Businesses looking to attract and keep customers should promote themselves online using various tools – some free and some not so much.
An effective strategy is joining industry-specific online communities and groups. While this can be effective, remember to focus on making connections rather than pushing your product/service/company directly.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is an extremely cost-effective form of digital advertising that can bring tangible returns for any business. Email can help engage customers, communicate new products or promotions to existing ones, nurture leads into sales opportunities and reach a wide audience at scale.
Email marketing campaigns come in various forms, each designed to achieve specific objectives. Transactional emails should ensure customer satisfaction, promotional emails should highlight new products or services, and newsletters should provide informative content. Each type of email must fit within your overall marketing strategy and key performance indicators (KPIs).
Paid Advertising
Paid advertising is a fundamental element of digital marketing strategies. Paid ads complement your content marketing and search engine optimization campaigns by providing additional leads, increasing brand recognition, and driving up conversion rates.
By targeting appropriate groups of people, you can reduce audiences who don’t respond positively while targeting those that do – LinkedIn makes this easier with groups such as job titles/seniorities/company sizes/member schools/interests/groups to select from and choosing your budget/time schedule/targeted groups options available to you.
Link Building
Link building is all about making your website more popular online. When other sites link to yours, search engines notice, and you climb higher in search results. This means more people find you! But not all links are the same. You want links from sites that people trust and that are related to what you do. These good links can really help your site get noticed by the right people.
Start by creating content that others find useful or interesting. This can be articles, blog posts, or resources that people in your industry would love to share. Reach out to bloggers and influencers who might want to link to your content. Networking in your field can open up lots of opportunities for getting these valuable links.
This can be overwhelming if you are new to this. You can get expert help for link building. There are many link building companies like Outreach Monks.
All you need is to analyze your needs and get on a call with experts to tailor a perfect plan.
Press Releases
Press releases are an age-old method of online promotion that has proved its worth over time. They complement other digital strategies like content marketing, blogging, and social media outreach and help increase SEO rankings.
Make sure your press release does not use industry jargon that won’t be understandable to average readers. Have someone who is unfamiliar with your industry read your release in order to ensure it is easy and clear for everyone reading.
Use an online tool like Prowly to make creating and pitching press releases to journalists easier. Their free trial gives you an opportunity to discover journalists while crafting pitches specifically targeted toward them.
Online Communities
An active online community is an indispensable asset to building customer relationships and meeting business objectives. While it requires careful nurturing to reap maximum benefit in the long run, its success hinges on clearly outlining objectives, selecting a platform with matching functionality and scale features, as well as dedicating community managers.
An effective community offers numerous advantages for its organizer, such as increased brand loyalty and advocacy, leads generation, crowdsourcing innovation development, enhanced support, monetization of usage fees (which is how America Online makes most of its revenue), or by charging membership dues.
An online community can also help organizations form meaningful relationships with prospects and guide them along what McKinsey refers to as the “community flywheel.” Watch how one SaaS talent assessment company leveraged its branded community to increase brand recognition and meet key business objectives.
