So in this article, I’m going to share seven effective marketing strategies going into 2024. These are things that are going to help you acquire more customers for less. So let’s go ahead and get into this article.
Introduction to Marketing Strategies for 2024
We’ve run ads on pretty much every platform—whether it’s Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Instagram, or organic marketing. We’ve done it all. So I want to share with you some of the best tactics and best practices that we’ve found can really significantly help to lower your cost and acquire customers for less.
Let’s start off with the first one here, which is one that I still don’t see enough people doing: running ads on short-form platforms, specifically on TikTok. While things like Google Ads and Facebook Ads have been around for a really long time, a lot of people have become accustomed to using those platforms, and in turn, the ad rates have increased on there. With any ad platform, you’re bidding against other buyers who are trying to buy ads, so the prices have risen quite a bit on those platforms.
Advertising on Short-Form Platforms like TikTok
On TikTok, though, the rates are still relatively low, especially for the amount of exposure that you are getting. Right now, we actually have a special offer from TikTok. We work with them, and if you sign up for a TikTok Business account and spend $100, you’ll also get $100 in free ad credits from the platform. That goes all the way up to $1,500. So if you spend $1,500 on TikTok ads using the link below in the description, you’ll get $1,500 in free ad credits, plus you’ll get onboarding support from TikTok if you want to start running ads on that platform. It’s kind of a no-brainer to at least get started with that. I wanted to just include that in this video because it’s something that we just got access to provide to the viewers on this channel. You can only access it using the link below in the description. I do recommend checking it out. Once you get that up and running, you’re going to realize that one of the best ways to run ads going into 2024 is to use something called UGC or User-Generated Content, where you don’t even have to be the one who’s making the ad for your product. You can just hire someone, hire a small creator, give them a couple of hundred bucks, and have them make the ad for you.
Building Relationships with Journalists for Free Advertising
We have a lot of clients who actually do this where they will basically have a bunch of TikTokers or influencers make user-generated content. They’ll make these ads for the brand, and then you’ll just run all these different ads, see which ones perform best, and then really pour a lot of ad spend behind those. That’s what some of these great free ad credits are that you can use with TikTok to figure out which ads are going to work, which ones are going to be effective, and you get that basically at like buy one, get one free, up to $1,500 for ad spend on the platform. So, I do recommend that. You can also try using short-form ads on other platforms as well. We’ve seen them work well on Snapchat too, though that’s not really my personal specialty, so I can’t speak on that too much. But I have heard good things about running Snapchat ads as well.
Implementing Email Newsletters for Customer Engagement
Let’s talk about other effective marketing strategies. Maybe you don’t want to run paid ads; maybe it’s just kind of a big barrier for you. That’s totally okay. There are some other really cool effective strategies for growing your business, whether it’s an ice cream shop in your local town or an e-commerce business or coaching business. These are still going to be some very effective marketing tactics for you.
The second one here is to do something that I really don’t see anyone else doing, which is to build relationships with journalists. This is some of the best free advertising you’re ever going to get. I’ve done this over the years; I’ve been in articles on CNBC and Forbes and a lot of big publications. I never paid for any of them. The reason why I was able to get into these and they helped with my business is that I built relationships with reporters, with journalists. It’s really not that difficult to do, and it’s great free advertising.
Embracing Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Here’s the strategy for building relationships with those people: If you are a local business—maybe you’re a landscaping company or an ice cream shop or something—just reach out to your local news and tell them what you’re doing. I almost guarantee they’re going to do a story on you because they are looking for stories; they want people to reach out to them. So reach out to your local news company. Even if you are a nationwide brand, just reach out to your local news company anyway. You’d be surprised; most of them would be happy to bring cameras to your office, to your house, whatever you’re doing—your home business. It doesn’t matter if it’s a dog-walking business; they probably would still love to do a piece on you because they’re always looking for stuff.
Another thing you can do is go to a site called HARO, which stands for Help a Reporter Out. I’ll leave a link to that down below in the description. Basically, when journalists are writing articles and they’re looking for experts to quote in those articles, so I’ve used this and I’ve built great relationships with reporters and journalists just by helping them out and providing them value. Every once in a while, I’ll just reach out to reporters and provide them with value. For example, “Hey, this thing just happened; the news hasn’t broken yet. I learned this through some of my contacts here’s some free info.” They love that, and then it’s kind of like you scratch their back, they scratch your back, and they write articles about you. It’s just something that’s worked really well that I would not underplay here. Just try it out; see what happens. I think you’d be surprised.
Embracing Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Okay, this next one is going to sound pretty basic, but I can nearly guarantee you that at least half the people watching this video do not have this set up. It’s realizing how much opportunity there still is in something like search engine optimization (SEO) on Google and even on things like YouTube for your products in 2024. What you need to do is you need to have a website and you need to have at least 10 to 20 thoughtful blog articles written about your industry and your specific product so that they can start ranking in Google.
I’ve seen so many people, and people have been saying this for the past 10 years, that blogs are dead, blogs are dying. Now we have AI who’s going to read blogs. That is absolutely not true. We still have blogs that are pulling in large amounts of money, that are ranking on Google, that are getting, you know, 500, 600 page views per day. The best part about it is that it’s totally free. If you can rank on Google search for specific search terms, you’re not paying for that. You just write blog articles and they rank, and you basically just get customers coming in all the time for absolutely free.
It’s a really incredible thing to do. You can create a website on something like Squarespace very easily. We have tutorials on that, showing you how to do that. You can set it up in literally just a couple of hours. I recommend doing that and just cranking out 10, 20, 30 blog articles, and then basically just let them sit. Let them start ranking. It’s going to take time; your blog’s not going to rank in Google for the first couple of weeks. It usually honestly takes months, sometimes even up to a year. But it definitely is something worthwhile. Basically, just plant the seeds now, write the articles now, and then wait, and then you can harvest that later on down the road. I know it’s something that people don’t have a lot of patience for because it does take time, but it is worth it. You know, even if you’re getting 500 blog visits per day, okay, you know that doesn’t seem like a whole lot, but how many is that per year? That’s about 180,000 website page views per year, right? Just roughly estimated. That’s a lot. 180,000 people. Do that over 5 years; you know that’s almost a million people coming through your website for free that you’re paying absolutely nothing for. I think that’s a really great one.
Launching Referral Programs and Contests
Number six here is to launch a referral program. I think we all know how effective they can be for marketing. So, what I would suggest doing is launching a referral program and even doing simple things like giving out free products to influencers.
For example, Black Rock gave me this hat the other day; I wear it all the time. It’s free advertising for them. I think I’ve worn it in a couple of videos as well. This is because of my personal channel; I have like a finance YouTube channel. Just a simple thing like that—free hat. Influencers will wear it. If you give them free socks and you don’t even pay them, they’ll probably wear them and they’ll probably promote you for free. It’s pretty cheap marketing if you’re giving them some pretty inexpensive products. Try to launch a referral program. You can do this on a couple of different platforms; you can do this on something like PartnerStack or you can do it on something like Impact.com or CJ.com. These are all basically known as affiliate programs for brands. You can even find some other platforms that are probably even less expensive than those. Also, something like contest marketing can be a really great strategy. Host some type of contest where someone has to tag you and share with other people, and then they can enter into a contest to win one of your products. A lot of people love this stuff, and it is free marketing as well or pretty inexpensive marketing. I think about the one company this worked so well for, it was called Sunny Clothing Company. This was back, probably getting close to 10 years ago, around 2015. It was basically you get a free swimsuit if you post their Instagram post on your feed. I remember pretty much every girl in my high school posted this photo. I’ll put it right here because I cannot forget it. This Sunny Company, I mean they probably had hundreds of thousands, probably millions of orders, where everyone was getting free swimsuits because they posted this on their Instagram. It was pretty incredible to see how viral that marketing strategy went. I think it went even more viral than the founders anticipated, and they might have been overwhelmed for millions of orders just going from no orders to millions of orders in like a week. But it was a very effective strategy because they did some basic contest marketing and some giveaways that really went a long way.
Building Educational Content Foundations
The seventh one and the final one that I want to share with you here today on an effective marketing strategy is to build a foundation of educational content. When you build a foundation of educational content around your product or around your service, this can be super effective. I think about a channel right here that does it really well, something like Learn with Shopify. We all know Shopify; this is a pretty big platform for e-commerce. But they have all these tutorials all about using their platform and also just like e-commerce in general so that they kind of stay top of mind for people. Maybe someone is in between using Shopify or maybe they want to use Big Commerce; they’re not really sure. Next thing I know, they watch a video from Shopify, and now they’re pretty sold on using their platform. I think Shopify does this really well. There are other platforms that do it well as well, companies that will basically just create a TikTok account, create a YouTube channel, create a Facebook page, and then create content around that. You don’t have to do it yourself; you can hire someone, an assistant, to do this for you if you would like to. But I do think that organic marketing by building your own content on these platforms can be super useful and, for the most part, is going to be free because you’re getting organic traffic.
Conclusion: Optimizing Marketing Strategies for Success
Those are the marketing strategies that I think are some of the most effective ones in 2023. Don’t forget to get your TikTok ad credits—up to $1,500 in free ad credits. This is going to help you get started. You can hire some other small influencers to create user-generated content, just give them your product for free, say, “Hey, make an ad for this, make a video about this,” and then send it back to me. It’ll give you like 100 bucks, and then you run that ad. Make sure you get their permission to run that ad, and you can use these free TikTok ad credits. Spend $1,500, get $1,500 plus onboarding support. It’s a pretty great deal, so I would recommend doing that, at least using those credits. If it doesn’t work out and you feel like you didn’t recoup your cost, well then you can kind of just move on to something else and try some different ad platforms. We have videos on Google Ads, Facebook Ads, LinkedIn Ads; we have all those videos helping you out to run those ads.
Thanks for reading the article; I hope you found some value in it. I’ll see everybody sometime in a future article.
