As a digital marketer in today’s age, it’s important to know different marketing strategies that can help your online presence grow and differentiate your business from others on the web. The more strategies you know about the better marketing plan you can come up with.
In this article we will discuss the different marketing strategies that can help take your business to the next level. We will also discuss what kinds of strategies to avoid that can potentially have a negative impact on your business.
Before we dive into all the strategies it’s important, we define what a marketing strategy is and what kinds of things it should focus on. We will also look at how a marketing strategy differs from a marketing plan.
What is a Marketing Strategy
A marketing strategy is the underlying blueprint used by a business to gain exposure for their products, services and brand. It’s the method which is meant to find ways of reaching people and turning them into customers.
The marketing strategy features all the elements a company plans to use in order to generate interest and traffic to their core business. Some of the most popular components inside a marketing strategy include:
- Defining your target audience
- Determining the marketing channels
- Reason for selling your products and services
- Knowing and analyzing your competition
- Promotional tactics
These are some important elements of a marketing strategy which are extremely important to consider when developing your marketing plan.
A marketing strategy should be constantly measured and monitored in order to make improvements as changes develop in the marketplace. It’s important to do because the marketing strategy has a direct relationship to the marketing plan.
What is a Marketing Plan
The marketing plan has a direct working relationship with the marketing strategy. It gives direction to the marketing plan on what components it plans to target and the methods it will use in order to accomplish its goals. The marketing plan develops the types of activities it plans to do to drive interest and demand for products and services.
The plan functions as the procedural structure which describes the type of advertising strategy a business will execute to attract clients and generate revenue. It will detail the type of advertising campaigns it will engage in and over what period. The marketing plan establishes budgets and the kinds of revenue it can expect to have from its related advertising channels. This is typically done through careful market research and market testing.
Once a marketing plan is live and running, a company needs to track which channels brings them the highest revenue. This is done through a process known as split testing and it’s a crucial part for marketers to understand and master.
So now that we have defined what a marketing strategy is and how it works, let’s dive into some marketing strategies that can improve the state of your business.
Marketing Technology
Digital marketers can leverage marketing technology in creating and implementing different digital marketing strategies. Marketing technology (MarTech) pertains to all tech efforts, software, processes, and platforms in promoting a product or a service.
Every digital marketing team should use a group of marketing technologies or a marketing technology stack. Examples of marketing technology include the following:
Artificial Intelligence (AI): You can quickly gather and analyze with AI, simulating human-like thought processing and conversation to drive personalization. If you already have a customer data platform (CDP) powered by AI, you can activate the data and boost engagement to deliver excellent customer experiences.
Extended Reality (XR): When you combine virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and mixed reality (MR), you’re using extended reality. This MarTech solution enables brands to engage with audiences through interactive marketing solutions. It helps shape brand perception, transforming your overall digital marketing.
Analytics: This MarTech solution involves automating metric monitoring and other previously repetitive tasks using online tools or software programs. Because marketers can track everything by using analytics, advertising efforts aren’t put to waste, which results in higher business revenue.
Marketing Automation: You can personalize your website, manage email campaigns, automate sales alerts track your visitors, and more with marketing automation, which is powered by analytics. This technology allows marketers to use and integrate customer relationship management (CRM) data to personalize marketing strategies.
Content Marketing
As the internet continues to grow and change, traditional marketing tactics are becoming less effective at engaging people’s interest. Content marketing includes things such as informational articles, e-books, instructional videos, webinars, online training and more.
Content marketing is meant to give people answers to very specific questions. It’s also meant to provide them with value that they can’t get somewhere else. It’s a very effective method to explain your product or service to a potential customer who has a problem that they want solved. Content marketing is very effective when it comes to selling software.
If you happen to be skilled at using a piece of software like Clickfunnels for example, you can create educational content around software and promote it as an affiliate. This is where content marketing can grow businesses to the next level. If you are a credible and authoritative person online, you can create educational content about a topic or service and get compensated for it in return.
If you’re not that well-versed with content marketing, reading this guide by Content Mavericks may be a good start.
Further Reading: How to Explain Content Marketing to Anyone
Influencer Marketing
Influence marketing has exploded in recent years with the rise of Instagram traffic and the engagement it can give a brand. It involves collaborating with an online influencer, typically a single individual who has a large social following and working with them in order to promote your products or services.
Influencers can be a great way to get immediate exposure to your brand. It’s also worth noting that audience engagement can be quite valuable. This is because influencers have taken time to establish trust and rapport with their audience.
So, if an influencer decides to promote your brand, product, or services, their audience can have an overall positive response to working relationships. Some of the most popular online platforms to find influencers who already have built an online audience in a specific niche include:
- Youtube
One small post on someone’s Instagram can skyrocket your sales overnight. If an influencer with 1 million followers puts a post-up promoting your brand or product and even 1 percent of that audience decides to check out your website or product, that is 10,000 eyeballs seeing your brand almost instantly.
Inbound Marketing
Inbound Marketing is the practice of building your brand and business through the process of building relationships with customers and prospects. It’s all about providing them meaningful value through a careful one-to-one approach.
Inbound marketing is most commonly seen through the use of creating some sort of content that drives people to your website rather than directly advertising the products you have for sale.
The content guides you through the use of a product or service with the intent of directly building a working relationship with you. If correctly executed an inbound marketing strategy can increase your customer retention significantly. The inbound marketing process can be broken down into three steps:
1. Attention/Attraction: Brings in prospects by providing them valuable content and having a genuine conversation with them about who you are and how you can help them with their problem.
2. Teaching/Engaging: Shows the prospect your level of expertise in the field or with the product. It explains to them what you can directly do to help their situation out.
3. Support/Follow Up: Provide your newly converted customers to successfully implement your teachings and follow up with them to track their progress.
Inbound marketing can be more time-consuming but it has the power to help you retain customers for much longer. It can also help your brand establish trust amongst people who are just discovering you. Once your customer feels like they have received valuable work from you they are more likely to refer you to others.
The tool to check is Hubspot, which is known for its great inbound marketing options.
Examples of Inbound Marketing:
There is more than one way to implement an inbound marketing strategy into your overall marketing plan. Some of the most common ways include:
- Publishing high quality and relevant blog posts
- Creating a useful infographic to illustrate a point
- Developing an in-depth whitepaper
- Creating a free ebook (makes the prospect feel the value immediately)
- In depth case study
- Webinar
- Instructional video series
These are just some of the methods used by people who want to think about incorporating an inbound marketing strategy inside their business.
Outbound Marketing
Outbound marketing is typically referred to as the cold method of marketing. Outbound marketing is the method of seeking customers through indirect sources and casting a wide net hoping to catch people who are potentially interested in whatever it is that you are selling.
It’s not as effective as inbound marketing and can be quite costly if you don’t have a concise strategy in place. The strategy is also much harder to track and scale if you don’t have a sales team behind your organization to constantly chase business. Some of the most common forms of outbound marketing include:
- Cold calling
- Sending cold emails
- Media Buying
- Seminars
These all revolve around the method of hard selling and require you to have the necessary sales skills to be able to bring in leads and convert them. Depending on the type of business you are in, outbound marketing can have its limitations.
Reading tip: 10 Email marketing strategies to improve your audience engagement
SEO Marketing
SEO marketing is the practice of optimizing your websites content and information in order to attract organic search traffic from search engines. There is a ton of work involved in order to actually start receiving organic search traffic from search engines such as Google or Bing.
You must be willing to patiently build high quality and relevant content for users in order to get your website to rank high in search results. Typically, it will take a brand-new website approximately 6 months to a year to start receiving organic search traffic from search engines. This will depend on how well your content is optimized for SEO and the quality and relevance of your content. Some of the activities involved in SEO marketing include:
- Creating high quality and engaging content
- Building backlinks
- On-Page SEO improvements
- Off-Page SEO improvements
- Creating Video Content and Tutorials
These are few of the popular methods used by SEO pros in order to gain organic search engine traffic to their website in order to grow their business. You should definitely have an SEO marketing strategy inside your business if you want an organic and consistent source of traffic to your website or product offering.
Tool to check out for SEO: SEMrush
Relevant Blogs: Keyword Research & Re-optimizing content for SEO
Video Marketing
It’s no question that video is at the forefront of marketing. This isn’t a new subject and it’s becoming more and more important for brands to develop a strong video marketing strategy into their overall marketing plan. If you aren’t incorporating video inside your marketing plan, you will quickly fall behind.
Video marketing is a great way to promote and market your products and services in order to increase exposure and engagement on your digital media and at the same time educate your prospects and reach new audiences.
In recent years there has been a surge in the use and overall popularity of video content as a form of marketing online. People have been building their own YouTube channels and are able to grow them at an unbelievable pace.
Video marketing can also be a much more creative and entertaining form of marketing than other traditional methods. It’s much easier to engage people through a video ad than any other ad form online. Some of the different types of video content that brand are creating for their marketing strategy include:
- Instructional video series
- Animated videos
- Brand Awareness videos
- Live YouTube videos
- Podcast interviews with experts
These types of videos have the ability to grab and retain the attention of an audience much more effectively than other forms of marketing. Humans by nature are very visual creatures. As such, video marketing is an important tool to help brands and business gain their interest and attention.
While you might create the best videos out there, it’s important that your consumers can watch them in every environment. Make sure to add subtitles to videos, so that the viewers can watch them even without audio.
Niche Marketing
Niche marketing is a marketing and advertising strategy which focuses on one specific target market.
Instead of trying to cast a wide net and market to everyone, niche marketing focuses on one specific target market. Some elements of niche marketing include:
- Demographic
- Activities or habits
- Culture
- Lifestyle
- Geographical area
- Behavior
- Shopping habits
- Age or sex
Niche marketing provides a benefit because it gives brands the ability to differentiate themselves from competitors in a similar space. It allows brands to become experts in a specific field and provide the utmost quality for a product or service. Niche marketing can empower brands to provide more value, build stronger relationships with clients and become an authority figure for their target business.
Further Reading: Examples of Niche Marketing
Mass Marketing
As the name implies, mass marketing is the advertisement and promotion of a product or service to a wide audience of people. The goal and intent of mass marketing is to try and appeal to as many people as possible by casting a wide net of marketing. It’s essentially the opposite of niche marketing.
To understand mass marketing, you have to understand yourself as a consumer. What are some of the most commonly purchased items in your household? What kinds of brands do you constantly see advertising to you on tv, radio and billboards? Once you begin seeing yourself as a consumer you will begin to understand mass marketing.
The types of companies that participate in mass marketing tend to have huge marketing budgets. They also have large marketing teams and vendors to make it happen. It tends to be marketing for items that you tend to use on a regular basis. This includes large scale brands such as:
- Charmin – (toilet paper)
- Colgate – (toothpaste)
- Coca Cola – (soft drinks)
- Apple ( computers )
- Land O’ Lakes ( cooking butter)
These are just a few of the many companies that participate in mass marketing. They’re not targeting a specific consumer. They are marketing to anyone and everyone who happens to have a need for those products. Mass marketing is extremely important because it has the ability to generate revenue for big time brands and companies that supply everyday essential items.
Guerilla Marketing
Guerilla marketing is a unique form of marketing which uses the element of surprise and shock to get the attention of an audience. The intent of guerilla marketing is to leave a lasting impression on an audience about a brand, product, or service through very unique and shocking marketing techniques.
This type of marketing strategy sets out to create campaigns with an unconventional twist which are meant to catch people off guard and cause them to really think about what it is that they are looking at.
Guerilla marketing campaigns can be extremely effective at making a point about a controversial topic. It’s also very effective in stirring up drama in the news. The most successful guerilla marketing campaigns have a very bold and clear message and can become viral overnight.
Another benefit is the fact that they can be extremely cost-effective while providing tremendous value to a brand. It’s meant to highlight facts and opinions in a way that is meant to invoke serious thought.
The great thing is that it can be used by a company during any stage when they see fit. It can help new companies drive immediate attention to their products, services or message. It can even help old and established companies remain relevant.
Pro tip: Everything you need to know about Guerilla Marketing
Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing is a great tool to add to your marketing mix arsenal. Most customers are already interacting with brands on social media in one form or another. Every business should be communicating with their customers through social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and even Pinterest.
Having the right kind of social media marketing strategy can bring highly targeted traffic and success to your business. It involves the sharing of content about your products or services and any sort of update on your brand or business. Some popular forms of social media marketing include:
- Posting new product photos
- Text and Images updates
- Videos
- Updates on new partnerships
These are a few of the ways you can interact with your audience through some of the most popular social media channels. It creates a more intimate connection with your audience and it’s a great way to let them know the current state of your business and what kind of future plans are in store for your brand.
It’s a very cost effective way to engage with your audience and increase the online presence of your brand and business. It’s also a great tool to raise awareness for current events and can help establish a strong brand identity for your business.
Reading tip: What are the best social media tools for Marketers?
Conclusion
With these 10 marketing strategies you should be able to grow the digital presence of your business and build a strong brand. In order to ensure the success of your marketing strategy you have to find one that is a strong fit for the type of business you are in. Not every marketing strategy mentioned here will yield a positive result for your business. It’s important to find one that aligns with the goals and missions of your business.