Resources can be scarce for small businesses. Especially now.
Limited budgets can pose challenges to raising awareness, attracting customers, and generating revenue.
In fact, 39% of small business owners agree that a limited budget is a major obstacle to the growth of their businesses.
However, there are many inexpensive and profitable marketing hacks that you can use to reach your customers.
These marketing hacks may not use traditional channels, but they can affect your bottom line.
This article describes five marketing hacks that you can use to gain new customers and generate revenue with little or no cost. These include:
Ready to dive in? You will see why each marketing hack is important and how you implement it to reach new customers.
At JustReachOut, we see an average of 10 to 20 emails a day from our customers who respond to requests from journalists for their stories or podcasters looking for stories. These questions and inquiries come out every day, there are tens of thousands of them for every keyword and topic out there, so they look like:
The hard part is finding the one that is most relevant to you, as these requests are spread across a TON of various newsletters and hashtags on Twitter.
Some of the most popular newsletters in which they appear daily are HelpAReporterOut, ProfNet, SpotAGuest, RadioGuestList, #JournoRequests hastag on Twitter, ResponseSource, SourceBottle and there is a TON more.
This is what a podcast request looks like:
Sometimes you need to go straight to the source and speak to a prospect to use your platform.
Given a typical perspective that the customer uses an average of three different devices a day at work, this is not an easy task.
Direct contact with potential customers is one of the most powerful channels available to you. Many marketers have achieved a higher ROI on cold email campaigns than on Google SEO / organic rankings or when running ada / paid / social channels.
However, it can be difficult to e-mail customers from the perspective. After all, only 8.5% of cold-outreach emails get a response.
How are you doing it right?
The trick is personalization and makes it easy for the recipient to say yes.
Make sure your pitch includes your prospect's name and company and is directly related to their business. Research your business, read blog posts, and read the latest press to find out what they're working on and how your business can help.
By personalizing your email, you can increase your response rate by 100%.
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After personalizing your contact, you can easily book a meeting. Adding a planning link eliminates the need for additional emails and gives potential customers the opportunity to book a meeting at their own time.
Together, this personalized approach, combined with an effortless booking engine, will create an attractive pitch with improved conversion rates.
News Articles, Yelp Reviews, Third Party Blogs – You Name It; There are so many places where your brand lives on the internet.
One of the most overlooked ways to promote your brand is to make sure that all the places where your company name, URL, address, phone number, and email address appear are up to date and links for your business.
These "brand mentions" are called "quotes" and can direct referral traffic to your website. Unfortunately, in 50% of the cases, the text, link, or contact information in these mentions and citations about your brand is incorrect and, according to Adam, needs to be cleaned up by Loganix. This is how he puts it:
“Quotes are places where your business is mentioned online, with contact information or ways to reach you for services. By perfecting existing ones, you can spend less time and money on new traffic, but maximize conversions for existing referrals. "
There are two main problems with bad mentions and citations of your brand:
Quotes play a role in placing your page in various search engines. Wrong quotes have a negative impact on your search ranking.
The quality, authority, and consistency of quotes are three of the ten most important factors that can have the greatest negative impact on your SEO rankings on Google. Ignoring wrong quotes can adversely affect your business, as searches have recently outnumbered visits to social media.
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You must inventory all of your quotes and ensure that your address, phone number, website, and offer are correct.
To correct your quote, contact the reporter or blogger who added the mention or "Claim Your Business" to third-party review sites like Yelp and Google My Business. This allows you to take control of additional channels that direct traffic to your site.
The perfect landing page is a mixture of substance and style. You can't expect your prospects to convert as soon as they arrive. You need to show them the benefits of your product or service in a way that resonates.
Go beyond images and text and add a video that shows your brand. Landing pages with videos see an 86% increase in conversions.
Your video can be simple and doesn't need a production value that breaks the bank. Consumers are looking for simple videos that showcase products, contain interactive elements, and highlight recommendations for what to do next.
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You should test different iterations of your video to find out what your customers like. Landing pages need to be continually optimized, but only 17% of marketers admit A / B tests.
Keep iterating with videos on your landing page and your conversion rate is likely to increase.
Most companies are podcasting or posting blog posts, waiting for customers to knock. However, the key lies in the subsequent phases of transportation and reuse.
You may be visited and deal with the original format of your content, and that's great! However, you will miss a TON more engagement if you never convert the same content to another format: podcast, infographic, webinar, video, etc.
According to Jaclyn Schiff, founder of Podreacher.com, a service dedicated to converting podcasts into blog posts: “Reuse of content, be it an old blog post that you used in a podcast interview or transform an old podcast interview you can turn into a blog post. This is the most effective way to give your brand a TON more attention without spending a TON more content creation. "
The process is simple. You can repackage the insights from your blog into different types of content such as infographics, webinars, podcasts and social posts. This will help bring out the full value of your work and can lead to new target groups discovering the insights you share.
Some of these alternative forms of content also perform remarkably well. Over 40% of marketers confirmed that the original visual content, including infographics and illustrations, was most effective for their business.
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Also, don't be afraid to share old content again. An Evernote blog that generated 23 stocks at publication had 181 stocks after a full month. The trick was to re-share the content later, which resulted in an increase of 686%!
By re-using and re-promoting blogs, you will make your content more consumable and accessible to a wider audience.
Marketing in 2020 doesn't have to be expensive. There are many marketing hacks for small businesses that can be used inexpensively and effectively.
Answer journalists and podcasters who are looking for sources for their articles and guests for their shows.
Personalize cold emails and add booking links to seamlessly involve potential customers.
Improve your brand names on various websites to improve your local SEO and optimize your referral traffic.
Add videos to your landing pages to improve your local conversions.
Use old content in podcasts, infographics, illustrations, and webinars, and continuously promote different forms of content to reach a new audience.
These are just a few of the many marketing hacks that are available to you. By using them, you generate more attention, traffic and sales for your company.
Image: Depositphotos.com
