As business owners, we know you spend a lot of time and resources planning marketing campaigns. It can be exhausting—especially if you're trying to actually run a business at the same time. But it's necessary because if you don't have a steady stream of leads coming in, your ship will sink. Today, we thought we'd give you a little inspiration to help keep some wind in your sails.

Make a video

In an increasingly visually oriented world, video is quickly becoming king. Many people are naturally visual learners, so perhaps it would benefit you to make a video demonstrating your product or service. When done right, video can be a powerful marketing tool.

Always have a call to action

Whether you're making a video or sending out an email newsletter, make sure your call to action is very clear. If it's in an email or on your website, be sure it's bigger and bolder than the rest of the text so that it stands out and folks know what you want them to do. If it's in a video, tell your potential customer what their next step should be—give you a call!

Leave only one choice

Have you ever gone shopping for something and been so overwhelmed with choices that you just left without getting anything?  The same thing can happen unless you limit confusion and decrease the number of call to action options you offer your customer. If you want people to sign up for a free trial, just use that call to action rather than doing that plus offering a way to sign up for a newsletter or get an estimate. Pick the thing you want them to do most and just give them that one choice. You don't want folks getting overwhelmed and just walking away.

Give your about page a little spit and polish

People read about pages, so it's important that yours is stellar. It's where customers go to learn what you're about and what you can do for them. You have to make sure your value proposition is solid and easy to see. Make it big, put it in a headline, whatever you have to do to make it clear what kind of value you can deliver. It also helps to break up your copy into small paragraphs. A big giant chunk of text is overwhelming and people won't read it.

Keep your blog updated

We know it's time consuming and you already have a full plate, but sporadically posting on your blog is a bad idea. You need to keep your content fresh and ever flowing. The more you post, the more traffic will be driven to your site and the more customers you will get. Your organic traffic will grow naturally the more you put yourself out there with blog posts.

Promote your tweets

Promoted tweets are a form of sponsored content, but they should still look just like a regular tweet and not an advertisement. Keep your tweets fun and valuable to your followers. To maximize their potential, be sure they link to a strong landing page that is related to the topic of the tweet. This will help you continue the conversation you started on Twitter.

Pay attention on Twitter

Do a topic search on Twitter and you'll get a list of tweets about what you are offering. This is a way to get real time information and reach out to people who are mentioning your product or service or looking for it. Engage them and make them yours!

Quora is your friend

Quora is a social media site that we wrote about a while back. If you missed it, click here to get caught up. It's growing in popularity and is becoming a great place for you to get recognized as an expert and meet people who might be asking questions about stuff you happen to know a lot about. You can help them with their problems by answering their questions. Next thing you know, you're doing business together.

Quora even allows you to create a profile that links back to your site, so you are giving people a direct link to you, the person who can fix their problems.

Volunteer to speak at an event

We've written about this type of thing before, but being a speaker at an event can get you a bunch of good quality leads since you are the presenter. Clearly, you're a reliable source of information and you're the person people will go to when they need what you have to offer. You'll also be able to do a little networking with others in your industry and that's never a bad thing!

We hope some of our suggestions have inspired you to try a few new things to refresh your marketing efforts. If you ever need more idea, come and see us. We'll have a chat and come up with something that will totally kick some serious buttski!