Whether it’s reaching a new audience or retaining an existing one, you’ll need a strategy in place achieve your goals. With so many different types of advertising strategies to choose from, you’re sure to find at least one that suits your marketing needs.
We live in a post-print era where TV, radio, and printed materials just don’t cut it anymore. While they might still suffice for very small or very local businesses, most other brands turn their eyes to the internet. Digital is the name of the game, and with the expertise of a social media marketing agency, so are the types of advertising strategies we’ll lay out for you here today.
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What Is an Advertising Strategy?
An advertising strategy is a carefully laid out plan to achieve broader marketing goals. It details the steps to take and marketing channels to utilize to reach a target audience, retain a loyal customer base, or increase brand awareness.
Regardless of the types of advertising strategies you employ and for what reason, the ulterior motives remain the same – increase revenue by selling more products or services than before.
If you care about retaining a loyal audience, that’s because they’re excellent recurring customers, and they’ll keep spending money on your business because it delivers superior service to that of your competitors.
There are as many types of advertising strategies as there are communication channels you can use to reach people. And that’s plenty.
What Types of Advertising Strategies Are There?
The most common differentiation between types of advertising strategies is based on the super-channel you’re using – digital or non-digital.
While non-digital channels such as print media or radio still have a role to play in today’s advertising landscape, they’re nowhere near as relevant as digital marketing is. We will pay our respects to the traditional forms of advertising in this article, but only to an extent. Digital is where the world is at.
For clarity, we’ll separate digital marketing channels into two superstrata – major and minor types of advertising strategies. That doesn’t mean significant types of advertising techniques are more important - just that they’re akin to archetypes in advertising.
First off, we’ll present you with significant types of advertising strategies. They’re the primary, all-encompassing techniques that you cannot avoid.
- Content Advertising
- Pull Advertising
- Push Advertising
- Email Advertising
- Social Media Ads
- Native Advertising
- Paid Search Advertising
- Podcast Advertising
- Influencer Advertising
- Promotions and Giveaways
- Loyalty Programs
- Guerrilla Advertising
1. Content Advertising
Content is an overarching theme in advertising. There’s no business, no matter how big or small, that doesn’t need content in one shape or form.
No matter what strategy you cook up, it will most likely involve some type of content. Be it articles, videos, podcasts, or newsletters, you will deliver content to your target audience in the hopes of resonating with them and providing them with confidence to buy from you.
2. Pull Advertising
Pull advertising is all about retaining your existing customers. You want people who already know you to remember you, so you focus on strategies that result in more customer retention, long-term brand loyalty, and repeat purchases.
3. Push Advertising
Unlike pull, push advertising is about finding your foothold in a highly competitive market. Your brand needs more exposure, new customers, and a way to offer a unique perspective that will set you apart from the rampant competition.
4. Email Advertising
A classic in the digital marketing game, email advertising is one of the oldest advertising strategies in existence, but one with the highest ROI. It deserves a spot in the major league of advertising techniques based solely on how resilient and profitable it remained throughout digital marketing’s turbulent history.
Minor, or rather the subspecies of digital marketing, are all the types that advertisers use to reach their goals, be they to gain new customers or retain old ones.
5. Social Media Ads
Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter... They are all ripe for picking when it comes to reaching new audiences. Social media advertising will put your brand in front of millions worldwide.
You can place paid ads on social media and have them be seen by precisely the people who match your ideal buyer persona. Since social media ads have access to precise data on their users, you can segment those millions of impressions into those of absolute relevance to your brand.
Besides paying for ads on social networks, they’re also the best place to engage with your existing customers. Social media posts can help you stay in touch with your rabid followers on their good sides.
6. Native Advertising
Have you ever seen those articles marked as sponsored content? Then you already know what native advertising is.
It’s a very peculiar type of marketing that aims to camouflage itself as all the regular content on the page by mimicking the form and function of said content. When done right, it’s near impossible to tell the difference between real, editorial content on the page and sponsored posts.
For that reason alone, are all the native ads required by law (in places) to disclose that they are, indeed, advertisements.
What’s great about native ads is that they don’t interrupt your customer’s journey on your website. They are all but intrusive and make for a natural way to market a product or a service to your users.
7. Paid Search Advertising
One of the most popular forms of digital advertising, paid search allows you to target users based on the keywords they search for, then offer your brand the most appropriate answer to their query.
You’ve seen them before – results marked as “Ads” at the top of the SERPs. The concept is straightforward – you pay Google for more exposure, and you get it.
Since you’re matched to your target audience based on keywords, it’s also a highly effective way of capturing the right people at the proper stages of their journey. No matter where someone is in the marketing funnel, you’ll be able to reach them.
8. Podcast Advertising
Having gained a great deal of popularity in the last couple of years, podcasts are now a fantastic venue for anyone looking to get their brand out there and their message across. Podcasts have a massive following, can be optimized for search engines, and work as both push and pull types of advertising strategies.
9. Influencer Advertising
Influencers can get your brand out there and advertise it to their loyal following. While influencer advertising isn’t exactly old news (yet), it has changed a great deal in recent years. It’s evolved from finding the influencers with the most significant following to those with the most active and engaged following.
10. Promotions and Giveaways
While different in essence, promotions and giveaways serve the same purpose. They’re expensive, yet fast ways of getting more attention to your brand. People love getting their stuff cheaper (or downright free in the case of giveaways), so these types of advertising strategies are best used to reach a new audience. Use sparingly, because approaches such as these are costly for your business.
11. Loyalty Programs
Keep your loyal followers happy by providing them with tiered rewards that increase their lifetime value as customers. The best example of pull advertising is loyalty programs. These honor existing customers and treat them to added value for sticking with the brand for so long.
12. Guerrilla Advertising
Every other strategy that doesn’t conform to standardized types of advertising strategies is referred to as guerrilla advertising. These unexpected, highly creative techniques stir the pot and get results by simply being unusual and out of the ordinary. If there’s a strategy that hasn’t been done before and gets results in a unique and quirky manner, it’s guerrilla advertising.
Seasonal Types of Advertising Strategies
Every advertising strategy is subject to seasonality – that means adapting your existing marketing approach to the current time of year and all the advantages and disadvantages of it. Certain brands offer products or services that are season-specific. That means you can cut your marketing budget for the rest of the year and then amp it up when you expect actual sales.
How To Choose From Different Types of Advertising Techniques?
With so many different types of advertising strategies to choose from, settling on one seems like an impossible task. However, no one says you have to pick only one.
Usually, brands tend to create a unique mix of advertising strategies that best suit their needs. No two businesses are the same, even if the minuscule differences set them apart. Like other brands, you will have to find a combination that best matches your marketing goals and budget. Here are a couple of things to consider.
What is The Purpose of Your Advertising Campaign?
What are the advertising techniques for? What’s the goal of your current marketing or advertising campaign?
The reasons are many, and depending on what you want to achieve, your choice of different advertising techniques will vary. You might want to increase sales, boost conversions, push users down a marketing funnel, or raise traffic to your website. As you’re about to find out, they have highly differing applications in marketing, so your choice does matter.
Who’s Your Target Audience?
Your choice will also vary significantly depending on who you’re trying to reach. Age, gender, demographics, spending habits, and geographical region are just several factors that comprise a buyer persona, a specific set of characteristics that make up your ideal customer.
Creating a buyer persona is usually a starting point for many advertising campaigns. Who you’re targeting will significantly affect your choice of a communications channel, as well as who else you talk to. In other words, marketers will often target social circles surrounding their ideal customer, hoping that their friends, family members, and coworkers will become unsuspecting vessels of your advertising campaign.
You’ll probably want to get a couple of influencers on board to help spread the word. However, it’s a waste of money if your buyer persona is a boomer or Gen X. It’s an oversimplified scenario that clearly shows what factors into target audience considerations. Take Gen Z, for example.
What Are Your Budget Limitations?
Giant companies with jaw-dropping revenues have virtually unlimited advertising budgets because they know how irreplaceable advertising is when making even more money.
However, setting a realistic budget is far more important for smaller businesses. There is no limit to how much you can spend on advertising, so you’ll have to create those limits yourself. Omnichannel marketing probably won’t be an option, but certain types will.
Consider a combination of factors, such as your target audience and your goals, then set the budget accordingly. Sometimes, a bit of PPC advertising will cover all your needs, but sometimes, full email marketing campaigns and a combination of PPC and social media advertising will be required. Stay realistic and go after high-priority channels and audiences only.
Which Measurable Results Do You Want to Achieve?
No matter the advertising strategies you employ, you should always keep an eye out for their performance. Advertising is never a one-time thing you do and then forget about. It’s an ongoing process of perfecting your approach, improving aspects of your lacking advertising campaign, or removing those that just don’t work.
Set marketing goals and metrics to measure, then follow them closely. You’ll probably not get it all right on the first go, so stay vigilant. Alter different types of advertising techniques as often as you need to attain your marketing goals.
Find the Types of Advertising Strategies That Befit Your Business
No one strategy does it all. You’ll always need a combination of different advertising techniques to reach your marketing goals. Take your budget restraints, ideal customers, and brand uniqueness when developing a marketing strategy.
What works for you will most likely differ from all the other companies out there. So, put your thinking cap on, brainstorm ideas, put them to the test, and measure, measure, measure. Data is your best friend in determining the best types of advertising strategies for your brand.
Professional advertising companies can help you in that regard by providing their expert opinion on the matter and guiding your business as fits your market.
