For small businesses, resources can be tight. Especially right now.
Limited budgets can present challenges for how businesses raise awareness, acquire customers, and generate revenue.
In fact, 39% of small business owners agree that a limited budget is a major roadblock in growing their businesses.
However, there are plenty of low-cost, high-yielding marketing hacks that can help you reach your customers.
These marketing hacks might not leverage traditional channels, but they can impact your bottom line.
In this article, you’ll discover five marketing hacks you can deploy to acquire new customers and generate sales at little or no cost. They include:
- Get featured in press by responding to journalists and podcasters
- Personalize cold outreach campaigns
- Correct Existing Mentions of Your Brand
- Add videos to your landing page
- Repurpose old blog content
Cheap Marketing Hacks to Use During a Pandemic
Ready to dive in? You’ll see why each marketing hack is important and how to implement it to reach new customers.
1. Get Press By Responding to Journalists and Podcasters
At JustReachOut we see an average of 10 to 20 emails per day from our customers responding to requests from journalists for their stories or podcasters looking for stories. These queries and requests come out each and every day, there are tens of thousands of these for each and every keyword and topic out there, here is what they look like:
The tough part is to find the most relevant one for yourself since these queries are spread across a TON of different newsletters and hashtags on Twitter.
Some of the most popular newsletters where these come out daily are HelpAReporterOut, ProfNet, SpotAGuest, RadioGuestList, #JournoRequests hastag on Twitter, ResponseSource, SourceBottle and there are a TON more.
Here is how a podcast request looks like:
The key to getting your response featured is:
- make sure you answer the question being asked
- you are a good fit for the journalist, research their past articles or podcast episode
- your answer is newsworthy and has exclusive data, or connects with the news in some way
Here is a quick template you can use:
2. Personalize Cold Outreach Campaigns
Sometimes you need to go straight to the source and pitch a perspective customer to use your platform.
It’s not an easy task given a typical perspective customer uses on average three different devices at work daily.
Direct outreach to perspective customers is one of the highest performing channels at your fingertips. Many marketers have realized a greater ROI on cold email campaigns compared to Google SEO/organic rankings or running ada/paid/social channels.
Pitching perspective customers over email can be tricky, though. After all, only 8.5% of cold outreach emails receive a response.
So how do you do it right?
The trick is personalization and making it easy for the recipient to say yes.
Make sure your pitch includes your prospect’s name, company, and relates directly to their business. Research their company, read blog posts and review recent press to learn what they’re working on and how your company can help.
By personalizing your email, you can increase your reply rate by 100%.
After you’ve personalized your outreach, make it easy for them to book a meeting. Adding a scheduling link eliminates the need for additional emails and provides the prospect with the ability to book a meeting on their own time.
Together, this personalized approach paired with an effortless booking engine will create an attractive pitch with improved conversion rates.
3. Find Existing Mentions Of Your Brand And Correct Them
News articles, Yelp reviews, third party blogs—you name it; there are so many places your brand lives on the internet.
One of the most overlooked ways to promote your brand is to make sure all the places which have mentioned your company name, URL, address, phone number, email have up to date information and links for your company.
These “brand mention”s are known as “citations” and can drive referral traffic to your website. Unfortunately 50% of the time the text, link or contact information in these mentions and citations about your brand are broken and need to be cleaned up according to Adam from Loganix. Here is how he puts it:
“Citations are places where your business is mentioned online, with contact info or ways to reach out to you for services. Perfecting existing ones can mean you can spend less time and money on acquiring new traffic, but rather, maximizing the conversions on existing referrals.”
There are two main issues with bad mentions and citations with your brand:
- Customers cannot contact you
- Google doesn’t rank your company high
Citations play a role in how your page ranks on various search engines. Incorrect citations negatively impact your search ranking.
The quality, authority, and consistency of citations are three of the top ten factors that can have the strongest negative impact on your SEO rankings on Google. With search surpassing social media recently in the share of visits, ignoring incorrect citations can have a detrimental effect on your business.
You need to take inventory of all your citations and ensure your address, phone number, website, and offering are accurate.
To correct your citation, reach out to the reporter or blogger who included the mention or “Claim Your Business” on third-party review sites like Yelp and Google My Business. This will enable you to take control of additional channels that will drive traffic to your site.
4. Add Videos to Your Landing Pages
The perfect landing page is a mix of substance and style. You can’t expect your prospects to instantly convert once 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 showcases your brand. Landing pages that include videos experience an 86% boost 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, include interactive elements and highlight recommendations about what they should do next.
You should test different iterations of your video to discover what your customers like. Landing pages require continuous optimization, yet only 17% of marketers admit to A/B testing.
Continue to iterate on your landing page with videos, and your conversion rate is likely to increase.
5. Repurpose Old Content
Most businesses record a podcast or publish blog posts and wait for customers to come knocking. However, the key lies in the promotion and repurposing stages that follow.
You might get come visits and engagement with the original format of your content and that’s great! However you’re missing a TON more engagement if you never convert this same content into another format: podcast, infographic, webinar, video, etc.
Here is how Jaclyn Schiff, Founder of Podreacher.com a service dedicated to turning podcasts into blog posts puts it: “Repurposing content, be it an old blog post which you can turn into a podcast interview, or an old podcast interview you can turn into a blog post, is the most effective way to get a TON more eyeballs on your brand without putting a TON more effort into content creation.”
The process is simple, you can repackage the insights from your blog into multiple different forms of content including infographics, webinars, podcasts, and social posts. This will help extract the full value from your work and can lead to new audiences discovering the insights you’ve shared.
Some of those alternative forms of content perform remarkably well, too. Over 40% of marketers confirmed that original visual content—including infographics and illustrations—was most impactful for their business.
Additionally, don’t be afraid to reshare old content. An Evernote blog that generated 23 shares upon publication ended up having 181 shares after a full month. The trick was found in resharing the content at a later date which resulted in a 686% increase!
By repurposing and re-promoting blogs, you will make your content more consumable and available to a wider audience.
Conclusion
Marketing in 2020 doesn’t have to be expensive. For small businesses, there are many marketing hacks to leverage that are low-cost and effective.
Respond to journalists and podcasters looking for sources for their articles and guests for their shows.
Personalize cold emails and add booking links to further engage prospects seamlessly.
Improve your brand mentions on various sites to improve your local SEO and optimize your referral traffic.
Add videos to your landing pages to improve your on-site conversions.
Repurpose old content into podcasts, infographics, illustrations and webinars and continuously promote different forms of content to reach new audiences.
These are just some of the many marketing hacks available to you. By leveraging them, you’ll generate more awareness, traffic, and sales for your business.
Image: Depositphotos.com
This article, "5 Marketing Hacks On The Cheap To Grow Your Business During a Pandemic" was first published on Small Business Trends
April 26, 2020 at 03:25PM
via https//www.brucedayne.com/
Dmitry Dragilev, Khareem Sudlow
