Marketing refers to all efforts made to popularize a product or service among consumers, like communication, promotion, advertisement, etc. The marketing strategy of a business determines the level of its sales and revenue. Marketers have always used the best possible marketing strategies that could be successful according to their time.
Marketing is not something new; it was always a crucial part of businesses. But marketing in the 21st century has become a completely different thing. In the past, business owners and marketers had only a limited number of platforms to run ads for their products and services on, like TV and radio or print ads in magazines and billboards. But as technology developed rapidly in the 21st century, it completely changed the game of business and marketing.
Now marketers have a huge range of platforms to promote their products, which means new marketing strategies are needed. With the advancement in every field of business, marketers have also adopted new strategies. Here are five things that define marketing in the 21st century.
1. Online Marketing:
Without a website, it is impossible for a business to thrive nowadays. The Internet has made it fairly easy to shop online. Most of your customers search for your products or services online and expect to place an order online, too. Thus, you need to have a strong online presence and utilize online marketing tools to make your marketing strategies successful. It is like inbound marketing.
Inbound marketing means utilizing all possible digital marketing tools to make a potential customer interact more with your business or brand. So instead of sharing a message, you are bringing a potential customer to your website.
You can work with a reputable company to make an online marketing plan for your business according to your customers’ needs. Every business’s nature is different, every business’s consumers are different, and thus every business requires a personalized online marketing plan.
2. Social Media Marketing:
Social marketing is the top marketing trend in the 21st century. Social media is not only used to communicate, post pictures, or just tweet about your favorite things. Now it has become a hub for online shopping. And this is a platform every business owner must utilize to market their products and services. There are different ways to use social media for marketing purposes.
First, just like a website, businesses must have official business accounts on all social media platforms, like Meta, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Snapchat, and Twitter, to promote their brand. Your marketing strategies must include viral things on social media to catch users’ attention. You must update customers about your products’ features, discounts, and offers on these accounts. The best thing is that it gives your brand a positive word-of-mouth benefit as users share their experiences with your brand on these platforms.
Second, you can run paid ads on social media platforms. These ads get viewed by the majority of the audience and result in higher returns on investment. Moreover, you can run sponsored marketing campaigns like collaborations with different influencers on these platforms. Influencers heavily impact the opinion of the masses. So if you engage them in promoting your products, there are extremely high chances of a higher return on investment for your marketing strategies.
3. Content Marketing:
Marketing strategies today lay more stress on content marketing. Having a website is not a one-time thing; it’s not like you can make a website and just leave it. Having a website is a full-time job as you must keep updating it. To generate more sales, you need to attract more organic traffic to your website. The best way to generate more on-site traffic is by updating content on your website. Creating up-to-date content means improving the SEO of your website. Improved SEO means Google will show your website to users on the first page of search results.
This is the backbone of improved marketing strategies nowadays. Every business’s nature is different; some businesses are launching new products now and then, thus automatically updating their website by adding relevant keywords, even unintentionally. But some say manufacturing businesses have fixed products and thus not much to update on their site frequently. Content marketing is a savior in that case.
You must have appealing and shareable content on your website. Create engaging and interesting content for your brand; it could be blogs or video tutorials etc. Customers may ignore pop-ups or get irritated by banner ads, but engaging content creation will prove to be the best marketing strategy.
4. SMS Marketing:
Most internet users prefer using smartphones for online activities like searching, surfing the web, placing online orders, tracking their shipments, and whatnot. Mobile users are your biggest customer base, and you cannot ignore them in your marketing strategies in today’s age. That is why effective mobile marketing has become a huge factor in successful marketing campaigns nowadays.
The most cost-effective and best results-generating tactic is SMS marketing. It is the quickest way to reach a large audience and drive sales. It is highly effective as 90% of SMS get opened and read, too, compared to only 20% to 30% of emails that get opened and read. Setting up an SMS marketing campaign will take as little as five minutes.
You can connect with your customers by sending them SMS about sales, discounts, loyalty rewards, updates, etc. If you get it right, a thoughtful SMS marketing campaign will positively impact your sales as a result of increased brand awareness.
5. Google Ads:
The biggest search engine where people look for products is Google, which is why marketers today focus a lot on Google Ads. Business owners utilize the Google Pay-Per-Click tool. You can set up any budget for this that you want, even as low as $5, and the best part: you will only have to pay when a user clicks on your ad, so you don’t have to pay for each view.
The benefit here is that Google Ads is like a targeted marketing technique as it shows the ad of your brand to potential strong leads, i.e., people whose past behavior and search show they are more likely to buy a product of yours.
Also, you can choose different types of ads to reach customers. For example, you can run text ads that show up as blue links or Google shopping ads that show up as product carousels with details, prices, and reviews of the products.
Conclusion:
As technology evolved, so did marketing strategies. So today, marketers use the latest tools to make a perfect marketing strategy with higher ROI. So, look at the five ways mentioned above to know how marketing is done right in current times.
