When you’re running a business, sometimes it’s important to see immediate results. Some businesses have the luxury of setting long-term marketing plans in motion, and waiting months for them to pay off – others aren’t so lucky. If you’re running a business, and you want to start seeing some instant results, here are a few of the most effective marketing strategies that you should try.
You Need a Great Website
First, it’s essential that you have a great website. All your other marketing strategies will rely on your website and it will do a lot of the work when it comes to converting leads. What do we mean by a great website? There are a few requirements:
To start, it needs to have an eye catching design. Your website can’t simply be a solid background color with some text on it. You need to have a professional looking website, one that shows you’re a legitimate business who takes this seriously. To do this, you’ll want the following elements:
- Great, high-definition graphics
- A site that’s optimized for mobile devices
- A simple color scheme
- Text that is easy to read
- And finally, an easy to use navigation menu
Once you have all this, the other thing you should focus on is optimizing your website for the search engines. While a great search engine optimization (SEO) strategy takes time to implement, you can see often see some immediate effects. Sometimes a few small changes to your on page SEO can bump you to the top of search results and start bringing in more visitors. To learn more about getting started with SEO, you can check out this guide.
If you don’t already have a website, or if yours is a little lackluster, now is the time to change that. Having a professional website is one of the best things you can do to give your marketing efforts an immediate boost.
Online Business Listings
Now that you have a great website, it’s time to start getting the word out. If you’re running a local business, a good way to do this is through online business listings. Google My Business Page is an excellent place to start, as these results often appear at the top of search results.
For example, let’s say you run a local heating and air conditioning company. When someone in your area searches on Google for “Furnace repair near me”, you want to appear at the top of the results. And while SEO, among other tactics, can help you appear higher in the organic search results, Google often places business listings at the top automatically. By creating a page on their service (for free), you can instantly jump to the top and start bringing in more visitors to your website.
Email Marketing
Next up, if you don’t already have an email marketing campaign in place, now is the time to get one. Studies have shown that email marketing is one of the most effective marketing strategies for not only bringing in new customers, but retaining the old ones. Email marketing allows you to instantly connect with your customers in a place that they likely check daily. And unlike SEO or Inbound Marketing, which requires that you wait for potential customers to look for you, Email marketing allows you to do the reaching out.
To get started with an email marketing campaign, you need to first get the email addresses of any interested or past customers. There are a few ways you can go about doing this. You could create a newsletter and promote it on your site. You could ask for email addresses when someone completes a purchase. Or you can have a “request more information” section on your website which requires an email address.
However you do it, once you have plenty of email addresses, it’s time to start marketing towards them. There’s a fine balance between emailing your list too often and not enough that you’ll need to learn. But, when you get it right, you’ll likely find that you’re able to drive in instant results with just a simple email out to your list.
If you’d like to learn more, this guide on email marketing can give you some great tips. After you’ve been running a campaign for a while, you’ll want to look into things like drip campaigns, video email signatures, and outreach automation tools.
Social Media Marketing
One of the greatest tools available to businesses these days is social media. With it, you can instantly connect with hundreds, if not thousands, of people, all with just a few clicks of your mouse. Similar to email marketing, social media allows you to connect with your target audience at a place they visit often. In fact, one study found that social media users across the world spend on average about 135 minutes on social media sites each day.
To get to the point where social media can deliver instant results, you need to build up a following. The more people you can get to follow your Facebook page or Twitter account, the wider audience you’ll have when you send out a message. Imagine if you have 1,000 people following your Twitter account, all of whom have shown an interest in your product or services. If only 10 percent of those people see a message about a new sale you’re having – or 100 people – chances are a few of them will turn into a sale.
Social media is easy to use and allows you to instantly connect to a large audience. To get started, set up accounts on various popular social media networks. Then work on connecting with others in your niche, and promote your social accounts on your website. From there you can get more in-depth if you’d like, learning about things such as using the right dimensions for Instagram stories, how to auto schedule your tweets, or how to target an audience with Facebook ads. But for now, feel free to keep it simple. If you do, it likely won’t be long before you have a good following, and you’re able to instantly turn a simple message into results.
Hold a Contest
Finally, a great strategy for instant results is holding a contest. Contests provide immediate results because they have a deadline and encourage people to act now. For example, let’s say you’re a freelance photographer. To promote your services, you offer free lightroom product photography services to one lucky winner. To enter, all people need to do is either provide you with an email address or share your post on social media.
Now, for just the cost of this prize, you’ve accumulated plenty of email addresses for your email marketing campaigns, and reached out to a wider audience on social media. With this you can then promote your other services – maybe you teach a class on landscape photography or specialize in pet photography.
Contests get people who have an interest in your product or services to engage with your brand. Even if they don’t win the contest, they may spend some time browsing around at your other products or services and decide to become a customer. Sometimes half the battle is just getting people through the door, and a contest is a great way to do this.
Turn Your Instant Results Into Long-Term Success
While we all want immediate results, you shouldn’t let them distract you from your longer term goals. The above strategies should help you to see the results you’re after in the short them, but if you keep at them, they can also deliver long-term success. Hopefully this guide was able to give you some ideas on how to start driving in instant results, and it won’t be long before your numbers start to improve. Good luck!
Video – What is Marketing?
This MBN (Market Business News) explains in simple English what marketing is.