Choosing the right approach to advertising your business is essential to its success. Read our guide on the most effective ways to promote your products.
Effective ways to promote products
In today’s digital space, there are so many ways to promote products – and making the most of them is absolutely essential towards your success. You might have the best product in the market, but it won’t do you any good unless you can get the word out about it.
Choosing the right approach to advertise products really comes down to what you’re selling and who you’re selling to, and with so many different ways to go about it, it can be overwhelming to narrow down the list.
So, let’s explore some advertising ideas for small business, why they work, and who they work for.
Social media
Social media becomes more and more powerful as a marketing tool by the minute. Beyond the emergence of influencer marketing and the rise of TikTok creating a new space to promote products to younger demographics, platforms like Facebook and Twitter create a great opportunity to raise awareness and build a community around your brand and product. Each social media channel provides its own benefits for different audiences and content types.
Instagram, Pinterest & TikTok
Instagram is one of the best places for retail companies, restaurants and bars, beauty brands, and more to promote their products. Of course, it depends on your audience and industry, but chances are, if your core demographic is millennials or younger, then Instagram would be a powerful place to advertise business.
People engage more with visual content, and Instagram puts the visuals front and center. Stories, Highlights, feed posts, Reels, and IGTV offer a lot of variety in terms of how you approach Instagram marketing, while sponsored posts and paid promotions make it easy to serve your content to your exact desired audience.
Influencer marketing has become a crucial strategy for brands selling to young audiences. Users trust the influencers they follow, and in turn, they trust the products those influencers use and promote. For example, cosmetics brands gain so much attention by sending products to influencers in exchange for a post promoting the brand.
Instagram is also an opportune space to capitalize on user-generated content. User-generated content creates a lot of trust between the consumer and brand, as getting genuine endorsements from your customers will help legitimize the product. New customers may be more drawn to a product after seeing positive reviews from real, unpaid people. Encouraging your followers to post about your product and tag your brand, and then sharing that content (with permission) on your own channels is a fantastic method of promoting business.
Pinterest is another great place to share visual content that promotes your product – and another great place to encourage user-generated content. Meanwhile, TikTok offers the same benefits as marketing on Instagram but is geared towards a younger audience. It’s a great place to spot trends and get on top of them, and a way to present your brand as youthful, entertaining, and modern.
Facebook has over 2 billion monthly active users, more than any other social network, making it prime real estate for advertising. The Facebook for Business platform gives you all the tools you need to serve your content to a large but focused audience. Facebook is able to leverage its users’ behavior and activity on the website to serve them content that’s relevant to their interests – in turn helping you expand your reach and deliver content to those who would benefit from it.
While Facebook’s audience is perhaps older on average than Instagram and TikTok, there are so many users that really, it’s an opportune space for businesses in any sector with any demographic to advertise.
Affiliate marketing
Affiliate programs are one of the most effective and efficient ways to promote products. Anybody can apply to an affiliate program, where they will receive a commission for successfully marketing a product and ultimately driving sales conversions. As the business, you would provide a unique link to each affiliate, and then leave it to them to market the product in whatever way they see fit. Any time a customer uses that link to make a purchase, the affiliate receives a commission. Networks like ShareASale can facilitate the creation and distribution of unique links to ensure the affiliate program runs smoothly and easily.
This is a great way for small businesses to expand their marketing efforts without having to expend a lot of time, money, and resources. You won’t need to hire a fully-fledged in-house marketing and design team; you can simply add more affiliates as you grow.
One of the most effective ways to use affiliate marketing is to partner with affiliates who create strong, engaging review content, blogs, or niche interest websites. For example, if you sell camping equipment, you could partner with an affiliate blogger in the travel and outdoor activities sectors with the idea that they’ll mention your product in their content, with their affiliate link included.
Finding the right affiliates that you can trust to market your product successfully can be difficult. Anybody can be an affiliate, but ideally, you only want to work with the very best, who understand your product and understand your goals.
ShareASale’s easy-to-use affiliate platform offers partnerships with over 241,000 active publishers. When you create an affiliate program with ShareASale, you’ll be teamed with a specialist account management team dedicated to providing you with all the tools and resources you need to succeed in affiliate marketing. Our affiliate partners are experts in a wide range of sectors, including finance, retail, telco, and travel.
Exclusive offers
Introductory offers are an enticing way to attract new customers. If you offer a subscription service, a free trial is a great way to reel in new potential customers. If you’re using an affiliate program, you can provide your affiliate partners with unique coupon codes that they can use to promote products. ShareASale’s tools for merchants, like the coupon attribution tool, make it easy to create unique coupon codes and distribute them to affiliate partners.
Email marketing
You might think email marketing is an outdated concept at this point, but this is far from the case. Email marketing is still an extremely well-performing channel, especially when engaging with existing customers about a new product. Offering exclusive deals for your email subscribers, paired with an alluring subject line and preheader, is a sure way to keep customers coming back to you.
It’s a great way to build hype around a new launch with an audience that you already know likes your brand.
Display advertising
Display advertising using banner ads is another effective way to promote your brand. Banner ads take traditional advertising methods – like newspaper ads, billboards, and bus stop ads – and launch them into the digital sphere. What makes them so effective is simply how prominent they are. Everyone who uses the internet regularly sees and engages with display ads.
Businesses can create campaigns and upload them to ShareASale’s platform, while website publishers can offer space on their website as real estate. Publishers are paid a commission for every click or conversion your ad generates, so they’re incentivized to let your brand stand out.
This is a competitive space, so to ensure success, you must make sure you design ads that are truly engaging and unique.
SEO
For many, Google is still the first port of call for consumers looking for a new product or service. Search engines are only getting more and more important in marketing and advertising, with new, smarter technology making them more versatile and helpful than ever.
Spending time to improve the SEO of your website will benefit you hugely. SEO should influence the content you create, the structure of your site, the keywords you utilize, the metadata of the site, and more. It’s all about shaping your content so that search engine algorithms can connect you with the right customers. Whether you focus on social media, affiliate marketing, SEO, or otherwise – choosing the right advertising strategies for your brand, product and market is essential. The tools and processes we’ve outlined above will not only help you to get more eyes on your product, they’ll help ensure that you’re connecting with relevant, engaged audiences who will truly benefit from what you’ve got to offer.
