Marketing in the Digital Age
As a business owner, you’re always looking for new and creative ways to advertise your products to bring in more customers while retaining your current customers. Classic digital marketing strategies such as SEO (search engine optimization), PPC (pay per click), content marketing, social media marketing, and email marketing are all great and effective ways to draw in more customers. However, all of these methods still limit the number of people you’re able to reach. Here are some other ways you can apply digital marketing strategies to your advantage.
Affiliate Marketing
Also known as influencer marketing, affiliate marketing is the process of having an influencer on one or more social media platforms promote your products to their followers. Companies typically choose influencers who have a large following and influencers whose content relates in some way to their products. For instance, if your business sells cookware, you wouldn’t look for an influencer whose main content is makeup— you’d look to influencers whose content reflects cooking or lifestyle-related material. If a popular influencer uses your products and reviews them on their social media platforms, their followers are more likely to purchase from you if their favourite influencer likes your products.
One of the biggest examples of affiliate marketing is that of famous YouTubers who have hundreds of thousands of subscribers, if not millions. YouTube is one of today’s biggest social media platforms and is right behind Google when it comes to search engines. And because its content is in video format, viewers can see first-hand how products are used, making it much more convincing to buy.
Consider reaching out to popular YouTubers and other influencers across various social media platforms to see if they’d be interested in trying and reviewing your products. Compensation typically includes anything from sending free products to the influencer or paying them for their review.
Native Advertising
Native advertising is similar to classic marketing techniques, but it is much more targeted and relevant to the audience it’s being shown to. Instead of having your ads run across all social media and on various blogs, native advertising only shows your ads on platforms and to people who are most likely to click on your ad. Again, YouTube is an excellent example of native advertising: the majority of ads placed on videos are relevant to what each individual searches for on Google and other platforms. An example would be ads for kids’ toys shown on YouTube videos that mainly focus on children and families rather than beauty videos.
It’s no secret that ads can get pretty annoying, especially those popping up across different blog sites. It’s even more annoying when the ad has nothing to do with what you’re searching for or what you’re interested in. Native advertising fixes this by showing relevant ads that relate to what the user is looking for, increasing the chances that your ad will be clicked and that they’ll be directed to your website.
Other Platforms – Seeking Paths Less Traveled
Social media is a very powerful tool when it comes to marketing, and many business owners take advantage of using a variety of different platforms. If you feel like you’ve exhausted all options when it comes to social platforms, consider using Usenet to your advantage. Usenet is a social platform where people exchange information, ideas, and various forms of media across a network of servers. Similar to discussion forums, Usenet uses newsgroups to post and download information that other users have shared.
This platform is known as the internet’s “best-kept secret” because there’s tons of information (scholarly and entertaining) that can’t be found anywhere else on the internet. This also means that there’s a whole new audience that your business may not have reached yet. Access the network today to create your own newsgroup for your business to post ads, sales, and even job openings for your business.
Being an entrepreneur requires you to be creative and constantly come up with new ideas. Sometimes you have to take your marketing strategies in a completely new direction and maybe even revisit some older strategies in the future.
