Today, practically every public business activity relies on digital marketing strategies. No matter what you do, you need marketing tools and strategies to carry your message across. Of course, a business owner, a philanthropist, an economist and community leader, or a spokesperson will need different marketing strategies to grow their online influence.
To make full use of the best marketing strategies that work for your niche, you will need to define your goals first. Therefore, this guide will be pointing you in the right direction, explaining the parameters on which all effective marketing strategies are based and listing the most relevant channels for online promotion. So, let’s get started!
Getting Started with Creative Marketing Strategies: The Building Blocks
Today, everyone emphasizes the value of creativity that, supposedly, should help one stand out in a noisy digital crowd. Important as creative thinking is, marketing strategies are more about analysis and precision. The ability to think outside the box will surely help. Still, to go ‘outside,’ one will need proper knowledge of the marketing strategies’ ‘inside’ first. There are several building blocks on which all effective Internet marketing strategies will base on.
Unique Value Proposition
No matter if you are promoting a product, service, or personal brand, every proposition should have a unique marketing value. Of course, do not think that only 100% unique and revolutionary products have what it takes to survive. Most services and products we see online are not unique, but an effective marketing strategy can make them seem so. After all, there is a reason why different customers trust different brands. For example, one company may emphasize product quality, while another one — low price. Alternatively, emphasizing something eco-friendly and locally-made can become one of the best marketing strategies for small businesses. Here, the main question is — how is your product or service better than the others in the same niche? What superior qualities can your marketing strategies highlight?
Target Audience & Brand Positioning
” Your unique value proposition translates directly into your brand positioning. Quality marketing positioning strategies promote the value of your product. Those are the qualities you will need to emphasize in all of your campaigns, conveying a very specific message and building a very specific image in your customer’s brain. For this, you will also need a good perception of your target audience” – says Milosz Krasinski, Managing Director at Chilli Fruit Web Consulting.
In a nutshell, the target audience is people who will see and appreciate the value of your product. The most effective target marketing strategies include a detailed overview of the potential buyers. You will need to understand who those people are and how they live. Such a strategic analysis will often include age, gender, income, living situation, hobbies, etc. The main question here is — who is your product for and why these people will love it.
SMART Goals & Major Milestones
No marketing strategies are valid without goals and milestones. By SMART goals, marketers imply specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely milestones. Here, it is important to differentiate between short- and long-term marketing strategies and goals. For example, a short-time marketing goal may be gaining a specific number of subscribers to your website or social media account. A more long-term and strategic goal could be making a certain number of sales, gaining revenue, etc. Simply put, you need to understand what exactly your marketing strategies should achieve and how soon.
“Using SMART goals to organize our marketing actions was highly effective. It finally helped us get clarity on the end result by providing clear objectives, measurable criteria, achievable milestones, realistic expectations, and a timeline to ensure all our efforts were focused towards achieving the same desired outcome.”, says the Marketing Manager at HotSlots.io.
Once you understand these basic marketing strategies, finding the best channels for your B2C or B2B marketing strategies should no longer be that challenging. Let’s take a look at the top channels for digital promotion in the section below.
Top Channels for Effective Online Marketing Strategies
With this section, we will be discussing the channels for the online promotion. Before we start, mind that not every business will need all of the following marketing strategies. Small businesses with limited marketing budgets should better focus on one to three of the channels that best suit their marketing purpose. On the other hand, large corporations should strive to cover all of the following strategies — at least, in the long run.
Google Marketing Strategies: SEO & PPC
Google is definitely the most popular search engine, so all corporate websites should be optimized for it. On the other hand, you should understand that search engine optimization strategic campaigns are time- and budget-consuming. No one can hit the top results in one night — especially if plenty of other companies are marketing in the same niche. That’s where Google Adwords campaigns and marketing strategies come in.
Setting up pay-per-click ads is quicker than optimizing your website for the search engines, which makes it a good marketing strategy. While you should definitely invest in SEO, PPC ads can bring measurable results quicker. According to the latest marketing stats, it is possible to generate up to $8 of revenue for each dollar spent on Google ads.
Another important thing to focus on while setting up SEO and PPC strategy campings is the voice search. Approximately half of the adults use voice search on their smartphones. Half of those searching (which translates to 25% of adult smartphone users) take interest in branded content as well. So, even though voice search optimization campaigns are relatively new to most marketers, this marketing strategy trend cannot be overlooked.
Social Media Marketing Strategies
It’s no secret that social media is a powerful tool for marketing and online promotion. Social media marketing strategies can be very different and depend both on your target audience and your unique value proposition. Instead of trying to cover all possible social media platforms, businesses should better focus on several sites where their target buyers are most active. This is the most cost- and time-effective marketing strategy.
The most popular platforms for social media marketing are Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. Obviously, Facebook is the largest of these five. By the end of 2020, it had roughly 2.8 billion users. In the U.S, Facebook is used by 69% of adullts (source: 60+ Fresh eCommerce Statistics & Trends). However, more is not always better. Even though Facebook advertising algorithms are complex and allow displaying ads to very specific audiences, FB is still a challenging platform for startups because it is so noisy and heavily populated.
In contrast to that, LinkedIn has only 760 million users, and only 260 million of them are active every month. However, its narrow professional focus makes this site one of the best B2B promotion tools. If your unique value proposition falls in line with this major professional network, LinkedIn marketing strategies are a must.
Content Marketing Strategies: Text & Video
Content marketing is another effective strategy that can drive traffic to your website or increase your social media presence. Like SEO, content marketing a long-term strategic haul, but it can pay a thousandfold if done right. Text and visual content, like infographics, are perfect strategies for websites with their own blog page. Alternatively, content curators can post on other websites and include links to any relevant pages of their site. In the long run, this strategy can increase your brand awareness and grow the number of backlinks to your site, boosting SEO.
Creating quality video content — for your own blog or social media marketing — is another long-term strategy that always pays off. Engaging videos can increase your brand awareness, educate your audience, or explain your product’s features. Creating new videos will take a lot of time and effort of video editors, but once these videos are up and running, they will generate a lot of traffic to your website. Unlike most social media sites with a limited lifespan for every post, YouTube videos remain searchable for years after upload. So, video marketing is definitely a long-term marketing strategy to consider.
Email Marketing Strategies
Properly crafted email strategies can increase traffic, boost sales, and help find new leads. Besides, email marketing is one of the most profitable strategies when it comes to return-of-investment. Carefully designed campaigns may generate up to $44 of ROI for every dollar spent. Email is also the most effective tool when it comes to B2B lead generation because it ensures twice more sales than any other marketing strategy. No wonder that over 80% of companies use email marketing solutions as their ultimate promotion tool.
Of course, given how many emails are sent and how many companies are using this marketing channel, standing out with your email campaigns might be challenging. The most important advice here is never to look for shortcuts, like ready-made email lists for sale. Their quality is always lacking, so it is vital to grow the subscriber’s base manually. Let people subscribe to your website, allow you to send them emails, and unsubscribe when they want to. This way, the quality of email marketing campaigns will increase — even if slowly.
To wrap it all up, effective marketing strategies combine mathematical precision with a touch of creativity. None of these two will bring any measurable results on its own, but a balanced combination of analysis and outside-the-box thinking creates miracles. With the rise of technology today, it’s beneficial to use the right AI marketing tools for your marketing campaign.
To come up with the most functional strategies, marketers will have to be aware of their business’s strengths and limitations. Of course, one should always have a hands-on situation, which means monitoring each campaign’s results to come up with timely strategic solutions on how to improve them. Only this way will each new marketing strategy be better than the last one.
Author’s Bio:
Emily Moore is an English & programming teacher with a passion for space and blogging. She believes that current exploration should be focused on preserving our planet’s resources. With satellites circling the orbit, it is easier to get relevant data on any environmental changes. This, in turn, should help people quickly address any challenges.