Outbound Marketing and Inbound Marketing

The easiest way to divide the marketing areas into two groups: Outbound Marketing and Inbound Marketing. Outbound Marketing one in which the company takes the initiative to the client and wants to take their attention. Tools that can be used here are advertising on radio, press, television, billboards, campaigns in Google Ads, Facebook Ads and other social media, mailing, pop-ups on the site, active sales through merchants, etc. This type of activity has many advantages – allows you to reach a wide audience, is simple and quick to implement, and often you don’t have to wait long for its results. On the other hand, too pushy Outbound Marketing can be irritating to recipients and discourage the brand – that’s why it is sometimes even called disruptive marketing. But has his time passed? Rather not, when used sensitively, it can still bring the company quite a lot of profit.

Inbound Marketing, stands in opposition to it. It means activities that make the customer find the brand and visit it by himself. It is much less obtrusive, you can even compare it to slowly attracting potential customers. This can be done using profiles on social media, sharing blog articles, videos, guides, podcasts or website positioning so that it appears as high as possible in search results. A difficult to implement, but a very effective variety of Inbound Marketing is viral marketing, i.e. publishing content that Internet users will themselves massively disseminate, thus providing the brand with free advertising.

SEM

SEM (Search Engine Marketing), i.e. search engine marketing, are all those activities that we take to make the brand visible in the search results in Google, Bing, Yandex or other search engines. It includes both activities aimed at increasing organic traffic (SEO) and paid advertising (PPC). When we talk about SEO (Search Engine Optimization), we mean the positioning of the website for the most profitable key phrases. Increasing visibility in organic results includes technical optimization of the website, creating texts containing keywords, acquiring valuable external links and many other activities that are individually selected for a given website.

When it comes to PPC (pay per click), there are advertising campaigns launched in the Google Ads system. Thanks to them, we can make the website appear as a sponsored link in the search results or, for example, place our products above the list of results and in the Google Shopping tab. Of course, Google Ads also provides many other advertising formats, thanks to which you can advertise on YouTube or the Google advertising network.

Content Marketing

Content Marketing is currently one of the most frequently chosen areas of marketing. It involves attracting audiences by offering them valuable content for free that will bring them to your site and later possibly benefit from the offer. As part of content marketing, or content marketing, you can create a company blog, YouTube channel, infographics, guides, webinars, podcasts and any other form that potential customers may be interested in. Such content should not be strictly promotional, advertising of individual products or brands may be slightly highlighted in the background, but the main goal is to provide the recipient with valuable advice or inspiration. It is not about the sale itself, but about attracting the customer to the brand, building in him the feeling that he got something without incurring any costs. Thanks to content, it is also possible to arouse sympathy for the brand – show who creates it, what values ​​it believes, and what it emphasizes.

Social Media Marketing

Marketing in social media is a very important element in building relationships with potential customers. It shortens the distance between them and the brand, allows for more free contact, gives recipients a space to express their own opinions and a sense of influence on shaping the future of the brand. It also allows you to show the company from a more human side, because you can place less serious content on social media than on a film page.

When we talk about social media marketing, we mean keeping official brand profiles, but also creating groups or events focused around this brand. An element of Social Media Marketing are also paid ads in various formats – promoting a website, profile, specific post or aimed at gaining new recipients. Of course, not all social media will be appropriate for every brand, but it is worth appearing in at least one or two channels outside your own website. The most popular social media today are YouTube, Facebook and Instagram, but it is not worth underestimating the potential of other platforms, such as LinkedIn, Twitter or Pinterest.

E-mail Marketing

E-mail Marketing is a type of direct marketing in which we send messages directly to recipients from our mailing list. They are designed to build relationships with recipients, and then skillfully maintain them. As part of E-mail Marketing, we can send information about discounts and promotions, new products, test the satisfaction with the services provided, etc. Newsletters in which we send the recipients interesting content are also popular forms of e-mail marketing: a collection of the most interesting content from the last weeks or even material not available from any other channels. However, it is very important to be moderate and not to turn E-mail Marketing into regular spam. If users find brand messages on a daily basis, there is a good chance that they will get annoyed and simply revoke consent to receive the emails.

Real Time Marketing

It is a very difficult type of marketing that requires immediate reactions to the current situation. It consists in sharing content, most often on social media, in some way referring to a famous, widely commented event. However, the condition for a successful action is to create an interesting and creative reference in a very short time – publication of the material a week after the incident will not amuse anyone, and may even irritate the recipient. After all, something new happens every day and news becomes a thing of the past faster than ever. An example of a successful RTM is an advertisement published when Great Britain left the European Union. The company then published a graphic with a question resembling a system message: “Are you sure you want to delete 1 GB?” A funny, ambiguous reference quickly circulated the Internet, giving the company a lot of sympathy for users.

Influencer Marketing

Influencer Marketing assumes promoting the brand through cooperation with celebrities and generally recognizable people on the Internet – for example, bloggers or a popular YouTube channel. Such people can become the face or partner of the brand, but constant cooperation is not necessary here. A common practice of companies is to send products to influencers in return for publishing their reviews on their channels. In this way, the brand gains access to the group of recipients associated around the celebrity and additional interest – after all, for many people recommending a product by an idol is much more motivating to use the offer than any advertising on the Internet or outside it.

Guerrilla Marketing

This type of marketing uses very unconventional methods to interest the recipient with a product or service. Its main goal is to evoke strong emotions in the recipient – shock, amusement or even terror. As a result, the ad is very memorable and widely commented, which gives it additional publicity. For this purpose, you can use urban space, for example by creating murals or city games, or an element of surprise – for example a flash mob or performance. An example is the promotion of the new season of the series Money Heist carried out by Netflix. A few weeks before the premiere, posters with photos of the main characters and a designated reward for their arrest, similar to the “wanted letters” in Westerns, began to appear on advertising posts in the cities. The posters were devoid of the Netflix logo and there was no mention of the series in them, so they interested passers-by and made them search the Internet for information what they meant.

Word of mouth marketing

Word of mouth marketing is based on the fact that a large part of recipients trust the opinions of their friends and friends more than advertising messages. Therefore, it is worth providing them with the so-called social proof, i.e. social proof of rightness – information from other users that a given product or service has proven successful and is recommended. This effect can be achieved, for example, by introducing a referral program for clients. In return for recommending the brand to their friends, they get a cash bonus, discount or any other remuneration.

A widely used, although debatable in terms of ethics, method is also posting comments or opinions about the company by the company, using false nicknames and giving the recipient the impression that the customers praise the brand. A variation of word-of-mouth marketing is the so-called buzz marketing based on making noise around an upcoming event or product to be released. In such cases, people employed by the company often maintain the interest of the recipients, encourage discussion, fuel curiosity and generally build an atmosphere of expectation, skillfully involving the real recipients of the brand in the dialogue. Thanks to this, the product premiere has a chance to become louder and more widely discussed in the media.

Marketing Automation

Marketing Automation is an area dealing with the acquisition and analysis of information about recipients. These are not so much personal data as information about users’ behavior on the Internet, their professional and private situation, interests or current needs. Such data is used to show the recipient personalized advertisements for products and services that they are likely to be interested in. Of course, they are not analyzed by a human, but with the use of advanced technologies in the field of machine learning and artificial intelligence.

The collection of user data is currently very controversial and some companies are at least partially withdrawing from the most ethically questionable activities (eg Google withdraws from third party cookies). However, many different entities collect data and use it for marketing purposes, and some recipients appreciate receiving personalized, not accidental, advertisements.

ATL

ATL (above the line) includes traditional advertising channels such as radio, press or television, as well as outdoor advertising, i.e. placed outside the place of residence of the potential customer. It is about all kinds of billboards, posters, citylights, etc. Many brands still carry out this type of marketing, but it is much more expensive than more modern methods of promotion. Why? First of all, you often have to pay dearly for a good place in the city space, airtime or newspaper advertising. Second, we have little influence on who sees our ads. We cannot define the target group as precisely as in online activities, therefore a very small percentage of recipients will actually be interested in the product. The return on investment may therefore be minimal or not even cover the costs in some cases. This does not mean that this type of advertising is bad. Showing oneself in a respected magazine or on a channel with high audience builds the prestige and recognition of the brand. Due to the price, however, it is reserved for companies with a large advertising budget.

Social media is not homogeneous – although their core remains similar, individual websites use slightly different solutions, have a different user interface, focus on different customer groups and approach data management differently. However, you can find many common features and basic principles that should guide a social media specialist in carrying out his work. These are the foundations that may seem obvious to an experienced marketer, but – as practice shows – in surprisingly many cases they are neglected.

Don’t lie

Almost everyone uses social media – we will see the entire cross-section of society there. Generation Z has naturally come to the digital voice in recent years, growing up in constant contact with computers, smartphones and the Internet. This means that the new generation can – in general – verify data better. People “born with a smartphone in their hand” are much more efficient than previous years of using long tail keyword searches and controlling the accuracy of your message. It was required by their constant presence on the Internet – the constant bombardment with messages naturally made it necessary to filter them.

What does this mean for the marketer? It is more and more likely that the average social media user will say “check” and do a decent research on the product and the entire brand. Only transparency in communication will guarantee that it will not end in a crisis. Basing your offers and image on half-truths today is more risky than ever, and sooner or later marketing manipulations usually turn against dishonest scammers.

Don’t limit yourself to one medium

Does your brand only have a website and Facebook profile? It may not be enough. Diversification of traffic sources has even become a necessity. Your profile on a given portal may disappear in a fraction of a second, for example due to an algorithm error – of course, you will probably regain access to your account, but it may take some time. In such a situation, each day cuts you off from the sales channel, which is in fact irreplaceable. If you don’t separate your traffic sources, you are completely dependent on one of them. Only a skillful combination of SEO, Google Ads and marketing on various social networks will bring meaningful results.

Match the message to the platform

Each social media has its own rules – it results from both the technicalities and the general target group of a given portal. There are of course some universal guidelines, but each portal is a kind of a separate world with a separate communication code. Twitter doesn’t post long elaborations, TikTok is ruled by video – of course you can fight it and go against the tide on a given platform, but most likely it will just end up with very poor results. Use especially the technical guidelines of a given portal, for example, choose the size and format of graphics carefully for the platform.

Don’t count on organic

You refresh your Facebook feed, and after pressing F5 you see completely different posts than a second ago. You set Facebook as the “show newest” user and a moment later you see again what the algorithm has chosen for you. Big data rules social media – organic reach is successively decreasing, and portals find new ways to monetize users’ activities every day.

Although it is less and less frequent, many social media specialists still believe that it is better to publish, for example, 4 or 5 sales posts a week, instead of one, but “burnt” with a decent campaign, significantly increasing the reach and click-throughs. Overproduction of content on social media disturbs rather than helps, and by engaging the time of graphic designers and copywriters, such an approach can actually increase the financial and time cost, rather than optimize it.

Don’t look at the number of likes

The number of likes really matters little. Of course, a large number in the profile adds to a certain digital prestige, which is important for potential collaboration with other brands and overall brand perception on the Web, but usually the impact of this factor is horribly overestimated.

Facebook is slowly withdrawing from showing this value on fan pages, which means that the exposure of the number of “likes” decreases (the number of followers of a given page remains public, however). Algorithms reduce the reach of posts – organic traffic in social media experiences difficult moments without any prospects for improvement. Your posts won’t be shown to all subscribers without your ad investment.

It can be assumed that if the fanpage was set up a few years ago, a certain number of users no longer use a Facebook account. These dead souls are of no value to the marketer – an inactive user is not a potential customer.

The same is true when we decide to buy followers – apart from ethical issues, it will not actually help us sell the product in any way. Fake accounts “clog up” the space to display our posts and advertisements that could be used for marketing purposes. The fake account will not buy your product, which will burn through your advertising budget. It is also prestigiously a complete shot in the foot – the flood of likes from suspicious-looking foreign accounts will light a red lamp for anyone with anything to do with social media marketing.

Use Stories

Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and even recently LinkedIn – all these portals strongly focus on fleeting content in the form of reports. Social media posts have always been characterized by a lot of flyby, and the Stories format makes the shelf life of a message shorter than ever.

However, the data show that a skilfully prepared relationship can bring great reach and sales effects. In order to conduct effective marketing in social media, you cannot afford to disregard this format.

React quickly and use RTM

It is not only about responding to customer questions instantly, although this is of course also a very important aspect of social media marketing.

Is the occasional post for Valentine’s Day, the football world cup or the presidential election real-time marketing? Theoretically yes, because it concerns current events, but usually such activities have zero marketing power. They are simply predictable – we have known the date of these events for a long time, we see news about it long before the actual event, so there is no chance for a surprise effect.

Good real-time marketing is based on spontaneity, instinct and quick reaction. When an internet buzz about a topic breaks out, it usually fades away after a few days. “Late” and “imitative” are two words that should definitely not be associated with real-time marketing. In many companies, this is of course due to the need to “pass” a given post through all levels and the acceptance of several people. Real-time marketing, however, requires overcoming the organizational power of inertia – in this case it is better to react as quickly as possible or not at all.

Thanks to the coverage provided by Facebook, many people use it for advertising purposes. So how do you stand out from other companies in your niche?

Facebook Messenger provides additional advertising features that will help you reach customers better. In this article, we’ll look at what messenger advertising is and why it’s worth using it.

Advertising on Messenger – what it is

Facebook first announced new ads on Messenger in November 2016, calling them “an unprecedented opportunity to take advantage of the amazing targeting and reach offered by Facebook News Feed.” However, only recently has the ad format discussed here gained popularity.

It is also important to note that Messenger ads are not a typical ad category – there is no such thing as the “Messenger ad” format. Rather, they are the goal – the end point that you want to lead people in contact with your ad.

They were also designed so that they would be a quick method to start conversations with potential and existing clients in a much faster way than is the case when filling out the contact form on the company website.

Advertising on Messenger – types

There are basically 3 main types of ads:

Place of advertisement
This ad consists of placing the banner between the conversations. Usually in campaigns it is useful in a supportive form.

Start a conversation
At the time, the most popular type of advertising on Messenger is the so-called destination ads. At first glance, they do not differ from ordinary ads displayed in the feed. However, the difference lies in their call to action. People who click on it are not redirected to a company page or fan page, but are encouraged to “Send a message” to start chatting.

Sponsored messages
Sponsored messages are a bit more direct because they involve starting conversations directly with Messenger users. The caveat for these ads is that you can only send them to users who have previously had contact with your brand through Messenger.

When should you use messenger ads?

Messenger campaigns are least effective when acquiring completely new customers. This is because they require a higher level of engagement compared to other campaign goals such as video views or getting traffic. Instead, use them inside the sales funnel to reach an already engaged group in some respects.

You can also use them at the very bottom of the sales funnel to reach hot leads. It is in such a situation that campaigns on Messenger are the most effective, because then you direct them to recipients ready for interaction.

What are the benefits of using ads on Messenger?

Messenger ads give companies a unique way to connect with their target audience personally. They are affordable and can help you reach new customers, connect with existing ones and work on these potential through sponsored messages.

Other benefits we can mention are:

A good chance of interaction
If, in addition to email marketing, you want to use another proven method to reach customers directly, Messenger will be for you. In the case of the advertising channel in question, there are no such phenomena as deliberate avoidance of advertising content (the so-called banner blindness) or irritation resulting from receiving e-mail fatigue too often. Interestingly, messenger ads can even get an open rate of 80%.

Better personal communication
Direct messages are more personal than news feed ads, which helps create a better connection between the company and the recipients.

Acquiring valuable information
People who respond to your ads also give you access to their information. Thanks to appropriate tracking tools, you can collect data on the sex, place of residence, job position etc. of people who have contacted you.

Real-time marketing
Ads on Messenger, in particular sponsored messages, appear when the user is displaying activity on your site. This allows you to engage him when he shows your first interest in your offer.

New sales opportunities
Starting a conversation via Messenger helps guide potential customers through the next stages of the sales funnel, as it allows them to quickly answer any questions or concerns that may arise. For example, your ad can show a demo version of a product, giving users more information and acting as a direct sales conversation.

Summary

If your company uses Facebook to generate leads, advertising on Messenger can be an important element of the campaign, which will help convert the target group into real customers. You can use this ad both inside and at the bottom of the sales funnel. In the first case, direct it to people who have already had some contact with your brand, watching e.g. video on Facebook. In the second case, direct it to more advanced groups that have already visited your company page.

If you use the messenger ads correctly, they will certainly help you build trust on the part of the target group. In addition to increasing the number of leads themselves, an earlier conversation in the sales funnel will also allow for their initial qualification and quality improvement. So try this form of advertising, and if in doubt, use the help of people who have already successfully optimized many campaigns.