17 Actionable Marketing Tips That You Can Apply Right Away

Here’s a list of 17 marketing tips that you can implement right away.

Someone on LinkedIn offers you 64 ChatGPT prompts to improve your content marketing. You download the PDF and tell your marketing team members they need to get on those now.

You then hop on Twitter and see someone share the MrBeast formula for YouTube. You don’t even have a YouTube channel, but you’re convinced—you need a YouTube strategy right now.

But here’s the thing: Chasing every new tactic that falls on your lap is derailing your marketing.

Avoid shiny object syndrome and focus only on tactics that advance you toward your #1 marketing objective. Be honest with yourself. If you don’t see how they help, don’t do them. You can always save them for next time.

The success of Mark Zuckerberg can be attributed to his hyperfocus:

If you find that your marketing is dispersed in all directions and getting no results, chances are you’re trying to chase too many marketing goals at once.

Simplify your focus. Commit to one marketing goal. And make sure it’s SMART too:

• Specific – Clearly state the desirable outcome and explain who, what, when, how much, etc.
• Measurable – Track progress with key performance indicators (KPIs).
• Achievable – Set bold goals, but also be realistic; use the current growth as a benchmark.
• Relevant – Does the objective align with your overall marketing and business strategy?
• Timely – Set up a time frame for achieving the goal.

You’re likely not the only business selling your product or service. So why should anyone choose you over the rest?

If you don’t tell them why, they won’t.

That’s why your positioning should make it crystal clear to potential customers what your product or service is, why it’s different, and why it matters to them.

How do you create your positioning statement? The best way is to follow April Dunford’s “Obviously Awesome” framework. I highly recommend buying the book, but here’s a quick summary:

1. Understand who your best customers are
2. Form a positioning team and align your positioning vocabulary across teams/departments
3. List your competitive alternatives
4. Figure out the attributes and features that make your product/service unique
5. Figure out the true value of these attributes and features—what do they do for your customers?
6. Find a target market that makes your value obvious to the customer segments that care most about your unique value proposition
7. Capture your positioning in an evergreen document that can be shared across all teams

You may have a significant following on social media, but:

• Your reach can be throttled anytime.
• Your account can be suspended for no reason.
• Your country could ban the platform altogether.

When it comes to developing an audience, there’s no better way than to build an email list. It may be a relic on the internet timeline, but it’s reliable—with an email list, you own the contact details and can communicate with your audience anytime.

To build an email list, you must convince website visitors to subscribe. Most websites offer something in return for subscribing—a free ebook, a course and, sometimes, a discount.

At Ahrefs, we have a simple opt-in form on our blog:

The moment your audience signs up for your email list, they’ll likely receive a welcome email. For example, this is what our email looks like:

Your welcome email sequence can be one or more emails. But how do you know what kind of emails you should send?

It all depends on your guiding narrative. This is the high-level message you think will resonate with your audience. Basically:

For example, if you sell Italian food in London, your narrative could be:

• The recipes you use in your restaurant are passed down from your great-grandfather’s generation.
• All the ingredients are shipped fresh from Italy.
• Your restaurant has one Michelin star.

For us at Ahrefs, we decided that:

• We want to showcase our content since it is both educational and product-led.
• All we need is one email to share our best blog posts.

That’s how we came up with our welcome email.

Here’s an article listing the best cafes in London:

If we plug this page into Ahrefs’ Site Explorer, we see that it gets an estimated 3,800 visits from search engines each month:

If there are any relevant lists like this for your business, you’ll want to be on them. You can find relevant lists with traffic using Ahrefs’ Content Explorer:

1. Enter a relevant search (i.e., “best [business type] [local area]”)
2. Select In title from the dropdown
3. Run the search
4. Set the Live & broken filter to Only live
5. Add a Page traffic filter and set the minimum to 100
6. Check Exclude homepages

Giveaways are a great way to simultaneously build brand awareness and your email list. But many marketers make the mistake of giving away things utterly unrelated to what they do, like an iPhone or iPad.

They then wonder why none of the people they attract turn into paying customers.

For sweepstakes to work, you must give away something that attracts potential customers. Your product is the most obvious choice, but don’t limit yourself to that.

For example, when I worked for a burgeoning startup years ago, I partnered with another company to give away its product. We then shared the email list between us.

At Ahrefs, we regularly give away our swag.

Look at how happy they are:

The first step is to create or claim your Google Business Profile (GBP). But that’s not enough. You’d want to optimize it so that you’ll appear on Google when searchers are looking for businesses that offer things or services they need.

Here’s how to optimize your GBP:

• Business categories – You can help Google understand your business better by selecting up to 10 business categories. It’s also a good idea to keep abreast of the new categories that Google adds so you can update your GBP accordingly.
• Attributes – These can be thought of as labels or tags that convey additional information about the business. Some are objective (e.g., “black-owned [business]”) and thus can be controlled by you. Others are subjective and are earned when a certain feature of your business is often suggested by the customers.
• Reviews – This is beyond GBP itself, but you’d want to provide a great experience for your customers so they’ll leave good reviews. You should also ask for it when you have the opportunity—usually when the customer expresses their satisfaction, whether they say it personally or online.

Did you know that 90.63% of pages get zero traffic from Google?

It is likely because they’re not targeting topics that people are searching for.

It makes sense: If nobody searches for what you’re writing about, you won’t get search traffic. So if you want passive, consistent traffic coming to your site, you’ll have to target topics with search traffic potential.

How do you find these topics?

1. Go to Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer
2. Enter one or a few relevant terms
3. Go to the Matching terms report

You’ll see over 4 million potential keywords to target. You can narrow the list by focusing on low-competition topics with traffic potential.

Just add these filters:

• Traffic Potential to >500
• Keyword Difficulty to <20

Go through the results and pick out relevant ones for your site.

Generally speaking, the more high-quality links you have, the higher your page will rank.

So if you spot a page that doesn’t have many backlinks but still ranks high on Google, it means you can potentially outrank it. Here’s how we can find these opportunities:

1. Go to Ahrefs’ Content Explorer
2. Enter a relevant keyword
3. Set a Referring domains filter to max. 10
4. Set a Page traffic filter to min. 500

Click Details and then the Organic keywords tab to see which topics those pages are ranking for.

They could be potential keywords to target too.