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Marketing Strategies to Take Your Business to the Next Level

“Our jobs as marketers are to understand how the customer wants to buy and help them to do so.” – Bryan Eisenberg

Starting a business from scratch is hard. But sustaining it and making it profitable is even harder. You not only need a good idea, but you also need to form a team, create something valuable; define and find your target demographic, and eventually sell them the product/service or information you have created. Each step is a challenge on its own but the final frontier is the real kicker- Marketing!

Marketing plays a significant role in a company’s pursuit of sustainability and growth. The efforts of marketing bring more eyeballs towards the company’s offerings and help put it on the path to growth. However, marketing in an increasingly noisy world is no walk in the park. 

Marketing is no walk in the park!

“You can’t just place a few “Buy” buttons on your website and expect your visitors to buy.” – Neil Patel

There’s no “quick hack” that the marketing department whips out and BAM! your business grows 10x. Even if you achieve such massive success on your first attempt at marketing, it’s highly unlikely it will sustain over a long period of time. The only way a company can realize true growth is by employing marketing tactics that are backed by strategy and data.

Without the right marketing tactics to fuel your growth, converting a prospect into a paying customer and staying in business for long is virtually impossible. But how? How to effectively create campaigns that actually move customers? How to adequately reach out to our target audience? How to know which marketing strategy is right for our particular business? These are some of the many important questions marketers ask themselves every single day. If you are one of those people, don’t worry, you’re not alone.

With so much content competing for our attention- from social media and Netflix to search engines and PPC ads, it’s no wonder why 89% of marketers do not think their digital marketing efforts are working. 

Read more: Marketing Collateral: What, Why, Types and Tools!

Marketing Strategies Every Business Must Implement

If you think your marketing efforts are not working or simply don’t know where to start, don’t fret. Marketing is all about experimenting, testing, analyzing, and then refining your strategy until you find the “secret formula” that works for you. There are no shortcuts to generating brand awareness and more importantly, moving customers to a point where they choose you and not your competitor. 

And with the internet giving birth to so many new marketing avenues and tactics, marketers often feel overwhelmed as to where to even begin. This is why we decided to come up with our top strategies every marketer should be using to market their product or service in 2020. 

#1. Provide Great Customer Service

I know what you are thinking- “why would you include customer service as part of a marketing strategy? That’s not my job!”. In the midst of creating the perfect copy or visual for our marketing campaigns, we often forget the most important part of the whole equation- the customer! Without customers, your business simply cannot survive. Keeping your customers satisfied should be the prime goal of any business. 

When you keep your customers satisfied, they are more likely to spread a positive word about your business, which, in turn, brings more business to your company.

According to stats, happy customers who get their issue resolved to tell about 4-6 people about their experience while a dissatisfied customer will tell between 9-15 people about their experience. Word of mouth is a solid marketing strategy as according to Nielsen, 92% of people trust recommendations from friends and family over any other type of advertising! Being on the good side of your customer really pays off big!

Moreover, it is anywhere from 5 to 25 times more expensive to acquire a new customer than it is to keep a current one. So rather than trying to spend more of your marketing budget to acquire new customers, maybe you should allocate some budget to make sure that the current customers are satisfied. 

#2. Leverage content marketing to up your search engine rankings

If you are not posting or even have a company blog, you are missing out a lot. Businesses who blog on a consistent basis build a relationship with search engines and eventually rank on search pages to get traffic to their website. A healthy knowledge of search engine optimization or SEO can go a long way to help you rank effectively on search engines like Google. 

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Blogging is so effective that marketers who prioritize blogging are 13x more likely to have a positive ROI on their efforts! Hence, it’s not surprising when I say that 53% of marketers say blogging is their top content marketing priority.

Having said that, blogging regularly and creating quality content that resonates with people is no easy task. And the fact that there are over 150 million blogs on the internet right now makes blogging, a relatively harder marketing strategy. 

If you don’t want to do all the work from scratch and learn search engine optimization techniques, you can start blogging on websites like Quora and Linkedin which already has millions of daily visitors. In this way, you can get your content in front of thousands of people daily without having to set up a blog from scratch and promote it online. 

Read more: 24 Shocking Digital Marketing Stats

#3. Use Social Media to your Advantage

With over 40% (around 3.2 Billion people) of the world’s population on social media, it’s important that your business comes up with an effective social media strategy to reach your target audience.

With people spending over 2 hours on average daily on social media, you cannot afford to not have a social media presence. Your business should be where your customers “hang out” the most and hence, it is critical you regularly create content for social media and engage with your followers. 

Apart from posting about your products or sharing links to your company blog, you can share just about anything your audience might be interested in.

A good way to build authority in your niche is to share content from your industry on social media and help educate your audience on a varied perspective. This strategy is not directly linked to your product or service offering but will surely establish your brand as a thought leader and stay on the customer top of mind.  

If you don’t know where to start or what content to post/share on different social media platforms, you can always hire a social media manager to help you out. With around 54% of browsers use social media to research products, paying someone to handle your social media is worth the money!

Read more: Meme Marketing: Definition, Tips & Examples!

#4. Use lead magnets to your advantage

A lead magnet is an incentive that marketers give to prospects in exchange for their email address and/or additional contact information. A lead magnet can be an ebook, a checklist, a guide, a report, a whitepaper or something else of value. Having a handy list of prospects and customers can be highly beneficial for marketers as they can use this email list to build value and sell to. 

Marketers can use their email list to share new announcements, offer coupons or discounts, upsell new products, remind customers to complete a purchase, share the latest blog posts, and build an ongoing relationship. 

The best way to create a lead magnet is to identify the pain points of your target audience and give them the solution via your lead magnet. Make sure that your lead magnet is relevant to the page people are viewing on your website. For example, if you have written a blog post on “top marketing strategies”, your lead magnet could be a marketing checklist or an ebook showcasing the “best marketing examples”. 

#5. Video Marketing is booming!

Videos have become the go-to business tool in the past few years. With cheap smartphones and internet plans, video consumption on the internet has increased multifold. In fact, according to Cisco, 82% of all consumer web traffic will be video by the end of 2022. From entertainment to education, video is the go-to format to consume information online. Take a look at these stats: 

  • 4x as many customers would rather watch a video about a product than read about it.
  • Almost 50% of internet users look for videos related to a product or service before visiting a store
  • 4 out of 5 consumers believe that demo videos are helpful 

Since customers clearly prefer video content over any other form of media, a whopping 87% of marketers use video as an effective marketing tool. We would advise you to simply create educational videos around your customer pain points and provide value. YouTube is the most visited website in the world and is the go-to place for people to watch videos. 

Make sure your business has a YouTube presence and optimize your channel to look visually appealing. Learn about YouTube SEO and make sure you have the right keywords in your video title and description to give your content a chance to rank. YouTube reaches more 18-34 year-olds than any cable network in the U.S, making it a hot commodity for content creators as well as advertisers. 

#6. Influencers marketing is all the rage

Influencers are people who have built a huge following online, a following which recognizes them as their friend and trusts them. So when an influencer promotes a product, there’s a much bigger chance that their audience will buy it. Partnering up with influencers to market your product or service is a great way to get your name out there. 

Don’t believe us? The stats are there to prove it: 

  • 6 in 10 teens follow advice from influencers over celebrities.
  • 49% of consumers depend on influencer recommendations.
  • 30% of consumers are more likely to buy a product recommended by a non-celebrity blogger.
  • 4 in 10 millennial subscribers say their favorite influencer understands them better than their friends.
  • 40% of consumers have purchased something after seeing it on Twitter, YouTube or Instagram. 

Brands are quickly recognizing the power influencers have over their audience and are hence spending heavily on influencer marketing. Data suggests that over 72 percent of major brands are dedicating a sizable portion of their marketing budgets to influencers.

Moreover, around 22% of marketers say influencer marketing is the most cost-effective method of acquiring new customers as studies show that influencer marketing campaigns earn $6.50 for every dollar spent!

However, the trick is to find the right influencer to partner up with. Many brands make the mistake of partnering up with influencers with huge followings thinking of their massive reach. But in reality, conversions are quite low in most cases. Finding the right influencer and working with micro-influencers (influencers with less than 50k followers) in your niche would probably yield better results. 

If you are having trouble finding the right micro-influencer for your niche, read this: Top 100 Micro Instagram Influencers to Follow in 2020

#7. Email marketing is alive and well!

Email marketing seems like an old idea with little no ROI but you’d be shocked to know the reality. Data suggests that email generates $38 for every $1 spent, which is an astounding 3,800% ROI for your marketing campaign!

Email is widely considered as one of the most cost-efficient marketing channels as the average open rate for marketing email across all industries is around 24% and the average click-through rate is around 4%.

To put that into perspective, Google’s search network has an average click-through rate of 1.91% and 0.35% on its display network, while the average CTR for a Facebook ad is a mere 0.9%!

A great way to use email marketing to increase brand awareness and conversions is by starting an email newsletter. A staggering 88% of B2B marketers use email newsletters for content marketing.

Newsletters are a fun and engaging way to interact with your audience, share relevant and valuable content, build authority, and occasionally upsell your product or service. If you think it’s too much work, you can use an email marketing tool like elink.io that will help you create an awesome looking and responsive newsletter in minutes!

In a world full of likes and shares, email is still going strong. More than 86% of businesses say that they plan to increase their upcoming email marketing budgets while 82% of marketers are investing heavily in email. It’s time to go back to basics and leverage email marketing to the fullest!

Read more: Top 11 Email Automation Software Your Marketing Team Needs

#8. Don’t ignore Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a great strategy for brands to increase their online presence and reach a wider, global audience. Brands are realizing the power of affiliate marketing in driving conversions and increasing brand awareness and as a result, 81% of the brands and around 84% of the publishers leverage the power of affiliate marketing. 

An affiliate is someone who promotes the merchant’s products or services for a commission. The more sale they make, the more commission they earn. Since an affiliate’s income is directly tied to your product sales, its a great way to ensure you are not spending money without making something in return. The biggest challenge, however, is finding the right affiliates who would produce quality content to promote your product. 

Using an affiliate network like Commission Junction or Clickbank can help you overcome this challenge. These networks not only help you find quality affiliates but also handle the payment and delivery of the products, making sure that the transaction between the merchant and the affiliate is genuine and fair.  

#9. Use Facebook Pixel

The latest figures show that more than 2.45 billion people log into Facebook every single month, a figure which is up by 8% (2.32 billion) from last year. Even with new social media platforms emerging every single day, Facebook still continues to be the go-to social media platform for people. 

Facebook ads are one of the most powerful tools marketers have to target prospects. With Facebook’s ad tool, marketers can reach a very specific audience and can filter prospects by age, gender, geography, demography, interests, and even relationship status! But that’s not all. The real magic begins when you install the Facebook Pixel, a code used for ad retargeting. 

You can install this Javascript code on your website. Once added, Pixel will track every visitor that comes to your website and build a custom audience around them. These tracked conversions will appear in the Facebook Ads Manager and in the Facebook Analytics dashboard, where you can use this audience to create dynamic ad campaigns. 

Over to you!

There you have it, folks- some of our top-rated marketing strategies to get your name out there. Before implementing any of the above-mentioned marketing strategies, we would advise you to first come up with a plan.

determine the goal of the campaign, lay down the resources required, and keep your target audience in mind while formulating. Once you have executed your strategy, its time to analyze the results, see what went right and what didn’t, and make future decisions accordingly! 

So what do you think about these marketing strategies? Have you tried any of these? Did we miss out on some good ones? Do let us know by tweeting us @elink_io

This blog post is written by the editorial team at elink.io

elink is a robust content curation platform used by businesses, bloggers, marketers and educators around the world. With over 100k users worldwide helping users save web links, bundle them and turn them into email newsletters, fast website/blog content, single web pages, social media bio links and much more! Try it for FREE here!

Further reads:

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