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Especially if you’re a small business, you know your biggest marketing dilemmas are knowing how to keep pace with the preferences of your target customers and how to stay on top of overall marketing trends.

After all, to excel in marketing you must devise the most-effective marketing strategy and expertly implement it for trust in the marketplace. All of this requires expertise, time and energy.

Your options are many.

Success is possible if you’re expert in 11 strategies:

1. Content marketing
2. Social Media
3. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
4. Emailing
5. Developing “centers of influence”
6. Public relations and earned media
7. Landing pages
8. Advertising
9. Affiliate marketing
10. Retargeting
11. Artificial Intelligence

1. Content marketing

Competition in content marketing is strong. Published reports indicate there are 600 million blogs on Google.  It’s estimated there are 4.19 million registered podcasts. Webinars keeping increasing (see The Ultimate List of Webinar Statistics for 2014).

The most successful strategies are masterful in engaging audiences in helping to tell your brand’s story enroute to becoming regarded as an authority.

Helpful elements include content writing, infographics, videos and podcasts.

You can maximize your sales pipeline with effective content marketing, prioritizing follow-up and marketing automation.

2. Social Media

Social media can be instrumental in generating leads, for customer service and for expanding your sales channel.

Social media can also help you target a specific type of audience.

For example, to target conservatives, truthsocial.com is effective because of its loyal audience. That’s despite its market cap being much smaller than x.com.

To reach a professional audience, consider linkedin.com.

In terms of users in 2024, the three largest are Facebook, YouTube and Instagram, according to statista.com.

Naturally, video marketing on social mediums is very popular for brand visibility and for increasing your site’s traffic.

In essence, to develop an engaged audience, capitalize on social media to grow your audience.

3. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO is a marketing tactic to increase your site’s presence on the Internet. For competitive visibility, it is important to incorporate the keywords, the words used by Internet users to find what they want.

No. 1 organic ranking is of paramount importance to connect with people in ecommerce and blogging. Here’s how: 10 SEO Strategies for Best Organic Search Engine Ranking.

4. Emailing

Countless marketers use email. The best email marketing develops trust with readers to build relationships.

If you pick the right subject and time, you’ll increase your odds for the most-opening and clicking rates. The trick is in knowing when to send your marketing emails.

For a great return on your investment, a newsletter is a terrific tool in your marketing mix. Why? Your prospects and customers have signed up for a subscription. It’s best to add a popup to your site to sign up readers, and then to outshine your competitors  with a top newsletter.

5. Developing “centers of influence”

An influencer is someone to promotes your brand. Typically, a center of influence is a person who is respected as an authority to enable her or him to persuade prospects to consider you, your products and/or services.

This is also called referral marketing or word-of-mouth marketing. Ideally, you will profit from word-of-mouth advertising and customer service.

6. Public relations and earned media

You will gain an advantage if you generate positive publicity. That can come from radio, TV, newspapers, bloggers, newspapers and podcasts.

Raymond Loewy, the iconic father of industrial design and the world’s leading expert in creating visuals, probably helped to sell the most products in history. Mr. Loewy taught us public relations — how to get noticed with the.best business PR.

A Bill Gates quote on PR is famous and typifies why PR is so valuable.

Newsjacking is valuable because it’s the art and science of obtaining mountains of free media coverage and social-media spin by getting your content injected into late-breaking news stories.

7. Landing pages

A landing page is making a comeback as a stand-alone page to convert readers. The obstacle occurs if a landing page is slow to load. If so, you will lose visitors.

See eight landing-page tips.

8. Advertising

Naturally, your advertising options are voluminous. First though, you must consider your audience, cost and budget, the timing and length of your marketing campaign, and your options.

For most advertisers, marketing segmentation is vital. Marketing segmentation is a strategy that enables you to divide a broad target into subsets of businesses, consumers and voters – based on their common interests.

It can be done affordably — without expensive research — using radio as a tool.

Are you at a point at which you want to advertise your company on the Internet? But you’re unsure which sites are the best for you? There are nine ways to evaluate online options.

9. Affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing involves having paid partnerships so other parties promote your brand.

It’s accomplished when they market you on their blogging or social-media platforms. Their affiliate links enable them to be paid on results.

You have dozens of affiliate options.

10. Retargeting

Retargeting helps you reach people who are acquainted with your business and have shown at least some interest. Retargeting shows ads to them.

Retargeting increases brand awareness, generates leads, and increases sales.

But be careful:  Use eight ways to get transparency from your retargeting campaigns.

11. Artificial Intelligence (AI)

You will create happy customers by generating insights into data and consumer patterns in marketing with AI.

From the Coach’s Corner, here additional marketing and sales strategies:

To Boost Sales, Do You Need to Refresh Your Brand? — A rebrand is more complex and entails an overhaul of your identity – ranging from renaming your company and logo to altering your business values customer targets. A brand refresh simply involves a more contemporary approach to invigorate sales.

Use Consumer Psychology to Attract Customers – In the selling process, you must be aware of micro-moments. That’s when emotional seeds are planted in the minds of consumers that motivate them to do something. Not to oversimplify, in essence, consumers have four micro-moments.

Responding and Capitalizing on Negative Online Reviews – While bad reviews are disconcerting, there is a silver lining. Why? Ironically, bad reviews can lead to positive results for your business success. Here’s how.

Small Business Marketing, $ales – 7 Digital Strategies — For small-business marketing and sales success, consider artificial intelligence (AI) and augmented reality (AR).

Plan for Business Profits Using the 7 Ps of Marketing — After 250 years in the various stages of marketing, the 7 Ps of marketing are the crème de la crème in checklists to earn optimal profits.

“The best marketing doesn’t feel like marketing.”

-Tom Fishburne

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Author Terry Corbell has written innumerable online business-enhancement articles, and is a business-performance consultant and profit professional. Click here to see his management services. For a complimentary chat about your business situation or to schedule him as a speaker, consultant or author, please contact Terry.