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Showing posts with label Advertising. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Advertising. Show all posts

Friday, September 17, 2021

How to Improve Your Small Business Website Design

A Small business owner working out of a computer with "Branding Sign" on the screen, iPad, beverage cup and a smartphone on the work table.
If you want your business website to excel, it must have a design that feeds your website user experience, functionality and appropriately complements your content. This encompasses its fast loading speed, easy accessibility, aesthetics, layout and easy navigation. Professional webmasters can help you design a business website if you are unable to do it yourself to meet these standards. A high-performing content on a well-designed website helps to guarantee exceptional user experience. For this reason, no matter how awesome your content is, it risks getting unnoticed on the web if it lacks a good design, layout, and navigation.

Here are a few things you can pay good attention to if you want to improve on your website design for better performance.

Make a Plan

If you resolve to improve your website design, you must have identified issues with it you plan to resolve. First is to sit back and create a plan detailing how you’re going to deal with these issues. Many of these issues have to do with how customers relate with and interact with your website. Map your customer journey on your website and put plans in place to improve the pages they are viewing, time they spend on the site, content they prefer to read and what offers they’re going to convert on. This is the knowledge you need to help you decide who really your customers are and how you can sell them.

Organize Your Website Navigation

How easy it is for customers to navigate your website hugely helps its conversion efficiency. Essentially, great landing page, site maps and internal links help customers to quickly access what they are looking for on your website. They help users to easily dive deeper into very important areas of the site like what your business is about, your services/products, blog content, pricing, promos, discounts, etc. You can greatly enhance the navigation of your website by avoiding poor design practices, such as overloading your navigation with vague or confusing hypertext. These together with lack of proper organization can greatly hamper your website visitors from easily finding where they want to go and what they want. To enhance customers user experience on your website, you must pay good attention to how easy it to navigate the site.

Make Your CTA Conspicuous

Your call-to-action CTA buttons must be conspicuous on your website to ensure no visitor fails to notice them. CTAs help to guide your visitors to places on your website that will help them convert. What exactly are these conspicuous places? Marketing experts recommend the first column of your navigation, which is one of the most popular places for CTAs to be put. You can position these CTAs to link to a free guide where visitors can learn more under sections needing action and at the bottom of your website pages. That can be great for conversions.

Showcase Product Reviews

Customers experience with products helps others to make their buy decisions. That experience comes by way of product reviews which you can showcase on your website and around the products you are selling. Most buyers gain more confidence by merely looking at these reviews. If they see a product which others say it does what it promises to do, it prompts buyers to buy it. How marketers showcase reviews depends on the products they are marketing and the versatility of their business websites. It could be in form of texts or videos even though video testimonials are generally more effective because of their captivating visual content. Naturally, media tends to hold users’ attention longer and establishes a stronger human connection because people hear voices and see real people’s faces real time.



Don’t Ignore Sitemaps

Sitemaps on a website help its navigation and generally enhance user experience. It is these maps that display the main places that users can visit and to dive deeper into areas where your products and prices are displayed. The aim is to help direct new and returning customers to key areas of your website where they can convert. What really matters therefore is to improve your website with sitemaps in such a way that with just one click, users can easily access these key and important places in your website where they can do business with you.

Optimize the Website for Mobile Devices

As at today, you risk losing out from a huge percentage of web traffic if your website is not optimized for mobile. A good way around that is to make sure your site performs well on mobile devices and larger displays because from Google reports, about 80% of web users now access the web from mobile devices like smartphones. As a marketer, that is one huge chunk of traffic you cannot afford lose out of. Many more people are now doing business online any and everywhere and on the go. Their main gadgets of choice are smartphones.

Minimize Browsing Distractions

Browsing distractions as the name implies are time-wasting for web users. Therefore, on your website, you must do away with any elements that can distract users. Some of such elements are complicated animations, overly long content and chunky/gaudy website images/gifs. The attention span of most web users is notoriously short. So, what you want your visitors to see should be easily visible to them short of unhelpful distractions. All you want is to avoid anything that creates distraction or visual confusion for users trying to convert. If you are not getting conversions, your business struggles.

Make Product Prices Easy to Find

This is inevitable because it is products you want to sell anyway. If buyers cannot access your products and their prices easily, they quit your site and look elsewhere. If buyers spend quality time finding your products and they are required to spend more time looking for the prices, you risk losing such buyers to your competition. Online shoppers are notoriously hasty as most marketers very well know. To avoid frustrating buyers and risk losing them to your completion, be sure your products and their prices are easy for them to find on your website.

Use the Right Stock Images

When choosing stock images to use, strive to avoid the cheesy and poorly lit stock photos that are common on the internet. Buyers are very smart people and many are everywhere online. Many recognize cheap and common stock photos when they see them. Some of such photos that are well choreographed with fake and exaggerated smiles won’t help your business. They affect the credibility of your business if many other websites feature the same images. Users subconsciously project their negative experiences onto these stock photos, reducing confidence and adding friction to the conversion process. If convenient, try to use original photos on your website. You don’t need too much expertise to do this. These days, even smartphones can give you good photos you can use on your website.

Wednesday, February 17, 2021

3 Practical Ways Digital Marketing Can Help With Advertising to Attract Local People

Lone digital marketer in work station with a computer, a white mug of beverage, some cookies and a mobile phone.
Recent Google reports indicate that over 90% of its users regularly search for local businesses. Now that is quite awesome and a very huge volume of search information.  Smart digital marketers cannot afford to ignore that vital information. The reason is simple. With the growth of the internet coupled with changes in consumer behavior, most consumers now habitually search for products online to find out where nearest to them they can find such products. Digital marketers quickly latch in on that to refocus their advertising to local consumers. They tend to do better business when they deliberately target local people, who are geographically around them. Deliberately targeting ads at such people becomes hugely rewarding business-wise.



Here are three ways small businesses can target local consumers with advertising.

01. Take Active Part in Community Events

Every local business inevitably draws patronage from local consumers. So, anything they do with and in the community usually benefits the businesses in the short and long term. Local businesses need to support their communities because they are part of the communities.  Being active in community service is good for business, as most small businesses very well know. Helping and giving back to your community usually secures very valuable ads mileage for many businesses. You can sponsor community service events for your community and your business benefits even if you did not expect to sell anything from the sponsorship. The community naturally gives back to you by patronizing your business.

02. Advertise with Local Targeting

People now search online for businesses near them first before they look elsewhere. Optimizing your website for local searches helps to target local consumers. However, if you rely only on organic engagement, it is difficult to reach a large number of people at the same time. That is why it is imperative to combine direct advertising with local online marketing for best results. For this reason, you must endeavor to be active in both social media and search engine advertising to promote your business locally. That is better enhanced if you focus on and target the community you are known and the language the community speaks to help create familiarity and ease of doing business.

03. Build a Loyalty Program

As experienced digital marketers very well know, digital advertising is not only to gain new customers. It is much more. You can do better business with returning customers than new ones. So, it is smart for business to always explore viable ways to retain current customers. That is where customer loyalty programs become very handy. When you remember customers, they in turn remember you. If you are loyal to them, they reciprocate by being loyal to you. Discount coupons, promos, outright gifts, buy-two-and-get-one-free rewards to returning customers help to cement customer loyalty.  A loyal customer is not only good for further repeat purchases; he is also a reliable brand ambassador and a most dependable word-of-mouth advertiser for your business.

Thursday, May 21, 2020

Effective Facebook Ads Placement Strategies

Red social media marketing poster with a red background.
With over 2.5 billion regular users, Facebook has become a real delight for digital advertisers. It is now some kind of advertising goldmine for some marketers. Even though many marketers are now advertising on Facebook, not many are getting the desired results because of faulty strategies in the main. To be successful with Facebook Ads, all you need is to deploy strategies that can help you to get the most out of the huge advertising opportunity the platform offers. If you know what you are doing and with a little bit of efforts working with strategies that are very essential to good ads placement, you can get very good results advertising on Facebook.



The first thing to understand about ads placement is that Facebook segregates its ads into three categories. These categories are in, Social, Organic and Targeted ads. What Facebook does if you are advertising on the platform is to try to match the products/services you are advertising with specific audiences in these categories. That is like taking your ads directly to where they are likely to be well received. Doing so somehow guarantees some effectiveness for the ads. To get the best out of this arrangement, you must find a way to improve on your Website’s Ads Page to take advantage of these elements.

Facebook has in-house tools to effectively track your ads performance. If your website Landing Page is well optimized for your ads, you can easily track the performance of the ads on Facebook through its User Profile Page or Facebook Analytics which help to analyze for you, a full-scale report on the performance of all of your ads on the platform. The information you get from there helps you to accurately evaluate where you are and to see if your ads may need some rejigging or outright changes for better performance.

If you settle for the audience you want to target with your ads, you can then implement the specific campaigns from the specific ads that you put on your website. By the time the ads start to run, you can set up the Conversion Tracking Module on the platform. It is through this module you can effectively measure the effectiveness of the ads you are running.

By using the Opt-In Functionality of the in-house software which Facebook provides, you can easily get your potential customers/customers to sign up for your mailing list. That list helps you to maintain direct contacts with them with a view to regularly sending them necessary information, promos and ads messages relevant to your business.

Your website must have a Content Page to run your ads from. That is what Facebook prefers for its ads to be effective. The use of a Content Page is to run an ad which concisely and summarily explains what your business is all about and what precisely your product/service does or can do. Without this ads page, Facebook may not send you more than five ads per day, if it sends at all. So, by having your own Content Page, you will increase your chances of getting more relevant traffic. A Content Page allows you to add more value to your users and they tend to reciprocate with more organic traffic to your website.



Facebook also uses Audience and Targeting information to direct ads. Thus, by filling out the Audience and Targeting fields you are required to fill out with your data; Facebook can then place ads on your pages to get good results. Facebook also has the capacity to analyze your customer list with a view to creating appropriate ads which resonate with your most popular audiences. Also, Ad Groups can be customized and typically sorted out according to your interests, demographics, and experience level. In addition, your ads can also be classified based on how much you want to pay and how many people are in the Ad Group. Facebook has all these capabilities and deploys them to make your ads more effective.

Facebook has capacity for Audience and Targeting which it can use to help you in placing your ads. This is a grouping of the individual customers that are showing interest in your ads. These groups can be anything from a small niche group of friends, to someone who is interested in your particular industry. This information is handy to direct specific ads to these groups individually.

Expert digital marketers say, if you are getting your Facebook Ads placed correctly, then you are making the most of your advertising strategy on the platform. What that means is that, your initial investment on ads will be low when compared to the Returns on your Investment ROI, which will be huge. The real rewards for your ads efforts will manifest in the form of increased traffic, better click-through-rates, more leads, more conversions, and ultimately higher profits.


Sunday, November 10, 2019

Effective Digital Marketing Strategies for Newbies

Digital marketing work table with working tools, a marketing manual, pens, potted plant and white sheets of paper.
These days, many more people are taking to digital marketing as new entrepreneurs on the block. Most of such persons are genuinely desirous of becoming successful in digital marketing as a viable business enterprise. Some plan on becoming good digital marketers with a view to attaining financial freedom through creative freedom of entrepreneurship. But, many don’t know how or where to start. My advice to such people is, just pay attention to this article. As a newbie, it can help you out to develop your own marketing strategies which you need to grow your own business. 


 

Here now is some more information for you. In this age and times, if you want to run a successful business, marketing experts strongly advise that you must devise potent ways to up your digital game. The reason digital marketing is on right now. Some credible Research Results suggest that about 72% of marketers now believe that traditional marketing is no longer sufficient and that digital marketing has been proven to be capable of raising business revenues by up to 30%. Given that doing business online is daily increasing in leaps and bounds, any new business must explore ways to step online big time if they want to remain relevant in their chosen fields. If you are a newbie and you want to see your business prosper, you must embrace the latest trends in digital marketing. Online is the best place to find customers these days, and with the right strategies, it is the best place to market to them. That’s where the real action is at the moment and digital marketing is on.

As a newbie, here are some tested and effective strategies you too can apply to grow your own business.

Build a Functional Website

In any online business, owning a functional website/blog is a given. Without one, you cannot even be in the game talk less of competing effectively. If you do not have the technical knowhow to build a website, you can get professionals to build you one for a small fee. A functional website ensures that it is not only showcasing your expertise but also helps to provide solutions for potential clients/customers. It must incorporate tools that help to accurately gather data particularly as they relate to inbound traffic, demographic details and details of sales and leads. It must be mobile responsive to boot.

Use Email Marketing

As a newbie, it helps a great to create personalized campaigns of your own and to send them out in thousands. That’s where email marketing comes in very handy. First, you must build an email list which contains the names and emails of people you are interested in marketing to. With a good list, one message blast gets across to thousands of persons in a matter of seconds. It is very cheap and has about the highest ROI among different marketing channels. That must be good for your advertising budget no doubt. With effective email marketing campaigns, your business can build brand awareness fairly smoothly. Email marketing is also very effective at helping to drive very relevant traffic back to your website.

Market on Social Media

These days, nearly everyone is on social media, ranging from Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn and the rest. The huge patronage of social media makes it a very fertile marketing ground for all manner of potential customers. One of the most vital aspects of social media is that it can be used to strengthen your customer base to enhance repeat sales. It is also very good for brand awareness, getting out latest news and information about products/services and alerting customers about breaking news. Social media also makes it easy for a two-way communication between the business and potential customers/customers.

Engage in Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a business relationship involving Merchants, Affiliates and Buyers. Affiliates help merchants to promote their products to buyers and they earn commissions from their efforts. It is one great marketing strategy which allows Merchants to let Affiliates handle promotions for them. They only pay commissions to the affiliates from the sales proceeds when sales are made as a direct result of the promotional efforts of such affiliates. Such commissions are paid on the basis of pre-determined percentages. If your business is small scale or even a start-up and it has little or no resources to invest in advertising, it can benefit from affiliate marketing.



 

Optimize your Website

If you want to prevent your website from being crowded out easily online, you must take steps to optimize it for Search Engines. Search Engine Optimization, SEO, is a technical gimmick webmasters use to place certain keywords on your website/blog to make it search engine friendly. That way, the engines get to rank the site high in their search results thereby directing organic traffic to the site. Because of this technicality, it is just not enough to build a website with an impressive design and layout. The site must be sufficiently optimized to attract organic traffic. Out there online, the competition is always very stiff among millions of other websites.  So, if your website is not optimized for search engines, it will not come up high in search results when your target audience searches for it. If it does not come up high, that means less organic traffic to it. The higher it is ranked, the more visible it becomes. Your website must have enough visibility online to attract the much needed organic traffic. A good SEO ensures its high ranking and consequent high inbound traffic.

Wednesday, October 09, 2019

How Facebook's Policy Changes Impacts Digital Marketing Strategy

Red social media marketing banner over a red background.
The only constant in life is change. As the internet evolves, changes become inevitable particularly in online digital marketing strategies. This is most especially on social media advertising particularly on Facebook, readily the most popular of them all. No doubt, Facebook advertising has become a real potent force to reckon with in digital marketing strategies across a range of industries around the world. Many digital marketers now prefer Facebook for showcasing and advertising their products/services as well as for routine sales and branding efforts. Facebook ads have become the second most powerful digital advertising medium on the Internet, second only to Google and slightly ahead of Amazon. With over 2 billion monthly active users, Facebook is readily the right platform of choice for digital marketers to use in their online advertising. Inspite of that, Facebook advertising regularly undergoes fundamental modifications in response to exigencies in the advertising market and outcomes of judicial events particularly in the United States. Some of such judicial events derive directly from human rights and discrimination. At the moment, there are US laws which strictly prohibit housing discrimination based on color, race, religion, gender, national origin, family status, and disability. Facebook has responded appropriately.

In a normal course of business, Facebook is compelled to enact significant restrictions to its digital advertising platform. What that means is that Facebook has evolved with some restrictions on how advertisers may reach their target audience with paid posts relating to housing, employment, and credit opportunities. Somehow, these changes drastically alter how multifamily communities can filter prospects within Facebook’s digital advertising sphere. Some of such changes include the elimination of a filtering option that once allowed the targeting of Facebook users by “multicultural affinity.” That is, no more user activity which even remotely suggests any interest in any specific racial communities. In addition, Facebook platform now forbids advertisers from targeting their messages using age, gender, and even ZIP code filters.

Because effective digital marketing strategy does not start and end with only compliant Facebook ads, many digital marketers now work to prioritize branding and customer service over paid advertising. They no longer rely upon sponsored posts alone to solely drive conversions. No doubt, as the World Wide Web becomes increasingly regulated, Facebook characteristically has effected many changes on its platform. As a direct consequence, Facebook now gives more attention to the once-neglected sector of housing. Online communities are now forced to familiarize themselves with the changes taking place within all digital spaces. Doing so enables them to continue to effectively market their properties online. As a digital marketer, you stand to get the best results when you learn to adjust your advertising campaigns as quickly as Facebook makes necessary changes as regards to what is acceptable on its platform. This generally engenders more and fiercer competition amongst Facebook advertisers who now tend to focus much more on branding with new tools on housing that help to place apartment communities exactly where they can easily benefit from searching apartment renters and or buyers. 



Friday, August 09, 2019

How Internet Marketing is a Boom for Small Businesses

Dollar notes floating out of a lone computer screen.
Most small businesses always operate on very tight budgets particularly for advertising. On that score, digital marketing comes in very handy to help them out. With a phenomenal boom in the use of the internet and increasing digital marketing techniques, many small businesses now find space to compete favorably. Some can now compete even with well-established and high profile businesses. Many thanks to digital marketing!

Here are some of the foremost benefits of digital marketing for small businesses.

Most easily measurable form of marketing


This is done through digital tracking with Google analytics tools. With these tools, you can easily track the success of your digital marketing campaigns. Such tracking is practically impossible in cases of the traditional strategies like newspaper ads, TV, radio and others. With digital tracking, it is easy to know which ad is working well and which isn’t. That is the information which enables swift marketing decision making and to make amends as desired.

Enhances easy targeting of ideal customers


With well-directed SEO techniques, small businesses can attract and reach customers who are on the web searching for content and topics related to their businesses 24/7.  With digital analytics information at your disposal, you can take marketing decisions on the basis of demographic and general characteristics of the products/services you are selling. Without any significant increase in your marketing budget, you can literally reach millions of potential customers online without having to dissipate too much effort in the process.

Very powerful form of marketing


Digital marketing enhances easy and seamless reach of millions of potential customers with measurable and targeted results. Small businesses can reach and engage a huge number of customers much more than traditional marketing methods. The real reason why the end results are much better as well!

Most cost-effective way of marketing


Depending on how good you are on the internet, you can advertise to millions of people out there at no cost at all. There are many free ads sites on the web you can easily take advantage of to reach a very large audience. With social media sites, many small businesses have an added benefit of reaching millions of potential customers even on zero ads budget.

Ease of Shopping, Buying and Selling


Because of ease and convenience of transactions, many more first time buyers now prefer buying stuffs online. Many thanks to internet marketing which has enhanced that great advantage for small businesses! Habitually, most shoppers now first search online for the products/services they intend to buy. The internet is where people easily turn to now in search for the answers to their questions and the solution to their problems. The versatility of internet marketing makes it a great place for all shoppers and a boom for many small businesses.  


Friday, June 07, 2019

4 Creative Marketing Campaign Ideas to Promote Your Business

Digital marketing sign projected from the screen of a black computer.
Periodically, good marketers create marketing plans for their businesses. These plans they incorporate into their overall marketing strategies. Many do roll over and fine tune the strategies they’ve discovered over time really work for them. Even though marketers may all be doing the same things, those who get the best results tend to do many of these things differently. That is the trick. In the ever-changing digital world, it’s more important than ever to update your marketing strategy at least yearly, failing which your competitors can easily take advantage of your laxity. It is that serious. 


 

Here are some very potent marketing tactics many experts recommend to promote your business.

#1. Be Active on Social Media

Social media now appears to be the most popular marketing platform on the web. It is here with us all and has come to stay. If you want to put your business out there in front of millions of potential customers, just get it on social media. Be sure it is active on some of the most popular platforms like Pinterest, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Being active on social media makes the business more transparent and accessible to people who are most likely to do business with you. People generally like a business that is easily accessible and easy to interact with. Social media guarantees these as well as being a very good platform for advertising the business.

#2. Create Attention Grabbing Business Marketing Tools

Irrespective of whether you are advertising online/offline, it is still very important to use physical marketing tools, such as flyers and brochures designed in such a way as to easily grab attention. Flyers, business cards and brochures can be professionally produced and handed out conveniently in large numbers at gatherings of potential customers. When used online, these materials are best deployed at locations on the sites where they catch attention easily.

#3. Write Quality Blog Content

Do you write a blog? Trite question! There is hardly any marketer who doesn’t write a blog these days. If you do, be sure to write quality content and regularly too! In the blogging world, content remains king. If you aren’t writing blog content for your website yet, I have a bit of bad news for you. You’re way behind your competition. No good marketer likes that. Blog content is what improves your site’s SEO and drives people to your website. That means traffic which translates to sales as bottom line.

#4. Deploy Video Marketing

Video marketing is a way of visual content marketing which is about the most effective traffic-attracting idea currently online. It is becoming increasingly popular and essential for many small businesses online. Many marketers are now choosing video over text more and more because of its effectiveness at capturing people’s attention fairly easily. For best results from visual content marketing, you can put together a webinar for your cyber-audience. In addition, you can create how-to videos for your products/services or you can even choose to open a YouTube channel for your videos.



Thursday, March 28, 2019

Advertising by Word of Mouth

A marketing strategy happy customer white on black sign post.
 Advertising by word of mouth may sound old fashioned but it is still very potent, efficient and effective. There is research evidence supporting the fact that at 21 years of age, the average young person already knows at least 800 people very closely. The numbers can be staggering when you factor in that most of these people will be youths who each also knows other 800 people very closely. Just get out a word into such a group and you will be amazed how far and how fast such word will travel within the loose network. That is the power of word of mouth particularly in advertising. 


 

Unarguably, one of the most viable alternatives to the traditional established media outlets, that is, television, radio, newspapers and others for disseminating information is word of mouth. This is because word of mouth retains the capacity to spread information cheaply to a huge number of people in a short period of time. Before the advent of modern media outlets like newspapers, radio, television, or even the Internet, word of mouth was the only viable way to spread information effectively and efficiently to a very large audience within a short period of time. It is still that effective even at the moment.

Word of mouth is cheap, effective and it comes very naturally to most humans. Over the ages, human beings have relied more upon word of mouth to convey and preserve information than any other form of propagation. It simply comes naturally for most people. Because modern media outlets exist to make a profit for their owners, they have no choice but to charge for advertising. This at times amounts to very huge costs which most marketers can ill afford. Keeping down costs is one smart way marketers rely on to increase their profits. The main reason why word of mouth is still around with us and still helping us out in our daily lives and businesses!

If you are in business, there is no doubt you’ve heard someone say: “pass the word on fella!” That is word of mouth in information propagation. Marketers have since found out that it is historically true that for news to spread by word of mouth, it must be newsworthy. “Have you heard?” is one common phrase everyday people use everywhere they interact with themselves and others. Traditionally, the human being is a social animal and it is part of his life to habitually interact with others. That is what helps to spread word of mouth information cheaply, quickly and very widely. If you’ve ever been the subject and the butt of gossip, you’ll get to appreciate what I am driving at. The newsworthiness of any event directly controls how fast and how far it is spread. Good news or bad news, people always want to hear it particularly when it is coming from people they know and routinely interact with. That helps the spread more than any other form of pecuniary considerations including financial.


Monday, December 24, 2018

Marketing Strategies Every Small Business Needs

Marketing strategy graphics in work station with a mobile phone, eye glasses, pen and tapes.
The first major challenge everyone faces as a small business owner is competition. That gets stiffer by the day. So, if you want your own business to survive, you must always have your thinking cap on. Resolve to think strategically at all times. These here strategies are not one-size-fits-all strategies. You must look at yourself and your business very well to decide what will work for you and what won’t. Here are some of the best marketing strategies that can help you get your business in the right direction now and the years ahead.

If you’ve been around for a while, you may have deployed one, two or more of these here strategies to promote your small business in the past. Exact same strategies that have proven useful to many others around the world! Here's a list of a few proven strategies that are right now helping businesses across the world:

Building an email marketing funnel
Speaking at, sponsoring and or hosting events/seminars/webinars
Offering free business consultations
Traditional media advertising
Advertising on social media, particularly Twitter, Instagram and Facebook
Adding your business profiles on directories such as Google My Business
Investing in content marketing
Writing a column/articles factually, consistently and continuously

More hands-on strategies:

Write about your products/services: You may not know how to write a blog but not to worry. At least you are literate enough to write something. You may not need to worry about blog writing skills if you are literate enough to write something readable. Just write stories and articles about your products and or services and how they help your customers. Even if your platform is social media, so long as you are consistent and factual, you can build a reputation for your brand online and patronage naturally follows.

Create online visibility for your business: What that means is to be sure your business is visible and accessible online 24/7. To be able to do so, you must create your profiles across all available social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and others. You must keep your contact details updated there so that people can drop a message anytime of the day. That is one great way to generate very valuable leads.

Maintain email contact with your customers: You can build a reliable email list from your online visibility. Thereafter, you can regularly send emails to your existing customers and also to potential customers you are targeting. This is one very useful way to promote your content, improve sales and nurture existing leads for the future.

Using word of mouth promo: A satisfied customer is a very big asset to your business. You should encourage your customers to speak about your business to others. You must therefore strive more to satisfy customers than turning a profit. Businesses that enjoy good customer satisfaction not only benefit from good customer retention, they also benefit from good word of mouth promos and customer testimonials on your website and even on social media platforms. The better and more the reviews your business gets, the more customers it continues to attract.  


Wednesday, June 28, 2017

How to Get the Most Out of Your Marketing Efforts

Internet marketing graphics.

Putting your business out there to get customers is almost always a very challenging undertaking. You need real marketing skills and resources to get the job done. Sadly, small businesses do not always have the benefit of big budgets for advertising. As such, they must explore ways to balance creativity and efficiency to make their marketing efforts effective. These here tips can be of help to you if you want to get the most out of your marketing efforts.



Create Your Own Productivity Strategy
 
You can always be a step ahead your competitors if you can create your own inimitable productivity strategy. This is because productivity isn’t a one-size-fits-all thing. What works for one business isn’t necessarily going to work for another. So, you have to create your own productivity strategy which works exclusively for your business.

Turn Your Customers into Advocates
 
Finding customers is one skill, turning them into advocates for your business is another. Your marketing efforts can always go a lot further if you’re able to get customers and followers to do some of the work for you. Satisfied customers are willing and highly effective tools in these efforts. 

Use Data/Statistics to Influence Reluctant Buyers
 
What really counts in most marketing efforts is what easily convinces by way of verifiable data and statistics. When you’re trying to convince potential buyers to do business with you, you can create complicated marketing campaigns using correct data/statistics to back up your claims. 

Sharpen and Hone Your Writing Skills
 
Today, most business owners are using content marketing by way of blogging to get their businesses noticed. If you use a blog for your business, it’s in your best interest to make that blog reach as many potential customers as possible. That is straightforward enough. If however you want your blog or any other form of written content marketing to be effective, you need to constantly work on improving your writing skills to get out your message simply and without ambiguity. That requires some good writing skills.

Build a High Performance Content Marketing Team
 
Efficient and effective marketing is usually done by well-trained and dedicated content marketing teams. Your content marketing team can actually make or break your marketing campaigns. That is the reason why the team must be very good. Somehow, if you can build a high performance content marketing team, it can easily take your business to the next level with team efforts.



Constantly Improve the Motivation of Your Workforce
 
All businesses revolve around people and for people. What they do and or neglect to do readily impact the fortunes of any business. Significantly, your employees can have a major impact on the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns and other areas of your business’s operations. Keeping them well motivated readily guarantees that effectiveness. Somehow, if you can keep your workforce sufficiently motivated, they help improve your chances of being successful.

Tuesday, February 21, 2017

Real Challenges to Success in SFI Business

Internet work station with a computer, notepad and pen.

From my own experience, my greatest challenge to success in SFI business was MARKETING my business. Because I was unable to market my business effectively, I faced very tough challenges in selling products at Tripleclicks and even recruiting PSAs. I found out to my chagrin that because I could not recruit real active PSAs to grow my downline, succeeding in SFI became a real challenge. This challenge was exacerbated because: 


 

- I was too shy to talk to people.
- I was not very good in Internet marketing.
- I could not advertise my business effectively.
- My budget was very low for advertising.
- I was not learning very fast.
- I was not very optimistic.
- I was not even enthusiastic.
- I thought I was not smart enough for this kind of business.
- I did not believe in the usefulness of advertising my business.

How did I overcome these challenges? I sat down and thought long and hard. You know, I even considered quitting the business at some point. My saving grace was that I turned to fellow affiliates including my upline for help. That is what changed my thinking. That is when I discovered that all these factors which hitherto inhibited me from marketing my business effectively can be overcome by deliberate efforts. These efforts include reading/learning the business thoroughly, following the rules and using the tools provided to grow your business. Your upline, your sponsors and your a2a friends can also help you out to find a way to market your business effectively. From my experience in SFI, fellow affiliates willingly give to other affiliates free tips to market their business. This is aside from the free tips SFI Admin makes available to all affiliates on very regular basis. I have over time found these tips/opportunities to be very useful and have actually been using them. My business has been on the upswing ever since.