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How Different Types Of Marketing Can Quickly Generate Revenue
When you drafted the Executive Summary for your business plan, you probably thought of marketing as just another aspect of your business, something on par with staffing, operations, and financials. However, after you start your business, you soon come to the conclusion that it’s one of the most important parts of your businesses.
Here’s the reality: if your marketing is weak, then it almost nullifies the excellence of your administrative, operational, and financial components. Conversely, if all aspects of your business are clunky but your marketing is superb, your business has a chance of building a better team, managing your operations with greater efficiency, and organizing your financial records more meticulously,
Now that you understand how essential marketing is for the success of your business, then you’re e probably wondering about different types of marketing options you have available and how they can be used to grow your business.
The Two Categories of Marketing
Before the advent of the Internet, marketing consisted of things like trade shows, radio spots, television commercials, press releases, cold calling, billboards, and print advertising. Digital marketing, however, has become so cost-effective and efficient that it would be a big mistake to not use some form of online marketing. So, even if you just have a brick-and-mortar business that serves a local market, you should build a website and create an online presence.
While some businesses rely only on online marketing and others on offline marketing, savvy businesses use the best of both worlds, regardless of whether they are virtual or physical businesses.
4 Ways to Market Online
Let’s take a closer look at four of the most popular ways of marketing online:
1. Search engine optimization (SEO)
Search Engine Optimization taps into the free, organic traffic available on the Internet. In order to tap into this source of traffic, you must optimize your website to get ranked by one of the major search engines. By using highly relevant keywords, people will find your website after they do a search on a search engine.
2. Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
Search Engine Marketing (SEM)is faster than SEO because you pay to get traffic by buying ads on the search engines. One of the most popular types of ads to buy are Google Adwords, but you can also buy ads on the Bing and Yahoo networks. These ads are called Pay Per Click (PPC) because you only pay when people click on the ads.
In essence, you are buying visitors rather than hoping to earn an organic visit. Everyone involved benefits from PPC advertising. The search engines make a profit, you get people to visit your website immediately instead of waiting for weeks or months for your keywords to get ranked and surfers are made aware of a website that offers the product or services that they happen to be looking for at the moment.
3. Content marketing
By writing regular articles on your blog, writing guest posts, posting content on social media, contributing to forums, hosting podcasts, having a YouTube channel, and using other ways of adding content online, you are leaving valuable pieces of content in many different parts of the web that will lead visitors directly back to your website either directly from a link you leave after your content or indirectly when your content is indexed by the search engines.
4. Email Marketing
Email marketing is a way to continue the conversation you have with visitors who come to your blog or website. By using landing pages and opt-in boxes, you can persuade people to sign up for your ezine. After visitors become subscribers, you can stay in touch by posting informative content and valuable offers via email.
When You Should Market
In closing, it’s important to mention when you should market. Obviously, you should be marketing your business all the time, but the optimum time to increase your marketing budget is during a product launch. This will get your product in front of as many people as possible quickly. Since your product or service is fresh, the sooner you start marketing, the easier it is to generate enthusiasm for it. So, in terms of time and effort, it’s always a good idea to invest more heavily when you are launching a product and then maintain that momentum through consistent, less intense, more budget-friendly marketing efforts.
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