Category: Sales & Marketing

A good marketing strategy to ensure your brand is here to stay means including several important factors that will help you reach your target audience in every way possible. Here’s what to definitely focus on while creating an effective marketing strategy.

1. Social media

Social media marketing, or SMM, is a type of internet marketing that includes creating and sharing relevant content on social media networks to raise brand awareness. Typical activities are posting videos and images and posting text, all of which incite audience engagement, but it also includes paid social media advertising.

First of all, Facebook advertising is one of the most cost-effective media channels in the world, enabling you to easily reach your target audience anywhere you want. Just to give you a hint of its possibilities – more than 75% of Americans are using Facebook, so the possibilities of advertising your brand to the right audience are incredibly high. The Cost Per Click is pretty low, while the benefits could be quite substantial.

Videos are a great way of telling people who you are and what you offer, as well as why they should choose you instead of your competitors. Videos are more popular and influencing than television and newspapers so it would be a good idea to invest in a high-quality video advertising on social media.

Visual social media sites such as Instagram and Pinterest are perfect for creative image roundups that show exactly what you offer and tell an interesting story. In order to make the images more shareable, overlay them with catchy quotes.

2. Guerrilla marketing

If you’re aiming at unexpected marketing tactics, then you should opt for guerilla marketing. It’s a way of avoiding becoming bland and predictable when it comes to promoting your brand.

It’s a different approach, where people are told stories and even drawn into them and inspired after watching/reading them. The good thing about guerrilla marketing is that it isn’t expensive but needs a certain amount of creativity and it should try to incent people to give comments.

This type of marketing includes public “stunts” and planting a new idea in people’s head – something unusual and with a twist at the end is the best possible version. It works better if you only do it occasionally, at a specific time through a targeted campaign, so don’t let the whole site get overwhelmed with this one-time hype.

3. Merchandise marketing

This type of marketing means creating brand awareness but also customer loyalty through the smart use of merchandise. The term “merchandise” refers to any tangible item, like a gift card, a T-shirt or flowers. For example, it means organizing a contest or giving out free custom t-shirts and jackets for your next tradeshow to raise your brand awareness among the targeted audience.

However, merchandise marketing is more than just promotional marketing – any use of incentives, thank-yous and referrals are also an example of using the physical merchandise. It is also highly useful for supporting other types of marketing like loyalty and word-of-mouth marketing, making it clear that merchandise marketing is not a thing of the past at all.

4. Quality content

Quality content presupposes several factors. First of all, whatever you’re writing about, it’s highly important you’re being transparent, meaning the communication between you and your audience/clients is honest and direct.

People will always buy from those who they trust, so in order to build that trust, transparency is a must. It means that that the content you’re putting on your site needs to be honest, even when it’s uncomfortable to you and you should also be prepared to share some of your personal stories and prepared to take public responsibility for your potential mistakes.

Also, you need to put yourself in your reader’s position and think about answering three questions referring to the content: Is the content relevant to the reader? Is it educational to them? Does it add any value? In order to be sure the content won’t be disregarded by the reader as irrelevant or annoying, the answer to these three questions needs to be “yes”.

The keywords you choose will also add to the quality of your content. Don’t listen to those who say that SEO isn’t that important for your marketing strategy – words that you use could help your product or service more than you think. So, pick three keywords and stick to them for a long period of time – your persistence will get you high Google ranking, and that counts!

Final comment

Your marketing strategy doesn’t need to be expensive – creating buzz for your brand generally includes creative thinking and a lot of hard work. But all of that effort will be rewarding after a certain time has passed.

Developing a marketing strategy and promoting marketing plan is one of the most important steps when launching new products and services on the market. With their help, you can identify the company’s business goals, specify tasks and performance indicators. The strategy reflects the needs of the audience and the user’s way from the first interaction with the brand before the purchase. If you are not sure you have enough energy, time and experience to deal with this task, it is better to hire an expert to do it for you. We have gathered several convincing reasons to buy a custom marketing plan from qualified freelance writers.

To Earn the Money You have to Spend the Money

Once you decide that you can earn money as an entrepreneur, you should embrace the idea that you will have to make investments at each stage of the process. If you invest wisely in an expert-written well-thought-out marketing plan, you can save significant sums of money on promotion and advertising, increasing your profit due to the working and efficient marketing strategy suggested in the plan.

It Will Help to Avoid Mistakes Inherent to Start-Ups

Here are only 6 out of numerous critical mistakes you can make when writing a marketing plan without some expert help. You can also use this list for a quick check up of what you already have done.

1. Problems with goal setting. Goals should be expressed in numbers, be specific and achievable. You need to register how many customers and for what period you want to get, which financial indicators need to be changed and how to achieve it.
2. Problems with defining the targeted audience. Making mistakes at this stage is critical. The marketing specialist must be able to identify the needs of the target audience. For each segment, the product must bring its value, cover exactly its needs, different from the other offers in the segment.Segmentation can be formed on different grounds: socio-demographic, territorial, behavioral, psychographic, etc. Moreover, in modern marketing, the audit of a segment can be a complex process/structure and have several different characteristics.
3. Ineffective budgeting. In an ideal world, actual and planned indicators should coincide, but in reality, they may differ widely enough. Only experience and a series of long tests can correctly lay the budget for this or that channel of attraction. Much depends on the coverage, the features, the type of audience and how effectively you can optimize the purchase of traffic if it comes to using paid advertising sources.
4. Too complicated plans. Concentrating on long-term tasks is great, but fulfilling the weekly plans is even better. With a budget deficit, one should focus on simpler and more achievable goals. For example, first lay the budget for contextual advertising and retargeting, as the simplest and fastest channels for attracting and retaining users, then support official groups in social networks.
5. Ignoring rivals. To develop a unique offer for future customers, you need to know the offers of your competitors. Audit of the competitors’ websites or applications will help to understand the market, the needs of the audience better and sharpen the competitive advantages.
6. Lack of visualization. For clarity and understanding of the correlations, it is convenient to use connection diagrams (Mind Map), a tree structure and visual execution of which gives an idea of what follows what, and also how it will work. Data visualization will help to present and defend the marketing plan.

Everyone Else Does It

You get it right — you competitors don’t spend days and nights working on marketing strategies themselves. Most of your rivals pay for assistance, and it a right thing to do, because you can’t be good in everything. More of it, if a marketing plan is your graduate project, you will make all possible mistakes if you decide to do it on your own. Your marketing plan will be only one of dozens read by a thesis committee, which means everyone else who paid for some external help will look better than you do.

The marketing strategy is a combat plan for the work of a commercial enterprise. This know-how package defines sales markets, consumer segments, pricing methods and sales channels. Let experts help you out with this exceptionally important assignment.

 

Many people believed that email marketing will become obsolete. Now, 2018 is just around the corner, and email marketing has no intention of going anywhere anytime soon. Digital marketers still use email, as it’s still one of the most effective marketing strategies. As a matter of fact, 91% of adults in the U.S. like receiving emails from brands they do business with. In addition, email marketing is 40 times more effective than Facebook and Twitter combined.

That being said, email marketing is still being used and will continue to be used by businesses both big and small. Furthermore, email marketing is a cost-effective marketing strategy. That’s why small businesses oftentimes use email to grow their business successfully. Here are a few reasons why email won’t go out of style in 2018.

Effective lead generation

Having a subscriber list is always beneficial to your business. Not every website visitor who subscribes to your email newsletter is going to become a customer overnight. However, email marketing allows you to craft your messages well and nurture a relationship with your subscribers, as you slowly lead them down your marketing funnel.

That way, if your strategy is good, you’ll eventually convert leads into customers. Moreover, email marketing allows you to identify good prospects. After visitors decide to sign up for your email newsletter, you can identify leads by monitoring prospect’s interests, such as the number of emails opened and how many links they’ve clicked on in your email.

Showcases professionalism

Designing the email you’re about to send to your leads, prospects, clients or business associates is very important. People are more likely to take your offers seriously if the emails they receive from you have excellent design. You can customize your email template by adding elements, such as corresponding colors, fonts, content and logothat match your brand identity.

That way, your emails will showcase professionalism once they reach you customer’s or client’s inbox. Also, you can add your very own signature to the emails you send out. However, in order not to risk making a signature using an HTML editor, you can use an email signature generator to ensure everything is perfect.

It drives more sales

There’s a good reason why email marketing is still one of the most effective marketing strategies. The main reason is that it allows you to segment your email list and communicate with leads in many different ways. That way you can place your leads in different groups and use personalized content and offers to communicate your message to them more effectively. This helps deliver your messages at the right time, and speeds up the conversion process.

Moreover, you’ll get an immediate response, which will provide you with an insight into whether or not your strategies are working well. Furthermore, segmentation allows you to identify leads who are willing to take action straight away and separate them from leads who are still indecisive. The only thing left to do is customize content and offers, so that you can help them make the decision easier.

Improves retention rate

One of the key goals of every business is to retain customers. As a matter of fact, it’s 6 to 7 times more expensive to attract a new customer than it is to retain an old one. In addition, return customers oftentimes spend 67% more than new prospects. With email marketing, you can easily retain customers with specialized messages.

For instance, your emails can update customers about new products, services or sales. Also, you can offer your customers special occasion offers for birthdays, holidays and other events. Moreover, you can reward loyal customers via email or notify them about abandoned carts to remind them to finish the checkout process.

Email marketing is still a powerful marketing strategy, because it offers an effective way to target prospects and improve conversion, as well as customer retention rate. Email marketing is also very cost-effective, which is quite appealing to businesses, especially small businesses and startups. That being said, email marketing won’t lose its popularity in 2018.

Dan Radak is a marketing professional with eleven years of experience. He is a coauthor on several websites and regular contributor to BizzMark Blog. Currently, he is working with a number of companies in the field of digital marketing, closely collaborating with a couple of e-commerce companies.

If you’re not fully maximizing your website you’ll be missing out on new subscribers.

There are many ways to capture a visitor to your website, and turn them into a new subscriber, but if you’re not fully using all of the strategies available to do so, then you’re going to be missing out on filling your pipeline with potential clients and customers.

In this article I’m going to be sharing three very simple ways you can fully maximize your website so that you capture more visitors who come to your website.

Driving traffic to your website is only one side of the coin; once you’ve got visitors there you then need to get them onto your list!

Having a sign-up box on your website detailing your ‘free taste’ in exchange for your visitor’s name and email address is one way that you can do this, but deciding WHERE to place your all-important sign-up box for maximum impact is also just as important.

Depending on whether your page is a sales page, an information page, or some other type of web page will determine the strategy you use for enticing your web site visitors to sign up to your list.

I’d like to share three different, but very effective, sign-up page strategies with you.

1.  At The Top Of Every Web Page

Your sign-up box should appear at the top of every single webpage on your website – the top right-hand corner has been researched to be the most effective place to put this. Or another place is at the top of the right sidebar, if you’re using a WordPress blog.

Why do you need to this?

Because you never know where someone will enter your website from.  As your site grows and more pages/posts get added, it will be getting picked up by the search engines for different terms or key phrases – and they might be phrases that aren’t on your home page, but on one of your other pages instead.

Someone could enter your website and leave via the same page (in other words they don’t stop to look around), and if you haven’t got a sign-up box on that page, you’ve got no chance of getting their name and email address – and they won’t know you offer a ‘free taste’.

2. Using Exit Grabber/Popup Software

Another sign-up strategy that I’ve been using for many years Exit Grabber software.  This is a clever piece of software that knows when a visitor is about to leave my website and only pops up just before they leave.

The popup box reminds a visitor not to leave without first grabbing their free gift, whether that’s a report, checklist, tip sheet, or some of kind of gift that you’re offering in exchange for a visitor giving you their name and email address.

Again, if you’re using a WordPress site there are many different exit grabber/popup plugins that you can use — both free and paid.

3. Adding A PS To A Sales Page

Internet marketers have done their research and the conclusion is that a lot of visitors to your sales page are going to scroll straight down to the bottom of your sales page first to read your PS’s!

So, if the first two strategies aren’t suitable for a particular page on your website or one of your sales pages, be sure to include a PS that tells your visitor what your ‘free taste’ is. And rather than include the sign-up box in the PS, provide a hyperlink that takes them to your sign-up page.

All three sign-up page strategies offer something slightly different, depending on your particular web page, and are very effective for ensuring that your website visitors don’t just leave your website without first signing up for your free offer.

So once you’ve got traffic coming to your website ensure that you’re capturing your visitor’s information by implementing at least one of the three different strategies I’ve shared with you today.

 

Article Contributed by Michelle Laurey

Your marketing content may be designed to spur direct action, such as to appeal to a direct need so that your customers make a purchase. It may also be created to improve relations, such as by offering product-related tips. In some cases, it may even develop your brand’s image.

When you spend the time, energy and money creating exceptional content for your marketing campaigns to achieve specific goals, it only makes sense that you would take every reasonable step possible to promote it. Through promotion, you may be able to extend your marketing reach and get your content the attention that it deserves. You may think that this would cost a fortune, but there are actually multiple steps that you can take at little to no cost.

Sharing Is Caring

Your content isn’t worth much when it’s not seen by the target audience. Fortunately, you can increase its reach by sharing it multiple times on various platforms. Simply change the teaser for maximum appeal and increase the chance that your potential clients will see it and pay attention to it. Sharing your content on Twitter, Facebook, and other platforms is free and simple: you can automate it using tools like Buffer. Another wise idea is to ask your close contacts – friends and family – to share the content. It’s enough that just a few of them do it to reach hundreds of other people.

Online resources, such as Open Site Explore and Ahrefs, can tell you which websites linked similar content, and you can personally reach out to the owners of these platforms to ask for a direct link to your content. Likewise, you can research who shared similar content via Twitter or Facebook, and you can contact those individuals directly with a similar request. It may be wise to offer the similar effort in return so that the other party gets something beneficial out of their actions.

Another smart idea is to keep track of influencers. Rather than contacting them directly to request content sharing, mention something positive about them in your content. Then, create a link to their page. Through this indirect method that appeals to their self-image, you may generate a share from a major influencer. This may even be viewed as a testimonial by some of your customers. If this happens, you may essentially be getting spokesperson-like benefits from an influencer without having to pay this person a penny.

Do Some Volunteer Work

Research industry blogs that appeal to your target audience. Ask the bloggers if you can create a guest blog for their website. It might seem like a waste of your time at first (since it won’t earn you anything), especially when you’re first starting your business. You are still paying off your office space, worrying about paying the taxes, trying to see if you are actually making money. Yet, you must be willing to sacrifice time to later reap the benefits. You will reach more people, people who maybe wouldn’t usually visit your blog. Do your best to create great content even if it’s for someone else’s blog.

You also should ask readers to share comments and testimonials directly below the blog post. This strategy typically will not result in a huge number of sales immediately. However, you will gain more recognition, and this can pay off with long-term gains.

Use “Old-Fashioned” Methods

While there are many new technologies available to help you get the word out about your business now, remember that there are also tried and true methods that marketers have been using for years. Specifically, be aware that email marketing continues to be more effective than social media marketing. In fact, you are six times more likely to generate a response from an email campaign than from a Twitter comment. Remember that your email subscription list is a list of people who have specifically asked for information from you. They are interested and engaged.

Also, don’t disregard the older customers who maybe don’t feel comfortable in the online world. These are individuals who may not regularly check email or who even maybe don’t use email. That is why you should also consider printing hard copies of your marketing material to directly hand to your older consumers or to snail-mail to them. On these hard copies, you may include a call to action to visit your website for more information. If you have many older customers in your target audience, this is a veritable necessity.

Final Thoughts

It can take time and resources to create interesting, engaging content. Therefore, it makes sense to maximize the mileage from each piece that you create. Use these tips to expand your reach in the most cost-effective ways possible.

Author bio:

Michelle Laurey is a freelance writer who enjoys fitness, relaxing in the fresh air, trying to live a healthy life and daydreaming about visiting new places (and actually visiting them). Her best ideas and problem solutions appear while she’s riding her bicycle. You can reach her via Twitter.