I’ve often argued that thinking long term with a marketing strategy should be a marketeer’s main aim. Striving towards goals that takes hard work over time is often cost effective in the long haul, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t quick fixes along the way! Need some handy tips to keep your online marketing fresh? Read some of my thoughts below…

Email autoresponders

Online email marketing providers like Campaign Monitor and Mailchimp have given us a newer, slicker way of communicating via email. It’s cheap, easy to use, looks great and gives you a direct avenue to communicate with your customers and also those people who haven’t yet invested in your products or services. Not everyone on your website is going to buy there and then, so why not try and get something from their visit? Offering an incentive to give away an email address is easy to setup, and means you then have a direct line of communication with the potential customer.

Take this very website, for example. When you land on the homepage the two top main buttons encourage you to find out more about us because people like to be nosy, and secondly an option to download a free E-book telling you how to market your business on the cheap. Cool eh? What’s even cooler is that you might be reading this blog right now because you did exactly that, and we told you about the blog via email. 🙃

Also with autoresponders, once the person signs up to a list you can setup a pre-planned “journey”. For example, if the subscription is triggered by a product purchase you can follow up a number of times automatically with predesigned, personalised emails. Think of the possibilities! A huge time saver…

Time saving social media software

Social media activity for any business is pretty much a bust. Actually, if anyone can find a really successful start up recently that isn’t active on social media then please email me. I would love to know what else they’re doing with regards to marketing!

That being said, it’s not always easy to be consistent with posting on social media on a day to day basis. Scheduling social media posts can help with managing your time more effectively and also enable you to post at times where your audience is more likely to see your posts. Timing can make a difference when it comes to engagement.

So how can you do this? Well firstly, Facebook has this feature already built in to its ‘Pages’ feature on desktop – but also has a handy app called “Pages Manager” to manage however many pages you have control over. Twitter has its own “Tweetdeck”, which is fairly similar and gives you the ability to create a number of feeds to monitor at the same time, enabling you to be more proactive and conversational on Twitter. Instagram currently doesn’t have scheduling functionality which is a pain from a management perspective, but I suppose that would undermine and restrict the “there and then” ethos of Instagram. You can manage all of your pages and posts all in one place in Hootsuite, Buffer and Sprout Social with various pricing plans. Personally, I think the native management tools that social media websites offer are worth exploring before buying into any software, as your posts will always look exactly how you want them to (Hootsuite etc. can sometimes slightly alter appearances, reducing effectiveness).

Have a blog strategy

One of the biggest barriers I come across when recommending regular blogging to clients is the issue of not being able to think of content, so therefore it often gets forgotten about or pushed to the back of the queue. I’ve previously discussed the benefits of blogs in other blogs (ironically), but essentially blogging about your product or service provides interesting and fresh content for people to read on your website, giving a reason for them to keep coming back. It also gives you fodder for your social media posts and email newsletters, giving followers/subscribers interesting information that’s associated with your brand rather than just sales, sales sales.

Every 2-3 months, sit down and think about what your target market would be interested in and the sort of advice and additional information they’d want to hear from you. Brainstorm titles and set specific deadlines for yourself to meet, then instead of trying to think of blog titles/ideas there and then you’ll have a clear strategy to work towards.

I hope you’ve found some of these ideas useful and can relate them to your marketing activities. If any of you have anything to add to this short list then please leave a comment below. 🙂