In addition to the initial theory and basics of marketing, it is important to become familiar with the various marketing channels and measures that will help you increase your sales. We differentiate between online and offline marketing and finally we will look at the topic of public relations (PR).
With the increasing digitalization, online marketing plays an increasingly important role. Internet marketing or e-marketing describes all marketing activities that take place in the digital world of the Internet.
This includes communication via social media channels, but also sending newsletters, paid advertising on Google or in the BEILRY advertising service. Compared to offline marketing, it is usually more cost-effective and, above all, easier to measure.
The core of your online marketing is and remains your own company website, no matter how many social media channels you use or how many emails you send as part of a marketing newsletter. Your own website is the center of your online presence. After all, this is where a purchase is made, a newsletter is subscribed to, or a contact form is filled out.
However, having your own website will do you little good if no one knows about it. Search engine marketing is a discipline that aims to direct your target audience to your website through Google and other search engines using relevant search queries. Search engine marketing (abbreviated SEM) covers two broad areas: search engine optimization and search engine advertising.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) aims to get your website or your content to appear as high as possible in search engine results. Organic or natural search are search results that you as a company do not pay for.
There are countless aspects that positively or negatively affect your website’s search engine rankings. The five most important aspects that businesses can consider for Google rankings are:
1. Good keyword research
2. Lots of quality content
3. Clear page structure
4. Quality external links
5. Strong internal link building
If you haven't done any SEO yet, these keywords probably don't mean much. Using SEO is especially recommended for smaller companies. It can attract a lot of customers, especially in the long run. Plus, SEO "only" costs time, not money.
Search engine advertising (SEA) involves trying to rank higher in search results through paid advertising. Search engine advertising refers to paid advertisements on Google that appear in the form of links or images.
Whether Google ads actually show up depends, in addition to the SEO of your website and your own willingness to pay, primarily on the keywords you choose. For this reason, the terms SEA and keyword advertising are often used interchangeably.
Social media marketing describes the strategies and actions companies take on social media. With the increasing number of users of Facebook and other social media, more and more companies are using social media for their marketing.
Social media channels provide companies with additional platforms to communicate and interact with their target group. In addition to (potential) customers, social media marketing is also used for recruitment.
There are now many different social media channels that companies use. However, the usefulness of using channels always depends largely on the company itself. Not every company needs to use all social media platforms.
For example, an industrial adhesive manufacturer will have less success on Pinterest, a platform for posting images on specific topics (often fashion or food), than a fashion startup. However, the number of B2B companies on social media continues to grow, as decision makers from other companies are also registered on Facebook and other social networks or have created company pages there. Platforms like Facebook are often used as a means of customer loyalty and support.
Facebook is the largest platform and, so to speak, the mother of all social networks. The platform now has a huge number of active users around the world, and the platform continues to grow. Of course, since so many people use Facebook, it also offers huge potential for companies, especially for the following purposes:
1. Reach and awareness
2. Targeted advertising
3. Traffic to the company's website
4. Customer support
5. Customer loyalty
YouTube is the world's largest video platform. In addition to young people, YouTube is used by 70% of people aged 30 to 44. Even among people aged 45 to 59, almost half of those surveyed said they regularly visit the platform.
In both the B2B and B2C sectors, YouTube is now a regularly used channel for an increasing number of companies, especially for displaying promotional videos.
Hundreds of thousands of companies use email as a marketing channel. Informative marketing is so popular because it is relatively cheap and flexible, and its effect is easy to measure. With hundreds of billions of emails sent every day today that flood recipients' inboxes, companies have to focus intensively on their own newsletters to benefit from email marketing.
Segmentation of target groups, i.e. specific communication to different target groups, is particularly important. If you send the same newsletter to all your customers, only a few of them will be addressed. Informative marketing works much better if you send different newsletters with specific content to small target groups.
To implement this, you need to use software that helps you classify your customers and thus creates a basis for targeting different customers. We also recommend using professional mailing software.
Permission marketing or permission marketing is closely related to newsletter marketing. Permission marketing is sending information or advertising with the explicit permission of the recipient or customer. Permission marketing is becoming even more important, especially in view of new data protection laws.
Content marketing is a strategy in which self-created content is intended to attract a target group. This content can be informative or entertaining and is aimed at attracting new customers while retaining existing customers.
Thematically, the content is selected so that it matches your target group. A good example here are corporate blogs, where companies write posts that are interesting and useful to their target group.
Content marketing works on the so-called “principle of attraction”. This means that, for example, readers of a corporate blog can find their way there on their own because they searched for relevant keywords in Google. Content marketing offers the company in question many advantages: it is cost-effective, has a positive effect on search engine optimization, directs the target group to your own website (keyword traffic) and increases brand awareness.
In affiliate marketing, an “affiliate” (or “publisher”) sells advertising space to a company on their website. The basic principle of affiliate marketing is that the affiliate redirects visitors to their website to a relevant company via special links.
This company is then called an “advertiser” (or “merchandiser”). Once a visitor referred by the affiliate makes a purchase, the company pays the affiliate a predetermined commission.
A good example of affiliate marketing is travel blogs, where operators write about their experiences and sometimes include affiliate links, such as to booking.com. If one of the blog’s readers books accommodation via this link, Booking pays the blog operator a corresponding commission.
In addition to the marketing channels presented above, it is also important to consider the advertising service BEILRY. The advertising service BEILRY is the most accessible of the known channels for the advertiser. Unlike Google, in the advertising service BEILRY the advertiser can determine and set the cost of one impression of his advertisement.
The cost of one impression determines the largest amount that you are willing to pay for showing your advertisement to the user. It can also be noted that the cost of each impression of your advertisement will be equal to this amount or even less. The cost of one impression may be less than the value you set if the partner of the advertising service BEILRY places and displays your advertisement on its resource (for example, a website) with a small amount of remuneration for the impression.
In this way, the company will be able to increase brand awareness and sales at a guaranteed low cost per ad impression. The BEILRY advertising service is a platform with payment for impressions (CPM or Cost Per Mille). The minimum amount for replenishing the balance for advertisers is not limited, you can start (continue) an advertising campaign with any budget.
As already mentioned, a big advantage of online marketing compared to offline marketing is that individual metrics are easier to measure. Probably the most important key metric in online marketing is the conversion rate.
The conversion rate reflects the ratio of conversions (e.g. purchases) to the total number of visitors (site). The conversion rate is expressed as a percentage and is calculated as follows:
Conversion rate = conversions / visits
If 5 out of 200 website visitors make a purchase, the conversion rate is 2.5%. Since conversion rate always directly impacts important company goals, such as sales, many companies conduct conversion rate optimization.
As the name suggests, all marketing campaigns that are not conducted online are called offline marketing. As mentioned, the big disadvantage is that the effect of offline marketing is much harder to measure than online marketing.
For example, it is difficult to determine how many people saw your billboard ad or how many flyers you distribute end up in the trash unread. In addition, offline marketing activities are usually more expensive.
The most common offline marketing activities include:
- Flyers and posters
- Mailings
- Business cards, stickers, gifts (such as ballpoint pens or magnets with your logo)
- Advertising in newspapers and magazines
- Bonus cards (e.g. in a cafe where the tenth coffee is free)
- Vouchers, coupons, discount campaigns, etc.
The fact that online marketing has taken over in recent years and that people are exposed to advertising on all digital channels is currently leading to a renaissance of offline marketing. For example, with a postcard you can reach your target group much better than with an email. On the one hand, this is due to the tactile experience, but above all to the fact that everything is now much clearer in the mailbox than in the email inbox.
Online or offline? In general, marketing is particularly effective when the marketing concept is consistently aimed at your own target group.
PR, or press work, is not traditionally considered marketing, but it has the same goals: attention and, as a result, increased sales for your company. With your press work, you are not directly reaching out to your target group, but rather to journalists who act as multipliers. This means that they can reach a much larger audience through the media.
As with content marketing, you don’t have to spend money on press work, but you will have to invest a lot of time. This can be especially helpful for smaller companies with a small marketing budget.
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