If you own a small or medium business, then you are a marketer yourself. And even if you hire a chief marketing officer, you will always remain a marketer. So it’s important to know that your business will always require continuous testing for new marketing strategies.
Now, the first thing you need to do when starting a business is developing a marketing strategy, so where do you begin?
Knowing where to begin might be difficult/challenging with so many marketing methods available.
In this article, we will demonstrate seven types of marketing strategies that you may try out and apply to your business.
1. Organic traffic
Visitors who find your website without using a paid ad are known as organic traffic. They discovered you through a search engine, such as Google or Bing.
Organic traffic is crucial because the potential consumer intentionally looks for a product or service similar to yours. You may not get a lot of organic traffic at first. But all new businesses go through the same thing.
To make your business as visible to search engines as possible, you’ll need to try search engine optimization (SEO). Making these small changes to your website, help Google understand your business and send more traffic to it.
Organic traffic is a long-term growth strategy. ut SEO is a large subject that needs to be learned in-depth for your business’s benefit.
2. Social media marketing
It requires content creation to be shared on social media platforms to establish an engaged audience.
In the United States, people spend two hours each day on social media on average, so there’s a great opportunity for you to get your business online in front of the right audience.
But, where do you begin?
Your time is valuable as a small business owner, and it may be hard to expand your audience on every social media platform at the same time. You may initially pick one or two social media channels and focus on them based on your ideal target consumer.
Social media marketing and organic traffic are long-term growth strategy. You can benefit from social media marketing enormously if you post the right content and engage with your audience. However, you must maintain consistency from the beginning. Set a time of day for posting and engaging on social media and stick to it.
3. Email marketing
It is the process of sending marketing emails to new potential and existing customers via email to educate or sell your product or service.
Email marketing tools don’t necessarily have to be expensive. There are numerous free email marketing tools available to help you save time and money.
One of the advantages of email marketing is that you build a relationship with your clients. You’re not relying just on a search engine or social media platforms to show your business to the right audience.
Having an email list is crucial for your business, so start creating it immediately. You can do it even before launching your business by building a “Coming Soon” page or collecting emails in-person face-to-face with your clients. To attract visitors, consider offering an incentive of 10% off the first purchase if you sign up for our email list.
Make sure every email you send should add value. Otherwise, your recipients will unsubscribe, and you’ll lose their confidence.
4. Paid marketing:
Paid marketing is when you pay for advertising. It allows you to design well-targeted ads and connect with your potential consumers quicker. If you want fast results and you are ready to invest, this might be a great way for you.
To create paid ads, you choose a specific channel, such as Google Ads or Facebook. And then you define the targeting criteria such as location, search terms, interests, demographics, etc.… You can create a budget that works for your company. It’s best to start and test a small daily budget for a while. The results will help you understand your ad’s performance and eventually improve it.
So how do you get started?
Shown can help you manage your ads through the best channels for your business & goal. You can run Ads on Google & Bing in only a few minutes and Shown AI generates all the perfect keywords for you. Facebook Ads can also be created and optimized automatically for you to reach your business goals.
5. Referral program
A referral program is a marketing strategy that uses existing customers’ recommendations and word of mouth to expand the business to their networks.
Referral marketing is a method of getting your clients to support you and spread the word about your brand. It converts your present consumers into brand advocates.
Using affiliate, referral, and partnerships programs can help you to build and grow a client base through your existing customers. It can be a great strategy to incentivize customers to tell others about your products or services.
6. Earned media & PR
Earned media is any publicity about your business that you did not pay for. It can also be referred to as “free media” since it was created for free.
Earned media can take many forms such as word of mouth, a customer review, Product Roundup, TV or radio mention, a newspaper article., or even a tweet.
Although earned media is usually created by a third party, you may still influence some of this publicity about your brand.
How can you do it?
The best ways to do that is by
• Creating awesome useful content worth sharing
• Spending plenty of time interacting with your fans on social media
• Delighting your customers to become a lovable brand
7. Content marketing
Content marketing is a marketing strategy that focuses on spreading relevant information to customers to attract those who are most likely to buy your product or service. This type of marketing prioritizes education over selling which impact customers’ purchasing decision.
Content Marketing is important as it promotes brand awareness and credibility. It can take various formats such as videos, blogging (influencers), podcasts, and webinars…etc.
Nowadays more companies are using influencer marketing which is under the content marketing umbrella. They prefer this type of marketing because Influencers have a large follower base and can help them gain huge brand recognition.
Influencers promote your brand’s products or services based on their specific niche. They provide recommendations to their audience which can be through blogging. For that reason, you must ensure that the influencer communication reflects your content too as this will bring relativity.
Now, you know seven different ways to advertise your business. So start today!
