Category: Sales & Marketing

Article Contributed by Sophia Quinn

If only it were enough to craft a winning product or service that just sells itself. Unfortunately, competition is stiff and the only way that today’s entrepreneurs can get any traction is by aggressively seeking out and expanding their audience.

In this post, we are going to explore a couple of powerful ways that you can amp up your small company’s voice and grab the attention of new potential customers. We’ll cover one of the most powerful online tactics along with an old-fashioned offline strategy that still delivers plenty of value. 

Engage with Customers Online

Blogging and social media platforms present businesses with an excellent opportunity to expand their reach and tap into new audiences. Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr and a host of other social media sites are powerful tools on the 21^st-century marketing stage. However, posts can easily go unnoticed if you haven’t gone to great lengths to build and engage with your social media fan base. Of course, it’s one thing to say this and quite another to actually achieve it.

The brilliance of social media marketing is the fact that your own followers are the ones out there sharing and ‘liking’ your posts and content. They’re doing the legwork for you. Assuming you have genuinely grabbed their attention, they’ll be providing your company with this service because they actually want to. In other words, they’ll do it for nothing in return. When your company’s subscribers and followers start pushing your marketing messages into viral territory – well, that’s when sales are going to hit a fever pitch.

Here are some tips for turning your company blog or social media account into a high-powered, audience-expanding marketing medium:

• Don’t blather on about your product features or the inner workings of your company; this may be interesting to you, but the average person probably doesn’t care.
• Provide links to relevant information and events, even if doing so doesn’t directly benefit your bottom line.
• Get the discussion moving by asking and answering questions.
• Offer preferential discounts and promotions to your followers (e.g. through a promotional code that they can use on your website); this is a real-value proposition, and people will take notice.

Provide Something of Value (For Free)

That’s right. Give stuff away. You operate a business, and your target customers understand that you’re in it to make money. That only makes this tactic all the more effective. Whether you’re passing promotional pens to advertise an upcoming sale or giving away product to loyal customers, the only thing that matters is that the items you put in their hands have some level of utility.

Tried-and-true promo campaigns like this have been around for eons, and they’re not going away anytime soon. The key is to understand the fact that the items you give away are – well, they’re more than just items. They serve a purpose in the hands of the recipient, and they also broadcast a clear and succinct message from your business. You can’t exercise total control over who gets their hands on these products, but you can certainly target certain demographics by carefully planning when, where and how you pass them out.

This tactic is backed by plenty of research. A survey conducted by the Promotional Products Association International found that nine out of ten people surveyed had at least one promotional product in their kitchen. More importantly, three-quarters of respondents were able to recall the product, advertiser and marketing message attached to a recent promotional product they had received. Those are encouraging figures, and they serve as an important reminder that brick-and-mortar marketing still has a powerful role to play in the Digital Age.

About the Author:

Article Contributed by Sophia Quinn of Dynamic Gift in Australia,  a dependable provider of quality promotional products. They not only have promotional pens and other stationery, but also mugs, power banks, and magnets.

You just put the finishing touches on your kick-butt marketing plan that’s going to skyrocket your business. Hooray!

Only problem is that kick-butt marketing plan isn’t going to do a thing for your business unless you actually put it into action. And that, alas, is where most marketing plans end up — a really good idea that never got implemented.

So, how do you stop that from happening? Here are 3 steps to help you move from thinking to doing.

1. Figure out what you need to be doing versus what you can get someone else to do. Look, there’s no reason why YOU have to do all the implementation. Get some help!

If you already have a team, fantastic! Now you just have to start delegating. If you don’t have a team or you don’t have the right person on your team to do a specific job (for instance, a technical person to fix your shopping cart) then you need to put finding that person to your to-do list. In the short-term, yes it does add to your workload, but in the long-term, it will save you a lot of time.

2. Block off time in your calendar to work on your plan. The only way these things are going to get done is if you actually take the time to work on them. So start by actually setting aside the time.

You may be someone who works better in shorter, more frequent bursts of time (15 or 20 minutes every day) versus a longer time less frequently (2 hours or half a day once a week). Only you know what appeals to you, and I would suggest scheduling your time accordingly. (Look, it’s tough enough to get things done; you might as well make it easier for yourself by working with your natural tendencies than against them.)

3. Set yourself up for success. Just because you set the time aside doesn’t mean you’ll actually get anything done on your plan during that time. So you need to keep yourself focused and motivated and don’t allow yourself to get sidetracked.

Now there’s no question that’s much easier said than done. So how do you do that? Here are a few tips to try:

• Remind yourself WHY you’re doing this. Is it so you’ll be able to take care of your family better? Is it because you want to sell a million copies of your book? Is it because you’re so tired of the way things are you’re ready for a change? Whatever it is, remind yourself of the bigger WHY before you sit down to work. That will keep your motivation up.

• Make it a special time just for you. Maybe light a candle, put on some favorite music or pour yourself a fave cup of tea. Or maybe you head out to a local Starbucks to hang out. Whatever it is, make it special — something you look forward to.

• Create a “squirrel file.” If you ever watched the movie “Up,” there’s a talking dog in it that keeps getting distracted by squirrels. So he’ll be talking and in the middle he’ll shout “squirrel!” and completely lose his train of thought.

As entrepreneurs, we are surrounded by squirrels. And there’s no better time for the squirrels to come and play then during this time we’ve set aside to implement our marketing plan. “Oh, I’ll get to my plan as soon as I get this email out…as soon as I return this phone call…as soon as I clean up my desk.”

You get the idea.

So the way to keep the squirrels away is to create a “squirrel file” (or call it something fun like “squirrel nest”). Any of those squirrels come running out, capture it and stick it in the file to work on “later.” If you want, you can even designate a time to work on all those squirrels.

But the most important thing to do is DECIDE you really ARE going to implement your plan. Once you do that, the rest will fall into place.

Part of our outlook into 2014 we’ve started to compile some blog posts that are not only designed to help us but also help you in creating an effective strategy.

Email marketing, have you been doing it?

I ask simply because email marketing is hugely underutilised with B2b sales however the stat’s behind why you should be doing it are eye opening:

• 40% of B2b leads generated via email marketing are considered high quality.
• 44% of respondents to email marketing made one or more purchases.

Now when you’re response rate is close to being half that’s pretty good going, especially when it’s either a hot lead or a done deal at the end of it.

The trouble with email marketing is that we’ve all become some immune to spam and get rich quick schemes that we tend to have a misconception as to what email marketing should be. (It’s about value, just good old value adding to someone’s life).

So in 2014 here are the things you should be focusing on with your email marketing strategies:

Subject Line

If you happen to be a one man band or don’t actually have a marketing department then it would be wise to take a couple of hours out to learn about creative writing.

Put it this way – the subject line is the first thing the recipient will see and it’s the only thing that will make them open the email.

Social Leverage

Social media is here to stay so give into it and leverage it to your full advantage alongside your email marketing campaigns.

Here are some ideas:

• Competitions
• Exclusive offers
• Newsletter subscriber only offers

All of the above is designed to simply capture as much data as possible, getting more and more people onto your email list is vital. They may not be interested now but it’s the most efficient way to maintain mindshare.

Timing

You can no longer disapprove the value of sending well timed means of contact. Social media updates are being widely optimised for release at specific times that followers are most likely to click through and so should emails.

Use metrics to back up your findings and ultimately test what you’re doing, it will take some time to fully understand and develop a solid strategy but in the long run email marketing is about Open Rates and Click Through Rates.

Images

Sales pitch emails are horrible, they are the best example of the worst type of email that can be sent out. Forget the paragraphs of how you’ll add value and how previous customers saw X increases.

Instead focus on the visual appeal of your email, pictures and videos are becoming a huge growth market for social media therefore you need to optimise your emails to these trends.

Images and videos also carry the added bonus of being more likely to be shared over a plain piece of text – you just can’t get excited about something like that.

Update: Google has released news that they will be caching all images – meaning that there’s a strong chance measuring metrics such as opens and views will now be difficult. For more details check out this article.

Mobile

The all round numbers for mobile usage are going drastically up – viewers, amount of time spent, activities etc – so ensuring that your email marketing campaigns are mobile friendly is vital. Add too many large pictures and you’ll have a slow to open email – instant delete.

Again test and measure as for everyone it’s different but focus in on the need to have a balance between images, information and ultimately a mobile presence.

Automation/Segmentation

If you use the likes of iContact, Mail Chimp, Aweber etc you’ll have the wonderful ability to segment and automate your email campaigns. The whole process from list sign ups to welcome messages to follow up emails can all be done on an automated scale, why aren’t you doing it?

Email marketing has become such a fluid process that 2014 should be the year you fall in love with automated campaigns and hyper targeted segmentation. Realistically there are few reasons as to why your lead rate isn’t growing with email marketing.

Email marketing isn’t that bad, there are only a few bad seeds out there that want to create horrible campaigns that deliver nothing more than pain and sorrow for your inbox.

Some of the most popular email marketing providers; Aweber, MailChimp, iContact provide great services that allow you to understand your customer. 2014 should be key for your development and use of email marketing throughout your business.