Top 10 Most Effective Marketing Techniques

jross

March 22, 2021 (Updated: May 4, 2023)

Businesses need to have effective marketing techniques to ensure that they stand out against their competitors. The best marketing technique for your business will depend on your specific goals and target audience. Not all techniques work for every business. When choosing product marketing techniques, you should focus on ones that will help you profitably reach your target audience. In this article, we discuss:

What Are Marketing Techniques?
10 Effective Marketing Techniques

What Are Marketing Techniques?

Marketing techniques are specific strategies used by businesses to promote products and services. The best marketing techniques are usually low-cost, impactful, and customizable to your target audience. Many companies will approach their overall marketing strategy by adopting a mix of multiple techniques, moving them closer to their goals. Each marketing technique hits a specific data point, including educating an audience, generating sales, or peaking customer interest.

10 Effective Marketing Techniques

With the ever-changing digital marketing landscape, even the most seasoned marketer needs a refresher on what some of the best marketing techniques are and how they can be utilized in your business. We have rounded up the top 10 latest marketing techniques for you to consider implementing in your next marketing plan:

1. Storytelling

As a marketer, engaging people and influencing them to make buying decisions is your primary goal. You can engage with your customers by sharing relatable stories about their daily challenges. Acknowledging these problems will immediately create an engaging story that will create a bond between you and your ideal customer. Since you have become relatable, your customers will feel like you know and understand them. Once you are a trusted brand, you have an opportunity to demonstrate how your product or service can solve your customer’s problems.

2. Strategic Content Marketing

Content marketing is an essential aspect of developing relationships with both loyal and prospective customers. Creating informative and engaging content helps your clients to quickly solve their needs and sets you up as an industry expert. Strategic content marketing involves explicitly defining measurable goals, identifying the intended audience, creating a plan for distribution and promotion, and evaluating success in measurable ways.

Strategic content has the potential to generate new leads, increase website traffic, and pull prospective customers into your sales funnel. Setting explicit goals will help you measure your success as you go and focus on strategies that work.

As you create your content, you need to decide your audience’s most commonly consumed form of media. There are various content forms to consider, including infographics, blogs, white papers, and videos. If your potential clients need more information, then you may consider a longer form of content, such as an eBook.

Shorter forms of content, such as a short blog post or a social media post, can also engage followers. Short blogs can be beneficial as long as the post is well-written, engaging, and actionable. These three factors encourage readers to share the content with others generating more buzz for your business. Using keywords will also help you increase the amount of traffic to your website.

3. Pillar-Cluster Technique

Google’s algorithm wants users to find the most relevant and useful answers to their questions. To accomplish this goal, the Google algorithm is evolving to recognize unifying connections between users’ specific searches and other’s similar searches. With this method, they boost content they deem to be authoritative. The pillar-cluster technique focuses on topics rather than keywords to reach top rankings on search engines.

Pillar pages are a comprehensive overview of a topic. In contrast, cluster pages drill down on the related topics providing invaluable content-filled posts. The posts are all connected to each other via hyperlinks, making a strong value-based presence. When Google sees these hyperlink clusters, they automatically consider you to be an authority on the topic. Since you are considered the primary source, your ranking rises. The key is to link pillar content to the cluster content. Linking the pages will increase your pillar page ranking in the event the cluster page ranks highly for a specific keyword.

4. Email Subscription Service

Email subscriptions give businesses an invite into their customer’s inbox. The content in these emails serves many purposes, including generating website traffic, leads, or product subscriptions. Email subscriptions also allow people to keep in touch with the brand, hearing news, and stories. When people are willing to engage with your content voluntarily, you create a network of loyal subscribers who genuinely value the content you offer.

Email marketing has a slow build. Each message adds to the one before it, increasing the value you have to offer your clients. As you increase your email list, you can personalize and optimize the emails to fit your customer’s buying stage and needs.

5. Producing Podcasts

One of the latest marketing techniques that is growing in popularity is creating podcasts. Roughly 90 million Americans surveyed in a 2019 study said they have listened to a podcast in the last month. 22 percent of Americans aged 12 and older are consistently listening to podcasts weekly. On average, those who have made the habit listen to at least seven unique podcasts each week.

With podcasts growing in popularity, your business has the potential to reach those listening with valuable content. What makes podcasting so useful is that it is easy to gain a potential customer’s trust. Listening to another person’s voice as they speak about various topics is an intimate experience. As you release content related to your niche, you can quickly develop a loyal customer base that comes back each week for additional content. Remember, content needs to be filled with useful and entertaining information. Otherwise, you will not retain listeners.

6. Link Building

Link building, also called content syndication, is a marketing strategy in which a business attempts to get other websites to include their website link in the content. Having inbound links from other websites is essential for any SEO strategy and increases your page’s domain authority.

One effective method is to ask other websites with higher rankings to hyperlink your content. To make this method effective, you’ll want to choose websites that are relevant to your business. Google has stepped up efforts to make sure that people aren’t artificially enhancing their domain authority by buying links.

Building links to your website does not need to be complicated. Search for mentions of your business in existing content on the Internet. When you find that content, you can contact the website editor and ask them to include a link to your website. This is a simple strategy that doesn’t require a lot of work to generate viewers.

The best way to organically generate links to your page is by creating content that people engage with. People will link to your content if it contains valuable information that they can share to enhance their content. When people do the linking for you, it gets you more views without spending time or money.

7. Growth Hacking

Growth Hacking is a strategy first employed in 2010 by early-stage startups seeking massive growth within a short timeframe and a limited budget. Since then, growth hacking has gained popularity and is being utilized by larger corporations such as Twitter and Dropbox.

Growth hacking strategies solely focus on acquiring as many customers as possible in the least amount of time. Growth hackers use viral marketing, social media, and targeted advertising instead of traditional media such as newspapers, radio, or television.

Marketing teams that employ growth hacking have a singular focus on growth, scalability, customer engagement, and retention. They also consider products and services as a way to reach their growth instead of just something to sell. Most of the focus is put on measures that are deemed to be the most cost-effective. Growth hackers utilize content marketing, product marketing, and advertising to achieve their desired growth level.

8. Influencer Marketing

Image via Unsplash

More businesses are using a relatively newer marketing trend to reach their customers, influencer marketing. The company or brand partners with an influencer to help them promote their product or services to a larger group of consumers, ones the brand would not usually reach. An influencer can be anyone with a large, devoted audience, including celebrities, authority figures, and social media figures. The influencer promotes the product or service to their followers across various social media networks. Influencer marketing is effective because consumers feel celebrities, athletes, and other influential figures are trustworthy therefore are more likely to take action on their recommendations.

Influencers have become so important to their followers that 4 in 10 millennials believe their favorite influencer knows them better than their friends. Out of current teenage YouTube viewers, 70 percent of them state they feel YouTube creators are more relatable than celebrities. Influencers are so valuable in reaching markets that almost 90 percent of business owners using this approach say they achieve a return on investment equal to or higher than other business marketing techniques.

However, you do need to do your research on the influencer and their following before you offer to have them endorse your brand. If an influencer or their audience is ill-suited to your product, it could bring harm to your brand’s reputation.

9. Search Engine Marketing

Businesses use search engine marketing (SEM) to boost their website traffic through paid online advertising. One of the universally used techniques is pay-per-click (PPC) linking. With PPC, a business will pay to be listed in an ad at the top of a search engine’s results. The ad will take consumers directly to the advertiser’s page. Currently, the advertisements listed on Google Display Network are seen by a staggering amount of internet users, almost 90 percent.

For your ad to show in the search results, the consumer has to search for a relevant keyword that ties into your product or service offerings. When the ad is clicked, the business pays the search engine a fee hence the name, pay-per-click. Knowing the top keywords, your audience is searching for is a great way to optimize this marketing tool. Hitting those specific keywords will raise your brand awareness, allowing you to reach more clientele.

10. Social Networking and Viral Marketing

Social media marketing leverages social platforms to provide users with content that is valuable to them. In turn, they share the content across their social networking platforms. As users share your content, it creates traffic for your business and can influence your SEO. More shares also bring recognition from search results on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube. This recognition leads to higher rankings with Google and Yahoo search results.

If enough social media users share your content, you can go viral. However, this only happens if the users see that your content engages their followers. The more engagement a piece gets, the higher the potential for additional content to go viral. Remember, even if a post gets many shares, or likes, those factors alone are not enough for the content to go viral. The content must move people to take action, whether that is signing up for a newsletter or looking at what else your brand has to offer.

Whether you are a small business or a multi-national company, you need to have a solid content marketing strategy to achieve growth. In an effective strategy, it matters who you target and when. It is best to create a plan and work on expanding your reach from there. Remember, growth comes from careful planning and nurturing. It does not happen overnight. If you need help creating your plan or are unsure where to start, reach out to us here at CopyPress. Our team of experts can help you analyze your content, find strategic opportunities, and create a winning marketing strategy that gets results.