Marketing Strategy Examples and Tips for Improving Yours

As a business owner, you know how important marketing is for company growth. But if you’re flying from one idea to the next and trying to be active on all marketing channels at once without a proper plan, you’re wasting your time and money. If you want your marketing efforts to be effective, you need a marketing strategy.

Coming up with a marketing strategy can be daunting which is why in this post, we’ll share what you need to create an effective strategy, offer up popular marketing strategies currently in use, and showcase marketing strategy examples that you can use as inspiration. 

What Do You Need To Create An Effective Marketing Strategy?

Before we get into marketing strategy examples, let’s go over the four key things you need to create an effective one.

Know Your Target Audience

The first step to creating an effective marketing strategy is to know your target audience. By knowing their demographics (age, gender, income, education level, etc) and, more importantly, their psychographics (hobbies, interests, problems they’re facing), you’ll be able to pinpoint exactly how to help them. 

This, in turn, helps you communicate with them more effectively which then leads to better results from your marketing efforts. 

Understand Your Competition

When crafting your marketing strategy, it’s important to know what your competition is doing. Make a note of what they are doing well. Then, come up with a way to do it better. 

You’ll also want to make a note of where their marketing is lacking and identify ways for your efforts (as well as your offers) to fill the gap.  

Decide On Your Marketing Channels

Now you know who your target audience is and what their problems are. You also spent some time analyzing your competition and know how they position themselves in the market. 

The next step is to decide on your marketing channels. 

Naturally, you should market where your audience is already spending most of their time online. This can include social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. It can also include your website, email list, paid ads, guest posts on other websites in your niche, appearing on podcasts relevant to your industry, and more. 

The important thing to remember is to focus on one or two platforms at the start instead of going all in and trying to be everywhere at once. 

Doing the latter will result in becoming overwhelmed while focusing on one or two platforms will allow you to hone in on your audience’s needs and perfect your strategy before adding more to your plate. 

Craft A Compelling Message

The final part of your marketing strategy is to craft a compelling message. Focus on the benefits of your products or services and paint a vivid picture of how you solve their problems.  

Remember, most consumers want to know what’s in it for them. In other words, they will be more likely to buy if you manage to elicit an emotional response. That’s why listing features or deliverables doesn’t work as well as highlighting the benefits of what you have to offer.  

5 Popular Marketing Strategies To Consider

Here are five popular marketing strategies to consider for your business. 

1. Blogging 

Blogging is one of the most effective marketing strategies for any business. It involves publishing content on your company’s blog regularly. Blogging works well because it allows your business website to rank better in the search engines. 

Each blog post you publish is a new page on your site for Google and other search engines to index. This gives you more opportunities to show up in search results for keywords related to your industry. 

What’s more, you can reap the benefits of blogging years after you’ve published a certain blog post.

An example of a company using blogging as their marketing strategy comes from Hubspot. Hubspot offers a range of tools designed to help you market your business more effectively. They post in-depth guides about marketing, sales process, customer retention, and more.

2. User-Generated Content

If you have a product-based business, consider using user-generated content as your marketing strategy. This works well on social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook. 

It also takes the pressure off you from constantly creating new content for your social media profiles. To get started with this type of marketing strategy, create a hashtag, and invite your customers and followers to share a photo of themselves using your product. 

You can then repost these posts to your profiles and feature your followers. On top of subtly promoting your products, this marketing strategy also fosters a sense of community and trust. 

An example of a company using user-generated content well is Wayfair. They created an Instagram hashtag #wayfairathome and encourage their followers to share their style.

3. Retargeting

Have you ever visited a website like Amazon to check out the newest camera or drone? And then, all of a sudden, you start seeing ads about those products wherever you go?

That’s known as retargeting and it’s a popular marketing strategy that allows you to stay top-of-mind with your customers even after they leave your site. 

In most cases, you’ll need to install a small piece of code (often called a pixel) on your website. This small bit of code will then trigger a cookie every time a new visitor lands on your website. 

After they leave, the cookie will then let your retargeting provider know when to serve your ads and make sure they’re served only to those who have visited your site previously. 

Almost every company nowadays uses retargeting as their marketing strategy. For example, if you visit Nordstrom’s website and leave without purchasing, you’ll run into their ads on other websites you visit. This can include other websites as well as social media platforms like Facebook. 

4. Loyalty Programs

Another effective marketing strategy is the use of loyalty programs. This strategy works well with existing customers. In essence, you give your customers points based on actions performed on your site. 

For example, they can get points for adding a certain product to their cart, spending a certain amount of money, filling out a survey, recommending a friend, and more. 

They can redeem points for discounts, get free products, or unlock special offers. 

A great example of a company using a loyalty program as its marketing strategy comes from Sephora. Their Beauty Insider has three different tiers meaning that at each tier, you can get a different set of rewards and incentives.

5. Email Marketing

Email marketing is another example of a highly effective marketing strategy. It allows you to continually nurture the relationship with your subscribers so you can convert them into paying customers and clients. 

The best part about email marketing is that you own your email list and have full control over when and how you show up in your subscribers’ inbox. You aren’t dependent on a random algorithm that may or may not show your latest post. 

If you want to see an email marketing strategy in action, look no further than your inbox. You’ll probably notice emails from different companies showing up in your inbox regularly. 

For example, the popular WordPress SEO plugin, Yoast SEO, regularly sends emails to their subscribers with actionable tips for improving their SEO.  

Start Creating A Marketing Strategy For Your Business

By now, you should know what goes into creating a marketing strategy as well as have an idea of what marketing strategies you can consider for your business. The next step is to use the tips in this article to help you create and implement a marketing strategy that will grow your business. 

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