5 Tips to optimize your marketing efforts
Pip, one of our favorite (very good) BadDogs! Photo by Jane Bernard.
Email marketing (see last month’s post!) on its own is an excellent marketing tool, but it works best as part of a carefully choreographed marketing strategy that also incorporates social media, blogging, and your website. The most successful brands find creative ways to connect the dots between channels to achieve a more complete and satisfying customer experience. Integrating platforms will optimize your marketing efforts and funnel both current and prospective customers directly to your website, where they can learn more about your products and engage with you directly.
There’s no need to dedicate a huge budget to getting your marketing off the ground. Many tools exist that will cost you very little, if anything, to use. We’ve put together a few simple tips below to get you started.
1. Blogging
Adding a blog to your website is one of the easiest ways to connect the dots between platforms, build credibility, and increase traffic to your website. Every time you publish a post and share it through your email marketing and social media channels, you are providing a link that leads back to your website and an opportunity for your audience to share that link through their own channels. At the same time, each post gives online search engines new content to index, which in turn increases your visibility on search engine results pages. It’s basically free marketing with potential to increase your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) while also helping you get established as an authority in your field.
2. Email Marketing
An email campaign allows you to engage directly with existing and prospective clients through targeted, personalized emails that land right in your audience’s inbox. It’s far less expensive than “snail mailing” printed materials and—unlike direct mail—makes it possible to track important details using analytics tools—details like who opened your email, who clicked on which links, etc. Like blogging, emails also serve to connect the dots between platforms—simply by including the top paragraph of your latest blog post with a link back to your website or by sharing the email through your social media channels. Read more tips on email marketing in last month’s post.
3. Social Media
Social Media Marketing (SMM) is a form of internet-based marketing that allows you to create and share content through platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Start by researching the pros and cons of existing platforms before creating new accounts. Social media done well takes time; you’ll get better results—and waste less time—by concentrating your efforts on just a couple platforms to start with. That said, engaging with social media is a must if you want to build your brand and expand your audience. Sharing your latest email marketing campaign or blog post on Facebook, for example, can exponentially expand your reach and direct new traffic to your website. Because social media algorithms are now often designed to be “pay-to-play,” devoting even a small monthly budget to SMM will help ensure greater and quicker results.
4. Calls-to-Action
Simply put, a call-to-action (CTA) prompts the user to take a next step or specific action. CTAs are often presented as a button or link on a website or in an electronic newsletter and are most effective when kept succinct and direct. Without a CTA, the user may not know what next steps to take to make a purchase, sign up for updates, or register for an event—and will likely leave your site without taking further action (this registers as a “bounce” in digital analytics—read more about this in an upcoming post). Examples include a “Read More” or “Download Article” button in an email campaign, a link to your website blog in a Facebook post, or a “Sign up for our newsletter” prompt at the bottom of a blog post. Getting in the habit of including a simple call-to-action at the bottom of blog or social media posts and in email campaigns will help increase audience engagement.
5. Partnerships
Cultivating strategic partnerships can help attract more traffic to your website by creating new pathways to get there. A few ways to utilize partnerships for win-win results include partnering on a joint promotion on social media; writing guest blog posts for partner sites (with links back to your site) and inviting partners to reciprocate with guest posts for your site; offering a joint event; and trading website ads.
Let us know how these tips work for you! And stay tuned: coming up, we’ll talk about how tracking website data through Google Analytics can help guide your efforts and tweak your messaging to ensure greater customer retention and engagement. In the meantime, Call BadDog Design to get help on designing a comprehensive and effective marketing strategy that integrates your various platforms and helps ensure greater traffic to your website.
Sign up for our monthly Howl (or follow us on Facebook) to receive more articles like this one and be the first to know about promotions and workshops in email marketing, branding, website updates and more, held in the loft at BadDog Design.
Free Workshop: October 15th in Santa Fe. Join us for our free, 2-hour workshop on “Using email marketing to build your business,” on Tuesday, October 15th, at 10 am. We’ll walk you through the basics of email marketing and show you some fun examples. Workshop participants are eligible for an email set-up discount through BadDog.
BadDog Design specializes in branding + marketing strategy. We produce identities, stationery systems, responsive web sites, advertising, catalogs, books + magazines, invitations and packaging.
howl@baddogdesign.biz | www.baddogdesign.biz | 505.986.6146