Ten marketing tactics for growing your online business in 2020

Executive overview

Most online channels force you to pay to reach your own audience. Email remains the most direct line to your people — but only if they're still active. The goal isn't a big list; it's a small, engaged one.

Vanity metrics (list size, traffic) hide the real number: your active audience.

Facebook groups

• Facebook actively promotes groups, giving you organic reach you no longer get from pages
• Join existing groups or build your own; either way, you're meeting the audience where they already are
• Use your group as a hedge against email — another guaranteed channel to reach people
• Goal: pull group members onto your email list over time

Weekly email newsletters

• Social platforms give you an audience, then charge you to talk to them; email bypasses this
• A weekly cadence builds a show-like habit — readers look forward to it
• Consistency matters more than volume; irregular sends train your list to ignore you
• Develop a unique format and angle rather than copying existing newsletters

Autoresponders

• Most people either skip them or set them up once and forget them
• Treat the onboarding sequence as a curated menu: surface your three most valuable things
• Sequence example: LinkedIn connection → Facebook group → podcast (lightest ask last)
• Applies to every business type, including service businesses (e.g. auto-email for re-booking or review requests)

LinkedIn newsletters and content

• LinkedIn concentrates business owners in a way other platforms don't
• Experiment with format: video, photo, text, giveaways — most won't work, find what does
• LinkedIn newsletter feature is underused; worth testing if your audience is B2B

Active audience as a metric

• Active audience: anyone who opened or clicked an email in the past three months
• A 100k list with 25% open rate and 5% click rate is really ~1,250 engaged people
• Focus on this number instead of total subscribers or raw traffic
• Use the weekly newsletter to keep the active audience number from decaying

Free tools, calculators, and templates

• Blog posts on common topics are commoditised; a tool that does the thing is harder to copy
• Free tools generate leads more effectively than content on the same subject
• Calculators, generators, and fill-in templates lower the barrier for users to take action
• Give away tools adjacent to your core product to drive top-of-funnel traffic

Offline events and in-person tactics

• When everyone is buying Facebook ads, offline becomes less crowded and more differentiated
• Meetups, free trainings, and in-store sampling build relationships competitors can't easily replicate
• Physical product brands: consider hiring people to give samples in stores rather than defaulting to digital ads

Bonus: Facebook Marketplace and marketing automation

• Facebook Marketplace had ~400 million transactions in 2019; early movers pay nothing
• Worth testing for physical products before the platform starts charging
• Next-generation automation tools can generate email campaigns, social posts, or ads automatically — reducing production cost to near zero