By: Talia Phillips
Are you marketing your company correctly? There are so many different promotional platforms to advertise your product or service, and each pathway has different types of content that work best for them. Websites, social media, and advertisements are the leading platforms for marketing your company. Still, they each have different affordances that are best to utilize to increase your brand awareness and amount of customers.
Websites are one of the first factors that come to mind when starting a business. Having a domain with all of your company's products or services is essential. One of the most important types of content that you should have on your website is calls to action. Calls to action are prompts to get your user to take immediate action. This includes "apply today," "buy now," "contact us," "register today," "join today," or "learn more." The next type of content you should utilize on your website is blogs. Blogs provide users with helpful information that answers a question or solves a problem and establishes trust on the topic. It's important to note that your blog posts should always be relevant to your company's work. It becomes ineffective if you establish trust on an unrelated concept instead of something regarding what you are trying to sell.
Although websites are essential, social media users are increasing drastically, totaling nearly 4.74 billion users today. Social media is one of the most effective marketing platforms because of the large number of users and diverse audience. You should post humorous and relatable content, fun facts, and company news to catch users' attention. Social media is more light-hearted, and users tend to scroll until they find something engaging such as a joke, meme, or interesting fact. If they find something funny or exciting, they will likely stop and explore your page further. You should also use interactive content on social media. This allows your audience to use their personal life to connect with the content. You can do this by writing "comment below with your favorite…", creating surveys and polls, or making a quiz. Lastly, social media is perfect for posting company or industry news updates. This keeps your followers up to date on everything regarding your products or services, verifies your education on the topic, and keeps them engaged with new relevant news constantly being posted.
While social media is a fantastic way to gain attention, advertisements can be just as efficient in expanding your customer base. Modern advertisements have been around since the 15th century and have consistently been proving it's a top-tier form of marketing. The best way to take advantage of advertisements is to use them to promote product or service features. This is when a company can discuss its products or services to gain new customers and draw in current ones. Through advertisements, you can get your products' information out to a larger audience, and based on the algorithm, it will target people who are most likely to enjoy your products. Another effective type of content for advertisements is statistics. This uses real numbers and facts to prove to readers that your products have clear advantages compared to other alternatives. The most effective social media platforms to publish a company's advertisements are LinkedIn, Google, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.
Overall, each promotional pathway has different content that works best for them. Therefore, it is in a company's best interest to utilize different affordances for different platforms to increase the company's overall presence, attract new clients, and increase current customer retention.