23 Marketing Techniques That Cost You Time, Not Money

 Content markiting in India

Here is the common situation of many startups. They have no money, but they have to do marketing.
What’s to be done? Instead of focusing on costly marketing methods, such startups must focus on low-budget marketing hacks.
The beauty of growth hacking is that it engages alternate methods of growth, methods which are sometimes lower cost.
Where marketing and engineering meet, growth hacking happens.
Obviously, growth hacking isn’t free. Strictly speaking none of the techniques in this article are “free.” Anytime you involve people, employees of the company, there will be payroll and associated costs.
But here’s why these methods are so powerful. They don’t require a huge marketing budget. All you need is some time, some savvy, and the kind of focused and driven perspective that smart marketing requires.

1. Get Links From Your Service Providers

To rank well, a website needs high-quality backlinks. Where do you get these backlinks? Obviously, buying links is not advised. What should you do?
If you’ve built partnerships with service providers or business partners, you have an instant source of untapped link potential. Reach out to these service providers and ask them to link to your website.
You gain a few nice links,and all it cost you was a few minutes of emailing.

2. Search For Unlinked Mentions

Another great way to get links and boost your site authority is to look for unlinked mentions of your brand or company name.
If you find such mentions in online publications or websites, email the site editor and ask them to provide a link. You might discover plenty of brand mentions all over the web.
A quick search and a few emails later — presto. Free backlinks. The good kind.

3. Host a Webinar

Free webinars introduce your brand and product to a wider audience. The more appealing the topic, the better you’ll attract interest.
Kissmetrics has been hosting webinars on a regular basis for a long time, with surprisingly powerful results.
Webinars take time. You’ve got to brainstorm topics, plan the webinar, and spread the word. The benefits, however, are top-notch.

4. Cross-promote

One explosive method of marketing that some companies use is cross-promotion. Cross promotion allows you to partner with related businesses who can market your services, in exchange for your marketing their services.
For example, if you are providing consulting services for online business owners, you may recommend that they use a certain web designer to create their website. The web designer is your cross promoting partner. This web designer works with business clients, and she points these clients your way for consulting services.
It’s a win-win, and apart from a signed document and an easy conversation, doesn’t require much work at all.

5. Be a Blog Commenter

The idea of marketing is to make your brand presence as well known as possible. One way of doing so is by commenting on blogs. Here’s how this works:

• Identify the top 5 blogs in your niche.
• Read and comment on the blogs on a regular basis.
• As people see your name and associated brand, they become familiar with it and perhaps even curious about it.

With every comment, you’re establishing a persistent brand presence. Just make sure you’re not making dumb comments. Customers’ perception of your brand is shaped by the quality of your comments.

6. Help a Reporter Out

Occasionally, you’re going to come across some newsworthy information in your niche or business. Sign up for Help a Reporter Out (HARO). It’s a free service that reporters often use to find stories. If you have a story you can help a reporter out, and gain publicity.

7. Create a Robust Google+ Presence

Google+ is one of the web’s foremost places for building brand exposure. Google uses your business information to form a web presence in Knowledge Graph boxes and wider indexation.
The better your Google+ profile, the better your brand will be featured and published organically across the web.

8. Network in Person

Don’t neglect the opportunity to market in person. You’ll meet great people in person whom you may never come across online.
Every person you meet is another marketing possibility. Obviously, you don’t want to go around shoving your business into people’s faces, but as the issue of work comes up in conversation, tell them about it.
The whole idea of networking is basically marketing. You get to introduce other people to your business live and in person.

9. Go Ahead and Run a Contest

As much as they’ve been sullied and scammed, online contests are still a great way to get low-cost marketing publicity. Giving away the cliche iPad, cash prizes, or other merchandise is an easy way to gain some viral potential and improve your brand’s image.

10. Build a Referral Program

The best forms of marketing are those that you can set up, turn on, and they grow — organically, automatically, and without too much effort. A referral program or affiliate program may not work for every business, but it’s worth a try.
Creating an affiliate program essentially turns your customers into a de facto marketing department. You don’t spend marketing money unless they first make a sale on your behalf.

11. Tweet Up a Storm In Your Niche

Twitter is a killer marketing platform. With its instant reach and massive output, Twitter can produce high levels of referral traffic, plenty of brand exposure, and nonstop social buzz.
What I suggest is following at least ten influencers in your niche, following their followers, retweeting their tweets, and mentioning them in comments. As you associate with their platform, you’ll begin to build your own platform.

12. Upsell Your Existing Customers

Too often, we view “marketing” solely as a method of gaining new customers. In reality, some of the best marketing happens with existing customers. Econsultancy and PredictiveIntent report that upselling is “20 times better than cross-selling.”

Source Marketing back at your own customers is relatively easy and low-cost. The benefits are extraordinary.

13. Get Cozy With Niche Influencers

Within every industry are a group of power players. They control the conversation, shape the contours of the market, and reach a huge audience.
Make these people your friends. You don’t need to be schmoozy about it. You can be direct. Providing them with a product or partnering with them on a project are simple and mutually helpful ways to grow your brand and ride their wave of influence.

14. Claim a Hashtag

Hashtags are the billboards of the Internet. Since hashtags are now available on every major social platform, you can create a hashtag for your business and use it everywhere you post.
A hashtag is a searchable and interactive extension of your brand, and has the potential to spread virally.

15. Get More Email Addresses

Growing your email list is one of the most enduring and effective methods of marketing. I suggest using Hello Bar as a simple and cost-effective way of harvesting more addresses.

16. Get More User-Generated Content

Everyone knows that content marketing is effective for inbound marketing. If you’re not careful, however, content marketing can be expensive. How can you gain more content without blowing your entire marketing budget?
The answer is user-generated content. Motivate your existing fans and customers to tell their own story and write content, and you’ll instantly open the floodgates to tons of fresh and engaging content that your audience will love. Your fans will be creating and sharing content for you.

17. Talk to Your Fans

Customers and fans love to be loved. The way you show that love is by retweeting, favoriting tweets, liking the comments, and sharing their status. Don’t simply expect that your social media presence is going to work for you. You have to work for it, by talking to your fans.
They will return the favor, and engage at a deeper level.

18. Produce High-Quality Press Releases

Press releases have past their heyday as an SEO tool, but they still hold sway in marketing. If you use a source like PRWeb, you’ll be out a few hundred bucks anytime you pop out a press release.
A source like PRLog.org, however, is free of charge. The amount of syndication you get may not be as high quality, but it’s something. And, hey, it’s something for nothing.
Just be sure to write very high-quality releases, and nofollow any links back to your website.

19. Hack Craigslist

Craigslist is the 59th most popular website in the world. Airbnb, valued at 24 billion, used Craigslist to skyrocket its growth. You can use Craigslist, too. Try using Craigslist’s geographic focus to target specific areas and markets.
Make sure that you’re complying with the site’s terms of service. Use Craigslist in the way that it was intended. Violators will be banned from the site.

20. Blog

I can’t create list of marketing techniques without mentioning blogging. A business blog is an indispensable strategy for online marketing. Use it, work at it, and make it work for you.
If you’re frustrated with the current condition of your business blog, read these 35 tips that will make it better. If you’re struggling with traffic, read this post.

21. Guest blog

If blogging is awesome, then guest blogging is doubly awesome. When you post an article on another blog, you are instantly gaining that blog’s audience. The cost of guest blogging is free, less the time you spend. Create a killer article, appeal to the blog’s audience, and you may be invited back to contribute more.
I’ve used guest blogging with incredible success. My 300-and-counting guest blogs are still paying me back in terms of referral traffic, leads, and customers.

22. Create a LinkedIn Group

LinkedIn is free, and yet it gives you incredible marketing opportunities. Many professionals use LinkedIn as static social media tool — a place to put up their resume, and not much else.
LinkedIn is so much more than an online resume. I’ve used LinkedIn to publish content, connect with powerful people, and build a marketing group with thousands of members.
All of this cost me zero dollars and zero cents, but the marketing upside has been incredible.

23. Give Free Help to Others

If you make marketing all about you and your business, you’re going to be frustrated and unfulfilled. Try giving to others, free of charge.
Obviously, you’re not a charity; you’re a business. But why not give away a product, an hour of your time, or a membership for a customer who can’t afford your services?
Some of the best business opportunities I’ve had were consulting gigs with customers who couldn’t pay. These opportunities have been beneficial in ways that I couldn’t have predicted.
Even today, I give away virtually all of my content without charge. Doing so is fulfilling for me personally, and it provides an opportunity for improved marketing.

User Research is NOT Market Researc

Mobile app development

The term “research” is not new to the business world, yet its meaning varies along a wide scale. In some companies, research is identified with genius engineers pushing technology capabilities in Research & Development departments. In other realms, interns proudly present their team leaders with research findings gathered from the numerous corners of the internet (thank you Google!).
The masses reside between these two extremes and that is where things get muddy. Many stakeholders identify “research” with market research activities and results. However, in the technology space where identifying user needs, product requirements and design strategy are critical, user (not market) research provides the best insights. To business stakeholders, the lines between the two may not be clear; hence, we clarify the differences below.

Market Research

The focus of market research is on the consumer in the market economy; specifically, his or her demographics and purchasing behavior. Here, research uncovers which buckets customers fall into as it pertains to their gender, ethnicity, income and education levels, areas of residence and work, shopping preferences, social media engagement, and so on.
The outcome of such an inquiry results in Target or Buyer Personas which are used to inform business decisions about what might make this Persona receptive to a product or service, what return on investment might be expected, and how to best market to this customer.
However, because market research is focused on current patterns of consumer behavior and does not delve deep into reasons behind them, these Personas lack detail for defining design requirements, product functionality, and prioritizing features.

User Research

Unlike marketing research, user research places the focus on the user as a whole entity in the context of his or her environment. Researchers answer questions like “what does a day in her life look like?”, “what activities does he engage in?”, “what motivates and frustrates her?” (which is also in buyer personas) by utilizing ethnographic research, interviews, surveys, usability tests, A/B tests, analytics of daily behavior, diary studies, and other methods.
This multi-faceted approach to understanding the user uncovers various pain points and needs, even those that users cannot verbalize themselves. Such insights are key to driving innovation in business. User needs communicated in User Profiles present direct design requirements, product or service functionality, or convey novel problems to solve.

Side by Side

Market research reveals what has happened up to now, especially as it relates to buying behaviors and patterns, but does not indicate where a business should go next. User research, on the other hand, reveals not only what, but also why users are currently experiencing something. When frustration or pain points are discovered, they open doors for business opportunities to address those user needs.
For example, if the business objective is to engage with mothers of middle-school athletes, market research will reveal the best avenues for advertising to these Personas and for connecting with them. User research, additionally, might reveal that these mothers struggle juggling multiple athletic event schedules and constantly transporting their kids to various activities. Addressing this user pain point through a service or a product could become a profitable line of business.
Clearly, both market and user research have their purpose. For ground-breaking innovation in the business space, market research only scratches the surface of users’ lives. For greater insights, user research is a must.

  By Evelina Tapia

3 Things Gen-X Content Marketers Should Know about Millennials

 Content Marketing Services in India


We Gen-Xers know that everybody wants to rule the world, and we think we still do. We don’t wanna stop believing and would rather keep partying like it’s 1999. But, news flash! We don’t rule the world anymore. A new generation has barreled in and are demanding their place in the digital landscape.
It’s fascinating to see how different generations grow, develop and approach life differently. Sure there are always crossovers and similarities - after all, we’re all human. At the same time, the proverbial generation gap was coined for a reason. There are always defining characteristics for each generation, as we touched on in our blog last month Do Your Buyer Personals Include Millennials? and as The American Bar points out in this chart, highlighting the differences between these two generations:

While those of us who are Gen-X content marketers wanna cry, “Don’t you forget about me,” we need to get used the idea that these kids are now adults who are very different from us in the way they approach digital media. The New York Times said that millennials are “so wanted by marketers” that “businesses are terrified that if they don’t snare them now, they’ll miss the chance.” The millennials are saying hello, and we need to make sure it’s them we’re looking for.

They are fluid between multiple devices

It’s hard to track these buggers. Because millennials have grown with the digital revolution, they are quick to adopt new technology. As a whole, they don’t get attached to a specific device or platform… when something newer and better comes out, they want it. If it’s more efficient - they are there. The great challenge then lies in tracking their online behaviors, since they are hopping from one device to the next. That’s where traditional marketing has become more of a scattershot approach - throwing out something wherever you can and hoping you hit something.
This is why inbound marketing is on the rise and is so powerful in actually reaching this generation. You’re not worried about what device they’re on, because they will be coming to you.

But that also means your inbound marketing strategy must now include an optimized mobile content strategy. According to comScore’s recent Global Mobile Platform Report, 61 percent of total digital media time in the US is spent with smartphones and tablets, while 39 percent is on the desktop. That means more people are only interacting with digital content on mobile devices, and you can bet millennials are a part of this group.

They don’t like email

Gen-Xer: “Hey, I emailed you … didn’t you get it?” Millennial: “I haven’t checked my email in a week.” This is a common frustration Gen-Xers have with millennials. We’re all about email. C’mon... it was our first love of the digital age and it’s a hard habit to break. Millennials just don’t like email so much…  sure they may have to use it at work or to get some coupons for H&M, but in their personal life, they’ll be texting, Facebook messaging, Tweeting, etc.
What a disappointment this is for email marketing campaigns where low open percentages are accepted as the way of life. Again, they’re just throwing their marketing in the dark and hoping it will stick. And once again, this shows the growing importance of inbound marketing where this group is able to engage with you on their terms.

Reviews are everything

Social media is part of the very fabric of this generation. Millennials will look to what’s trending across the social networks before they make their decisions. Gen-Xers are more apt to buy a product in good faith that it will do what it’s supposed to do and then simply return it if they’re not happy with it.
Not so with millennials. Online personal reviews are everything with these guys. They will take their time to thoroughly research a product before buying. In this way, they have a general distrust of the corporate world and traditional advertising. They will look to the reviews in detail and see what the online buzz is before moving towards a purchase.
This is similar to how influencer marketing works. By sharing your content through targeting the influencers in your industry, this approach allows businesses to show thought leadership and organically build trust with your audience. That trust is especially important to millennials.

Summary

As with any generation, millennials are a complex group and we need to rethink our strategies on how to reach them effectively. Is your marketing strategy just living on a prayer? Are your business’ true colors shining through? If you need the help of an inbound marketing agency to effectively reach this generation, contact us today.


 Posted by Janelle Zander

How Google changes will affect your page structure

Google Adwords Marketing Company in India



A large number of new websites—perhaps even the overwhelming majority of them—have started to take on a really familiar look: there is a navigation bar at the top of the screen—usually inverse in color to the rest of the page—followed by a huge carousel of images (both in terms of physical size and the number of images it contains), often some kind of hideous Google AdSense advertisements, and then finally, if we’re lucky, there will be some actual content to read before we have to reach for the scroll wheel.

Google doesn’t like it!

Get your content above the fold

The problem with making users have to scroll past these huge carousel graphics at the top of the design, after perhaps waiting for it all to load, is that it unfairly hijacks the bounce rate analytics for your site. Those analytics are not just there to help you, they are also connected to the formula Google uses to rank pages.

So if users seem to be lingering for a long time on your site, it makes your site seem to be more useful and popular than it probably really is. On the other hand, sites that really do provide useful content may have their rank negatively affected by having a higher official bounce rate than your site.

As a consequence of recognizing this, Google is rewarding sites that actually do place useful content above the fold. It does not mean that they will take aggressive action against sites that do waste space at the top of the page, but there is an advantage to getting useful information presented as early as possible on the page so that users can quickly decide if your content is relevant to their needs.

This is another one of those paradoxes that websites have created by failing to discourage clients from being copy-cats. Business owners are often short-sighted when it comes to understanding the importance of originality and there is a tendency to think that if a design (and sometimes even content) works at company X, it should be used at company Y as well.

Google gets serious about mobile support

Another thing that Google is now pushing quite aggressively is “mobile-friendliness”, which is actually just another word for responsive design. It could be argued that now Google is a browser vendor and OS vendor, they’ve lost neutrality, but that’s kind of beside the point. It’s their search engine and they make the rules.

When you manually index a site with Google these days, they will nag you constantly if they find that it needs more mobile-friendliness. This is not a bad thing… it’s good to know when improvement is possible, and to be given helpful advice on how to implement that improvement.

What would be a bad thing, however, is if Google insists that mobile-friendliness is compulsory, and imposes a ranking penalty for non-compliance. That would be a problem because not every site is intended to be viewed on a mobile device. The good news is that—for the moment at least—it doesn’t seem like Google will take that path.

Keep in mind that Google wants more people using Android, so they have a very strong incentive to try to make sure as many sites as possible are catering to the needs of Android users. Just to be on the safe side, it’s probably worth investing some time to create some extra columns in your grid that will be shown in place of your main content when displaying on a device that is below the minimum horizontal width that your main content can support.

What is clear is that Google’s latest update is going to massively affect search results on a device-specific, location-specific level. So if your website isn’t supporting mobile devices, then you can expect users of those devices will not see your site listed above competitors in the search results.

Even though Google has said that it is not going to directly penalize sites who don’t provide “mobile-friendliness”, there are many reasons why I don’t think we can trust this advice.

The main one is that with Google potentially listing competing websites higher in search results on mobile devices, and with more people using mobile devices, we can expect to see the rankings of desktop-only sites fall through natural attrition. This means that more users going to competitor’s sites will cause Google to think that those sites are more popular than yours, even though Google provides the conditions under which that can happen.

There is one other crucial problem with the “mobile-friendliness” issue, which is exactly where the line gets drawn. Some sites, such as the MCDU Emulator site, support tablet displays but not cell phones. Tablets are mobile devices and so are cell phones, but they have enormously different abilities. If Google classifies both types into a single category, that means search results on tablets will be impacted negatively even if you support tablets. This is not fair to the users and not fair to the site owners, but as long as that single category exists, that is what we’ll have to contend with.

What you need to do

These may seem like small changes, and for many designers they are not going to have a major impact, but you must not overlook the fact that the clients who will eventually own the websites don’t usually understand what it’s all about. They’ll make demands of you that go against what you know, and you will have to try to educate them.

While the following are basic best practices that everyone should already be doing without having to be hit with a stick by Google, the incredible majority of sites are not actually doing so, therefore it is necessary to spell out that the following things are what you should be doing when you create a new site:

• Always approach from a responsive design point-of-view
• Try to support all display types natively
• If you can’t do the above due to the nature of your content, use mobile-only columns
• When using mobile-only columns, show the users what they are missing!
• Use image carousels appropriately
• Try to put at least some relevant content above the fold
• Stop using regurgitated templates.

Following the above steps is a good way to keep ahead of Google, but just as importantly also the best way to build any new website. Making these changes is the easy part.

Now the hard part of the challenge is getting your clients to understand why the changes are needed!

Information Credit : www.developerdrive.com

Outsourcing Services vs. Software — Is There Really a Difference?

 Digital Marketing Services in India


This week, we’re highlighting the topic of outsourcing, and there’s little doubt agencies of all sizes are fingering their worry beads, even as clients increasingly look for outside help. More big media agency-of-record accounts are up for review than at any time in living memory. Yet simultaneously, the share of labor budgets for external services and consultants in fast-growing areas such as marketing analytics can reach 25-30%, according to Gartner surveys.

As the lines between inside and outside help get smudged out and redrawn, another — perhaps more insidious — question comes up: Is software the ultimate consultant? What’s the difference between external services and software, anyway?

The fast-twitch distinctions between agencies and marketing software, low-margin analysts and high-margin code, are rapidly disappearing. Of course, when it comes to economics, software looks more enticing than services. Software gross margins average 75% vs. 40% for services, according to PwC. And the IAB estimates that 20% of digital advertising is executed by one machine talking to another. As this number grows, it is logical to assume humans in advertising will exit stage left to make way for machines. Yet Gartner predicts the number of math graduates entering marketing will double by 2016. Presumably these people can be trusted to calculate the ROI of their own career, so what’s going on here?

Inspired by their investors, software startups trip over themselves to show how hands-free they are. Meanwhile, many solutions are sold to customers who either staff up to support them or pay agencies to run them, making data scientist the “sexiest job of the 21st century,” according to the Harvard Business Review.

The software providers themselves have hardly succeeded in keeping humans off their books. Many of the more interesting companies are primarily managed services, from providers like Epsilon/Conversant and Experian to ad server Trueffect. Even quintessential software-as-a-service (SaaS) shops like Google quietly offer on-demand professionals to support higher-end products, such as Google Analytics Premium and rich-media creative units. And the fastest-growing teams at digital marketing startups are customer care representatives, who are essentially consultants.

If software is really getting more self-reliant, requiring less human intervention, then we would expect to see a shrinking investment in people. Ninjas at the top of their game, in particular, should be chop-chopping human capital. Yet exactly the opposite is happening: The top third of marketers spend twice as much as the bottom third on both software and services. The most successful digital marketers are at least 35% more likely to lean on outside services for functions like analytics and media planning.

Meanwhile, service companies are selling more software. For example, Deloitte Digital packages its own predictive models under the brand name nACT. Global holding company Publicis Groupe acquired mobile ad solution RUN, part of performance-marketing platform Matomy, and was rumored to be flirting with ad tech platform Criteo. Meanwhile, rival WPP claims to have invested more than $1 billion in technology, much of it gathered under its ad tech umbrella Xaxis.

Xaxis shows the forces at work. Calling itself a programmatic media and technology platform, it offers both engineers (280 at last count) and engineered platforms. In the past year, it acquired contextual ad-tech company Crystal Semantics and spun up a data-management platform called Turbine. Meanwhile, when the agency phased out its proprietary demand-side platform last year, Xaxis Global COO Mark Grether said, “the DSP is becoming a commodity.”

Here we are at the heart of the matter: commoditization. As artists, cookbook authors, and software engineers have all noticed by now, commoditization is what the Internet does best. It excels in making efforts obsolete. No sooner does a category pop up – say, tag management or portfolio-based keyword bidding – than its margin starts to drift downward. Providers and practitioners who do not relentlessly add features and skills find themselves doing business for free. We all teeter on a wave of looming obsolescence.

What does the threat of commoditization mean for the software vs. services continuum? It means that there is no end state for software; as soon as it is implemented, it starts going out of style. Engineers are needed to improve it. And the same goes for services. No sooner do marketers spin up a new SaaS solution than their enemies across town are doing exactly the same thing. To compete, they need to invest in new skills to replace their former edge, now not so sharp.

These skills can be built up in-house or they can efficiently be outsourced to agencies, which specialize in what we might call “skills on-demand.” And we are back to a cycle of more: more software requiring more services, which require more software to provide more services. Pretty soon, you’ve got what you could call a hybrid model.
When Rocket Fuel acquired [x+1], part of the strategy was reportedly to round out the former’s managed-service model with [x+1]’s SaaS offering. A few months later, the company’s CEO said he’s “somewhat indifferent” to whether a customer uses its own or Rocket Fuel’s services.

What he’s describing may be a more functional model: one where the customer opts for managed service, self-service, agency-supported, or all of the above. Outsourcing — whether to agencies, software, bots or whatever the future holds — will remain what it has always been: an on-demand tool to perform a required task in an environment that frustrates planning.



Information Credit - Martin Kihn