Top 3 Most Effective Marketing Techniques in 2016

How can you make consumers aware of your products without repelling them?

Making people aware of your product is critical to the sale of your services / products and to the overall productivity of your businesses. Most companies are not as widely known as Apple or Ford. Without an effective method of informing, your products and company could likely go unnoticed. However, in general, blatant advertisements have the opposite effect of their intended purpose perhaps repelling more audiences than they attract. In today's over-advertised world of products and services, helping the public become aware of your business requires making your product information interesting and perhaps even subtle.

Let's look at three modern marketing techniques businesses have been successfully utilizing.

PRODUCT PLACEMENT is a form of advertising used effectively by many well-known companies. Product placement is the placement of brand names typically within media types such as movies, video games, and television with the hopes the brand name will be seen and associated with the good feelings within the source. For example, many luxury brand vehicle are placed in James Bond movies in hopes the vehicle will be viewed as stylish / cool, increasing the viewer's desire to make a purchase. Usually this type of advertising is expensive, but a large number of people will be exposed to the product / service. Some have further criticized this method of advertising claiming it's only effective for well-known brands that people already recognize. But if a business carefully selects the media which their target audience will be viewing and inserts their product into the media, the chances of positive effects may be increased.

CONTENT MARKETING is a type of advertising that has gained momentum in the last few years. Content marketing is basically "hiding" the product and company information in publications that will likely attract the interests of consumers. Content marketing is often free and can easily be shared on social networking sites.

** Some common forms of content marketing include (1) Educational videos. Such publications might give customers advice about personal finance, business strategies, health advice, retirement ideas, etc. In these videos, the company will place truly useful information, but also insert small "plugs" for their service / product and businesses. (2) Another popular method of content marketing is online informational articles. A company might print articles related to the interests of their target market and insert links and the company name into the publication. (3) A final method that is commonly seen in content marketing is blog posts. Through these blogs, companies hope to begin conversations with among customers and attract attention to their website.

** Another effective branch of content marketing is infographs. Infographs show a graph, chart, or another display that shows some interesting information. They are quick to read and are likely to gain the attention of an audience.

** Although not directly a type of content marketing, many companies show their products / services and educate people about their company through humorous or interesting online video. Posting such content on popular online video channels such as YouTube can be free. If the information in the video is carefully designed, the video has greater chances of being shared on social networks. Thus, this type of free advertising can be effective if the content of the publication is appealing to your audience. Gary Vaynerchuk is considered a master of content marketing using videos. By making and publishing various videos on YouTube, he expanded his small family winery to a 45 million dollar company in a matter of years.

SOCIAL MEDIA has millions of users everyday making it an excellent avenue for reaching consumers. It's very common now for companies to create their own social media accounts and post articles, videos, product information, and company updates. Facebook, Google+, yahoo, LinkedIn, and Twitter all allow you to create accounts and post information. If consumers are interested in the information on your company account, there are great chances of it being shared. Thus if your account and publications are interesting and appeal to the needs and interests of social network users, your company's information can be shared by others for free.

According to statistics, the average adult sees an average of 2,500 ads per day. People literally see so many advertisements their mind doesn't react when they see it. If the advertisement is constructed in a way that the viewer must, or is forced, to read / view it, the usual response from viewers is annoyance. As a business, you want don't want people to view your company's advertisement with disgust and frustration … This is the common response to older methods of marketing. The advertising methods listed above are current and designed to be less intruding and offensive to viewers. They are designed to separate your company's product or service information from the other 2,500 ads people see everyday.