In today’s digital world, every type of business can benefit from digital marketing strategies— but that doesn’t mean that you have to completely abandon traditional marketing techniques. Studies show that both are highly effective, and here are some of the current trends.
Affiliate Marketing
Partnering with your most loyal customers can link your business to many new customers, especially if these loyal customers have a huge following on social media (also known as influencers). The way affiliate marketing works is by having your affiliates promote your products or services online and in person to their family and friends. When others purchase your products through a link that’s associated with a specific affiliate, that affiliate will receive a small commission for that purchase. Affiliate programs incentivize customers to promote your products and buy more of your products for themselves, especially if they’re allowed to use their own affiliate link.
Email Marketing
The way email is used today is much different than how it was used when it first came out. Unfortunately, this has led to a lot of junk emails— but email services do a pretty good job of keeping these out of their users’ main inboxes. However, your promotional emails can get mixed up in their junk/spam folders.
This is why it’s important to segment your emails and send personalized emails to your customers. Even when customers voluntarily sign up for emails, they still want content that is relevant to them. Your CRM (customer relationship management) software can help identify the purchasing habits of your current customers, allowing you to create more targeted emails— which is especially helpful during .
In-Feed Shopping
In-feed shopping allows you to link your social media accounts to your website to let your followers click on your posts to purchase your merchandise. This is a very convenient way to shop because most people are constantly scrolling on social media. You can also use Google Ads’ shopping campaigns feature to create shoppable photos.
Promotional Marketing
Promotional marketing involves putting your company name and logo on everyday and . The idea behind this marketing technique is that you’re exposing more people to your business by displaying your logo on as many things as possible. Your logo should already be on your storefront, website, and business cards, but you can benefit from having your logo in several other places as well.
Consider employee uniforms (it can be something as simple as a polo shirt or T-shirt) with your company’s name and logo printed neatly and clearly on it. You can also invest in accessories for your employees such as lanyards, notepads and sticky notes, pens, coffee mugs, and water bottles. Your most loyal customers may also like promotional coffee mugs and water bottles, and you can sell these items alongside your merchandise or services.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO utilizes keywords from your website and blog posts to get your website to rank higher in search engines. This drives organic traffic to your website, which makes it more likely for the visitor to make a purchase rather than just browse. One of the latest trends in SEO marketing is voice SEO through digital assistants like Alexa (Amazon), Siri (Apple), Cortana (Microsoft), and Google’s digital assistant. In the same way traditional SEO uses typed keywords, voice SEO uses artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze conversational phrases that people are likely to use when looking for products or services related to your business.
Video Marketing
Video marketing is a specific type of content marketing that uses video ads on platforms like YouTube for advertising purposes. The average person watches of online video content each day, and many video watchers aren’t bothered by ads. If you don’t want to pay for a platform to show your ads, you can create your own videos on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and various other sites to share information about your business. Live-streaming on these platforms allows you and your customers to interact with each other, and you can allow them to ask you questions about your business and products/services.
You can also take advantage of SMS marketing and push notifications. These techniques allow you to connect directly to your customers or clients through texts and notifications that show up on the home screens of their phones. Because around seven billion people use mobile devices, this is a great way to stay connected to your customers. This and other digital marketing techniques are the future of advertising.