprises emphasized mass production, believing customers would rather pay for low-cost readily available products.
- Sales Orientation Era (1920s – 1940s): Recognized that not every product can sell itself, unlike the Production Orientation Era, encouraging businesses to depend largely on marketing promotions to sell their products.
- Marketing/Customer Orientation Era (1940s – 1970s): Began to integrate and recognize what the customers needed, along with taking actions to meet them. The consumer, rather than the product, set the basis in this scenario, emphasizing the importance of market research before the product’s release.
- Societal Orientation Era (1970s – Present): Put a premium on a company’s social responsibility to design strategies that benefit both its customers and the environment, altering their objectives to deliver a higher-quality lifestyle while avoiding environmental pollution.
- Era of Digital Marketing (1990s – Present): Transitioned the world in marketing dynamics with businesses being reliant on internet technology to effectively reach their customers since the early 1990s. Consumers may tailor their targeted advertisements in just about any way they desire owing to the sophisticated digital world.
MICRO-MARKETING
Marketing has evolved substantially over the last century. Companies have steadily developed a value-oriented marketing strategy since the 1990s by taking advantage of the opportunities provided by improved user information.
Micromarketing represents an important departure from the previous paradigm, in which firms relied primarily on in-store suggestions as a form of marketing and placed a significant value on brand optimization.
This form of marketing targets a segment of the population in a small market; it is the practice of promoting products or services to a specific group of customers. Targeted marketing ensures that important customer groups are addressed, and a well-planned micro-marketing strategy can help a company categorize a key target group. Customers with similar characteristics are usually “targeted” through various descriptors, like location, age, interests, household income, purchasing behavior, and/or occupation.
Example: In 2014, Coca-Cola used a micromarketing campaign to analyze which names would sell the most according to their consumer base, substituting various first names for the Coca-Cola label on their 20-ounce bottles.
Employed by both start-ups and established businesses, micro-marketing may be a great way for a multinational firm to introduce new products/services or for a small business to establish a foundation through local marketing campaigns.
EMERGENCE OF MICRO-MARKETING
With time, providing some of the most customized and spectacular products to consumers worldwide has become incredibly impressive and simple. Although advanced digital technology has greatly facilitated the rise of micro-marketing, it’s interesting to see what the game was like before smart tech entered the picture.
- 📧EMAIL CAMPAIGNING: A series of marketing initiatives that contact several recipients at once with the goal of reaching out to users, email marketing is a powerful channel between a firm and its target audience. This form of marketing fosters and enhances consumer engagement, increasing revenue and helping to establish a brand image.
- 🌎GEO-LOCATION TRACKING: The geographical location of an internet-connected device, particularly mobiles, is referred to as geolocation. By using the visitor’s IP address, geo-targeting provides a personalized user experience.
- 📱SOCIAL MEDIA ANALYTICS: Digital marketers create personalized content for each social media site to drive engagement and increase business, whereas social analytics tell you about the status of your strategy on social media networks. Some helpful tools to track social media campaigns can be:
- Facebook Insights: Facebook insights provide audience demographics ranging from education level to job title, age, and gender for Facebook users (including those tied to your Page).
- Instagram Insights: Instagram analytics show a business all that it needs to know about its audience, including general trends among followers, engagement rates, and online networking statistics based on stories, reels, and IGTV videos.
- YouTube Analytics: YouTube Analytics shows you where all viewers come from, both on YouTube and outside, allowing you to smoothen your strategy and drive more traffic.
- Google Analytics: A web analytics tool that helps businesses determine increased user web traffic, analyze the success of their marketing activities and campaigns, monitor goal completions, and much more by tracking the website’s performance and gathering information about its users.
- Facebook Insights: Facebook insights provide audience demographics ranging from education level to job title, age, and gender for Facebook users (including those tied to your Page).
ESTABLISHING AN EFFECTIVE MICROMARKETING STRATEGY
For a successful micro-marketing campaign, it is essential to follow a set of steps that can result in an effective strategy to benefit a business.
- Establishing Buyer Personas 👤
Buyer personas entail learning about the users to whom a company is marketing through quantitative (pulling metrics from datasets, offering insight into demographics, age, gender, location, and interests) and qualitative (acquiring patterns to connect with users, understanding their shopping behaviors, and building trust via surveys and interviews) components.
- Picking the Best Method of Engagement 🎯
These buyer personas often have varied preferences for the products/services a business offers. Hence, determining the best way to reach out to them will act as a garnish for the campaign. Social media, online ads, podcasts, and video streaming platforms are a few mediums that help a company reach out to its target audience.
- Developing a Brand Message 💌
Only if you have the proper message to deliver to your audience on the right platform will you succeed. Understanding buyer personas’ qualitative components can help personalize a brand message that resonates with customers.
- Testing & Implementation 🧪
Using these fundamental components, a company can improve its micro-marketing campaign by testing alternative messages consistently to see how the audience reacts.
THE ERA OF SMART-TECH
Covering the fundamentals of sending and receiving, customer data searching, and on/off switching, smart-tech gives the consumer more connectivity and control through the internet. It employs artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and data analysis to give previously dull products cognitive awareness often via smart devices like phones, televisions, appliances, automobiles, personal assistants, and so on.
When it comes to micro-marketing, big data analytics, AR/VR, and Chatbots are among the best smart technology applications for businesses to use.
- Big Data Analytics
Data scientists have developed algorithms for collecting data from nearly any source on the internet and predicting what products specific groups would want. Mostly every user company may use the data it provides to design and advertise products based on science rather than personal bias.
- Augmented Reality & Virtual Reality
Marketers are incorporating AR and VR into their marketing initiatives to provide customers with interactive and captivating experiences that bring them closer to brands.
Customers trying on frames and spectacles from their computers before going to an optometrist is an example of such strategies.
- Chatbots
Marketers can integrate chatbots into their company’s sites and apps, similar to assistants. These bots can answer questions about products or services owing to AI. They do, however, learn from customer interactions, allowing them to make recommendations based on data obtained from similar consumer behavior.
Fun Fact: Taco Bell was the first fast-food restaurant to introduce chatbots in 2016.
BUT DOES IT INVOLVE ANY DECEPTIVE INFORMATION BREACH?
As revelations about the negative implications of privacy violations in microtargeted ads and weak legal security for users become more common, targeted ads become a point of controversy every time this issue is raised.
A consumer is usually unaware that the information obtained about them is shared with others besides the business user that obtained it. Data mining can be used to extract data from data warehouses, find distinct facts and relationships about customers, and make connections based on this collection, which may put the customer’s private information at stake.
The infamous timeline of Facebook’s privacy violations attests to the fact that it can cause enormous damage to consumers and the business itself. The growing emphasis on privacy protection as internet advertising evolves must serve as a wake-up call for advertisers to develop forward-thinking privacy strategies.
- Focusing on data privacy and building a cybersecurity culture by adjusting their mindset to see their role as more than just bringing in new clients is crucial to finding strategies to sell their product while also safeguarding their company’s reputation in the event of a cyber crisis.
- Correct measurements, metrics, and analytics can help ensure that marketing efforts are reliable and clear. Marketers must ensure that any data acquired, processed, and maintained is managed and stored safely in accordance with applicable requirements when using marketing tools.
Data collection methods are being developed by companies like IBM that allow for total individual privacy while still building accurate data models. Furthermore, Google’s intention to make cookies invalid from 2023 onwards can be seen as a step towards shielding user data.
IN SUMMATION / TL;DR
Since the advent of digital media, technology has taken over as the key factor in marketing. Getting to know your clientele and building long-term relationships with them is the key to future marketing success.
While marketing allows firms to engage with potential customers, it also benefits from the rapid evolution of smart technology.
Consumers today are demanding, expecting immediate information and replies from businesses, as well as to be engaged and captivated by specific targeting. Marketers would be well to take note of the fact that most of these demands might be met with smart technology.
Written by Upasana Sharma,
Edited by Krishna Rathore and Suranjan Das.