Jumpstart Your Marketing With These Commonly Overlooked Channels

Jumpstart Your Marketing With These Commonly Overlooked Channels

Hi. Today, I'm going to talk about how to jumpstart your marketing with these commonly overlooked channels. Hi, I am Tim Fitzpatrick with Rialto Marketing. Thanks so much for taking the time to tune in. I thought that this was an appropriate topic right now because we've got a lot of businesses that are starting to go back and open up after we've had these shelter in place lockdown orders, and we've got to find ways to jumpstart our marketing if our business has fallen off the face of the earth or is just surviving.

So, I'm going to talk about five things that I think a lot of businesses overlook that are really key to marketing success.

5 Things Businesses Overlook to Marketing Success

So, first one, fundamentals first. And this really isn't a marketing channel per se, but you can't skip the fundamentals. The fundamentals don't change no matter what you're doing, and they are keys to success. You can't possibly stand up to the plate and hit a major league fastball if you don't have a proper stance, you're not holding the bat correctly, your head's not in the right position. Marketing is the exact same way. You've got to get the fundamentals in place. They lay the foundation for the rest of your marketing to be successful and effective. To me, the marketing fundamentals, I like to call them the marketing strategy trilogy. You have to know who your target market is. If you don't know who you're trying to reach, you're not going to reach anybody. But when you know who you're trying to reach, it is much easier to find those people. You've got to have great messaging that is clear and engaging. If you confuse people, you're going to lose them. And the last thing, a part of the marketing strategy trilogy, is a plan. You got to have a plan. If you don't have a plan in place, you're planning to fail. Right? A plan helps keep you focused so you know exactly what you need to do and what you need to execute on. And when you're done with that, executing that plan, you can measure the results, wash, rinse, and repeat, and just keep doing the same thing over and over again. So, that is the first one, you got to have the fundamentals in place first.

The next channel, your website. Not to say most businesses overlook their website, most businesses at this point have a website. You got them if you want to be successful. But, there're a lot of bad websites out there. They're not clear. People land on the website, they don't understand what you do, they're not sure what they need to do to buy it. You've got to have a solid message on your website and it's got to be effective. Your website is the hub of your marketing. Everything that you do to try and drive new business drives traffic back to your website. Even if it's offline, even if I'm having a conversation with somebody, I'm networking. Right? I'm speaking. That is driving people to go look at my website. So, it's got to be right. You can't afford it to not be effective. So, if you don't have good messaging, you don't have good calls to action, you don't have an updated design, now is the time to make sure that your website is right because everything else you do is going to drive traffic back to it.

Number three is email marketing. I cannot tell you how many people I talk to who've been in business 5, 10 plus years. They've worked with thousands of customers and they're not emailing their customers, their past customers, their current customers on a regular basis. You're missing out. Okay. Email marketing still works. People always say, "Oh, I can't stand getting all these emails." I don't care. It still works. If you are adding value to people through the messages that you send, it will still work. Email marketing is incredibly inexpensive compared to other marketing channels. It's a fundamental channel. You have to start using it if you are not using it. Email is a great way to stay in touch with current and past customers. It's a great way to nurture potential prospects that you haven't even done business with. Help nurture them to the point where they're ready to buy. If you're emailing people consistently, you're staying in front of them. Okay. Even if they're not reading your email messages, they're still seeing your company name. It's still helping you stay top of mind. Okay. Take advantage of email marketing. It is a low hanging fruit for a lot of businesses because they're just not using it at all.

So, number four, online reviews. Super, super important for local businesses. But, I still think online reviews are relevant and add value for businesses that are doing business regionally or nationally. If you're not doing online reviews, certainly you've got to at least get testimonials. Okay. But I would highly recommend you have a plan in place to generate online reviews consistently. They're super important for building trust, building credibility. For local businesses, online reviews are fantastic and really helped with local SEO. It's not everything you need to do to drive traffic from a local SEO standpoint, but online reviews are a part of that. So, you're definitely going to get a boost when you're consistently getting and you've got a lot of online reviews. So, really, really important. And if you can, try to get people when they're leaving online reviews to focus on, hey, what problem did you solve for them? How did you help them? And what was the benefit or the results that they saw from it? Now, in order to get consistent online reviews, three steps. Three simple steps. One, you got to have a way to consistently ask, whether that's via email or you've got point of sale materials, you have to have some way in your sales process to consistently ask for people to leave reviews. Two, you've got to make it easy for them to leave reviews. If you make them jump through hoops, if you don't tell them what you want them to do, people are not going to leave reviews. But if you make it easy for them, I think most people do want to help. So, if you make it easy for them, you will consistently get reviews. Not everybody's going to leave one, but just make it easy. And then three, you've got to monitor your reviews. Respond to your reviews, good and bad. Bad reviews, just take them offline. "Hey, I'm so sorry. We strive for a hundred percent satisfaction, but we fall short at times. Please reach out to us here." Give him a number, give him an email, and take that offline. With positive reviews, just respond, "Hey, thanks so much. We enjoyed working with you." When you do that, you are showing people that you are proactive and that you care. Okay. So, online reviews, they don't have to be tough. You just got to put a process in place and start doing it. 

Last tip I've got for you, last channel is content. Okay. Content attracts ideal clients. It adds value to your audience and it helps build relationships. At this point, you've got to produce content in some way, shape, or form. And I like to use the term content fairly loosely. Right? Blog posts, videos, podcasts, but content is also white papers, case studies. It's the messages that you are sending out to potential clients and to current clients. That's all content. The stuff you put out on social media is all content. Okay. You've got to be putting out content. It's really tough to build consistent leads without content at this point. I mean, content is so prevalent and a lot of people say, "Hey, everybody's doing it. There's too much content out there." I still think you have to do it. You have to put out content that adds value to your audience in some way, shape, or form. It doesn't have to be difficult. For example, video is a great way to produce content if you're comfortable with it. You can repurpose videos. It can go to YouTube. You can transcribe videos to blog posts. You can take the audio portion of it and turn it into a podcast. You can get tons of mileage from video. This video I'm shooting right now is with a $50 webcam. I do have a decent mic, but it's not hard. Do it. You can repurpose that and put out a ton of great content with video. But, I don't care how you do it. Just start putting out content on a consistent and regular basis. 

Conclusion

So, those are the five channels. Okay. You've got the fundamentals first, your website, email marketing, online reviews, and content. So, I hope you found that helpful. Don't try to do all of them at once if you're not doing all of them. Choose one, start doing it, and run from there. Okay. Thanks so much for tuning in. Again, I am Tim with Rialto Marketing. Remember, marketing your business shouldn't be a challenge. All you need is a plan. Thanks for tuning in and take care. We'll see you next time. See ya.