Marketing ideas for time-poor marketers

If you’re a marketer who’s too busy to even get to marketing, you’re not alone. We’re a full-time digital marketing agency. Everyone in our office has a role that revolves around marketing and yet even we can sometimes be too busy to do our own marketing.

We have to prioritise our tasks and pursue the activities that are going to get the best outcomes for the business. Generally, that means getting more sales.

For different businesses that can be driving more traffic to an e-commerce platform, tweaking an abandoned cart email to get more returns, or promoting sales to deliver higher engagements. 

So what creative digital marketing ideas can we offer to produce results quickly and with as little effort as possible? 

How to increase website traffic

This is key to any business’s online growth, but achieving it can be rather complicated! Here are a few quick digital marketing tips you need to look at to achieve this, especially if you’re time-poor:

How to use social media posts to increase website traffic

Creating posts that link back to your website is key to generating more traffic. The more you post, the more traffic you can get. In order for things to work this smoothly, however, you need to make sure the posts are relevant to your audience and entice them to find out more.

Struggling to find the time to post? Improve your digital marketing by simply carving out one hour a week and use a scheduling platform like Hootsuite or Buffer to line up your social media posts in advance. 

How to use blogs to increase website traffic

Websites with blog content have 434% more search engine-indexed pages than those that don't publish. This means the more you blog the more you’ll be found by search engines. This is a big deal as the higher up the search ranking you are, the more website traffic you’ll receive.

If you’re pressed for time when it comes to writing blogs, then ask team members to help. Your sales reps will be able to write about the common questions they get asked, and your support team can write a blog answering a commonly asked question.

How to use email marketing to increase website traffic

Emailing your existing database about a new product, recent project, new blog post, and so on will result in your existing contacts returning to your database to re-engage with you. You can use a platform like MailChimp to do this easily and in a low-cost fashion.

If creating high-performing emails sounds too time-consuming, you’re gladly mistaken. If you create one standard template then adding content to it in the future becomes easy and efficient.

While the above activities may sound time-intensive, if you’re able to find the time to do them, and do them properly, the results can be well worth the effort and save you time in the long run.

You might not have the budget for a digital marketing agency to do this for you, but what value would increasing your website traffic by this much have on your business?

How to gain more website leads

Getting more website traffic is only part of improving your marketing efforts. Captivating those visitors enough to take a desired action on the website is another key driver for marketing success. If you’re time-poor then it can be difficult to know where to start. So here’s what we do:

Review your inquiry forms

If you ask too many or irrelevant questions on forms then you may be putting people off enquiring. Likewise, not asking enough of the right questions may mean salespeople are wasting their time chasing unqualified leads.

Ask your salespeople for 1 question that they ask to determine if a lead is worth pursuing. Then make sure you are only asking the bare minimum required to effectively follow them up. 

Gate your brochures

If you offer an online version of your brochure consider placing it behind a simple form so you can capture people’s details and then email it to them. This marketing tip will enable you to start building an excellent email marketing list. Many people believe gating their brochures behind a form will deter visitors from downloading it, and to an extent this is true. Although, how keen must someone be on your product to jump through a small hoop to get the brochure? The answer is very keen. Gaining this type of person’s details in your system to follow up with and/or email market to is much more valuable than obtaining excess brochure downloads.

Better email opens

Don’t have time to A/B test every subject line or email content? Don’t worry, we can explain how to swiftly improve your email marketing campaigns.

Firstly, good email performance is broken down into 3 parts:

1. Deliverability
2. Open rates
3. Click-through rates

You’ve got to address each in that order. If your emails aren’t delivered they won’t get opened. Bad open rates mean people won’t click so don’t skip past the first one!

Here’s what you can do, with minimal time input, to improve these areas:

Deliverability

Lots of people use the same email hosting (Gmail, Outlook, etc) and some of these systems can see if you’re a spam sender. This is a broad definition, but in essence, if you send it to people that aren’t interested or engaged then you may get put on a spam list.

To avoid this it’s important to understand why your emails may be going to junk and to avoid sending emails to people that haven’t opened a lot of your past emails. 

Make sure you’re fully compliant with CAN SPAM guidelines and consider introducing double opt-in systems for people joining your email lists. Also, make sure the people you're emailing actually want to receive emails from you. 

You’ll accumulate a score that shows whether you’re a spam sender or not. Improving your score will help ensure higher deliverability rates.

Open rates

This is where the dark arts of email marketing really come into play, but here are a few tips.

You only have 3 areas to impact and grow your open rates:

1. The sender’s email address
2. The subject line
3. The preview text

As these are the only 3 things seen before someone opens the email, these are the dials you need to tweak up and down to improve results.

Use a sender email that the recipient will recognise. Instead of using ‘marketing@companyname’ use someone they would have talked to, or a known figure - ‘john@companyname’ seems a lot less spammy.

The subject line should entice people to open the email to learn more, it should also include a personalisation token to resonate with the recipient and look like a unique email to them.

The preview text should be an expansion on the subject line and should go into more depth as to why they should open your email.

Click rate

Once you’ve succeeded in the above, you can play around with getting the recipient to take action on the email they’ve received and opened. This should be the ultimate aim of every email.

Having too many buttons to click can actually put people off and be quite overwhelming. So make sure there’s one main action for people to take, and try to make this a link back to your website content (now we’re circling back to increasing your website traffic).

Click-through rates are often very low, only around 2.6% of people who open an email click on it. We’ve managed to achieve click-through rates of 36% with creative content and digital marketing that engages with recipients to take action.

There you have it, a few time-saving hacks for anyone looking to improve their digital marketing performance without having to spend hours doing so.

Of course, the other angle is to work out the economics of successful marketing. If you were able to achieve more website visits, more conversions, and gain more qualified leads how significantly would that help your business grow?

If a digital marketing agency was going to cost your business $20,000 to $30,000 over 6 months, how many MORE sales would they have to bring in to make it worth your while?

Once you have that number, send us an inquiry and we’ll show you how we can help you sell that many more units through elevated digital marketing.