When business becomes busy or money becomes tight, companies often reduce or ignore the marketing budget. However, without marketing, it’s difficult for people to discover your business.

Instead of neglecting marketing, we want to give you 9 easy and effective marketing ideas that you can do anytime. Doing these tasks won’t take much time. If you make them a habit, the outcomes will speak for themselves.

1. Create an email welcome series

A welcome series is an email campaign that introduces new leads to your brand. It triggers when they sign up for your newsletter.

They are often relatively short in length (keep them to the point!) and you don’t need to do too many. Here’s a little example of what your welcome series could look like –

• Email 1 – thanks for joining! Tell us what to expect from your newsletters in the community.
• Email 2 – share how people can connect with you on social media
• Email 3 – share a free resource, or a discount code to make a purchase
• Email 4 – answer some frequently asked questions, or offer a free consultation

Once you create your welcome email series, you’re done! When someone signs up for your newsletter, the email automation takes over and does the work for you.

2. Plan a hub-and-spoke blog series

Heard of hub-and-spoke approach to blog posts? Take a broad topic, under your area of expertise, and write a brief blog on that topic. This is your hub blog post.

The spoke posts are born out of the subtopics in your overview blog post, so, for example, we could write a hub blog post about creating a content marketing strategy. The spoke blog posts could be –

• How to analyse competitors
• How to objectively critique your current marketing efforts
• How to choose the right marketing channels for you brand
• What content to create and where to share it

3. Use a content creation calendar

Create a central calendar which collates all your ideas into one place and shows where you’ve posted any piece of content and where. This will allow you to see how often and where you have shared the content, and whether you have missed sharing it somewhere (don’t let all your hard work go to waste!).

4. Commit to a weekly/monthly newsletter

The frequency of your newsletters should be based on how much time you think you can give to creating a newsletter. If weekly feels too much, don’t try and live up to it – do what feels right for you, and it won’t feel like such a chore.

Newsletters may go unnoticed, but people will at least glance at the subject line before deciding what to do with them. This means that you are still on their mind and they are aware of your presence.

5. Rewrite blog posts

You can write multiple blog posts on the same topic, even if you have already written one before. You won’t necessarily save time updating and old blog post, but at least you already have a topic in mind to work on.

6. A/B test email subject lines

Have you ever trialled A/B email subject line testing? Results show it increases your open and click-through rates. Results show an average increase in open rate of around 20 – 25%.

7. Gather reviews

Good or bad, reviews are imperative for business. People trust reviews. Studies show that 87% of people read reviews and 79% trust them as much as they would a personal recommendation.

Companies such as Trustpilot offer free packages where they will send automated emails requesting reviews to your customers, triggered by your chosen action, e.g. a completed purchase, downloading a resource etc

8. Video

Not the first time we’ve mentioned it, but video really is king. In 2023, 82.5% of all web traffic is accounted for by online videos, making it the most popular type of content over the internet.

When we say video, don’t panic, it doesn’t need to be a film! Even just 1-minute videos drive a lot of traffic to a website. In fact, the shorter the videos are, the better. We naturally have short attention spans, so videos that grab attention quickly, are the best.

9. Track metrics

Have you ever tracked whether your marketing efforts are actually paying off? Tracking a buyer’s journey can be difficult, but examining where you publish your content will provide a good understanding.

• What open rates are you getting on your emails?
• How is the engagement on your social media posts?
• How many views have you had on your Instagram reel?

Another useful tip is to look at your Google analytics and deep dive into your website traffic. Where is it coming from?

What are people doing once they are on your site? How long are they staying on the site? Are they hitting a brick wall somewhere on your site that you could improve on?

Tiny tweaks can make a massive difference!