15 Different Types of Marketing Strategies You Must Try

Marketing is an important type of every business. Without marketing, any company would surely fail.

However, there are so many types of marketing strategies, and here, you can find 15 different strategies you can apply to your company.

Surely, you can’t apply every single strategy (unless you have a large marketing budget and team), but you can find few of them and apply.

For example, I found content marketing and SEO very useful, but it doesn’t mean that will be the case for you. Simply said, test different strategies and check what works best for you.

Let’s explore different types of marketing strategies!

#1 Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing helps you build brand awareness and build strong relationships with your clients.

When I say social media marketing, I mean promoting your brand organically and promoting the brand by paid posts (ads) both.

Which social network you’ll choose depends on the business model. I think Twitter and LinkedIn are much better options for B2B companies than Facebook and Pinterest.

Here’s the evidence which proves that.

The following photo shows how much time an average American spend on social networks.

As you can see, the Americans usually spend the most time on Facebook, and after that comes Tumblr and Instagram come.

Keep in mind that the owner of Instagram is Facebook, so we can say that Facebook still dominates.

There’s no data for Google+ and that’s not surprising because I think that social network doesn’t have a bright future.

Finally, the best practice of social media strategy is to create a plan, and after that implement the plan.

Once you do it, you need to measure the results because that’s the key to success.

Without measuring, you can’t know what drives the best results.

#2 Marketing Automation

First of all, you need good software for marketing automation. Fortunately, there are more than enough options on the market. So, do your research.

The biggest issue of E-commerce businesses is high abandonment rate. That’s frustrating to every business owner, and your job as a marketer is to minimize the rate.

One of the ways to do it is marketing automation. When someone adds a product to your or your client’s cart and doesn’t process the order you need to shoot an email and remind him of that.

Now, there are different reasons for cart abandonment. The photo above tells us that unexpected shipping costs are the main reason.

But also, payment security concern is very important.

For example, in an automated email, you can always remind users that your store is absolutely safe, and you can say how you use the latest technologies to prevent the fraud, and also you can say that you’ve implemented an SSL certificate.

Take this issue very seriously because an abandonment rate can be up to 75%.

Some niches have a lower rate, but still, that’s incredibly large number so don’t forget marketing automation.

Finally, I want to say that this is just one idea, and there are many other ways of leveraging marketing automation.

#3 Newsletter Marketing

Email marketing is still the most important marketing channel although some marketers think that emails are the past. That’s not true.

Sending newsletters will increase the authority of your brand and it will increase the number of conversions. For that reasons, collecting as many as possible emails is exactly what you’re looking for.

Email marketers think the biggest challenge is earning new subscribers and increasing open rates.

As for earning new subscribers, you should start blogging and once your blog traffic increase, you won’t see problems in capturing new subscribers.

I know that sounds easy, but blogging is what you need to do. Here’s one interesting quote from Dorie Clark.

One post, or 10 posts, or 100 posts probably won’t make much of a dent in raising your profile, or your company’s. But 300 or 500 or 1000 will, and very few people are willing to commit to that.

Keep in mind that most emails are opened on mobile devices which mean that you need to make sure your newsletter design is mobile ready.

But not only that. Your website should be responsive because one of the Google ranking factors is responsivity.

#4 Guerilla Marketing

Here’s the best definition of guerilla marketing.

Guerrilla Marketing is an advertising strategy that focuses on low-cost unconventional marketing tactics that yield maximum results.

Now, I want to show you few examples of guerilla marketing.

Source: Flickr

Source: Direct Daily

Source: CreativeGuerillaMarketing.com

As you could see, guerilla marketing is excellent for advertising but it requires creativity. Don’t forget that you need to pick offline places where lots of people walk.

However, guerilla marketing isn’t only about the offline world because there’s something we call online guerilla marketing.

For example, creating an infographic is a type of guerilla marketing. Infographics often go viral and simply said, they let you drive traffic to your site, and what’s more build lots of backlinks.

If you don’t know how to build an infographic, no worries. You don’t have to be a professional designer because there are lots of drag & drop tools which allows you to create a solid infographic.

However, I’d always suggest you hire a professional designer because they are able to create outstanding infographics.

#5 Twitter Marketing

Twitter has more than 300M monthly active users which tell us that everyone should consider Twitter as a platform for growing the business.

Marketers should try to increase the number of followers as much as possible. I’ve written an interesting article about gaining more followers on Twitter.

Here’s what I suggested:

• Post great content
• Use hashtags
• Follow more
• Ask for retweets
• Tweet consistently
• Engage with other users
• Use different tools
• Add widgets on your site
• Guest blogging
• Avoid being a bot & don’t spam
• Visit conferences
• Verify your profile
• Leverage Twitter cards
• Use an appropriate photo & bio

Notice that I mentioned hashtags.

Well, hashtags have effects on retweets, which always will increase the organic reach of your tweets, and finally, make sure you get new followers.

Simply said, Twitter users who use hashtags will always see an increase of RTs, but keep in mind that you can’t use too many hashtags because that might have a negative impact on your profile.

Furthermore, there are hours that are most popular to tweet.

For example, the time between 12 p.m. and 1 p.m. (CET) is the time when you should always tweet.

Anyway, don’t forget to test if this time works for you - it’s just a statistics.

#6 User Generated Content

Sometimes small companies don’t have a large marketing budget and founders don’t have enough time to focus on content marketing.

If you take a look at PayScale, you’ll see that online marketing content writer in the United States has a median salary of $45,812.  

If your content writer publishes 3 articles per week, I will be free and say that he or she will write between 135 and 150 articles in a year (45 - 50 working weeks).

Simply said, that will cost your company between $305 and $339 per article.

Furthermore, if we know that you need at least 300 or 500 articles to achieve the full potential, we can say that content marketing isn’t cheap. Instead, small businesses let users generate content.

There are many forms of user generated content, but guest blogging is surely the most important. Content marketers like it because it makes the link building process much easier.

Every few days, I get a guest blogging request. I’ve approved maybe one or two, but I decline the offers because I’m focused on content marketing on my own.

If you accept guest blogs, never forget to measure the quality because there’s a sort of bloggers who will publish bad quality content and you need to avoid that.

#7 Search Engine Marketing

Google Ads is the reason why Google makes so much money. In fact, whenever a user searches for a product or service, Google displays ads related to the searched term.

I don’t know which business you run, but your potential clients are surely searching on Google keywords that you may target.

Of course, different industries mean different CPCs, and here’s the average CPC you’ll pay.

In Finance and Insurance industry you should pay an average CPC of $3.72 This is probably the cost of long-tail keywords because I know that in the Insurance industry you can pay up to $50 per click.

Here’s an evidence from Keyword Planner.

Simply said, that’s why you need to check on your own because statistics is just a statistics. One tactic that marketers focus is writing an eBook.

The concept is very simple, and here’s what you need to do.

Firstly, find keywords that are very cheap.

For example, keywords related to fashion trends are cheap and they have a solid search volume.

Next, write an eBook about trends and drive traffic to the landing page.

If you get a conversion rate of 2.5% (which is fine), you’ll be able to collect 25 leads from every 1,000 clicks which may cost you about $35.

That’s about $0.71 per lead, and thanks to negative keywords, you’ll be able to increase the conversion rate and decrease cost per lead.

When you get leads, you’ll be able to convert those leads into customers. But, this all depends on your CLV and how much an average customer is worth to you.

#8 Remarketing

It’s very frustrating when someone visits your site and doesn’t buy anything.

The visitor simply leaves the site. Luckily, there’s something we call Remarketing which helps you return your visitors back cheaply.

Here’s a graphical overview how the process looks like.

According to WebSpeek, even 66% consumers have seen an ad on another website for a product that has recently viewed.

What’s more, 64% of them have clicked on an ad which shows you how important remarketing is.

Now, I’d recommend you to open Booking.com and I bet that you’ll see its ads somewhere while browsing the Internet.

Here’s what I just found on Mashable.

That’s because Booking.com uses remarketing, and Mashable.com uses Google AdSense.

Preciously, almost 2M people uses Google AdSense which tells you that almost every site significant site that you open has AdSense.

You can use remarketing through Google Ads, or retargeting through Facebook Ads. However, did you know that there’s RLSA (Remarketing Lists For Search Ads) on Google Ads?

It lets you target users who visited your site while searching for the specific phrase.

For example, imagine that you’re selling books online and you want to target people who search for Paulo Coelho.

But only people who have visited your site before, and who are already familiar with your services or site. Thanks to Google, that’s possible today with RLSA.

#9 Interviews

Interviews are the perfect for building the traffic to your site because in the interview you’ll present someone as an expert.

Interviews are a pure ego building strategy. It’s sure that you won’t make an interview with someone who just started a career.

Okay, that might be fine if you’re interested in sharing some tips about those who just started with their own business, but here I’m talking about building the traffic.

If you don’t know how to find an influencer, don’t worry. Here’s how.

Open a site like Followerwonk and enter a phrase related to your business. For example, if you work in the digital marketing industry, you can type content marketing.

Once you click on Do it, you’ll see the list of Twitter users with “content marketing” in their profiles. Next, carefully pick a user and shoot a message.

If you’re still not sure, I suggest you check the article where I explained creating an interview step by step.

When you publish an interview, you can expect that the influencer will share it across different social networks.

#10 Content Marketing

It’s well-known that marketers are now investing a lot of efforts on content marketing. There are even researches that claim marketers are now spending $44B dollars on content marketing.

In fact, I told you that a median salary of content marketing writer is about $45,812 which isn’t cheap and especially if you’re starting a company without an investor.

If that’s case with you, you’ll need to write on your own. Now, I want to discuss organizational goals of content marketing.

Have you ever asked yourself why marketers like content marketing? Why they spend such a large amounts on content marketing?

Most of them do that because of lead generation.

After that, sales, lead nurturing and brand awareness come. The process of lead generation sounds very simple:

• Write amazing pieces of content
• Drive traffic to the content
• Capture emails

However, driving traffic takes lots of time and the best advice I can give you is the following: BE PATIENT!

#11 Word of Mouth

Companies that have very satisfied customers means that they will talk best about your company.

In fact, I know for many software development companies who don’t write the content or companies who don’t have a sales representative.

Instead, the only type of marketing strategy they focus is - word of mouth. According to ReferalCany, recommendations from friends is the top trusted sources.

Even 92% of people trust recommendations from their friends.

Online consumer opinions are the next trusted source. Here, I want to say something very important. Negative reviews on Facebook may hurt your business.

Here’s the example of one very dissatisfied consumer.

It’s 100% sure that not every client will be satisfied, but however, every business should handle negative reviews by answering and explaining to the public what exactly has happened. Here’s what this hotel did.

As you could read, the hotel minimized the risk of hurting the business. In fact, sometimes you’ll need to handle with fake comments, and the way you do it is - reporting to Facebook.

This is a great opportunity, but you need to follow Facebook Community Standards.

#12 Personalization

Sending personalized campaigns will surely help in growing the business. Surely, one of the best examples is email personalization.

Email personalization will help you increase open rates which may be significant when you send dozens of thousands of emails.

The trick with sending personalized messages is that you need to collect as much as possible information about your subscribers.

So, how’s that the trick? It’s because when you ask too many information about your customers, your subscribe rate goes down.

Here’s the example from VWO which says that removing three form fields may increase conversions by 11%.

In other words, you need to find a sweet spot which will help you collect more information about your visitors, but not too much, because visitors are not interested in filling too many fields.

Finally, I just want to say that almost every email marketing app will let you send personalized emails.

#13 Segmentation

Once you collect enough data about your clients, you should also segment your customers.

Here’s the list of different techniques for segmentation. For example, interest based is the technique that marketers use the most.

After that, marketers segment customers by demographics, and recent open or link click activity.

Every online business should know an average Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) of its users.

For example, you can segment customers who spent more than average, but who haven’t bought anything for a while.

This is a classical example where segmentation helps you. Segmentation isn’t only about sending newsletters because you can create an audience on Facebook by importing the list of email addresses.

Also, you can target your email subscribers by using Google Ads lists.

#14 Direct Marketing

Direct marketing lets you promote the products of your company without a middleman. Here’s the list of common forms of direct marketing:

• Brochures
• Catalogs
• Fliers
• Newsletters
• Post cards
• Coupons
• Email marketing
• Targeted online displays ads
• Phone calls
• Text messages

Personally, I think direct marketing is the only chance for small companies because they usually don’t have a large marketing budget.

Mass marketing is always good for branding, but I found it very expensive.

The biggest benefit of direct marketing is personalization which I’ll talk about later. What’s more, direct marketing is easier to measure.

It’s possible to deliver fliers and measure the results. Here’s how. Print a unique short (bit.ly) URL which contains Google Analytics UTM tags.

Direct marketing has its cons too. For example, one big con of email marketing is that there are regulations email marketing specialists need to follow.

Just think about ANTI SPAM ACT. Next, there might be deliverability issues, competitiveness issues, and so on.

#15 SEO

Currently, there are around 200 Google ranking factors, and we split them into two groups:

• On-page factors
• Off-page factors

You have an influence on on-page factors because they are all about your site (title, website speed, responsivity, etc). As for off-page factors, there you have an only indirect impact.

Of course, links are still the most important ranking factor.

However, you can’t build spammy backlinks because Google now understands what is a quality link and what isn’t.

If your site is new in the industry, I’d always recommend you to target long-tail keywords because it’s easier to rank for them, than for head terms.

Here’s the photo which explains you it.

For example, if a user searches for shoes, there will be really high competitiveness, but on the other side, if a user searches for red Nike men running shoes, there will be less competitive.

Why does that happen? It happens because head terms have high search volume, and marketers spend large amounts on ranking for those terms, but you should do the opposite thing.

What’s more, long-tail keywords have a higher probability of conversion because the intent is more specific.

Conclusion

I hope you enjoyed reading about these marketing strategies. Just as I said in the intro, you need to find what works best for you because you won’t have enough time to focus on every marketing strategy.

If your marketing budget is high enough, I’d always recommend you to try with Search Engine Marketing (SEM) because that will drive lots of new leads and conversions. You can always find some keywords that are not expensive, but profitable.

Finally, never forget content marketing and SEO because it’s something that adds value in long terms.