I know a few marketers who are convinced that email marketing is dead. They back it up with proof that many brands' email marketing strategies are currently suffering from low ROI. However, I choose to believe otherwise. Email marketing as a tool is not really dead. The only issue is that some company practices are outdated. For instance, a lot of them are still using generic email subject lines and are not looking into the overall user experience. As a digital marketing agency, email is an essential part of our business, so we can't operate entirely without it. What gives us the edge over other agencies is we always make sure to update our practices and strike a balance between email marketing technicalities and personalization. That way, we are able to boost our email deliverability and improve our ROI.
Some of the experts in market research said that user generated content should be limited in favor of more “professional” marketing graphics. The belief was it could send a negative message to prospective customers that shouldn’t be attributed to our business. Trusting non-photographers to capture quality images was putting too much faith in others. From our research we actually found the opposite to be true. Encouraging users to share pictures of rewards they earned with items like a branded sticker of our company has been highly successful. It offers social proof and also provides regular content for us to include in social media and website marketing. We only wish we’d realized this sooner because there were surely prospect opportunities we missed out on. A more important lesson was also learned. Experts provide general guidelines but you need to test with your own customers since some principles are specific to certain industries.
I remember when I first started my business, I was told by a marketing expert that I needed to post on social media multiple times a day, every day, in order to build up a following. So I dutifully began posting several times a day, but after a month or so, I noticed that my engagement rates were actually going down. I was starting to feel burned out from all the posting, and it was beginning to show in my content. So I decided to experiment with posting less often. Instead of posting several times a day, I began posting just once or twice a week. And you know what? My engagement rates went up! It turns out that my audience was actually getting tired of seeing me post all the time, and they appreciated the break. So if you're finding that a marketing tactic isn't working for you, don't be afraid to experiment and try something different. Chances are, you'll find that the results speak for themselves.
Many digital marketers today will tell you that small businesses don’t need to invest a myriad of cash in ads and marketing, in general. Merely because small businesses are usually short on budget. Well, that’s wrong and did not work for me. Thousands of small businesses operate in my industry, and audiences don’t even know we exist. The only viable way to get discovered and sell more is through taking minor steps and start investing in paid ads and marketing campaigns. If you do it well enough, you’re most likely to get a good ROI, as well as increase your brand awareness.
When we were looking to grow our business, we hired marketing consultants who advised us to invest in PPC (Pay Per Click) ads to attract new customers. We tried PPC, and although we had some success with generating new customers, the cost of the ads was too prohibitive for us to continue. In the meantime, I had taken an interest in SEO (search engine optimization) and was learning from various blogs and podcasts. I decided to implement an SEO strategy as it was much cheaper than PPC and had more promise in meeting our long-term goals. My strategy paid off and today we rank in the top three search results in Google for 150 search terms, giving us a steady stream of customers via organic traffic. A key reason for our success is that we were able to successfully target local search results where there is less competition.
Social media presence. Over the last few years, there was always so much hype around using social media for business marketing (IG, Facebook, Twitter, etc). Our business is 100% B2B (business to business), therefore using social media as a marketing tool attracted a different audience which was not valuable for us. Instead of SMM, we decided to go all-in on a different marketing area we were good at - SEO. We would rather try to own that presence so we could always be found online. This strategy has been working for us and is a real asset to the business and our growth.
In the early years of managing our business, a marketing mentor advised us to collaborate with big names in social media. We were trying so hard to amplify our reputation and gain public exposure, so we decided to get in touch with a famous personality who had over a hundred thousand followers on social media. However, our strategy did not succeed. Our marketing team tried to check what went wrong. After a thorough analysis, we realized that working with someone directly affiliated with our niche market could have been a better move despite having fewer social media followings. So, we changed our strategy and sought a less popular influencer with a certain degree of familiarity with our products, which we never regretted as it became successful. If there's one lesson we learned from it, that would be to carefully assess if big-time influencers are the right fit for you. Keep in mind that their enormous fan base doesn't always mean profit for your business.
The idea of creating the perfect people-pleasing company is every businessman's vision at the beginning of their business journey. However, this is a wrong viewpoint. If people are looking for your service/product, then they want to get that. Nothing less, nothing more. I stopped trying too hard when I saw our support tickets where people complained about the too many options we offer for our services. It often leads to complicating things and people like it when every process they go through is easy and simple. So, I made it easy for them - I removed the many options and the unnecessary obstacles. Since then, I've had more satisfied customers than ever.
Blogging is meant to be the bread-and-butter of digital marketing. But in my specific case, I found that it didn't really work for me. I spent too much time writing posts, and they didn't seem to get much traction - even after a year or two of regular blogging. What did work was podcasting. My 500+ episode podcast has over 1,000,000 listens. As it turned out, people prefer to listen to what I have to say, rather than read about it. Also, since I always have a guest on my podcast, I don't have to do much (if anything) to distribute content. The guests do a lot of that for me The podcast created a direct connection between me and my audience and increased customer engagement with my other businesses. When it comes to the L&D niche, podcasting proved to be more effective than blogging for me. I love it!
Successful marketing is all about testing, testing, and then testing some more. Making changes across the board within your branding makes sense from a time and cost saving perspective however it can be catastrophic from a marketing perspective. My team and I, updated our logo, colors, and tone of our brand on the advice of a pro. This led to a lot of confusion within our customer base. We found our audience was confused and actually our traffic dropped significantly. Fortunately, as our business is digital we check metrics daily and picked up the big drop quickly. We changed back to our old branding style and instead rolled out the changes slowly testing how each update affected our traffic and following.
There are lots of marketing experts out there. Gurus, marketing influencers, SEO whizzes, social media geniuses. And among the vast array of professionals in the marketing industry, there can often be conflicting advice. I've heard quite a few suggestions during my career as a digital agency owner that weren't actually that effective for marketing my business. One example is social media strategy. For example, we're often told to promote our services on social, and post as often as we can to help sell our services. I was selling services instead of giving value., I ignored short-form video (I couldn't be bothered)?, and I had stopped engaging. My growth and engagement had died. So I focused on the context rather than the content, making sure I was giving lots of value wherever I could, not just saying "hey, look at me and my services." Nicholas Robb, Design Hero. www.design-hero.com Multi award-winning six-figure digital agency
They say effective marketing should bring you fast results, which basically means soaring sales instantly. That’s not even half right. Sure, a good marketing campaign might go viral on social media and may generate your brand buzz. But what are the chances of it? I think one in a million. What worked for my brand was consistent efforts. We used the same channel of SEO, and some social media, to slowly grow my brand’s awareness and grab sales. We planned everything beforehand – the exact steps that needed to be taken for the next six months. Results? We went merely surviving to a thriving curve.
While yes, there is an energy to "going live" to connect with your audience, nurture your leads and sell your offers... You DO NOT have to do live video or live anything really to make consistent sales! The power of carefully strategizing your content, crafting thoughtful messaging and creating evergreen sales funnels are also very powerful marketing strategies. These strategies give you the great part of live marketing by delivering timed messages to your audience right when they're ready to see them PLUS you have the opportunity to reflect and prepare your content in your own time without the pressure of a live event. Thinking outside the box, you can still use video and more casual engagement in your business without requiring you to "go live"! You can record on-the-fly videos and schedule them to post whenever you like, record your webinar or training in advance and stream it to a live stream or even prep your Q&A session with pre-submitted questions whenever you like.
Creating a few pieces of excellent content may work if a few things are true: 1. You have a good domain authority already Or 2. You have the time and resources to dedicate towards outreach and link building tp get a good domain authority Otherwise, it'll fall flat and no one will see it. Instead, we focused on two things. 1. Creating a lot of content for our website 2. Creating a lot of content for other peoples websites in the form of guest posts. Funnily enough, we're on the front page of Google for thousands of keywords and most of those pages have no links pointing at them and they keep moving up the SERPs every month. Don't get me wrong, if you can do outreach to rank for some of the most competitive terms in your niche go for it. For everyone else, focus on quality and quantity to capture the long tail of the traffic in your niche. It pais just as well as the most competitive terms if you do it right.
Managing Director at Skills Training Group
Answered 4 years ago
Social media management is extremely time-consuming. For us as a small team, we use automation to simplify the process and publish across multiple channels according to our social media calendar. Initially, we maximized automation by linking channels making the same content available across multiple platforms. This effectively reduced the time spent creating content and publishing. However, our following significantly dropped. Our audience expects unique content that fits the platform and what interests our Facebook following isn't attractive to Instagram users. Although we still rely heavily on social media automation, we no longer link channels and are careful to create content specific to each platform.
Thinking that some strategy will work for us just because it worked for other organizations is a big mistake. I have heard the same line from many marketers to go with the trend and get the result. To some point, it might work but the chances of you getting vanished within the list are much higher. I've tried it as well but to my surprise and gut feeling, I believed the opposite. Each brand is different and that's why it's important to have different strategies for it. Going in with the same strategy that others are using is just going to merge you also into the crowd. Doing the opposite makes you unique and stands out from the crowd. We changed our marketing strategy according to our needs and wants. It doesn't align with what others are doing and it is working pretty good for us.
Marketing experts told me that social media could help me get more engagement, followers, and sales. But what they didn’t say is it takes time to grow followers. Using social media hastily didn’t work for me, so I took time to accumulate followers and create engagement. Initially, I created an Instagram business account, followed different people, appealed to them to follow me back, and posted numerous links. I chose to quit because I didn’t get the desired followers and tractions online. But later, I realized that gaining traction on social media requires a lot of time and effort. So, I started sending tweets at intervals, and after a few months, I started seeing people flocking into my social media to buy my services.
When I first started my business, I was told to advertise online aggressively. I spent a lot of time and money on paid advertisements, but it didn't really help our business take off. Instead, I focused on word-of-mouth. I invested in building relationships with people who could spread the word about my business through their networks, and I made sure that my clients had an amazing experience with our service, and they went out of their way to tell their friends about us. It really worked for me, as soon as we started doing this, our sales went up without spending a lot on paid advertisement.
A good friend with a degree in marketing once approached me for a marketing position in my small business. I hired him to devise strategies and help me reach my target audience. One thing he proposed was creating accounts on multiple platforms and spreading our content across all of them. At first, I thought it was an incredible idea and decided to give it a shot. Two weeks later, I noticed that we'd been restless since we launched our marketing drive. Only to find out our attention was divided into multiple social channels without realizing that we were not going anywhere with it. Desperate to hit our intended deadline, we dropped some of our social media accounts and focused on one channel with the highest target market concentration. Good thing we did that because it helped us connect with our audience on a deeper level and let us realize there was no sense in casting a wide net across multiple platforms as it just wasted our time and resources.
I remember when I first started my business, I was told by several marketing experts that I needed to be visible on social media. So, I dutifully set up accounts on all the major platforms and began posting regularly. But after months of consistent effort, I wasn't seeing any results. My social media following was stagnant and I wasn't getting any new clients. Finally, I decided to step back and reassess my strategy. That's when I realized that the experts were wrong: social media wasn't the best platform for my business. Instead, I shifted my focus to building relationships with potential clients in person. This may seem old-fashioned, but it ended up being much more effective for me. Through face-to-face interactions, I was able to build trust and credibility with potential clients, which ultimately led to new business. So, if you're finding that something isn't working for your business, don't be afraid to try something different.