2014 Marketing “Must Dos” for Raleigh Businesses

2014 Marketing “Must Dos” for Raleigh Businesses

With each passing year, changes in marketing occur at faster rates than ever before.

All these changes can be daunting to small and medium-sized business owners, who have enough to think about without keeping up with marketing.

But the positive part of the changes is that many of them level the playing field for smaller businesses against larger competitors. Two such trends that will become even more important: content marketing and social media.

Content marketing as defined by the Content Marketing Institute is “A marketing technique of creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action.” This content can take many forms (written, illustrations, audio, video, pictures). No matter what form it takes, to be to be successful it must be relevant, useful, and interesting.

You don’t have to be a giant company to create content that your audience wants to consume; you need to be smart, thoughtful and work through the lens of your target audience. The better the content the more people will see, share and remember.

The next area that is becoming bigger for 2014 is that of social media. Companies have been told that social media is important, but many have been left scratching their heads about why. The reason: social signals are becoming of much greater importance. People see commentary about your business and respond; Google tells us it is becoming more important in how they will rank you in search results.

In the past, only a few social sites mattered. Today, there are literally hundreds of sites that have a million users or more. Sites such as Instagram and Pinterest came out of nowhere and shot to meteoric heights. Social sites are growing every day.

It is another example of an area with a low barrier of entry for your business. You need to branch out and become a part of as many relevant, useful social sites as you can.

Make the Trends Work for You in 2014
While these two areas are often a challenge for small and medium-sized business owners, their importance grows daily. Your business New Year’s resolution should be to add both to your marketing mix — or risk getting left behind.

The Department of Marketing is an award winning, world-class boutique marketing agency.  We are small enough to have a personal relationship with every client, yet big enough to tackle the largest projects. Specializing in strategy and interactive marketing, we have built our business on our contributions to our clients’ growth. We are headquartered in Raleigh, North Carolina.