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Are you starting an online business or thinking about it, but you are not sure where to start when it comes to promoting it? Or do you have a brick-and – mortar store, and you are searching for new ways to advertise your products online as you venture into e-commerce?
Welcome to the world of digital marketing, where you can share information about almost anything, anytime, without investing a lot of money. But beyond the simple operation of social media, what are some other ways to get the word out? Read on for a few easy tactics.
1. Email Marketing
Are you aware that email marketing remains one of the cheapest and most powerful methods of digital marketing? Email marketing has four times the ROI, according to Email Monks, relative to other digital marketing strategies, and almost 90 percent of marketers use email as their primary lead generation tool.
Why is email marketing so efficient? For one thing, it cost zero to launch and run a campaign. For another, email marketing solutions available today usually come with several built-in features to help you remain organized and on track with specific campaigns – for instance, there are lots of low-cost solutions that provide process organization, segmentation, and social scheduling.
If you have already been building a mailing list, you are halfway there already. But some extra organization is required to build an email campaign that converts.
Create An Effective Email Campaign
Firstly, you can select an automation and e-mail management platform to help you get organized. MailChimp and GetResponse are only two of the many email management applications available today, with MailChimp likely to be the most user-friendly and inexpensive. Then you can build a schedule that suits your overall marketing objectives – plan to deliver your emails regularly but without flooding a person’s inbox with what could be viewed as SPAM mail.
The next step is to create compelling text and quality content that matches your marketing target. You are going to want to make sure your welcome email is straightforward and precise so that your audience knows where the following emails come from and why you are sending them.
It is also important you construct a title that stands out in a crowded inbox. Good subject lines are the keys to higher open rates and click-through rates. To get people’s attention, consider posing a quirky question, offering a discount, or making a direct reference to your specific value proposition on the subject line.
Also Read: How Small Businesses Can Advertise Free On Facebook
Create Content that Converts
Make sure that your content adds value to their lives and that you make it easy for them to access your products – for example, if you are promoting a zoom meeting, be explicit that they can watch it later if they need to.
Your call for action should be informative and instructional, as email is not inherently a “hard sell” for brand recognition and knowledge. They should also be prompted to move towards a next stage, which may or may not be the purchase of your key product. The key is to make this transition as smooth as possible so that they can move on to the next level of the sales funnel without even worrying about it. Make it frictionless and be straightforward and precise about the unique value you are providing.
Tracking and Followup
Finally, you want to keep track of what works (and what doesn’t work) by tracking main success metrics such as the ratio of open rates to sales. You may also want to pay attention to where traffic flows are stalled, such as looking at unsubscribe rates. At the end of the day, don’t forget to nurture your leads and ensure re-engagement with those segments that seem to lose interest.
2. Referral Marketing
Referral marketing is simply just another term for “word of mouth” advertisement. In the past, it would have been popular to open a store in a small town, hand out flyers and hope, and pray that people would actually prefer your business over the competitors. Of course, it still happens occasionally, but more consumers are now doing a lot more online research, using social media and reading feedback before purchasing.
The fact is, people, prefer their peers over brands – and often they do this without even understanding it. For example, if they advertise on their social media page, they literally serve as brand ambassadors. According to Nielsen, peer referrals make people four times more likely to make a purchase. The Wharton School of Business maintains that referral customers have a significantly higher conversion rate and consumer lifetime value than other categories of customers.
It might seem obvious that people are more likely to trust friends and family than anonymous advertisers. However, news stories, testimonials, influencers (e.g. social media celebrities or bloggers) as well as consumer feedback often come within the spectrum of referral marketing. Yeah, the reviews you read before purchasing a product on Amazon or trying a restaurant on Yelp go a long way, and as long as they are positive, they practically serve as free advertising.
Influencers Marketing
Influencer marketing is just one aspect of referral marketing. Influencer marketers are people who have made a name for themselves on social media, but often they are people who already have an influence (e.g., movie stars or entrepreneurs) who want to make themselves prominent in the digital landscape, for instance, by advertising goods.
When you link to an influencer and get them to advertise your product, you immediately tap into a massive audience. And if the relationship is an even exchange (i.e. you don’t need to pay the influencer), this is an incredibly cost-effective way of marketing.
That said, we can use the influencer marketing system as a clear example of why referral marketing works on social media. People follow celebrities or other forms of influencers (let’s say hip hop musicians) on Instagram because they are not just interested in people, they are interested in a particular activity. So, if you meet someone with a major follow-up that is important to the brand or product, you can join forces and build a relationship that benefits the other party as well.
In this way, mixing recommendation or influencer marketing with something that appeals to feelings – or issues that someone cares about – when it’s brand-consistent can be an incredibly powerful way to bring people to social media attention.
3. Affliate Marketing
Affiliate programs are a perfect way to get a word out about your product or service without wasting too much money. This is basically commission-based sales, where an associate (like a blogger) promotes your goods and makes money when they make a sale, or often when they do some other kind of action.
What you are going to do here is build a URL for anyone who promotes your stuff and then they can post on their own feeds. Each connection serves the purpose of monitoring and managing the amount and number of sales made by the affiliate.
To get started with an affiliate marketing campaign, you will have an account set up with a particular affiliate marketing platform, such as Clickbank, where affiliates will apply to advertise your product. Customers can click on the link on their site and then be able to buy your product.
This is one type of free advertising, and it can be a useful way to get a word out about your brand, but there are a few things to keep in mind. First of all, this works better for some goods than others, and it might only be worth it for a lot of affiliate marketers if they feel they are getting a fair fee. Second, you need to make sure that your affiliates are truly enthusiastic about the product and are consistent about advertising, as well as promoting it in the right way.
Finally, a marketing individual should already have a good follow-up and grasp the basic concepts of how to sell a product in such a way that it contributes to sales.
Conclusion
Since there are so many online publicity opportunities, online publicity leaves plenty of space for the ad campaigns to be imaginative. Moreover, you don’t really need a lot of money to get the traffic going, but you do need a good follow-up to get started, particularly in the case of social media promotional activities.
Once that is done, you can build creative campaigns and activities to help you connect with your followers face to face or use similar methods of mixed campaign techniques to reach your best clients.