What Are the Five Marketing Strategies?
We’re going to be honest with you here and start by admitting that there are more than five marketing strategies. Even with a conservative estimate, there are at least a dozen, and there’s an argument to be made that there are as many different marketing strategies as there are different marketers.
But that takes us above and beyond the purposes of this blog post, so let’s take a step back and look at five of the most powerful strategies. These are those where you’re most likely to see results no matter which industry you’re in. Let’s get started.
1.Email marketing
Email marketing is a no-brainer for a few different reasons. For a start, pretty much everyone has an email address, and they’re still just as relevant as they were 20 years ago, way before social media marketing was ever a thing.
There’s also the fact that an email list is an owned asset. If you spend your time building a following on Facebook and then Zuckerberg shuts it down, you lose everything. If you build an email list, you can easily take it from one provider to another.
Email is also particularly good at driving conversions, in part because of personalisation. You can target people with more relevant messages based upon their previous activity and ultimately use your email list to push direct sales.
2. Content marketing
Marketing influencer Jay Bear has said that our marketing needs to be so good that people would pay for it, and that’s where content marketing comes in.
The idea behind content marketing is to create high quality content that people want to consume, whether we’re talking about blog posts, social media updates, infographics, videos or podcasts. The key to success is to create great content and then to finish up with a call-to-action which tells people what you want them to do next.
Creating content can be expensive and time consuming, and it’s also a long-term strategy that can take a little while to deliver dividends. Still, there’s a reason why so many marketers rely on it. It works.
3. Social media marketing
Social media marketing isn’t as good at driving direct sales as some of the other techniques on this list, but it’s a great way to build a community around your brand and to create a marketing channel that will continue to deliver results in the years to come.
Social media marketing can also fit in nicely alongside some of these other techniques. For example, you can use it to push people towards your email marketing data capture pages, or you can use it to disseminate the content that you’re creating.
4. Influencer marketing
Influencer marketing can be a great help because when you work with an influencer, you have access to their pre-existing audience. This can save you a lot of time and be super effective for generating sales if you’re careful to find the right influencers.
On top of that, they tend to receive higher engagement rates than brands do, and it also enables you to tap into the phenomenon of social proof. As human beings, we naturally trust what other people say about brands more than we trust the brands themselves.
Influencer marketing can also be a great way to encourage user-generated content, which saves you time and money because it means you don’t have to make the content yourself.
5. Digital advertising
Digital advertising is one of the most powerful ways to generate direct conversions because you can tap into searcher intent. For example, if you run Google ads that target people searching “dress summer sale” and link them to a summer sale on your clothing store, you know that there’s a good chance you’re going to be able to sell to them.
Another advantage to digital advertising is that you can easily scale it up and down on demand. You can pause your ads if you need to, and you can increase your ad spend if you take on investment or find some extra cash.
How to get ahead in advertising
A lot of people ask us what they can do to get extra bang for their advertising buck. One of the best ways is to find a trusted agency who can carry out advertising on your behalf, or alternatively to reach out to a freelancer.
That’s because while it’s easy to pick up the basics, a lot of expertise is needed if you want to get the optimum performance. Plenty of digital advertising analysts specialise solely on a single network.
If you’re planning on running your own advertisements, the best way to set yourself up for success is to make sure that you’re constantly testing new things and measuring the performance. The key is to do more of what works and less of what doesn’t.
What is the best marketing strategy?
The truth is that different marketing strategies work well for different brands, and you’re likely to find that you get the best results if you use a mixture. The downside to this is that you can require a large and varied amount of expertise to do it properly.
That’s why it’s a good idea to bring in outside help, whether you’re hiring an marketing strategy agency or working with freelancers. Fortunately for you, we can lend you a hand. Get in touch with us to find out more about how we can match you up with the agencies you need to get the job done.
