5 actions to charge your marketing right now

No vague “strategies” here! If you want to boost your marketing efforts this afternoon, here are 5 positive actions you can take.

1. Get more reviews

Reviews serve more than one purpose. We all read reviews when we buy - to not do so is foolish. Therefore, it’s vital to have reviews available so potential customers can choose your business over the competition.

Reviews on Google can also be good for your SEO. The more positive and relevant reviews you have, the more likely you are to appear in Google’s all-important Snack Pack.

The easiest way to get reviews? Ask for them. You can set up an automated email in Mailchimp, or your preferred mail provider, to send to customers who have just purchased from you. People can be surprisingly supportive towards small businesses.

Don’t forget to make it easy for people. Send them a link in an email that they can just click to leave their review. You can get a link for Google reviews by clicking on “get more reviews” in your Google My Business entry.

2. Do an SEO audit

Think SEO is scary? Well, it has its moments but basic SEO tools are becoming more accessible and small businesses are becoming empowered to manage their own SEO to a certain extent.

Semrush offers a full suite of keyword research, backlink analytics and site audit and the best part is that it’s free. There are other tools, such as Neil Patel’s Ubersuggest but SEMrush is the most comprehensive that we have found.

Get a handle on your site’s performance, check out broken links that need to be fixed and see what keywords you need to be using.

3. Steal something from your more successful competitors

Call it stealing or call it taking inspiration. We all have something to learn from our more successful peers so take advantage. Just don’t be too blatant, don’t copy text word for word (Google knows!) and remember to still be yourself. You want to be inspired, not a slave to another brand.

You should regularly pay attention to your competitors and taking inspiration now and again can be a great way to refresh your content.

Things you can steal/use/take inspiration from:

• Hashtags
• Keywords
• Video content - remember not to be too blatant here. Instagram values originality
• Email content

4. Install Grammarly

If you haven’t heard of Grammarly yet then you must have had your laptop closed for the last five years. Their aggressive marketing has been very successful and Grammarly has become the standard for those who want to want to avoid mistakes in their copywriting. It is a spellchecker and also helps you with grammar. It is far more intelligent than Word’s spellchecker whose suggestions can be questionable. Now, the standard of your writing may be very good and you may say, “hey, I don’t need help with my writing”. However, we all make mistakes. I write copy for a living and I make tons of mistakes. Grammarly points my mistakes out to me and saves me time.

If you make just one spelling mistake on your website, it can lead people to think your website isn’t genuine. This seems unfair - we’re all only human after all. But people expect well-written, professional copywriting and so your introductions, category pages, product pages and blog should all be mistake-free.

The free version of Grammarly only works on web pages so it’s great for working on your website but if you want to work in Word documents for free, you’ll have to copy the text into a browser-based email messages (in Yahoo!, Hotmail, etc.), work from there and then copy back into Word.

Oh and the free version is American English so you have to be on the ball.

5. Write or plan some content using answerthepublic.com 

In Search Engine-land, questions are the new black. Search terms have evolved as search engines have evolved, and with the advent of smart speakers. Most of us now enter full questions into our search engines. “Who is the new Home Secretary?”, “Where can I buy the latest iPhone?”, ”What do flies dream about?”.

Answer the Public can tell us what questions people are asking around any topic. This gives us a chance to make our content not only useful but very SEO-friendly. With our content, we can seek to answer the questions that people are asking, which makes it more powerful than if we just researched keywords.

Enter in the topic you’re interested in – probably the product or service you sell – and see what the public wants to know. As well as questions, Answer the Public also shows long-tailed key terms, comparisons and related terms. It’s very useful!

Go and give your marketing a nudge!

Put your phone on silent for an hour or two and see how many of these you can complete. All of these actions have the potential to make a difference to your business.

Good luck!

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