Five Marketing Tips for Rookies
In almost every industry we work in, our clients’ marketing departments run relatively lean. In truth, that’s a nice way of saying that the marketing staff consists of one or a few individuals wearing an assortment of hats.
Often times, these staff members can find themselves taking on new responsibilities with little experience or training. If you’re now tasked with handling your organization’s social media and email marketing initiatives and haven’t had the experience, don’t sweat! We put together a few tips to help you fake it until you make it.
In the year 2019, 99 percent of the population recognizes that if a sequence of words, with no spacing, ends with .com, they know it’s a link to a website. The remaining one percent that doesn’t make that connection is probably not going to visit your website anyway. Save yourself some space in your social posts and in your graphics by not including the www prefix. You’ll save real estate and look more professional.
On any other social platform, posting a link automatically creates a hyperlink. In Instagram, that’s not the case. If you post a URL in a comment of a post, it just shows up as normal text. No one is going to copy the link, open a browser, and then paste into the browser to get to your landing page. If you want to direct traffic to a web page, tell viewers to “click the link to your bio.” You’re allowed to have an active hyperlink in your page description. Two clicks versus seven. This is how the pros do it. And you can, too.
You go through all the trouble of creating a newsletter for your company; there’s awesome photos, blurbs that link to helpful blog posts, and maybe even a special giveaway if your subscribers forward the email to their friends to help you grow your subscriber count. But, in your haste to get the eNewsletter out, you forget to fill out the bottom part of your email, the footer, with an email address, physical address, and other boilerplate information. It looks bad. Please, for everyone’s sake, double-check your footer before you hit send.
With open rates falling due to the sheer deluge of email marketing consumers experience these days, put yourself in a position to succeed. Think about it like this: On Friday at 5 p.m., are you itching to open an email and start reading a post or view a gallery? If the newsletter contains info about a restaurant’s Happy Hour, sure! But if it’s industry- or work-related, the email isn’t getting opened. Be conscious of when you read industry or professional newsletters – that’s the best time to send your own.
The purpose of hashtags on platforms like Twitter is to grow your reach to a wider audience. Users can click a specific hashtag and see all (well, as many as the algorithm wants them to see) posts tagged with the same hashtag. With that being said, try to keep your hashtags focused on the topics by which you’re trying to target consumers. For example, tag #socialmedia at the end of your post if the content you’re sharing is relevant to that topic. Don’t use the hashtag in the middle of your post, either. And don’t just throw a random #tag in #your #post just because. It looks wonky and isn’t what readers expect.
In fact, once your audience grows sufficiently, you may not even want to use hashtags at all. Some of my favorite media outlets and brands (Buffer, The Verge, Recode, etc.) don’t use hashtags at all anymore. They’ve become so reputable in their space that consumers seek them out, rather than just stumble across them through hashtag searches. If you’re just getting started, you’re a long way from being at that level. Use hashtags to grow your content’s reach, but be sure to do it like a pro.
Digital marketing proficiency exists on a spectrum. Some brands do it better than others, and that’s cool. If you’re new to marketing, this whole Internet thing might seem a little daunting; there’s so much to learn, so much to create, and so much to do across so many platforms. But don’t sweat it. A few little tips and tricks and you’ll be well on your way to being a total pro. To help, be sure to sign up for our newsletter, and I highly recommend checking out Buffer, HootSuite, Mailchimp, and Squarespace’s blogs for some really great insights and case studies to help you out as well.
Congratulations – you’re now no longer a rookie. Happy marketing!
Business Development Manager