Promotion Strategy: How to Promote Your Business [2023]

[Lee este artículo en español: Estrategias de Promoción]

No wonder that promotion strategy is one of the most important processes in marketing.

In fact, it supports your marketing voices to reach your target audience, creates interest, and helps you to engage with them. If you want more traffic and conversions, then developing promotion strategies is critical.

Here’s the deal:

You’re going to find out how to promote your business and how to build a promotion strategy with actionable promotional tactics. Then, you will get a better understanding of content promotion, digital advertising, mobile marketing, and public relations.

Everything here applies to a GREAT promotion strategy in 2023.

So let’s begin!

Chapter 1

Promotion Strategy Fundamentals

Business promotion is the first marketing communication with customers. There are too many companies talking about their products and services. So you must create a well-crafted road map for your promotion to reach out to the right audience and convert them into your customers.

In this chapter, you’re going to learn the basics of a promotion strategy and why it is so important for your marketing success.

What is a promotion strategy?

A promotion strategy is an actionable plan to influence people about your business, generate more leads, and boost customer engagement. It visualizes how to perform your marketing strategy and communication, who to target as your audience, and where and when to execute the promotion plan.

The Marketing Mix – Marketing Promotion
by 365 Careers

Many marketers spend more on business promotion each year, but they receive less. There are too many options and marketing voices, so you have to make sure that your messages are really reaching the people you want to approach when you promote your business.

What’s more, it is very difficult to convert people into customers without resonating marketing voices to create emotional connections and arouse interests and demands to your offers.

Role of promotions

Business promotion is one of the 4 P’s of the marketing mix. It is a part of marketing communication which reaches your target market to gain awareness and foster conversation with prospects and customers.

Promotion helps you draw your target’s attention, create interest in your products and services, generate demands, and encourage them to purchase from you.

The following are the four main roles of promotion:

1. Build awareness – Making your target audience aware of your products and services. You must identify your target audience, your promotional marketing messages, and your outreach strategies.
2. Foster interests – Gaining their interests in your business. It requires a well-designed content marketing strategy to provide enough information for lead nurturing, and show uniqueness for differentiation from competitors.
3. Generate demand – Making your products and services desirable. You can share great features and benefits, and create an emotional connection with your prospect.
4. Induce prospects to take action – Placing a call-to-action for your target to easily engage and find the next steps. Anywhere you can position to drive conversions, such as your website, digital advertising, and social media.

As you can see, these are following the A.I.D.A. marketing models. It means that promotion can contribute to all the consumers buying processes.

Besides, it will help you to establish a stronger relationship and cultivate the repeated customer to stay longer with you.

Types of promotion

There are many promotional marketing approaches where you can attract your prospects and customers and draw people into the A.I.D.A. process. From traditional promotions like face-to-face selling to digital advertising and the customer loyalty program.

The key promotion types are:

1. Personal (face-to-face) selling – Salespeople from a company give you a sales presentation in person to present their offer. Unlike the other approaches, it is easier to build relationships with you.
   i.e.) Sales meeting, sampling, telemarketing, etc.
2. Traditional advertising – You can use any paid advertisements to reach a bigger audience and prompt short-term engagement and sales. It is one-to-one marketing, and its costs are based on the bidding.
   i.e.) Print ads, billboards, TV, radio, etc.
3. Direct marketing – It is direct communication with a highly targeted audience through marketing channels. It has more chances to get quick feedback and retain customer relationships.
   i.e.) Emails, direct mail, digital ads, etc.
4. Sales promotion – Performing a short-term marketing campaign to gain attention and encourage conversion or purchase. You can get immediate responses and interactive, but it’s not good for developing a long-term relationship.
   i.e.) Contests, coupons, flash sales, sweepstakes, etc.
5. Public relations – To build a good corporate image and cultivate a stronger customer relationship, you can provide appropriate information and handle both positive and negative voices from consumers.
   i.e.) Newspaper/magazine articles, seminars, speeches, etc.
6. B2B promotions – a B2B company offers materials and services that other businesses need to work and get benefits. It focuses on how people will benefit from using your offers.
   i.e.) Trade shows, case studies, online courses, etc.
7. Word-of-mouth marketing – It is the process of motivating people to share information about your products and services with others. Since people trust words from close people more than from a company, it will bring qualified leads.
   i.e.) Referral program, customer reviews, influencer marketing, etc.
8. Customer loyalty program – a Customer loyalty program induces your current customers to make frequent purchases and retain them, which brings you great profits in the long run.
   i.e.) Reward programs, referral incentives, etc.

You’ve got what a promotion strategy is and what you can do. Before we go any further, let me explain why it is critical for your business.

Why is a promotion strategy so important?

Business promotion is one of the most critical processes in marketing. It focuses on how to attract the right audience to your business, introduce your product and service effectively, and convince people to buy it.

Back to what I was saying, with a great promotion strategy you can drive prospects from the awareness stage into the action stage if you do it right. It allows you to create strong brand awareness, generate leads and build a long-term relationship with your target audience.

Besides, developing a promotion strategy helps you to cut unnecessary promotion costs. This is due to the fact that you’ll target the right audience instead of marketing anyone out there. And they will start recognizing you more and choose you over the competition.

By creating a good corporate image in promotions, you can also build a better reputation that will bring more benefits for your business, like word-of-mouth.

Benefits of a promotion strategy

A promotion strategy will be the compass for your promotion. And it will have a great impact on the consumer decision-making process.

These are the key benefits of a promotion strategy:

• Target the right audience.
• Gain brand awareness.
• Attract prospects and customers.
• Publish your promotion at the best time.
• Increase qualified customer traffic.
• Show differentiation from competitors.
• Offer more value to your customers.
• Engage with your target audience.
• Drive customer decision-making.
• Find potential partnerships.
• Create customer relationships.
• Build your reputation.
• Improve word-of-mouth opportunities.
• Stay ahead of the competition on market share.
• Grow sales and profits.

Thus, the potential benefits you’ll get from a promotion strategy are huge and you don’t want to miss them! That’s why you need to craft a well-designed promotion strategy and ensure your success.

So, how do you create one for your promotion success?

Don’t worry! I’ll walk you through the whole process in the next chapter.

Chapter 2

Promotion Strategy Overview

In this chapter, I’ll show you the value of each step and the best way to set a promotion strategy for your business. If you are ready to start learning how to promote your business, you are in the right place. Keep reading, and you will discover all the possible ways to promote your business.

Great success without a strategy is impossible on business unless you’re super lucky.

Having a solid strategy helps you to go through an effective path for your goals and see where you’re in the campaign and what you have to do. It is vital not only when you execute and improve your plan, but especially when you face difficulties and obstacles.

Therefore, I would like to share some promotional tactics on business promotion strategy to make it easier for you to put them into practice.

Promotion trends and terms

But before we go into that, I would like to share some terms of the promotion trends. Understanding these trends and adapting them to your approach might help you to beat the competition and stay one step ahead.

1. Artificial intelligence (AI) – In digital marketing, Artificial Intelligence (AI) enables you to predict customer behavior, create content, personalize customer experience, manage promotion and optimize your performance. It makes it easier for you to take any marketing data, analyze it and learn from it, and provide better solutions and results.
   Read more about Artificial Intelligence.
2. Chatbot – A chatbot is a type of conversational AI that interacts with people through a text or voice interface. Using chatbots in your marketing allows you to offer 24/7/365 customer service and enhances customer satisfaction. What’s more, it saves you time and money.
   Read more about Chatbot.
3. Customer experience email marketing – Email marketing is still the top way to drive qualified traffic and generate leads. Especially, creating personalized emails is becoming a must-have tactic to gain better recognition and engagement. Make sure to focus on providing great customer experience and develop relationships.
4. Micro-influencer – Continuing from last year, influencer marketing will dominate 2023 and grow even more. Among the movements, you need to give special attention to Micro-influencers. They use social media and have a bigger impact than top influencers. People trust that micro-influencers use a product or service in their posts without having a sponsorship with brands (they don’t post for advertisement).
   Read more about Micro-Influencers.
5. Messenger Ads and In-App Ads – As more than half of online traffic comes from mobile devices, mobile advertising will stay on top of marketing communication. There are many types of mobile advertising, but in particular, messenger ads and in-app ads are on the rise. They show ads which have more visibility and engage better with users.
6. Video content – Video content has the highest click-through rate of all digital formats. As you know, it dominated digital advertising like YouTube and short videos on other social media last year, and more and more companies are investing in it to promote their businesses.
   Read more about Video Contents.
7. Mobile coupons – As the redemption of coupons has increased and most of them can be carried out on mobile devices, you cannot ignore them. They have a great impact on consumers buying decision process and boost sales. Also, you can acquire customer data easily and use it for further approach.
   Read more about Mobile Coupons.

I hope these trends and are helpful when you craft your strategies. Just keep in mind that they might affect your promotion.

How to promote your business: Build your promotion strategy

Now you’re good to start developing your promotion strategy.

Here is the step-by-step process to successfully promote your business using a great promotion strategy. I’ve also made a list of all the things to do for a successful promotion. In each step, you will find tips and some pieces of advice that will help you in the process. Following this guide on how to promote your business, you are closer to building a winning promotion strategy.

1. Set Your Promotional Goals.

Goal-setting is vital to your promotion success. It will give you a sense of direction and motivate you to be productive and achieve your goals efficiently. Think about what you want to achieve with it and establish your promotional goals. If you set goals that you cannot control or that are dependant on others, your goals may block off your progress and waste your time and money. So, check the following goal-setting tips to ensure your promotion will work effectively.

Define S.M.A.R.T. goals

There’s a reason why people follow S.M.A.R.T. goal-setting. Simply because it works. Specific goals make it easier for you to create detailed action plans and achieve them. A measurable plan visualizes your progress and helps you to stay on track. Achievable goals motivate you to focus on tasks and improve your progress. Realistic goals lead you to accomplish your progress and avoid a big failure. Time-bound goals give you a sense of urgency to achieve the goals and ensure your plan completes on time.

Align the goals with your overall marketing strategies

Review your overall marketing strategies. Since if your promotion goals don’t fit in with the other 3 P’s of marketing mix strategies, your promotion strategies won’t work. Consider how your price and product strategies are devised and influence your place strategies.

Determine what you want to achieve with promotion

As I mentioned in the previous chapter, there are a number of potential benefits on a promotion strategy. Such as, providing features and the functionality of your product to create interests, turning your one-time customers into loyal customers, or beating your competitors on customer acquisition. You can get ideas from those advantages to set your goals.

Keep it simple and small

Your goals can be big, but you must keep them simple and break them down into small goals. That helps you to stay focused and certainly attain your goals. Like you have yearly goals, quarterly goals, monthly goals, weekly goals, and daily goals. It allows you to create action steps that assist you to reach your goals.

Set up your success metrics to measure

Once your goals are set, you should determine what metrics to measure for your promotion success. If your goal is to increase customer traffic, you need to get data on traffic growth, traffic sources, organic keywords, etc. The metrics you should track vary depending on your goals, so work on them right after goal-setting.

Brainstorm what call-to-actions to use

Source: DFL Interiors

When you set your promotional goals, start thinking about how you can make your prospects take a specific action. Since you want them to do something, you’re going to promote your business. Crafting an effective call-to-action is the key to achieve your goals. Brainstorm what action you want them to take, and what content you can prepare for the promotion.

Important note:

Success without having a strategy is impossible on business. It’s how you keep trying to achieve your goals and put your efforts at the right place in the right direction.

Make sure that you take enough time to set goals and design your strategies for what you’re going to achieve.

2. Make Your Budget Plan.

When you think about budgeting, it’s important to balance your budget and your goals. Depending on them, determine how much you’re going to spend on each promotion. Even if you choose online promotion, which is low-cost, interactive, and effective for targeting and measurement, you’ll still want to cut down costs. These are some budgeting tips.

Prioritize your goals

When you have a small budget, prioritizing your goals and strategies can help you cut down on costs and achieve the desired goals at least. Once the target goals are taken care of, then you will be able to move forward to the rest.

Schedule your promotion

To control your budget, you can specify the time and limit your promotion schedule, especially with digital advertising. Since you can select your promotion’s timing, you can restrict the time to display your promotion.

Use geotargeting

Another effective way to reduce your cost is geotargeting. It allows you to target your audience by geographic locations and deliver them your content effectively. For example, local PPC is to attract local prospective customers.

Choose your conditions carefully

When you make digital advertising, there are a variety of settings by goals and plans to promote your business. For instance, you can select the conditions of “pay-per-conversions” as you pay when your prospects convert, rather than when they click.

3. Define Your Target Market.

Narrowing down your target market can cut your promotion costs down and help you to implement effective measures. If you aim for the wrong target market, you’ll not only spend time and money for nothing, but it will also move you away from success. To avoid this, you need to define what’s your target market and seek your marketing communication opportunities.

Understand your current target market

First, you have to evaluate your current promotion and analyze it for opportunities and gaps. It gives you ideas of what to aim for a successful promotion. If your current plan is not working well, then you need to come up with a way to break through the situation by targeting a specific segment or changing it.

Conduct a SWOT analysis

What are your competitive advantages and weaknesses? A SWOT analysis helps you to look at yourself from an outsider’s perspective and make smart decisions. You can build strategies around your strengths and opportunities to take advantage of them. Don’t forget to consider the threads your targeting has.

Sharpen your target market

Setting your target in as much detail as possible leads you to implement your promotion effectively. You can consider it by many factors, such as location, gender, interests, income level, etc. with marketing analytics tools. Check out your current customer base, it should give you an idea of who to market and the details of the persona.

Research your target market

To provide better marketing communication, you should find out their preferences and their pains at least. Without understanding your target market, grabbing their attention and interests is not going to be a piece of cake. You can ask directly to the target, check it on your analytics tools, or carry out a survey.

Learn your competitor’s strategies

Studying your competition allows you to build your strategies around their weaknesses and beat them by doing better. You’re targeting the same people as them. Thus, you should look at their strategies carefully, from their messages and channels to their top-performing content.

Important note:

Make sure that you fully understand your target market to grab their attention to your business promotion. By putting yourself in their shoes, you will be able to choose compelling words and call-to-actions that reach their heart.

4. Determine Your Promotion Types.

Before creating your promotion message, you need to select what types of promotion you’re going to use based on your target audience.

If you’re looking for O2O marketing, consider implementing local SEO and creating a location-based service on mobile. 

Based on your goals and what you’re capable of, select your promotion types. If your budget allows, you can develop cross-channel promotions.

5. Develop Your Marketing Messages in Your Promotion.

Now that you have a better understanding of your target market and promotion channels, it’s time to build your marketing message in your promotion.

Your marketing message is one of the most important components in a promotion strategy. It impresses people, tells them how you can solve their pains, and gives them a call to action.

People won’t pay attention to your promotion unless you have powerful messages that attract your target audience and make them want to know more about you.

Here are some promotional tactics to craft powerful marketing messages:

Look at what pains your target market has

In the previous step, you’ve researched your target market and understood their pain points. To make your marketing messages persuasive, you need to face the problems your target market cares about the most. And then think about how you can present solutions from their perspective. Without understanding their pains, you won’t be able to deliver marketing messages that reach their hearts.

List out the value and benefits that you can offer

Make a list of the value that you can offer and the benefits that match your target market’s pain points. This will ensure you offer what your target market needs. That is to say, benefit-driven solutions. To appeal to your prospects effectively, it is key to focus on those benefits that can solve their problems over what you do.

Highlight your competitive advantages

In addition, your marketing message should contain a differentiation from your competitors. If there’s nothing you can convince people about why you are the best choice for a type of products/services, they won’t choose you over the competition. Thus, you must highlight what are your competitive advantages to show your uniqueness.

Prove that you’ve solved their suffering

Source: Amazon

Social proof makes your business more trustworthy and has an impact on influencing people. As social proof like reviews and testimonials work, you should prove that your products and services have gotten results. Collect proofs that your target market wants to hear about.

Make your message clear and sharp

The marketing messages in your business promotion strategy must convey the main idea to your target audience and communicate well. If the message is too long and deep, people will not get the point and take time to respond. Keep your message as clear as possible and make it sharp!

Research keywords that your target market searches for

Source: Google Ads – Keyword Planner

Understanding what keywords your prospects search for in search engines is decisive to attract them and make your message persuasive. Besides, it helps you to increase your visibility and deliver your content to your target audience if your promotion is online. Don’t forget to work on SEO.

Change your message depending on channels

Based on where your target market is and how effective your message can be delivered, you choose your target channels and create your messaging. Check out the rules and regulations that each channel has, like the limits on the number of characters and video length.

Come up with ideas for content creation

While you’re making your marketing message, start thinking about content creation. To make your promotion stand out, seek the best way to achieve your promotional goals. If your goal is to build awareness, you should give enough information and show your values without sales pressure.

6. Build Your Promotional Tactics.

Developing your promotion strategy is to figure out how you are going to achieve your promotional goals and make a scenario of how you build awareness, get your target audience to be interested in your business, and turn them into customers. Don’t forget to develop strategies that focus on results for your business!

Visualize your progress

Visualizing your workflow allows you to see a bigger picture, prioritize your goals, and focus on your plan. It also helps you to improve teamwork since it is easy for anyone to grasp what’s going on in a project, share what you’ve done and contact others when needed.

Find the best time to execute

Source: Sprout Social

Needless to say, timing influences results. Even if you have perfect strategies and sources, bad timing can destroy your opportunity for success. Use analytics tools or spy on competitors to seek the best time to run your promotion.

Commit to a specific time frame and deadlines

It is wise to specify a time frame for your promotion. Since it gives you an idea of how much work you need to put into the marketing campaign and when each task needs to be completed. Remember to overestimate a little bit to ensure your campaign accomplishes on time.

Create a sense of urgency

Source: Asos

A sense of urgency makes people feel anxiety for losing a great offer if they don’t act right away or within the time limits. It works especially with promotional offers. You can run a limited time or limited quantity promotion to make conversions and sales.

Make leads for content share

A great way of promoting your business is to let others share your content. Encourage the people who are interested in your promotion to share, interact or even give reviews. You can also consider influencers to promote your content to a wide range of audiences.

7. Execute and Measure Your Promotion Efforts

Now is finally the time to spread your promotion. After starting your promotion, you always need to track your performance so that you will develop your strong points and work on the prompt correction when something goes wrong. If you notice errors and mistakes at an early time, it would be easier to adjust your strategy and avoid a big failure.

Review your goals on a regular basis

Checking your goals frequently helps you to motivate yourself to tackle each task of the campaign, commit to the plan, and come up with a better idea to improve your promotion. What’s more, it avoids losing focus on the goals and end up just following directions.

Check if you’re tracking the right metrics

If you’re not tracking the right metrics, you’re missing the opportunity to grow and improve. To see if your chosen metrics are the right ones for your goals, you need to confirm how the metrics relate to your goals and how your promotion affects the metrics.

Don’t judge without enough data

Sometimes it’s hard to get enough data in a short period of time, and people reach a conclusion at an early stage. Go for a growth rate instead of counting the numbers in that case. You will be able to see how your performance is, what’s working, and what isn’t working properly.

Stay flexible and adjustable

To improve your performance, you must be flexible and make changes in real-time. Because most of the promotion is time and cost-consuming, it’s wise to make adjustments whenever needed and perform your best promotion.

I hope those step-by-step promotional tactics are helpful when you create a promotion strategy. All you need to do is to apply them to your promotional campaign!

In the next chapter, I would like to share more details about digital advertising to help you win the promotion battle!

Keep reading and you’ll find actionable business promotion tactics…

Chapter 3

Content Promotion

To maximize content marketing which allows you to grab and keep the attention of your audience, it is critical to promote your content to the right target who is interested in your business and really consumes it. So, you will need a strong content promotion strategy.

In this chapter, you’re going to learn how to promote your content with eight proven tactics.

What is Content Promotion?

Content promotion is one of the key marketing processes to expose your business and earn an actual audience for your content. It helps you to grow your traffic and gain results quicker.

6 Content Promotion Strategies That Actually Work [8.2]
by Ahrefs

However, many people fail to get their content in front of a target audience who cares about it. This is because most businesses fail to build the correct content promotion strategy. If your content doesn’t lead to further engagement, you might be delivering it to the wrong people and wasting your effort in creating it.

To avoid this, you must outreach to a qualified audience and engage with them efficiently.

The bottom line

For successful content promotion, it is critical to reach out to the people who can have an impact into your business and share your content.

Email Subscription

Source: The New York Times

Email subscription is one of the most effective ways to receive news and updates. It is cost-effective and helps you to do direct marketing. It’s a great tool and an essential part in every content promotion strategy.

Since most people who subscribe to your newsletters are already interested in your business (maybe some of them are not reading your emails though), they can be your potential customers and the actual readers of your emails.

In short, sharing your content to your subscribers is a must. If you don’t, you’re missing out on the best prospects and customers who care about what you have to say.

It means that it is essential to set up an email subscription form on your website. If you don’t have one, you can create yours easily with email marketing tools like OptinMonster.

Now that you understand the importance of email subscription in content promotion, it’s time to grow your email list.

However, acquiring new email addresses isn’t easy. To make that happen, you also need to offer something they would like to receive in return.

For example, you can create gated content in which you ask readers for their submission to your form and they get premium or bonus content in exchange.

Source: Evinex

But don’t forget that gaining email addresses is the first step, it shouldn’t be your goal. From then, you will need to foster a strong relationship.

If you would like to build your email list, read these proven tactics to develop an email list.

Blogger outreach (Link building)

This is one of the most strategic and efficient approaches to spread your business to other audiences and get quality backlinks. Backlinks are essential in content promotion.

It sounds quite difficult but it is actually simple:

You will reach out to bloggers who might want to include your content in their articles. So, your content gets promoted by others to their followers and you will receive quality traffic without extra advertising.

To make this happen, you need to research who shares content like the one you want to promote. Thus, you will grow your outreach list, if you send an email to them.

Source: Content Analyzer – Buzzsumo

You can use Buzzsumo to find out who shares content like yours. Since it has great filters to find key influencers and your target audience, you can save tons of time looking for influential bloggers.

Also, from an SEO point of view, I recommend you check out Ahrefs’ Domain Rating (DR). The domain rating shows backlink profile strength and searches traffic size.

Source: Domain Overview – Ahrefs

A backlink from a higher authority domain will help you to rank your content up on Google. So you’d better outreach the highest DR bloggers.

Then, it’s time to move onto the most important part in blogger outreach; reaching out via emails.

It is vital to explain why you’re sending them out to people and make it easy for them to check your content out. Make sure to keep your message simple but seize the point.

Here are some great tips when you outreach your influencers via email.

And don’t forget to avoid being a hard sell!

Fact

Blogger outreach is one of the surefire ways to boost your online visibility and backlinks and gain credibility and promote your content.

Remember: After spotting relevant bloggers, check what they can bring to your business and outreach them strategically. And make sure to add value to them and offer a win-win situation.

Content syndication networks

Another great way of promoting your content is to leverage forums where people share great resources and exchange thoughts.

Content syndication is a content marketing tactic of republishing content on third-party websites, including guest-posting. It brings you fantastic opportunities to expose your content to a broader audience.

Normally content syndication networks require just sign-up or becoming a member for content promotion. Then, you will republish your content on the communities and that will help you to increase your visibility and credibility.

There are several content share communities you should try in, such as:

• Medium
• Reddit
• Alltop
• Outbrain
• Quora
• Slideshare
• Scoop.it
• StumbleUpon
• GrowthHackers
• HubPages
• SocialMediaToday
• Inbound.org
• Triberr
• BlogEngage
• BlogCatalog

Note:

With content syndication, your content may not only get a backlink from third-party sites, but you will also benefit from SEO performance.

To get those results, seek the best community and the best ways to promote your content. If you’re new to this, try some and see if it’s worthy for your content promotion strategy or not.

SEO content

Needless to say, SEO will help you to spread your online business in an effective and steady manner.

When your content ranks in a higher position on search engine result pages, you will not only get lots of traffic without promotions, but you will also create brand awareness.

So, it is critical to optimize your online content for SEO. From keyword research to page loading time, you have a bunch of things to complete to gain a better position on SERPs.

For example:

These two posts from Faverie, a fashion eCommerce, “Types of Shoes” and “70s Fashion” have experienced tremendous growth in a short period of time.

Search Console: www.faverie.com

The former started getting some traffic in just six months after publication (August 19, 2021). This was one of the first blog posts in a new domain with zero authority. This is generally a great result for a new site. Yet, what surprises me the most is how much it grew in the first year.

Search Console: www.faverie.com

As to the “70s Fashion” blog post, has started to grow traffic just in the first month after publication (April 10, 2022). It is already showing amazing results by the time been.

When you create high-quality content and have a great SEO strategy, you can significantly improve your website’s traffic in a short period of time. These two strategies together are critical to success. What’s more, they’ll help you to reach your target audience organically.

To complete your content to be SEO friendly, use SEO tools that tell you how to improve.

There are plenty of tools that can help you with your marketing efforts, and you do not have to spend a dollar.

Source: SEO Analysis Results – SEO Site Checkup

In particular, the following elements are the ones you need to pay attention to for on-page SEO:

• Title.
• URL.
• Meta description.
• Media.
• Body.
• Website optimization.

SEO is essential for online business. To learn SEO and get more organic traffic, you can watch this powerful SEO checklist video:

SEO Checklist 2019 — How to Get More Organic Traffic (Fast!)
by Brian Dean
Source: Evinex

Content update gives you another chance to promote and drive traffic to your existing content again and gain new audiences.

As time goes by, it is true that some of the information on your content becomes old-fashioned or no longer useful. That’s when you must focus more on updating your blog rather than creating new posts.

For example, you can add up-to-date information such as the latest statistics and trends. Many people search for fresh information like “keywords 2023, ” so I recommend you to include this data to get easily found.

You can create checklists and cheat sheets to upgrade your content. Those additions mostly improve user experience and their loyalty.

Take some time to give a fresh air to your content and be a great resource for your audience!

Content transformation

Content transformation is an advanced technique in content marketing that turns your content into a different format. It captures more opportunities for your business and increases your SEO performance.

Repurposing existing content helps you to reach a new audience and find the best formats to engage with your audience. This is worth almost any content promotion strategy.

Although the most popular way of content transformation is to convert a blog post into a video, here there are a few examples of content transformation:

• Video.
• Infographic.
• Slideshare.
• Podcast.
• eBook.
• Online course.
• PDF.

Like content update, it is very important to look back at your old content and keep adding valuable sources for your audience.

Social media

In content promotion, you cannot forget about the power of social media. It’s one of the easiest ways to increase traffic to your content and improve brand perception.

There are many tactics to boost traffic from social media:

• Impress your audience with visuals.
• Share your content at the optimal time.
• Engage with your audience consistently.
• Optimize your content for mobile.
• Make your content easy to share.
• Add compelling call-to-actions.
• Use social media advertising.

Social media is a fantastic approach to content promotion. Once you share valuable content on social media, it has a great possibility to get viral and maximize your efforts.

Don’t forget to mention your sources and the influencers that are related to your content when you share! They might reshare your post.

Paid advertisement

Source: Facebook Business

At last, getting help from a paid advertisement will promote your content faster and effectively. Especially, digital advertising is more cost-effective than traditional advertising.

There are many ways of digital advertising: display advertising, search advertising, social media advertising, video advertising, and more.

With digital advertising, you can greatly benefit and grow your business. That’s why I’m going to explain it more in detail in the next chapter.

Chapter 4

Digital Advertising

Digital advertising allows you to deliver advertisements to target segments that you subdivide for your target prospects at a low cost. It makes it easier for you to measure what kind of effects it brings due to its interactivity. It’s a powerful promotion tactic.

In this chapter, I’ll cover the basics and seven types of digital advertising.

What is digital advertising?

Digital advertising refers to any promotional advertisements on digital mediums. It is the most cost-effective way for digital marketers to reach a target audience and improve their ROI.

You can creatively practice storytelling, enhance personalization to maximize customer experience, and leave a strong impression in the audience’s mind.

What differentiates it from traditional advertising the most is that digital advertising can creatively drive interaction and engagement. Since it encourages interaction, it makes it easier for you to keep your target audience engaged and drive them to take the actions that you have designed.

As you can see, using digital advertising helps you to provide enough information to manipulate people’s minds and emotions. Thus, you will improve customer experience.

Benefits of digital advertising

Digital advertising has so many advantages for promoting your business, besides its interactivity.

For example, digital advertising gives you a valuable insight that allows you to see how many people have seen your ad, how many of them engaged with it, what is the demographic information of those people, and more.

Besides, since you can access the data in real-time, you’ll be able to vary your promotion approaches with the situation and respond in real-time.

Let’s sum up what you can expect:

• Cost-effective.
• Effective targeting.
• Access to data and insights.
• Trackable and measurable results.
• Personalized approach.
• Interactive.
• Higher conversion rate.
• Obtain valuable user insights.
• Qualified customer traffic.
• Flexibility to change and make an adjustment.
• Great ROI and ROAS.
• In control of your budget.
• Improving Ad formats every year.
• Mobile engagement.

Thus, digital advertising can maximize the effectiveness of your promotional marketing efforts and boost your conversions and sales efficiently.

Want to know more about the types of digital advertising?

Let me explain the main options and help you find the best way to promote your business.

Display Ads

It is a paid advertisement on third-party platforms (websites, mobile apps, etc.) including banner ads, rich media ads, and video ads. An example of display ads is the Google Display Network, which allows you to place your ads in websites using Google AdSense.

With display ads, you are targeting people by demographics and interests. You can also use it to retarget prospects and customers.

This is different from search engine marketing which focuses on displaying ads on search engine result pages.

Be aware that there are ad blockers that remove ads and prevent users from seeing your ads.

Banner Ads

It is a popular online advertising form and often shows up at the top side, or in the middle of a webpage. It shows your ads to a specific target market with levels of targeting so that you can improve conversion rates strategically.

To get clicks, there are several things to consider: size, place, value proposition, image, CTA buttons, and more.

For more details, check out this ultimate guide to display advertising.

Rich media ads

Rich media ads are a kind of display advertising. Besides, they are a highly creative and innovative way to impress your audience and generate leads. It gives you the flexibility to promote your business and offers interactivity with the ads.

With rich media ads, you can tell your brand’s story dynamically, drive engagement and achieve higher CTR and ROI. What’s more, it can improve brand experience and make your ads memorable!

There are many rich media advertising formats:

• Rich media interstitial ads.
• Rich media (floating) banner ads.
• Interactive rich media banner ads.
• Expandable banner media ads.
• Pushdown rich media ads.
• Pop-up ads.
• Slider-rich media ads.
• Rich media billboard.
• Rich media video.

Read this rich media ads guide to make the most out of them.

Search advertising

Search ads are one of the most popular methods in online advertising where you can target a certain audience who searches for specific keywords or phrases. As you know, these advertisements are displayed at the top of SERPs that get most clicks.

Thus, using search advertising you can target a highly relevant audience who already has search-intent and your ads can enhance better CTR and conversions.

However, search advertising gets expensive if you’re targeting highly competitive keywords. Don’t forget to check the value of your keywords and look for the best options considering your budget!

Pay-per-click (PPC)

PPC is a paid advertising in which advertisers pay each time a searcher clicks on their ads. So even if you’re a small business, you can buy traffic for your website to convert and make sales.

To make it work, you need to study the Quality score which is Google’s rating of the quality and relevancy on the combination of your keywords and PPC ads.

You can also test whether your keyword ideas will work using PPC advertising. It will help you to build better SEO pages and improve your ads.

But here’s the scary part:

As the name (per-click) goes, you have to pay when someone clicks. If you’re targeting a broad keyword, you may end up finishing your budget without enough results.

Put a lot of thoughts on your bid strategy, targeting, and keywords to make a wise decision. If you’re not familiar with PPC advertising, you can check this guide to get a better understanding of what it is and how it works.

Shopping Ads

If you sell products or run an e-commerce website, creating shopping ads for search engines is the perfect way to increase your visibility and drive qualified traffic.

Shopping ads showcase and promote your products at the top of the SERPs. You have a great opportunity to display your products besides the web page results and attract your prospects with a product image on SERPs.

Social media advertising

Social media advertising is one of the most powerful and cost-effective digital advertising methods. Due to a great number of active users on social media, you can reach a bigger audience.

With this kind of advertising, it’s easy to catch users’ attention since people on social media normally pay attention to all the content in their feed, unlike looking for something in mind on search engines.

What’s more, social media advertising allows you to target or retarget specific segments by more accurate user information like their interests, geographics, and connections. Thanks to the effective targeting setting, it increases brand recognition and drives higher conversion rates.

But here’s the problem. Social media advertising is a great way of drawing users’ attention, but it may be less likely to convert. Because social media cannot track users’ real-life; and information on social media might not be accurate. Also, even if you target the right audience for your business and they wish to use your products or services, they may not have time or budget.

YouTube video ads

Needless to say, YouTube is the best and easiest platform for video marketing to generate traffic, market, and promote your business. You can reach a large number of your audience, and a video is sharable like other social media content.

Moreover, search engines love video content and YouTube helps you to boost search engine rankings. Thus, it is a great opportunity to get your content viral and grow brand awareness.

The following are the three main types of YouTube video ads:

• TrueView Ads (In-Stream ads and Video Discovery ads).
• Pre-Roll Ads.
• Bumpers Ads.

For more information about YouTube video advertising ads, check this comprehensive guide.

Native advertising

Native advertising consists of a paid advertisement that doesn’t make people feel “I’m watching an advert,” even though the functions are almost the same.

Many people skip and ignore advertising, but with native advertising, people don’t see your ads as advertisements. So they will naturally consume your content.

An example of native advertising is the sponsored content on social media. It shows up as an in-feed unit and promotes ads in a similar form as the other organic content.

Here are the main six native advertising types:

• In-feed units.
• Paid search ads.
• Promoted listings.
• Content recommendation widgets.
• In-ad with native element.
• Custom content ads.

You can read this guide for more information about native ads.

Email advertising

Email advertising is one of the top performing and cost-effective marketing approaches. It allows you to place your ads into newsletters by leveraging your email list. Besides, you can send personalized messages with a flexible design.

Mostly, email advertising uses opt-in or permission-based marketing. It means that most recipients already show interest in your business so that they are more likely to engage with the advertising you offer and convert.

However, here’re huge challenges for marketers to improve open rates. Since it is easy for users to arrange a spam filter setting, your emails might not be delivered and your subscribers don’t even notice your emails. Remember to keep your email list up-to-date and build relationships to constantly get your messages consumed.

Video advertising

It is the fastest growing advertising format. Since it can carry so much information for a short period and impact on the audience’s mind, video advertising is a smart marketing approach to take.

With video advertising, you can introduce your products and services in a way that’s easy to understand for viewers, and it creates emotional triggers to engage with the ads.

Now that we are exposed to many video ads, if you make a poor quality video advertising, your audience will notice the level of your quality and that determines whether they will be interested in your business. So, be creative and come up with well-designed ads that convert.

Here are the following key options in video advertising:

• In-stream ads (Linear / Non-linear).
• Out stream in-read video ads (In-page / In-banner / In-text).
• Interactive video ads.
• In-game video ads.
• TV video ads.

To understand each video advertising option, read this great post about video ads.

Remarketing and Retargeting

At last, I would like to talk about remarketing and retargeting. Both are very effective marketing tactics to reach out to people who have shown interest in your business.

Leveraging these approaches will bring another opportunity to build brand awareness, drive qualified traffic, retain previous customers, and improve conversions.

Consider that the frequency of your advertising can make your audience find it as a violation of their privacy and they might feel annoyed. This may cause them to keep away from your ads.

1. Remarketing – Remarketing in digital advertising is a powerful technique to place your advertisement in front of the people who have already visited your website. It helps you to set focused targeting, keep your brand top of mind, lead your target users to return to your website, and boost your ROI.
2. Retargeting – On the other hand, retargeting focuses on users’ previous online actions instead of browsing history. It allows you to display your ads when your target audience is ready to buy. With retargeting, you can find a relevant audience for future sales emails, draw them to a specific page, and avoid shopping cart abandonment.

As you’ve seen in this chapter, digital advertising can boost your bottom line and that will take your business to the next level.

In the next chapter, I’m going to explain mobile promotion which is one of the best promotional marketing tactics to really connect with your target audience in an effective way.

Chapter 5

Mobile Marketing

Mobile has become the main screen for information consumption and purchasing online. Although there are common promotions on the web and mobile, it is key to take advantage of mobile’s unique characteristics such as their location and personal information.

In this chapter, I’ll cover the basics of mobile marketing and the main types of mobile marketing approaches that work great.

What is mobile marketing?

Mobile marketing is a mobile user-centered marketing approach that reaches out to your target audience and gets you as close to your prospects and customers as possible. It makes it easier not only for users to leverage your services, but also for you to offer business value.

What’s more, mobile marketing allows you to have direct marketing communication with target users, send out specific content to them, and gather customer data effectively.

Let’s see some of the mobile marketing statistics.

There are some interesting insights that you should not ignore.

• 80% of internet users own a smartphone.
• Mobile devices are used for over 40% of online transactions.
• 52% of companies use a simple template that works for all devices.
• Apps account for 89% of mobile media time.
• 80% of shoppers use smartphones during physical shopping.
• 39% of companies create a mobile responsive email template.
• Google owns 96% of mobile search traffic.

As you can see, mobile marketing is crucial for your business and you must improve your mobile user experience to promote your business successfully.

Benefits of mobile marketing

Mobile devices are becoming increasingly popular tools to communicate and make a purchase. So, mobile marketing plays a critical role in overall marketing strategies.

Here’s why mobile marketing is a must:

• Reach out to a large number of users.
• Give convenience to share content socially.
• Increase brand awareness.
• Enhance the effectiveness of cross-media ads.
• Keep users engaged.
• Build a personal relationship.
• Gain instant feedback (higher response rates).
• Easy to track results.
• Improve user experience.
• Drive O2O marketing.

In short, mobile marketing gives you the opportunity to provide your target prospects and customers with unique user experience and engage with them.

Let me show you what you can do with mobile marketing to promote your business.

Mobile-friendly websites

This is crucial and the first thing you should do to perform mobile marketing effectively. A mobile-friendly website is a tiny version of your website and has a great impact on the consumer buying process. It attracts new customers and retains your current customer base.

When it comes to a mobile-friendly website, it is critical to display your content and text correctly to any different size of screens and devices. For example, if your website requires users to zoom in every time they read texts, you’re giving a poor and uncomfortable user experience.

What’s more, it is good for your overall SEO performance. A mobile website provides improved rankings on search engines and drives customer traffic. Also, it enhances mobile user experience and user satisfaction.

Responsive web design

Responsive web design (RWD) adapts and changes web content depending on screen sizes and browsers. It gives you better SEO results and helps you to improve user experience.

Designing your website and content focusing on how a user makes use of it is of vital importance. From homepage design and layout to web forms, make sure to offer great usability and work on increasing mobile user engagement.

You can read this guide to better understand what it is and how to use it.

Loading time

Another way of enhancing mobile user experience is to reduce loading time. Now that more than half of visitors leave a page if they’re forced to wait longer than 3 seconds, you must improve your page speed as fast as possible.

Source: Webpage loading time – PageSpeed Insights

There are many techniques to improve your page speed:

• Avoid landing page redirects.
• Enable compression.
• Improve server response time.
• Leverage browser caching.
• Minify resources.
• Optimize images.
• Optimize CSS delivery.
• Prioritize visible content.
• Remove render-blocking JavaScript.
• Use asynchronous scripts.
• Avoid plugins.
• Configure the viewport.
• Size content to viewport.

Size tap targets appropriately

Use legible font sizes

You can use PageSpeed Insights from Google to make your web page faster.

Text-based marketing

Text-based marketing is a fundamental and promotional way to reach out to a target audience. As texting is the most used mobile device feature, you are able to communicate with the right message directly and stay in touch with them in a comfortable way.

Besides, the global SMS open rate is over 90% and its click-through rate is better than email. You can send promotions, updates, confirmations, and reminders using text messaging. Text messaging allows you to promote your business and generate leads effectively.

What makes text-based messaging so powerful is that it is cheap and you can automate all the activities for great user engagement. However, you have limits of space to send your messages and function to attract your audience and integrate with other apps.

SMS Marketing

Short Message Service (SMS) is the most used mobile marketing approach. It allows you to have instant communication with customers through short text messages up to 160 characters. Since it only requires the phone numbers to send, it is easy to get started with SMS marketing.

SMS marketing can bring the best engagement and conversion rates of any of the marketing methods. You can increase brand awareness. Thus, making your audience feel comfortable to open your short message and click on the link in it. That will help you not to go into a spam folder.

Opt-in SMS marketing is a more comfortable way for both sides to communicate. You can ask your prospects and customers for permission to keep sending your marketing messages. Remember to give instructions to opt-out, with a short message like “Text STOP to opt out.”

MMS Marketing

Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) is when you send a message but with an image, video, or some other type of multimedia on it.

What’s different from SMS is that you deliver information through email addresses instead of phone numbers. So with MMS you can send long-form texts and include images, videos, voice data, etc.

Push notification

A push notification is a message or alert that pops up on desktop and mobile devices. You can send personalized information, reminders, and advertisements to users after you ask for permission (opt-in) to receive your message.

As the opt-in rates are much higher on Android devices (91.1%) than iOS (43.9%), it can be one of the easiest ways to send messages to your targeted audience and increase user engagement.

With push notification, it is easy to segment your target audience based on real-time website behavior, device type, geographic information, etc. It helps you to acquire new customers, encourage users to complete certain tasks on your website, and convert abandoned carts into sales.

Also, you can conduct an A/B test to check which title/message/CTA/image works better with your audience. So you can perform your best to drive engagement and conversion.

Find out more information about push notifications in this post.

Location-based service

Location Based Service (LBS) is a service to deliver custom information or promotions based on the geographic information of mobile devices through GPS. It gives you a better understanding of user behavior by tracking analysis.

This works especially well when they are physically close to your business. Using location-based mobile marketing you are not only able to attract new customers, but also accelerate your local business and drive O2O marketing effectively.

Thus, LBS sends your marketing messages to potential and current customers effectively. Besides, it gathers their information in real-time and customizes your marketing campaigns to fit your customer’s location.

If you’re looking for more information about location-based marketing, you’ll love this publisher’s guide.

Check-ins

Source: Instagram

A famous example of LBS is a “check-in.” Mostly it is visible on social media to the friends of the person who “check-in”. So it can be social proof of your business, drive personal referrals, and increase your local business exposure.

What’s more, check-in is a geo-targeted service that allows you to provide additional information about your business, engage users, and offer promotional offers like discounts or coupons.

Make sure to activate your check-ins and monitor activities frequently. It gives you the chance to interact with users and draw them into customers. Also, you can get a better idea of who’s checking, what they’re saying about you, and how you can approach them effectively.

Mobile Ads

Mobile advertising is a fast-growing and influential promotion method that displays advertisements on mobile web pages and in mobile apps.

As the global mobile device usage is continuously growing, you cannot miss this amazing opportunity to reach out to a wide range of active users and convert them into your customers.

By placing relevant information on what users are doing with their mobile devices, it is not only possible to attract users, but also to significantly improve lead generation and sales.

Mobile coupon

A mobile coupon is an electronic coupon delivered to mobile devices. It allows users to access a certain web page and receive valuable information or special deals/discounts/rebates when purchasing a product or service.

According to a mobile coupon survey, 25% of the responders redeem texted coupons within three days, and 60% redeem them within a week. Many shoppers are influenced by coupons and discounts. So, a mobile coupon plays a key role in consumers’ purchasing decisions.

Thus, you have a great opportunity to promote your product or service, increase customer traffic, build a customer database, and deepen customer loyalty with mobile coupons.

QR codes

A QR code is a readable barcode by camera-equipped mobile devices. It stores specific texts or web URLs to let people take specific actions, such as visiting a mobile website, offering coupons and deals, or giving downloadable information.

With a QR code, you can provide users with convenience and great user experience at the same time. It will guide users to a particular page and induce people to take the desired action.

However, you need to work on its disadvantages. Since QR codes need to be scanned with a mobile device, obviously you are asking users to take additional action before receiving your offers. You must give clear benefits and persuasive messages for users to scan your QR code.

Mobile Apps

As 90% of mobile time is spent on apps, mobile apps have sunk into our lives. They are distinct from a mobile website and they bring a huge opportunity for businesses to boost brand awareness, highly engage with users, improve customer service and increase customer loyalty.

Most importantly, you can offer better personalization with mobile apps. Since they track user engagement and collect data, you can offer customized content and a personalized experience. Also, mobile apps allow you to send push notifications at a point of sales so that they have higher conversion rates.

Besides, mobile apps can utilize mobile device features such as phone, camera, GPS, contact lists, Face ID, etc. This will give you additional value that can differentiate you from your competition. It enhances user experience and generates customer satisfaction.

Social media marketing

Social media is a cost-effective and interactive marketing channel for businesses to reach prospects and customers, increase brand awareness and traffic, promote your content, and engage with them.

As there are about 3.5 billion active social media users, marketing your business on social media has so much potential. It allows you to promote your brand and content and helps you to find your audience in an easy and fast manner.

Besides, you can easily join any conversation and offer real-time customer services. So, it is effective to perform one-to-one marketing and develop relationships with users.

Mobile payment

Mobile payment is an electronic point-of-sale (EPOS) transaction which makes it easier for users to make payments. This improves cash flow, conversions, and user experience.

Since app stores keep track of the purchase information each time the user buys something, it allows you to access customer data and integrate loyalty programs. For example, you can use this data to offer reward points, coupons and more.

If you’re not familiar with mobile payment, check out this great Q&A post.

Don’t forget

Mobile marketing only works if you offer mobile users content that is optimized for mobile platforms and display it correctly. Keep in mind that mobile devices have diverse platforms with different screen sizes. And the performance varies for each browser.

Mobile marketing is very effective by collecting user data like preferences and searching history through mobile devices.

But you need to deal with users’ data privacy and security carefully and you must be transparent about your use of personal data.

Chapter 6

Public Relations

When it comes to promotion, marketers tend to focus on the online marketing strategies I mentioned earlier.

However, you cannot neglect the power of public relations (PR) to promote your business.

In this chapter, you’re going to learn what PR are about and how you can leverage them.

What are public relations?

Public relations focus on strategic communication management in marketing that develops better relationships between organizations and their public. They help you to maintain a good brand image and a stronger relationship with your audience.

One of the main PR functions is storytelling through the media. It spreads your story to the public and builds your credibility among your audience. Another one is marketing communication that handles good and bad perceptions of your corporate images.

HOW TO DO PUBLIC RELATIONS. A BEGINNER’S GUIDE TO PR FROM A PR BOSS.
by Jo Jones

As you can see, public relations aren’t all about getting brand mentions and promoting your business. Without striving to keep your brand image clean and safe, you won’t achieve marketing communication success.

The roles of public relations

Public relations support your brand building, expand your messaging reach, minimize your damage by negative publicities, and shape your organization image. Thus, PR have so many functions.

If you’re new to public relations, check out the following roles below:

• Media representation.
• Content development.
• Media relations.
• Community relations.
• Financial relations.
• Government relations.
• Employee relations.
• Customer/Client relations.
• Investor relations.
• Influencer relations.
• Marketing communication.
• Public affairs.
• Reputation management.
• Crisis management.
• Social media management.

Building a good brand image is not an easy task and it will take time till you feel the power of public relations. But if you have a brand and a business to run, you won’t want to miss what public relations can bring to your business!

Do you want to know why it’s worth implementing?

Then, let’s see what advantages you can expect from operating public relations!

Benefits of public relations

Public relations can secure beneficial relationships with the public and protect your established brand from negative publicities. This will drive so many advantages to your business and support your business producing the best results.

Here are some benefits of public relations that you can gain:

• Shape a better brand image both online and offline.
• Highly target your market and audience.
• Attract public, investors, partners, stakeholders, and employees.
• Generate leads.
• Cost-effective (more than advertising).
• Build trust and educate your target audience.
• Influence the perception, knowledge, behavior of your audience.
• Obtain credibility, reliability, and authority.
• Generate positive media coverage.
• Develop long-term relationships.
• Expose your brand to a large audience.
• Raise brand awareness.
• Gain endorsements from a third-party media outlet.
• Avoid false information spreading.
• Minimize the damage and crisis of your brand reputation.
• Establish your brand.
• Improve customer experience.
• Boost your brand mentions.
• Increase qualified traffic.
• Enhance social media engagement.
• Gain backlinks.
• Acquire new customers and retain current customers.
• Drive revenue and profits.

Note:

Public relations are quite different from marketing which focuses more on sales by direct and promotional marketing. Yet, they share common goals such as promoting news, raising awareness, and improving attitudes.

Public relations focus not only on impacting the perception and behavior of the target audience, but also on preventing reputation attacks. Those activities will eventually build positive relationships with the public.

Now you know what PR is all about, let’s get to the point – how you can implement them as a part of your promotion. I’m going to share some key PR activities that you can apply to your strategies.

Content Development

To nurture your audience and build a good image of your brand, content development is one of the key activities for public relations. It is necessary that you get some endorsements from the media to promote what you’re and what you can bring to the market. But it’s not enough to make the public get a better understanding of you.

With content development, you can share your pitches from your angle and promote your message to your target audience. This way, you will capture more qualified leads who are already interested in your keywords, topics, or business.

Press release

A press release is one of the most valuable assets in public relations. It can reach a wide range of audiences, and generate media coverage, and it creates public awareness like journalists and media outlets. 

You can include anything you need to tell your story within a few pages. However, there are some content aspects a press release should contain:

• A compelling headline that attracts the public.
• Subheadings.
• Body in detail.
• Quotes.
• Notations.
• Your logo.
• Release date.
• Contact information.

A press release is a great opportunity to promote your brand professionally. You can send out as many as you like from different angles. This will lead your audience to find you as they need. Be sure to triple check if your press release is proofreading and error-free before media distribution!

Website content

As you already know, your website is a critical component of digital marketing performance. PR’s content development is not only about a press release. You can promote your business on your website by adding features that make your website visitors get to know you better.

Here are some examples you can consider:

1. Develop an attractive About Us page.

An ‘About Us’ page is a very important page on your website. This is the place where you can introduce any appealing information for your website visitors to understand who you are, how you can help them, what you’ve done to solve the problems your customers and clients have, etc. 

Many people think that an ‘About Us’ page should be all about yourself. But it’s the place where you need to focus on how your target audience reads your content and how you can persuade them to do business with you. If you have more things to talk about, you can write a blog post or a case study.

2. Winning industry awards.

Winning awards boosts your credibility and reputation. It showcases your achievements and how reliable your service is. It is time-consuming and requires extra work to get awards, but you cannot miss out this big chance to win the trust of your audience. Even for the people who don’t know your business, award marks are effective.

Either on the ‘About Us’ page or at the footer, it is a great chance to show your credentials, awards, and certifications. Be sure to apply for quality and credible awards. This will make your audience feel confident to trust and try your business.

Blogging is an effective public relations tool to promote your work. It enhances not only your reputation, but also your authority. Let’s see if you write how-to posts about your industry topics that your audience may want to hear about. It is helpful for them to figure out what’s going on, especially from someone (you) who they consider as an expert. Also, it can show that you care about them.

There are so many reasons why you need to blog, but one of them is that a blog post is shareable. So you can spread your messages to a large audience and your readers can also share it. This way, your content gets more exposure and generates extra leads.

4. Create case studies.

A case study is one of the best ways to showcase your business value and the effectiveness of your marketing performance. It tells a successful story about how effective your business is dealing with your customers. You should choose the most valuable stories that brought satisfying solutions.

Most potential customers want to know how you did your job with others before they contact you. To grab your audience’s attention and convince them that you’re the best choice, you must make your case study as specific as possible. Don’t exaggerate your story, and use the real numbers!

5. Ask for testimonials and reviews.

Social proof is a powerful marketing technique that you should include in your website content to boost your value. People believe and trust what others say more than your words. So, it is vital to add testimonials and reviews on your website. They strengthen your credibility and convert your visitors into your customers.

For collecting testimonials and reviews, you should ask your customers and clients to give you feedback right after your delivery. Otherwise, you may lose the opportunity to ask for a testimonial and get detailed information from them. Remember what others say matters most to your potential customers and clients!

6. Video content.

Considering the fact that video is one of the favorite types of content that people like to consume, you should think about creating one for your business. It takes lots of time and effort to make one, but you cannot overlook that video content drives qualified leads and better SEO to your business.

Video is easy to consume and people are 95% more likely to remember the message in video content rather than text-only content. Besides, it also increases user engagement.

Though, it is key to make your video interesting and work on how to prevent bounces by hooking viewers at the very beginning!

Consider adding a good promotional video to your website.

7. Infographics.

Infographics are eye-catching content that support your message. It helps you to tell your story visually and deliver complex information in the easiest way. As infographics get higher engagement on social media, they can generate more traffic and improve your SEO.

My advice here is that you should create infographics as an assistant of your content like blog posts. Although they are generally used as a supportive channel, infographics are a great link building tool and a helpful source for your audience. Especially for busy people who write articles.

PR events

It is always a good idea to go to PR events in order to interact with professionals in your industry and its audience. PR events can be your great shots to build relationships with real-people, develop your professional profile and polish your brand image.

There are three ways to participate in PR events:

1. Be a speaker in PR events.

Public speaking is one of the most powerful ways of sharing your message and building your credibility with the audience. With strong communication skills, you can influence and create relationships with them. What’s more, public speaking helps you to grow your business and career.

So, you must improve your communication, critical thinking, and leadership skills to inspire people. You should test which tools and equipment work best for your messaging. And when you give a speech, be confident and enjoy!

2. Organize PR events.

Sponsoring PR events can put your business front and center. It will generate brand awareness and improve consumer perception of your business. Normally event attendees provide personal data like contact information. So you can organize your event more related to them and strive to strengthen relationships with them by sending emails after the event.

Speaking in front of a large audience can be terrifying, but choosing your guest speakers is hard. Since your PR event must reflect your brand image, you cannot risk the event’s success to guest speakers.

Though, if you decide to do so, you should select them carefully by checking their previous speeches and talking in person before making a decision.

Last but not least, you must prepare your backup plans in case something goes wrong. Otherwise, it can destroy your reputation, brand image, and relationships.

3. Attend industry events.

You should search for events in your industry and attend them for your network. Industry events are a gathering of professionals and their audience so that it is a great PR opportunity for you to meet people and start business relationships with them.

Who knows you might meet your future clients and partners in the events. Your business chances are laid in anywhere. All you have to do is look around and grab them!

Public relations play a significant role in your business development and marketing communication. And it spreads a positive image to everyone. Thus, you should incorporate public relations into your promotion strategies if you haven’t done it already.

Chapter 7

Promotional Marketing Metrics​

Promotional marketing metrics are very important factors to spread your brand. Tracking and analyzing your performance helps you to do your best and develop better strategies.

Before completing your promotion strategy, let’s check out some promotional marketing metrics.

Measuring your performance is extremely important because it will tell you whether your approach is worth continuing and you need to modify your strategies.

Without knowing promotional effectiveness, you may waste your time and effort focusing on results that don’t bring any benefits for you.

The bottom line:

I’m going to share key metrics for content promotion, website performance, and advertising so that you can strive for your best promotion.

So let’s get to it!

Content promotion metrics

Content marketing works when you track and measure the right metrics for your goals. Although which metrics to track depends on your business and your content marketing goals and strategies, the following metrics are essential.

Consumption

Pageviews

The total number of times that a specific page on the website got viewed or refreshed.

Visits

This is a single browsing session.

Unique visits

It refers to the number of visitors your website had during a week.

New / Returning visitors

New visitors are those who visit your website for the first time. But, returning visitors are those who have visited your website before, and then they visit your page again.

Traffic sources

This is a report which gives you information about all those sources that send traffic to your site whether they are paid or organic.

Average time on page

This means the average time users spend on your Web page.

SEO performance

Organic keywords

Organic keywords are those we use to drive free traffic to our site through SEO.

Ranking position

This is the position of your website in search engines.

Backlinks

This refers to a hyperlink that links another website with your Web page.

Referring domains

A referring domain is the one from which you receive backlinks. This is extremely important as having many referring domains will improve your SEO ranking.

Engagement

Bounce rate

It means the percentage of visitors who log in and then leave your site without browsing.

Time on page

It means the average time the total amount of your visitors spend on your site.

Pageviews / Visits

It means the amount of times people visited your Web page.

Engagement rate

This tells you how much your audience engaged with your content. It can be by means of likes, comments, shares, etc.

Interactions

Interactions are how users react to content and how they communicate that to you. Visitors can interact with your site, content, even with you through various ways.

Comments

Comments are messages your audience leaves you about the content you post. They can be either positive or negative. They are really important as they provide you feedback.

Social media engagement

It tracks your performance on social media networks. It takes into account likes, shares, comments, etc.

Share

Social media shares

This means that users share and help you to distribute content among their friends, followers, groups, etc. This is key for a successful brand awareness.

Email forwards

This means that an email which has already been sent to an account is then sent again to a different email address.

Lead-generation

New subscribers

These are visitors to your site who decide to become new subscribers. They are really important as they usually have to give you their contact details. They do so in exchange for extra content, newsletters, etc.

Unsubscribers

This is when your originally subscribers decide not to belong to this group any more. So, they ask you to cancel their subscription.

Downloads

This is when you transfer data or a file from one computer to another. Thus, it is the amount of times users download files or content from your site to their electronic devices.

Conversion

Conversion rate

It refers to the percentage of your users who take a desired action such as buying a product.

Click-through rate

It tells you the percentage of users who visited your site and clicked on a specific link.

Cost Per Conversion

This is when a user sees one of your ads, clicks on it and then visits your site within a period of time.

Remember

These metrics are not all you should track. They can be useful to understand your performance better. But as I mentioned earlier, you need to match your goals and what metrics to measure.

Website performance metrics

Simply, website performance metrics are indicators of whether your website is successfully working or not.

And here’s the point:

No matter how awesome your content is, you won’t be able to make the most out of it if your website performance is bad.

It means that you must check out the efficiency of your website before your promotion. You can use a website speed test tool like WebPageTest to improve the usability and user experience on your website.

Here are some key indicators for speeding up your website performance:

Connection time

Connection time is the time it takes to establish a connection between your browser and the web server. The counter starts when the request is sent. Slow connection times can occur because different factors: DNS issues, server overload, geographic distance…

DNS lookup time

It is the time it takes to translate a domain name (www.example.com) in an IP address. A DNS request is sent by the browser and a DNS server resolves it.

Error rate

This simple yet important metric tells you how many requests turn into errors. It is necessary to spot problems in the communication between the client and the server.

Asset count

It’s the total number of assets the server is serving on a page view. HTML, CSS, JS, IMG and any other file you are serving counts. The more assets you have, the more likely you are of carrying out a losing performance.

Page weight

Page weight has become a very complex term. It measures the total page resources load. It can be tricky to measure because of javascript loading external resources asynchronously. The measure could vary depending on what resources are being loaded. In a general way we can say page weight is the actual amount of data the browser loads to completely serve a web page.

Page load time

The time it takes to fully load the web page and all its assets. It is one of the most important metrics as it can influence search engine rankings.

Server response time

The server response time measures the time required for the server to deliver a response to the client. It’s the time between the request is sent and the received response. Usually it is the same as Time to first byte, but it is an ambiguous term.

Requests per second

An average number of satisfied requests per second. Each time the browser sends a request to the server and it gets a positive response the counter increases.

Start render time

This website performance metric measures the time from the start of the navigation (when the request is sent by the browser) until the first graphic element is painted on the browser window.

Third party domains

This counter reflects how many connections to different domains are made in order to satisfy the web request. For example, if a website is loading an image from an external source, that domain is being counted as a third-party domain. Every developer should aim at the lowest possible amount of external connections as they negatively affect web performance.

Time to first byte

This metric measures the time spent between the request and the reception of the first data package from the server.

Time to interact

The time needed to correctly load the first interaction element (button, link, form…) in the browser window. Before this time the user is not able to interact with the website.

Time to last byte

This metric measures the time spent between the request and the reception of the last data package from the server. At this point the browser has everything it needs to correctly load the website.

Time to title

The time it takes to correctly load the first title of the page.

Digital advertising metrics

Digital advertising is one of the most common advertising techniques. Still, every lead you get with it has a direct acquisition cost.

Therefore, it is very important to track digital advertising metrics not only to improve efficiency but also to reduce costs. Otherwise, you may get a negative ROI.

The following are critical for digital advertising success:

Impressions

It means the number of times you have displayed your content. Though, it doesn’t take into account whether your visitors click on it or not.

Reach

This refers to the entire number of people that have seen your content.

Engagement rate

To determine the engagement rate of a piece of content, you will need to divide its interactions by the number of followers of the account where you post this content.

Clicks

A click is when you select a link with your mouse. Thus you click on it and it drives you to another website, an ad, a landing page, etc.

Conversion rate

It is a number expressed in percentages. It gives you data about how many people fulfilled a desired action. That is to say, it tells you the number of visitors who completed an action divided by the total number of visitors to your Web page.

Quality score

It is the score that search engines give to your keywords, advertisements, website, etc. The score goes from 1 to 10. 10 is considered the highest. The score you get will influence the position in which your advert will appear. It will also affect pay-per-click.

Total spent cost

You can use it to calculate the total amount of expenses that you have paid to manufacture a product, buy equipment, invest on something, etc.

Cost-per-thousand impressions (CPM)

It tells you the total amount of money that an advertiser pays for one thousand impressions on his/her Web page.

Cost-per-click (CPC)

This means the amount of money you pay each time someone clicks on one of your paid adverts, links, CTAs, etc.

Cost-per-conversions (CPC)

It tells you how much it costs you to get a customer to fulfil a conversion. For instance, subscribing to your email list, buying a product, downloading content, etc.

Average cost-per-acquisition (CPA)

It tells you how much it costs you to convert a visitor into a customer. Being aware of this information is key as it will help you to decide whether your strategy is working or not.

Return-on-advertising-spend (ROAS)

It tells you information about how profitable an advertising campaign has been for your company. That is to say, it monitors your performance and gives you data about its efficiency.

With successful promotion strategies, you will be able to increase the engagement and conversion of your products and services. They will also help you to make more sales and grow your business as a result.

Conclusion

There you have the step-by-step promotion tactics and useful techniques that you can implement right away.

What is important is, don’t wait for things to happen, take the initiative.

Now I would like to hear from you!

Which of the promotion strategy formulas in this post are you going to apply?

Or perhaps did I miss your favorite strategies…?

Leave a comment to let me know what you think!