My friend Lars recently told me that his company's biggest win (in terms of getting new email leads) was a focus on SEO: "Nothing beats people searching with intent."<p>What's been your biggest marketing win of the past year?
I have had two pretty big wins.<p>Pretty easy (results in days): Answering questions on Quora was a relatively easy, quick win. I answered a question on salary negotiation or job interviews every day for a month, and immediately saw a lot more interest in my site.<p>Harder (results in 90+ days): A focus on SEO has really paid off. SEO takes a while to build up, but once it's built up, it's pretty reliable traffic source. That means I can spend time working to offer more value to visitors so they'll stick around and come back later.
We reached out to everyone that ever did a review of a direct competitor within the last 4 years - we were very much last-to-market.<p>About 10% actually did a review of us on launch which gaves us a major boost. However, the ones that reviewed us a few months later are those with a long tail.<p>Reach out to those that love good products. Even if they have a small audience, it all adds up in the end.
Biggest marketing win for <a href="https://www.withcoach.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.withcoach.com/</a> has been using our own product to create and promote free content.<p>Since Coach is an online course platform, we're not only giving people a demo of our product, but we're also providing value through content.<p>For example, we giveaway a free eBook on selling more online courses & digital products: <a href="https://coach.withcoach.com/level-up-your-sales" rel="nofollow">https://coach.withcoach.com/level-up-your-sales</a><p>We also run a free email course on launching your next digital products in 10 days: <a href="https://coach.withcoach.com/10-day-product-bootcamp" rel="nofollow">https://coach.withcoach.com/10-day-product-bootcamp</a><p>Both have driven thousands of leads to our product.
Our focus has been on giving as much free value at <a href="https://www.cluboid.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.cluboid.com</a> as we can.<p>We mostly do this through our blog to pick up traffic like @JoshDoody mentioned below, but we try to capture the email by pay-walling (which I was MASSIVELY against at first) with a subscription page popup.<p>From there we drip feed them value before ever mentioning our own product.<p>However, without a decent backlink profile it can seem like you're not getting anywhere, so do bear in mind that SEO is the other side of the coin here.
For <a href="https://hellowebapp.com" rel="nofollow">https://hellowebapp.com</a>, it was running Kickstarter campaigns to promote the books. It's a really effective way to do a "pre-order" campaign for the book, start a lot of conversations, and start building my email list (not to mention getting a chunk of money that replaced a traditional advance a publisher could give.)<p>For <a href="https://weddinglovely.com" rel="nofollow">https://weddinglovely.com</a>, I work with small businesses and running the weddings blog has been our biggest marketing win. Our businesses send us content, which we publish, getting traffic and also cementing our relationship with the submitting business. We've also started getting significant affiliate revenue ($2k+ mo) from past articles we've written.
OP here. These answers are great! Feels like content marketing is a big winner so far.<p>If you'd rather not comment on this thread, I've also created a quick survey here:<p><a href="https://tinymarketingwins.com/2017survey/" rel="nofollow">https://tinymarketingwins.com/2017survey/</a>
I set up a small product and self assessment tool for <a href="https://compassofdesign.com" rel="nofollow">https://compassofdesign.com</a> validating my target audience.<p>About 20% of my visible audience took part in the assessment and/or bought the product. I got a really good vibe of the people that are most likely to engage and who I should be focusing on.<p>Surprisingly, people that my content is reaching are further along in their journey than I had intended on reaching out to.<p>This has been my biggest result so far from my efforts
Writing, blog posts on <a href="https://thomasroest.com/" rel="nofollow">https://thomasroest.com/</a> that lead people to <a href="https://linuxforwebdevelopers.co/" rel="nofollow">https://linuxforwebdevelopers.co/</a>