These days, if you’re not actively marketing your business or a startup, the chances of being discovered by potential customers or users are minuscule.
That’s why marketing should be one of the top priorities for anyone who’s looking to take a deserved spot on the market and scale up. But how do you make it in a crowded market full of businesses similar to yours? And how to promote your products and services in a more efficient way?
Here’s a list of marketing tips that I’ve tried myself and found the most useful:
#1 Researching your competitors
There’s no shortage of information online these days (the quality and reliability of this information can be subject to doubt, though). Everyone can open Google search and look up hundreds of reviews, product comparisons, and any other piece of insight that can help them make the final decision: to buy or not, to subscribe or not, to download or not, and so on.
Two conditions – highly competitive environments + the abundance of readily available information – make it more difficult for new businesses to enter the market and for already established businesses to maintain and/or improve their positions.
Hence, it is important to have competitive intelligence, or the process and results of the research of all possible competitors your business might have. Here’s what helps you with:
- Finding out what advantages your business can have in the industry;
- Growing your market share by capitalizing on your advantages;
- Running better marketing campaigns;
- Always stay aware of industry trends and players.
All of this is crucial if you’re planning to stay in the game for a long time and scale upwards.
This is what competitive intelligence can entail:
- Researching customer sentiments, i.e., what your potential customers think of your competitors and why they pick certain businesses over other similar ones;
- Discerning the key aspects of how your competitors position themselves on the market and how it differs from your positioning;
- Checking the social media/content/SEO strategies your competitors use;
- Compare the prices and calculate your optimal price point to compete successfully.
Key takeaway: knowing who your competitors are, why & how they attract customers can help you find viable strategies to differentiate your business and improve it to take a bigger share of the market.
#2 Developing a conversion funnel
People discover your business and interact with it through multiple steps and channels – the process is not as straightforward and linear as it might seem.
People move through what is called a conversion or a sales funnel, which has several stages: awareness, consideration, conversion, and retention. At each of these steps, you have to interact with them in a specific way to achieve your goals, and your marketing campaigns and efforts should be tailored to the expectations customers have at different levels of the conversion funnel.
Here’s what having a full-fledged conversion funnel entails:
- Running organic campaigns for both cold and warm audiences: cold audiences will get familiar with your business, and your existing customers will be retained through useful content;
- Running paid campaigns to 1) acquire new leads, 2) convince them to become customers, and 3) retain those who converted and increase their LTV;
- Tracking data about user interaction and behavior for each touchpoint/stage/channel – you have to be aware of what results every single thing you’re doing brings;
- Understanding what each audience segment wants and needs to see – useful content (is it going to be video? Tutorials and guides? etc.), unique/competitive offers, incentives for long-term users/customers, and so on.
Key takeaway: a conversion funnel that is properly thought through will help you build a clear and understandable conversion pipeline that continues to bring new leads and customers to your business.
#3 Leveraging educational content
Entertaining your potential customers is not enough anymore. We’re overloaded with entertaining content that’s coming not just from regular creators but brands and businesses as well, and it’s getting to the point when it annoys more than it engages.
What people seek these days is knowledge and valuable information instead of entertainment. We can notice this trend on all platforms businesses use for marketing, from TikTok to LinkedIn.
Educational content like how-to guides, tutorials, checklists, myth-busters, webinars, etc., helps businesses establish authority in their niche and a relationship of trust with their audience. When potential customers/users trust a business, they’re more likely to engage with it and convert, and it works for both acquisition and retention.
The key thing here, though, is having something worth sharing with others – the information has to be valuable and relevant for the intended viewers.
Right now, it’s easier to find suitable examples in the B2B sector. Take content created by Ahrefs on different platforms as one such example: it’s relevant for SEO specialists, digital marketers, and copywriters, i.e., for the target audience of the service.
Key takeaway: educational content is more about making a name for your business as a reliable source of valuable information within certain niches than direct promotion.
#4 Automating ad campaigns
Automation continues to be the biggest trend in 2024, especially in advertising. If you’re not automating your workflows, it will be hard to keep everything running smoothly without spending a lot of time and effort on controlling your campaigns manually.
Hence, automation tools are rising in popularity for all kinds of advertising purposes, from content creation and publishing to ad performance and bidding optimization.
Personally, I prefer tools that use automated rules for automating ad management (like ConvertBomb, for example). These rules allow you to scale or decrease budgets depending on ad or keyword performance, pause and duplicate ads and keywords, and so on. Essentially, this helps you automate multiple repetitive tasks that can quickly pile on and lead to performance issues if not done on time.
For example, you can make a rule for pausing ads that had 50 clicks during the last few while the ad spend was more than $100. The numbers and KPIs will be different in each specific case, but the core principle is the same: a metric reaches a specific value => something happens to your ads.
Even one rule can make an instant decision and take the necessary action on your part, preventing wasted ad spend and making sure your ads are scaled when
Key takeaway: running online ads is an essential part of marketing for most businesses and startups, so it makes sense to automate the process for higher efficiency and better results.
You don’t want to miss out on this if you’re relying on PPC advertising to promote your business.
#5 Learning the art of AI prompting
We already know that AI can help with various marketing tasks, from writing emails to generating creatives.
If you’re working with an AI tool or a language model, you should know how to speak on its terms. Giving the right prompts is the key to getting quality outputs, which makes it a key skill to learn in 2024 and beyond.
Compare these two prompts:
This is a simplistic example, but you can already see that adding context clues to your prompt helps you get responses that are closer to what you’re looking for. The more details you provide to ChatGPT and other language models, the better they’ll work.
The same goes for AI tools that generate images – if you want to get something that you can work with as a result, make sure to give specific instructions that AI can understand.
Key takeaway: correct inputs => desired outputs.
Keep in mind that in most cases, people can definitely tell whether a piece of content was quickly made by an AI or not. So don’t test your luck, use AI wisely, and don’t rely on it too much in terms of creativity or providing accurate information.
P.S.
This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to useful marketing tips for this year, so keep doing your own research and always check what happens in your industry – knowledge on its own is not power, but coupled with timely action, it will be.