Growing a business doesn’t happen overnight; it takes time and persistence to see results. If you have a good business idea to start with that is in a profitable niche, then setting up a website and deciding on a marketing strategy should be next on the agenda. How important is marketing for business growth? It is very important, no matter how good your idea or product is, if no one ever sees it what good is it? Marketing is the rudder that keeps your boat afloat, so to speak.

What are the best methods of marketing?

There are many different types of marketing strategies. But how many of them will actually work for your business? Which marketing strategies should you choose to promote your business?

There are 8 basic marketing strategies that will work to help you grow your business. These strategies are:

PPC
Content Marketing
Blogging/Vlogging
SEO
Digital Marketing
Email Marketing
Social Media Marketing
Google My Business

These methods work because they target certain groups of people who are already interested in what you’re offering.

Marketing Strategies

Google, Bing, and Yahoo are the top 3 major search engines people use to find what they’re looking for. There are many others but we’ll focus on the major ones for right now. The first place to start is often with a Google Adwords campaign.

Google Adwords

People are typing keywords into Google and coming back with over 40,000 search queries every second. No other method of advertising has the potential to get your business in front of that many pairs of eyes.

Google Adwords is the one that started it all. It’s been around a long time and it is very competitive. You will need to do a lot of keyword research to make this work for you. It requires searching the competition and volume for your chosen keyword and making sure there is enough demand in your niche. If you target the right keywords you can get a flood of traffic to your website, but if you target the wrong keywords you’ll hear nothing but crickets. This strategy definitely has a learning curve to it.

Although it is a form of paid advertising, the goal of an Adwords campaign is to have your ad show up when a user types in the keywords that relate to your product or service. This works well if your page is optimized with on-page SEO. The good thing about Adwords is that it can be used alone or in combination with other marketing strategies for better results.

Content Marketing

Content marketing is the process of promoting your website, product, or service using content that offers value to the reader. This strategy costs nothing to implement, you just need to have a source of content and post it on the Internet. Content marketing is not like copywriting which is focused on sales, but instead seeks to educate, inform, and entertain the reader with information that is interesting and engaging.

It has a slow turnaround compared to other paid methods but it is no less effective at bringing traffic to your website. Why? Because people don’t like to be sold to, they would rather learn something new for free and maybe come back to purchase something later. If you take the time to build a rapport with your audience they will come back and they’ll bring their friends. Content marketing was one of the top marketing strategies of 2016, when more than 18% of marketers reported good results with it.

Content marketing consists of:

Quality content
Relevant topics
Optimized for search engines
Optimized for human readers
Frequent content creation & promotion

Blogging

Another good method of engaging with readers is by writing and posting engaging information on your blog. Every month, more than 409 million people read blog posts through RSS feeds on their desktop. It is easy to start a blog and requires very little maintenance. There are inexpensive hosting services that will perform updates and WordPress installs for you as part of your service package.

You can focus your content on important topics in your niche, issues, concerns, or offering advice. Having a blog means you have a place to direct traffic to get your content read. You can monetize your blog with ads in the sidebar, or by placing affiliate links.

Blogging is a cheap method of advertising since it doesn’t cost anything other than the initial start up (hosting and domain name).

Vlogging pertains to blogging by way of a YouTube Channel. You Tube is a very well-known marketing strategy used by people to promote their businesses through video content. They create a channel and create short video posts on topics related to their business and include a link back to their website for more information.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Local SEO (search engine optimization) incorporates your location into the search results. If you want to rank for your business name+your location (city, state) for better targeting. It helps businesses promote their products and services to local customers in their area who are looking for their service. It uses the same keywords on the website and in search, and is optimized with html, authoritative links, and more.

This is achieved through a variety of methods, some of which differ greatly from what’s practiced in standard SEO, and some of which are far easier to manage using local SEO tools and can require specific local SEO or local search marketing services.

Digital Marketing

Digital marketing is advertising delivered through digital channels such as social media, email, web applications, mobile applications, search engines, websites, or any electronic devices (electronic billboard, etc).

Digital marketing is designing a strategy to promote a business, product, or service by electronic media. The applications are widespread to reach across multiple media applications like phones, desktops, laptops, tablets, etc.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is marketing to your customers by email. This requires building a list of subscribers and creating a newsletter or email that you send out once or twice a month telling your readers what is new or upcoming on your blog. Since they subscribed to you you can show them ads or suggest products that may be of interest to them.

Marketing strategies combined together make a bigger impact on your traffic. You could use Adwords with social media marketing for example to boost your advertising power. Or Facebook ads with content marketing. Each one has it’s unique benefits, but combining strategies will help you grow your business faster than a single method could do.

Social Media Marketing

When talking about social media marketing, it includes sites like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Users of these platforms share content every day, all day long across the various sites. If you get lucky, your content may go viral and be what everyone is talking about.

Facebook, in particular, is another good source of advertising. It is relatively inexpensive and you can set your target range to reach people with related interests. Over 2 million small businesses advertise with Facebook every day. Creating the ads is easy and doesn’t take long to accomplish. The Facebook Ads Manager also makes it fairly simple to run and test multiple ad sets.

Google My Business

Claiming your Google listing is another way to get your ad to come up in search results. Your Google My Business listing will have your information as the owner and can help people find your business. It incorporates your Google+ profile, Google Maps profile, your Google reviews, access to data on Google Analytics and Google Insights all in one place. It will also display your brand name or logo so people will recognize you in the listing.

Optimizing your Google Business listing is as simple as just filling out your profile and all blank areas and using your keywords and related terms.

Today's going to fun!

I'm going to show you exactly how we used a sales funnel to generate over a million dollars in revenue for our software company Revukangaroo.

So...

What is a sales funnel?

Sales funnels seem to be the hottest new phrase crossing the internet. A lot of popularity credit can be given to Russell Brunson, who is named the kind of Funnels.

A sales funnel is a process in which you take your customer down a journey of steps to lead them to the final action you want them to take, ultimately the sale!

Hubspot defines a sales funnel as:

A sales funnel is a metaphor for a traditional sales process from beginning to end.

On a macro-level, a sales funnel will start with a large number of potential buyers at the top Based on certain criteria, this pool of potential buyers is reduced to a fewer number of prospects.

How Do I Build A Sales Funnel?

Anytime I'm looking to build any sales funnel I break it down to 3 easy steps:

Idea or Product
Sales Process aka "The Game Plan"
Execution aka "Massive Action"

Step 1:

We had spent nearly ten months in a dark office, creating our tool. So taking this from idea to the product wasn't an overnight thing. In many cases, you can create a sales funnel in a short amount of time.

Make sure you are clear about the concept that you have. You can test your idea with friends, your email list, current customers, or your Facebook group.

We developed our software based on solving a problem that many of our customers had, gathering online reviews.

Step 2:

Create a clear sales process, map out your entire game plan on paper. Or if you're like me, you'll prefer a giant whiteboard to doodle on.

We had to make sure we had a way to sell the system. We had to think of all the steps a buyer would take from start to finish in the buying process.

We had to consider how we were going to market to them and what would happen when they landed on a page. What was the buying experience like, did we send them emails? If so, how?

Where did the transaction take place? How would we know which subscription clients had?

So, we wanted to automate a lot of this and make sure our clients shared the same experience each time.

We started making a list of tools that we knew would solve this problem. Lucky for us Innvio had been around a lot longer and already had some of these tools in place.

Sales Funnels Tools

Where it comes to building out your sales funnel toolkit, there several competitors in the space. I'll list here what I believe are the best in the market.

When it comes to the sales process, you will want to automate communication with your prospect.

In our case, we had to think of the process when we got someone to become a lead what did we want to happen next, how did we want that to happen at all?

In this situation, we figured we would take two approaches that required two different tools.

We wanted our leads from ads to opt-in to a forum and go through a series of emails starting the sales cycle. We built multiple sophisticated email campaigns using Infusionsoft, which is a powerful marketing automation tool.
From there, we wanted to leverage the power of SMS communication and used an add on tool to Infusionsoft called Plus This.

In order to get these tools to trigger, we first had to get them to a landing page.

There are many sales funnel software platforms around, too many to name in this post. I favor one over the others because of simplicity and functionality.

Clickfunnels

Clickfunnels.com is a sales funnel building software that allows almost any user who can drag and drop elements to create a functioning funnel.

For beginners, it's one of the better all in one option on the market. It not only functions as a sales funnel builder but also allows you to do email automation.

Again, let me state this is good for beginners. There are some setbacks when it comes to email deliverability because of the service provider they use, but ultimately it will get the job done.

How Much Does Clickfunnels Cost?

I'm glad you ask! Priced at $97 a month for its base subscription, I consider it a good buy. The $297 a month subscription allows you to leverage the email automation I mentioned and allows you unlimited funnels to build in your account. (Here is a promo link to a 14-Day Free Trial)

Here is one of the bonuses Clickfunnels offers over many of the other funnel building software; it comes with series of educational videos called Funnelflix to help you understand the art of online sales and digital marketing.

Adding a video education series is one of the strategies we adopted in our software company. We took the page right out of Clickfunnels.

Adding an education platform around the best uses of our tool helped us increase sales by another six figures a year. It also provided a better anchor to the software.

So now that we had unpacked our software stack (toolkit), it was time stage 3 implementation.

Step 3.

Execution of an idea is always one of the most enjoyable parts of building a sales funnel. You get to see your creation come alive right in front of you.

We started out by jumping into Clickfunnels.com and using one of their pre-made templates and quickly realized we needed to build our own to match the quality style we want.

(Note: Clickfunnels has developed much more aesthetically pleasing funnels over the past couple of years.)

[DOWNLOAD]: FREE SALES FUNNEL TEMPLATES

Once we had a design, we wanted to connect our Infusionsoft account to the landing page, allowing any new contact to be sent a series of emails from the automation campaign.

Once inside that campaign, they were also sent a text message encouraging them to view a video from our education series.

With a little fancy marketing automation, an invite was sent asking them to book a time on our sales team's calendar. If they didn't, our sales team would reach out to them a week later, asking what they thought of the resources we sent them.

With a few tweaks, some additional traffic sources, and sales conversion, we were able to break the seven-figure mark. We even received an award from Clickfunnels (Two Comma Club Award) that signifies you are have earned seven figures using their software.

Conclusion

If you're going to sell to anyone, you need to build a sales funnel so your customers have a predictable journey.

Yes, it takes a little work, but if you follow those three simple steps and you'll be able to create your sales funnel in no time.

Let me know what industry you are in. We may have a sales funnel already pre-built that we can send you. Just go here to sign up for a 14-Day free trial for Clickfunnels, and we can drop it in your account.

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8 Basic Marketing Strategies That Will Work in Your Business

What are the best methods of marketing?