5 Tips on How to Maximize Social-Media Efforts With a Small Team

No matter how small your business is, a good, strong social media strategy should be a vital part of your marketing efforts. An October 2015 study by Pew Research Center found that 65 percent of American adults surveyed use social networking sites, which means that if your business doesn’t have a presence there, you’re missing out on two-thirds of the U.S. population.

With dozens of social avenues to choose from, though, social media management may seem overwhelming, especially for a small business. Below are some tools and tips to effectively manage social media for your business, no matter how lean your team is.

1. DEVISE A MANAGEABLE STRATEGY.

Before diving in and signing up for every channel with a social aspect, get organized and be realistic about your capabilities, looking at the following categories:

• Hours per week available for social media management: This will set expectations about what you should prioritize and how many channels you should manage. Critical tasks that should be taken into account for effective social media management include:
• Design: This includes not only signing up for and populating your page with the essential elements but working with a designer to optimize graphics for aspects such as profile banners, profile pictures, and images for shared content.
• Content creation: This includes strategizing and writing posts, as well as working across multiple departments to publicize promotions.
• Content-engagement monitoring and interaction with followers: If your brand experiences negative sentiment online, or you anticipate customer service needs through these channels, allot time accordingly. To keep customers engaged, your social media manager should also be responding to comments and answering questions.
• Analytics: Monitoring of analytics, which includes sales, followers, engagement and sentiment, is imperative to refine content strategy and adjust social media management tactics for your business.
• Determining your target audience: If your product is built for businesses, look at professional sites such as LinkedIn to focus on. If you’re a storefront, establishing a presence on Google+ is essential to ensure you are search-engine-friendly. Facebook is the behemoth social media mainstay, so it should be on your list of must-have social channels.
• Determining your message: Besides increased sales, what do you want to achieve with your social media presence? Do you want your channels to act as an additional form of customer support? Do you want to distribute engaging content in hopes of its getting shared? Do you want to make new connections with leaders in your industry? Deciding on your goals will shape the messages of your channels, which should be unique to each outlet’s specific audience. As a fellowEntrepreneur writer mentioned, posting the same content repeatedly leaves followers less engaged.

2. USE TOOLS TO SAVE YOU TIME.

Now that you have a strategy in place and know what social media channels you’ll use, what type of messaging you want to disseminate and how you’re going to monitor your successes and areas for improvement, you’ll next need to put your approach into action. Thankfully, social media monitoring tools save you time as you’re managing channels and evolving a strategy.

3. USE FREE ANALYTICS PROVIDED BY EACH CHANNEL.

Often, social media in-house analytics tools provided by social media channels, such as those outlined by Social Media Examiner, are some of the most effective ways to keep track of data. Facebook Analytics, for example, shows page managers everything from the number of visitors at varying times of the day to data on how many people carried out a negative action — such as unliking a page — when interacting with a specific post.

Pinterest analytics show you the type of content your users love the most, while Twitter shows you not only yours and customers’ top Tweets but impressions and engagement. Google Analytics will show you what channels are driving traffic to your website and resulting in sales. Explore the free analytics of whatever sites you’re using, and use those insights to craft better content and optimize frequency of distribution.

4. USE FREE TOOLS TO MANAGE MULTIPLE CHANNELS.

While you can use software such as Excel to keep track of messaging and ensure you’re creating unique content for each channel, a multi-channel management application can display multiple feeds at once, saving you the pain of logging into myriad sites and clicking multiple windows.

Free social media multi-channel management services, such as those endorsed by the experts here, include Hootsuite and Buffer; and pull networks, such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+, which can go into one easy-to-read window. Some, like Hootsuite, will even display additional data besides your channel content, such as interactions with your business from other brands.

5. MAKE SOCIAL MEDIA PROGRESS EASILY SHAREABLE WITH YOUR TEAM.

Since social media is, well, social, you’ll want to make your strategy transparent to your team. This will not only garner you insight and suggestions from the social media users who make up your company but will incentivize them to get involved and boost your engagement by participating on your social channels.

Free project management tools such as Trello and Slack, mentioned by Social Media Today, allow you to display tasks to your team, while also allowing for global discussion.

Social media may be free, but your time is highly valuable. Continue to refine and optimize your social media strategy to maximize results, while saving your business money by taking advantage of free applications.

 Source : http://bit.ly/2dEu6VS

5 Things to Think About Before Creating a Marketing Plan

 

Setting a marketing budget before defining a marketing plan is like putting the cart before the horse. Although there are plenty of online resources that can help you get a general idea of how much your marketing budget should be (depending on the number of years your startup exists, the industry in which it operates, etc.), preparing a marketing roadmap should come first.

Your marketing budget may change during the budget year, but to make it feasible, it should be built together with a plan that fits the goals of the company and one you could work with on a daily / weekly / monthly basis.

Before creating a detailed marketing plan including budget allocation to the various channels, deadlines, owner and more, there are 5 things to consider:

1. Audience

Startups are agile, and the answer to the question “who is your target audience” may change over the lifetime of the start-up. However, when you initiate your marketing efforts and build a plan and budget, there must be a clear answer to this question. For example, is your product an innovative a/b testing widget aimed at marketing executives in Fortune 500 companies? Is it an app targeted at teenagers ages 12-17 who live in English-speaking countries? Generic marketing targeting e-v-e-r-y-o-n-e (or “anyone who would want to buy the product”) is bad marketing. Even if you want to target multiple audiences, you must define them and often will need to narrow the list of audiences down, depending on your available capital and human resources.

Some would choose to build a persona (or persons) of the potential audience, to better understand who the potential client is and which pain they have that your product can solve. There are several excellent guides online to help build a persona and a free Persona builder by Xtensio.

2. Objectives

Once you defined who your target audience is, set your goals for the period of the marketing plan. One goal, for example, can be positioning yourself as an expert in the industry (thought leadership). This can be done by guest columns written by the founder/CEO in relevant blogs (for example, Bessemer Partners mapped Israeli cyber security startups for TechCrunch to position themselves as experienced investors in this industry). Another goal can be increasing sales. This may lead to focusing your budget on paid advertising.

A goal can also be recruiting new employees, and for that you may want to reach out to tech blogs who cover cool office spaces like this article in Fortune. There are additional goals you can have, and the answer to the question what are your goals could be “all of the above.” But, in order to prepare an effective and executable marketing plan, I recommend prioritizing these goals.

3. Marketing Channels

After you set your audience and goals, the next question is where can you find the audience. Going back to the example of targeting marketing execs in Fortune 500 companies, the chance of them reading an article mentioning your company at AdAge or AdWeek is higher than them reading such an article on Mashable. If you target the 12-17 age group, are they on Facebook, or like all of us, moved to Snapchat? Try to understand where your target audience spends most of its time online. Often, the chances of finding good and targeted leads will be higher in niche industry blogs. I worked with a company that targeted c-level executives in the hospitality business. The best leads we got was from an article on a small blog, but one that all c-levels in this industry are subscribed to. Sometimes, being featured in a large publication is a matter of ego more than ROI.

4. Team

While building the marketing plan, ask yourself if there is currently someone on the team that will be able to carry the plan out. If not, is there a need (and budget) to hire a full-time marketing person? If you have an existing team, do you need to hire more people or would outsourcing services like Fiverr and UpWork make do? There are opinions supporting and opposing hiring freelancers, but from my experience, it depends on the person. You can hire an employee with zero dedication and a contractor who gives 120 percent into the project.

5. Budget

This point is derived from the four points above. Only when you set your target audience, objectives, optimal marketing channels and structure of the team will you be able to better understand what budget is needed. The marketing budget should be consistent with the growth to which you aspire. If you decide on a fixed monthly marketing budget throughout the year, it will be difficult to expect that it will support a growth. Start with a realistic budget – both in terms of available resources and also you in terms of your goals (it’s difficult to demand a 10 percent MoM growth with a fixed monthly marketing budget of $1,000). Consider long-term and short-term factors. For example, investing in content and SEO is a long term investment (Google will kill any tricks you try ;-)). In contrast, a PR campaign can and should be limited in time, so you can allocate only a few months out of the budget to it. If you decide to work with a PR agency, you can limit the work to 3-4 months. In addition, as the company’s general budget may vary due to external factors (drop in revenues, declining recruitment, etc.), the marketing budget will vary too, and that should be taken into account as well.

  Source : http://bit.ly/2bYpD2m

How to Prepare Your First Round of Startup Funding

The majority of startups need some financing to get them off the ground. They need an injection of capital to get them over those first major hurdles. But getting ready for the first round of financing isn’t easy because you have more competition than ever before. Every industry is experiencing an uptick. For example, the payments industry saw corporate investment increase by 335 percent.

This guide is going to introduce you to some of the tips you need to follow in order to prepare your startup for funding.

Get Your Business Plan Ready

 Your business plan is the first thing investors will see. It will also be the primary marker they use to make a judgment call on you. Your business plan shouldn’t just stick to how you think your company is going to be successful. It should go into the big market risks facing you and the likelihood of you overcoming them.

The key to nailing your business plan down is to be honest in your evaluations. The majority of investments are rejected by investors because they don’t buy into overly optimistic predictions.

Be sure to have a section on exit opportunities. Not all investors will want to be in this for the long haul and they will want to know how easy it is for them to get their money back.

Perform a Financial Audit

Investors are going to want to know exactly what you intend to do with the money. Examine the financial needs of your company and identify where additional funding is needed. This serves two purposes. First of all, you are able to clearly tell investors what you will do with their money. And you’ll ensure that you won’t be wasting any money.

There are many potential options open to you and you won’t be able to utilize them all. Weigh up the pros and cons of each option. Put a tentative plan in place so you have the potential for change later on.

Do Your Homework on Investors

It’s amazing how many startups don’t spend time considering who they are going to approach. Just because an investor specializes in small business doesn’t mean that they are right for you. You are not just looking for an investor you are looking for someone who can take your company to the next level.

A startup with no outside help has a high chance of failure whether it happens to have a thousand dollars or a million dollars.

Be Smart in Approaching Investors

All investors want something different. Some are conservative and want to see guaranteed returns with a range of security measures in place to protect against loss due to banking and investment fraud. Others may want to take a punt, but they only want to take a punt on tech startups.

As you can see, winning over investors requires a different strategy every time. Don’t waste valuable time and effort by approaching the wrong people. Too many people have spent months seeking investment only to come back with nothing because they approached people who wouldn’t have had any interest in them in the first place.

When Will You Need More Investment?

The time to start thinking about when you are going to need more investment is now. Your startup should be prepared for both this round of financing and any future rounds of funding. You should attempt to look as far into the future as possible when preparing your startup for investment.

One important consideration is whether you are willing to give away any equity. Startups can either take on investments in the form of a loan or they can provide a share in their company in exchange for the money. Both options come with their own pitfalls and it’s vital that you weigh them up with a clear head.

Investment Is Not a Silver Bullet

Startups are often seen as a way of making more money than with a degree. They are seen as your ticket to a better future, assuming you can secure the investment you need. But the reality is that investment is no silver bullet and it will never provide you with a guarantee of success.

It’s not uncommon to see startups take a lot of money and throw it right up the wall because they don’t know what to do with it. The right team behind a startup with a solid business plan in place will always secure better results.

Investors know this and that’s why it’s often seen as so difficult to actually get first round financing. Come in prepared and make sure which startup funding tactic is the best option for you.

 Source: http://bit.ly/1q1Tj1C

Free Marketing tips.

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

7 Budget-Friendly Marketing Tips for Early-Stage Startups

Marketing a startup is not for the meek. There are several challenges to success, and the time, money and resources needed to implement them are often scarce in the early stages. This means it’s crucial to plan ahead and reduce the possibility of making a costly mistake.

As an entrepreneur, you always want to make the best use of your resources. Devising and implementing innovative marketing ideas will set you apart from your competitors and draw more customers to you.

Here are seven low-cost tips to help new startups market themselves effectively.

1. Understand Your Target Audience

As a new startup, it’s extremely important to figure out exactly who your target audience is. Only then can you design your marketing strategy to appeal to the people who will readily pay for your product or service. Think about who is most likely to need, want, or otherwise be interested in what you offer. Based on the answer, you can determine who your target audience should be. Some further tips:

Instead of thinking about who you’d like to sell to, think about who is looking for the kind of products or services you offer. Ask yourself how your offerings can solve their problems. Study your market, competitors, and leads and prospects that you’ve identified. Create customer personas, which should serve as in-depth descriptions of your potential customers’ psychographic and demographic data. You can then tailor your marketing to the specific needs of these personas.

Don’t stop after you’ve identified your audience. Keep the work going to stay on top of current trends in your industry. Create a way to track your sales, networking, customer service, requests for information, etc. so you can continually focus on improvement.

2. Build Strategic Partnerships

It’s easy for startups to get lost in the crowd and go unnoticed. More than 386,400 are founded in the U.S. every year. But by building strategic partnerships with other well-known companies in your field, you can maximize your presence and market your startup more effectively.

One type of partnership involves syndicating your content on other websites, as well as collaborating with relevant sites to create compelling content. To start doing this, identify companies that have users you want to reach, and that could benefit from working with you.

Partnerships have played a key part in helping us build our brand. We’ve developed relationships with popular news and auto websites and work with them frequently to create original, data-driven content that benefits their readers and gives our company more exposure.

3. Share Your Expertise for Free

You’re an expert in your field, so it’s time to share that knowledge with others in a helpful way: a free seminar, webinar, blog, guest post, or even a series of tweets.

One of the ways our company does this is by analyzing millions of data points and discovering interesting, surprising insights about cars. We publish these studies to share what we’ve learned with other people who are interested in cars. This has significantly helped elevate our company’s exposure – more than 100 media outlets, including publications, TV programs, and radio stations have covered our studies!

4. Listen to and Engage Your Social Media Followers

Social media can be used for a lot more than just “advertising” your startup. In addition to communicating with your audience, your social media pages can be used to provide value and genuinely connect with them. Make an effort to find and share useful information to engage your customers. Make them feel like valuable members of your brand’s community. We use our data and content to answer questions and help social media users whenever we think we can add value. If you run into critics, don’t be hostile. Approach complaints with positivity and use them as an opportunity to showcase your startup’s commitment to customer-service and expertise, and you’re sure to win your critics over!

5. Add Value Through Email Marketing

Email marketing is not the same as spamming your customers’ inbox. Joke a side, when used properly to help and provide value to users, email marketing can work wonders for promoting your startup.

Successful email marketing campaigns have a well-planned schedule so that people will know when to expect your emails and can look forward to updates from you. The trick to keeping this going is to focus on your target audience when deciding on the emails’ theme, template and content to ensure what you send them will be helpful.

Our company uses emails to make the process of looking for a car more efficient. Users can sign up for alerts, and we email them whenever we have newly-listed cars that match what they’re looking for. Users who sign up for our alerts are two to three times more likely to contact the sellers of cars on our site than non-alert users.

6. Network, Network and Network Some More

One of the biggest factors contributing to the successful marketing of any startup is networking. Knowing the right people in your industry can put you on the path to success. So be sure to carry your business card with you and be ready with your elevator pitch at all times.

Actively seeking out opportunities to talk about your startup will go a long way in building awareness. Conferences and networking events are great places to connect with key influencers, spread the word about what you’re doing, and learn more about your industry.

7. Start Using Video Today

YouTube has over a billion visitors every month. Facebook users watch 8 billion videos a day. You don’t have to have access to Hollywood producers to create a shareable online video. Look at the audio and visual resources you have, and think about what type of video would be helpful and informative to your audience. Can you make a professional, informative video sitting in your office? With some trial and error, probably yes. There are plenty of free slideshows and video editing software that will help.

Last Words

For a new startup, marketing can feel like a challenging game that’s difficult to master. Using these seven tips will help jump start your marketing efforts with little to no strain on your company’s budget. You’ll have the basics such as social media and networking covered, and your startup will stand out for its focus on providing real value for customers, followers and other industry professionals.

Source : http://bit.ly/1jm1AcZ

50 Best Startup Tools & Resources For 2016

Whether you’re thinking about launching a business in 2016 or you’re already working on growing one, you probably recognize and understand the importance and value of tools. The fact is, you can’t do it all on your own—no matter how savvy you think you might be or actually are. In order to build or grow a startup in 2016, you need to invest in tools that can help you optimize, automate, and improve every working part of your business—from sales and marketing, to employees and customers.

But here’s the problem: there are a TON of tools out there (and more being introduced everyday). So how do you know which ones to choose? How do you know which ones are a waste of time and which ones can actually help you grow your business and reach your goals?

It’s not easy, but we put a list together in an effort to make it a little more manageable. In this post, we’re listing the 50 best startup tools and resources that you should consider using in 2016. You might not need all of them at the same time, but we’re guessing at least a handful of these would be beneficial for you to look into, no matter what stage of development or growth you’re in.

We’ve categorized the tools into 10 main categories: marketing, sales, data, customer support, project management, productivity, back-office, social, employees, and learning.

Take a look at our list of the 50 best startup tools and resources that will help you grow your startup in 2016:

Marketing Tools

These top marketing tools will help you grow your startup in 2016:

1.  SumoMe – For capturing and nurturing website leads, boosting traffic, and increasing brand awareness.
2.  Kissmetrics – For increasing website conversions, tracking analytics, and personalizing experiences.
3.  Adwords – For spreading the word about your business on Google through advertising.
4.  Optimizely – For running A/B tests that help you optimize your website and influence interactions.
5.  Content Marketer – For promoting your blog content, connecting with influencers, building relationships, and increasing traffic.

Sales Tools

These top sales tools will help you grow your startup in 2016:

1.  Drip – For sending trigger-based and educational-based email campaigns.
2.  Close.io – For automating the tedious tasks associated with closing deals.
3.  Yesware – For automating and scheduling email communication.
4.  AppDataRoom – For designing sales presentations that can be used on-the-go.
5.  ToutApp – For automating and scaling your lead nurturing & sales processes.

Data/Analytics Tools

These top data/analytics tools will help you grow your startup in 2016:

1.  Google Analytics – For tracking web traffic and goals and for optimizing experiences.
2.  Maptive – For quickly data interpretation and action upon complex location-based data.
3.  Moz – For optimizing SEO, word-of-mouth, and brand awareness.
4.  Chartio – For organizing and understanding business intelligence data.
5. Social Analytics

Customer Support Tools

These top customer support tools will help you grow your startup in 2016:

1.  Groove – For helping and interacting with customers.
2.  HelpScout – For nurturing and improving relationships with customers.
3.  Zendesk – For building a help center and providing live chat.
4.  Intercom – For automating and optimizing prospect interaction and customer support.
5.  Help.com – For customer support and lead management.

*Note: these 5 tools are very similar—but they are all great options if you’re looking for building or scaling customer support! Each offers something a little different. Spend time exploring all five and pick the one that you think will align best with your business and goals.

Project Management Tools

These top project management tools will help you grow your startup in 2016:

1.  Basecamp – For project management and communication across multiple teams and departments.
2.  Asana – For project management and communication within your company or department.
3.  Trello – For personal project management or smaller team-based project management.
4.  Evernote – For personal project management.
5.  Voxer – For team communication.

Productivity Tools

These top productivity tools will help you grow your startup in 2016:

1.  RescueTime – For tracking your time, eliminating distractions, and optimizing your daily productivity.
2.  AnyDo – For building personal and professional task lists.
3.  Toggl – For tracking time and optimizing productivity across your team.
4.  Google Drive – For sharing documents, collaborating with team members, and working from anywhere.
5.  Pocket – For saving helpful resources and reading them at a later time.

Back-Office Tools

These top back-office tools will help you grow your startup in 2016:

1.  Zenefits – For managing all your HR needs in the cloud (payroll, benefits, compliance).
2.  BambooHR – For centralizing employee information and managing your team.
3.  Gusto (formerly ZenPayroll) – For all your payroll, compliance, and benefits needs.
4.  Xero – For your accounting needs.
5.  Square – For accepting payments from anywhere and managing your team.

Social Tools

These top social tools will help you grow your startup in 2016:

1. Buffer – For scheduling your social media updates.
2.  Buzzsumo – For curating top-performing content.
3.  Canva – For designing graphics for social media, blog posts, and your website.
4.  Flare – For increasing social shares and engagement.
5.  Narrow – For building a targeted following on Twitter.

Employee Tools

These top employee management tools will help you grow your startup in 2016:

1.  Slack – For communicating with your team and departments.
2.  TinyPulse – For keeping a pulse on employee happiness and loyalty.
3.  AnyPerk – For showing employee appreciation and praise.
4.  When I Work – For building employee schedules and communicating with your team.
5.  Jazz – For hiring and onboarding your employees.

Learning Tools

These top learning tools will help you grow your startup in 2016:

1.  Coursera – For helping your employees grow in their careers.
2.  Udemy – For mastering a particular subject before hiring someone else to do it.
3.  edX – For learning more about your industry.
4.  Clarity – For mentoring and coaching.
5.  YouTube – For entertainment and miscellaneous education.

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Source : http://bit.ly/1jecZva