With more than 4.62 billion social media users in the world by January 2022, an overwhelming 58.4% of the total population is on social media today. That is precisely the reason why you can't ignore social media when it comes to online marketing. The growing importance of social media also calls for adequate knowledge of social media marketing.

How to Grow Your Social Media Presence?

According to the latest stats, over 9 in 10 internet users use social media. However, even then most marketers cannot tap the vast potential of social media. Unable to understand the way social media works, some businesses end up doing it the wrong way.

They get too pushy, market-y, or overly friendly and, as a result, dim their prospects significantly. To grow your social media presence and achieve your business goals, you should learn the art of engaging your audience. It would also help if you do it without annoying them or losing their attention.

This article discusses the ways you can leverage social media for your business, the right way!

1. Provide Real Value

Social media is indeed a miracle of our times. Since it's so widespread globally, it provides numerous opportunities to a marketer for promotion and targeting.

Apart from using it to educate your audience and connect with them, you can also use it for advertising, tracking trends, and monitoring social conversations.

Social media is crowded with businesses, individuals, and influencers. That's why it also comes with a host of menaces, such as fake news, bought engagement, and sponsored content.

Owing to all this noise, people often don't trust an unknown person or brand on social media and look for content sources that seem authentic. So, how can businesses win the loyalty of the masses and attract new consumers?Ā  Simple! By offering real value to them through well-researched, intelligent content, and engaging conversations.

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2. Avoid Seeming Fake and Deceptive

A popular method to gain the trust of your audience is to emphasize 'authenticity' in your social media presence. In simple words, avoid things that look fake and deceptive.

There is a visible shift towards authentic marketing these days. People prefer to buy from businesses that share their beliefs and ideologies over those that are just interested in plugging their products.

They like to interact with a person that is fun, friendly, and authentic. To succeed on social media, businesses should offer an enjoyable experience to their audience.

There's no magic pill to succeed in social media, but you can achieve your goals if you understand the way social media audiences think.

3. Bridge the Gap Between a Marketer and a Trusted Friend

No one likes to use social media to interact with businesses, so marketing is mainly considered an intrusion. Therefore, marketers are expected to befriend their audiences and post engaging and entertaining content.

However, marketers aren't really friends, so their messages can come across as formal, dry, and uninteresting. This approach obviously doesn't work and fails to attract much engagement.

Engagement begins when you start bridging the gap between a marketer and a trusted friend. Here are a few things you can try to do that:

• Be human: A business should ‘appear human’ throughout its interactions. They should reciprocate the feelings expressed by their audience, listen to them, and use humor in their conversations. But at the same time, they should also maintain their brand identity and help people resolve their issues. People love to interact with a responsible human face, even if they represent a brand. It adds credibility and gives way for improved customer experiences.
  
• Show Credibility and Avoid Vanity: Theoretically, your job is over after setting up a social media account and filling in the necessary profile info. However, to succeed on social media, you need to go beyond branding as there is no place for vanity on social media. Interact with your audience, joke with them, have conversations with them, and engage them with authentic, interesting content.

4. Leverage Influencer Marketing

People tend to trust leaders, be it in real life or social media. Who would trust a nameless and faceless social media manager's words? That's perhaps the reason why influencer marketing is so popular. Platforms like Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok have numerous brands leveraging influencers to tap into newer audiences. You can easily find influencers endorsing everything from big-name brands to small-time, local brands.

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So, if you want to promote your business faster and need quick results, leverage influencer marketing. It becomes even more crucial when your brand is relatively unknown.

Here are some ways you can leverage influencer marketing for your social media campaigns:

1. Tie up with a local influencer having a good outreach to promote your products/services in a way that seems authentic to their audience.
2. Involve micro-influencers as they usually have a higher engagement rate.
3. Use their insights to broaden your marketing initiatives and make them even more effective.
4. Establish long-term relationships with these influencers and tap into their ever-expanding audience pool.

According to a 2018 Brandfog study, consumers are 93% more likely to purchase from a brand once they interact with a top-ranking official or CEO of that company on social media. So, when you post a message or video from the CEO, don't forget to share their title and credentials.

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5. Don't Push Too Hard

As in life, it's important to not push too hard on social media, lest you end up annoying and driving away your audience. Offer friendly advice, tips, and information that can add value to their lives, aside from marketing and promoting your brand.

Building a social media presence isn't easy. Most marketers try to sell too hard on social media, and soon lose their credibility as a result. Had the marketing been more natural, they wouldn't have lost their reputation. It may sound tempting to try copy-paste tactics like using too many hashtags, promoting mindlessly, or posting too frequently, but it can be a recipe for disaster. Being too sales-y, aka annoying on social media, certainly backfires.

In short, avoid shortcuts and instead think of ideas that can provide lasting value to your customers.

6. Create Quality Content & Stunning Graphics

Creating quality content has tremendous benefits; it multiplies your social media traffic manifold and generates more engagement. Great content also gets shared by users, leading to more and more people finding out about your brand!

People don't share content that doesn't excite them or add value. So, if you are seriously thinking about creating ripples on social media and going viral, work hard and employ your resources to develop and promote great content.

Similarly, stunning images and graphics can up the ante for your social media marketing. Images are the soul of social media and are perfect for grabbing attention and increasing engagement. Use high-quality images with vibrant colors and pictures instead of text to convey your message. People love to share images more than text. So, images can help you succeed on social media and achieve better results.

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7. Don't Get Distracted By Vanity Metrics

It would help if you also stayed away from vanity metrics such as likes, shares, views, etc. These metrics can be highly misleading, as you will get nowhere if there are hundreds of shares yet no conversions or sales. So, you should focus more on real-value metrics such as the number of new followers and clicks, etc. to measure the success of your social media campaigns.

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You can also get a bit creative and coordinate an offline adventure or experience for your campaign. Surprise your fans with custom-made images, gifts, and rewards. You should also use some popular niche-based social platforms apart from mainstream ones such as Facebook, Instagram, etc.

Conclusion

To sum up, social media has fantastic potential for marketing and promotion. But that can only come true if marketers understand their audiences and focus on engagement and adding value.

Effective use of social media can create tons of opportunities for your business. However, it requires thought and planning. If you do it right, you can achieve outstanding results. Since around two-thirds of the human population is there, you can't take their attention for granted. So what are you waiting for? Get creative and think outside the box today to stay ahead of the pack and shine bright in the constellation of social media!

Welcome to our first episode of Whiteboard Wednesday.

Chad Kodary, the CEO of DashClicks, a prominent white-label agency, has extensive experience running a successful digital marketing agency business. He has effectively turned a small startup into a transnational white-label services company that has served thousands of clients so far.

During this time, he explored the ways to escape the daily grind and constant struggle agency owners go through to survive and grow.

To address this problem, he decided to use these insights and launched a SAAS-based agency platform that automates everything and saves time and hassle for the agency owners. Meanwhile, it allows you to focus on the most crucial jobs, i.e., prospecting, marketing, building a sales pipeline, and nurturing leads.

Think Outside of the Box

Marketing and sales are constantly evolving. Strategies that were a massive hit a few years ago can become unpopular and useless faster than you can expect. Tactics like the “free consultation” or the “I’m the best marketer spiel” are no more perceived as magic bullets. It’s crucial to think outside the box to ensure success in this highly competitive industry.

After serving thousands of clients across the globe, he developed a tried and tested magic formula for prospecting. This formula not only provides value but also creates awareness about your agency. According to him, these small wins can be the stepping stone to grabbing long-term accounts that are much bigger.

What’s Whiteboard Wednesday All About?

Through Whiteboard Wednesday, Chad wants to share what he has learned within his agency, including successes, failures, and the high-level moments ‌he has had.

The objectives of the Whiteboard Wednesday Tutorials are as follows:

1. Inspire agency owners to replicate our success
2. Share strategies and tactics that agency owners can use for their agencies
3. Help agency owners increase revenue, build better processes, build a team and do better fulfillment
4. Get a better prospecting method to ensure getting more new clients every month
5. Create efficient and sustainable processes to add and maintain clients

It’s a game-changer since hardly anyone would be practicing it yet. So, without further ado, let’s dive into the step-by-step formula to build a sales pipeline faster and with more certainty.

How to Replicate the Prospecting Goldmine?

To make money from your digital marketing business, you should have an irresistible sales plan. You wouldn’t want to be the 50th person calling a company that you’re a digital marketing agency, and you would like to offer a free consultation or something like that. It doesn’t work anymore! And that’s probably the reason ‌new agencies struggle to find new clients.

First of all, you must have a need-based product, and you should not think about the kill every time. You can offer website building services as an integral part of your sales plan.

Here’s the step-by-step formula to do that:

1. Download the lists of your prospects
2. Conversion #1: Pitch a front-end offer
   A. Start cold-calling using an irresistible offer — A free website
3. Share with them the pre-built website & bring the prospect into the sales funnel
4. Give a demo of the website created with our InstaSites tool and activate it if the customer likes it
5. Conversion #2: Make the Back-End Offer
   Sell your website for an upfront setup fee and a fixed monthly fee
6. Conversion #3: Sell directory listing and other SEO services with a recurring fee

The ultimate aim should be to add as many people to their marketing bucket as possible.

Source: Ep.1 - 33:37

Most agencies fail because they are too focused on generating traffic and probably not aware of what conversion steps #1, #2, and #3 are all about and why this process works. So, we will delve into the details now.

How to Download the Lists of Your Prospects?

You can easily download the list of your prospects using www.leadcarrot.io.

Source: Ep. 1 - 12:05

To generate traffic, you can use:

1. Phone Calls
2. Facebook Group
3. Email marketing
4. Walk-ins
5. Webinars and conferences

Lead Carrot is a tool that allows you to download the lists of the prospects according to your search criteria, such as the nature of business and location, etc. It crawls the web and provides you with the prospects' phone numbers, emails, Google My Business information, and their social media handles.

For example, if you are targeting roofers or painters in your area, you can download a list of 5000 painters along with their phone numbers. After that, you can cold call and pitch for your free website offer.

1. Start Cold-Calling Using an Irresistible Offer

A website is a product every business needs. So, you can offer a free custom-made website to your prospects. Furthermore, you can scale it further to upsell other agency products such as directory listings, SEO, etc.

DashClicks developed a tool known as InstaSites that helps you create a professional niche-based website on the fly. This tool is a game-changer for the agencies. The tool offers you more than 200 niche-based website templates that you can choose from. All you need to do is fill up a form and hit the submit button. The tool automatically injects the content and other vital information from the form into the website to help you build the website on the spot.

2. Pitch a Front-End Offer “ A Free Website

Usually, agencies would charge 5K dollars to build such a website, but since you want to make it an irresistible offer, you can charge just $97 as a one-time setup fee and just $49 per month as recurring charges. Most agencies fail because they tend to focus on the kill but forget about the relationship-building part that improves their prospects.

It makes it an irresistible offer since the website you offer is much better than their current website, and you offer it at a fraction of what they will pay for a similar website. It will help you quickly fill up your clients' bucket. It's much easier to sell an affordable product than an expensive high-value product.

It moves the customer into your SALES FUNNEL, which means they enter your world, so you can easily talk to them, build long-term relationships, and upsell other products.

A. Use a Hook

It would help if you had a" hook" to sell. Most agencies struggle with their sales process as they don't have an irresistible offer or the hook that can instantly attract prospects. Using a "hook" is highly crucial to succeed as an agency. It's an initial idea that sweeps people off their feet. The free website can be used as a hook in the present scenario.

B. Make a Sales Pitch

Here is an example of a good sales pitch:

"Hey, what's goin' on? This is Chad calling from Social Agency. I just wanted to give you a heads up that we are calling all the roofers and painters in our local area. We went ahead and built out a free website for your business. So, I would love to send you a preview of what our website looks like. I can send it to you in an email or a text message. Which one do you prefer?"

C. Prepare for Rebuttals

Our experience tells us that rebuttals are natural, and some of the most common rebuttals are as follows:

Rebuttal #1: Sorry, I already have a website. I'm good.

You can quickly answer this rebuttal in this way. "Hey, that's cool that you already have a website, but I built you a website that looks ten times better, and it's free. I would love it if you took a look at it. There are no hard feelings if you don't want it."

Rebuttal #2: I'm not interested right now.

Here is the perfect response:

"Yeah, but the website is already built. Our team went out and built the whole website for you. And it took us a lot of time to do that. We would love to show it to you. We will send you a link. You can check it out, and if you don't like it, no hard feelings. If you do like it, it's free, and we will activate it for you."

After that, the customer will most likely drop their defenses and agree to check the website you've built for them using the InstaSites tool.

You may have a question here. Why are we repeatedly using the word "free website" when not?

The pre-built website is free for the customers to take a look at. It doesn't cost you a single penny to build this website. It's professionally built for conversion and engagement. But, if the customer likes it and gets it activated, they will be charged a one-time activation and setup fee of $197 and $49 per month for maintenance.

Why It Works

This tactic has a high success rate because, ultimately, the customer doesn't lose anything. They get a quality product at a much lower price. Agencies would typically charge around 3K to 5K dollars for a similar 30-page website.

The customer will most likely provide you with their email address and contact details and agree to look at the website at the end of this conversation. However, you need not hang up your phone and instead schedule a demo just after the prospect agrees to take a look.

Book a Demo

You need to inform the customer that the demo will be over a 20-minute Zoom call with the activation experts, who will review the website.

They will answer customers' queries, review the pages, and if the customer likes it, they will activate the website on the call. Such instant activation aims to ensure a smooth transition from a review call to booking. It will ensure that you regularly collect a revenue of $197 + $49 per month in the following months.

If you go by this method, your calendars will be booked for many weeks to come.

Using the "Stacking" Tactics to Your Advantage

You can stack up different elements to make your demo a success. For example, you can stack these offers.

The website comes with:

1. SSL Certificate
2. Hosting
3. Drag & drop website builder
4. Dashboard (DashClicks sub-account)
5. CRM
6. Marketing Automation (Inside DashClicks Dashboard)

Make this offer sound better and irresistible.

Before you take their credit card details, make your offer even more convincing.

Your website comes with:

1. 30 relevant pages with all the necessary information
2. All the content
3. Royalty-free stock images
4. Pre-SEO
5. Fully responsive interface

Customers must be aware of the market price of a website of such a size and caliber, which is around $3K to $5K.

Now, the customer has two options—they can pay $3000 for this website in the market or get an offer from you and pay just $197 plus $49 towards the first month’s payment. Most people would want to go with the second option.

You can tell them that the total upfront fee of $250 to be charged in the first month is the setup and activation fee, and the recurring fee of $49 per month is for the SSL certificate, website builder, hosting, etc.

Source: Ep. 1 - 47:55

With this, the imaginary customer "Bobby the painter" gets inside your bucket. Now, you can sell additional equally essential products for a website owner.

Conversion #2: Make the Back-End Offer

You can set up or use call center services to step into this stage. Here is the secret recipe to enter into this stage.

Wait for seven days after website activation. Now that the website is activated, the owner, "Bobby the painter," is happy. You are now Bobby's go-to guy for any technical issue he faces with the website.

After exact seven days, you can call up Bobby using the following script:

"Hey Bobby, what's going on? I'm Chad from Social Agency, and I'm super excited to tell you that your website is up and running. How did you like the website? Do you have any questions for me? I just called you up to know if you need any support for your website?"

At the end of the call, you can add this:

"Hey, by the way, Bobby, before we hang up today, I'm looking at your website, and it's so awesome. We are running a crazy promotion today. I would love to increase traffic on your website to boost revenue for your business. We are running a listing manager program.

So, we will list your website on 70+ directories, including the most prominent ones such as Google, Yahoo, Bing, Yelp, and many other directory networks. It will boost your website's online visibility and backlink profile. As part of this promotion, directory listing services are available for just $99 per month. It's on sale for today only. The setup fee is $49 only."

The last sentence uses a slight pressure point.

This is conversion #2.

On average, your customers are likely to continue your website package for seven years.

Rising the Value Ladder

You can continue adding at least one person to your bucket almost every day, and you can make a lot of money. You can repeat the same procedure discussed above, download a list, cold call every person on it, offer them a free website, and book a demo.

As a recurring fee, you're now getting $49 per month for directory listing services and $99 per month for website hosting and web builder. So, on average, you'll get $150 per month from every customer added to your bucket.

You cannot add customers to your bucket and climb up the value ladder if you offer standard services such as SEO or PPC.

If you can successfully use this value ladder, just a single customer would pay you $150 per month for the next five years, and you will not have to do anything to get this money.

Final Words

It is a tried and tested procedure, and we at DashClicks have been practicing it for the past several years. All we know is that it works methodically. We are also supported by a call center for the past two-three years.

Here is a strong message for all the agency owners.

"CHANGE YOUR WAY OF PROSPECTING."

To succeed with this strategy, you should also change your mindset. Most people will try it for one week, and if it doesn't work, they will quit. According to Mr. Kodary, "75% of people are likely to fail in this strategy because they have the wrong mindset." To succeed, you must have the right mindset and practice perseverance. Dashclicks' InstaSites tool is the primary driver of this strategy.

You can use DashClicks CRM to build a sales pipeline and schedule appointments. Automate your deals using the Deals app and start filling up your bucket. Deal automation will also help you in a huge way while adding clients. It automates your repetitive tasks and saves you a lot of time and hassle.

Marketing is the decisive factor in the success of a small business. It kicks in the entire process of sales funneling, starting from attracting prospects to converting them into customers. So, if you do it right, marketing becomes the key to your survival and growth.

Many would confuse it with creating awareness about a brand. Though partially true, it's not the ultimate aim of marketing. It's also not about beating your own trumpet in an already noisy world. Marketers have now started viewing marketing from a different perspective altogether. They prefer to see it as a tool to connect a business to its consumers.

Businesses are doing everything possible to engage their audiences. It necessitates a business marketing plan that should entail the entire modus operandi of how you'd reach your ideal customers.

There are several methods to market your small business or startup, but you should focus on the most effective strategies that can change the game for you.

Marketing Ideas for Small Business

Marketing is a process of targeting your ideal customer and nurturing leads by sharing the right messages at the right time. It all revolves around adding value and making their lives better.

However, you can't do it if you don't do a proper marketing audit to identify your target audience and make your marketing message appealing.

Here is a list of 121 small business marketing ideas to fulfill your dream of running a successful entrepreneurial venture.

1. Make a marketing plan keeping in mind your target audience.

2. Do market research to understand its dynamics and find essential information about your ideal customers.

3. Make your buyer persona and further refine it to reach the right audience.Figure out the value you can add and identify a powerful unique selling proposition (USP).

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5. List your product features and service specifications.

6. Relate product features to benefits and use them for your marketing message.

7. Add your mission statement and key marketing message to your business cards.

8. Create and publish white papers, industry research, trends, and brochures to spread your word out.

9. Create a website and offer an excellent user experience. Even a single landing page will do, but it should provide enough information to help users make a purchase decision.

Gifts, Giveaways, and Outreach

The first step of any outreach campaign is to entice your prospects through irresistible offers, gifts, and giveaways. It is probably why many eCommerce companies offer a discount for people when they visit their website for the first time.

Here are a few outreach ideas you can try.

10. Use the power of giveaways and seize the opportunity trade shows and networking events offer.

11. You can offer several gift items people hang on to, such as pens, notebooks, keyrings, stress balls, etc.

12. Keep an elevator pitch ready and use it for quick prospecting. Use the following tips to craft the elevator pitch:

• Use an irresistible offer or hook people can’t ignore.
• It should reflect your enthusiasm.
• Keep the facts and stats ready to support your claims.

Networking and Partnerships

Networking and partnerships help small business owners in a huge way. Participating in local events enables people and local businesses to learn about you. It gives you the required visibility and advantage of working with like-minded people and experts.

You'll also get institutional and technical assistance and support from business groups and government institutions.

13. Participate in industry events, seminars, meets, and conferences.

14. Leverage the power of networking, use business networking and connect with local networking groups.

15. Attend business workshops, especially the ones taking place in your neighborhood.

16. Join your small business technical assistance center, local small business development center, the local chamber of commerce, or use tools like commercetools CMS to enhance your business capabilities.

Direct Mail

Direct mail sounds like an old practice, but it's still very much in fashion. It has become even more relevant because it has a very high level of reach and penetration. It can be a bit expensive, but it's five times more effective than email in terms of sales. A targeted list is the prerequisite, though.

Here are a few direct mail ideas you can try.

17. Start a well-planned direct mail campaign.

18. Apply multiple tactics and do A/B testing to determine which approach works the best.

19. Use a compelling call to action in your direct mails.

20. Experiment with different direct mail formats such as tear cards, enticing envelopes, and inserts to attract your prospects.

21. Approach customers who have bought from you in the past with free samples and rewards to regain their business.

Advertising

Advertising is the sub-domain of marketing, so don't confuse it with marketing. Marketing is a broader concept, whereas advertising is an aspect of business marketing that deals with sending the right message to your audience. Everything counts in advertising, including its timing, message, tone, and platform you use, and it's planned according to your audience's mindset, psychology, needs, culture, and emotions.

Here are some of the best ways to advertise your business:

22. Tap the advertising channels to help you reach your target audience. For example, you can buy a spot on the radio.

23. Identify magazines, journals, and other publications your ideal customers love to read. For example, Cosmopolitan, the women's magazine for fashion, is widely read by women across the globe. Car and Driver is the most popular magazine for auto lovers.

24. Go traditional and rent a billboard having a lot of visibility. People still look at them while waiting at the traffic signals.

25. Besides handouts and pamphlets, use stickers and magnets for advertising on the rear window of your car.

26. Buy advertising space in your local newspaper.

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27. Buy ad space on a website related to your niche, but you also need to ensure that this website is popular among your audience.

28. Another forgotten traditional technique is to use a sidewalk sign to promote your products and services. It surely attracts the eyeballs of the locals. So, if you have a local business, it can be an effective medium for promotion.

Social Media Marketing

Very few businesses are able to actually survive if they aren't a part of our social media ecosystem. Almost everybody is on social media, and if you aren't active on it, you are missing out on many opportunities. Just like being a part of a group of like-minded people on social media, customers want to follow their favorite brand's progress, view updates, and make connections with their community.

Social media can help you achieve your marketing objectives by promoting products, creating awareness, generating and nurturing leads, defining your brand image, and building lasting relationships.

Here are a few killer social media marketing ideas for small businesses.

29. Use various social media platforms, including some lesser-known platforms like Foursquare, Pinterest, Reddit, and Tumblr.

30. Don't underestimate the potential of growing platforms like Twitch, Discord, TikTok, Clubhouse, Twitter Spaces, Caffeine, and Instagram Reels.

31. Don't forget to create your personal and business profile on LinkedIn. It increases your online visibility and opens many vistas of opportunities for you.

32. Regular blogging brings numerous benefits, such as increasing follower growth and engagement. So, invest in blogging and do it consistently; create different versions for different platforms.

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33. Creating short videos on TikTok can be magical if you wish to tap a younger audience.

34. Leverage the power of Instagram. Pay attention to the visual quality and maintain an attractive aesthetic. Create short videos for Instagram Reels.

35. Research your audience and popular keywords in your niche, and then create an editorial calendar for your blog and social content. Cover the topics that might add value to the lives of your target audience and address their pain points.

36. Create an informative website and optimize it using the best SEO practices.

37. Leverage the enormous power and reach of paid search using Google Ads or Facebook Ads. Choose the platform as per your audience type.

38. Social media influencers enjoy a dedicated fan following. Hire them for promotional posts and tap newer audiences.

39. Vlogging is the latest craze. Create video blog posts and attach a familiar face to your brand.

40. Leverage YouTube marketing and create YT videos to boost your online visibility.

41. Online directory listings offer numerous benefits for a local business. Save time and get your business listed in desirable directories at an affordable cost using white-label directory listing services.

42. Leverage the power of Facebook advertising. It offers laser-sharp targeting based on your customer characteristics and personality types.

43. Leverage the world's most extensive professional network. LinkedIn brings you many opportunities by allowing you to connect to people according to their niche, job profile, and location.

44. Try a Facebook Live video demo. To tap into the power of live streaming, you should have a Facebook page. It's an utterly personal way to engage your fans.

45. Analytics offers many marketing benefits, including Google Analytics or social media analytics. It helps you improve your campaigns. To learn more, refer to this actionable guide on Google Analytics.

46. Always be on the lookout for what's trending. It can be a new practice prominent brands are tapping into, new platforms and tools, etc.

47. Update yourself with the latest trends in local search marketing and use them to your advantage. Local search marketing is highly effective in terms of conversions and ROI

48. Track your online reputation regularly. To learn more, refer to the definitive guide to online reputation management.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is considered even more "intimate" than following a brand's social media account. People give their email addresses only to the brands they are interested in, making it a powerful means of communication.

Here are a few killer email marketing tactics you can try:

49. Capture your prospect's email through opt-ins on your website.

50. If you want free publicity, you can organize sports events or sponsor a local sports team.

51. Ask for your prospects' email in exchange for gifts, access to a platform or event, an ebook, or a free download. You can also try contests, coupons, and incentives.

52. Build an email list and regularly send emails to them.

53. Subscribe people for a free monthly email newsletter. Click here to know more about cold email marketing.

54. Track the performance of your email marketing campaign. Various tools offer inbuilt analytics. You can also use A/B testing to know what works best for your campaign regarding content, promotional offers, frequency, open rate, CTR, and sending different emails to different customer segments.

55. Optimize your email signature and include links to your website and social media handles.

56. You can use email marketing tools such as Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign, MailerLite, Constant Contact, Hubspot Suite, Moosend, or Drip.

Customer-Focused Marketing Tactics

Here are some more customer-focused and innovative ways to promote your business:

57. Organize contests and promote them aggressively.

58. Create coupons or tie-ups with other brands and offer vouchers and discounts.

59. Launch reward-based loyalty and "frequent buyer" programs.

60. Launch a brand ambassador or an affiliate marketing program.

61. Launch a customer of the month program and announce it on social media.

Pro Tip: Check federal regulations before you promote any giveaways or contests. Check and follow the related rules.

62. Focus on building relationships.

63. Conduct customer satisfaction surveys to check out how satisfied people are with your services. The customer satisfaction ratio is directly linked to your revenue and survival as a business.

64. Use the power of referrals. Request your happy customers to provide referrals.

65. Leverage charity events and humanitarian work. Besides getting the opportunity to work for a noble cause, you'll also get free publicity.

66. Leverage the power of networking. Tie up with local businesses and cross-promote your products and services with them.

67. You can also create a buzz by joining a professional organization and delivering value to the community.

68. Leverage holidays and make a plan to promote the next holiday. It can trigger sales from "ready to buy" customers.

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69. Identify your best and most loyal customers and plan holiday gifts for them.

70. Surprise your bonafide clients by sending them birthday cards, greetings, and gifts.

71. Positioning yourself as an expert or mentor always helps. Neil Patel, Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, Tom Bilyeu, Tony Robbins, Brian Dean, Rand Fishkin, and even Mark Zuckerburg are renowned mentors apart from business owners and entrepreneurs. Educating others helps you build trust and allows you to make sales happen.

72. Leverage content marketing. Enticing, informative, and engaging content attracts customers to your website, where you can encourage them to buy. Move beyond advertising and create useful and value-adding content.

73. Conduct free teleconferences and webinars. These are some of the most effective techniques for building email lists, lead generation, and boosting sales flow.

74. Leverage podcasting. While live podcasting continues to grow, podcasts are slowly gaining prominence in Google search.

75. Make press releases a part of your marketing strategy. Share press releases to local newspapers and periodicals and paid services like PR Newswire, etc.

76. Repurpose your blogs into videos, podcasts, and infographics. Share such content pieces on different platforms. For example, you can slice your YouTube videos into small videos for TikTok, Instagram Reels, Twitter, and Facebook.

77. Use storytelling in your sales copy and ads.

78. Publish a book to help your target audience and widely promote it. Offer it for free during events and seminars.

79. If you are too busy with day-to-day business operations, recruit a marketing expert or hire a consultant.

80. Increase your PR activities by hiring a PR professional.

81. Hire a trained copywriter to write attention-grabbing sales copy to boost conversion and sales.

82. Hire a search engine marketing agency or, still better, hire PPC services from a professional white-label agency.

83. Another cost-effective method is to hire an intern for regular marketing tasks. You can also go to sites like Fiverr and hire a virtual assistant to help you with daily marketing tasks.

Agency Management Tools & Apps

You can use various tools and apps to help you manage your agency tasks swiftly and efficiently. If you're on a tight budget, you can use such tools to automate tasks like scheduling social media posts.

Here are a few killer tools and apps that will save you from the daily grind:

84. Monitor and report on all of your marketing campaigns in one place using the Analytics App. You can try it for free. For example, you can integrate your Google and Facebook Ad campaigns into the dashboard to monitor your campaigns performance in real-time.

85. Now handle your sales CRM and get your contacts data at your fingertips through Contacts App. It's not an average sales CRM; it helps you effortlessly manage your people and business contacts with beautiful contact cards.

86. Manage all your data in one place with the Dashboard app. Use dozens of pre-built widgets across all your apps and extract your data into one unified dashboard for better monitoring and management. Create your dashboard view using drag-and-drop widgets to create your perfect view. It enables you to run your entire business with one platform.

87. Experience the power of automation when managing leads and deals within your sales pipelines with the Deals app. Additionally, this app also allows you to generate reports, gain insights, and showcase your leaderboard. Sales is an extremely tough and exhausting job, but this app creates a truly transformational experience for your sales team.

88. Improve your workflow and turn data collection into an exciting experience with a powerful Forms app. Online forms are designed to meet all your data collection needs. Manage unlimited form submissions with the Forms app, and collect them straight away from your dashboard.

89. If lead management is a hassle for you, try the Inbound app and organize all your leads like never before! This app can streamline and manage your inbound leads across different platforms. Later on, you can assign them to your sales reps, so they can easily track progress and do a follow-up. With this app, you don't need to log in to multiple third-party softwares to manage inbound leads; you can fetch all those leads in one place.

90. If you need in-depth performance reports, use the InstaReports app; Data is complex, so you should prepare reports so that everybody can understand them and interpret the complex facts. The InstaReports app offers a grading scale that is easy to comprehend and helps in decision-making. If you manually try to compile this much data, it might consume several days, but with InstaReports, you can do it in a matter of seconds.

91. Are you struggling with website building for your clients? InstaSites app, the instant website builder, comes to your rescue in this. Create a custom website in seconds from hundreds of niche templates. You can choose from hundreds of pre-built niche-specific templates to design your dream website for your clients with a few clicks. These site templates come ready with the content, thanks to the white-label fulfillment services from DashClicks. So, you don't need to create content for most web pages.

92. Projects, a projects management app, is good news for agencies as it allows them to swiftly manage their projects, teams, customers, etc. The Projects app helps you execute your tasks with lightning speed.

93. If website management becomes a hassle for you, download the Sites app. It allows you to create and manage your websites using a drag-and-drop website builder. You can swiftly edit your website using the app's custom content management system (CMS). So, you don't need any IT background or coding skills to manage your website.

94. With the Templates app, you can create custom email and SMS marketing templates. It streamlines your communication across the organization.

Other Marketing Ideas

The ultimate objective of marketing is to differentiate your brand. You can go a bit crazy, creative, or even provocative to grab the attention of the masses.

95. Partnerships work wonders for a business. Identify a complimentary brand and cross-promote each other's products. This way, both parties will find newer audiences.

96. Invent a lucky charm for your business and aggressively promote your brand using it.

97. Launch your startup business coaching for your target audience and cite your business as a case study. You'll get many benefits through free publicity, strong branding, lead generation, etc.

98. Distribute corporate gifts and branded wearable items such as t-shirts, caps, sweatshirts, polos, fleece jackets, shorts, wristbands, office stationery, etc.

99. Get your office building and the car painted in your brand colors. Add logos everywhere.

100. Sign up for the most popular business coach or mentor online and get yourself trained in cutting-edge business skills and strategies. They will help you scale, revamp, and restructure your business if needed. They will also teach you marketing skills to outperform your competition.

101. Research the businesses doing it right in your niche and generating handsome revenue, and learn from them. You can also borrow ideas to succeed if you don't want to reinvent the wheel.

102. Use Amazon's "trigger phrases" while marketing your products. Amazon filters its top reviews according to the trigger phrases that define the customers' pain points in your niche in customer lingo. You can use that to exploit search results and reach the right audience.

Here is an example of a few trigger phrases for Amazon Kindle eBook readers:

You can also fetch such trigger phrases from forums and online communities and collect them in a file.

103 Ask for success tips from your suppliers and vendors. Since these guys have been in your business for a long time, they are the best people to advise you on the best practices to survive in your industry.

104. Subscribe to industry magazines and publications to get tons of valuable insights and information. It will also help in lead generation.

105. Use emotions in your advertising. Apart from the four basic emotions, i.e., happiness, gloom, fear/surprise, and anger/disgust, you can use a wide range of mixed emotions to connect with the audience. It always works.

106. A deeper understanding of the local demographics will always help. It includes purchasing power, taste, and buying behavior. If you don’t want an unexpected outcome, spend some time understanding the local demographics.

107. Make it a practice to listen to customers’ queries, needs, and concerns. When you prioritize listening to them, you get deep insights into what they expect from you. It will also help you generate lots of content ideas for content marketing.

108. Set Google Alerts and track every “brand mention.” Tracking brand mentions is a good way of social media monitoring and getting to know what people are saying about you and your products. Likewise, it’s also crucial to know if other businesses mention you, link to your website or social accounts, or simply complain about you.

109. Over 42 million people in the US speak Spanish, so it’s a good idea to translate your website into multiple languages. It will help you target new audiences.

110. Optimize your website to load faster. Fast-loading websites attract more traffic and enjoy better Google rankings. To achieve this, you can compress files, optimize images, remove heavy elements and reduce the number of active plugins.

111. Add fresh content and regularly update your website and give a reason for visitors to come back to your site again and again. Add value by providing helpful content. Update your website by adding new landing pages dedicated to new products or events, etc.

112. Reduce your response time. According to Forbes, the average lead response time was 47 hours. Businesses that respond within an hour of receiving the leads are almost seven times more likely to have meaningful conversations with decision-makers. It clearly shows that the sooner you respond, the higher are your chances of closing the sale.

113. Respond to all online feedback. Customers like the seller who cares about what the customers say and responds to them. Whether negative or positive, make it a priority to respond to customer feedback as soon as you receive feedback from a customer. You should monitor customer feedback on your eCommerce platform, blog comments, Yelp, Google, or other review sites.

114. Leverage blog commenting. When you leave thoughtful comments that add value and provide additional information on other blogs in your niche, you create awareness about your brand and attract the eyeballs of the audience visiting those blogs.

115. Create a digital brochure. You might have used your printed brochure for offline publicity. Consider creating a digital brochure in PDF format and promoting it everywhere, including your social media accounts and through email marketing. Upload it to a visible place on your website. You can also use additional graphics to highlight it and attract eyeballs. Encourage people to download it.

If you want to keep it in an online form with additional interactive features, consider converting your PDF brochure to a flipbook format.

116. Focus on personal branding and thought leadership. People respect influencers and follow their advice. So, when you promote yourself as an expert, people trust you and flock to you for advice and industry updates. You can create your personnel website for this purpose. Apart from that, you can also try these things:

• Participate in industry events
• Get featured in media outlets
• Write columns for industry-specific websites or blogs
• Host or get invited to a YouTube or podcast channel of another influencer in your niche

117. Use retargeting to bring back your ad and site visitors. Retargeting is extremely powerful. A study claims retargeted visitors are 70% more likely to convert to your website. Stats also confirm a tenfold increase in brand searches after running retargeting ads.

118. Make it easy for mobile users to contact you. You can make your phone number “tappable” so they can call you with a single tap.

119. Use Canva to create stunning professional-grade graphics and banners. You don’t need to know Photoshop or Illustrator to do that. With Canva, you can create beautiful marketing templates, banners, and graphics to use on your website, social media, email, etc.

A Canva template

120. Try SMS marketing. The average CTR of SMS marketing is an impressive 35%, which is pretty high for any marketing platform these days. The open rate is 99%, which is surprisingly high.

121. Use more visual content for your marketing. Visuals convey messages faster, making them invaluable in creating engaging content. Whether through professional graphics or eye-catching photos, having the right materials enhances visual appeal. Consider unique and personalized items such as a coffee table book photo album to showcase your business’s journey, milestones, and achievements; this can resonate deeply with clients and visitors.

Conclusion

These are the handpicked ideas and tips that will help you succeed in your small business venture. Your ability to understand your audience and their buying behavior is highly crucial to your success. Apart from that, you should also work smarter using apps and technology rather than doing everything manually. It will reduce the cost, time, and efforts involved and help you execute things faster and manage your campaigns in a better way.

Rapid digitalization and proliferation of the Internet in the past two decades have allowed us to connect with almost anyone in the world. Facebook helps us find relatives and friends and stay in touch with them, whereas Instagram enables us to communicate directly with celebrities and share stunning pictures and visuals. Twitter allows us to stay abreast of the latest news and trending topics, and LinkedIn helps us connect with the people in our industry or niche for business purposes.

Still, you can’t turn these connections into relationships. A relationship requires awareness, commitment, and a certain level of trust, even if it exists purely in the social media realm. So, a relationship isn’t just a click away, contrary to what most digital enthusiasts claim. It needs nurturing and time to grow.

However, if you look at the trends, businesses hardly have the patience or inclination to develop customer relationships. They want quick results. It happens mainly because digitalization has brought everything to our fingertips, and everybody seeks instant gratification.

However, the truth is far from it. Regardless of the environment and technology you live in, people’s reactions are based on their emotions, feelings, and motivations.

It can be big marketing to treat online profiles simply as digital existences. There are real people behind these digital profiles who would like to be treated as humans. So, if you expect people to respond to your marketing, focus on building relationships rather than completing transactions. Remember also, that you build relationships with people and not digital profiles.

What is Relationship Marketing?

Unlike transactional marketing, relationship marketing aims to build long-term relationships with your customers. When you implement it as a strategy, you start achieving your business goals swiftly. It includes almost everything from generating revenue and sales to attracting more clients, getting repeat purchases, and making loyal customers.

Relationship marketing aims at providing the best customer experience through top-notch service and building trust. In transactional marketing, brands focus on completing sales, making it a closed-minded and myopic approach.

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Brands that resort to transactional marketing may soon lose their customers to their competition as they don’t invest in building lasting relationships. When closing sales becomes their primary focus, they move from one customer to another, increasing their churn. A high churn rate can become fatal for a company. It can become even more lethal if you run a subscription-based business.

You can run customer success programs to arrest churn. According to The Customer Success Association, “Customer Success is a long-term strategy that is scientifically engineered to offer proven value that is also sustainable. It’s professionally directed to maximize customer value and achieve business goals through it.”

So, to sum up, customer relationship marketing is a long-term marketing approach. You might think that most businesses must be practicing it because of the apparent benefits it offers, but the research proves otherwise.

Tracking Relationship Marketing Industry Trends

Every business owner knows that establishing long-term customer relationships is crucial, and 85% of companies affirmed this in a Super Office study. But are they really investing in relationship marketing? If studies are to be believed, the truth might shock you.

According to a 2013 Econsultancy study, 30% of businesses invest in relationship marketing. Whereas in 2021, only 24% of companies used relationship marketing as their long-term marketing strategy. So, there was a sharp drop in the number of companies practicing relationship marketing in these six years.

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The study also revealed that relationship marketing is linked to a higher ROI as compared to transactional marketing.

So, why are companies not taking relationship marketing that seriously? It’s not a lack of awareness but a lack of strategy that prevents them from taking the plunge.

This article discusses how to formulate the strategy to implement relationship marketing into your marketing plan.

How to Formulate a Sound Relationship Marketing Strategy?

You won’t get much traction if you only use a few tactics such as offering discounts, personalized services, and introducing loyalty programs & rewards. It is simply because you can’t refer to these tactics as a strategy.

Start by bonding with your audience. Use social media for forging friendships and leveraging the power of feelings. It’s a given that no marketing campaign or offer can ever score over customers’ emotions.

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Customer relationship marketing allows you to go into the heart and minds of your customers. Here are some of the ways you can do that!

Take some of the biggest, most successful product/service-based companies in the world. We’re talking about companies such as Tesla, Apple, Nike, Amazon, and Starbucks. You’d think they don’t need to invest in relationship marketing anymore, but you’d be wrong. All of them, in fact, is highly customer-centric brands.

The love & respect for these brands is so high that if someone talks negatively about any of these, their customers get offended and defend their beloved brands.

What else can you wish for as a brand?

Again, it is not limited to just B2C brands; emotional bonding also affects B2B brands.

In B2B transactions, too, someone who visits your website watches your videos or downloads a white paper isn’t a business but an individual.

These individuals have feelings, so you can easily tap into their emotions and build a bond with them. It’s their emotions that will make them spend their money on your brand and not facts, stats, or logic.

Here are a few tips to formulate your relationship marketing strategy.

1. Be Real; Show Your Vulnerable Side

Tell your real struggle, and don’t just brag about your achievements. According to Adam Enfroy, you need to show your vulnerable side, so that people can relate their struggles with yours. Authentic stories that showcase your weaker side help you establish an instant emotional connection with your audience.

2. Build Trust

Deliver on your promise throughout the customer journey and build trust through positive reviews and testimonials on your website. The important thing is to ensure that these reviews and testimonials are authentic and verifiable. You should also bring your communities together to inspire and build trust.

3. Use Storytelling

Since humans are emotional creatures, storytelling has emerged as a powerful technique to establish emotional bonds. Tell them stories about your business that may include the following:

• Inside stories
• How you treat your employees
• Your mission and vision
• How your business was founded
• How you overcame the fierce challenges and failures

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You can also ask your audience to share their stories. Videos are the best content formats you can use to inspire trust and bring authenticity to your stories.

4. Personalize Your Communications

According to a University of Houston Victoria research paper, personalized interactions enhance the recipient’s experience. For example, you can try sending handwritten personal notes to your customers along with their orders. They will love it.

5. Keep Your Communications Consistent

Consistency leads to better customer experience, and excellent customer experience inspires confidence. So, keep your communications consistent across different locations and individuals. It would also help to keep it uniform across various advertisement campaigns and sales presentations.

6. Strive to Provide an Excellent Customer Experience

To give customers a fantastic experience, treat them exclusively. You can use CRM to craft custom messages and videos to make them feel valued. Address their queries and offer solutions to their problems. Ask them to provide their feedback and suggestions and inspire them to create user-generated content. It will help you boost your brand image. It’s a proven fact that excellent customer experience is the only factor that helps you make loyal customers.

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7. Offer Real Value

Successful businesses have a purpose-driven strategy and offer real value to their customers. This is the reason it’s tough to replace them in the marketplace. They don’t position themselves as product suppliers or sellers. Instead, they focus on adding value to their customers’ lives. For example, many cosmetic companies don’t perform testing on animals and people love them for it.

Here are some of the companies that offer cruelty-free products.

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It can be a cause, social responsibility, environment-friendly products, charity, or affordable products that people perceive as valuable.

Conclusion

Successful organizations try everything in their capacity to turn every customer into a long-term one. Long-term customers can ensure your success and growth and protect your brand against market fluctuations. With the help of an army of loyal customers, you can successfully decrease your marketing and advertising costs and scale your business.

Technology has impacted business activities in many ways, but the bottom line is still the same, and that is building, nurturing, and growing your customer relationships. Be mindful of how your customers feel regardless of the competitive advantage you may have over others.

With the relationship marketing strategies mentioned in this article, you can directly appeal to your customers’ emotions. Profitability keeps you in business, but if it becomes your ultimate objective, you may soon find yourself in deep trouble.

So, the best strategy for a business is to stand for a good cause and build a community of passionate supporters, who will likely turn into your brand advocates. Customer relationship is the most crucial element of Customer Relationship Management (CRM), so you should focus on relationship marketing to survive and grow in this highly-competitive, cut-throat environment.

Almost every organization is developing unique and engaging content these days, which is why there's a shallow entry barrier for content marketing. Though easy and cost-effective, most brands are unable to utilize it to the fullest to achieve their organizational objectives.

It happens partially because the bar is getting higher and higher every year. What worked yesterday may not be working today. High-quality and appealing content receives the lion's share of traffic and eyeballs, and the remaining brands end up fighting for a tiny amount of traffic.

According to a 2020 AHREFs study, around 90% of all content online receives almost zero traffic from Google. It might not sound very comforting for the startups, especially those not having sufficient cash to spend on content marketing.

This article discusses how to implement content marketing in the lowest budget to achieve the desired results.

Plan Your Content Marketing Campaign

When you begin implementing online marketing, you are confronted with multiple choices. Running PR and social media campaigns and creating podcasts and videos can be on top of your mind, but soon you may find it overwhelming. It can grow even more overwhelming when your budget is tiny.

According to a Microsoft study, people start losing attention after about 8 seconds, and it is falling further every year.

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Content is exponentially increasing in volume. So, to grab the user's attention, you need to be diligent and focus on quality and engagement.

The sheer number of online marketing channels used for your online marketing campaigns can be devastating as it decreases focus and leads to poor management.

In this competitive environment, you need to choose one or two channels and put in your best performance.

To compensate for the users' decreasing attention span and content visibility, you may run short-term campaigns like getting featured on prominent platforms, news sites, and channels.

For example, you can promote your products on Product Hunt or increase your visibility by getting featured in Hacker News.

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Find opportunities to speak in industry events. Create podcasts and share them on different platforms.

Through these action steps, you can increase your market understanding and create better opportunities to be in front of your target audience.

Here are the four tips to crack the content marketing code for startups.

1. Set Your Goals

Goal setting is a crucial step as it serves many purposes, such as communicating the business objectives to the team, tracking progress, and team management. It also helps provide direction and focus to the team and optimize team performance.

Your organizational goals keep your team motivated even after a setback.

Pro Tip: You will find your goals easy to achieve if you split them into smaller objectives and even smaller targets for better measurement.

Setting goals is essential to keep your eyes on the bigger picture and prevent your team members from feeling overwhelmed.

To create awareness and buzz around your brand, you can do the following:

• Organize an industry event for better networking and build industry relationships
• Organize PR activities
• Build a blog or set up a podcast channel to create awareness and drive traffic to your website

2. Define Your KPIs

With well-defined content KPIs, you can easily measure your performance. It would help if you had exact and specific targets to easily track your performance. Here are some of the content marketing KPIs you can follow:

• Unique Website Visitors
• Downloads
• Time (spent) on page
• Inbound Links
• Shares
• Comments and interactions
• Cost per Click (CPC)
• Cost per Lead (CPL)
• Number of Leads
• Annual Contract Value (ACV)
• Influence (Leads, opportunities, or closed deals)
• Conversion rates
• Followers and subscribers

You can have specific targets such as publishing 30 press releases by September or 10 keyword-oriented blog posts every month as pillar content on your website. You can also set marketing targets by hosting five meetings with micro-influencers every month.

3. Use Appropriate Messaging

Your marketing messaging is crucial to your startup's success as it helps you convey the value and benefit your product or services offer your target audience. You should carefully plan it as it's used everywhere, from social media posts to ad scripts and blog posts.

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Conveying the right message moves your prospects down the sales funnel, helping you convert your prospects into leads and paying customers. You can engage with your audience by discussing their pain points and how you can offer a unique and practical solution for the same.

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Pro Tip: Content marketing messaging should be educational and not salesy.

Pro Tip: Every time you create content, your audience anticipates a story from you. So, be a storyteller.

Your messaging should vary according to the stage of the user in the marketing funnel. The message for the first-time website visitor shouldn't be the same as you would like to flash in front of someone who is in the consideration phase and have already received a couple of drip emails.

4. Use Various Promotion Techniques

When you plan to implement online marketing, you are confronted with numerous choices. Running PR and social media campaigns and creating podcasts and videos can be on top of your mind, but soon you may find it daunting when you realize you have budget and time constraints.

Would you like to know the secret recipe of success in content marketing? Publishing more and more content is not a standard formula. On the flip side, it can be counterproductive. To drive maximum value and ROI, focus on generating fewer content pieces. What you can do instead is to repurpose and reuse this content into various other forms of content and take it to the audience by scheduling and rescheduling it on social media.

For example, we can create a webinar or a long tutorial video and split it into small videos and audio clips. You can reuse these small clips as social media posts or blog posts to turn them into rich media. People work hard on producing content, but once content is published, they gather dust on their website or YouTube channel.

The best content strategy for startups is to extract the maximum juice from your content by repurposing it into a blog post, pro tips, actionable insights, a slide deck presentation, an infographic, a picture message, a small video, a podcast, etc. This way, you will have enormous content to share on social media for a long time, eventually decreasing your content product cost and increasing your content marketing ROI.

So essentially, you can implement content marketing for startups without an astronomical budget if you know how to effectively reuse it.

The success rate in content marketing is relatively low because the bar is getting higher and higher. With 79% of the marketers using content marketing, the competition increases almost every day. People are no longer happy with regular content that adds little or no value. They want powerful yet compact content that adds value. Such content also increases engagement and ROI. Complacency can kill you even if there is no entry barrier in content marketing.

The big brands produce excellent content because they have the funds and resources to invest. It has raised the bar for midcap and smaller companies. Apart from that, millions of writers, marketers, and brands create free content because they want visibility.

How to Make Content Marketing Work for Your Startup?

Another major issue responsible for the deteriorating visibility of content is people's waning interest in branded content. So, unless your content resolves the reader's issues and addresses their pain points, they are unlikely to spend time reading your content. Here are a few things you can try to make content marketing work for your startup.

• Focus: Don’t work on multiple channels as it may overwhelm you and bring down your overall performance. Master just a few channels and put in all your efforts.
• Quality: Acquiring proficiency and producing quality content takes time. So, rather than focusing on the metrics, you should focus on the quality, especially in the initial phases. When quality becomes a habit, it becomes easier to produce content people love.
• Consistency: If you think the compounding effect is applicable only to finance, you might be wrong. Content marketing is also an excellent example of the compounding effect. As you start building your content repository, you start getting noticed by the search engines and attracting traffic through them. Gradually the traffic starts increasing exponentially. That is probably why the big brands term content marketing as miraculous.

But, simply because content marketing is so effective, you shouldn't deduce that producing more content is akin to achieving the best results. Holly Pels says that creating more content can be counterproductive as your cost shoots up and quality worsens.

Create Memorable Content

Startups use content marketing to produce their go-to marketing messages. But here's the catch. Lots and lots of companies are making similar content to get noticed. So, to differentiate your content from others, you need to create remarkable content. That's perhaps a significant reason why startups don't succeed in content marketing.

SEO and social clicks should lead to fan following and conversion. If it doesn't happen, your website fails in its ultimate objective ā€” brand building.

Writing is about crafting content that matches your audience's interest, resolves their problems, embodies your tone of voice, and creates a fan base. Uniqueness is the essence of successful content marketing.

Pro Tip: Create unique content and make it memorable. Creating poor quality or generic content equals creating no content at all. With the run-of-the-mill content, you won't succeed in content marketing.

Good content strengthens your brand and makes a product top of mind when your prospect decides to buy the products or services similar to yours.

Some famous brands share a slice of their office life, employee stories (workplace storytelling), and an inside look at company culture, which often generates curiosity. It also helps make the content go viral. It works both ways. When employees are encouraged to share their stories online, it builds an attractive and lovable work culture. On the flip side, your customers trust and respect your organization when they see that employees are valued, and the information comes directly from them.

Pro Tip: To automate employee advocacy programs, you can use an employee advocacy tool like EveryoneSocial.

Buffer's Open Blog and Vanguard's employee stories are great examples of how you can use employee stories to enhance branding.

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Adobe's workplace storytelling on the Adobe Blog and social media is also an excellent example of it.

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Content marketing is highly effective for startups, but you shouldn't expect immediate results for keyword rankings, links, or views. However, in the beginning, it will help you get market validation for different ideas.

In the later stages, you'll learn how to leverage different content pieces to attain your SEO, lead nurturing, and PR objectives. Startups have an advantage over established brands in terms of agility, so they should focus on building a community first. Later on, you can produce 10X content to beat your closest rival.

How to Do Content Marketing on a Small Budget?

Here are a few things you can try to implement content marketing for startups at a small budget.

• Create a YouTube channel
• Join or launch an industry podcast
• Seek speaking opportunities at industry events and conferences
• Host and record webinars and share them on social media
• Create branded content
• Leverage influencer marketing
• Join online communities
• Create industry reports, stats, manuals, and trends
• Exert your presence on ProductHunt
• List your products on AppSumo and eBay
• Share your blog posts and articles on LinkedIn Pulse and Medium
• Repurpose your content into different content formats
• Split large content pieces such as a long video or a blog post into small social media posts

Conclusion

Content marketing is the best strategy for building communities, conducting online marketing, increasing organic visibility, and generating and capturing demand. Still, many people don't succeed because they lack focus, commitment, and consistency.

The key to success is focusing on a limited number of channels and initiatives as soon they start getting overwhelming. Choose your initiatives according to the interests and preferences of your audience, so you can get immediate feedback and leads.

Choose the channels where your target audience spends most of their time. Try to master one channel before jumping on to the next. If you try to manage too many things simultaneously, even the best startup marketing campaigns will fail.

Continue tracking and measuring to explore what works best in your niche and repeat those activities with a fresh perspective.

Suppose you canā€™t afford quality content or have a problem finding excellent writers. In that case, you can avail DashClickā€™s white-labeled content services to deliver your clients beautiful and unique written content like clockwork. Itā€™s the best way to generate more organic traffic and leads.

Marketing automation platforms revolutionize the way that businesses and agencies handle their advertising.

With the assistance of these smart tools, professionals can unburden themselves of the countless manual tasks that are necessary for managing and optimizing campaigns. AI assistants automatically compile audience data, guide performance, and oversee advertising budgets.

However, why use a marketing automation platform if your traditional strategies are already working?

Below, we’ll dive into what a B2C marketing automation platform is, the benefits of using one, and help you determine if it’s the right choice for your organization.

What is a Marketing Automation Platform?

A marketing automation platform is a collection of software that automatically manages and processes manual everyday marketing tasks.

This can include:

• Lead & sales pipeline management
• Email & SMS messaging
• PPC campaign analytics & optimization
• PPC campaign budget management
• Website analytics & optimization
• Product/service upselling
• Directory listing syndication
• Social posting & promotions
• Measuring ROI for all marketing channels

The software acts as a virtual assistant that can automatically oversee all of these processes, leaving you and your teammates with the ability to focus on more involved tasks that require hands-on attention.

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With that said, a marketing automation platform does not give your organization the freedom to be complacent or uninvolved. Though these smart, automated tools may be able to rapidly handle certain tasks, you still need an experienced agent to help your efforts to ensure that the gathered data is utilized effectively.

Why Use a Marketing Automation Platform?

The benefits of using a marketing automation platform are powerful enough to make them a no-brainer for any company or agency.

1. Optimized Workflow

The first major benefit that we touched upon above briefly is that this smart software will help your team improve their workflow. Users can quickly visualize the entire process of lead management, from lead acquisition to closing the sale.

Then, you can set up your custom automation based upon your company's unique needs to rapidly complete monotonous tasks. This saves the organization a tremendous amount of time and frees the talent up to focus on tasks more deserving of their attention.

2. Improved Accuracy and Mitigation of Human Error

Equally important, these AI assistants will provide far more consistent and accurate work than is possible with human efforts. Even the most careful individuals make mistakes and one unchecked error can upset the overall workflow.

Marketing automation tools collect data and manage key processes almost instantaneously, leaving you with the cold, hard data you need to guide your future marketing decisions.

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3. Real-Time Analytics & Behavior Tracking

The minute you publish an ad, web page, or some other form of content online, your marketing automation software will immediately begin tracking performance. Without any additional effort, you can track:

• Impressions
• Page visits
• Traffic sources
• Session duration
• Keyword rankings
• Form submissions
• Intersite navigation
• Cost-per-action
• Cost-per-lead

These metrics simply scratch the surface of what is possible depending on the software you're using. You can not only monitor your performance but can quickly glance at competitor analytics to see how your efforts stack up in comparison.

4. Automatic Bidding & Budget Management

Finally, marketing automation is essential for staying competitive when it comes to paid search or paid social campaigns. You can utilize your platform to automatically set your budget minimum and maximum limits as well as your desired daily spending.

The software will then seek out opportunities to utilize your budget effectively when reviewing current bidding costs. It can even automatically allocate funds to higher-performing ads or landing pages when A/B tests multiple creatives at the same time.

This is a significant boon as it ensures that your organization maximizes its available ad spend. You can easily avoid getting caught up in fruitless bidding wars and focus your budget on ad sets that are delivering a worthwhile ROI.

Let's consider an example.

A PPC campaign manager creates their initial ad set and landing page for lead discovery. The minute these assets go live, their automation platform (i.e. Google Ads, Facebook Ads) automatically begins to capture performance data.

The campaign manager also sets a maximum daily and lifetime budget they wish to use for the campaign. Thus, the automation platform also automatically tracks and manages bids in real-time to help your better-performing ads gain more exposure. All of these things happen around the clock without any additional input from the campaign manager.

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With all of this additional time, your campaign managers can easily oversee several client accounts simultaneously. They can also utilize their extra time to prepare new ad sets, landing pages, or offers based upon the performance data they're receiving from the active campaign. They can be more proactive and make decisions with reliable data as opposed to testing with guesswork.

Determining Which B2B or B2C Marketing Automation Platform to Use

With how significantly marketing automation can improve your efficiency and customer experience, our answer is clear.

Your organization needs a marketing automation platform if it wants to remain competitive and grow in an evolving digital landscape.

However, not every platform is the right fit for every business. You'll need to ask the right questions to ensure that your team gains the right tools for your offerings.

1. What Are Your Business Goals?

Every business has unique objectives that they wish to achieve with their marketing. Clearly defining these goals and the process to get there will help you identify the tools you can leverage to improve your strategy.

If you wish to improve lead generation on your website, you'll want to focus on tools that can provide clear analytics and custom goal tracking.

If you're struggling with your sales pipeline workflow, you'll want to investigate lead and pipeline management tools that can automatically define deal stages and move your lead through the process accordingly.

Defining this is important as not all marketing automation platforms offer the tools you need. Some position themselves as a comprehensive package, while others are highly specialized to serve organizations in key areas.

2. How Can We Measure Our Performance?

As we highlighted above, you can instantly measure the performance of any marketing channel with the right software. In addition to defining your goals, think about which aspects of the process you need assistance with measuring.

This can vary whether you're focusing your efforts on social media, email marketing, paid ads, etc. Think about the specific types of metrics that are success indicators for the channel and seek out software that can help capture data and make the overall process more efficient.

3. How Does the New Platform Mesh with Our Existing Tools?

Finally, you need to perform an analysis of how these tools can augment existing strategies. To keep the transition simple, you may want to look for software that simply improves existing processes.

However, if your analysis determines that your existing strategies are inefficient, you may need to consider a major change. You'll need to perform a cost-benefit analysis of what it will take to not only upgrade to the new platform, but the time it will take to retrain all of your employees to effectively utilize new automation tools.

You may also need to incur additional costs depending upon the available subscription plans to that platform and the account limits for each tier. Smaller businesses can typically take advantage of low-cost plans due to their smaller client base, but growing organizations may need to make a substantial investment to gain plans that effectively suit their needs.

Marketing Automation Platforms Are Essential for Your Organization

Your organization must mobilize and find the right platform for its specific needs. If you're still relying on traditional marketing management methods, you're moving at a snail's pace while all of your competitors are lapping you in the race.

Because marketing automation platforms offer universal benefits and features to all types of industries, you must make one the center of your tech stack. It can make your workflow more efficient whether you're content with your current success or positioning yourself for future growth.

Aside from the initial cost to transition, there are little to no arguments to make against using a marketing automation platform. These tools are long proven to be reliable, accurate, and will allow your talent to perform more effectively than ever before.