Marketing methods to Promote Brand or Product or Service or a Blog?

Marketing methods to boost sales – Conversions- Brand image – Customer’s loyalty

Let us assume that the business is established or  blog is created. It means that business essentials or ready to customers or articles are created as blog posts and pages and hosted on a website. The preliminary  requirements like purchasing a domain name, hosting services are finalised and business or blog is hosted. Now what? The content should reach masses and get recognised. It is assumed here that the created content is useful to customers or visitors. The content helps the visitor and answers all their questions, when searched for. The business or blog is waiting traffic. Get the traffic through any or all of the marketing methods, content marketing, digital marketing, affiliate marketing, email marketing, Apply these marketing methods intelligently and gain traffic, leads and conversions. 

How to find marketing methods and opportunities to promote business or blog or brand?

The business or blog can be promoted in many ways. First and foremost promotion methods are

  • submitting the content to search engine directories like Google, Bing, AOL.
  • Promoting the business or blog through E mails to friends and relatives Spreading the blog through word of mouth
  • Listing the business or blog content in social media like Facebook, Twitter. Create accounts in the social media and add the blog to profiles
  • Use the business or blog URL as a signature in the emails. .

Once the above preliminary promotion techniques are done, think seriously to take the business or blog to further levels. Here’s comes the renouncing names like

Traditional marketing: An ancient marketing method is not online marketing. Traditional marketing focus on print media, broadcasting through radio, billboards and newspaper. Many companies moved on to other marketing methods and strategies over a period of time with technology innovations like mobiles, videos, emails, paid advertising and many other techniques..

traditional marketing
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Content Marketing: In this marketing method content places a prominent role. Valuable and informative content is constantly updated and made available to the customers online. Microsoft stories is a great examples for content marketing. Here at their story labs, microsoft features success stories and innovations made by their people to motivate and inspire others. These stories create trust among visitors and visitors become loyal customers. Content marketing focus on quality of their content. They develop content from the audience view point. Feel themselves as customers or audience while developing the content. Ask themselves all the questions the customers ask them and solve their doubts through their content. The content targets the solutions, mot the product details. Content marketing methods will be successful only when the creator understand the audience prospective.

content marketing

How to publish content in content marketing scenario?

Content is crated and published in so many ways . The objective is to reach customers and answering their queries. The content can reach the customer through

Articles: They are also called blog posts. This requires a blog, writing skills, a hosting service and its maintenance. Link the blog posts to social media. This is important because social media gets lot of traffic to your business.

Videos:

Case studies: Case studies are focussing the promotion process to individual cases. Case studies deal with customer needs, addressing the problem and offering a solution. Building trust among people who are looking towards your product and develop traffic cloud around your brand. One way to do this is driving the traffic to more actionale page on your site or blog through asking lead generating questions.For example let us think that the visitors are looking for ‘competitors keywords’ for their niche blog.

They have landed at your blog post Your blog post about keywords. Your blog post is explaining ‘what is a keyword’ and what is a keyword strategy; and ‘long tail keywords and the benefits.’. The visitor has gone through your page for few seconds and wanted to know he competitors keywords and did not find it there, they tend to leave the page. At this moment ask a question like ” want competitors keywords” and ask them to say ‘Yes” or “No’. If the answer is “yes”. drive them to competitors list through a pop up. This is what is called caching the visitors wish and engaging them further.

  • iSpionage PPC campaign story: A case study listed by OptiMonk on iSpionage. a PPC marketing blog. With this inbound strategy of redirecting visitors to a different page through timely pop up got them a higher conversion rate and blog traffic. (achieved a 5.47% CTR, increased their blog referral traffic by 58.09%).
  • Coca Cola campaigns : ; Another case study is about a viral content marketing strategy by ‘Coca Cola’ . They boost their sales by engaging the visitors in content marketing ways. Their campaigns like ‘share a coke campaign‘ in 2011. In this campaign they have tagged the coca cola name with 150 popular names attached to the slogan. ‘Share a Coke with —-‘., then another campaign ‘Share a Coke and a Song’ campaign in 2016 and with over 75 holiday destinations now printed on the labels as opposed to names or lyrics in 2017.
digital marketing
Selena Gomez the photograph on “Share a Coke and a Song”
  • IBM Success Story: Today it is the day of social media. Social influencers play a prominent role in brand promotion. Social influencers normally have good number of followers on social media. They take the work of content promotion through their followers. This is very effective and the social media traffic that is generated through this method is organic traffic and search engine friendly. IBM was successful in utilising this technique to boost their brand image. Social influencers promoting the well known brand name makes miracles. It is not enough if a informative content reaches masses. It is also important from which source the information came from. The authenticity of the information. It is here IBM uses the social media influencers to write blog posts for their products and services. Read the article at ‘How Influencers Have Ignited IBM’s Content Marketing

Content marketing companies:

The following list of companies provide content marketing methods and solutions

  • HubSpot: HubSpot started by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah in 2006, It is an American company. They are the developers of software products for inbound marketing, sales, and customer service. They have solutions for people looking for developing powerful website to lead generation and boosting sales. Here at hubspot one can use their free tools like customer relationship management tool (CRM), lead generator and email marketing tools for free before you jump into buying their services. Truly a content marketing giants.
  • TED is the name for true digital marketing concept. They mainly focus on video promotion f their content. They have wonderful videos on YouTube for everyone. Their videos are views over a million times by people and they release videos everyday. They have vedios on every subject.

Digital marketing:

Digital marketing is similar to content marketing in broad sense that both promote products and services through content. If content is promoted through visual media like videos, films, internet, mobile media and all available devices is called digital marketing. Digital marketing includes remarketing and sponsored.  Remarketing uses sponsored advertisements to place your advertisement of products and services before generic results on the search results page, social media pages. Contest engage visitors where as digital marketing promote and improves sales through media. 

digital marketing

Digital marketing methods are marketing products and services through internet using available digital media. Digital media is anything from desktops to tablets, social media, SEO techniques, search engine marketing, emails, paid advertisements and content marketing. Let us discuss in detail about digital marketing. Digital marketing concept is coined in the year 1979 with inseparable technology breakthrough of first email sent by Ray Tomlinson sent the very first email. With development of social media, voice and data exchange gadgets like mobiles, laptops, search engine optimization techniques, content marketing, digital marketing is integrated with all promotion methods.

With so many weapons to market content is available, the marketing strategies took a new dimension called interactive marketing. with digital marketing approach the promotion of product, services and content took a new shape from traditional marketing techniques. Traditional marketing is direct and one-way messaging to consumers using print, television and radio media. Through digital marketing strategies brands can reach customers across multiple online channels. Through digital marketing the content reach the customers in the form of visuals and increases the customer base.

digital marketing strategy
http://ascend2.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Ascend2-2019-Digital-Marketing-Strategies-Report-181005.pdf

Digital Marketing strategies:

search engine optimization
Components of SEO

Search engine optimization: Search engine optimization takes your blog to the customers in a straightforward way. It makes the blog available easily to search engines. Search engines can crawl your site or blog for valuable information for a customer query and places the page in front of the customer. To achieve this goal bloggers use search engine optimization techniques. Search engine optimization techniques is an integral part of digital marketing. SEO is the basic step to promote a blog and a part of digital marketing strategy. The components that work for optimization of a web page is

  • Choosing the right keyword and optimizing content for the keyword variants. Keyword with single word is difficult to optimize for search engine because of high competition. . The only way to optimize for a niche keyword is using long tail keywords and keyword variants in the article. Focus the main points of the article and spin the topic around keyword variants with new content. See that the content offers new information useful to the visitors. The content must be easily readable, understandable. SImple sentences without grammatical error work miracles. These techniques will place the content in front of the visitors in generic search results without spending time and money for marketing. There are many SEO optimization plugins to develop search engine optimized content.
twitter marketing

Email marketing: Email marketing methods  have replaced traditionals postal cards and covers. Through emails any one can reach people at a keyboard click. Write a decent proposal of your blog, articles and objective of those articles and how they solve your problems and help you to get solutions and send the email to potential customers. But here the customers must have opted to receive your emails. Otherwise it becomes a spam. Read more email tactics at fobes

Paid and free advertisements: These marketing methods of advertising is a part of digital marketing. Advertisements with proper heading and description will catch the attention of customers seeking for information and approach your brand, product or service. While informative content helps in ranking on search results, called generic search results, bidding on a keyword helps to get your ads in the first place to attract customer. Google and bing advertisements are very popular to improve traffic. When it comes to social media. social media paid advertisements takes the promotion to rocket speed. If you have lots of social media followers these advertisement will improve traffic sources. Facebook ads and Twitter ads are popular in this category.

Data driven personalization: Data driven personalization is promoting business or blog to known circles at proper time. It is very difficult to get close to the customers and win their confidence. It requires great deal of efforts. Here comes the the requirement of personal data collection. These three data sheets help business to improve sales – sales data, customer support data and marketing data. Visitors to your brand came to your website through a search engine query. This might have happened because your SEO is good and search engine placed your ad on the top of the search results. Once the customer comes to your website what you offer to them through content is important. Your content should answer all their questions to stick to your page to make further decisions. To make your content meaningful you need to understand customer interaction with your brand online and offline. Marketing data brings customer list across the globe to your kind of business. It does not give you an insight to the potential customers in a meaningful way. Now the sales data will help you to identify customers you already have and what they purchased from you. It also tell why few have not chosen your product or service. These two sets of data is priceless.
Customer Service Data can tell you what existing customers think about the product, how it fits into their daily lives, which pain points are solved and which remain. This data can help you tell compelling stories rather than focusing on selling.

Out bound marketing

Promoting products through distributing sales pamphlets to every house, making cold calls. here the calling person does not know whether the receiver wants the product or service, just throwing a stone. Trade shows and seminars can be included in the out bound marketing strategies. This method is disappearing after technology innovations to promote products.

Which marketing strategy to choose?

With many marketing methods floating around, it is really confusing when choosing the right one for a business. But if you pay attention and know your business purpose and goals, it is not difficult to choose the right model. Decide and select the goals

  • Choose the right business that suits your taste, your budget
  • Find Out the audience for your business
  • Understand the audience pulse and customer psychology
  • Decide on the business model
  • Evaluate the model with data and improve skills to promote them further
  • Raed about more marketing strategies at Types of marketing

Marketing tools: There are effective tools to develop content marketing strategies. The most important are

  • Buzz sumo: The research through buzz sumo helps to identify the topics for your content, finding influencers to promote the content. With buzz sumo you can get information about the topics that social network shares, what information influencers promote, content alerts for a query, alerts on competitors new posts on the topic you are focussing. You can analyse the date and conclude the best performing content.
  • Ever Note: We tend to forget things . To preserve what has been done we require a platform. Evertone preserves your research data with buzz sumo for future reference and action.
  • Kred: Identify potential influencers to promote your content with the help of kred. It is not enough to have big research data and well designed content on the base of research. It is equally important to find out people that can promote Identifying trust worthy influencers is a task. Kred comes handy.
  • Tweriod: Tweet your content people listen. Twitter is a platform to promote content and Tweriod is a messages organizer. The tweet of your content should reach the audience while they listen. Tweriod know when to place the messages before them
content marketing through tweets
  • Grammarly: Do not forget using this tool while creating content.

More on marketing tools by neil patel’s 15 content marketing tools

Affiliate Marketing:

Affiliate marketing
Affiliate or Referral or Associate Marketing

Associate markets target at selling the products and services through referrals,associates or affiliates. They promotes company products or services or brand image for a commission. Brand get the benefits of huge saving on sales promotion budgets. Affiliate lead the visitors to the parent sites through a affiliate link embedded on their websites or blogs and use affiliate marketing techniques to promote the pages with links. If the affiliate links are promoted through social media, they are called social media influencers. Social media influencers will have huge social media following. Affiliate is marketing a taking a new shape to day and it is named as drop shipping.

Drop shipping marketing method work in the same way as affiliate marketing with a slight difference. In drop shipping you will stand as a bridge between the manufacturer and the customer and prote products or services. The marchands holds inventory, you develop a online store and fix your own price list for the product and sell through your channels. You will not hold inventory. You will still be responsible marketing the product. As you are fixing the price, you are are responsible for your profits.

drop shipping
Drop Shipping

Drop shipping have their own advantages like the business model ultimately can be a business itself.

Similarities and differences between affiliate marketing and drop shipping
Similarities
  • Need not hold inventory npr ship products
  • No risk or low risk business
  • Requires a blog or website
  • Expenses will be maintaining costs of domain, hosting services
  • Same skill sets to promote products
  • Both models require hard work
  • Both models require authority manufacturer and quality products
  • Both models require good rapport with customers
  • Both models yield good returns
Differences
  • Drop shipping requires customer support. Affiliates does not need it.
  • In drop shipping ,you can decide the price of the product. Buy it at a whole sale rate from marchant , decide your profit and sell it at your price. In affiliate business model you are only paid a commission decided by the owner
  • In drop shipping you make an agreement with the manufacturer and set up your own store. It is your brand. In affiliate marketing you work for others as a commission agent
  • Affiliates get commissions and commission structure may change from time to time. You are dependent. In drop shipping price tag is your decision

Drop shipping marketing methods are tedious to implement because you have to continuously add products to the store. You have to create product descriptions, images and develop smashing content. You have to manage customer service, answer calls, manage inventory, never fall short of inventory, manage orders for yourself.

List of Marketing Companies and Agencies:
  1. Click giant: Their tag line is clicks, conversions and customers. They are into SEO, PPC Management, Content Management, Social Media, Web Development, Review Builder Tool and Dental SEO
  2. Communications strategy group: They say behind every challenge is an opportunity. If clients are looking for public relations, brand communication, marketing and business analysis, they have a solution.
  3. Brafton: An american based company claims to offer content marketing solutions that work. They say that they tell stories that inspire trust and authority . Evaluate yourself.
  4. Brandloom: An Indian company promises to help business people and new start ups to improve their operational performance and grow their businesses in existing & new markets Have a look.
  5. Orbit media: Orbit based in Chicago. They are into web assessment to analysis, They do website design and be with you till the website optimization is finished. Find Out how.
  1. Tangent: Tangent digital agency design tailor made web strategies for clients. They promote the companies brand image through digital marketing tools. They also offer SEO services, webdesign services along with promotional aids through digital marketing.
  2. Massive media: They connect brands with customers. They do this with advertising channels, product road maps, business validations, design and development, brand identity and positioning.
  3. First page digital: It is singapore based agency claims to deliver results not excuses. Their services include SEO, paid search, reputation management, social marketing and e commerce SEO.
  4. WebFX : A result driven digital marketing agency. They say that they have around 700 satisfied customers under their sleeves. Sysco, verizon, martins and peoped to name few.
  1. Amazon associates Amazon associate program is a popular name on affiliate marketing circles. Thousands of people joined as amazon affiliates and earning decent income promoting their products. Amazon associate market place program is trust worthy because of their brand name and presence,
  2. CJ affiliate: Cj also known as commission junction founded in 1988 by Lex Sisney, Todd Crawford, Per Pettersen. It is an online advertising company working with affiliate markets. Join them and earn commissions as an affiliate through their advertisers.
  3. Click bank: Click bank where you can be a seller or buyer or affiliate. That means you can be a passive earner through their affiliate program or just buy products from them or sell your on products on their shopping portals.
  4. ebay: with 1.5 billion products under their roof, 182 million buyers in their list and working in 10- countries across the world, ebay is the old e commerce shopping portal. List your products on ebay as a seller and buy products from their vast inventories as a buyer.
  5. Shopify: The best e commerce platform for both affiliate marketing and drop shipping options. With the help of shopify one can start their own online stores You can covert your retail shop, if you have one already into a online store. Shopify experts will help you to develop your stores.
  6. i Synergy: A company that brings advertisers and affiliates together through their marketing platform called ‘affiliate junction’. They already have around 2500 advertisers and 30000 affiliates. They offer programs that addresses to different business sectors
Traffic sources for marketing opportunities

Traffic sources for any marketing opportunity is from generic search. The results displayed on search engine query results. It is free and natural. All marketers promoting products or services should concentrate first on this generic source. Then comes paid sources through content marketing, digital marketing , affiliate marketing and so on.

traffic sources

Useful Resources:

  1. https://www.equinetacademy.com/what-is-digital-marketing/
  2. https://www.educba.com/seo-in-digital-marketing/
  3. https://www.convinceandconvert.com/digital-marketing/data-driven-personalization/
  4. https://www.salesforce.com/uk/blog/2019/12/how-to-implement-data-driven-personalisation.html
  5. https://blog.treasuredata.com/blog/2019/01/22/how-to-boost-sales-through-data-driven-personalization/
  6. https://neilpatel.com/blog/content-marketer-attributes/
  7. https://www.brafton.com/blog/content-marketing/7-compelling-content-marketing-case-studies-from-jetblue-ibm-adobe-and-more/
  8. https://blog.marketo.com/2018/08/5-inspiring-content-marketing-case-studies.html
  9. https://neilpatel.com/blog/content-marketing-tools/