Results-Focused Online Marketing Strategies

Are you concerned about Marketing ROI in these tough times? Read on for a variety of things you can implement virtually without cost if you have the available resources.

Co-Registration & Co-Marketing
Are there companies in your industry that have related but non-competitive offerings? What better time to work with them and figure out some strategic co-marketing. These efforts might include:

• Ad swaps. Get them to run a small ad on their site or in their newsletter in exchange for running one on theirs.
• Co-registration. Get them to offer an opt-in “check box” for your newsletter in their newsletter sign up process and do the same for them.
• Shared editorial. Write a relevant newsletter article or blog post for them and get them to do the same. Be sure to get a link back to your site to maximize SEO.
• Contests. Launch a contest to encourage purchases or sign ups and get a partner to give you the prizes. Be sure to give them enough exposure so that it’s well worth their while to do so.

Social Media
Have you figured out how to leverage Social Media for your business yet? If not, it’s a great time to start some experiments in this “free” medium. Bear in mind the word “social” in social media and make sure you only launch relevant initiatives or you’ll risk alienating your audience.

One great strategy is to develop some valuable content and offer it for free. You can then promote the content through social media (which, unlike promoting your business directly, is okay). As an example, if your business offers Executive Coaching you might want to write a great guide on “Effective Leadership in Tough Times” then find opportunities to get the word out to relevant sites, networks and forums.

Just remember, you do NOT want to be spamming sites and forums with commercial stuff. Just stick to getting word out about the helpful guide (or whatever content you develop) and ensure that the guide itself and the pages it’s presented on are well branded and have an appropriate call to action. If you take the high road and do a great job executing on this you can achieve dramatic success with such an approach.

Email List Optimization
Regardless of the size of your organization you can improve your results dramatically by cleaning and optimizing your list. The lowest hanging fruit in these regards is simply to determine who has been in your list for the last 6 months or more and has not opened an email. Break this group into a separate list, send them a test mailing to determine they are indeed “dead” and then cut them from the list.

Your deliverability % will go up, your complaint rate will go down and your costs will be reduced if you use an external vendor. This is a tactic we love to bring in when we’re doing email consulting with larger companies as it’s usually possible to save the company more money in deployment costs than what the engagement costs them (we’re 3 for 3 in these regards in the last year or so with companies who have lists over 500,000 in size).

This post originally ran in our Online Marketing Insights Newsletter. Watch for the next issue as we look at Article Marketing, Blogging and Effective Site Optimization.