How to Generate Leads for your Online Business through Outsourcing

In this age and time particularly with the advent of the internet, digital marketing happened. Digital marketing brought with it new ways to get leads without physical interaction as was the case previously. One of these new ways to get leads is through outsourcing. Leads generation by outsourcing is one of the most effective methods presently out there. Technically, leads generation outsourcing requires third-party advertising to gain sales for your businesses. Digital marketers presently use several lead generation outsourcing methods to stimulate their business growth. They can therefore use multiple techniques at the same to get leads from various platforms. Some of these techniques include paid services if you have the resources.

 

Following are some of the best ideas for outsourcing lead generation to help grow your business:

Host Free Webinars

Well organized webinars are some of the best places to get quality leads. The reason for this is simple. Webinars are popular networking events that attract a certain caliber of individuals. When these individuals show interest in your business, they could follow up. That creates good leads. If you own a business, webinars provide you with a great opportunity to sell yourself, your brand, and your products/services. They give you a great chance to speak for yourself, educate others and offer your audience a lasting impression. That can create valuable leads.
 
Sponsor Competitions

The average human being loves to compete and many love being winners. Many customers really crave being able to gain something from businesses through competitions. A smart business owner can take advantage of this craving to get valuable leads. This he can do by sponsoring competitions with his business name and logo fully displayed on the ads. He can also set up contests, and offer discounts and gifts as prizes to winners. As a business owner, if you participate as sponsor in competitions organized by famous brands in your niche, you can gain more integrity for your business while at the same time generate valuable leads.
 
Write a Business Newsletter

This requires good writing and analytical skills to do. Well written Newsletters offer great insights into your brand. They provide people with a personalized experience when it comes to offers, testimonials, and so much more. But, writing a newsletter and sending it out isn’t doable without third-party interference. If however you can secure the services of a copywriter and with bulk email software, you can make it easier and more convenient to distribute your Newsletter to a larger customer base. This helps to nurture more leads.

Run Podcasting Sessions
 
Presently, one of the most popular trends in digital advertising is through podcasts. Podcasting is an audio session which is an excellent way to make your business stand out and be noticed. In a well- packaged podcast, you can directly discuss your products/services live and real-time. This discussion can include their benefits, and significant advantages over the competition. It is advisable to also talk about what makes your business different from everyone else’s in your niche. You can through podcasting directly relate live, how your products/services can be of use to your customers and how they can help solve problems for them. Good leads can be generated from these efforts.
 
Hire a Reputable Ads Company

Yes, there are real professionals who can help you generate leads. Most of these professionals are in advertising companies. They come with predefined templates containing various lead-generation strategies. If you so choose, they can also provide customized lead-generation strategies and campaign ideas. These ideas can help you gain more leads and paying customers in your business.

Allow Customers Access to Demos  

Demo videos are very effective marketing tools to get leads. Most people love to get a demo of things they want to buy and services they want before making their decisions. To take advantage of this marketing strategy, you can offer free consultations and samples for people to click your link. You can even take it further by providing discounted services and or free gifts for particular users. Demos if well deployed can be very effective to get leads.

Use Video Tutorials

Another very effective way to generate leads is through short informative videos. Such how-to videos must provide very clear audio-visual representations. They help to make it easier for people to understand your brand since they speak directly to your target audience. If they effectively help to expose your content, they generate leads as well. To get good leads, you can carefully create quality videos and upload them on social media particularly YouTube, Instagram and TikTok.

Use Lead Generation Software

It is possible to use smart software to generate leads. This technology works by analyzing data to determine which customers will most likely patronize your products/services. The software not only examines data for you, it also helps to drive traffic to your platform and ultimately leads. It is possible for you to customize most lead generation software and specifically tailor them to your business needs. This makes them more effective to generate leads.
 
Summary

If you want to enhance high-impact growth in your business, lead generation outsourcing is essential. It is also a great way to analyze what works for your business through trial and error. So, if you outsource lead generation, it will help boost your traffic, get leads and conversions. Ultimately, it helps to boost sales and increase brand awareness in the short and long term for the business.

How Best To Use Affiliate Links in Your Digital Marketing

In digital marketing parlance, an affiliate link is a unique URL given as a referral to affiliates for tracking traffic movement from the affiliate website to the merchant website. Digital marketers rely on these links to help them track the traffic and conversions generated by each affiliate. The commissions due to affiliates are determined on the basis on these conversions. What this means is that without unique affiliate links, it is practically impossible to attribute conversions correctly and accurately to affiliates. This is because the links help affiliates to track their performance. Data from the tracking helps affiliates to refine and improve their strategies to attract more traffic, get more leads and conversions. To get these results, an affiliate must promote these unique links in the right places and via the right channels that can help enhance their visibility. It is not really the affiliate links per se but the ways the links are promoted that greatly help to enhance their effectiveness.

 
Following are tested and effective ways to efficiently promote your affiliate links in your digital marketing to get the most benefits from the links.

Use Affiliate Links in Your Product Reviews

Affiliate marketers use product reviews to attract engagement from their audience by building interest and curiosity. So when affiliates promote affiliate links to the products they are marketing in the content of these reviews, they help to generate traffic and even conversions. For better results, you can also create affiliate review videos to promote your affiliate products and links. Reviews may be directly responsible for driving traffic to your content but the affiliate links you promote along the content help to generate leads, conversions and sales from the traffic.

Use As Affiliate Banners on Your Website

Banners as ads tools on your website are highly visual. They directly appeal to your audience thereby increasing the chances of clicks. If this happens, the affiliate links on the banners will direct the visitors to the products you are marketing. That increases the chances of conversions and sales. But, the locations you place these banners on your webpage is of paramount importance. For best results however, you can best place banners on the top of your web pages and on the sidebars and footers of the pages. On these locations, banners tend to be more visible and as such generate more clicks.
 
Use Links on Repurposed Video Content

Marketing videos are highly visual and naturally help to increase traffic to websites. Therefore, adding video content to your website is highly beneficial to the website. If the videos carry affiliate links, they help direct traffic to your affiliate products. It is smart marketing therefore to add affiliate links to your video content by simply mentioning the link in your video or in the description. If your video is of high quality and impactful enough, it will attract a significant number of clicks on your affiliate links. That can be great for conversions and sales.

Add Links on Your Landing Page

Your landing page is a webpage on your website where every visitor first makes contact with. It usually has details of the merchant tools, applications, software and apps you use and the products/services you are marketing. You can add your affiliate links to these products’ descriptions for maximum exposure to visitors who land on your website. When your visitors understand these descriptions, they may be tempted to click on the links. That gives you the ultimate benefit of getting conversions and sales.

Add Affiliate Links to Your Email Newsletters

In digital marketing, emails Newsletters are a very effective way to build great relationships with your audiences. This is more so when you already have in place a responsive email list which you can segment for more effective marketing. With such list of subscribers, you already have a very valuable marketing asset in place to handle your promotions. It contains a list of persons who already subscribe to what you are up to and as such well positioned to read your newsletters. Newsletters to such a list usually serve as veritable channels to promote affiliate links. They help you to build the much needed trust with your recipients and that helps to enhance more clicks on your affiliate links.

Run Links on Pay-Per-Click Ads

Running ads particularly on Google is one great way to promote your affiliate links to attract clicks. In digital marketing, this is about the most direct and straightforward way to promote affiliate links. Characteristically, it manages to bring in the most clicks and conversions. It is a very efficient way too because you are only required to pay for clicks successfully delivered and nothing more.
 
Add Links to Your Posts on Content Publishing Platforms

If you are a blogger, aside adding links on the blog content of your blog, you can also add links on the content you publish as a guest blogger on other platforms or on the content you publish on content publishing platforms like Medium. Such platforms allow you to do link promotions in your posts directly. That means you are allowed to add your affiliate links to your posts on such content publishing platforms to generate traffic and clicks.

Use Affiliate Links on Your Own Products

If you run your own e-commerce store, it means you have your own products to sell. You can add affiliate links to the descriptions of these products. Be careful though to ensure you naturally add affiliate links to your products in relevant places. If your audience already trusts you enough to come over to your store, they will also trust the affiliate products that you market with the affiliate links in your products. That translates to more clicks and a rise in affiliate sales.

Use Links on your Content on Social Media and Forums

Social media is one hugely popular hangout for most people these days. Smart marketers target their audiences there as well with affiliate products. To leverage marketing on social media effectively, a marketer must have a sizeable following and a good online presence particularly on the very popular platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and the likes. Once you’ve created this online presence, you can tactically promote your affiliate links leveraging the in-house marketing tools of the various platforms. Some of the platforms allow you to add affiliate links to your social media bio and descriptions. You can also create posts tactically promoting these links on the platforms. You can in addition promote affiliate links on popular forums with like-minded discussants and with good results as well.

Last Line

If you are able to promote your affiliate links well enough, it is possible for you to earn more in affiliate marketing. No doubt affiliate marketing is one great way to earn money online. But, you need to know the right strategies/techniques to promote your affiliate links online to make this happen. All the foregoing strategies/ways/techniques as discussed come in very handy in that quest. 

Lead Generation Strategies to Boost Your Sales Revenue

In digital marketing parlance, a lead is any person/entity expressing interest in the product/service you are marketing. Obtaining such persons/entities by deliberate marketing efforts is lead generation. Marketers acquire leads to grow their customer base by way of leads, conversions and sales. More sales in your business directly translate to a boost in your sales revenue. So, to generate more sales, you must deploy effective strategies to get more leads and eventual conversions. Following are some of the best lead marketing strategies you can deploy to get more leads for your business.

 

Compile a Buyer Persona

A buyer persona is like profiling the individuals you want to target with your marketing messages who may be interested in buying your products/services. If you use the right parameters and segmentation, you can have the right insight into the prospective buyer's needs and wants. You can have an insight into their specific purchasing attitudes and the criteria that can drive them to purchase your products/services. If you have these vital insights of your products/services buyers' persona, it becomes easier for you to create actionable and efficient lead generation strategies. With this persona in mind, you can easily fine-tune all your marketing efforts/strategies to resonate well with the buyer who wants and needs the products/services you are offering. That way, you can get more leads, conversions and sales.
 
Enable Sales Chat Feature on Your Website

Communication is really key to successful marketing efforts in this age and time. If this communication is instant and two-way, so much the better! When visitors take advantage of the chart feature on your website, it is easier for you to deal with them real time, address their concerns instantly and eventually convert them to leads. The presence of a sales chat feature on your website can easily turn ordinary visitors into leads because they can talk to you to know more details about the products/services you are marketing. With chat features like Skype for instance, visitors are easily at ease knowing they are talking to “someone.” With AI like Chatbots, you can have a 24/7 chat feature that helps you to maintain a great customer experience no matter what time of the day or night customers are on your website. These chat features are inevitably handy to help you to nurture your website visitors and convert them into leads and customers. The more leads and conversions you get this way, the more sales you make.

Rev Up Your Content Marketing Efforts

Content remains king in digital marketing particularly for ecommerce business owners. When links to products are embedded in content and promoted widely online, they help to get traffic and clicks back to products on the ecommerce website. The best content is content that is highly informative and impactful. If such content is optimized with the right keywords, it attracts the attention of search engines. Search engines like to go for optimized content, rank it higher in their SERPs and send organic traffic to it. Without good content, your website cannot reach the top search results whenever an Internet user keys in a search. The more good content you create on your website therefore, the more traffic it attracts and the more leads it gets. When your web visitors like your content, they stay with it, read it and may eventually subscribe to your products/services. When the traffic to your website leads to sales, it helps to boost your sales revenue. That is what good content helps to enhance.

Collaborate with Influencers

The advent of social media has really made influencer marketing popular. Influencers are celebrities in the online world particularly social media with huge audience and at times fanatical following. If you partner with and collaborate with influencers, they can help talk about your products, try them out, endorse them and even recommend them to their huge audiences. They can even serve as affiliate marketers to your products and earn commissions on the sales they generate or earn discount codes on your products. That way, influencers can help to promote your products/services, bring in more leads and eventual sales. Most influencers are known for constantly creating a buzz and hype in the online world. This can have a very positive effect on the products/services they are helping to market. This celebrity buzz can help to drive interest to your products/services. That translates to leads and sales for your website.
 
Task Your Current Customers for Referrals

If you want to task your current customers for referrals, there are some marketing strategies you can deploy to help turn them into a good source of leads. This is because there's no one better to ask for referrals than your current customers. Your customers already know your brand, they are delighted with it and are thus in the best position to refer others to the brand. For this reason, you can directly reach out to your customers tasking them on referrals. This you can induce with incentives like discount codes, coupons, or thank you gifts for each referral they send to you. You can also encourage your current customers to send new referrals to your business by giving them a warm follow-up and thank you message after each purchase. Doing this routinely can help you to generate more leads through customer referrals.  

Effective Techniques to Capture Sales Leads Using WhatsApp

Most digital marketers are increasingly becoming highly innovative. Presently, if they need to pass information quickly, many easily turn to WhatsApp which is now one of the most popular messenger Apps in the world. The App is deliberately designed for business and it makes an excellent and efficient sales leads generation tool. It is one App that is very easy to use for marketing purposes and you can post marketing messages including excellent pictures to individuals and in groups making your messages available to hundreds of thousands of WhatsApp users in a matter of seconds. Now, that’s a great marketing tool no doubt! You can set up a WhatsApp account in minutes and take advantage of instant two-way communication that is great for leads generation. If you create a WhatsApp business account, it comes packaged with a wide range of in-house marketing tools and products that provide excellent support for your businesses. On WhatsApp, marketers can easily share marketing messages and even photos and videos of their latest products demonstrating how the products work.

 
Because of the design and peculiarity of WhatsApp, it can be great for these here lead generation techniques.
 
Easily and Widely Sharing Stories
 
Every business that wants to generate leads must as a matter of course share stories and very widely too. That is where the stories feature or WhatsApp status becomes quite handy and relevant for sharing stories on WhatsApp. This feature allows marketers to connect directly with their followers by sharing the relevant content they may be interested in. Such relevant content can be in form of new products, product launches, product promos and salient customer testimonials. Smart marketers also share user-generated content to entice and hook their followers using some powerful social proof to pique their followers’ interest. Such content helps to entice quick response to enable the marketer take their queries and direct them to the answers.
 
Leveraging Data-Driven Marketing Campaigns

WhatsApp messaging allows you to prioritize data-driven decisions. This allows marketers to speed up their marketing processes and get better and faster results. Marketers can therefore leverage on it to improve predictability, speed, and adaptability to change in their marketing campaigns. Through it, you can quickly determine what works and what isn’t working as you expect in your marketing campaigns particularly as it affects your lead generation and sales strategy. You can extract the right data at any stage in your marketing. This allows you to come up with rapid iterations that can help you to increase your conversions.
 
Providing Better and more Effective Customer Service
 
Serving customers is always a business priority. In fact, customers always expect to be served and served well without which you cannot expect to have them as customers for much too long. WhatsApp comes in handy here because it is always on 24/7. With it, marketers can directly interact with customers and even prospects round the clock. Prospects and customers can ask questions at any time and get instant and direct responses. That can be great for customer support, leads generation and conversions. For this reason, WhatsApp is not only a great app for building trust and relationships; it can also be effectively used to nudge prospects further down the sales funnel and towards a conversion.

Leveraging Consultative Selling
 
Marketers understand consultative selling to be when they prioritize the customer-business relationship. It simply means putting the customer’s interest first in your marketing calculations at all times. With WhatsApp, you can easily explore all ways to understand your customers’ problems before attempting to sell them anything. It is like needs assessment really. It is only when you know what your customers really want that you can effectively sell them anything. So, instead of focusing on the product you are selling, you can focus more on the customer and his needs through direct WhatsApp messaging. This is possible because you can easily use WhatsApp to extract relevant information from your customers. Through this App, you can spend quality time building and nourishing a great business relationship with customers. This enables you to get to know them much better. If you do, you’ll then be able to deliver an awesome brand experience to them. In most cases, doing so usually results in improved sales. 

Easily Eliminating Junk Leads

Most online businesses usually find it difficult to know which leads are good and which are simply junk. WhatsApp is a perfect tool that comes really handy for marketers to attract quality leads and easily eliminating junk leads. This is because of its easy two-way interaction feature. This feature allows marketers to rely on WhatsApp to classify leads faster and drastically cut down on the time needed to do so. The App can come in handy for customers at any stage they are in the sales funnel. No matter the stage customers are in the sales funnel, marketers through WhatsApp can still target prospects with the right marketing messages/strategy. This is because marketers can easily match these messages to wherever the buyers are in their buying journey.

Wrapping Up

If you are an ambitious marketer and you want to get and retain customers, WhatsApp is the right social media App your business needs. This is why the App has quickly grown to become one of the most-used social media platforms in the world. It is not enough to simply set up a WhatsApp account. If you cannot use it to implement the foregoing strategies, your business cannot benefit from it. Many marketers now effectively use this App to connect with businesses as well as being social. You too can tap into the huge potentials of this fantastic marketing App to acquire more leads and expand sales in your business.

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.

Benefits of User-Generated Content for Affiliate Marketing

In affiliate marketing, user-generated content (UGC) is extremely valuable for driving traffic, building trust, and generating leads for marketers. Affiliate marketing is a simple business model where affiliates help product merchants to market their products and the affiliates earn commissions from the sales they generate. It is all about building relationships and networking to earn money online. Many affiliates prefer to build a relationship with the businesses they work with, while others focus on building a relationship with their audience. Affiliates take advantage of UGC to build these much-cherished relationships.  UGC is a content created by users rather than professional marketers or publishers. It comes in such forms as comments/feedback, photos/graphics, videos, reviews and even blog posts. Many marketers hugely rely on UGC to promote their products and drive traffic to their websites. UGC helps affiliate marketing to work better and deliver more beneficial results. Here is how:

More Traffic

Even if the UGC is in the form of funny meme, adorable video or a heartfelt post about a personal user experience, if it is widely shared, it translates to valuable inbound traffic. Affiliate marketers cherish good traffic. This is because good traffic in quite helpful to their business. The challenge however is always how affiliate marketers can make their UGC more appealing and, therefore more shareable. To this end, marketers must strive to make their UGC more relatable than traditional marketing content. They can make it feel less like an advertisement and more like a conversation between friends, family or business partners. That way, UGC manages to provide a sense of authenticity that can be lacking in other forms of marketing. When shoppers see that other real people are using and enjoying a product, they can relate better and are more likely to try the product themselves.

Enhanced Trust

One huge challenge of affiliate marketing is always how to earn the trust of consumers. This is because many consumers don’t quite trust bloggers or websites promoting products. UGC usually comes handy to plug that trust deficit hole because it comes with a built-in level of trust. Consumers see UGC as coming from a real person rather than a faceless entity. The reason they relate well and better with such content. That helps to build trust. So, affiliate marketers can better enhance this relationship by rewarding their customers with deserved recognition through widely sharing their posts and even mentioning them by name. Great for trust building no doubt!

Higher Engagement

UGC is more likely to be engaged with than traditional marketing materials. You know why? It is because it is more authentic and relatable in the eyes of consumers. Smart marketers can use UGC to address poignant issues as well as disclosing more about their personalities and values. Most human beings crave recognition and always want to be seen to matter. This is why people are more likely to share content that’s relatable and not superficial. That translates to higher engagement.

More Leads

Typically, UGC can generate more leads because it can help marketers to reach a wider audience. The more people your marketing messages reach, the more leads you’re likely to generate. The more leads you generate, the more sales you are likely to make. UGC is highly effective to generate leads because it is more authentic than other forms of marketing. That helps to make it more trustworthy and persuasive in the eyes of consumers. Naturally, UGC often usually comes from people who are already customers or fans of a product/service.

Credible Ways to Get UGC for Your Affiliate Marketing Program

For your affiliate marketing business to take advantage of the foregoing benefits, you must first explore all credible ways to get UGC for the business. One of such credible ways to encourage UGC is to offer incentives, such as discounts, free giveaways or exclusive content. With these incentives, users will be more likely to share your content and help you promote your products/services as widely as possible. You can also encourage shoppers to share their own photos and videos or create contests and giveaways. The more fun and engaging your content is, the more likely people are to share it. You may also use influencers and reputable content creators, but adequate care must be taken to make sure the end result looks more like UGC and less like a paid ad. Many consumers do not take paid ads as seriously as they take UGC.

Conclusion

Even though UGC looks like and sounds like users are doing the entire job, it is not really the case. Deft and calculated marketing efforts from the business owner usually help to get the right UGC. Affiliate marketers must be sure they do their research well, make good plans and budgets, gauge strategies, and employ the best analytics tools to measure results. That is about the best way they can hope to get the real benefits of UGC for their affiliate marketing programs.

How Best to Use Affiliate Marketing to Drive Traffic, Generate Leads, and Boost Sales

Affiliate marketing is now well-established and proven as a very viable option for increasing eCommerce sales. Through it, marketers can exponentially extend the market reach of their business and effectively drive traffic to their business websites and blogs. Most marketers find affiliate marketing extremely attractive as a business model because of the low-cost and low-risk aspects of the business. This is exactly why many small business owners rely on affiliate marketing to drive traffic, generate leads and boost sales. Aside individual small business owners, even the most prominent players in the eCommerce world, such as Strong Future International SFI, ClickBank, Amazon and eBay, all have thriving affiliate programs. This is a clear testimony to the great potential of affiliate marketing for any online business.

To get a team of good affiliates, you can either source them directly yourself or you do so through a reputable agency. If your affiliate team is good, your business can benefit from excellent return on investment. This ROI is not only in sales and subscriptions but also in building brand awareness and market reach. The types of affiliates you decide to work with depend on your business aims and the kinds of products/services you are promoting. Sourcing affiliates directly is OK and can yield good results too but using agencies has an added advantage.  If you use the services of a reliable affiliate marketing agency or affiliate network, they not only provide you with pre-vetted and targeted affiliates, they also manage the transfer of links, images, logos, ads etc. etc. and handle payments as well. By doing this, it makes things easier for the business owner to get more and better managed leads and sales.
As a business owner, if you are marketing with affiliate marketing campaigns, your business has added benefits when compared to other online marketing channels. The reason is simple.
 
Affiliates are independent business persons with their own web channels and audience. This is what they bring to bear to help a business owner whose affiliates they are to widely propagate marketing messages and make sales. Most affiliates usually have good access to consumers with whom they have already established a strong and responsive trust relationship. So, when such affiliates make a personal product recommendation through their own channels particularly when such massages go out to a responsive mailing list of hundreds of thousands, the impact of such messages can be tremendous. When this happens, the conversion rate such affiliates achieve usually out-performs standard marketing techniques in terms of leads and sales. Typically, affiliate marketing not only engenders new demographics for your business, it characteristically draws many consumers to your business website or blog. That means traffic. For many marketers, affiliate marketing is one great way to build traffic and boost online presence for their business in the SERPs of search engines. This ultimately translates to good organic traffic for the business.

 

If you relate with affiliates as individual freelance marketers themselves and do business with them as such, the benefits are great. Most affiliates bring to bear on your business their high skills and tremendous experience in content marketing. Many already have their own established portfolio of websites and blogs, along with well-managed and responsive email lists. Now, these are highly valuable marketing assets affiliates lay out for affiliate marketing. With these marketing assets in place, all a business owner really needs to do is to simply provide affiliates with links to the sales pages of their specific products/services. Affiliates do their promotions using these unique links in their content. For correct and easy attribution purposes, each of these links has a tracking code embedded in it that is unique to each affiliate. When affiliates promote a product/service using these links, for each consumer they send to a product page that converts, they earn a percentage of the value of the sale as commission. The more conversions they generate, the more commission the affiliates earn. This is why affiliate marketing is a performance-based business model. Much unlike a marketing agency whom you are required to pay irrespective of whether their campaigns yield results or not, affiliates are compensated solely based on the results they generate. This is why affiliates are generally more highly motivated. How great they are doing depends on how well they are performing in their affiliate marketing activities. The reason affiliates are best suited to help businesses drive traffic, generate leads and boost sales.

How Web Development is Important for your Small Online Business

Professional webmasters define web development as all the actions, updates, and operations required for building, maintaining, and managing a website to ensure optimal performance, user experience, and speed. They actualize this by professionally creating web pages and apps for the Intranet, a private network, or the Internet during a web development process. This process includes creating and maintaining web pages as well as web design, web development, web publishing, and database management. Webmasters use a variety of online tools to create apps and websites for the benefit of online business owners. The results range from basic and simple websites to complicated web applications and social media platforms, and from countless online shopping web pages to content management systems (CMS). These web development activities are of huge importance to online small businesses particularly in the following ways.

 
Coping With Changes in Technology

Daily, online technologies are advancing just as the internet is deepening. Web development thus helps your small business to cope with Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Data Science, and others in terms of need and application. Good web developers take advantage of new technologies to design websites that greatly help small business owners to explore and take business opportunities online.
 
Improvement in Marketing Tactics

To make sales, every small online business needs to attract traffic. Improvement in marketing tactics which a good web development engenders can help this process. Through it, a small business can directly increase sales by engaging marketing tactics that enhance good communication with customers and potential customers. It also assists in making good business decisions by precisely assessing data, your website insight, and other vital information. Good web development makes your website more appealing and user-friendly. That helps to keep your customers and potential customers actively engaged on your website without which you’ll be steadily losing them to your competition.

Increase in Business Accessibility

A good web development enables users to access your website from anywhere in the world and at any time 24/7.  It provides the right space for everyone to view your website and the information they require about your business whenever they need it. Anytime anywhere a customer wants to know more about your business and its contact information, your website is where to go. It provides enough relevant information to help customers solve their problems and acquire your products. With good web development on your website, it helps to boost your chances of closing great business deals and to generate leads.

Generating More Leads

Every business thrives on sales. The more the number of sales made the higher the profits. Therefore, by deliberately building a website that helps with marketing, generate leads, attracts more customers and generate sales, your business booms as a result. A good website development enhances the ability of a business to offer more online transactions and a great opportunity to capitalize on online sales through good leads generation.

Establishing Brand Identity

Good web development enables a business to create and construct a website that meets the needs of customers. Good customers experience on your website aids in the development and protection of your brand’s identity. It also ensures consistency across all of your digital and physical media. If your web development is good, it enhances customer experience on the site. This experience encompasses the entire customer journey from your website to your shop and from your website chatbot all through to the checkout processes. When the customer experience on your website is seamless, and with smooth continuity in the consumer journey, it helps to establish a great identity for your brand.

Resourceful Advertising

A well-developed website allows you to display all meaningful information about your business online. Your business website is your business window to the world on the internet. This is why the information you provide on it must include product/service details, pricing, contact information, and much more. You can even showcase your current attractive offers and promos on the site to attract viewers’ attention. That provides a great opportunity to promote or even endorse these products/services to generate leads and sales. On-website advertising provides an effective and cost-efficient more resourceful digital marketing way to reach out to your target audience as against traditional marketing methods.

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 Get the Best Out of Affiliate Marketing

As a small business owner, you must no doubt be thinking of how to increase your sales and revenues by way of cost effective and efficient marketing strategies. Have you given affiliate marketing a good thought? Affiliate marketing is an excellent revenue-generating tactic used by many small online businesses to promote sales and traffic. What it involves is to simply use creative ways to link products merchants with buyers and you earn a commission for your efforts. It is as simple as that. Among the many options and tools available to small business owners today, affiliate marketing remains one of the best proven ways to market your brand and grow your business. It is hugely cost-effective to boot. Find below some of the many benefits your small business can derive online from affiliate marketing.

Cost-Effectiveness

If you get involved in affiliate marketing, you can effectively promote your brand, products/services without worrying about huge promotional expenses. If you need a low risk way to gain new customers, try affiliate marketing. Unlike most other online marketing strategies, affiliate marketing costs relatively less. This is because affiliate programs are based entirely on payment for performance. For this reason, an affiliate is only entitled to be paid a commission once a customer completes a desired action. This is a payment that is due only on the basis of conversions. It ensures that you do not waste your time and money on things that seem to have no value and are irrelevant to your making money.

Increased Brand Awareness

All affiliates are required to promote brands on their own with a view to attracting buyers. By doing this, there appears to be no better and faster way to be recognized by many potential buyers than by affiliate marketing. Through the diligent work of affiliates, it can help to significantly increase brand awareness and reach. Since affiliates get paid as per their efforts, they automatically become loyal brand advocates and promoters. Their efforts help to introduce brands to countless prospects, generate leads, and build trust among a target audience.

Increased Website Traffic and Sales

Because affiliates actively promote products links, their efforts can significantly help to increase traffic to a website much faster. The more websites that link to your pages, the more likely your target audience is to visit your website and get to know your products and services. With greater referral traffic, your organic traffic usually gets a boost. Every business owner hugely relies on website traffic to gain potential customers and to increase quantifiable clues. The more the numbers of people who visit your site, the more opportunities you have to address your target audience and eventually get them to buy from your business. It may however pose a few challenges for you to get the right traffic to your website. Affiliate marketing comes handy to meet these challenges. 

 
Better Target Audience Reach

As many online marketers very well know, it may be fairly easy to identify a target audience, but figuring out how to market to it, poses its own challenges. One of these challenges is figuring out how best to convey your marketing message to the right people, in the right frame, at the right time and in the right place. It is not enough for you to simply understand your audience well enough. If you are unable to develop a strategy based on effective marketing information to promote your brand to this audience, you cannot get the desired results. Affiliate marketing helps to get around these challenges. What you need do is to explore all ways to work with affiliates who have the right audience and their businesses resonate with your brand. That way, you can be sure that your marketing efforts will easily and widely reach people who are likely to be interested in your products/services.

Final Thoughts

Your small business can greatly benefit from affiliate marketing if you follow the right steps in your affiliate marketing campaigns. As the internet deepens and small business owners become more reliant on it to promote their businesses, they need affiliate marketing more than ever before to build their brands and to reach a wider and bigger audience at minimal costs in terms of time and money.

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.

Top Content Marketing Tips for Small Businesses

If you are a small business owner and you market online, you need content marketing tactics to help your business build a strong online presence and to attract customers. Content marketing is one of the most effective digital marketing strategies that help to bring that about. Small business owners do not just need to write good quality, educational and informative content, they must widely promote it multi-channel on the web to make it effective. These here tips can help small business owners to write and promote the right content that gets results.

 
Know your Audience

You must know your audience well enough to be able to write and promote to them the kind of content that will make impact on them. If you want your content marketing strategy to help your business, be sure you know your audience well enough. First, you must build an ideal customer persona that you are trying to reach with your content/promos. Next is to identify where this ideal customer can be located, the salient demographics, shopping patterns, order sizes, expense sizes, and how you can put your business before them. Next is to figure out how to best target this audience cost-effectively to get good results. With this information, you can better curate each of your advertisement or piece of content to have maximum impact on your audience.

Be Active on Social Media

Lately, for many small business owners, social media has become a very important and dependable tool for their digital marketing activities. Through social media, business owners can build a very valuable community of friends/followers which they can segment for effective marketing purposes. Sharing info on social media is easy and a good piece of content can easily go viral to the overall benefit of your marketing efforts. You can only get the best results from social media if you are active on it. What this means is that opening a social media account and having your profile on it cannot help your business much. You must stay active and engage your community to get good results. Answer comments and messages, and create content that encourages your audience to join in the conversation. This you can do by regularly posting quality content in form of photos, videos, blog posts, infographics etc on the most popular platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and others. You must however observe their community rules fully if you want to get the very best from these platforms. 

 
Hire a Marketing Agency

Allowing a professional digital marketing agency to handle some of the marketing activities of your business can free up quality time for you to manage the business properly. Such agencies don’t only have the experience; they also have the resilience to run things in the long term to get the best results. They usually deploy a variety of skill sets and strategies to put your business out there in the minds of prospective customers and customers. If you have the knowledge and skills, you may be able to handle some digital marketing tactics in-house yourself. But, many of these tactics could be more effective when carried out by an agency with specialized knowledge and skill-sets backed by experience. When compared with the results your business will get, the fees you pay the agency can be well worth the while in the long term.

Word of caution: Deal only with agencies that have verifiable case studies, reviews, and testimonials to back them up and they come highly recommended by businesses/persons they’ve worked with in the past.

Diligently Track your Leads

Good online analytics tools can help you with leads tracking if you want to optimize your digital marketing strategies. With these tools, you can easily chart where your leads are coming from and which marketing channels are worth investing more of your time and resources. With diligent leads tracking, you can determine which strategy is delivering the best results and through which channel. You will also know which leads are converting better to customers and which customers are doing more business with you. This info helps you to periodically reassess what you are doing, continue with what is good, rejig certain things or discard others completely.

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.