Sure, you know you need marketing, but do you know how to make it work for you? Today we’ll break down not only the best practices for email, ads, social media, blogs, and webinars, but we will also show you how to get the most out of your marketing budget. For every industry, marketing is essential, and using these tactics and strategies you too can make your marketing flow like a well-oiled machine.
Email marketing is one of the least expensive and most effective means of marketing. Many business owners keep a list of contacts and reach out to them periodically, but are you among the many who are not utilizing best email practices? On average, people spend 11 seconds on an email, making it essential to not only grab their attention with striking subject lines and headers, but you also need to make sure your emails are easily scannable for your quick readers. Another way to make your emails more targeted to your audience is through segmentation. Segmenting your list allows you to speak to specific groups of contacts without causing fatigue to your list.
Ads
Ads are an investment, but when utilized correctly, they are one of the best ways to measure the success of a marketing campaign. With ads, always include a landing page to capture more contacts from your target audience while leading the further down the sales funnel with your call-to-action. Ads can be optimized and within a few hours you can see results and make real-time adjustments to your campaign. The more data you collect, the better targeted your ads become. Best practices for your ads include using a clear, simple image and copy that is punchy and eye catching to stop those scrolling fingers.
Social Media
For social media, it is important to keep up a presence with value-added posts. Ideally you want to use your social platforms to become a thought-leader within your industry. You want to build relationships with your customers by being responsive to posts, creating relatable content, and showcasing your expertise. Your social platforms are not where you want to push sales. It is best utilized to warm leads organically and the main goal of your social media should be to build brand recognition and trust.
Blogs
Blogs not only bring traffic to your website, but they are essential to building up your SEO (search engine optimization). SEO is a reflection of how high up your business is located on Google, Bing and others when keywords for your business or industry are searched. You can build up your SEO to rank higher with blogs that are optimized for keywords. Your blogs not only allow you to be seen before other businesses on searches, but they are important to building your brand to be a thought-leader, industry expert.
Webinars
Providing webinars are a great way to provide free value-added content that is important to your customers. Your webinars will establish your brand as an industry expert and give you another opportunity to warm your leads. It is also one of the best ways to generate new leads that are segmented and highly engaged. Best practices include allowing enough time (typically a month before) for your leads to sign up and sending them a couple reminder emails including the day of to try and capture registrants. Also, providing the webinar afterwards helps to build up your content library within your website.
Ash Emrich 