Every dollar and cent you make in business counts. You work hard for it, and you probably already have plans for how it’s going to be spent the moment it comes in. Sometimes, you can begrudge that spending – especially if you’d rather be spending the cash on yourself, which too many business owners neglect to do during the initial growth stages of their business.
One of the areas that people quickly start to lament spending money on is marketing, because it’s such an imprecise science. Sometimes you’ll spend huge money on a marketing campaign, and see almost nothing good come from it. On other occasions, the most innocuous thing you do can yield big results, and you might not even understand why. It’s a scattered approach, and it’s easy to see why some people start to spend blindly on it. All too easily, you can fall into the habit of marketing lazily. So long as more comes in than goes out, you assume everything is working.
If that approach works for you, then that’s fair enough. If it doesn’t, then keep on reading. There are ways your marketing process could be leaner, smarter, and more efficient, and we’re going to show them to you. Marketing doesn’t have to be like mobile slots, where you spend money hoping rather than expecting that you’ll get a reward for it. All online slots players live for those jackpot moments, but they’re few and far between. If mobile slots paid out a jackpot to every player, they would quickly go bankrupt, but there’s no reason a strong marketing strategy can’t consistently pay out jackpots to you. Here are five strong ideas to sharpen up your marketing campaigns, and have them deliver reliable growth for your business.
Create Email Sequences
You might have heard it said that Gen Z doesn’t use email, and for that reason, email marketing is dead. That’s not strictly true, and even if the younger generation is a little less likely to use email than everyone else, there’s still Gen X, the Millennials, and the Baby Boomers out there using email every day. That’s the bulk of your potential customer base, and that’s why email marketing is definitely still worth pursuing. You just have to be smart about it. Sending out blanket, identical emails doesn’t work and never has. You need an email management tool (which should be part of your sales funnel) to monitor responses to emails and respond appropriately. Keep track of who opens it, who clicks on links, and who buys products. Tag those people, and break them down into different categories. Send follow up emails to those category groups based on their previous interactions with you. The targeted approach is the profitable approach.
Stop Getting Facebook Advertising Wrong
Facebook ads are a great tool. However you might feel about the world’s largest social media brand – and we won’t pretend that it hasn’t had some terrible press in the past twelve months – it’s still a platform that gives you potential access to more than two billion users. You can target your adverts to people of a particular age, location, gender, and interest – and doing so will boost your conversion. That’s not all you need to do, though – you should also use Facebook Pixel to find out more about how people interact with your ads. You can also track people from location to location using the same software, and show them hyper-relevant content based on where they’ve been and what they’ve looked at.
Another tactic that’s gaining momentum when it comes to targeting the right people is called Rank and Rent. We’ll cover SEO later in this article, but this new approach is a great alternative if you don’t want to deal with Facebook ads.
Use Influencers
The phrase ‘influencer’ sends a shiver down the spine of many people, but that doesn’t change the fact that social media influencers exist, and they’re good at what they do. Ultimately, if you have a marketing budget, you should spend that money on the forms of marketing that deliver the best results. Time and again, results have shown that working with an influencer pays off. We’re not talking celebrities on the scale of Kendal Jenner here – unless you have $250,000 to blow – so look for people who are either related to your industry, or important to the people you want to sell to. Influencers can give you the kind of instant visibility that would take months of regular marketing to achieve. It’s is all about the right word in the right place. Start off with small-scale payments for a couple of minor plugs, and if that works for you, go bigger. Just someone using your hashtag can be enough to attract curious buyers if the timing is right.
Blog In The Right Places
‘Start a blog‘ is a piece of advice you’ve probably read on a thousand marketing websites, and most of the time, it’s worthless. Your blog is only useful if there are people around to read it, and if nobody knows about your website, nobody is reading your blog. That doesn’t mean that blogging as a whole is redundant, though – you just need to blog where people can see you. Websites like Medium allow you to blog as an ‘authority source’ within your industry, and anyone on their site who has an interest in what you sell is likely to see it. LinkedIn is always looking for industry voices to highlight and feature (which is why it’s worth keeping your LinkedIn account. You could answer questions on Quora, which thousands of people are likely to see. These marketing ideas don’t even cost money, and they can deliver huge results.
Get To Grips With SEO
The ideal situation to be in is to have your website or social media profiles come up every time someone enters a Google search for whatever it is you do. You may never reach the top spots – large companies spend millions of dollars every year to make sure they stay there – but you could still reach the first page with a little effort. It all comes down to SEO, or to give it its full name, search engine optimization. That means writing the content of your website in a format that’s most likely to attract attention from Google’s algorithms and, therefore, be picked up when people go looking for products or services. If you have a Google Adwords account, you can even see how many people are using specific search terms related to your industry or area of business, and therefore hone in on those individual terms. Google offers a reasonably-priced SEO course for anyone who wishes to learn how to do it – although you could always just pay for someone to handle your content for you.
You might have noticed that all of our tips are digital. That’s because radio advertising is dead, and if you have the budget to pay for television marketing, you don’t need our advice! A successful marketing campaign on the internet comes down to one simple thing – putting the right content in the right place to catch people’s eyes. Follow the tips we’ve laid out above, and you’ll be one step closer to doing exactly that.
