A strategic marketing effort is an essential part of any business. If you want to succeed, the market must know you. Nobody will buy your products or services when they do not know you exist.
Hence, this explains the importance of strategic marketing efforts to bring success to any business of all shapes and sizes.
Marketing in a Nutshell
Marketing is typically the activity and processes carried out to communicate and deliver offerings that have value for customers. It is the effort to promote and sell products/services. Marketing has evolved through time, from the more traditional methods to the recent digital marketing effort.
Both traditional and digital marketing are similar in that they aim to develop a mutually beneficial relationship with leads and customers. However, digital marketing methods have become more prevalent due to the shift in people’s purchasing behavior to online.
You cannot escape the crucial 7 Ps, a set of proven marketing tactics. You can use them in any combination that suits you best, a tactical marketing mix of:
- Product
- Price
- Promotion
- Place
- People
- Process
- Physical Evidence
As the world is changing rapidly, so also is the business dynamic. Hence, marketing trends have to change and adapt fast to stay ahead of time and to ensure businesses remain relevant in the market. Organizations have to be flexible to adopt various changing marketing strategies with time.
If you do not plan for such changes and learn to leverage the future of marketing trends, you will be left behind.
Marketing Goes Back To Basics: Smart Hacks To Succeed
Google has been dominating the search engine market at 92.47% share as of June 2021; this means if anyone wants to buy something or needs solutions fast, the first place they go to is Google. As a marketer, your goal is to bring greater visibility to your company as you want the user to easily find you when they search relevant to your business on Google.
Hence, you have to occupy the prime real estate on Google pages; the first page of the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). Regarding marketing, there is nothing like going back to the basics, as these are proven. Here are some smart hacks that you can employ to help your business succeed:
Define Your Marketing Strategy
To be successful, you must have a well-defined marketing strategy. If not, it will be just the blind leading the blind; you get nowhere. Your marketing strategy is a plan that determines the course of your marketing team’s direction and goals.
Coupled with realistic and measurable marketing objectives, you can know where you stand in terms of your marketing success for your business. Remember, your marketing is only as effective as your well-crafted marketing strategy.
Discuss and plan with your team as your marketing strategy is a comprehensive way forward that impacts everyone; it charts how you run your business. To do so, you need to:
- Know your business and marketing goals
- Know what you are promoting and selling
- Research and know your market
- Profile your customer portfolio and also competitors
- List out and develop strategies to supplement your goals
Use SEO Smartly
If you want to rank high in Google’s SERPs, you cannot forsake Search Engine Optimization (SEO). If done right, various SEO strategies can help drive more traffic to your website by ranking you high up.
Use Relevant Keywords and Phrases
There are certain words and phrases that people use when they search on Google. Bear in mind that Google matches them to determine your website’s ranking. As such, use them in your content.
However, be careful not to stuff your content with too many of such words and phrases. Doing so can backfire on you as Google will penalize you. Many keyword tools can help you capitalize on the preferred keywords and phrases, so use them.
Use Quality Link-Building
Including hyperlinks from other websites in yours is an effective SEO tactic. You want more people to be directed to your web pages to increase your website visibility. Linking to authoritative websites can help boost your ranking, as these are link-worthy sites that increase your website’s authority level.
Google will see your website as valuable, thus ranking you high. That said, be cautious when exercising link-building opportunities. Simply linking and stuffing too many irrelevant links into your content is bad for your website as Google will demote your ranking further.
Check out the popular link-building tools; they help bring in quality link-building opportunities.
Use a Trusted Web Host
You may not be aware of this, but the web host and the hosting solution you choose can greatly influence search ranking. Google likes fast websites. The dedicated resources of a VPS plan can make an impact compared to shared hosting. It also helps if you engage a trusted and reputable web host.
Ensure Quality and Updated Content
The content is the heartbeat of your website. It is the currency that forms the base of all your marketing strategies. Quality and relevant content is a ranking signal for Google. Your website must make sense in that it has to be beneficial for your audience to come back for more.
Hence, ensure to update your website content regularly. You would be surprised, but Google does not like outdated information; they consider the frequency of updated content to decide your ranking factor.
While it is all good to put up articles in your blog, people demand more nowadays. Simply writing informative articles alone won’t cut it. You need to include more ways to engage your audience and a more proactive way to reach out to them.
So, instead of just educating them, incorporating quizzes, contests, and even polls on a topic can encourage more interaction and participation from your audience. Of course, keep them relevant to your business. Entice your audience by using expiring but relevant content; this creates an urgency on their part to take action.
Use Video Marketing
People are visual; this explains why videos have become the driving force for most digital marketing endeavors. Video is a powerful storytelling medium as it reaches out and emotionally connects with the audience via its sound, motion, and attractive visuals. Videos also give a better online user experience to your audience.
They also break up chunks and chunks of text, improving readability. The ‘how to’ and technical videos are more effective than technical manuals. Live videos encourage more interaction with the crowd; they feel like being part of the conversation by commenting during live sessions.
Emphasize crafting unique content for your videos that make you stand out. If done right, video marketing can be a powerful and effective method to engage and entertain while conveying your core message to the audience.
Leverage Social Media
Without a doubt, social media is the preferred choice for most marketers. After all, the number of social media users will increase to around 4.41 billion in 2025. You would be silly not to want a piece of this big and lucrative pie.
As such, deploy your social media marketing effort across the platforms such as Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Google+, Instagram, and others. Each channel comes with its strengths. Leverage these strengths to boost your organic reach to increase awareness and secure a higher conversion rate.
Also, do not forget to incorporate social media plug-ins into your content; your audience will not hesitate to share your content via social media; this increases your outreach.
Use Short and Simple Forms
As a marketer, gaining access to relevant data is crucial to a successful marketing strategy. All businesses are big on data. However, collecting data from your audience is a fragile matter as the way you do so can either nudge the user to voluntarily opt-in or feel irked and leave.
Be reasonable and respect your audience’s privacy when you want information from them. Your web forms should be simple with a minimal number of fields. Focus on what you need, not the ‘nice-to-have’ type of information.
Make your forms simple, direct, and easy to understand. Help your audience decide to opt-in to share their information with you.
Use Email Marketing
As traditional as it seems, email marketing remains an effective way to reach out and promote your company. However, for your email marketing campaigns to succeed, you need a comprehensive and quality email listing with well-crafted emails and targeting the correct market base. If done right, you can reap a significant Return on Investment (ROI).
Use Automation
Be willing to embrace automation; this helps heaps with your everyday tasks. Identify repetitive tasks that you believe a tool will help free you up for others that require specific attention and detail. As such, your productivity increases as your time is spent efficiently.
Use AIDA
AIDA is short for Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action; this is an age-old recipe proven to work on almost every marketing channel. The purpose is to capture the user’s attention (Attention), create a sense of need in the user (Interest), tug their heartstrings (Desire), and finally provide solutions that push the user to buy (Action). All your marketing strategies must revolve around this formula.
Conclusion
If there’s anything we learned from the past, it is that the basic and proven marketing tactics are here to stay. That said, such tactics are not set in stone; you must always be on your toes to do the necessary to tweak your strategy along the way to reap the maximum benefits.
The above are some of the popularly used smart hacks that you can use to build your marketing foundation while focusing on your unique selling points to stand out among the many.
About the Author
Pui Mun Beh is a digital marketer of WebRevenue. She keeps an eye on the latest digital marketing and social media trends. She loves to travel around the world offline and online. Say hello to her on LinkedIn
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