Whether you’re starting your own online retail business, or a more established looking to keep up in the always shifting landscape of online marketing, there are no silver-bullet marketing techniques, despite what marketing experts may tell you. Marketing success is a combination of things, and leveraging different strategies to work in your favor.
You might be thinking about buying up some sponsored ad space on a website like Reddit, but how well do you really know Reddit’s demographic? That’s what it boils down – knowing your audience, their habits, and the best places to reach them.
In this article, we’re going to share 5 marketing ideas that are proven effective, but don’t make the mistake of honing in on any one particular idea – it’s the amalgamation of ideas that matters.
Become an expert in your category.
Gaining recognition and trust from consumers is a crucial aspect of marketing, and one of the ways to do that is by becoming a known source of information for things related to your industry. As a niche example, let’s say you sell custom-made guitars.
You could run a blog that goes into detail about how guitars are made, the various woods that affect intonation, and do YouTube videos on the same topics. This strategy can apply to practically anything, as long as there’s interest for it.
Include promotional products.
People love free stuff, especially if the products are actually useful. Studies show that % of consumers more favorably view a company they receive promotional products from, and are more likely to do business in the future. They can also make a great impression on clients, such as these corporate gift items.
Promotional products also have an incredible impression rate, for instance, imagine the amount of people that see your brand logo on a tote bag being carried by someone at the mall.
Target your demographic on social media.
If you plan on using sponsored ads on social media, you can really fine-tune the options for who will see your ads, and include all kinds of demographics. You could really narrow it down to, for example, 18-25 year old males in a local radius (a practice known as geo-targeting), who are also interested in (some other thing related to your industry), and you could make it even more specific than that.
This will also save you some money on advertising, as the price goes down the further you boil down the demographic.
Leverage the power of influencers.
One way of gaining trust and recognition for your brand is to have it come from an influencer’s mouth! Yes, peer-to-peer marketing is a very real and useful thing. I’m not going to dress this up in fancy words – the basic idea is that you pay a vlogger or social media personality to mention your product.
Of course, the vlogger’s channel should be related to your industry, but it’s a proven modern marketing technique.
Put AI to work for you.
In order to determine the best marketing and outreach methods for your consumer demographic, you need comprehensive data on your consumers. That’s where big data and AI come in for you. There’s a lot of misinformation and fear surrounding big data, but it’s not the evil entity made out to be.
All big data does is help businesses more effectively target demographics that are more likely to be interested in their products, based on shopping habits and interests. In fact, big data helps reduce uninteresting advertisements, by showing consumers only products they are interested in. When you combine AI with big data, you can be shown customer trends and habit predictions at the speed of light. AI and big data is here to stay, so check out this list of the best AI software for data analysis.
