You know the definition of insanity, right? “Doing the same old thing and expecting different results.”

So why do so many companies keep doing the same old thing, and expect anything different? It’s insanity.

If you’d like to break out of the same old routine, and produce some real results you need to try something new.

Here are 12 great marketing ideas you can try in the coming months to achieve better results.

12 Cost-effective Marketing Ideas you can implement to Achieve Better Results

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Everyone says they want better results.

So why aren’t companies more adventurous when it comes to trying new things?

It’s the “I hate brocolli” syndrome of marketing and business.

If you ask the average CEO, “What’s the rationale for the way you’re currently marketing your services?”  Many say: “It’s what we’ve always done.”

The sad truth is that many companies are engaging in the same old tried marketing tactics rooted in strategies that were developed eons ago (a.k.a. 2007).  They’re wasting money on tactics that are not rooted in any real, current strategy – or based on the realities of today’s marketplace.

How to get higher response rates and higher conversions

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Why is everyone talking about “Inbound Marketing?” Who cares about the “Real-time Web?”

Several years ago when Google modified its Pagerank Algorithm, and started factoring in how other influential websites link to yours,  few people really could imagine the explosion of social media engines like Linked-in, Facebook, and Twitter. Your search engine visibility is determined not only by the quality of the content on your website, but by who is linking to you.

Just recently, Google has launched the real-time web. Now more than ever there is an extraordinary opportunity for small businesses to carve out a niche in their social media marketplaces — effectively creating their own channel to communicate with their customers and prospects.

In an article in Huffpost by Manish Mehta, the Vice President, Social Media and Community at Dell Inc. (who can attribute $7 million in sales to Twitter for doing nothing at all!),  Mehta affirms “Social media isn’t a means to further a corporation’s strategy, it’s a means to help determine it.”

Sometimes pictures (or mindmaps) are better than words, so I’ve created a Mindmap that illustrates a general Inbound Marketing/Social Media Strategy.

Inbound Marketing / Social Media Strategy Cashmap for Small Businesses

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The biggest mistake people make when it comes to Google Adwords is to create one ad, send it to the home page of your website, and choose all the keywords that Google Adwords suggests.

That’s a great way to go through your entire budget fast with zero results.

The trick to getting higher higher response on pay-per-click ads is to create a separate landing page for each of your top keywords in three easy (but time-consuming) steps.

3 Easy Steps to Better Pay-Per-Click Results

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Once you’ve established a unique identity, you need to create a web presence that works for you 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year with an offer that engages your prospects and prompts them to contact you.

How do you get your prospects to engage with you? Top search engine rankings are nice, but it really doesn’t matter if you’re not converting traffic into inquiries, and inquries into sales.

Here’s the secret: “It’s not about you.”

Most websites are guilty of the biggest strategic copywriting blunder

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Direct Marketing Old Timers will tell you that the success or failure of any marketing program is attributable to:

• 40% the list,
• 40% the offer, and
• 20% for everything else , i.e., copy, creative, timing, etc.

If you’re not getting the response you think you should be getting, look at the offer first.

The strategic process in old-fashioned Direct Marketing is matching up the right list with the right offer… segmenting the list into micro-segments (or “splits”), and tailoring specialized offers to make the offer more relevant. 

The 3R’s: It’s not Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic, but…

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 A ‘Gravatar’ is a ’Globally Recognized Avatar’.

An avatar is an icon or a little picture you see next to comments in a website, and is used to or distinguish yourself from others. In other words, a Gravatar is an Avatar you can take with you. Created by Tom Werner, and available at www.gravatar.com, gravatars make it possible for a person to have one avatar across the entire web.

Why is this important?

One of the factors in achieving higher search engine rankings for your website is what’s referred to as “off-page optimization,” which is determined to a large part by how many influential websites with a high page rank link back to your website.

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Reward your customers for referrals

Everyone wants referrals. They can be the easiest customers to sell.

To get a consistent flow of referrals, you have to have a system in place.

The first and most fundamental key to getting referrals is making sure that you are completely satisfying your current customers.

You must provide a great service, and it helps if you’re so good that your customers want to brag about you. The kinds of referrals you’ll get from this are “buzz” referrals.

 Next, you need to create a system where your customers refer others to you by “conditioned reflex.”  This does not happen by accident. You have to be constantly top of mind when the referral situation arises, so the person referring the business simply reacts to the referral opportunity without even thinking about it.

 How do you do this?

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Everyone loves Constant Contact.

It’s a simple easy-to-use tool that I have used to help many clients communicate periodically with their customers.

One of the drawbacks of using Constant Contact though is that the subscriber forms they are  just plain ugly.

Fortunately, Constant Contact has made it possible to create  a  normal-looking webform, and put it on your website through the use of their API.

The Constant Contact API

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What is she thinking?

We’d all like to know what others, particularly our prospective customers, are thinking.

And that’s what the discipline of Market Research is intended to do. But how do you conduct research on the web that’s cost-effective, and that produces results?

We’ve all seen them. Those Netflix popups that are generated when you’re leaving a website. They’re annoying and inneffective. The best way to conduct market research on the web is to be honest with people. Let them know up front what they’re getting into, and give them the option to say “Yes”, or “No” upfront.

Best practices require that you ask permission first

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