Are you here to talk about marketing strategy? It can be a tricky game. Sometimes, a little more trial and error.
You already know marketing is the secret sauce that helps your business grow and promotes your brand. But if you’re not seeing the results you hoped for, it’s time to change things up.
With a few tweaks and new tactics, you can give your marketing strategy a makeover and start seeing the success you aim for. Let’s dive in and level up your marketing game.
Marketing is the lifeblood of any business. It’s how you connect with your audience and showcase your products. But even with top-notch strategies, results can fall short. If you’re not seeing the success you want, it’s time to rethink and revamp your approach.
Knowing the best marketing strategies can kick your business into high gear. Think content marketing, social media marketing, SEO, email marketing, and newsletters. By staying on top of marketing trends and understanding your customers, you can pinpoint the strategies that will work best for your business.
Before you create content, platforms, and marketing materials, you must first understand the fundamentals. It is critical to define your target audience, understand their challenges, solutions, and rivals, and develop a clear implementation strategy.
If you are not taking care of your customer, your competitor will. Bob Hooey
Starter Marketing Tips:
Develop a Unique Value Proposition
Create a clear statement that explains how your product or service solves customers’ problems or improves their situation and what distinguishes your brand from the competition.
AI Unique Value Proposition Generator: This AI-driven tool is designed to assist in creating a winning message that grabs attention and boosts a brand.
Define Your Target Audience and Create Buyer Personas
Understand your audience. Tailor strategies to their needs and preferences by creating detailed buyer personas. Without this understanding, resonant messaging and advertising are challenging to achieve.
HubSpot’s Make My Persona: This tool can help you create detailed buyer personas based on market research and accurate customer data.
Analyze Your Competitors’ Marketing Strategies
Analyze competitors for valuable insights. By understanding what works for them and what doesn’t, you can refine your strategy, identify market gaps, and differentiate your brand.
SEMrush: This tool allows you to conduct competitive research and analyze your competitors’ digital marketing strategies, including their advertising, SEO, and content tactics
Use Data to Track and Measure Effectiveness
Track key metrics like website traffic, conversion rates, and customer engagement to measure strategy impact accurately. Otherwise, you are merely speculating on the effectiveness of your strategies.
Google Analytics: Provides in-depth data on website traffic, user behavior, and conversion rates, allowing you to measure the effectiveness of your online marketing efforts.
Experiment with New Tactics
Don’t be afraid to try new marketing tactics, like influencer marketing or social media advertising. Experimentation can help you discover what resonates best with your audience.
Hootsuite: A social media management platform that allows you to schedule posts, manage multiple social media accounts, and monitor your brand’s presence
Constant Contact: An email marketing tool that lets you create and send email campaigns, manage subscribers, and track performance
Canva: A graphic design tool with pre-designed templates, fonts, and images, allowing you to create professional-looking graphics
Assess your marketing plan’s effectiveness:
Start with SMART Goals: For clear marketing direction, make sure your goals are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound.
Dive into Financial Analysis: Check your marketing expenses and revenue to see what’s paying off. This helps you make wise budget and strategy decisions.
Look at Year-Over-Year Trends: Compare your current plan to last year’s performance to spot areas for improvement. Monitor sales, customer costs, and market share.
Marketing often requires trial and error. If current strategies aren’t working, adjust and experiment with new tactics and tools. Understand your audience, analyze competitors, and monitor data. Embrace new strategies and continuously improve to advance your business and achieve success.
If you want to successfully promote your business, you need to know how to create effective landing pages. Distraction free landing pages can help you generate more leads and sales. If set up properly they can achieve conversion rates as high as 60% or more.
Therefore, today I am going to show you how to create landing pages that convert…
Find a landing page software:
The first thing you must do is get yourself a landing page software. Of course, you can always hire a designer to create the landing page for you. But using a tool will save you time and work out cheaper.
Most of the top ones provide access to several templates with which you can design your landing pages quickly. You also won’t need to hire a designer every time you need an edit. A couple of good landing page design tools you can try are Leadpages and Unbounce.
They have templates that will make it easy for you to design webinar landing pages, product landing pages and more.
Design the landing page:
After you choose your landing page software choose a template that will suit your project best. Then you can begin designing your landing page. Start by writing a headline. It should be both attention grabbing and enticing as it needs to convince people to read the rest of the landing page.
You should also optimize it for social media so that the headlines will drive more clicks and shares.
Next, write the body copy. The goal of the body copy should be to convince people that signing up for the content in exchange for their details or buying the product is worth it. The best way to do this is by discussing the benefits of the content or product.
Start with a short paragraph and then continue with bullet points that quickly state the benefits.
After that you can end with a call to action that asks people to ‘Sign Up’ or ‘Buy Now’ to gain access.
Here’s a good example of a landing page from Hubspot that promotes a free marketing assessment…
As you can see it starts with an attractive headline followed by a sub headline. After that you have a couple of short paragraphs which are followed by bullet points that state the benefits of the assessment.
Finally, it ends with a call to action that asks people to fill up the form.
Another important step they have taken here is adding their logo at the top. When people see this they will instantly know that this is a promotion from Hubspot. If you don’t have a logo, you should at least add your company name at the top.
Attach it to a domain:
The aforementioned landing page design tools can host your landing page. So, you can set them up there. But if you want them to have an extra layer of credibility you should host it on your own domain. When people see that the name on the logo matches with the one in your URL they will trust you more.
So, attach it to your website.
If you are a startup and haven’t got a website, you can purchase one using a domain name finding tool.
When you type in the name of your company in the search field it will find all the domain names available and you can buy the one you like most.
Once you have a domain you can attach the landing page to it and it will look very credible. Some landing page design tools have their own WordPress plugins. So, if your website runs on WordPress, adding the landing page to it should be much easier.
Send traffic and test results:
The next thing you must do is send traffic to this landing page. This should be done through both organic and paid methods.
While you do this watch out for the conversion rates to see if they meet the industry standards. If it is not converting well enough you should make some modifications to see if it improves.
Split test different versions:
Another thing you can try is to split test your landing pages right from the start. This is where you create different versions of your landing page and then simultaneously send the same amount of traffic to all of them to see which converts the best. To help with split testing you can use a free tool like Google Optimize.
Now create your landing pages…
This is how you create landing pages that convert. Start by getting a landing page design tool. Next, choose a template and add your copy to it. After that you can attach it to a domain and send traffic.
While you do this you should regularly monitor your page to make sure it is converting well enough.
How do you create your landing pages? Do you use any tools or do you design them from scratch? Please leave your comments below.
There are literally millions of businesses occupying social media space just vying for a customer’s attention.
They are pulling out all of the stops to promote their business, to get customers to buy their product. So it’s safe to say that there is stiff competition in the socialverse.
For a business to survive and thrive you must have a strategy that works. And in order to create an effective social media strategy you have to know what the latest marketing trends are.
Otherwise, you won’t get a return on the time and money you invest in your marketing plan.
In this post, I’m going to cover the latest social media marketing trends for 2018.
Social Media Marketing Trends For 2018
Social Media Examiner published their 10th annual social media marketing industry report. More than 5,700 marketers were surveyed and they shared how they will use social media to grow and promote their business.
The most commonly used social media platforms marketers are:
Facebook
Instagram
Twitter
YouTube
Pinterest
Snapchat
And in spite of Instagram’s ever-growing popularity, Facebook is still holding its own. A whopping 94% of marketers use Facebook followed by 66% who use Instagram. And…2 in 3 marketers claim Facebook as their most important platform.
The Most Commonly Used Types of Content
Social Media Examiner asked marketers to identify the types of content they use in their social media marketing. The chart below shows the percentage of marketers for each type of content.
Visual Images
I can’t tell you how important visual images are. It is what will drive a customer to take action, like clicking the link to your blog post.
When people hear information, they’re likely to remember only 10% of that information three days later. However, if a relevant image is paired with that same information, people retained 65% of the information three days later. Brainrules
80% of marketers said they will use visual images in their social media marketing plan.
Social media is busting at the seams with brands trying to get a customer’s attention so it’s important that your visual images stand out from the rest of the digital herd.
Studies demonstrate that images receive a high response rate, and are a very effective technique for generating leads.
So how can you use visual images in your social media marketing?
Infographics are not only a quick and easy way to share information with your audience, they are also highly engaging. It is a graphic visualization tool to capture attention and to tell a story while the reader consumes the content.
There are tools like Piktochart to create your own infographics but you can also find infographics created by other marketers in just about any industry on Visual.ly.
Video
The digital landscape is exploding with video content. As a matter of fact, 77% of marketers plan to increase the use of video.
According to Hubspot: 54% of consumers wanted to see more video content from a brand or business they support.
Adding video to your social media marketing plan is an effective way to draw more attention to your business. Remember a video should be interesting, engaging and helpful for viewers, reaching their pain points, their sweet spot to want and need your service or product.
Here are some of the ways to incorporate videos into your social media marketing plan:
Create short and simple instructional videos to show your audience how your product works
An audience loves original, out-of-the box videos. A good example is one Dollar Shave Club created to promote their blades:
You can also create thank you videos to show gratitude to your audience for using your product or service
Blooper videos are also popular so share those out-takes and goof-ups!
Blogging
Customers prefer live videos over reading a blog post but blogging is still an important, fundamental tool to drive your business success. You can incorporate videos into your blog, further boosting the readability interest with active content.
Blogging is means to keep your audience informed of the latest trends in your industry, develop your reputation as a thought leader, provide updates about, and to your product, and be a valuable resource hub of information. A blog also aids in building your community of loyal, interested followers. Followers can become customers because they know, like, trust you.
Quality content is essential. It truly is KING! Be the subject matter expert to drive social waves to you and your business. Rich and relevant is a must.
Here are some of the stats that caught my attention:
According to the infographic, 80% of customers would rather watch live videos from a brand than read a plain old humdrum blog post.
Live streaming can be used to make announcements and give updates on your products. You can do a live event to promote your business. And you can do a live behind the scenes video to show your audience the creative process for your brand.
Now, live streaming is popular on many social media platforms but Facebook is killing it! Statistics show Facebook live videos are watched 3x longer than regular videos.
So if you’re wondering whether you should use live video streaming, the answer is YES!
Podcasting
Podcasts are a low cost, high impact content platform to promote your business, reach your target audience, personalize your brand and share your voice. Typically, it’s unfiltered, an opportunity to humanize brand and provide a more authentic feel than other types of content marketing.
Podcasts expand your reach, touching the lives of many. In a report by Edison Research, they found that in 2018 (so far) 44% of Americans, 124 million people, have listened to a podcast. 73 million listen in on a monthly basis. Pretty impressive.
TIP: Pat Flynn wrote a great tutorial that has step-by-step instructions to start a podcast.
Messenger Bots
Messenger bots came into the scene back in 2016 and have become a leading tool in content marketing. This form of content marketing took off when Facebook figured out how to take payments in messenger so users wouldn’t have to go to an external website to make purchases.
And from there a new trend was born!
Bots uses Artificial Intelligence to understand a user’s question and provide the right response according to the conversation flow.
It’s designed to help your customers in a more “personal” way and can help businesses provide content and resources to help customers. It adds another layer of communication to help convert viewers into customers.
Here is a list of Messenger chatbots you can check out:
Investigate the available platforms and tools to further your audience engagement and customer journey. There are many to choose from and while it can be overwhelming, start small but think big impact. Be creative and innovative, not a copy of the competition.
Experiment. The key to a working social media marketing plan is to analyze your results and tweak your plan as needed.
Over to you: What’s working? What isn’t? What are your favorite platforms?
Social media marketing continues to grow at exponential rates and remains one of the simplest tools a business owner can use to reach their audience and further deepen their digital footprint.
According to We are Social, 3.81 billion people worldwide have active online accounts which exemplify the tremendous opportunities to build and connect with your audience. It does take time and effort to develop a strong foundational footprint but where else are you able to assemble a sizable following at pennies per impression?
My dad used to say “if you throw enough shit against the wall, somethings gonna stick.” This still holds true but I recommend a planned attack, some SMM strategy. Nothing willy nilly if you’d prefer better results. So let’s dive in!
Here are 13 tips you can use to maximize your social media footprint
Social visibility – include all social channels in your marketing collateral (print and online), email signatures, and your website. Don’t make people have to click, search and discover. It should be an act of ease and grace to connect with you on their terms.
Profiles – make sure they are all up to date with cohesive branding and content. If your information is scattered with various profile details, obscure images, varied company/service descriptions, you’ll confuse your audience.
Consistency and frequency are key – post several times daily. Don’t be a flash in the pan with sporadic posts. You won’t give people a reason to follow you or look for your content. You’ll get lost and forgotten.
Incorporate video and branded images.
Content-rich, relevant, and sharable.
Ask clients to “check-in” and tag the business. The more the merrier right? Each time a client checks in, a little bell goes off. Figuratively speaking of course. What greater way to help promote your business and generate a little social proof with people clamoring in your front door. To take it a step further, offer an incentive.
Build relationships – engage with your audience, share, and comment on their content. Keep the social in “social media” and humanize your brand. Buyers and prospects don’t want robots or the sound of silence. Relationship marketing develops authentic relationships based on real connections and emotions. Reach out.
Branded visuals – incorporate branded images into your marketing magic. Your images should be strong, convey a message, emotion, or thought, and most important, it should contain your logo or company name. It’s been proven that visuals generate a greater response to your posts.
Tweets with images receive 150% more retweets than tweets without images (source)
Hashtags – use popular, trending or industry hashtags. Join the conversation, gain authority, share rich/relevant content. #UseHashtags
Social proof – Display (ask for) testimonials/reviews. People buy from people. People trust people. People will follow the crowd. Be the people that people love to talk about and ask them to talk about you. Social proof generates business with the peer to peer discussions.
Local business – make sure all online digital maps/places/directories are up to date with your address/phone and hours. Finding your whereabouts shouldn’t feel like a mission impossible or a CSI investigation.
Blogging – weekly/bimonthly – go for daily if you can or hire someone that will
Consistent blogging pings Google and other search engines to new activity
Increases SEO with keywords and tags
Content is shared by your network, bringing people to your website and social platforms
Cross share the content on your various accounts to drive site traffic
Write for the audience and their needs/problems/pain points. Your content isn’t about you or what you feel is essential in the world. It’s all about your buyers and what moves them most.
Blog commenting – Each time you comment on other relevant business blogs you have the opportunity to provide your website which links to your name. It can be time-consuming, but create a few keyword alerts with daily email digests or use tools like BuzzSumo, Feedly, and Tagboard to discover appropriate content.
LinkedIn – comment on daily pulse articles as those are shared in public domain. Public domain is your free for all link to the search engines.
Team involvement – suggest that staff also share and like content. This helps FB algorithms and exposure. The more people who like/share content, the greater chance of being seen, showing up in keyword searches, and increasing social proof once again.
Social Media is not just a spoke on the wheel of marketing. It’s becoming the way entire bicycles are built. Ryan Lilly
Social media and the online environment has become an integral part of people’s lives and it’s only going to continue to explode. With approximately 4.5 billion people on the internet and 3.81 billion using social media, don’t you want to wriggle in with your target market?
Be discovered before your competition?
Maintain a stronghold on your market share?
Distribute those digital breadcrumbs to maximize your social media footprint and give your audience a full meal, not just a tidbit snack.
Email marketing is a basic, yet elemental solution to reach out to millions of people in a matter of seconds. Your personalized message is a cost-effective business tool to touch a larger target market at a much lower cost than hard-copy mass mailings or print ads.
Email Marketing Will:
Help you build lists
Increase website traffic
Generate sales
Stay in touch with clients
Share data about your company
Create an instant call to action
Enhance your brand or corporate image
As a form of direct marketing in the digital world, your communication is sent directly into the hands of your consumers, delivering impact and content. This isn’t simply a mass broadcast, but a carefully crafted bulls-eye message to your interested audience. Your email marketing campaigns are delivered via different types of email or messaging platforms. Tip: don’t spam your readers and ALWAYS ask permission before you send a newsletter, a text message, or add them to a list. OPT-IN!
Transactional – triggered by consumer action. When a customer buys a product, pays via credit/debit card, or even makes an online reservation, emails or text messages are generated based upon this activity. This type of communication provides the marketer with an immediate opportunity for another touchpoint with the consumer to deepen the relationship and buyer satisfaction.
The Transactional emails have 8x more opens and clicks than any other type of email, and can generate 6x more revenue. Experian
Email Newsletters – regular emails delivered to opt-in subscribers containing relevant industry content, solutions to pain points, and company news in addition to some promotional news/e-commerce products. These help to keep your audience connected and informed during the purchase or marketing cycle.
Mobile Messages – text messages for appointment reminders, sales, special mobile opportunities as well as typical campaigns read via a device. Mobile messaging continues to grow at exponential rates – be mobile-ready, mobile-friendly, and responsive.
A fundamental purpose of your email marketing is to make it simple and easy for the consumer to act. You want them to opt-in, click, engage, share, purchase, and be your brand evangelist.
Guide Your Audience
Add a signup box in your email signature, website, social platforms, and other marketing collateral
Make your content rich and relevant
Solve pain points and address gnawing issues (How can you improve their lives?)
Add share buttons
Embed links to your blog, products, and services
Always use a CTA (call to action) in your emails
Engage Your Readers
Readers want to know, ‘What’s it in for me?’ Make sure your email delivers
Your email needs to capture their attention immediately. Use a clear and captivating subject title
Content should be relevant and engaging. It’s too easy for your reader to click the delete button. If either of these two expectations is not met, your reader may delete or unsubscribe
Encourage your readers to share your e-newsletter by offering incentives
Keep it short and sweet
Add links to drive traffic to your site or to reference other attention-grabbing articles
Develop a reputation as value-added – a resource in your industry
There are many email marketing platforms to choose from so it is important to review the features, benefits and cost structure of each of them, learning which one best suits your company and your needs. Consider your present situation as well as future expansion. What might work now, may not work in a few years. As with any marketing or social media communications, consistency is key, as is your content marketing. You are writing for your reader, not for yourself. Understand their wants and needs. Hold off on sounding spammy and merely pushing products and services – it becomes overkill and annoying. Your marketing efforts should be to not only educate and inform but more importantly, build the relationships with your audience. This is the heart of your business! Thanks for reading. I hope you found this post useful and informative. What successes have you experienced with email marketing? Please leave your thoughts in the comment section below.
Back in the day, and yes I’m dating myself here, there was an ingenious advertising campaign devised by Wendy’s using the slogan “Where’s the beef?” Everywhere, from Saturday Night Live to the White House, people were asking “Where’s the beef?” and poking fun at investigating where the true value of something resides in comparison to face value assumptions. Back in the day, Wendy’s used the campaign to highlight the fact that Wendy’s burgers were actually larger than Burger King or McDonalds, and that these competitors had simply used larger buns to create an illusion.
Recently, I’ve been looking for the “beef” in my social media marketing. Like many small business owners I wear a lot of hats, and fortunately my passion for my business far outweighs the tremendous hours that are required. Particularly as a small business owner, I have to be discerning about where I spend my time and how.
Social media at times feels a lot like those competitor burgers – enormous yet not a lot of meat or substance. It’s a delicate balance to keep up with social media etiquette, find relevant and interesting content and even retweet and repost others’.
I’m fairly new at social media, having dragged my feet for years, but I could quickly see that you could spend all day every day attending to social media endeavors and still never quite get done, let alone have any time left over for your “real” job. I’ve enthusiastically embraced that social media is an integral and important tool for us to use. The reality of incorporating social media into my existing responsibilities created additional challenges. Social media takes a lot of TLC, patience, and dedication, and success doesn’t often happen overnight, or look like you expect it to.
Recently I found myself creatively asking my social media coach that old Wendy’s question, “Where’s the beef?” I began to list the justifications for my perceptions. Almost any small business owner could recite them in his/her sleep:
There are only so many hours in the day.
I’ve got to put my time where it makes the most sense strategically.
Every hour I spend doing one thing means I’m not spending it doing another.
[Fill in your own!]
By the end of our conversation, however, I realized that I’d unwittingly fallen into the same illusion that the viewers of the old Wendy’s commercials had suffered. I’d been looking at the numbers associated with my social media initiatives rather than the quality of those relationships themselves. In other words, I’d been looking for the big buns as the burgers rather than the beef itself.
Is it more impressive to say that you have 25,000 twitter followers than 5,000? You bet! In the course of two months since I started with social media, I’ve gained a few hundred net followers. Does that compare with the visions of what I could gain during that time? Not even close. The numbers had been how I was defining my success and had also over time become the source of my frustration.
But just as the bigger buns created the illusion of delivering bigger burgers, the focus on numbers is also an illusion. There are numerous ways to create a massive following, from purchasing followers, to setting aside my operational tasks and focusing exclusively on social media initiatives. That would get me the big buns I desired, so to speak. But that’s not what I really wanted. I didn’t want just big buns – what I really wanted was a good, high quality burger.
That’s what I need to remember, what every small business owner needs to remember when they start asking, “Where’s the beef?” Those efforts we make, every new social media connection made organically, adds the quality into the burger you’re creating.
“Social media is the vehicle, not the destination. You can’t just ask, ‘What’s the ROI of social media?’ You have to ask, ‘What’s the ROI of specific activities that we engage in via social media?” Hal Thomas
I’ve created new relationships with those in our audience who are genuinely interested in who we are, what we offer, and want to partner in ways that benefit both of us. The “beef” in social media isn’t really about the numbers. Yes, it looks impressive, but the true growth comes from the quality of the relationships you form. Within the past two months, we’ve found new columnists to write for us as well as new radio guests and those burgeoning relationships were formed easily and swiftly in ways that we never could have done without social media. The “beef” has been found and the quality of that beef will continue to feed my small business in ways that a couple of fluffy, big buns never could on their own.
Guest Author:
Christine Andrew
Christine Andrew is the founder and CEO of CoSozo, a wellness and empowerment media company she created in response to what was ultimately the terminal illness of two of her loved ones. CoSozo, literally Greek for “Healing Together” was founded on the desire to bridge the information gap between the alternative and allopathic medical worlds and empower individuals to make informed decisions that align with their own personal beliefs.
Christine held a long and successful career in the biopharmaceutical industry, primarily in the development and implementation of quality systems. As a consultant, Christine worked with manufacturers both within the U.S. and internationally to prepare for and successfully pass regulated industry inspections and also to develop systems and strategies to produce and maintain quality standards.
Today, Christine has what she calls “the best job in the world” using the powerful platform that CoSozo has developed to bring the spotlight to issues, information, and resources that can help people everywhere live happier, healthier and more fulfilling lives.
Mitt Ray is the founder of 
