The world of marketing is often dominated by the hottest trends of the moment, which are heavily publicized in blogs and magazines. Every year seems to bring ‘the next biggest thing’ in marketing strategy, especially in digital marketing. The huge social media hype of several years ago was a prime example of this. However, ultimately what counts is whether the marketing approaches you use yield two main things: strengthened branding and sales. Of course, there are more nuanced targets within those categories, but broadly speaking they’re the end goals. With that in mind, it pays to pay attention to aspects of marketing that may not be in vogue as such, but are proven to be highly effective. Here are several such aspects.
A holistic approach
In marketing terms, we mean holistic in the sense of seeing the bigger picture and taking it seriously in your decision making. Your branding should be consistent across the board in order to present a clear idea of who you are and the value of your product to consumers. In practice, this means taking marketing decisions based on your core values and to the benefit of your entire enterprise, rather than isolated aims. For instance, as discussed in this article, marketing a new food or drink product as ‘healthier’ can have damaging implications for a company’s existing products. Ultimately, it comes down to consistency in your marketing campaigns; consumers will respond better to a unified message.
Email marketing
You may think of email newsletters as somewhat old fashioned in the digital marketing field, and you wouldn’t be alone. However, this perception is slightly misplaced: while it’s true that some email marketing campaigns are seen as spammy, it has more to do with the implementation not the idea of newsletters itself. For a start, people still use email heavily despite the rise of social media. A report by the Radicati Group shows that 205 billion emails were sent and received per day in 2015, so the scope is still there. Plus, people have to opt into newsletters, so are more open to marketing material. The key, however, is to embrace a mobile-first approach. With the rapid growth in mobile usage, email marketing campaigns can thrive so long as they are compatible and visually attractive on mobile devices. Furthermore, this can be combined with retargeting strategies to re-engage customers who show interest in particular products.
Combining online and offline
Especially for predominantly online businesses, it’s all too easy to simply equate generating brand interest and conversions to driving web traffic. While this is important, you shouldn’t underestimate the role that offline marketing strategies can play in this regard. What’s more, your offline marketing efforts can directly contribute to boosting your online profile. Trade and consumer fairs are great examples of this, where you can set up a stall to promote your goods or services to industry peers or customers respectively. Professional printing shops such as Saxoprint can provide you with a range of display materials, like roller banners and brochures, to strengthen the impact of your branding as you engage with the public. This not only serves to give a more human, tangible image to your company, but it’s also a great opportunity for social media content – product demonstration videos and interviews for example.
PPC
By now, most entrepreneurs know the value SEO brings to a website and business as a whole; many may already be familiar with how to approach it. Generating organic traffic is a fantastic long term strategy, and can improve your conversion rate when done effectively, but all too many people neglect the PPC element of search engine marketing. Pay-per-click (PPC) is a Google-based advertising strategy where advertisers pay a fee each time a user clicks on their ad, displayed as a link at the side of Google search results pages. To do this, you bid on keywords relevant to your products and services, effectively paying for highly relevant traffic. The beauty of it is that you only pay once consumers click through and once they do the conversion rates are reasonably high. That said, take care to choose appropriate keywords to target – go for longtail search terms, as these are more likely to pinpoint people with a purchase mentality.
