Are you looking for the best marketing strategies to grow your business this year? You’ve come to the right place.

In this post, we’re going to discuss the five marketing strategies you should focus on to ensure that you’re able to acquire more customers, generate more sales, and grow your business’ revenue.

1) Create highly-researched, in-depth content

The absolute best way to generate more traffic, leads, and customers for your business in 2020 is to create highly-researched, in-depth content on topics that interest your target audience.

There are many different content formats you can choose to reach your target audience, including blog posts, videos, podcasts, ebooks, and infographics.

Which types of content you’re going to create will depend on your specific audience. You’ll need to research how your target audience prefers to consume content and which types of devices they use to do so.

Your findings will ultimately dictate which types of content you’ll include in your content strategy.

Whichever content formats you decide to pursue, it’s crucial that the content you create focuses on addressing your target audience’s needs and helping them solve their pain points.

When looking to come up with specific topics you’re going to cover, think about what your target audience cares about and what kind of topics interest them.

Finally, note down any specific problems and issues they might be looking to solve.

You should strive to either educate or entertain your audience with your content (or both).

Apart from providing value to your target audience, the content you create will also help you improve brand awareness and develop thought leadership.

2) Take advantage of email automation

No list of top marketing strategies could be complete without mentioning email marketing.

Email has long been known as the most effective and the most profitable form of marketing, generating as much as $44 for every dollar invested.

All types of businesses can benefit from email marketing. Email allows you to reach your audience no matter what device they use since people read emails on both desktop and laptop computers, smartphones, and tablets.

In 2020, focus on taking advantage of automated email campaigns. Create email sequences for new customers, cart abandoners, inactive customers, and other segments of your audience.

Here are a few ideas for automated email campaigns you might want to create for your business:

• Welcome emails – The welcome email is the first email you’ll be sending to your new customers. It generates three times more revenue than all other types of automated email campaigns, so it’s essential that you incorporate a welcome email sequence into your email marketing strategy.
• Abandoned cart emails – 69.57% of online shopping carts are abandoned. Use abandoned cart emails to recover some of these orders.
• Re-engagement emails – Send your inactive customers a re-engagement email to see if there’s anything you can do to get them to engage with your business again.
• Upsell and cross-sell emails – You can set up automated email campaigns with the intention of upselling and cross-selling products and services to your customers. Implementing effective upsells and cross-sells can boost your business’ revenue significantly.
• Holiday emails – Most people are in a shopping mood during the holidays, making this time of the year the perfect opportunity to reach out to your customers and keep your business top-of-mind.

Work on optimizing all your email campaigns regularly to squeeze out as much profit out of them as possible.

Pro tip: You can use Gist to send hyper-targeted, personalized email campaigns that will convert leads into customers, as well as delight and retain your existing customer base. 

3) Double down on social

Most businesses have a social presence just for the sake of it. They don’t put in the effort to try to extract as much value as possible out of their social media channels.

If you’re one of those businesses, 2020 is the year when you should double down on social and work hard on expanding your social media reach and generating more social traffic and sales.

Remember – there’s no need for your business to be on every social media network out there. Focus on a few social platforms where your target audience spends most of their time.

Stay active on those platforms by posting at least once a day. Dedicate most of your social media posts to educating or entertaining your target audience instead of trying to sell your products or services.

Here are the five platforms you should consider engaging your audience on:

• Facebook – With more than two billion monthly active users, it’s the biggest social platform in existence. Almost all businesses should have a Facebook presence.
• Instagram – Facebook’s younger cousin, Instagram, has a user base of 1 billion active monthly users who come to the platform to look for products and brand content.
• Twitter – While having a smaller user base than Facebook and Instagram, Twitter has very active users, which generate an average of 5,787 tweets on the platform every second. If you’re looking to build brand awareness and have one-on-one conversations with your customers, Twitter is the place for you.
• LinkedIn – The business-oriented social platform, LinkedIn has 500 million users, 12% of those being senior-level influencers, and 8% occupying decision-making positions. If you’re a B2B business, you’ll most likely want to have a presence on LinkedIn.
• Pinterest – With the platform’s user base being heavily skewed towards women (and the median user age being 40), Pinterest is the perfect platform for businesses that cater to this specific demographic.

4) Collaborate with influencers

With an ROI 11 times greater than traditional marketing strategies, influencer marketing is a marketing strategy that you should seriously consider in 2020.

Collaborating with influencers can help you increase brand awareness, grow your social media following, generate social proof, and drive traffic and sales.

Influencer marketing campaigns are also a great source of high-quality, influencer-created content that can be reused and repurposed indefinitely.

If you want influencer marketing to work for your business, focus on finding influencers that align with your brand image and have a highly-engaged following.

Remember not to judge influencers by their follower count.

Your business will derive more value from collaborating with an influencer that has 10,000 followers and a 10% engagement rate, than by working with an influencer that has 100,000 followers and a 0.5% engagement rate.

Once you find the right influencers for your brand, reach out to them and try to arrange a collaboration.

The type of collaboration you’ll want to set up will depend on your specific business, the products or services you’re looking to promote, as well as your profit margin.

If you’re looking to collaborate with big influencers, note that most of them will require monetary compensation. 

However, it’s been shown that most influencers charge $250 or less for a promotional post, which makes influencer marketing a very affordable way to improve brand awareness.

5) Focus on improving customer retention

On average, it’s seven times more expensive to acquire a new customer than it is to retain an existing one.

This statistic alone should make it obvious why improving customer retention should be one of the main marketing strategies you focus on in 2020.

You can use any of the following highly-effective strategies to increase your business’ customer retention rate:

Implement live chat customer support

Customers that aren’t satisfied with a brand’s customer support are four times more likely to go to a competitor. This makes it crucial that you work on improving the support experience for your customers.

Make it as easy as possible for your customers to get help by being available on a variety of different channels, including email, social media, phone, and live chat.

Live chat, in particular, is an important means of communication for today’s consumers. The majority of them prefer communicating with businesses through live chat.

It’s easy to understand why. It only takes 42 seconds, on average, to resolve a customer’s issue through live chat.

Live chat also provides a personalized experience for customers and enables them to multitask, which is important to 51% of consumers.

Additionally, it’s been shown that live chat generates the highest satisfaction levels among customer support channels.

Taking all of this into account, it’s no wonder that 63 of consumers state that they are likely to buy again from a business that offers live chat support.

Pro tip: You can take advantage of Gist’s live chat solution to provide support to visitors and customers, qualify and route leads, as well as book meetings.

Build a community

Building a community around your brand is another great way to improve customer retention.

An active community of brand supporters will help each new customer feel that buying from you isn’t just about getting a product or service, but rather about joining a community of like-minded individuals.

Encourage your brand supporters to share their opinions, exchange advice, and discuss topics of their interest on your social media pages or a discussion board hosted on your website.

Getting the first few active participants in your community is always hard. You can make this easier by rewarding active community members with free products, services, or discounts.

Practice regular communication

If you want to improve customer retention, it’s crucial that you stay in touch with your customers on a regular basis.

Look for a communication medium your customers prefer, and reach out to them regularly via email, social media, or phone.

Find a frequency that works best for you and your customers, and then create a schedule around it.

Follow this schedule religiously to keep your business top-of-mind and let your customers know that you’re thinking about them and their needs.

Communicating with your customers on a regular basis will enable you to develop a stronger relationship with your customer base, as well as provide you with valuable insights about your customers, their preferences, needs, and pain points.

Grow your business in 2020 with these marketing strategies

This year, focus on the following five marketing strategies to acquire more customers, generate sales, and grow your business:

1. Create highly-researched, in-depth content that addresses your target audience’s interests and needs, and helps them solve their pain points.
   
2. Take advantage of automated email campaigns by creating email sequences for new customers, cart abandoners, and inactive customers. 
   
3. When it comes to social, focus on a select few platforms where your audience spends most of their time. Make sure that your social posts revolve around educating or entertaining your audience.
   
4. Collaborate with influencers to improve brand awareness, grow your social media following, create social proof, and generate sales. Focus on influencers that fit your brand image and have a highly-engaged audience.
   
5. Work on increasing customer retention by improving customer support, creating a community of engaged brand supporters, and communicating with your customers on a regular basis.