For businesses, it’s more important than ever to think of marketing as a long-term proposition. The digital marketplace is becoming increasingly crowded and competitive, forcing companies of all sizes to improve their promotional strategies. Here are four of the most important things that your business should include in its long-term marketing strategy.
Content Marketing
Now more than ever, content is king in digital marketing. Blog posts, YouTube videos, Instagram pictures and a strong Facebook presence are all essential components of a good content marketing strategy. By producing valuable, evergreen content, your company can raise its brand awareness and bring in a steady flow of new customers. Ideally, your content should focus on engaging new audience members, making them more likely to re-engage with your brand later on.
New Product Offerings
When you’re designing your marketing strategy, it’s important to think of how it could be leveraged to promote future product offerings. The most successful businesses are constantly expanding their product and service lines, and you need to have systems in place for promoting new offerings as you roll them out. The better these systems are, the quicker your new products will be able to achieve profitability.
Search Engine Optimization
One of the best ways to cut through the overly crowded digital marketplace is with a strong long-term SEO strategy. By planning out and implementing your SEO efforts over the long haul instead of focusing on a single keyword at a time, you can greatly improve your organic search engine traffic.
Email Capture
Marketers have long known that one of the most effective ways to acquire and retain customers is to get them signed up for an email list. If your long-term marketing strategy doesn’t include a well-optimized plan for getting your audience to an email opt-in page, you’re almost certainly missing out on sales. Ideally, you should have several channels for driving traffic to this page, since visitors from a number of sources should ultimately be ending up on your email list. This strategy also needs to include plans for producing valuable emails that will entice people on your list to open them and read up on your latest offers.
If you can get these four vital components in place, you’ll have the foundations of an excellent long-term marketing strategy. Needless to say, every business and every audience is different, so you may have to experiment and test different tactics to get the best results.
Anica is a professional content and copywriter who graduated from the University of San Francisco. She loves dogs, the ocean, and anything outdoor-related. You can connect with Anica on Twitter @AnicaOaks.