Every single day, we are bombarded with new marketing ideas and strategies to drive more traffic, leads, and sales to our businesses. Whether you’re running an online store, a service-based business, or are the head of marketing for a Fortune 500 company, there’s always something new to learn and implement in your marketing plan.
What’s more is that the techniques and methods that work today might not be what works tomorrow. Think about the following marketing ideas:
Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising
PPC advertising, or pay-per-click advertising, is pretty self-explanatory. You place ads on a search engine and when someone clicks on it, you get paid. Generally, the higher the click-through rate (CTR) on your ads, the better. But the key is to ensure that the person who’s clicking on your ads is truly a potential customer or buyer for your products or services. Generating interest and setting up the sale with a potential customer is much better than driving traffic to your site, liking or sharing your content, and hoping someone will click on your link at some point.
Let’s say you’re running an online store selling women’s clothing. You might want to run a Google PPC campaign, paying for ads that appear when someone types in “women’s clothing” or “womens clothing” into a search engine. When someone clicks on one of those ads, they will be taken to a landing page with a couple options. They can either (a) continue to your store or (b) be forwarded to the product page for whatever they were searching for.
Display Advertising
These are the ads that are often placed on a website or blog posts when they are published, not the ads that are shown on TV. You might also see ads on social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook.
The benefit of display advertising is that you can choose to target the audience that’s most likely to be interested in your product or service. With display ads, you can choose the demographic, gender, ages, or even geographical region of the audience you want to target.
For example, if you’re selling men’s clothing and want to target men between the ages of 18 and 34, you can create a display ad with a picture of a male model wearing your product or service. When someone clicks on that ad, they will be taken to a landing page with a couple options. They can either (a) continue to your store or (b) be forwarded to the product page for whatever they were searching for.
The key to using display advertising is to make sure that the person reading the ads is indeed interested in your product or service. If you write a compelling advertisement and choose the right audience, you can completely change the outcome of a marketing campaign without having to resort to paid advertising.
Content Marketing
If you’re not really sure what content marketing is, it’s basically using content to attract, engage, and convert potential customers into actual customers. So rather than just focusing on attracting visitors to your website, you can also develop content that will engage your audience, making them more likely to buy your products or services. Content marketing covers a lot of ground, including online magazines, e-books, videos, infographics, and webinars. Basically, you can write blog posts, create digital content, and host webinars to engage with your audience and grow your business.
Depending on how you plan to grow your business and what stage you’re at, you might choose one method over the other. For example, if you’re just getting started, you might want to focus on SEO and PPC advertising. As you grow your business, you might choose to do more content marketing or display advertising.
Social Media Marketing (SMM)
SMM, or social media marketing, is all about getting people to “like” or “share” your content, while also engaging with your audience on social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook.
If you want to succeed on social media, you have to understand the unique psychology of social media users. Unlike traditional marketing, people on social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook are constantly looking for something to “like” or “share” with their followers. This means that your content needs to be both interesting and engaging, but also needs to relate to something that will attract people’s attention. Creating a successful social media strategy takes a bit of homework. You’ll want to choose your platforms wisely and build a schedule around using them, connecting with your audience, and engaging with potential customers. By understanding your audience’s behavior and habits, you can tailor your content to engage them, gaining their trust and growing your business.
Choosing the right social media platforms is crucial to your success. If you want to succeed on social media, start by looking at the demographics of your target audience. Choose a platform they’re already on and one that’s relevant to your industry. When someone chooses to follow your account on Twitter, they are already showing an interest in what you have to say. The same goes for Facebook.
Video Marketing
If you’re writing an e-book, you might want to consider adding a video to it. People love to watch videos. Most of us have hundreds of hours of video content stored on our smartphones alone, so it would be a natural fit for digital marketing material. Videos can function as collateral for online stores, such as product demos, reviews, and FAQs, and they can also sit in their own right as a standalone piece of content, attracting a completely different audience.
The key to making videos work for your business is to choose the right platform, create compelling content, and find a way to integrate it into your website or e-book. When done right, videos can function as a valuable tool in getting visitors to engage with your audience, eventually leading to a purchase.
Email Marketing
Even older than social media marketing is email marketing. People have been using email to receive content, offers, and other types of communications for decades. Marketers often forget that a significant portion of their audience are still using email as their main form of communication. According to Litmus, a marketing automation software company, about 77% of consumers still use email to communicate with businesses. If someone doesn’t use social media to interact with your company, they’re probably using email or some other form of digital communication.
The key to effective email marketing is to utilize marketing automation software, such as HubSpot. Using marketing automation software can help you coordinate your email marketing campaigns across different platforms, analyze the results of your campaigns, and segment your audience. In the future, marketing automation will make email marketing less of a hassle and more of a viable option for any business.
Radical Marketing
Nowadays, the term “traditional” marketin doesn’t mean what it used to. The lines between digital and traditional marketing have blurred, and traditional marketing strategies have become more innovative and data-driven. One such strategy is called radical marketing, which is basically using whatever resources you have at your disposal, whether it’s digital or traditional, to reach your audience.
The beauty of radical marketing is that it doesn’t rely on one platform or toolset to reach people. Instead, you might choose to use a combination of SEO, PPC advertising, and social media to gain visibility and drive traffic to your site. If that doesn’t work, you could try a bit of content marketing, email marketing, or even old-fashioned word of mouth marketing. Whatever it might be, you’re using all available resources to grow your business.
As you can see, there are numerous methods and tools that you can use to market your business. Which one you choose depends on what you’re looking for. For instance, if you’re just getting started, you might want to limit yourself to SEO and PPC advertising, writing blog posts, and sharing them on social media. As your business grows, you might want to consider investing in display advertising, creating videos, and doing more email marketing.
Just remember that whatever you choose, it needs to support your overall business goal. If you want to succeed, leverage everything you can. Whether it’s traditional or digital marketing, you need to identify the platforms your target audience uses, create compelling content, and find a way to connect with them wherever they are. Don’t get stuck in the past and thinking in terms of “clicks” and “traffic”. The key to marketing today is to be innovative, creative, and data-driven.