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6 Time-Tested Marketing Habits that Drive Unstoppable Success
Pop Quiz: What is the most important thing you do every day to generate marketing results?
- Build your email list
- Generate more website traffic
- Write kick ass blog content
- Generate PR
- All of the above
Over the years, there have been numerous new ways to generate awareness for our business. Some are more effective than others, these are the 6 time tested marketing habits that drive unstoppable success.
The Prelude to Your Marketing Crescendo
Like any great piece of music, your marketing must take the time to build up. You can’t just rush right into the climax of a song, and you certainly won’t be able to rush your marketing efforts. To create unstoppable success in your marketing you must first define your short term and long term goals.
To do so, download this free goal setting worksheet.
Now that you have a goal setting worksheet start creating S.M.A.R.T goals. What can you do to drive immediate growth in your business? What can you do to drive future growth? Take the time to really look at what is working in your business and what isn’t, because every business is different.
Community Management on Social Medias
Social media isn’t just a mechanism to push your message. If the only thing you use Twitter for is to share your latest blog post, then you are leaving a ton of money on the table. Through effective community management, a single operator of a business can drive thousands of website traffic and correspondly dollars.
It is seriously easy to automate social medias to push content out. Tools like Twitterfeed will feed your blog or your favorite blog into your Twitter feed. If you don’t want to go through all that get the WordPress plugin: Revive Old Post to push out your content.
Pro Tip: Automating social medias to push content isn’t bad, it is actually a very sound tactic to save you much needed time and energy. BUT you must follow up all automated tasks with real world, time in the trenches, community management.
What effective community management looks like:
- Every day spend time thanking and engaging your followers
- Every day follow 200+ new followers per social media
- Every day create unique daily content that you’re following engages with
A super easy hack to rock your social medias is the native Twitter video message to thank you followers one by one. Yes this is time consuming but makes a huge impact on people!
Daily PR Outreach
The days of hiring on an expensive PR firm are dead. With technology available today, you as a solopreneur can easily become a one man (or woman) PR team. PR sources are not just your local news stations, though they are still a prevalent source for massive exposure. Many influencers in your space can be a huge boost to generating exposure.
- Sources like Fohrcard and influential.co can help you identify and hire various influencers.
- H.A.R.O or helpareporterout can help you showcase your expertise and get featured on major publications
- Guest blogging on sites like Huffingtonpost.com can generate you thousands of unique website hits.
- Collaborations with other influencers (if you are one yourself) can be a great way to build your own network
Sales, Sales, and More Sales
As Gary Vaynerchuk says “cash is oxygen.” If you want to grow your business you have to be growing your revenue. The more money you make in a business the more options you have. You can hire in more staff, put more money into marketing, and seize more opportunities.
According to my limited sales training, an effective cold call strategy is this:
- If you make 100 cold-calls a day.
- This will net you an average of 20 phone conversations.
- Consequently this will net you 5 sit down appointments a week.
- Collectively, this will get you one sale.
Or something like that.
Cold-calling statistically has a 1% return on your investment. It is low but it is also a proven system. This works for some people, personally being an online entrepreneur I don’t have to do cold calling. What I deal with and most likely a lot of you do too, is RFP’s (request for proposal) and pitches.
The key to any sales system is having a system.
Analyzing Analytics Everyday
Data! Data! Data! I can’t make bricks without clay!
~ Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Stop for a moment and ask yourself this question: “how do I know if I am making progress in my business unless I am tracking it?” Measuring and tracking the analytics of your business is fundamental to the growth of a business.
Your business website is your biggest asset in marketing. Statistically, 78% of users conduct primary research online before buying a product. This means your website could be the first and last impression someone has. This means you absolutely must have google analytics installed on your website.
For those who are completely stupid when it comes to analytics (like myself), Moz has an killer beginner’s guide to google analytics.
Social Media Analytics
Social media is a staple to your advertising arsenal. Gone are the days we can pass it off as a fad, and now there are highly competitive jobs solely for running social media accounts. Social media marketing covers a broad spectrum of different areas of expertise. Community management, growth hacking, and social media advertising are three separate beasts altogether.
Someone great at running Facebook ads, can be absolutely terrible at building an organic community. No matter what aspect of social media you specialize in, you must use analytics.
Personally, the two main analytics I look at when talking about social media are engagement and traffic. Reach, impressions, number of likes, and follower count are all a by-product of great content.
- Measuring engagement helps me determine what sort of content the audience wants to talk about.
- Knowing what content gets clicked on helps determine what pain points the audience has.
Every social media platform natively has analytics tools built right into it. That being said there are lots of 3rd party tools like bufferapp that help you analyze what content is performing best.
The more often you measure, the more often you look at what works and what doesn’t, the faster you can change.
Nurturing Relationships with Customers
Remember how we said earlier 78% of customers will do research with a company on their website before buying. Well turns out 98% of your website traffic will not buy from you on that first visit. They are doing that research we spoke about.
Every day you must spend time nurturing relationships with your customers to make those sales.
- Send email marketing blasts every week or two weeks.
- Create a free or paid webinar exclusive to your email list.
- Giveaway additional free content.
- Create surveys to understand your audience wants, needs and desires.
Success in business is a marathon, not a sprint.
It is imperative that you spend at least part of every day building those relationships. One of my favorite ways personally is to use Snapchat to engage in building one-on-one relationships with my community.
Experiment on Something New
“Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.” – Thomas Edison
If you want to build marketing habits that drive unstoppable success, you must be comfortable with failure. Greatness is only achieved if you are willing to try and fail time and again. Ask yourself when was the last time you tried something knowing full well that you might fail?
I bet you $10 bucks you can’t remember the last time you put yourself in that position. As a society, we are afraid of failure. If we try something new and fail, we feel stupid. But if we continue to push past those feelings, get up and brush ourselves off, do we achieve greatness. After all, you are meant for greatness.
We are not born into this world to do small things—to play small, accomplish little, and die without leaving a legacy. Great men and women of this world know that need to fail.
Take a page from Thomas Edison and fail often.
