101 Marketing Ideas for Technology Companies

Targeted LinkedIn Connection Requests

LinkedIn is the key social platform for business and your audiences utilize it in a wide range of ways. The greatest opportunity is being able to target on specific firmographic data such as revenue, job title, job skill, education, and many more factors.

With the right tools, you can segment audiences based on those factors to find specific individuals in companies that fit your criteria to then initiate connection requests as well as follow-up messages. They key is to be strategic rather than spammy - understanding what's in it for your audience and giving value first should be the crux of the plan.

Services Animated Explainer Videos

Animated explainer videos are well known for software to deliver a quick, engaging story about the problem, fix, and outcome of your product. And stats show video is great for marketing.

Technology companies can utilize animated videos whether you sell products or services to explain the benefit and process of how you work. It's all about telling an engaging story that is clear, concise, and comprehensible.

If you can explain the concept of one of your offerings well in a one-minute video, it can be leveraged in a wide variety of ways to drive leads and close deals.

Create A Live Video Show Series

Don't be afraid to get on camera and talk - the easiest is to use a buddy system and have a slide deck to talk from.

The great thing about a live show is that you present yourself as an expert, create content for search, and do something your competitors are not.

Check out our live show SaaS Founder Interviews

Send a Press Release About A Client

Your greatest asset is a successful project or happy client.  You can talk about one of your clients while inserting subtle information about how you helped them achieve what you are promoting in the press release.

The great thing is that it boots the relationship with the client, potentially brings them value, establishes validation, and can reach a wide audience.

Talk about how they are growing or innovating, but then mention how your product or service helped them do that. Once you have the release send it out to local media and post on press release sites.

Send a Press Release About A Client

Your greatest asset is a successful project or happy client.  You can talk about one of your clients while inserting subtle information about how you helped them achieve what you are promoting in the press release.

The great thing is that it boots the relationship with the client, potentially brings them value, establishes validation, and can reach a wide audience.

Talk about how they are growing or innovating, but then mention how your product or service helped them do that. Once you have the release send it out to local media and post on press release sites.

Create Job Opening Landing Pages

Search optimization can bring some amazing targeted traffic to your site.  A smart tactic can be creating highly targeted pages for job titles and roles.

Not only can this bring you more candidates but often prospects will search for roles they need to hire that will deliver a specific solution. By driving them to your site you may have the opportunity to convert them on a download, webinar, demo, or some other action even though they were looking to hire an individual.

Pages like "Data Architect", "Director of IT", or "SAP Specialist" that have job role, responsibilities, skill, and more could bring a lot of visitors with a pain and need.

Social Media Trivia

Social Media is a community - whether LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Quora or any other platforms - they are not just places to spread your content but also engage with audiences.

To that strategy, you can encourage interaction and engagement with trivia, polls, or other audience feedback tools.  Asking a question on LinkedIn about who was the first company to develop a VoIP product could spark interesting feedback and even debate that puts your name and post in front of a lot of your connections' connections.

For B2C technology companies, these types of tactics should be bread and butter. It's ok in B2B to try to engage or even have fun - B2B buyers are people too and want to interact. 

Film Client Interviews

This tactic is for validation and awareness. A client telling a story about their challenge, experience working with you, or providing insight on the industry you are targeting is a great asset.

On your site, this helps increase validation for prospects in their due diligence process, increases conversion for early buying cycle visitors, may be promoted by your client and posted on channels like YouTube to create awareness.

Film Client Interviews

This tactic is for validation and awareness. A client telling a story about their challenge, experience working with you, or providing insight on the industry you are targeting is a great asset.

On your site, this helps increase validation for prospects in their due diligence process, increases conversion for early buying cycle visitors, may be promoted by your client and posted on channels like YouTube to create awareness.

Create A Library of Terms with Your Own Spin

Search Optimization is a lot about having more content that is focused around a specific topic as well as being valuable and relevant.

A simple approach is to develop a glossary of terms where each has its own page. To expand on just the meaning, you can add additional insight, links, and insights from others around the web.

Sometimes people just need to know what something means and you could be that source in your industry.  best of all, this tactic can help increase the overall search rankings of your entire site.

Build A Solution Readiness Self-Assessment

For technology companies selling services or products, sometimes it is important for customers to understand if they are right for your solution.

A self assessment helps a visitor understand if they are ready for your solution but also can serve as an education tool to help you get prepared buyers as leads.

This is a great lead magnet that can drive visitors both in search but also be used in advertising campaigns.  Add gamification or budgeting to make the process more interesting to prospects.

The key is that at the end, you want to offer something to the visitor of greater value to submit their information:

"You scored an 8 out of 10 and are ready to leverage Virtual Desktops in your business.  Now download our Virtual Desktop integration guide to understand the process."

Develop A Joint Educational Event with Partners

One big challenge for any company is to reach people outside their existing lists or network - and not do it in a cold way, like advertising.

A great option is to leverage other people's lists and the equity they have built with them - what's the price? Sharing your contacts with them.

A joint event is a great solution to not only reach new people but also be able to establish yourself as an expert while being verified by your partner company.

Costs for these types of events can be minimal and both companies can market to their existing lists to get a range of new faces in the crowd for both.

Also, a joint event can attract more people as it gives a two for one education session.

Start a Niche Podcast

Podcasts are all the rage. And as a replacement for radio with often an entertaining or educational spin, they offer a lot to those that like to consume content but not always be looking at a screen.

The great part about podcasts is that numbers show a sophisticated audience and the mechanism for delivery allows people to subscribe and continually be fed your content.

The best tactic with a podcast is to make it niche and targeted rather than broad. A podcast about marketing - there are plenty - while a podcast about marketing for Software companies is not only less competitive, it reaches the exact right audience you most want.

One way we have used podcasts is as part of a content repurposing tactic - film a live show, convert to a podcast, create a transcript, write and article, and then create some related graphics. It allows you to take one topic and reach people in multiple ways.

Hold a Virtual Topical Roundtable

The great thing about conferencing software is that you can bring a group of people together on video, hold a discussion, and even record the experience.

A great tactic is to select a common pain or interesting topic for a group of like-minded people and moderate a discussion.  The content that comes out of the experience can be really useful for marketing and you can find out specific needs of your audience.

As an example, send VIP invitations to CIOs of hospitals to talk about how Artificial Intelligence will affect healthcare IT in the next 5 years. Or for the same audience hold a roundtable talking about the challenges of data visualization in hospital systems.

Send Out High Quality Promotional Products

Make an impression. If you have a limited target market or want to go after a small set of prospects, then utilizing higher-quality promotional items can stand out.

Create either a unique marketing piece or even a luxury gift. With thee you may only send out 50 but the goal is to make a big impression.

This example below was a pizza box sent out by Google with a cool message, guidebook and more.

Become A Hashtag Hero

Hashtags categorize social media posts and help the social media community discover similar content.  Many users utilize them to view feeds of specific topics that they are interested making them perfect to reach target audiences that are interested in something.

On LinkedIn, users can subscribe to various hashtags and get alerts for new content with those hashtags.

Hashtags also are a way to help optimize your posts for searching.  There is a science to picking phrases people will utilize for feeds and categorization as well as search.

Create A Mini Documentary

Video is powerful and on the web we are used to short or very informational videos.  But people love a great story no matter what line of work they are in or what position they have.

Everyone loves movies and there is an opportunity to tell your story in a really, unique and interesting way.

One great example is even a company who backs a documentary created by someone else. A jucier company is behind the documentary Fat, Sick & Almost Dead which talks about how to lose weight by jucing.

Mailchimp has create a series of documentary-like stories about businesses across the country.

Offer A Free Live Support Specialist

People need help and when you can deliver it, that creates brand equity and leads.  Consider offering a free live chat open to anyone to get answers on a specific topic. 

Have a managed IT business? Then offer a live chat for anyone with VoIP issues.  Just make sure you get contact information to put someone in a funnel.  Is a solid lead with a known problem worth 10 - 20 minutes of a support person's time?

Design A Valuable Infographic

Infographics help explain concepts, process, or data in unique, concise, and impactful ways. There are many visual learners out there that struggle to grasp a concept written in five paragraphs, but consume infographics with glee.

These are great not just as viral content that gets shared, liked, and linked to but also as tools in the sales process to help you communicate what you do or the importance of things to your prospects.

Consider building a mix of infographics about your offerings as well as industry data. They can take a lot of effort but also provide a ton of value.

Build A Library of Statistics & Quotes

When we are thinking about search optimization, it is a lot about creating focused content that people are searching for and that they will share or link to.

People are always looking for statistics and quotes for various topics and you can become that resource. With a little effort in data entry, you can build a library of statistics or quotes where each has their own page, includes some background information, and links to similar content for cross-linking.

Our quote, “The best place to hide a dead body is page 2 of Google search results,” has tons of inbound links and shares which brings us traffic that finds other valuable content.

Being a resource is never a bad tactic.

Guest Blog For Partners & Industry Sites

Writing for other websites is an easy way to build inbound links and leverage the exposure of other sites for your own brand awareness. Simply reach out to partners, industry sites, or even other online media publishers and ask if they are looking for content. 

One important key (and this should always be the case) is not to phone it in and create a mediocre piece of content.  If you create something great for this other site which gives their visitors value and brings them traffic, they will as k you to write more.  We are always trying to reach new audiences with our expertise and messages, so being able to access other existing audiences is valuable.

Finally, when you choose the right sites, you can segment your approach and tailor the topics to what is most important for that audiences.

Create An Industry Survey & Report

Business always want to understand what is going on in their market and be able to benchmark themselves to others. As a third party that supports and industry, you can help facilitate that.  Offering a survey online and then producing a report that provides information about the industry without specific names is valuable.

There are many companies who do this as a business, but if your are targeting an industry, this can be a great way to drive traffic and conversions.  Offering an industry benchmark report is something that a targeted audience would be willing to give their contact information away for.

To expand this, you can build marketing tactics around the report to promote being part of the survey (and therefore getting the report for free in return), sharing new insights throughout the year via email to stay in touch, and even a personal discussion to review the report with prospects and what it might mean for their business.

Just as an example, if your are an IT firm focused on accounting firms.  Create the “State of CPA IT” that compiles data on what systems CPAs are using, the percentage of clients using online portals, and much more.  As an accounting firm, the data you can collect would be extremely beneficial and worth connecting with you for.

Let A Customer Take Over Your LinkedIn Posts

Got a great customer that loves you and is socially savvy?  Let them take over your LinkedIn, Instagram or Facebook for a day and tell the story of a day in the life as your customer.

You could hand it off to them or hang out in their office for a day to reduce their effort.  People love customer validation and this makes it look like you have a great relationship with your customers.

Run A Giveaway With A Vendor, Partner or Client

Who doesn’t like free stuff? Even people in business don’t mind the occasional surprise. Technology companies can offer products from their vendor or services in tandem with a partner.  If you have great vendor partners, asking them for some giveaways that can be used in a promotion is typically a no-brainer for them as it gives both companies exposure.

To go further down the chain, you can offer a subsidized prize or content for a client out to their audience. in this case you can reach an entirely new audience of a client that is an advocate for you.

Turn A Presentation Into A YouTube Video

Many companies develop presentations for a wide range of uses including sales, internal training, speaking, or marketing.  A simple re-use of these that can be valuable is to record a voiceover presentation using those slides or even automatic slides with music.  Create these videos to post on your own site as well as on Youtube - make sure you create an engaging title, keyword-rich description, and links back to your site.

Don’t be afraid to get creative with your presentations - typically these are great assets that shouldn’t sit on the shelf to only be used in certain circumstances.

Make An Instructional / How-To Video

Just because you show someone how to do something, doesn't mean they have the patience, time or skill to do it themselves.  Show your audience how to an install that part, configure that software, or solve their big technology issue.

It makes you look like the expert and then they will call you when they realize its not worth their time.  These types of videos not only build brand equity with your audience but are fantastic for search optimization. How-to videos have a high likelihood of receiving shares and inbound links.

A smart move in marketing is to share more than competitors are willing to — today there is so much content out there and much of it isn’t that valuable. If you are able to go a little bit deeper, it can really produce an impression and traffic. The key to remember is that even if you give a lot away, most people will need help and it leads to more business than not.

Run Pay-Per-Click Advertising on Google for Competitor Names

Ok, so people tend to have mixed opinions on this approach but in reality it’s just smart marketing.  If someone is searching your competitors name, then there may be a high likelihood they are either a prospect or client for them that could be a prospect or client for you.

The nice thing is that often these campaigns can be relatively inexpensive because they are not as competitive. If you feel really confident, you can even send the visitors to a page that compares you with competitors.  Often technology services business steer clear of this but it is something that prospects would love to see and understand.  For technology devices or software products, this really is an expected tactic and one way or another people will find comparisons - its always better to control the message.

So, consider running PPC campaigns for competitor names or names of alternative solutions to yours.

Get Listed - Everywhere

The amount of online directories, social media channels, forums, communities, and other online platforms is massive - most people don't even realize how many are out there.

For many industries, especially in the technology space, there are directories that categorize companies and even provide reviews. One example is Clutch which provides detailed information and third-party reviews of companies.

All of these sites are like real estate and not only can you reach the audiences that visit those sites but it can help with search optimization in some circumstances. If you don' have your business listings on Google and Bing, do that first and then get all of your social media accounts setup and filled out. In addition look for communities or sites like Quora or AngelList.

Now, this is just a sampling, but here are some directories to check out.

https://www.techdirectory.io

https://www.techonline.com/directory

http://www.boogar.com/resources/informationtechnology/index.htm

https://techpoint.org/tech-directory/

Finally, here is another list of 100 different sites to list yourself and this one as well from hubspot of 50 business directories.

Build A Target Market Microsite

There are a few different types of microsite and a few great reasons to consider building a microsite.

First the types we look at:

• Product or solution focused. If you sell a number of products or devices, creating a separate site for one or each can help create focus for SEO and conversion.
• Educational. Another type of microsite is to pick a specific topic and provide the most in depth educational content on that topic.
• Industry. Narrow your site down to target the needs of just one industry across multiple products and solutions.
• Community. Creating a microsite with the sole intention of building a community and discussion around a topic.

These types of sites can even be used together. As an example, we have a microsite just for SaaS and Software companies that is focused on educational content and community building.

Next, microsite can be valuable for the following reasons:

• Search Optimization is about having relevance which is often determined by how specific and related the topics on the site are.
• Conversion. the more personalized a site is to an audiences needs, the more likely they are to engage and take action be cause the content resonates with them.
• Inbound links. A focused site gets inbound links from other sites of similar topics which is great for SEO.

With microsite you can either increase sales or leads. This really is a smart marketers tactic.

Start A LinkedIn Referral Program

LinkedIn is a powerful B2B channel and can be used in a wide variety of ways.  There are actually programs out there that can help you leverage your existing connections to drive referrals. Often companies do not spend enough time cultivating referrals and just rely on the random ones that happen to come in.

The goal with these tactics is to leverage connections that should already be warm relationships.  The key to these tactics is to build the messaging and process correctly.  You really want to make sure that you are saying the right things to increase the likelihood of getting a response and utilizing tools that make the experience easy, trackable, and successful.

Write A Book

Authors are seen as experts for the topic they write on and a book can instantly give clout and validation to what you are saying.  many smart business owners write books to help present that instant validation with the world.  In the business world, writing a book is not as much about selling the book and making money as much as using the book to grow their core business.  Here are some benefits of a book:

1. Listed on various sites including amazon.
2. Instant validation when shown on your website.
3. A great leave-behind for sales.
4. One of the best ways to get speaking engagements.
5. List building for purchases or even materials created around the book.

Writing a book can be either a very time-consuming process or expensive, but has the ability to pay off.  Even if it costs $30,000 to write a book, the value it can bring over a 3 - 6 year period or more can pay back over and over.

A book also has a lot of opportunities for content reuse and expansion into other materials that can drive SEO as well as leads.

Create An Online Course

To close deals, we need to prove our expertise. Prospects do their research and due diligence prior to making a purchase decision. And there is no better way of demonstrating your expertise than by creating an online course.

Software companies, technology services companies and devices have the ability to create online courses that teach while also building a large ecosystem of targeted prospects.

Hootsuite, a social media management software, for example, offers free social media marketing courses on Hootsuite Academy. More than 250,000 people have taken these courses, many of which have become paying customers of their software.

"For Moz, educational content and helping marketers succeed has been at the forefront of our mission and the best way we've found to grow our community and our customer base." -Rand Fishkin, Founder, Moz

Develop A Deep Article

We talk a lot about short attention spans in marketing and web design. If you read some of our great content on conversion optimization and usability, you know that we are fans of short, powerful, and scannable content. The key thing to understand though is that the pages of a website are different than people looking to do due diligence or looking to learn. This is where longer, more in-depth content comes in and why google ranks deeper content higher for search queries around questions - its about intent and people don't look to get questions answered by weak, watered-down explanations.

Many companies don't want to put the effort or money into writing more valuable and in-depth content. Longer and more robust content does well on search engines and can be a great source of leads - our article on marketing for technology companies gets hundreds of visits a day and drives consistent leads into our own business.

A deep article is often 3,000 to 6,000 words, includes media, quotes, statistics, and lots of outbound links.In our deep articles we also include interactive charts. Yes, it takes time and money to create these deep pieces of content, but they can pay off in organic traffic for years as well as increase the search rank of other content across your site.

Coordinate An Employee Activation Program

Your team has a wide audience and not encouraging them to promote your content and services is a missed opportunity.

But, just asking people to post more doesn't work.  You need to build a strategic, coordinated effort and leverage software to streamline the process for employees to get involved.

Don't miss out on the exponential netowrk that your entire team has access to.

Facebook Ads Can Work For B2B Technology

Pain-based advertising is appealing to target audiences as they scroll through Facebook in their off hours. People are wound down for the day, but will notice a message about a solution to a problem that faced that day or will in the morning.

Just be smart about your targeting and message to be effective.  You can even tie in LinkedIn remarketing to ensure you re-engage with the perfect audiences.

Create Public Slack Channels

Slack communities are digital congregations which are very similar to Facebook groups. However, as you may know, Facebook groups don’t have the option for instantaneous communication. You also can’t attach files from your computer or Google Drive to share wit the community.

If you’re not a fan of social media but still want to keep up with your industry, joining a Slack community can be a great idea. These communities are excellent for providing you with up-to-date information.

Here are some resources to get involved in slack communities.

What is a slack community and the importance of slack communities./

Find A Slack Community

Personally, we've found some amazing invite-only as well as public slack communities that are full of great information and contacts. One key is to make sure that you are treating it like a community and giving - no one wants the sales, sleazy person who is just there for themselves.

Build A Budgeting or Cost Comparison Calculator

A great interactive experience that you can add to your site to drive traffic and build your lists is an online calculator. Often these are budget calculators, estimators, or comparison calculators. The basic premise is that a visitor fills in various fields as well as makes other selections to then see a result real-time.  You see these all the time in the form of mortgage calculator for banks.

You can see our own marketing budget calculator which allows people to put in their revenue and select information about their business to see an estimate of what they should spend on marketing.  Once they complete the calculator and see a real-time result, they can then submit their contact information to get a deeper report on making a marketing budget.

Receiving links and shares is often built on the premise of creating value. When content can be deeply personalized to an individual like a calculator, it is a high-value experience because the content and information is unique to their specific scenario rather than being generic for a wide audience.

The key to conversion is offering something of higher value at the end of the calculator. Obviously a visitor came and spent the time to use a calculator, so there is some need - that is your opportunity with the right download, webinar or list signup to get them into your marketing ecosystem.

Use Geo-targeted Ads During Relevant Events

Geo-fencing is a targeting strategy used to blast a digital banner ad to a specific location, usually an area of one mile or less or broaden it to include nearby hotels and restaurants.

After establishing your geo-fence, demographic, psychographic and contextual targeting help filter the crowd and put your message in front of your target audience. These targeting strategies look at everything from the apps someone has installed on their phone to the articles they read online. Implementing a geo-fence campaign is an easy, cost-effective way to reach a hyper-targeted event audience–even if you aren’t there in person.

Landing pages are a key part of online advertising (which includes geofencing) because you need a way to collect and measure conversions. When integrated with a tactic like LinkedIn remarking, that can help you really hone in on the right people and continue to reach them.

Send Handwritten Notes or Fun Gifts To Key Prospects

A handwritten note can really stand out to prospects or existing customers. Whether you are trying to get a prospect's attention, make an impression during the sales process or build your relationship with an existing customer a handwritten note is a great way to do it.

The awesome thing today is that there are services to help you do that. Check out one like InkPact that allows you to send handwritten notes online.

One solution we love to use is LovePop that has popup cars that really create an impression. Sending one of these with a handwritten note will really standout to anyone you send them to.

Host An Awards Ceremony Or Online Awards

Companies are always looking for awards to get PR - that was even one of the other ideas here in this list. But, many companies have also built their own awards and even held award ceremonies.  If you are targeting doctors offices, could you create an award the best innovation in technology for medical instiutions.

This can be combined with ideas like a focused industry microsite to reduce the barrier of being driven by a company. The opportunity is that the CTA or ask to prospects is not aggressive and can help you collect contacts.  When done right you can build targeted lists to nurture over time to build interest in your offerings or company.

Spinout A Loss Leader Standalone Product

Take a small part of one of your offerings that has high-value to customers and low to medium cost for you to sell turn-key online.  It could be an audit or assessment, a tune-up or optimization, or a consultantion.

The key is to find something that is of value and is very easy for your target audience to say yes on. This is the land and expand approach. Get in the dorr and build a relationship while competitors are taking months or years trying to get huge wins.

Offer A Valuable Workbook

Your customers would love a fill-in-the-blank book that walks them through the strategy or planning process for your service or product implementation.

It's ok to give this away. I makes them trust you, gets them invested in the solution, and creates the next logical step into buying.

Create Your Own Magazine

One of those tactics that used to be popular like direct mail but now is less utilized, a magazine is an amazing opportunity to reach your audience in a unique way. Similar to creating a blog or online resource center, a magazine just transforms your great content from digital into a physical experience.

It’s a powerful thing to deliver something physical to prospects and clients especially when we move away from trying to sell into a space to try to inform or educate. When done right, a magazine will be pages through, shared with others, and kept on a desk for a good period of time.

The best approach is to treat it like one of your own favorite magazines and look to give to the reader - give them new information, give them entertainment, new insights, a behind the scenes view or something else that makes them get value and enjoyment out of interacting with it. A magazine is a lot about building brand equity more than being a conversion piece.

This doesn’t mean you can lead prospects to more content online that then funnels them into campaigns, but if you want a magazine to be effective instead of thrown away, then focus on delivering real value that will be remembered.

Develop A Referral Kit for Current Clients

As mentioned in Tip #30, referrals are a key aspect of growing a business but many companies do not have a clear plan or approach to building referrals and instead wait for them to come to them. One of the key strategies with referrals is to make it easy for your existing customer or contact to both think of a referral as well as provide it.

One big mistake people make is to generally ask for a referral - “do you know anyone who could use my service/product?” - but the issue is that it takes a lot more effort to think without any parameters. What you want to do is be specific - “do you know any owners of manufacturing companies over 10M in revenue that could be looking to improve their cybersecurity?” - this makes it much easier for prospects to focus their thinking and produce a result.

A referral kit is often a tool that helps give a customer criteria about what you are looking for, but also provides some materials or a process to provide a referral.  These kits can be online and include a form that customers or contacts complete that then puts their referral into an automatic process. A kit can also include materials that a customer can give to a referral including business cards.

The key here is to think through tools, approaches, and processes that significantly simplify the process for your contacts to think and provide referrals. We’ve actually develop some interesting online referral portals for our clients to improve their referral strategy.

Develop A Partner Program

A partner program can be a smart tactic for any business to employ. It isn’t easy, but it can significantly scale your revenue if you build it correctly. Partner programs are so powerful that even multi-billion tech companies including Microsoft, VMWare, Oracle, eBay, Hubspot and thousands of others use it — often technology companies are a channel partner.

There are a few steps to look at when you are building a partner program:

1. What is an offering that is appealing to a partner model? Is shared revenue viable? Can it scale? Are you able to white-label if needed? There are a lot of strategic evaluations that need to be made.
2. Define the revenue model.
3. Determine your angle. Why should partners want to sell it and what messaging helps they sell it?
4. Who are ideal partners? Like all marketing, you want to target potential partners intelligently.
5. Create a sales process that will work with partners and begin to put together materials.
6. Build out the tools needed - a platform, forum, documentation, support process and more.
7. Develop a marketing program to find partners.

Creating a partner program is a big idea but it can drive massive growth for your business.

Commission Original Research

Reach out to your local university. Contact specific colleges or departments. Recruit data scientists, statisticians, and economists in the making. Provide them with something they want (e.g. money, a recommendation letter, prestige, experience, etc.).

Ask them to create original research data on your behalf (in exchange for the thing they want). Ideally, you're answering questions the industry, your prospects or partners care about most. Provide them with the research credit, then advertise your original research (displayed on your website) to prospects.

Repurpose Existing Content

Creating high quality content is a key strategy in marketing and sales. Content is the hub whether it is writing for a blog, posting on social media, sending a newsletter, supporting sales, and many more strategies to increase search optimization, visits or help close deals. 

If you are doing it right, your content should take time and effort to really make it valuable but it doesn’t have to be just for that one piece that you developed. Repurposing content is a great way to utilize what you have created and turn it into something new - try some of these ideas:

• Convert a video into an article.
• Turn a series of blog posts into a podcast
• Break up a white paper into bite-sized social media graphics.
• Take a presentation and make a webinar or video
• Combine blog posts into an online course
• Convert an article into an infographic

And that is just a sampling of ideas.  One of the tactics we take is to sort our content by the most popular based on visits and shares and then focus on creating complimentary or repurposed content from that.

Apply For Business Awards

Best workplace, great culture, lots of growth, top CIO, great intern program... there is no shortage of awards out there in your local area, in magazines and across the globe. 

One challange can be completing all of the award criteria so build out your library of submission information to make it easier and easier to process.

Check out a few of these business awards:

1. Best in Biz Awards
2. DREAM BIG Awards
3. Ernst & Young: Entrepreneur of the Year
4. Innovation Project Awards: Best Small Business Innovation
5. National Small Business Awards
6. The SCORE Awards
7. Small Business Influencer Awards
8. The Stevies: American Business Awards
9. Thrillist
10. Good Food Awards

Often there are many in your local community that you can find or in target regions you want to penetrate.

Sponsor A Targeted Podcast

Podcasts have become extremely popular. In idea #13 we talked about you creating your own podcast to a niche audience. Whether in addition to or if you are not ready to create your own podcast, sponsoring one cane reach the right audience. The great thing about most podcasts is that the have regular listeners allowing you to have multiple touchpoints, they have limited sponsors and ads to be more impactful, and most importantly the audience is very targeted.

Look for podcasts that would have listeners that fit your target audience. Often this tactic is not local, so it does fit better to target a type of person, people in a specific field, or people with a topical interest that are not restricted by a region.

Check out a platform like AdvertiseCast to find out how to sponsor the right podcast for you.

Ask Customer For Google Reviews

Google reviews are not just for your local pizza shop. Having reviews provides a couple of benefits for your business starting with increasing your visibility in Google. Google wants to present relevant, valuable and trust-worthy results to its searchers and a review signals that.

Next, reviews display as part of your listing in results and the display of stars and a higher count of reviews is shown to cause people to click on the listing more. Seeing those starts and review count act as link bait because people want to see a listing with reviews over one without.

Finally, if you are able to compile a quality rating, it provides instant credibility and validation before someone even hits your website.

The great thing is that it can be easy to send out a link that sends clients straight to your review section. One successful approach is to include it in any follow-up emails or customer satisfaction programs. Do not be afraid to ask.

Optimize Your LinkedIn Profile For Key Phrases

LinkedIn is growing to over 600 Million business professionals and many of those are using LinkedIn every day to search and find people. To help the chances of you being found, it is smart to optimize your profile for key phrases that you want to be found for.

Put yourself in your target audience's place, and imagine the keywords they're using to find someone like you to fill a business need. Try searching within your own network using the most likely keywords your target audience is using, check out the LinkedIn company pages of competitors, and while you’re at it, check out their websites as well.

LinkedIn gives you suggestions for adding sections to your profile. Take them whenever possible, since adding these sections increases the opportunity for you to use keywords that will help you to be found. For example, people commonly leave out the Summary Section. This is a mistake. Make it a great, keyword-rich pitch for how you can help organizations or individuals.

Some other tactics include:

• Add keyword-rich “functional descriptions” to your job titles
• Have a keyword-rich headline
• Use all 50 slots in the skills section
• Pay attention to the organization name and make sure it matches the company
• Fill in the job descriptions
• Have as complete a profile as possible
• Gather recommendations

Ask A Client To Write An Educational Article From Their Perspective

Content is at the center of a lot of the ideas and tactics we have talked about. It is the counterpoint of marketing as it influences Search Optimization, drives social media, fills email marketing, supports sales, and so much more. Our goal is to create valuable and interesting content which sometimes can be difficult to do.

One approach that tends to be both valuable and interesting is to have your customers share their perspective - it could be about their industry, how they utilize a solution you provide, future predictions, or even their own processes. The key here is to not go with a sales approach but education from the customer perspective. Hopefully customers will buy in for the exposure themselves including backlinks to their site for SEO.

Create Regional Landing Pages for SEO

Some technology companies are focused on specific regions and often people search this way as well. Terms like “Cleveland IT firm”, “Pittsburgh Analytics Consultant”, or a wide range of other specific region targeted terms are often used to find businesses. We often see these terms as extremely good lead generators because they have an intent that is often someone in a researching or buying mindset versus a term that is more educational or informational.

So, how do you target phrases like this?  Well, to start your site should use those keywords throughout and you should be building links from local websites that also have regional focus. But another tactic is to create specific landing pages for regional terms you want to rank on. As an example, we are located in Cleveland, Ohio and have a specific page deep in our site focused on the term Cleveland eCommerce and have been able to gain #1 ranking for it.

The page is not meant to be fluff either. While we do make sure we use the term often that we are targeting, we try not to do it in a way that is spamming. Instead the mindset is that we want to actually create a page that if someone is looking for Cleveland eCommerce that our page is a good resource for them. In some cases we do even link to competitors on these regional landing pages because that is a signal to Google that it is a good reference for the search term. We are ok with that as long as we are the main site they are visiting first and we have the #1 ranking.

Don’t be afraid to create several of these pages for regional terms you want to rank for. just make sure that the content is unique and valuable - never just copy and paste the same text over and over with a few words changed.

Create A Comparison of Products or Solutions Against Competitors

People love simple side-by-side comparisons to help understand what they are considering better. When it comes to products, especially technology products, comparisons are common place. In many circumstances, those comparisons are done by third parties but there is opportunity for you to control the conversation by creating them yourself - often that comparison might be foundational information for a third-party writing their own.

For services business, there is opportunity to compare the difference between companies by displaying key buying factors or unique aspects of the offerings. Many services companies steer clear of direct comparisons, but just like products it is better to control the conversation than letting it control you. Also, this is the exact type of information that prospects are looking for to make a decision.

Don’t be afraid to go big or different either - building interactive content, including media, adding filters, presenting data, infusing testimonials, or other unique ideas can not only make it more valuable but help you tell your story better. This comparison - whether for products or services - is great for lead generation and sales. Consider for lead generation offering a deeper exploration of the comparison in exchange for contact information from the visitor.

Build A Board Of Industry Experts or Advisors

A board is way more than a marketing tactic but can actually help drive awarenss and leads.

Building a board is about finding a group of people who can provide wisdom and insight as well as expertise and connections.  Often, great board members come with a powerful netowrk of people and often a mechanism to communicate with that network.

Invite board members that help give valuable advice on how to grow the business but also look for the opportunity to supply them information, posts, and assets to help promote the business as well.

Create A Series of Quote Images For Your Target Audience

Simple graphics are great eye-catching tools to distribute on social media. Combine that with wisdom, inspiration, or expertise and you create a dynamic piece of media that catches attention, builds an impression and can even drive clicks.

In addition to quotes, you can look to utilize statistics or other powerful bite-sized information that will capture attention.

Create your own statdard look and brand the pieces so that you get the value of name recognition.

Create A Checklist - Or Even An Interactive Checklist

Checklists are valuable pieces of content.  They simplify the articulation of information, can be actionable, and provide the prospect with value.

There are a lot of different types of checklists you can make as well:

• Process Checklist
• Readiness Checklist
• Success / Completion Checklist
• Quality Assurance Checklist

All of your technology services or products, can leverage some sort of checklist that provides value but also often can help the prospect be aware that they don't have the expertise or time to complete everything necessary themselves.

DIY'ers look for checklists and then realize they need your help.

To take it a step further, offer the checklist on your own site with the ability to complete and save or download it.  This type of experience keeps them on your site and brings them back.

Build A Free Tool or App

Could you take a valuable document or need of your target clients and turn it into a tool or app that builds leads?

Consider if you provide maintenance services for technology products and you built a tool that allows companies to keep track of all their systems and their end of service dates.

Building a free online or mobile app that provides a great solution that aligns with your core offerings  is a great way to get people to provide you their information or even give you access to them when they need your services or products.

Offer Articles To Writers

There are writers for publications looking for help to meet their next deadline.  Create a series of articles and send them out to writers offering exclusivity for them to repurpose the content.

One key goal is to make sure that you are mentioned in the article as a quote or resource.

Making other people's jobs easier is not only a way to get a first article but to potentially build a long-term relationship with someone who can help you get more mentions and backlinks.

Design A Really Smart B2B Remarketing Campaign

Remarketing allows you to show ads to visitors who have come to your site. Done right, you can even target visitors that have completed or not completed certain actions on your website.

Remarketing ads can be displayed on Google Display, Youtube, Facebook, LinkedIn and other platforms by adding a tracking code and then configuring your ads.

If you choose the right pages or actions to target your visitors with remarketing ads, it can both help drive lead generation but also reinforce your brand during sales.

Often remarketing is a smart tactic when joined with other campaigns as a way to bring people back or remind them of your brand.  There is a valuable window of time after someone visits a specific page on your site that they are a ripe opportunity.

Build An Affiliate or Partner Program

An affiliate or partner program is based on revenue sharing. The affiliate, or promoter, offers your products to potential customers using their site. When a customer purchases your product from an affiliate’s site, the affiliate receives financial compensation.

The affiliate can provide a long-term revenue stream. The performance-based commission mitigates risk and your product is being seen by an audience. In short, instead of paying for advertising, you are offering a commission on sales made through a partner’s efforts.

Often this can be setup in an automated way as well for products or even services to track and distribute funds.

Create A Badge for Clients To Put On Their Sites

Let associates, affiliates, or clients put your badge on their site to show their affiliation with your brand. This can mean direct referral traffic which search engines consider “organic” backlinks to your site.

The badge is similar to your logo in that it represents your brand. Having a well designed official badge can add credibility to your company or brand and entice new visitors. Think of a badge as a visual stimulus. It’s more powerful than just a text link and it can leave a long-lasting impression.

When done right, you can provide code that is a link back to your website with specific "alt" text that creates an inbound link to boost search optimization.

Start Your Own LinkedIn Group

LinkedIn groups can be leveraged to your advantage and used as a highly effective platform. These groups can be used to reach a highly targeted group if leveraged correctly.

The key to a successful LinkedIn group is engagement. Share industry developments, share relevant news and stories, discuss new trends, or new products. Engage with your members by offering thoughts, liking comments and responding to questions or relevant statements. Maintaining a LinkedIn group is like having a ready made audience curated for your business.

A smart tactic is to make groups niche around an industry, technology, product, or something else specific. Niche groups attract people because they help narrow down their conversations and content to be focused.

Setup Open Office Hours For People To Call or Visit

Open up time weekly or on a monthly basis and allow interaction with potential customers or current clients. You can answer questions, respond to comments, or discuss how they use your product.

This establishes you as an expert and in a position to give first.  Engagement gives your company a person to connect with and people are more likely to do business with a personal connection and a face.

These sessions can be held virtually or even in person and should be surronded by other marketing and touch points.

Write A Robust FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) Section On Your Website

Creating a FAQs section on your site can be used to lead a buyer through the entire buying process. Providing the answers to questions you are likely to hear most can facilitate purchases. When consumers can easily find information about products or services, online sales increase dramatically.

Having solid answers to FAQs creates a rapport with visitors and sets you up as the industry expert. FAQs play an important role in creating the customer experience and can be a fast way to turn prospects into customers.

In addition, you can turn FAQs int otheir own pages to create a more indepth review of a specific topic for search optimization.

Offer A Free Trial For Products Or Services

Offering a free trial is one way to let your product sell itself. The consumer gets first-hand experience with your product to see if it is a workable solution for their application. The difficulty of shopping online, or for tech products in particular for the consumer is that it’s hard to know exactly what they are getting.

A free trial allows them a way to try it before they buy it. It’s also effective for increasing awareness of your product and its features.

Share Your Culture on Social Media

The most valuable asset in today’s society is trust. As the world is becoming even more connected via social media, customers value transparency and authenticity, even when you’re talking about your brand. Social media can be the window to allow consumers a glimpse of the human side of your company. Transparency with your consumer base provides them with a sense of authenticity and makes your brand stand out from the rest.

People buy from people they like, know and trust. Even in the B2B technology world, people want to see who they will be working with and their personalities.  Get excited about sharing your culture online as it can increase your top line.

Make Predictions

Buyers want to know where things are going. Macworld and other sites have built entirely around predicting features and releases of Apple products and software.

It’s not all that foreign. Think about sports teams who use predictions to determine which young players they select in the draft. That’s based on numbers and where the team is presently, and filling gaps based on where they want to go as a team. Predicting what consumers are going to want next can keep you one step ahead of the game and give customers exciting features to anticipate in the future.

If you produce predictions regularly, this is a tactic that can build a good following.

Go Behind The Scenes

Give a raw view of your people and processes doing what they do every day.

TV shows like “Dirty Jobs” and “How It’s Made” are popular because it gives the audience an insider’s view. Create your own “Behind the Scenes” video as a way to connect more deeply with clientele and inform them of some of the details involved in your operations.

This creates content for search, exposes your culture to prospects, gets employees engaged, and helps you stand out from competitors.

Create A Unique or Interactive Case Study

Anyone can do challenge-solution case studies.  Consider reinventing case studies to go more in-depth, include media, allow people to interact with data, or other inventive ideas to tell the story of how you achieved success. Could it be told with a series of videos, be more like a tour where visitors traverse slide by slide or look like an infographic?  There are so many inventive ways to present information and case studies don’t have to be the same-old, same-old.

The first place to start is think of your ideal prospects and how they would want to consume information about how you executed a solution or solved a problem for a customer. What information would be most valuable to them, how to they typically get information in their industry, and what could you do to blow away their expectations. With case studies being key validation tools, asking yourself while you create your next one how you can make it a little better could be the difference that closes the next deal.

Build An Industry Calendar

Your target markets want to know whats going on in their industry and sometimes it is hard to find everything in one place -- be that resource. Creating a calendar on your site of events that appeal to your target audience helps you become a regular resource as well as improve your search optimization.  You can build a simple list calendar or get more robust with categories and unique features.

Don’t stick just to big events either. if you can take the time to do the research, include webinars and small virtual events.

Be A Tease

The digital world, dominated by Facebook as it was, was not an easy one to penetrate. Snapchat had to make some noise, somehow slam the door open.

Snapchat generated buzz with giant billboards featuring nothing other than the logo. Such guerilla marketing ideas help crack a hole in the wall of dominant businesses in the industry.

And since no one knew what this logo represented and what it was all about, Snapchat’s very competitors, the brands which were going to be directly affected by it, did not know what was coming.

These giant billboards helped create hype for the ghost-logo app which led to thousands of people googling the brand.

Expose A Pain

Pains are a key aspect of any marketing. People are looking to solve their challenges and often when we create content around pains it ends up being our top lead generation content.  There are a number of different ways to expose a pain. The first place to start is writing content around pains - we often go through exercises when building a content calendar that start with identifying audiences and exploring pains for our audiences.

You can take this further by even getting input or running a contest — ask people to submit their worst IT customer support experience, the messiest network closet, or even their biggest win (which often exposes a challenge).

Create A Limited Beta or VIP Preview

Launch a new service into beta where only specific clients or prospects can submit to be part of it. Creating exclusivity can be a driver for many people especially if it is an emerging concept or opportunity they can’t get in other places. These types of concepts can be hyped up to make the demand feel high and the supply feel low to not only gain interest but also build up additional pent up demand that you can deliver on upon a full launch.

If you create or resell products, an exclusive event around a new release ahead of public release is exciting and can drive a lot of attendance. It doesn’t even have to be in person and can be virtual - but don’t be afraid to put some pomp and circumstance behind it to get people excited.

Overall, don’t be afraid to limit availability and create a feeling of exclusivity in your marketing. It may see mop-posits to trying to build leads but often people are hungry for things they can’t have.

Incorporate Personalization Into Your Site

Website Personalization is the process of creating customized experiences for visitors to a website. Rather than providing a single, broad experience, website personalization allows companies to present visitors with unique experiences tailored to their needs and desires. Personalization is proven to significantly increase conversions, return visits and overall help catapult results.

Examples of ways that you can utilize personalization include:

• Always feature a specific service on your home page if a visitor has been to that service’s page 2 times or more.
• Display a specific location in your header based on the visitor’s IP address location.
• Make exit pop-ups specific to the content a visitor looked at or how long they spent on the site.
• Show CTAs across the site based on the ads they visitor clicked from.
• Show progressively more intense CTAs as visitors return to the site.
• Adjust testimonials when you learn the visitors industry

Really, the ideas are limitless. You can adjust any aspect of your site based on any information you learn - how they got there, their location, what they visit, how long they spend on the site, demographic info you collect, and much more.

The key is that the more you personalize the experience to a specific visitor, the more it will resonate or match their desired next step. This is a huge win to increase the effectiveness of your current site.

Build Inbound Links To Your Content

Building inbound links to your site is a great way to increase search optimization. Think of it as a room of people— if someone asks for “data and analytics companies” and 75 people point at one person and 25 at another, which one represents that most. Links into your site are the same and serve as references to you. The quality of the links also matters so you want links from other high ranking, value-driven pages.

Here are just a couple of ideas to try:

• Link to other blogs on your blog.
• Write guest blog posts.
• Curate and publish helpful resource lists.
• Do expert roundups to build relationships.
• Volunteer to be the subject of a case study.
• Create free tools.
• Create shareable templates.
• Send out a joint press release when your news involves another company.
• Write and pitch op-ed articles.
• Partner with companies in complementary industries.
• Ask for reviews.
• Search for and monitor mentions of your brand.
• Search for and monitor your competitors' backlinks.
• Install social sharing widgets.
• Sponsor or speak at an event.

There are many tactics to build inbound links - just avoid buying backlinks as they are not quality and will hurt your rank more than help it.

Sign Up For HARO

HARO is Help A Reporter Out and is a long-standing tool for writers at publications to make requests in looking for people to interview or information for their stories. You can sign-up to be on a list to receive an organized list of press opportunities. This is a simple idea, but it takes effort to stay on top of watching the opportunities for the right one. Everyone is always looking for press and HARO makes it a lot simplier.

Help A Reporter Out

Optimize Your Site For Speed

Speed impacts SEO ranks as well as success metrics of your site by improving user experience. There are ton of tactics to consider, but look at various tactics including:

1. Enabling compression.
2. Minifing CSS, JavaScript, and HTML.
3. Reducing redirects.
4. Removing render-blocking JavaScript.
5. Leveraging browser caching.
6. Improving server response time.
7. Using a content distribution network.
8. Optimizing images.

Also, consider platforms like Cloudflare and go through the process of testing your site and making adjustments to improve the speed. You'll see a big bump in SEO with solid site speed improvements.

Create LinkedIn Showcase Pages

Showcase Pages are niche pages off of a company page. They allow a company to promote specific products or markets to a specific buyer persona. LinkedIn users can follow singular Showcase Pages without following the business or their other Showcase Pages. This allows businesses to promote and cater to the audience specific to the page.

In other words, if you have a pet boutique, your dog-lover customers won’t be subjected to reading about your blog post on the new tank cleaning spray for iguanas. With Showcase Pages, marketers can create hassle-free content that's personalized to the audience they’re selling to.

This allows companies to drill down into each of their buyer personas more deeply and keep content personal and interesting. Once that content is published, LinkedIn provides businesses with useful, dedicated analytics for each page. You may do this for different industries you are in, your different offering groups, sub-companies, spin-out products or a wide range of other uses.

Upgrade Your Approach To eMail Signatures

Think of all the emails that your entire team sends and the total number of brand impressions that happen every day. The question is, what is being communicated? Nothing, the right thing?

Today, not only can you create a consistent and professional-looking signature for everyone in your company, but you can also develop a marketing message to be pushed out to all your employees. There are tools like Sigstr that help you easily manage these things across an entire workforce. If done intelligently, you can feature important content, upcoming events or even promotions.

Build Up Your Cross-Link Game

Links across your site are the connections that Google (and other search engines) use to traverse your content, understand their relationship, and help determine topics for pages. Cross-links - when done right - can really improve your search optimization as well as improve things like time on site.

Start with your content such as blogs to see if there are opportunities to link to services on your site. Similarly, look for ways to like to related content in your blog from services pages. The goal is to continue through your entire site and look for ways to create connections of relevance and reduce connections that are less relevant. If you have pages with links to content that have no subject matter connection, it is better to replace those with links that do.

This process will help improve your search optimization significantly.

Launch Your Own Roadshow

Take your products or services on tour. If you have products that you are selling especially ones that people would like to experience in person, then consider creating a roadshow. This could actually be a team that travels around showing off the products like the good old days or even one that is done via mail.

You can even launch into the future and do Virtual Reality experiences and send your headset to business for their team to experience your roadshow in their own office.

For many products, a barrier is getting them familiar with and hands on with your product to make a decision to pursue or purchase. Don’t be afraid to get creative with how you put products in front of prospects.

Help Customers Share The News

Just implemented a new phone system, or setup virtual desktops, built an app, or integrated an ERP? Well, that might be news that your client’s customers are interested in because it affects how they do business with your client. In many cases, your clients will want to promote that they are evolving, doing more, or have a new way to work with their customers.

So, fund those announcements. Help them collect their list, design an email blast, create social media posts and pay for mailings. You can reach a whole new audience by helping your client promote their big news which just so happens to be supported by your solution.

Now, it is key to keep it focused on your client because it is their list and announcement, but you can mention your own brand as the guiding force behind it all.

Create a Series of Photos for UnSplash & Google Images

Well, unsplash.com is an awesome resource for high quality, unique photos at absolutely no cost, but they do ask that you cite the photographer and link back to their work. A cool idea is to get images created that represent what you do - data dashboards, phone service, pc support, consulting, or whatever and offer them for free on unspalsh asking for links when people utilize them. It may not bring a mountain of backlinks but can help get some exposure and some backlinks which helps your search optimization.

Once you've done that, don't be afraid to watermark the images with your brand name and put them in a gallery on your site so that Google finds them and puts them in image search. If you name the files and tag metadata right you will even rank high in various searches with those images. If you want to take it further, add them to your Google Business listing, instagram, facebook, and every other platform you can syndicate your visual masterpieces across.

Create A Cheat Sheet

We all love to read pages and pages or deep detailed documents, right? Ok, not always. The opportunity is to help create cheat sheets for books, product documentation, or any other long content. Creating a summary of the content is a great way to provide value to your audience. here are couple ideas to consider:

• Summarize product documentation into the most important points.
• Simplify an industry report.
• Create key points for a new book.
• Outline a speaker’s content from an event.

Cheat sheets allow you to break down more complex content into bite-sized pieces for your audience while injecting some of your own thoughts and ideas.

Curate Other Good Content

You don’t always have to be the original source but you can provide a ton of value by searching, sorting, and prioritizing content on a topic to then help your audience read the right information in the right order. For companies selling technology solutions, there can be a lot of information on a topic for your audience to understand it.

As the expert, you can provide an article that is less about explaining the topic and more about pointing to the best resources that exist on the web as well as helping your audience know what the best way to consume them is - is there a good starting point or foundational knowledge or what is fact-based versus opinion-based.

We are all looking to create great resources our prospects will love, share, and link to. Intelligently curated content is a powerful resource.

Increase Conversion with Exit Intent Popovers

Exit-intent popups detect when someone is leaving the page and present them with a message and often an action. This gives you a second chance to communicate call-to-action messages just before visitors leave your site.

Exit-intent popover technologies, also known as overlay popups, detect when visitors are about to hit the back button, close a browser, or navigate away and presents popup dialog as a last-ditch effort to gain a business conversion.

On article pages these can entice someone to another piece of relevant content, a download or newsletter. On service or product pages, these suggest a webinar or even present a testimonial. The key here is to test what pages should have exit-intent popovers for your site and what types of messages/CTAs are most effective. Don’t just throw up one on all pages with a newsletter signup and assume it is a good approach.

Use Paid Content Distribution

Paid content discovery and delivery platforms, such as Outbrain and Taboola, are a great way to drive traffic to your site. These content marketing platforms provide display links to your content as recommendations on the web's largest content publishers including sites like CNN.com, Slate and ESPN. Just like Google Adwords, you set a budget and pay per click for these platforms.

Delivery platforms like these are powerful to get your content and resources in front of the right audiences. The difference between this and normal digital advertising is that you are typically showing ads for your articles on sites that are content focused. So imagine on CNN you are promoting and educational article about upcoming trends in analytics for retail. This moves away from selling and instead of driving people to valuable content.

Be Provocative

It’s better to get controversial in a blog post instead of on social media because you have more room to explain yourself and people are more likely to read first and attack second. Just make sure that your argument is well-supported because people will be coming.

Having a strong opinion is good and sometimes it is valuable to take risks. In marketing, people often try to stay in the middle of the road which neither excites people to get behind them nor turns anyone off. Great marketers know that sometimes you have to turn off a group of people to get your core target audience more excited and involved.

Polarization and provocative approaches have worked extremely well and even turning some people away makes the people you want even more your fans.

Create Micro Case Studies

In tip #70 we talked about creating more interactive cases studies. On the reverse side of more depth, you can consider micro case studies that focus on specific outcomes within a solution or smaller parts of a bigger case. These micro case studies can explore bite-sized wins that you have for clients and often are easier to consume.

If you are a data and analytics company that implemented a whole Business Intelligence solution into a hospital system,, could you pull a specific scenario about how you uncovered data on nursing schedules and patient outcomes. Instead of staying high-level about a data problem and a big solution, get down to specific pains that you solved.

Once you have these, create a micro case study section or your website or turn them into quick articles for your LinkedIn content strategies.

Product Or Service Placement

In the movies its not luck that the label on that coke can is facing out or the star is eating doritos. Product placement has become huge in recent years with big money behind it.

Now for those in the technology, B2B or software space, it is a little different and more akin to sponsorship.

Where can you place your product or service that many people in your target audience will see it? Could your product or service be used at a conference or event? Could it be used to help a non-profit board? Could it be placed in a popular location or with a marquee client for reduced cost?

Product placement could take a lot of different forms. During the Covid-19 virus crisis, Zoom video conferencing donated their software to a lot of schools as both a way to hack the news and get exposure.

A/B Test Your Conversions & Forms

Testing allows you to compare two versions and get concrete proof on which one produces better results. With A/B testing, you create two different versions of a page with minor changes that are easy to compare - too many changes and you won't know what caused the results. As visitors come to the page, half a shown version A and half version B and then the results are measured for an action you specify.

As a simple example, imagine your contact page and on version A you have 7 fields including industry, job title, and area of interest; but on version B you have 4 fields. We can measure to find we get 15% more conversions with less fields. Once we learn this, we can start a new test to get even better results.

A/B Testing is a great investment because it helps you get more value out of the visitors you are getting. If you are spending on ads or SEO, maximizing your conversion significantly increases the return on investment.

Build A Chatbot

Very well defined by SendPulse, Chatbot marketing is a way to promote products and services using a chatbot a computer application that carries conversations with users by a predetermined scenario or with the help of AI. Brands create this virtual assistant with a chatbot builder, and connect it with messaging apps like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Snapchat, etc., or add to their website. 

Chatbots are built with logic to answer questions or perform services as they interpret what a user types or even speaks to them. The technology has become extremely advanced and is evolving all the time to become smarter and closer to emulating real human interactions.

• Customer support
• Scheduling meetings
• Tracking orders
• Making orders
• Sharing news and updates
• Complete a survey
• Sign-up / register for an account
• Answer pricing or package questions
• Replace a form with a conversation

Build Plug-ins For Other Tools

Build plug-ins and integrations with other tools. By creating a wide set of plug-ins you’re able to create new marketing channels. Plugins can be created for a wide range of systems including CMS tools like WordPress, CRM like Salesforce, eCommerce like Shopify, and many more. Think about how your service or product could support these platforms and build something that attracts people to download it.

Creating a basic API to your product can enable you to outsource building all the plugins and reaching dozens of new integrations. Promoting the plugins you build can include a guest post on the company’s blog (the one behind the product you’ve build the plugin for), a joint webinar or promoting it on the product’s communities. Often these channels give you ways to promote to anyone using the plugin, extension or integration.

Retargeting list swapping with a partner

One of the main problems of B2B companies when using retargeting is the retargeting audience is too small. In order for retargeting to bring a significant number of leads, you’d usually need to have an audience of at least 100,000 users.

One thing you can do is swapping retargeting pixels with other companies/ blogs which address the same user base. In most services you’re able to keep cookies for different campaigns, so you’re able to embed a pixel for a different company and they’ll get the traffic and handle it.

While you can do it manually, CookieJar is a cool tool to help you grow your retargeting list, whether through swapping or purchasing a list from another company. One thing you need to bear in mind is that unlike your ordinary retargeting where you need to ‘remind’ users about your brand when you’re advertising to visitors of other sites you should use a different ad set.

Post Valuable Questions & Info On Reddit

Since Reddit’s creation in 2005, the platform has earned its title as the “frontpage of the Internet.” Reddit, a popular social networking site and forum, has over 300 million users, 140,000 active communities, and boasts over 14 million monthly pageviews. Reddit is structured like an elaborate message board, where users submit both links and text posts for other Redditors to comment on. Rather than one centralized location, Reddit is made up of hundreds of thousands of subfolders that act as individual forums—referred to as “subreddits”.

Each subreddit has its own moderators and regulations, but there’s one common sticking point. Redditors value authentic content and interaction and detest overt self-promotion—which can put them at odds with marketers.

• Identify your target subreddits.
• Post links to other websites.
• Share valuable, non-promotional content.
• Invest in Reddit Advertising.
• Create your own subreddit.

Send Physical Gifts for Milestones

Ever seen the silver play YouTube button for 100k subscribers? If you are an IT company, send a cool gift when your client reaches 50 workstations; or if you are a CRM company, send something fun when they reach 10,000 contacts. The ideas are limitless but the concept is focused around surprise and joy for wins that your customer achieves.

How does this play into marketing - word-of-mouth, retention and upsell.

Take A Stroll Down LinkedIn Lane

It’s shown that on LinkedIn that just viewing someone’s profile often gets them to view back. The trick here is to build a system around this natural curiosity. Find people that you would like to connect with and view their profile — when they view back, make a connection request with a great message and continue the conversation.

The key with this approach is actually segmenting and sending the right messages to people.

Setup Automation Campaigns for Leads, Prospects & Customers

Automation is about creating a sequence of emails (and even direct mail) that is triggered automatically to segments. So, if someone downloads a white paper on a specific topic, you can then send them a related article in 24 hours, a webinar request in 7 days, a demo requisition in 15 days and then a discount offer in 30 days - without any human intervention.

You can look to setup automated campaigns for visitors who convert on your site, prospects in your sales process or even existing customers. The key with automation is to segment and build a program that feels personal and adapts to the interactions your contact has with you. In automation, if they visit a page or take an action you can move them to a new list and out of another.

Just imagine all that you could do with leads, prospects and customers with a really well built automation strategy.

Add A Sharing Tool to Your Site

Sharing is a key aspect of any blog as we want our content to spread and be linked to. Utilizing a tool like https://sharethis.com/ you can easily integrate a wide range of different platforms for sharing into your site. The great thing with ShareThis is that there is an option for buttons that follow the user down the page as well as the ability to see statistics about sharing.

While you are at it, look at their other tools for follow buttons, image sharing, reaction buttons and much more that can help you get your content out there.

Sharethis isn't the only option though. take a look at some of these sharing tools that can help you get your content out there: https://neilpatel.com/blog/the-9-best-tools-for-getting-more-social-shares/

Have us create a pin list like this for your site or build a killer growth strategy...

And last but not least, create a really cool “Pin List” like we did or other highly shareable content. We thought this was a really fantastic list of ideas, so really our final one is to reach out to us and turn a bunch of random ideas into a cohesive strategy to build leads. We’ve created lots of cool content just like this that gets hundreds of visitors to a site today, but we have also taken a lot of these ideas and combined them into really intelligent targeted marketing strategies.

So, don’t hesitate to contact us even just to chat or share another cool idea with us.