The businesses that run solely on designing and producing goods and services that a general consumer can buy, often use the form of promoting and advertising that is called consumer marketing. Over a period of time, consumer marketing has gone through a hell lot of change in its overall approach.
Consumer Marketing in Earlier Days
In initial days, there was no marketing activity as such, because the businesses were less and the supply was more and hence the businesses did not require much effort to get customers. For example, if you look back around 50 years back, if there was one shop selling grocery items in a neighborhood, it was by default that everyone bought their stuff from that shopkeeper. Look around now, one neighborhood has as many as 10 shops selling the same stuff. In this case, the customer base has not increased, but the business has got divided amongst those 10 shopkeepers. To out show each other, they offer consumers various schemes and discounts in order to lure them and maximize their business and sales.
But this was just a small neighborhood example; now look at the bigger brands and businesses. In initial days, the competition was between a couple of brands selling the similar kind of items and they used Print Ads, TV and Radio to send across their message to the consumers. But today, the times have changed; from big to small all players are chasing the consumer, trying to make the best out of their business. Like the businesses, the choices of marketing their products or services have also increased. It’s not just the traditional consumer marketing anymore.
Consumer Marketing in Digital Era
Nowadays, digital channels, as well as mass media dominate consumer marketing.
In this digital era, businesses are growing super fast because of technological advancement available to them. The use of technology in terms of social media is hugely responsible for the market business. This digital era has allowed the businesses to gather information about their target audience and then design the product or services as per needs, it also gives them a chance to receive direct feedback from the consumer, thus making effective improvisations.
The new modes for Consumer Marketing
Content marketing
In today’s time, this is considered to be the most effective and important way of consumer marketing. It involves sharing of content about your product and service through media and social platforms. It’s the art of communicating your brand message and it is one of the most widely used media.
Mobile Marketing
In this era of smartphones and internet connectivity through them, all the time, marketers find it important to use mobile marketing for their brand. The increased usage of mobile phones have made it possible to push the content on this medium and even websites today are redesigned in order to be more responsive to the mobile user.
Personalized marketing
This marketing uses technology and computer software to understand and read and deliver a personalized message to the consumer and also read consumers behavior in order to help them with relevant information only. Chatbots are a prime example of this kind of marketing.
Visual Marketing
Its all about alluring images of the product and services that get the consumer interested in the business. Instagram, Pinterest, and Facebook provide these platforms in a very successful manner. And going forward from just images, YouTube videos and other video ads on social media platforms hook the audience with targeted consumer marketing.
Today any brand would find it hard to ignore these changes that digital era has brought and all they can do is to adapt themselves to the changing demands and deliver exactly what their consumer wants. The marketing strategy today depends on consumer insights and social media trends.
