How to Market a Product or Service: 10 Highly Effective Ways

As a business owner, devising a marketing strategy to promote your product or service is important to your business. With so many competitors out there, getting your offer to the right audience is key. Marketing doesn’t only help your business gain visibility, but it could help drive traffic, get more sales and generate more revenue.

While there are many marketing strategies you could use for your business, understanding the ones that work best is vital. In this guide, we’ve explained 10 highly effective ways you can market your product or service.

1. Social media marketing

In today’s world, social media remains one of the best marketing methods that should be utilized by every business out there. Whether you own a local shop, sell a product or service online or are a professional in a field, you should maximise the power of social media. 

This marketing method doesn’t only help you gain the visibility and awareness that’s needed, but could also help you generate a lot of sales. With social media, you could use organic or paid ads. Organic ads are the kind of advertisement done without having to pay any platform, while paid ones also known as inorganic involves making payment so that your product or service can be made visible to the right audience.

As a business owner, you should consider using both types and as such, you would want to ensure that you consistently make valuable written and video content and upload them on your social page. These contents should preferably be engaging and attractive to the audience. Apart from that, you should invest in paid ads, so you can use Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit and so on to run your paid campaigns.

 It is vital you understand how each social media paid ads works before investing in them, as this could have a say on the outcome. Apart from that, you would need to comprehend the rules and regulations guiding each platform before advertising on them.

 While you don’t have to spend much before you get results through this strategy, you must understand the tricks involved. As a general rule, you would find out that videos in most cases work better for ads than images or written words and apart from that, you must know who your target audience is to run an effective ads campaign. 

2. Google My Business

Whether you own a local store for your business or you render an online service, you should consider using Google My Business. This is an online tool owned by Google and it allows businesses to freely showcase and advertise their business on Google even when they don’t own a website. 

So with it, when an individual searches for businesses on the Google search engine, it would provide every essential detail of the business. However, the kind of details that people would see when they search for your business depends on what you upload on the Google account.

As such, you should be able to provide basic information about what your business does, including your mission and vision, your available hours of operation, what you sell and so on. Apart from the fact Google My Business makes you visible on search engines, you could make posts and upload them to the account. 

With that, you can upload your new offers or products, share your upcoming events, create a do-it-yourself post and upload and so on. So if you want a more easy way to keep in touch with your customers and audience without having to bother about traffic generation, then this is a good way to start.

3. Blogging 

As a business owner offering products or services, you should also consider blogging as a marketing tool. With blogging, many existing and new audiences across many nations would get to know about your product and not only that, they would be able to gain meaningful and valuable information about your product or service. 

Blogging therefore allows you to share your knowledge, ideas, tricks, etc. that are related to your product or services. Beyond that, this marketing strategy helps people portray you as an expert in the field, since you can provide answers to most of their questions through your blog. Also, you won’t only be providing content that solves problems but you would be able to earn through blogging itself. 

Apart from that, the SEO aspect of blogging makes it easier for new audiences to reach you whenever they search for a product or service related to what you do and with that, you could generate more sales. 

4. Run a Social media Contest

With the world of social media, your business can achieve a lot within a few months to years. Running social media contests is now very common with many online businesses. You can set up a contest to drive engagement to your social media page, gain more audience, attract new customers and many more. By creating awareness and involving the existing audience and customers, you will be able to achieve your goal with the contest. 

If you’re a new business, you can set up a contest dedicated to helping you gain new followers. As such you would need to involve the existing customer or audience and allow them to run the contest by introducing a new audience to your brand. You can therefore reward the winners by offering a giveaway or a huge discount for a product. 

Apart from that you can encourage your audience to share your post and invite people to like while you offer gifts to winners. In fact, there’s a lot you could use this marketing strategy to achieve, however, you need to be sure of the goal of the contest and plan accordingly. 

5. Influencer marketing

This is another online marketing to try as a business owner. Influencer marketing involves using online influencers or gurus to advertise your products or services. Influencers are individuals who have already mastered the power of social media and other online marketing platforms and have gained a lot of audience from that.

Most times influencers are loved and cherished by their audience and because of the trust and loyalty audiences have for influencers, it is easier for them to market products or services that are within their niche. 

So as a new start-up looking forward to gaining an online presence, then you should be on the lookout for an influencer who will be interested in marketing your product for you. He or she should therefore be someone who speaks about your niche product or service. For example, if you are into automobile or skincare products, then you should only use an influencer who is known for promoting such kinds of products. 

You can therefore gift them your product in exchange for your product advertisement. With this, they’d be coupled with making your product visible to their already existing large audience or followers. 

6. Affiliate marketing

With affiliate marketing, there is a lot of money to be made. Affiliate marketing is a marketing strategy that involves promoting other brands' products or services while you receive a commission from every sale that comes through you.  With this method, you can create an affiliate program whereby people will sign in with your brand, and help promote your product or service while you offer them a commission with each successful deal made. 

As such, they do not even have to own the product or purchase the product from you, as they are only required to market your product while they earn from every product sold through them. 

Many big companies out there make use of this strategy and even as a start-up, it's a good marketing method to try. Affiliate marketers, on the other hand, could maximise the use of social media, websites, emails and so on to advertise your product or service.

7. Email marketing

Email marketing is a great tool to reach your already existing customer base. Whether you want to advertise a new product to them or you wish to showcase your exclusive offer, this is one of the most effective ways to consistently sell to your audience. As such, you also need to continuously work on building your email list to gain more audience and increase your chances of generating more sales. 

Through persuasive and engaging content, you would be able to get people to take action. Apart from that, with emails you could share valuable information about your product usage, how to care for the products and so on. Emails are one of the strategies you could use to communicate directly with each audience, so you have to put your persuasive skills to work so they can take the action you desire.

8. Utilize customers reviews

Research has shown that many online buyers go through customer reviews before purchasing from a brand. No matter how many words or videos you used to compel people to buy, they are still interested in what past buyers have to say about the product and, as such, you must ensure that you gather reviews from your customers. 

In as much as your product meets up with the quality demanded from the audience and they are satisfied, they would be willing to give you a positive remark. These reviews could be in the form of written word or video and should be placed on your social media handles, website, and other necessary platforms. To make this strategy easier, you could offer a discount to your loyal customers in exchange for a review.

9. Create a limited-time deal

Another effective way to market your product or service is to offer a limited-time deal to customers. With this, you can target existing or new customers, or both. By sending emails to your subscribers, you would be able to communicate the new limited deal to them. 

For you to be able to reach new customers, you could maximise social media ads. Either of the ways you choose to use this marketing method would work fine as far as you’re able to reach your target audience.

 Creating a onetime or limited-time offer helps you create a sense of urgency as customers feel they would be left out if they don’t participate in the limited offer.

And for you to make this marketing method work, you need to offer customers an exclusive deal which can involve giving discounts, offering a free delivery or offering a gift on every purchase. 

As such, you should ensure that the audience is getting real value even when buying at a discounted amount. You would also want to attach a countdown to the limited offer and also lay emphasis on the product's limited availability.

10. Join online communities and groups

When you go through several social media platforms, you will find that there are many communities and pages that are related to your business, product, or service niche. These communities don’t only exist to provide useful content relating to the group's aim, but they help connect sellers and buyers. 

So whether you are offering a product or service, it would be wise to join such communities. In fact, in most cases, you don’t even have to pay to get your offer to people, as there is already an existing audience in such a group. 

Your offer, however, must be unique and attractive to buyers to succeed with this. You would also be expected to dish out useful, engaging and valuable content that will help grow your visibility within the community. Once potential customers get to know you from the group, they are likely going to patronize your business.

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Conclusion

While you don’t have to jump on every marketing strategy at once, recognizing the ones that work best for your business is key. With it, you will be able to minimise marketing costs while also gaining more sales and generating a lot of profit.