20 Practical Marketing Strategies to Help You Reach Customers Better

As Lee Bolman once said, “A vision without a strategy remains an illusion.”

In marketing, no matter how beautiful your dreams, how excellent your ideas, or how great your vision, if you don’t have a good strategy, what you’ve envisioned won’t easily become a reality. 

Similarly, if you only have tactics or in-depth techniques for doing something without a strategy, you will lack a broader perspective and understanding of the cause and effect of your actions.

In this article, I will share marketing strategies as far as I can think of (at the time of writing). None of the strategies I will share are the best. Moreover, in almost all situations, using more than one strategy is a must. Therefore, after reading, I recommend you try to think about them and integrate them into your marketing plan.

What is Marketing Strategy?

Marketing Strategy is the intermediary and a connector between vision and tactics/techniques, making your marketing effective in reality.

20 Practical Marketing Strategies

1. Scarcity Marketing Strategy 

Scarcity Marketing, simply translated into Thai as ‘ขาดแคลน’ (lack/scarcity) marketing, is based on the idea that people tend not to care about things that are abundant, but rather crave things that are scarce. For example, if you walk into a department store and find three shops selling the same type of clothing, but the price tags they display are different, namely:

1. This shirt costs 15 usd.

2. This shirt costs 30 usd. Special! Discounted to 15 usd.

3. This shirt costs 30 usd. Special! Discounted to 15 usd. 

This promotion is valid today only! 

Which shop would you choose to buy the shirt from?

A real-world example I like is Booking.com. If you try searching for hotels on Booking, you’ll see that Booking uses Scarcity Marketing in many parts of its website, such as telling you the number of rooms left or how many people are currently looking at the same hotel you are. 

Every time I look for a hotel on Booking, one part of me tells myself to be calm and choose later, while another part tells me I have to book now, or it will be full and I’ll miss out. In the end, the latter usually wins every time, haha.

2. Try Before Paying Later Marketing Strategy

Giving your customers the opportunity to try your products or services first is about ‘Give before Take’. The more you give first, the greater your chances of receiving back. 

In the digital world, common examples are software businesses (SaaS) that come in a Freemium Model, meaning they are free to use forever (but with limited features). If you want premium features, you have to pay.

Examples you can explore further include Google Drive, Clickup, and Monday. 

Or, in the offline world, common examples include distributing product samples in department stores for people to try or take home and use first. If they like it after using it, they can then buy it. I once attended an event at PTT where they gave out Texas Chicken (which I had never tried before), and after that, I became a true fan of Texas Chicken. 

However, not everything can be given to customers to try for free first (such as expensive or highly complex items). I recommend that if your product or service falls into this category, what you can give away for free first is “knowledge.” For example, Content Shifu itself provides articles that you can read for free without any cost.

Give value before receiving value, and you will become valuable.

3. Self-Organized Event Marketing Strategy 

No matter how strong the online world becomes, humans, known as social animals, still need face-to-face interaction with other humans. 

Organizing events is another marketing strategy that will position you as a leader or an expert in that particular field. 

For example, Priceza (a famous Thai price comparison website) organizes the Priceza E-Commerce Summit to show that they are leaders in E-Commerce. 

Or Wisesight (a famous Thai Social Listening platform) organizes the Thailand Zocial Award to show that they are leaders in Social Media Marketing. 

Beyond large-scale events or conferences, organizing seminars to invite people to listen to topics you specialize in (whether free or paid) is also feasible. For example, if you provide accounting services, you might organize an accounting seminar, or if you sell tea, you might organize a seminar on how to brew tea.

4. Participating Event Marketing Strategy 

If organizing events yourself feels too big and beyond your reach, there’s an easier way that can yield similar results if done well: changing from being an organizer to a participant in events. 

By attending events related to your work or business, you will meet new groups of people you might not encounter online, and you will find additional opportunities to market yourself or your products/services. 

My advice is that besides attending events directly related to you, you might also try to find events that are indirectly related to you. 

For example, if you provide accounting consultation services, events directly related to you would be accounting-related events. But indirect events that could benefit you might be business-related events or Startup events (because these people will definitely need accounting services, to some extent). 

Alternatively, you might look for opportunities to attend networking events. Famous ones I know include BNI, ABC or DEF, for example. 

Many times in marketing, ‘Know How’ alone is not enough; you also need ‘Know Who’.

5. Do Public Speaking

Speaking (or being invited) at various events is another way to market broadly. If done well, you can gain customers or media exposure without spending a single baht on advertising. 

It sounds good and seems easy to do, but actually doing public speaking well is not easy at all. Because to do public speaking well, while also bringing it back to marketing yourself or your business, preparation is crucial. What you need to prepare is:

1. Content 

The important thing here is that your content must be “relevant” to the audience and should not focus on selling. 

Those who don’t do this well will focus on direct, blatant selling. But those who are good at content will focus on providing value and then subtly selling. The way to do this well is to focus on creating content that you are confident your audience wants to hear first, and then gradually add what you want to say.

2. Content Delivery 

“Practice doesn’t make perfect but better”

Practicing doesn’t make you deliver content perfectly, but it will make you deliver content better (than if you don’t prepare). 

If you have to do Public Speaking for a large number of people or on a topic you’ve never spoken about before, practicing is important. 

My recommendation for easy ways to start practicing is to try practicing speaking in front of a mirror or practicing speaking to close friends or family members. 

The more you practice, the smoother the storytelling will become.

6. Referral Marketing Strategy 

The Referral Marketing strategy is based on the concept that “If you think our product or service is good, recommend it to a friend. Besides your friend benefiting, we also offer additional benefits to you.” 

One of my favorite examples is Dropbox, which is a file hosting service (similar to Google Drive and OneDrive). 

What Dropbox did was tell their users that if you invite one friend to use their service, you will get an additional 500 MB of storage space (up to 16 GB). The more you invite, the more space you get. 

By doing this, they increased their user base from just 100,000 people in 2008 to 4,000,000 people in 2009, or within just 15 months. 

If you want to study more about Dropbox’s Referral Marketing concept, you can see it from the Slide below. 

Dropbox Startup Lessons Learned from gueste94e4c

Summary of Referral Marketing strategy is: 1. Good to use 2. Tell others 3. All parties benefit.

7. Affiliate Marketing Strategy 

Affiliate Marketing strategy is similar to Referral Marketing in terms of word-of-mouth, but the difference is that Affiliate Marketing requires actual sales to occur, meaning the seller genuinely needs to sell products, and the person promoting the product or service will receive real money if a sale is made.

An example of Affiliate Marketing I want to raise is SiteGround, a hosting provider (renting space for your website). What they do is create special links specifically for Affiliate Marketers (e.g., Content Shifu’s link would be this: https://www.siteground.com/index.htm?afcode=987b64107744c10dfdd144ab7f425d06)

and if anyone clicks on those links and purchases SiteGround’s hosting service: 1. SiteGround will naturally make a sale. 2. The Affiliate Marketer will receive a commission. 

In my opinion, this marketing method is one of the very effective marketing methods. Affiliate marketers have to work very hard for you to ensure they can sell your products (and thus earn their commission).

8. Partnership Marketing Strategy 

Each business and each brand has its own follower base or customer base (simply called fan base). Expanding a fan base is difficult and takes time, because the target audience is often similar to the existing base. However, forming a Partnership will help shorten the time needed to build a fan base, because you can “exchange” fans with other brands.

A Thai example I remember seeing is the partnership between Bonchon and After You, creating a special menu item called Chicken Toast. 

An example I want to mention is the Partnership (Collaboration) between HubSpot (Inbound Marketing Software) and Canva (Graphic Design Software) which jointly distributed “195+ Visual Marketing Design Templates” for free download. This collaboration allowed HubSpot to distribute good templates and gained Canva (which is more mass-market) to help expand its user base. Canva itself gained a more premium customer base (HubSpot’s software is expensive, so anyone who can afford HubSpot can easily afford Canva).

Going alone, you can go far. Going together, you can go further.

9. Influencer Marketing Strategy (Influencer Marketing)

Influencer Marketing is about getting influential people to talk about, write about, or refer to your products or services (in the past, influential people might have mainly referred to celebrities, but nowadays, ordinary people with followers can also be influential).

In my opinion, the main purposes of Influencer Marketing are:

1. Stimulate marketing campaigns.

2. Purchase the Audience or Branding of influential people.

3. Have influential people talk about things you shouldn’t say yourself. Points 

1 and 2 are probably normal points you might have seen, but for point 3, I would like to give an additional example.

Suppose you make cosmetics and are famous for products for women, then one day you launch a new product that is cosmetics for men. Your explanation of how good the features of your new cosmetics are would probably not be as effective as having a man (with the audience and branding you desire) speak about it, right?

You might think that Influencer Marketing requires a large budget, but in reality, that’s not always the case. Currently, there are many Influencer Marketing Platforms, such as Tellscore and Revu, that help you access Micro Influencers at an affordable price.

10. Blogging Marketing Strategy (Blogging)

The reason I include a simple method like article writing as one of the marketing strategies is its simplicity. Simplicity here means:

1. Easy to start writing.

2. Easy to start distributing and attracting people to read, especially when writing articles online. 

Just use your brain and two hands, start writing, and then share what you’ve written in various places. Writing articles that provide knowledge or solve problems for people will make readers view you as an expert in the subject you write about. When your target audience considers purchasing products or services, if you have what they need, you will be one of their top choices.

Content Shifu itself used this strategy as a primary strategy during the initial years of website creation.

11. Guest Blogging Marketing Strategy (Guest Blogging)

This strategy is similar to the previous one, but instead of promoting or sharing articles you write on your own platforms (such as your website or social media), it involves writing articles for websites that already have an established follower base.

I myself have written articles for Techsauce, one of Thailand’s leading Tech Startup websites, to leverage their existing follower base. My additional advice when you do Guest Blogging is:

1. Focus on providing value to the Audience.

2. Focus on Evergreen Content, not Topical Content, to make your written content long-lasting.

3. Don’t promote yourself or your business too much.

4. Don’t just write without promoting or mentioning what you do. If you choose the right media and your content is good and truly meets the readers’ needs, Guest Blogging will be one of your powerful marketing channels.

12. Remora Marketing Strategy

Naturally, remoras attach themselves to sharks to feed on food scraps that fall from the shark.

Remoras cannot transform into sharks, so they choose to stay with strong entities like sharks. If they choose a good shark, they will never starve. We can apply this principle to marketing as well by trying to latch onto what is currently trending or attaching ourselves to large platforms or companies and growing together with them (because with your limited resources and budget, it’s not easy to create something to compete with or replace those platforms). 

For example, if you think TikTok is emerging and will grow strongly, you might start building your brand on TikTok so that when TikTok grows big, you can grow with it. The important thing about this strategy is that you should not be a remora that merely eats scraps from the shark, but you should also help maintain and strengthen the shark you are attached to, helping it grow strong.

13. Upsell Marketing Strategy (Upsell)

Once your customer has decided to purchase your product or service, it means they have a certain level of trust in you. Therefore, selling additional products or services to them is something that can and should be done.

An example from Content Shifu: if someone has already purchased our Inbound Marketing book (and registered online), we will try to Upsell that person with courses or other types of products.

Besides Upselling, Downselling can also be done. For example, at Content Shifu, if we sell a course for 7,900 Baht and you try to Upsell a consultation service for 50,000 Baht per month but the customer is not interested, we might Downsell them with a lower-priced product instead, such as the Inbound Marketing book for 265 Baht or a Content Marketing Template for 1,000 Baht, etc.. 

14. Regional Marketing Strategy

Currently, marketing is becoming increasingly complex and sophisticated, involving AI, Automation, Programmatic, and many other seemingly difficult-to-understand terms. Regional marketing refers to personalized marketing according to each local area outside Bangkok. 

Examples of regional marketing include using mobile parade vehicles and organizing concerts. When I first heard about and saw regional marketing at the Money Expo (which is held in several provinces across Thailand), I wondered if this approach would still be effective. It turns out that this type of marketing is a significant part of making people in those areas see and become interested. 

In reality, I think regional marketing is just normal marketing. The key keyword is truly knowing and understanding the target customer groups. Each person and each group has different interests and needs, so marketing should also be different.

To know what kind of marketing your customer groups like, creating Buyer Personas can help.

15. Employee Marketing Strategy 

If you ask who knows your brand or company as well as customers, or perhaps even better, it would likely be your team members. Because insiders have more insights due to their almost daily interaction with the brand. Therefore, besides trying to encourage outsiders (whether influencers or marketing platforms) to help you market, don’t forget to start simple marketing by communicating with your team members to be a voice and help market for you further. 

Examples of Employee Marketing that I think are done well include MK, where employees dance to enhance their own happiness and that of customers (I’m not sure if they still dance nowadays), and Bar B Q Plaza, which allows employees to take Mother’s Day off to have a meal with their mothers. 

Or, for a slightly more high-tech company example, I like Wongnai, which has a section called life.wongnai.com that allows team members to share various stories within Wongnai. Insiders with insight, when they come out to share or do something, will be more captivating than other forms of marketing. 

Note: If insiders are not passionate or willing to be a voice, I believe it’s the duty of the management team and HR to have ideas or methods, whatever they may be, to make people passionate. In this article, I will not go into detail on this matter as it falls under HR, not Marketing.

16. Social Media Marketing Strategy 

Fundamentally, humans are social animals; they like to live together and interact. Social Media addresses this basic human need. Wherever there are people, there are business and marketing opportunities.

Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and LINE are the most used platforms by Thai people. Platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn, and TikTok are also in a period of growth, making them highly suitable for online marketing. 

Typically, what these platforms sell to you is “people’s time and data.” Platforms with high saturation require high creativity and significant budget.

On platforms where people are not yet densely populated, the high aspect is the risk you have to bear – the risk that you might waste both effort and money if, in the end, not as many people use the platform as expected. 

I have two simple ideas for choosing which Social Media to use:

1. Choose what is appropriate for the business model (it wouldn’t work if what you sell is machinery, and you use the method of taking a two-finger selfie with the machine and posting it on Instagram).

2. Choose what suits your financial and labor resources.

17. Search Marketing Strategy 

Humans… besides being social animals, are also curious and inquisitive beings. Currently, the place where curious and inquisitive people find answers is Search Engine (in Thailand, the most popular Search Engine is Google). 

Therefore, if you can answer questions or solve problems for people, you will do well with Search Marketing. Content Shifu also primarily focuses on Search Marketing, especially quality SEO.

I can tell you it’s very worthwhile because it helps Shifu get over 1,000,000 visits per year with very little advertising cost (which you can also do :) if you know how). 

Or you can view all articles about Search Marketing that Content Shifu has written at this link (articles about Search Marketing without buying ads) and this link (articles about Search Marketing that require buying ads).

18. Email Marketing Strategy 

Email Marketing is a scalable 1-on-1 marketing strategy. This means you can send messages to communicate with your customers or followers on a one-to-one basis, whether it’s one person or a million people. 

If you do Email Marketing well, recipients will feel that the emails are communicating specifically with them. For the Thai market, I think Email Marketing is one of the overlooked strategies because it might seem outdated and less exciting than other methods.

However, in reality, if executed well, Email Marketing is another channel that can bring you customers with a suitable investment. 

For an example of Email Marketing, I’ll use Content Shifu’s again. Normally, when we opened training sales, the two methods that brought us the most customers were: 1. Referrals. 2. Through email. 

If you want to test or learn more about Email Marketing, I recommend trying to Subscribe to Content Shifu’s Email Newsletter. Or if you want to find an easy-to-use Email Marketing tool, I recommend Mailerlite. I use this one for personal use.

19. Community Marketing Strategy 

The most suitable people to be a voice for your business are those who love, like, and spend their time with your place/brand.

I think Community Marketing is another level of Referral Marketing that requires effort and time to nurture relationships with customers or followers until they become trusted advisors and loyal friends to your business.

There are many examples of businesses that do Community Marketing well, such as Houzz (a platform that aggregates products, services, and knowledge about home decoration) which brings together people interested in or who love home decoration, Teachable (online learning management software) which brings together people interested in sharing knowledge, or for Thai examples, Builk (construction contracting software) which brings together people interested in construction contracting. 

If you can gather people who like the same things and think alike to be with you, you will have an army of marketers helping you market without needing to spend any advertising budget.

20. Niche Marketing Strategy 

I always say that in the current era, “Niche is Bliss. Mass is Bad,” or simply translated into Thai, the more specific, the better; the broader, the harder. 

In the current era, with the growth of technology and changes in people’s behavior, it is very difficult for your products or services to be created to suit everyone and every group (or if you do create such products or services, customers might easily change their minds and buy from other providers). 

Therefore, niche marketing strategy is one of the interesting strategies. Niche marketing is when you choose to create products or services that are very good or the best for only certain groups of people. Beyond that, those are not the groups you prioritize.

An example I like is Tofusan, which initially ignored the market for soy milk mixed with powdered milk, which was cheaper and had a larger market size. Instead, they focused on fresh-squeezed soy milk (which had a market 10 times smaller) but was a segment where they could become the market leader. When you have to fight a giant, defeating the giant might be difficult. But if you gather all your strength and strengths, using them to break the giant’s little finger, it’s still possible. 

Similarly, in marketing, you should focus only on what you specialize in or target specific audiences who are likely to be interested in you, so that you can differentiate yourself from the marketing efforts of small and large companies in the market.

Summary

And these are the marketing strategies I’ve shared for you to read today. Before concluding this article, I have a small message to leave with you. Peter Drucker, one of the business gurus, once said, “Strategy is a commodity, execution is an art”. 

Whether it’s you or your competitors in the market, they can all access marketing strategies through this article. But what will make you different from others is picking up the marketing strategies you have studied and learned and actually trying to adapt and use them. A strategy can only be good if it is truly put into practice until it yields good results.

Your Turn

Do you have any other interesting strategies you’d like to share with me and other Content Shifu readers?