Whether you want to rebuild your marketing strategy or are just starting out with your business, deciding upon choosing the ideal marketing strategy is always a hurdle. It is always wondered if there is a perfect, one-size-fits-all marketing strategy that fits everyone or is the best one. To answer it with one strategy will be wrong. No, one strategy cannot guarantee or is sufficient for the successful marketing of your business. Marketing should have an integrated and hybrid approach, which utilizes a range of tactics and marketing strategies for persistent and robust marketing.
After consulting with marketing professionals from various industries we have compiled a list of the most preferred marketing strategies that you can use to decie which marketing strategies are best for you. It doesn’t matter whether you have a B2B or B2C business, they work for all. Here’s what we found:
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Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search engine optimization is more of a requirement than a choice as it helps in making the audience who is looking out for services like the ones your business give, find you. It is the process of utilizing keywords and phrases relevant to your business and the ones with which your target audience may/is trying to find someone like you. It plays a crucial role at every stage of the buying funnel, from initial research to decision making, from making the audience aware of you to their advocacy. Plus now everyone wants to be on the first page of the search results or improve their ranking on the search results page, as very few people go to the next search result page. And the only unpaid way to achieve that is through SEO. You may not get to the first page instantly but you may gradually, by following the right SEO practices.
While social networks, emails, display ads, and other marketing tools generate website visits, SEO visibility is particularly significant as search engines are the primary medium through which users navigate the Internet. SEO automatically increases your reach towards your target audience. The audience self-identifies themselves as someone who is interested in your product or service with their searches. And the better your SEO the better its SERP (search engine results page) ranking will be. And with a higher SERP ranking more traffic will be diverted to your website, which gives you more chances to convert. SEO is a cost-effective way to keep your brand in competition and make its visibility relevant to the actual audience.
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Pay-Per-Click (PPC)
SEO is an effective strategy, but earning high rankings every time takes a lot of time and effort, which includes strong content writing, link building, keyword research, and a well-designed website. While PPC will allow you to start ranking on the first page almost instantly.
Pay-per-click marketing can be explained as paid SEO in simple terms. As the name implies, your business pays for clicks generated to your website from your targeted keywords. It is basically paid advertising on the SERP. With this strategy, a company buys a link that appears as ads in search engine results when a query is related to the targeted keyword or targeted ones. There is competition for these ads also as more than one company or website can be bidding for the same keyword.
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Content Marketing
Content marketing is deeply associated with SEO and should be aimed to provide your users, viewers, etc., with information around the various aspects of your product or service. Content marketing emphasizes educating the audience to develop buying behaviour or to influence them to buy. This approach focuses on creating and conveying information that is relevant to the target audience to attract those who best associate with you and influence them to buy your product or service. Still the information provided through content marketing is intended more to be informational than transactional.
As this is a communication-based approach, hence, it keeps growing and with the knowledge you gain about your audience you can tailor your content according to them. It can be in various formats, for example, blogs, ebooks, case studies, infographics, and webpages. With all such content, you will be able to improve your visibility, desirability and credibility, and draw prospects through the sales funnel.
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Social Media Marketing
Social media is a great way to broaden your audience and integrate your marketing efforts with, that too with low costs. Social media marketing is mainly focused on building relationships and community with the audience and customers. It facilitates as being a platform to provide valuable information about the company, the brand or its products or services. One can create business pages on various social media platforms for example Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. You can share relevant and interesting content for your followers and audience, for example, images, infographics, videos which will also help in the SEO efforts by increasing the relevancy of your product or service. You can also use sponsored ads as provided by the different social media platforms that will help your content to reach beyond your followers on those platforms.
Social media is also a great medium for remarketing to those who visited your website by showing them new content, products or services, updates, and promotional posts. All these will help you to keep your audience engaged and connected to you and build a buying behavior from you. It is a key tool in establishing credibility, trust, and a relationship in your brand or company with your existing and potential customers. Social media platforms also give insights into the market and the audience and lead to reducing spendings in market research and lead generation.
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Email Marketing
Email marketing is one of the only traditional marketing strategies which has withstood the test of time and has evolved according to today’s digitized environment. It may continue to be the preferred method of communication among B2B businesses. It is an effective method throughout the buying funnel from brand awareness to encouraging customers for repeat purchases. It helps you to stay in your customers’ or prospects’ minds so that whenever they are ready to make the decision for purchase, then they are not just aware of you but also can communicate their decision quickly.
However, email marketing is not a game of chance but a lot of skill. Its success is determined by open rates and click-through rates. Most of the promotional emails end up in your prospects’ spam folders and to bypass that you need to have a strong copywriting game. You need to be very efficient in your emails and especially your subject to not land in spam folders. Email marketing is another effective method of content distribution that can help you supply a lot of information from your side. For example, you can send information regarding your expertise in your domain and establish yourself as a subject matter expert in it. You can send offers, coupons, personalized deals and newsletters through emails. The key to an effective email marketing strategy segregating your audience based on their behaviour and demographics. For instance, you can list them based on their gender, age, people who signed up for more information, people who signed up for the newsletter, etc. You can also retarget existing or past customers when their previously bought item or items they buy more is in stock now, or you can send them recommendations of what they might like based on their purchase decisions and browsing activities.
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Referral Programs
A referral program is a systematic approach companies take to incentivize their customers when they tell other people about their products or services. Programs like affiliate programs, partner programs, and customer referral programs are designed to give a sense of connection with the brand and credibility as a loyal customer to an existing customer and to grow the customer base. This strategy will help you in leveraging recommendations of satisfied customers and recognize and reinforce customers’ brand loyalty. This gives customers a personal touch with the brand and they act as advocates of your brands which in itself is the best organic marketing .
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Co-branding
Co-branding is a marketing strategy where at least two brands collaborate to promote or try to influence peoples’ buying behaviour. By collaborating with other brands that are relevant to your product or service you can leverage their credibility to improve your brand image, product or service perception, etc., so that consumers tend to purchase from you more. This can also be done as influencer marketing where you find influencers relevant to your domain and utilize their credibility in a similar manner.
This will increase your reach to even those people who are relevant to your business or are interested in similar businesses and are potential customers.
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Earned media and PR
Earned media is that publicity that you get through efforts other than paid advertising. It is basically the most organic marketing done by people who have been your customers, so you have to put a very few efforts in it. Earned media can be in various forms, for example, social media testimonials, word of mouth, mention on television or radio, newspaper or magazine article, website reviews, product or service reviews, reviews on business listings, etc. All these lead to more credibility in your brand. One thing to be noted here is that earned media is “earned” that means it can only be gained organically with your honest business and marketing efforts.
While deciding on what strategies to choose for your marketing efforts you may also wonder if you should put your own efforts into it or should you hire professionals? It may cost you both time and money to get a hang of these strategies and how to effectively implement them. Take our advice and hire professionals that can do your work for you and in a more efficient, and cost-effective manner. Whatever the size of your business the right marketing professionals can set your marketing efforts in the right track.
