Mar 04, 2021
In any industry or product category, marketing reach and activation are critical success factors. You may have a simple and compelling brand story, but if you’re not telling that story to enough of your target customers at the right time and in the right place, you’re not going to sell much stuff.
So it’s essential that you consider new ways to reach your customers and innovative approaches to tell your story through different marketing channels. Here are a few marketing ideas to help you reach, engage and ideally, convert your target customers.
1. Reformulate Your Search Strategy
Many business owners didn’t realize the real power of search strategy until the COVID-19 pandemic struck last year. Government lockdowns shuttered many brick-and-mortar businesses and consumers turned to e-commerce businesses to meet the majority of their needs. Seemingly overnight, we witnessed a massive shift from traditional to digital marketing channels, and search strategy became even more crucial as a basic requirement to reaching customers.
Search strategy encompasses web content optimization, keyword buying, and link-building strategies to win your fair share of customer attention. The goal of SEO is to place your website on the front page of search engines and increase your brand exposure and customer reach. However, executing your search strategy requires more technical savvy than creativity. While you can probably learn the basics on your own, it’s best to engage marketing agencies to help you reformulate your search strategy and execute SEO, saving you time, money, and effort.
Here are some specific search marketing ideas and tips to consider:
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- Social media marketing: optimize image descriptions with keywords in your social media posts
- Email marketing: include search keywords to optimize subject headlines and content
- Content marketing: choose the most relevant links and keywords
- Video marketing: optimize video titles and descriptions with your search keywords
2. Build an Affiliate Network
To reach more customers, build your network and partnerships with prospects, existing customers, investors, and other stakeholders. You can do this by partnering with other businesses offering complementary products and services, thus increasing your customer reach, getting partners to help you tell your brand story and open new opportunities to connect with new audiences. For more winning ideas on affiliate marketing and SEO for your website, make sure to check out Affiliate Lab Review.
Here are some specific ideas to create more profitable affiliate relationships:
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- Leverage your email lists. Use your email lists as barter when partnering with another complementary business. For example, if a home security business has 2000 subscribers on their email list, the business owner can partner with another entrepreneur, such as a security agency, to target the same market in exchange for their 2000 subscribers. In this way, both companies can expose their brands to a broader audience than they already have.
- Sponsor mutually beneficial events. Sometimes the cost of an event is best spread across multiple complementary business partners. For example, if you own a bakery, you might partner with a restaurant or another food business to sponsor a cooking contest in your local area. It’s an opportunity to increase your local exposure and broaden your customer base.
- Encourage brand mentions. Work with influencers, brand advocates and your most loyal customers to promote your brand on their social media pages to expand your reach authentically and make more people aware of your business.
Highlight Customer Feedback
95% of consumers read reviews before making an online purchase, so it’s critical to make feedback, testimonials, and comments part of your marketing strategy.
Including customer comments on your social media ads is a good place to start. You can also include screenshots of customer ratings on your product listings. Featuring customer testimonials and letting customers share their own personal stories about your brand on your website is another powerful way to expand your reach.
Engage Authentically on Social Media
Social media engagement should be a cornerstone of your marketing strategy to boost your online reach. You can create dedicated groups to answer consumer queries, encourage followers to participate in your social media forums, and entice followers to share your post to their family and friends on social media for an incentive, such as freebie branded merchandise or a discount.
Activate Referrals
Encouraging referrals is an effective way to generate word of mouth and recommendations to grow your customer base. With the help of your existing customers, you can turn them into brand advocates. One way to apply this marketing idea is to create a rewards system for your customers, such as referral discounts.
The Takeaway
Implement the marketing ideas discussed above to reach more customers. You can create your SEO campaign with the help of SEO experts to increase brand visibility and consumer awareness. Another bright marketing idea to grow your customer base is building partnerships with stakeholders and other businesses. Engaging through social media and referral marketing are also effective ways to broaden your customer reach.
By weaving these five ideas into your marketing strategy, you can begin to reach more customers with your brand story, and ideally, you’ll put them on the path to conversion. If you’re looking for more tips on reaching and converting more customers, subscribe to the TopRight blog, and connect with me on Twitter and on LinkedIn. In our best selling book, Marketing, Interrupted, you will find stories about successful marketers who bring simplicity, clarity, and alignment to their brand’s story, strategy, and systems. Contact us any time with inquiries.