10 Clever Marketing Tricks Using CRM, Link Building and More

Want to master online marketing? There’s so much that goes into creating an effective strategy. But members of our small business community have plenty of marketing knowledge to share. Read on for some of their top tips for taking your online marketing to the next level.

Solve These CRM Problems

Customer Relationship Management is a key part of communicating with customers online. But every CRM system presents its own challenges too. In this SBA post, Anita Campbell explains some of the biggest problems businesses might run into when implementing a CRM system and how to solve them.

Change Your Social Media Mindset

There are some common myths about social media that could be hurting your online marketing efforts. In this post on Strella Social Media, Rachel Strella details what some of these myths are and how to avoid them to make your social media strategies more effective. BizSugar members also share thoughts on the post on the community.

Use These Link Building Techniques to Push Traffic and Revenue

Link building isn’t just a cheap way to bring in customers via search anymore. It involves actually building relationships with other bloggers, businesses and site holders and then nurturing those relationships with visitors once they get to your site. Moosa Hemani of SETalks shares some link building tips here.

Generate Sales Through Social Media

Making sales doesn’t mean you have to have individual salespeople push your offerings onto different consumers. You can actually use social media to generate sales. Neil Patel outlines some tips for doing so in this post.

Pay Attention to Bounce Rate

Your website’s bounce rate is a stat that measures how quickly people leave your website after clicking on one  of your pages. To improve your website and this rate, you need to first understand what it is and why it’s important, as Mike Allton of the Social Media Hat details here. You can see further discussion about the post over on BizSugar.

Boost Your Ecommerce Sales With Email Marketing

Email marketing can let you communicate and form relationships with lots of different customers. Even if you have an eCommerce business, you can use email marketing to boost sales. This post by Vanhishikha Bhargava of Exit Bee includes tips for doing just that.

Create Interactive Content Your Audience Will Love

If you look at content marketing as just a way for you to share a specific message, you might not be getting as much out of it as you could. Instead, creating content that lets your audience interact with you can be more helpful for both your business and your audience, as James Pointon explains in this Right Mix Marketing post.

Master the Time Zones for International Marketing

Marketing a business online means having the potential to reach consumers all over the world. But if you want to actually reach those consumers when they are likely to act on your messages, you need to master the time zones. Bettina Specht provides some tips in this Litmus post. And the BizSugar community shares input too.

Learn From Abandoned Shopping Carts

Running an eCommerce business means providing a very specific type of customer service. You have to create a positive experience for customers on your site. So when they do things like abandoning their carts before completing a purchase, there’s usually something to be learned from that. This post by Leslie Simpson on Carts Guru includes some lessons you can learn from abandoned shopping carts.

Send the Most Relevant Emails to Recipients

Perspective customers on your email list don’t want to receive canned emails that look like they could have been sent to anyone. If you want to provide the best online experience for all of your customers, you need to know how to send only the most relevant emails to each of your customers. Scott Heimes explains more in this Marketing Land post.

 Source : http://bit.ly/2aK2HRt

How to Grow Your Startup Without a Budget

Here are 4 things you can do right now to grow your startup without a CMO or budget:

1. Use Free Resources to Spread the Word

There are some high-quality blogs and forums with a large and relevant audience that can be your content distributor and promote your startup. Popular blogs like ProductHunt, Betalist and startupli.st are ones that are being visited often by potential customers, tech industry members (including possible future investors or employees) and reporters. Promoting the launch of your startup in one of these blogs can generate massive traffic to your site and even spark interest in tech reporters who can, later on, cover your startup in large tech news outlets.

2. Reach Out to Bloggers and Reporters Yourself

Having a small or zero dollars marketing budget probably means you won’t be able to afford a good PR agency. Don’t be tempted to work with cheap agencies that can’t deliver (for reference, good PR agencies in the U.S charge somewhere between $5K-$10K/month), but rather do the outreach yourself. Whenever you are ready to spread the word about your company, prepare a pitch or a press release and send it to reporters who you know cover your field. Like anything in marketing, the best results are the targeted ones. Most media outlets publish their reporters’ emails, and there are some great templates you can use to draft a release. Before sending, do your homework on what a reporter is interested in. Influential reporters and bloggers receive hundreds of pitches a day, so the major part of your work is to plan and create a great pitch. To make sure it’s appealing and interesting, run it by your friends first to solicit feedback.

3. Use Your Personal Network

Not all marketing and growth has to do with SEO, conferences and buying media. Your personal network is valuable and can lead to even more valuable second and third-degree connections. Maintaining a strong personal network is important for any entrepreneur, as it can be tapped into from the brainstorming stage – advising with friends on aspects of the product, name, etc. – all the way through to the launch stage and future partnerships.

4. Use A/B Testing Methods to Increase Conversion

A/B testing is something that can really help you grow, without investing a lot of money. By using tools such as Optimizely and Unbounce, you can maximize the potential of users who are already visiting your site. A/B testing can be tricky if not done right, as you don’t want to be overwhelmed by numerous variables. Simplify the tests, and each time, check one variable or two. You will be surprised how a small change in the color of a button or the size of your header image can boost your conversion rate, sometimes by 20%-30% or even more.

Source: http://bit.ly/1UoWjNg

3 Ways to Strengthen Your Marketing Leadership

These days, marketers don’t just want a chair at the table—they want to lead the meeting. But no matter how smart and fast your marketing team is, it’s only one piece in a larger puzzle that runs your company.

Whether you’re part of an in-house team or a member of an agency brought on to assist, it’s your job as a marketer to ensure the rest of the business understands that marketing influences all areas of a company. Sales, services, development—they all need marketing to amplify or clarify their message.

For these reasons and more, we are now seeing the path to CEO begin in marketing. But before you can lead, you have to gain the respect of the company.

While your marketing metrics might seem obvious to you, no one cares what an MQL or SQL is. If you aren’t making it a priority to change the way your company perceives your marketing initiatives, you’re undermining your own success.1  Your entire company should be invested in the success of the overall marketing strategy. To accomplish this, they have to understand what you’re doing and how it impacts both the individual and the company as a whole.

That’s easier said than done, but here are three critical ways to change your company’s perception of marketing.

1. Be a Leader

Every company has annual, quarterly, and even monthly revenue goals that are agreed upon by the executive team at the beginning of your fiscal year. But is the rest of the company aware of these benchmarks?

When you spend all your time on content, email campaigns, webinars, and events, it can be easy to get tunnel vision. It’s important to ensure that you’re keeping the company focus where it belongs. Marketing can take center stage in making these goals visible.

Internally, marketing the progress of teams and tying them back to company vision is an area of marketing that’s been largely forgotten. The most successful teams don’t allow this to happen. If you can’t see the forest for the trees, you’ll get mired down in routine and lose sight of the “why.” This causes even the best organizations to lose their way. Let marketing be the beacon it’s meant to be, steering the giant ship to port.

2. Connect to the Individual

Allow everyone to understand how their role contributes to company goals.

You already know that your efforts create business interest, leads, and revenue. But depending on their background, the department managers and the company executives might not understand exactly how marketing drives the bottom line.

When you finish a webinar that results in an impressive lift in a pipeline, share that internally. Champion the sales associates who use your content most effectively, and demonstrate your content to show others in the department your value, too. Not everyone cares about infographics, email open rates, and marketing tech. Everyone cares about revenue. Showing the company how you’re making a difference on the bottom line is the ultimate way to get them on your side.

Beyond the one-to-one results of some marketing campaigns, the number one shortcoming of marketing departments is their failure to produce accurate attribution reporting. Marketing is an additive process and one that is mainly rooted in influence. Recognize this, and educate the rest of your company around this crucial fact.

After you’ve pollinated the idea, be sure to enforce it with accurate and frequent reporting. If you are only able to produce simple “lead”-based reports, you’ll fall victim to the “eBook fallacy.” Everyone knows a prospect downloading an eBook doesn’t close deals. It certainly does help, though. Attribution reporting will allow you to show this influence rather than undermining your metrics by trying to take credit for revenue with nothing but a download to show for it. 

3. Dwell on the Past

Be a steward of results, and remind every one of successful initiatives. Marketing is often the victim of ignorance. Simply put, sometimes the organization doesn’t know what you’re doing.

Don’t sell yourself short. When you have a record number of qualified leads coming in as a result of a new campaign, send around a note to the company celebrating your success. When a piece of educational content goes viral on social media, let everyone know. Call out by name the other departments who helped you, whether it’s Customer Success bringing in great customer stories or Accounting who helped you meet your budget goals on a big event. Put your successful campaigns up for an industry award, and name people outside the marketing department. Then, put the plaque you get for winning right above the coffee maker.

By championing the success of the company as a whole, the marketing team changes the perception, gets more allies within the business, and encourages more excitement towards future campaigns.

Marketers and the companies they represent have a symbiotic relationship: You need each other. By explaining your approach, stepping outside your comfort zone, and crediting others with some of your successes, marketing can go from weird artsy kid to class president in no time.

There’s no time like the present to make the changes outlined above. Marketing is still shedding the stigma that has plagued it for too long. The modern-day marketer is an ambassador of the brand, the poster child for duality. Analytical and yet creative, today’s marketers can’t be ashamed to highlight how rare it is to see their rare skill set in one, highly effective executive. If the path to CEO is the CMO title, the vigor with which marketers perpetuate their brand must also be applied to advertising their results internally.

 Source: http://bit.ly/ideasnews