Marketing strategy involves a series of steps you require to engage your leads and customers — eventually guiding them to make a purchase decision. Different marketing tactics are meant to accomplish other goals; therefore, you might require more than one to keep your business growth on the right trajectory.
Use your marketing strategy to target consumers at different stages in the sales funnel. Moreover, you can utilize the metrics you produce from these strategies to pin down your customers’ buying journeys, which will allow you to target them effectively. In this post, we will be looking at 35+ marketing tactics to help you grow your business.
B2C marketing refers to a marketing strategy meant for a company that directly markets its products or services to customers. They can serve online, offline, or both.
Customer data drive a B2C marketing strategy. But, first, you have to understand your customers inside and out, from where they live and how much money they make to their preferred social media channels.
Many businesses neglect employees as their potential customers and brand ambassadors. Think of companies that use employee discounts as part of their benefits packages. Employees usually buy from their employers — as long as they’re convinced that they’ll make the best deal.
Moreover, you need to create a stable of interested employees who don’t just show up for their paychecks but who come to work willing to promote the business and help it accomplish the goals you’ve planned for it. Don’t overlook employees while building a marketing strategy. You need your workforce to help promote your brand.
Unlike B2C marketing, B2B marketing happens when one business markets its products or services to another business or organization; for instance, if you build online courses for entrepreneurs, you’re working in the B2B space.
B2B marketing demands a different approach because several steps are involved. First, you have to recognize the decision-makers, determine how to gain buy-in from C-level leadership, and nourish those relationships through constant contact and excellent service.
Companies like Amway, Avon, and Mary Kay have developed their entire businesses around direct selling. It’s a useful strategy, but only for specific niche markets. You’re engaging with customers outside your business location, and you have a viable strategy for convincing those customers to buy.
You require excellent sales skills and a gregarious, extroverted personality. Otherwise, you might not produce sufficient excitement and energy throughout these events.
People choose to give back. They like understanding that their purchases help further their favorite causes, so collaborating with a nonprofit or not-for-profit organization works as a viable marketing strategy. Again, you’re utilizing your business to help customers give back to their communities.
A cause marketing strategy entails a partnership that benefits both parties.
If you want to excel at cause marketing, you need a clear link between your business and the cause.
Earned media is free publicity, typically via public relations. For example, it might involve a mention in a newspaper, magazine, or blog. It could also incorporate brand ambassadors who spread the word about your courses without any reason.
As you can probably understand, earned media has become one of the most worthwhile marketing tactics.. You don’t need to pay for or create the media, so you don’t need to delete your resources.
Plus, people believe in earned media more than any other form of marketing. It’s extremely transparent and honest because there’s no exchange of funds, products, or services.
A point of purchase (or sale) marketing strategy includes upselling the customer near where they purchase. For instance, you might have seen that small items are arranged on or near the counters in a retail store. This is because they’re meant for impulse purchases.
Additionally, you might have encountered a cashier who has tried to upsell you on another product. They might see that you’ve bought an MP3 player, for instance, and suggest that you buy earbuds or headphones to go with it. This is another example of POP marketing.
When it comes to e-commerce, you can also seek a POP marketing strategy. It’s a simple way to encourage larger transactions for every purchase. Just optimize each stage of the checkout process for upselling.
Paid media advertising might propose the most efficient solution to expand your business fast. Of course, you’ll require the liquid capital needed to invest, but you can quickly make significant ROI on every dollar you spend.
Paid media advertising can take several forms:
Before diving into paid media advertising, set specific, measurable goals for every ad’s performance, then track your progress. If one advertising strategy doesn’t act, don’t keep wasting your money into it. Instead, try something new.
You already understand that you share an audience with your competitors, but you also share with businesses that complement your own. For instance, an entrepreneur who sells fitness-related online courses would likely share audience members with an entrepreneur who builds digital products about nutrition.
Co-branding or affinity marketing is a partnership between two organizations that share common interests and audiences. They aren’t immediate competitors, so they don’t stand to lose leads to their partners, but they get access to each others’ followers. Affinity marketing can further include co-developed products.
This umbrella term comprises multiple types of marketing, from social and email to blogging and landing pages. Marketing you conduct over the Internet can be deemed an Internet marketing strategy.
However, you require a specific strategy to build your business. For instance, if you’re on social media, what kinds of posts do you make and at what rate? What topics do you cover if you blog, and how do you acknowledge readers in the comments section?
An Internet marketing strategy should also include metrics accumulated from your efforts. Connecting Google Analytics to your website, for example, enables you to view metrics like bounce rates, traffic data, and more.
It’s simpler than ever to create word-of-mouth advertising because it no longer depends on people talking to one another face to face. For example, you might get word-of-mouth advertising when a customer mentions your online course on social media or writes a blog post about it.
Review websites (and your course site with internal reviews) also become a sort of word-of-mouth advertising. These reviews act as social proof, which can assist you in attracting and converting more customers.
You can’t underestimate the power of storytelling. A story has a beginning, middle, and end. Then, there are characters and points of conflict. Ultimately, a resolution ties up everything in a neat, satisfying bow.
You don’t need to write a novel or present a feature film. Stories can be as short or as long as you desire. For instance, you might have heard of the six-word story phenomenon. It challenges writers to convey a complete story in precisely six words. In business and marketing, storytelling is a method that enables you to reach your audience on an emotional level.
Growth hacking is not a new term, thus experiencing a resurgence these days, particularly Internet marketing. Growth hacking includes generating massive growth in a short time by “hacking” a marketing strategy to make it more effective.
One way to improve your way to success is to simultaneously test multiple kinds of marketing tactics. You’ll get large amounts of data in a short period, and you can infer from that data that will inform your future efforts.
You never know the content will go viral (indicating that it spreads quickly through social shares, emails, search engine traffic, and other referrals). But, sadly, there’s also no definitive metric to decide whether a social media post, blog article, YouTube video, or another piece of content “goes viral.” Getting your brand in front of as many people as possible is the ultimate goal, and viral marketing via social networks can make it occur.
There are several ways in which you can increase your chances of building a piece of viral content:
This marketing strategy depends upon your existing customers to make new ones aboard. Then, you allow your customers a discount or some other incentive for introducing paying customers to your business. It’s highly useful in the retail space, but it can work just as well for online courses.
You can set up a referral program manually, but so many referral program software options are also available. Either way, you go, ensure you have a way to verify purchases before you present your customers with rewards for referrals.
Everyone enjoys a good contest. This kind of marketing works especially well on social media platforms, such as Instagram and Facebook, but you can also run contests on your blog or other online properties.
Contests further drive traffic to your website and boost conversion rate optimization. You can give away a free course, for example, or some other digital product. The contest can be anything of your devising, but ensure it relates to your focus audience and your digital products.
When you produce content, you want it to appear in the search engines. Therefore, search engine optimization (SEO) can cause massive ROI through search engine marketing (SEM).
Consider SEM as a challenge to encourage your content into the top few listings in the search engine results pages (SERPs). Building unique, value- and data-driven content can assist you to generate backlinks to your work and make your content more appealing to the search engines.
Moreover, take the time to optimize your meta tags, images, and other on-page elements so people can discover your content through long-tail keywords. It’s simpler to rank for long-tail keywords than for single words.
Search engine marketing also includes PPC advertising and other efforts to get your brand before people who utilize search engines.
Consider retargeting as a paid advertising shortcut. Rather than paying to advertise your brand in front of unqualified leads and total strangers, you retarget people who have associated with your business before.
For example, Facebook Ad retargeting enables you to put a Pixel on your website. When users visit your website and then go to Facebook, they’ll notice an ad for your brand. Since they’re already brand-aware, they’ll remember the messaging and prove more likely to convert.
You can utilize retargeting on many social platforms, so don’t be restricted to Facebook.
People post value-rich content on social media, driving traffic to their sales and landing pages while strengthening brand awareness and creating relationships with their audience members.
A social media marketing tactic should involve a posting schedule and an editorial calendar of the kinds of content you might want to publish. Then, figure out how to include links, hashtags, images, and videos into your content to drive engagement.
Not all marketing takes place online. Sometimes, you notice the best results when you step out from behind your computer screen and engage people in the real world. Networking events allow the ideal environment for reaching people who might appreciate your online courses.
Clearly, you’re looking for networking events that relate to your industry.
When you attend networking events, always bring loads of literature to hand out. Enter your website address on every piece of literature, as well as descriptions of your digital products. Keep your elevator pitch short and clear, and look for methods to help other people before you ask them to purchase something for you.
SEO includes meta tags, keyword selection, optimization, and more. When it comes to keywords, you have lots of options. Latent semantic indexing (LSI) keywords can make your content contextually relevant to users and search engines. LSI keywords are phrases that correlate to your primary keyword.
Search engines like Google desire to serve up content that will provide readers value. Utilizing primary and LSI keywords can help you rank higher in the SERPs for that reason.
A content marketing strategy includes content that you post online, from your landing pages and blog posts to your social media accounts. It’s a highly effective strategy because it encourages organic traffic from the search engines and turns visitors into loyal followers.
Again, though, you require a strategy for your strategy. Develop a content marketing editorial calendar, determine how frequently you want to create content, and develop ideas months in advance.
Consider inbound marketing for developing positive relationships with prospective customers without paying too much money or annoying leads. Inbound marketing leads to any marketing activity that brings leads to your business like a magnet.
Instead of shooting a television commercial or forming a blind PPC campaign, begin with an email list, publish content for free, create a presence on social media, and ask for people’s permission before you contact them.
As customers become more blinded to traditional advertising and more cautious of cold calling and other hard-sale tactics, inbound has become an ideal alternative.
Outbound marketing is the traditional form of marketing. It’s existed for centuries in one form or another. But, of course, it’s become a bit more complex over the years.
While inbound marketing gives many advantages, companies still use outbound marketing to succeed. Direct mail, for instance, might get read as frequently as email, but you must form a list of qualified prospects, so you don’t waste postage.
You might also cold-call prospects, primarily if you work in the B2B space, as described above. Commercials and advertising also work with metrics to back up your marketing tactics.
People come to your online business for several reasons. For instance, you sell online courses for health enthusiasts. Some of your customers might need to lose a few pounds, others might want to participate in bodybuilding competitions, and others would like to increase their endurance or speed.
It would be best to market these different segments in different ways to hit their specific pain points and highlight the aspects of your digital products that will appeal to them directly.
Think of your customer’s journey as a set of touchpoints. Every point will be unique depending on how your customer knows about you and the steps needed to convert them. Therefore, Touchpoint marketing includes analyzing the touchpoints that your customers hit most often so you can optimize them.
It’s also a method to shrink the buying cycle so that customers purchase your digital products faster. It would also help ensure that every potential touchpoint leads to a positive impression. For instance, if prospective customers call or email you, high-level customer service will leave them feeling optimistic about your business.
You own a brand, whether you’ve consciously created one or not, so you might as well take charge of it. Your brand contains physical manifestations of your business (such as your logo and tagline) along with your company culture, voice, tone, and structure.
The best way to adopt branding is to figure out why you’re in this business in the first place. What drives you to make online courses and other digital products? Why are you passionate about it? Then, use your answer to specify every aspect of your brand.
Agile marketing involves core values and belief systems that drive a company’s marketing strategy. It prefers small experiments, consistent customer feedback, rapid iteration, and data and analytics.
Email campaigns let you directly tied to your audience. Utilize them to segment your audience, as described above, and apply opt-in forms on your website to enable users to sign up. In addition, you can send emails that comprise educational content, information about sales, discounts, coupon codes, and more.
Before sending emails, ensure your email account has a good rating to avoid getting into the spam folder. You can use the email warming tools, which mark emails as important and will not end up in spam. This will greatly increase the open rate.
If you want to acquire more customers quickly, consider setting up an affiliate marketing company. Your affiliates receive commissions on every sale that they generate for your business. In addition, each affiliate gets a unique link to your product page in most cases.
The affiliate earns the agreed-upon commission when you register a sale from that link. It’s a great way to reach new audiences and drive sales.
Like content marketing, article marketing refers to writing articles based on your business’s core purpose and industry. Then, you can publish these articles on your website, guest-post them on appropriate industry blogs, or use them as lead magnets to attract email signups.
Entrepreneurs can yield more data than ever before. Behavioral marketing utilizes that data to tailor marketing messages to typical consumers. Using cookies, IP addresses, web histories, and more information behavioral marketing ensure that each customer sees the right message at the right time.
Unlike relationship marketing which concentrates on customer retention, transactional marketing tries to make the most of each transaction. In other words, it tries to convince the user to spend more during each transaction by offering different products, placing ads in conspicuous places, and providing incentives for upsells.
An augmented reality marketing strategy brings the third dimension into your marketing efforts. It’s likely a more costly option than other types of marketing tactics on this list, but it’s also a forward-thinking option.
From virtual tours to augmented ads, marketers discover ways to reach customers in 3D and grab their attention in more immersive environments.
When you write a guest post for someone else’s blog, they will usually let you include a call to action (CTA) at the end of the post. In addition, you can have a link back to the sales page that would most appeal to that blog’s audience. It’s a useful way to briefly hijack someone else’s platform to earn more eyes for your content and digital products.
While guest posting permits you to create content for someone else’s audience, influencer marketing results in original content by a blogger or social media personality who recommends your digital products to their audience. You must pay the influencer for this service in most cases. Still, you can also give away free products and make other arrangements, depending on the influencer’s terms.
You can try out these different marketing tactics to choose which goes best with your audience. Plus, you can incorporate different marketing tactics to expand your business faster and with less effort.
Start by analyzing your current marketing efforts and then test the marketing strategies you think will be most effective. The more data you accumulate, the more targeted your marketing messages become.
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