Placing your advertising and marketing technique into play is totally different than creating that technique. To deliver it to life, it’s important to make use of the correct channels, strategies, and ways.
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In fact, advertising and marketing a model on-line has develop into far more nuanced and sophisticated, with many strategies at your disposal.
That can assist you study the simplest advertising and marketing strategies round in the present day, we have rounded up the most effective ones so as to add to your digital advertising and marketing toolbox.
Desk of Contents
Greatest Advertising Methods
Branding and Consciousness Methods
Viewers Engagement Methods
Techniques for Driving Traffic
Conversion and Nurturing Techniques
Best Marketing Techniques
- Brand Storytelling
- Digital PR
- The Surround Sound Method
- Brand Extensions
- Podcasting
- Video Marketing
- Community Building
- Contextual Marketing
- Blog Title Optimization
- The Pillar-Cluster Model
- Historical Optimization
- Retargeting
- The Skyscraper Backlinking Method
- A/B Testing for CTAs
- Value-Add Emails
- Audience Segmentation
- Marketing Automation
- Lead Scoring
Branding and Awareness Techniques
1. Brand Storytelling
Purpose: Capture Attention
In the neuroscience field, researchers have proven that storytelling is the best way to capture people’s attention, bake information into their memories, and resonate emotionally with them.
Put differently, the human brain is programmed to crave, seek out, and respond to well-crafted narratives — and that’ll never change.
If you have an About page on your website that functions only to say what you do and who you do it for, crafting a compelling narrative is a great way to uplevel that page and resonate with your readers.
For maximum effectiveness, consider following a storytelling framework such as Simon Sinek’s Find Your Why methodology, Donald Miller’s Storybrand, or the classic Hero’s Journey.
And storytelling doesn’t just have to live on your About page.
Just like your favorite Netflix show, you can craft a series on YouTube to entice your viewers to subscribe to your updates. This can get your audience more excited for your show’s newest season than they currently are for the latest season of Stranger Things.
Before you green light another slew of listicles, how-to posts, and ultimate guides, remember how powerful storytelling is and consider crafting a story chock-full of conflict, surprise, and emotion that your viewers will relate to your brand, regardless of the channel you’re targeting them on.
2. Digital PR
Purpose: Reach New Audiences
As of April 2023, individuals spend a mean of six hours and 35 minutes per day on social media. Evidently, individuals spend extra time on social media than ever earlier than.
In response, public relations professionals are pivoting their technique from solely specializing in inserting their tales in information retailers’ publications to concentrating on driving visitors to their web sites and social media profiles too.
To be able to efficiently pitch your tales to journalists and information retailers these days, you’ll want to account for the content material that performs effectively on their social media profiles and their publication. So earlier than you pitch your story, ensure that it is related and attention-grabbing to the information outlet’s social viewers.
3. The Encompass Sound Methodology
An advert’s effectiveness will increase the extra occasions it has been seen by a prospect. It is also fairly protected to say that any advertising and marketing asset’s effectiveness will increase the extra it is seen.
It is a reality beforehand alluded to on this submit anytime the phrase “touchpoints” comes up.
The surround-sound methodology takes this concept and amplifies it by difficult the notion that your owned channels and belongings aren’t sufficient to create true model consciousness. You must also seem in every single place else somebody goes to think about merchandise. For instance:
- Evaluation web sites
- The social timelines of outstanding influencers
- Featured within the media they eat (articles, movies, podcasts)
In line with Alex Birkett, Senior Progress Advertising Supervisor at HubSpot, should you can “get numerous individuals to speak about you favorably, ideally across the similar time,” you possibly can generate fairly a bit of brand name consciousness.
4. Model Extensions
Objective: Broaden Into Tangential Markets for Elevated Consciousness
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Huge firms typically prolong their model to develop new merchandise in industries that they have no market share in. These initiatives are referred to as model extensions, they usually permit firms to leverage their model consciousness and fairness to create extra income streams. For instance, Reese’s getting into the cereal market with their peanut butter and chocolate “Reese’s Puffs” product.
Traditionally, essentially the most profitable model extensions are those that carefully tie to the corporate’s flagship product or core model, like Gerber’s child garments and Dole’s frozen fruit bars.
By getting into tangential markets that may protect your model’s distinctive associations and perceived high quality, you possibly can develop new merchandise that buyers intuitively perceive the advantages of, despite the fact that they’ve by no means seen them on a shelf.
On the flip facet, an organization can even exploit its model and, in flip, injury it. In the event that they develop a product in a market that is not carefully tied to their flagship product or core model, audiences may connect undesirable associations to a model, weaken its present associations, and harm its established merchandise’ perceived high quality.
Viewers Engagement Methods
5. Podcasting
Objective: Leverage Audio Content material and Attain New Audiences
The popularity of podcasts has grown rapidly year after year. The number of global podcast listeners is expected to grow to 464.7 million in 2023, according to eMarketer.
Needless to say, the demand for audio content has exploded, but that doesn’t mean people will listen to your branded podcast just because it’s a podcast. In reality, they’ll only listen to it if it can hold their attention and, ultimately, entertain them.
Here’s where the technique part comes in: Many podcasts rely on a host/guest model. This model is wildly successful because hosts can tap into the audience that the guest brings in and vice versa. It’s a mutually beneficial arrangement so long as both sides promote effectively. That’s why it’s important to choose guests wisely and make it easy for them to promote the show and episode they appear in.
With each guest that comes on, the podcast audience grows, and so does the engagement.
6. Video Marketing
Purpose: Leverage Video Content and Reach New Audiences
Video has overtaken blogs and infographics as the number one form of media used in content strategy (HubSpot). There’s a couple reasons for this:
- It’s flexible. You can create video for YouTube, embed it on your blog, share it on social media, and more.
- It’s a different kind of organic play. Google shows videos in the SERPs (search engine results pages). YouTube is also a search engine in its own right and is the second most visited site after Google itself (Alexa).
- The engagement is rewarding. Video consumption continues to rise, outpacing television, and it’s more effective at conveying information (Biteable).
So not only are consumers looking for audio content; they’re looking for video content as well. And savvy marketers are getting ROI in the form of engagement and repurpose-ability.
7. Community Building
Purpose: Improve Long-Term Engagement and Build Authority
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Speaking of engagement, the last thing you want to do is create a piece of content and then hear crickets when you promote it. One of the best ways to increase engagement and brand awareness is by building relationships with prospects, users, customers, and other individuals in the industry.
Many brands are creating digital communities on social media, online boards, and their own hosted networks/forums. In fact, a staggering 90% of social media marketers say building an active online community is critical to success in 2023.
With community management, you’re building relationships, giving back, and establishing yourself as an authority in the industry. It can be as simple as answering questions on Quora or cultivating a hashtag on Twitter, or it can be as complex as creating a whole support network for your product.
Either way, you’re improving the affinity your prospects and customers have with your brand.
If done correctly, your community may even expand beyond your brand and become a beneficial resource for everyone within it. For example, Women in Tech SEO, founded by Areej AbuAli, is a community focused on accelerating the careers of women in the SEO industry. The organization has a network with a discussion component, ongoing meetups, a newsletter, and more.
8. Contextual Marketing
Purpose: Improve Website Engagement With Personalized Content
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Contextual marketing is the practice of serving up personalized website content to visitors according to their stage of the buyer’s journey. The idea is that if you can cut through the noise and serve your website visitors the content that matters the most to them, you’ll be far more successful at capturing their attention.
We can all agree that improving the experience for prospects can lead to increased effectiveness, but what does contextual marketing look like in practice?
For example, you might use dynamic CTAs that only show them offers that are relevant to them. This cuts down on the amount of useless information they’re taking in on your website and decreases banner blindness… in part because the banners they do see are helpful and relevant.
It might also mean using smart forms so that you don’t keep asking for the same information from website visitors who have cause to fill out multiple forms on your site.
Then, you might segment your database so that your leads receive email campaigns that are directly relevant to their needs based on content that they’ve already consumed on your website.
All of this resulting in a personalized, tailored journey without the pressure of going to a salesperson for it.
Techniques for Driving Traffic
9. Blog Title Optimization
Purpose: Increase Traffic to Existing Assets By Improving Click-Through Rate
When you write a blog post, do you use the first title you came up with or do you write a few?
People will not get to the rest of your content until they choose to click on the headline. That’s why it’s so important to have grabby titles that resonate with your audience and compel them to click.
By increasing the effectiveness of your titles, you can increase click-through rate (and, in effect, traffic). One way to do this is by using tools like this headline analyzer to see what you can do to improve your headline.
Better yet, you can always analyze your existing blog posts to see which headlines aren’t doing enough heavy lifting. By improving the click-through rate, you’ll be able to get more traffic from that asset without a heavy editorial lift.
10. The Pillar-Cluster Model
Purpose: Drive Traffic By Establishing Topic Authority
Since people heavily rely on Google to provide accurate and relevant answers for most of their questions today, Google needs to understand the intent and context behind every single search.
To do this, Google has evolved to recognize topical connections across users’ queries, look back at similar queries that users have searched for in the past, and surface the content that best answers them. As a result, Google will deliver content that they deem the most authoritative on the topic.
To help Google recognize your content as a trusted authority on marketing, sales, and customer service topics, consider implementing the pillar-cluster model on your blog.
Essentially, the pillar-cluster model is a topic-based based content strategy. This means that you generate and organize ideas for your blog by topic.
By creating a single pillar page (an ultimate guide, for instance) that provides a high-level overview of a topic and hyperlinks to cluster pages (subtopic blog posts) that delve into the topic’s subtopics, you can signal to Google that your pillar page is an authority on the topic.
Hyperlinking all of the cluster pages to the pillar page also spreads domain authority across the cluster, so your cluster pages get an organic boost if your pillar page ranks higher, and your cluster pages can even help your pillar page rank higher if they start ranking for the specific keywords they’re targeting.
11. Historical Optimization
Purpose: Drive Traffic By Improving Existing Assets
In 2015, HubSpot made a revolutionary discovery about our natural month-to-month weblog visitors — the overwhelming majority of it got here from posts revealed previous to that month. In actual fact, 76% of month-to-month weblog views got here from these outdated posts.
At this time, the groundbreaking revelation rings louder than ever — 89% of our month-to-month weblog views presently come from posts that had been revealed not less than six months prior, and we have developed a complete technique devoted to refreshing and republishing these historic items of content material.
A majority of these weblog posts are referred to as “updates,” they usually comprise 35-40% of HubSpot’s editorial calendar. By refreshing posts with new data and successfully republishing them as new weblog posts, HubSpot can construct upon its present natural worth that these posts have accrued by means of backlinks and consumer engagement and double and even triple their visitors.
This course of additionally helps HubSpot optimize our weblog for effectivity, lowering the quantity of latest content material now we have to create whereas growing our natural visitors and conversions.
12. Retargeting
Objective: Recapture Misplaced Site visitors
Numerous content material advertising and marketing strategies contain attracting new audiences somewhat than bettering the effectiveness of the audiences you have already acquired. That is why retargeting earns a spot on this record as a vastly underutilized tactic.
I am going to clarify retargeting with a situation: A prospect involves an ecommerce web site and checks out a product. They resolve it isn’t time to purchase, they usually go away.
Retargeting lets you remind them of their preliminary curiosity by exhibiting them advertisements for the product on different websites (e.g. banner advertisements or Fb advertisements). In impact, your advertisements “comply with them round” the web, growing the chance that they arrive again to make that buy.
13. The Skyscraper Backlinking Methodology
Objective: Receive Hyperlinks for Elevated Site visitors and Improved search engine marketing Indicators
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Incomes high-quality inbound hyperlinks from web sites and pages with excessive authority scores is essential for enhancing your area authority. However, sadly, “If you happen to write it, they’ll hyperlink to it,” shouldn’t be a viable search engine marketing method.
One technique for incomes high-quality hyperlinks is by performing electronic mail outreach to ask different web sites which have the identical or greater area or web page authority rating than you to hyperlink to your high content material. You must also ensure that your content material is related to the referring web site’s content material.
Conversion and Nurturing Methods
14. A/B Testing for CTAs
Objective: Enhance Conversion Fee on Current Belongings by Testing Variables
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Since opt-ins are key for rising your electronic mail subscriber record, you may need to carefully monitor the efficiency of your CTAs (buttons that ship individuals to your kinds) and enhance on those that are not understanding.
Each firm has a special set of consumers, so there isn’t any one-size-fits-all components for designing essentially the most optimum CTAs. To determine which CTA design or copy will produce the most effective outcomes on your firm, you should experiment.
A/B testing lets you do this experimentation between two CTAs synchronously, eliminating variables and supplying you with the most effective perception into which model performs higher.
For instance, you possibly can run an experiment to check a variable comparable to coloration. For example you’ve a pink CTA and a blue CTA. A/B testing lets you establish which of them produce higher outcomes.
To conduct an A/B check, you should utilize HubSpot’s A/B testing equipment. With this equipment, you may get tips for A/B testing, study what variables to check, and acquire entry to a easy significance calculator to trace your outcomes.
A/B testing should not be confused with multivariate testing, although, which lets you concurrently check many variables.
15. Worth-Add Emails
Objective: Enhance Engagement and Earn Goodwill Throughout Nurturing Course of
Electronic mail is extra of a channel than a tactic, however let’s begin with why the channel is a crucial one. Do you know that People spend 172 minutes every day checking their private emails, and 149 minutes checking their work emails?
On high of that, 59% of shoppers say that advertising and marketing emails have influenced their purchases.
Because it takes a a number of touchpoints to achieve the eye of prospects, persuading individuals to subscribe to your emails and, in flip, continuously eat your content material will generate extra leads and income for your enterprise.
That is the place the tactic half is available in. The very last thing you need to do is muddle up their inbox with yet one more gross sales electronic mail. As a substitute, contemplate emails that really present worth alongside their paths to buy.
Take the e-mail above from HubSpot Company Companion Yokel Native, for instance. It does not matter if the recipient of the e-mail is actively contemplating Yokel Native’s companies; they nonetheless present worth that retains their subscribers opening emails.
Rising an engaged, loyal subscriber base additionally speaks volumes concerning the high quality of your content material and its emotional resonance. In case your prospects actively have interaction along with your electronic mail content material, it is a clear signal that they really worth it. This contributes to their impression of your model and serves because the touchpoints alongside their paths to buy.
16. Viewers Segmentation
Objective: Create a Extra Personalised Expertise to Enhance Nurturing
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In a world overflowing with digital noise, creating irrelevant or unwarranted content material will not catch anybody’s consideration.
To electronic mail the correct particular person the correct content material on the proper time, contemplate leveraging viewers segmentation, which separates your subscriber database into particular, accessible teams of individuals based mostly on private attributes like their demographics, psychographics, and behavioral data.
This system lets you enhance the worth of your emails (see the method above) by making certain that they are extra related to your subscribers. In different phrases, somewhat than creating messaging designed to attraction to everybody, you’ll get far more particular along with your messaging since you’ll have a narrower audience.
To correctly implement viewers segmentation strategies into your electronic mail advertising and marketing technique, you may want a CRM and advertising and marketing platform. For instance, HubSpot lets you collect details about your clients and section contacts into lists based mostly on that data. This makes it simple to focus on the correct clients in your database with messaging particular to them.
17. Advertising Automation
Objective: Improve Effectivity of Electronic mail Campaigns
Automation is the method of utilizing expertise to eradicate guide actions and set off repetitive or programmable performance in an computerized manner. Advertising automation applies this precept to your CRM and electronic mail advertising and marketing actions, permitting you unlock time and get your message out at scale.
As a substitute of sending one-off emails, you should utilize advertising and marketing automation to provoke a sequence of emails and actions, all with out you hitting the ship button. Better of all, you possibly can apply it to any of the next (and extra):
- Lead nurturing campaigns
- Auto-responder sequences
- Re-engagement campaigns
- Occasion reminders
- Shopper onboarding sequences
- Up-sell campaigns
This can permit you to enhance your group’s touchpoints with a lead with out tanking your productiveness. To take action, you may first must put money into advertising and marketing automation software program.
18. Lead Scoring
Lead scoring is an automation-based method that charges (or “scores”) your leads based mostly on sure attributes. The concept behind it’s that you’ll higher establish leads which are nearer to a buying choice so that you could prioritize these leads on your advertising and marketing and gross sales efforts.
Some advertising and marketing automation software program can carry out lead scoring utilizing AI machine studying, however many permit you to manually designate the attributes that make a advertising and marketing or gross sales certified lead. As soon as a lead meets the standards, they’ll have a better rating (and thus greater precedence for extra direct advertising and marketing and gross sales conversations).
As well as, the act of defining the standards for lead scoring can result in a greater relationship between your advertising and marketing and gross sales groups. With a transparent definition, your advertising and marketing crew will likely be higher targeted on producing leads that meet these standards, and your gross sales crew will likely be pleased with extra certified leads.
Innovation Is Key
Whether or not you are creating a brand new advertising and marketing plan or bettering on an outdated one, it is essential to think about new advertising and marketing strategies.
Whereas your advertising and marketing technique could also be sound, counting on previous tried-and-true strategies might not be sufficient. As time goes on, outdated strategies lose aggressive benefit and develop into desk stakes. New strategies will assist you implement your strategic objectives in new, thrilling methods.
Editor’s be aware: This submit was initially revealed in Might 2019 and has been up to date for comprehensiveness.
