Marketing is not just promotions and advertisements but the complete process of product designing until the final sale of the product in a strategic manner. It would be foolhardy to think of marketing as simply promoting a brand or its services and products.
Nevertheless, promotions and advertisements are integral to successful marketing campaigns.
Having said that, conventional marketing campaigns were executed either through printed media or broadcast channels. But, with technical advancement, these broadcast channels have been replaced by the unicast channels. And these channels make up the essentials of the modern marketing strategy.
Here’s all you need to know about these essentials to help grow your business and establish your brand.
Digital Presence
As already mentioned, the broadcast channels such as television and radio have been replaced by unicast channels encompassing various modules of the internet. The only reason for the widespread popularity of these channels is the ease of measurement of campaign progress and success rate.
- A Website
The most essential part of your marketing strategy is a website. Without a website, all of your promotional practices would be in vain. A digital user perceives a website as a mark of legitimacy and authenticity. So, you need to get a website for your business, if you are looking forward to online marketing.
- Social Media Channels
The next best thing to do after you have your website live is to go for social media channels. Social media channels are the second-best source of digital traffic after search engines. Create a business profile on social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and alike. Furthermore, you may need to link these profiles with your website to drive in referral traffic. There are even many tools available to help you make the best use of social media channels like Kicksta for Instagram that helps you improve your Instagram profile.
- Influencer Marketing
Now that your website is up and live and receiving traffic (organic and referral) its time you start laying focus on promotional practices. In fact, it would be better to call these practices as branding efforts. Influencer marketing is the process of reaching out to online celebrities, essentially bloggers and podcasters, who are trusted by a sizeable audience. According to this post from SocialBook.io, using influencer marketing as a growth tactic allows smaller companies to compete with fortune 500 companies. Moreover, these bloggers can influence their audience and therefore help you generate more revenue by providing you, potential buyers and customers.
- Customer Interaction
Marking your presence online is just one part of the story. You need to maintain your presence and earn a high reputation amongst your customers as well. According to a study, 9 out of 10 users make use of reviews and customer feedback before they make any purchase online. So, you need to interact with your customers and encourage them to leave behind nothing but good reviews.
Digital marketing alone can bring in potentially convertible leads to your storefront, but it is still the offline efforts that help with the actual conversion.
Optimized Equilibrium Between Online & Offline Campaigns
While you mark your presence online and promote your business as a brand, missing out on offline strategies is still not favorable. You need to make use of some of the conventional marketing practices such as printed media or newspaper advertisements for successful results. You don’t need to use all of them, just the ones that can help you reach your target audience are sufficient.
Moreover, a careful equilibrium needs to be maintained between online and offline campaigns. For example, is you are using paid advertisements on Facebook, you don’t necessarily need to invest in televised advertisements.
And to help you optimize this equilibrium carefully, technology plays a crucial part.
Technology Driven Advertisement & Promotion
The aforementioned practices are relatively new and still in their growth phase. There are practices that have already reached their maturity and created a benchmark for technology-based marketing strategies.
- Email Marketing
With the introduction of the internet, the very first form of digital marketing that emerged was email marketing. And it still works to create leads and convert them potentially. You can make use of email marketing to promote offers and new launches amongst your existing customers. Improving customer interaction for your business, email marketing can also help connect with new customers through referrals.
- Cellular Promotions
As soon as the cellular devices were introduced, cellular promotions, or as it is popularly referred to as mobile marketing, made a breakthrough. They are cheap and promise a high conversion rate as compared to email marketing campaigns. You can share product details, to even the link for your website with your potential customers, over messages. Even if they don’t open up and read the link, it is very likely that they’d remember your brand and recognize it. For example, coupon codes are the most popular content shared through cellular marketing, which helps drive in more customers, while earning their loyalty for your brand.
- Advertisements On YouTube
The youngest amongst all unicast modes of promotions is youtube advertisements. With the growing popularity of YouTubers (influencers on youtube) the number of youtube users is also growing. In fact, YouTube is the second largest search engine after Google. Tapping into such a large audience base and that too at reasonable prices is definitely the epitome of visual advertisements.
Execution And Follow-Ups
Unlike offline marketing practices, online ones are measurable. You can easily measure the number of visitors on your ad, the number of impressions your ad received, bounce rate and dwell rate, and much more, with just a click of a button. The only thing you need to take care of is the careful execution of the marketing strategy you’ve designed.
Additionally, you need to monitor and follow-up with the progress of your campaigns in order to evaluate if you are on the right track. And believe it or not, all of these practices, if carried out in the right manner can result in a promising return on your investment.
Having said that, keeping up with the updates that popular search engines roll out from time to time can further improve the results. Therefore, having an experienced SEO strategist to help you through all of these essential practices can improve the chances of success of your marketing campaign.