Marketing Help: 10 Tips for Guaranteed Success

Without a solid understanding of today’s best marketing practices, you’re likely leaving money on the table.

Nobody in business wants to do that.

In this article, we’ll dive into 10 tips that will start driving your success immediately.

This may just be the marketing help you’ve been looking for.

1. Learn and Understand What Makes Your Customers Tick

Before you even begin a marketing campaign, you need to have a solid understanding of who your target customer is and what’s important to them.

What keeps your buyer awake and rolling around at night? What questions do they have that burn until they can find the answers? What exactly do they expect of you in terms of how to solve these problems?

There’s a process that each customer has that takes them from being a cold prospect, to a solid lead, to an eventual customer.

Each step of this journey provides you with ample opportunity to learn and change the communication of your brand accordingly.

What worked last month may not work today. Always look for changes in how your customers behave and adjust your branding to these changes.

2. Start a List. Grow It. Then Keep Growing It.

When looking for marketing help, many business owners ignore the basics of direct marketing.

Simply stated, direct email marketing still works. And works very well.

While it’s not an easy task to convert a prospect into a paying customer, it is much easier to convert prospects into email list subscribers.

For thousands of small businesses, their email list is their top marketing tool.

The best way to convert prospects into email list subscribers is by giving them value for turning over their personal email information to you.

What can your business provide, for free, to prospects interested in what you offer? An ebook? A free drink?

Think about what makes sense for your business and then implement it immediately.

The growth of your list depends on it.

Once your list starts growing, you could easily make thousands of dollars in one day by simply sending out one email to your list.

This concept is not to be ignored.

3. Provide Content That Customers Are Excited To See

It doesn’t matter if you cater to B2C or B2B. You need to know one thing for sure: customers go online when they are trying to solve a problem.

And guess what? You’re in a perfect position to help them solve these problems with your product or service. Don’t be afraid to step up to the plate!

Get into the habit of providing significant problem-solving value to customers well before they ever purchase from you. This practice will build trust between you and your customers and help you cut through the noise of competition.

When you do this, future sales are an absolute certainty.

4. Take Your Old Content and Share, Share, Share!

Of course, creating new content is highly important to your branding and image. It delivers excellent information that educates readers and leads to sales.

However, sometimes, old content is just as good as new content. If you’ve written an article or blog post in 2014 that’s just as relevant today, chances are most of your new leads haven’t seen it.

Oftentimes, marketers will try to figure out ways to write 10 different articles on the same subject. This doesn’t provide customers with any real value and mostly helps you lose them.

As long as the older content is still relevant today, don’t hesitate to re-share that information on all of your social media pages.

You’ll be surprised at what might go viral years after it’s been written.

5. Instead of Re-Writing Content, Repurpose It

Most savvy marketers understand that useful blog posts are the bread and butter of online marketing. Even people needing marketing help mostly understand this concept.

But so much more can be done with blog posts well after they’ve been written, posted, and promoted.

Great blog posts can be transformed into ebooks (which can be sold or used as giveaways for new list subscribers), turned into a series of informative YouTube videos, parceled into infographics, and so much more.

Each of these formats will give you the chance to reach new customers while building the thought leadership of your brand.

Best of all, repurposing old content saves you time and effort.

Always look for ways to turn old content into new opportunities. 

6. Use Visual Content and Use It Often

When it comes to social media, users are much more likely to “like” and “share” content that includes interesting images. It’s human nature.

Instead of sending out a short text tweet, consider turning those words into an eye-catching graphic with an identical message.

When you pound out a  blog post with lots of facts and stats, think about turning it into an infographic. It will be more likely to get shared on users’ social media pages (if the content is interesting, informative, and useful!).

Of course, remember to maximize the SEO of these images.

Also, pretty much any blog post is much more powerful when it contains a short video covering the same subject matter.

7. Mobile Compatibility is of the Highest Importance

Smartphones have completely transformed the way people browse the internet. Did you know that Google now ranks mobile compatibility as #3 in it’s indexing?

If your site isn’t compatible with people’s mobile phones, it’s getting buried in the sea of the World Wide Web.

Getting your site compatible on mobile doesn’t take a ton of money. In fact, content management systems like WordPress are an excellent option for small businesses that want amazing-looking sites that easily translate to mobile phones.

Don’t have the knowledge or ability to do it on your own? Consider hiring a freelancer on a site like UpWork.com that will do it for you at a very reasonable rate.

If your site doesn’t display beautifully on iPhones, Androids, and others, you’re losing customers every minute of every day.

8. Need More Marketing Help? Automate Your Email List

You’ve worked hard to build your email list and provide your subscribers with the best content possible. Now, it’s time to automate the whole process.

Use a service like Constant Contact or MailChimp to get it automated. Set up each new subscriber with a welcome email, then a sequence of onboarding messages over the first few days after sign-up.

Also, automate the delivery of your regular newsletters.

Every so often, drop a can’t-miss offer to your subscribers that they didn’t see coming.

Your sales will soar.

9. Have a Plan For Follow-Up

This wouldn’t be an article about marketing help if it didn’t cover follow-up.

Throughout every customer’s journey from cold prospect to buyer, there’s going to be times when the right intervention from you will make the difference between a sale and a lost prospect.

Identify where these moments happen, and use automated follow-up emails to prospects that bring them back.

You’ll also want to design new offers for these customers before they’re lost for good.

10. Put Analytics To Work For You

If you’re looking for marketing help, don’t ignore analytics.

Analytics software is there to show you how users come upon your site and what they do once they arrive.

By pouring through this data, you’ll know what content is most important to your users. This helps you focus on what’s working.

It also saves you the time of repeating failed efforts.

It’s important to turn these insights into action. By paying attention to your daily analytics, you’ll better understand how to turn a prospect into a customer.

Bonus Tip for Marketing Help: Watch Out For Internet Marketing Tips!

You read that right. You’re reading an article about internet marketing tips warning you about internet marketing tips.

Let me explain.

If you’ve been reading a lot of articles on marketing help and online marketing resources, you’ve no doubt noticed an overwhelming theme: “experts” always seem to frame internet marketing in terms of discovering the next great technique.

Not so long ago, it was social media marketing, then came SEO, etc.

Obviously, these marketing techniques have a very important role in achieving your marketing goals. But at the end of the day, no individual technique is a sure-fire way to success.

Instead, define clear goals, a detailed plan, and methods you consistently repeat, all working in unison.

The Most Important Tip

Simply stated, the most important tip for online marketing success is to define your personal strategy, understand the elements required to carry it out, and be consistent.

When you stick to one overall marketing approach, positive results will follow. Never market like the wind changes by chasing the most current trend.

When you’re ready to get serious about your marketing efforts, get in touch with me, and let’s talk. I’m always here to help.

Here’s to your success!