5 Tips on How to Maximize Social-Media Efforts With a Small Team

No matter how small your business is, a good, strong social media strategy should be a vital part of your marketing efforts. An October 2015 study by Pew Research Center found that 65 percent of American adults surveyed use social networking sites, which means that if your business doesn’t have a presence there, you’re missing out on two-thirds of the U.S. population.

With dozens of social avenues to choose from, though, social media management may seem overwhelming, especially for a small business. Below are some tools and tips to effectively manage social media for your business, no matter how lean your team is.

1. DEVISE A MANAGEABLE STRATEGY.

Before diving in and signing up for every channel with a social aspect, get organized and be realistic about your capabilities, looking at the following categories:

• Hours per week available for social media management: This will set expectations about what you should prioritize and how many channels you should manage. Critical tasks that should be taken into account for effective social media management include:
• Design: This includes not only signing up for and populating your page with the essential elements but working with a designer to optimize graphics for aspects such as profile banners, profile pictures, and images for shared content.
• Content creation: This includes strategizing and writing posts, as well as working across multiple departments to publicize promotions.
• Content-engagement monitoring and interaction with followers: If your brand experiences negative sentiment online, or you anticipate customer service needs through these channels, allot time accordingly. To keep customers engaged, your social media manager should also be responding to comments and answering questions.
• Analytics: Monitoring of analytics, which includes sales, followers, engagement and sentiment, is imperative to refine content strategy and adjust social media management tactics for your business.
• Determining your target audience: If your product is built for businesses, look at professional sites such as LinkedIn to focus on. If you’re a storefront, establishing a presence on Google+ is essential to ensure you are search-engine-friendly. Facebook is the behemoth social media mainstay, so it should be on your list of must-have social channels.
• Determining your message: Besides increased sales, what do you want to achieve with your social media presence? Do you want your channels to act as an additional form of customer support? Do you want to distribute engaging content in hopes of its getting shared? Do you want to make new connections with leaders in your industry? Deciding on your goals will shape the messages of your channels, which should be unique to each outlet’s specific audience. As a fellowEntrepreneur writer mentioned, posting the same content repeatedly leaves followers less engaged.

2. USE TOOLS TO SAVE YOU TIME.

Now that you have a strategy in place and know what social media channels you’ll use, what type of messaging you want to disseminate and how you’re going to monitor your successes and areas for improvement, you’ll next need to put your approach into action. Thankfully, social media monitoring tools save you time as you’re managing channels and evolving a strategy.

3. USE FREE ANALYTICS PROVIDED BY EACH CHANNEL.

Often, social media in-house analytics tools provided by social media channels, such as those outlined by Social Media Examiner, are some of the most effective ways to keep track of data. Facebook Analytics, for example, shows page managers everything from the number of visitors at varying times of the day to data on how many people carried out a negative action — such as unliking a page — when interacting with a specific post.

Pinterest analytics show you the type of content your users love the most, while Twitter shows you not only yours and customers’ top Tweets but impressions and engagement. Google Analytics will show you what channels are driving traffic to your website and resulting in sales. Explore the free analytics of whatever sites you’re using, and use those insights to craft better content and optimize frequency of distribution.

4. USE FREE TOOLS TO MANAGE MULTIPLE CHANNELS.

While you can use software such as Excel to keep track of messaging and ensure you’re creating unique content for each channel, a multi-channel management application can display multiple feeds at once, saving you the pain of logging into myriad sites and clicking multiple windows.

Free social media multi-channel management services, such as those endorsed by the experts here, include Hootsuite and Buffer; and pull networks, such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+, which can go into one easy-to-read window. Some, like Hootsuite, will even display additional data besides your channel content, such as interactions with your business from other brands.

5. MAKE SOCIAL MEDIA PROGRESS EASILY SHAREABLE WITH YOUR TEAM.

Since social media is, well, social, you’ll want to make your strategy transparent to your team. This will not only garner you insight and suggestions from the social media users who make up your company but will incentivize them to get involved and boost your engagement by participating on your social channels.

Free project management tools such as Trello and Slack, mentioned by Social Media Today, allow you to display tasks to your team, while also allowing for global discussion.

Social media may be free, but your time is highly valuable. Continue to refine and optimize your social media strategy to maximize results, while saving your business money by taking advantage of free applications.

 Source : http://bit.ly/2dEu6VS

4 Ways to Integrate Instagram Ads Into Your Marketing

It's official: one of the fastest-growing social media networks worldwide is now offering advertising opportunities for marketers large and small. After months of testing its new ad format to a limited audience, Instagram rolled out the platform to advertisers everywhere on Sept. 30. If you're looking to integrate the ads into your social media marketing strategy, you've come to the right place! Keep reading for an in-depth guide to Instagram ads.

1. Understanding the network

Experienced digital marketers will be familiar with Instagram, the social network that has experienced a meteoric rise since its $1 billion purchase by Facebook three years ago. Today, the network boasts 400 million active users, propelling it to a high ranking behind industry giants like Facebook and its Chinese competitor, QZone.

Compared to its direct competitors, Instagram boasts a relatively young audience with 53 percent of its user base being 29 years or younger. Thanks in part to this young demographic, the network is one of the few which doesn't see college graduates as the top education demographic, though 31 percent of its users do have at least some college experience.

In other words, the network has long offered a premier opportunity for brands to expand their reach to millennials, promoting consumer-based products and services in the sub-30 age range. In fact, 32.5 percent of U.S. companies now use Instagram for marketing purposes, and eMarketer expects that number to rise to over 70 percent by 2017 -- surpassing Twitter.  

If I were a better person, I'd put money on the new ad capabilities for that induction of brands into Instagram.

2. The ad format

If you've been using Instagram since its early stages, you might think of the network as a digital photo album. And in essence, that remains true -- thanks to a layout that emphasizes pictures and the multitude of available filters, Instagram offers the perfect opportunity for brands to visualize their imagine and provide behind-the-scenes photographs of their operations. But now that the network has entered the ad landscape, it can offer so much more than that.

Currently, Instagram offers three types of ads to marketers: Image ads, video ads and carousel ads. Considering that the platform is owned by Facebook, it should come as no surprise that all three are closely related to their Facebook counterparts.

• Image ads are the equivalent of Facebook's Link Ads but with a heavier emphasis on visual. They offer brands the opportunity to add a call-to-action button to their ad, which enables them to drive web visits in addition to raising brand awareness. 
• Carousel ads are similar to image ads but offer additional functionality in the way that Facebook's carousel ads are essentially enhanced (and diversified) link ads. Instead of just one image, you add multiple images within the same ad, which enables you to showcase multiple pictures and calls to action with a single targeting option and ad copy.
• Finally, video ads do little more than drive video views -- you can add up to 30 seconds of moving images, but call-to-action buttons are not yet available for this ad type. 

While Instagram does not currently offer conversion optimization, the network has promised to add that feature in the near future.

3. Facebook integration

Here's without a doubt my favorite part of Instagram ads -- the set-up integrates seamlessly into Facebook's Power Editor, enabling marketers to take advantage of the numerous advanced targeting methods that they've come to love on the world's largest social-media platform. The new Power Editor even lets you create an integrated Instagram / Facebook marketing campaign that ensures you reach your target audience through a variety of channels.

When Facebook purchased Instagram in 2012, many users and marketers worried that it would mean the end of the picture network's independence of its larger brethren. The introduction of widely available, integrated Facebook ads have made that worry a reality -- but early on, it looks like marketers are benefiting rather than suffering from this integration.

Considering that Instagram ads became widely available less than a month ago, we don't yet have compelling statistics that show the network to be more effective than its competitors. But a variety of marketers who were able to take part in earlier tests, from Starwood to Levi's, has claimed to find significant success and favorable return on investment in their paid Instagram efforts. For what it's worth, the network itself is already showcasing a variety of success stories in promoting the new ad features.

4.Integrating Instagram into your social media marketing

Considering the early excitement around new ad features on the world's fastest-growing social media site, predict a large number of advertisers flocking to this shiny new toy. In fact, I encourage it. If only 32 percent of marketers are currently using Instagram for marketing purposes, the amount of competitive noise should be significantly less than some of the more established sites. But when moving to Instagram, it's important to integrate the new capabilities into your existing strategy rather than simply racing ahead.

Fortunately, the network has made this integration easy by working flawlessly alongside Facebook ads. But as most marketers know, that doesn't mean you should simply duplicate your efforts. Instead, you should develop ads that fit within your strategy and match the network's audience.

Business models that can provide easy visuals, from multimedia companies to fashion outlets, will find Instagram to be a great fit for their audience. Business-to-business companies, on the other hand, may not easily find footing on this consumer-based network. Put simply, Instagram ads make sense only if the network would have made sense for you even without the paid possibilities. If you haven't seen the need for an Instagram presence in the past, you should not change your mind now.

If, on the other hand, you're looking to enhance your presence on Instagram and spread awareness of your brand beyond your current followers, the new ad capabilities are huge news. They are without a doubt the new, shiny toy in social media marketing -- and I look forward to tracking just how well they perform compared to other networks.

 Source : http://bit.ly/1U0Wcwo

More about me. Be curious.

20 People Who Only Achieved Success After Age 40

As we look at actors, businessmen, and other geniuses who found success at a young age, we sometimes cannot help but wonder what we have been doing with our life. But not everyone hits their peak in their 20s to 30s. Here are 20 famous people who achieved success after the age of 40, and what they did to get where they became.

1. Samuel Jackson

The famous movie star was 46 when he played his role as Jules Winnfield inPulp Fiction. Before then, Jackson had struggled with drug addiction for two years until he got his first major role in Jungle Fever in 1991.

2. Martha Stewart

Stewart worked in catering for years, but her role as “America’s housewife” did not materialize until she started writing cookbooks and other pieces on domestic living in her 40s.

3. Ronald Reagan

Reagan obviously had a successful acting career, but he first came onto the political stage when he delivered his famous “A Time for Choosing” speech during the 1964 election at the age of 53. He leveraged his past acting talents to become one of the most respected presidents of the 20th century.

4. Henry Ford

In his youth, Ford worked as an engineer under Thomas Edison, where he worked on ways to improve the then new automobile. It was not until he was 40 that he founded the Ford Motor company, where he introduced the Model T five years later.

5. Abraham Lincoln

At the age of 40, Lincoln left the House of Representatives and went back to practicing law, his young political career seemingly over. He jumped onto the just-founded Republican Party seven years later, and then was elected President of the United States four years after that.

6. Reid Hoffman

Not every social media website was founded by some young tech genius. Reid Hoffman founded SocialNet.com in 1997, a precursor of sorts to Facebook. But he founded LinkedIn in 2002 at age 35, and then worked for years to make it the professional social networking site. When Hoffman took LinkedIn public 8 years later, he became a billionaire.

7. Lee Ermey

Ermey’s infamous performance as Gunnery Sergeant Hartman in Full Metal Jacket was his first major acting role at the age of 43. Ermey was originally supposed to be an advisor, but was cast as Hartman by impressing Stanley Kubrick with his knowledge of life as a Marine.

8. Ray Kroc

Kroc worked various jobs including a pianist and a traveling salesman for a milkshake maker. Then at the age of 52, he met the McDonalds brothers and proposed that their restaurant could expand across the United States. By the time he died in 1984, McDonald’s had become well, McDonald’s.

9. Richard Adams

While he worked as a British civil servant, Adams told his two daughters a story about a rabbit, who insisted that he write it down. After writing it down two years later, he published Watership Down, which instantly became a children’s literary classic.

10. Jack Cover

Cover worked for NASA and IBM, and eventually used his scientific knowledge to create a weapon which could stop individuals without killing them. Today, police agencies across the world use his Taser to subdue criminals nonviolently.

11. Momofuku Ando

As Japan recovered from the end of World War II, Ando sought a way to provide quick and cheap noodles to his impoverished countrymen. At the age of 48, Ando developed the instant ramen which sustains college students everywhere.

12. Alan Rickman

Rickman quit a successful graphic design business in his mid-20s to go into acting, but spent years working in theater until he was asked to play the role of Hans Gruber in Die Hard.

13. Sam Walton

Walton ran several stores, and failed many times in the process. But he learned from those failures and used the lessons to open the first Wal-Mart at 44 and become one of the richest men in the world. The store’s philosophy was simple, buy in bulk and sell them cheap. Today his stores sell everything from groceries to electric skateboards, and everything in between.

14. Miguel de Cervantes

Widely credited as the first Western novelist for his work Don Quioxte,Cervantes did not publish his first book until 38 and his most famous work at 58. Before then, he served in the Spanish Navy and struggled for years to find work which could support him as he wrote.

15. Julia Child

The woman who brought French cuisine to American televisions did not eat French food until she was 36, working for the OSS in post-war France. But after being absolutely stunned by French food, she studied the cuisine fanatically until she had enough knowledge to host The French Chef at 51.

16. “Colonel” Harland Sanders

Sanders worked a variety of odd jobs throughout his life, and watched his first attempt at a fried chicken restaurant fail at the ripe old age of 65. But Sanders used his Social Security checks to begin franchising Kentucky Fried Chicken, which became the success it is today.

17. Tim and Nina Zagat

These two certainly enjoyed success throughout their life as a pair of corporate lawyers. But after making a list of local restaurants they liked or did not like, they expanded the list into a full-time business. Today, the Zagat list covers over 70 cities.

18. Charles Darwin

Darwin went on his famous voyage on the HMS Beagle at just 21, but his work as a naturalist was held back by health issues. It was not until he was 50 that he finally published On the Origin of Species.

19. Peter Mark Roget

Peter Mark Roget had an interest in lists and orderly language throughout his life. When he retired from his scientific and mechanical work in 1840 at the age of 61, he began preparing to work on a book which would organize words by their definitions. The first thesaurus was published in 1852.

20. “Grandma” Moses

Anna Moses loved to embroider, but when her fingers started to fail at the age of 78, she took up painting. Today, she is remembered as one of America’s great folk artists, who painted scene after scene of American rural life.

  Source : http://bit.ly/1RsdFYf

From Likes to Leads: Five Steps to Social Lead Generation

Does the name ‘John Wanamaker’ ring a bell?

Probably not, but around the turn of the last century, he was a brilliant marketer and founder of a department store chain. He pioneered merchandising, was the first to add price tags to items, and introduced the money-back guarantee on purchases.

But perhaps more than anything, old Johnny W. is best known for his humorous take on his investments in marketing. You know the quote: Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.

Which Half is Social?

Fast-forward to today, and the truth is that many social marketers likely ponder similar issues. Over 150 years later, marketers and communicators are still wrestling with what we today call ‘attribution’.

On one hand, it feels great to measure success based on the number of fans, followers and subscribers a brand has. After all, views, likes, shares, and tweets are clear indications that your audience appreciates what you have to share. There’s definite value in creating brand awareness and affinity.

But on the other hand, this isn’t 2010 anymore. CMOs are under increasing pressure to show demonstrable ROI (or attribution). Every marketer must now correlate social marketing with the bottom line. Are those Facebook likes translating into web form completes? Are Twitter campaigns reducing acquisition costs of search engine marketing? What happens after somebody shares your blog posts on LinkedIn?

Just ask any sales exec and they’ll be quick to tell you what they want from social. Quality leads.

Driving Bottom Line Value from Social

Generating leads from social marketing is the new measure of effectiveness, but the majority of organizations fall short. While 83% of marketers use content to generate leads, a mere 21% are able to correlate ROI against the goal.   

So what’s a marketer to do? Let’s check out five social tactics that can help you delight your sales team and measure the value of your investments.  

1. Listen for the Right Signals

The key to being a great conversationalist is to be a great listener, right? Social marketing is no different.

Of course you want to deliver great content, but social listening is a short path to lead generation. Not only does it enable you to discover what topics are generating interest and what customers are saying about your brand, it equips you to hone in on key ‘buy words’ that indicate an active interest in finding solutions pertinent to your products and services. You’ll need to adjust your listening filters based on your specific situation, but imagine the value of detecting associated terms like ROI, RFP, considering, opinions, evaluation, buying, review, etc.

2. Pinpoint Messages Based on Insights

Next, leverage the insights you’ve gained through social listening to join the conversation. Make that research actionable. Monitor where conversations are happening, and align content to topics generating the most interest.

For the best results, apply social insights to drive broader marketing decisions. One quick win opportunity is to target specific customers with 1-to-1 social advertising on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or Instagram. Be sure each call to action enables you to track the prospect to the next phase—this is not the time for fleeting marketing messages.

3. Connect Social IDs to CRM Records

Associating social identities to CRM records enables you to continue the conversation on other channels like email. The best approaches use every customer interaction—regardless of channel or stage in the customer lifecycle—as an opportunity to connect the dots. Imagine a day where your marketing can be “channel-agnostic” and technology helps to determine the best way to reach a prospect at a particular time. That day starts now with identity consolidation.

Customers are accustomed to providing an email address or phone number as a unique identifier. Are you requesting social handles as a standard part of every interaction you have with them? How about your peers in support? Or better yet, even earlier—do your online purchase forms include fields for social identifiers? Your product registration process? Webinar registration forms? Surveys? 

Be sure to identify all critical touch points throughout your customers’ journeys. It will likely reveal new opportunities to connect social identities to data already stored in your CRM platform. 

4. Carefully Manage Sales Expectations

It’s not uncommon for social leads to meet some initial resistance from the sales team. Because the strategy is unfamiliar, there’s a tendency to perceive the source as less valuable than more traditional types of leads.

That’s a dangerous assumption. Consider that only 27% of all leads—regardless of how they were generated—ever receive any type of follow-up from sales (and most of those don’t receive any within the first 48 hours). Talk about a negative impact on ROI!

Marketing will have a hard time changing that culture: It has to come from sales leadership. As it relates to social leads, let sales leadership know what they can expect from your team in terms of volume and quality, and gain agreement on SLAs for follow-up.

It’s also a good idea to provide some coaching on how to best follow-up on social leads. They should be handled differently than other qualified leads. The chances are that you’ve carefully curated the interest over time, and a heavy-handed response from sales can quickly unravel what had been a ‘soft sell’ up to that point. 

5. Measure the Results

Last but certainly not least, carefully track the results of your social efforts. Avoid the temptation to solely use marketing metrics. Instead, speak salespeople’s language—analyze and share results based on sales-centric measures like number and value of leads, opportunities and closes. 

For added validity, be sure you’re able to answer the proverbial ‘as compared to what?’ question in reports. With social lead generation being new, it’s easy to classify it as a new sales tool with no peers (and thus no comparison). But the budgets, resources and marketing efforts could be spent doing something else.

And of course, be honest with your reporting, even if you don’t see immediate efficacy. Driving leads through social can take time, but few doubt that building 1-to-1 social relationships will continue to become ever-more critical.

Source : http://sforce.co/1Q3DNYG

Predictions for marketers and brand managers in 2016

The start of a year means a new slate of predictions.

Here are some key things we expect to see in 2016:

1. Networks and advertisers will realize engagement is key. Though some measurement organizations continue to opine about the value of measuring conversation on Twitter and Facebook and how that affects TV/advertisers, 2016 will mark the year when networks and advertisers wise up to the fact that most people don’t talk on social media.

So, if you’re measuring talk, you’re missing the big picture. Focus will turn to measurement of “engagement” more broadly defined to analyze and measure the signals that all users of social media actually do, not just the hyperactive users who represent the majority of content on everyone’s feeds. In our view, conversation is just a subset of engagement.

2. Companies will resist processing too much information. The first use cases of social media data in respect to driving business decisions was a game of cherry-picking metrics and flipping a coin to get meaningful business results. Over the years, we’ve championed looking at the complete picture of metrics as the only way to get meaningful business results.

Though many people in the industry now agree, looking at 2,000+ social media and digital metrics also has its set of challenges. Brand managers who analyze and make use of the right curated and derived metrics will provide the advantage of coming to most business decisions more quickly, digging into lower-level metrics only when they need more specific analysis.

3. Chat platforms will embrace their value.  Younger social media users are shifting their attention to chat platforms (WhatsApp, Snapchat, WeChat, Viber, Kik, etc.). There is a great and exciting opportunity to hyper-target audiences; however, you must do it correctly.

Chat platforms will look to build the right native ad products and, more important, the right measurement to gauge engagement. Brands’ stories must align with how the platforms work, not be repurposed or syndicated from other platforms.

4. New measurement tool will excite and confuse. The entire TV/advertising industry is waiting with bated breath for Nielsen’s Total Audience Measurement—the magic solution to cure the ills of declining TV viewership. (It’s not declining, but rather moving to new platforms: tablets, mobile, computers, OTT devices, etc.).

We know it’s launching in 2016 and will, no doubt, have glitches that everyone will complain about. Hopefully there will be compassion out there for this massively complex undertaking.

This year will therefore be a big year of education and testing in this world:

• Education—because everyone has to learn exactly what this is measuring, all the vocabulary and all the features.

• Testing—because these data have never been available to the marketplace, so packaging and pricing will be all over the place.

5. Network advertising will go old school. Harkening back to the days of sponsored programs, networks will expand advertising inventory for integrated experiences and other non-30-second pod advertising opportunities. This year’s Pepsi/Empire collaboration will be unleashed in many different forms by major networks and advertisers to cut through the clutter, avoid time-shifting behavior and make a meaningful impact.

6. TV programs will evolve into brands living in a post-viewership world. Though we’ve been saying it for years—and someone (Philippe Dauman in Viacom’s earnings announcements) finally said the same thing—the notion of selling 30-second pods is not the way of the future.

With the realization finally sinking in that consumers can interact with shows (beyond watching 30- or 60-minute episodes) every day across social media platforms, expect that network execs will make moves as simple as selling native posts on network-owned feeds, releasing sponsored mobile games inspired by the shows, or creating real-world sponsored events with talent and non-episodic content.

7. The “audience targeting/programmatic” honeymoon may wear off. The ad world will continue to focus on hyper-targeting and addressability of everything—linear and nonlinear, across different screens and devices. The question is whether all the time and financial investment going into these technologies will reap premium ad pricing to sustain the continued investment and evolution. Industry pros might be asking for it, but that doesn’t mean they’ll put their money where their mouths are.

On that front, brand managers will be forced to reconcile which initiatives drive conversion and which ones drive brand. Driving conversion clearly drives the bottom line; this will lead to more questioning of the role of brand marketing that’s not tied to conversion and the weight it receives in advertisers’ marketing strategies.

8. The industry will up its game so consumers don’t want to block ads. Ad blocking is a hot topic, but the conversation will shift from, “How do technologies stop it or enact it?” to, more critically, “How does the industry change the ways in which ads are conceived and put in front of consumers so that consumers don’t want to block them in the first place?”

9. Election year will usher in a new era of social media analytics. Social media data will be finally be used in meaningful ways to project contest results, including the race for the White House. Though we are not sure we’ll see something as sophisticated as Nate Silver’s 538, these data signals are definitely heading in that direction.

Source : http://bit.ly/1PGGdw1

Quote of the day.

3 Actionable Marketing Tips for a Startup with no Money

With so many big and well established brands competing for market share online, it can be a daunting task for the small business to find a marketing strategy or SEO tactic that is going to give them any edge on the web.

This is true for standard marketing and media buys as well as for organic search engine ranking.

Not to despair, there are always opportunities to build a stable business online. Small business, especially local business can be very nimble compared to the larger business.

As a result, they can often get closer to their target market a lot easier than the big brands can. They can also negotiate and partner a lot quicker than big brands.

Here are three marketing tactics that won’t break the bank, but might just help you brainstorm a way to break free of the, “little man mold”.

Low Cost Tactic 1:

"Friends with Benefits"

This tactic requires you to think laterally about your industry. Rather than look at your customer or competition, look around at those industries and services that somehow compliment or contribute to your own.

How can you engage their services to promote your own and increase your own brand exposure?

Example: A new hair salon targeting 18-35 year old females

Combine your hair salon service with a service that every girl in this demographic is looking for when they get married: A Hire car service. Find a local, perhaps reasonably, new hire car service that would like a bit of exposure themselves.

Offer to advertise their service in your salon in exchange for a free limo ride once a week to a lucky group booking in your salon.

The offer is a free Limousine ride to and from the salon, won by draw, when you you book yourself and three other friends for a salon treatment.

Submit a local press release to promote the idea within your community and at the same time increase the exposure of both business. Run the campaign on the Social Media Platforms of both businesses as well.

Who are the friends and neighbours in your niche? How can you collaborate with them?

Low Cost Tactic 2: 

"Industry Press Release Services - with a Twist"

OK, so it's hardly groundbreaking, but it is still powerful and still free. The trick, in my opinion, is not to write the release yourself but to find someone in a related niche who will write about it for you. Let the marketing become their problem.

Example: Utilise an Industry News Columnist or Blogger

I once came across a retail industry news site that seemed to publish a lot of articles on online retail start ups that were offering something unique. I was running an online ecommerce store at the time that sold traditional board games, many hand made, from all over the world.

The unique concept was that we went back to the countries in which the games originated and asked those artists to make their game, their own, authentic way.

I approached the retail news site about our products and offered to do an interview. The editor liked our unique angle, wrote up the interview and published our store as "retailer of the week".

We got huge traffic and from the article which is still on their site 5 years later. All I did was find a unique angle for our product and answer the questions.

What makes your product or service stand out? Find a new angle and exploit it.

Low Cost Marketing Tactic 3: 

"Talk, Talk Talk... to Influencers"

Every industry has it's influencers, and they are all hanging out online... influencing. You should know who they are if they are in your industry. Having the courage to reach out and talk to them can have surprisingly good results if you are genuine, humble and honest.

Example: "Infographic and Rich Media Sharing"

Infographics don't cost anything except your time. I use Canva. It's free and gives great results.

I am no designer, but not long ago I put together a cheeky article, "First Page of Google, and How I get my Clients there", and then created a fairly simple infographic to go with it.

Luckily, the article went to the first page of Google and is still there - otherwise this would have been a monumental flop! I then managed to put that infographic under the noses of some big names in my industry - the web marketing industry.

Two of them took it up and published it on the front page of their SEO website.

The results of such a high profile marketer taking up my humble infographic had almost immediate results. The link back to my site also meant that my cheeky article remained on Google's first page.

To this day, that article, along with the organic traffic and the referral traffic from that influencer is the number one source of new clients for my business.

What content do you have that you could re-purpose? Do you have a video you could turn into an article? An article you could turn into an e-book?

Whatever your niche, there are always fresh ways to market your brand online. From the personal and contactable nature of your customer service, to the partnerships you form with other small business, there are ample opportunities to create new marketing channels for your business.

Startup marketing requires brainstorming. it requires getting together with friends and business neighbours and collaborating. it requires patience, testing and a commitment to the task.

Big brands are investing big money into their online reputation and marketing and the cost of doing business online has gone up considerably the last five years.

But it doesn’t have to cost a bomb. Grab a pencil and paper and see how your new start up can put these marketing tactics to work for you online.

Source : http://bit.ly/1T7XiCB