What are the best online marketing ideas you could share?

I wrote an article breaking down 6 of the most popular online lead-gen tactics, http://righthello.com/best-lead-generation-tactics/?utm_source=quora_new. I'll give you strategic tips for the tactics that we use at http://righthello.com/?utm_source=quora_new, based on our previous experiences: 1. Content marketing Content increases your online presence and creates an opportunity to generate leads, become an influencer and build your brand image. Good content proves your expertise and sells your unique point of view. It can guide potential clients through the buying process. Starting with purely value-adding content that creates interest, and ending with content that strongly incentivizes to buy. Strategic tip for content marketing Content marketing doesn't have to be expensive, it can start with you or your teammates writing articles for your company blog. Even better, you don't need to set-up a company blog at all - using Linkedin Pulse or Medium as your main publishing channels will be enough in many cases.   The main fuel for your content marketing strategy is grit. Put out a post (a piece of content, for your target it could be a video, a podcast, an instagram photo) each week and continue doing it. It will grow from there, and once you have the resources to start building a proper content marketing team, you'll know a lot more than those who don't create and publish content until they can hire someone to do it. For this to be your main marketing tactic though, it will require a lot of patience (or mind-blowing content) to start generating the amount of leads you need to sustain your business. 2. Search Engine Optimization No site has more users than Google, which means there's unlimited potential to tap into. Being the 1st result in searches for your solution gives you the most targeted traffic out of any marketing tactic. Plus you can pretty easily position yourself on long-tail keywords - specific phrases people google when looking for solutions similar to yours. This generates smaller, but very highly converting traffic. Strategic tip for SEO Basic SEO is a must and the guidelines are pretty simple. Delegate someone from your team for basic SEO or try handling it yourself. There are plenty of resources to go through over a weekend and come back knowing what you need to do basic SEO. Basic means - linking to parts of your own website analysing your position in search results creating a sitemap to make Google's crawlbot's life easier placing the right keywords in URLs, articles, all website content names, title tags, page headers Advanced SEO, however, requires serious expertise and staying up to date with search engine updates. It's a tricky, purely data-driven strategy. I'd advise advanced SEO if there's no huge competition over keywords in your market. This typically translates to lower costs and easier implementation. 3. Cold email This tactic generates the best customer insight and offers a way to connect 1-on-1 online. Once set-up, it's easily scalable. But it takes time and know-how to wind up your cold email lead generation machine. Apart from finding new clients, cold emails offer a lot of added benefits - you can get real-time feedback and referrals if you play it right. This is a challenging tactic though - defining and finding your target group, finding email addresses, organising and automating the sending process, dealing with different types of replies and qualifying replies as leads being the main challenges. Strategic tip for Cold Emailing Starting with cold emailing doesn't have to be hard. With scarce resources, this can be limited to: prospecting on Linkedin (looking for companies fitting your Ideal Customer Profile, finding the right decision maker, mining contact data) creating a spreadsheet to stay on top of things - who was outreached, who responded, who didn't, whom you have to follow-up with etc. It's very easy to get lost in this stuff, which leads to poor, inmeasurable performance sending emails straight from your regular email client - no need for automation yet Remember about segmentation - in case of a small team that has to handle prospecting and outreach, I'd say focus on one group of potential leads - find and email as many as you can. This way, this also becomes a test of your ideal customer profile. Time for a shameless plug – the company I founded, RightHello, supports B2B tech companies in effective cold email lead generation. Our platform has 4,5 mln companies to pick from and easy segmentation to find your ideal customers. We write cold email campaigns that convert, and assist you throughout the lead generation process to make sure you start getting only qualified leads, straight into your inbox -  http://righthello.com/request-a-demo/?utm_source=quora_new. End of plug!

Landing pages with Unbounce: http://www.ubounce.com Email marketing with either aweber or mailchimp: http://www.aweber.com, http://www.mailchimp.com SEO with: higherclick: http://www.higherclick.com SEO work and monitoring as well as PPC with Raventools: http://www.raventools.com Blogging and sharing on social media. (I work for none of these companies) Creating landing pages and free helpful content like white papers is effective. You can either drive to them through PPC campaigns or social media. Any kind of content you produce really has to be good and easily shareable. The main thing is content is really the key. Helping people and making cool stuff will get you some good traction. It worked for SEOmoz and several others. It can work for you too.

Here are a 12 examples from the http://growthhackingdigest.com archives. You can get more like this every week by subscribing.http://www.madkudu.com/blog/50-of-saas-conversions-happen-after-trial-ends/ This interesting study discovered that 50% of SaaS conversions happen after the trial ends. Shorter sales cycles lead to faster growth, so you may want to reconsider the length of your trial period.https://blog.docsend.com/find-10k-sales-prospects-linkedin/  This approach uses Google to find the LinkedIn profiles you want, bypassing LinkedIn's restrictions on the data it shows, based on your degree of separation. It's an easily scalable and time efficient tactic.http://labs.openviewpartners.com/top-10-startup-growth-hacks-2015/  Number seven is my favorite on this list. Generating epic content requires an incredible amount effort, more than most people appreciate. As this example shows, you can leverage your investment by repurposing your content.https://www.groovehq.com/blog/early-wins  I like their third tactic the most. It's not enough to ask people to share a link to your landing page. You need to give them motivation, as demonstrated in this post.http://www.matthewbarby.com/saas-startup-growth-hacking/ Here's a list of 25 hacks for your Saas startup that you can use in both the pre-launch and post-launch phase. Be prepared for some serious reading as each hack contains information about its purpose, implementation instructions and useful tools that make it easier to execute.http://pointblankseo.com/link-building-strategies This list is an excellent collection of 198 tactics for building links back to your site or blog. Each tactic contains a detailed description, estimated time required, resources necessary and the potential value of those links. This nicely categorized list can also be filtered based on different criteria. The inventory covers a wide variety of actions, including off-line activities, in which you can engage.http://growth.founders.as/ The folks at Founders, a Danish startup incubator, have created a set of documents and spreadsheets to structure, prioritize and track marketing experiments. Inspired by Brian Balfour's presentation on designing and tracking viral growth experiments, their tool will help you put into practice, what Brian preaches. It's a very well thought and organized set of materials.http://robsobers.com/growth-hacking-trello-template/  Rob Sobers created a public Trello template for use in implementing Brian Balfour's process for designing and tracking growth experiments. If you're a Trello fan, you'll find it quite simple to use.http://www.buckfiftymba.com/7-technical-skills-growth-marketing/ The mad men of the last century who combined creativity with exhaustive analysis were called direct marketers. Now they're called growth hackers. Here are seven technical skills essential to growing your product quickly, along with resources to acquire that expertise.http://seobrien.com/startup-marketing-metrics-that-matter  So you're committed to metrics and measuring performance. But who do you do that? And which ones count the most? Here's a look at 11 metrics you should be constantly monitoring and trying to optimize. Remember that raw numbers themselves have little meaning, it's the change that counts.http://appcues.com/product-launch-playbook/the-6-variable-framework-for-planning-product-launch-content/  If your idea of content marketing is putting how-to articles for your product on your public blog, think again. Appcues 6 Variable Framework is a unique concept focusing on the variables that influence the type of content that gets created, and when and where it's released. On a practical level, you can try their http://appcues.com/product-launch-playbook/planner-tool/ (beta) to plan your next product launch content.http://www.programmingformarketers.com/massive-pr-exposure/  Getting press is always a tough job for any startup. You don't know with whom to talk. You haven't any clue how to find them, and you have no idea what to pitch. This system helps you find reporters who cover your niche using http://press.customerdevlabs.com/, get their email addresses using MTurk, and sending personalized HTML email via MailChimp.

Retargeting (or Remarketing if you're Google Adwords) is really interesting right now. Facebook just opened up their ad platform to remarketing. I just started using http://perfectaudience.com for retargeting and it's fantastically easy, and no min. budget. Retargeting is getting easier and easier to use. Of course you have to have traffic for retargeting to make sense...it reminds me a bit of conversion rate optimization...you can get really high ROI on both but you still have to have the traffic to make both CRO and Retargeting worth spending time on.

Another underutilized approach is viral marketing in the way of funny video promoting your product. Example: Infographics are also a good way to display information in an easy to use manner. Funny pictures with your product also work. The Point: Be more personal and be human-like. Most people can see right through your bogus promises, and unrealistic results. Sure, you may get a few idiots to buy, but ask yourself: "Is this how I want to run my company?" If you answered "yes", then you need to find a different profession. Now, if you answered "no", then you're in good luck. Go out there and starting getting personal with your clients, and customers. Forget about your bets friends. Your customers and clients are now your best friends. Hope this helps!