April 22, 2019
Earlier on the ON24 blog, we introduced the theme of scrappy marketing and why it can help you achieve more. This next post provides ideas on how you can put that into practice.
As marketers, we’re pushed for time to achieve our goals – and we rarely have the budget or resource we would love to have. But with a scrappy mindset, we don’t let that limit our ambitions. Instead, we embrace the challenge and look for creative ways to drive gain results quickly.
So how can you make moves to accelerate your marketing, find out what works and what doesn’t, and ultimately smash your targets?
Below are five tactics to consider when you’re looking to drive results more quickly.
Run Micro-campaigns: A Low-Risk Way of Testing Ideas
If you’re only just starting to dip your toe into scrappy waters, and are feeling a little apprehensive, running micro-campaigns is a great place to start.
These are small, low-cost and highly-targeted efforts to test an idea or a target market. Because of the little investment micro-campaigns need to get off the ground – they can take just days or hours to pull together – you can afford to take some risks with them, experiment with different angles, and discover what kinds of ideas and themes resonate with your audience.
Some types of micro-campaign could include:
- Running display ads with experimental creative, perhaps limited to a particular type of day. For example, if you’re selling technology for B2B lead generation, you could run a campaign with the slogan “Hungry for leads?” around lunchtime.
- Promoting a webinar format aimed at just one account. If this works, you could repurpose it as part of your account-based marketing efforts.
- Testing paid search terms for verticals that use cases you haven’t focused on in the past. Providing you get enough volume, you may discover a market that you haven’t previously targeted.
Micro-campaigns can also encourage your team to be more creative. By giving them permission to think beyond existing campaigns and messaging, but limiting the time and budget they can spend on such efforts, you empower them to find new ways of improving performance.
Curate and Syndicate Existing Content
There’s really no need to reinvent the wheel. By curating consistently useful, comprehensive and relevant content, sourced from different places online, you can establish yourself as a reliable source of information.
Even major enterprise businesses are built on the back of curating useful data. As an example, research firm eMarketer collects data points from studies by other companies and distills it down to the most important takeaways.
Syndicating content can also help in terms of both building your content on-site and reaching audiences elsewhere. Many excellent posts on the ON24 blog have originally been published elsewhere (and are marked as such). In addition, ON24’s webinars and resources are promoted on third-party sites.
To save time reaching out to individual publishers and media sites, syndication networks such as NetLine can help you get your content hosted elsewhere, driving leads automatically.
Apply the Create Once, Publish Everywhere (COPE) Principle
If you’ve invested a great deal of time (and sweat) into creating a resource from scratch, it only seems right that the resource works hard too. Think about different types of content you could launch off the back of the resource that you can post on different platforms and reach different audiences with.
In a blog post on Search Engine Land, Ted Ives shows how a single whitepaper can be repurposed into 19 different content assets – including blog posts, a webinar, a podcast, or even an email newsletter.
Transcription can also be particularly powerful, especially given the range of low-cost tools and solutions now on the market. If you assume a speaking rate of just one word a second, an hour-long webinar could produce 3,600 words of content that can all be repurposed elsewhere.
Automate routine processes
In scrappy marketing, speed is key, so it makes sense to automate as many of the simple, routine processes marketing as possible.
Tools like Zapier let you schedule the publication of content on blogging platforms or social by getting apps to talk to each other, while marketing automation platforms like Marketo can keep interested customers engaged by sending them more of your relevant content at a pace that suits them.
Some types of automation you could consider include:
- Automated social posts when you publish a new blog post on your site.
- Triggered emails based on a particular on-site action, such as visiting a particular page on your site.
- Automatically adding content to a newsletter by using dynamic email templates.
- Running automated product demos, where your sales team can answer questions from any attendees.
While you should take care to make sure any automation doesn’t appear spammy or low-quality, this can also act as a creative exercise for your team in terms of figuring out ways to drive results automatically.
Establish Checklists, Templates and Reusable Formats
In other words: don’t think more than you need to. Trying to remember the same steps of a process each time you do it, or creating similar pieces of content over and over… this takes a lot of cognitive energy that could be saved by falling back on established content formats, templates and checklists.
Marketing publisher Econsultancy built much of its audience using a list of 34 different blog post formats. As a result, even on a slow day, the editorial team can quickly go to this list as a source of inspiration, allowing them to turn content around quickly and with less effort.
Checklists can also help you get things done more quickly, reduce the chance of failure and aid team coherence, just what your organization needs to succeed in its scrappy endeavors. ON24 even uses its own Webinar Checklist to plan its sessions and make sure they are a success.