Starting an online business is always complicated. You used to run your business in a good old-fashioned manner making numerous calls to potential customers, distributing leaflets, placing advertising banners, etc.
You used to do your marketing campaign like your business predecessors did.
Unfortunately, practice shows that all these methods of classic marketing don’t work in the modern world.
Every entrepreneur moves the business to the internet. And it is not surprising. Online business has completely pushed out the traditional ways of managing any kind of business for today.
Thus, those small businesses who have just launched their first startup struggle for some actionable marketing hacks from the start.
Likely, I am going to reveal 10+ marketing hacks that won’t leave small businesses upset.
Let’s start!
SIDENOTE: If you want to know 10 detailed steps to rank #1 in Google, you should watch this video:
- Create Content That Is Relevant to Your Business Goals.
Let’s imagine that you are one of those small business representatives who run an eCommerce store.
You sell customized guitars that are crafted with your own hands. You know that the guitars you craft are of high-quality wood and have a unique design. The sound of these guitars is professional with perfect sustain.
You have written an epic post that covers all delicate processes of a guitar crafting and you have proven the practicability of playing the customized guitars from your brand.
You noticed that the post has started to rank well and it brings lots of visitors to your website. You started to believe that your online business will succeed and you’ll get a bunch of customers.
I believe there is no amateur or professional musician who would refuse to get a guitar like this one:
However, you can see that only a small group of visitors has turned into paying customers.
You are quite confused about this. Why does it happen?
The problem is very simple and clear. Your piece of content doesn’t cover your business needs and goals.
But what if you wrote your post in a slightly different manner covering something like “Top 10 Best Ecommerce Custom Guitar Shop Across Virginia” and would mention your online shop there?
That would be a completely new ball game for your website! It will make your content structure relevant to your business goals.
To accomplish this aim you should keep in mind these two aspects:
- Always do proper keyword research to see that you target the topic that is in-demand among your potential customers.
- You should try to create the content that would highlight the value of your product.
2. Content Repurposing
It should be said that people like to spend their time on various places online. Some like to hang out on YouTube; some are addicted to forums or social media channels. Whatever the case – content always differs.
What does it mean for you?
It means that you should analyze your target audience’s preferences in terms of content and repurpose it afterward. But it doesn’t mean to stop creating some exact type of content completely. Tastes differ and you must be flexible with your content.
A few examples of what you can do:
- We have written a pretty solid post on guest blogging and we decided to repurpose it in a suitable and informative “tweet”:
- Or how we turned our video on WordPress SEO into a piece of content that has been shared 840 times.
Here are three suggestions what you should follow when you are thinking of content repurposing:
- Try different formats of content (video, infographics, images, etc.)
- Create separate posts from a single in-depth topic
- Turn your content into a visual presentation
3. Your Customers are like Walking Advertisements
I am sure you are familiar with the fact that lots of companies run their SWAG campaigns to make a brand awareness stronger.
Let’s review a few examples first.
A well-known video gaming corporation Valve that released such world-class games as Half-Life and Counter-Strike has its own SWAG campaign:
Music brand Ibanez runs SWAG campaign as well:
It goes without saying that your SWAG ideas might vary. Starting from the t-shirts, stickers, other types of apparel, and ending with whatever you can think of. It is absolutely up to you. What’s more important, you can ask your customers what they would like to get using a community poll.
As the result, your customers will be happy with all this branded staff and your company will raise its brand awareness.
4. Monitor Your Brand Mentions
If you want to be ahead of your competitors and make your small business successful, you will have to be everywhere on the web. I meant everywhere where people mention your brand.
However, how is it possible to track all the mentions of your brand?
It is possible with the help of Ahrefs alerts that come to your email address directly.
How does it work?
You set up an alert choosing the period of time when you will get notifications to your email address:
The biggest advantage of using the alerts is that you can keep monitoring almost anything you want: your business, keywords, your competitor’s brand name.
Afterward, you can start disputing about your brand across different communities, in comments, and on forums. Furthermore, you can see if people say something negative about your service. You should use these findings to your own benefit and make the updates subsequently.
5. Share a Word or Two About Product Upgrades with Your Audience and Reap the Benefits
I want to start with the example. Back in 2018, we decided to remove a data limitation on one of Ahrefs subscription plans. And here is a tweet from our CEO:
This decision gave us the result we needed – we got 1K retweets. And we removed the limit as promised. Both sides of this deal are happy.
You can try this technique but do it deliberately.
6. Cooperate with Other Brands
Cooperation is an excellent way to create cross-promotion between the brands.
This cooperation could be handled in different ways like guest post swap, interviews, round-ups, and webinars.
And here is the example of such cooperation right from the jump. Our CMO Tim has participated in a webinar hosted by Buffer. As you know Buffer is a social media management tool, while Ahrefs is all about SEO.
The question is “what was the main idea for that webinar?”
This webinar covered the topic on how to build traffic with evergreen content and social media. As you can see – the connection between social media and SEO is evident. Ahrefs part was about the things related to evergreen content and Buffer covered social media space.
Must admit that this cooperation had pretty solid success. Plus, brand cooperation is not about stealing customers from each other but sharing knowledge and complementing each other.
7. Create a Facebook Group
Facebook is a social media platform that gathers people from all around the world. Definitely, you can find your target audience there for sure. Thus, don’t hesitate to create a Facebook group in order to build your brand community.
Here are a few benefits of running a Facebook group:
- Direct interaction with your audience
- Sharing and collecting knowledge
- Posting any updates and releases of your service
- Creating the polls and seeing what your customers need
8. Find Unlinked Mentions of Your Brand and Turn Them into Links
There are lots of cases when you can see your brand mentions on the websites without any links back to the source. Like this one:
It is another one wasted opportunity to boost your traffic. Likely, you can turn the tables on. Just get in touch with a blog’s editor and ask to turn that mention into the link.
But how to find these unlinked mentions?
Content Explorer tool will help you here. For example, put your brand name like a query into a search bar. Afterward, click on “Highlight unlinked domains” and put your domain name there:
The next step is to export all the unlinked mentions:
Lastly, skim through the list of the unlinked mentions and try to build the links.
9. Do More of Guest Blogging
At first glance, guest posting is another way to build links. Yes, it is true. But this strategy is more than an ordinary link-building. It allows you to introduce your brand to a new audience.
As you already guessed, guest blogging helps your website gain more traffic. And the thing is that when you publish a guest post on some blog, you might observe a sudden spike of traffic. However, it fades away afterward.
This traffic change is called “the Spike of Hope” and here is how it looks:
To prevent the process of traffic fading you should get your guest publications rank!
Moreover, guest blogging is a great chance to rank for those keywords that you had struggled to rank before.
10. Podcasts Work!
Featuring in podcasts is a widely-used practice among the experts from the different niches. And it gives the positive results because podcasts seem to start picking up steam nowadays.
Statistics show that there are about 550,000 podcasts in 100+ languages with 18.5 episodes available online on the web.
What’s more important, podcasts are a new alternative to old-fashioned types of content like posts, videos, infographics, etc. Any podcasts is a chance to be heard by your audience in a more informal manner.
For example, our CMO Tim appears on various SEO/marketing podcasts pretty often. And these podcasts bring us direct signups from those people who listen to the podcasts featuring Tim:
Thus, podcasts make sense in terms of pushing your brand into masses.
To Conclude
I have introduced you to 10 actionable hacks that would allow you to push your small business forward. All of these tactics have been tested in practice and already proven their effectiveness.
However, if you have your own hacks for small businesses, feel free to tell me about them in the comments.
Don’t forget to share this piece of content on your social accounts.
Sergey Aliokhin.
Sergey Aliokhin is a Marketing Manager at Ahrefs. Apart from working at Ahrefs he likes spending his time with family, studying martial arts and plucking fat bass guitar strings.
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