Last updated on
June 12, 2024
The online business sphere differs quite drastically from its physical counterpart. The competition for a consumer’s attention is much more intense and shifting technologies and trends keep creating new opportunities for businesses to grow.
Amongst all the one-upmanship and ever-transforming tactics, there are some marketing strategies you can always rely on, that have stood the test of modern times, to deliver you results and grow business.
Let’s dive into them.
Facebook has 2.5 billion users, Twitter has 330 million monthly active users and Instagram has 1 billion+ active. To add to this, the number of people using social media is expected to jump to 3.43 billion in 2023.
With such massive communities on just three platforms, and an ever-growing user base its no surprise that businesses are heavily investing in social media.
The advantages are clear, social media allows you to:
These are just a few of the ways a business can use social media to its advantage. The biggest and the first value you can derive from social media is to increase your brand awareness so more people are familiar with your company. This will serve you well when people consider buying products/services from your industry.
Before you dive into the world of social media, you’ll have to do research and find out which platforms serve your business needs.
Seek out your target audience
To get a better understanding of which social media platforms will serve your business needs, learn about:
These questions will give you a solid idea of where to find your audience.
People also behave differently on each platform and they like to consume content differently on each channel. For example, a long post you create on Quora will probably fall on deaf ears on Instagram. So it’s important to know how people consume content on each social media platform.
Define your social media objective
As mentioned above, social media can be used to achieve a lot of marketing goals. As we’re focusing on awareness here, it then becomes important to define how you’ll measure awareness.
The number of followers can often prove to be a shallow metric. It’s better to define success through engagement. Engagement can be measured through number of likes, reposts, comments, clicks, and profile visits.
These numbers will give you a clearer picture of how your social media content performs and will let you gauge what sort of awareness you’re generating through your social media channels.
When you’ve decided on which social channels you’ll use and how you’ll track results on them. It’s time to focus on execution.
First, you’ll need to figure out what kind of content you’ll post and what tone you’ll keep. The tone should ideally be in line with your brand identity and you can choose to produce content that relates to your industry.
Finally, figure out a publishing frequency that works for you and you’ll be able to manage and then stick with it. Consistency is very important and social media is a long-term game so you’ll need to stick your nose in it to reap the benefits.
Content marketing is the practice of creating and distributing valuable content to attract and retain an audience.
To get your message across and attract people to your website, you need content. It’s suitable for every major marketing goal, including raising brand awareness, increasing sales, fostering brand loyalty, and keeping a company on top of customers’ minds.
A solid content marketing plan will help you rank in search engines, and attract more people to your website.
Similar to how you will plan for your social media strategy, you need to do an audience analysis for content and ask these questions:
You will gather this information using:
With a complete profile of your audience at hand, you will be able to craft content that suits the needs, and uses the tone of your target audience.
When your goal is to attract traffic to your website. You will create content that solves problems for a larger subset of the audience. At this stage, people don’t really care about your company and the only way they will engage with your content is if you educate them regarding keywords they are searching for, or if your content offers entertainment.
Content at this stage that will come in handy includes:
If your content offers value, it will start ranking on Google and will attract people to your website.
Now you need to capitalize on this incoming traffic. We cover this in the next section.
Once you have a social media following and traffic starts flowing through your website. It’s time to take advantage of this activity and turn these users into leads and customers.
A great way to capitalize on your social media following and website traffic is to create funnels using email marketing.
Email marketing is renowned for its high return on investment, its reliability as a channel of communication, and its ability to nurture relationships with leads that eventually become loyal customers. It is especially used in eCommerce marketing, blogging, and software marketing domains.
Let’s see how you can put email marketing into practice
You need email addresses for email marketing to work. For that, you will create and place opt-in forms (popups, topbars, embedded forms, etc.) on your website that offers users something in return for their email address. Similarly, you’ll create landing pages that you promote on your social channels that collect email addresses in return for some value.
To incentivize people to sign up, offer them value through:
If your offer is easy to consume, relevant to your audience, and specific to them, you’ll start attracting high quality leads through your opt-in forms and landing pages.
Once you have leads, it's time to start sending emails.
First of all, you should send an email delivering on the promise you made in your opt-in forms and landing pages. Send these offers as quickly as possible so users know you deliver on what you say.
Then you can use emails in many ways to create value for your business.
You can send:
There are among just some of the email ideas you can use to keep your subscribers engaged. The idea is to build value for your customers, increase your brand value, and increase the number of sales you make.
Email lists are a rare asset in the sense that they give you direct access to your audience, unlike social media following which is liable to changes made through algorithms and change in popularity.
This article outlined the best three marketing tools we have in the modern era to expose our brands, grow traffic and users, and close more sales.
As a business, you need to know which of these strategies will best serve you. And the only way to find out is to experiment and measure the returns. In some cases, you might only need email marketing to reach your marketing goals. In other cases, you might need a combination of all three to get you your desired results.
Tell us which of these strategies you already use and how they’ve worked out for you so far, in the comments below.
Rukham is the Content Lead at Mailmunch. He believes trust should be the basis for all marketing communications.
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