4 Types of Marketing Strategies
One thing you’ll quickly realize when you run a small business is that flying by the seat of your pants 99% of the time isn’t a good plan. Don’t get me wrong, it can be fun but not necessarily effective when growing and scaling a business.
Trust me when I say I love a good strategy just as much as the next person. As a business owner, your competitive advantage is driven by a strategy. Unfortunately, so many opportunities fall through the cracks with little planning. It can be a complex place, and we want to help simplify it! In this blog, we dive into some of the effective digital marketing strategies and how you can leverage the different marketing strategies that drive growth.
What Is a Marketing Strategy?
Simply put, marketing strategy is the steps a business takes to reach its goals in various campaigns and marketing models to compete in its industry. It’s the deep dive into select parts of your marketing plan. It involves understanding what problem you solve, how you can solve a customer’s problem with your products and services, and what you need to reach those metrics set in the strategy.
To create an effective marketing strategy, here are four questions to ask as you start each strategy:
- Who are your customers?
- How to motivate these people to buy/ continue to buy your products/ services?
- Who are your competitors? What are they doing to achieve results?
- How do you measure the success of each marketing campaign and effort?
Each campaign, event, or marketing project can have a different customer persona, motivation to engage with your business, or even find another place they like doing business with. For example, currently, your audience is an older generation, and you’ve uncovered an opportunity with a younger audience that you want to gain a competitive advantage in this space. As a result, you create a marketing campaign to grow your audience within your retail store. This example is a great start to a campaign with its own strategy.
Types of Digital Marketing Strategies
Digital marketing tactics are going nowhere. The different channels to leverage are growing. While we’re not going to cover every marketing strategy in a single post, there are some common strategies most businesses use. Here are the main ones to consider if they are a fit for your business goals:
Social Media Marketing Strategy
Social media has transformed every business’s marketing efforts into selling products and services, driving traffic, building brand awareness, and reshaping the advertising industry that is taking over the online world.
How are you utilizing social media to support your business goals? There is no right answer to this. While we covered just a few of the many social media channels available, implementing a strategy will get you better results than blindly posting from time to time.
Email Marketing Strategy
“Email is dead” couldn’t be further from the truth. When you capture customer emails, you are getting their approval to keep them updated and to sell to them respectfully. Emphasis on respect. Email marketing does get a bad rap. However, with the right strategy, it can be very effective in reaching an engaged audience that supports your brand.
Content Marketing Strategy
Let’s focus on content creation here. Content marketing will overlap with every strategy to support your brand. How do you want to draw people into your brand? Again, there is no right answer. More so, how can that blog post support your social media strategy and SEO strategy all at the same time?
Content is king in spreading brand awareness and positioning you as the expert in your industry. Fun little tip create content once and leverage that one piece across all your channels.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Strategy
“I want to appear on the first page of Google or any search engine.” If this is you, here is your “free” way to show up on page one without spending money on ads. However, showing up organically on a search engine results page (SERP) does take time and effort, and a strategy to ensure success SEO does have a hidden cost. This depends on your business goals, and would SEO be the answer?
Now What?
When succeeding at marketing, there isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach. Each business is unique. As is each project is unique that will get move you closer to your goals. Implementing a marketing strategy for the many channels and events your company will have is an important part of reaching those goals quicker.
When you choose which types of marketing strategies are a fit, it’s time to create that strategy. You don’t need a huge team to create or implement a strategy for every campaign from which you can reap benefits. However, even small businesses need marketing tailored to their brand to grow and interest people. After all, even with the best products or services, nobody will buy if they don’t know you exist.
Before diving into any strategy planning, it’s important to understand what you’re trying to accomplish. What does marketing success look like for you? If your marketing efforts work, what does that look like from campaign to campaign or event to event?
Be as specific, goals vary widely, but some of the most common goals are:
- Grow the organization
- Generate more leads
- Brand awareness
- Increased market share
Take time to create a very detailed strategy for your business and implement a strategy for each campaign or event to understand how your marketing efforts are moving the dial and allowing you to move forward with your big vision.
Do you think you need external support when it comes to creating one or more of these types of marketing strategies? This kind of support can be a game-changer for your business. So if you’re ready to learn more about what it’s like to work with a digital marketing firm on a project basis, let’s chat!
