It’s easy to get into a marketing rut, and simply publish a post and walk away. Sometimes we need a few creative marketing tips to shake up our routine and draw readers back to what we are writing.
The Internet is a crowded place these days, and we are past the days of good content simply winning the day for originality. It needs to be plugged and promoted, and an audience needs to be built and nurtured.
Here are some simple marketing tips to boost your online visibility. Building a strong digital presence is important. Your website, social media accounts, and other online platforms should all work together to set you apart from your competitors and create a solid digital footprint. In brief, your online presence should assist you in making sales.
Creative Marketing Tips for Your Business
Focus Your Hashtags – It’s easy to drop your best writing and best content on social media and feel like it’s lost in the great vacuum. One way to battle anonymity on Twitter and Instagram is to use hashtags. The functional purpose of hashtags is to highlight the search word in a given tweet or post. With a little research you can find the highest searched hashtags for your industry.
Design Infographics – We live in a visual world, and pictures outperform 1,000 words when it comes to quickly communicating your ideas. Your reader’s time and attention are taxed, and those who can communicate their ideas both quickly and effectively will win online. If you are working with a marketing budget, hiring a professional designer to help with your infographics is the best way to stand out from the competition. If not, websites like Canva.com or Piktochart.com make creating an infographic extremely doable for a graphic design novice.
Labor Over Headlines – I know it seems like the last step before publication should be to slap a headline over that blog post you worked so hard to write. It’s just a few words, right? Well, that headline serves as the single biggest factor determining whether your reader will click on what you have to say. Why not write a headline that draws them into the piece? Give them a promise. Entice them to click and continue. What will they learn by reading? Why should they care? Becoming an ace headline writer is highly worth your time. This is one of the most important creative marketing tips to get people to click on your content, and read your work.
Read Everything – Read everything you can get your hands on both inside and out of your industry. It’s important to know the major trends within your business, but also understand how they can tie into the outside world in ways your competitors haven’t thought of yet. It’s also important to understand why online models such as Buzzfeed have been so successful for content creation (Clue: headline writing is HUGE.) There are patterns in their writing that entice people to read until the very end.
Become a Content Curator – When you find another piece of content that you absolutely love or feel like your audience will benefit from, share it. Your social platforms can become a place where people turn for the best news regarding your industry or niche. Make sure you give credit.
Vary your formats – Blogging is a logical and easy medium for content creation, but don’t forget about white papers, case studies, social media, infographics and video. There are a wide range of ways to reach your audience. It’s not always about the platform you are most comfortable with. Sometimes it’s about the platform where your audience spends the most time.
Just be you – “Today you are you! That is truer than true! There is no one alive who is you-er than you!” As the parent of a 3-year-old, my brain functions in Dr. Seuss quotes. This one is easy to lose track of as adults concerned about what the people next to us are doing. Instead of focusing all our energy on keeping up with our competitors’ latest move, we could all do better to focus on conveying what differentiates us in our business space. Also, don’t be afraid to let a little of your personal life seep into your work. If you’re an avid sports fan, music fan or post every little thing that happens with your kids, you never know what might serve as a connecting point with a reader.
Audit Existing Content – Does your existing content serve its purpose? Have you been receiving leads from your website? It might be time to revamp your home page or about page. It might be time to make a few tweaks to existing blog posts. Sure, the nature of blogging is much more informational than sales oriented, but you are still in business. Your website should be there to assist your sales. If it’s not working it might be time to make some changes.
Guest Blogging – Contrary to popular posts that have been written, guest blogging is not dead. It still pays to get your work in front of new audiences, and work to generate some traffic on your own website. Don’t operate in a vacuum. Find the popular news outlets within your industry and don’t be afraid to submit new work to them. With a little Google research, you can also find the sites willing to publish your already existing blog posts, also bringing your work a new audience. This can be a huge traffic generator if done correctly and consistently, making it one of the more efficient creative marketing tips.
Understand Keywords – The quick version is that keywords are what your audience uses to find your work through Google search. A percentage of that search will occur through typical “phone book” searches such as “Plumber near me” or “CPA in Chicago,” etc. But for businesses to stop with their attempts to attract that type of traffic would be a mistake. Long tail, or more informational searches, can provide an excellent backdoor into your website. Blog posts on fixing a leaky faucet, or the numerous expenses that can be deducted also serve as windows into a website. Businesses should work to attract traffic from all levels of search.
Drive Offline Content to Your Website – As a business, you are probably doing a certain amount of offline marketing and networking. Do your brochures, flyers, business cards and any other paper promotional materials point people to your website? Are you promoting your website as you talk with people? Face to face relationships can be some of your strongest business advocates. Make sure they are abreast of what you are doing online and off.
Are you looking to rejuvenate your blogging efforts, or in need of more creative marketing tips to rejuvenate your content marketing? Contact me today!