How to Grow Your Business with Outbound Sales Strategies

If you run your business online, you need a good outbound sales strategy if you want your business to grow. You may face huge challenges figuring out what works and what doesn’t in your marketing activities. That is expected. But, experienced marketers like to advise “using and testing” to determine what strategy works best. Many do recommend a delicate mix between inbound and outbound sales strategies to get the best results.

These here are some tested outbound sales strategies that could have a positive impact on the growth of your own business.

Create Your Ideal Customer Persona

Before developing any marketing strategy, first you must create an ideal customer persona right from the outset. A good customer persona allows you to understand your existing customers and prospects better. With it, you can better curate your content, services, product development and messaging to meet your target audiences' specific demands, behaviors and issues. To create a reliable customer persona, you may choose to directly interview your existing and prospective customers to uncover what they like most about your brand, services and or products. That is in addition to researching your customers’ database to discover trends related to your leads and the customers' behavior towards your content. The info and insights you glean from these exercises will help you to create and ideal customer persona to market to.

Market on Social Media

By way of definition, social media marketing involves the use of social media platforms to promote your brand's product/service. These days, social media appears to be where nearly everyone is at doing their own things around the world 24/7. It is the versatility of social media that business owners leverage on to communicate and engage with customers and reach new audiences. When properly nurtured, it is this audience that can potentially become paying customers. If effectively used, popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram can help business owners to establish great business relationships by helping them to widely share content of value to potential customers.

Generate Quality Leads

Without a doubt, lead generation is by far one of the most effective ways to succeed in outbound sales marketing. For this reason, business owners always need to consciously generate quality leads for their businesses. Lead generation may be a very technical and hugely challenging activity for most marketers but it is worth the while in the long term. Business owners can however reliably use reputable lead generation tools like ZoomInfo and LinkedIn Sales Navigator to help them out. If you have already created an ideal customer persona, you can leverage these tools to help look for qualified prospects that could be a great match for your product/service. In addition to this, you can generate quality leads by way of deliberate referral programs technique. These are programs that encourage other people to promote your brand in exchange for some token value for every converted lead.

Be Active in Online Communities

Marketers are gradually discovering that participating and being very active in online communities actually delivers a number of advantages to businesses. Online communities such as forums, internet communities and Facebook groups can be great networks for you to get an overview of your product/service and to evaluate how your customers are relating with your brand. The insights from these communities really help brands to improve their offerings, create better products and build better and stronger brands. In addition, you can take advantage of these online communities to create strong partnerships by taking advantage of networking opportunities with fellow business owners in your industry/business niche. That helps to grow and strengthen your brand. As a direct marketing effort, you can directly promote your product/service by providing quality content to the community and reaching out directly to members that may be interested in what you are selling.

Use Cold Email Marketing

Email marketing is still a very effective marketing strategy if spamming is eliminated. Cold email marketing works best if you can create great quality, and attention-grabbing emails, that are optimized and targeted at a segmented audience. If such mails have attention-grabbing headlines, they entice people into opening the emails and possibly acting on them as well. If you send cold emails, make sure to follow up with your prospects and to track the “open-rate” of the mails using online tools. From your analytics/metrics, you can get insights about prospects that opened your emails and actually visited your website. If such persons did not make any purchase, you can then directly promote your brand to them again through re-targeting ads.

How to Develop a Good Content Marketing Strategy for a Service Business

Many service businesses have since discovered that content marketing on the internet is one of the most powerful lead generation tools they can depend on to grow their businesses. This is because through the internet they can publish thought-provoking content, market their services, follow up with clients/customers, get leads and make sales. Service businesses are hugely dependent on good content to market their businesses online across multi-channel. To do this successfully, they rely on their content marketing strategy to reach the right audience at the right time with their marketing messages. A good content marketing strategy can assist service businesses to reach more customers through high-quality, informative, valuable, relevant, and engaging content.

These here tips can help you to create an effective, customer-attracting content plan to get more leads and customers to grow your service business.

What’s Your Primary Marketing Objective?

If you run a service business, this question must be answered right from the outset of your marketing strategy. Exactly what do you want to achieve with your content marketing efforts? That is, your primary marketing objective? Content usually serves a variety of purposes for marketers. Some of these purposes include, improving SEO, getting more leads, attracting more backlinks, attracting more website visitors, increasing engagement on social media, growing your email list and so on. Before creating content, these factors must come into play to decide on a primary marketing objective since different types of content usually work to generate different results.

Tap Ideas from Your Audience

What keeps a service business in business is its client/customer base. That is the main audience it serves. Without this audience you cannot remain in the business. So, what is good for your audience is what is good for your business. For this reason, sourcing ideas and suggestions from your audience is good marketing. You can find out from your audience what topics they’re interested in and what questions they have about the services you offer even if by way of email questionnaire, social media posts or through anonymous surveys. From the information you gather from these efforts, you can turn some of the questions/topics into blog posts. Better still, you can create a Frequently Asked Questions, FAQ page on your website from this information.

Create a Content Marketing Schedule

This is one effective way to plan and distribute your content. In matters of content marketing, quality comes first but consistency tends to make the real difference. If you have a credible content marketing strategy in place, it is made more effective when you are writing, publishing, posting, distributing and marketing your content on a regular and reliable schedule. You can engage project management tools like Asana and Monday.com to help you stay on schedule, organize your content details, and ensure that you’re distributing your content regularly across multi-channel.

Diligently Research Keywords for SEO

You cannot have a good SEO for your service business if you do not have searchable keywords to use in your content. That makes it imperative for you to thoroughly research keywords, using online keyword research tools like SEMRush.com or Ahrefs.com to find keywords to use on your web pages or in your blog posts. It involves identifying keywords your target audience is searching for to find the type of service your business is rendering. SEO is a bit technical in implementation. You can hire the services of professional webmasters to help you with SEO on your website if you are unable to do it yourself.

Spy on Your Competition

It is smart digital marketing to always keep an eye on what your competition is doing. By doing so, you can get to find out what they are doing better than you and how they are doing it. It is ok to spy on their content strategies to see what keywords they are targeting and what content they’re posting on social media and even in other web channels. You can use keyword research tools like SEMRush or Ahrefs to search for your competitors’ domain names and see what keywords they are ranking for. This can be a credible and effective way to find keywords you should be targeting on your own site. What your competition is posting on their blogs or social media channels, can give you some very helpful insights on the type of content you can create to increase engagement, boost your brand authority, and even attract more leads and customers to your own website.

Create Linkable Assets

There are many types of linkable assets content marketers like to create and use. These range from research findings to eBooks to guest articles to industry leaders’ interviews to webinars and so on. A linkable asset is a type of content that works to attract backlinks to your website. If such links are from high-quality and reputable sites, they can help to improve your own website’s SEO. An improved SEO helps to increase your website’s rankings, increase traffic and draw in more website visitors. If you are smart enough to share content that services many purposes, you can have just one SEO-friendly blog post that generates traffic, attracts backlinks, boosts engagement on social media, and converts your blog readers into leads/customers. Now, that’s great!

Have Content Distribution Plan

After planning your topics, writing your content, and publishing it, the next thing is to be sure it is widely distributed. That calls for a content distribution plan. The plan allows you to explore all viable ways to widely distribute your content multi-channel to reach as many eyes as possible. You may choose to distribute your content manually if you have the time and the patience. On the alternative, you can use content distribution tools like Buffer or Hootsuite to share your content on social media sites like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram and some other web channels like email, Google ads, Blogs, GMB and the likes.

Generate Leads

If you have leads generation as one of your content marketing objectives, you must give your readers ample opportunities to make contact with you. Make sure your website has a CTA feature to invite/direct your visitors to take desired steps. Include contact forms and be sure they are easily noticeable on the service pages of your website. Offer value, by way of downloadable eBooks or infographics on your website posts in exchange for users to provide their email addresses. Have an easily noticeable “contact me” feature on your website to include email address, telephone, chat bot, office address for physical visits. It helps to make it easy for prospects to easily make contact with you. When a contact is made, that is some kind of lead when qualified.
 
Maintain Contact with Prospects

It is just not enough to have leads, the leads must be nurtured. A lead is of no use without a diligent follow up. The contacts information you generate in your business must be used to keep communications open with prospects. Either by regular emails or even occasional telephone calls, if you maintain contact with your prospects, you can turn them to customers. With online Customer Relationship Management, CRM tools, you can keep your lead information organized, check follow-up status, send customers business information, and much more. These tools are great to help you follow up with every lead to be sure you are not missing out on any new customer opportunities.

Final Thoughts

From the foregoing, you can easily deduce that with good writing skills, the right planning, tools, and great scheduling/distribution, you can create amazing content that helps to grow your service business. The more content you create, the more beneficial experience you’ll have, the more your skills will improve and the better you’ll become at using content to turn prospective visitors into new leads/customers.

4 Digital Marketing Tips for New Business Start-Ups

No matter the size of your business now, at some point it was a start-up. Business start-up challenges are similar and the biggest challenge however is marketing in the midst of paucity of financial resources to embark on it. Digital marketing comes to the rescue at this stage. Digital marketing helps to get good results even in severely limited financial outlays. Nevertheless, as a start-up, you must embark on aggressive marketing all the same. If you want to engage in a business start-up, the more interest and support, you can muster early on, the more likely your chances of success. These digital marketing tips will help guide you on how to embark on marketing your new start-up for success.

Tip #1. Research, Test and Validate Your Marketing Strategy

Yes, you must begin from the basics. Researching and gathering information to plan your new start-up that is. As a new start-up, you need to design a marketing campaign strategy for your business. The information and data you can gather from your research efforts will give you the opportunity to plan and validate a digital marketing campaign for the future of your business. Detailed information about your products, target customers, the market, your competition, business environment and such like information will help enrich this strategy. These efforts help your business in no small measure to break into the market and be able to get good returns on your digital marketing investment in time, efforts and money.

Tip #2. Create a Business Website

This is a given. A business website serves as your business window on the internet. That is where online surfers first make contact with your business. Your business website is more of a potential marketing tool than just a channel to sell your products on the internet. If well-designed and hosted, it will help expose and promote your brand, attract customers, provide business information to customers and potential customers, attract leads, make sales and so on. To enhance these functionalities, the website must be, fully optimized to make user-experience very pleasant. What this means is that the website should have a good loading speed and be responsive to a wide range of user gadgets particularly computers and smart mobile devices. Ensuring that the website is designed and built for SEO, Search Engine Optimization is a necessity. That is what makes it visible to search engines. This is one issue start-ups must fully address right from the outset. Doing so helps to put the website in the best position possible for future digital marketing campaigns.

 

Tip #3. Engage and Nurture Your Leads

Start-ups naturally start prospecting widely from online audiences. From there, they source leads that they can skillfully nurture to paying customers. Through effective marketing communications, start-ups can do this effectively and efficiently. With good communications, they can maintain follow-up contacts with all the leads/connections they make from their marketing communications. As a start-up, if you embark on good promo before product launch, you can start gathering leads early enough to build potential customer base. One effective way to do this is through expectant offer messaging marketing campaigns.

Tip #4. Think Strategically

Strategic thinking is a must for a successful new business start-up. Since the start-up is new and still young, you always have all the time you need to think of a creative and unique digital marketing strategy for your business niche. Strategic thinking is a way of thinking of a plan designed to achieve a particular long-term aim. Start-ups that cannot effectively think long term are not very likely to succeed. First you must look for the most appropriate and suitable digital marketing techniques to support your digital marketing strategy to survive the long term. With that, you can effectively create your own unique and original marketing strategy to help your business stand out amidst huge competition and gain the attention it needs for success in the long term.

Why Digital Marketing is Right Even in a Pandemic

In times of severe restrictions in business, particularly in times of a pandemic as we are currently experiencing, digital marketers may choose to take part in virtual events. Even at that, talking to and marketing directly to customers and leads is still imperative. Fortunately, with the right digital marketing tactics/techniques, marketers can still connect to potential customers and amplify their marketing messages across many platforms. With digital marketing, marketers can still improve communications and online interactions despite the pandemic restrictions.

 

Here is why digital marketing is the best way to market, generate leads and sales even in times of a pandemic.

Cost-Effective Techniques

Digital marketing allows you to make contacts with customers seamlessly and to follow up leads without excessive cost implications. With it, you can communicate with prospects without any prohibitive travel and communications costs. That allows your business to have a consistent return on your investment, ROI. Most marketers are satisfied with the ROI from social media marketing, video content marketing, email marketing and other digital marketing techniques. In addition, they have different marketing options available to them depending on the sizes of the ads budgets they are operating. By combining a robust marketing strategy with automation tools, digital marketers can choose when, where, and how to reach their audiences to get the most out of every ads penny they spend.

Better Audience Targeting

Digital marketing allows marketers to use a clear digital strategy specially designed to deliver personalized messages tailored to suit different categories of consumers and their buying/engagement journeys. These online strategies help to make it easy for marketers to link up with the right target market and for the consumers to link up with the marketer. This is more so when marketers can easily seize the opportunity of using the right marketing tools to qualify leads in digital space. With digital marketing, marketers can also add fields to forms or use ads to target the decision-makers of a business and qualify leads well in advance. That helps sales and revenues returns.

Continuous Delivery of Results

Once a digital marketing strategy is well designed and launched, the effort generates leads continuously and almost in perpetuity. That is good for business no doubt. Such strategy allows marketers to have many opportunities to boost brand awareness and share their stories in cyberspace. In digital marketing, whatever content you create never goes to bed. It keeps your message alive in digital space allowing your targeted audience to find what they are looking for at any time 24/7. In addition, digital marketing allows you to easily repurpose and rejig your campaigns to sustain the interest of your leads and to keep them returning for more.

Measurable Results and Attribution

Digital marketing allows marketers to track leads and nurture such leads with a view to making them customers. With digital media, marketers can see how many prospects stop by their websites, what they click on, and where they go after leaving the sites. They can make use of online tools to diligently track these prospects and attribute all their actions adequately. By setting Key Performance Indicators, KPIs, marketers can continually analyze the performance of their content. That allows them to learn more and better understand their audiences, and how they interact with the brands they are promoting. By doing so, they can build up very useful real time and historical data to aid their marketing decisions. Such data helps marketers to focus more on workable tactics and high-impact actions that help to deliver the most leads and better sales.

6 Ways Digital Marketing Can Help Boost Your Business

Many digital marketers are always on the lookout for the most effective ways and means to secure a boost for their businesses. This quest is usually very daunting because of the fierce competition out there in cyberspace. This is aside the huge costs involved in traditional marketing methods as against digital marketing methods. This appears to be the real reason marketers like to turn to digital marketing, not only to market more efficiently and effectively but also to keep marketing costs down as much as possible. Marketers derive from digital marketing numerous benefits. Below are 5 of the most tangible benefits which most marketing experts tend to agree with.

1. You Can Directly Target Your Ideal Customers

Most digital marketing channels have audiences peculiar to them. Some have in-house analytics to measure demographics and classify their audiences into common characteristics. Some of these characteristics include age, gender, geography, educational qualification, employment etc etc. Many social media channels have this advantage. With this all-important marketing information, marketers can use it to directly target who they want to market to depending on the product/service they are marketing. Doing so helps to save costs and helps marketers to get better results in terms of leads and sales.
 
2. You Can Drive Conversions Better

Expert marketers rely on digital marketing techniques to attract organic traffic and drive conversions. Digital marketing allows marketers to derive immediate benefits in terms of leads and conversions as soon as they launch a marketing campaign. With ease of conversations and interactions it engenders, any new leads can be nurtured carefully to become customers while returning customers can be easily encouraged to return as repeat buyers. Digital marketing makes such interactions easy, cost-effective and seamless.

3. Cost-Effectiveness

Most marketers are always on a very tight marketing budget. They want real value for every penny spent on advertising. Digital marketing is a cost-effective marketing method and it delivers amazing results when measured against the cost of the marketing efforts. Marketers can save a considerable amount of money out of their digital marketing campaigns strategies in comparison to traditional marketing methods. This cost saving cuts across all available digital marketing options and multichannel. You can launch a digital marketing campaign at minimal cost or no costs at all. That helps to save money, freeing it up for other vital aspects of the business. Saving costs on marketing campaigns is hugely beneficial to the bottom line of the business.

4. You Attract Better Revenues

If you can save costs, you increase revenue as the bottom line. Digital marketing helps marketers to do that. When marketers launch a good campaign, viral propagation can keep it widely relevant for a long time even without additional prompting or boosting from the marketer. That helps to save marketing costs and increase revenues.

5. Easy Two-Way Communication

The beauty of digital marketing lies with the ease of communication/interaction between marketers and consumers. This communication can be very quick and easy to help consumers have problems resolved and their concerns addressed in good time. The two-way communication allows feedback in real time. Marketers can build trust faster and quicker with easy two-way communication. That helps to generate better business.

6. Benefits from Real Time Feedback

Unlike traditional marketing methods, digital techniques powered by the internet have kind of made real time communication extremely easy for marketers. They interact better with consumers, and with ease of feedback, they get problems and concerns addressed and resolved better and faster. That helps to boost business both in the short and long term. When marketers get real time feedback, the info helps them to better adjust their marketing campaigns depending on what the customer/consumer concerns are. They can easily judge how well their campaigns are doing and whether or not to make changes and or adjustments where needed. That is the main benefit of real time feedback for any marketing business.

7 Ways to Get the Best from Your Digital Marketing Strategy

Digital marketers always worry about how effective their digital marketing strategies are. They worry about how these strategies help their businesses to grow. If at any point in time they discover that the strategies they are using are not working for them as expected, they take steps to rejig them for better results. In your own business, whenever you observe that your marketing campaign is not working well to your satisfaction, it is a very clear sign that your business is in a vulnerable position. That is when something just has to be done and done fast too. A good look at your digital marketing strategy is the first logical step in that wise. Smart digital marketing demands it as a basic step, since most businesses rely heavily on effective marketing for their survival and steady growths. To get the best from your digital marketing strategy, don’t ignore the following. 

 
1. Have a Formal Digital Marketing Strategy

You must first be sure to have a marketing strategy and it works for your business. Not having one is always a very grave marketing error that stunts business growth. If you have a digital marketing plan in your overall marketing strategy, your business benefits immensely. By putting all the elements together in an effective way, doing all you should do at the right and proper time, your strategy becomes effective as a result. Of course, you can only know how well you are doing, if you have the right tools in place to track your results and monitor your progress.

2. Use Your Marketing Budget Prudently

Smart marketers always have a very keen eye on marketing costs. This is with a view to better organizing their marketing budgets and in delivering higher Returns on Investments, ROIs. For this reason, budget analysis/management in digital marketing becomes hugely important. By relying more on the most cost-effective techniques in your digital marketing strategy, you can better manage your marketing budget more prudently.

3. Target the Right Audience

You dissipate energy and resources unnecessarily if you habitually “shoot at everything that flies” in your marketing activities. Effective targeting is what gets the best results. If you fully identify and understand the ideal audience for your products, you can market to them directly for good results. For this reason, if you know your audience well enough, you can effectively tailor your digital marketing activities to fit them. These activities entail the right content, the right type of marketing medium/channel and the right message you are conveying. It is always very important therefore, to have a plan for targeting customers and potential customers who share a lot in common in a specific and effective way. Targeting the right audience in your marketing efforts, is not only a cost-effective thing to do, it gets the best results.

4. Pay Attention to Search Engine Optimization, SEO

A good search engine optimization, SEO technique on your website helps to get it noticed by search engines. It requires a careful and tactical use of keywords and alt tags in your content and headlines. When correctly used, they have a large amount of influence on your SEO. They help search engines particularly Google to rank your website well in its SERPs. That is what easily becomes available to searchers first when in need of information. Your website directly benefits by way of good organic traffic from such search results. Because search engines tend to change their algorithms from time to time, be sure to keep an eye on these changes and to update your SEO techniques in tandem to avoid penalties from search engines. Such penalties may have adverse effects your business online.

5. Connect with Influencers

It remains a good marketing strategy to develop good relations with influencers and to depend on their large following to grow your business. Because of their effectiveness, making some investments in connecting with influencers is a good marketing strategy. Making this investment is usually worth the while because it tends to engender higher ROI for the marketer. This is why marketing with influencers is always worth it and a large percentage of marketers think so as well. Many see it as a very effective marketing strategy because of the good results it gives. For best results, it is advisable to make some deliberate efforts to source the right influencer to work with and who suits and promotes your brand better. That kind of influencer can easily help to create a huge awareness for your brand and help to boost sales/revenue for your business.

6. Use Paid Social Media Ads

Social media platforms have become very popular with digital marketers because of their immense popularity and ease of sharing information. They now serve as very important platforms for marketers to build and grow their audiences very quickly. With their customized in-house analytics, marketers benefit by building greater insights into their marketing efforts free of cost. These benefits can be boosted with additional paid ads that are cost-effective too. Promoting your brand on social media without any paid advertising is usually time consuming and may not even guarantee any appreciable increase in your audience. If your marketing budget can accommodate it, it is good to invest in paid ads on social media. Doing so will not only help you to better target your audience, but also, it will help transform your page into a very popular page and a top leads generator as a result.

7. Market with all the Platforms

Expert marketers like to advise marketers not to ignore any marketing channel/platform in their digital marketing strategy. All channels have their own advantages and peculiarities and the results they deliver vary as well. Content marketing, blogging, email marketing, social media marketing, inforgraphics, video marketing etc. must be part of your marketing strategy for better effectiveness. What matters is to be very active when using most of these channels. If you regularly post fresh and informative content related to your brand/product on daily basis, it will help your page to get more traffic and to build a larger audience. For better and direct audience targeting particularly on social media, it is very important to understand how their algorithms work. You can rely on hashtags to post information according to your audience’s online stats to get insights and a brief of your audience. Doing so will enable you to have a better use of hashtags and keywords to target your audience based on such hugely important marketing demographics like age, education, employment, profession, gender, marital/parental status, and interests. You get better results as well. 

5 Digital Marketing Tips to Grow Your Small Business

If you are involved in digital marketing and you want to grow your business online, you must find ways to take advantage of constantly evolving digital technology. These technologies play a very significant role to enable many small businesses to have a very robust online presence. The bottom line to digital marketing online activities is to be able to attract good traffic to your website. Doing so consistently helps to get good leads, customers and eventual good sales. To enhance that, these here, 5 digital marketing tips come in very handy.
 
1. Create a User-Friendly and Attractive Website for Your Business

Your website is your dependable business window in virtual business world. For this reason, it is very important for your business survival and growth to have an attractive, user-friendly and informative website for your business. That is the type of website that can help your potential customers and customers even if they have different and diverse backgrounds, to easily do business with you. For best results, you must ensure that your website is dynamic, optimized and responsive to different gadgets like laptops, tablets, and mobile devices particularly smartphones.

2. Don’t Ignore Your Customers’ Opinions
 
If you are a marketer, there is no doubt you are aware that you are in business because of your customers. Doing business online requires that you have a real footprint in digital space.  By having an online footprint for your business, you acquire the ability to interact directly with your customers in an unfettered manner. Such interactions help to make your customers feel like their opinions matter, are being heard, that they are valued and are very important to your business. Do not ignore your customers’ opinions. If you value their opinions and they get to know, your business can as a result get some brand loyalty from them. There is an additional benefit of their word-of-mouth publicity for your businesses because of their brand loyalty. This can directly help your business to rake in more and more leads, customers and even better sales.

3. List Your Business on Google My Business

Make sure you list your business on Google My Business, GMB, with such vital business information as Name of business, Business location, Services provided, and Contact information. Most marketers are now aware that GMB listing has become an effective search tool many marketers now effectively use worldwide. It is a hugely effective Google search tool. If for instance someone is trying to locate a business/service near them, they can simply type “Mechanic Near Me” keyword option on Google. Google will immediately display a list of businesses/services dealing in that particular business/service in their vicinity. Most online searchers habitually search their localities first to do business. For this reason, you can take a quick advantage of that by creating a GMB listing for your business.
 
4. Get Your Business on Social Media

Getting your business on social media is akin to taking it where your customers are. In this age and time, nearly everyone is now on social media. Because of the unique features and immense popularity of social media platforms, they create room for easy and very wide forum for sharing online information. Creating a business page in some social media platforms for your business is thus a very good idea. That idea can be of very huge benefit for your marketing efforts. Many marketers are now aware that a major part of the global population prefers to get their queries answered on social media. The reason is, social media is where nearly everyone appears to be at for varied social/business reasons right now. On social media, you can easily spread more awareness about your business, interact easily with prospective clients, market to them, and rake in more leads, customers and sales.

5. Run Ads on Social Media  

Apart from the fact that social media ads can be budget-friendly, they allow you to directly target the right customer demographics. So, you can always take real marketing advantage of these demographics for better results. Some in-house and unique social media features allow you to do this with ease. These unique features of social media allow you to specify the gender, age and interest of your prospective customer. Social media ads are most effective when used for the local vicinity such as surrounding cities/communities close to your business. By adding specific demographic details of your potential customers in local community ads, you can get a better and more effective reach. It allows you to better target and impress the right customers by way of a better and more effective leads conversion.  

How to Use Email Programs to Nurture Leads

Every serious online marketer always wants leads, credible leads to help grow their business. Many rely on intensive email marketing to get it done. Email marketing may look old school to some marketers but it is still hugely successful when it comes to lead generation. Many successful marketers agree with this and they identify email newsletters as about the best way to nurture leads if used correctly.

If you have not been successful so far to use email program to drive leads, you can try these tips for a change then compare the results.

Write Brief and Direct Subject Lines

If you know how to write great subject lines, you can do this on your own but if not, you can get free assistance from online headline generators. A Google search for “headline generators” can give you many sites to choose from depending on what your immediate needs are. For recommendations, if you start with a keyword term or phrase search on Sumo.com or SEOPressor.com, you can get dozens of great subject line ideas from which to choose. For best results, be sure to limit your email subject lines to not more than 70 characters and less than 10 words. 

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Keep Your Messages Simple and Straightforward

The attention span of most online users is notoriously very short. For this reason, the faster and quicker you can deliver your message, the better the results it gets. You must therefore keep your messages, simple, catchy, straightforward and to the point if you want them to be effective. In email marketing, time is of the essence. An email is great when the subject line easily grabs readers’ attention, lure them with a CTA graphic and sell them on the why they should take action. Great emails help to build relationships, nurture these relationships and help generate credible leads.

Use Autoresponders and AI Tools

For most marketers, it is virtually impossible to be online 24/7 to handle inquiries. Here comes the need for autoresponders and even some Artificial Intelligence, AI tools to feel in intelligently for you when you are offline. You can target these tools based on specific and common requests and not just for responses to email requests. That way, they are hugely effective to help generate and nurture leads.

Use Attractive Email Designs

As they say in marketing, “boldness and beauty always catch the eye.” Great emails benefit from this phrase. For an email to be great, the subject line must be catchy enough, the main message short, direct and to the point of your main objective. You can make the most important point stand out clearly with a clever use of graphics, complementary colors, colored links, arrows, CTA, or even a simple banner. These fine touches greatly help the attractiveness of an email that stands a very good chance of helping to get and nurture leads. Always remember to test how your recipients will see your email by previewing it on your mobile device and or desktop. If you are a good marketer, on preview, if you like what you see, chances are high that your recipients will like it too.

Schedule and Automate Your Emails

Scheduling and automating your emails is one great way to reach out to your recipients around the clock anywhere in the world even in different time zones. Scheduling and automation allow you to effectively use behavior-triggered, email drip campaigns in marketing. They give you the great opportunity to engage directly with leads about their main concerns. Lead generation and nurturing tend to flow effectively from there. Email automation works effectively well for promo announcements, new product launching, webinar announcement and sundry periodic announcements drip campaigns that marketers use to lure and nurture leads.

How to Boost Your Website Conversion Rate

 If you are in digital marketing or you are blogging for business, you need a great website out there on the internet. What makes a website great is its ability to covert visitors to customers. The higher the conversion rate, the better the website. Ensuring that a website converts well is the main reason behind creating, updating, and maintaining your business website or blog strictly for that purpose.  If your business website or blog is unable to acquire qualified leads and customers, it is clearly unhelpful to your business success. That is why expert marketers advise that it is not enough to build a great website or blog, you also need to constantly optimize the design, the content and the usability of your website or blog. That is what helps it to convert better.

Here are a few things you can start doing immediately if you are not already doing them. If you do these things effectively, they can help boost your website or blog conversion rate significantly.

Adopt Simple Webpage Designs

Simple webpage designs engender easy accessibility to your website. The easier it is to access your website, the more visitors it gets. This is more so when you have simple and very easy to follow landing pages which are easily navigable. Online surfers appear to have the “attention span of a crazy gnat.” Therefore, your webpages if simply designed can be quick in attention-arresting bearing in mind that web pages with low visual complexity,VC and high prototypicality, PT always appeal more to visitors.


 
Develop Quality Landing Pages

A landing page is the first port of call for all visitors to a website. The better the quality of its design, the more visitors it attracts. Part of the good quality of a landing page is that it must be well optimized and regularly rejigged for easy compliance with the ever-changing algorithms of Search Engines. Among the many essential elements your landing page must have include:

Good visuals supporting what your page offers
A simple, attractive and well optimized headline
A strategically positioned call-to-action button leading to your offer
Proof of past accomplishments from real life testimonials, case studies and so on

Some expert marketers advise that apart from increasing the quality of your landing pages, you may also need to increase their quantity. Reason being that having more landing pages at times translates directly to more opportunities for conversions. That is good for business no doubt.

Track Your Conversions Effectively
 
Without effective tracking of your conversion efforts, you can never be sure if you are doing great. First you must set goals and measure your tracking records against these goals. That’s why you must put a credible system in place to track your conversions effectively. What readily comes to mind here and very popular with marketers is Google Analytics tool. It is very simple to install and use for tracking website visitors. If you’re able to track conversions effectively, it becomes easier to make adjustments as necessary and to implement new strategies for better results.

Routinely Test Your Web Page Elements
 
There are many elements to routinely test on your website to see how well they are converting. The most recommended are page copy, visuals, headlines, page background, CTA button size, color and location. The results from these tests give you the information you can use to optimize conversions for your webpage. For accuracy, it is advisable to test a single page element at a time. This way, you’re able to pinpoint the changes responsible for your results. A web tool like Crazy Egg which allows you to set the elements you want to test on your page and for how long is about the most popular and efficient tool for such tests.

Regularly do Competitive Analysis
 
If you want to succeed as a digital marketer, you must devise ways to “spy” on your competitors to find out their strengths and weaknesses and how to take advantage of the information you gather from such efforts. This is with a view to regularly do competitive analysis. Since every online business always has very strong competitors, it is smart to keep abreast with them otherwise you risk being run out of business. Experts recommend you study the following elements in your competitors’ websites using smart web tools which use artificial intelligence then compare with yours. These elements are essentially what all potential customers get to experience in different websites before they make their choice on where or what to buy. These are elements you can explore for better customer experience to enable you have some edge over your competitors.

Such elements you can look at are:
 
Payment Platforms
Call to Action
Website Design
Page copy
Product/Service Offer
Product/Service Features

Studying these elements puts you in a position to clearly identify who your competitors are and what are their strategies. Armed with such vital information, you can then explore ways to gain some advantage over them. This you can do by building better and higher-performing landing pages which can help convert more of your website visitors.

Use Testimonials to Convince Visitors
 
Characteristically, most potential customers are always skeptical about new products/services online. Satisfied customers testimonies are usually very handy to allay such skepticism because they have credibility. Such testimonies are easily believable because the customers giving the testimonies have practically nothing to gain from marketing your products. The reason they are believable even to skeptics. You can add case studies, past sales figures and customer reviews to testimonies to help convince more potential customers.

Use Lead Magnets and Content Upgrades Efficiently 

Most website visitors need to have something of value no matter how token to convince them to give you something in return. That is where lead magnets become very handy. A lead magnet is something of value like a piece of content that is capable of solving immediate pressing problem(s) for your website visitors. Commonly used lead magnets are, Videos, Discount Coupons, eBooks, Checklists, Webinars, etc, etc. Content upgrades when efficiently used can act as some form of lead magnet that is more targeted. What that entails is you’re making efforts to entice your website visitors with a piece of content that is highly relevant to the page they’re currently viewing. That helps to keep them longer on your website and as such, more likely to convert.

Effectiveness of Visuals on Blog Posts

 Every blog is designed to attract traffic and eventual leads. The reason it must be informative, educating and even entertaining enough to attract readers. Experienced digital marketers now know that blog posts which contain a lot of visual content are a lot better for generating traffic and leads. The selling point of visual content on blogs is that most people like looking at something attractive and captivating. That is what visuals provide in blogs which helps such blogs with better depth and insight. Many people actually gauge the meaning in blogs through visuals like videos, images and pictures. 


 
Visual illustrations are vital keys to help blog readers know how to take some important steps at blog sites. These are steps like call to action either to sign up for a special offer, download content or whatever and wherever the blogger wants to lead the reader. Great leads usually come about from such developments and leads are highly needed in marketing efforts.

If you are desirous as most marketers do to keep your readers interested in your content in order to help establish your brand, great visuals usually come in very handy in that quest. What images do in blogs and do really well is to enhance the posts by boosting their appeal and thus make many more people read the entire post as a consequence. Some visuals are also very helpful to expand on the ideas in a blog post. They also serve the very useful purpose of providing an emotional connection and a deep, personal connection with the reading audience of any blog.

Some very interesting visuals in digital marketing are Infographics. These provide an excellent way of getting all of your information across to your readers in a way that’s visually impressive and succinct. If you have a blog and you’re not significantly generating leads from it, you may be missing out on a lot of competitive advantage that other businesses are enjoying with blogging. Most marketers get more leads when they use a blog than when they choose not to. Visual content helps out a great deal to attract the much needed traffic and eventual leads. The real reason they are considered highly effective.

Visual content contributes a great deal to make a blog content great. By the time you have a great content on your blog, such content automatically becomes a resource for both your market and your industry. Such content easily goes viral with time. Over such period of time, more sites will be able to link to your useful posts and attract potential leads towards you. That is actually one of the hassle-free ways of generating good leads. If you blog, your biggest challenge most times is how to ensure that you get good and attractive visuals on your blog content to help attract organic traffic and eventual leads.


 

Tips to Write a Great Blog Post

 Traffic and leads are the real essence of writing blog posts. Your blog could have everything it takes to make it important, but unless you’re significantly generating traffic and leads from it, you may be missing out on a lot of competitive advantage that other businesses are enjoying from blogging. Most marketers very well know that it is much easier to get leads when you blog than when you don’t. When you have a good blog in place, it becomes fairly easy for you to generate traffic and leads. What really matters then is how to write great blog posts capable of generating satisfactory results.

Here are some tips to get things done properly for good results.


 
Resolve to Write Great Content Always

This is a tested and proven marketing fact. When you have great content on your blog, the content becomes a resource for both your market and your industry. That’s the first step. You must write what people like to read which will benefit them in terms of information, education and even entertainment. When your content is good, it tends to go viral fairy quickly. That is when other sites will be able to link to your useful posts and attract potential leads towards you. Most marketers know this to be one hassle-free way of generating traffic and leads fairly easily.

The Opening of Your Blog Posts must Arouse Curiosity

This helps to pin down readers’ attention. Experts advise that a great way of beginning a blog is to lead with a fact, question or statistic catchy enough to hold attention. You can present the readers a problem and aim to answer it within the first few opening sentences as a way of giving your audience real value straightaway without any rigmarole. If your introduction manages to convince them enough, it could hold them to stay on and look better into your blog for the answers they are looking for. Your biggest challenge therefore is how to create a strong opening with which to win someone over in a very short amount of time to keep them reading on.

Post More Long Form Blogs

Expert bloggers have since discovered that long-form blog posting sometimes generate 10 times more leads than short-form posting. The reasons are not farfetched. Search Engines love long form blog posts more than short ones and they tend to rank them higher in their search results. Experts recommend a minimum of 350 words to as long as 1500 words or even more. These are more likely to cover more subject depths and answer most queries and concerns of readers. Long form blogs always manage to attract better traffic and even leads.

Post More Visual Content

Visual content like images, photos and videos are better at arresting readers’ attention than written content. Blog posts that contain a lot of visual content are a lot better for generating leads. Everybody likes looking at something interesting and attractive so visuals can provide more insight depth than text. More readers really gauge the meaning of any message through visuals than any other method because images really enhance posts. They help boost their appeal thereby making more people read the entire post. Images help to provide an emotional connection and a deep, personal connection with the reading audience.

Always Test Your Content Yourself

You can test your blog yourself by assuming you are a stranger reading what you have posted. You can do this by pretending that you are someone else visiting for the first time then ask yourself the following questions:

How relevant is the post to my needs?
Am I better informed about the subject matter?
Do I feel inspired enough to carry on reading?
Would I rely on this blog for information in future?
Have I seen a clear and better answer to my problem?
Does the blog make for easy reading?

If after this test your answer to all the above questions is in the affirmative, it is a good pointer that you have a good blog post out there which is capable of generating traffic and leads.

Direct Invitation to Act

A call-to-action feature is a must for any blog hoping to generate traffic and leads. It must be visible and strategically displayed on your blog in such a way that it can’t be missed or overlooked by visitors. In addition to your call-to-action, you can also embed links within your content to direct readers to relevant sign-up pages, e-books, gift tokens and even additional relevant pages and or more information.

 

How to Generate More Leads to Your Business

As expert marketers very well know, lead generation varies from product to product and it depends on several factors. That is why not every lead generation idea or tactic marketers decide to adopt works the same way with every business or brand. Marketers usually go around that problem by using many and varied ways to generate leads to their business. The bottom line is that as a marketer, you’ve got to work smart all the time if you want to generate good leads to your business. Good leads eventually lead to customers and that is good for your business.

Following are some tested ways to generate leads for your business as recommended by expert marketers. 


 
Adopt the Latest Digital Technology

That the world is going completely digital is no longer in doubt. What is however in doubt is the percentage of marketers that have realized this and have taken advantage of it. Since nearly everyone now uses the latest inventions like smartphones and social media apps whenever they want to search for desired stuff, a smart marketer must explore ways to use these technologies to his advantage.  Doing so helps such marketers to easily promote their products/services using the latest technology to a very large target audience with relative ease. These days, nearly everyone is on social media. With a responsive web design, mobile apps, and social media platforms, you readily have some of the best marketing tools at your disposal for leads generation for your business.

Create and Use Videos Wisely

Be sure such video content is really appealing. Because videos graphically convey corporate messages more effectively, they are now some of the most popular and commonly used forms of content in digital marketing. That is the real reason for their great popularity among marketers. If your video content is quite interesting and appealing, it manages to get across to more people thereby getting more views particularly when shared across different popular social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and many others. These channels help to get it across to a wider audience in no time at all. Good leads follow as a result.

Use Email Marketing Extensively

Even though some marketers now doubt its efficacy, email marketing still remains one of the best ways to generate more leads for your business. It works by offering prospects with discounted rates, freebies or giveaways asking them to take action. These massages arrive in the emails of prospects which they access in their spare times and mostly in the comfort of their homes/offices. A good response rate enhances leads generation.

Be Active in Social Media
 
A smart marketer always tries to get an account in different popular social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and many others. These days, nearly everyone is on social media. The real reason you can easily find your target audience on social media. With ease of interactions, feedback and sharing of content, social media engagement remains a very powerful tool for marketers to effectively and efficiently reach their target audience freely or at very low cost. By providing your social media followers with problem-solving content and useful information, you always stand the best chance to turn them into valuable leads and customers.

Mind which Promotional Methods you Use
 
Effective promotional methods always vary depending on the product/service being promoted. Deciding on a promotional method therefore requires a great care. You need a workable promotional plan in order to get your products/services in front of the target audience efficiently. To get good results, be sure you use the most effective promotional methods for your brand to generate more leads at little or no costs at all. Good results from good leads are all you want, and the methods you choose to use must guarantee these leads.



Participate in Guest Blogging 

Guest blogging may be fairly tedious, but it is very effective in generating leads. Guest blogging is a very effective way to gain exposure to many potential customers apart from the products or services you offer. This happens if you manage to get a foothold at guest blogging in very popular and authoritative sites. If you are not very good at guest blogging yourself, you may choose to hire a digital marketing company or other persons to write guest posts on highly authority and relevant blogs on your behalf. That gives good results too if you hire persons who know their trade and are very good in it. Writing of guest blog posts is one of the best and cheapest ways to reach a target audience. For best results, such guest posts must be of high quality and informative enough, posted on the most relevant and famous blogs in your industry/product niche. Good leads usually follow as a result of such efforts.

How to Promote Affiliate Marketing on Social Media

These days, nearly everyone is on social media. Many already have a formidable audience built up over time on social media. For that reason, social media has become another effective way of promoting with relative ease affiliate products and services. If you are a celebrity, with the help of social media, you can easily play an influencer role to promote products and services. As a celebrity influencer, your fans will respond to your recommendations simply because they like or trust you. Many of such fans routinely follow your lead so when you endorse a product or service, you easily get them to try the product or service based solely on your endorsement. That is the power of social media. Here is how it works in some of the most popular social media platforms around.


 
Affiliate Marketing on Facebook

With about 2.2 billion active monthly users, Facebook appears to be the most popular social networking platform at the moment. On Facebook, if you are having a Facebook page or group that is focused to a niche, it is likely to be more effective to promote any affiliate marketing product/service. It is therefore readily one of the best platforms to do affiliate marketing. It is most advisable to use Facebook Groups more to promote affiliate links because organic engagement is still positive in Facebook Groups inspite of platform restrictions elsewhere.

Affiliate Marketing on Instagram

This is a photo-friendly social media platform. But, one big drawback on Instagram about affiliate marketing is that it does not allow you add links to your posts. The only effective way around this drawback is for affiliate marketers to routinely put the affiliate links (shortened by way of URL shortening service on Google anyway) in their profiles for the duration their ads campaigns will be running. That is the only way your site visitors can get to have an opportunity to click on the link displayed in your profile.

Affiliate Marketing on YouTube

This no doubt is the most popular search engine and the largest social media platform for videos. This dual nature makes YouTube a very effective source of traffic for affiliate marketing. As an affiliate marketer, you can use YouTube effectively if you can create a video guide, tip, how to, or review of the product or service you want to sell. In this description, you can add links to the product using your affiliate link. When your viewers get to know through the information you provide that you have included a link to the product or service for their convenience, you get them really curious and that earns higher click-through rates as a result.

Affiliate Marketing with Email Marketing
 
Many marketers sometimes argue that Email marketing is a thing of the past but to others, it is another effective way to promote your affiliate partnerships. Most experienced Email marketers still believe in it and use it efficiently. For good results using Email marketing, first you must build a list of email addresses of leads and customers using the opt-in form in the entry point of your sales funnel. That done, you can then offer your visitors something of value like an e-book for free then ask them to enter their email addresses in the form so that you can send them the free offer. After building up the list, you can segment the audience for effective affiliate marketing campaigns. That done, it becomes fairly easy to target the appropriate deals, and offers to the right audience. Ultimately, such efforts lead to more responses and better sales which is what thrills many affiliate marketers. 

 

Expert Blogger Marketing Tip: Service Your Leads

 In blogging business, it is not enough to build links and leads. You must devise ways to test and service these links and leads for good results. One of such ways is to keep a keen eye on the growth of your Email list. By so doing, you become the credible source of information in your niche. That credibility helps your blog to build backlinks to your site. Backlinks determine the sites that are linking to your website, thus building your site’s authority.

That is what Google Search Engine really loves. So, if you want to build your rank on the search engines, you become THE authority in your niche. Simple! You must explore all ways to routinely create content that others will link to and share all over the internet. The real reason you must strive to be the reliable expert in your industry. You must however be willing to build your authority over time by earning the respect and trust of your audience. That requires some real work and overnight success is not guaranteed. The real reason you must keep innovating and honing in on what your buyers want. Be willing to be ahead of the curve and to offer products and services that you know meet their needs before they even know they have those needs. You must be the leader in using specific terms and phrases in your industry. Be the source that first coins the phrases and uses them repeatedly in your marketing campaigns. Real authority is derived therefrom and the Search Engines love to showcase that.