Business Owner Roundup: What's Been Your Most Effective Marketing Tactic in 2021?

With so much going on in the world recently, marketing—both to consumers and business owners—has become more challenging…but also more critical.

We asked business owners their most effective marketing strategy or tactic in recent months. Here’s how they responded:

Promoting user-generated content

Our audience is typically B2B, so we send satisfied customers to our G2 reviews page, a site where software companies collect reviews and where prospects go to compare and contrast products or services. This makes for an organic way to collect content that we can then share in our social media. We also engage our customers as they share reviews on their websites and social media channels. Whether it’s photos of themselves with their purchases or their highly detailed reviews, we let them know how happy we are that our product brings them joy, by commenting and resharing their posts. Genuine engagement on social media helps us reach an even broader audience.

—Shaunak Amin, co-founder and CEO, SnackMagic, New York City

Sending personalized letters via FedEx

We manufacture and sell HVAC equipment. We’ve found that most people open a FedEx letter that’s sent directly to them, because knowing that someone spent $20 to get their attention justifies, in their mind, at least reading the letter, if not reaching out to discuss. I have found it’s the best way to cut through the noise without being overtly conspicuous, which can be off-putting.

—Andrew Tjernlund, owner, Tjernlund Products, White Bear Lake, Minnesota

Forging strategic partnerships

The best marketing tactic for our business over the past year has been developing strategic partnerships with businesses and individuals who can refer new business to us. To implement this tactic, we made a list of all the businesses that engage with our customers, either right before we work with them or directly after we work with them. We then systematically began a campaign to connect with these businesses. We knew that these are the businesses that are best positioned to know if their customers need our services. The benefit to our referral partners is they get to add value to their customers by making the introduction.

—Mike Faherty, founder and CEO, ProSales Connection, Spring, Texas

Enhancing email marketing

Our most successful marketing tactic the past year has been email campaigns. We put some serious time into optimizing and making our emails interesting and worth opening up (offering both giveaways and useful information). So when we do want to push our customers to order, we have all the groundwork done and can get conversions. I know email isn’t that exciting of a marketing tactic, but it works when done right. Everyone has email, but not everyone will be on the social media platform you are looking to market on.

—Evan McCarthy, CEO and president, SportingSmiles, Waukesha, Wisconsin

Soliciting online reviews

One successful market tactic I have implemented has been asking my customers to leave Google Reviews. If you ask, often they will do it. As more customers search for my industry’s services on Google, it is imperative to have many high-quality reviews to get noticed.

—Ryan McEniff, owner, Minute Women Home Care, Lexington, Massachusetts

Boosting organic search results

In the past year, we have made a huge push into search engine optimization (SEO)  and have seen a huge success. We did this from the ground up and without any outside help. It took many months before we started to see leads come in, but now that the stream is on, it’s kept rolling. The biggest thing I learned is to look at what your competitors online are generating the most traffic from. A great keyword tool we use is Ubersuggest, but there are many others.

—Kelly Maxwell, founder and owner, Seniors Mutual, Pflugerville, Texas

What’s the top marketing strategy your company has used over the past year? Share your insights in the comments section below!