Here’s the only good thing about shopping at Costco on a Saturday: free samples. I hate crowds, parking, and waiting in lines, but oh man do I love free samples. And you know what? It works! I never would have bought that bag of sausages with the special sauce if the lady hadn’t given me a piece fresh out of her little portable oven.

Your blog is a kind of free sample. It gives a taste for the quality of your work, establishes trust, and is totally free! You don’t want your blog there just talking up real estate on your site. You want it to be a resource for your visitors—and ideally, you want it to be the reason visitors come in the first place (like samples on a Saturday). Because if people go to your site to seek out your advice on something, or your reviews of a new product, you’ve established yourself as an expert in the field and a trusted resource. That’s how you get good business, loyal customers, and great referrals. In short, it’s how you generate leads.

Establish Yourself as the Expert

Everybody claims to be the best in an advertisement. This is your chance to show them that you actually are the best. You can solve the very problem they’re coming to you to get solved. As an expert, you understand not only what you do, but what that particular customer wants. When you can demonstrate that, you’ve got yourself a sale.

Write Great Pillar Articles

Pillar articles are in-depth articles that serve to both establish your expertise and drive traffic to your site. Write about four for your site, each one 1000 words. Take your time, do your research, and ensure that they’re engaging, readable, informative, and helpful. That’s how you rise up the search results rankings and get more and more people checking out your business. This is one area you probably want to hire out for. Read on to see why.

Use Calls to Action

Calls to Action are your opportunity to upgrade that reader to a customer, thought perhaps not directly. Put an opt-in form at the end of the post and make them a subscriber. Ask a question to get them talking in the comments or on your forum. Ask them to share the post on social media. Or direct them to your online store. Done right, your pillar content brings in new traffic and directs them to customerhood.

Produce High-Quality Content

Because these articles are so so crucial to your business, get them professionally produced. Get a designer to put together infographics. Get a writer to write the post with calls to action. Get someone to do the research for it. Since this will be the first thing many see, you want it to be stellar, the best content on your site.

Everything on your blog should be providing value to your customers. Produce your posts with that in mind, then direct them to the part of your site that will most benefit them. You’ll have no problem generating leads.

Marketing. Really great marketing.

Because it doesn’t matter how great your management is or how brilliant your content or how ingenius your business idea. If people don’t know about it, if people know about it but don’t understand how it improves their lives, your work is for nothing.

Invest in Market Research

It is so easy to start a business. Most fail. This is crucial to succeeding. You can’t just launch a business and say, Here we are! Give us your business! That’s not going to work. You have to first get in front of them and second persuade them with your pitch. Whether that pitch is a video or landing page or tweet, you don’t have much time to convince them, which is why knowing your audience is everything.

Who is your ideal customer? What do they read? Where do they hangout? Why do they need your product? What do they do in their freetime? What words are going to resonate with them, compel them to be interested? How will you solve their problem? How will you help them understand how you will solve their problem? You’ve got to answer these questions so you can craft effective marketing campaigns.

Launch a Killer Campaign

Because you’ve done your research, you know what sort of visuals, colors, words to use, and you know where to put your ads and where to guest blog, which social media platforms to leverage and which influencers to partner with. When all is accounted for, running a good campaign costs a pretty penny. You take all the information you gathered to craft a campaign that elevates your brand, brings traffic, and ends up in sales.

Rack Up 7-13+ Touches
https://www.onlinemarketinginstitute.org/blog/2013/10/why-it-takes-7-to-13-touches-to-deliver-a-qualified-sales-lead-part1/ But, you’re doing more than looking for sales. You’re actually cultivating relationships. This is the fun part of building a business in 2017, and it’s also going to help your business build long-term success. Your campaigns need to be well-crafted and fresh to get eyes, and they have to establish a connection to keep those eyes on your channels. Whatever form of content you’re producing, tell a story that connects to your audience.

Don’t Do It Alone

It’s so time intensive to do marketing right. It’s complex, involved, and always shifting. Few startups have the capacity to do it well, and that’s part of why so many fail. Entrepreneurs work really hard to make excellent products, they pay for beautiful websites, they get investors and hire great people—and then they fail because the people who would have been happily loyal to them didn’t know about their product, or didn’t see its value.

You worked so hard to make your idea a reality. You worked so hard to build a good company. Don’t do all that work just to see it all collapse. Market market market. Market smart. Market often. Market well. And as your business grows and changes, shift your strategy along with it.

It’s easy to feel like you should be on every social media channel. Get a facebook, a twitter, and instagram, a youtube, a pinterest, a blog so that you can reach everyone. The more people who see your page, the more who will follow, the bigger influence, growth, and revenue = social media jackpot!

Except, people don’t just follow you because you’re around. They follow you because you’ve got good content, because you’re providing videos they want to watch and share, or memes or information. Basically, like in all things business, you have what they want.

The problem is, every platform is a little different and if you put the same content on all the platforms, you just come off as stale and lame. But if you produce different content for every platform–well, you don’t have time for that as a startup.

So how do you choose?

1. Do the thing you’re best at. Not everyone presents well on camera, and not everyone is interesting to listen to, or can write engaging blog posts. Think about your strengths and interests and those of your team. It’s going to take dedication so choose a form of content that can be produced both well and consistently.
2. Go where your market is. Not everyone is on facebook as their primary platform. Instagram is influencer-heavy. Both lend themselves well to video. If your market includes commuters, people who exercise and students, a podcast may be a good fit. Blogs are great for every website because they’re easily integrated into SEO-optimization strategies (in fact, they’re often a cornerstone) but they, too, require writing skills, good visuals, and a bit of technical knowledge.

Videos and Podcasts and Blogs, Oh My!

Video marketing is said to be the big thing of 2017. The American Marketing Association says that 85% of US search traffic will be driven by video by 2019. Engaging video content is already king on social media. Every major social media platform now includes options for video, whether it’s a disappearing snapchat-style video, live streaming, or improved options for sharing.

Of course, the payoff for viral video is significant. It’s what everyone hopes for. But creating viral video may be one of the most energy and time-intensive options. It requires scripting, equipment, editing, music, not to mention content that quickly engages your viewer. In other words, unless you have a really great company to make your videos and the budget to spare, it’s probably not the best option to start with. (Then again, if you have the strategy and the means to execute, go for it! But don’t bother with trying to maintain other social media channels as you get it off the ground.)

Podcasts have a very low barrier to entry. All it takes is a microphone and a computer. But for a well-produced podcast, a podcast that gets listened to and that gets advertisers and a strong listener base (which is the reason you’re putting it out, right?) then you should at least get an editor. Plenty of podcasts start out without one, but production values will be much better which means more people will be willing to listen and share. You can invest in nicer equipment and greater sophistication as you go, but since podcast is all sound: make it good from the start.

In addition to the technical aspects of a podcast, it requires a weekly commitment. Are you going to interview a new guest each week? In person, by phone or by skype? Think about the time it will take to find, research, book and interview guests. If it’s not an interview show, what value will you be providing your listeners and who will be in charge of producing that content? How will you promote it? How much time will you devote each week to producing and recording?

Blogs are arguably the easiest and most low-maintenance form of content. They also help to boost your SEO rankings, and all you need is a solid writer. A good blog should always be a part of your website and your social media strategy. Like podcasts and video, it’s a great way to build brand awareness and establish your company as a leader in your field. Video is showing up more and more in search results, but people still visit websites and scan pages for their answers. It’s easy to share information at a glance, to tell a story in the time it takes to scroll down the page. Plus, embedded graphics are shared on social media sites, providing another avenue for visibility and traffic.

No matter what you choose, you’ll have to invest some money and time. You need a strategy for engaging and growing your audience, converting views and likes to sales, and a consistent production schedule. Commit to one and make it amazing.