We’ve all witnessed the power of the Internet at this point in our lives. As business owners, we value the effectiveness of online marketing and harness it to our full advantage. But like most savvy online entrepreneurs, we realize that it’s possible to grow and expand our reach even further. The only real problem we face is figuring out how to make it happen.
Today, we’d like to help you take a step in the right direction. When you have the best methods in place, you can begin marketing your business online through social media, paid advertising, content marketing, blogger outreach, and more.
No one is saying you have to reinvent the wheel. On the contrary, you should focus on tried and true marketing methods that work, but experiment and put your own spin on them so they’re most effective for your brand and audience.
Sound good? Now’s the time to show you how to make the magic happen!
1. Crush it with Blogger Outreach
Guest posting is a hot commodity right now. It’s the perfect way to connect with a wider audience by sharing valuable content on blogs in your niche. By taking this approach to audience expansion, you’ll create valuable, teachable, and entertaining content and get permission to post it on other people’s blogs. Getting the okay to post is often where the biggest challenge lies.
You see, many online business owners have a tough time connecting with influential bloggers in their niche. In fact, they often send out desperate sounding emails practically begging high traffic blogs to post their content.
This is seriously a huge turnoff to bloggers, so you have to take a much smarter approach than this. Remember, most high traffic authority blogs are inundated with guest posting requests, so you need to stand out in the crowd if you’re going to get noticed in a positive light. You’ll get noticed too when you beg for a guest posting handout, but not in a good way. So avoid that approach at all costs.
How should you approach bloggers for potential guest posts? The easiest way is to not approach them at all, at least at first. Start out by sending your target blogger an email, tell them how much you absolutely adore their blog, and offer to help them in some way.
You can try a few different tactics. You should definitely use flattery because it will get you everywhere! Also offer to add the blog to a roundup post that they’ll promote everywhere so it goes viral. Or offer to write free content for the blog, promote it to their growing audience via email and social media, or do any other favor that seems appropriate at the time. If all else fails, don’t be afraid to offer the blogger cold hard cash. Money talks. Remember that. And bloggers love getting paid too!
Now that you understand the best ways to approach an authority blogger in your niche, you need to do it on a large scale to make a big impact and accelerate your online business growth. So get to work people!
Start finding the best blogs in your market and ask for a chance to guest post. The more the merrier and the more blogs that say yes, the further you’ll expand your audience.
But this only works if you create high value, kick ass content. If you slap together crap you’ll get crappy results. If you deliver awesome content, you’ll have awesome results. So put in the time, make the effort, and reap the rewards!
2. Finding the Right Ways to Advertise through Experimentation
Do you want to know the biggest reason why so many online marketers fail? They spend too much money and time advertising their products and services and never analyze the data generated through these experiments.
More often than not, when you initially test out new forms of advertising like pay per click marketing or social media ads on Facebook or Twitter, you’ll end up spending a small fortune without experiencing too much success. As long as your ads are set up correctly, you can track your progress using programs like Google Analytics or other ad tracking software and determine which ads were successful, which keywords drove the most traffic and lead, and other important key data points.
Now that you have this information readily at hand, you can use it to tweak your advertisements and take them to the next level. This information is crucial to your company’s success. You have to kill the ads that don’t work and begin throwing a lot more money at the ads that are effective. Once you make these tweaks and kick things up a notch, you’ll have no problem accelerating your online business growth this quarter, next quarter, and as long as your advertisements keep working. Read about The European Business Review.
European automaker Dacia is a great example of putting experimentation into action. They were recently struggling with lead generation and brand awareness, so they experimented with Facebook ads to improve their results.
How did they improve their reach and start generating more leads? With boosted Facebook posts. In these posts, they showcased ads about 3 specific vehicle models: the Stepway, Sandero, and Logan.
They didn’t just post one ad for each and call it a day. They tested dozens, if not hundreds of ads for desktop and mobile users. After they’d gathered enough data, they saw which ads worked and which didn’t, killed the losers, tweaked their middle-of-the-road ads to make them better, and pushed hard on their biggest winners.
Guess what? In a short while, they cut their lead costs by 45%, had a six-point increase in brand favorability, a six-point increase in purchase intent, and a 27 point ad recall increase.
In total, they increased their brand awareness, generated a plethora of leads, and paid much less for the privilege. If you aren’t experimenting with advertising, it’s time to step up and make a move.
Remember, no advertisement method works forever. Eventually, you’ll reach a point of saturation and fewer and fewer people will continue to click your ads. Once this happens, you’ll need to change things up again to get the traffic snowball rolling full force to continue to plow full steam ahead.
3. Use Automation to Your Advantage
The fastest way to accelerate your online business growth is through automation. Most people tend to learn this the hard way after years of sweat, toil, and failed marketing experiments that are too long and too time-consuming. If you automate your online business growth, you can achieve bigger and better success in a much quicker time frame.
As an example, let’s say you plan to expand your brand and reach through content marketing. You can approach this in two different ways. First, you can hire in-house writers or ask your current staff to write the content along with you and plaster it all over the Internet. Since you already have so many other responsibilities, as well as your staff, this really isn’t going to be feasible unless you decide to work like dogs until you finally burn out.
Or, you can hire freelancers to create high-quality content based on your specifications and requirements. These expert professionals will deliver the goods, help you put together a fantastic content marketing campaign, and you’ll begin seeing results very quickly.
Obviously, automating content creation is only one step in the process. You could automate other areas by hiring freelancers to post blogs to your site, reach out to potential blogs for guest posting opportunities, and much more.
Remember, building a team takes time. You aren’t going to get it right on the first try. In many cases, it could take years. And the team you have right now might look totally different six months from now as new members join and others leave to move on to different projects.
By taking full advantage of these automation tactics, your company will grow fast throughout the quarter, and Office 365 is a great solution to automate your processes!
4. Connect with Your Potential Audience on Social Media
Finally, you need to start using your social media accounts to connect with your audience. Get to know them on a personal level and share insightful, relevant, original, and personal content with them.
People love buying products and services from businesses they know, like, and trust. By developing a personal relationship with your audience through social media, you’ll become their go-to company in your specific niche.
A few years back, Red Bull wanted to improve brand awareness of their new “Summer Edition” drink in the Australian market. How did they intend to do this? They choose to run an Instagram campaign to reach their target audience.
To make a long story short, you’ve probably guessed that their Instagram experiment was a huge success. They shared summer oriented videos and images across their channel and incorporated a yellow filter to make it seem more like a sunny day.
The results were outstanding. Their campaign reached 1.2 million Australians, improved top of mind awareness and favorability, and convinced many Red Bull fans to try their new flavor. It was a wild success, to say the least.
Conclusion
When all’s said and done, it’s certainly possible to accelerate your online business growth this quarter. Please use the steps we’ve shared today and you’ll have no trouble setting this foolproof marketing plan in effect quickly to reap the fruits of your labor just as fast. Also, Checkout Norstrat.
