Did you know ?

Quote of the day.

10 Ways to Update Your Online Marketing Efforts

Marketing methods for small businesses are constantly changing. You need to be able to keep up with customers who are using technology that’s always evolving.

To update your online marketing efforts, take a look at the following tips from members of the online small business community.

Use These Tips for a Great Social Media Marketing Campaign

Social media marketing is more complicated than just posting the occasional Tweet or Facebook photo. If you’re going to use social media marketing campaigns as part of your online marketing strategy, take a look at these tips from Anita Campbell on the SBA blog.

Write Headlines That Catch Fire

Headlines are often the first impression that potential customers have of your online content. To make them as catchy as possible, you can learn from the songwriting techniques outlined in this post by Merrill Shane Jones on the Copyblock Creative Blog.

Use Blogging More Effectively

Whether you want to do it as a career or use it as a promotional method, blogging presents multiple upsides for your business. To learn how to be a professional blogger, take a look at this post and checklist by Ginny Dwyer on Modgility. Then see what BizSugar members are saying about the post.

Use These Best Practices for Pinterest A/B Testing

In order to get the most benefit out of Pinterest, you need to learn the best practices that will work for your business. That means you need to do some testing. This Blogworthy post by Sara Tetzloff includes some best practices for A/B testing on Pinterest.

Optimize for Ecommerce Sales with Information Bias

When selling online, it’s important to give customers enough information to make a decision. But more isn’t always better, as Jeremy Smith explains in this post on the JeremySaid blog. You can learn more in the post about how to optimize your selling strategy by using information bias.

Analyze Your LinkedIn Data

As the business social network du jour, LinkedIn can be a great place for you to connect with other professionals and potential clients or collaborators. The platform also lets you access data about who views and interacts with your profile. To learn how to best utilize that data, take a look at this post by Nancy A. Shenker on the Bad Girl, Good Business blog.

Follow These Social Media Do’s and Don’ts

When it comes to social media, there are some practices that can be beneficial for businesses and others that can be detrimental. For help deciphering between the two, check out this Dyer News post by Jonathan Dyer. Then you can read thediscussion on BizSugar.

Use Mobile Marketing to Reach Millennials

Millennials love their technology. If your business is one that you want to appeal to millennials, then you should probably be utilizing some form of mobile marketing in order to get your brand in front of your target customers. This post by Kristina Waters on the Candybox Marketing blog includes an infographic with some facts and statistics about millennials and technology.

Learn How to Promote a Podcast

If you’ve decided to take the leap into podcasting for your business, then you need to learn how to promote your podcast so that it gets heard by as many people as possible. This post by Lyndsay Phillips includes some tips for promoting podcasts online.

Make Sure Your Landing Page Forms Don’t Ask for Too Much

Landing pages can be a great way to catch the attention of potential customers and collect leads. But if you try to make them do too much, it can be detrimental to your business, as Elisa Silverman explains in this PageWiz post. 

Source: http://bit.ly/1oj75LT

Be curious

More about me go to : www.patrick-osinski.com

7 Ways You Can Power Your Mobile Marketing Strategy

Companies are investing in mobile and for good reason. The mobile marketing world has expanded rapidly, and it’s not slowing down. In recent years, mobile device usage has taken over desktop—and it’s becoming a preferred marketing platform for many.

Your brand’s marketing strategy needs to be up to date, and it deserves a good amount of planning to stay afloat. Below, we’ve rounded up the biggest, hottest trends sweeping the mobile marketing world. Take a look at them, and compare your current strategy with the industry’s greatest advancements:

Trend One: Smartphone Reliant Shopping

Sure, you might’ve heard of consumers using smartphones to browse the Internet. You might’ve even accommodated for “mobile-only” customers. Until you dedicate a significant portion of your marketing strategy to mobile web, however, your business will be behind. In 2015, 90 percent of smartphone-enabled shoppers compared prices, conducted purchased and left feedback via their devices. Beyond 2016, the smartphone will be a sole buying utility.

Trend Two: Mobile Payments

Mobile payments were slow to start, but they’ve definitely dominated modern shopping. In 2016, mobile pay will experience great adoption. In fact, the United States can expect a volume of $142 billion in mobile payments by 2019. Apple, Google and other providers are streamlining the smartphone’s security to enable in-depth payment options, and brands are generating secure apps to offer customer-centric deals.

Trend Three: SMS Polls

Where feedback is considered, text-based polling promises to be the business world’s newest “social feedback” option. This year has already birthed a plethora of poll-centric response options, and businesses are directly increasing product sales by way of integrative SMS polling. After 2016, leading industry gurus will adopt real-time, long-term polling campaigns to target market shifts before they happen.

Trend Four: Mobile Coupons

Digital offers are booming. Mobile coupons experienced great success in 2015, and they’re expected to achieve new heights in 2016. SMS-delivered coupons, currently, are 10 times as effective as their paper counterparts. Printed coupons are out, and texted coupons are in. Buyers beyond 2016 will only opt for digital turn-ins, reworking the way providers conduct business. 50 percent of consumers make direct purchases after obtaining a text-bound coupon, and, even more, are open to the idea of ongoing digital coupon offers.

Trend Five: In-App Advertisements

Experts agree that mobile apps will be the new frontier of mobile advertisement. In 2015, 79 percent of smartphone users engaged mobile apps daily. If you want to be a top-dog industry professional, you need to secure purchases and retain visitors via a mobile app.

Trend Six: Deep Linking for Mobile Web

SEO has finally hit its stride with smartphones. Google’s App Indexing has made online visibility important, and mobile user experiences have become reliant on contextual search. Emergent markets are reliant on Google App Indexing, and they’re crafting entire strategies around mobile web SEO. One of the best strategies is to outreach to writers in your niche to see if they would allow you to contribute your thought leadership essay on their blog. This strategy will boost ranking and referral traffic.

Both mobile websites and mobile apps are benefiting, as cross-channel accessibility between mobile websites and mobile apps is huge. To achieve maximum visibility in the modern age, companies must double down on indexing options.

Trend Seven: Mobile Video Marketing

A YouTube video, when distributed effectively, is an indispensable marketing resource. Facebook constantly hosts viral videos, engaging brand campaigns and interactive media. After 2016, this paradigm will take place primarily on mobile. Mobile video advertisement revenue is expected to reach 13 billion before the start of 2020.

As your strategy grows, it should be redirected to match the industry’s ever-expanding options. Smartphone technology grows quickly, and it won’t stop for business professionals to catch up. Double check your strategy, prepare for growth and ready your brand for the world’s newest, greatest innovations.

  Source : http://bit.ly/1R3MLGq

4 Content-Marketing Methods to Stay Above Your Competition

Promoting irrelevant content to your customer base is as useless as bringing a knife to a gunfight. The question is no longer whether targeted content is a competition worth entering, but how to bring home the gold.

With 86 percent of buyers “frequently” using mobile phones to access business-related content, it’s no wonder marketers and publishers are leaving their pay-per-click and display tactics in the closet and opting for the gold medal of all advertising methods: content marketing.

Here are some of the methods being used by winning companies:

1. Leveraging influencers

Influencer marketing is the force of nature shaking the online marketing world. There are two things to know when utilizing influencer-based marketing: it's expensive and it works. With that said, choosing the right influencer takes much more than a bit of YouTube browsing. Successful influencer marketing doesn’t end once a video goes live. It is important to follow up with comments and viewer queries across your channels, as well as the influencer’s.

2. Making it move

Digital storytelling should be as engaging and fluid as your content. Having a compelling user experience is exactly what your brand needs to draw your customer in and retain them. Content should be moving with your customer and enhancing their online customer journey. 

Interactive content is also a highly useful way for testing audiences’ online preferences, allowing for brands to elevate the content they curate. 

Recommended app: Apester allows brands to engage using personalized experiences such as quizzes and interactive content.

3. Creating for your customer

A surprising 61 percent of consumers are more likely to buy from a company that delivers personal content that is specific to their wants and needs, according to Custom Content Council. Being that content has such an impact on conversion and retention, having an awareness of trending topics and industry keywords is a great way of understanding what your customer is searching for online.

It’s crucial to remember that content should be targeted to your customer’s needs, not your own. While self promotion and PR are huge forces in marketing, giving information to your clients with no strings attached is the best way to organically reach your customer base and keep them for good. By knowing your customers' personas and breaking down their pain points, you can adapt your content to your target customer and create deeper connections.

At the same time, if you are truly creating content for your customer, it should never be a one-way street. Instead, your content should be a catalyst for a dialogue. To make your content genuinely useful, encourage your users to add their own insights. This not only enriches the content itself, but it also empowers them to become loyal users.

Recommended app: Popular sites such as EW.com use Spot.IM’s social sidebar to make such conversations easy and simple.

4. Letting the journey drive content

The competition for outstanding content begins with a keen understanding of the customer journey, so that your brand can improve it. By creating a road map for this epic, you can position your content to tell a consistent story -- one that individually addresses each action and motivation of your customer base. Much of the content story can be boiled down to smart planning and a well-devised content calendar.

Recommended app: This one I haven't tried yet, but searching through many blogs I've found DivvyHQ to be highly recommended. With it, you are able to plan and manage your calendar on one dashboard, allowing you to be ready for your customers' journeys. Remember that the customer journey isn't necessarily linear, but is constantly in flux.

Source : http://entm.ag/1Swsy0T

13 Social Media Resolutions to Try in 2016

  





1) Refresh your friends and followings. Give your newsfeeds a fresh start by letting go of your unnecessary or unhealthy online connections, and only follow the people you really care to get updates from.

2) Limit your Snapchat stories to 1 minute or less. Just because they removed the numbers in the timer, doesn't mean we won't realize your story is ridiculously long. Unless you're DJ Khaled.

3) Slow down with your posts during Fashion Week. Front row snapshots, show invitations, celebrity spottings—keeping up with your social media during Fashion Week is a job in itself. Post less, we all have enough blurry runway pics to scroll through on our Instagram feed.

4) Show some love to your LinkedIn. LinkedIn—the poor neglected child of your social media sites. Update your profile, accept those invitations that have been sitting in your inbox for months and add your latest work to your page—take advantage of the resource, you never know what kind of career connections you can make.

5) Try taking advantage of the "see less" Facebook feature if you're going through a breakup. Not ready to see your ex on social media? Hide their activity from your feed if it'll help heal those wounds. (Or better yet, just delete them).

6) If you're still in a relationship, keep it on the DL. We know you treasure the special moments you have with your significant other, but don't rub it in everyone's faces. Which, similarly, leads us to #7...

7) Your child is cute. We get it.

8) Take a break from the Facetune and other face-editing apps. Often when you use them, you get so sucked in that you forget what looks natural. Unless you've mastered a way to flawlessly cover your blemishes and add a light tan without it looking completely obvious—as it usually does—you're better off with #nofilter.

9) Think before you comment and argue. As we enter upon an election year, opinions will fire up more often and conversations will be all the more volatile. This doesn't mean you should stop sharing your beliefs, but just be wary of (and prepared for) what reactions the articles or statements you post will incite. Not everything has to be a political rant or a comment showdown—as entertaining as it is for your followers.

10) Chill with the online tests. Do you really need to know who secretly wants to marry you, or which characters from the cast of "Friends" you and your buddies are? (You're Rachel anyways, duh.) These are funny once or twice, but it's not something your followers want to see every day. In fact, each time you sign up for one of these tests, you give that website access to your friends list and personal info. That might not be something you want going around.

11) Put the "act" in activism. Changing your profile picture or cover photo is a great way to spread awareness about a cause. But this year, try challenging yourself to offer more than post. Maybe make a small donation to an associated charity or sign a related petition. That'll give a lot more meaning to the causes on your page.

12) Live in the moment. The new year has a lot in store for you—you won't want to miss out by being too glued to your screen.

13) If you're still using a selfie stick: it will only go downhill from here.

Source : http://bit.ly/1TznvKv

4 Steps to Identify Your Target Market

 If you are getting ready to launch a startup, or you are preparing to add a new product or service to your list of offerings, you must have a target customer profile mapped out and clearly defined. Unless you prefer sending your marketing dollars straight to the trashcan, of course.

A lot of startups fail – that’s not news. But, a lot of them fail because they did not define their target market and failed to learn the in and outs of it.

So if you don’t want to end up in the same boat, try applying these 4 steps.

Develop a Profile of People Who Will Purchase Your Product or Service

Begin with creating a simple list of the people who would want or need what you wish to sell the most. Once you have your list, you can begin dividing the people into categories. The categories you use will depend on a number of factors. For example:

• Are you B2B or B2C?
• Do you sell a luxury service, or something that is a necessity?
• You could divide by gender, geographic location, market (retailers, distributors, consumers, wholesalers), income, or any number of categories.

Once you have your categories, you can begin collecting data for each one. Are the people in a particular category married or unmarried? Do they have disposable income? What are their politics? Do they travel? If you don’t feel comfortable making these assumptions yourself, you could do a little market research by using surveys and polls to collect data. Ultimately, you should have a few different customer profiles.

Identify the Customer Profile Who Wants or Needs What You Sell The Most

Once you have your list of profiles you can sort them in priority order. Essentially, you want to identify the profile that is most likely to have the problem that your product or service solves, and is most likely to have the ability to purchase your product or service. Then categorize your other profiles in order after that.

“When considering who is most likely to have the problem your products or services can solve, don’t just think in terms of physical need. Stress, comfort, reputation, and vanity are also things you should consider as needs when identifying your target customer. Remember that luxury and entertainment products solve problems as well” – says Harsha Kiran, CEO of BargainFox.

Another thing to take into consideration is which customer profile has the most to lose if they do not find a solution to their problem. This is very important, because it can be used as a sales and marketing angle when you target that particular group.

Look at Your Customer Profiles and Determine Which Ones Aren’t Having Their Needs Met

Here is what you have identified so far. You know which customer profiles have the most to lose if they do not find a solution to their problem. You know which customer profiles are most likely to have the problem that you solve and also have the ability to buy your product. You also know their interests, values, hobbies, etc.. The next thing to determine is which customers aren’t being reached by your competition.

The best way to deal with competition is to avoid it altogether. This means identifying untapped markets, so you don’t have to fight for your space. Take a look at your competitors marketing efforts. Who are they going after in their ads? If they blog or are active on social media, who are their posts trying to connect with? What about their branding? Who is it designed to impress? If you see a customer profile on your list that is being largely ignored by your competition that could be your sweet spot.

Pick Your Primary Target Customer Profile

Ultimately, the group that you target with your marketing efforts should fall into as many of the following categories as possible:

• Most likely to have the problem that you solve;
• Able to afford your solution;
• Has the most to lose if they do not find a solution to their problem; and
• Not being targeted by your competition.

Once you’ve made this identification, you can use the information you have gathered to tailor your marketing to reach that audience.

Source :  http://bit.ly/1NdzJXd

7 Ways For Startups To Build A Strong Social Media Following

If you’re a startup, operating on a limited budget, it becomes essential to focus your marketing on low-budget marketing strategies that are proven to work. You need to make every penny count.

Social media is essential to any new startup’s marketing plan because it offers free and low cost ways to promote a new website. Social can work better than techniques like SEO to build traffic in the initial states of promoting a startup.

Here are seven ways that startups can build a strong following on social media.

1. Create buyer personas

Buyer personas are an inbound marketing strategy that help you hone in and focus on the right target audience. With a limited marketing budget, the last thing you want to do is to throw money away on marketing to an audience that is not interested in your products or services.

Creating a buyer persona will help you focus only on those people that are likely to purchase what you have to offer. When creating your buyer personas for potential customers, you need to list:

• Their job and demographic information
• What a day in their life looks like
• Their challenges or pain points
• Places where they access the information they want
• Their most common objections to making a purchase

Understanding all these aspects of your buyers will help you focus your marketing and content to appeal to the right buyers at every stage in the sales funnel.

For example, this is what a buyer persona might look like for a startup like BigBasket.com.

2. Create a responsive website

With a majority of internet users now accessing the web from their mobile devices, your startup website needs to have responsive web design and be easily accessible on all mobile devices.

Google’s “Mobilegeddon” update made having a mobile-friendly site a ranking factor in the Google search results. That means, if you hope to use SEO to get traffic to your website, your design needs to be responsive, so it adapts to any mobile device that it is viewed on.

The alternative is creating a mobile app, which is an expensive proposition for a startup, and not really necessary if your website is responsive. If you use WordPress to build your website, it is easy to download a free or low-cost theme to make your website mobile friendly.

3. Create a social presence on select channels

One of the biggest misconceptions startups have is that they need to build a presence on every social network. This only means you’ll spread yourself thin and remain unfocused in your marketing strategy.

While I would recommend creating an account on all social networks, just to make sure no one else takes charge of your brand name, you need to focus your efforts only on those networks that your buyer persona is spending the most time on.

For example, for the Busy Mom Persona above, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram might be the best networks to focus on because these are thenetworks most frequently accessed by women. The more focused your efforts, the mbore successful your social media marketing campaign will be.

4. Invest in social advertisements

The fastest way to build a strong following on a network like Facebook is with paid advertising. Facebook Like ads can grow your following, while Promoted post ads can boost engagement on your best content.

Facebook advertising is still relatively low-cost, especially if you’re advertising to an audience in India. For just a few rupees a click, you can grow your network to thousands of targeted fans and followers.

On Twitter and Pinterest, it is still easy to build a following without advertising. But if you’re in a hurry to grow your numbers and get your startup in front of more people, explore Twitters follower ads and Pinterest’s Promoted Pinsoptions.

Set aside a budget for social media advertising and you will be able to build a strong social media follower base in a much shorter time.

5. Start a blog and post regularly

While your social media profiles are your outreach posts, I highly recommend that you make your blog the hub of your social presence. Publishing a regular blog is great for SEO, and also provides you with original content to post on your social networks.

Make sure your blog is setup to capture leads and emails from blog subscribers. There’s no point sending traffic to your blog, if you’re not generating targeted leads that you can add to a follow-up email campaign.

Your blog is an essential component of your sales funnel, so invest some time and effort in publishing posts that target the challenges and pain points of your buyer personas.

Publish content in multiple formats, like video, infographics and PPT (Slideshare) to reach those customers who prefer consuming content in these formats. Spend some time learning how to make your content stand out from the clutter.

6. Invest in social customer service

Social customer service is such an important aspect of social media today, that it’s no longer an option whether you should invest in it or not.

On average, 40 percent of customers complaining on social media expect a response within an hour, and 32 percent expect a response within 30 minutes. It would be wise to hire a dedicated social media manager to answer queries immediately.

Social networks like Facebook have even introduced features that display how quickly customers can expect a response from their favorite pages. If you respond to 90% of messages and maintain a median response time of 5 minutes for all replies sent, your page will qualify for a “very responsive to messages” icon.

As a new startup, you can build an advantage over more established competitors if you show your fans that you are super responsive to their queries and concerns.

Facebook also allows Page admins to reply to comments left on their Page with private messages. This can help you respond to personal requests and handle customer-specific information more effectively.

Facebook’s “Saved Replies” feature gives you the ability to use canned messages when communicating with potential customers on your page. This can help you cut down on the time you spend responding to frequently asked questions.

On Twitter, response times have to be quick, or else customers are likely to complain and spread negativity about your brand. To learn how to create a social customer service program that gets results, read the 2015 Definitive Guide to Social Customer Service.

7. Hold contests and promotions

The best way for a new startup to build visibility and buzz on social media is with the help of contests and promotions. Offering free versions of your products, discounts, or prizes, can help you get a lot of new followers and fans in a short amount of time.

Spend some time coming up with a creative idea for your contest. Use videos to announce your contest, and upload your videos directly to Facebook, so you can benefit from the viral nature of Facebook shares.

Use social ads to advertise your contests and promotions to a targeted audience of buyers. Contests and promotions can create a lot of positive publicity and word of mouth for your brand on social media. 

Source : http://bit.ly/1m7mazL

6 Ideas to Expand Your Lead Scoring Model Beyond the Basics

Lead scoring is the backbone of many B2B marketing organizations, as they focus on better quality leads instead of just generating more leads. But like many things in marketing, even lead scoring is not a set it and forget activity. Once your lead scoring model is established by combining prospect identity and prospect engagement, look at some of the ideas below to increase its efficiency at identifying better quality leads. The more you understand about your prospects and which ones are likely to become customers, the more efficient both marketing and sales become.

1. Expanding Awareness Of Prospect Influences

As prospects receive more and more messages, information, and education through social media during the buying process, these peer channels will continue to grow in relevance. In fact, awareness of how an individual discovered a message, along with where and from whom, can feature prominently in lead scoring and nurturing routines.

2. Content-Based Scoring

Companies that regularly refine their scoring models begin to notice patterns in lead quality that can be directly tied to the content accessed during the buying process. Advanced organizations creates scoring models that include content type—ilike white papers, product information, and customer testimonials— instead of just the download activity itself.

3. Account-Level Scoring

Because companies market to individuals but sell to companies, marketers must identify micro-trends within a larger set of interests. Consider these trends to pinpoint when a certain role is appearing in the buying cycle.

4. Customer Scoring

To increase customer lifetime value, you need to seize opportunities for up selling and cross-selling. That means you must understand when someone is in the cycle for a new product, and determine when a prospect or existing customer has switched mid-stream and is interested in a different product. Smart marketers can analyze all customer touch points to identify opportunities and risk throughout the lifecycle.

5. Opportunity Scoring

Top marketers analyze behavior of a lead all the way through the middle of the pipeline to predict the likelihood of an opportunity closing.

6. Predicting Changes

Your lead scoring model needs to remain closely aligned to your sales and marketing processes, even as they evolve. With predictive modeling tools, you’ll be able to constantly monitor prospect behavior to understand how your model may have to change.

Source : http://bit.ly/1NxNmlq