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.

Article Contributed by Gerardo Hyde

Online marketing in today’s world can take some serious time, effort, and money too. Engaging in online marketing is often a multifaceted approach, with the aim to target as many people as possible with advertisements for goods and services. However, such broad approaches to online marketing do often have their drawbacks, with a huge costs and low click rates being some of the biggest ones. Broad marketing campaigns usually do not do a great job at targeting specific custom audiences with the highest chance of being interested in what is being advertised. However, if you really want to create brand awareness, sell a service, or move a product, targeting custom audiences is exactly what you need to do. This is especially true when it comes to being efficient with your marketing dollars. Today we are here to talk about marketing with Facebook Ads and Google Adwords in relation to custom audiences.

Facebook Ads Custom Audiences

Facebook “target audiences” is a pretty neat tool to use when it comes to advertising your goods and services on Facebook. To be clear, Facebook custom audiences do not consist of new customers which you do not have yet. This is not like marketing to a whole group of people which you have never seen or met. These custom audiences are audiences which you can create from a list of already existing customers or followers of your Facebook page, your website, contacts, and your products being sold on Facebook. The real aim of these custom audiences is for you to be able to market specific goods or services to specific groups of people which already follow your page, brand, or who have already bought things from you previously.

Using Facebook Ads in combination with custom audiences is definitely a great way to engage in online social media marketing. Heck, there are over 1.5 billion regular users of Facebook, so it only makes sense to market your products on this huge social media platform. However, like we said before, a broad marketing campaign is not that ideal because your advertisements might inadvertently target people who have zero interest in you or your products. It ends up being a monumental waste of money, paying for ads which most of the broad audience won’t even look at. This is where custom audiences come into play. All you need to do is use the Facebook Ads manager to create a custom audience list from your pre-existing contacts.

There are actually different kinds of custom audiences that you can target with your advertisements. These custom audiences include the following.

• You can create a customer list or standard custom audiences where you upload customer emails, phone numbers, and Facebook user IDs.
• You can create website custom audiences where you target Facebook users who visited a specific page on your website.
• You can create custom audiences based on people who have used a specific app or service of yours.

What is really neat is that you can then create lookalike audiences, which is a type of audience that Facebook will create for you. This type of audience will include people with similar ages, styles, gender, interests, and so on as the people who are already in specific custom audiences of yours. In other words, these broader custom audiences are people who are not yet your customers, but have similar characteristics to already existing ones, thus increasing the chances of them buying your goods or services. Facebook will find these people based on your already existing custom audiences and their similarities to those people.

This is a really effective and efficient way to market your products and services to people. What is also pretty neat is that you can then use an automated marketing and customer retention tools to send emails, newsletters, and other such things to people in your Facebook custom audience. It’s a really good customer retention tool to use in combination with Facebook custom audiences.

Google Adwords Customer Match

Now, to be perfectly clear, this so called Google Adwords “customer match” is more or less the same feature as Facebook custom audiences, but with a different name and location. Customer match is designed to help you reach and target your highest valued customers on platforms like Google Search, YouTube, Gmail, and other online entities that are a part of or related to Google. It is very similar to custom audiences in the sense that you upload a list of customer data, whether from a website, YouTube channel, and eCommerce site, or other such things, which will then be your customer match list, AKA your custom audience.

In fact, Google’s customer match was a response to Facebook’s custom audiences. Google saw how good this going for Facebook and decided to create a so called custom audience feature of its own, and simply renamed in customer match. You create your custom audience or customer match audience, as Google calls it, which will then be the targets for your advertisements. Once again, online advertising, whether on YouTube, Gmail, Google Search, and other such things, is very expensive, so being able to target pre-existing customers is a big deal. Customers who bought something from you the first time around are way more likely to buy goods or services from you the second time, much more so than people who have never bought a good or service from you.

Whether people are searching, looking at displayed search results, on YouTube, or in their email, when people look up or are known to have an interest in a certain product of yours, your advertisements will be displayed or sent to them thanks to this customer match application.

Google Customer Match vs Facebook Custom Audience

Google does have an advantage over Facebook here because the combined services of Search, Display, YouTube, and Gmail together have a far higher amount of users than Facebook. Therefore, using Google customer match allows you to reach a far higher amount of people than Facebook allows for. This is even truer when you consider that Google also has something called “similar audiences”, which is just like Facebook’s lookalike audiences.

Google’s similar audiences feature has the ability to larger lists of people than Facebook, but there is also a drawback. Facebook is much more in tune with the age, gender, likes, dislikes, and other characteristics of the people on your list, as well as potential people for the lookalike lists. In other words, Facebook does a much better job here at creating lookalike custom audience lists where the people have a lot in common with each other, thus increasing the chances of people being interested in your advertisement.

Google’s similar audiences may be able to put together huge lists, but they lack a large and concise pool of customer data in terms of their defining characteristics and likes. Therefore, Google’s “similar lists” may not actually be all that similar to the Google customer match lists which you have created.

Below is a great illustration which captures the intricacies and everything you must consider when choosing between Facebook’s custom audiences and Google’s customer match.

Conclusion

The bottom line is that both Google and Facebook have developed great ways for you to target specific audiences based on pre-existing customer lists and contact details you have. Both customer match and custom audiences are great tools you can use to narrow the scope of a specific marketing campaign or even for a single advertisement. These tools can help you target already existing customers or visitors with the highest chances of being interested in what you are offering. The big takeaway here is that both are good ways to engage in online marketing with existing platforms while allowing you to save a whole lot of money.

Author’s Bio: Gerardo Hyde is a marketer and writer with 8 more years of experience in analytics customer marketing and SEO. His passion for powerful technologies is what always keeps his writing up-to-date. He currently works for StackTome, an advanced customer retention tool.

Article Contributed by Tim Eunice 

You’ve got that big trade show coming up, and it’s a must-win for your business.

Everybody who’s anybody will be there: clients, prospects, and (of course) Brand X, hoping to woo away all the business before you get a chance.

You have to stand out!  You have to “win” the trade show.

After all, it’s a once-a-year opportunity.  Fumble it now, and it’s a long wait until next year.

You probably know that the businesses with the best trade-show displays get the most traffic… and that means they have the greatest opportunity to grow their business and create new relationships with the most sought-after customers.

How is your trade show display?  Is it time to trade up, to get a better response at this year’s show?

Have You Considered These Cool Options? 

You’ll have a table, and maybe some “swag” to hand out, and (hopefully) a nice brochure or two to describe your business’ unique offerings.

What about these display choices?

• A table-top “throw.”  You could have any image, from a logo to a photo to a business card, reproduced by a quality large-format printer onto fabric or vinyl to throw on top of that table and catch the eye of passers-by.

• A retractable banner or two.  Whether it springs up from a floor or table-top stand, or hangs from your display, a retractable banner can really make a statement.  And there’s a wide variety of materials, including nearly-transparent stuff Brand X never heard of.

• An impressive island.  Remember those super-cool “island” displays you’ve seen at previous shows?  Creating something like that can be more affordable than you might think.
• Lights and TVs.  Nothing grabs attention faster than a unique lighting display, and nothing sells your message with more impact than a sharp video playing on the screen at your display.  If you’ve invested in video marketing, you’d be wise to take it with you to the show.

These are just some of the things people are using these days to win their trade shows.

Believe it or not, your large-format printer is probably on the leading edge of these options… and if he doesn’t provide all these solutions, he likely knows who does.

Choose A Display That’s Easy To Work With 

The best trade show displays are light in weight, but pack a heavyweight marketing punch.

When you’re choosing your display, make sure you get something that’s easy to pack, easy to ship, and easy to set up.  Nothing’s more frustrating than finding out there’s some little part missing, or some other reason you can’t use your new trade show display to its full potential.

The whole rig needs to be relatively easy to take down, too.  You don’t want to miss your flight because your trade show display is too hard to break down and pack for its own flight!

Again, your printer will be able to point you in the direction of a trade show display that’s going to be easy to work with, in addition to supremely effective.

Make those guys at Brand X green with envy.  Trade up to a great trade show display.  If your display gets you the most traffic at the show for the lowest investment, well, there’s a word for people like you: “winner!”

This is a guest post by Tim Eunice the owner of The Visual Edge Signs & Designs Inc

At first glance, it may seem easy enough to make a sale to a prospective customer. After all, you have something that they need or want, and you expect them to, therefore, make a purchase. You may think that you simply need to create a marketing campaign that shows off your product’s key features.

However, before you begin marketing for your business, you need to analyze the buying process for your specific target audience in greater detail. When you understand their specific motivation for considering your product and adjust your marketing efforts accordingly, you can expect great results.

The Buying Process

To build an effective marketing campaign, you need to highlight your product’s selling points and features. However, you also need to be aware of the consumer’s needs and desires. There are five stages of the decision-making process that most buyers will go through.

• Problem Recognition: The consumer determines that he or she has a specific problem that your product could help them with.
• Information Search: The consumer spends time learning as much as possible about your product to determine if it is an effective solution.
• Evaluation of Alternatives: Many consumers will not make a hasty buying decision without comparing your product against at least a couple of the alternatives.
• The Purchase: When the consumer makes a buying decision, he or she will usually act on it rather quickly. However, some will delay this step because they are waiting for a better price or are unsure about specific features or other factors related to your product.
• Post-Purchase Behavior: Consumers typically will analyze the product after they have used it for at least a short period of time. By doing so, a decision about how effective the product is will be made.

Deciding to Buy

There are two main types of buying decisions: short-term and long-term decisions. Both of these decision-making strategies depend on what you’re selling. Learning more about them and adapting them to the product or service you’re offering can help you attract more customers.

Short-term Decisions

A short-term decision is usually associated with smaller and often cheaper items. These are either impulse purchases or routine purchases.

• Impulse Purchase: Impulse purchases are usually for cheaper or smaller items, such as buying a candy bar at the checkout stand at the grocery store. Little or no thought is given to the purchase.

Even though impulse purchases mostly take place in store, you can tempt the customers to buy impulsively online, as well. For example, if you sell clothes, you can offer accessories that go well with the chosen outfit. The trick is to create a very straightforward and streamlined shopping experience. After all, if they have to jump through hoops to make the purchase, the urge to impulsively buy may be gone.

• Routine Purchase: There are many products that consumers buy regularly without thinking about them. These may be essential items, such as toothpaste or toilet paper, or they could be their favorite foods. In many cases, these are products that the consumer has used in the past and has had great experiences with and they stay loyal to the brand.

However, if your product is new, you can’t rely on loyalty: you first need to attract your competition’s customer. In order to do that, you once again need to understand the target audience, so you can approach marketing in different ways. For example, you can ask customers to review your product online and share the positive experiences on your social media profiles. People are more likely to buy something that others have tested and liked. You can also offer coupons or discounts to encourage an initial purchase. Once a customer tries your product, they may decide to continue using it.

Long-Term Decisions

If you offer more expensive products, like electronics or cars, or if you’re in the real estate industry, you shouldn’t expect your customers to make quick decisions. They may spend weeks or even months analyzing the market and exploring alternatives before making a purchase.

Long-term decisions are usually based on products that could potentially impact a person’s budget or lifestyle. Part of the research process includes reading reviews, looking at consumer ratings and even asking friends for recommendations.

Some consumers need a financial incentive to get off the fence and to make a buying decision. For example, they may need a great discount for a new TV. On the other hand, real estate agents will have more success if they research the demographics of their target audience.

For instance, if you want to attract millennials, you should be aware that they may have limited budgets in comparison to older real estate buyers. The millennial generation may also prefer homes that have more modern features or finishes, electronic or automated features and more. Remember that, for them, the visual factor plays a great role in the decision-making process: the house you’re showing needs to be well-decorated, from the inside as well as the outside.

To Conclude…

As you can see, regardless of what you are selling, effective marketing is about more than just highlighting your products’ features and benefits. Consumer behavior should also be a focal point when crafting a new marketing campaign. When you understand consumer behavior, you can more effectively craft an excellent marketing campaign that produces amazing results.

About the Author:

Jasmine Williams covers the good and the bad of today’s business and marketing. She was rummaging through her grandma’s clothes before it was cool and she’s usually hunched over a book or dancing in the kitchen, trying hard to maintain rhythm, but delivering some fine cooking (her family says so). Tweet her @JazzyWilliams88