Hiring experienced professionals or an agency can set you back thousands a month and simply doing nothing just widens the gulf between you and your competitors online.
And if you’re running a relatively new business or you’re tight on resource, time can be as hard to find as expansive marketing budgets. But being tight on time and without the budget to bring in a professional doesn’t have to mean standing still and doing nothing.
Here are 4 marketing tasks you can complete in just 5 minutes each day.
Find a New Keyword or Group of Keywords
Truly understanding how people are looking for your products or services online really is critical to understanding how to find them with the right message at the right time.
And it’s not just about finding product or service keywords. Sometimes it’s about finding the questions people ask online about your products or identifying the concerns they share online for which your service is the solution.
Here’s how you can do it in 5 minutes per day:
- Take a look at Google’s Keyword Planner (https://adwords.google.co.uk/KeywordPlanner) to identify keywords people are tying into Google related to your products, services or the problems they solve
- Visit http://www.quora.com and look for the questions people ask related to what you sell or the problem you solve
- Visit www.answerthepublic.com and find the questions people ask about your products
Find a new keyword or closely related group of keywords as often as you can. It takes 5 minutes.
Win Those Searchers
If you have a group of search terms, the next step is using it. Ranking in search engines for “washing machines,” is not a 5 minute a day job. But perhaps appearing in search for, “which washing machine is best for a family of 6?” is something you can appear for quickly – less competition, fewer searchers but likely much more straightforward to appear for.
Create a blog post that answers a question or modify an existing piece of content to include those keywords or questions.
Ok, so it might take a little longer than 5 minutes, but not much longer and spread the work out over a few days if need be.
Find Out What Your Competitors Are Doing in Search
If you have a competitor whose work you admire or who is established in your field (with bigger budgets!) do a bit of digging into what they’re doing in search (both paid search and organic search). Find out what content is working for them from a social perspective.
- SearchMetrics (http://suite.searchmetrics.com/en/research) will give you information about the keywords your competitors rank for and the keyword they invest most of their paid marketing budgets into. You get some limited information with a free account but could upgrade to a paid account for more information
- Buzzsumo (http://www.buzzsumo.com) allows you to enter a domain and find out what the most successful content on that domain is, so you can begin to understand what is working for your competitors and what isn’t.
Understanding what you’re competing against from a marketing perspective is important and 5 minutes a day is enough
Find Out What Content Your Audience Engages with and Which Other Brands They Like
We’ve already talked about finding out what your customers and potential customers are searching for. But getting to know your customers really is more than just knowing how they look for your products. Understanding what other brands they engage with, their demographics, what newspapers and publications they read and so on can help you to understand where you can reach them.
You don’t need to invest lots of time or money into finding this information in the social media age. Facebook Audience Insights (https://www.facebook.com/ads/audience_insights) lets you find out lots about your target market.
Search by age, gender or interest to find out key information about your target customers. List a big competitor as an interest and find out more about the make up of their fan base on Facebook.
Measure Everything
It becomes much easier to prioritise those few minutes each day if you can see the impact of you what you. Set goals, monitor using Google Analytics or Facebook Insights and measure the impact of every single minute you invest in your marketing.
