Stop Being a One-Hit Wonder and Start Scaling Your Marketing Strategy

Are you working overtime to generate leads for your business? Do you find yourself on a hamster wheel, going round and round but never quite catching up to your marketing goals?
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Are you working overtime to generate leads for your business? Do you find yourself on a hamster wheel, going round and round but never quite catching up to your marketing goals?

Maybe it's because your marketing campaigns are one-hit wonders rather than the scalable marketing solutions they need to be.

What do I mean? A scalable marketing solution accomplishes two key objectives:

  1. It positions the company for long-term success as opposed to short-term success
  2. It can be accomplished through technology or automation, or it can be delegated to another team member, freeing your time as the marketing lead

In other words, you need to implement a marketing strategy that doesn't take up a ton of your time, but does continue to bring in a stream of leads, and also starts working for you now, rather than a year from now.

But how do you do it? Let's look at three simple case studies in three of the most obvious places of your marketing strategy: search engine optimization, public relations, and email marketing.

Example #1: A Scalable SEO Strategy

Everyone knows that writing blog posts and guest blog posts is an excellent way to build SEO and thought leadership. But let's be realistic: how long is it going to take you to write the minimum needed -- often around 100 blog posts -- to start gaining major traction for your site? You need someone to write content, publish it, and drive traffic to it via social media and advertising so that you get back links, which will get you search engine juice in time.

Yes, it all sounds nice in theory, until you realize that building links this way is a slow and methodical process that may not pay off for years down the road. Even if you outsource the content, you still need someone to manage your freelancers, come up with topics and keywords, outline posts, schedule posts, and in general, make sure that the blog runs smoothly.

Instead, aim for the 20 percent of 80/20 and look for the big wins that will get you indexed now. Can you optimize the content you already have? At my company VoiceBunny, we realized that we had thousands of posted projects that were not getting indexed by search engines. We quickly created a site map and optimized the URLs for the projects posted, which saw an increase in our search engine traffic by over 58 percent in 3 months.

Also, explore ways you could get a burst of content indexed right away in search engines; this will drive traffic to your site through long-tail keyword searches in the short-term, while you create more evergreen content over the long-term. User-generated content is killer for this. At Voice123, we created and optimized a Voice123 Forum and encouraged voice actors who were looking to establish thought leadership and expertise to participate. This content great increased our traffic from search engines, more so than any single blog post could have.

Example #2: A Scalable PR Strategy

Gaining media press for your company can drive a huge influx of traffic to your site, but rarely seems to bring in consistent visitors because the news industry covers topics in bursts.

Instead, opt for a continuous traffic-driving source. We decided to target influential people to participate in the alpha version of our product, BunnyCast. The product allows us to create an automatic voice recording from a real person and posts it in the actual blog post as a downloadable podcast version.

Since this happens automatically whenever a blogger posts to their blog, and since we include a quick voice over spot about what VoiceBunny does at the beginning, we're able to easily drive tons of press to all of our products whenever one of our influencers writes a blog post. We approached several investors and entrepreneurs and ended up partnering with influencers like Fred Wilson from AVC.com, who is one of the more prolific bloggers in the industry. Because we use influencers, we're able to get consistent coverage rather than a blip of hits that fades away quickly.

Example #3: A Scalable Email Marketing Strategy

You have probably had it hammered into your head that email marketing is a crucial piece of the promotion puzzle. But even when you implement an email marketing strategy, you might be making it much more difficult than it needs to be and expending unnecessary energy trying to maintain a consistent content schedule, making yourself crazy in the process.

The problem is, you're relying too much on seasonal campaigns and neglecting auto-responder sequences, which are the key to building your email list quickly and on autopilot. It's tempting to send out quick hits with coupons and discounts on major holidays, like Valentine's Day and Christmas, but too many promotions can rapidly devalue your product and train your most loyal customer to wait until there is a sale.

Instead, focus on building a highly converting auto-responder sequence with emails rooted in thought leadership. Make building trust with your potential customers the main intention for this sequence. For example, at VoiceBunny, we provide our email subscribers with a comprehensive guide to directing voice over talent, which is extremely helpful if they are new to working on projects that require voice over artists.

So now that you've seen how to create scalable solutions in every aspect of your marketing strategy, are you going to continue running your one-hit wonder campaigns that draw a crowd for a just a few fleeting moments before they're on to the next shiny object? Or will you implement this advice and come up with a scalable, consistent approach that brings in a steady trickle of leads every single day?

The choice is yours, but remember -- one-hit wonders may make a splash momentarily, but they usually don't stick in people's minds for long!

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Jun Loayza is the Chief Marketing Officer of VoiceBunny and Voice123. In his entrepreneurial experience, Jun has sold 2 Internet companies, raised over $1 Million in Angel funding, and lead social media technology campaigns for Sephora, Whole Foods Market, Levi's, LG, and Activision.

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