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Do you have a product or service to sell? A blog that you want to promote? Then you need to reach potential customers and visitors to convince them to support you. And you need to keep yourself top of mind for existing customers.
This is where powerful princess marketing comes in – and the more effective your marketing, chances are the better your product or service will sell.
If you’ve done your homework and you know who you want to market to, then you have what’s called your ‘target audience’. Always speak to them using as many methods as you can in this blog post.
A very important thing to remember when it comes to marketing is that you are trying to build a relationship with your audience. If you understand this then you are halfway there.
What’s the other secret saucy ingredient? Having fun with it. This is your chance to set your brand apart, get people excited about it and to show your creative side. If you are Excited about what you are doing, your audience will pick up on this and jump on the wave with you.
I’ve broken this post into three sections: The absolute basics to start with (START HERE), medium-term strategies to implement to get your marketing off the ground (START GETTING RESULTS), and longer term things you can do to keep on growing your business (LONG TERM STRATEGIES TO KEEP ON GROWING). Decide where you are on the journey and pick up from there.
START HERE
♥ Get a website
A website gives you and your brand authority. People will trust you more if they can read what you are about, read reviews from your customers, see a video of your product in action, or even see your face.
Get a designer to build a basic WordPress site for you and learn how to update it yourself. Then be sure to add articles, products or interesting info on a regular basis. Be active online and your customers will be active in supporting you.
Handy hint: If you want inspiration or to show the designer certain patterns you like and want on your website, check out our ultimate guide to design patterns here. You’re welcome ?
If you can’t write hire a professional to do this for you. The content on your site is your advert to the world, so make it amazing.
♥ Emails are BIG news
No more snail mail, we are in the age of electronic mails.
Have you started building your email list yet? Nope? Then you are probably making a very big mistake. Get it done. And fast.
Don’t use a free service such as Gmail to send out emails – you will end up straight in spam folders. Sign up for a professional email service. Click here for a comparison of some of them, and many are free to start off with.
Now put an opt-in form on your website where people can sign up for your newsletters. Decide if you will send out daily, weekly or monthly newsletters. Then commit to that. Send them out at the same time every time, so your readers know when to expect news and offers from you.
Now that’s set up, focus on value, value, value. Newsletters will help you to start building a relationship with your readers. Nurture and respect this. Offer them something free and valuable when they sign up – here are some ideas for digital products you can easily create to make your customers love you.
Very handy tip: Make the text and buttons in all your emails very big, at least font size 14. Most people read emails on their tablets or phones, so bigger text makes it easier for them to read your emails and bigger buttons make it easier for them to click on your links.
Now keep on giving your readers interesting content. Think about what problems your target audience faces or what questions customers have asked you, then write about this and give practical solutions. Giving value is what will set you apart from the rest. It is what will convince people to read your emails rather than unsubscribe.
Don’t blatantly try to sell things to subscribers immediately. Please. I repeat: Don’t blatantly try to sell things to customers from the get-go / the start / the first time you interact with them. Once you have a relationship with them and are providing value regularly, then you can start with email marketing to let them know about your great products or services…
Which brings us to marketing method #3 to start getting results – email marketing.
START GETTING RESULTS
♥ Email marketing
Use your newsletter service provider or a specialized email marketing service to create an exciting campaign. An email marketing campaign is usually a series of emails sent to your subscribers to let them know about any products or services you are launching or have on sale.
A professional campaign service will let you choose great pictures and brand the emails to show your personality – so do just that and have fun with it. And now that your subscribers know you and love you, they are 67% more likely to buy something from you. Great.
♥ Send out press releases
Extra! Extra! Read all about it!
Are you launching a new product or want to get people excited about your business? Then you could write a press release. A press release is a short article about your news – short enough to create interest and long enough to give value to the reader.
Press releases were traditionally used to create interest with journalists (aka the press), but nowadays anyone can release one to share their news with the world. They also help with search engine optimization by creative hyperlinks on the Internet back to your website.
If you are writing a press release or briefing someone to write one for you, be sure to cover these points:
- Use a catchy heading: For example, ask a question, use powerful emotive words, or tell the reader what problem you are solving
- Describe your product
- Provide research or statistics to back up claims or inform the reader
- Give your website and contact details
So where do you release your fancy little article? Here’s a great wiki article on finding places to submit a press release. Or go straight to a press release releaser (I just made that up!), such as MyPressportal or eRelease (they also write press releases for a fee).
♥ Walk into the spotlight on Medium and Quora
This is a very good marketing option if you’ve been around for less than two years and you need to attract more visitors to your website.
Write two really awesome articles and post one to Quora and another to Medium. These sites have a lot of visitors and your content will appear on the screens of many of them. Write articles that add value, entertain the reader or solve a problem. Remember to write for your target audience.
Now choose a keyword in each article (a word or a few words that you know your target audience uses and searches for on the internet) and create a link on the keyword back to your website. This makes it easy for readers to click through to your site, all with a word or phrase that’s very important to them. For example, if you know your readers are looking for ‘how to sharpen scissors’, then highlight ‘how to sharpen scissors’ in your Quora article and add a hyperlink back to your website where you discuss this in greater detail.
♥ Get a Facebook Business Page
A Facebook Business Page is a free profile you can create for your business, blog or brand. You can use it to promote your business with some very handy tools.
Here’s the link to get such a business age: https://www.facebook.com/business. Follow the steps to create a page.
Once you have a page, upload some posts. Make your posts interesting, funny, informative – whatever will appeal to your target audience.
Now you want to get people to take notice. Start sharing your page with friends, family and colleagues. Ask them to share it with people they know. Write comments in groups where your target audience spends time, so they see you are active and you know what you are talking about.
♥ Set up a Facebook advertising campaign
Setting up an ad campaign is a great marketing tool. Facebook adverts do cost money, but if you know your customers well then you can tell Facebook exactly who to show your adverts to.
Think about your target audience – How old are they? Where do they live? What are their interests? Are they male or female? You will need to answer these questions when setting up a campaign.
You also need to decide what you want to achieve with your campaign. Do you want to sell a product or service, get more followers, build awareness, collect donations? Have the answer to this before you start.
You can start building a campaign via the ‘Ads’ link on your business page.
Test different adverts. Budget a little money for one advert, then see how it does. Do people start following your business page? Are visitors buying your product? Are you achieving what you wanted to achieve with your campaign?
Now try a different advert with a different picture and/or text. Does this one perform better than the first one? Keep on trying combinations until you find the right one for a winning advert. This is a learning curve, but once you’ve mastered it and know your audience it will make your campaign much more successful and you can grow it from there. Don’t give up!
♥ Be friendly in Facebook Groups
This is a handy little tip that costs no money and has given amazing results to many brands. Make sure you have an active and good-looking business page going. You want to look professional as you explore the world of Facebook conversations, called ‘threads’.
Search Facebook for threads that relate to your business or brand. You can also join groups that talk about topics your business is in.
Use this to market yourself in two ways:
- See if the groups have promo threads where you can promote yourself to the group. Often there’s one day a week or a specific thread where you can tell the group about your business and what you offer. Take advantage of this – if you’ve joined the right group then those in it are already interested in this field.
- Help people in the group. There is a fine line between helping and spamming people. Here’s how to NOT spam people and look like a jerk: Don’t push your course / product / newsletter / service onto people. Rather take the time to find a question in the thread and give a genuine answer that the person can use. Show them you are an expert and they will often follow you back to your website (by clicking on your name in the comment) to see what else they can find.
♥ Link in with LinkedIn
LinkedIn is where professionals promote themselves and businesses hire them. It’s also a great way to pick up freelance work and network with influencers in your field.
Need an account? Sign up here: https://www.linkedin.com
LinkedIn groups (much like Facebook groups) are a great way to connect with others, reach out to answer questions, add value, and implement all the other tips we looked at in the Facebook group section. Share updates as often as you can and enjoy making friends you would never have met any other way.
Again, avoid spamming people (but you already know that).
♥ Contact an Instagram influencer
This is a paid form of marketing, but often so worth it if you want to quickly reach a large audience.
Instagram influencers are those who have collected a huge following on Instagram. They will often agree to mention you or promote your business for a price – usually about $1 000 for every 100 000 followers they have. Remember that they have worked hard to get those followers and you are riding their wave of attention, so it won’t come free.
Make sure you choose an influencer whose followers match your target audience and that your influencer fits with your brand. There are many out there, so keep looking until you find the right fit.
♥ Use YouTube
More than one billion people watch Youtube videos, which means that creating videos and posting them on YouTube is a great way to get coverage.
Building an audience for your channel will take time, but the more ways you market yourself the better. Focus on offering valuable content that either helps viewers with tutorials or entertains them. Don’t just try to sell a product to them. It probably won’t work.
Interesting fact: A blogger who makes videos is called a ‘vlogger’.
Sign up for a YouTube account here, then fill in all your details. Create great-quality videos and upload them. Put a link to your website in the video description so people can easily click through to your site and find you.
♥ Have business premises? List it on Google and Yahoo
If you have a traditional brick-and-mortar business that customers can visit in person, then you want to tell them where to find you. You can easily do this by listing on Google and Yahoo.
You can put a lot of info in your listing, such as your business address for Google Maps, photos, operating hours, and other info about your business.
Add as much info as you can and make your premises look like an exciting place to visit. Take photos of happy customers and staff members, and take photos of your amazing products.
Create an experience for those who look you up online.
LONG-TERM STRATEGIES TO KEEP ON GROWING
♥ Join forces with popular bloggers
Do some homework and find bloggers who write about the field your business or blog is in. Write to them and ask if you can work together. You could offer to write a post for their blog, called a ‘guest post’. Come up with a good idea for this and pitch it to them – they may put your article on their blog and give you great exposure to their fan base.
Some blogs will even pay you up to $100 to write a guest post for them. Do a Google search and see if you can find blogs that are in your niche. Make sure you find a blog that’s more established than yours – they need to have more subscribers and visitors than you do. This will give you the best results for the work you will put into doing this.
To find out if a blog is more popular than yours, put your website (url) address in the Moz Link Explorer. Write down the domain and page authorities. Then type in the url for the blog you’d like to write a guest post for. You need to choose websites with higher domain and page authorities than yours. Any domain authority above 30 is good (above 50 is wonderful) for a blog, so these blogs might still be worth writing for even if their scores are lower than yours.
Rinse and repeat, working with as many bloggers as you can along the way.
♥ Start a podcast
If you are comfortable speaking and have interesting stuff to share with the world, you can start a podcast. Podcasts are voice recordings that people can download and listen to whenever they want. I listen to podcasts on my phone when I’m at the gym.
If you get a professional to design a podcast brand image for you, make sure it’s at least 1 400 x 1 400 pixels and a jpg (preferred) or png.
To record podcasts, you will need a good microphone and audio editing software. All podcasts need to be saved as mp3s.
Commit to making regular podcasts that discuss topics your target audience is interested in. Plan a schedule at least 3 months in advance, so you can prepare for your podcasts and focus on getting them done.
Now host your podcasts on SoundCloud, or search the Internet for good service providers.
♥ Translate your content
English may be the universal language, but it’s not what most people speak at home. If you decide to just keep all your online content in English then you are cutting out many possible readers and customers. Remember what we are trying to do here? KEEP ON GROWING. You are also competing with millions of English websites out there.
Sooooo *drum roll*
Consider translating your content to reach more people. But how will you know which languages you should choose if there are about 6 500 languages spoken across the world? Set up a Google Analytics account to track where people are from who visit your website. It’s free.
Now make websites for each of these regions. Get your content translated into their main home languages by a professional translator. Google is good for doing searches and analytics – leave the translations to the professionals.
You can look for certified translators who have passed tests to prove their expertise in a language. Budget to pay them between $30-125 per page, or $0.08-0.40 per word. I wouldn’t skimp on using a professional. Just saying.
You now have sites with similar content in different languages. Google needs to know which language you are using on a page or which region you are targeting – you can tell Google by putting ‘hreflang’ tags in your metadata. Get your designer to do this for you.
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Keep on going. Marketing is a wild and wonderful word of exploration. Decide what you want to do and the explore. Try something, tweak it, try again, until you get the results you want. Use resources like this blog post to find ideas and information on what to do.
You’ve. Got. This!
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