For a business to grow, your marketing should be vibrant and well planned to yield the desired results. This plan should be both short- and long-term, adequately flexible to adopt new market trends, and diverse enough to optimize outreach to customers. Here are eleven different types of marketing strategies to grow your business.
1. B2C Marketing Strategy (Business-to-Consumer)
This type of marketing strategy involves businesses selling their services or products directly to consumers. This strategy is driven by consumer data. Businesses operate online, from physical stores, or both. Your knowledge of customers, wherever they are; their preferred online platforms; their income; needs; their preferred shopping and payment options is key to growing your business through razor-targeted marketing.
2. B2B Marketing Strategy (Business-to-Business)
One of the most popular types of marketing strategies, B2B marketing involves marketing services or products to another organization or business. You need to identify, contact and maintain relations with decision makers from other business entities that consume your services or products. A B2B strategy involves marketing on different channels, a longer nurturing cycle, and multiple decision makers.
3. Workers’ Marketing
Your number one brand ambassadors are your employees. Employees have the power to spread the word about your services and products to neighbours, family members and friends. They can post promotional adverts on their social media platforms and refer potential clients to your brands. You can offer incentives to workers with the highest customer traffic to enhance healthy competition among high performing employees.
4. Account-Based Marketing
This is where you engage potential buyers one-on-one. This approach gives you an opportunity to zero in on specific prospects in the B2B sphere. This strategy is good since it creates awareness, educates, promotes your products to a specific company that is most likely to buy. However, due to the costs involved, this is a strategy best left to big accounts.
5. Affinity Marketing and Co-Branding Strategy
This is a partnership of organizations with common audiences and interests. In it, you complement each other by providing what your partner is lacking. Since you are not in competition, you don’t lose customers. To the contrary, you gain entry into each other’s niche. For instance, an entrepreneur who creates digital products on nutrition can share an audience with one selling online fitness courses. You can do promotions together and pool resources to target followers and grow your businesses.
6. Point-of-Purchase (POP) Marketing
This involves upselling to a client at the point where a purchase is made. In a retail store, you arrange small items near the counters to attract impulse buyers. You can have your marketing teams at your key product display stations as a way of encouraging buyers to purchase your brand. The POP marketing strategy is very effective.
7. Online Marketing
This is also referred to as internet marketing. It is a marketing strategy that includes landing pages, content marketing, email, and social networking platforms. However, you need a strategic approach to online marketing for your business to leverage this method. The frequency and type of posts, topics covered and your response to readers’ comments and inquiries are key to attracting online customers. The beauty of this strategy is it helps track customer/ traffic data and analyses it for behaviours and actions that can be retargeted and repurposed for business growth.
8. Referral Marketing
To bring on board new customers, referral marketing is critical. In this program, you offer incentives and discounts to customers who refer paying customers to your business. This strategy is highly effective among retailers, especially in online businesses. Your referral system can be manual or application based. Always verify purchases before issuing rewards for referrals.
9. Marketing Contests
This where you offer a prize to a winning buyer. This approach is highly effective on social media platforms, mainstream media and on marketing sites. You attract traffic to your website, retail stores and point-of-purchase. Your core audience grows as awareness increases.
10. Networking
Networking events offer an ideal chance to meet new people and attract new clients to your business. A short presentation could turn out to be a point of contact that yields long-term engagement with high-value customers. Be on the lookout for opportunities to market your business to related industries. Dish out handouts and other publicity materials to people you meet at these networking events.
11. Content Marketing
Publishing content about your products and services online is a great marketing strategy. From your blog posts and landing pages to your social media platforms, content marketing attracts traffic to your business from all parts of the world. Properly targeted and primed, valuable content can convert organic traffic into loyal followers and customers. To be effective, publish valuable content regularly and optimize it for the search engines.
The different types of marketing strategies you adopt should be an all-around approach that employs more than one method to promote the sale of goods and services. Every avenue to enhance the absorption of your brand is vital.