Inspiring Ideas to Market Your Business
If you want to be successful as a freelancer, you need to make sure you are marketing your business well. This is true whether you are just starting out or you have been established for years. It’s how people find out about you and contact you for employment.
In a market with a lot of competition and many noise sources, how can you make your business stand out and attract new customers? The following essential list should help. To ensure success for your business, 100 marketing ideas are provided to serve as inspiration. Marketing should be made a priority to avoid any future excuses.
Get into your local newspaper
Write a press release about anything newsworthy going on in your business. Not sure how to write one? If you want to get your story published, read these tips or call a journalist to see if they would be interested. If they are, they’ll probably write the story themselves.
Create a newsletter
If you have permission to contact your existing customer base, publish a regular e-newsletter. Make sure to let others know about your latest ventures and any new products or services you have to offer! Staying in touch with your clients will help you stay on their radar and encourage them to continue doing business with you.
Write a blog
Blogs present an opportunity to improve digital marketing strategy by creating a range of long-tail keywords, which would improve SEO. Conferences are a great opportunity to share your knowledge while also establishing trust. If you want Google and web visitors to keep coming back to your blog, make sure to keep it updated with high-quality content.
Cold call
Check in with any new leads, and make some cold calls each day. It’s a good idea to keep your marketing efforts on course and explore new opportunities that come your way.
Carry business cards
Don’t ever leave home without your business cards. You never know who you might meet. Having your website address and social media accounts on your business card is important so people can easily find and connect with you online.
Offer mini versions
Think about creating a smaller version of your product or service for a reduced price. This text is saying that a good product will make customers want to buy it, and could even turn them into long-term customers.
Find a niche
Identify an area of the market that could use your product or service, then focus your efforts on that particular area. Find out what’s missing and what people need. Offer solutions to people’s problems.
Talk to your customers
Don’t be shy or intimidated to speak with customers who have already hired you to ask them why they did so. Is there anything you could be doing to improve your services?
Use Twitter
Many businesses view Twitter as a valuable social media platform because it provides an opportunity to network online while promoting their brand identity. Remember to be courteous on Twitter and follow basic etiquette rules.
Get testimonials
There is no marketing tool more effective than a genuine testimonial from a satisfied customer. If you have not yet added testimonials to your website or marketing materials, you should do so now! Testimonials can be a great way to build trust with potential customers and show them that you are a reliable business. Just make sure you ask full permission first.
Make friends with influential bloggers
There are a lot of new blogs on the internet, so do some research and find some influential bloggers to connect with. If you can, get them to write a review about your business, product, or service.
Advertise on blogs
To investigate online advertising opportunities, research where your target market likes to go online. Are there any blogs that appeal to your customers? You can contact the blog owner and inquire about sponsoring the blog in exchange for advertising space.
Write link-bait blogs
You can encourage people to link to your blog by writing posts that are interesting and informative. If more people recommend your articles, you will get more traffic to your website.
Make the most of your email signature
Make sure your website and social media accounts are connected by adding links to them in your email signature. Think about adding your main marketing message or company slogan. Remind people why you’re so great.
Sponsor an awards ceremony
Sponsoring awards can be expensive, but it’s a way to get your business known. Remember, not all awards are expensive. There are always award ceremonies that are more suitable for your business and budget.
Sponsor a competition
There are often media competitions. Consider sponsoring one of them to raise your profile. Advertising your brand and company name will not only make you more visible to potential customers, but it will also give you access to a much wider market.
Give something away
Got something you can offer in a competition? If you want free editorial space in a newspaper or magazine, you can offer a prize. Just be aware they’ll always want minimum prize values.
Offer discounts for limited periods
People always like discounts at certain times of the year. If you want to attract customers during the summer or winter, consider offering your products and services at a discounted rate. For example, you could call your promotion “Summer Savings” or “Winter Deal.” People always like a bargain.
Create an e-brochure
Hard-copy brochures can be expensive to design and print. By creating a PDF version of your document instead of printing it, you can save money and make it available to download on your website. Use this opportunity to promote yourself and convince potential customers that you are the best person for the job.
Traditional mailers
Mail-drop campaigns involve sending marketing materials through the mail to either existing customers or potential customers. This can be done by sending out postcards or leaflets to people’s homes. Don’t underestimate them just because they’re old-school. They can still work.
Write a column for your local paper
See if your local newspaper would be interested in having a regular column where an expert answers reader questions. If they are, provide them with regular features. Don’t miss out – call today.
Become an expert spokesperson
Journalists are always interested in getting industry experts to add their knowledge to news reports. You can increase your visibility and credibility by contacting local TV, radio, and newspapers to offer yourself as an expert in your field. It is recommended that you be prepared to be available for interviews and media training so that you are able to respond to questions that might come up.
Create a press kit
Be prepared to share some background information on yourself and your business with journalists. Make sure to include a ‘press’ page on your website where journalists can easily find more information about you and get in touch with you.
Social Media Tools
Social Media Publishing Tools
It is great to have time away from work as a social media manager, and social media publishing tools let you do that. The social media publishing tool from HubSpot is very useful because it not only allows you to schedule text updates, but also image updates. Scheduling text updates or spending our holidays at the computer creating memes means we don’t have to sacrifice engagement on Facebook over the holidays or weekends.
Facebook Global Pages
This is a new development and it is very helpful for global marketers. Marketers who want to target a global audience on Facebook _____. before had to either have one Facebook page for an untargeted audience or multiple Facebook pages and struggle to maintain them all Facebook’s global pages allow marketers to have a central maintenance location while also benefiting from better targeting options.
Audience Targeting in Facebook Advertisements
There’s more to love about Facebook. The ad platform allows marketers to customize their ads to target a specific audience. Pretty self-explanatory. But also pretty — or insanely — helpful. This prevents advertisers from wasting money on ads that are not relevant. You can create a custom audience from email addresses that you already have in your database!
Twitter Hashtags
Twitter hashtags help to promote a specific event on Twitter, and mean that a separate handle is not needed. We don’t need to manage another Twitter handle when we host an event like INBOUND, we can create an event-specific hashtag and monitor the discussion. That is so much easier!
Content Creation Tools
The Thesaurus
Ridiculous? Maybe. But holy cow do bloggers use this a lot? If you aren’t leveraging it, get on it! We avoid using the same words over and over again in our “Title Brainstorms” so our vocabulary doesn’t get stale (let’s not call everything, “great,” am I right?) and readers want to keep clicking on our headlines. Bookmark this tool on your toolbar for easier brainstorming and to increase the variety of words in your vocabulary!
Evernote
Note-taking apps can be helpful for writing or brainstorming content when you’re on the go. For example, many of our content creators have their best ideas when they’re not using their computers. Wherever you are, there’s a good chance you’re within arm’s reach of a bottle of _____ You’re never far from a bottle of _____ An app like Evernote can help you organize your ideas so you can easily find them later when you’re at your work computer.
Factbrowser
When you’re creating content and you need a compelling stat or data point, you can go to the website Statista and search for the topic you’re writing about to find the data you need. Enter Factbrowser. It’s like Google for data. Broken down by topic, source, format, region, and/or demographic. You’re welcome.
CreativeCommons
There are three ways to get images for your marketing content: buy them from a stock photography site, make them yourself, or steal them from someone else on the internet. Oh wait, you have a fourth option! It’s CreativeCommons! You can search for photos that are free to use commercially, as long as you give credit to the artist. We use it very often, even in this blog post!
Final Cut Pro X
This new video editing tool is much more user-friendly than the previous version, and you can share videos to YouTube and Vimeo without having to download them to your computer first.
PowerPoint as a Design Tool
It’s not just for presentations, people! Marketers can use PowerPoint to create professional-looking calls-to-action, eBooks, and even infographics, without needing to call up a designer or invest in expensive design software.
Snipping Tool
The snipping tool is a handy Windows tool that lets you quickly and easily take screenshots. This is really useful for creating tutorials on how to do something, or for communicating with your IT or Support team to show them bugs that have cropped up. Here’s a great explanation of how to set it up on your computer if you haven’t already.
SEO Tools
Google Webmaster Tools
The search engine giant Google has some great free tools that can assist marketers with their search engine optimization strategies. Some things you can do to improve your website’s ranking are to check the number of indexed pages, submit your site to Google, and disavow bad inbound links.
Free Site Crawl Tools
The bigger your website gets, the harder it becomes to track all the pages and potential SEO issues. Free tools like Xenu and Screaming Frog are fantastic for crawling your entire site and spitting out a spreadsheet of all the pages, URLs, and broken links on your site. It’s a content or SEO auditor’s dream.
Analytics Tools
Excel
Any report that can be exported into Excel is very convenient for marketers, whether from a tool like Xenu, or when we use HubSpot. A spreadsheet of raw data is a great asset because it can be manipulated and analyzed from different angles.
VLOOKUP
Marketers can use a VLOOKUP in Excel to quickly search for and identify all types of data in a particular set. This software saves a lot of time for our event marketers.
YouTube Analytics
YouTube Analytics has been revamped in the last year, allowing marketers to measure the effectiveness of their videos in the same way as any other content they create. You can learn about which videos are most popular with viewers by looking at metrics such as drop-off time and engagement. This information can help you determine the ideal length for your videos and what content within the videos is most engaging.
HubSpot Sources
I think the marketing team uses the Sources dashboard every day. We enjoy seeing where our site traffic is coming from and how it compares to past months using analytics software like Sources. We also like to see which channels are doing well and which ones are not. Sources has a great feature where you can set goals for every day, week, or month to help you see how you’re progressing.
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