Many people have been talking about all of the different new forms of marketing that businesses can pursue. While traditional marketing has been around for centuries and is still being used today, the internet now plays a massive role in the success of any company, and people are developing more and more different ways to market their services and/or products. To that end, here’s a quick look at a few different ways to market your products and/or services.
Inbound Marketing
This type of marketing is focused on having your business found by customers as opposed to outbound marketing – which is where you reach out directly to them. Things like the inbound call center have been around for years, but the options for inbound marketing have grown with the age of the internet. The thing to keep in mind is that, typically, when the person has the need or want for a service or product, they simply go out to find it. When they run a search on an internet search engine for what they need, the results will show inbound marketing type results. This is the latest form of inbound marketing. Instead of utilizing paid advertisements, this type of marketing is more like an SEO (Search Engine Optimization) portion of marketing on the web.
Outbound
When people think about marketing, the various forms they think about tend to be traditional types of outbound marketing. In actuality, most businesses today use a variety of types of outbound marketing to reach potential customers, think about buying a sturdy xerox printer that can handle large amount of printing if you plan to use flyers, posters, or bandit signs for low cost print marketing. Outbound marketing includes any efforts that are made in order to introduce a service or product to anyone who isn’t actively looking for it. A few examples of this include things like banner ads on websites, billboards, sending newsletters, and cold calling.
Texting
Have you ever signed up at a store to receive text messages? Maybe they tempted you with a certain percentage off of your purchase or a free gift with purchase. This is yet another new type of marketing and one that is effective at getting not just new customers, but also for engendering customer loyalty.
Paid Marketing
While the paid marketing arena has been around for decades, some aspects of it are relatively new. Paid marketing includes quite a few different approaches. There are more traditional approaches, like print media advertising and TV commercials. There’s also internet marketing, and this is where you’ll find the newer approaches. Internet marketing can include things like PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising as well as paid advertising. It reaches massive amounts of people, depending on where the ads are placed. With PPC in particular, it narrows down your cost to those who are actually interested in your product or service.
Offline Marketing
This is the polar opposite of marketing online and it includes any form of marketing that isn’t done online. Some examples of this are advertising locally on TV or in the newspapers. In the marketing world of today, businesses are finding new and innovative ways to leverage their online marketing campaigns with their offline ones to make them complement each other.
Depending on the industry you’re in and your business, you’ll more than likely choose a few different types of marketing that will provide you with the best results. Regardless of the type, there are marketing consultants out there who can (and should) help you with researching and implementing your next campaign. This is a critical part of all marketing and it’s important to remember that you shouldn’t embark on any type of marketing campaign without doing your research first.