Can you Promote Your Business without a Marketing Consultant?
There are many marketing techniques you can use to advertise your business. But what happens if you do not know how to use them? What can you do in this case? It is quite simple: learn the basics of online marketing, and you will be able to develop your own marketing strategy.
No, you do not have to go back to school for this. All you have to do is to check the differences between particular marketing techniques available today.
Inbound versus Outbound Marketing
Formerly called “pull” marketing, inbound marketing proposes specific techniques that focus on attracting the people already looking for your services or products to your business. Some inbound marketing techniques include:
- making your business easy to find online;
- engaging site visitors in discussions through comment forms or social media sites;
- offering interesting, relevant content via your blog, podcasts, and social media.
In contrast, outbound marketing, initially referred to as “push” marketing, is more “aggressive”, imposing the use of particular techniques without regard for consumers’ desires and without their consent. The most commonly used outbound marketing techniques are telemarketing, print advertising, billboards, and email advertising.
Unfortunately, when it comes down to choosing the best marketing approach, there are no silver bullets. This means that you have to understand what people really want, and combine various traditional and digital marketing tools in order to craft an effective marketing mix. Concisely, you need to figure out what exactly works for your business.
But regardless of how hard you try, you will come to the same conclusion as we did: there are no shortcuts in marketing. The only thing you can do to create an effective online marketing strategy and gain an unparalleled competitive advantage over your competitors is to connect different marketing dots in new, unique, and even unexpected ways.
7 Easy Ways to Promote Your Business
If you are new to marketing, finding out where and how to begin can be challenging. What exactly do you have to do first? Are certain marketing techniques better than others? In this section, we will take a look at the most important aspects to consider before developing your marketing strategy.
1. Direction. As soon as you establish a particular direction you wish to follow, you have great chances to develop a more unified marketing strategy, so there are no disturbing discrepancies regarding ideas and content presentation style.
2. Website. The second thing you need to do to position yourself as an expert in your field is to create a professional looking website.
3. Create a blog. Adding a blog to your site is imperative not only to attract clients, but also to offer them one of the most valuable things in the world: accurate, timely information.
4. Target audience. Knowing who your potential customers are can help you understand what services they expect from you, and how you can meet and even exceed their expectations.
5. Community. Participating in local activities is an excellent way to build brand awareness and advertise your business. You could consider volunteering, such as teaching a class for free, sponsoring or hosting events, and joining groups that have the same interests as you.
6. Local media. If you are running a local business, promoting it locally is as important as advertising it across the World Wide Web. To do this, you should use specific traditional” marketing methods, including print, radio, and TV advertising.
7. Email marketing. Email marketing can help you achieve incredible results. The easiest way to ensure that only the customers and leads who have expressed their interest are receiving your emails is to have a form that visitors can use to sign up for your email newsletter. To discover the best practices in email marketing, we invite you to download our guide, “Understanding email deliverability“.