10 MARKETING TACTICS THAT ACTUALLY WORK!
Once your marketing goals and budget are in place, it’s time to plan and implement winning marketing tactics in order to successfully execute your marketing strategy. We have assessed a number of marketing tactics to bring you a list of those that actually work!
But first, let’s be clear on the basics…
What Are Marketing Tactics?
Marketing tactics refer to specific actions a marketing team undertakes to implement its marketing strategy and eventually achieve its marketing goals. A marketing team may use not one but several marketing tactics to execute a single marketing strategy.
Some common examples of marketing tactics are: publishing blogs/articles, sending direct emails, posting on social media and putting up billboards.
What Is the Difference Between Marketing Tactics, Marketing Strategies and Content?
A marketing strategy is a marketing team’s overarching plan that utilizes its marketing budget to achieve its marketing goals in a specific period. A marketing tactic, on the other hand, is simply one of the particular ways by which a marketing strategy intends to achieve those goals.
Marketing tactics are like the hands and legs of a marketing strategy, and they should be implemented only after the entire marketing budget is prepared along with the marketing strategy.
Marketing content is the copy and visuals that finally communicate the brand/product information a marketing tactic aims to convey to the brand’s/product’s target audience. Naturally, the creation and publishing of marketing content comes after the ideation of marketing tactics.
10 Marketing Tactics You Can Count On
A good marketer is a perpetual learner, constantly evolving to keep up with societal trends and changes in order to succeed. There’s no guarantee that all marketing tactics that have worked effectively in the past will continue to be as effective in the future. However, tried and tested formulas can be implemented in new ways to still bring home results. And these marketing tactics that have withstood the test of time, can be considered reliable classics. Here’s your list of time-honored marketing tactics that yield rewarding ROIs.
A) Offline or Traditional Marketing Tactics
- Referral Campaigns
A referral program is nothing but a system or scheme that incentivizes customers to promote a brand/product to people in their social circle. The customers usually get a benefit or discount for every customer who makes a purchase through their reference.
Even today, referral programs are very effective at attracting new customers, simply through word-of-mouth.
Here are some tips to create a referral program that works:
- Ensure that the incentive is of enough value to motivate your customers to refer.
- Make sure the referral program is easy to understand and simple.
- Make sure your customers can easily share the referral links with others.
- Track all referrals and purchases to measure the success of your campaign.
- It’s not enough to just create a good referral scheme, ensure that you come up with a promotion plan with enough budgets allocated to create awareness about the referral plan your business is offering. A multi channel marketing plan that spans across traditional as well as digital touchpoints is recommended for best results.
- Press Coverage
Press coverage implies the use of press releases to create buzz about a brand/product. Organic PR or earned media is any media content written about your business, which you have neither paid for, nor created yourself. It can be an exceptionally effective marketing tactic for brands who are in dire need of awareness. A press release allows marketers control over their brand story and the ability to share what they want people’s attention for. An integrated marketing communication strategy for press coverage be it online on social platforms or offline in traditional media can get a brand/product exposed to a large audience. It’s strongly advisable to include this traditional marketing tactic while forming your Go To Market Strategy for a new product or service.
To pique your TG’s interest in your brand, you can make the most of press releases for major announcements such as:
- Launches of brands, products, services or new businesses
- Big contests or events
- New partnerships with community organizations, NGOs or celebrities
- Winning of one or more remarkable awards
- Significant modifications to your business, such as changes in top management, mergers or acquisitions and rebranding.
- Sponsorships
Sponsoring a non-profit organization, webinar, podcast or big event can boost a brand’s reputation through outreach in the eyes of potential customers. It is one of the most popular traditional marketing tactics because of its simplicity in reaching a wide audience. The brand can also get many free mentions on social media.
You can offer different kinds of sponsorships such as:
- Financial Sponsorships:
This is the most common type of sponsorship wherein you offer funds for publicity or perks. - Products or Services Sponsorships:
In this type of sponsorship, you provide your brand’s products/services for the event instead of funds. The products/services, with their branding, themselves publicize your brand at the event. - Media or Promotional Sponsorships:
You utilize your own multi channel marketing resources for the promotion of the event, mentioning or exposing your brand to all the attendees and viewers in the best light.
- Customer Loyalty Programs
Customer retention is key to sustaining the profitability of a business. A customer loyalty program offers special discounts or benefits to reward a brand’s regular customers, thereby encouraging new ones to engage with the brand more frequently and at a deeper level. It generates a sense of belonging among regular customers, improves customer retention, increases customer satisfaction, enriches your customer database, understanding and, of course, drives sales.
Introducing customer loyalty programs is a great idea for incentivising your customers to make recurring purchases of your brand’s products/services. Fast moving consumer goods, subscription based models, movie theaters, hotels are some apt examples of businesses that are known to benefit significantly from engaging customer loyalty programs.
- Publishing Original Research
Tobacco, sugar and cola manufacturers have been leveraging this marketing tactic for years.It is of great marketing advantage to conduct and publish groundbreaking, eye-opening and reliable original research that supports the value proposition of your brand and generates awareness about relevant facts in your target audience. It establishes brand authority, generates good PR, drives online traffic, generates leads and even supports SEO efforts through backlinks.
Conducting original research can be an expensive and challenging marketing tactic, but it can work wonders in getting your brand to beat its competitors and be seen as the undisputed best in its category. Original research has the power to generate demand for even a whole new category of products/services – by highlighting the major problems it solves or refuting the concerns raised against it. Think about all the studies you’ve heard about Garcinia Cambogia, caffeine, magnesium and how the hemp industry successfully created a whole new market for hemp products like clothing, flour and oils supporting it with the investment in R&D and publishing original research. This marketing tactic can successfully be employed to be part of your go to market strategy for launching unconventional products/services or new businesses that need a headstart in the market.
B) Online or Digital Marketing Tactics
- Executing PPC Ad Campaigns
Pay-per-click (PPC) is a digital marketing model which makes the marketed business pay a certain fee every time its ad is clicked/tapped on. The business can bid on relevant keywords, after which the algorithm of a search engine like Google decides where the business’s ad will be visible when someone searches online for those particular keywords. You’ll need experienced PPC experts to run your paid campaigns with engaging creatives, persuasive copy, optimized bidding and well-researched keywords. Click here for getting in touch with Pop Communications for creating and executing creative and result-oriented PPC ads as well as analyzing their performance for you.
Executing PPC ad campaigns can be a quick and cost-effective way to reach your target audience as they themselves are actively searching for the products/services of your brand’s category and therefore are more likely to visit your website and make a purchase.
According to Google’s estimates, the businesses that run Google Ads earn eight times the amount of their ad spends. Nike’s PPC ad campaigns made the brand’s website show up as the topmost Google search result for the keyword ‘shoes’.
PPC advertising requires you to have a landing page that can handle traffic, so make sure yours is capable of handling the expected traffic you wish to generate. When used correctly, PPC advertising has immense potential to skyrocket sales, undeniably the reason why so many businesses invest in it. In fact, as per data by Insider Intelligence, search engine ad spends will continue having double-digit growth, reaching $111.8 billion in the year 2023.
- Interactive Content
Interactive content makes viewers engage with it by ‘taking an action.’ Quizzes and polls are the most popular types of interactive content found online, but many brands invest in detailed, multi-step online games to promote themselves and their products. This is called ‘gamification in marketing’ or, in other words, marketing content disguised as a game. Some of the common actions that interactive posts prompt viewers to take include replying with a comment in the comments section, tapping a button from a set of options, moving a slider to rate something on a scale and even using AR filters. As per data by Gloam, the engagement from AR filters is 4 times the engagement from mobile videos, and AR filters’ memory recall is 70% more than that of non-AR content.
Interactive content increases the time your existing and potential customers spend engaging with your brand as well as with each other on your brand’s social media pages. It can increase traffic on social media platforms, websites and mobile apps. And today, digital platforms like Instagram and Facebook have made it quite easy to post interactive content. So, you don’t even need skilled coders, app developers and spend enormous amounts of money to tap into the power of interactive content and gamification. All you need is some creative people who can come up with novel ideas and create engaging posts for social media platforms.
Pop Communications is an integrated marketing communication agency, brimming with talented creative professionals that can help escalate your brand engagement with dynamic, interactive content for your social media platforms including AR filters.
Source : Pop Communications
- Personalized Offers
Personalization of offers or discounts is one of the most high-yielding digital marketing tactics to drive online sales. And this process is easy to automate. Using machine learning algorithms and AI tools that collect and analyze behavioral data of enormous sets of online shoppers, individual online shoppers can be given personalized offers according to their preferences.
Using such tools businesses can offer exclusive discounts to customers based on various relevant factors such as their age, occupation, gender, financial status, location, race, culture, ambitions, brand loyalty, etc. This marketing tactic is where cutting-edge technology can be used to its full potential. Ecommerce brands must invest in a developed digital infrastructure to pull off this advanced marketing tactic like a pro. Successful brands in the fashion industry like Zara are already reaping its advantages for years. A simple ‘You may also like’ suggestion on Amazon and numerous other websites has proven to increase the checkout cart value of customers.
- Increasing Email Subscribers
The email marketing channel has proven to be one of the most effective ones at a contemporary marketer’s disposal for driving sales and, especially, retargeting customers. A vast email subscriber base will always reward your business whenever it launches a new product/service and wants to inform and educate its customers about it.
Emails offer a more intimate and personal interaction than the countless posts we see when we get on a social media platform like Facebook. People tend to be more attentive towards the messages in their personal inboxes as compared to their social feeds. Moreover, emails allow you the space to communicate information that cannot fit into a social post.
To begin reaping the benefits of email marketing, be regular in sending out newsletters, articles/blogs and any other helpful or interesting content to increase and retain your subscribers. Encourage website and social media visitors to subscribe for updates on email by requesting them upfront. Also, don’t neglect middle-of-the-funnel content, like content offering valuable lead magnets, for increasing your subscription base. Engaging your email subscribers, as a marketing tactic, can be a remarkably effective part of your go to market strategy as well for launching a new product within your brand by leveraging the goodwill it has already garnered with your customers and subscribers.
- Optimizing Content for Searches
You just can’t turn a blind eye to SEO in digital marketing. Think of SEO like the roadmap leading your customers to you. They won’t know your business exists if you don’t give them directions. All the investment in creating a user-friendly, powerful website and numerous well crafted blogs is a waste if they don’t show up on Google’s first 2 pages. That’s where Pop Communications can help you bring in organic traffic – by evaluating and selecting the right keywords and optimizing all your content so that your website ranks higher and shows up right in front of high-intent buyers when they’re searching for similar products and services. Other than optimizing your website content to rank higher on search engine results pages, optimizing the content in your social media bios, post captions and ad captions can go a long way in getting your brand/business discovered by people who are actively looking for it. The most rewarding social media platforms for SEO right now are Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn. Users have now started using them like any other search engine, typing in keywords to search for images on topics they’re interested in. Make sure you enrich your text with focus and secondary keywords, and plug in the most popular of the relevant hashtags as well. Also add links to your website in your bios to your direct social media traffic to it and increase conversions.
C) Integrated Marketing Communication (IMC)
IMC is analogous to a well-oiled machine in which different parts work in coordination to achieve a unified result.
What is integrated marketing communication?
Integrated marketing communication is a collaborative and strategic multi channel marketing tactic to target potential customers with consistent brand messaging through multiple mediums of marketing in a coordinated manner to lead the potential customers towards conversion.
Simply put, it is the optimal implementation of all your marketing tactics – offline as well as online – to amplify the effectiveness of your marketing campaign and profoundly convey your brand messaging to the target audience. Big players in every industry know the value Integrated Marketing brings and hence ensure their campaigns touch across touchpoints with the same messaging to increase brand recall. The Barbie movie campaign with an incredible 150 million dollar budget left no stone unturned to reach their target audience and the world is witnessing them reap its benefits. This doesn’t mean you need millions of dollars to pull off an IMC, with the right strategy and thoughtfully chosen media even SME’s can execute integrated marketing campaigns to their advantage.
Pop Communications can be your one-stop integrated marketing solution provider. If your business needs support in executing any of the above marketing tactics you can reach us at
Email: [email protected] | Call: +1 647 846 6601.
Partnering with us could be the only marketing tactic you need! 🙂
Good luck with your marketing endeavors.