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Five Unconventional Marketing Tactics To Use In Your Start-up

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By Chris Kille

Whether you’re an aspiring entrepreneur or a marketing maverick, you might be ready to ditch cookie-cutter marketing strategies and experiment with a few unconventional tactics. I want to share some of the marketing manoeuvres that worked wonders for my start-up. Through these strategies, you can say “goodbye” to the mundane and predictable and unleash your creative side.

1. Aim to create highly shareable content.

Let’s start with a bang: the power of viral content. While cat videos and dancing babies might dominate much of the internet, your start-up can tap into that addictive quality by creating videos that have the perfect blend of humour, quirkiness and relatability, all while showcasing your product’s unique features. When my start-up unleashed such a video, it spread quickly across social media. The key here is that you can’t be afraid to take risks, push boundaries and create content that people can’t help but share.

A few tips to keep in mind.

1. Stir emotions. Make your audience laugh, cry or feel inspired. In my experience, emotional content gets shared.

2. Be one-of-a-kind. Dare to be unique and unleash your brand’s personality.

3. Stand out from the crowd. There are no guarantees, but being bold and authentic can help boost your viral potential.

2. Partner with micro-influencers.

Move aside traditional celebrity endorsements—I believe it’s time to embrace the era of influencers and their mighty effect on the masses. But here’s the catch: Consider taking a detour from the traditional path and teaming up with micro-influencers who have a passionate and devoted following within your target audience instead.

This is the approach my company took, and by sending these influencers free samples and engaging them in an authentic way, we gained exposure to a highly engaged niche audience. Encourage these influencers to share their honest reviews and experiences, as this can build trust and credibility for your brand. Remember, it’s all about quality over quantity when it comes to influence.

3. Consider guerrilla marketing, and prepare for impact.

What’s stopping you from surprising the world? Enter the realm of guerrilla marketing. This unconventional tactic is all about catching your audience off guard and leaving them in awe. In my start-up’s case, we orchestrated a flash mob in the heart of a bustling shopping centre. Our dancers, dressed as our product mascots, unleashed an explosion of energy that captivated the crowd and left them clamouring for more. The results were foot traffic surges, social media buzz and increased sales.

To succeed in guerrilla marketing, you must be bold and unconventional. Align your efforts with your brand and target audience. Think outside the box. Break free from traditional strategies. Embrace creativity, and surprise your audience for a lasting impact.

4. Turn customers into players through gamification.

Who says marketing has to be a monotonous affair? Consider turning the tables and transforming your customers into active players in your brand’s story through gamification. In my company’s case, we developed a mobile app that rewarded users with points, exclusive discounts and a sense of accomplishment for completing tasks related to our product. Suddenly, our customers were eagerly competing, unlocking achievements and sharing their progress with their friends. I’ve found this approach can not only deepen customer engagement but also inject a thrilling element of competition into your marketing strategy.

To get started, identify key actions or behaviours you want to encourage. Then, create a points-based system or challenges that reward customers for completing those actions. Inject fun and friendly competition to keep them engaged. Get creative with leader boards, badges and exclusive rewards. Level up your marketing game.

5. Tap into the power of experiential marketing.

I believe experiential marketing is the key to leaving a lasting impression and forging profound connections with your audience. Instead of relying solely on virtual campaigns, my start-up organized a series of pop-up events. We created immersive experiences where potential customers could interact with our product in person, which helped spark their curiosity and left them hungry for more.

Imagine this: a beautifully designed pop-up store that showcases your product’s features and transports customers to a different world. To make this a success, craft an environment that engages all their senses, from captivating visuals to enticing aromas and live demonstrations. In doing so, customers can not only see and touch your product but also experience it first-hand. This hands-on approach creates a personal connection between the brand and customers and leaves them with a memorable experience to share.

Do not underestimate the immense power of social media when holding these events as well. By creating Instagram-worthy moments within your pop-up events, you can encourage attendees to capture and share their experiences online.

The ripple effect my team saw was astounding as we observed a wave of user-generated content flood the digital sphere. The power of experiential marketing is that it can dispel the clutter and create an emotional bond with your audience that I believe no digital ad can replicate.

In the realm of unconventional marketing tactics, the possibilities are endless. Think outside the box, and let creativity run wild. Marketing evolves; standing out demands being daring and breaking free. Embrace the unconventional, be fearless and watch your start-up thrive.

Feature Image Credit: getty

By Chris Kille

Chris Kille is the CEO of Payment Pilot and Elevate Outsourcing, operating out of Charlotte, NC. Read Chris Kille’s full executive profile here.

Sourced from Forbes

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5 Marketing Tactics You Can Do Even Before you Have a Product

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BY HILLEL FULD

You don’t have to only start marketing once your product is ready.

One of the most common mistakes I hear from entrepreneurs regularly is “I don’t even have a product yet, how can I possibly start to do marketing?”

My answer? If you only start doing marketing once your product is ready, you’ll have missed the train. Now is when you need to start building an audience, establishing the brand, and testing product-market fit. Don’t wait until your product is ready.

All said, here are five things you can do to begin your marketing even before your product is ready.

Find out if people even need your product.

While your product might not be ready for launch, now is a good time to measure how much demand there even is for your product, Whether it’s through surveys or interviews with potential customers, it’s probably a good idea to figure out if anyone even wants a product before you start building it.

Start building your social media accounts.

Now is the time to set up the infrastructure for your social media activity. Your company Twitter isn’t going to set itself up and once your product is ready, you should already have an audience waiting. If you only start setting up your social media post launch, you have missed a golden opportunity to build an initial community around your product.

Even if you don’t plan on tweeting or posting, you can still use social media to listen to what people are saying about the market, about your competitors, and if you’re lucky, about what people want to see in a product like yours.

Begin to produce industry content.

Now, I understand why this might sound scary to you since the last thing you want to do is give away what you’re building and give your competitors a head start. That doesn’t mean you can’t start producing content about the industry without even talking about your product.

If, for example, you’re building an artificial intelligence product, why not start writing articles on your company blog about trends in artificial intelligence, new developments in the world of artificial intelligence, and other content about your industry without even mentioning the name of your product?

Initiate some interviews with leaders in your space.

Interviewing people in your industry might be the perfect type of content to generate early on, well before your product is ready for market.

When you interview people in your industry, you achieve three very important things: You establish a relationship with the leader who you are interviewing, you gain targeted traffic when that person shares the interview with their audience, and you elevate your own brand by associating yourself with that industry leader.

Establish relevant relationships with journalists.

When launch day arrives, you’re going to want to pitch the press, right? How do you plan on doing that without knowing who you’re pitching and how they like to be pitched?

Now, well before launch, is the time to do that research and set up the foundation for a successful launch.

In addition to the research, you can also start engaging with that journalist on social media so when you are ready to pitch them, they already know you and are more inclined to cover the launch There are many things you can do to prepare for your launch and none of them have to compromise the ability to remain under the radar.

Having said that, if it applies, you might want to ask yourself why you want to stay under the radar. Is it because you want to be first to market? Well then you might be ignoring the fact that being first is meaningless and perhaps even detrimental.

Google wasn’t first, Apple wasn’t first, Facebook wasn’t first. They just did it better. In order to do it better, you might want to start sharing your idea with some close contacts to get their feedback. That is much more useful than remaining under the radar.

Feature Image Credit: Getty Images

BY HILLEL FULD

TECH MARKETER AND STARTUP ADVISER@HILZFULD

Sourced from Inc.

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Five B2B SaaS Marketing Tactics That Most Organizations Overlook

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By Brian Schofield.

Digital marketing consultant at Market 8, specializing in search engine optimization. He is mainly focused on the SaaS industry. 

Growth-minded SaaS companies need to find strategic ways to stand out online. And while it seems like many marketers tout “the next best thing” when it comes to software-as-a-service (SaaS) marketing, I find that there are a few tactics that are routinely underrated.

It’s become all too common to see SaaS companies getting caught up in the “shiny object syndrome” of the latest growth hacks. Although some of these “hacks” can produce results, it’s important to remember the basics.

In fact, having stood the test of time, these tactics prove that it’s not always necessary to reinvent the wheel. So here are five marketing strategies that we leverage for our B2B SaaS clients at Market 8 and that I find most software companies ignore — tactics that could be the difference between being overlooked and winning over new customers.

1. Leverage searchability around competitor brand names.

With such stark competition in the SaaS space, companies need to find a way to elevate themselves above their competitors. This often means positioning your software against your competitors’ software in a way that acknowledges yours as the superior choice.

To get in front of prospects looking for your competitors, you can target your competitors’ branded keywords through Google Ads (or Bing Ads, depending on the market). Then, direct these prospects to a landing page that showcases why your solution is best.

What’s great about these landing pages is that they often attract organic traffic, especially if you’ve included comparative keywords such as “Brand A vs. Brand B” in the meta page title and header tags.

2. Fully optimize your review listings.

It might seem obvious, but this one is often overlooked.

Be sure to claim and optimize your review listings on G2, Capterra and similar directories. This means thoroughly filling out your company description, specifying the categories you do business in, and adding high-quality images and demo videos.

Next, you’ll want to make sure you have an ongoing plan in place to collect reviews, especially on the directories that your target audience is routinely browsing. Lastly, address any existing negative reviews in a tactful way to show that your brand values and listens to customer feedback.

While doing all of this will most certainly improve your brand’s reputation, it may also improve your search engine optimization (SEO) on and off the directory website.

3. Become more visible in the search engine results page (SERP). 

Schema markup is a type of code that can be placed on webpages to help search engines better understand what a page is about. This code also allows search engines to display rich snippets in the search results.

FAQ markup and AggregateRating markup are two types of structured data that our agency is seeing great results with right now, simply because the click-through rate of these listings goes through the roof. It makes sense — if users are able to get their most important questions answered right away while seeing your company’s glowing reviews, they’ll be more likely to click your listing than your competitor’s.

4. Extract more value out of existing content.

Many SaaS firms are so focused on creating new content that they forget about their existing content. To get the most out of what you already have, revisit your blogs, and optimize based on data you find in Google Analytics and Google Search Console. Update, remove or add sections of content, and add a new lead magnet to the page.

The same can be done for your important product or service pages. Add power words, modifiers on keywords and conversion-focused long-tail keywords to attract targeted users and convert that traffic into buyers. Highlight your strongest selling points, and add compelling calls to action (CTAs) to entice users to click, buy or subscribe right away.

Updating existing content improves user experience, but what it also does is provide “freshness” signals to search engines, improving your rank in search results.

5. Focus new content on customer retention, not just acquisition. 

Build your content strategy with the goal of retaining users, not just acquiring new ones.

It’s a well-known fact that retention is less expensive than acquisition, so why do many SaaS businesses focus on acquisition as a top growth strategy?

Having a retention-focused content marketing strategy could set you apart from the vast majority of your competitors. Successful SaaS firms that do this have “learning centers” on their sites, answering every question users could possibly have and addressing any confusion users might have about their products.

A great example of a company that does this incredibly well is Ahrefs. Its content acquires new customers, but it also creates product experts out of existing customers, too. These customers go on to be brand advocates who direct even more customers to the software.

Conclusion

While it may be tempting to chase the next best marketing “hack,” it’s important not to forget the fundamentals. The above B2B SaaS marketing strategies routinely generate amazing results for SaaS companies that implement them on a regular basis.

Brand positioning, reputation management and having a retention-focused content marketing strategy are all tactics you can use to increase your online visibility, even in a highly competitive industry. What is your SaaS company doing to stand out in your market?

Feature Image Credit: GETTY

By Brian Schofield

Digital marketing consultant at Market 8, specializing in search engine optimization. He is mainly focused on the SaaS industry. Read Brian Schofield’s full executive profile here.

Sourced from Forbes

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Five B2B SaaS Marketing Tactics That Most Organizations Overlook

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By Brian Schofield,

Digital marketing consultant at Market 8, specializing in search engine optimization. He is mainly focused on the SaaS industry.

Growth-minded SaaS companies need to find strategic ways to stand out online. And while it seems like many marketers tout “the next best thing” when it comes to software-as-a-service (SaaS) marketing, I find that there are a few tactics that are routinely underrated.

It’s become all too common to see SaaS companies getting caught up in the “shiny object syndrome” of the latest growth hacks. Although some of these “hacks” can produce results, it’s important to remember the basics.

In fact, having stood the test of time, these tactics prove that it’s not always necessary to reinvent the wheel. So here are five marketing strategies that we leverage for our B2B SaaS clients at Market 8 and that I find most software companies ignore — tactics that could be the difference between being overlooked and winning over new customers.

1. Leverage searchability around competitor brand names.

With such stark competition in the SaaS space, companies need to find a way to elevate themselves above their competitors. This often means positioning your software against your competitors’ software in a way that acknowledges yours as the superior choice.

To get in front of prospects looking for your competitors, you can target your competitors’ branded keywords through Google Ads (or Bing Ads, depending on the market). Then, direct these prospects to a landing page that showcases why your solution is best.

What’s great about these landing pages is that they often attract organic traffic, especially if you’ve included comparative keywords such as “Brand A vs. Brand B” in the meta page title and header tags.

2. Fully optimize your review listings.

It might seem obvious, but this one is often overlooked.

Be sure to claim and optimize your review listings on G2, Capterra and similar directories. This means thoroughly filling out your company description, specifying the categories you do business in, and adding high-quality images and demo videos.

Next, you’ll want to make sure you have an ongoing plan in place to collect reviews, especially on the directories that your target audience is routinely browsing. Lastly, address any existing negative reviews in a tactful way to show that your brand values and listens to customer feedback.

While doing all of this will most certainly improve your brand’s reputation, it may also improve your search engine optimization (SEO) on and off the directory website.

3. Become more visible in the search engine results page (SERP). 

Schema markup is a type of code that can be placed on webpages to help search engines better understand what a page is about. This code also allows search engines to display rich snippets in the search results.

FAQ markup and AggregateRating markup are two types of structured data that our agency is seeing great results with right now, simply because the click-through rate of these listings goes through the roof. It makes sense — if users are able to get their most important questions answered right away while seeing your company’s glowing reviews, they’ll be more likely to click your listing than your competitor’s.

4. Extract more value out of existing content.

Many SaaS firms are so focused on creating new content that they forget about their existing content. To get the most out of what you already have, revisit your blogs, and optimize based on data you find in Google Analytics and Google Search Console. Update, remove or add sections of content, and add a new lead magnet to the page.

The same can be done for your important product or service pages. Add power words, modifiers on keywords and conversion-focused long-tail keywords to attract targeted users and convert that traffic into buyers. Highlight your strongest selling points, and add compelling calls to action (CTAs) to entice users to click, buy or subscribe right away.

Updating existing content improves user experience, but what it also does is provide “freshness” signals to search engines, improving your rank in search results.

5. Focus new content on customer retention, not just acquisition. 

Build your content strategy with the goal of retaining users, not just acquiring new ones.

It’s a well-known fact that retention is less expensive than acquisition, so why do many SaaS businesses focus on acquisition as a top growth strategy?

Having a retention-focused content marketing strategy could set you apart from the vast majority of your competitors. Successful SaaS firms that do this have “learning centers” on their sites, answering every question users could possibly have and addressing any confusion users might have about their products.

A great example of a company that does this incredibly well is Ahrefs. Its content acquires new customers, but it also creates product experts out of existing customers, too. These customers go on to be brand advocates who direct even more customers to the software.

Conclusion

While it may be tempting to chase the next best marketing “hack,” it’s important not to forget the fundamentals. The above B2B SaaS marketing strategies routinely generate amazing results for SaaS companies that implement them on a regular basis.

Brand positioning, reputation management and having a retention-focused content marketing strategy are all tactics you can use to increase your online visibility, even in a highly competitive industry. What is your SaaS company doing to stand out in your market?

Feature Image Credit: GETTY

By Brian Schofield,

Digital marketing consultant at Market 8, specializing in search engine optimization. He is mainly focused on the SaaS industry. Read Brian Schofield’s full executive profile here.

Sourced from Forbes

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4 Things You Find In Every Successful Marketing Plan

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By Nurdin Budi Mustofa

Whether you’re just starting out or you’ve been going for a while and you’re considering expansion, your business needs a solid marketing plan. If you don’t have a clear strategy that outlines how you’re going to keep your existing customers and attract new ones in the future, your marketing efforts won’t have a direction and they’re not likely to be very successful. If you think that your marketing plan needs an overhaul or you’re just about to write your very first one, these are the key things that you need to include.

Identify Your Target Market

You can’t run a marketing campaign if you don’t know who it’s aimed at, so understanding your target market is the first thing that you need to do. The best way to do that is to use master data management. What is master data management, you may be wondering? It’s a process that you can use to bring together all of the data that you hold about your customers from sales and marketing, accounts, and social media. By looking at the general trends in your customer data, you can get an idea of exactly who they are. This is essential if you’re going to create a marketing campaign that really resonates with them. If you don’t understand your customers, you can easily end up wasting resources on a marketing campaign that doesn’t connect with them at all.

Understand Your Marketing Goals

The next thing that you need to do is think about what your marketing goals are. If you’re just starting out, you should be aiming to get your first customers and promote your brand identity. If you’ve already been operating for a while, you might be focused on a new product launch or perhaps trying to break into a new market segment. Whatever your goals are, it’s important that you’re clear on what they are from the outset so you can focus on them and not waste resources on other areas.

Research Marketing Tactics

Different marketing tactics have their own benefits and drawbacks so it’s important that you do some research. For example, if you’re trying to increase sales to the older generation, advertising on social media might not be the best route. You will probably have more success with traditional marketing techniques. Think about what your goals are and who your marketing campaign is aimed at and then look at which techniques are best suited to those things.

Set A Budget

The biggest mistake you can make is going in without a budget. If you don’t have a cap on your spending, it’s so easy to keep funneling money into marketing campaigns indefinitely. But it’s important that you’re weighing up the cost of marketing with the return on investment that you’re seeing. If you spend more on the marketing campaign than you get back in sales, you’re losing a lot of money. That’s why it’s essential that you set a realistic budget and stick to it when you’re running marketing campaigns.

If you can include all of these things in your marketing plan, it should be a huge success.

By Nurdin Budi Mustofa

Sourced from Digital Hints

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Think Tank: Changing Marketing Tactics When Temps Rise

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By Kyle Flaherty

Kyle Flaherty, chief marketing officer at Zaius, offers insights into engaging consumers when the summer heats up.

Unless your target audience lives somewhere lucky enough to experience hot weather year-round, your customers’ behavior is bound to change as the temperature rises and vacation auto-responders go up this summer.

Whether you’re a swimsuit brand gearing up for your busiest buying season or a ski brand making it through a slow buying season, seasonal buying can have a huge impact on revenue.

But many business owners may not realize the impact the summer months will have on their customer behavior: from increased vacation time to summer hours to more time on mobile than at their desks. And as your buyers’ behaviors change, your marketing must as well.

So how do you shift your marketing to effectively reach your customers during the summer months? Your marketing team has the answer at their fingertips.

Historical customer behavior helps you understand how this season typically shifts your business and come up with interactions to create an ideal customer experience. It takes a little forethought, sure, but it’s not too late to adjust your marketing strategy to reach your buyers effectively as the temperatures rise.

Analyze last summer’s buying habits

The key to great marketing is simple: know your buyers. The more you know about how your buyers behave, the better you can tailor your marketing to their preferences and habits. This applies to all of your marketing activities, but can be especially powerful during seasonal ebbs and flows in your business.

For example, if you look at your customer data from last summer in detail, you may notice that your most popular line of products slightly underperformed, while another line did fantastically well in comparison. You may also notice that your share of site traffic from mobile jumped 15 percent overall and your best channel for promotion was Instagram.

These examples are all speculation, but by digging deep into your own customer data, you can find out what holds true for your business. With that data in hand, you can adjust your overall marketing strategy to take advantage of your buyers’ behavior and reach them where they are this summer.

Adjust your promotion mix

The same promotions that you use throughout the year may not resonate as well for buyers during the summer. Many of your buyers are likely on their mobile devices more frequently in the summer because they’re outside — whether by the pool or on the beach. If your customer data tells you this is true for your audience, it’s a huge opportunity to increase your investment in social ads and pull back on other channels.

In the summer, your brand should likely:

  • decrease investment in search ads;
  • increase investment in social ads,
  • and explore traditional ads like magazines or billboards in areas with summer tourism.

These are just a few examples, but you should run a number of A/B tests to assess whether changing up your promotions during the summer results in better conversion rates for your ads. Again, your business is unique and so are your buyers — so test everything!

Promote summer-friendly products

Going back to your customer data, you can see what products and brands perform the best during the summer months. Depending on your business and what you sell, the products that perform best may be obvious, or completely surprising.

For example, it only makes sense that if your business sells ski equipment, the summer may be a bit slow no matter what line of products you promote, but that doesn’t mean you can’t get creative. For example, a ski brand could have a mega-hyped summer sale to clear out excess inventory and drive revenue during slower months. But brands shouldn’t just send the same sale message to everyone — send personalized product recommendation campaigns to your buyers to drive higher conversion rates on the sale.

In comparison, a swimsuit brand should significantly increase its paid marketing spend for its busiest season. Using segment sync and lookalike campaigns across Facebook and Instagram, the team could identify similar buyers to their most loyal customers and make the most of their campaign spend during the most profitable season.

Either way your business shifts, you should use customer data to power your summer marketing campaigns and make sure your business adjusts to the season. Don’t get stuck with underperforming marketing campaigns this summer — be proactive and drive real revenue for your brand.

Feature Image Credit: Shutterstock / i like photo 

Kyle Flaherty is chief marketing officer at Zaius.

By Kyle Flaherty

Sourced from WWD

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Strategic Growth Marketing Can Help Your Business Reach Three Goals

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By Haseeb Tariq

Often referred to as “growth hacking,” growth marketing is one of the latest marketing tactics that businesses are using to grow their customer base. The term sounds like a no-brainer — growth marketing means you just market your business to grow, right? Well, sure, but, as you can imagine, it’s more complicated than that.

Here’s everything you need to know about what growth marketing is, along with goals to set for your growth marketing campaigns so you can start measuring your success.

What is growth marketing?

Growth marketing is a type of marketing strategy that’s focused on retaining your customers rather than just attracting new customers. Instead of only focusing on the top and bottom of the sales funnel, as traditional marketing does, growth marketing follows the customer through the entire buying process.

Understanding the life cycle of the buyer helps you figure out where to reach your future customers. It also tells you how to retain your current customers and, most importantly, how to keep them coming back and referring you to their network.

Growth marketing isn’t a “set it and forget it” type of marketing. You’ll need to stay vigilant by running A/B tests, tracking analytics and monitoring trends. You’ll have to be flexible and ready to concede failure quickly when you discover that your marketing tactics aren’t working.

When it comes to growth marketing, businesses tend to have three main goals:

1. Customer Retention

A key difference between growth marketing and traditional marketing is that growth marketing focuses on existing customers first. People who have already bought your products or used your services are more likely to come back to you if they have had a great experience and if you continue to deliver products, services and information they find valuable.

Starting with a customer retention focus is also smart financially. As research has shown, acquiring a new customer can be anywhere from five to 25 times more expensive than it is to retain an existing one.

2. Customer Acquisition

Customer acquisition comes second because you want to know how to keep customers before you go out and find new ones. When it comes to customer acquisition, the main goal here is to figure out where potential customers are located and how they’re going to find you. It could be through online marketing, offline marketing or referrals.

Drill down into these components even further, and focus your efforts where you have the highest potential. If your potential customers are on Instagram but not Twitter, focus on Instagram, and forget about Twitter.

3. Increased Profit And Revenue

Of course, at the end of the day, your business needs to make money. A poorly executed growth marketing strategy that relies too heavily on customer acquisition costs might help you increase profits but not revenue. A successful growth marketing strategy, on the other hand, will give you new revenue streams and lead to an increase in both revenue and profits for the long term.

No matter what stage your business is in, developing a growth marketing strategy will help you retain customers and find new ways to attract new customers so you can grow your business.

Feature Image Credit: Getty

By Haseeb Tariq

Haseeb is responsible for guiding the marketing automation vision for Fox (Film, TV and Sports). He also writes at HaseebTariq.com

Sourced from Forbes

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How To Balance Between Marketing Strategy And Marketing Tactics

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By John Rougeux.

Every startup founder is faced with the same seemingly unanswerable question: how much time should you spend on marketing strategy versus tactics?

In this post, I’m going to share one approach that will help you quit worrying about whether you’re spending too much time one or the other. Spoiler: it’s actually pretty easy.

The Temptation Of Tactics

First, let’s take a look at the behavior most of us revert to: spending all our time on short-term wins, with little attention given to anything long-term or strategic. It’s easy to live in that state. It feels good. You’re making that sale, publishing that blog post, attending that event. All that activity keeps you really busy. And when you’re trying to grow a startup, somehow things just don’t feel right unless you’re constantly getting things done.

Overall, this focus on action over theory is a good thing. No one built anything by just thinking about it (don’t worry, I still love you Napoleon Hill). But two major problems arise if you spend all of your time on tactics.

Two Pitfalls Of A Tactic-Based Focus

First, you might be spending all of your time getting really good at the wrong things. For example, there’s no point to optimizing your marketing on the wrong channel or creating a bunch of content that your audience isn’t interested in. As obvious as those examples are, most of us are guilty of confusing activity for progress. Developing and checking your strategy helps you avoid that scenario.

Second, without a larger strategic plan, it’s unlikely that your efforts will have any compounding effect. Ideally, your efforts would complement each other, every action building upon another. But simply spending time on activities without consideration for the end goal is a bit like preparing a bunch of random foods without knowing what dish you’re planning to make. Yes, you would have made something to eat. But the result would be pretty sorry.

How Much Strategy Is Enough?

So how much time should you actually set aside for strategic thinking about your marketing? I’m not going to give you a number of hours or a percentage of your calendar. There’s no right answer that works for everyone.

Instead, ask yourself one question: “How well do you know what actions will consistently grow your company?”

If you’re highly confident (and you have a track record of showing that you were right), then you can afford to spend less time on marketing strategy. After all, if something is working, why change it? And chances are, your actions are probably succeeding because they’re based on a sound strategy. Maybe you don’t have it written down but you know where you’re headed, who you’re selling to and what gets them to buy.

But if the outcome of your tactics is unpredictable (or just plain fruitless), then you need to start setting aside more time for strategic thinking. The more erratic or unsuccessful your efforts, the more likely it is that the solution will involve more than just “trying harder” or “needing to optimize.” And you won’t have the clarity find that solution unless you step back and look at the bigger picture.

Use This Baseline To Get Started With Strategic Thinking

If you aren’t spending any time on strategic thinking today, here’s a good place to start. Set aside one hour a week, one day a month and one week a year to strategically think about your marketing. And spend extra time on the areas that tactics typically don’t cover: your branding, positioning, messaging and marketing channels.

Even if things are going really well, this will be time well spent. Few things stay the same. What worked well one year may let you down the next.

For example, for a couple years our business was able to grow consistently using paid Facebook ads. We didn’t need to “strategize” about marketing too much because we could reliably grow the business. But over time, our market became increasingly expensive to reach on Facebook, and we had to rely more on partnerships and referrals. And we were only able to find the new direction after we took a step back and looked at the big picture.

The Perfect Strategy Is A Myth

Don’t give into the temptation of thinking that you need a perfect strategy before you take action. By the time you have every last detail addressed, someone competitor will have passed you by. And besides, a perfect strategy is a myth anyway. All of us deal with uncertainty, a lack of information and imperfect judgment. So consider the 80/20 rule: spend 20 percent of your time getting a strategy that’s about 80 percent right and then move forward.

Feature Image Credit: Shutterstock

By John Rougeux

John Rougeux is Co-founder/CMO at Causely, overseeing their marketing, branding and growth strategy.

Sourced from Forbes

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No Budget, No Problem: 5 Free Marketing Tactics Guaranteed to Deliver

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By Adam Heitzman

Don’t have funds to compete with big brands on marketing? There are plenty of free marketing tactics small businesses can do that deliver results on little to no budget.

Between influencers, paid search, outsourcing design, and everything else, marketing has gotten expensive. Spending on marketing has been on a dramatic upward swing for some time now, and will almost certainly continue to increase. For larger businesses, this doesn’t present a particularly difficult challenge, because they need only adjust and reallocate a few numbers to their marketing budget.

But for other businesses, the increase in spending on marketing means it’s only getting more difficult to compete. For smaller, independent, and locally owned businesses, there isn’t always extra money that can be pulled from one expense and reallocated to a marketing budget. This presents both problems and opportunities: problems, because it’s already hard for smaller businesses to compete with bigger businesses/budgets and online retailers; opportunities, because it’s a chance to get creative with your marketing strategy while learning more about how your business can connect with your audience.

Contrary to what the predominance of digital marketing, SEO, and paid search would lead you to think, you don’t have to swear off traditional marketing tactics completely. In fact, if you’re working with a limited or nonexistent budget, there are plenty of effective, “old school” marketing strategies that work well when paired with some digital strategies. For marketing on a dime, these 5 marketing ideas mix up some effective ways to blend digital and traditional marketing at little to no cost.

1. Use Social Media

The free option of marketing across social media platforms is teeming with possibilities. Yes, many businesses pay for promoted advertising and targeting on social media platforms, but there are plenty of other ways you can very effectively reach your users. Some of my favorite free social media marketing tactics are:

  • Hosting a contest. Maybe a photo contest or a tagging contest. Whatever the contest is, people love freebies and it’s a quick way to increase followers.
  • Posting tutorials. If you sell products, you can demonstrate how to use them in a way that compels users to buy them. For example, a boutique could demonstrate a bunch of different ways to wear a scarf they sell.
  • Personalizing your brand. There’s a local bakery I follow that does this particularly well. By posting pictures of happy bakers baking or being silly with frosting, they create a personalized charm for their brand. Now, when I think of cupcakes, I think of that bakery.
  • Sharing helpful tips/information. For example, if you’re a local auto shop and your city got an unexpected blizzard, share some winter car care tips or advice on driving in the snow. It’ll be quick and easy for your users to read, and something they’re likely to share.

2. Create a Loyalty Program

This doesn’t have to be nearly as expensive as it sounds. To implement a loyalty program, it could be something as simple as a strategic email list. Let’s say you have an email loyalty sign-up sheet at your register. You can entice customers to sign up by emailing a birthday coupon, or giving them store credit when they refer someone. If you’re a local coffee shop, print off some punch cards that make every 10th coffee free. These are easy ways to reward your customers for their loyalty without breaking the bank.

3. Partner With Another Business

Creating mutually beneficial relationships can be really helpful for a couple of reasons. First and foremost, you can create a small business ally that sends customers in your direction. Second, you have someone to learn alongside. By finding a business in a similar financial situation that complements yours, you can develop a strategic business partnership.

Let’s revisit the auto body shop and coffee shop I mentioned earlier. If you own one of those businesses and the two happen to be right next door to one another, why not work out a little partnered marketing? If a customer of the auto shop has to wait for a repair, why not send them next door with a $1 off coupon? And why not leave a pricing menu/business card for the auto shop by the register for customers to see? This is particularly effective for local businesses, as customers can come to associate a certain area or neighborhood with specific goods and services.

4. Make the Most of Your Reviews

Online reviews are really, really important for businesses. Why? Because 88% of consumers trust online reviews as much as a personal recommendation, and that number jumps to 92% as it pertains to local businesses. Reviews are one of your greatest online marketing assets, because it speaks directly to the experience and/or products your business has to offer. This is good, because optimizing your reviews is a really easy process.

Start by asking for reviews from all of your customers, especially the most loyal and returning customers. Then build asking reviews into an everyday practice. Once you have the reviews, be sure to respond to all of them. Good reviews, bad reviews, neutral reviews, whatever the case may be, engage with the users leaving them, because it’s as effective as free marketing gets.

5. Support a Cause

Supporting a cause = free marketing and publicity. You might not have the money to donate, but you most certainly have the man power to volunteer. You could for half a day and promote that employees will be volunteering for a cause the business has chosen to support. This works, firstly because customers are more compelled to purchase goods or services from a business they feel an ethical attachment to, and secondly because many charities offer free publicity in exchange for business support.

The opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of Inc.com.

By Adam Heitzman

Adam Heitzman is a co-founder and managing partner at HigherVisibility, a nationally recognized SEO firm. Having been a marketing executive in the financial services industry, Heitzman now uses his 10-plus years of… Full bio

Sourced from Inc.com

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