What is Your Most Successful Marketing Tactic?

A LinkedIn small business group organized by Staples just posted a question on what its members consider as the most successful marketing tactic for their businesses in 2015. As expected, answers vary among the respondents, as follows:

• Social media, specifically seeking out the best websites that can help promote their brand, increase followers and increase traffic
• Their own website, whereby their clients tell them that, “Your website really sold us!”
• Word of mouth
• Customer referrals
• Offering free webinars

In a similar question posted in question-and-answer site Quora, the respondents cited the following marketing strategies as the best for them:

• Blogging
• Search engine optimization
• Pay per click
• Content marketing
• Mobile marketing

For a Kindle author featured in the Amazon Kindle newsletter, the best marketing strategy that allowed him to sell more than 10,000 copies of his books per month is podcasts. He searched for relevant podcasts, particularly the upcoming and new ones, and contacted them for possible guesting citing how his book could “add extraordinary value for their audiences.”

In this YouTube video, an Australian entrepreneur considers strategic marketing to be the best marketing strategy of all time.

As he explains:

In a nutshell it is where you find other businesses that share the same (or similar) customers to you, but you are not competing. Then you agree to promote their product or service to your customers with an agreement that they will reciprocate.

From the above answers, there is NOT ONE single, most effective marketing strategy that works for everyone. Social media may work for one or two; while content marketing works for another. One small business owner cites Instagram because they sell a “really photogenic cat bed product” and “Instagram makes it easy for people to share pictures of their cats using our product.” Unfortunately, not all business owners have an arsenal of product photos that they can share in the visual-heavy social media sites such as Instagram or Pinterest.

As B2B Marketing Consultant Jen Dewar wrote in Quora,

“There is no magic bullet – but if there were, everyone would be using it and it wouldn’t be so magical anymore. You have to try different things, optimize what’s working, drop what isn’t, and see what works best for you.”

As you prepare your marketing strategies for 2016, make a list of what has worked for you in the past, as well as those that did not work for you. Could you have done something differently to change the results of the marketing strategies that did not work? For those that worked for you, what else can you do to give you even better results? Don’t be afraid to try out new marketing strategies, as long as you carefully track and measure how these strategies work for you.