4 Different Types of Marketing Strategies

Marketing strategies can certainly be complicated. If you’ve ever tried to message potential customers, you’ve likely experienced how convoluted marketing can be.

There’s an infinite number of tactics you can use to message your potential customers, and it can be easy to feel overwhelmed, especially if you don’t come from a marketing background. Unfortunately, marketing terminology can also be filled with jargon. With so many variables and terms to learn, it can be easy to get a little lost.

The best way to deal with confusing terminology is to define the term you’re struggling with! That led the JSL Marketing & Web Design team to lay out some of the most common marketing strategies you might run across to ensure you fully understand these terms when evaluating your business strategy.

It’s important to note that these marketing strategies are not all mutually exclusive; savvy businesses might use several techniques in tandem for the best results. However, knowing a few of these marketing strategies as you think through how to grow your business is worthwhile.

Competitive Conquesting

Competitive conquesting is a marketing strategy where businesses go head-to-head against their competitors. This is at play in most marketing, but a competitive conquesting marketing strategy takes it up a notch and places the difference between you and your competition front and center.

If you’ve ever done a SWOT analysis and evaluated the strengths and weaknesses of your competition, you’ve likely begun the foundations of a solid competitive conquesting marketing strategy. Knowing what separates you from the competition is the first step in conveying that difference to potential customers. Competitive conquesting can be worked into many different marketing tactics.

There are many ways to incorporate competitive conquesting into your marketing, whether developing content on your website around what separates you from a competitor, targeting keywords around your competitors on Google Ads, or sending emails to customers who left your business for a competitor.

Some businesses might not want this bold confrontation in their marketing, and that’s fine. Others, however, might see the value in knowing how to speak to potential customers about the competition.

Recommended Tactics: Pay-per-click advertising and email marketing

Recommended For: Businesses with small lists of competitors and distinct value propositions compared to those competitors.

Cross-Sell/Up-Sell

Selling is hard. Anyone who has spent time in sales or revenue operations knows this. That’s one of the many reasons brands consistently see better success reselling to core and profitable customers. After all, these customers are already familiar with your solution and often will buy quickly. The result is that you put less resources and time into marketing and see quicker success!

Recommended Tactics: Email marketing, sales collateral, and social media

Recommended For: Businesses where renewal conversations could be highly lucrative. For instance, cross-selling and upselling will only go so far with a fast-food restaurant. A manufacturing firm, however, could see a massive expansion if they could win a new job from a new business unit for their largest customer.

Brand Awareness

Thinking of the marketing funnel or buyer’s journey when conceptualizing brand awareness is essential. Every purchase, whether a new coffee or home, begins with understanding, moves on to consideration and then ends with a purchase.

There are more complicated and industry-specific paths, but this is true at a high level for all brands. Brand awareness marketing aims to make quick contact with potential customers and educate them about the problem your brand solves. You can’t purchase from a business if you know nothing about the company!

Recommended Tactics: Advertising, whether via broadcast television, print marketing, or digital marketing through tactics like display or YouTube, is typically how brands increase their potential customer’s brand awareness of their solution.

Recommended For: All businesses should use some element of brand awareness in their marketing. However, it is most impactful for brands with short sales cycles. Knowing and recognizing your brand increases the odds of a spontaneous purchase, especially when the product is a commodity.

Educating The Buyer

All marketers should look to educate their buyers about their solutions. That’s just good marketing. However, specific industries need to educate more than others. If you’re a neighborhood coffee shop, you likely don’t need to educate your prospects about what a cappuccino is and why they should want it.

If you’re a manufacturing firm looking to highlight a new type of production, you might need to educate about your solution. This type of marketing will likely focus on technical and well-written content about the problem your buyer faces and how you can help solve it.

Recommend Tactics: Whitepapers, blogs, case studies, and other well-written and designed pieces of material.

Recommend For: Brands with long and technically complex buying cycles. Business-to-business companies, in particular, should focus on education as a critical linchpin of their marketing strategy.

Plan Your Marketing Strategy With JSL Marketing & Web Design

These are just a few marketing strategies brands can use to reach customers. However, as mentioned previously, not all marketing strategies suit all businesses.

What works well for a local coffee stand might not work well for a more prominent manufacturer. Indeed, two businesses in the same industry might see vastly different results from the same strategy based on their unique region, company, and strategic situation.

For help developing your perfect marketing strategy, turn to JSL Marketing & Web Design!

We offer:

• PPC Advertising
• Web Design
• Content Marketing
• Social Media Marketing
• Brand Collateral
• & More!