Complete List of Marketing Tips and Tricks

Marketing Advice

Marketing strategy

Build your marketing muscles.

Aspiring to get healthier requires intentional diet and exercise over time. The same applies to marketing – you need to commit to building your marketing muscles. You won’t lose your Christmas weight gain or become a marketing expert overnight, but just like a habit, it becomes commonplace, and you’ll begin to see results over time.

Start today. Put it in your calendar and plan for devoting resources to it.

You’ve just taken the first step towards building your marketing moxie. Well done! Stay tuned for more tips…

For further tips, check out our blog on Essential marketing practices for small businesses.

It’s time for “marketing” cleaning!

Every quarter, take the time to critically assess your marketing. Just like spring-cleaning! Where have you spent your time and money YTD? Did you get the results you expected? Have you forgotten or neglected any online or offline marketing activities? Here’s a couple suggestions to get you started:

1. Refresh your digital technical audit (no 404 errors!)
2. Optimize your Google Ads (they get paid, even with lousy ads)
3. Keep a pulse on customer satisfaction (do they know you care?)

Marketing Advice

Digital Marketing

Words matter. Do your keyword homework.

When was the last time you did keyword research? Last month? Last year? Never?! Keyword research is the foundation of digital marketing strategies. How do you expect to create high-value content, drive traffic, sales, ROI, and keep a pulse on the competition if you don’t know the relevant keywords that prospects are searching for?

How do you begin? Just start googling terms, reviewing the page from top to bottom. Google displays a lot of information including the top advertisements, “People also search for,” other website links, and ‘Related Searches.” Heck, even explore the thesaurus for other keyword variants or ask new A.I. software such as Google Gemini, Claude, or ChatGBT. Then use “Google Trends” to identify potential geographical differences.

You should also take advantage of free trials from SEO juggernaut companies like Moz, Neil Patel’s Ubersuggest, ahrefs, and SEMrush. In minutes, you’ll get a jump start on your keyword research. It will provide powerful insights such as a technical site audit, your current Google rankings, keyword opportunities, backlink opportunities, and competitive analysis.

Yes, this is hard work and must be done regularly. Keywords are a crucial part of your digital marketing strategy. They are the link between what people search for and the content you provide to satisfy that need. This could lead to increased sales. Good luck!

Your website must be ADA compliant. Really!

Websites are considered “public spaces” and need to be accessible to all. Not only is having an ADA compliant website legally required, but there are bad apples trolling websites and slapping businesses with lawsuits. If your site doesn’t meet accessibility standards, you could be fined up to $75,000 for a first violation. Although extreme and unlikely to happen, the courts have ruled against businesses to ensure disabled people have the same digital access as able-bodied folks. Small businesses simply can’t afford the expense or hassle to fight lawsuits. Most importantly, an accessible site could help your business reputation by making it easier for everybody to use your website.

Help is available. We’ve worked with an amazing partner – that can help you get ADA compliant immediately – and for free: https://www.equalweb.com/ If this is intimidating, try this online checker to see where your website scores (red errors are bad).

Ask for Google reviews.

Be sure you are diligent in asking customers for reviews. Reviews matter in Google Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), both in quantity and quality of reviews – even for B2B industries. It is also critical to build your reputation in multiple platforms such as Yelp, Facebook, Alignable, and Nextdoor. This was painfully evident when Google suspended their review functionality for months early in the pandemic. You can make it easy and convenient for customers to complete a Google review with a custom QR code.

This step-by-step blog article is super helpful in learning how to create a QR code for your business. https://businesswebsiteleader.com/blog/creating-a-qr-code-for-google-business-reviews/

Don’t get hacked. Be security savvy.

You may be thinking – hey, this isn’t a marketing tip. But it is. Small and mid-size businesses are hacked too. You don’t hear about it because they aren’t considered newsworthy, unlike hacks in recent years has proven that no business is immune. Manufacturing, physician-owned clinics, grocery stores, gyms, and even churches are targets. Just imagine if your website, social media accounts, or internal systems were shut down and data was stolen. What is the potential negative impact to your client relationships, or irreparable brand damage and PR nightmare if this happened? How many people have access to your accounts and networks, whether they are staff, volunteers, contractors, or vendors?

Start this today:

• Update passwords, the longer the better (we use 31 characters!)
• Enable two-factor authentication (2FA)
• Generate a tech inventory worksheet documenting digital accounts, devices, and authorized users

Here are some of our go-to resources:

1. 1Password for managing all personal and professional passwords
2. Sovran, a women-owned IT solutions provider including disaster recovery services
3. LegalShield, offering cost-effective cybersecurity plans

Be safe out there!

Create a free Google My Business profile.

Do you want to boost your organic Google search results? Drop everything right now and claim your Google My Business listing! AKA as GMB and now renamed Google Business Profile, it is a powerful (and free) tool for prospects to find you on Google Search and Maps. You must have a legitimate physical address, even if it’s a home-based business. Once Google verifies your business, populate all possible attributes which will be dependent on your industry. You can add photos, videos, events, promotions, pricing, plus detailed product and services information. When choosing your business categories, the primary service should be first. Best of all, you can “post” updates to promote your business. If you’re already doing regular social media posts, do the same on GMB.

So get busy and make Google work for you.

Complete a technical audit of your website.

You don’t need to be a web tech expert or pay for SEO software to do this step. It is a “health” check-up of your website to uncover common SEO issues. It is critical your website is optimized to ensure Search Engines (aka Google) can find you. Are your website meta descriptions, page titles and header tags (H1, H2) missing, duplicates or up-to-date? Any broken links or 404 page errors? Are your large image sizes slowing your site speed? Download the Screaming Frog app, an SEO audit tool, and scan the first 500 pages of your website for free. It’s kinda techy looking, and the interface is not sleek, but it’s an amazing tool. You gotta love the name, right?! Export multiple CVS files and start digging in.

Also check your site Content Management System, such as WordPress and Hubspot for additional SEO fixes and improvements.

Digital Audit Part 2.

Update your meta descriptions and title tags.

The previous tip was about technical website audits. After you fix broken links and 404 page errors, what should you do next? Invest in a ‘magic pen’ copywriter to update your website meta descriptions, page titles and H1, H2 header tags. Moz, a SEO juggernaut has stated that improved page titles can generate a 15% lift in traffic. Who wouldn’t want that?

It’s important to craft enticing and distinctive copy. After all, the ultimate goal is to get users to click your page. Be sure to maximize the character counts, but not so long that Google truncates the descriptions (and potentially annoy prospects by pushing them to other sites).

A good best practice is to review pages on a semi-annual or quarterly basis. After all, this is not a one-and-done process. Good SEO agencies are constantly updating and optimizing their client’s websites.

P.S. Use the Screaming Frog SEO audit tool to check out your competition. Are they lazy in their SEO (i.e. copying and pasting the same title tags on each page) or are they pretty darn good? Use this as an opportunity to hone your online differentiation.

Marketing Advice

Avoid These Marketing Mistakes

Bonus: Avoid The Most Common Marketing Mistakes

Beware the HIPPO effect, known as the “HIghest Paid Person’s Opinion”

This common marketing mistake is intended for bosses. It is important to be mindful of the impact your words and actions have on individuals and teams. Because employees may feel forced to follow orders, even when it’s not the right thing to do. Did you ever say this? “We should do this random act of marketing [because that’s what I think will work best].” Stop and think about the time, effort, resources, and impact this has on staff morale. Customers should be considered too. How does this “request” address customer needs? Do they really care? Do better, bosses.

#7: Avoid The Most Common Marketing Mistakes

We have unclear goals or shifting priorities—change is good, but not for its own sake.

COVID required us to reinvent everything again and again. Early on, it was all about making constant changes to stay afloat. Small businesses continue to face tough times as they grapple with huge internal challenges such as culture, diversity, supply chain, and labor shortages woes. Avoid being too internally focused or you will neglect customer needs. Your success depends on understanding and meeting customer needs! Tip: Refer back to our earlier “marketing math” tips to help you remain focused on customer acquisition and retention goals.

#6: Avoid The Most Common Marketing Mistakes

We don’t watch trends in our customer data over time until it’s too late.

How can you spot slight or moderate customer changes if you’re not actively looking for insights? Businesses may be so immersed in supply chain and labor shortage woes that they miss emerging trends. Analyzing behavior differences between newly acquired vs. long term customers could uncover hidden issues. It’s also easy to get distracted by the success of building brand awareness (Yeah, our online visitors grew 75% last quarter), without noticing the slow leakage of sales from long-standing customers (Yikes, average orders declined 9% from top customers compared to last year). Be alert for discrepancy patterns between customer acquisition and retention information.

#5: Avoid The Most Common Marketing Mistakes

We succumb to the “sparkle pony” effect: a cool metric, new martech tool, or pretty dashboard.

Many marketing technology tools are usually invisible to the customer. They don’t care and it doesn’t matter to them! The rapid proliferation of marketing technology – even new AI tools – is quite astonishing. From 150 products in 2011, the martech market is over 11,000 solutions today! For marketers, this resource investment comes with significant performance expectations. Marketing must not only test, integrate, and train on these technologies, but also become power users, while connecting results to sales. Choose your martech tools carefully. There are many highly effective tech tools available. The key is to show value and justify the effort to the customer journey.

#4: Avoid The Most Common Marketing Mistakes

We don’t look to the left and right and left of customer journey data and lose their connections in the sales funnel.

We must devote resources to both client acquisition and customer retention. Businesses can’t ignore one and expect to have consistent and sustained growth. Sometimes you will have too much data in one place and not enough in another. There will be good and bad data. Or you will have no data. This marketing mistake can occur when teams don’t talk to each other and share “data” in their heads. Marketing and Sales are like cats and dogs with friction between them. Marketing can get stuck in their corporate ivory towers and think they know what prospects want, but don’t engage with customers because that’s “sales responsibility.” The magic happens when we can talk directly with customers!

#3: Avoid The Most Common Marketing Mistakes

We collect lots of data in one place on the customer journey and nothing in other places.

Companies know who is on their website at any given time on Google Analytics, heatmaps, mouse hovers, and video snippets of users, yet many haven’t measured customer satisfaction, or spent time uncovering why the company lost clients. This is hard to do, as there are always other pressing issues. It’s also easy to ignore, especially if there are departmental silos between sales, marketing, and account management. This is an unbalanced diet. Marketing spends too much time on the left side of the sales funnel and not enough on the right side of the funnel to keep customers happy and satisfied.

#2: Avoid The Most Common Marketing Mistakes

We ignore the source of customer journey data or the method to gather it.

Small and mid-sized businesses (SMB) cannot rely solely on digital marketing data to fully understand the customer journey and address their needs. There is no substitute for engaging with customers and prospects and hearing what they have to say about you. It is also important to examine customer data and research that marketing typically doesn’t have access to. These include satisfaction survey comments, customer service emails, tech support phone and chat logs, and even meeting minutes from sales calls. Talk to all customer-facing teams – sales, account management, customer service, and anyone else who answers the phone. Companies still working remotely may have overlooked key customer insights, opportunities, or concerns. Make sure to look at past customer satisfaction surveys, such as NPS (Net Promoter Score). Do everything you can to protect your Promotors and address the issues with your Detractors.

#1: Avoid The Most Common Marketing Mistakes

We focus on the data that is easiest to get, not the data that tells the full story.

We have access to a lot of data – Google Analytics, Search Console, Google My Business – plus all the social platforms’ info. It is overwhelming, and most of the data are vanity metrics (web visits, time on pages, social media likes, and followers). Simply regurgitating numbers without interpretation is meaningless. Monitoring data is not a substitute for reporting on results that matter to a business. Of course, uncovering your true customer story can be fuzzy and downright challenging. To start, concentrate on numbers that tie into your bottom line: #1) organic traffic and #2) leads, and how these improve over time.

Marketing Advice

Customer Acquisition

Target 10x leads for every new customer.

We must admit, generating interest is one of the hardest marketing responsibilities to successfully master. This is commonly where massive friction occurs in organizations. Does this sound familiar? “We need more leads!”

This typically is what happens:

“We must beef up our sales funnel!”

“We need definitions to explain all the lead phases – hot, warm, cold, qualified, unqualified, no budget, and decision maker.”

“Now we must score it to determine a lead’s worth.”

Then marketing hands the leads over to sales.

But marketing complains that sales does nothing with the leads.

• No conversions.
• No increased pipeline.
• Stagnate revenue.
• Sales is mad that marketing gives them crap leads and crap content too.

This conflict certainly doesn’t bring everybody together as a team.

What to do? Keep it simple!

If a lead is worth pursuing, give it to sales, otherwise marketing keeps nurturing the lead or mark as unqualified. Next, put your marketing math to work because leads don’t just automatically turn to sales. You must strive for 10x leads for every new customer. If your revenue target is 50 new customers this year, then you’ll need to generate 500 leads.

Build brand awareness with impressions.

How many people know about your business? You can’t sell something to someone who just met you. To buy from you, people need to trust you. To trust you, they need to know you first. It’s the first step. A good rule of thumb is to target achieving 7x impressions of your total addressable market* during a sales cycle. AKA “imps”, this is the number of “eyeballs” seeing your brand, both organically and paid. It may take at least 7 times for your brand to stick with your target audience. An easy method to monitor your imps is through Google Search Console. Sure, you might have internal tools and staff to compile all your impressions (from social media, advertising, GMB, etc.), but this is the fastest way to check how you’re tracking on your 7x target.

*See the previous tip on the importance of determining your total addressable market (TAM). That is your denominator for calculating your 7x impressions.

Marketing Advice

Budgeting

Construct a $ and time budget aligned to your customer journey.

How much money and staff time are you spending on customer acquisition and retention? Most companies don’t know! First, you must understand how you’re spending your money today. It’s an elbow grease exercise, analyzing all dollars and activities spent on the customer journey. Include anyone that spends time and money on prospects and customers. Look closely at sales, marketing, customer service, executives, and even the technical team. Once you have this data, you can construct a zero-based budget to prioritize what you should be spending along the customer journey. Instead of simply begging for more money, you can make more informed budgeting decisions, get a better ROI for your efforts – and more attention spent on customers.

Ask us about our magic spreadsheet to create a customer journey budget aligned to your business goals. Your CFO will love this.

Strive for 10X ROI on marketing.

Ask yourself this question each time you consider investing in a marketing initiative: If I spend X, can I get 10X back in revenue?

Here are some real-world examples:

• Will sponsoring a golf hole for $250 net $2,500 in sales?
• Should we participate in a hybrid tradeshow for $3,500? Is $35,000 in pipeline opportunities realistic?
• Google Ads is offering a $1,000 credit if we spend $2,000 in advertising over six months. Could we procure enough leads to generate $20,000 in revenue?

Of course, you should put a lot of elbow grease in planning, budgeting, and attribution analysis. But this exercise spurs rapid conversation and decision-making about a particular marketing activity. If there’s little hope of success, don’t waste your time and resources on it!

Learn to develop a customer-based marketing budget your CFO will love. >> Read about the 4-step budgeting process