As entrepreneurs we can often feel like the deck is stacked against us when it comes to the digital world. We don’t have the same budgets as our massive competitors, nor do we have the army of marketers that they can employ. So how can a small- or medium-sized business, against overwhelming odds, carve out its piece of the market? The tips below will show you how.
1. Facebook remarketing
Facebook is a great promotion tool whether you’re in the B2B or B2C industry. But did you know you can set up remarketing audiences in Facebook? By installing a Facebook tracking pixel on your site you can continue to market to customers who have visited your site. This is a great way to create return traffic to your business blog or website. And you can start remarketing to audiences as small as 100 visitors.
2. Facebook email custom audiences
Staying with Facebook, you can also give that email list of yours a second life. Instead of just using it to blast emails to your customers once in a while, you can upload that list into Facebook and capture the social accounts of anyone that has their email address attached to it. This is a HUGE benefit since it will allow you to market to those users on their mobile devices.
3. Twitter remarketing
Twitter remarketing works in almost the exact same way as Facebook remarketing. Simply install the pixel and you can now target your sites visitors on Twitter. The main difference is that Twitter will require a higher minimum audience count before you can start advertising towards them, 500 people to be exact.
4. Twitter custom audiences
Just like Facebook, you can target Twitter users on their mobile devices by uploading their emails into Twitter. However, if you cannot get at least 500 users into your custom audience through an email upload, then you won’t have the required minimum to advertise towards them.
5. Twitter Cards
Twitter Cards is a great tool to drive traffic to your site. They are larger tweets that incorporate images and allow you to have buttons built into the tweet. They allow you to have engaging calls to action, attractive images right in the stream, and you can even give them special functionality like having downloads attached directly to the tweet. Tweets with images get 18 percent more clicks than its text counterparts, so make sure you’re using Twitter Cards.
6. Spend 80 percent of your time on the ad’s headline
Did you know that 8 out of 10 people will read a headline and not read the rest of your ad? If this is the case, you should be spending the majority of your time perfecting the headline to grab your audience’s attention – and driving them to your site. Whether you’re running ads in Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter or pay per click, make sure that your headlines are on fleek. (Yes, I went there.)
7. Build an email list
I just told you how you can use emails for social promotion, but they’re also an amazing tool for driving traffic through a newsletter. Make sure that you have a newsletter opt-in on your website. We personally use a great tool called Drip. It’s free and very easy to set up.
8. Blog, blog, blog
Blogging really does drive traffic. We recently ran an experiment where we increased our blogging from twice per week to over 10 posts per week. The result was a 300 percent increase in traffic in just two months. And this isn’t an unusual occurrence. Another company called Convirza ran a similar experiment with even better results. But, if you’re going to blog, you better do number nine.
9. Promote your blogs on Facebook
You may have heard that Facebook has cut back on their organic reach. This means that almost no one will see your social media posts on Facebook. Instead, you need to put a little bit of budget behind them. A good strategy is to have a campaign constantly running that is featuring your blog posts and target that campaign towards your custom audience and remarketing audience as described above.
10. Optimize your site for SEO
Trying to manipulate the search-engine rankings is a losing proposition at this point. Instead, what you should be concerned with is making your site look as good as possible for the search engine robots that will be crawling your website. Software like SEMrush can give you a complete SEO audit and show you what you should fix. Spending time on your site’s SEO optimization is always time well spent.
11. Exchange blog posts with other sites
Syndicating your blog on other sites is a great way to drive new audiences to your site. A great way to do this is to search for blogs that are in a similar industry as you and that are in a similar situation in terms of size and audience. Then, you reach out to their editor or site administrator and ask if they’d like to swap blog articles and you each take turns featuring each other’s blogs and linking back to the site. Special measures should be taken to avoid duplicate content, but this is a great way to drive new customers to your site.
12. Automate your emails
Shockingly, marketing automation has only been adopted by 3 to 5 percent of all businesses. Yes, this number is higher if you only look at larger companies but this list is trying to help smaller companies compete with their bigger brethren. So, why aren’t you using marketing automation? It may have been that the costs were too prohibitive or that it seemed too daunting, but there’s help with that. There are new lower cost marketing automation platforms like Autopilot and Hatchbuck that are great for small businesses. But if you still have your heart set on HubSpot or a similar product, then look for a certified partner, like my firm, that can help onboard you and can even waive the kickoff fees that can cost several thousand dollars.
Now that you have your software set up, you need to ensure you have email campaigns set up for everything. There should be an automated email campaign when someone fills out a form, downloads some content or signs up for the newsletter.
By staying in front of your customers through email you’ll continue to drive relevant traffic to your site.
13. Become a contributor
Contributing to other websites is a great way to drive traffic to your site. I myself write for about a dozen major media site, and while it may not result in immediate customers, the benefits are definitely felt throughout the organization. And our referral traffic from these sites is a huge boon.
To become a contributor you need to start small and work your way up. Also, you need to hone your craft when it comes to writing. To do this you need to be writing every single day. The more you write, the better you’ll be come and the better your chances will be at becoming a contributor.
14. Create a quiz
Quizzes are fun pieces of content that work really well at driving engagement with your visitors. Plus, they’re a cinch to promote on social media using the techniques presented earlier in this article. Sites like Quizzr allow you to create free quizzes to then post on your blog and drive traffic to your site.
15. Host a webinar or webcast
Regardless of your industry, I can guarantee there’s a topic you have enough expertise on that your customers would come to listen to you speak. The trick is to identify this topic and then to create a fun and engaging presentation. Carol Tice put together a phenomenal guide on putting on a great webinar.
16. Create a podcast
If you’re worried you can’t present to a live audience or develop the right message, then instead consider a podcast. Podcasts are great ways of distributing your expertise and are a surefire way of driving traffic to your site — but you need to be consistent and promote it.
When you first start off, it will seem like you’re talking into a black hole and no one is listening to you. But if you stay persistent and promote your podcast on social media, your audience will grow and your future episodes will gain more and more listeners.
Another great trick to getting a boost in your podcast audience is to invite a guest that has a large social following and asking them to help you promote it. You’d be surprised who would say yes to joining your podcast, if you only ask them.
Zach Cutler put together a great article on getting your podcast off the ground.
17. Find partners in your industry
There are usually dozens of partnership opportunities for any business out there. The trick is to find those partners and establish a working relationship. To give an example of this, we signed up as a partner for Unbounce. They’re a landing page creation software that helps companies optimize their marketing campaigns. It was free to sign up as a partner and they then featured us in their partner section and allowed us to do a little write up on our firm. Before you knew it we were getting leads from their site and it’s been a great source of traffic for us.
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by MIKE TEMPLEMAN
