Introduction

What are the characteristics of a successful business? Good products. Satisfied customers. Happy employees. Regulatory compliance. The right Shopify pricing plans. All of these are useful. But no trait is as defining of business success as revenue growth and profitability. It is after all revenue that makes the business a sustainable, going concern.

Revenue growth is not easy. Your business does not operate in a vacuum. You must battle tens or hundreds of competitors to close each sale. To grow revenue and profitability consistently, you have to deploy marketing strategies that work. We cover some of the most effective marketing strategies below.

1. Social Media Marketing

Social media is a vast space comprising billions of users encompassing the most popular apps in the world such as Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, LinkedIn and WhatsApp. Whether paid or organic, social media marketing makes sense.  Countless successful businesses have been built almost exclusively through social media marketing.

But while social media can have a quick pay off, it still takes patience to learn the ropes and get advertising momentum. At the start, interest and enquiries may be few and far between. As you keep at it, stay authentic, interact with customers as well as tweak the content to cater to your target audience, social media can drive steady business growth.

2. Video Marketing

If a picture is worth a thousand words, a video is perhaps 10 times that. The content you can pack into a 30-second video would likely require dozens of pictures or multiple pages of text. For instance, how much text would you need to fully describe a video or audio recording of nature sounds? Likely a lot.

Videos are harder to make but can be more effective than articles and images. They also have a higher likelihood of going viral. One study found businesses that use video marketing saw revenues grow about 50 percent faster than those that didn’t.

Video marketing does not necessarily mean creating a sales pitch of your product. Often, the videos that will have the most impact will be those that are less salesy and more about offering valuable information to prospective buyers. Like an intuitive, step-by-step tutorial addressing a problem that prospects are hoping to solve. Create videos that set you apart as a subject-matter expert. It boosts your credibility, expands brand visibility and ultimately grows sales.

3. Blog Marketing

Blogs are a means of sharing snippets of your expert knowledge for free and to engage your audience. Do not post on your own blog only. To increase your reach, do so on third party websites as well as long as part or all of their audience falls within your target market. These could be platforms such as Medium and LinkedIn or media sites like Forbes and Inc. Also, guest post on pages of businesses that focus on the same market as you but do not offer a product that competes with yours.

Blogging can feel mundane at the beginning when your business is relatively unknown and your website draws hardly any traffic. But think of blogging as building a library of knowledge. The long term pay off of each article is substantial. Your blog may not look like much when it has less than five articles. As you do dozens and hundreds of articles, it becomes an information hub that keeps prospects lingering longer and increases likelihood of conversion.

4. Search Engine Optimization

What do you do whenever you come across a word, concept or product you do not understand? If you are like most people, you turn to leading search engines like Google and Bing. Since 2005, Google has ranked among the top two most popular websites in the world. Access to this enormous audience is why search engine optimization (SEO) is so important for business.

The higher your website appears in search results for a relevant query, the greater the visitor traffic to your website. While keyword targeting is what comes to mind when many people think about SEO, there’s a lot more to it. Quality, readable, regular, current content is of utmost value. Other key factors include backlinks, page loading speed, user friendly layout and a responsive device-aware design.

5. Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing has existed in some shape or form for decades at least even though it was not referred to by that name. In recent years though, social media has not just redefined it but has also increased the scale and impact of influencer marketing by several orders of magnitude.

By accumulating social capital within their circle of followers and fans who often number in the thousands or millions, influencers have the power to boost your business’ visibility quickly. When you work with an influencer whose base falls within your target audience, you can leverage their authority to effectively get your message to the right people.

6. Email Marketing

Spam filters have made email marketing significantly harder than it used to be. Many well-meaning businesses have their messages flagged as spam and never read by the recipient. Matters are further compounded by Gmail’s decision to classify incoming mail as either primary, social or promotional with only primary mail being shown by default. This is a significant email marketing setback given that Gmail is the world’s largest email services provider.

Despite this, email marketing remains one of the most cost effective avenues for long term engagement with customers and prospects. Segment your customers and craft messages that are consistent with where they are at in the sales funnel or based on the product they would be most interested in.

Conclusion

These are not all the strategies you could possibly tap into to make your business a success but they can get you moving in the right direction. The least leans heavily toward digital marketing strategies. With good reason.

While traditional marketing channels are still crucial for business growth, the Internet is increasingly the primary playground for business. There are more than five billion Internet users worldwide and this number will only increase.

That said, traditional marketing techniques such as flyers, posters, billboards, print ads, TV/radio ads, exhibitions, coupons and cold/warm calls are still vital depending on the industry in question. Most businesses will be best served by a mix of traditional and digital marketing techniques.