You won't be able to fulfill your business's goals if you don’t have marketing strategies that work. You probably already know that already.
These marketing strategies will assist you in making your long-term marketing plan a success. Implement one at a time, and before you know it, you'll start attracting and converting loyal customers and growing your business.
Strategy #1: Targeted Content Marketing
Content marketing is a marketing strategy that focuses on creating and distributing relevant content aimed at educating your audience. The key to this strategy is to provide valuable contents that help your audience find answers to their questions.
Over time, the audience begins to see you as a trusted expert (i.e. authority) and starts to like you. This is how you build loyal followership that can be converted into paying clients.
Content marketing can range from newsletters to blog posts, videos, audio, and even images. And each item must be tailored to your intended demographic.
To be successful, you must first define your target market, understand your products and services, and create content that addresses each stage of your customer's buying journey. Marketing giants like Hubspot and Copyblogger swear by content marketing.
Strategy #2: Collect Customer Testimonials
A great way to get the word out about your offerings and to persuade your audience to buy what you’re selling is to ask for testimonials from satisfied customers.
If you’re just starting you can give work or products away in exchange for a testimonial. Put the testimonials on your website and link back to the customers’ information so that everyone knows they are real people.
Customer testimonials help to give you something called, “social proof,” one of the potent weapons of marketing influence, according to the legendary marketing professor Robert Cialdini.
According to Dr. Cialdini in his highly influential book, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, “one means we use to determine what is correct is to find out what other people think is correct.” Potential customers will first read testimonials about your products or services before they read your fancy sales letter. They want to know “what other people think.” If they don’t get a good vibe, they are out. That’s a well-proven psychology of human behavior.
Strategy #3: Email Marketing
Permission-based email marketing is one of the most effective marketing strategies on the planet today. Every business is using this strategy, from the one-woman laptop entrepreneur to the largest corporations. Craig Ballantyne calls it the “Holy Grail of Internet Marketing.” If you’re not using email marketing in your business, you are leaving a lot of money on the table.
Permission-based email marketing can become your primary lead source (I emphasize permission-based because you MUST get the permission of a recipient before you start emailing them. Spamming is the fastest way to have your business shut down).
If you know how to generate quality lead, and nurture that lead with regular valuable content sent directly into their inbox, you can build and scale a small business in virtually any niche.
Strategy #4: Host Webinars
Webinars have come of age. As the technology gets better and less expensive hosting and performing a webinar is a great way to prove your expertise status. When people can see you, and hear you they’re more likely to trust you.
If you also interview movers and shakers within your industry you can gain some of their audience as well as impress your audience by increasing the trust factor you already share. When you hobnob with influencers you can become one too.
Webinars have become so hot that the Australian marketing consultant, Tom Polland of the Leadsology fame recently published a bestseller titled: Marketing With Webinars, in which he gives you a step-by-step method for generating new client inquiries in bulk and without significant cost or complication using webinars.
Using webinars as marketing strategy has grown even more exponentially in the past year since this global pandemic shutdown.
Strategy #5: Give Away Good Stuff
When you decide to build your list you already know that you need to create a “freebie” so that your audience will sign up for your email list.
But, did you know that the stuff you give away free should be just as good as the stuff you sell? It may seem counterproductive but when you give away super-targeted information that is high quality it builds a lot of trust in you from your audience who will recommend you to others even if they never personally buy from you. This will help you expand awareness and make more money faster.
Legendary marketer, Dean Jackson, calls this “Potato Chip Marketing.”
Here’s how it works. You’re at a park with a bag of potato chips, and want a squirrel to eat out of your hand. What do you do?
First, you make a line of potato chips. You set one chip down first, then another two feet away, then another, and so on. Then you sit on a bench further away. The squirrel will come out and steal the first potato chip. It will wait, look around and then eat the next one when it feels comfortable. And then the next one, and the next, until it’s eating straight out of your hand!
Just like you cannot expect a squirrel to eat out of your hand on first contact, you cannot expect a client to buy from you when they first land on your website. You must build trust first, then you sell.
Strategy #6: Speak at Live Events Online and Offline
Most people are terrified of public speaking. It’s been said that most people are more afraid of public speaking than dying. Ouch! Therefore, if you can do it, and do it well – the payoff can be enormous.
You can speak online and offline today. Look for speaking gigs through your network and let people know you’re ready to do it by creating sample videos and a “one sheet” to market your speaking services. This one marketing strategy alone can explode your business.
Strategy #7: Partner with Other Businesses
It's a quick method to raise exposure and grow your business when you collaborate with other businesses. One method to accomplish this is to develop short-term joint venture initiatives with someone who provides complementary goods, services, and skills to you.
Make sure you have a contract in place that spells out each party's obligations and responsibilities in the joint venture. If you collaborate on a short-term project with someone, such as a live event or an online webinar, you can explore collaborating on longer-term initiatives, such as joint product offerings.
Bonus: Build an Affiliate Program
Affiliate marketing is a great marketing strategy for small businesses. This is true whether you sell physical or digital products. Getting others to promote your products and services is a win-win for you and the affiliate. You reach more people than you could on your own and the affiliate earns a commission for sending buyers to your site.
You also get to grow your email list. When you build your affiliate program, consider using an affiliate network such as JVZoo, ClickBank, or Commission Junction to promote your offerings in order to reach even more potential affiliate promoters.
These top marketing strategies will help you get more attention to your products or services if you do them persistently and consistently.
Of course, there are other marketing strategies you can also use. Social media marketing is an amazing addition to traditional marketing methods in the 21st century. You can build an entire business using almost any of the platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and others.
The key is all marketing takes time and consistency to produce results, but finding one or two (or three) strategies that work for you, and working them can yield profitable results for you.
