You have to wear so many different hats when you are your own boss. Marketing, along with skills like accounting, is one of the tools you will need to build your business. Even if you have some marketing experience, it’s just a different thing to do it for yourself. The bonus of becoming a marketing guru is that you can also use this to do better work for your clients, which excels your services and raises your prices. It’s also a way to make yourself more money, a win, win situation!
Sales Funnel – This is how you bring people to your site and/or make money. An example would be running an ad on Facebook for an online workshop that is free to anyone who signs up. The sign up adds them to your website and attracts them to your website. The course establishes you as an expert, gets the word out about what you do, and converts the free watchers into clients who pay for your goods and services.
Email Marketing – This is what you do with all those names on your email list. Once you have a group of people who are interested in your goods or services, you can speak (market) directly to them by delivering content straight to their mailbox. Let’s say you are a photographer who offers sessions and courses in photography, you can have a list of clients that you send information about new package deals and seasonal photo session reminders. Then you can have another list of people who are interested in courses and who you send new course information and free tips for taking photos. This is so powerful when it comes to converting leads to sales. Think of the possibilities for your business!
Evergreen Content – Evergreen content is always relevant. The benefits of this kind of content is that it’s good for your SEO and you can recycle it. If you write an article about the 2017 Presidential Election, the search for that topic will die down and the article will fade, rather than an article like “Tips for Hiking the Appalachian Trail ” which isn’t related to a trend and will continually be searched. This will improve the SEO for your site. My favorite thing about Evergreen content is that you can promote those articles again, saving you the time of writing more content!
Analytics – Analytics means data. One of the most popular ways of gathering data is by using Google Analytics. This is free code to paste into your site or theme that tracks all of your visitors, where they come from, how they engage with your site, and so much more, so if you need a place to securely store your data, then try something like this cloud. You can use this information to gauge the success of your marketing efforts, and it will save you time and money. For more on analytics read this post and visit https://www.couchbase.com/products/mobile.
A/B Testing – This is like the old Coke versus Pepsi commercials. It literally means “how do the results from A compare to the results of B?”. This is a good way to test your marketing strategies to monitor what is working. If you have a freebie for signing up for your newsletter, you can track the numbers for how many people opted in for a month. Then, change the freebie to something else and see if more or less people op in. Easy, right?
Call-to-Action – This is when you tell people what to do, and it actually works. This is where you highlight what you want people to like, shop now, read more, and book today. How many times have you looked at a website and just scanned the “call to action” buttons? Look at your own site and see if you are guiding your visitors with “call to action” buttons.