Sourced from Beyond Execute

e’ve been doing marketing from almost a decade now and frankly speaking our journey wasn’t easy. Believe me it wasn’t all success. Beginning months was really tough, and we failed a lot. But we keep experimenting and figured out we were making same mistakes over and over again. If some one says that they are best in marketing and know everything, then thats a trap. It requires continues experiments and learning. One thing that we learned is to create marketing principles to strictly follow.

Why create marketing principles?

When creating a project or even this blog post, it helps us. We figure out we were making some small mistakes and wanted to reduce them (and ultimately remove them.). We make this list to ensure we never break them off and we keep adding newly into this list.

Over here are 18 marketing principles we followed with our marketing (and you can too.):

1. Welcome your new customers.

When you visit a store, usually their staff welcome you. Even if they don’t do so, you can physically see them. But what about an online store? Where your audience can’t see you, how will they trust you? It’s really important to make sure whenever a new audience subscriber’s you or follow you on social media – Greet them!

Make them feel special, like you care for them. Because and of the day they are the one’s who fill your pocket. It’s really easy, let’s begin with email subscriber. Create a Welcome series email (read this to know how to create one.), whenever a person subscribes your list send them welcome email. Include things like – what you do, services or product you offer, articles to read and social media links. You can create welcome series email through email service provider. 

[Recommend – How to attract new email subscribers?]

Social media – truly speaking consider it secondary. If you really want to build customers, focus on creating email list first. A research states that only 30% of your social media audience really care about your service or product. But these 30% can turn into big business, if you care about them. 

Send them messages including intro and link to your website. Several apps can help you send automatic messages to your new followers. You can check it out from here. Mostly they are paid but it’s worth trying. But I would encourage not to do it often, just send them when they follow you.

2. Marketing Principles #2 – Reply immediately. 

Many brands and businesses have a bad habit of not replying to there followers at all, this damages their reputation. Would you trust a brand or business that doesn’t reply to you at all? I don’t think so. In this period, on social media, people don’t even like to wait for a minute, why would they wait for you for hours. 

Many brands and businesses have a bad habit of not replying to there followers a lot, this damages their reputation. This will not only increase their trust in your brand but also create customer engagement. Replying with words like “Ok”, “Thank you”, isn’t enough. Write engaging comments and keep conversation going. 

3. Create content like nowhere, with full of secrets.

No wonder content marketing is a powerful way to market your business. It will get you more traffic than any other promotional means. But more than 10,000 blogs are created every month, some of them can be from your niche. So how to stand out? By creating content full of secrets and unique.

It isn’t necessary to have a good-looking blog, but having amazing content like no one else can get you into the spotlight. Others might not know a lot about blogging world but you can catch attention with pouring out some secret tips and tricks in your content. You can create your own marketing principles which helped you minimize small mistakes and focus on development. And many other ways to stand out.

Make sure your content has the right message, and it’s easy for your audience to understand. It doesn’t make sense if it’s written in shabby language or grammar. Check spelling and grammar through online tools. Here is some list of tools you can find helpful.

4. Marketing Principles #4 – Offer free guides and resources in return for email.

Ok! So you write amazing content, now what? Until and unless your users don’t visit you again, how will you get more engagement and traffic? Less than 10% users who visit your blog sign up to your email list. Its human nature, if you don’t offer something for free or on a discount, they won’t do what you say.

Create downloadable resources or guide. But that’s not it, make it as unique as you can. Fill it with useful resources  and make sure it’s short. Tell me, do you even read or download guide that takes more than 2-3 hours to complete? No! And not even your users will do. So why make the process so complicated?

Free resources have to be detailed and short, and quick to understand. Use images, graphs and infographics; study shows they help readers understand fast. It’s not necessary to only offer free guides, if you’re a designer you can offer some free downloadable designs or templates. 

When you offer them something to download for free ask them to subscribe. This way you’ll get to build up email list and whenever you send them email about updates they can visit to your site.

[Recommended: How to start attracting users to sign up to your email list?]

5. Ask yourself why would someone like your content and get hooked with it.

Everyone writes content but users like to visit blogs that write with quality and informative content. No matter how effective your traffic generation skills are, you won’t win if people don’t understand why they should buy from you over the competition. A great example of this is Airbnb. They beat Home Away and are worth roughly ten times more.

Typically, ask or take surveys from your audience. Ask them if your content is understandable or it effectively helps them buy your product or how can they improve. Keep conversation going.

6. Marketing Principles #6 – Create infographics.

Infographics summarizes whole blog post into images and graphs. Usually, people like to share it, cause they are easy to understand and can get you a lot of traffic (if you share them on Pinterest). Creating infographics is easy and doesn’t require much effort. So it is advisable to include at least one infographic in your every post.

7. Create headlines that says about the entire blog post.

70% of people read you posts title and description through search engine and only 25% will click on it. To increase the percent you need to take your time writing effective and click-worthy headlines. Even if you write content related to what your users are searching for, but your headline isn’t descriptive, then why would they click to it and visit your site. It’s a good idea to invest on click worthy headlines and description. 

8. Marketing Principles #8 – Be everywhere.

Normally, you’ll hear focus on developing one social media or channel or community, and create engagement. But today if you aren’t everywhere you won’t be able to attract audience. Over these years many communities and social media platforms have been created and disappeared. It always keeps changing algorithms, that might affect your business and traffic. So why worry about this? 

Imagine being on 10 different social media or community platforms, the amount of traffic it’ll generate. Mostly, if you stick to one social media, like Instagram, you won’t be getting as much traffic from this single source as you’ll be getting from 10 different sources. Comparatively, if you use one platform you get only 37% of traffic, but if you’re at 10 different places you’ll get 48% traffic from all those sources. 

Though, you don’t have to be available on all these platforms all the time. You can set a time or day per week. Some of them don’t even require you to be there all the time. Here are different places you can traffic from.

9. Marketing Principles #9 – Define your USP.

USP (Unique Selling Proposition) describes about your business and why it’s different from your competitors. In such a competitive world it’s really important to stand out and define your USP, to let your audience have an option to choose from.

10. Like, comment and share other stuff.

Competition is healthy when it’s good. It’s great to be connected with your competitors because sometimes they can be in your need or via versa. If you don’t have connection or don’t know much people in your industry. You can build connection with them through continuously liking and commenting on there posts or articles.

At time, if there is some useful content that you find interesting you can share it with your audience. This can both getting exposer to their audience and building connection with influencers. You need to begin by creating contacts with other influencers, don’t wait for them to notice you and share your content. 

11. Make is easy for people to share your content

Most of the time when your content is very unique and very well detailed, people will like to share it with there network or audience. So make it easy for users to share your content. You can install image sharer, if you use WordPress install plugins like SumoME or AddThis. They will help users share images to there accounts.

But having an option to share where you aren’t is useless. Suppose you gave an option to share your content on Reddit but you don’t have a Reddit account it’s a good idea, because at the end of the day they would like to subscribe to your account to receive more updates. So, make sure to keep minimum options to reach higher audience.

12. Marketing Principles #12 – Weekly send email newsletter with updates.

It’s important to keep your subscribers up-to-date with your business. No wonder you might be sending email about your latest posts but it’s important to keep them updated with your latest improvement or development. Sending weekly email newsletter can be effective. You learn every day and revamp your content, website and taste everyday, so to ensure your audience is keeping up with you through weekly updates can increase engagement.

Many a times your subscribers don’t even open your latest blog post email. To make sure they get updates on what you published this week can be done through weekly newsletter. Include from whatever milestone you have achieved to what you published on your social media.

13. Marketing Principles #13 – Optimize your site with SEO.

SEO – One of the main reason for your website ranking. Take time to optimize your website with SEO. Make sure your every important page is indexed with search engine. If not, submit it to search engine. Whenever you publish a new blog post make sure to submit the link to search engine. You can easily do it through Webmaster by Google.

Use plugin, either Yoast or All-in-one SEO, to check your post is fully optimized for SEO as per preferred by search engine.

14. Marketing Principles #14 – Consider ads.

No matter how much traffic you get from organic marketing, it’s never going to be as fast as paid media. You really have to go through strategic way to spend less on paid media and get higher ROI. We did create an article on how to start with social media ads. If you have budget it’s advisable to invest in paid social media marketing.

15. Keep updating your old posts.

We still get traffic from our old posts. So, it’s necessary to keep them updated with new experiments and tips. Almost 60% of our traffic is driven by old posts. Most links get broken or content requires some changes. There are plenty of things that you can do with content that you’ve already published to make it more up-to-date.

Brian Dean from Backlinko, for example, has only published around 30 posts in two years. Yet, he keeps all of his posts up to date by rewriting them and adding new information as he finds it. But some of them needs to be updates in every once-in-while.

16. Start a campaign to attract followers.

Companies like Airbnb, got popular through social media campaigns they started to attract users. Campaigns not only create customer engagement but also drive huge traffic. People enjoy taking part in campaigns that are trending today and to make your campaign trendy, you need to make sure your campaign is interesting to people.

Campaigns might take a lot time to create, but they are worth sending your time and dedication. Create such campaigns that send some social message or value some cause and people are willing to take part in it.

17. Add affiliated links to your content.

Even if you are starting at small and get very few views on your post. You can still earn something from Affiliate Links. There are always people within your space who aren’t competitors and have an established user base. Have a dedicated resource continually reaching out and partnering with these sites and companies. Make sure you use “nofollow” on those links because Google doesn’t prefer any kind of paid content or links.

18. Build a Community and create engagement.

Whether you know it or not, your business has a community. To collect loyal fans or customers, build a community either paid or free. This can help you stand apart. Most businesses don’t think beyond collecting emails, but you can be the one building a strong and huge community. You can give your exclusive community members offers you don’t give it to outsider, this can make them fell special.

You can also keep only those people who gradually create engagement and are loyal to your business. Mostly these types of community is offered only by inviting. So, make sure you create a one and build a loyal fan base community. 

This marketing principles list is not done!

We’ll keep adding new principles as we encounter new issues. Some of these will be obvious you but not to others. Consider creating your own marketing principles list for you and your team to follow. It shouldn’t be only under marketing department; you can create it under any field or department.

Sourced from Beyond Execute