We love finding the brightest marketing minds and getting the opportunity to pick their brains! If you haven’t met Ryan Lee Cox from J.C. Hart, be sure to put that on your bucket list! His refreshing approach to apartment marketing keeps us on our toes and we are thrilled to have him as our guest blogger this week!
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There isn’t a magic pill for marketing success. If your favorite talking head swears by one…find a new talking head. The fact is that marketing is the most ubiquitous and transformative department of your company, big or small. Marketing is something that shouldn’t live in one silo or have it’s own wing of your Google Complex. Marketing should be woven into all tactics and operations of a business to be successful. “The value of integrated marketing communications and of departments working together cohesively is more important now than it ever has been in our history,” said Gini Dietrich…and she’s spot on.
But as the saying goes, Rome wasn’t built in a day, so how can you get a quick marketing win? A quick win is something that you can implement with little to no approval or oversight needed, but it can give a bump to your marketing efforts and hopefully your sales. Here are 3 quick marketings wins:
Quick Marketing Win #1: SEO, Optimize existing pages
This is pretty 101 marketing, but remarkably powerful. There are gobs of free SEO tools and posts written about optimizing your pages, so getting your site as optimized as possible, is only going to help drive traffic for those inbound marketing campaigns you do. Getting started is as simple as installing Google Webmaster Tools. Simply adding and verifying your site with Webmaster Tools gives you access to data you can use immediately, and it’s important data: errors when Google crawls your website, recommendations for HTML improvements and a tone of content keyword data and links to your site that can help you from a content/inbound perspective in the long tail. Heck, even if you only use it to identify the 404 errors Google finds when it crawls your site, you can quickly setup to have those bad links redirected to the right page and turn back on that link’s juice.
Making sure your images, header tags, URL structure and your keywords are optimized will show an almost immediate bump to your web traffic and conversion rates.
Quick Marketing Win #2: Referrals, Top-of-mind-awareness from reviews
Reviews, ratings and social mentions matter. If you’ve got your head in the sand and think they don’t, go stand here. Whatever the top two or three review sites are for your business, get your reviews up there. Reach out to your past and current customers and incentivize them to back-fill a review or leave a new one. This immediately gives value in four areas:
- You gain reviews on the platforms people are looking to/for reviews such as Yelp or ApartmentRatings.com. Additionally, it will improve your ranking on those sites, which all showcase the most recent review.
- It offers itself as an opportunity for those customers to take to social media in addition to leaving the review. From tweets and @ mentions on Twitter, to LinkedIn recommendations, there are a ton of social cues you can collect from reviews. Furthermore, it’s not out of the realm of possibility for them to take to Facebook or even write a blog post raving about your product or service.
- Refreshes your last touchpoint with the customer. This gives you an opportunity to up-sale, resale or engage them in additional offerings. This is a simple ‘top-of-mind-awareness’ (TOMA) tactic that has been physiologically
proven to increase sales. Google Ipsos MediaCT conducted a research experiment to measure the impact of search ads on brand awareness in 2013. Here’s another fascinating report on consumer-based brand equity and top-of-mind-awareness.
- Content, content, content. Sorry, content dudes, but it’s just plain old marketing. With that being said, you immediately get a plethora of content marketing opportunities from a product or service and expertise angle.
Quick Marketing Win #3: Social Ads, Promoted posts on Facebook
Setting up effective Google ads and Facebook ads isn’t a quick win. However, promoting content, contests or specials on Facebook is absolutely a quick marketing win. In a matter of minutes, you can choose your audience (an existing one you’ve created, or better target whom’ll be served the promoted post) and the total amount you want to spend. By boosting your post, your CPM (cost per impression) will be dirt cheap. For example, here are the stats on something I ran last week: 13,756 Reach | 1,378 Post Engagements | $0.04 Per Post Engagement. Talk about a quick marketing win.
Utilizing social media to boost TOMA is a very strategic but easy to execute way to nab a quick marketing win.
Be aware what other’s are doing for quick marketing wins.
For my parting shot, I want to remind you to be sponge-like aware of your fellow marketing professionals. Marketers are not silent types by nature, so they’re going to be big and bold about their wins. Always have your ears open and be on the lookout for someone boasting about a recent quick win they had — imitation is the sincerest for of flattery after all, right?