A business can have a fantastic product and excellent service and still fail. In most cases, this failure can be traced back to ineffective marketing. Successfully marketing a company’s brand and products is different today than it was in decades past. If you want to stay ahead of the curve, it’s good to reassess your marketing strategies from time to time. With that in mind, below is an overview of some of the business marketing strategies that are highly successful today.
Social Media Marketing
Something that has absolutely transformed how companies market their products and services is social media. Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and Reddit have all changed how businesses communicate with consumers. Never before in history have companies had a better direct line to so many consumers, about 79 percent of Americans. Unlike traditional marketing strategies, social media can foster two way communication. You can impart the messages you want to consumers, and they can tell you what to think back via hashtags, replies to social media posts and more. Social media, in fact, is a plentiful source of absolutely free market research far superior to anything available before.
Content Marketing
A form of marketing that has received a good deal of buzz in recent years is content marketing. Instead of being used as a means to simply alert consumers of a specific product, content marketing works a bit differently. Content that has value on its own to the consumer is distributed. This should be content that entertains, informs or engages the consumer regarding things that are related to your product but extend beyond a simple commercial. Think, for example, of a grocery product company that runs a recipe blog. The recipes may, for example, call for the use of the company’s spice blends. That way, the spice blends are advertised in an indirect way. The consumer gets value from the recipe and can be convinced to buy a spice blend at the same time.
Email Marketing
E-mail, of course, was one of the very first online services available. To this day, it remains one of the best ways to market directly to individual consumers. However, eventually consumers got sick of receiving “spam” email. Instead, you should be more savvy with your e-mail marketing strategies. The best strategy is to use incentives such as coupons, discounts, exclusives and more to convince consumers to actively opt-in to being added to mailing lists. Managing a large mailing list can be complicated but can be simplified by using solutions like an Easy-SMTP server. Make sure marketing emails are also tailored in response to data regarding individual consumers to produce the most conversions.
Search Engine Optimization
Today, consumers don’t typically “window shop” in the traditional sense to find products they want to purchase. They may still browse products. However, that browsing is done online. The vast majority of consumers now perform online research on their smartphones before deciding on a product to buy and what store to buy it at. As such, being able to come up near the top of relevant search engine results for a particular product category is paramount for being able to compete in the modern business environment. Search engine optimization, or SEO for short, are the strategies a company deploys to obtain and maintain a healthy level of web traffic from search engine results. Ignoring the importance of SEO in your marketing-mix will certainly hurt you dearly by greatly lowering your ability to make a healthy profit.
Influencer Marketing
You should also consider adding relationships with internet “influencers” to your marketing campaigns. Influencers, in this context, are internet personalities with big followings on social media, the blogosphere or video sites like YouTube. Think of influencer marketing as the modern version of celebrity endorsements. However, in this case, the endorsement should not be so obvious. For example, you could have your product reviewed by a popular YouTuber. The product review won’t come off as a commercial but will still do the job of informing that YouTuber’s audience of your product. Considering a lot of people watch services like YouTube now instead of traditional television networks, this is one way to adapt your marketing to the current landscape.
Final Thoughts
Overall, you should constantly be reassessing the marketing strategies you are using. New ways to advertise products and services are constantly being introduced in today’s fast-paced and high-tech market. If you are too dependent on the marketing strategies of the past, you may end up ceding a good portion of your potential business to your competitors.
