Marketing Fundamentals: How to Use Them for Steady Growth

Shiny new tools, viral trends, and innovative tactics—these are the things we see a lot in marketing. And, of course, they help us keep up with the times and stay competitive. Yet, when you let them overshadow marketing fundamentals, it can play a bad joke on you.

Why? Because marketing basics are steady and time-tested. Things like understanding the customer and their journey, focusing on high-value content, excellent UX, and others are the strong foundation your business needs to build trust and attain long-term goals.

In this guide, we’ll tell you about the most pivotal basic elements of effective marketing to help you go from the first click to conversions and loyalty.

Understand the Customer Journey

When we think about marketing for beginners, we can see many brands make the same mistake and focus on clicks. Yet, the truth is that when a user clicks on the ad, your link in search engine result pages (SERPs), link on your social media profile, or any other link that brings them to your website—that’s just one tiny moment in a large customer journey. The complete journey users complete to become your buyers and loyal customers is much bigger than that. It consists of multiple steps and interactions that all lead to your big goals–sales and advocacy. And it’s one of the primary fundamentals of digital marketing you need to be aware of.

The key stages of a customer journey include:

• Awareness: A prospect gets familiar with your brand or product/service.
• Consideration: A prospect recognizes a specific problem they have and considers a possible solution (aka a product or service).
• Decision: A prospect compares specific solutions (brands) to choose one they want to purchase from.
• Loyalty: A customer comes back to you and advocates for your brand.

At each of these stages, your TA will have different motivations, pain points, and decision triggers. Respectively, when you have a clear understanding of your customer journey, you can adjust your messaging (content, CTAs, etc.) to match these unique needs and encourage people to convert faster.

Traffic and Success

Traffic is, without a doubt, one of the primary digital marketing fundamentals as it represents the number of potential leads you drive and thus, your conversion and sales capacity. Still, there is quite a lot of confusion between just high and high-quality traffic:

High traffic simply stands for a large volume of visitors. They can come from a diversity of channels, including organic search, social media, ads, and others. And it’s important for your outreach and brand awareness.

High-quality traffic stands for visits with the potential to convert. Typically, they find you at the right point of their journey and thus, are more likely to engage with your site because it meets their intent.

They both matter. Yet, high-quality visits shape long-term success. You can drive them through understanding the main search intents, such as informational, navigational, and transactional, and tailoring your messaging to each for maximum output. Qualified visitors who come to you from such targeting can help optimize the ROI of your advertising efforts and turn more users into customers.

With the help of tools like Semrush, you can gain a detailed breakdown of your traffic with insights into its sources, fluctuations, and audience insights that should help you define their intentions and align your efforts with them. You can also find a trusted but more suitable alternative to Semrush based on your needs.

Content That Moves People

Organic discoverability stands for awareness, credibility, and thus, more potential sales. Hence, search engine optimization (SEO) has long joined the list of marketing basics that no business can do without. Yet, there is a fine line between optimizing only for algorithms and hitting the spot with your audience’s needs and interests. The first one may move your rankings. However, it won’t help create the needed bond and convert users. That’s why, when we speak about good SEO content, we mean the balance of optimization for algorithms and real value for people.

So, what does this mean? First of all, this means planning your content not only based on keyword trends, but also based on your TA needs, through audience research and analytics. It also means bringing unique and valuable insights that will help your readers find the answers they need. All in all, focus on answering TA’s requests, speaking to their emotions, and balancing quality content with optimization efforts.

Website UX

User experience (UX) is one thing that helps bridge traffic and conversion. UX is responsible for the overall impression and experience users have on your website, which makes it one of the central fundamentals of digital marketing.

To make a perfect asset for business, UX should involve:

• Creating a clean and appealing design that keeps users engaged and doesn’t distract them from your content.
• Simplifying the navigation on your site, including the registration and checkout processes.
• Ensuring that your website is convenient for mobile users.
• Creating CTAs that are noticeable and clickable for higher conversions.
• Reducing decision hesitation through featuring trust signals, such as security badges, reviews, etc.

Alignment With the Funnel

As you already know, understanding the funnel (aka customer journey) is a pivotal marketing knowledge in general that will help you guide the rest of your efforts. Apart from helping you understand how to tailor your message and CTAs, it will also help you understand which channels will be the most effective ones for capturing and converting leads.

The truth is that not all channels have the same purpose and impact. Let’s consider their differences in alignment with different stages of the journey:

• Awareness stage: At this point, your primary goal is to get in front of your TA and drive new, unique visitors. The perfect channels for this purpose include display ads, social media, and influencers.
• Consideration stage: At this point, you want to address the problem your TA is already aware of and educate them. The perfect channels for answering the audience’s questions include blog posts, email newsletters, webinars, landing pages, etc.
• Decision stage: At this point, you want to make your value proposition and show the audience how they will benefit from turning into your customers. Perfect channels for these goals include review pages, case studies, conversion-focused landing pages, free trials, direct outreach, etc.

Yes, you want to build a multi channel marketing tactic to gain great results. But, as you can see, you can draw more perks from different channels across each stage of the funnel. That’s why matching them to each other is more productive than using different channels randomly.

Track Behavior and Outcomes, Not Just Clicks

Clicks and impressions are the so-called vanity metrics. They may give you impressive numbers. However, they rarely provide meaningful insights into how effectively your business attains its goals.

This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t track them. But it definitely means that they should not be your primary analytical focus if you want to get deep and realistic insights. What should be? Metrics that reflect user experience, behavior, and your business outcomes. These can include:

• Bounce rate
• Average session duration
• Pages per session
• Conversion rate
• User engagement
• Scroll depth
• Site performance
• Customer lifetime value
• Retention rate

Optimize Continuously

Now that you have a detailed marketing guide with the basics that bring results, there is one more tip we can give you in the end. You can use the tips provided here and see steady improvement. However, you should never expect this improvement to last if you don’t amplify and continuously improve your approach.

Let’s face it–marketing changes all the time. Your competitors might get ahead, available channels may evolve and change, and consumer behavior may also shift. This means that ongoing optimization is a must for long-term results. It’s also worth emphasizing the value of social listening. Listening tools like reviews, surveys, feedback loops, and others make a crucial part of data analytics. They let you hear back from your audience directly and use their feedback to improve your efforts.

Images by Freepik.