Best Type of Marketing: Effective Tactics for Ongoing Business Growth
● Key Topics
Attracting customers to your business requires a good marketing strategy, but in the past, this often required a large budget for traditional advertising methods such as commercials, radio ads, and billboards.
However, today's consumers are increasingly resistant to advertisements - 73% of consumers dislike popup ads, followed by 70% dislike mobile ads, and 57% dislike video ads that play before content on platforms like YouTube.
What is the best type of marketing?
The best type of marketing is not a one-size-fits-all answer; it depends on the specific goals, target audience, industry, and resources of a business. However, the most effective marketing strategies tend to be those that are customer-centric and data-driven. This approach involves understanding your audience deeply - their needs, preferences, pain points, and behaviors - and then tailoring your marketing efforts to address these aspects effectively. By leveraging data and analytics, businesses can optimize their marketing strategies for better engagement, conversion, and ROI.
Additionally, a multi-channel approach often yields the best results. This includes a mix of digital marketing (like SEO, content marketing, social media, and email marketing) and traditional marketing techniques (such as direct mail, print ads, or television commercials), depending on where your audience spends their time. The key is to create a consistent brand experience across all platforms, making each interaction meaningful and relevant to the audience. Agility and the ability to adapt to changing consumer trends and technologies also play a vital role in the success of marketing efforts. Ultimately, the best marketing strategy is one that aligns with the company's values, resonates with its target audience, and achieves the desired business outcomes in a sustainable and ethical manner.
What is Inbound Marketing?
Inbound marketing is a customer-centric approach that focuses on attracting, engaging, converting, and delighting consumers through valuable and educational content. This is similar to the inbound calls that sales departments receive from interested individuals who want to learn more about a product or service. By providing valuable information to consumers, businesses can attract warm and hot leads that are more likely to convert into customers.
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To drive consumers to your business, you can use a variety of tools and techniques, such as blogs and social media. By knowing where your target audience is and what they want to know, you can create and share content that captures their attention and encourages them to engage with your business.
Some key steps in the marketing methodology include:
- Attract: Use tools like blogs and social media to attract your core audience and capture their attention
- Engage: Create engaging content that encourages consumers to interact with your business and learn more about your products or services.
- Convert: Provide consumers with the information and resources they need to make a purchasing decision and become a customer.
- Delight: Continue to provide valuable and educational content to customers after the sale to build trust and foster long-term loyalty
Overall, inbound marketing offers a proven methodology for attracting, engaging, and converting consumers into customers. By providing valuable content and resources, businesses can build trust and credibility with their audience and drive more revenue.
Let’s take a closer look at this methodology.
Stage one: Attracting your customers
The difference between inbound marketing and outbound marketing is that you’re not casting a large net and hoping to capture a ton of fish.
Instead, you’re using a line with specific bait to capture specific fish. However, in order to make this happen, you must first learn everything you can about your core audience.
For example, you'd need to know who your core audience is. This is important to know whether you’re a startup or an established company. So the first step is researching who’s interested in what you have to offer.
Maybe you already have an idea of who your ideal buyer is. Create customer profiles for each potential buyer. This should include their gender, age range, profession, income range, and whether they’re married, have children, and make financial decisions.
You may find you have a handful of personas to attract. This means you’re going to have to have multiple campaigns for each. For example, writing blog posts that cater to each group.
This way, you have content that’s attracting each segment. At this stage, your prospects are in the awareness phase. So, they’re looking for content that addresses their pain points.
An example campaign may look a little something like this:
- Creating keyword-optimized blog content that educates your audience on questions and concerns they have (and how your product or service can help).
- Promoting those blog posts on social media.
- Engaging in conversations with followers and non-followers on social media.
- Visitors are drawn to the blog, and they browse around for products/services.
At this point, you’ve successfully gained the attention of your target customers.
Now, it’s important to note that blogging is highly effective for both B2B and B2C companies. It’s found that companies that publish 16+ blog posts monthly get 3.5x more traffic than those that only publish 0-4 posts monthly.
But even those that publish less still get great results. For example, B2B companies that publish 11+ blog posts monthly get 3x the traffic than those that only publish 0-1 posts.
And it’s the same for B2C – those that publish 11+ blog posts monthly get 4x the traffic than those that only post 4-5 blog posts monthly.
By targeting your traffic, as we mentioned, imagine how many conversions they can generate with those traffic increases!