November 23, 2021
by Lauren Buchanan / November 23, 2021
Marketing a business online is not for the faint of heart.
Not only do you have to compete with competitors from around the globe, but the rapidly advancing technology and an ever-changing consumer focus make it hard to capture audience attention and stay ahead of the curve.
Many business owners mistakenly believe that to advance their digital marketing efforts, they simply need to boost their ad spend and end up sinking a huge amount of money into underperforming marketing techniques.
Pumping resources into a broken marketing plan won’t fix it, but implementing an advanced marketing strategy may be the answer to the problem.
Advanced marketing strategies help businesses build customer relationships by taking a deep dive into all aspects of their marketing channels, from social media marketing (SMM) to SEO.
When your marketing campaigns are underperforming, it is tempting to pump more money into your ad spend instead of strengthening customer relationships. Unfortunately, adding more money to the equation is like putting a Band-Aid on a broken leg. Without a focused marketing plan in place, your ad spend is often wasted on poorly optimized and misguided campaigns.
By strengthening the pillars that make up your marketing campaign, an advanced marketing strategy allows you to build a holistic battle plan to conquer your competitors, increase your conversion rate, and form lasting relationships with your customers.
Whether you have an existing marketing campaign or are starting from scratch, these ten advanced marketing strategies will help you boost traffic, increase conversions, and take your business to the next level.
Great marketing results don't just happen by chance – they rely on consistency. This applies to all aspects of your content, from the tone to topic and timing.
The first step in achieving consistency is to create a roadmap that outlines your scheduled content topics and lay out when you plan to reach certain targets. Creating a marketing framework prepares you for upcoming campaigns well ahead of time.
This means that instead of rushing your content, you can create detailed briefs for your writers and still have ample time to edit and publish, ensuring you consistently produce high-quality content.
It’s difficult to achieve consistency if you don’t have a streamlined production process. The best way to achieve this is to have an in-house team working on your marketing assets, all the way from conception to publication.
If this isn’t possible, stick to using only one full-service advertising agency to manage this process for you.
As with many things in life, timing is key. An effective marketing framework helps you time your content publishing to align with peak seasons. Instead of letting the festive season sneak up on you yet again, you could be the first brand creating festive cheer among consumers.
Remember that quality content is wasted if no one is viewing it. It’s important to identify which customer acquisition channels work well for your business and the ones that are dead ends.
Your product offering is the heart of your business. An unsuccessful launch can be very expensive and negatively affect your brand reputation. So it’s worth taking the time to do thorough research before launching a new product to identify who your product will provide value to.
An important part of product research is identifying your target audience. Think of your ideal customer. What are their daily habits, aspirations, fears, favorite social media platforms, and so on?
Audience segmentation helps you focus on the people who will actually take an interest in your product, saving you valuable time and money.
An easy way to identify what your audience wants is to analyze the keywords they’re searching for when shopping online. This gives you a good idea of their needs and helps you identify a solution to their problem.
You can also use specific sales analytics software to help you conduct market research. For example, Amazon FBA sellers can check bestsellers lists to get a good idea of what products are trending during different seasons.
Launching a successful product that resonates with your audience is a great achievement, but the hard work doesn’t stop there.
As a business owner, you need to continuously find ways to drive customers to your products and convince them to complete the purchase. Some great marketing techniques to draw more attention to your products include adding discounts on popular products or giving away free gifts to new customers.
You can cross-sell or upsell products at discounted prices. While lower prices can hurt your profit margins, overall sales and revenue will likely increase as a result of more orders.
When you’re focused on driving sales, don’t fall into the trap of placing all your attention on lead generation. Spending all your resources on finding new customers can make you forget about your existing customers. Repeat customers are an important asset for your business and can become loyal brand advocates if you nurture them.
Referral programs are a great way to encourage existing customers to engage with your brand while driving new customers to your platform.
If you sell a software-based product, offering free trials is a clever strategy to help customers see the value of your product and what they’ll be missing out on once the free trial period ends. Free trials can be offered to new customers, or as a way to promote upgrades to existing customers.
When you first start exploring search engine optimization, it’s easy to get lost in the vastness of the internet and forget about your own little corner of the world. If your product or service helps people in a specific location, your first port of call should be to prioritize your local ranking on Google.
of customers who did an online search for a local store visited the store the same day.
Source: HubSpot
So it’s important to make sure your neighbors know about your local brand! An easy way to ensure your website ranks high in local search results is to claim your business on local business directories. This allows you to edit your business’s listing and update details, such as operating hours, contact details, and more
Including a link to your location on all of your business’ social media accounts is also a quick and easy way to boost your local SEO results. Even if you run an international website or blog that isn’t location-specific, you can still benefit from analyzing your audience demographics and catering to their local needs.
If a large portion of your audience speaks a foreign language, consider translating your articles into their local language. This simple task can unlock a whole new audience and significantly boost your traffic.
Effective content marketing is a powerful tool in any business’ arsenal. It's a way of building trust with your audience by providing them with valuable information that answers a question or solves a problem.
Content marketing, as the name suggests, refers to the creation of online content, such as blog articles, videos, and social media posts.
The goal with content marketing is to increase traffic to your site by boosting your search results on Google. It’s a win-win situation; the higher you rank on Google, the more people are likely to view your content. The more people click through to your content, the higher you will rank on Google.
Over and above boosting traffic on your site, interesting and informative content increases the chances of potential customers staying engaged with your product or service and moves them deeper into your sales funnel.
A great way to boost your Google search rankings is through backlinks. Having reputable people in your industry feature your content on their website is a great way to boost your site’s visibility.
Backlinks give authority to your content by signaling to Google that your content is valuable enough to be shared across different sites independent of your business.
Explore backlink opportunities by reaching out to sites within your niche and see if you can do content collaborations to boost your backlink profile. You can write guest posts for other sites, submit articles to forums, or offer helpful comments that link to relevant content on your site.
As the owner of a small business or startup, it’s easy to feel like David and Goliath when trying to rank against the heavy-hitters in your industry. At the end of the day, consumers are looking for engaging, informative content regardless of who is producing it.
Your brand could solve world hunger or bring world peace, but if you don't generate awareness around it, it’ll forever remain the internet's best-kept secret.
In today’s world, there’s no better way to shine a spotlight on your business than by promoting it on social media. Social media puts you in a room with millions of people worldwide, giving you the opportunity to share your brand story and connect with your audience.
Sharing content on social media is easy, but posting attention-grabbing, memorable content can be a real challenge. The trick is to keep your content short and shareable. You only have a few seconds to grab the viewer’s attention before they scroll past your post, so make sure your content is easy to digest and provides value.
Infographics are a great way to tell a quick story, packed with interesting data points, that viewers can absorb with just a brief glance.
The ultimate goal on social media isn’t just to post random content, but to start a conversation with your audience. Without a targeted social media marketing plan, you’ll likely just add to the white noise.
When marketing your business on social media, it’s important to strategically pick your platform. Twitter is a good platform for short, punchy headlines or interesting facts. LinkedIn, by contrast, is more formal and best suited for company updates, strategic collaborations, or job postings.
Social media gives you the chance to humanize your brand and create brand loyalty. Engage with your customers by asking questions, creating polls, and replying to comments. Go out and find your ideal customer and connect with them instead of waiting for them to find you.
Social media influencers didn’t achieve their position of authority by being bland and uninteresting. Influencers are charismatic and demand attention, and fortunately, you can use this to your advantage.
Partnering with the right influencers in your niche can drive significant traffic to your site. Influencer marketing allows you to leverage the influencer’s significant social media following to your advantage.
So, what do the influencers get out of this deal? This is where affiliate marketing comes into play.
Affiliate marketing involves an influencer promoting a product or service and asking their audience to follow a link to that offer. Whenever someone clicks on the link and completes a purchase, the influencer is paid a small commission based on a percentage of the total value of the sale.
Create your own affiliate program to incentivize influencers and affiliates to promote your brand to their social media audiences.
Affiliate marketing gives the influencers an incentive to really showcase your product. They can perform live tutorials of them using your products or service, or they can test your product out over a pre-determined trial period and produce content where they review it.
To ensure your product is marketed correctly, you can provide influencers and affiliates with creative assets and briefs, outlining how to market it and what the best angles are.
If you have followed so far, you probably have insights into how to hone in on your target audience, boost traffic on your site, and which platforms you should tailor your marketing campaigns to.
All of these strategies put eyes on your content, so the next thing you need to focus on is the content itself. The online market is saturated with advertisements and promotional content. It’s easy to make your content all about you, but it’s important to remember that you’re not the person you’re trying to sell your products to.
As discussed earlier, the best way to give your brand value is to appeal to an existing problem or pain point for your customers. Cut through the noise and distractions by creating story-driven content that focuses on your target audience and explains how your product or service helps them.
By putting your customers at the center of the story, you’re helping them see how your product or service can be an integral part of their lives. You want your product or service to be the customer’s knight in shining armor, swooping in to save the day just when the customer needs you most.
A great way to ensure your content pops up at the right moment is to use APIs to tailor the content your leads see based on their behaviors.
An application programming interface (API) is a piece of code that helps one app talk to another. For example, when you book a doctor’s appointment online, an API connects with your Google Calendar app to ensure your appointment is reflected in your calendar.
Using high-quality visual content isn’t just a call to action to paste the highest-resolution stock images or videos on your content. It’s about finding compelling images that add to your message and differentiate your content from the competition.
Keep in mind that while your hero image should be engaging and eye-catching, its main function is to highlight your product, not distract from it. Your selected images should add to the story you’re trying to convey, showing consumers how your product or service works and how it solves their problems.
People are naturally drawn to images of other people. Using models to demonstrate the product is a great way to increase your conversion rate. This gives consumers a better understanding of the size and functionality of your product.
The online marketplace is a highly competitive arena, so repeating the same boring images and layouts your competitors use won’t help you get ahead. You’re only limited by your imagination, so think outside the box!
Fifty-four percent of traffic comes from mobile devices, so it’s vital that your content is optimized for mobile devices.
This doesn’t mean only adjusting your website to display correctly on a mobile device, but also taking into account how your site’s functionality might be altered. Menus, toolbars, and buttons may need to be moved around to improve your website’s ease of use on mobile devices.
By combining a seamless searching experience on mobile with optimized local SEO searches, you stand a good chance of dramatically increasing your site’s conversion rate.
As more entrepreneurs venture into the world of e-commerce and online marketing, it’ll become harder for business owners to stand out from the crowd. To stay one step ahead of your competitors, you need to adapt and remain flexible when it comes to marketing your brand.
Implementing these advanced marketing strategies will provide a solid framework to help your brand grow with the industry, instead of lagging behind. With a sturdy foundation of advanced marketing strategies in place, you create a marketing engine that attracts new customers while providing value to existing customers.
Over time, you’ll discover which strategies generate the most ROI for you, so you can spend more resources on certain customer acquisition channels. Don’t worry too much about what your competitors are doing, since you want to differentiate your brand for all the right reasons.
To truly position your brand as unique, put your customer first in all of your marketing, and share how your brand solves their problems and delivers a great customer experience.
Lauren started out as a graphic designer and copywriter, then worked as a financial advisor before returning to her marketing roots at Empire Flippers. When she's not talking about culinary discovery (and eating gastronomic delicacies), she works off the calories by playing cricket and action hockey.
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