The Many Marketing Methods

The number of ways available to a business to market to their customers are growing almost by the day and it is becoming increasingly difficult for business owners to know what type of marketing would work best for them.

Here we look at the various forms of marketing available to a company and what benefits they offer, thus making it easier for you to cherry pick the ones that would suit your business best – and keep your costs down by rejecting those that won’t work for you.

Print Advertising

Placing adverts in newspapers and magazines is a very useful and powerful form of marketing. You can build your brand or create a call to action advert and it can be very carefully targeted. If you want to market to your local area, you buy ad space in the local newspapers, while a specific product or service can be advertised in the various magazines that cover that topic – ie, flying lessons in aeroplane and flying enthusiast magazines.

Print advertising must be prepared well in advance to meet the deadlines of the publications – especially with monthly magazines, since they are printed months before their release date.

It can also be a very expensive form of advertising and requires big advertising budgets.

Direct Mail

Direct mail involves the sending of flyers, leaflets, letters and similar directly to individuals at their home or workplace. It is, depending on the campaign, often cheaper than print advertising, but you still have to pay for the printing, postage and a targeted mailing list.

However, it can be worth it as the campaign can be targeted directly at an individual, allowing you to personalise your mailing which is often far more effective than generic marketing.

TV and Radio

Fast, hard hitting and impressive – people who see a TV advert or hear a radio advert from your company generally have an improved opinion of you almost straightaway – TV and radio marketing is extremely powerful.

Of course, that power comes at a cost and this is by far the most expensive form of marketing. Depending on your product, service or needs it can be a price worth paying as the response could be huge.

Online Marketing

The baby in the marketing world but the fastest growing sector as well, online marketing offers a cheap but effective way of communicating your message to potentially millions of people. Online marketing comes in the following forms.

Pay Per Click – You bid on keywords and your short, crafted ad will appear when people do searches for that keyword. A fast but potentially pricey way of being on page one of the search engines.

Banner Advertising – Your advert on another person or company’s website, linking back to your site. The owner of the website will want paying, of course, but if it’s a carefully chosen site it could reap rewards.

Email Marketing – Deliver your message directly into the inbox of your email marketing list. If you’ve built the list yourself this is an almost free form of marketing and is very, very powerful as it can be personalised. The online equivalent of Direct Mail. If you don’t have your own list, you can buy one – and it would still be worth it.

Organic Search – Using search engine optimisation (SEO) to rank high on the search engines so people find you when they search for terms related to your business. This is a long term form of marketing that requires effort and patience but if you achieve your goal you will see the benefits of ranking highly in the search engines. You’ll get a lot of traffic and you won’t have to pay the Pay Per Click cost you otherwise would have to get that position.

All of these forms of marketing can be effective – but you know your business better than anyone so pick the one(s) that are closely aligned with it and don’t be tempted to do them all!

Author Bio: Ian Grainger is writing on behalf of Extravision, specialists in email marketing.

Category: Marketing
Keywords: marketing, email, online, tv, radio, magazines, newspapers