Levi jeans don’t go out of date despite new fads and trends. Since they were first sold in San Francisco in 1853, the Levi jeans have become the most timeless pants in history. They are versatile, indestructible, and form-flattering on anyone. Levi jeans stand the test of time and can ride the winds of change.
With marketing, many tips come and go with the news cycle or the season. This timeless marketing advice will retain its importance years from now.
Being a marketer today requires that you are on top of your game year-round. Whether you’ve been in marketing for three months, three years, or 30 years, there’s always room for improvement.
20 of the best marketing tips that will won’t go out of style
Let’s dive into 20 of the best marketing tips that will never go out of style. They have been written in paragraph form so that the tips won’t be longer than five sentences long.
1. Why
You can’t market your products and services unless you understand the “why” first. Marketing is a long-term play and is never finished. Study other companies and marketers and learn what worked well and discover their why to better understand your why. The why is your reason and purpose for why you are in the marketing profession, why you are marketing for your current company, and why marketing matters at your organization.
2. Audience
Work with your product development and services teams to create products and services your audience actually wants and needs. It’s not about what your company thinks they want and need. Audiences are not as smart or as dumb as you think, so it’s essential to ask your audience what they want to serve them better. Everything you do in marketing starts and ends with your audience.
3. Learn
The best marketers find out how they are marketed to. They understand what’s working and not working. They study their competition, other industries and are constantly learning about marketing. Learning is about acquiring knowledge, skills, and experience. Are you getting certified in new tools and technologies, attending marketing conferences, and talking to your peers about marketing?
4. Teach
Everyone thinks they are a marketer so it’s vital you teach, not preach. Research shows that teaching someone else is the best way to learn. As physicist Albert Einstein once said, “If you can’t explain something simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”
5. Help
Successful marketing focuses on helping, not hoping. Help is about making it easier for someone else to do something by offering your services and resources. Are you helpful in your marketing where you don’t talk about your company and provide real value? You are not a successful marketer until you have done something for someone who can never repay you.
6. Vision
Marketing is all about making people believe that something is possible. Nothing is impossible. Marketing shows the world what is possible. Are you painting the vision for how marketing can help your company? Vision is about the ability to plan for the future with imagination and wisdom.
7. Connection
Marketing doesn’t sell; it connects the dots. A connection is about linking things together whether that be people, products, services, or ideas. Are you helping your audience see the integration between your products and services? Are you making the connection between your company and the larger trends happening in your business and industry?
8. Hang Out
It’s essential to understand why your audience uses a social media channel so that you can engage with them better. Are you researching where your target audience hangs out online first before you digitally market to them? It’s crucial to find out where their watering hole is, so you come across as a helpful, considerate, and value-add company that influences before it sells.
9. Emotions
Emotions are powerful because they derive from your situation, mood, and relationship with others. Use more emotion in your marketing and learn from song writers who have mastered the art of feelings. Research shows that emotions can be more potent than facts at influencing your decisions and actions.
10. Influence
It’s essential to build your influence first before you sell something. You need to persuade others to trust you before you can make money from others. Influence is about changing someone’s mind or something indirectly. Influence guides others to take your desired action and persuades them to think like you think.
11. Strategy
Develop a real marketing strategy because most companies don’t really have a marketing strategy. A strategy is a short-term or long-term plan to achieve a goal. Many companies don’t have a business strategy, let alone a marketing strategy. If you have both, your company will be ahead of the competition.
12. Discounts
Discounts are red flags in marketing because they show your audience you are desperate. When I think of discounts, I think of Macy’s red tags. It didn’t work for them because they recently announced they are closing 45 stores. Discounts are a race to the bottom unless you are doing it as part of your business model like Amazon.
13. Delivery
The best marketers know the art and science of delivery. Delivery can mean many different things to many different people, but it’s the action of delivering things such as packages, goods, and presentations. Delivery is about fulfilling your promises and doing it on time and on budget. If you can’t deliver, you can’t market and sell.
14. Conversation
Marketing is a conversation, not a lecture. Customers want to have a good conversation with your company, not be sold to. The better conversationalist you are, the better you’ll be perceived by your audience as a company they want to do business with because you bring value to the conversation. People love to talk, and if your organization can get your audience to talk, they’ll more likely buy from you.
15. Google
Digital experiences begin with search engines, so it’s crucial to make Google love you. Where do you go to find an answer to your questions? You Google it. Google drives traffic to your website, and your website is your welcome mat, front door, and cover page of your company.
16. Content
Great content equals great marketing. Content is still king. Content marketing is all about providing helpful, valuable, and useful information to a person who consumes it. It is at the heart of successful demand and lead generation.
17. Unspoken
Say what everyone else is thinking. Marketing is successful when it communicates well. The best marketing talks about what people are thinking in their heads but haven’t had a chance or don’t know how to express it. Sometimes, it is best if your marketing uses silence because it can be more powerful than saying something.
18. Journey
In their journey to digital marketing, the best marketers standardize first. Then, they virtualize their digital marketing. Finally, they automate their digital marketing. The journey to digital is about traveling from offline to online and figuring out what makes digital unique and how best to combine the physical world with the virtual world.
19. Curiosity
The best marketers are curious because they have a strong desire to know or learn more about marketing, their company, and their industry. They ask great questions about human nature. They read a lot and go out into the world to learn what works and doesn’t work.
20. Different
It’s crucial to be different to stand out. It’s essential to zig when others zag. Marketing is all about why you are different than your competitors. Why are you not the same as another company? As humans, we have an innate curiosity to seek out the differences (for better or for worse).
Bringing it all together
These 20 marketing tips should help you think differently about marketing. Marketing is a critical component of your company’s business growth. Marketing is constantly changing and evolving. However, some tips like these never go out of style and form the foundation for successful marketing.