10 Tactical Marketing Tips to Grow Your Business

Oct 31, 2022

I like to think of marketing as all those activities which grow your customer or partner acquisition funnels. Good marketing complements both sales and business development, and it should be done in service of those two functions.

Each of these tactics should be used in conjunction with a well-defined, quantifiable goal. Measure your results against your goal, and iterate as necessary.

Note: this is a long-ish post (about 1,700 words). Each section is highlighted in bold--you may want to scan through the entire post first, and read those sections which interest you the most, and ignore the rest. There are a ton of links provided throughout the entire post, where you can find more in depth information about the various tactics discussed.

Blog regularly

This one is pretty straightforward: a company blog is a great way to market your product or service. You can use Ghost, Substack, Wordpress, or any other blogging service. But it needs to be done consistently. If you are able to consistently blog for six months or a year, you will find that a flywheel starts to develop, in which your site ranks more highly on Google, you start to generate more inbound inquiries, and your company's surface area grows.

A lot of people are inclined to outsource this to a freelance content writer. I'd avoid that temptation. Not only do you know your product or service better than anyone else, but the practice of writing about your company and the value you offer your customers helps you sharpen your messaging on sales calls, customer visits, conference talks, etc.

I previously wrote about how to use AI tools to rapidly build out blog content. This strategy could work for your company, however, you have to learn prompt engineering for content marketing. You would also have to add an additional tool to your arsenal, such as Copy.ai, Jasper.ai, or OpenAI's own Playground. It's also important to keep in mind that AI-powered writing tools are, like all of AI tech, developing very rapidly. Staying on top of it all can be a full time job.

If you're interested in a more conventional blog creation process, here are a few articles providing some advice about how to run a blog for your business:

Repurpose your content

Take a blog post and decompose it into a Twitter thread. Or, use a twitter thread as the basis for a new blog post. Take a curated selection of your blog posts and compile a newsletter.

A lot of marketing entails content creation, and one of the nice things about the 21st century is that virtually all content is digital. Take advantage of the infinite replicability of digital content and repurpose your previously generated content.

Here are some more tips:

Podcasts

I'm not a fan of podcasts, but I know a lot of people are, so I'd be remiss if I did not include them in this list. You can either host your own podcast, or be interviewed on other people's podcasts.

Maybe you sell software that car insurance companies can use to more accurately price their policies. So maybe you should be interviewed by a car insurance podcast? There is literally a list of the best insurance podcasts. Who knew?

There are supposedly over 2 million podcasts out there. You should be able to find one which complements your company.

A couple of things to think about regarding podcasts, whether you decide to host your own, or be interviewed by others:

You need to understand how your speaking voice comes across to potential customers, users, partners, etc. Certain accents, dialects, speech cadences, etc. can be hard to understand or are off-putting. Maybe you have a trusted confidant who can tell you whether yours is a good speaking voice.
It can be very hard to draw a line from a podcast appearance to a new user or customer. Podcasts are a long term game, and you will never quite know how effective a given podcast appearance is at growing your funnel. But the overall effect can be positive.

Here are a few links with some suggestions for finding podcasts interested in interviewing you:

Write guest posts on other blogs

Another possibility is to create content for blogs that are complementary to, or adjacent to, your business. Maybe you build software for developers, and My Really Cool Software Blog allows guests to blog for it. It's another opportunity to widen your customer funnel, so maybe it's worth a shot.

It is hard to measure the effectiveness of guest posts, as you probably won't have access to analytics data from the blog.

Some useful links:

Partner with complementary businesses

This is standard business development. Are there other businesses which complement your product or service, with whom you could partner? Many of the large tech companies run conferences which complementary companies attend. Salesforce, for example, has its Dreamforce conference every year. Thousands of companies attend. You never know who you'll meet at those kinds of conferences.

Here are a few links which can help you start to think about where to find partnership opportunities:

Get your product or service reviewed

This is a pretty straightforward tactic: if you can identify a high traffic web site whose audience is directly relevant to the product or service you sell, see if they do reviews. If so, it may be worth pursuing this channel.

A few links to help you start thinking about this:

Speak at conferences

The appeal of speaking at conferences is pretty straightforward:

It's a one-to-many dynamic, in which you are conveying your company's message to a lot of potential customers at the same time.
It's an ego boost.
It's a great way to scalably drum up interest in your business.

But from my experience there are a number of things to consider when looking at conferences:

Is the time required to prepare a speech, and travel to the conference, worth it? What opportunities do you lose out on, by spending time on this endeavor?
Is your speaking slot at an optimal time? Getting the last speaking slot of the day means no one will be around to listen to your pitch.
Do you have to pay a fee to speak? Whether this is worth it to you depends on a whole host of variables that only you will know the answer to.
Are the people who are in a position to buy what you're selling in attendance at the conference? Conference organizers like to highlight all the VIPs and senior executives who attend, but these people won't necessarily be at the conference on the day you speak, or they may not be in the room you're speaking in.

In any event, here are a few links to help you get started on finding conferences to speak at:

Get listed in relevant directories

Getting your company listed in directories can help you attract customers who are specifically interested in whatever your product or service is.

Examples of directories include:

There are many more niche directories available. Some links to peruse include:

Build an email list

Email lists have been around for a few decades now, and spam filters are increasingly good, so returns on email marketing have been trending down. Nonetheless, it remains a viable channel for certain businesses.

If you think that your business would do well to build an email list, here are a few links to help you get started:

Giveaways & promotions

Everyone loves free stuff, and companies seem to love giving away swag. The return here is uncertain, because it's next to impossible for you to know that a given customer became a customer because she received a tote bag emblazoned with your company logo at last year's conference.

However, company-branded swag has been around for decades and has staying power. Clearly some companies find it to be a profitable marketing channel.

Some useful links to help get your started exploring this marketing channel:

Summary

The world of marketing is vast, and this post could have easily been tens of thousands of words long. However, these 10 tactics should provide a great start to anyone looking to grow their sales and business development funnels. The most important aspect of any of these tactics is to define a quantifiable goal to measure against. Iterate based on results, and grow your channels.

Buy the Rumor; Sell the News

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