Effective and appropriate marketing strategies are to get ahead of your competition. The right approach could mean the difference between a waste of time and money, or stellar results.
Marketing is used by companies to communicate and connect with their consumers. It is also employed to inform the customers about the features, specifications and benefits of the company’s products. It is basically focused on encouraging the target audience to buy those specific products and services. Some marketing strategies might be totally innovative or they can be tried or tested strategies.
There are many different types of marketing strategies available. Different strategies will be most effective for different businesses, or even for alike businesses wanting to reach audiences in different parts of the buyers journey. Before choosing the right marketing strategy for your business, you'll want to do a thorough analysis and plan of your target audience and the business goal you want to achieve with your marketing. We have an eBook series that can help you with just that! Click here to get it!
If you've already analyzed your market and determined your business goal, here are some of the most common (and effective) strategies for digital marketing and lead generation:
These days, Pay-Per-Click Marketing (known commonly as PPC) is the bread and butter marketing strategy for many businesses. It's also the strategy we use most commonly here at Goliath. When deployed strategically, it is one of the most effective, direct and measurable marketing approaches out there. This means you get really good feedback from your campaign and are able to tweak it for success based on the data and spending you do.
Why pay per click marketing works: the main benefit of pay-per-click marketing is in the name. You don't pay for general 'exposure' or 'awareness', this kind of campaign is designed around the actual intentional 'clicks' on your ad. That means you are only paying when someone shows interest in what you are advertising. Couple this with an effective marketing funnel, ad copy, landing page and fulfillment process and you have a very potent and streamlined approach to online marketing.
Content marketing can be a stand-alone strategy, or incorporated into a larger digital marketing campaign. The point of content marketing typically is to create a relationship with a potential client/customer and build loyalty and brand reputation. This can lead to immediate results or long-term benefits depending on how the content marketing campaign is deployed. We find that this strategy is usually most effective at longer-term relationship nurturing, which is very useful for high-value products and services where the target market may do a lot of research and comparison before making their decision. Many people are looking for general information about a product or service well in advance of making a purchase. By placing an ad that links them to a useful landing page, eBook, educational report, or other content of value to their inquiry, you become a top-of-mind option in the future for more information and even purchasing.
Pay Per Lead is a marketing model in which the clients of a marketing agency only pay for leads that express specific interest in their products or services. The client and the agency come to an agreement about how much each lead will cost and how many they should deliver each month. Leads are defined as conversion events such as signing up to receive emails, placing a call to your sales team, or using your website’s contact form. You can set up parameters around the number of leads you want and can service per monht, allowing you great control over your budget and the business flowing to you.
PPL agencies only get paid once they deliver interested visitors who are ready to take the next step. This means they have a much greater incentive to bring leads to your practice. It also reduces the risk on your end, usually in exchange for a higher cost per lead (CPL) than other marketing approaches.
Because you only pay for qualified leads, you face a lower risk of losing your investment than you would from pay-per-click or SEO campaigns, which can take a long time to start delivering results. If your accounting firm is struggling to find enough clients, PPL is a proven method of bringing high-quality leads to your site without any financial risk to you.
Social media marketing is the use of social media platforms to connect with your audience to build your brand reputation and loyalty, acquire new sales, and drive traffic. This involves publishing engaging, entertaining and/or educational content on your social media profiles, having conversations with your audience and followers, and running social media advertisements. Social media marketing tools usually give you great ability to analyze your audience and the results of your marketing efforts on their platforms.
The major social media platforms (at the moment) are Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, and Snapchat. Tiktok is an up and coming social media platform with lots of viral marketing potential as well.
There are many sub-forms of social media marketing, intended to suit different objectives. For example, a business that is concerned about the online conversations in regards to its brand would monitor social media conversations and respond to relevant mentions (social media listening and engagement). Businesses that want to analyze the outreach potential and effectiveness of their social media would analyze reach, engagement, and sales on social media with an analytics tool (social media analytics). A business that wants to reach a specific audience at scale would run targeted social media ads using established demographics for their best customers (social media advertising).
Marketing on YouTube is something most people are familiar with, even if only as the target audience. It's nearly impossible to watch anything online without seeing ads before the video starts. It's the new form of "TV commercials" that are paying for the hosting of the content online for us to peruse as we please.
YouTube Marketing has similar social-engineering and targeting capabilities as Social Media Marketing, but to make a successful YouTube ad campaign, you will need to start with first-class quality video content. You'll need a well written and performed video with professional lighting and sound production to be successful, which can be a large investment and doesn't fit all companies and marketing objectives.
For certain types of products though, there is no better platform for marketing than YouTube. Combining the targeting features of the YouTube marketing platform with a visually appealing video is one of the most persuasive marketing approaches on the planet. In a previous blog post, we briefly explore a case study of the Dollar Shave Club, a company that grew from a minuscule no-name to a multi-billion dollar major player in their industry off the success of their first YouTube ad.
This list doesn't even cover all the different online marketing approaches out there, but it will give you some general insight on the most popular ones. Of course they are the most popular because they have been proven to work when applied in the right context and backed up with a comprehensive strategy.
We hope this guide will give you some ability to understand and determine which marketing approach might be right for you. If you have further questions or want to talk about applying any of these approaches with our help, we'd be happy to chat! Click the 'talk to an expert' button below.
