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From the TheGenieLab US - TheGenieLab Blog blog

1. Content
2. Referral
3. Email
4. Instagram
5. Facebook

Content Marketing

This activity is the creation and distribution of content that’s relevant to your business, your market, and your customers. The goal is to drive the audience towards positive action with an increase in mindshare of your brand, business ethos and well being of your client base.

This being a long and enduring strategy, it reinforces more direct marketing activity by not directly selling but adding value to your audience in both knowledge and strategies that matter to their business/consumer needs. 

Examples of this activity are Blogs, Columns in newspapers, Product reviews using Youtube channel, Facebook reviews, Experiences and all practical aspects of products/services that are within your industry using products/services that are being offered.

With today’s social media tools, you can view your engagements and views of your content, giving you a measure of how to direct and improve your effectiveness in this area.

eCommerce Application:  In the likes of Shopify, your shop can incorporate your Blogs just like this one to then propagate them into your social media/email marketing.

Referral Marketing

This type of marketing leverages your existing customers to bring in new customers.

Better known as word-of-mouth marketing, a scheme must be set up that’s both easy and attractive for telling your friends and relatives to take action and engage.   This is most successful with trending products/services that the clientele values the benefits.

Examples of this could be a “Tell a Friend” referral click (sending an email to your friends/family) on saving 10% of your energy bill and get a 5% discount on next bill if they sign up. Benefitting both the customer and the recipient of the referral.

There are a couple of advantages in using this method vs. direct advertising.   The trusted initiating client has already engaged with your business, so their referral brings a higher level of trust if they recommend it.   Secondly, it is more targeted since your client will identify people that might be interested in your product/service, to begin with. Relating the scheme to a larger audience need is the tricky part – the scheme cannot be too complicated in qualifying, and must be easily understood/seen as the benefit shows up in their bills.

eCommerce Application:  Smile.io is a popular and well-established loyalty/referral app along with Loyalty Lion, Swell Rewards, ReferralCandy, and several others.  Select which platform your store belongs to and see the apps being offered.

Email Marketing

This is both a method of communication (channel) and a method of advertising in one. You can target audiences with advertising on your products/services by having clients subscribe to an Email listing to be kept in touch with your business. However, Email fits in with referral, content and even social media notifications/messages.

From a marketing method in promoting your brand/product/services, Drip Marketing would be an approach that would be a strong foundation in bringing your message consistently in the public square. This requires frequency, content, and a strategy to keep the audience interested and looking forward to your next “drip”.

Leads vs. Existing clients make up 2 different lists for 2 different types of messaging, thus targeting client listings differently. Organizing and obtaining such mailing lists are at times difficult to obtain other than organically capturing interest and having clients register.

 

Instagram Marketing

They say that pictures are worth 1000 words, and when it comes to products, that can definitely be a benefit. Showing your products placed in desirable environments, lifestyle examples to which your client base would aspire to will get your brand/product the mindshare desired.

Instagram being a social network platform where social engagements take place is a very dynamic environment for product placement, for Celebrity endorsements, sharing to your followers an awesome lifestyle shot and following other key market leaders in your business space. 

This does take time and devotion to nurture and mature, which is another long term strategy but one that will deepen your loyal clients with testimonials and customer satisfaction. Visuals are very powerful in influence, branding, and lifestyle – using the right tools between social platforms, and working with your following can yield strong results in your market presence.

eCommerce Application:  The integration of your Instagram library can easily be done in your Shopify homepage with various apps - connecting your feed to your page.

Facebook Marketing

Facebook has different facets where it can promote your blogs, to direct marketing. Given the wide range of communication in both content and pictures, links that can promote, links that can refer, video, testimonials, the possibilities are endless. What has to happen is that you have to have a plan on what’s best on how your client engagement will yield the best-qualified leads.

If a Facebook page gets subscribers to see your business communication and activity, then the page is set up to be an outbound communication page.   Unless you are a large corporate, it is difficult to get engagement if you are a small business. A page that gets your clients to post their products, or how they are using your products have much greater engagement. Even a closed FB page or a group/fan of a product or service can be a lot more effective. How you cultivate your clients' engagement around your page is up to you, the rules you set on your page and how you moderate the page and its contents.

Facebook advertisement can be broad or targeted as FB profiles people, their interest and their engagement behaviors which allows you to make a video/static advertisement and set it up to be in their newsfeed. These ads are analytical in nature and will capture “likes/shares”, comments and other engagements and give you a timed response graph on how well that advert performed.

Much like all the above marketing, Facebook is also a long-term strategy since it records and shows historical posts, engagements, comments, and can even have a library of knowledge-base of your product/services with Q&A already built-in. The ability to message the business and reaching someone is a key factor in turning a hot lead to a customer. It is a time-consuming activity to grow your subscribers, moderate the pages and promote the ads – but when done with coordination with other social media outlets, this platform can be quite powerful in how your business/brand is promoted.

 

Conclusion

There are well over 100+ marketing methods to consider, all of which are derivatives of one another or have a very targeted specific method for a particular product/service. These top 5 cover today’s priorities in market presence for most businesses in a lot of industries. There is no “right way” to do this, but one thing for sure is if you have the right product/service these methods can promote themselves with the successes of your clients in mind – and let your clients do your marketing.