In an era when trends can shift on a dime, you need marketing solutions that can keep up with the pace. You need to be able to adjust, in real time, whenever you learn something new about your customers and/or the market. That means investing in tech and working with partners that take advantage of the latest strategies for growing your audience.
Ultimately, it’s up to you and your financial team to decide who the right partners are for your company’s future. But to be successful, you’ll need to make sure they embrace a handful of key marketing strategies. Look for partners and solutions that use the following approaches to help successfully scale your business.
1. Growth Marketing
A growth marketing strategy is an analytical, data-driven approach to understanding and accelerating a company’s growth strategy. Growth marketers leverage insights from past marketing campaigns to iterate and improve outreach efforts across the entire customer life cycle. Through frequent testing and optimization, growth marketers adapt and scale their strategy in a flexible, agile way.
Unlike some more traditional marketing methods, growth marketing places particular importance on the customer experience. It emphasizes not just acquiring customers, but converting them into extremely enthusiastic and loyal brand supporters. These people will, in turn, help the company continue to acquire more of a following.
Growth marketing accomplishes this through a multifaceted plan of attack that can include content, SEO, PPC ads, influencer campaigns, and more. Growth marketing’s high adaptability means these approaches can be tweaked on the fly to keep customers coming in and coming back. Checking in with customers every step of the way, growth marketers learn what works and how to do it better.
2. Content Optimization for Search Engines
One of the most important pieces of any digital marketing campaign is search engine optimization. A good SEO strategy means that, instead of advertising at passive customers, you show up when they’re already looking for you. This makes your chances of conversion higher, often for a much lower investment than with traditional marketing tactics.
Your content needs to be search engine–friendly in several different ways. It needs to use headers and subheads that help search engines understand what’s on the page. It also should answer user questions succinctly and well to raise your chances of snagging a featured snippet — SEO gold. And most importantly, it should genuinely address users’ search intent. Never use keywords to try to shove irrelevant results in front of your prospects.
The goal of content optimization isn’t just to hit a bunch of keywords and show up in the rankings. You need to produce meaningful, authoritative, authentic content that customers will engage with on a deeper level. Good content optimization gets you onto the search engine results page, but great content is what actually converts and retains.
3. Social Media
There are two general ways you can use social media to expand your audience. One is paid advertising, and the other is organic community-building. Within each strategy, there are a multitude of ideas and approaches to try. But the basic principle is the same as with SEO strategy: getting your content in front of the most relevant viewers.
With well-targeted paid ads, you can use customers’ most pressing wants or interests to encourage them to engage with your brand. Social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok use advanced algorithms to serve your ads to the users most likely to convert. The platforms handle the tech, while you choose whom you want to see your ads and how they’ll stand out.
Paid advertising works on social, but it can get expensive, and it’s not always necessary. Many brands have also gained tremendous growth through a more organic approach. They convert and retain customers by crafting a strong brand identity, creating engaging content, and interacting with their followers. Responding to user comments and DMs, in particular, can make them feel more engaged and connected with your brand.
4. Influencer Partnerships
Influencer partnerships help marketers leverage the power of social media to grow even larger audiences. Studies have shown that people trust certain influencers as much as they trust their own family members. When a beloved creator speaks highly of your brand, users believe their words and want to try it, too.
When influencer marketing is inauthentic, though, it’s really obvious to most people — especially younger generations. Hiring a huge celebrity to hawk your product is not the way to go about it. It’s usually better to have relatable creators with smaller followings use and earnestly review your products for their audience.
In China, these creators are called key opinion consumers. In the U.S., they’re often known as micro-influencers or nano-influencers. These content creators have small followings, sometimes under 10,000 people, but those followers are invested in the influencer’s content. You may be able to get many of these lower-profile creators to test and share your product by sending them samples.
Choosing the Right Solutions
Robust marketing strategies, such as those outlined here, are vital to building a successful, enduring, scalable brand. But the way you approach them will differ greatly depending on your offerings and the audience you serve. You need to be on social media, for example, but your target demographics will determine which social media platforms to focus on — and how.
For that reason, when you set out to invest in new marketing efforts, be discerning about your choices. Choose partners who share and reflect your brand’s values, mission, and attitude. Aim for marketing approaches and channels that amplify, rather than alter, your company’s voice. Your customers will notice and appreciate your authenticity.