Despite the fact that there always seems to be a new, shiny tool for marketing each day, email marketing is still incredibly powerful. Don’t get me wrong. I get plenty of emails each day that go directly into my junk mail. But just because some businesses stink at email doesn’t mean the whole tool is obsolete.
Whenever I see a headline that reads “email is dead,” I think to myself, “No…it’s not.”
My recent guest on Delivering #MarketingJoy, Luke Charlton, agrees. Luke Charlton is known as the Aussie Hermit and he teaches business coaches how to increase their business by sending amazing emails…every day. Yes. Every day. You can watch my full conversation with Luke here.
Here are his 3 steps to big email success.
Tell A Story
As Luke says, if you want to send an email every day, it needs to be interesting. They have to include a story. It needs to entertain. That might be something that makes your audience laugh, cry, or be angry. It just needs to be interesting!
Tie In A Lesson
With each story, there should be a lesson. Regardless of the service or product, you are selling, the point of telling the story is to relate it to the audience. How does this help them? What can they learn? And of course, this lesson should relate to the product or service that you offer.
Give An Offer
Finally, after you have told the story with the lesson, you need to tie it to what you sell. What offer do you have that will help solve a problem for your audience? Make that offer!
There you have it! According to Luke Charlton, that is the key to building an email list and creating big sales success by sending an email every day. Those are the 3 steps to email success. Again, you can watch the full interview here!
“If you build it, they will come.” This is a line from an iconic Hollywood movie called “Field of Dreams,” with Kevin Costner. It’s also one of the biggest lies we believe in business when it comes to creating a new website.
Building a new (or improved) website for your organization can be exciting. It takes a lot of planning and hard work. And hopefully, when you are done, you are incredibly excited about the outcome! The problem that many organizations run into is they think that when the website is built, the work is done. They believe the line from the movie. They have built it…now the traffic will come!
Unfortunately, that’s not how website traffic works.
I hate the be the bearer of bad news, but once the site is functional, now the work of driving traffic to the website begins. This is one of the ways that websites are just like a retail establishment. You can’t just put up the “open” sign and have a steady flow of traffic. You have to do the work. So here are 7 ways to drive traffic to your new website.
Paid Traffic
You have likely heard of Google Adwords and Facebook ads. These are incredibly effective ways to drive traffic to your site. The best part about this traffic is that it tends to be very targeted. When it comes to Google Adwords, they have likely searched for the very solution you provide. For all its faults, Facebook is incredibly good at creating traffic as well. This is a great way to get your website on the map. The downside, of course, is that if your entire strategy is built on paid traffic, the cost will just continue to rise.
Press Releases
This is such an often overlooked strategy. When well-written and well-targeted, this can be extremely effective. We recently launched a website called JobsInCoshocton.com. The idea is to educate 17-24-year-olds in Coshocton County about the opportunities in their hometown. While sending this press release out nationally would make no sense, the local media is very interested. If you pick the right target, the audience might be hungry for your news.
Content Marketing
There are a LOT of ways to use content marketing to promote your new website. The first is to create a blog on the new site or to have other interested bloggers write about it to drive traffic. You can also create videos or podcasts that can talk about the importance and features of the new site. You can also request to be a guest on other podcasts or videos. These content providers may already have an audience that speaks to your target, so you can help them (by providing interesting content) while they help you!
In the example of JobsInCoshocton.com, we will likely feature that team on the Coshocton Conversations podcast soon. That podcast already speaks to people who are interested in the area, so they would be a perfect fit!
Direct Mail
We have said it before here, direct mail is not dead. And with the pandemic, its effectiveness has increased. When you want to drive traffic to your new site, a targeted direct mail piece can be powerful. A few tips to help increase the effectiveness include:
Make it clear what you want the audience to do. Put a QR code on the piece to show people to scan it so they can head straight to the site.
Do a postcard so they don’t have to open anything to see the information.
Add an extra feature (like a magnet) so there is added long-term value to promote the site.
Make it bumpy. Add a piece of branded merchandise to improve open rates and the long-term success of the mailer.
Branded Merchandise
Using Branded Merchandise is a great way to build a tribe. These brand advocates can become the best source of “word of mouth” for your new website. The best brands have a tribe of people excited to tell the story. And if you are smart, you can make that even easier. You can certainly add your website to items that have a large enough imprint area. And just like your direct mail piece, you can create an amazing piece of merch with a QR code as well.
Branded merchandise is (by its nature) very targeted and also longer lasting. So by incorporating a quality piece of branded merchandise into your campaign, you can not only give the website a boost in the short term but give it a longer-lasting impact as well.
Email and Text
We have talked about the difference between brand marketing and direct marketing here before. Branded merchandise can serve both purposes. Email and text messages are hardcore direct marketing! Your own list of contacts in email and text can be one of the most valuable assets you have in your marketing toolbox. You own that list. By letting these “VIPs” know that you have a new website, you can create direct traffic to the site…right away!
Event Marketing
When you know exactly who you are marketing to, you know what events they attend. Whether that is going to a trade show, a community event, or an educational conference, getting face to face with that audience can be powerful. At these events, you can create a buzz around the website and even show people how to use the new site. This “hand to hand combat” can be a great way to tell the story of your organization…and why the new website can be a great tool!
These are 7 ways to drive traffic to your new website. As you can see, I talk quite a bit about targeting the right audience. Traffic only really matters if it’s the right traffic. By using these strategies, you can not only increase traffic…but the right kind of traffic to the website!
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If you are a marketer or an entrepreneur, you likely have more than a few challenges. But one of them is most likely, where to spend your time and resources. There is finite time and money, and you want to make sure you are doing the thing that will bring you the most return. Mike Michaelowicz turned me onto this idea in his book “Fix This Next.” Mike created a “Business Priority Pyramid” so that entrepreneurs can decide what is the right thing for them to be working on each day. I found this to be a powerful tool in order to make sure my efforts are going in the right direction.
But I find this to be a challenge for marketers too! There are so many marketing options to spend your time and resources on, it can be tough to know what to work on next. In addition, it seems like every day, a shiny new marketing tool comes out. As marketing professionals, we want to stay on top of the latest trends. But you don’t want to spend all of your time distracted by the newest toy…and lose out on the foundation.
That is why we created our HMC Marketing Pyramid
The concept is simple. We have created our HMC Marketing Pyramid as a worksheet for marketers. We have created levels so that you know where you are on your marketing journey. It also helps you prioritize what you need to work on next (or budget to work on soon). As you go through the pyramid, you want to check each box where you feel you are strong (or at least comfortable) where you are. After you go through the whole checklist, go to the lowest part of the pyramid where there is an unchecked box. That is where you need to start! You need to have a strong foundation if you want a pyramid that is going to last.
Rookie Level
If you love sports metaphors, you are going to dig this. If not, think of this as the foundation of your marketing plan. You might be starting a new venture, or you want to get back to basics. You start at the Rookie Level. At that level, you want to make sure you are happy with your logo, basic branding, website, and more. If you leave something un-checked here, no problem. It just shows you that it’s time to work on that to move your marketing efforts to the next level.
Starter Level
And speaking of the next level, now you are a starter! At this level, you have mastered the basics and you want to begin to be more intentional and more consistent. This is when you “up your game” on communication and letting your best customers know you love your fans.
All-Star Level
All-stars take it to the next level, and that is exactly what this ranking means. Once you have completed all of the tasks at Rooke and Starter, you can take bigger swings. Sure you have social media pages, but do you have a plan? Have you made the transition from rented media to owned media? I talk about what that means here. This is what happens at the All-Star level.
Hall of Fame
Marketers and entrepreneurs at the Hall of Fame level are truly building brands. They have custom events to showcase their services and to connect with their tribe. Many also feature custom apparel that their customers actually pay to wear! Now THAT is a brand!
So where do you land on the HMC Marketing Pyramid? This is a jumping-off tool to help you plan what should be next for marketing your organization. Let us know if you want to meet with one of our Hasseman Marketing reps to go over the pyramid…and plan the next steps!
A week or so ago (as I write this), something happened that rocked a huge group of people to their core…Facebook and Instagram went down for around 6 hours. While you can comment about the addictive qualities of social media and our phones (and that’s a blog for another day), I looked at it through the eyes of a marketer. The fact is, many businesses use social media exclusively to market their businesses. Some businesses talked about losing millions of dollars during that 6-hour stretch because everything they did (marketing, selling, and collecting money) all happen through Facebook.
So it begs the question…what happens when Facebook goes away?
What will you do if the largest social media platform stops? How will you market your business or your organization without Facebook? Now before anyone gets on your high horse, this is not a blog designed to bash Facebook, or using the platform to market. From my perspective, an organization would be crazy not to use this resource. You can find us on Facebook here. For all its faults, I still see Facebook as the number one platform to promote just about anything online. But some of us (maybe me included) have become overly reliant on this one platform to meet our needs.
The most obvious and immediate strategy, if this happens, is to move to another social media platform. As a matter of fact, that’s exactly what happened that day. Twitter usage took off, as did Linkedin, TikTok, etc. And in talking with other marketing experts about this very situation, that was their first suggestion. As my friend Bill Petrie said, “When Facebook goes away it will likely be because another platform became more important.” That’s a great point. So first step…go to where your clients are hanging out.
While this is good advice (and it is), there are challenges here too. What if Facebook goes away quickly? What if the platform that takes on most of the users is not one you have a following on? You have the audience built on Facebook. The challenge, of course, is that you would need to start over to build your audience again. So if you need to build that audience on another platform at some point, maybe you should begin before you need to.
Takeaway: If your audience can only access you on one platform, you might want to consider building another.
Using Physical Marketing
One of the most powerful things that social media has allowed companies to do is to create a real relationship with their customers. Traditional media was one-sided. But social media allows for conversation. While Facebook is a powerful distribution tool, it does allow for you to hear from your tribe. That is really cool. Now that you have done that work, it’s important to continue to solidify that relationship. One powerful way to do that is by using high-quality branded merchandise. Get your brand in the hands of your advocates and let them help you spread the word.
This is what the best marketers did during the pandemic. When there was no way (other than social media) to reach customers, creative marketers started to send boxes of branded merchandise to their employees and their customers to their homes. This created a connection that did not exist in the “real world” because of our isolation. It’s powerful. So why wait? Start a campaign to get amazing coveted merchandise in the hands of your best customers.
Takeaway: Create a quarterly appreciation program targeted at your Top 20% of customers.
Rented Versus Owned Media
Since the early days of marketing, we have become very comfortable with “rented media.” That is when another entity “owns” the audience and we just rent their attention for a short time. We did this with radio, newspapers, and TV. Those companies owned the audience and we paid for access. As social media proliferated, this relationship became a bit more confusing. As we built our audience on these platforms, we got lulled into thinking that we “owned” the audience. But we don’t. If Facebook decides to change their algorithm, they don’t have to check with us. They own the audience. So does every other social media platform. That became incredibly clear when Facebook and Instagram went down. Boom..”our audience” was gone.
That is why it’s so important to create an audience that is actually our own. How do we do this? The best way is to get your fans to sign up for an email or text list. When a customer opts in to receive messages from you, they are really a part of your audience. You have the right to send them messages when YOU want to. While many marketers ruin this by spamming people with too many offers, many do a great job of providing value and giving great offers that the audience is excited to see. Do that.
But we all know that (thanks to those spammers) most people don’t just go around handing out their email address to everyone. Most of us have been burned by that! So it’s important to create an offer of real value so the audience is excited to hand over their information. Then, it’s equally important to value that audience. The audience you “own” is a true value to your company. We do this. That is why we have created this 5 Day Marketing Course. It’s totally free…and we hope it provides you value. Sign up today and join our VIP list!
Takeaway: Create an offer for your customers to “opt-in” to sign up to get emails (or texts) from you.
Have A Website That Works For You
I have repeatedly heard from new small businesses, “Why do I need a website? I have a Facebook page!” Well, my friends…this is why. If that platform goes away, so does all of your ability to tell your story. In addition, though Facebook is a powerful marketing tool, not everyone is on it. That means that even if they WANT to see your message or learn about your service, they can’t. You need a website.
But you don’t JUST need a website. You need a website that works for you. Many companies have what I call a “brochure website.” That is a great start. But if you want to succeed in a world without Facebook, you need a website that can help people find you. That means a website that Google can find. Have you done a search for your service? Not your name…your service. Are you coming up near the top? If you are not in the first few search results, you are effectively invisible to your potential customers.
In addition, your website is a great place to start providing actual value to your clients. You are the expert in your field. Start acting like it on your website. Write a blog that answers questions. Create a podcast. Start a video series that helps clients. Create content and host it on your site. This builds your credibility in the marketplace. It shows that you are willing to “Give First.”
In addition, it’s the place where you can not only sell your service but also have offers that allow customers to give you their contact information and you can build that audience you own.
Takeaway: Create a website that really tells your story and acts as a business builder for your company.
Put It In Writing
We have all heard prognosticators tell us “Print is dead.” But a funny thing happened when nearly everything shut down during the pandemic. Businesses needed an affordable way to tell their story and promote their business. So they turned to print and direct mail. Social media is a great way to promote your organization. But I don’t recommend abandoning all other forms of marketing. If Facebook goes away, you will still need to tell your story…and do it affordably. That is when you might want to turn to print.
And here’s the thing, with many of your competitors moving away from print, it might be a great time to get valuable attention in that same place.
Takeaway: Don’t forget about print to tell your story…today and in the future.
So what can you do if Facebook and Instagram go away? How will your organization tell your story? These are just a few ways you can still stand out. And if they work then…it might be time to start implementing these strategies right now.
At Hasseman Marketing, we are all about creating content that provides you value, inspiration, entertainment, and (hopefully) some joy! It’s about “Giving First” and we are big believers! But we have heard that sometimes, it’s hard to keep up. We get that. And while it’s totally okay if you are not able to see every piece of content we create, we don’t want it to be because of a lack of effort on our part. So I wanted to take just a moment to highlight a few pieces of content we are consistently cranking out.
Each Monday we create a motivational video for PromoCorner. The idea is to give you a quick boost of motivation to start your week off on the right foot. And because it’s quick-hitting…we hope you can find the time! If you have never taken the time to listen, you can find them all right here. Feel free to binge-watch them all and get fired up!
In Stock and Ready to Rock
As we write this, inventory is a challenge in nearly every industry. We have been talking about it a lot because we want to spare you some stress and headaches. But we didn’t want to just complain…that’s not our deal. So we created the “In Stock and Ready to Rock” shop. Each week we will feature one item that has deep stock and is ready to be branded with your organization’s logo! Click here to check out the latest!
The Kirby Hasseman Blog
Each week I work to create a personal development article that might help you move your business in the right direction. I often file these under “messages I need to hear,” as they resonate with salespeople, entrepreneurs, and leaders that want to level up. Here is my most recent (as I write this) about 3 Things To Do Every Day if you want to be more productive and happier. If you enjoy that one…there’s plenty more where that came from!
Delivering Marketing Joy
This is what I call the “OG” of our online content. With over 350 episodes, that means we have been doing Delivering Marketing Joy for nearly 7 years. Every Wednesday we interview leaders, marketers, entrepreneurs, and authors from (quite literally) all over the world. This is one of the pieces that updates to our blog page each week, but you can head here to binge hundreds of episodes on PromoCorner.
Thirsty Thursday
One of our newest pieces of content has quickly become one of our most popular! Each week we try a mystery drink in a different piece of branded merchandise. Sometimes the drinks are good…but not often! The reactions and the cool branded merchandise make it all worth while. This is posted on our Facebook page and is just one reason why you should follow us if you are not already. Watch the latest episode here!
Oh…and if you are interested in any of these pieces of drinkware for your organization, you can head to our shop here!
Fashion Friday
Each week we have some fun featuring a simple apparel piece for our Fashion Friday! This is another Facebook/Instagram exclusive, so head here and give us a follow.
Ohio’s Heart
Finally, I want to highlight Ohio’s Heart. Some of you may remember that we created OhiosHeart.com to highlight positive things going on in our region. While I have been a bit distracted from this site, I still believe it has a great opportunity to spread the good word! So we have been posting more to it recently (like this drone footage of a local expansion)…and I want to continue that trend. So if your organization has some good news, please feel free to share with us! Please add us to the list of press releases you are sending out to lift up the good news!
Whoo! That’s a lot of content…but we do it for you! If you want to have most of this content delivered directly to your inbox, join our VIP list here. Each week we send ONE email to the members of our list so you have it in one place!
