Coming out of 2022, many businesses experienced a rough last quarter. Now that we are in 2023, things are starting to look up. But are your marketing efforts on the right track? Here are the top 7 marketing tips for those wanting to scale their business in 2023.
1. Clear Message for Your Brand
If a customer is looking at your products or services, it’s because they have a problem and they’re looking for you to solve it. If you are not clearly telling your customer how you can help them, you are losing clients. A clear message is the foundation to having great marketing in 2023. Donald Miller, New York Times bestselling author, says in his storybrand book “If you confuse, you lose” and we couldn’t agree more.
We highly recommend every business owner read the book “Building a Storybrand”. This will give you everything you need to build a clear message for your business. That way, you can stop wasting money on marketing and instead, have a message that will grow your business for you.
2. Lead Generation
Every business owner I work with deep down knows that they need to grow a list of leads for their business. However, most never do it. They spend money on other marketing efforts and the Lead Generation stays on the sideline. It’s time to change that!
Ending 2022, we saw the best numbers to date with Lead Generation. As a matter of fact, we were able for the first time to get an email AND a phone number for the same cost. Mind you, in the past a lead valued their email at about $20 and a phone number twice that. But no longer – you can get phone numbers and emails at the same time without having to spend your entire marketing budget. That. Is. Crazy!
We recommend rolling out Lead Generators on your website’s homepage as well as running digital ads campaigns focused on lead generation. If you use reliable software like Rocketfuel, you can have the leads funnel right into email campaigns, but I’m getting ahead myself. You need lead generation first if you want to grow!
P.S. AI is getting in the email list building scene – we’re excited! Blog to come on this.
3. Storytelling Video & Photo for Your Brand
Take a minute and watch this Chevy Ad – it failed and you can see why. We don’t mind if you stop halfway through, (I know we did).
Now take a minute and watch this storybrand film.
If you want your brand to move people to act then you need video. It has been seen to boost conversion by 86% and over 60% of people say they want to see a video before they do anything else. Your video can be used on your website, ads campaigns, emails and text messages, you can even include it in blogs, as I’m doing here!
Now moving on to photography. Using quality photography in 2023 is basically a must. I would love to say, you should do it because it increases your conversion rate (which is true). However, what I’m going to say is more important than conversion rate. Here it is: Your audience knows that they are stock photos and it cheapens your brand. For the sake of your brand, get original content.
Now if you want a deep dive into this subject check out this great blog on images for a website.
We all love a great film and we love seeing products in clean images. Why would you want your audience to put up with stock images and low quality. The shoppers of today demand it, so this year make sure you focus on video & photo for your brand.
4. Email & Text Automation Campaigns
Dr. J.J. Peterson from Marketing Made Simple says that “email marketing is not dead, only bad email marketing is”. We completely agree. Through 2022 we had many clients who used email & text marketing to grow their businesses. Email & text automation campaigns take cold leads and make them warm, and warm leads and make them hot.
Nothing is better at getting you a sale than sending out an email and/or text blast to your lead list.
The important thing to keep in mind about email automation campaigns is you need to set them up to make sense for your client. If they download a lead generator make sure that campaign of emails is geared toward their needs. If you run a campaign to your current clients make sure you are referring to them as customers not as leads.
The hardest thing about Email & Text Campaigns is starting. There is no trick – you just have to start today! (Tip: I recommend nurture & sales emails to start).
5. Digital Ads
I’ll be frank – you need to run Paid Advertising on Google at a minimum for your brand if you care about getting leads. Now with that being said, there are basically four recommended channels of Digital Marketing: Google Ads, Meta Ads, LinkedIn Ads, and Programmatic Ads. They each have a purpose to help companies grow. Do you know which channel would be best for your business?
A Marketing strategy is crucial when it comes to successfully running Ads for your company. Take the time to do your research and know what you actually need rather than guessing. In the end, all it will do is waste your ad dollars, and ultimately cost your business. But we get it, you’re busy running a business and sometimes you don’t have time to come up with a marketing strategy. This is when it’s important to find a marketing agency that you can trust to run your ads for you. This way you can spend your time running your business and know that your marketing efforts are in good hands. And you can watch your business grow!
6. S.E.O. Search Engine Optimization
Google has ruled at over 85% market share on search engines for the last 7 years. So when I’m talking about SEO, I’m talking about optimizing your website for Google Search engine.
If you’re interested in ranking page #1 on Google search for what you do or sell. You need to be focused on SEO. Why? Well on Google you have two routers if you want to show up as page one: Ads and SEO. We recommend both at the beginning because ultimately you want SEO to win, and ads can get you there. We tell people SEO is like paying into a mortgage, while Ads is like paying for rent. In the end you keep what you pay for on SEO, but with Ads it’s a one and done.
There are a few different types of SEO in today’s marketing. There’s cheap and quick overseas SEO work. This normally has tons of links all pointing to one particular blog or a specific page on your website. The second route is more “grit” SEO, this where you produce blog content like crazy, and you fill those blogs with as many keywords as you can. So when someone searches for a keyword, Google knows that your blog/ website contains those keywords and in return, Google assumes that your content is relevant to the person searching. We recommend this route if you are doing your marketing on your own.
Lastly is the professional backlink building, long blogs, GMB unification, and on-going scheme builds. This is the route to go if you want to win in the long run. All I can say about SEO is don’t go cheap. To be clear, $500 a month is cheap for SEO work. Invest into the future of your company. We know that this can be overwhelming for business leaders who are not familiar with SEO. If you feel this way, give us a call! We can help.
7. Blogging – Don’t Use AI, Use Your Fingers
In 2022, Google rolled out a big update that hit all AI content hard. If you just used AI to write your content and posted it then Google in September took the ranking of your website down big time. So our advice is to write your content.
Now with that being said, we love technology and it makes our lives easier. Think of AI as a tool. It can give you a starting point when you’re unsure of what to say, provide you with different ideas that you may not have thought of, and it can give you an outline of what you’re wanting to write. But it’s important to not let it take over your copywriting, use AI as an aid when it comes to creating content, but make sure what you’re writing is your own words and not something the computer generates for you.
Here’s a tip! Do a simple keyword research, find out what people are searching for and write on these topics (make sure to include the keywords when you’re writing- this will help with SEO). Funny enough, one of our clients is a Church and before we began writing for them we did keyword research. We wanted to see what users were looking for when they included the word “God” in their search. And what we found was that the most used keyword/ phrase with the word God was “what do we say to the god of death”, followed by “who does God say I am”. Now there are some good topics for church blogs, right?!
BONUS: Marketing Software
I think every company in 2023 knows they need reliable software to help them with their marketing. But they don’t yet understand how valuable this software is for their business. Let me give you an example, one you may not have thought of yet. We set up automated emails and text messages for a client…what happened next? The business owner took down their salesperson job posting (that they were spending money to advertise for). They realized that they didn’t need to hire another team member because the software was doing the work for them. This saved them tons of time and money. 🤯
That is huge!
A software like Rocketfuel will automatically pull in your leads, help you nurture and sell them with automated emails and text messages, post on social media, keep your client list clean and organized, and so much more! These are not cheap because of the value they bring to your business. We highly recommend using Rocketfuel as a marketing software, it’s the best on the market- and it’s half the cost of Hubspot and a third of the cost of Salesforce. Schedule a demo with Rocketfuel for your CRM marketing and sales platform.
Conclusion:
Let’s leave 2022 in the past. Get ahead of the game in 2023 with marketing that actually works.
Here are the top 7 marketing tips for 2023:
- Clear Message
- Lead Generation
- Storytelling Video & Photo
- Email & Text Automation
- Digital Ads
- SEO
- Blogging
- BONUS: Marketing Software
If you need help on your marketing strategy, schedule a call today. You deserve to feel confident in your marketing for 2023. Not all businesses need the same thing, but if they want to grow- they all need to have a clear plan.
Get clear on your marketing my friend – until next time! ✌️
