Whether your marketing programs have succeeded or stumbled in 2015, as you look ahead to the rest of the year you’d no doubt like to finish with strong growth and some fresh ideas. Here are five ways your company can quickly break out of a rut and produce big marketing wins.
1. Try “1-2 Punch” E-mail Offers If you’re like most managers with an e-mail marketing campaign, you’re in a cycle of sending out a promotion, watching the results over a period of days, and then tweaking your creative and offers for the next round a week or a month or more later.
If so, you are giving up a big percentage of sales or signups too soon and too easily. Next time, set up a variation
of your e-mail creative that provides an exciting and fresh “sweetened” offer with a discount, or premium incentive that can turn the interested but undecided into customers or clients.
E-mail your sweetened follow-up offer within a day to everyone who opens your first e-mail but didn’t buy (or sign up), and watch the conversions roll in.
2. Test New Landing Pages
If you don’t have a systematic landing page testing program in place, you are leaving sales, signups, or other types of conversions on the table. There are percentage gains to be made (sometimes significant gains) by testing new headlines, images, body copy, call-to-action button copy and position, offers and more.
A tool such as Unbounce (NetCrafter Solutions’ service of choice) can dramatically ease both the creation and evaluation of landing pages.
If your landing pages aren’t fully mobile-responsive or mobile-versioning, including thoughtful design implementation for the smartphone user experience, now is the time to work on it. A smartphone-versioned landing page should have actionable items in the first viewable screen, for example.
3. Try a New PPC Campaign, or Audit Your Existing Campaign(s)
Most managers fall into one of three camps regarding pay-per-click campaigns such as Google AdWords: “It doesn’t work,” or “we haven’t tried it,” or “it’s a profitable mainstay of our ongoing marketing program.” Whichever category your business is in, you can benefit from testing new campaigns or having your existing campaigns reviewed for performance and growth potential. I’ve reviewed dozens of campaigns, and haven’t seen one yet that couldn’t be significantly improved in terms of performance and volume.
4. Influence the Influencers
Make a list of individuals who have the respect and attention of your potential buyers or clients. After that’s complete, create a plan for influencing these influencers. There are a hundred ethical ways to do this, and your knowledge of your industry and its context will help you here.
Common techniques include providing free samples to get them talking, following them and conversing with them on Twitter and other social media, quoting them in your materials, inviting them to speak at your conferences, and direct-linking to them when appropriate.
5. Hijack a Conference
You can still make an impression at a key business conference, even if you aren’t buying a booth or sending a team. This technique works best if you send one or two staffers, however. Tweet your perspective on presentations using the conference and speaker hashtags. Have a staffer live-tweet on presentations they are attending. Release and promote some key new findings or news relevant to the conference and then promote your content.
You may even put paid search to work by buying conference hashtag, conference, and speaker name keywords and pushing your message via geo-targeted campaigns to mobile-friendly landing pages.
Try any or all of the above growth-hacks to jump-start your marketing for the remainder of 2015.
