Best Ways to Generate Leads for your Online Business

The need for leads generation in your online business is to boost sales even though the process can be a bit tricky. It is usually a step-by-step process that requires resource planning and investments that you must decide upon at every stage. For best results, you must be able to leverage as many online digital channels as possible to generate good leads. No matter the size of your online business, these here lead generation tactics can help your business to grow. If you follow these tips, they’ll help you to generate the right leads to grow your online business.

 

Optimize your Digital Presence

Optimizing your digital presence is a perfect way to maintain and grow the virtual presence of a business and attract leads to the business. This is one of the best ways to get leads to your business. Optimization is a technical way of using selected keywords on your content to attract the attention of search engines. Through this SEO effort, search engines particularly Google will rank your website higher in its SERPs. That means more organic traffic and consequently leads. Therefore, one of the best techniques to generate leads online is to keep up with ever-evolving Google Algorithms. This you can do by applying the latest SEO techniques to the content published on your website.

Effective Email Marketing

If properly deployed with effective segmentation and automation, email marketing is a great way to generate leads online for free. As most digital marketers very well know, email marketing remains one of the most effective ways to make people aware of your brand and services online. By deploying emails to drop customized newsletters, promotions, event notifications, and generally create awareness about a product/service, business owners easily generate leads extensively through these activities. If you craft your emails to be short and crisp, carrying the right intro and marketing purpose, having good aesthetics particularly good photos/graphics/images, making sure to include the right CTAs, and launched extensively in a well-planned and executed marketing campaign, they tend to generate more and better leads for a business. If you package your emails in regular newsletters to your email subscribers, it is a good way to grow your brand reputation and consequently generate more leads for the business. Widely sending cold emails is quite useful to help improve your chances of getting leads and converting them into sales/revenues.

Guest Blogging

Blogging is a fantastic content marketing activity business owners can always take advantage of online. That is exactly why guest blogging is one of the most creative ways to generate leads for a business. Guest blogs are done to promote the website content of a business with the help of other blog websites. Technically, guest blogging is the process of publishing your blogs by mutual arrangement and agreement on other websites besides yours. You must be generally good and recognized as a good blogger to effectively pull guest blogging off. If you are good at it, you can publish your blogs on third-party websites mostly for free to get traffic and leads and at times even through paid guest blogging services as well. Depending on the blogging conditions of the third party guest blogging website, you may be allowed CTAs on your blog posts. Such CTAs in combination with catchy blog titles and high quality and informative blog content, can be really great for leads generation and conversion rates. 

 
Build and Grow your Presence on Social Media

With about 4.6 billion active users worldwide, social media has gradually become one huge market out there online. The most popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube and the likes are platforms business owners now take advantage of to generate leads and sales. These platforms also have unique in-house tools to help business owners market and grow their businesses through leads generation and effective sales pitches. How do business owners take advantage of social media? This they do by consistently posting highly informative content on the platforms and sharing it widely. Business owners who have a large following on social media platforms benefit from viral sharing of their content, higher engagement with the content, and increased feedback. These activities are great for leads generation.

Work with Social Media Influencers

Working with social media Influencers through Influencer collaborations is one of the most effective ways online businesses generate leads and convert them into sales/revenues. The rapid growth and wider popularity of social media platforms has thrown up social media Influencers. These are persons who have very large following on social media platforms. Their activities play a huge role in influencing the behaviors of their followers. Business owners who are able to collaborate and work with social media Influencers tend to benefit immensely from the activities of these Influencers. Influencer activities are a great way to get leads for a business. Business owners can arrange this collaboration based on their niche business and the type of content that suits their business. If you create content in form of how-to videos, Influencers can help endorse these videos, recommend your products to their huge following or craft content for them with links to your product. Through these activities, Influencer marketing is also considered one great way to generate leads.
 
Ask for Reviews and Customer Testimonials

If you have a bit of experience in Internet marketing, you’ll know how great customer reviews and testimonials can be in leads generation. This is why most business owners directly ask for customers’ reviews and testimonials. These testimonials play a very huge role in helping to create a positive image of your business on the minds of people who come across and read reviews about your business. Business reviews are the first things potential customers, financiers and potential business partners rely on to gauge the reputation of your business. In the Internet world, reputation matters a lot to build trust along the way. It is smart marketing therefore to ensure that good reviews are easily visible on your website and with more clarity to create positive images in the minds of whosoever gets to read them. This is why reviews and testimonials are also top creative ways to generate leads for your business. Reviews and customer testimonials are particularly very useful to build the trust factor for a business. This helps the business to attract a great percentage of leads.

Use Referrals to Attract Leads

Referrals are usually quite suitable for already existing customers and affiliate marketers to invite new customers. It is a highly effective lead generation technique. Referrals are also considered one of the most trustworthy and effective ways to attract engagements. Participating referrers and affiliate marketers are usually in it for a benefit. Such benefits range from commissions, discounts and exclusive coupons which the referrers earn when they generate sales, sign-ups and leads.

Organize Webinars and Seminars

When properly used, webinars and seminars are also very effective to pass important information or even educate a large group of people. Business owners effectively use them to market products/services. If they are advertised well advance and with attractive packages, webinars and seminars can be very effective to educate potential customers about the products/services on sale. They are thus helpful to attract potential customers who became leads courtesy of the webinar/seminar. Technically, social media platforms, video conferencing apps, and many more of suchlike tools are quite helpful in creating and organizing webinars/seminars. They’re very good lead generators as a result. Seminars and webinars are in a class of their own. They are very effective lead generation strategies that help make potential customers aware of brands and products in the market.

Summary

Generating leads for a business takes time and proper planning using the right techniques and marketing channels. The foregoing techniques are very handy to help your business generate leads. If you fail to use the right techniques to generate leads, you risk wasting your time and resources on a merry-go-round without tangible results. Lead generation is hugely important to help stimulate your business growth. Therefore, taking positive and deliberate steps to generate leads is good for your online business.

8 Major Benefits of Affiliate Marketing Model to Your Business

Affiliate marketing is a unique marketing model hugely popular with marketers because it is simple to implement and it is fair and highly rewarding. Marketers who understand its benefits as a business model can always succeed if they adopt the right tactics/techniques. These techniques can be fine-tuned for effectiveness if marketers research the business enough to know how it works and why it works. If they understand how it works, some of the major benefits derivable from the research and marketing efforts come from its relative ease and low-cost to set up and execute, increased competitive advantage, grossly reduced or non-existent risk, increased conversation rate, improved competitive advantage, and much more. More specifically:

1. Reduced Risk: The less you invest in affiliate marketing, the less the risk you are taking. When costs are relatively low, the risk is highly reduced in affiliate marketing strategy. Affiliate marketing as a business model may be prone to some slight chance of loss when payment is done only after actual conversions since it is best suited for businesses on a lower budget.

2. High Return on Investment (ROI): Keeping costs low and returns high is typical of affiliate marketing. If you use affiliate marketing in your online advertising methods, it can significantly lower your start-up costs and influence your overall revenue. That tells on the ROI of the business. ROI provides the right information as to whether the rewards the business gets justify the efforts put in to marketing the business. If you run a marketing campaign, you can through the ROI determine whether the amount of revenue generated during the affiliate marketing campaign rightly justifies the resources spent on the campaign. Marketers who do these calculations have determined over and over again that the affiliate market has a considerably higher ROI when compared to other online marketing strategies. The primary reason for this is because affiliates work for commissions and what they get is relative to what they bring out in terms of sales from their marketing efforts. Such affiliate activities help to keep costs low and returns high.

3. Low-Priced Start-Ups: Business success is directly hinged on keeping costs low and returns high. Affiliate marketing is typically known for low-priced start-up costs. Through diligent research, business owners always make sure they choose cost-effective measures particularly in products advertising while making sure not to get their brands involved in too pricey and non-profitable but mere fanciful marketing schemes. When business owners are extra careful while making purchases, they manage to keep the risk factors involved in the purchases as low as possible.

4. Less On-going Costs: Keeping overhead or on-going costs low always help the bottomline of a business. In affiliate marketing, most of the promotional activities are done by the affiliates themselves. That way, they share in the cost elements of the business. If the affiliates are many, that cost element shared becomes extremely low and even insignificant in some cases. When compared to the commission the affiliates earn that is performance-based, on-going costs pale into insignificance. On the other hand, business owners only have to pay affiliates commissions based on the sales they bring in. This way, affiliate market model only guarantees that business owners only part with their money only when a sale is made. That helps to keep costs low and justified.  

5. Targeted Traffic: Many affiliates are independent business owners in their own rights. They have their own online audience and favorite marketing channels. If you select affiliates in your business niche, chances are higher that their audiences will be interested in what you are selling. Your affiliates can therefore directly target this audience with your marketing messages. In affiliate marketing, targeted traffic is a more responsive traffic. When the traffic is targeted, the e-commerce store tends to receive higher traffic that is characteristically risk-free and with high ROI. Since the affiliates you deliberately select are in the same niche you are, it increases the chances that the targeted traffic they send to your store are individuals who will most likely be interested in the products you are selling.

6. Developing Brand Recognition: As a business owner, building brand recognition helps to build your business. In this quest, affiliate marketing directly helps to connect with social media influencers and bloggers who, in turn, could channel organic traffic towards the business owner’s website. Affiliates, even if in their thousands, are directly responsible for spreading unrestrained info about the positive side of any business. That helps in no small measure to build brand recognition. They act like some sort of brand ambassadors working round-the-clock to help push the brand and strengthen its recognition in the Internet market.

7. Reputation Boost: Affiliate marketing helps businesses to build reliable affiliate networks. These networks play very important and significant roles to help promote businesses even if indirectly. This can result in a rapid reputation boost for a business. If you work with reputable and reliable affiliates, it helps your own confirmation as a reliable and reputable business. Every successful business is built on trust. This is why businesses with strong reputations are trusted more and they always attract many more people to do business with.

8. Flexibility: Affiliate marketing business model is a simple and flexible business model. It is therefore easily scalable and can be transformed into bigger or smaller affiliate programs at minimal or no cost at all. This flexibility factor is one great attraction for more and more people who get involved in affiliate marketing. It is characterized by time flexibility, scale flexibility, location flexibility, products flexibility, promotional channels flexibility and so on. As an individual getting involved in affiliate marketing therefore, it is absolutely up to you to decide the type of business you want to promote and the time and effort you are prepared to put in which may generally range from a few hours per day to a few hours a week or even a few hours a month.

Effective Marketing Tips, Tricks, and Techniques that Yield Good Results

Marketing is the technique brands use to promote their products and/or services. It involves deliberate actions to make others aware of the products/services you are selling. Marketing activities could be general or deliberately targeted. What is common to both is that they are designed to attract leads and customers. Online, digital marketing has proven to be the most effective form of marketing. Traditional marketing, mostly offline compliments it effectively for marketers. Below are some of the most preferred techniques by marketers.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a marketing technique of partnering with product merchants to help sell their products while the affiliate earns commissions from the sales. Typically, affiliates promote these products or services on their blog, website, and/or social media channels. Affiliate marketing is one great way product merchants can leverage on the reach and promotional abilities of affiliates to market their products/services with minimal efforts. By this arrangement, every time a product is purchased through an affiliate link, the affiliate earns a commission as per agreed percentages.

Social Media Marketing, SMM

Since nearly everyone is on social media 24/7 worldwide, marketing through social media is now hugely important for digital marketers. With billions of social media users worldwide, getting out marketing messages through social media has become a great opportunity for brands to effectively market and attract leads, customers and even sales. Marketing is very easy on social media platforms because of their huge popularity and ease of sharing information. So, getting a free account for your brand on any or all the popular social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook Instagram, TikTok and Pinterest and marketing through them can be highly beneficial for your brand.
 
Digital Marketing Strategies

Digital marketing is a very effective online marketing strategy if you know what you are doing. The reason is simple. Because of the peculiarities of the Internet, the enabling environment for digital marketing is enhanced. Through the Internet, marketing messages manage to reach the widest audience possible by simply pressing a computer button. With it come good technological advances such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) that allows marketing to become more specifically targeted, automated and effective.

Traditional Marketing

If your target market consists of those who prefer to stay offline and read newspapers, traditional marketing is effective too if your marketing budget can accommodate the cost. Because there are still people out there who appreciate reading newspapers, watching local television channels, and listening to local radio stations, advertising your business through Newspaper articles, TV and radio commercials, and fliers are still very effective forms of marketing. In fact, traditional forms of marketing are at times your best bet if your target market is your local community. 

    
Brand Marketing

You must know how to market your brand well no matter the size of your business. This is because for marketing purposes, your brand is what helps people to easily identify your business. For this reason, you must pay keen attention to some rather seemingly intangible business things like your business name, business colors, logo, motto/mission statement, and why you are in business. These are the things that remain in the subconscious minds of your customers and potential customers that are helpful for your brand identity and recognition.  They help people to think about your business in a certain way directly related to your brand identity. Take your business logo for instance. One of the best ways to market your brand is through your business logo. The reason your brand logo must be unique and easy to identify and relate with to be useful. It is very effective marketing if you display your logo in promotional items like Face caps, T-shirts, blankets, handkerchiefs, napkins, table mats, coffee mugs, key chains or some other simple items people like to use or carry around.
 
Email Marketing, EMM

Email marketing may be old school but it is still a very effective form of digital marketing. Building a credible email list may be challenging but once in place it becomes a hugely valuable marketing asset. The larger this list, the more effective for marketing. If the list is segmented, so much the better! Once you settle for a marketing message, decide the recipients and press send. The message instantly goes to the inboxes of your recipients. Simple!

Search Engine Marketing

For search engine marketing to be effective, your business website needs Search Engine Optimization, SEO. That helps search engines to discover and rank your business/brand/products online. If your brand ranks high in their SERPs, it benefits from organic traffic which search engines send to it. For your business to benefit, you must use the right SEO techniques on your website/blog. SEO techniques involve the deft use of keywords on your website/blog to help your business rank higher in search results particularly on Google, the largest of them all.

How to Start, Run, and Operate a Successful Blog

You can start and run a private blog for fun or to make money. Even when you start your blog from scratch, you can monetize it and make a small business out of it. That’s exactly what bloggers who want to make money from their blogging do these days. Blogging may appear quite common now particularly among digital marketers who are running their own businesses. These people effectively use their blogs as marketing/promotional tools for their business. If however you are just starting out in your blogging business, you really need quite a bit of guidance to start, run and operate your blog successfully. These here tips can be of help.

 
Decide what you want to Blog About

Deciding on what you want to blog about is hugely important right from the outset of your blogging experience. What you can successfully blog about is what you know and are passionate about because discovering your passion early enough is the key to successful blogging. You must think deep and brainstorm well to come up with relevant subjects and topics for your blog. If your blog mission is well defined, coming up with relevant topics to blog about becomes fairly easy. What your blog readers want to see is high quality and informative content and they stay hooked on to your blog. Just give them such content regularly and consistently and your audience will grow.

Carefully Select a Blogging Platform

The blogging platform you choose to blog from is very important to the success of your blog. You must therefore take adequate care to select a platform for your blog. The right platform to settle for depends on the product you are marketing and the nature of your blog. It is a need based decision that also factors in your skills and your personal preferences. Most blogging platforms have various in-house tools that can help to enhance your blogging experience. These must be factored in too before you choose a platform. Among the many blogging platforms available, experienced bloggers do recommend WordPress, Blogger, Square Space, Wix, Tumblr, and Ghost. For beginner bloggers, WordPress and Blogger are great to use because they are text-based and search engines particularly Google love them.
   
Consistently Create Quality Content

In blogging parlance, content is always king. The more the content you create, the more following you get for your blog. That translates to good traffic too. Your blog can never succeed if you only manage to create poor and mediocre content. This is why you must pay special attention to content creation. In this wise, it is advisable to consistently create high quality informative and educational content that will interest your readers. Grammatical presentation is important too. For this reason, before posting any content, make sure you proofread it thoroughly and correct all grammatical errors as well as formatting mistakes.
 
Create a Brand

For marketing purposes, your blog must reflect your brand. You must therefore create your blog name, logo and even colors to reflect your brand. Figure out your unique storyline that will reflect your brand and be attractive to your audience. Come up with ideas and test run them to see what works best. By the time you get what works best for you, you can proceed to use it consistently and use it as often as possible to consolidate it as a brand.

Network to Build your Community

If you want your blog to quickly succeed, it is not enough to consistently post content, you must network well too. As soon as you start posting, you’ll have to spend a lot of time networking. This you can do by way of blog commenting, cooperating and working with other bloggers. In fact, you must carry out all activities needed to get audience for your blog. This is important because the audience will not just come to you except you work to bring them to you. To build a reliable community for your blog therefore, networking is the answer. For good results, you must spend quality time commenting on blogs, engaging on social media, communicating with your blog followers, reaching out to and collaborating with various influencers.

Be Diligent and Patient

It takes quite a while for your blog to get noticed online and indexed by search engines. For this reason, you cannot expect your blog to have overnight success. Waiting patiently for your blog to start getting the right traffic may be discouraging, but it is not sufficient to frustrate you out of blogging. You must be diligent and consistent at creating and posting content and with time, traffic will come. You must endeavor therefore to be patient with your blog and with yourself. Try to maintain your blogging schedule, create and post content regularly and establish your presence in as many social media platforms as convenient for your schedule. It may take a while but with time, your blog will be a success if you are diligent and consistent in your content creation.

How Small Businesses Can Use Social Media for Business Growth

With an estimated user population of over 4 billion, small business owners who genuinely want to grow their businesses can no longer afford to ignore social media. This is more so for the hugely popular platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Instagram. These platforms now account for billions of active users around the world 24/7. Now that’s one huge market out there which smart small business owners now take good advantage of to grow their businesses. They latch on to the vast opportunities social media provides to connect with customers, allowing them to do more business and to maximize their earnings therefrom. As an aside, small business owners can also use social media platforms to make some money even without having to sell anything.

The hugely popular social media platforms are really great at helping small businesses build brand awareness, increase customer base, increase sales, get more leads and connect with current and potential customers. This is largely because of the ease of interaction and information sharing on the platforms. With a good SMM strategy in place, small businesses can take good advantage of social media to interact easily with customers and grow their businesses. Specifically, here is how social media directly helps small businesses with business growth.

Create real connections with your brand: Small business owners can effectively create real human connections with their brands through social media. Through social media platforms, you can introduce your customers to your brand story as well as showcasing the benefits of your products/services with ease.

Expand your business reach: Yeah social media with billions of active users represents one very huge market out there. Small business owners can take advantage of this market to expand their business reach exponentially. They can take advantage of in-house marketing tools on Facebook, Instagram or Pinterest to showcase products or even directly advertise products and services.

Do more business: Available marketing data indicate that more and more people are buying on social media. Small businesses can take advantage of this by adding CTA ‘buy now’ buttons on their social platforms to generate more sales. This allows social media users to buy directly without ever having to leave the social media platform they are on.

Generate more leads: With the help of social media platforms, you can increase lead generation by increasing interest among potential customers in your audience. The more leads you generate, the more conversions you get and consequently more sales.

Drive traffic to your website/online eCommerce store: If you habitually create and post high quality content on social media, it helps to grow your audience and traffic generation. Through social media posts and ads, you can drive traffic to your website or your online eCommerce store. If you continuously share great content from your website to your social channels, it encourages more click-throughs to your website. That is good traffic.

How to Earn Money Online with Internet Technology

It is convenient, it is sleek, it is cute and it works leveraging internet technology to earn money online. If you’ve tried to earn money online, you may have been scammed a few times with over-hyped eBooks, webinars and get-rich-quick schemes. Well just take that as your learning process. You can actually earn good money online if you follow the rules and do what is legit. Any get-rich-quick scheme online is in most cases a scam. If it is too good to be true, it usually is. Never you forget that cliché.
 
If you’re interested in legitimate ways to leverage internet technology to earn extra cash, pay good attention to the following.

Market Yourself as a Brand

This is exactly how celebrities and sports personalities make good money with internet technology. But first, you must have an engaging personality and live for social media. If your personality becomes engaging enough based on what you do regularly on social media, you can monetize these activities and earn good income. By the time your social media accounts particularly on Instagram, Twitter or Facebook have very large following you become some kind of influencer. You earn money through products endorsements and recommendations to buyers. By fully establishing and building your online brand, you earn more income as your online following continues to grow.

Embark on Affiliate Marketing

If you provide content online, you can help promote affiliate links and earn commissions from sales made through these links. That is affiliate marketing. It simply means linking products merchants and buyers through affiliate links and you get paid commissions from sales made through the links you are promoting. A commission-paying affiliate is any product merchant that offers a commission for selling its products online. You can earn these commissions if you connect your followers/viewers to their products through blog posts, videos, email marketing, or social media accounts by way of affiliate links. When a click on these links takes a buyer to the product merchant’s platform to purchase a product, you earn a commission which is usually calculated as a percentage of the final sale.

Start a Blog for Money

If you know something or you have a skill that can benefit others, you can blog about it to grow a following. When your blog becomes hugely popular, you can use it to promote affiliate links and earn commissions on product sales. You can also use your blog as an influencer to endorse and recommend products and get paid handsome commissions for these efforts. If you are blogging for money, always make sure your blog posts are of high quality, educating and highly informative. Be sure that all your content is current and up-to-date when posting. That is what helps to build loyal and dedicated following for your blog. The more the following, the higher the income you earn from the blog.

Sell Photos Online

Photography is a great skill. If you have the skill, you can earn money online selling photos. Before deciding on which photos to sell, you must settle for a niche that you’re exceptionally good at then start creating images in this niche. Some good images to sell can include abstracts, city-life, scenery, buildings, and iconic structures and so on. The idea is to build up your portfolio until you have multiple images to post online to attract attention. Next is to decide on which platforms you’d like to sell the photos on. Many of these online platforms offer different incentives particularly on copyrights and payment methods. Depending on what you prefer, you can settle for pay-per-view or outright download payment offer and you earn money from your photos.

Teach Online Courses

Online teaching skills help to earn money. You can teach cooking skills, yoga and sporting skills, teach languages, offer language translations, teach music or playing a musical instrument and so many other skills that can benefit others. Many people have specific skills/talents they can teach. We all have specific talents we can teach others to earn some extra income online. What really matters is to ensure you market your skills in the right online platforms to help you earn money from teaching these skills. How you teach these skills can vary depending on your preferences. You may choose to teach these skills by way of online courses, Webinars, eBooks, or even a profitable blog dedicated to your specific talent/niche.

Start an eCommerce Store

You can run your own small business and make money online by opening your own store in an eCommerce platform. You can consider eCommerce dropshipping as a convenient business model. It is hugely popular with eCommerce stores owners. Dropshipping allows an eCommerce store owner to sell various products to its customers while the manufacturer/supplier handles the shipping part of the sales chain. It saves the eCommerce store the huge costs of warehousing, safety/security of the products and the cost of shipping. Thus, when a sale is made from the eCommerce store, the product remains in the supplier’s warehouse until they ship directly to the customer. To get started, you must first create a website, find a reputable supplier, and start posting.

Organize Periodic Garage Sales

This is one great way to sell off your extra junk online. Solid items you no longer need such as used furniture, clothes, tools, appliances, books, bedding, sports equipment and children’s toys etc. etc. are eligible for periodic garage sales. Periodically selling off such items online can be a hassle-free way to earn some extra money. If you search well online, you can locate many websites that allow users to post items free of charge, complete with photos and a description. If you’re looking for a local seller, find an online platform that caters to your area. To sell unique or specific collectors’ items like antiques, paintings and rare photographs you need to find specialized and reputable websites for such rare items. You can make quick money from such sales.

How to Create a Better Content Marketing Strategy for Your Small Business

Every digital marketer needs a good content marketing strategy to run a blog or an e-commerce website. If the strategy is effective, it greatly helps to generate unpaid or organic traffic to the business website. How do you measure this effectiveness? It is by using online marketing content analytics tools such as Google Analytics. These tools help marketers to better analyze the performance of their content types to determine which performs best in terms of cost-effectiveness and marketing results.

When creating a content strategy, one of the most important considerations is to know your audience. If you don’t know your audience well enough, it is pretty difficult to know what type of content you can create to attract their attention better. If for instance you know what your website visitors love to read on your web pages, you can then take deliberate steps to improve those pages or create similar articles to attract more of such people to your website. You can also approach performance based on segmentation. However, what matters most is to try to use analytics results from all these efforts to maximize ROI. Just keep a keen eye on the metrics and you can take better marketing decisions. That’s all it takes.

Here are 7 important marketing metrics your business needs to create a better content marketing strategy to maximize ROI.

1. Total Visits: This metric helps to measure the number of people who visited your web page or website.

2. Brand Awareness Metric: This metric helps to track how people get to know about your business/brand on search engines, your website content or social media posts.

3. Returning Visitor Metric: This metric helps to measure the effectiveness of your website in building an audience your web content directly influences.

4. Web Traffic Sources: This marketing metric helps a marketer to understand exactly where his traffic is coming from. The information is vital to help the marketer to focus content creation on those sources. 

5. Time on Site: This marketing metric measure the time visitors spend on a business website per each visit.  This is hugely important because the longer visitors spend reading your content, the better for your website SEO and your conversion rate.

6. Bounce Rate: This metric helps marketers to assess visitors who left their websites too quickly, maybe just immediately after hitting just a single page. A high bounce rate deeply hurts your website SEO, reduces overall conversion rate and even sales. Smart marketers always aim to reduce bounce rates on their websites to the barest minimum.

7. First Visit Metric: This metric helps marketers to understand how online users find business websites and how they engage during their first visits to the websites.

3 Powerful Tips to Energize your Social Media Marketing

Besides socializing, social media has evolved in recent years into a powerful digital marketing platform. Smart marketers now leverage the power social media platforms to promote their products/services, get leads, boost conversions and sales. Marketers who engage social media to promote and sell their products/services tend to do better than others who don’t. That eloquently testifies to the real power of social media in digital marketing. To continue to get the best out of your social media marketing strategy, you need to energize it from time to time. Here are 3 of the most effective ways you can try out to get that done. 

1. Give Your Brand a Human Face

If you want your brand to better connect with your audience and build trust quickly, give it a human face. Instead of marketing with just your brand images, you can try giving it a human face that your audience can connect easily with. Many buyers are always interested in knowing the human face(s) behind any successful brand. Online, human faces and big names in a given industry help in no small measure to build brands. Many people relate better with great names behind every brand than just the brands on their own. If you are a small business owner, you can leverage your reputation to showcase what your brand stands to benefit your audience. Through your social media handles, you can easily let your audience know that you are the human face behind your brand. That encourages them to engage and interact more with you for the benefit of your brand. Through such engagements and interactions, you can get to know and understand their expectations better. That way, you can deliver better to meet their expectations. That helps to increase customer satisfaction for the brand.

2. Include Videos in Your Content Strategy

Most digital marketers are now aware that video content is usually a more effective marketing content than others. This is particularly true of how-to videos. For this reason, if you effectively incorporate video content in your social media marketing strategy, the results you get can be very encouraging. Video content is hugely advantageous for your business. One of the major advantages is that videos are highly entertaining to watch, highly engaging and easier to interpret and remember. By using videos to market therefore, you can easily retain your users to convey your message more convincingly and effectively. Videos thus help to make your brand more memorable because your users are more likely to remember your message if you show it through a video. What really matters in the marketing effectiveness of videos is creativity. If you are creative enough with your ideas you can make great videos to enhance your audience engagement and grow your brand.
 
3. Market with the Art of Storytelling

Most human beings love stories particularly stories that invoke great memories and teach lessons. Thus, if you want to make your social media marketing strategy more effective, you should imbibe the art of storytelling in your marketing campaigns. Smart marketers really get creative using stories on their sales pitches to connect with their audience on a deeper level. Such stories help prospects visualize the relatable outcome of using products/services the marketer is promoting. That helps in no small measure to enhance the possibility of converting them to paying customers. Story telling is thus a wonderful way to engage your audience and make your marketing pitch more memorable and effective. However on social media, always make sure you give your story an attractive framework and your audience has something to relate with and take away from the story. That is what enhances its effectiveness.

Final Thoughts

The foregoing tips if tactically applied will no doubt be of immense help to make your social media marketing strategy more effective. Most other marketers and I who have used them and still use them can testify to this. You too can try them if you aren’t using them already. The results will no doubt impress you. If effectively used, you can rely on them to grow your followers, get leads and conversions, grow your customers, and boost your sales/revenues. Using these tips is great for the overall health and profitability of your business.

Why Your Small Business Needs a Strong Online Presence

Every small business needs a strong online presence to do well on the internet. Online presence is one credible and effective way to place your business in front of your target audience. The more avenues available to you to place your business in front of your target audience, the more opportunities you have to build awareness for your brand and to improve your business reputation. Aside that, there are some other ways a strong online presence benefits your small business. Such as:

Marketing Round-The-Clock: A strong online presence gives your small business the opportunity for 24/7 marketing around the globe. If your business has a strong online presence, it is easy for people to discover you, learn about you, engage with you, and reach out to you anytime of the day convenient for them and from wherever they are. They can do business with you round-the-clock on the internet no matter what device they are using to access the internet.

Get Discovered: As experienced marketers like to say, establish your business firmly on the internet and get discovered easily. This is because a strong online presence makes it easy for ideal customers who don’t yet know you exist to discover you. They can do this even when they are not directly searching for what you are offering at any point in time.

Earn Google’s Trust: If you want to get organic traffic to your business, you’ve got to build the trust of major search engines particularly Google.  This is because Google takes more than just your website into account when ranking. Its algorithms are programmed to take a holistic look at your assets across the web and how consistent they are. That affects your ranking in Google SERPs.

Present as Legitimate Business: Most online shoppers/consumers always rely on multiple sources of information before making their buy decisions. If their search results show your business as a legitimate business, you can earn their purchases. If however you fail or neglect to provide enough information about your business across credible online sources, consumers and search engines may ignore your business completely.

Get More Conversions: Experienced marketers very well know that it takes several encounters with a business before a lead becomes an actual customer. A strong online presence for your business makes it prominent and available for such encounters. Being prominent on multiple channels creates the right opportunities for such encounters to happen much more quickly. You get more conversions as a result.

Key into Consumer Buyer Journey: There is research evidence that over 60% of consumers buyer journeys start online. A strong online presence makes your business available to be found by these consumers. That engagement can take place at different points in their buyer journey towards becoming customers, irrespective of whatever devices they are accessing the internet with.

Herd Mentality: All your online assets are relative and interdependent on one another. Each of your online assets and identities gives power to one another. That is why each channel performs better in concert with the others than it would on its own. These assets thus help your small business better when they work in concert like a herd.

Save Time and Money: Every small business owner always operates very tight ads budgets. Whatever saves costs is always great for the business. Digital marketing helps to save costs. Digital marketing platforms all come with data/metrics to let you know what’s working and what’s not. That vital info helps you to allocate your ads budget judiciously and to use it efficiently in your marketing activities. That is in addition to the fact that most digital ads are hugely cost-effective.

Random Tips to Manage your Business' Reputation on Social Media

If you want to quickly build a reputation for your business, get it on social media. Social media aside from being a very suitable place for your business to post ads and promotions, just as the name applies, it is also one great place to socialize. Because of the huge popularity of social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and the likes, you can get to quickly build a large community of followers/friends. That becomes a great social media asset for your business. Through it, your followers/friends easily interact and engage with your brand by way of comments, reviews, feedback and asking questions. That helps to enhance your business reputation in no small measure. If you take positive proactive steps to manage your business’ reputation on social media, you can easily build a stronger relationship with your customers through whom you can generate positive word-of-mouth promo for your brand. Here's what you can do. 

Highlight and Promote Positive Reviews

If you market on social media, always keep an eye on reviews and testimonials from any of the platforms you have an account on. What you do with these reviews/testimonials (even if negative), can go a long way to help your online reputation management efforts. You can respond directly to reviews or you use them as user-generated content to build trust and your business reputation. This is because user-generated content is by far more persuasive to potential customers and as a result, does more to establish your reputation better than most other promotional activities. This gets better when you factor in that you can easily share reviews and testimonials very widely on social media platforms. Most digital marketers are aware that a very large percentage of consumers rely on online reviews to make their buy decisions. It is smart social media marketing therefore to always take a proactive approach to reputation management to ensure that you’re making the right impression on these prospective customers. With quality reputation management, business owners take control of the narrative surrounding their brands. Doing so helps them to post such great results that ensure positive actual growths in their businesses.

Respond Promptly to Comments and Reviews

On social media, when brands respond promptly to customer reviews, they send a positive message which demonstrates their commitment to customer service. That helps brands to create a positive image, more so when such responses relate to negative reviews. A positive, personalized response to reviews goes a long way to shape a positive narrative for the brand. This is more so when you factor in that social platforms are often where customers go to share their experiences with brands. If these customers leave reviews, a prompt response is imperative, to enhance your business reputation. As a business owner, if you give a positive response that adequately addresses your customer’s concern or complaints, it clearly demonstrates to others who might read the review that your brand takes customer service seriously. Doing so helps your business reputation positively thereby avoiding losing good customers unnecessarily in the bargain.

Diligently Track all Conversations about Your Brand

Every second, every hour, every day, countless conversations are taking place on social media. It is always a very huge challenge for most businesses to decipher which of these conversations relate directly to their brands. How then can you find the conversations that relate to your brand? Simple, through diligent tracking! Doing this manually however is a very daunting task. Online social listening tools help businesses to solve this problem. By using these tools effectively, it is pretty difficult for businesses to miss out on any online conversation involving their brands. Online social listening tools like HootSuite help businesses to track branded keywords even if such brands are not tagged by name. With these tools, business owners do not need to search through social media manually (even if that is feasible), since the tools provide direct notifications when a conversation about your brand is taking place on social media platforms. This allows business owners to easily gauge the overall sentiment surrounding their brands on social media. It provides them great opportunities to step up and engage directly with customers. A move that no doubt helps their business’ reputations a great deal!

Tips for Effective Live Chats on Your Website

In today’s digital business world, communication is key. The faster and clearer it is to communicate with prospective customers and customers, the better for the business. If as is expected your business website has easy-to-navigate features, convenient automation options and simple site integration, you can easily set up instant messaging on the site. A leading customer service tool that easily comes to mind here is live chat. But, live chat is only effective when used correctly. When used correctly, live chat is a powerful communication tool that helps to quickly address customer concerns, answer questions, and give vital information and even secure sales real time. However, when wrongly used, it is capable of hindering the performance of your website by frustrating your communication activities. That scenario is avoidable if you take cognizance of these tips.

 

Be Proactive in Your Messaging

Many prospective customers who hit on your website may abandon it fast if they are unable to find answers to their nagging concerns/questions fast enough. That creates high bounce rate problems. With live chats, you can combat rising bounce rates with the use of proactive messaging. By using real-time visitor monitoring and variable triggers, you can easily target consumers based on their browsing habits. You can then utilize automated messages to ask the right questions or provide valuable information in the exact moment your website visitors need it. With such proactive messaging, you greatly increase your chances of securing sales conversion.

Make Chats Convenient and Easily Accessible

Live chat features should ideally be installed on very prominent and easily accessible location on your website. That makes it convenient to use because one of the most significant benefits of live chat is its peculiar convenience. It is great for instant messaging when compared to emails. With live chat instant messaging, marketers can greatly cut down on the time consumers spend tracking down contact numbers or email addresses. That means live chat provides consumers with significantly low-barrier support option. If well-integrated, live chat can provide a disruption-free customer service experience thereby eliminating the time-wasting need to sit on hold or wait minutes, hours, days or even weeks for an email response for example.

Revamp Your Strategies

There is a need to revamp your marketing strategies if you want to introduce live chat into your marketing. Chat allows you to add a more personalized and conversational approach to your marketing tactics. With chats, you can provide a quicker and more effective customer service to your customers. That is something that is difficult to achieve through traditional customer support services. The benefits of instant message support are extensive. They include a decrease in customer service response, minimizing support costs, enhancing user experience, increasing sales and brand loyalty. You must decide on which of these benefits you are targeting in your strategy before you launch a live chat. That is vital to your success.

Make Interactions Need-Based and Personal

Exploring ways to interact with consumers on a personalized basis is always very effective. Everyone likes to feel important and to be treated as such. That appears to be the reason why many consumers look for personalized experiences.  Quick chats are characteristically one-on-one interaction and many consumers appreciate that and they respond better to your marketing efforts as a result. So, if you tailor your marketing resources to support agents having knowledge of past chats or purchases, personalization can improve the messaging experience. Pressed further, need-influenced message personalization can effectively translate to better quality leads, increased brand loyalty and higher sales figures.

Factor in Valuable User Experiences

In today’s digital marketing world, marketing without factoring in user experience in your efforts is usually an uphill struggle. With consumer expectations increasing daily and search engines becoming more technical in ranking websites, it is now more vital than ever for marketers to increase site satisfaction and ease of use of their websites. One of the most profitable ways to do that is to introduce live chat to your website. That is one great way to enhance its user experience. Live chat combines effectively with the fundamental elements already at play on your site to maintain a cohesive experience and a search engine-friendly structure.

Optimize Chat for Mobile Usage

Google reports indicate that nearly 50% of all web traffic is attributable to mobile devices. Now that is a very huge chunk of traffic attributable to people who do business on the go and from any and everywhere. What this means is that many more people are visiting websites from their mobile devices as against traditional desktop computers. How do marketers take advantage of this development? Simple! Just optimize your website for mobile devices by creating a site, including live chat that is easy-to-use on cellphones, tablets and any other smart mobile devices. A mobile-friendly chat interface on your website can help to boost its user-experience and inbound traffic a great deal.

Final Thoughts

No matter the type of business you are marketing, incorporating live-chat feature on your website is great for customer support. Ranging from improving user experience and overall customer satisfaction to generating more leads/customers/sales, the benefits of live chat are really immense to marketing strategies. Consumers now want quick service and they want it like yesterday. Live-chat feature on business websites comes very handy there. Marketers must adapt to rapid changes in consumer expectations or they get left behind as their businesses take a hit from avoidable negligence.

Digital Marketing Tips for Marketing a Local Business Online

If you run a local business, one of the best ways to grow it is by investing in digital marketing. With digital marketing, you can easily connect with prospective customers and customers, get good traffic, leads and make sales. This is because digital marketing leverages internet technology to reach a diverse audience of people that are also on the internet to do business and make connections. The influence of social media and the rising trend of web searches enable you to build a strong online presence for your business. Yes indeed, but thanks to internet technology and digital marketing that it enables. If correctly deployed, digital marketing can help your local business to connect with customers online and effectively promote your brand to them.

 
To market your local business successfully online, you must give it a strong online presence which these here tips can help you with.

Make a Digital Marketing Plan

To market successfully online, you must have an effective digital marketing plan right from the outset. Decide early on exactly what you want to achieve with your marketing efforts. You must have clear objectives, goals and strategies to incorporate into your digital marketing plan. You may decide on such goals/objectives as increased traffic, increased leads, customers, sales and a strong brand. Next is to decide on which digital marketing plans that can best help you achieve your goals/objectives. After SWOT testing your digital marketing plan using analytics to be sure it will deliver on your expectations, you’re good to go.

Launch a User-Friendly Business Website

Your business website is the most important window your business has on the internet. That is where you first make contact with online surfers looking to do business. If your business website is both user and mobile friendly enough, it helps you to do good business online. It is through your website prospective customers get to have firsthand opportunity to learn more about your business. If they like what they see and are satisfied with their experience on your website, they will engage more with you. You can help your website to be user-friendly by making sure it is well designed, secure, loads fast and has relevant information about what your business is offering to customers through clear, concise, aesthetically appealing and persuasive content. For organic traffic purposes, be sure you use good SEO to help its search engine rankings. You can also optimize your website for mobile devices to make it mobile-friendly since Google now attributes a high percentage of searches to mobile devices.  

Invest in Quality Content Creation

In digital marketing, content is king. This content must be of high quality, informative, educational and even entertaining. If you regularly craft high quality and creative content and post it on either your website or social media platforms, it will help you to attract customers and build your brand online. If you have the skills, you can create your content yourself. If not, contracting your content creation activities to professionals is the next best option. Irrespective of whosoever writes the content, what is important is to make sure it is relevant to your business niche and provides very useful information to your customers. It is advisable to experiment with different kinds of content and see which one works best for your objectives before deciding on it. If you decide, you can commence pushing the content through infographics, videos, how-to guides, and blog posts with your objectives firmly in the picture.

Create a Google Listing

Google-My-Business, GMB listing with the tools it offers is very helpful to local businesses. The listing allows you to enter your business name, location, the products/services you market, contact address, day time phone number, and other relevant business details. It can be fully optimized for local searches. That is what allows searchers looking for businesses “near me” to hit on your website and hopefully make beneficial contacts with your business. If you have Google listing, when a prospective customer searches for a product/service that your business offers, the name of your business will pop up alongside others. That helps prospective customers to easily reach you.

Be Active on Social Media

These days, social media because of its peculiarities appears to have some of the best digital marketing services online. The reason it is advisable to have active social media pages for your business particularly on the most popular platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and others. On social media, local business owners can easily interact with prospective customers since they are able to identify the platforms that they like to use. If social media is effectively used, you can better promote your business and grow your brand to generate more interest in the products/services you are rendering.

Market with Locally Targeted Ads

You get better results from digital ads when you are specific about the locality you are targeting. What you need to target are relevant factors that make it clearer for prospective customers to reach your business. Factors like street addresses, city names, county names, boroughs, district names, regions and countries. That helps to increase your reach and enable you to target more relevant customers. By having a compelling Call-to-Action, CTA in your ads, it helps to enhance the process for prospective customers to engage with you.
 
Win Customers with Offers and Discounts

Including offers and discounts in your digital marketing messages is a very effective way to win new customers. Many people will always be interested in buying your products if they discover that you have some really enticing offers or discounts. You can make these offers alongside your normal marketing info through your website, your social media platforms and even via emails and newsletters. If you notice products that are lagging in sales, you can specifically target such products with good offers and discounts to boost sales.

Evaluate Your Marketing Strategies with Analytics

It is with accurate evaluation of your marketing strategies that you can effectively determine if you are getting good value for every ads dollar you are spending. To accurately measure the Return On Investment, ROI in your business, you need good analytics tools. If you connect your website to Google Analytics, you can constantly check the reports from your marketing activities on social media pages and multi-channel ads campaigns. These tools help you to analyze and understand the impact of your marketing strategies, and which brings the best returns on your investment. With this information, you can plan accordingly and make necessary adjustments on your ads. Significantly, you can rely on the insights from analytics data to help you take vital decisions to rejig or repurpose your digital marketing strategies.

 
Engage with Your Customers

If you market online and you value customer reviews, comments, and complaints, you must explore all ways to constantly engage with your customers. It is the insights from such customer reviews, comments, and complaints that can help you to get a very clear picture of your business from the perspectives of your customers. It is through these perspectives you can get to know what you are doing great and what you need to improve upon. By doing so, you build customer trust and reliance and your business benefits immensely. When customers trust you, they are likely to stay loyal to you and you win more new customers in the bargain. It therefore makes good business sense to constantly engage with your customers, by sending them regular emails about the latest deals, price adjustments, promos, special offers, and giveaways, all great for customer loyalty and retention.  

Have Multiple Contacts on Your Website

Aside the landing page, the “About Us” page appears to be the next most important page on your business website. That is where your website visitors can get to know more about your business and to make contact with you because in online business, it is hugely important to make it easy for customers and prospective customers to easily reach you 24/7. For this reason, you must make sure you have multiple contacts on your website and even in all your social media platforms. Make it easy for your website visitors to have easy access to your email address, day time telephone numbers, and your handles across all the social media platforms where you have accounts. With these multiple contacts, customers and prospective customers can freely choose any contact method that they are comfortable with to reach out to you.

6 Effective Digital Marketing Strategies for Marketing a Small Business Online

Promoting your small business online is no tea party particularly if you are not innately familiar with digital marketing methods. With the advent of the internet, traditional forms of marketing and advertising are now grossly inadequate to promote your small business successfully. We are now in a digital age so, marketing and advertising are now done better with digital technology. If you want to market your small business well enough and get noticed online, you need digital marketing strategies to do so.

These six digital marketing strategies can help set your small business up for success even in the hugely competitive digital space.

1. Create High Quality Content

Creating high quality content online is one very potent way to build your brand. In the parlance of digital marketers, content is king. There is no substitute for good content if you want to effectively market your small business online. Online marketing is not just about how great your products or services are. It is much more than that. For instance, you must be able to offer information, education, entertainment, or some kind of solutions to the problems of your audience. You need to post relevant and consistent content marketing solutions to help out your audience. That content can be served through all kinds of video content, blog posts, social media content and guest blogging. You just need to have a good content marketing strategy in place to regularly create a compelling content to meet the needs of your customers.

2. Vigorously Promote Your Brand

Every small business owner who wants to get noticed online must be prepared to vigorously promote his business. The real essence of this promotion is to give your brand a respectable online presence. That is what makes your brand unique and trusted. Do not ignore any online marketing channel if you want to promote your brand. Email newsletters, social media, search engines, SEO and the like are all useful to help your small business build its brand. Be sure to let on at any and every opportunity what distinguishes your business from the competition. If you really know who you are, what your business is, what it offers and who your customers are, you can develop strategies that align with your values and your brand identity. With these strategies in place, you can effectively promote your brand vigorously online to establish your brand identity.
 
3. Market on Social Media

Social media appears to be where nearly everyone is at the moment. Small businesses need social media to connect with one another and to a great audience of customers and potential customers. Social media is now a crucial and hugely effective method for small businesses to grow their brand awareness, get leads and even make sales. Small businesses can market directly to specially identified segments of social media audience and the results are usually great. For this reason, it is simply not enough to just establish your social media presence. You must post good content regularly and consistently to provide the real value that helps to generate interest in your business. Since many social media users cherish interacting with valuable brands on the platforms, smart small business owners never miss the opportunities to make real connections and sales.

4. Don’t Ignore SEO, Search Engine Optimization

Small business owners cannot afford to ignore search engine optimization, SEO if they want to market successfully online. With good SEO techniques in your business website and your content, search engines get to rank your business in readiness for online searchers. That way, they send organic traffic to your website free of costs. Optimizing the content on your website and generating quality backlinks from other sites is a credible way to communicate to search engines particularly the largest of them all Google that your site actually provides relevancy and value. If search engines take up your offer because of your SEO, it helps to build your brand visibility and perception over time in an organic way. The better the SEO of your website, the more likely it is that your site will appear prominently in the SERPs of search engines. Without a good SEO, your website may never be noticed online. Marketing from such a website will be akin to marketing to yourself only. 

5. Use Paid Digital Ads

Digital marketing now resonates more with small businesses than traditional marketing methods. Digital ads are not only hugely convenient and effective, they help to save ads costs as well. For this reason, smart small business owners now have a preference for PPC, display ads, and even social media ads. Apart from the fact that these ads types are often more affordable, business owners have more and better control over how the ads are shown and through what marketing channels. Businesses can better target segmented audiences with digital ads than any other ads types. The reason they get good results in driving traffic to your website, generate leads and make sales.

6. Rev up Your Email Marketing

In this age and time, email marketing is still very effective as a digital marketing strategy. If you already have a credible email list, you can rev up your email marketing activities anytime. Once you are able to avoid sending spam mails, email marketing can be very effective if it is well conceived. That email marketing is often more effective than other marketing techniques is a digital marketing fact. In fact, marketers are more likely to get a click from a marketing email than social media posts despite the legendary popularity of social media platforms. When email messages/newsletters contain high quality content, videos, call-to-action, CTA buttons and social media buttons, they often have impressive click-through rates. If marketers make efforts to personalize their emails and actually provide something of real value customers really want, such emails rarely end up in the trash.