Diversified Marketing
How to Diversify Your Marketing Strategy
We all remember those days when marketing focused on a select number of options. A company could buy an ad in a local newspaper, rent billboard space, or purchase a commercial slot on the radio or television. Marketing was simple.
But now, with the advent of the internet, though, the concept of a marketing “strategy” has exploded. At this point, digital ad spending has officially surpassed television, ushering in a myriad of different marketing options.
While each company must discover the soft spots where they can get the greatest ROI, a diversified marketing strategy could lead to other opportunities and untapped markets.
Why Diversification in Marketing Matters
The modern marketing space is in a continual state of flux. With nothing certain except for change itself, it behooves marketing managers everywhere to diversify their marketing portfolio. This provides a slew of different benefits:
Maintaining multiple marketing channels provides a cross-pollinating synergy across all of your marketing efforts.
Diversified marketing allows for a more complete omnichannel experience.
Using multiple marketing channels allows for more comprehensive data to be gathered.
A diversified strategy spreads your marketing risk out into different baskets.
Marketing diversification helps you to stay ahead of the curve and allows you to adapt to new marketing trends quickly.
While there are numerous advantages to a manifold marketing strategy, though, it can be challenging to truly cultivate a diversified marketing stategy.
Ways to Diversify Your Marketing Strategy
While there are numerous tips and tricks for modern marketing, the idea here is not to utilize the latest hack or trending marketing channel in order to make a quick buck. The focus should be on cultivating a company culture that enables a business to maintain a diverse marketing strategy over the long-term.
With that said, here are five elements that are critical to maintaining that all-important diversity in your marketing efforts.
A Diversified Marketing Strategy from the Inside Out
While it’s tempting to diversify by simply looking up the latest marketing trends and pouring untold levels of time, effort, and funds into adopting them, if you want to build towards true marketing success, it’s important to begin implementing change from the inside out.
By diversifying your workforce itself, your business will be able to maintain a comprehensive perspective that can span age, gender, culture, and any other major, industry-specific demographic you may have to consider.
This isn’t just a non sequitur appealing to greater diversity in the workplace. It’s a genuine call to cultivate a thriving work environment, and it can have very direct implications on a marketing strategy.
Diversity in the workplace has been shown to increase both innovation and productivity. This is largely due to the healthy friction that comes when those from different backgrounds and perspectives respectfully rub shoulders and collaborate together.
In other words, if your workforce is diverse, the healthy difference in perspectives that everyone brings to the table will naturally enable you to maintain a diverse marketing strategy as well.
Socialize Smartly
Utilizing social media to generate online traffic is one of the most important digital marketing strategies currently available. It allows you to avoid an over-dependency on traffic (both paid and organic) from search engines — especially Google.
A solid footing on social media allows you to engage with an existing customer base and use them as a launching point to find more social followers. However, make sure to invest in social media that is used by your customers. Don’t just post random content sporadically.
Instead, focus on utilizing social media as a greater part of your marketing strategy by finding new leads, providing customer service, and driving traffic to your site. This will provide ample opportunities to integrate your social efforts with your other marketing channels.
Balance Paid and Organic Content
Both social and website strategies can include paid ads, when necessary, in order to generate traffic for specific events where a large ROI is expected.
However, you should also try to cultivate a following on social platforms as well as utilize SEO to create organic traffic for your website. This will enable you to build towards long-term organic growth.
Both strategies are popular, and both should be utilized in a complementary fashion.
Personalize Your Content
One natural result of the tendency towards online marketing diversification is the rise of personalization. The ability to track and process data in unprecedented quantities is enabling companies to personalize the marketing message for each individual customer.
While still a developing trend, personalization is certainly here to stay, and it should factor into every marketer’s plans for the future at this point.
Make it stand out
Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
Implement Change with a Care
Finally, always consider when and how you will implement a change in your marketing strategy. While shifting your efforts in the name of diversity and cutting-edge methods is the way to stay ahead of the curve these days, you still want to keep your internal marketing team in mind when instituting changes.
When you reorganize a process, method, or strategy in order to hone in on your diversifying efforts, make sure to take steps to properly identify your goals, strategize your methods, and communicate the plan with your team.
A Diversified Marketing Strategy
While the specifics of a diversification strategy can vary wildly depending on the industry, time, and place, the core concepts are universal.
As you go about creating your company’s diversified marketing strategy, make sure to focus on developing that long-term momentum through things like diversifying your company culture, keeping everyone on the same page, and focusing on forward-thinking concepts like personalization and social strategies.
This positive foundation will help you to promote and maintain a diversified marketing strategy for the foreseeable future.
