Building and growing a business is not for the faint of heart. Consumers are fickle, and finding reliable suppliers is a challenge. Rising costs, heavy competition, production bottlenecks, and other factors make running a business feel like moving from one dumpster fire to the next. And if you don't have a strong marketing plan, you’ll be scrambling to figure out which tactics make sense to hit your sales goals at the 11th hour.
Effective marketing relies on strategic planning that incorporates multiple strategies. Here are seven types of marketing your business should leverage to help grow your business.
Digital Marketing: Key to Success Today
A digital footprint is indispensable in a city like Madison. It’s no surprise consumers find companies online, and while e-commerce levels may have receded from pandemic-level highs, retail sales remain substantially above pre-2020 levels. Even if you're selling B2B or maintaining a physical store with lots of foot traffic, there's no denying buyers increasingly interact with your business both online and in person. So, ensuring your online presence pulls consumers in, provides an excellent experience, and promotes your products effectively will make a huge difference in your bottom line.
Digital marketing encompasses everything from search engine marketing to streaming TV ads and contributes to your overall success. The trick to doing digital marketing effectively hinges on choosing the right channels for you and crafting compelling content to attract and engage prospective customers. If your website and other branded online channels and platforms don’t provide a smooth and exciting customer experience, your ROI will definitely take a hit. Do a web audit if you’re unsure about your site and how it measures up.
Audio Marketing: Radio in the Digital Age
Broadcast radio marketing offers a multitude of advantages, with one of the most significant being its exceptional hyper-local targeting capabilities. At Mid-West Family Madison, we specialize in assisting you in tailoring your message to effectively reach the specific communities, neighborhoods, and demographics that are vital to your business's success. By precisely pinpointing your audience geographically, you can ensure that your message resonates with individuals who are most likely to become your valued customers.
When you advertise on the radio, you're connecting with commuters on their daily drives, dedicated listeners who tune in on smartphones and other devices throughout the day, and millions of Americans who still adjust that AM or FM dial or open their app, at the appointed hour to hear their favorite programs. Not only are you reaching them, but your products are promoted by a voice they trust, providing a level of credibility to your brand that's truly priceless.
Content Marketing: Keeping Consumers in the Know
Many consumers seem jaded about advertising and marketing. Given how many ads we see each day, it's easy to see why. No one wants to feel gullible and fall for marketing messages that promise but fail to deliver. Instead, we want to make rational decisions based on objective information about the product. Consequently, there's a hunger among consumers for product information that is accurate, straightforward, and credible. And this demand provides an excellent marketing opportunity to position your company as a trusted partner.
When you deliver accurate, straightforward information with either a weak call-to-action or none, you build trust with consumers because you’re speaking credibly about your products and industry without a heavy-handed pitch. Content marketing demonstrates your expertise to prospective customers far more effectively than a simple claim on a website can. Content marketing can prime prospective customers for conversion and keep existing customers engaged and excited about your business.
Social Media Marketing: Active Engagement
Social media has evolved significantly beyond its origins as simple online bulletin boards. The impact of social media platforms is so extensive lawmakers regularly discuss its impact on our government and economic systems. Social media's inherent networking brings many opportunities to promote your products and directly engage with and obtain consumer feedback. Gathering valuable feedback from social channels aids in identifying growth prospects and potential risks for your company.
Effective social media marketing relies on more than the occasional posted picture and call-to-action. Businesses should engage with consumers who frequent their social media platforms by answering questions through chat and comments and actively soliciting feedback on products and services. This level of responsiveness inspires loyalty to your business and more sales over time.
Email Marketing: Personalized and Automated
Mass email marketing is a great marketing tool, in large part because of advancements in technology. Today, you can automate and personalize email messages to a great degree based on the preferences and behaviors of the reader. With a few keystrokes, you can trigger a specific email to send to consumers with particular preferences and thank you emails to customers who made a recent purchase. You can even send reminder emails to consumers who put an item in their online cart but left your website without completing the purchase.
On its own, email marketing can generate some sales. But email marketing paired with other types of marketing, like radio, can have an even more substantial impact. A crisp radio ad delivered by a voice listeners trust can greatly increase associated email open and conversion rates. The low setup and ongoing costs make email marketing a cost-efficient way to reach prospective and existing customers.
Influencer Marketing: Voices Consumers Trust
Working with an influencer helps you gain credibility with consumers. Influencers make their living through their authenticity and expertise. The best influencers only promote brands they use themselves, so when they speak to their audience, they're being honest.
Some people still shy away from influencer marketing, thinking they need seven-figure or eight-figure budgets to attract an A-list celebrity. But the truth is, there are a lot of successful content creators online with sizable followings that are niche, industry-specific, or locally based. There are also credible figures in the Madison community, such as radio hosts, whose voices resonate with the buying public. Identifying and working with the right influencer to promote your brand doesn't have to break your budget. However, it can increase your business bank account.
Event Marketing: Selling Face-to-Face
Despite the advancements in streaming technology, many consumers love attending in-person events. From a business perspective, it takes work to achieve the same sales benefits meeting consumers one-on-one as online. Sponsoring or attending an industry conference, awards ceremony, or event can expand your reach, boost your credibility, gain positive press, and encourage consumers to buy. Promotional events help you sell in volume, and successful events bolster positive word-of-mouth and referrals.
While digital events can provide a lot of helpful data, many salespeople crave the kind of metrics virtual pitches don't easily capture, like body language. Creating the contagious excitement you find in truly engaged crowds online is also more challenging. That excitement can be crucial to selling your products and services at the event and in the following days.
Moving from Marketing Strategies to an Effective Marketing Plan
The above strategies continue to help Madison businesses thrive. But for them to work requires thoughtful planning, time, and resources. If you rely on just one type of marketing, you risk your target audience not responding to it as well as you thought. Moreover, you lose the potential marketing boost using two or more channels in tandem can bring.
Are your current marketing efforts not yielding the results you want? My Superpower is planning and implementing an effective marketing strategy for your unique business! Together with the marketing experts at Mid-West Family Madison, we can evaluate your marketing efforts, refresh and strengthen your plan, and help you implement it to get the results you deserve. We've worked with businesses throughout Southwest Wisconsin to identify the broadcast and digital marketing opportunities they need to grow. Contact me today, and let's discuss your marketing needs.
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