These days, everyone talks about search engine optimization (SEO) as if it’s the ultimate marketing strategy. Naturally, you want to focus on SEO to work your way up in the search results and generate traffic to your website. However, there’s more to marketing than SEO.
To have a well-rounded marketing campaign, make sure you’re taking advantage of the following 4 marketing strategies in addition to having a solid SEO campaign.
Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising
PPC advertising is one of the most effective ways to generate leads and sales. If you’ve never explored this form of advertising, you’re missing out. It can be intimidating to start a campaign if you’re new to PPC ads, but you can always hire a professional to set up and manage your campaign.
A PPC ad campaign has the potential to bring you a steady stream of new customers and help you turn them into long-term, repeat customers.
If you’ve been struggling to make PPC ads work, a professional PPC audit can help you identify where you’re missing the mark. From there, you can hire a professional ad agency to fine-tune your ads to bring in the success you deserve.
Direct mail marketing
Direct mail marketing isn’t for everyone, but considering most business owners ignore it, there’s probably little competition in your market. Generally speaking, direct mail generates a higher response rate than email marketing, and the ROI is often greater than digital marketing.
However, there are rules to follow when using direct mail. For instance, you’ll need to hire a professional copywriter to write your sales copy. This isn’t a task you can hand off to any writer, no matter how well they can write. Your sales copy needs to be written by someone with experience generating responses from your market and they need to be trained in persuasive writing.
To get an idea of what’s involved with writing persuasive sales copy for direct mail pieces, check out this guide. Writing effective sales copy is truly an art that takes years to perfect. While you may want to try it yourself, it’s better to skip the experiment and hire a professional.
Advanced email marketing
If you’re like most business owners, you have an email marketing list. That’s great, but if you’re not running advanced email marketing campaigns, you’re missing a fantastic opportunity to generate leads and sales.
What’s the difference between basic and advanced email marketing? A basic campaign is where you send emails to your list perhaps once a week to introduce new products or make special announcements.
Advanced email marketing utilizes automation – specifically, automated segmentation. For instance, say you own a pet store. You might send an email to your list with links that go to categories on your website for dog products, cat products, and bird products. With an advanced strategy, you’ll program your links to automatically tag each contact with “dog,” “cat,” or “bird” based on the link(s) they click.
Once your contacts are segmented according to the type of animal they’ve expressed interest in, you can send even more specific emails that focus only on the type of pets they own.
Social media marketing
Social media marketing gets a bad rap sometimes because most businesses focus on engagement, and engagement doesn’t translate to sales. However, social media marketing isn’t just about getting sales. Sometimes it’s the perfect opportunity to sell people on your brand image.
Think of social media as more of a lead generation and brand-boosting strategy. Engagement is great and you should definitely work toward getting more of it, but don’t let that be your end goal. Use social media to create a positive experience for your fans and make them feel good about your business.
Start interacting with your followers and be human with them. Respond to their comments with positive messages, appreciation, and generosity. Acknowledge them for their positive comments about your business and ask how you can make things right when someone complains.
Effective marketing begins with a plan
Whether you’re using SEO or other strategies, effective marketing hinges on a solid plan. Without a plan, your efforts can be a waste of time and money. For example, you’ll waste plenty of advertising dollars by targeting the wrong market or not investing in professional ad images and copy.
To get the best results with your marketing efforts, spend more time planning than you think is necessary. It’s better to take a while to create solid plans than to jump in without a proper roadmap.
