A great deal was learned, after recently taking inventory of our marketing agency’s own online marketing plan. We were a bit embarrassed to find that we were in fact making many of the mistakes that we so adamantly work to keep our clients from making. I’d like to share a bit of my company’s experience with you and some of the ways that we greatly improved our own online marketing campaign for FREE.

The first major step we took was to update our website’s look, feel, function and usability. Here are the 5 FREE Marketing Necessities that have already started driving our inbound leads:

  1. FREE SOCIAL MEDIA PAGES Setup or Enhance your social media pages and set a schedule to update them with industry or details specific to your company. Maintain accounts on at least 3 of the following 5 Social Media Sites: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, YouTube, Yelp, Angie’s List or Vimeo.
  2. BLOG about your company’s own experience 4 times a month. You can do some in depth pieces but just 1 to 3 paragraphs a week on your experiences and opinions on news in your industry.
  3. FREE ENEWSLETTER SERVICES Create and maintain a monthly e-newsletter, utilizing free services like MailChimp.com or ConstantContact.com. Use a compilation of your daily posts and weekly blogs to develop content that is consistent with the conversation you’ve created.
  4. SEARCH ENGINE FRIENDLY CONTENT DEVELOPMENT Write your website’s content to be search engine optimized. Create content that emphasizes the exact service or product that your viewer’s search phrase is intended to drive traffic to.
  5. FREE GOOGLE ANALYTICS Setup and monitor your FREE Google Analytics account. Monitor this FREE SERVICE and use the statistics to improve your customer’s online experience and funnel to a point of sale.

There are still a number of improvements we are implementing on our own site, but these 5 FREE marketing platforms have already increased our organization’s visibility and inbound sales traffic.

The Internet is an ever-changing business landscape and as with any wild environment you must adapt to your surrounding. Make sure to use all of your resources wisely and always take advantage of any low or no cost marketing solutions. In addition, treat these marketing campaigns like you would a client meeting. Put them on a calendar, plan for them, be on time with execution and follow up. Using these 5 FREE marketing platforms will increase your company’s online marketing success.

Please feel free to comment below and leave suggestions on additional platforms that you think will help create successful online marketing campaigns.