When you think about marketing, it’s easy for your mind to immediately jump to advertising. After all, it’s the most direct and obvious form of marketing there is. However, it’s far from the only way to win, retain, and get more value from your customers online. Here are a few other avenues that you should make sure are getting the attention that they deserve.

Social Media

Social media is an advertising platform, that is true, but it has so much more potential. Sometimes, natural engagement with viral potential can be much more valuable than even an endless advertising budget. Tools like this social media management tool can even help you schedule and prepare posts in advance, so you don’t have to spend all day watching your feed and posting things live. The more you get to engage your customer base online, the more likely they are to develop the kind of emotional connection that can help you retain them for more value, as well.

Emails

What emails are you sending your customers? If it’s all support and basic outreach, then you might not be engaging them anywhere near as much as you should. Creating email campaigns for things like newsletters can help you deliver more value to your customers, such as tips they might be interested in, news about your latest offerings, as well as exclusive sales and coupons. Apps like this email marketing tool can help you create professional-looking and gorgeously branded emails to send out to both leads and existing customers. You get a much better chance of converting the unconverted, as well as driving more value from repeat customers.

SEO

A shocking amount of online engagement from customers and clients is driven by search engines, with Google being the undisputed king of them all for the past couple of decades. However, while you can advertise on search engines, using organic methods to have your site appear at the top of search result pages can offer a much better return on investment, and firms like this content marketing agency can help you do it without having to learn every SEO discipline yourself. Make better use of one of the most widely trafficked sites on the net.

Influencer/Affiliate Marketing

One of the more popular trends of late has been for brands to partner up with content creators and trusted online faces that can represent their brand for them. Influencer marketing and affiliate marketing don’t only get you connected to their audience. It also helps to build trust. The average consumer looks at the average advert with some suspicion, but hearing their favorite content creator singing the praises of the same product doesn’t win as much skepticism. You have to make sure you choose your influencers and affiliates well, though, to make sure they’re a good fit for your products and services.

A robust online marketing strategy should utilize multiple kinds of marketing, working them together as best as possible. Identify the gaps in your current strategy and make sure that you’re working on some means of filling them up.