7 Must-Have Marketing Tactics You Need to Try

In the game of marketing, doesn’t everyone want to reach their business goals with ease? Or better yet – exceed them. To get it done, you need to create a data-driven game plan and fill out your roster with the best players (or marketing tactics).

Here we’ll run you through 7 powerhouse marketing tactics and marketing analysis tools to help you reach your business goals and grow your brand in the digital sphere and beyond.

What are marketing tactics?

Marketing tactics are the actions you take to achieve your business goals. You’ll use different tactics to achieve different goals, whether your goal is to build awareness, trust, or boost conversions. Choosing the right tactics that work with your specific audience is key. Marketing growth strategist Katelyn Bourgoin explains it best:

You don’t need your product to be the best.

You need it to be the best for a very specific group of people in a very specific context.

Big difference.

— Katelyn Bourgoin (@KateBour) December 2, 2021

You might be wondering, how do your digital marketing tactics work within your marketing strategy?

Marketing strategy vs. marketing tactics

Your marketing strategy is the big picture plan of action to reach your business goals. Marketing tactics are measurable actions to execute on organizational strategy.

Essentially your marketing tactics nestle into the bigger picture of strategic vision.

Every company has:

Strategy and tactics are on the same team and must always align with one another to be effective. A company’s plan might include metrics and marketing goals that look something like this:

• Vision: Increase market share by 10% by increasing share of voice
• Strategy: Earn trust on platforms that our target audience knows and trusts
• Objective 1: Increase followers of our brand by 5% on LinkedIn
• Tactics:
  • Make a co-branded webinar with industry experts
  • Gain viewership via LinkedIn paid advertising
  • Edit a series of short educational videos for LinkedIn
  • Specifically, publish for and on this platform

Marketing tactics – the fundamentals

Before we get into specific marketing tactics, there are a few principles to always keep in mind to achieve results quickly.

Allocate resources tactfully

When deciding on tactics, make sure to consider your resources carefully. Resources include people, platforms, skills, network, and marketing budget. Always keep your business goals as a marker for decision-making and don’t spend above your means.

Think about the journey of your target audience

When creating content, focus on the user’s intent. Get to know them and their interests. Create high-quality content to anticipate their pain points. The user experience and customer experience may be different from one another. See what SEO expert and CEO of SparkToro, Rand Fishkin has to say about it:

Pssst.. Customer research and audience research are *not* the same thing.

Customers = people who've already bought from you.
Audience = people who may become future customers, or might influence your future customers.

5 big mistakes folks are making here:

— Rand Fishkin (follow @randderuiter on Threads) (@randfish) December 13, 2021

Focus on community

You are not just a brand, but a community of people. Your target audience likes to see you and your people. Content is about relationship building. SaaS and agencies investor, founder, and adviser Eric Siu says:

https://twitter.com/ericosiu/status/1465395880136036352

Vary your content

People learn in different ways. Some people are visual learners, others respond to audio, still others are experiential learners. Give your target audience variety in your content.

You can combine different mediums to engage your audience with multiple formats at once, like this YouTube video from Permaculture instructor Andrew Millison using a lightboard to explain the process of Permaculture site analysis below. It successfully overlays schematics onto a video presentation which is an effective tactic to engage his target audience.

Take advantage of remote learning tools

Remote training and schooling leapt forward during the COVID-19 pandemic. As a result, there are so many digital education tools, like Kahoot for gamified learning, Animaker or Lumen5 for animated infographics and whiteboard videos, and Mentimeter for real-time polling results. Utilize them to make your content more interactive, engaging, and fun.

Keywords research

Running keyword research shows you what your audience is searching for online, so you can build topics around what they need.

We use keywords to:

• Optimize web content
• Find affiliate relationships
• Bid on paid advertisements
• Create webinar topics
• Find influencers

Doing your research not only helps you decide what topics to focus on, but it can give you inspiration about the best format to use (i.e. podcast over article).

7 marketing tactics that help you move the needle

1. Harness the power of interactive content

Interactive content is a no-fail way to engage your audience.

So, what is interactive content? Interactive content is anything that requires active participation vs. passive consumption. It can include things like:

• Quizzes
• Polls and surveys
• Calculators
• Interactive infographics
• Interactive emails
• Data visualizations

Interactive content is more likely to go viral and get shared – effectively growing your reach and brand awareness.

For the start of 2022, Grammarly asked people to vote on the word of the year.

Similarweb quizzed you in June to find out if you were on top of the latest digital trends right as our brand underwent a makeover (rebrand). And it worked.

Want to boost engagement and get your brand out there? Interactive content marketing is a powerful play.

2. Host a webinar

A webinar is one steller way you can vary your content. The basic idea is that you are educating your target audience on your brand in video format that you can make interactive.

Viewers sign up in advance, giving you an opportunity to capture emails, AKA leads. That way you can continue a conversation with them after the event.

A lot of marketers are sleeping on LinkedIn.

For SparkToro, we promoted next week's Office Hours webinar on Twitter and LinkedIn 1hr ago and the difference in signups are absurd:

Twitter: 3
LinkedIn: 34 pic.twitter.com/YRt8cjVlnC

— Amanda Natividad (@amandanat) December 3, 2021

There is chat functionality in most platforms. You can take questions and comments in real time. If you want some moderation, the comments can go to a moderator who asks them at a designated point in the event

Webinars are perfect for lead generation. At the end of the webinar, offer your product to the webinar attendees.

Another benefit: you can repurpose content from the webinar in post, or video.

Remember that consumers are concerned about the privacy of their data. So, whether you’re hosting internally or choosing a webinar platform keep that in mind.

3. Create hype with a video

Video learning isn’t new. Once Google began to show video search results, video as a marketing tactic skyrocketed.

• 72% of customers said they would rather learn about a product or service by way of video
• 30% of marketers plan to invest more into this format in 2022 than any other format
• Almost 5 billion videos are watched on YouTube every day

In the words of leading marketer Eric Siu:

Trend #5: The pie for YouTube will keep growing and growing

There is a reason why @MrBeast keeps focusing on Youtube. It's still the #2 search engine in the world and does more revenue than Netflix! (over $30B)

It is not too late to focus on YouTube!

— ericosiu (@ericosiu) November 16, 2021

Remember that YouTube is not the only platform to market on. There is Vevo, Patreon, Vimeo, Instagram, and TikTok for video content of various lengths. There are also live streaming social media channels, like LinkedIn Live, Facebook Live, and Instagram Live.

Format, finishing, and editing needs differ on each of these platforms. Keep your resources and user journey in mind when entering the video content world.

4. Write evergreen blogs

Having a blog is a must for search engine optimization (SEO). Putting resources into creating strong evergreen blogs that rank pays off overtime. Writing content connected to your business and topics your audience is searching for, will help you bring in consistent website traffic (for free) overtime.

Consider this: Blog content has the third highest ROI of any content format.

In order to stand out in a crowded digital landscape, you need to bring something unique. If you’re concerned that you will give away too much free information on a blog, don’t be. Blogs are a brilliant place to build authority and trust. If your potential customers can see that you know your stuff and are willing to engage without a paywall, you are building a solid relationship.

Use your blog to offer some social proof to your consumers. It’s always more valuable for them to see your successful interaction with a client. You can create case studies or feature pieces.

Linking internally to other blog articles within your owned site and to external links helps build your website’s authority. If you choose your links carefully, you can also improve the user experience for visitors to your site, which is the ultimate goal. Nevertheless, you should avoid linking to your direct competition, as that will drive your reader to their site.

5. Focus on referrals

Referral traffic is any traffic coming from affiliate partners, content partners, and direct media buying or news coverage. People trust referrals more than they do ads from a company and as a result, are primed to be more loyal. The lifetime value for new referral customers is 16% higher than non-referrals. This tactic yields backlinks to your site and helps you achieve increased brand awareness.

6. Get in on native advertising

Native advertising is a way of using paid ads, like display ads, to blend in with the look and feel of an existing site, social media platform, or search engine and get your message across without being too salesy.

They blend in so well as they are meant to be as non-intrusive as possible and sometimes they are unnoticeable as ads unlike most PPC efforts.

If you see “suggested,” “recommended,” “promoted,” or “sponsorship” on a piece of content, these are signs of native advertising. Also, you may see a small icon on top that will confirm that this is indeed native advertising if you click on it.

Native advertising as a marketing tactic can be a major advantage. Here are some stats to show you just how influential it is as a tactic:

• 25% of consumers look at in-feed native ads over regular banners
• 97% of mobile media buyers said that native advertising was effective at achieving branding goals
• 41% of brands use native advertising in some form in their digital marketing strategy

The bottom line is that native advertising is effective, valuable and a useful way to promote your brand and execute your marketing campaigns.

7. Use display ads to retarget your missed customers

Retargeting display ads are an example of a paid marketing tactic to increase conversion rates. They aim to recapture someone who left your website without converting. If a visitor leaves your site without a conversion, you can pay to keep your brand on their screen and in their minds.

These retargeted ads show up wherever Google or another seller has ad space. They are the ads that populate in the middle of text or on the sidebar when you’re scrolling a blog for example.

Tools for effective marketing tactics

For your digital marketing tactics to make an impact, they need to be backed by accurate and real-time data. After all, writing a bunch of evergreen articles about posts not relevant for your audience won’t help you achieve your goals.

But having data on your own website isn’t enough. Having visibility on the data for your competitors and industry at large can give you even more of an advantage when it comes to setting up marketing tactics that work. Similarweb Digital Marketing Intelligence provides unrivaled data so you benchmark against your competition. Here are some of the features that give you an edge:

Marketing channels overview

Marketing Channel Overview helps distinguish what marketing channels work best for you versus your competition. This is essential in understanding where best to place your focus before choosing tactics.

Keywords by buyers’ journey

To support your overall content strategy, you can create keyword lists by buyer’s journey using the keyword tool. Filter by keyword phrases like “what” or “which” that reflect buyers’ exploration phase at the top of the funnel (TOFU) and so on to see which keywords have high search and traffic volumes.

This allows you to understand the journey of your user. Someone at the top of your funnel (TOFU) will search much differently than someone at the bottom (BOFU). By researching the buyer’s journey, you can create a content strategy to cover every step of your funnel.

SERP snapshot and features tool

Search engines give a lot more than just written content in results now. Similarweb provides insight on these features with the SERP Features Tool and SERP Snapshot.

Within the SERP Snapshot, you can see what links are ranking for a keyword. You also get to see within which feature they are placed, like “product listing ads,” “images,” “related questions.”

You can then allocate resources for your target audience. These tools are invaluable in crafting a multimedia content strategy.

Keywords by industry

In order to get published on sites that you don’t own, you need to understand what is trending within your industry. You may know that people are talking about how NFTs will disrupt digital marketing. However, the keyword trending in that topic might be “blockchain.” Use the Keyword by Industry function to create trending content that is SEO optimized.

Content publishing sites

You can look at the Top Ten Domains that are capturing referral traffic for a targeted keyword. From this data set, you have the ability to filter further. Discover affiliates, content publishing sites, and influencers sending traffic for that keyword. Now, you have your partnership hit list.

Affiliate engagement score

Increasingly, Google is rewarding engagement on your webpage as an important ranking factor. You can use Similarweb’s proprietary affiliate engagement score to see which potential affiliates send highly engaged traffic.

Discover ad partners

When creating your display ads, you don’t have to make decisions blindly. Similarweb’s Marketing Intelligence has functionality for this digital marketing tactic.

Within the Audience Insights area of the tool, you can see which sites your visitor also visited in a day.

A high overlap score means there is shared relevance between your site and one of the other visited ones. If the visited site has AdSense, you can start placing ads immediately.

Use our Display Ad Creatives section to optimize the graphics of your ads against your competition.

Achieve results with marketing tactics

You wouldn’t draft your dream team without an idea of what gaps and opportunities your team has and what players are coming up in that round. When it comes to game time, coaches watch film tape and run in-depth analysis of their opponent’s tactics in order to pick their own. Without data, it’s really hard to make effective decisions.

Marketing tactics allow you to take action on your organizational insights. Key performance indicators help your department move the organization forward. Research tools allow you to gain key insight that informs your tactical decisions.

Marketing tactics allow you to take action on those insights. The roster of what tactics to deploy is a game of resources. It’s challenging, ever-changing, and lucrative when done right.
Keep your business goals in mind and think innovatively to keep your target audience engaged while executing your marketing plan effectively.

FAQs

What are marketing tactics?

Marketing tactics are the steps you take to achieve the various goals you have for your business.

What is an example of a marketing tactic?

Interactive content is an effective marketing tactic. Interactive content, such as quizzes, polls and data visualizations, is a great way of engaging your audience, and in turn, a great way to boost your brand awareness.

What are different types of marketing tactics?

There are several types of marketing tactics, including:

1. Interactive content
2. Webinars
3. Video content
4. Evergreen blogs
5. Focus on referral traffic
6. Native advertising
7. Display ads