Marketing Strategies Definition
Marketing strategy plays a crucial role in reaching out to prospects and delivering them your product and services. In short, it is the soul of any sales funnel. Any business needs at least one marketing strategy for one opportunity. Marketing strategies hook your business, increase the market share, establish brand presence and help you to sustain and scale in the market.
In a cut-throat competition, growing a business is not an easy task at all. You need a viable business idea followed by other marketing parameters.
You have to assign all the 4 P’s of marketing at the most appropriate place, that is;
Every market space needs different types of market strategies and approaches to grow its business. For example, brands that are dealing in Business to Customer [B2C] need a different marketing plan, whereas brands that are in Business to Business [B2B] need another marketing approach. Obviously, some marketing tips will be the same in both cases.
Parameters of Marketing Strategies
– Know Your Buyers Personas
For every type of marketing, the first step is to know the buyer’s persona. You can collect the information of your buys such as location, age, income, job title, goals, challenges, hobbies, taste, and preferences for your market research.
– Define Goals and Set the Targets
If you are planning to grow your business by 20%, then analyze your marketing and sales funnel well. To achieve 20% annual growth, your marketing team should generate leads by 45-60%.
– Evaluation of Online Marketing Channels
Track and evaluate your social media platforms, website and see how these platforms should utilize effectively. You should not miss any of the channels such as owned media, paid media, or earned media.
– Audit and Plan Your Digital Campaigns
You should have a clear strategy and goal for every content you are producing before taking it live. Why are you doing it, what is the purpose, how will you promote it- such questions should have a definite answer. With the data tracking tools, you should keep eye on the sources of traffic whether they are coming from direct traffic, organic searches, referrals, Google Ads, Bing Ads, social media channels, or email marketing. It will help you in making better strategies and filling gaps if any.
So let’s see the ultimate checklist of B2B and B2C markets where you can do the best marketing practice for your business.
Ultimate checklist of B2B and B2C markets to do the best marketing practice for your business
1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Any business or brand needs SEO for organic growth, leads, and sales. You need not spend on clicks across search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, and more. More than 51% of the searches on the internet are from SEO only. All other tools of driving traffic on your web need high investment. You pay for every click on social media ads, search engine marketing campaigns (PPC) like Google Ads and Bing Ads, email marketing, banner ads need huge investment. But when it comes to search engine optimization, you drive all the traffic on your web for free.
SEO is a strong strategy that works for a very long time.
2. Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
Developing excellent organic visibility takes time. If you are in a highly competitive niche, it may take a year. But when it comes to PPC Ads, they can be created in a day and the result can be seen immediately.
You can do A/B testing for campaigns, landing pages, and CTAs.
Another best thing about SEM is you need consistent investment. You may lose colossal money if the ad campaign is not well optimized and you may do wonders with PPC if you are a master in it. You have tight control over budget and targeting the audience.
3. Content Marketing
Content marketing is vital because it is an essential tool to connect with consumers – ensuring you are sending the right message to the right customer at the right time. Creating a successful content marketing strategy enables brands to build trust and generate cult-like communities, resulting in long-term relationships and ultimately, sales.
You can make effective content marketing strategies that help you engage with the audience on your site and social media.
Ensure you have an agile approach. Many of the brands that have the most reliable content strategies are the ones that adapt quickly to changing consumer behaviors. Understand your audience and ensure you give them what they are looking for.
Create content with a purpose. Consider how you can make your consumers’ lives better through your content. It might not be posting about a competition to gain more followers. Instead, the answer might be hosting a live educational webinar on how to get the perfect zoom look in 10 minutes. Invest in actions and bring a human, honest focus to concerns.
Go beyond visual content and create interactive content. By creating interactive content, consumers are encouraged to compete, compare and consume information quicker through active participation examples include polls, surveys, and quizzes. It gives the consumer a reason to stay on your page, provides something unique, and also brings people into your sales funnel.
4. Referral Programs
Launching referral programs is one of the best marketing strategies, no matter if you are in B2B or B2C. It works for every type of business fantastically.
Referral programs allow your customers to promote your product where you give benefits in return. The best part of this strategy is- people trust personal recommendations more than anything else. So it will become easy for a brand to more extensive their presence.
You are a startup or big corporate; referral programs should be run to promote your business. But unfortunately, most of the startups do not do it.
The best example is the HR department in the corporates. HRs save enormous time, money, and resources where their existing employees refer the most suited employees for the required position. Referral programs are always a win-win situation.
5. Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is one of the most used marketing tools across search engines. It is a commission-based sales program where bloggers, YouTubers, and other content marketing sell your products or services, and you give them a commission.
Affiliate programs provide massive growth and give you the fuel where your business grows and runs. The researches of Black Friday and Cyber Monday found that affiliate merchants had a 45.7% increase in new customers.
So do not waste your time in building an affiliate program and start approaching potential affiliate marketers, bloggers, and YouTubers.
6. Social Media Marketing
SSM is one of the robust ecosystems for a brand to distribute its content in an attempt to make it more humanized. The five major channels of social media marketing are;
i) YouTube, ii) Facebook, iii) Instagram, iv) Twitter and v) LinkedIn
Social media is a market hub for every age group, especially youngsters. Posting high-quality, valuable content will give a boost and unexpected success to the brand with viral marketing. SSM also reduces efforts, makes a huge presence, and boosts the SEO of any site.
7. Inbound Marketing
Recent data shows people are fed up with commercial and TV ads. Inbound marketing strategy is the best alternative to replace outbound marketing.
The creation of inbound marketing exists after knowing your customer’s journey. Inbound marketing is a useful marketing tool because it reduces expense, improves the quality of traffic, and leads to high trust and credibility.
The inbound marketing strategy is worth it because you hook your consumers to do their own research and find you organically rather than shouting with CTA “BUY THIS NOW”. More than 85% of customers do their online research before buying any product.
Stages of an inbound marketing strategy are:
Stage-1: Attract visitors to your content
Stage-2: Convert visitors into leads
Stage-3: Nurture leads to customers.
Stage-4: Delight your customers
8. Influencer Marketing
71% of marketers claim that traffic quality that comes from influencers is better than from other marketing sources such as PR, Paid search, email, social media, or even from SEO. The reason is simple; the influencers have a very targeted audience in their niche.
According to your budget, you can send the samples to the influencers. You need not always run for big influencers. Go with the micro-influencers who are having tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of influencers. In that way, you will drive more traffic, generate more leads and conversions. Fashion, food, travel, and health industries are the perfect examples where brands leverage their total outcome with the help of influencers.
9. Email Marketing
Email marketing is the only marketing channel where you own your audience without anyone’s interference. On a $1 investment in email marketing, it has a return on investment of $42.
It is a highly effective marketing channel, especially for a B2B audience. The pillars of email marketing success are the open rate, click-through rate, bounce rate, and spam score. The more you know and research your customers, the more effective the email marketing strategy you will make.
10. Paid Media Advertising
Another way of driving traffic on your site is through paid media. It is a marketing tool where brands attract visitors through paid advertising. One of the most popular methods is pay-per-click (PPC) links where brands buy or “sponsor” a link. These types of advertisements appear in search engine results when people search for product-related keywords.
11. Co-Brand or Collaboration with Brands
To tackle the cut-throat competition when two brands come together and sell a single product or service called co-branding. The collaboration of telecom company Vodaphone with Idea is the perfect example of brand collaboration.
GoPro and Red Bull, BMW and Louis Vuitton, Alexander Wang, and H&M are some other examples of co-branding.
The collaboration marketing strategy will not only tackle the competition but also optimize cost, time, and money.
12. Participation in Forums
You can join exclusive forums and an ecosystem of like-minded people where you can share your knowledge and interact with many people. Forums are Facebook groups, Reddit, Tumblr, Quora, and more where any individual can participate.
It will not only help you in driving traffic but also the backlinks will sprinkle around your site. That is the reason why participation in these forums is the crazy marketing strategy to bring brand visibility.
13. Guest Posting on Industry Blogs
You can not establish your brand and get famous in the market only by writing for yourself. Making a presence on other influencing sites such as Forbes, Entrepreneur, Bloomberg, Times of India will not only boost your brand visibility and appearance but also build links and boost the search engine’s ranking.
Therefore, it is very crucial to devote time to contribute to these blogs. You will see a sudden change in the amount of traffic, leads, trust, authority, and ranking. That’s why it is one of the best marketing strategies for any business.
As a newbie, it is not easy to get featured on these influencing platforms, but you will also impress the editor of these sites then there is a high possibility of getting a positive response.
14. Use HARO
HARO is a strategy of earned media of getting popular across many media channels. No matter how well you write, but your brand can still appear on many media in the form of blogs, podcasts, television, and radio shows.
Instead of writing a full blog post for your site, you can provide quotes (less than 200 words) to the HARO reporters by signing up on HelpAReporterOut (HARO) as a Source.
To know more about HARO: Click on Off-Page SEO Strategies to Get Quality Backlinks
15. Make a presence on Freelancing Platforms
Get registered yourself on freelance platforms like Freelancer, Upwork, Fiverr, and Amazon Mechanical Turk platform. These freelancing platforms are a fast and effective marketplace. You can buy and sell your services. Millions of people interacted on these platforms, and hence it is one of the most appropriate strategies.
16. Bring Automation
Marketing automation is the future of marketing. There are many powerful marketing tools in the market from SEO to content to social media posting to email marketing that can bring automation.
Bringing automation is crucial to implement because it boosts the overall process and saves time, money, and other resources—the productivity and efficiency of the entire business grown-up.
Remark: For all types of business that are online or digital needs an efficient and fully optimized web design. No matter how you will put all efforts, money, and resources to drive traffic and generate revenue. It all will go in vain, and you will lose the market at a staggering rate if your website is not user-friendly and search engines friendly.
Hence, select a premium theme that has ultra-lightweight, attractive, and search engine optimised. You can also hire a professional and design your own website. These are one-time investments where you must not hesitate.
Very useful information and clearly explained. Thank you for sharing.