4 Expert Marketing Tips You Might Be Missing

When you’re developing your marketing strategy and building a platform for your business, you take your cues from the experts. Unfortunately, the so-called experts don’t always share all of their secrets–and that means that you might be missing out on some of the best ways to market your business, increase your platform, and learn more about the needs of your customers. Here, you’ll find some of the marketing tips and secrets that will help catapult your business to new levels of success.

1. The best way to attract customers through content marketing is to create something unique.

You’re living in the middle of the information age. The internet is filled with the so-called secrets of your industry. Information is available with a few clicks of the mouse. If you’re creating the same thing everyone else in your industry is creating, recycling the same few tired bits of news and discussing the same general issues, you’re going to struggle to obtain higher search engine rankings and to draw traffic specifically to your business. Creating new content, on the other hand, is the fastest way to make your business stand out from the crowd.

How do you take the existing pool of topics for your industry and come up with something new? There are several strategies that may help you.

• Stay on the cutting edge of breaking news so that you’re one of the first to report an announcement, rather than the last.
• Create unique sales, promotions, or contests that are of interest to your customer. Ideally, these should draw them in and encourage their interaction with your brand, not just require them to click a few buttons to participate.
• Disagree with the stated opinion or offer new information that can’t be found on your competitors’ sites. A good disagreement is often the best way to drive new traffic.
• Consider aspects of your business that might not be shared by your competitors. Are you more environmentally friendly? Do your products or services fit their needs in a way that your competitors’ don’t? Create content based on the way your business stands out.
• Take a personal, behind-the-scenes look at what your business does. Invite them to meet your staff or see your manufacturing process–something that gives your customers a solid look at your company.

2. You don’t have to come up with fascinating new ideas every time you create a new piece of content.

What piece of content, whether it’s a blog post, a video, or a social media post, did exceeding well? Choose a piece that is genuinely relevant to customers: an evergreen piece that keeps drawing traffic. Then, transform it into a different kind of media. For example:

• A blog post filled with numbers and statistics that people visit on a regular basis might make a great infographic.
• A video that received lots of likes and shares, but that gave only a shallow view of a particular subject, could turn into a blog post–or several blog posts!–that go into greater detail.
• A podcast that was a rousing success could become a quick video.
• A popular infographic could be expanded into a blog post, video, or podcast with more information.

Don’t forget the value of gated content! You can use your most popular free content to create paid content or gated content that will benefit both you and your customers. Ebooks, white papers, and webinars are also great ways to reach out to your customers. You can either ask them to pay for the content, which then becomes another source of revenue for your business, or take “payment” in the form of their contact information, which increases your list of marketing contacts.

3. The metrics that matter for everyone else might not matter for you.

What are you tracking when it comes to determining the success of your content? Are you staring at a page filled with numbers and just hoping that they’ll go up, or do you have a solid understanding of what those numbers mean for your business and how they align with your goals? When considering the key marketing metrics that are important for your business, make sure you’re considering the critical points that matter most to you.

• If you’re hoping to increase conversion rates with your content, the number of visitors you receive to a particular piece doesn’t matter as much as the number of visitors who convert as a result.
• Unique site views are a great way of tracking how your content is building your readership and attracting more interest in your business–particularly useful when you’re just starting your blog or you’re a new business that’s just starting to get the word out about what you have to offer.
• When you’re looking for increased site traffic, paying attention to what social media posts receive the most interaction might be a more useful metric than, for example, how many people saw the post.

In order to select the marketing metrics that are worth tracking for your business, it helps to ask a few key questions. First, what are you hoping to accomplish with your content? Second, what type of media are you using in order to accomplish it? For a video, where customers typically stop watching may be more relevant than how many people started watching. Finally, consider what your long-term goals are for your marketing efforts. They might not be the same goals as others in your industry–and that’s okay! Your business is unique. Chances are, your marketing goals will be, too.

4. Social media marketing tips: Your strategy will be unique, and no one can predict what will work for you.

Why is it that some content goes viral, while other, similar content remains unnoticed? How is it that some pages have hundreds or even thousands of followers, while another page doing the exact same thing goes essentially unnoticed? There is no magical formula for social media marketing success–and it often takes a large number of followers before you start seeing success in that arena. Building your social media profiles takes time and effort. If you’re lucky, you’ll hit on the secret to your success–but there are no guarantees! Instead of getting trapped by all the things the experts say you should be doing, aim for these strategies for growing your social media audience.

• Create content that appeals to your audience. Do you have a group of people who are interested in your products or services and genuinely want to interact with others concerning them? Creating a Facebook group is a great way to make it happen.
• Hashtags on Twitter and Instagram are a great way to find people talking about the right topics for your business. Excessive hashtags are a great way to annoy your existing followers. Find the balance.
• Pay attention to engagement. Shares, retweets, and responses are great measurements of how well a particular post is doing with your audience. If a specific topic isn’t particularly engaging to your audience, don’t keep posting about it.
• Examine how posting frequency chances engagement rates. For most businesses, there’s a “sweet spot” between posting so little that they’re never able to get word out and posting so much that customers scroll straight past their posts without stopping to read them. Find the right spot for your business.
• Social media marketing isn’t free. To maintain it well, you have to dedicate time and effort. Paid ads are also a great way to get your content in front of the right eyes, especially when you’re first starting out.

Building your marketing strategy is a time-consuming process. What works for one business–even the ones that claim to be experts in their field–won’t necessarily work for another. As you find your sweet spot, however, you’ll discover that these universal strategies will make it easier to reach your marketing goals and promote your business in unexpected ways.