From businesses ready to go to market with a new product or service, to companies with a longstanding history but little digital presence, business owners, investors, CEOs, and marketing managers are always looking for quick wins when it comes to getting started with their digital marketing initiatives.
Quick-result potential initiatives provide marketers the ability to test and prove a concept, product, or service for profitability before making larger, long-term investments in the digital space.
Everyone wants a quick turnaround on their marketing investment, but not everyone knows where to start. When looking at short-term growth, we’ll focus on a handful of marketing tactics that can be utilized to quickly build new website visitors, customers, clients, or subscribers for you today.
With that said, let’s look at seven places to start when looking to jump start your digital marketing right now. For each tactic, we’ll also highlight a marketer’s ability to measure, target, and scale along with the investment needed from a time and financial standpoint in order to set up and manage these initiatives.
1. Search network PPC marketing
Pay-per-click marketing on Search Networks can be one of the fastest and most scalable ways to start driving traffic to your website immediately. Utilizing an advertising platform like Google AdWords or Bing Ads, advertisers can quickly create keyword-targeted campaigns to serve their ads on search results pages triggered by their core customers.
Set your advertising budget, build your Search Network campaigns, and begin driving traffic to your website almost immediately.
PPC marketing can be expensive depending on your industry vertical and competition, but its turn around time on effectiveness has the potential to be extremely fast. By closely tracking your PPC performance with platform conversion tracking or an analytics solution, it’s easy to determine the effectiveness of your campaigns. Based on that performance, scale up to grow farther, or decrease your spending to save budget.
Ability to Measure: High
Ability to Target: High
Ability to Scale: High
Time Investment Needed: Medium
Financial Investment Needed: High
2. Paid social
Similar to PPC Marketing, Paid Social campaigns provide advertisers the ability to almost instantly promote their services or product offerings across many of today’s popular social media platforms. Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are today’s most popular social advertising options and platforms like Snapchat and Instagram continue to make their advertising options more accessible for marketers.
Unlike traditional keyword-based PPC marketing, paid social platforms mostly operate on demographic and contextual-based targeting methods. Capabilities across these platforms provide advertisers a unique ability to create highly targeted messages and creative for granular customer groups based on their demographics, pain points, and needs. From the advertiser’s perspective, this provides an unparalleled testing ground which is also readily trackable and scalable based on performance.
Ability to Measure: High
Ability to Target: High
Ability to Scale: High
Time Investment Needed: Medium
Financial Investment Needed: High
3. Display advertising
Display advertising, most traditionally done through image or animation-based ads, is typically the cheapest paid tactic to drive new visitors to your website. Google AdWords offers a robust display network on which to serve ads, for advertisers who are just getting started.
Advertisers can target their ads through a number of different methods. Manual selecting where your ads show website-by-website can result in highly targeted efforts, but lower levels of impressions and clicks. Utilizing targeting via display keywords, topics, placements, or demographics can result in a higher number of impressions and clicks to an unqualified audience.
From a value perspective, display networks can provide some of the lowest average cost per click figures across all advertising platforms and channels. However, direct response from display advertising is typically poor. That said, using your display ads to drive brand awareness or your remarketing pools is your best bet when diving into display advertising.
Ability to Measure: High
Ability to Target: Medium / Low
Ability to Scale: Medium
Time Investment Needed: Medium
Financial Investment Needed: High
4. Remarketing
Remarketing provides advertisers the ability to ‘re-market’ an advertisement to users who have already visited their website. Typically, website users who have already visited a website and familiarized themselves with a service or product are more likely to convert when coming back to that site for the second or third time. Remarketing provides advertisers the ability to get their offering back in front of users who didn’t convert on a first visit.
Utilizing Remarketing lists in Google Analytics and targeting those lists in Google AdWords, advertisers can become extremely detailed in putting together groupings of past website visitors to remarket to. Typically, remarketing is one of the best pay-per-click marketing options from a conversion rate and cost-per-conversion perspective.
Something to note here–in order to be eligible to remarket to users, a website must already be generating traffic. Remarketing cannot be the sole way for visitors to find your website. Utilizing Search Network, Display Network, or paid social campaigns can be a good way fill your audience pools to make remarketing a possibility for your business.
Ability to Measure: High
Ability to Target: High
Ability to Scale: Medium / Low
Time Investment Needed: Medium
Financial Investment Needed: High
5. Email marketing
When done right, email marketing has the potential to be one of the most effective marketing channels your business can leverage from a conversion rate perspective, and–depending on the size of your email list–can also be one of your largest revenue-generating channels.
A couple of caveats here:
If you don’t have an existing email list, email marketing is not a short-term path to growth. Building a true email list of engaged prospects and customers takes time.
Don’t buy email lists; this can (read: most likely will) lead to low-quality response rates in your email outreach and little to show from a conversion standpoint.
That said, if you do have an engaged email list, developing a strategy with product/service updates or promotions can trigger high response at a low cost to the marketer.
Using a third-party email solution and UTM tagging methods provides marketers the ability to closely track email performance and the financial investment needed here is typically low, making email marketing a huge opportunity for quick growth.
Ability to Measure: High
Ability to Target: High
Ability to Scale: Low
Time Investment Needed: Low
Financial Investment Needed: Low
6. Link building / PR
When grouping link building and PR into a singular bucket within the digital marketing landscape, we’re focusing on the idea of getting other websites to talk about and feature your product/service/website on their site.
The impact of link building and PR can be as big or as little as the websites featuring your offering or business. Hitting it out of the park with a feature on a highly visited and targeted website can bring thousands of visitors and sales to your website in a single day. On the other hand, working through to identify the right outlets for your business and then building the necessary relationships with the right people at those outlets can be a major time investment. And it is possible that your time investment ends in little-to-no results. Because of that, link building is the biggest wildcard on this list when looking at short-term growth opportunities.
Ability to Measure: High
Ability to Target: Medium
Ability to Scale: Low
Time Investment Needed: High
Financial Investment Needed: Low
7. Conversion rate optimization
Conversion rate optimization has nothing to do with bringing more traffic to your website. However, it has everything to do with making the most from a conversion standpoint with the traffic that does come to your site.
Increasing the conversion rate on your website can be one of the most overlooked methods for growth. Most people immediately think of getting more traffic to get more sales. But what if you focused on creating the best and most inviting path to conversion for the visitors already coming to your website?
Depending on how much traffic your website currently gets on a regular basis, improving your overall conversion rate by just half a percent can make a major impact on your bottom line.
Ability to Measure: High
Ability to Target: Medium
Ability to Scale: Low
Time Investment Needed: Medium
Financial Investment Needed: Low
When it comes to short-term growth, finding the right tactic isn’t straightforward. Commonly, the key to short-term success is finding the right mix of tactics that come together to meet your bottom line objectives.
Whenever you’re working through a short-term growth period, be sure to outline specific goals and a timeline for reaching those goals. When combining your goals and timeline along with cash and time investments, companies who are just hitting the market for the first time along with longstanding, established businesses can find success through utilizing a number of short-term digital marketing tactics.
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