Startup Marketing Hacks You Can Do in an Hour

If you are like me, you often have little buckets of time throughout the day and want to make the most of them.

So what are some quick and worthwhile tasks (or marketing hacks) to get the marketing needle moving forward?

I reached out to some friends who are amazing marketers and entrepreneurs and they had some great tips to share:

Talk About Others and Utilize Their Audience

by Cody McLain; CEO of SupportNinja

@codymclain

A really effective way of organic growth (when it comes to having a company blog) is not only talking about a relevant topic or industry that your customers might be interested in, but research the points you make within the blog post and quote content and share ideas from other bloggers.

Then after you publish the blog post, send them a tweet and a simple email letting them know you think they’re awesome and so you featured them in a recent blog post.

They’re likely to retweet and share a link to all their followers thus adding notoriety for your business in the respective industry.

Build a Great Email Marketing Template

by Anne Marsden; Principal Marsden Marketing
@annemarsden

6 Key Elements to Include in Every Email Marketing Template

Not long ago, the industry speculated that email marketing might be passé for the modern marketer. Instead of fizzling out, however, email marketing has evolved thanks to the inbound marketing methodology and the development of tools like marketing automation.

In fact, HubSpot, a leader in the marketing automation & inbound marketing industry, found that companies using email to nurture leads generate 50% more sales-ready leads and at a 33% lower cost. And nurtured leads, on average, produce a 20% increase in sales opportunities compared to non-nurtured leads.

So, you’re ready to ramp up your email marketing program, but aren’t sure where to start? Whether you’re sending out a content offer, newsletter, or company announcement, here are a few key components to include in every email you send.

1. Company Branding – If you’re like us, your email inboxes are most likely flooded by 11 a.m. on weekdays. It’s important that people who open your email be able to immediately recognize whom the correspondence is from. Be sure that all your email templates have been designed to include your logo and brand colors.
2. Your Unique Value Proposition – Due to ever-dwindling attention spans of today’s email recipients, it’s important that your email content clearly address the value of your offer. Use elements like statistics, bullet points and links to state your UVP and get that click.
3. Call-to-Action – Attracting your prospects via a call-to-action is a critical element of permission-based marketing. Every email should include a button, image, or link that supports whatever your conversion goal for the email is.
4. Relevant Images – 65% of people prefer emails with images rather than just text, according to HubSpot. Be sure to include attention-grabbing, powerful images that support your unique offer.
5. Social Sharing Buttons – Including social sharing links in your email will help extend your reach. Including these buttons makes it easy for recipients to share your offers with their own extended networks.
6. Unsubscribe/CAN–SPAM Link – In order to comply with CAN-SPAM regulations, your email footer should contain a clear “unsubscribe” link, and a link that allows recipients to update their email preferences. This is a must for all email senders, as not complying could results in significant damage to your sender credibility, and can also results in fees or litigation.

Want more tips on how to optimize your emails for conversion? Download Marsden Marketing’s eGuide, “The Must-Have Guide for Highly Effective Emails” today!

Start Sending News Roundup Emails

by Edward Nevraumont, MarketingIsEasy.com

@ednever

Assuming you are collecting emails, start sending emails. Don’t worry about personalization or monetization, just create a weekly newsletter of great content.

It doesn’t even have to be your content – curating other’s content is fine.

If you are doing it once a week, increase it to twice a week. If you are really good try every day (like TastingTable for example).

Every time you touch an email subscriber you are getting a brand impression — only unlike all other marketing channels, email is effectively free. Your only cost is that you may turn your customers off, so make sure the content is good and monitor your opt-out rates.

Even better…make give those opting out the option to reduce their frequency instead of fully opting out.

Get Leads With a Landing Page and a LinkedIn Group

by Dmitry Dragilev; Founder of JustReachOut

 @dragilev

A few weeks ago a startup asked me to figure out the cheapest and most sustainable way for them to get 25 qualified leads to try their product.

Like most startups they did not have a big budget for marketing experiments and needed to bootstrap to get some initial customers in the door.

24 hours later I generated 60 qualified leads for them using nothing but a simple landing page and a LinkedIn group. This process was so successful that they decided to repeat the experiment again.
I’ve done this many times and it works like a charm every time. Here is a step by step of how I did it.

Step 1: Nail Down Your Target Audience

There are billions of articles and books on the importance of defining your target market. I’m not going to give you a lecture on how to define your target market. I will say that for this technique, which I’m about to outline, you have to know exactly what type of people you want as leads.

Step 2: Find largest LinkedIn Group for Your Target Market

You need to find the largest and most active group there is on LinkedIn for your target market. Notice the mention of ‘most active’. There are tons of groups that consist of a bunch of robots. You need to find the biggest and most active group for your target market.

Step 3: Find a Killer Piece of Content for This Group

Now find an old piece of content written by yourself or your team or write a new piece of content. This content must really engage the people in your target group. I’m talking about something that stirs folks up, gets them to reply and upvote and read at least 80% of what you’ve written.

Step 4: Create a PDF Whitepaper Out of Your Article

This step is pretty straightforward, create a downloadable PDF out of your article. Format it nicely with your company bio or info all the way at the end of the whitepaper.

Step 5: Create an Opt-in Landing Page for Your PDF Whitepaper

These are typically called squeeze pages, the idea is that you’re “squeezing’ an email out of your visitor in exchange for something in return. In my case I created a page, which looked like this:

Step 6: Make Sure Your Landing Page Is Hooked to Your Email Provider

You want to collect an email address and make sure people who sign up get a nice email back with the PDF they want to read. So make sure to integrate with MailChimp or another email provider such as Aweber that will send out emails to your subscribers automatically.

Piggyback on Another Great Product or Service

by Chris Ronzio; helping entrepreneurs at ChrisRonzio.com

 @chrisronzio

One method that I’ve used to get a lot of traffic is to piggyback on someone else’s great product or service, and tell them how much I like using it! Here’s how to do it:

Think about the products or services that you’ve used to accelerate your business or improve your life. Then, write a quick article or blog post about your experience. How have you used it? What benefits have you seen? What unique success have you found?

For instance, I wrote an article about How I Automated Accounting using a popular bookkeeping application. I shared it with the company’s marketing team, and they enthusiastically posted my article on their blog, then promoted the post with thousands of dollars of paid advertising. 

Who got the benefit of all that ad spend? Well, we both did! The company received a third party testimonial, which customers trust more than marketing content, and I got some social promotion and plenty of interested click-throughs. It’s a win-win.