Popular Marketing Strategies Experts Swear By
Every brand and business can only go so far without marketing plans. To be successful in the business, you need to be able to have solid marketing strategies up your sleeve. There are many ways to market your product, but you also need to consider a lot of factors to make your marketing efforts fit the product or service that you are selling. This article will discuss marketing and marketing strategies that experts swear by.
What is Marketing?
First, you need to know what marketing is. Marketing is what you call the activities that a brand or company uses to promote their product or service. It’s a complex process of identifying while anticipating the client’s needs in order to satisfy their needs and wants. Marketing is also used to attract customers.
The approach to marketing varies depending on the audience and strategy. It can be affected by market research, characteristics of your product, and your target market. Marketers determine the best method to be used to market the product based on market analysis.
The basic and foundational tool that marketers use as a guide when deciding on marketing is the marketing mix. The marketing mix refers to four specific levels, which are product, price, promotion, and place. This is also most commonly known as the 4Ps of marketing.
· Product — When considering the product aspects of your marketing strategy, you need to know the specifics of your products and how it relates to your users wants and needs. When thinking of the product element, you will develop the product design, packaging, branding, and labeling. These are all part of marketing. This is the key to communicate your product’s identity to your audience.
· Price — When it comes to thinking of marketing strategies, you need to know the price points you are setting and how it affects your audience. You can do some research on pricing methods and make that match your marketing strategies.
· Place — The place element for your marketing strategy refers to how your products get to your customer. This means that you also need to think about your distribution channels or intermediaries such as retailers and wholesalers. The channel in which your product is going to sell is vital for your marketing strategy.
· Promotion — Promotion is that last out of the 4Ps. This refers to the communication tool that you will use for your marketing strategy. There are many kinds of communication tools for marketing. To name a few, these are social media, public relations, product placements, advertisements, link building, search engine optimization, brand awareness, event marketing, exhibits, and trade shows. All of this must also coincide with the other 4Ps of marketing when you sketch up your marketing strategy.
What are Popular Marketing Strategies?
Once you have the 4Ps fundamentals set, you need to build a relationship with your customers by adding value to their everyday life. Given that you know what marketing is now, here are just some of the popular marketing strategies that experts swear by.
1. Blogging
One of the effective marketing strategies is blogging. If your business does not have a blog yet, then you should start making one for it already. This will give you more visibility and spread awareness about your brand. On this blog, you can talk about your products or services. You can also relate some ideas to your product or services.
Having presence on one blog is not enough. Sometimes, you will need to get help from other blogs that have their own following already. This is where tiered link building comes in. What is Tiered Link Building — you might ask. Tiered link building is the method of having backlinks to your backlinks.
By using the tiered link building method, you can create authority to your website and increase your ranking in search engine results using the credibility of the blog you are riding on. This will help you get more exposure.
2. Social Media Marketing
Nowadays, everyone is on social media. If you are not there yet, you will definitely get left behind. It is something that you can no longer ignore. In fact, there are lots of businesses these days that started as social media pages. It's difficult to navigate at first, but once you build momentum, you will find it gets easier.
When posting on social media, you can talk about your product or build hype for your product launches. You might also need to hire a social media manager to strategize and schedule your promotions. Post anything that will be relevant to the product or services that you offer, and you will surely catch the attention of your readers and customers.
Some platforms that you can use are Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, or Facebook. There are lots of material online where you can learn how to do social media marketing. There is a lot of potential in using social media as a tool for marketing. All the big corporations already use it now.
On social media pages such as Facebook, they have developed their own Facebook ads that offer an inexpensive yet effective way to market products on Facebook. Compared to traditional marketing, you will reach more eyeballs when you pay for Facebook ads for your product posts or Facebook page advertisements.
Besides that, it is also more effective because Facebook ads allow you to target your audience in a more specific way. For instance, you can set the people that you want your ad to be circulated to. Facebook allows you to target the audience based on interests, sex, age, location, online behavior, and more. By doing this, you will be more effective in reaching your audience.
Facebook also has an ads manager that will allow you to make more efficient analytics on your ads. By looking at the analytics, you can gauge which ads work, and which don’t. You can also see what time of posting gets you the most views. You can also see the demographics of your viewers on Facebook.
3. Newsletter Personalization
When creating a marketing strategy, the most effective strategies are the ones that hits the heart of your customers. To create a better relationship with your customers, marketers should be able to put a personal touch by personalizing.
Even adding a simple touch of adding the name of your customer in the newsletter will make a great impact on your customer. This would make them feel more special. Customers would usually want this type of customization. Growing a loyal following coupled with quality content and emotional resonance, you will get more engagement from your customers.
4. Coupon Sites Partnerships
Striking partnership with coupon deal websites will also be a good marketing strategy to promote your business. These coupon sites already have a huge following, and you can take advantage of this. Using their audience, you can offer discounts and deals for your customers.
The goal of partnering up with coupon sites is not actually getting more profit. By offering a discount, you will tap new potential customers to try your product for a lesser price. People who didn’t know about your product or service could be enticed to try it out if you offer a discount on it. If they like it, you will have new loyal customers.
5. Brand Ambassadors
Competition in a saturated market is on an unprecedented scale. Because of this, you need any help you can get to market for your customers. With the rise of influencers, you can ride through their fame as well by getting key influencers as your brand ambassador. Brand ambassadors are individuals or influencers who can promote your product or service to the public. Then, these ambassadors will be compensated through fees or in kind.
Influencers have a great social reach and can connect you to different people. In addition, people often believe in recommendations from people that they trust. You will reach new potential customers, increase sales, and drive traffic to your website.
6. Affiliate Programs
You may also want to look into affiliate programs as a marketing strategy as well. This has been a proven and effective way to get a huge following more quickly. Affiliate marketing is basically a referral program wherein affiliate marketers will earn money for every product or service sold. The revenue-sharing mix will depend on the agreement between the company and affiliate marketer.
One of the advantages of this marketing strategy is the low cost. This costs lower than compared to launching an entire campaign. In addition, there are lesser barriers to entry. You just need to let people know that you have an affiliate program going on. Then, open the applications and filter through it.
You don’t need to look for professionals to become part of your affiliate program. Even your customers can join in. Launching this affiliate program entices and incentivizes them to promote your products to their friends and family. Since the recommendations will come from someone they know, people will be more inclined to try your products and services.
7. Support an Advocacy
Supporting an advocacy or social cause that is related to the product or service that you are selling is also an effective marketing strategy. You will also be able to help a community or support a cause. People who identify with the same cause or advocacy might become inspired by this campaign and convert into your customers as well.
8. Promote Customer Loyalty Through Loyalty Cards
One of the marketing strategies to cultivate customer loyalty is to create loyalty cards. You can use these loyalty cards to reward your loyal customers with discounts. It can also be an opportunity for your customers to earn points for every purchase. With these points, you can allow them to convert them into a product for a certain number of points.
In addition, you can also use the loyalty cards as prepaid cards for whenever your customer wants to purchase anything from your store. Since the balance is always running, customers will be pushed to keep reloading the loyalty card so as not to waste any cent.
An example of a brand that has this marketing ploy is Starbucks. Starbucks allows you to collect stars for every drink. Then, after collecting around 12 stars, you can convert it into a free drink. It also serves as a prepaid card. Starbucks requires a minimum top up. So, even though the customer purchases nothing yet, the top up can already by considered as revenues for Starbucks.
9. Offer Promotions
Promotions can also be a way to entice more customers to try your product. When your customers get something bonus aside from what they paid for, they will feel better about buying your product.
For example, together with be a special “opening offer”, you can promote through coupons with a free espresso shot being posted in the posters, magazine advertisements, and postcards. The website cam also has a subscription offer where people can become members so that they can order other products online and attain discounts depending on the number of products they buy. These things will hopefully do 2 things. It will get people to try the products and second, after they try the product, these people will opt to be loyal customers.
To encourage a relationship with our customers, you can also sponsor promotion programs that give back to your customers. For instance, if you own a coffee shop, you can put certificates and scrolls in our ground coffee packs that contain several prizes such as training with champion baristas, one month free coffee, meet and other prizes.
Conclusion
By integrating the 4Ps to the marketing strategies listed above, you will create a very effective strategy to sell your products and services. These are proven methods and strategies that many brands and professionals have used. So, you can use this as a guide to plan your own marketing strategy for your brand, service, or product.
References
https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/299335
https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2018/12/31/top-marketing-strategies-2018
https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2020/01/07/best-marketing-strategies
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/financial-theory/11/small-business-marketing-techniques.asp
https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/marketing-techniques
https://buildfire.com/marketing-strategies-for-small-businesses/
https://kingkong.com.au/6-top-marketing-strategies-from-fortune-500-companies/
https://www.engagebay.com/blog/powerful-marketing-strategies/
