Stop Throwing Money on Marketing Campaigns that Don’t Bring Results

Marketing can be considered the most important part of running a business. A business needs customers and clients to stay afloat. But how do you get people to realize that your business exists? It's not like they will magically realize that your brand exists. So, businesses have to invest in marketing to create awareness and exposure.

Marketing strategies seek to engage a large audience and make them aware that a business can help them. Just as there are many businesses, there are many different marketing strategies as well. Some of them are good and others are not.

Additionally, not all strategies work for every business. So, a business has to choose the right strategy as well. But in this article, we will show you some strategies that can work for every business. As long as they are done well, they can provide long-term benefits.

Effective Marketing Strategies for Any Business

We are going to discuss five strategies. We will not go too deep into the specifics as that warrants an entire article of its own. However, after reading this article, you will have a good understanding of each strategy and from there you can do further research yourself.

Email Marketing

Email marketing has been around for almost five decades. But despite its age, it has not waned in popularity. Email marketing has one big advantage over all other marketing strategies.

That is its ability to be highly specific and tailored for the intended reader. Of course, that requires prior research into the intended reader. You can use email marketing in a variety of ways. If you are a B2C business, then you employ behavioral targeting and combo it with email marketing.

A simple example of this is sending an email to a person who has shown interest in some products on your platform, informing them of a special deal. This deal can include a special discount just for them, a bundle offer, or even a free trial for a service.

For B2B companies, email marketing can help them offer unique deals to their clients. They can try to pitch customized offers that are beneficial to both companies.

There are some precautions that need to be taken with email marketing though.

• First of all, the formatting should be optimized for mobile. That is because most people use their phones for checking emails nowadays.
• Ideally, your email should contain visuals elements like banners, cover images or even in-text graphics like symbols and emojis. Having a bit of color in your mail can make it a lot better to read.
• The email should not be long. Start off with a brief introduction, then go straight to business. After discussing what you are offering and what you can give to the other party, add a CTA to schedule a meeting and end the email.

And that's how you can run an effective email marketing campaign.

Blogging

Blogs are one of the core mediums of content marketing. They are mostly used for digital branding but they also have their uses in marketing.

Today, most people do not like listening to a sales pitch. That's because there is the stigma of dishonesty and brashness associated with salesmen. People tend to believe that a salesperson only wants to sell them a product at any cost. They are also afraid of getting deceived and receiving an inferior product.

That is why most people prefer to do their own research before they commit to a purchase. Approximately 81% of Americans prefer to do research before shopping. And that's where blogs come in. Brands make their own websites where they host their blogs. The blog posts aim to educate their audience about the brand's services and products in a subtle way.

Blogging is one of the best ways of content marketing, as it has relatively low overhead costs and it can have a significantly high lead generation and conversion rate.

Just like there are a couple of things that you should never do in email marketing, there are a few things to avoid in blogging as well.

• Don't write complicated stuff. Most people have a lower reading age than their actual age. To accommodate such people, you have to make readable content.
• Don't plagiarize content. Plagiarism can get your blogs a penalty from the search engines, which can ultimately de-rank it. To make sure your content is unique, always run the final draft through an online plagiarism checker.
• Don't repeat the same things over and over in your content. It makes for a terrible read and only leaves disgruntled visitors.

These are some of the things that you can take care of to make the most out of your blog.

SEO

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is a core component of digital marketing. In fact, we can say that all content marketing efforts are actually useless without SEO.

In simple terms, SEO is basically a blanket term for all the processes that are done to boost the ranking of a website in the SERPs. It has three major components:

• Technical SEO
• On-page SEO
• Off-page SEO

Technical SEO is everything you do from the coding side to improve the ranking. It basically entails making a good URL and adding all the relevant tags and headers that a search engine crawler will see.

On-page SEO is everything you do related to optimizing the page content of your site. That involves creating a good site design, enhancing the user experience, targeting keywords, etc., etc.

Off-page SEO includes all your efforts to get backlinks from other high-ranking sites. Backlinks can occur naturally or they can be gotten through interaction and collaborations with other site owners.

SEO and blogging have a close relationship. They act together to enhance their results. Great SEO makes the blog more visible, while great blog posts enhance the user experience and drive leads.

Mobile Marketing

Mobile marketing is huge right now. That's because more and more people access the internet from their mobile devices every day. Approximately, 92.1% of all internet traffic comes from mobile devices.

Now that online shopping has become a societal norm, targeting mobile users through appropriate marketing techniques is the need of the hour.

In essence, mobile marketing includes all other digital marketing techniques but the only difference is that they are optimized for mobile.

An example of this is email marketing. Emails on a PC don't really need to be optimized too much. The screens are big enough to cover the entire text box of the email. But on a mobile device, the same email can look bloated and very unappealing.

So, mobile email marketing makes it a point to format and design emails with respect to mobile users. So that they don't feel overwhelmed.

A similar case can be made for blogging. Blogs are hosted on websites, and websites need to be “responsive” if they want to be successful on mobile devices. The blog content itself needs to be formatted such that it is easy to scan and read on a phone.

Mobile marketing also includes using SMS, push notifications through apps, and mobile apps themselves. These are all things that people are more used to seeing on their phones, so their reception is usually good.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing refers to collaborating with external individuals and companies to promote your own brand. This has some advantages and disadvantages. The major advantage is that you can hijack other people's reputation to gain trust from your audience.

If somebody trusts the person/company that is promoting you, then their trust will extend to you as well to a certain extent. If you don't betray that trust, then you will have gained a new customer.

However, this can easily go the other way as well. If the person promoting your brand is unscrupulous then their infamy can extend to you as well. So, affiliate marketing should always be done with people/companies that are trustworthy.

Conclusion

And those were five effective marketing strategies that can help you run a successful campaign. The best thing about all of them is that they are not as expensive as most marketing strategies.

But they all require perseverance and consistency. In fact, SEO always requires your full attention because search engine algorithms are always changing. So, SEO strategies have to evolve with them. Since most marketing strategies relate to SEO in some way, they have to evolve as well.