Ashley D. Su 
Are you looking for a way to boost your marketing strategy and increase your sales? If you’re like most of us, the answer is yes!
Business leaders and marketing teams around the world compete to reach their target audience and promote their products. The point is, there are many strategies to choose from, so it’s often difficult to find specific options that work well for your brand.
We want to take some of the confusion out today and share several universal ways to improve your marketing, regardless of your industry and budget. These tips could help you increase your sales and engagement while building relationships with your customers if implemented correctly.
Let’s dive into it.
Use data to create targeted customer personas
If you want to boost your marketing strategy, the first thing to do is to create several targeted customer personas. Customer personas are avatar sheets created by businesses that define their target audience. Like that:
So, an e-commerce store that sells sporting goods would likely have multiple personalities depending on the products it offers. A potential customer interested in soccer probably wouldn’t want to see basketball related content and offerings, and vice versa.
The goal of Customer Personality Cards is to learn more about your audience’s goals and weaknesses. If you understand the people who visit your site, you can create blog posts, sales pages, and promotions that suit their needs.
There are several ways to collect data for your persona sheets. Here are some of our favorite strategies:
- Check your Google Analytics account – Examine demographics, device preferences, and popular pages.
- Conduct Surveys – Gather information from as many subscribers as possible and identify trends.
- Social Media Research – Hear what your audience wants and needs from your brand. Also explore discussions with third parties to uncover issues you didn’t know existed.
Build rapport with personalization
Now that you know what visitors want from your brand, you can build relationships with personalized marketing. Believe it or not, 4 in 5 people say they want more personalized offers from their favorite businesses. This sentiment is a clear indication that using individual and collective interests in your marketing can yield meaningful results.
There are several ways to use personalization on your different marketing platforms. For example, a pop-up campaign on your blog that targets users by name and interest could lead to a dramatic increase in conversions. Here is what it looks like:
The exciting part is what we just described, it’s the tip of the iceberg. We suggest encouraging new subscribers to answer optional questions when signing up to your mailing list or purchasing a product. You can ask questions about their weaknesses, goals, and expectations.
Use this information to segment your leads and create unique email campaigns for each group of customers. Let’s go back to the sporting goods e-commerce showcase we talked about earlier. This company’s marketing team can ask users what type of sport they like. If someone says they’re interested in basketball, you know they’ll likely be interested in blog posts and offers that focus on, you guessed it, basketball.
The great thing about personalized offers is that they can be as broad or as specific as you want. It is possible to reach a significant part of your audience based on their interests. On the other hand, you can also create specific email campaigns for your subscribers on their birthday that include a special discount or a free gift.
We suggest that you experiment with different types of personalized content until you find a format that appeals to both prospects and paying customers.
Keep prospects engaged on social media
Next, let’s talk about several ways to improve your social media marketing strategy. If you’re not already using platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to engage with your audience, you’re missing out on a key marketing opportunity. Research shows that on average, users spend 2 hours and 29 minutes on social media every day.
Combine this statistic with the fact that 3.96 billion people use social media, and it’s easy to see the appeal. In Facebook alone, there are 2.45 billion active users potentially waiting for news from your brand.
When it comes to social media marketing, you have plenty of powerful and inexpensive options. One of the best ways to dramatically grow your brand is to host an online contest. Everyone appreciates the opportunity to win a prize, especially if it’s something they want or really need.
Include contest rules that encourage visitors to take action that will help your marketing efforts. For example, if you want to generate more leads, you can give visitors an extra chance to participate by signing up to your company’s mailing list.
We also recommend that you spend a lot of time talking to potential customers on your social media posts and in industry specific groups. These people are more likely to see value in your product or service, which can help you reach your sales goals.
Post lots of high quality content
Posting high-quality content on your business blog is another great way to boost your marketing efforts. Almost 80% of internet users read blog posts, so it’s easy to see why this strategy is working.
Think about the last time you visited a business website. Chances are, you’ve taken a look at their blog to learn more about the products and the brand. Would you feel comfortable shopping with a business without a blog? If you’re like most of us, the answer is no.
Much like our previous tips, your personas will play a crucial role in the type of content you post on your site. You want to post articles that resonate with your audience, which might convince them that your product or service is worth it.
You can get more people to engage with your business by posting videos to your blog. Research shows that 47% of consumers want more video content. Part of this is due to the rise of mobile marketing and users preferring to watch videos to learn more about brands.
If you regularly share high quality content on your blog, you will see a significant increase in traffic. In fact, after posting 51 blog posts, businesses report experiencing 77% more traffic compared to businesses who posted 0-4 posts.
Back to you
As you can see, there are plenty of ways to boost your marketing strategy and grow your brand. The tips here today can help take your business to the next level. We suggest that you experiment with the tips outlined today and refine your strategy over time. Before long, you’ll likely see more website traffic, which will lead to more sales and engagement.
