SEO - takes a while to get picked up and also some trial and error, but once you've got it will bring in a trickle of leads every day. This adds up.
Guest posts on industry blogs - My experience is to make it easy for the person to put the blog up - have a few ideas ready when you contact them. Make it awesome and they'll ask you to write another one.
Advertising is hard and expensive. Repeat advertising is HARD and EXPENSIVE. Its hard to convince people to buy your stuff with ads/landing pages. Its expensive to run ads. Great for driving traffic before you've "earned it" other ways. Measure, measure, measure and iterate. Spend time on different ad variations and turn of the bad ones. An increase in CTR from .05% to .1% doubles your clicks!! Spend some time on a landing page. Make sure you wow these people so you get referrals and stretch every last penny of your ad dollar. Use retargeting - its way cheaper and way more effective. Takes 5 minutes to setup w/Perfect Audience All of these things stretch your marketing dollar farther.
Referrals - ask people to refer you. Or better yet, WOW them and they will do it for you. In my experience, people ARE ok with doing business w/new companies that aren't super polished. Make up for it with ridiculous service and responsiveness.
I was with you until the recommendation that it "takes 5 minutes to setup w/ Perfect Audience."
Taking five minutes to setup a display campaign is a horrible idea for an experienced display buyer, let alone someone who doesn't have years of experience in the space. Lots of DSPs try to make it seem simple enough for Joe Businessowner to setup a display campaign, but that doesn't mean they should.
To go about display buying properly you need:
- A decent budget you are ok wasting to collect your initial data set
- Proper conversion tracking in place
- Ideally an ad server and/or way of measuring the contribution of view through conversions/revenue from a cross-channel attribution standpoint
- Display creative, and ideally multiple variations to test
- Retargeting tags set to take advantage of various list-based tactics
- Etc. Etc. Etc.
Some things like an ad server might be ok to do without if you know what you are doing as the DSPs all have their own you can use these days, but it enables things like exposure-to-conversion reporting which is pretty important.
Advertising in general is indeed hard and expensive, and all too often I see companies who have tossed thousands upon thousands of dollars (sometimes with several zeros appended) on buys that weren't thought out, weren't tracked properly, weren't managed properly, and that they ultimately deemed failures because they don't understand how view-throughs factor into the broader mix.
Guest posts on industry blogs - My experience is to make it easy for the person to put the blog up - have a few ideas ready when you contact them. Make it awesome and they'll ask you to write another one.
Advertising is hard and expensive. Repeat advertising is HARD and EXPENSIVE. Its hard to convince people to buy your stuff with ads/landing pages. Its expensive to run ads. Great for driving traffic before you've "earned it" other ways. Measure, measure, measure and iterate. Spend time on different ad variations and turn of the bad ones. An increase in CTR from .05% to .1% doubles your clicks!! Spend some time on a landing page. Make sure you wow these people so you get referrals and stretch every last penny of your ad dollar. Use retargeting - its way cheaper and way more effective. Takes 5 minutes to setup w/Perfect Audience All of these things stretch your marketing dollar farther.
Referrals - ask people to refer you. Or better yet, WOW them and they will do it for you. In my experience, people ARE ok with doing business w/new companies that aren't super polished. Make up for it with ridiculous service and responsiveness.