Beyond Social Media:
7 Other Business Marketing Strategies For Your Brand

What are some business marketing strategies that don’t involve social media? These days, ‘social media marketing’ is practically synonymous with ‘business marketing’.

In fact, you’d struggle to find a marketing agency that doesn’t have some form of a detailed and creative social media plan.

With 3.8 billion people around the globe using social media, it’s a hugely profitable market. In fact, when we look into eligible audiences for marketing, the percentage of social media users climb.

In target audiences aged over 13, 63% of people in the world use social media.

Meaning, that if you’re a marketer you’d be pretty silly not to be using it.

But, what do you do if your target audience isn’t on social media?

It may seem absurd, but for some people, this is a very pressing issue.

Marketing strategies will have to take a different form if you can’t reach your desired audience through everyone’s favourite apps.

So, what do you do?

Harkening back to the old Mad Men-style days of marketing, long before social media, what are some other business marketing strategies you can do that doesn’t involve social media?

Keep reading to find out.

Content is King, as the old adage goes.

And it’s a saying for a reason. Content is one of the best ways for you to get your business seen online and can be achieved without much cost.

The first thing you need to do is separate the ideas of social media and digital.

Often, people will conflate the two and forget that just because someone isn’t on social media, doesn’t mean they don’t use the internet.

Secondly, maximise your use of content marketing.

If you haven’t already then you need to set up a blog for your business. Within this, start producing carefully crafted and creative content.

This means using the right keywords that people will be searching for, writing long-form copy over short form, and writing about things relevant to your brand.

Simply put, good content has two benefits.

Firstly, if people search for something and stumble across your blog, then they’re already on your website. From here it’s only too easy to encourage them to check out your products and services.

Secondly, good content also builds you up as a reliable and useful source in the eyes of search engine crawlers. If you start producing high-quality content, they’ll start prioritising your website on Search Engine Results Pages.

It’s a win-win. And, it’s a one of the most cost-effective business marketing strategies out there.

Speaking of SEO, are you making the most of backlinks?

Backlinks are when another website links to your page. This can be done on directories, linking one of your blog posts, or including a link to your homepage.

But, why are they important?

Well, the more backlinks you have the more search engine crawlers start to consider your website as a reliable and useful page. And, in turn, they’ll start recommending it higher on search engine results pages.

But, there is a caveat.

When you’re looking to create or submit some backlinks, you have to make sure that these sources are reliable and authentic.

Meaning, that if your page is being backlinked on a spam website or an unverified source, it’s not going to do you any favours.

So, bear this in mind when submitting to online directories and asking if people can backlink your business.

Once you’ve done this, the chances of your business showing up higher on search engine pages increases.

And, in turn, your chances of people seeing your business increases also.

You don’t need people to be using social media to find you if you’re the number 1 results page online.

Moving away from websites and digital, another great business marketing strategy is podcasting.

It’s certainly something you should consider. Especially considering that, according to Ofcom, as of 2018, the number of weekly podcast listeners has doubled in 5 years – from 3.2 million in 2013 to 5.9m in 2018.

Meaning, that it’s a huge untapped market for business promotion.

If you’re able to tap into this market and start producing podcasts, you can seriously increase your revenue.

According to Oberlo, 82.4% of podcast listeners spend more than 7 hours a week listening to podcasts. Meaning that you only need to compete for a small fraction of their attention, considering how often people listen to them.

Podcasts are a great way to promote your brand or business because often, people listen to podcasts do so to learn new things.

Even if your podcast is only 30 minutes long, that’s 30 minutes of advertising for your brand.

Just make sure that each episode is new and exciting. And, most importantly, that it’s available on the right sites. YouTube, Spotify, and iTunes are the most popular podcasting services out there.

Did you know that there are 3.9 billion email users worldwide?

That’s more than the amount of social media users! Meaning, that even if every single social media user also uses email regularly, that’s still one hundred million people waiting to hear about your business through email.

Email is a great digital marketing strategy given how many people use it, and more importantly, the type of people who use it.

Active email users can be any type of person. But, the older generation is often avid email users too. Everyone’s grandma has an email!

And, considering that they’re one of the demographics least likely to be on social media, email marketing is a great way to reach them.

Email marketing is a tried and tested method of business marketing. At this point, it shouldn’t even be up for debate.

Ultimately, given that emails that feature personalisation have a 50% open rate, sending 3 emails that are about abandoned shopping carts result in 69% of more small orders, and that for every $1 you spend on email marketing you can expect $42 back in return – there are so many reasons why you should be using email marketing.

You may be surprised to hear that YouTube is the 2nd biggest search engine in the world. The first being Google of course.

It’s one of the greatest ways in which you can encourage people to visit your website.

In fact, according to HubSpot, 54% of consumers say that they want to see video marketing from their favourite brands.

So, how do you do it?

One way in which you can utilise video marketing is by creating video tutorials or educational videos.

Are you a personal tutor looking to promote your services? Create a video about the different learning methods you find useful.

Or maybe you’re a home bakery seeking a more diverse range of customers? Creating a video about how you decorate your cakes, or about your favourite recipes, is a great way to encourage them to visit your site.

All you need to do is get them to fall in love with one of your videos.

The second thing you can do is also include a video on your landing page. HubSpot states that conversion rates increase by 80% when businesses include videos on their front page.

Because of this, videos and media are a great way of utilising digital marketing. It’s one of the up-and-comers of the business marketing world.

Returning to the idea of search engines, pay per click advertising is another great example of business marketing strategies that don’t involve social media.

Pay Per Click advertising works by creating ads on a search engine, like Google for example, and paying a fee any time someone clicks on your website.

It means that you’re at the top of the search engine results pages but without doing the organic search results work.

Hence, the term ‘inorganic advertising’.

PPC is a great way to target your audience because it can be done based on the search terms they’re using and can be done at any stage of the search process.

As well as this, PPC is also measurable.

Meaning, that if some of them aren’t working, you can just get rid of them.

PPC advertising also isn’t as expensive as people think. Rather than paying a flat-out rate for the ads, you only pay if someone clicks on them and they work.

Which is a great benefit for those with a small budget.

Finally, another marketing strategy you can use for business marketing is earned advertising and PR.

Essentially, it’s free advertising. And why is it free? Because you can’t buy it.

Earned advertising and PR comes when your business is really great and people want to talk about it.

It can come in many different forms. From word of mouth referrals to online reviews, and even the old fashioned magazine or newspaper features; earned advertising is organic and authentic.

However, there are some difficulties with this.

Unlike paid advertising, you’re not in control of what people say when it’s free PR. And you also can’t measure the success of the advertising given that it doesn’t come from you.

But, this doesn’t make it any less successful.

According to weirdert.com, 92% of customers say that they trust earned media. That being reviews and mentions from people which they know hasn’t been bought or paid for.

What’s more, 51% of millennials are highly influenced by it.

Ultimately, earned advertising and PR is a great business marketing strategy given that it isn’t dependent on social media marketing.

Given the fluidity of it and the many different platforms it can be promoted on, it has the potential to be seen by everyone.

Social media marketing is a great way of promoting your business and products. There’s a reason why it has so drastically risen in popularity over the last few years.

But, we should be careful about our dependence on it.

How do you undergo business marketing if your target consumers aren’t on social media?

What do you do if you don’t have the budget for a social media marketing campaign?

Hopefully, we’ve shown you that there are plenty of options out there for you, beyond social media marketing.

And, if you ever need help, we’re here for you!

Shape The Market offers plenty of different marketing plans, besides our highly reviewed social media marketing strategies, which can help boost your consumers and make your business grow.

If you want to check out our services, click here.