If you’re still using traditional print marketing, it’s time to bring your business into the 21st century by integrating new techniques. Although some traditional approaches are still useful, high-tech marketing now inundates a large segment of the population, so you’re missing out if you don’t transition some of your marketing to these new methods.
Integrated Systems
If you aren’t familiar with high-tech marketing, managing lots of new systems can be tricky. Before you add new marketing channels to your business, look into ways to keep track of all of them, and execute a marketing campaign across all of the channels and track your responses on each one. Campaign management software allows you to view all of your marketing in one interface and schedule coordinated activities.
Social Media
Every business should have a Facebook and a Twitter account. It doesn’t matter what your business does or how small you are. People look for businesses on these sites, and having accounts there increases your visibility and shows that you are a modern business. Once you’re on Facebook and Twitter, let your current customers know so they can start interacting with you. Also make sure to post regular updates and answer any questions you receive through your social media accounts. Remember: social media accounts are completely free, so you have nothing to lose.
Email Marketing
Gone are the days of paper newsletters, which wasted valuable resources and had high postage costs. Now, email marketing allows you to reach your customers much more quickly and direct them to your website through links embedded in the email. One of the benefits of email marketing is that it makes it easy for you to segment your mailing list and design a different mailer for each segment, depending on their interests.
Pay Per Click
Rather than using advertising methods in which you pay to have your ad printed, regardless of whether anyone responds to it, the pay per click (PPC) model of online advertising allows you to pay only for ad impressions that result in visits to your site. This means you don’t have to pay if the advertiser isn’t reaching people who are actually interested in your product. You can buy PPC ads from many places, some of the most common of which are search engines that post them as sponsored links or sponsored ads alongside search results.
Search Engine Optimization
Rather than sending your ads out to consumers, another strategy is to focus more on inbound marketing and capture the attention of people who are looking for companies like yours. Search engine optimization (SEO) involves the use of specific keyword phrases on your website to increase the chance that your site will appear near the top of the search results for these relevant phrases people search for.
Launching new marketing campaigns on these platforms can jump-start your business by helping you reach new customers. Even if you’re feeling uncertain about how to use these marketing strategies, getting your feet wet in one or two of them can help you begin to learn new techniques that you’ll eventually get better at using to market your business.