2020 has been a whirlwind of a year. Period. And as a business owner it feels overwhelmingly natural to want to pause marketing efforts and go into hunker down mode. It’s normal to feel this way as we don’t know what the future holds and have lost a bit of that control we worked so hard for. But is this the best strategy?
There’s been a tiny argument circulating about whether or not companies should cut their marketing budgets. So, as a digital marketing agency ourselves, we went out and asked business owners and marketing managers in different industries about this key topic – How are you still going and growing in 2020? It seems the common consensus was not cutting their marketing budget (we saw that coming…). But what theses masterminds did do was adapt – they doubled down on their marketing efforts and/or changed their strategy to fit the times.
But don’t just listen to us. Find out for yourself with the key marketing strategies used for business growth in 2020.
28 New Hires by NOT Cutting the Marketing Budget
Joy Gendusa
Founder & CEO, PostcardMania
Our weekly earnings initially took a 41% dip from mid-March to the end of April. But since May 1, PostcardMania has been on a huge expansion tear by:
- adding 28 brand new jobs that did not exist previously
- making up ALL 2020 revenue losses — we got back into the black on July 20
- setting a new highest-ever record in July for sales (and June was the third highest-ever)
- and getting on track to actually be up this year by about 10%
Postcard Mania’s 2020 marketing growth was fueled by one thing in particular, which Joy explains below:
“Don’t cut your marketing no matter what — even during an economic slump! I know it can be painful, but continuing your usual marketing outflow is vital to your business surviving a slump and thriving afterwards. I learned this in 2008, when I cut my marketing following that recession, and it took years for my business to fully recover. This time around, I maintained my marketing budget despite nationwide pandemic shutdowns. As a result, our numbers were only down for about 5 weeks, from mid-March to late April. Granted, we took a pretty big hit — over 40% of our total earnings dried up overnight. But since then, sales have bounced back in a big way, and we’ve hired almost 30 brand new staff since May 1. (Those are totally new hires and not just rehiring staff we laid off — In fact, I was able to avoid laying off any staff this year, something I’m incredibly proud of.) July was the highest-ever revenue month in my company’s 22-year history, and June was the third highest-ever — and summer is always our slow time of year! I whole-heartedly believe that this growth would not have been possible if we had cut our marketing earlier in the year when times got tough. So, my advice is to always stick to your marketing! If you find yourself stretched or heading that way, before you touch your marketing budget, try to find cost savings or efficiencies somewhere elsewhere within your business and continue marketing without fail.”
Here is a breakdown of the additional marketing efforts we put into place earlier this year, which served to accompany our usual outgoing marketing:
- We published a small biz covid survival guide on March 13 and, since then, have updated it 30 times. We email each update to our entire customer/prospect list (~180k) from Joy personally, which has generated hundreds of responses. Out of the people who personally replied to these emails, we’ve generated over $117,514.81. Of course, the purpose of these updates was to help small biz owners, but the goodwill we generated will turn into clients who want to do business with us — an amazing unintended consequence.
- We developed a new product specifically designed to help small businesses reach prospects and customers to let them know they’re open again.
- At the end of March, Joy decided to stop paying vendors and go into debt with them rather than lay off staff or cut back on our marketing (about $100,000/week). She saw it like this – we’re a good bet and will pay off our debts once this is over, whereas cutting jobs or marketing was a much bigger cost in her eyes. She wrote about the toll that cutting her marketing in 2008 took on her business on the corona page linked to above.
700% Increase with a More Targeted Approach
Lee Nelson
Chief Marketing Officer at Rotageek
The company I lead marketing for, Rotageek, is a fast-growing SaaS company, with a revolutionary workforce management solution used by businesses such as Gap and Sephora. Since we specialize in the retail and healthcare sectors, it’s been a challenging year. However, our move to Account Based Marketing has seen a seismic shift in our business.
Previously, we had relied on traditional digital marketing and inbound leads but, a few months ago, we entirely switched our focus to Account Based Marketing. By finding our Total Addressable Market, we were able to narrow our focus on a smaller list of about 50-100 key target accounts, and create specific strategies to target those businesses with relevant content and personalized messaging for each. By spending time on research and finding the right decision-makers, and marketing directly to them on channels like LinkedIn along with our sales team doing targeted outreach, we were able to increase the number of meetings and engagements with these prospects by 700% month on month.
Creating a Community
Jeff Neal
The Critter Depot
Something we noticed was that reptile owners are some of the most caring people we’ve ever met. So we wanted to create a platform where they could share pictures of their pet, habitat, and help other community members. So we created CritterFam. CritterFam is a social media network for reptile owners to collaborate on ideas. This has boosted the engagement in our main website, due to our in-house zoologists chiming in with care tips for members that need help.
Trendhijacking, Optimizing, and Content Distribution
Muhammad Mateen Khan
Digital Marketing Strategist at PureVPN
1- Trendhijacking:
The trending topic can be anything – usually, it’s a hashtag, event, meme, or new slang term. It can be difficult to decide the right moment to chime in on a trend- too early and not enough people will understand it, but too late and you’ll be grouped in with the “overdone” category. You also risk being an unwanted or inorganic voice in the conversation.
Done right and tastefully, however, it can be an effective way to cut through the noise, boost your exposure, and gain a few fans. Just like we managed to do with the Australian Bushfire.
2- Optimized SEO title, URL, and OG Image:
The second main reason these posts worked for us was its SEO title, URL, OG image, and graphics which so enticing that wanted readers to find about more and our CTR kept soaring up.
3- Content Distribution:
The third thing which most of the time not given that much importance is content distribution. Great content is a waste if your audience does not know if this exits. For content distribution, we pushed the blog to each platform, groups even asked the relevant influencers to tweet it for maximum exposure.
Stats:
– Title of the blog: Australia is Burning and Cybercriminals are Profiting
CTR: 4%
– Blog Posts CTR: 3.1%
– Social Shares: Facebook: 888
From Face-to-Face to a Nurture Marketing Strategy
Brian
ProStrategix Consulting
We switched to an on-line nurture marketing strategy. Consulting is a very high-touch sell business, which mainly works through networking. COVID put a damper on face-to-face marketing tactics. Therefore, we had to switch gears. We found a nurture marketing strategy to be very effective.
A nurture marketing strategy is where you market content, which highlights your expertise. It’s not a typical ad-based strategy where you try to close the sale with an ad and a landing page. Instead, you provide value-added content to prospects. Those who find the content valuable, exchange an e-mail or connection on LinkedIn. The key is they permit you to talk to you. Once permitted, it’s important not to go into sales mode. Ideally, it is a two-way dialog, where you learn more about each other. Once that rapport is established, then they often ask you for help. We’ve seen our warm lead increase by nearly double and our close rate more than double. It’s a powerful strategy that gets results.
Creating Video Tutorials
Joe Wilson
Senior Career Advisor at MintResume
One of the most effective marketing strategies that can help fuel business growth in 2020 is to create video tutorials. You can teach people something useful, walking them through it. Step-by-step tutorials are quite popular these days. The better you are at this, and the more value you provide, the quicker you can boost your visibility, and ultimately, your sales.
Using Advertisements for Retargeting
Eliza Nimmich
Co-Founder and COO at Tutor The People
If you don’t realize what it is, note you’ve been introduced to it before. For example, you are visiting a website for sports apparel but don’t leave their info. Quite interesting, there is a feature that depicts a website ad of this sports apparel on another platform you visit later on.
If you are interested in the ad, you are going to click on the link; then you are being routed to the page, which is why the name is: retargeting. In addition, this service can be licensed to broad social networking networks. It seems you’re going to be able to reach a particular demographic, filter them out through interest, age, relationship status, and just about a lot more.
The Power of Social Media
Jane W. Muir
J. Muir & Associates
2020 is a tough year for us despite of this pandemic, marketing strategies is one of the best thing that we can do to boost our business online, some of those are by the power of social media’s it will help to gain more influence and prospect clients and also SEO plays important role, it helps you to promote on google by this you can gain more leads, keep in mind that have a great advertising platform is a must. Don’t expect to see the result right away but this strategy can lead you to a great success when you keep working on it.
Multi-Channel Retargeting
Ronald D’souza
Digital Marketing Manager at FJackets
If you want your visitors to become paying customers, only driving traffic to your store or website is not enough, that’s just half the job. In the beginning, we never really paid attention to retarget strategies, but as soon as we made some efforts, it doubled our conversion rate. Now we target our customers from all every channel possible, including Facebook, display ads, email, etc. It’s really helped fuel growth for our business.
Relevance, Competitor Analysis, and Staying Warm
Michal Kowalkowski
Co-Founder and CEO at No Spoilers
Marketing strategies heavily depend on the type of service or product you are trying to market. In my case, it’s a service aimed at bars and restaurants. Here are some of my strategies:
- Use a relevant marketing platform
There is no magic formula that will work for any business. Your brand and your audience determine what marketing platform to use. If your goal is to sell a consumer product or service, you will mostly rely on social media. If other businesses are your customers, you should use email marketing and connect with them via LinkedIn.
Most of my clients responded directly to my emails and we eventually started working together.
- Keep an eye on your competition
You might be selling a better product or service than all of your competitors, but it doesn’t really matter if they beat you on the market. Follow their strategies and social media profiles to see what’s their secret ingredient. It’s not spying, it’s a competitive analysis that can help you identify problems you probably have but don’t realize!
- Stay warm and personal
Businesses, no matter how big or small, need to stay close to their customers. Being cold and reserved in communication or with your visual and textual content is a one-way ticket to failure. Customers need to know that there is a breathing person behind your website, social media profiles, and emails. That person embodies the entire business and they need to make the customer feel welcome.
Podcasting. Podcasting. Podcasting.
Rishav Khanal
CEO at inPerson
This is not a new concept but still deserves the spotlight for its ability to connect businesses with their target audience and build relationships in a virtual world. We started our RecruitingU Podcast (Our business serves HR professionals) in March. to bring on various HR Professionals to talk about what they see in the industry. Not only were we creating valuable content for our target market but also creating the perfect reason to spend an hour in a non-salesy way, building a relationship with potential customers. After each podcast, our guest has asked, “So what is it you guys do”, and gladly set up a follow up conversation with us just about our offering. We’ve been able to get c-suite HR execs all the way from Verizon to HSBC bank on the phone because of this along with thousands of views on each episode.
1200% increase in organic search and 300% ROI with Trust Leveraging
Rhiannon Moore
Marketing Manager at Evopure
Our main marketing strategy is trust leveraging. If you trust a brand, you’ll buy from them, simple. Getting that trust is crucial. We do this by improving our SEO dramatically through link building across different websites.
We pitch to blogs, websites, and news organizations and try to get them to include a link in any way they can on their site – whether by replacing a broken link of theirs, adding value if there is a relevant piece of anchor text, or through guest posts.
The results were amazing. In a very short period of time we had 200+ links, which led to a 1200% increase in organic search, 300% ROI, and 200% more sales through organic search.
Biggest Tip – Utilize Search Engine Optimization
Steve Thompson
Founder and CEO of BootMoodFoot
In my experience so far, one of the biggest tips I’ve learned that should always be included in your strategy is the use of SEO – search engine optimization. This allows you to factor in keywords/most searched phrases into your blog, company website, and more.
Using SEO helps you gain higher amounts of traffic to your site, which is what everyone wants at the end of the day. If you run a website, you can’t go without this in your marketing strategy.
“Video has more than doubled my business”
Oscar Verduga
Founder/Owner of Trusted Realty Inspections
I have a home inspection company and use video as my main marketing strategy. Using video allows me to share more about me and give helpful advice and tips.
Many people have contacted me to do business because they feel like they get to know me through video. This strategy helps them feel like they really know me, which creates trust. Video has more than doubled my business. The first half of the year I only had 10 inspections and in the second half of the year I had 8 inspections in the first 4 weeks.
The Convergence of Online and Offline
Slisha Kankariya
CMO of With Clarity
The future of retail is seamlessly blending online and offline to create the best shopping experience. While it is stress-free to purchase a low cost item online, it can be stress inducing to purchase something that has a high dollar value and emotional value sight unseen online. The best retailers will be able to offer an online experience that alleviates the concerns about purchasing something a consumer hasn’t held in their hands. We offer a free at home preview that allows customer to see a highly realistic 3D printed ring customized for metal color, carat weight and diamond shape. Because we offer this service for free, customers gain confidence in our design and quality. This blend of online and offline that brings convenience to their doorstep goes a long way in blending the best of online and offline.
It’s important to have solutions that cater to the fact that people just don’t care to step into stores as much anymore. Solutions need to ease communication, ease doubts and cater to convenience as much as possible.
Generating Leads Through Guest Posting and SEM
Stanislao Marrazzo
Co-Founder of Italian Food Online Store
Over the years of founding Italian Food Online Stores, we have applied many marketing strategies and have found ourselves consistently growing in our business in terms of availing website traffic and converting these leads into sales.
Here are some of the practices that have helped us tip over from growing on an average rate to growing exponentially.
- Guest Posting – While considering guest blogging, it is highly important to consider that you only reach out to websites that have a medium to high ranking website. Another facet to note is, getting guest bloggers to write about trendy content that has a long shelf value and relevance for a longer period of time rather than being seasonal. Choosing the right kind of content to go up the guest blogging websites is very important. We have seen massive growth in gaining leads, links, and sales as a result of guest blogging. Here’s some data to support our claim. Yes, it has been totally a worthwhile tactic to create engaging content, measuring the effectiveness of our strategy, product & content. This tactic has established us not only as a leading e-commerce website but also as thought leaders in our field. It is always better branding when one establishes oneself as a thought leader rather than an influencer.
- Investing in Search Engine Marketing – During the very beginning of our business life, we saw and learned from experience that you cannot grow a business unless you are willing to invest in it and spend the time and money to grow it well. As these new revelations dawned, we began to sow seeds of search engine marketing and thereby paid attention to focusing all energy into optimizing our eCommerce website to perform well through search engine optimization. SEO can be quite frightening, initially. So, hiring a company proficient at performing these daunting tasks can not only set a sense of relief on our shoulders but entrust the task to experts capable of handling the task. Instead of trying shady PBNs and other schemes in order to trick Google, invest in long term tactics such as SEO & SEM to ensure maximum flow of traffic to the eCommerce website, persuading them into purchasing our products by making it extremely alluring through guest posting links.
- Establishing Lead Magnets – Magnets make metals latch on; the same is expected of leads. In order to create such codependency, it is very necessary for brands to begin creating content that isn’t just captivating with their titles and headlines, but to have a body that adds value to the audience. These kinds of magnetic leads will definitely convert into sales and are more likely to pass on the news about good content and references to another potential customer.
Rise to the Top with Link Building
Gregory Golinski
Head of Digital Marketing at YourParkingSpace.co.uk
Whether you want it or not, link building still is a major criteria to rank on Google and Bing.
Most websites implement the same on-page and technical SEO strategies. What can make a big difference between your website and your competitors is acquiring more high quality backlinks than them.
You need an in-house specialist dedicating their time to build backlinks, or to work with an agency you can trust. Link building takes lots of time so you need someone who can do this full time.
Personal Relationship Over Cold Outreach
John Bedford
Founder of Viva Flavor
My main marketing success in 2020 has come from investing greater time in building personal relationships, rather than broader cold outreach.
At the start of the year I began using HARO exclusively and have been surprised at the results. Traffic has increased exponentially since April, and I’m at a point now where I’m able to get my business featured in around ten authoritative outlets each month.
More significantly, I’ve developed relationships with journalists who work across multiple outlets. As useful as HARO is for journalists, it comes with its own noise. Where they’re working on topics within my area of expertise, a number of them now contact me directly.
It’s a win-win situation, and has increased the return on my marketing efforts significantly.
Creating a Scalable LinkedIn Strategy
Sean McPheat
CEO of MTD Training
Going into Lockdown we needed to change the way we marketed. In my opinion more and more people were going to look towards LinkedIn to either vent, look for work or network.
We created short, sharp motivational pieces around supporting people through the pandemic. So motivational quotes, wellbeing tips, overcoming anxiety, CV tips, homeworking strategies, leading remote teams. These were just images, posted 3 times per day. First thing in the morning at 8am. Then one at 2pm and then one at 8pm.
The average eyeballs that we received on each post was 9,000. It was great for brand awareness. We received an uplift of 28% of visits to my profile (I posted them, much more effective than a company name). I also received 13 new training opportunities from it at a value of approximately £120,000. 4 of those purchased (£45,000) and 4 are still in the pipeline. 5 have been closed lost.
It took pig headed discipline to work out the topics, get them created by our team and then scheduled with a personal note. But it was worth it and still continues to be worth it!
Educating Through Blogging
James Jason
Chief Marketing Officer at Mitrade
In March when Covid-19 was declared a pandemic, people were forced to work remotely while others were rendered jobless. During this period, idea came into my mind that if we could show people how to work from home, maybe they would embrace the concept of online financial trading.
So, we did two things:
First, we reincarnated our blog where we teach our clients how to trade. We started with the basics such as understanding the financial markets. With time, the blog grew and we had a complete course in trading. We were motivated to keep adding the educational material since we saw a huge number of interested learners joining us every day.
Second, we gave our new clients some No Deposit Bonus of $50 which they could use to trade on real accounts and withdraw the profits. This move was aimed at helping them test their knowledge before they deposited their funds. As our projections had predicted, quite a number of new traders took up the offer.
The results have been amazing. Our new customer numbers rose sharply between April and July. More people took up to financial trading and our trend was noticeable to the extent that we won the Fastest Growing Broker in Australia award courtesy of the International Business Magazine.
Live Streaming Through Youtube and Facebook
Jeff Moriarty
Marketing Manager at Moriarty’s Gem Art
Our jewelry business had to close our brick and mortar store during the pandemic. We had to come up with different strategies to keep business going during this difficult time and continue to grow the business.
We started doing live streams through Youtube and Facebook. These live shows allow visitors to view our items, buy online and ask questions. It is something we had discussed in the past, but never went through with, due to time constraints. We are now getting about 1000+ viewers watching our show each time. Not only has it helped to stay connected with our customers, it has generated a ton of sales, $10,000-$12,000 per show for our business. It has been so successful that we have continued it, even with our store now being open. We plan on doing more and more shows each month, and we are hoping to start generating over $50,000 a month from them.
Paid Advertising with Social Media
Randy VanderVaate
President and Owner of Funeral Funds
The #1 marketing strategy that helped fuel our business growth is paid advertising in social media.
We primarily utilize Facebook ads with re-targeting set up to optimize ad performance. The Facebook advertising program allows us to target our ideal demographic (people between 50 and 85 years old). We also utilize Facebook pixels to increase our targeting and lead conversions further.
Pixels help us track everyone who comes to our page, and we can then build custom audiences for people looking for life insurance. Facebook ads drive traffic to our site, increase our lead flow, and increase our sales conversions. Facebook advertising has been our key focus in 2020 to increase our sales and revenue.
Segmenting New Demographics to Improve Personalization
Polly Kay
Senior Marketing Manager at English Blinds
Targeting new demographics who were suddenly forced to stay home for long periods of time as a result of Covid-19 helped us to fuel business growth, as we found ourselves faced with a quite literally captive audience who were staring at the walls – and as a result, contemplating home improvements.
As an interiors company (we retail window blinds and shades) this gave us unrivalled access to a diverse and broad range of new prospect demographics who were already primed and actively seeking inspiration to buy.
We segmented our new targets along quite narrow verticals to improve personalization and developed a number of bespoke individual approaches to resonate with each one, rolled out across various different platforms as relevant to each audience.
Vitally, we were able to keep our supply chain moving (although this was not always a sure thing) and adapt our product lines to accommodate for any delays and shortages, which also gave us a lead over our competitors, many of whom were heavily reliant on sea freight shipments of materials from abroad and so who suffered accordingly.
This uptick in interest, lower than normal level of competition, and rapid and adaptive approach to targeting saw our second and third quarters of 2020 beat all of our prior records.
Social Listening to Cultivate a Community of Consumers
Brandon Monaghan
Co-Founder of Miracle Brand
Marketing strategies that have helped to fuel the growth of my business have been social media content strategies mainly based on Facebook and Instagram as well as SEO marketing strategies. Facebook and Instagram have the best ad platform and despite relatively high ad costs, when you dial in the right creatives you can scale to the moon. Facebook is all about the creatives. You need to figure out what resonates most with your audience, keep testing new angels, and continuously scale your working creatives. Social listening is a huge part of our work on these platforms. Through engaging with our audience we can garner ideas to create future content that will perform even better because it is derived from real and authentic consumer responses. By cultivating a community of consumers, we can build trust and longevity for our product.
When it comes to SEO, the biggest mistakes I see businesses making are not using the right keywords as well as not using negative keywords. When it comes to picking the right keywords, most businesses don’t realize that they need to pick the correct keyword match type depending directly on what type of business they are and in which industry they exist. Secondly, not using the negative keyword feature they increase their costs and lower revenue by not excluding words that aren’t a good match for their business.
Influencer Marketing and SEO
Ashwin Sokke
Co-Founder at WOW Skin Science
From an E-Commerce perspective, we have seen a significant boost in our online sales since the beginning of March. I believe the biggest reason for the growth in sales is our online presence and where we choose to sell; Amazon being our biggest reseller. Most Americans are staying home, afraid to go to grocery stores because of the virus or just wanting to avoid long lines. A lot of merchandise was unavailable in stores at the start of the pandemic, which forced people to resort to buying basic household items online.
Also, buying behavior changed; people were hanging out online more, occupying their time online shopping whilst being stuck inside their homes. Due to these changes, we have shifted a lot of our marketing budget towards SEO and influencer marketing. Our influencer outreach team uses insense.pro and carro to gather influencers to give us UGC (user-generated content). Most of the time we give them free products in exchange for a video testimonial/usage and recommendation.
We also have a collaboration program, where we get access to influencers’ Facebook page/Instagram page to advertise their generated content, it makes it more personalized and gives our brand more reach. Depending on the influencer we give $100/month base pay for getting access to their FB page. We also give them a 5% rev share to all sales that they generate through their links when I say links we use Everflow platform to set up the offers they push. Our media buying team works with their FB pages to promote any products they pushed using UGC ads.
Venturing Into Uncertainty When Others Were Fearful
Nick Bideshi
CEO of Blue Meta
Initial context: we’re a company that is almost 2 years old. Since COVID closures happened in our area (end of March), we’ve nearly tripled in size.
The key realization we made was that most of our industry retracted when COVID happened because clients were dropping off of a lot of our competitors’ rosters. Because we aggressively pushed when others retracted, we were able to capitalize on cheaper costs (as demand for ads lowered). Because we had a strong cash position we were able to capitalize on the opportunity and venture into uncertainty when others were fearful.
We aggressively ramped up our marketing, beginning in April, by changing how we budgeted. Instead of looking at it as a percentage of budgeted top-line revenue, we began only looking at Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) versus the Lifetime Value (LTV) and the number of months it took to pay back CAC once a new account was landed. Our CAC payback period is under 3 months currently, and our marketing budget went from 4k in April to 30k+ in August; the month over month increase in our marketing spend has yet to slow down..
Tactics included: Social media, podcasts, Vlogs (New Meta show), blogs, Pay-per-Click advertising, email marketing, content marketing, SEO.
Creating a Mutually Beneficial Relationship with Influencers
Jessica Rose
Chief Executive Officer of Copper H2O
We have made influencer marketing an integral part of our marketing since our inception in 2015, and we are still making influencer marketing an important part of our marketing strategy during COVID-19. Working with an influencer exposes your brand to an engaged and loyal audience and usually results in the endorsement of a thought-leader (ie. the influencer).
In addition, this strategy is achievable for most small business as many small or mid-sized influencers are willing to collaborate in exchange for a product sample or products that they can give away to their audience through a draw or similar contest. In addition, given that so many small businesses are struggling at the moment, some bigger influencers may also be agreeable to promoting small brands in exchange for product. To maximize value, we like to think of a successful influencer partnership as a two way street. Take the time to brainstorm ways you can help them build on their own brand through the partnership, such as by exposing them to your own social media audience. By making the relationship as mutually beneficial as possible, it is more likely that your influencer will be motivated to make the campaign a success for both of you.
“Interactive content is huge for growth. Audiences don’t engage with boring content.”
Kimberly Smith
Marketing Manager of Clarify Capital
Growth-oriented businesses are tasked with proactively addressing the issue of short attention spans by creating content that captivates. Uninterested audiences are terrible for growth, especially when we’re talking about the impact of disengagement to online user engagement metrics. Search engine rankings suffer when SEO metrics like bounce rate and session duration take a hit. These kinds of things are critical to be mindful of, especially for early-stage companies, because one of the best ways to accelerate buildout is to leverage SEO to maximize visibility.
We decreased our bounce rate by 38% and increased our average session duration by 2.5 minutes, just by incorporating interactive content, like quizzes and assessments, into our home and landing pages. Quizzes and assessments were not only helpful for encouraging our audience to stay on our site longer, but also for gathering insightful information about who our audience was. It’s a double whammy because you’re 1. keeping the audience engaged and 2. learning valuable information about how to better personalize and target subsets of consumers.
High-Quality Content Plus In-Depth Keyword Research
Kevin Miller
Founder and CEO of The Word Counter
A good SEO strategy relies on high-quality content plus in-depth keyword research. If you do the leg work and use keyword research tools like SEMRush or Ahrefs, you can identify hidden opportunities and then capitalize on those opportunities by creating high-quality, keyword-informed content.
We frequently use original research and data in our content. The data is fact-based and usually displayed in visual charts that tell a story. This makes it easy to convey the findings and it is differentiated from normal text. The uniqueness is the key and it must add distinct value.
The key to great content, regardless of whether the goal is marketing or entertainment, is to understand your narrative. How should the consumption of your content marketing make your targets feel? What actions should the assets inspire? Knowing, ideally with data, how different groups of people react to your brand, learn your value proposition, and are motivated to take action is the best lesson I’ve learned.
Since my company’s inception, I’ve formed a fantastic team of employees that help me create content as well as market it effectively. We have scaled quickly and seen tremendous growth.
Develop a Content Marketing Strategy
Zach Passarella
Marketing Director at SMP Nutra
The top marketing strategy we enrolled in this year was a content marketing strategy. With keyword research, we devised the best topics to write about and enhanced that content to be SEO optimized. We then produced this content onto our social medias and continually updated our audience of the new content we are releasing. We have seen a growth in traffic – from January to the end of March we had a total of 23k visitors, then from April to the end of June we had 28k visitors, then from July to today, we have already had 18k traffic, this 3rd quarter we are on track to eclipse 30k users in traffic.
Leveraging Real Time Data and Automation
David Kolodny
Co-Founder at Wilbur Labs
2020 has been a year of challenges and opportunities for marketers everywhere. With consumer behaviors and market dynamics changing at a pace never seen before, marketers are having to rewrite every playbook they use. At Wilbur Labs, we have been focusing our portfolio companies on two important marketing strategies this year:
(1) Let real time data drive marketing decisions.
In ordinary times, looking at historical snapshots can be very helpful and informative. In the course of a global pandemic, historical data is largely worthless because whatever happened last month is not necessarily an indicator for what is happening today or tomorrow. Since the beginning of the year, each Wilbur Labs portfolio company has worked on building dashboards with real-time metrics on every facet of each business to ensure that decisions are being made on the most relevant data possible.
Though trends are smoother now than they were in March and April, we are still seeing rapid customer behavior changes happening on a daily basis, and real-time data loops have directly contributed to greater marketing efficiencies.
(2) Leverage automation to respond to behavior changes.
For the first time in modern history, we are seeing trends, like global eCommerce adoption, that ordinarily would have taken five years occur in five weeks. With such rapid change, it is impossible for manual processes to keep up. By utilizing automation wherever applicable – and connecting it to the real-time data described above – we have been able to ensure that our portfolio companies are maximizing every opportunity available to them.
While every company is subject to macroeconomic effects that may bolster or hinder its marketing results, there are key strategies that can help navigate the swings. By focusing on real-time data and leveraging automation, each of our portfolio companies is running marketing programs that are more efficient than they were prior to the start of the year.
Focus on Existing Customers and Increase Exposure with Social
Andrei Vasilescu
CEO and Digital Marketing Specialist at DontPayFull
Businesses all over the world are going through a massive turmoil since the pandemic hit the world. Almost nothing is running normal in this unprecedented business situation. Along with other things, business marketing is also struggling to get the benefits for the businesses. These two marketing strategies are working really well to grow businesses in this new normal scenario.
Focus on your existing customers
Before COVID-19, three times more efforts were required to get a new customer than influence an existing customer to purchase from you. The global pandemic has caused everyone to change their purchasing habits and frequencies. Now people are prioritizing their true needs over any other purchasing stimulants. In this pandemic period, you need to pour ten times more efforts to do the same. So, focus on those who’ve already purchased from you at least once. Identify every singly strong point of your product or service and mention those to your existing customers. They’ve already trusted you and if you value their trust, they’re ready to buy from you again. Most importantly, your existing customers can be the best promoters of your brand. They are likely to refer your business to other people who are looking for trustable brands for their requirements. In this way, your existing customers can get you a lot of new customers and that is exactly you want in this tight business situation. A number of businesses have already taken this marketing strategy now in 2020 and they’re getting better ROI than they expected.
Invade social media for massive exposure
Social media marketing has been a great marketing tool for businesses for years. But, this marketing medium has reached the highest potential since the pandemic outbreak. COVID-19 has forced us to remain at home, avoid public gatherings, work from home etc so many new normal practices. From April 2020 since when the pandemic hit us globally, consuming social media contents has increased many times than before. People including your customers and target audience are looking for everything in social networks. To meet up the expectations, popular social media channels have also introduced many useful features to support sellers and buyers at the same time. Hence, any business contents shared through social media platforms are now capable of attracting several times more people towards the brands. So, run wide and frequent social media campaigns with more planning and intensity than before to grow your business during this tough business situation in 2020.
122% Increase in Business Through Podcasting, Courses, and Social Media
Katie Grimes is an International Sober Dating Coach
Marketing strategies that helped fuel my business growth in 2020 included:
- launching a podcast Anything for Love where I speak to sober people who want to learn how to feel better and have outstanding love lives
- I’d include virtual and digital courses I was offering or upcoming Summit of Love, which I made virtual this year
- LinkedIn and Instagram have been helpful to market my business. I have used IGTV videos with captions to help support all types of learners in my audience.
Business has increased by 122% from 2019 to 2020 with the highest grossing months being March – September 2020. I’ve increased my total number of private clients from 2 to 12 and run 3 successful virtual groups with a total of 18 women who are either looking to take time off of dating and those who are ready to let love into their lives.
