Little Things – 19 Quick Marketing Tips

For the last twenty weeks, we’ve been running this series of quick marketing tips to help you improve your performance. It’s been a great run, and we’ve had some fun putting them together. This post, the twentieth and final post in the series, recaps all of the tips in the series.

Last week’s topic was create a sitemap.

This week’s tip:

Review All 19 Marketing Tips in this Series

1. Change the Style of Your Web Forms
2. Optimize the Functionality of Your Web Forms
3. Add Alt Tags to Your Images
4. Start Retargeting Your Web Visitors
5. Start an Email Newsletter
6. Use Lists in All Your Copywriting
7. Use Surveys to Perfect Your Processes
8. Collect and Use Testimonials in Your Ads
9. Build Internal and Inbound Links
10. A Look Back
11. Incentivize Everything
12. Provide Phone Numbers
13. Answer Questions
14. Start a Blog
15. Attend a Marketing Conference
16. Automate Your Emails
17. Offer Free Trials
18. Offer a Mobile Website
19. Create a Sitemap

I certainly hope that you’ve enjoyed this series while it lasted. If you have any quick tips that I didn’t include, please share them in the comments section below.

Little Things 18 – Go Mobile

Welcome to this week’s edition of “Little Things”, a weekly blog series covering the small changes that you can make to improve marketing performance.

Last week’s topic was free trials.

This week’s tip:

Offer a Mobile Website

Mobile marketing has made some fantastic strides over the past year.

We’ve seen traffic from smartphones and tablets begin to climb at even faster rates in the past few months. And business owners and marketers must realize that this traffic cannot be ignored. It’s a trend that’s likely to continue, and unless you take the necessary actions to cater to this audience, you risk losing potential customers to your competitors who already are.

The first step is an easy one, create a mobile optimized website. This makes for easy viewing and browsing on mobile devices, meaning you won’t be turning away web visitors just because your site is too difficult to browse on a mobile device.

1. Visit your website on a smartphone and a tablet to see how it looks. Does it load correctly? Does it size appropriately or do you have to continually zoom in and out?
2. Try browsing a few pages. Is it simple enough to do it? Will people not already familiar with your brand think so?
3. If there is any question in your mind about the usability of the site, it needs work.
4. Visit http://www.howtogomo.com/en/d/, Google’s free tool to help you start the process of creating a mobile website.
5. Spend the money to create an easy to use, often shrunken down version of your site for mobile visitors.
6. Make sure key pages, such as forms or landing pages, are also optimized so that any search traffic or ad clickthroughs that you get can take the necessary next steps.

Little Things 17 - Free Trials

Welcome to this week’s edition of “Little Things”, a weekly blog series covering the small changes that you can make to improve marketing performance.

Last week’s topic was automate your emails.

This week’s tip:

Offer Free Trials

Offering free trials on products and services to potential customers has long been a successful marketing practice. Software companies have used this practice for years, and web services are taking advantage of the free trial as a means of signing up larger numbers of customers. One of the more famous free trial campaigns is AOL’s old free hours of internet usage that they would send out via CD’s in the mail. And to this day, many grocery stores feature free samples of food products that customers can try at the end of the aisle.

Why is this practice so popular? Because it works. It works on a number of levels.

First, it introduces people to a new product or service without any risk. To get customers to try something for the first time, you have to help them overcome their fears. One fear is getting ripped off. When they can try something for free, they can decide if they like it before they’re forced to pony up the cash.

Second, it gets people committed. If you think about the web services example, most free trials still require people to create an account and start interacting with the product. Once the free trial expires, many customers have already committed some time to the product, and will be more likely to continue their usage on some kind of payment plan.

Free trials won’t work for every kind of company. But don’t take the easy way out and reject the idea without giving it some serious thought. Even if your particular service does not lend itself to free trials, I’m sure you can find some creative ways to offer something for free to get people interested.

Here are some ideas to help get the creative juices flowing:

1. Get people to sign up for your service by offering a first time buyer discount
2. Require an email address in order to receive coupons
3. Offer your first hour or two of consulting at no charge
4. Delay billing to new customers for one month and allow them to return it within 30 days
5. Offer a secondary product for free with purchase of the first product
6. Create a liberal return policy that leaves the customer on the hook for 0% of the purchase