Marketing Techniques That Really Work

As of this post’s writing, we have officially entered the second half of 2016. This means that it is time to start evaluating our current marketing strategies and figuring out what has been working and what hasn’t. It’s also time to start making adjustments and exploring new techniques. This is especially true if you haven’t updated your marketing plan in a while. Here are some of the marketing techniques you should be using and will definitely need to master for your next campaign.

Pay-Per-Click

It’s true: pay-per-click advertising isn’t exactly new. It’s one of the pillars of online marketing. There’s a reason it hasn’t gone the way of keyword stuffing and blog ring building: it still works. Moreover, whatever Google does with its algorithm, pay-per-click allows you to make sure that your company will get a first page mention on the search engine. Additionally, as any PPC specialist will tell you: pay-per-click ads offer you immediate and easily trackable results. These are the easiest campaigns to adjust and optimize, so make sure that you set aside at least some of your marketing budget for this technique.

Remarketing

Remarketing has been around for a couple of years now but it is still considered new and innovative. Remarketing is a tool offered by Google and a couple of the other search engines. Essentially, remarketing allows you to take advantage of cookies and tracking for your own purposes so that, after a visitor leaves your company’s website, they will continue to see ads for your business around the web (any site that runs Google Ads is fair game). Opting into remarketing has proven itself to be a highly profitable marketing technique.

Video

Yes, we know that you know that everyone is using video these days. Still, if everybody’s doing it that must be because it works, right? The trick to video marketing isn’t just making a good video and hoping it goes viral. The trick is to integrate video into your email campaigns and to personalize those videos as much as possible. Personalized video marketing can increase your margins by 200-300%! Don’t worry, personalization doesn’t require you to create hundreds of specifically tailored videos for your list. It simply means creating a variety of videos that will be sent to your customers based on their demographic information, purchase history, etc.

Snapchat

Don’t roll your eyes! Sure, Snapchat seems like one of those fads “the kids like” but guess what: so were Facebook and Twitter. So was blogging once upon a time and look how that turned out. The best way to use Snapchat is to show customers the behind-the-scenes work that goes into creating your products and services. Remember, the photos and videos will only be live for 24 hours, so it’s about capturing what is happening at any given moment. By allowing your customers into this part of your company’s “life,” you build relationships and help people feel personally involved in your success or failure.

The Internet of Things

Another word for this is “wearables.” These are devices like iWatches, etc. that connect to the web and through which users can access all of the information they’d normally need their smartphones or laptops to access. Finding ways to integrate wearable-friendly mobile marketing is imperative if you want to keep your business growth going over the next couple of years. This doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to send a lot of messages to their devices; that would be more alienating than anything. It does mean, however, that you have a much better way to track your users’ day-to-day habits. That information is incredibly valuable when you are building your marketing campaigns.

OmniChannel Marketing

This is a fancy way of saying that your marketing campaign should flow seamlessly across the wide variety of devices and portals people will be using to find you. Instead of creating separate campaigns for social media, PPC, email, etc., look at each of these categories as one part of an overall idea or concept. A good example of this is a retail store that allows people to reserve products via the store’s website but still pick them up in person…and then get a thank you tweet or other social media message, as well as the usual thank-you email.

It is important to follow marketing techniques as they shift and change. Sticking with something that worked a few years ago is the fastest way to prove to your users that you are out of touch. Nobody likes to work with companies that are out of touch!