Marketing is absolutely essential to businesses. It’s how they attract new customers, retain existing ones, and help the company grow. There are lots of different methods businesses use to market themselves. Most of the ones that businesses across the board leverage are digital methods, but there are a few others that are well worth mastering as well.
Content Marketing
Content is king is a bit of a cliche at this point, but that’s because it’s true. You need to have a website for your business, and it needs content. Avoid the temptation to have just a homepage or to leave it at a home page and a second page for your products and services. Your business needs content in order to succeed and grow. You need to have information that your customers will find valuable. Have pages that are informative about your products and the problems your business solves. Write a blog that talks about topics that are relevant to your products, business, and industry. Your content is where you can put relevant keywords that search engines will use to tell how closely your content relates to search engine queries. Post updated content to your website regularly, and share it on different platforms to show search engines and consumers alike that your business is relevant and worth looking at.
Social Media Marketing
You’ll probably be posting the content you make to various social media platforms. Social media marketing gives your business a more interactive approach to marketing. When you post content, your existing customers and other consumers can see it and interact with it, giving it likes, shares, and adding comments. If your content is of good quality and gets people interested in your business, you can start to build a following.
You can also market your business on social media with overt advertisements. The specifics of how to advertise on different social media platforms will differ based on the platform, but they will all have terms and conditions. For your social media marketing campaign to be successful, you need to create engaging advertisements. Then, make sure they are seen by the right people. You also need to make sure that you are using the right medium for the platform. Video ads are great for YouTube and Facebook. For Pinterest and Instagram, you’ll want to have effective picture ads.
PPC Marketing
Pay per click marketing gives you a way to target leads who are more likely to convert into customers. PPC marketing is best done by leveraging Google Ads. This jumps your ad to the top of Google’s search engine results pages, though your placement will depend on both the quality of your ad and what you’re willing to spend when someone clicks on your ad. The other thing that will make your PPC marketing campaign effective is the proper use of long-tail keywords. These are specific phrases that are at least three words long and mimic what searchers are likely to enter into the search bar. If you get the keywords right and you position yourself properly, you put your business at the very top of search engine results, dramatically increasing the traffic to your site and the leads you generate.
Referral Marketing
Who says you have to do all the work when it comes to marketing your business? If you’re absolutely killing it with customer service and you have a product that performs the way it’s advertised to, you should have some fairly satisfied customers. These customers can be some of your biggest allies when it comes to marketing your business. They can refer friends, family, and anyone else they come across to your business. The happier they are with your business, the more likely they are to do just that. Of course, it doesn’t hurt to encourage them along the way. Even just asking for referrals can be enough to generate a few. If you want to really take advantage of customer satisfaction though, you’ll need to develop a referral program. Your program should make it easy for customers to refer people to your business. It should also have clearly defined rewards for referrals.
Influencer Marketing
Similar to referral marketing, influencer marketing uses the efforts and reputation of others to put your products in front of potential customers. Influencer marketing is the modern take on celebrity endorsements. Like celebrities, successful influencers have amassed quite the following. Unlike celebrities, though, influencers are perceived to be more like normal people. As a result, they tend to be more relatable and are often viewed as more trustworthy. To leverage the power of influencer marketing, you should find influencers who are relevant to your industry. Send them products that they can try and then share with their followers. Alternatively, you might partner with them on a project that they can go back and talk about later.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is one of the most cost effective digital marketing methods and can have an impressive ROI. It’s a great way to follow up with leads and reach out to existing customers. Of course, you’ll need to have email addresses for that to work, so building a robust emailing list is essential. Personalization is a must for a successful email marketing campaign. It makes those receiving your emails feel like you’re actually paying attention to them and that you care about what they want. Personalizing emails can take a lot of time if you’re doing it manually, but there’s no need for that. Segment your customers based on factors such as previous purchase history and spending patterns. Once you have your list segmented into groups, you can personalize email marketing campaigns to the groups and let automation do the rest.
SEO
Search engine optimization is what makes the difference in where you show up on search engine results pages. If you want consumers to find your business online, you need to use SEO as a marketing strategy. The majority of clicks go to the first few search results. The better your SEO, the higher you rank, and the more clicks you get. This is why keywords are so important, as crawlers use them to figure out how relevant you are to searches and use them as part of how they determine rankings.
Other optimization factors that make a difference are things like how mobile-friendly your site is, your bounce rate, and how much authority your site has. Search engines recognize that mobile browsing is only gaining in popularity. People surfing the web value user experience and won’t be satisfied with a poor one just because they are using their phones. If they are dissatisfied with their experience, they will leave your site. In the worst case, they’ll leave without exploring beyond the first page they land on. This is referred to as bouncing.
Bounce rate can indicate whether or not your site was actually relevant to the entered search. The higher the rate, the less relevant your site likely was, which will put you lower down on SERPs. You also need to pay attention to your website’s authority. Your authority is a reflection on how much of an industry leader and how reliable search engines think your site is. Your content is part of what helps you build authority. Having unique, high quality content increases your ability to build high-quality backlinks. These backlinks are essentially other websites citing yours as a source. As such, the more backlinks you have, the more relevance you have and the more you’ll be seen as being an authority in your industry.
Lead Magnets
Gathering leads is an essential part of marketing. High quality leads are most likely to convert into paying customers. Lead magnets are ways you can identify these leads and give you an in to follow up with them and hopefully complete the conversion. There are a lot of different types of lead magnets you can use. When planning out what type of magnet you want to create and use, think about what some of the common pain points are in your industry and what you are doing to solve them. Find ways to work that into your lead magnets to make them more appealing to consumers. Make sure the content is high value content with impeccable quality. It should go beyond your normal content to make it more specialized and attractive to leads. Incidentally, lead magnets can be an effective way to build your emailing list.
Direct Mail Marketing
Digital marketing is highly useful in an increasingly digital age, but more traditional methods are still worth using. Businesses rely heavily on their local customer base for support. Direct mail marketing can be a good way to make sure they know you exist. Unlike search engines that rely on optimization to get your business in front of consumers, direct mail marketing relies on your ability to create a compelling ad and the post office to get it out to people. This can be a great way to run promotions to encourage local consumers to give your business a try. Depending on the area you’re intending to market to, you may find it helpful to divide it into smaller segments.
Put a timeline on your offer and adjust it to fit when you’ll deliver it to the individual segments. This can help keep your business from suddenly being overrun with consumer traffic. Make sure you plan for the increase in traffic so you can adequately support it when it happens.
To create an effective direct mail marketing campaign, direct the majority of your focus to creating a quality mailing list and developing a compelling ad. You should give some attention to design elements, methods of delivery, and your chosen images. The majority of your results will come from the effort you put into your mailing list and how compelling your ad is though. You should make sure you clearly define your target market, just like how you would for any other marketing campaign.
Develop a compelling offer and call to action to attract people to your business. Do a couple of small test runs before running the campaign as a whole. This will give you a chance to troubleshoot it before you really get going. Don’t forget to review and proofread the ad before you send it out. Few things will get your ad thrown out or make people laugh at your business more quickly than noticing a misspelled word or a poorly positioned photo. Make sure the quality of the printing is up to your standards as well. Use a printer that has a quality guarantee so you aren’t out a lot of money if you aren’t satisfied with the initial printing.
Cross-Promotion
Your customers aren’t the only ones who can refer and promote your business to consumers. If you’ve established a positive relationship with businesses you already work with, you can ask them to help promote your business. This can be especially helpful if you are a B2B company. It’s essentially the B2B version of referral marketing. It’s important to remember that when choosing a business to cross-promote your own, you choose ones that are related to what you do but not your competitors. No business is going to promote their competition. When you ask, offer to promote their business in return. Getting a cross-promotion deal set up can be quite simple. In the end, the basics of what you need are the conversation that gets the ball rolling and a written agreement outlining the terms of your deal.
There are so many different methods you can use to market your business. Digital marketing methods are a must when it comes to reaching a broader segment of your audience. Other methods like direct mail, cross promotion, and referral marketing are good to look at as well, and can be used to great effect by a variety of businesses. Not all marketing methods are suited to every business across the board, but mastering the ones that work best for you can make a great deal of difference for your business.
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