A good marketing strategy to ensure your brand is here to stay means including several important factors that will help you reach your target audience in every way possible. Here’s what to definitely focus on while creating an effective marketing strategy.
1. Social media
Social media marketing, or SMM, is a type of internet marketing that includes creating and sharing relevant content on social media networks to raise brand awareness. Typical activities are posting videos and images and posting text, all of which incite audience engagement, but it also includes paid social media advertising.
First of all, Facebook advertising is one of the most cost-effective media channels in the world, enabling you to easily reach your target audience anywhere you want. Just to give you a hint of its possibilities – more than 75% of Americans are using Facebook, so the possibilities of advertising your brand to the right audience are incredibly high. The Cost Per Click is pretty low, while the benefits could be quite substantial.
Videos are a great way of telling people who you are and what you offer, as well as why they should choose you instead of your competitors. Videos are more popular and influencing than television and newspapers so it would be a good idea to invest in a high-quality video advertising on social media.
Visual social media sites such as Instagram and Pinterest are perfect for creative image roundups that show exactly what you offer and tell an interesting story. In order to make the images more shareable, overlay them with catchy quotes.
2. Guerrilla marketing
If you’re aiming at unexpected marketing tactics, then you should opt for guerilla marketing. It’s a way of avoiding becoming bland and predictable when it comes to promoting your brand.
It’s a different approach, where people are told stories and even drawn into them and inspired after watching/reading them. The good thing about guerrilla marketing is that it isn’t expensive but needs a certain amount of creativity and it should try to incent people to give comments.
This type of marketing includes public “stunts” and planting a new idea in people’s head – something unusual and with a twist at the end is the best possible version. It works better if you only do it occasionally, at a specific time through a targeted campaign, so don’t let the whole site get overwhelmed with this one-time hype.
3. Merchandise marketing
This type of marketing means creating brand awareness but also customer loyalty through the smart use of merchandise. The term “merchandise” refers to any tangible item, like a gift card, a T-shirt or flowers. For example, it means organizing a contest or giving out free custom t-shirts and jackets for your next tradeshow to raise your brand awareness among the targeted audience.
However, merchandise marketing is more than just promotional marketing – any use of incentives, thank-yous and referrals are also an example of using the physical merchandise. It is also highly useful for supporting other types of marketing like loyalty and word-of-mouth marketing, making it clear that merchandise marketing is not a thing of the past at all.
4. Quality content
Quality content presupposes several factors. First of all, whatever you’re writing about, it’s highly important you’re being transparent, meaning the communication between you and your audience/clients is honest and direct.
People will always buy from those who they trust, so in order to build that trust, transparency is a must. It means that that the content you’re putting on your site needs to be honest, even when it’s uncomfortable to you and you should also be prepared to share some of your personal stories and prepared to take public responsibility for your potential mistakes.
Also, you need to put yourself in your reader’s position and think about answering three questions referring to the content: Is the content relevant to the reader? Is it educational to them? Does it add any value? In order to be sure the content won’t be disregarded by the reader as irrelevant or annoying, the answer to these three questions needs to be “yes”.
The keywords you choose will also add to the quality of your content. Don’t listen to those who say that SEO isn’t that important for your marketing strategy – words that you use could help your product or service more than you think. So, pick three keywords and stick to them for a long period of time – your persistence will get you high Google ranking, and that counts!
Final comment
Your marketing strategy doesn’t need to be expensive – creating buzz for your brand generally includes creative thinking and a lot of hard work. But all of that effort will be rewarding after a certain time has passed.