Having effective marketing strategies will enable businesses to reach potential customers. There are marketing strategies that are worthy of your investment.
Your small business may be offering some of the best services out there but if people don’t know about it, your business will struggle to make sales.
And you know the results of not making enough sales? Subsequently, your business will be forced to close as it can’t survive without making sales. However, internet marketing offers an effective marketing strategy for small businesses.
Marketing strategies + competitors
Every business owner has to be mindful of the competitors; they are all out to outperform your business at all costs.
This is why your business will need to be equipped with efficient marketing strategies in order to be able to compete.
The fact is that it’s not just about setting up a business, it’s also about having effective marketing strategies that will enable your business to stand a better chance against your competitors.
Paid media marketing strategies
So how do you get people to know about your business? How will people know that your business exists? How do you get your business to potential customers?
It’s all about building a business and promote sales to the right audience. Gone were the days of a few TV channels, some radio stations, a handful of top magazines and newspapers. Reaching consumers was easy so simply easy then even though there is a limitation to how far the message can reach.
But modern technology has opened up opportunities for business marketing to reach quite lot of people a lot more easier than before. In today’s digital age, anyone can market a product and go viral if one is able to craft a compelling message.
Nowadays, businesses and their marketing activities have gone beyond traditional marketing techniques to modern means of business marketing. And at the centre of this are paid media and inbound marketing which were once seen as mutually exclusive.
Inbound marketing offers recurring gains for the initial investment in content, and surely, businesses really love this.
Paid media does still have its place, providing it’s used ethically and naturally as part of a holistic marketing campaign. Below are 4 popular types of paid media that are still worthy of investment.
#1]. Google AdWords
Google AdWords is not new; it has become the cornerstone of every paid media strategy. Advertising with Google AdWords ads in the Sponsored Links section next to search results has helped lots of businesses to boost website traffic and sales.
AdWords provides crucial keyword data that is impossible to glean through organic search due to the rise of keywords that are ‘not provided’. As such, AdWords still has a role to play in bridging paid media and inbound marketing. Check out our article on how to prevent click fraud on your Google Adsense and Google Adwords.
#2]. Social media promoted tweets
According to Twitter, Promoted Tweets are regular tweets with the added bonus that they can reach more people who are interested in your business.
So with this, Promoted Tweets give brands a new way to leverage their content. Tweets are set up in advance and promoted to people who search for keywords. Twitter doesn’t offer sophisticated analytics yet, but the service is reasonably good.
Small businesses can also use sponsored content advertisements on other popular social networking sites like Pinterest, Instagram, and Snapchat. By blending paid media and inbound marketing, you should aim to get the best of both worlds for an affordable cost. Your content marketing projects should also get a valuable boost from the paid media strategy you devise.
#3]. Press release distribution for traffic
Matt Cutts highlighted press releases as a source of discounted links. But while a press release won’t do anything for PageRank, the press release is still an extremely valuable paid media tool for traffic building.
Your business will get quality exposure if you use a distributor that gets the majority of its releases into Google News. Check out our previous article one the best press release distribution platforms your startup should be using for better exposure.
#4]. Facebook Ads/Exchange
Facebook Ads helps you reach people who have expressed an interest through their online behaviour so you can reach them with a similar kind of product.
In an attempt to compete with other major players in paid media ads, Facebook introduced Facebook Exchange as an alternative to its advertising efforts.
FBX is a re-targeting system based on real-time bidding. While Exchange is initially slightly less accessible than Promoted Posts or Sponsored Stories, it represents a move to a more sophisticated type of paid social media marketing where content can still play its part.