11+ Best Marketing Strategies to Fuel Your Business Growth

Growing a business isn’t a simple task.

And the heart of any business’s success lies in its marketing. Without the right marketing strategies to power your business, generating a profit and staying afloat is virtually unattainable.

So what are the best marketing strategies to use?

Obviously, there is no clear answer to this question as the market never stops changing. So do the consumers. However, some of the most crucial factors for a strong marketing strategy has proved that they can stand the test of time.

This post is designed to help you explore best marketing strategies for any business over time.

Table of contents

• What makes a marketing strategy powerful and competitive
  • Customer-centric mindset
  • A business’s marketing funnel
• Top 11+ marketing strategies for your business
  • Focus on persona-based marketing strategies
    • Audience segmentation
    • Brand storytelling
    • Build responsive communication
  • Content marketing strategies
    • Let data lead your creation
    • Create educational content
    • Keep content updated
    • Harness User-Generated Content
    • Make use of content to fuel SEO
  • Email marketing strategies
    • Growing email subscriptions
    • Make your email content mobile responsive
  • Launch a referral program
  • Prioritize customer retention
• Do you have any strategy in mind?

What makes a marketing strategy powerful and competitive

Customer-centric mindset

Advanced technology has created colossal opportunities for marketing, creating a rise of customer power to businesses.

The digital world has made it much easier for everyone to shop around and find exactly whatever they desire. This convenience leads to “a dispensable phenomenon” that the levels of customer expectation increase while their loyalty to a brand decreases.

However, getting the balance wrong will give consumers too much power. You will put your business in a completely unsustainable position in the long run.

What strategies can help your business face the problematic shift in power between companies and modern customers?

A business’s marketing funnel

To get the most out of your marketing efforts, the marketing funnel is a “must-have” condition.

For those who don’t know, a marketing funnel is where you map out each step your customers need to go through to, from prospects to purchasers and loyal customers afterward.

In each stage of the funnel, customers will have different desires, wants, and needs. Of course, they need specific conditions to keep engaged with a brand. As a marketer or entrepreneur, you can know exactly customers’ touchpoints to meet their expectations via a detailed marketing funnel.

A marketing funnel is an essential guide that enables you to prioritize, organize, and implement all your marketing strategies smoothly and efficiently. Its benefits are countless and indispensable for a business’s long-term success.

Top 11 marketing strategies for your business

Focus on persona-based marketing strategies

A persona-based strategy is a form of customer-centric marketing and plays a vital role in your marketing funnel building process.

A buyer persona is a combination of market research and customer interviews. It focuses on targeting and reaching the business’s high-fit prospects for better sales and marketing results.

The more you put attention to understanding customers and try to put yourself in their shoes when marketing, the better you can hone your message to resonate with them.

Some suggestions below will give you great ideas to fuel your current marketing strategy for unexpected results.

Read more:

• 5 Magento Personalization Strategies to Boost Revenue
• 3 Practical Ways To Offer Meaningful Personalization

Audience segmentation

Each customer is an individual, and no one is the same.

Customers today only care about what really matters and is relevant to them. That’s why in a world filled with digital noise, the unwarranted or general content is much harder to catch Internet users’ attention.

Applying the right audience segmentation strategy will help you avoid mediocrity as it makes your marketing effort more personalized. Some benefits of this strategy I can list:

• Identify your target audience with a high possibility to be converted into purchasers and loyal customers
• Tailor your content marketing messages to resonate specifically with different segments
• Know the specific needs of each audience segments to meet their expectations, hence drive up conversion rates
• Identify the crucial touchpoints for relationship building with the customers and earn their loyalty
• Give the right solutions for each customer segments’ pain points

Audience segmentation is the base of a logical and efficient marketing funnel. You can start with creating a customer persona meant to represent your ideal customer via some steps below:

• Based on your ideal customers’ work address, hobbies and interests, pain points, etc
• Then, conduct some research about your real customer persona through social media analytics, survey, interview or available relevant data, etc

Once you have finished creating those personas, you can separate them into specific groups, for example:

• Demographics
• Behavior
• Buyer’s journey progress
• Engagement level

Brand storytelling

It’s great that your company offers a perfect solution to the customer’s pain point.

However, solving your customer’s problems might not be enough these days because there are thousands of businesses out there that can offer the products as better as yours.

This is where a strong brand story can help. A master storyteller’s written book can draw its readers in and keeps them hooked. This goes the same with brand storytelling. Just remember that the human brain is programmed to crave and respond to a well-crafted narrative.

So your job is to tell a story that resonates on an emotional level with your audience and stick it to your brand. Emotions will make your brand more human, hence have a deeper relationship with your consumers.

Build responsive communication

Emarketer discovered that 63% of customers were more likely to return to a website that offers live chat. And 38% of consumers are more likely to buy from a business if they offer live chat support.

Those statistics show us 2 things.

• Today customers are less patient than ever before
• Customers really care about direct and responsive communications with the brands offering their wanted products

A fast response when a customer reaches out to you can have a significant impact on your building’s first impression

Before doing business with a brand, customers will hope to reach a real person at a company. And thanks to the convenience of the Internet, online channels of communication are considered as the most prominent type of direct marketing.

The time waiting for a brand’s response will affect their looks of its customer service. In some worse situations, customers won’t hesitate to find a new company if the response is too slow.

With the help of advanced technology, leveraging your human touch with customers with responsive communication such as:

• Being quick to email or call from customers who have difficulty with your products

• Provide real-time customer support with live chat

Content marketing strategies

Let data lead your creation

If you are anything like me, having basing yourself about what to write countless times. Then building a topic research plan can help you.

Whatever we do from making a chart-topping blog post, an ebook, or daily posts on the web, content is dispensable. However, not anytime, we can come up with excellent ideas that are new and compelling to the target audience.

That’s why most businesses need support from SEMrush tools to know exactly what their audience cares about and talk about on the Internet. Then write the content to meet their needs.

Besides SEMrush tools, some advice below can make your content work most effective:

• As a content creator, start visiting websites that your customers like and note down common pieces of content

• Catch trends fastly to be able to gain massive exposure for your content. Then identify the words or topics that ordinary readers use to discuss current events

• Pay attention to the news around your brand, your market and make your content resource always updated

• Analyze your competitors’ content and note down all the points they work best to optimize your content

Create educational content

No doubt content is king, and educational content is added value that makes you different.

The first step a potential customer takes when determining whether a product or service is right for them. To make a purchase decision, customers tend to search and find relevant content about all the available options.

This means businesses should focus more on educational content rather than promotional ones. Why? Because our customers don’t like to be sold.

Educational content makes customers think that they receive value from the brand, instead of the feeling of being lost money for your products.

Educational content typically takes the form of:

• Blog posts, product pages, your home page
• Your company’s “about” page
• Tutorials, reviews
• Other content that provides your customers with the information they need to make purchasing decisions

Ways to create valuable educational content:

• Focus one teaching your target customers, not about your business and offerings
• Write content that is based on the questions or concerns of the customers
• Conduct research about different customer segments of your industry to have suitable content for each group
• Consider the problems customers meet, then find how your products relieve those issues to make their lives easier

Copywriting and educational content go hand-in-hand. They are both crucial in a comprehensive content marketing strategy. However, as a marketer, knowing the balance point between them will become your critical success factor.

Keep content updated

Any content has its own expiration date. Some can become “old” within a few weeks, while some content types can stand the test of time. Whatever situation you are, there’s definitely a day that content becomes old enough to harm your business.

Usually, you can define whether the content needs to be updated based on its CTR. If that rate is low, then it’s time for you to renew it.

Some ideas to update your content:

• Check your title and description to make sure it contains relevant keywords but still eye-catching for readers
• For poorly-performing content, re-read it and try to improve your writing style to make it punchier and readable
• Make a list of content that is in little search traffic. Then prioritize which content shows up the most potential value to start first
• Check if whether your content contains outdated information to update
• Make sure all the old links you put on your past content still work. If not, just remove more or change it
• Add note like “Updated on” near the beginning or at the end of the post to notice customers your content is renewed

Updating old content is a strategy that can result in better search rankings and increase your chances of being discovered by new customers, hence more traffic.

Harness User-Generated Content

The highest level of selling is to let your customers do it for you. Over 70% of consumers look at product reviews before making a purchase

Thanks to the popularity of the Internet, anyone can be an author or reviewer. And even the smallest voice can be heard, especially when it comes to negative news. There’s one truth that a person’s mind is more attracted to bad news than good ones.

So how could you entice your customers to leave comments, reviews, or write content related to your brand or product?

User-generated content is naturally made if a brand’s product or service can satisfy the customers and alleviate their pain points. Then, there are 6 ways for businesses to harness their content marketing based on UGC:

• Use the referral program to entice buyers for inviting their friends and families to try the product
• Host contests on social media with unique hashtags. Then, get your followers to contribute to your hashtag (share, repost, or comment)
• Incentivize your customers to write reviews on their social accounts or your webs by providing them with coupons, rewards points, gifts, etc
• Facilitate customers to leave reviews by getting rid of all the unnecessary step and display those reviews on your web (used for eCommerce web)
• Interact with your current customers on their social accounts (for example: happy birthday to some customers and give them a discount on their special day)
• Say thanks to folks who mention you on their personal accounts

One last thing, UGC can be extraordinarily beneficial and harmful at the same time. As anyone can become an author, a business can hardly control everything customers talk about on the Internet, mostly the bad reviews.

Monitoring what customers are talking about your brand is truly important to deal with any negative information before it actually damages your reputation.

Make use of content to fuel SEO

Content creation these days is not as easy as it used to be in the past, especially in a world where anyone can be an author.

If you search for any keyword or question on Google, you can see thousands of posts with the same topics. And most readers care about the top 10 posts Google gives them.

Optimizing your content design to readers’ experience can enhance your chances of attracting new leads, therefore higher conversions.

Though SEO is a large aspect of digital marketing, your content is the fundament that fuels each of the SEO components. Without content, you have no place to put keywords, no post to give customers valuable information, and no links for other partners to link to.

So always consider your readers first and foremost to create something that truly delivers value to your audience and makes them heavily engaging. Then your content and SEO strategy succeed.

Email marketing strategies

Growing email subscriptions

First’s thing first!

An email list includes names and email addresses of people who subscribe to your web or any channel to receive updates and promotional information.

Email subscribers are valuable soft leads that could end up one day as full-fledged customers with the right interaction. The crucial role of email marketing as a bridge connecting customers with business is undeniable.

Some of the most effective ways to grow your email list:

• Run a giveaway and ask customers to subscribe to receive it
• Create multiple lead magnet pages
• Use discounts and deals as incentives for email subscribers
• Add sign up call to action on your Facebook page
• Make use of the header area of your web to place the call to action
• Use social proof to encourage for sign-ups

Make your email content mobile responsive

According to Campaign Monitor, mobile opens accounted for 68% of all email opens. The email with a mobile-friendly design is no longer just nice to have.

Make sure your email looks great no matter where it’s read. To do that, some quick mobile design tips that you should not get left:

• Bump up the font size to improve readability on smartphones
• Use one column template on your emails for an easy mobile fix
• Follow the IOS guideline of buttons (at least, 44px wide by 44px tall)
• Make the CTA button obvious, and its size is easy to tap (prefer to place it above the fold)
• Think about ergonomics. Lots of users tap and scroll with their thumb, so put main elements in the middle of the screen
• Test your email across multiple devices before sending it

Launch a referral program

Word of mouth (WOM) is one of the most effective forms of marketing and the most challenging to control. Nielsen’s study even shows that 92% of consumers around the world trust referrals from their peers.

A referral program is a marketing term used to describe when businesses incentivize people to tell others about their products or services - a particular type of promotion.

At the same time, referral programs enable a business owner to identify its loyal customers. They can be the customers with a high amount of accumulated points or large amounts of sent referrals, etc. Then the business can reward their effort to make them feel important.

What’s notable, the referral clients turn out more valuable to a business than normal ones because they already have a positive attitude toward your company.

So it will be a waste if you could not take advantage of them to be more profitable.

Prioritize customer retention

Customer acquisition and retention strategies are the 2 most crucial critical parts of a business operation. So which one will be more beneficial?

While new businesses require to push hard for the first, a focus on customer retention strategy is the winning key in the medium and long term.

Here are some main reasons why customer retention needs to be prioritized:

• Brands can take advantage of customer lifetime value
• Repeat customers tend to spend more on brands than the new ones
• Save your money and marketing effort. Acquiring new customers costs 5 times that keeping an existing customer
• Repeat customers will become your free brand ambassadors

Investing in retention strategies costs you less and makes you more.

Read more:

• What is the Customer Retention Rate?
• What is a Marketing Plan?
• Best B2B marketing strategies
• Best Magento 2 SEO Setting

Do you have any strategy in mind?

With the number of competitors increasing every year, your marketing strategies are crucial to standing out and be recognized by new and loyal customers. Make sure all your strategies are a combination of specific data, customers, and business goals.

I hope this post can give you some great insight and ideas on how to bloom your strategy to be different.