16 Top Marketing Hacks To Optimise Your Business

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marketing-hacks

Marketing world is filled with complex jargons and overwhelming tasks.

Still, there are some quick tips and life hacks you can try to simplify it. In today’s post, The Website Marketing Group compile 16 most useful marketing hacks categorised in three major clusters.

Personal Productivity & Management Hacks

These are very quick and deliberate practices that you can apply to your work life immediately regardless of the type of team you lead or work you do. Many are practiced by our own team.

1. Cut Meeting Time: Stop having weekly 1:1s with your staff. Instead have slightly longer monthly scheduled 1:1s plus bi-weekly office hours that can be booked ad hoc.Cut Meeting Time with Office Hours

2. Empower Your Talent: TELL people what they can really do with/without your permission. Back them up when something doesn’t go quite as expected and they’ll know that they really CAN make decisions with confidence, eliminating 50-60% of the back and forth.

3. Stop Micro-Managing: You’ve hired a competent marketing staff – trust them. Let them know what’s required, by when, how it will be measured – then get out of their way. (goes hand in hand with #2)

4. Demand Daily Impact: Hold everyone–and yourself–accountable to daily external impact. Ask yourself: have you moved the needle today? If not, think hard about whether you’ve earned your keep – make this a daily and weekly routine. Make lists and cross items off. It feels good.

Strategic Marketing Hacks

While it’s hard to imagine a ‘hack’ that’s strategic, these are really things that might get you to think differently about how you approach a problem. They aren’t difficult – but they can have a big impact by applying a smart lens to your strategic efforts.Quality over quantity

5. Think quality over quantity: Marketers often believe more is better—more impressions, more traffic, more fans. Challenge that thinking by looking at quality, not just quantity. Though sometimes economies of scale offer great value, often times, a smaller, more engaged audience or activation is more valuable than mass communication with the inactive or disengaged.

6. Ask “Why?”: Whenever somebody has a new idea for engagement – first, ask “Why?”. We still see too much emphasis on “how” and “when” and “where” to do the next shiny object, without solid thinking about whether it truly makes sense for your business, strategy and timing.

7. Measure Tests with LTV: Your A/B tests are awesome. You’ve been increasing conversion time and time again, but somehow overall revenue still isn’t taking off. Sometimes, initial results of an A/B test can fool you – driving short term wins that result in rapid client churn. Therefore, ensure that your test metrics follow customers through your major retention hurdles to determine which treatment is TRULY the winner.

8. Hire a Retention Marketer: When retention is everyone’s job, it’s often no one’s job. As soon as you make retention marketing part of someone’s charter, the way they service customer-facing parts of the organization changes and the collaboration with other parts of the marketing team to come up with clever new solutions changes entirely. So if you are giving ‘everyone’ retention metrics, back it up by giving ONE person retention marketing ownership.

9. Bring Personas to Life: Post your personas in the marketing office and have a stuffed animal represent them at tricky meetings. It’s easy to talk about buyer journeys and personas, but it’s much harder to LIVE with them. Every time your team ideates a campaign or makes a tradeoff or buys some media, they should be gut checking whether it’s true to who your personas are. That’s a much easier when you can’t avoid looking them in the face!

10. Get Cozy with Technology: Marketing and technology are inextricably linked. Marketing leaders no longer get a passing grade for delegating technology expertise to their IT team, agencies or underlings. You don’t have to become an expert in technology, but you should take the time to get to know something about the marketing technology that your team and your customers are using. Baby steps. If you don’t use the analytics tools, start with some dashboards. If you only use your smartphone for managing email, try your company’s mobile application.

Tactical Marketing Hacks

The ‘easiest’ of the hacks, these marketing short cuts are the kind that can help out in a pinch if you aren’t already engaged in a best practice or you need a quick source of inspiration or wins.

11. Retarget: If you aren’t using retargeting already, we need to talk. When you finish this post, your first order of business is to prune PPC and redirect some of that spend into retargeting. Period.

12. Low on Cash, Try Co-Marketing: Especially compelling for newer divisions or products inside a large brand, if you don’t have a large budget, but you need to build an audience fast, consider uniting with a complementary brand for co-marketed events, content or contests to effectively ‘swap’ lists by offering opt in to the other partners contacts.

13. Mine Referral Traffic: Referral traffic data can be a source of massive value through found audiences, found issues in mix, and more. Unusual insights can be found that could drive entirely new segments, one of our analysts was at a CPG company when a lotion brand found a lot of traffic from a men’s baldness site. Lo and behold, they identified a totally new segment of chafed headed bald men that became highly profitable. Get your analytics team to share outliers on a regular basis so you can ID opportunities and even mistakes in your mix.

14. ABT: Always be testing your advertising and campaigns with different creative, different messages and different offers. Even once you think you have a winner, keep testing because as a sage analytics analyst once said “first choice is rarely best choice”.

15. Crowdsource Content: Turn the mic around to speak with customers, industry illuminati and more. Interviews and Q&As are often more interesting than your point of view, and they take much of the burden of content creation off of you.

16. Use RobotsUse Robots: Ok, not quite robots. But content marketers should liberally use transcription services to turn audio content into the raw bones of blog posts or long form content. That might be a webinar or a Q&A as indicated before. Transcription has gotten so inexpensive due to voice recognition that it can really help drive down your cost of content production.