Every business wants “hockey stick growth,” where you go from flat growth to exponential gains. These online marketing strategies will help you get there.
Why online marketing?
Offline or traditional marketing works great for a lot of people, but most startups don’t have the budget to put toward print ads, commercials or other unpredictable channels.
If you do, great. But most online marketing strategies cost little more than time, and can bring you scalable growth. That’s what we’re going for in this article.
Related: 8 Essential Online Marketing Tools
Focus on long-term growth
The difference between these strategies and, say, paid advertising is that these strategies take more time to develop, but will keep working for you after you stop funding them.
By focusing on long-term growth instead of short-term revenue, you can build structures that bring you more and more value over time. That’s how you’ll create exponential growth, and that’s what these seven online marketing strategies will help you do.
- Create “10X” content
Rand Fishkin popularized “10X content.” The goal? Find the best piece of content on your target topic, and create something 10X better.
This doesn’t mean your content should be 10X longer than everything else, but that it should offer 10X more value. So how do you offer more value?
The big factors are relevance and engagement. How well are you answering people’s questions, and how much are they interacting with those answers?
When your content provides comprehensive answers that people connect with, search engines like Google will place it higher in their search results. This leads to more traffic, which should bring you more leads and customers.
- Send emails people actually want
Promotional emails typically get less than 30 percent open rates, despite the average worker checking his or her inbox 74 times a day! People do get a ton of emails every day, but if they aren’t reading your messages, you probably aren’t giving them what they want.
So how do you learn what people want? By getting to know your targets like your best friends, and by testing different kinds of emails (e.g. sales promotions, newsletters, triggered messages, etc.).
Once you know what people want, then you can use marketing automation tools to personalize messages based on their wants and behaviors. These personalized messages get 2.5 times more click-thru rates, and are six times more likely to drive conversions.
- Become a review hub
Reviews are a perennial top factor in people’s buying decisions. So when you provide great experiences for customers, ask them to share that experience in a review. Use Google, Facebook, Yelp, the App Store, or wherever your targets are most likely to be.
Since 90 percent of people are influenced by reviews, this has a huge impact! Positive reviews also help you rank higher in search results, and bring you potentially useful feedback.
- Turn blog content into video content
Most businesses have a blog, but few use video. Here’s why you should.
One minute of quality video brings as much value as 1.8 million words! Engaging videos are also significantly more likely to show up in search results.
You’re probably already creating content for your blog. Get some inexpensive equipment and turn those posts into videos! You can also share these videos on social media and in blog posts to holistically increase engagement.
- Think mobile-first for everything
Mobile is integral to the average person’s day, so being mobile-first includes things like:
- Using accelerated mobile pages to speed up your site
- Tailoring emails to mobile devices
- Sending texts and push notifications to reach customers and leads
- Breaking content down into short paragraphs
- Using SMS for lead generation on your website and Google accounts
When you go mobile-first, you reach customers where they are. When you reach customers where they are, your sales, search results, conversions and customer satisfaction all soar.
- Feature your customers
Customer case studies create clout for your business, make your value relatable and can get your current customers excited about working with you.
A good case study does two things. First, it highlights the customer and portrays them positively. Second, it shows how this great customer gets value from your business and why they chose you.
This creates a powerful sales tool that also makes the rest of your customers want to get involved. Who wouldn’t want to be featured on your website with that much praise? B2B customers will do it just to boost their own marketing!
- Get collaborative
The best businesses know when to get help, and there are plenty of ways you can collaborate with other businesses.
Case studies are a great example. If you feature a customer, you’ll get great content, and that customer will share the case study with their audience, because it highlights them.
Guest posting is another good option. Co-branded infographics, webinars, research studies and more can help almost any business spread quickly to new audiences. Collaborate with other businesses, and you’ll be able to grow exponentially.
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A final word
Exponential growth takes hard work, smart work and a bit of patience. Combine those traits with these online marketing strategies, and you’ll be able to achieve hockey stick-like growth without needing a large budget or a huge team!
