A marketer is like a mixing engineer: always in need to find the right balance for each channel to maximise global revenue and ROI. But prior to balancing the mix, there is a great deal of work to be done finding the right marketing channels. Which makes it essential to always stay in the front line of technology and new marketing techniques.
Marketing strategies can vary greatly from one business to another, depending on what you want to achieve. Two different approaches can mainly be distinguished: brand awareness and a more direct sales focused one.
Brand awareness can be achieved through advertising, on TV or billboards for example. This approach would be deemed more traditional in this internet age and its impact on sales is more difficult to quantify, but this does not mean the technique is not profitable. Brand awareness is important and will help you improve all your other marketing channels by making your brand and name recognisable by a wider audience. In addition, we will see later that brand awareness can be achieved through channels considered as more direct.
In these pages we will mainly focus on online marketing techniques, the best ones when it comes to measure return on investment: all your channels can be tracked, making it easy to check spend and revenue at a glance. The scope of online marketing techniques is vast and we will pick out some of the most renowned ones that could help you achieve your targets: PPC, SEO, Email Marketing and Social Media.
When it comes to PPC we will mainly focus on Google as it still accounts for around 90% of all web searches in the UK. However, the generic tips and techniques can also be applied to other search engines like Bing for example.
Search Engine Optimisation or SEO can be one of the cheapest ways to generate leads and sales but it takes constant efforts to get good rankings. We will look at the best practises and ways to achieve popularity for your online content.
Getting great results from Email Marketing is not as simple as it used to be 15 years ago but we will see that with a little bit of work you can still achieve great profit through this channel.
Finally we will look at how to interact with the massive number of users on social media platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter or YouTube, to increase your business sales.
