Whether you are exploring ways to boost an existing business or start a new one, an effective marketing strategy is critical to the growth of your brand and more sales. Your marketing plan enables you to develop strategies to increase your company’s revenue and gain insights into your customers and an effective way to engage with them. Read on for 11 marketing strategies you should implement in 2022 to achieve your bottom line.
1. Influencer marketing
If you want to expand your brand’s awareness and increase your sales volume, you should consider collaborating with individuals with a large following on social media platforms. Influencers can enhance your brand’s visibility, credibility, trust, and reputation since their followers already trust them and rely on their recommendations to make purchases.
However, you should be careful when selecting an influencer for your brand. While macro-influencers, personalities with millions of followers, can help you reach a broader audience, it is more difficult to get an audience with them. They are also more expensive. Consider targeting micro-influencers, those with around 10,000 followers, as they are more accessible and affordable. You will also get to access an audience that is more receptive to the influencer’s mode of marketing. Remember to ascertain that the influencer’s niche, ideals, aesthetics, and community are compatible with your brand.
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2. Email marketing
Emailing is among the earliest forms of digital communication but remains one of the effective marketing strategies to generate more leads and revenue for your business. Since emailing allows you to access your target audience’s inbox constantly, you get to nurture your company’s promotions and leads, so you should consider implementing it in your marketing efforts this year. For every dollar spent on your email marketing campaign, you are also guaranteed a $36 return on your investment.
To develop a successful email marketing campaign, you should create an email list. Consider implementing an email subscriber popup form, offering incentives, or adding banners to your company’s signature to nudge clients to sign up to your email list. You should then send emails with engaging content based on your consumer behavior data.
Be sure to invest in email marketing tools like Constant Contact and Mailchimp to track the success of your campaign through open and click-through rates and unsubscribe data.
3. Long-form content
Long-form content between 1000 and 7500 words is likely to drive more traffic to your website. According to a study, a long-form article garners 77% more backlinks than a shorter one, playing a crucial role in attracting organic traffic. They also help you establish yourself as an expert in your niche. A long-form post on a topic that interests your target audience shows that you care more than generating sales. This boosts trust, your brand’s awareness, and consumer loyalty. Other benefits of creating authentic long-form content include:
- More time spent on your website pages.
- Increased social media shares and backlinks.
- Reduced bounce rate.
- Improved ranking of search engines.
4. Video marketing
Approximately 72% of customers prefer learning about your products and services via videos, as they provide an excellent way for your customers to access your content on the go or through mobile phones. It can be challenging to read a full-size article and fine prints on a mobile gadget since the screens are relatively small. Search engines like Google are also likely to rank websites that include videos, leading to more traffic to your site. However, these videos have to include well-crafted subtitles and scripts, titles, and descriptions searchable on Google.
One of the most significant advantages of investing in video marketing is that you can easily reformat the video content. For instance, instead of just uploading the video on YouTube, you can also:
- Convert the audio and use the content for your podcast episodes.
- Transcribe the video content into a text version.
- Improve your website ranking by uploading the transcribed version on your blog.
- Increase engagement and shares by posting the video on Facebook. Remember to add transcription as subtitles to gain more impression.
- Increase your open email rate by using video thumbnails and the subject line video in your business’ email marketing campaign.
You could also dedicate time to doing live videos for your product demos, interviews or to give your customers a glimpse of your business behind the scenes, including events, a typical day at the office, or how products are produced to increase traction.
5. Podcasts
Along with video content, more people, including your target customers today, are tapping into audio content. According to recent research, people spend at least 11.2 hours every week listening to podcasts while relaxing, driving, working out, at school, or at work. This shows that you need to incorporate podcasts into your marketing strategy. However, you have to ascertain that you develop engaging content to avoid turning off your listeners. Dedicate time to listening to popular podcasts to get ideas and inspiration on your creativity to engage your audience more. You could also invite guest speakers who are experts in your field or conduct interviews.
6. Storytelling
One of the most effective ways to get your target customers to take the desired action is by including storytelling in your marketing strategy. Storytelling helps you attract your target audience’s attention. It also allows you to speak to clients as you would a close friend or relative, enabling you to tap into their emotions to trigger them to purchase. Be sure to use storytelling in all your content, including drafting an engaging About Us page, blogs, guides, images, web content, social media posts, and describing your products and services.
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7. Social media marketing
There are over 4.62 billion people in the world today on social media. This makes social media an effective channel to promote your business by building and engaging an audience, generating more leads, and improving your sales volume in 2022.
You should consider your target customer’s needs, preferences and demographics, and social media marketing goals, then perform a competitor analysis to identify a suitable channel for your brand. Next, share different types of content, including links to news articles and blogs, user-generated content, videos, and infographics on the social media channels, but be careful not to limit your posts to promotional messages. You should also ensure that your comments, ads, messages, graphics, captions, and posts on all platforms are consistent to boost your brand’s credibility.
8. Search engine optimization
When users look for products and services on the web, they will often opt for the first vendor that appears on the first page of search results. This shows that your site has to rank to help your target customers find you, increase brand awareness and boost sales, so you should not overlook search engine optimization in your digital marketing strategy this year.
Search engine optimization enables you to research high-quality keywords and incorporate them into your content. It also helps you pursue quality backlinks that establish you as an authority in your niche. This improves your brand’s credibility and visibility on search engines like Google and Bing, leading to more traffic to your site.
9. Pay-per-click advertising
Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising can help increase sales by focusing on users with transactional questions: those ready to purchase products and services. PPC advertising allows you to bid on key phrases you want your product’s ads to appear for whenever a prospective customer searches the keywords. The product ads will then appear at the top of search engine results, and whenever a user clicks on them, you will have to pay. The users are then directed to your website’s landing page, where they find a call-to-action button that enables them to take the desired action, including buying a product or subscribing to email newsletters. For every $1 spent on PPC, you will likely earn $8.
10. User-generated content (UGC)
If you want your clients to pay more for your products and services in 2022, promote them through user-generated content. User-generated content is any content created by an individual who is not an official representative of your brand. According to a TurnTo Networks study, UGC impacts the purchasing decision for 90% of your customers compared to promotional content.
Consider offering discounts and incentives to encourage your existing customers to share content in the form of social media comments, videos, images, testimonials, and blogs about your services and product. This will improve conversion rates and engagement since your target customers are likely to trust the opinion of a fellow consumer over the company.
11. Online events
Hosting online events such as product launches, seminars, and webinars can help improve your brand’s awareness among prospective and existing consumers. Online events also allow you to interact with customers, enabling you to collect helpful information that could be used to create customer profiles. Clients’ profiles help you develop marketing content tailored to your target customer’s needs and challenges, increasing your customer base and driving more sales.
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Endnote
With the COVID-19 pandemic forcing businesses to venture into the digital space, you should incorporate new marketing strategies to maintain relevance. Consider investing in email marketing, video marketing, storytelling, podcasts, social media marketing, PPC advertising, user-generated content, and online events to boost brand awareness, increase sales, and generate more revenue.
