Top 10 Marketing Hacks
Marketing can be tricky business at times, especially if you’re not really sure what you’re doing. To help your business create great marketing, here is a list of our top 10 insider tips and tricks that will increase the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns whilst minimizing time and effort.
1. DESIGN - CANVA
If you don’t have industry standard design skills or resources constantly at the ready, Canva is a great tool anybody can use to facilitate the smaller design jobs. This free, online design platform provides thousands of creative templates from newsletters and posters to social media graphics and web banners. You can even ask your designer to create a style guide in Canva with your branding already embedded for quick use! This is great for SM posts, small flyers, internal communications and much more. What else can Canva do? Find out more
2. MARKETING PLAN/OBJECTIVES
There is no question that creating a detailed and strategic marketing plan is the best way to ensure your communications effectively target your audience through the appropriate channels at the right time. However, if you find like many others that you don’t have the time to sit down and systematically plan out every detail of your marketing intentions, try setting yourself just 3 goals to achieve in the next 90 days. This could be objectives or marketing tasks to achieve and could be as simple as acquiring 5 new customers. Whatever it is, just have some sort of goal to work towards and track how you do. You’ll be surprised at the difference such a simple task can make!
3. COUNT YOUR INBOUND CHANNELS
How many inbound channels of communication does your business currently have? If you don’t have at least 5 ways of generating new leads, you need to get more! The easiest way to do this - leverage technology. With the invention of online forums, mobile apps and social media, it is simpler than ever for customers to get in touch with you, so long as you’re connected.
4.CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT - HUBSPOT
CRM can be messy business if not dealt with strategically, something that also has the potential to waste much time and energy. Enter Hubspot, a 100% free inbound marketing & sales software that facilitates automation, organisation, tracking and growth all in the one awesome tool. Every aspect of a client relationship displays in one simple dashboard for easy access and navigation, from tracking communications and quotas to scheduling appointments and viewing contracts. Find out more about Hubspot’s amazing CRM here
5. AUTOMATION - MAILCHIMP
Everyone wants to achieve great marketing results with minimal input/effort which is what makes Mailchimp’s automation features so enticing. Regardless of marketing goals, this campaign building software creates a platform to design and distribute tailored email messages with ease. More than this, Mailchimp facilitates automation of just about everything from publishing your ads and welcoming new subscribers to recovering abandoned carts by sending the customer a reminder to “checkout”. The whole idea is to enable swift, consistent contact with the people who matter to you. Mailchimp even integrates with all major e-commerce providers to acquire purchase data for business insight and personalized campaigns!
6. BOOSTING POSTS ON SOCIAL - FACEBOOK EXTERNAL ADVT ACCT
When working with increasing reach of your social media posts, it can be very tempting to simply hit “boost post now to get X% more reach” and hope for results. There is, however, a much more effective approach we can take that utilises Facebook’s targeting features and extends them into other apps and formats for a completely new audience experience. If you’re interested in increasing not only reach but customer loyalty and ROI, check out Facebook’s external advertising platform Audience Network
https://www.facebook.com/business/news/audience-network
7. B2B MARKETING – NEW LINKEDIN AUDIENCES
LinkedIn have recently released a new and exciting advertising platform that allows targeting through data collection. Yes, other platforms have similar functionality, however the exciting thing about Matched Audiences is that ads are displayed in a business setting rather than sandwiched between gossip stories and fashion ads, so b2b advertising will be largely more successful. In aid of this, Matched Audiences have encompassed 3 main targeting methods; retargeting previous website visitors (website retargeting), targeting through email addresses and contact lists (contact targeting), and targeting based on the companies/networks they are a part of (account targeting). To find out more about Matched Audiences, follow this link
8. ANALYTICS
One of the simplest and most basic marketing hacks that many businesses fail to utilise is analytics and Webmaster Tools. By taking advantage of web analytics software, invaluable data from traffic and keyword information to sales conversions and insights are readily available to you. To find out more about web analytics, head to
https://www.google.com/analytics/analytics/features/
9. CONTENT MARKETING
Great content marketing can have many fantastic benefits to your business, from heightened visibility in search engines, to directing more traffic and increasing customer relationships. More than this, it is so cheap and easy to do! As only a small percentage of content needs to be original, it’s as simple as grabbing 4 or 5 blogs about a topic that relates to your business or it’s customers and writing your own. Scoopit.com is also a great online tool to create automated searches on a topic to then share if you don’t have the time to nut out your own version.
10. FEEDBACK & REVIEWS
Another super simple but often neglected tactic to creating better marketing is to ask for feedback. Asking for customer reviews and feed back can be easily automated so the information practically rolls in with very little effort from you. Tip: Make sure you include questions for your Net Promoter Score (NPS) - a score based on the theory that one question (e.g “How likely is it that you would recommend Company ABC to a friend or colleague?”) can measure customer perception and performance.
Here’s an example NPS scale: 
11. FACEBOOK ONLINE AUDIENCES - PIXEL
If social media is your main lead generator, make sure you're taking advantage of Pixel - like Google Analytics but for Facebook and Instagram!In addition to conversion tracking, optimization and remarketing, Pixel also enables the creation of lookalike audiences. This means you can increase conversions by finding and targeting new customers who reflect your websites current visitors. For more info on how to boost conversions, measure returns and investment and find new audiences, head to https://www.facebook.com/business/a/pixel-best-practices