Marketing can involve a lot of waiting around: waiting for collaborators to add their touches to ads, waiting for your writers to turn over completed copy, waiting to collect data about your previous efforts. Let's take a look at some of the ways that businesses can easily add to their marketing strategy in an instant.
Expand Your Social
Sometimes, it seems like there's a new way to interact with customers on social networks every other day, yet most businesses tend to stick to the ones we know and love. Stay abreast of new social media revolutions, and create new profiles on some of the smaller networks. Social media is more than Facebook, these days: Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr, and countless other platforms see huge numbers of visitors. Just make sure to keep your content relevant to the channel you're using!
Listen to Feedback
Spend some time reading reviews, comments on your social media pages, and correspondence from your clients and customers. Maybe you'll find an area that needs improvement; maybe you'll find something you're doing completely right that can be translated to another area. Either way, staying informed of your customers' needs and wants is essential to marketing, and it's something you can do right this second.
Respond to Customers
Feedback should be a two-way street. Combine social media and customer service with thoughtful, timely responses to comments and reviews. Even a simple "thank you!" to a positive review lets a customer know that you care about their input, and that is the kind of thing that keeps people coming back in a marketing milieu defined by relationships.
Boost Your Transparency
The content for posts about your business is already at your disposal. You can use video to share information about your brand with a light-hearted tour of your headquarters, or you can Instagram photos of your marketing team brainstorming. While this kind of transparent, get-to-know-you content shouldn't be the bulk of your content, it's a great way to show the personal side of your business.
Share Content
Your social media strategy doesn't have to be based on content solely created by you. Retweet, reblog, or share interesting posts that relate to your product or service, or put out a call for fan-produced content. This cuts out some of the pushiness factor that can sometimes come from marketing-based social media efforts, too.
Review Your Strategy
Finally, if you have a spare minute and you're looking for something you can do now, review your marketing strategy. Is there room for improvement anywhere? Have you been trucking along with the same strategy since 2009? What part of the constantly changing social media landscape can you better integrate? You may decide that everything is in good order and you're happy with your current approach, but time spent reviewing strategy is always time well-spent!
Can you think of any other tips for quick marketing moves? Share your ideas with us in the comments section!