5 Must-Have Marketing Assets for Growing Businesses

Do you know which marketing assets are worth the investment and will perform over time instead of being one-and-done?

You are working with a limited range of resources — time, budget, and skill — and you have big goals to hit. It’s just not prudent for you to continually invest in short-lived marketing strategies that won’t continue to produce results for you in the long run.

But how do you find the long-term assets that are worth your effort? Simple, you keep reading.

We’ve done the research for you and uncovered some of the top assets that you need to add to your to-do list.

5 Marketing Assets That You Need Now

Marketing assets are the tools you use in your marketing strategies to promote brand awareness and generate new leads. Assets will continue to perform over time and be worth the investment in time, budget, and skill that it takes to produce them.

1. Digital Hubs

Digital hubs are places on the web where people can connect with your brand and learn about who you are and what you do. Your website and social media pages are examples of digital hubs. You need to optimize these channels to promote your brand and engage your audience — with the goal of generating new leads in mind.

Two Types of Digital Hubs You Need to Create

There are two main types of digital hubs you should focus on creating to boost your lead building tactics.

Content Hubs: A content hub is a landing page on your website where you showcase relevant content to your users. Content can take the form of blog posts, videos, infographics, ebooks, or even downloadable guides — anything that engages your audience and provides value.

Social Hubs: Social hubs consist of the social networking sites your business uses to interact with your audience and promote your business. These can include Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, or one of the other popular social media sites.

How to Build and Manage Your Digital Hubs

HubSpot Marketing helps you manage your content and social hubs in one place. Build a website using their drag and drop web builder, and use their social media tools to track audience engagement, brand mentions, and schedule future posts. Find out more about HubSpot Marketing and how it can help you manage your digital hubs on their website.

2. Influencer Relationships

An influencer is someone in your niche that already has a following of customers who are loyal to their brand and purchase their products. Partnering with influencers gives you the chance to promote you and your brand to their fan base. If you want to build beneficial relationships with well-known influencers in your niche, you will have to show them how a partnership with you will benefit them. 

How to Entice Influencers to Collaborate with You

• Contact Relevant Influencers Only: Study an influencer and do plenty of research before you decide to contact them. It doesn’t benefit you or them to team up if your products don’t suit their audience.
• Don’t Just Ask — Give: Influencers are busy people, and they don’t have time to take on projects that won’t benefit them in some way. Keep your emails personal, professional, and tell them what they will get out of working with you.
• Offer Fair Compensation: As mentioned above, Influencers need a good reason to work with you. Consider offering monetary compensation for their time if you are able.  
• Give Them Creative Freedom: Don’t tie your influencer down with exact instructions and project ideas that don’t offer wiggle room! They know their audience better than you do. Show them you respect and value their work by giving them creative freedom to come up with collaboration ideas to release to their fan base.

3. Case Studies & Testimonials

Case studies are customer success stories that help showcase how your company provides value and benefits to your customers. Combining case studies with testimonials is an excellent way to provide social proof and show potential customers you are legit and can be trusted.

What a Case Study Should Include

• Your client’s history and the pain points they were experiencing before using your product/service.
• What your client’s goals were.
• The step-by-step process they went through and the results.
• An explanation of exactly how your product/service made an impact. Make sure to include proof to back it up. Suitable proof can be in the form of statistics or real number results or a testimonial from your happy customer.

Publish and Promote Your Case Study

Publish your case study as a blog post or landing page, then promote it on your home page, relevant posts and landing pages, email newsletters, on your social media pages, and on any print advertising like brochures or flyers.

4. Search-Optimized Content

Content that has been fine-tuned for maximum performance on search engines is considered to be search-optimized content. This is an absolute must if you want users to be able to find your content when performing searches on topics in your niche.

How to Optimize Your Content

Optimizing your content involves several steps, and you will need to make sure it performs well for standard searches and voice searches. Snagging a featured snippet and the 1st result on Google is the best spot your content can possibly be in. So, how do you do it?

Basic Search Engine Optimization

• Learn what your customers are searching for and then use that information to tailor your content accordingly. Use keyword phrases that would be something your customers would type into Google when performing a search.
• Use a plugin like Yoast SEO or SEOPress for WordPress websites. These plugins allow you to customize the way your content appears in search results by letting you change the meta titles and descriptions for every page and post.
• Optimize your website to look great and function properly on every browser and device.

How to Snag a Featured Snippet

Featured snippets are the content boxes that show up above the ads on page 1 of Google. If you want to snag one of these spots, you will need to:

• Create content centered around a question — who, what, when, where, how, and why.
• Include your question in your H1 and H2 headings.
• The very first thing that appears on your page or post should be the question in the form of an H1 or H2 with the answer right after. Keep your answer to a max of 50-55 words.
• If it makes sense for your content, add an ordered list of steps — Step 1, Step 2, Step 3, and so on.

Optimizing for Voice Search

Google estimates that by 2020, half of the searches performed will be voice searches, and 55% of households will own a smart speaker by 2022. Voice searches are performed using long-tail, conversational keywords. Create content that centers around these longer keyword phrases and snag as many featured snippet spots as possible to perform better in voice search results.

Test Content Performance and Re-Optimize for Better Rankings

Monitor the performance of your landing pages and blog posts. If you notice that a post is getting a lot of traffic, but has a low conversion rate, that could mean the content isn’t relevant to the keywords people are searching when coming across your post. Re-Optimize your content to better align with what users are expecting to find based on the search terms they use.

5. SMS Marketing Templates

Text messages are opened and read almost 138% more than email, and 31% of consumers respond to SMS surveys in under 6 minutes.

If your company hasn’t invested in SMS marketing yet — you don’t know what you’re missing out on!

How to Build SMS Marketing Templates

Start by signing up for your free trial at EZ Texting to gain access to all the features our software has to offer. 

SMS marketing templates help you create campaigns and automated texts to send to subscribers quickly. Choose a template that matches your goal and tweak it to fit your needs. This will save you valuable time crafting the perfect text and can help you find new ideas for better campaigns to try. 

Once you have your templates created, upload your contacts, and send out your first 100 texts for free.

Photo: Adobe Stock/REDPIXEL