Favorite Marketing Strategies

[flippaguru]

What are your favorite marketing strategies?

 

[Staggered]

I have an E-Commerce website, so a lot of our marketing is via social media.
Not sure what your scope of practice is, but we do a lot of giveaways on social media, I also select a hand full of people as "brand ambassadors" and give them some free merchandise and a discount code.
I try to engage as much as I can with potential customers on our social media site.

 

[Peyton White]

Yes! I very well go with social media in getting potential clients or your target market.

 

[Greyerasto]

Social media (Instagram especially), influencers (like Staggered said, 'brand ambassadors', SEO, Adwords, and emails. I also like writing blog posts and recently learned that it is good to get a 'guest blog post' like mentioned here? Maybe it is viable too. Should try that.

 

[Inva]

I believe social media for selling is a questionable strategy. We use it solely for brand recognition unless if it's a specific special market segment such as cafe/bar/restaurant etc. Brand ambassadors and other types of "influencer marketing", their effect is unmeasurable. How can you be sure how much effect did your influencer have?

Promotions, if you do them on social media you keep the traffic on that social media when you should be directing it to your website! In general, we now encourage our clients to NOT have a social media page and only use paid advertising to direct traffic to their own site, nothing else.

 

[djbaxter]

I believe social media for selling is a questionable strategy. We use it solely for brand recognition unless if it's a specific special market segment such as cafe/bar/restaurant etc. Brand ambassadors and other types of "influencer marketing", their effect is unmeasurable. How can you be sure how much effect did your influencer have?

Promotions, if you do them on social media you keep the traffic on that social media when you should be directing it to your website! In general, we now encourage our clients to NOT have a social media page and only use paid advertising to direct traffic to their own site, nothing else.

I really must disagree with this post.

First, setting up business accounts on social media is absolutely a good strategy for creating awareness of your products or services and sharing reviews of your business among other users of social media. It is especially effective for small businesses but increasingly large corporations are using social media to good advantage. Social media in one of the places people go today to get recommendations, posting things like "Does anyone know of a good, reliable plumber in the Smallville area?" to their friends and followers. Such posts usually attract immediate responses from several people among that list of friends and followers.

You just can't get better advertising than that. And it's free.

As for promotions staying on social media and not benefiting your website, that's simply not true either. Any business page on social media can and should contain a link to your website. Social media drives word-of-mouth recommendations and awareness and that link drives people directly to your website or business.

All that said, some social media platforms are better than others, depending on your type of business and on the types of products and services offered by your business. In general, I don't think Twitter is the best place to try to promote a business but, depending on where most of your potential customers like to hang out, you can see large increases in traffic to your website and new clients or customers from Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest in particular.

 

[SARubin]

Brand ambassadors and other types of "influencer marketing", their effect is unmeasurable. How can you be sure how much effect did your influencer have?

It's fairly simple, really. We just have our " Brand ambassadors" (or influencers) direct their audience to a partcular link, that tracks the response.

So if we're paying 3 different people to promote our message to their audience, we give each of them a slightly different link to send their audience to.

For example (online):
Brand ambassador "A" tells their audience to visit yoursite. com/1
Brand ambassador "B" sends them to yoursite. com/2
Brand ambassador "C" sends them to yoursite. com/3

All links redirect to your same website, and you can measure which link(s) got the most activity

Another option is to have the Brand Ambassador offer a coupon code to their audience (for a discount, or a freebie, or whatever it takes to get those people into your store)

Each Brand Ambassador gets a different coupon code. When a visitor uses a coupon, it's easy to track where the coupon came from.

Offline, it's the same thing. As long as we have variations in our coupon tracking codes, it's easy to track and measure which ones worked the best (and where they came from)

There's a couple other ways I've heard of (that I'm not too experienced with). So this article on Forbes.com explains it better than I can...

How To Measure The ROI Of An Influencer Marketing Campaign

 

[Inva]

I really must disagree with this post.

First, setting up business accounts on social media is absolutely a good strategy for creating awareness of your products or services and sharing reviews of your business among other users of social media. It is especially effective for small businesses but increasingly large corporations are using social media to good advantage. Social media in one of the places people go today to get recommendations, posting things like "Does anyone know of a good, reliable plumber in the Smallville area?" to their friends and followers. Such posts usually attract immediate responses from several people among that list of friends and followers.

You just can't get better advertising than that. And it's free.

I do not see where we disagree. Product awareness and brand recognition are the same thing. Also the answer to "where is a good plumber" could easily be "check out www.smallvilleplumber.now". Having a page on the platform is not necessary. Regarding the "free" part, it's not free if you have to maintain a page. It costs at least time and effort, and usually hard money too.

As for promotions staying on social media and not benefiting your website, that's simply not true either. Any business page on social media can and should contain a link to your website. Social media drives word-of-mouth recommendations and awareness and that link drives people directly to your website or business.

Social media does NOT drive word of mouth recommendations. Word of mouth recommendations are driven by interaction between people and trust, irrespectively of medium/platform. You can make a point that a lot of people today interact through social media, but still that does not make maintaining a page on the platform necessary. If you don't have a page, it doesn't stop people from talking about your product. Also, most interaction is carried out through the messaging service and not posts. Regarding the part in bold, again, that costs money either way and you do not need a company/product page to buy ads on any platform.

Anyway, i did not mean that advertising on social media is wrong, maybe i wasn't clear enough. What i meant was that you don't need to have a company/product page. I somewhat clarified this in the 2nd part of my post where i said (in combination with what i had said before) something in the lines of: we recommend to not have a page and only use SM for paid advertisements for the purpose of brand recognition.

 

[Inva]

It's fairly simple, really. We just have our " Brand ambassadors" (or influencers) direct their audience to a partcular link, that tracks the response.

So if we're paying 3 different people to promote our message to their audience, we give each of them a slightly different link to send their audience to.

For example (online):
Brand ambassador "A" tells their audience to visit yoursite. com/1
Brand ambassador "B" sends them to yoursite. com/2
Brand ambassador "C" sends them to yoursite. com/3

All links redirect to your same website, and you can measure which link(s) got the most activity

Another option is to have the Brand Ambassador offer a coupon code to their audience (for a discount, or a freebie, or whatever it takes to get those people into your store)

Each Brand Ambassador gets a different coupon code. When a visitor uses a coupon, it's easy to track where the coupon came from.

Offline, it's the same thing. As long as we have variations in our coupon tracking codes, it's easy to track and measure which ones worked the best (and where they came from)

There's a couple other ways I've heard of (that I'm not too experienced with). So this article on Forbes.com explains it better than I can...

How To Measure The ROI Of An Influencer Marketing Campaign

What you describe is not influencer marketing, it's an affiliate scheme. Maybe i'm delving into the legalities here but i don't see influencer marketing like that at all. The whole point of the influencer is that they are someone who are trusted by their audience. If they give me a product link with an affiliate number, that is not trustworthy anymore because it's clear they are advertising this product because they get paid to and not because they think it's any good. Their credibility becomes as good as those "top #10 of this product" lists, full of affiliate links.

Regarding coupons, you don't need an influencer for that People use coupons for the benefit of it, does't matter where they got it from, as long as it works!

 

[djbaxter]

Inva, I guess we will have to agree to disagree.

 

[SARubin]

What you describe is not influencer marketing, it's an affiliate scheme. Maybe i'm delving into the legalities here but i don't see influencer marketing like that at all. The whole point of the influencer is that they are someone who are trusted by their audience. If they give me a product link with an affiliate number, that is not trustworthy anymore because it's clear they are advertising this product because they get paid to and not because they think it's any good. Their credibility becomes as good as those "top #10 of this product" lists, full of affiliate links.

Inva, I'm not talking about affiliate links. (where someone gets paid every time their link gets clicked) I'm only talking about the ability to track the individual links that we provide to our outreach partners. So we can know where the click came from.
We can track the links with, or without, paying the influencer.

But paying an influencer to acknowledge us to their followers is a common business model these days. (Whether we like it, or not)
And if we want an influential person to broadcast our line of products to their large audience... many influencers want to get paid to do it.
If you can get them to do it for free... that's great! Either way, we can still track the links in the same manner.

Regarding coupons, you don't need an influencer for that People use coupons for the benefit of it, does't matter where they got it from, as long as it works!

You're right, we don't need an influencer for that. I was simply showing one way to track the responses from our partners, in response to your statement about...

Brand ambassadors and other types of "influencer marketing", their effect is unmeasurable. How can you be sure how much effect did your influencer have?

 

[Leigh Steele]

Great conversation! I'm learning a lot just by being a bystander

 

[Edvin]

...Brand ambassadors and other types of "influencer marketing", their effect is unmeasurable. How can you be sure how much effect did your influencer have?

I'm sure you know that unless you are using only one marketing medium (ill-advised), multiple channels contribute to the bottom line.

Having said that, there are ways to indirectly track marketing strategies

• One is called Awareness, Attitudes, Usage; a metric of hierarchy effects. Customers need to be made aware -> then their attitudes are influenced -> and their usage/experience change. We would expect that the influencer would make a difference. To construct your data point you would use warranty cards, registration, prizes from a random drawing to encourage participation. You would conduct regular surveys and interview via familiar channels.
• Another strategy might be to evaluate the effect of influencer based on Customer Lifetime Value, which is dependent on the margin and retention rate.
• Yet another strategy is to measure the effect of influencer with regards to the brand equity. For example, there is Y&R Brand Asset Valuator, Interbrand's Brand Valuation Model
• Maybe, we should look at the effect with regards to market share & penetration; but, I doubt the influencer will make that much of a difference.
• One thing that I've thought about is to possibly do a projection, and then see if your efforts align with projection. In this case, I would hope the influencer would affect the result in a positive manner, which would be seen in statistical process control alarms, which I touched on this in cashflow projection

I haven't exercised these strategies, and am not sure to what extend they would meaningful in a small business; however, with larger companies spending millions of dollars, it is easier to evaluate the effect of celebrity endorsement and brand value.

I'm sure you'll find many more great strategies in Marketing metrics: 50 Metrics Every Executive should Know; but, the truth is, you won't have enough time to create a dashboard of all the metrics. Sometimes, you just have to go with the gut and hope for the best. (did I just say hope for the best )

Now, I still have not answered the first question:

What are your favorite marketing strategies?

During my affiliate marketing days, google adwords were the king for me. For small local business, I found advertising on adwords or facebook did not deliver as much value as I had hoped. so, I feel taking an active role during natural events would lead to more leads. In my case, holding a both for back-to-school night; or providing 1 hour free class in the local library. This strategy would then work better with social media event and give-aways to get more people involved; but, now we are starting to talk about a marketing plan strategy, which I have not had a chance to plan and execute.

 

[Timj77]

My own favorite strategy is the most successful one, which is strategic alliances.

Having generated well over $1,000,000 in sales from this strategy with a total cost of around $600, its by far the best. The time involved to set it up is a few hours to generate between $25,000 to $40,000 in income too. I don't know of any other strategy that can touch it, for a lot of businesses, and especially my industry of business training.

Every business has other businesses with the same target market. Its just a matter of working how to benefit from the relationship with a win-win for both businesses.

I've found out of every 10 business owners, 2 will be interested and 1 will make it beneficial for the relationship, so you need to go through a bunch of business owners to find that 1.

How the relationship works, which so few businesses understand is, you have to have a valuable offer for the other business to use to introduce their customers to your business. It needs to be an offer that people would pay for, that's the litmus test its an offer of value that would inspire people to contact your business.

The offer is then introduced by the other alliance partner business to their client.

My business benefited by working this strategy with a free management training session for accounting firms, followed by a free entry to an 8 month business management training course.

What can you offer other businesses, who have the same target market as yours, and make that business look good for "having arranged" a special offer with your business?

 

[skylerjones2018]

Engage as much as possible with customers, existing as well as prospective in social media. Build a story and identity around your brand.Make it come alive.
That's just what I believe works ,for me and lot of others.

 

[Leigh Steele]

skylerjones2018 "Make it come alive"...YES! TRUTH.
When your brand comes alive, it finally has the ability to wholly connect to people/clients/customers.
Thank you for that reminder.

 

[MarianaAttentive]

It really does depend on what your business is, but for me personally it would have to be content marketing and social media.

First, because I really do feel like providing helpful and relevant content to your niche market will result on ongoing traffic and thankful consumers and secondly, because engaging is such a big (and interesting) part of Marketing - consumers are people and, at the end of the day, they will always look to have their needs met and their voices heard.

Cheers!