How to Build a Small Business Marketing Plan

If you run a small business, you need a plan for your marketing strategy. Without a plan, you’ll end up marketing in the dark without any tangible results. Marketing without a strategic plan is a recipe for disaster. You cannot have a successful small business if you keep it under wraps. If you do, you may not be in business for much too long. Marketing and exposing your small business is what helps it to grow. Marketing gets your products/services in front of people who need or want them. Usually, good marketing helps to convince buyers that you have the right solution to their problems. Through it, you can sometimes manage to convince consumers that they have a problem that needs fixing and you have the right solution to the problem.

To market successfully, you need a small business marketing strategy. That requires intentional planning. It must also be dynamic enough to be relevant since things move so fast these days. You cannot for instance expect last year’s marketing strategy to still work perfectly for you one year down the road. The reason your marketing plan needs to be up to date and effective at all times. If you want an effective marketing plan for your small business, it will help if you can stick with the following guide to create one.

Clearly Establish Your Marketing Goals: The first thing you do is to establish clear marketing goals you want to achieve and create key performance indicators (KPIs) you can target and accurately measure to determine if you are doing well. Such goals can include the volume of traffic, number of leads/customers, volume of sales and revenue target.
 
Identify Your Audience: Next is to clearly identify your audience. Who exactly do you want to market to if you want to achieve your set goals? Your marketing strategy is doomed to failure without a good understanding of who your audience is. You must put on paper and clearly define who your business is targeting and by what means/channels. You must figure this out correctly because if you don’t, you’ll be marketing in vain without tangible results.

Set Your Marketing Budget: As most marketers very well know, a marketing plan without a budget is a mere wish list. Therefore, you must accurately figure out expenditure costs and what you can achieve by what you spend on marketing. Figure out how much you can allocate in your marketing budget to, for example traditional advertising, email marketing, social media marketing and so on. Be sure the expenditure is measurable against projected results or achievements.

Decide Your Marketing Channels and Tactics: If you factor in the products you are marketing and the characteristics of your target audience, you can decide on the most effective channels to use. Knowing quite well that it is virtually impossible or even prudent to invest in every marketing channel or tactic out there, you must deliberately make choices in favor of what will yield the best results for the type of marketing you want. Depending on your marketing budget, you can pick a handful of channels and strategies to prioritize.

Draw up Your To-Do List and Make Assignments: This is one great way to keep to schedules and targets on formats you can see and use as achievement/progress guides. You can start this by making check-boxes and assigning names to tasks. You then outline everything that needs to happen in tandem with your plan then take each marketing strategy from idea to execution. Each completed achievement is marked off done before you move to the next.

Set Your Deadlines: For your marketing plan to be effective, you must clearly set out dates and even time for when you hope to accomplish your marketing goals. You must be able to clearly define and track all your marketing goals against the deadlines set. If for instance one of your goals is to increase sales and revenue, you must decide how much of that you expect to achieve in the time-frame of one week, one month or by the end of the quarter or the year. These time-frames will help you to know exactly when to track your actual performance against your projections with a view to knowing how well you are doing.

Last Line

If you stick with this plan, your marketing results will amaze you.

4 Steps to Drive Traffic through a Simple Article Traffic System

Digital marketers need traffic, real traffic to get their businesses flourishing. One main strategy to get this traffic is through article marketing. Article marketing is a credible and reliable way to get free and quality traffic to your business website.  Through it, you can build your own profitable list and start to earn money from it. Quite a simple system really as espoused by expert marketers. Article marketing strategy only works to pull good traffic to your website if you are willing and able to follow the system and do the work using the right steps as follows.

Step 1: Write High Quality Articles

This is obviously the all-important first step in article marketing. Just get to work and write high quality and informative articles about any topic/niche of your choice where you have the requisite knowledge. If you are unable to write quality articles yourself, you can hire third parties to write articles for you. Professional articles writers abound on the internet for you to choose from. These writers, for a fee can help you to write quality articles and cede the right to you as the author of such articles.

Step 2: Submit the Articles to Articles Directories

Next step is to explore all credible ways to have the articles published. One of such credible ways is to submit your articles to Article Directories making sure to comply with all their articles submission rules. You can decide to use one of or two ways to submit your articles. You can either submit your articles manually or through some software automation. If you are doing so manually, it takes quite some time to get it done. To save time, you can make use of articles submission software which automatically submits your articles to thousands of Article Directories in a matter of minutes. The automation helps to save you valuable time and efforts.
 
Step 3: Post the Articles on your Blog

The wider you expose your articles to readers the better traffic you get. Posting your articles anywhere they’ll get readership is therefore recommended. One of such places that readily come to mind is your own blog. Whenever you write fresh articles, even if you have submitted them to Article Directories already, you can post them on your blog too.

Step 4: Send the Articles to Newsletters

The final step that is highly recommended to give exposure to your articles is to send the articles to your own or even other people’s newsletters. Doing so allows you to fully leverage your articles to generate good traffic. If you have a credible email list, you can take advantage of it to regularly send your articles through your regular newsletters to all the recipients on the list even if in their hundreds of thousands. That helps to create the much needed exposure for the articles.

Summary

If you follow the foregoing steps diligently, they will help you to generate the much needed traffic back to your website. That helps to boost your Articles Traffic System which you need to build your own profitable list. What is most important is to take positive action using this simple system to generate traffic. If you are consistent and you stick with it, you’ll get the traffic even if it takes a while.

Potent Ways to Promote and Grow your Blog

Promoting your blog to give it online authority and a good following is a long term process. It is not even a one-time event or action. It takes processes, strategies and deliberate actions to get your blog noticed among the over 600 million active blogs online. If you want to grow your blog, be prepared to promote it as much as you can. To promote your blog, one of the most effective strategies expert bloggers recommend is to work to create as much valuable content as possible and syndicate the content in as many places/channels as possible. That way, the content stands a very good chance of reaching more people. The more people read your content, the more traffic you will get back to your blog. That appears to be the main objective of promoting and growing a blog. Here are some of the promotion techniques.

Use SEO to Promote Your Blog

If you want to get good organic traffic to your blog, you must think Search Engine Optimization, SEO to promote it. SEO is one very effective way to promote your blog on search engines. The higher the blog ranks on the SERPs of search engines, the more people see it. The more people see it, the more traffic the blog receives. Most content marketers rely on blogs to reach new customers and keep existing ones coming back for more. If you research your niche keywords well enough and take advantage of a keyword planner, you can carefully use these keywords on your content to optimize it. With a good SEO on your blog content, the chances of its ranking higher on major search engines particularly Google increases. By deploying the right SEO techniques as listed below, you can promote your blog with SEO to get amazing results.

Some Potent SEO techniques to Promote Your Blog
•    Create Valuable Content People Want to Read
•    Make Your Content Better Than the Competition’s
•    Optimize for Mobile Devices
•    Guest Post on Other Blogs
•    Create a Backlink Strategy
•    Optimize for Voice Search
•    Use more Long-Tail Keywords

Use Social Media to Promote your Blog

With presently over 4.5 billion active users on social media, it is one great place to promote your blog. The platforms are hugely popular and some of them have in-house tools bloggers can take advantage of to promote their blogs. Aside the huge popularity of social media platforms, the ease of sharing content/info on the platforms and the ease of interaction and communication is great for bloggers. Among the very popular social media platforms like LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, Twitter and Facebook, you can easily share your content with a huge number of people because the platforms allow people interested in what you have to say to follow along and keep pace with your posts. That way, the platforms can be highly effective to drive traffic back to your blog.

Last Line

Blogging is essentially a painstaking effort to write quality content regularly and build a strong community around your blog. Giving your blog a strong online presence to grow it for traffic purposes is what follows next. That is where promoting it multichannel becomes hugely important. The foregoing techniques are quite handy to do so effectively.

How a Business Blog can Help Boost Your Marketing Strategy, 5 Tips

Content marketing is increasingly becoming popular among digital marketers and blogs appear to be leading the charge. A huge number of marketers are now using blogs as their main attractions tool to pull traffic to their business websites. However, it is only marketers who blog high quality and highly informative content on a good niche that tend to get the best results. These are marketers who when creating content for their blogs never neglect to follow the best SEO practices to optimize their content for search engines. The reason for this is simple. With content optimization techniques on their blogs, these marketers manage to increase the number of visitors to the blogs. With a good SEO, search engines particularly Google are able to rank blog texts higher on their SERPs. That is good for organic traffic which is highly valuable to marketers.

Most experienced marketers achieve organic reach by using a content-optimized blog. What this means is that these marketers are able to cut down on promotional expenses by using less of paid ads in their promotional efforts. With good SEO in place, experience shows that a large portion of the target audience still finds its way to business blogs through browser searches. That is organic traffic. Most of the people who make up this traffic are usually looking for a solution to their problems. What is therefore critical for a good blog is to consistently create appropriate content that isn’t just about selling, but about solving peoples’ problems. If you want your business blog to act as a real booster to your marketing strategy, do not ignore the following.

1. Produce High Quality Content Consistently

The only credible way to get traffic and earn money from your business blog is to consistently provide your blog readers with valuable content. The more often people read your posts, the more likely they are to click on the affiliate links embedded in the content. Doing so translates to more leads, sales and good income through earned commissions for the blogger. For this reason, a blogger must always aim to gain the trust of his target audience by being absolutely honest about the products/services he is promoting. The high quality content you consistently produce as a blogger helps to build this trust.

2. Target a Market Niche

Your blog can never gain much traction on the internet if it is not well targeted at a market niche. Be sure to restrict this niche as it fits the type of product/service you want to promote. Your blog posts become interesting when you write about the offers/opportunities that will attract the interest of your readers. Do concise surveys to determine who your competitors are in your chosen niche. You can choose several related topics and use them to further broaden the niche. But, be sure to target a less competitive niche since the lower the level of competition, the better attention your blog gets.

3. Identity your Target Audience

Because it is by far easier to successfully market to an audience you know, you must always endeavor to identify your target audience before marketing to it. If you know who your target audience is, you can easily craft your marketing messages to meet their needs. Such messages become more effective as a result.

4. Carefully Choose your Blogging Platform

You must carefully choose a blogging platform from a variety of platforms available for creating blogs. Blogger and WordPress are readily two of the most popular of all blogging platforms today. They offer a wide range of features and tools that assist bloggers to make a success of their blogging activities. Both are great blogging platforms that can help boost any marketing strategy no matter how sophisticated.

5. Optimize your Blog

To optimize your blog successfully, you must give serious consideration to SEO, Search Engine Optimization. SEO helps to make your blog content visible to search engines. With it, search engines can rank your blog content high on their SERPs. That translates to good organic traffic coming over to your blog. So, you can effectively use optimization strategies to increase blog traffic and earnings. Great for your marketing strategy no doubt! If you do not have the technical knowledge to effect SEO on your blog, you can hire the services of professional webmasters to do it for you. DIY tools are also available to help you out. Expert marketers recommend the following tools to optimize your blogs for search engines:

•    Google Trends: This tool helps to check the level of interest in a keyword and to determine which keywords are becoming more popular is Google Trends.
•    SEMrush: This tool helps to provide information about website traffic, backlinks, keyword positions and ideas for search engine optimized content, among other things.
•    Moz: This tool helps to check the positioning of your website in search results. It is some kind of ranking based on link authority and importance of your website when compared to others. A website’s Moz ranking is determined by the number of backlinks it has, the value of those links, and the authority of the website’s domain. Moz ranking range is usually from 0-100. The nearer the score is to 100, the better the SEO of the website.

Why Consumers Tend to Ignore Some Marketing Content

Content marketing is one of the most powerful strategies digital marketers can effectively use to cultivate beneficial relationships with existing followers and to reach new customers. The snag is, far too many brands/marketers neglect or fail out rightly to utilize this powerful technique effectively because many consumers tend to ignore their content. For best results, there is always the need for brands/marketers to deliver more valuable and engaging content to their customers. If you are a digital marketer, you’ll have a much easier time meaningfully engaging your customers if you pay due attention to the following marketing mistakes many marketers often make.

 
Poor Headlines on Content

The antidote here is to always ensure you use attention-grabbing headlines and CTAs, Calls-To-Actions in your headlines. No matter how good the content you create is, many consumers couldn’t care less about it if they don’t notice it. Only attention-grabbing headlines and CTAs on your content are effective enough to arrest the interest of your consumers most of who usually have only about two seconds or even less for them to be convinced to check out your content. Therefore, the more powerful headlines and CTAs your content has, the more likely it will get the attention that it deserves from consumers. Credible research evidence shows that about 80% of consumers read the title of a webpage, but only 20% read the main post afterwards. That is instructive.

The real objective of a content marketing strategy is to make sure your content marketing campaigns gain the right traction. This you can do by ensuring that your consumers pay more attention to your content and do not ignore them outright. You must therefore make sure that each and every content piece you create gets the right attention it deserves among your target audience.

What to do to get this result:

- Test different strategies to see which kinds of headlines draw the most attention and get the most clicks for your unique content pieces.
-Always use properly optimized headlines that are much more effective at engaging readers.
- Make sure that your headlines are long enough to draw attention and convey your message without being unnecessarily verbose.  
- Use more power words that prompt better curiosity with your readers.
- Use more of list posts which are shared about twice as often and are read more often as other types of content.

Poor Knowledge of Your Audience

It is virtually impossible to market effectively to an audience you neither know nor understand. Knowing your audience well enough will enable you to better focus your marketing messages on their needs. Because your entire marketing strategy needs to revolve around your customers and their needs, you must ensure your content is fully tailored towards them if you don’t want them to ignore it.

What to do to get this result:

- For effectiveness, you must deliberately focus every single piece of content you create on the needs of your consumers.
- You need to clearly define your target audience. This means that you must specify the demographic that you’re trying to reach right at the planning stage of your content marketing strategy. 

 

- The voice/tone you use in your marketing message must clearly resonate with the audience that you’re trying to reach.
- You must clearly identify your customers’ problems and use your content to offer the solutions they’re seeking.

Excessively Self-Promotional

Never make the marketing mistake of being excessively self-promotional if you do not want your consumers to ignore your message. There is usually a very fine line between proving that you’re cool with your brand and endlessly boasting about it. You must strike a distinct balance between both if you do not want your consumers to simply dismiss your messages out of hand. That is usually a clear possibility because most readers appear to be really skeptical and suspicious of overly-promotional content.

What to do to get the best result:

- You must better engage with your readers and earn their trust. To do this, you need to maintain a certain level of objectivity.
- You can accomplish this and earn more of their trust by using quotes and studies from other brands or by leveraging unbiased user-generated content.
- Your promotional messages must be subtle and supported by valuable content at all times.

Wrapping Up

As a digital marketer, if your content is not attracting the right engagement, it must be for a reason. The most plausible reason is usually that consumers are ignoring your content. If that is case, the foregoing tips can really be of help to enhance your customer engagement. Do not ignore them if you are really desirous to move your digital marketing activities to the next level.

Best Tips to Manage a Blog Successfully

Digital marketers see blogging as a very effective marketing strategy, the reason they embark on it. Many however do not realize that a blog is only as successful as the management of time and content put into it. You cannot simply write content and say you have a blog if it is not widely read. Your blog can only prove successful if it routinely brings in traffic to your website and helps convert readers into customers. If your blog is unable to do these things, it is simply an unsuccessful blog. It is quite a frustrating experience for bloggers if their blogs are not successful. Making your blog successful is hugely dependent on how well it is managed. This management is all about planning and knowing who you want to read your content, and what you want them to do afterward. Here are some great tips to help you set up and manage your blog successfully.

Find Your Niche

A good blog must have something interesting and important to write about. That is why you must settle for a well-defined niche. It is on this niche you can write content to attract readers who may translate to customers at some point. Of course your chosen niche must have a clear relationship with the products/services you are selling. This niche could be in form of a topic, industry, product, or service. You must write and develop content about all things related to the niche. Doing so consistently is one great way to connect with your customers and to attract the attention of search engines like Google.

Carefully Choose Your Platform

Your blogging platform is as important as the blog itself. You may choose to blog out of your business website or some free blogging options many of which are out there online. Even if you already have an established website of your own, you can still have a platform that will easily integrate into your website. One very popular example of such platforms is WordPress that has the advantage of making available to you lots of free blogging tools, themes, memes, graphics, SEO and even blogging tutorials and guidebooks. This arrangement allows you to have a blog that is managed independently, but shows up on your website seamlessly. That is great for blogging if you ask me.

Incorporate Images

Good images on blogs are like traffic magnets because most online users love images. However, any images on blogs must have real quality to be helpful. With this as your guide, you can carefully select and use images based on their quality and relevance to your niche. You can settle for high quality photos, graphics, infographics and videos. On this score, the more the merrier! Most successful blogs on the internet feature images that break up the text and add visual interest. This is a great way to expand your horizons, add interest, and alert search engines like Google that you are incorporating interesting media elements in your website/blog. If they notice, you get more organic traffic as a result.

Give Value Consistently to Your Readers

Content is king in blogging business. The more high quality content you produce for your readers, the better for your blog. Expert bloggers opine that one of the reasons why many personal blogs aren’t successful is because they don’t offer any real value to the reader. With this in mind, you must not only write about your opinion on current events even if hugely interesting and entertaining, but your blog should also offer value to the most readers possible. That is what helps to get the traffic you need. Whatever topic you chose to write on in your niche, your opinion, research, and insight into related topics in the niche is a great way to bring value to readers.

Incorporate Marketing Strategies

In digital marketing parlance, a blog is a great content marketing tool. You get better results from blogging if you are able to incorporate effective marketing strategies into the blog. Most business bloggers use their blogs as good marketing tools. They rely on their blogs to help drive traffic and get customers. Depending on the products you are selling and your blogging niche, you can incorporate some of the following marketing strategies into the management of your own blog for best results. 

•    Encourage interaction with your readers by asking for comments/suggestions.
•    Make interacting easy for users.
•    Leave valuable comments on other blogs/forums with a link to your own blog.
•    Contribute intelligently to e-zines, online news sources, and other reputable sources.
•    Avoid the temptation to respond harshly to negativity or criticism.
•    Write more on topics that are trending in search engines.
•    Portray yourself as offering solutions all the time.
•    Do not unduly delay in your responses to inquiries/comments.
•    Be absolutely honest and truthful in your responses.

Last Line

If you are getting a blog started or you want to revamp one, the foregoing tips from SEO experts can be of immense help to you if you are desirous to succeed in blogging. If you follow these tips, you could be well on your way to starting and managing a successful blog. Once you get the blog going with quality regular content, the results will start coming in through increased readership, interactions and leads, and with time, customers as well. That’s blogging success no doubt. 

Email Marketing Tips for Current Trends in Communication

Digital marketers are increasingly relying on emails to do business. Because more and more people are taking to shopping online, marketers are also increasing the volumes of emails they are sending. This is partly to be able to reach out and accommodate consumers' constantly changing needs and to reach more people restricted by covid-19 pandemic. This trend is likely to continue even when the restrictions begin to ease off.

To sustain the current email marketing trends, these here tips can become very useful to email marketers going forward.

Using AI to Optimize Email Strategy

Email marketers can benefit from more effective emails if they skillfully deploy Artificial Intelligence AI, to optimize their email strategy.  With AI, marketers can easily and accurately analyze consumers’ behaviors and streamline their email marketing efforts for better results. Marketers can for instance utilize smart online tools to analyze consumer’s purchase habits and interests. By optimizing the email sending time with these tools, marketers can identify a more suitable angle for their emails’ subject line and content to improve the open rate and even sales conversions.

AI can help out to make your emails more captivating and readable thereby reducing the numbers that end up in trash bins. They help to accurately identify your customers’ needs thereby providing the much needed Intel to shoot them the right emails. CRM systems come very handy to make these processes much easier and time saving.

Personalizing Emails

Marketers can leverage automation and AI to create personalized emails that resonate well with consumers, making them feel connected with your brand. You can use online smart tools to accurately gather customers’ data. From this data, you can analyze their interests and preferences so as to design, craft and deliver more personalized emails that directly speak to their wants and needs. With that personalization, the emails tend to be more effective. These days, many more people are craving personal connection. Many consumers want to feel valued so they respond better to direct and personal touch from marketers. Therefore if you strive to personalize your emails, they help demonstrate your personality and care. That way, more customers can read your emails and really feel connected with you. It helps them to build trust in you as well as your brand.

Using More Interactive Emails

You can engage your customers better if your emails are interactive. The interactive elements in an email don’t have to be too complicated. They can be presented in form of clear and clickable CTA buttons, polls/surveys and quick quizzes to showcase products and or services. The idea is to remove boredom and to give customers the room to help lead the process. This way, customers may really feel that they’re being given options to take their own decisions. Whereas what smart marketers do is to make use of their customers’ choices to tailor-make the user journey that fits the customer preferences most. Such specially customized customer journey tends to convert more sales for the marketer.

Respecting the Privacy of Email Recipients

Customer awareness is now helping to place more emphasis on their privacy. Marketers must beware of this and respect it particularly on how customer data is being used. Trending now and going forward, focusing on customer-data privacy is hugely essential for any digital marketing business. Data privacy regulations may vary from one country to another and all require the right observances, respect and compliance. For this reason, marketers must constantly review extant legislation regarding data privacy with a view to ensuring their email campaigns are in full compliance at all times. If there are any changes in these regulations, as it happens from time to time, marketers must inform their customers of these changes and letting them know how their information will be protected. Doing so helps to increase customers’ trust in your business.

Incorporating User-Generated Content, UGC, in Emails

In digital marketing, UGC is any form of content created by the users of goods and services. The primary source of this content is user feedback. Incorporating UGC into your emails is one great way to increase consumer’s trust in your product/brand. UGC is free and unforced content making it highly convincing and believable. So, if you include customers’ reviews, polls results and photos of customers using your product/service in your emails, your emails resonate better with your recipients. Customers’ feedback is so impactful that it is said to influence over 90% of consumers to make their buy decisions. To get more UGC, you can cross promote your products/services on social media. That is one great way to gather more user reviews or photos. Many social media users are always happy and tend to appreciate your brand more when they too see their own reviews shared publicly by your brand.

How to Use AI to Acquire and Retain Customers

Online marketers are increasingly relying on Artificial Intelligence, AI for problem-solving in their marketing activities. They do this by using AI powered aps some of which are voice-activated virtual assistants, auto responders, CTAs, customer service and retail and e-commerce automation. Online business owners now depend more and more on the power of AI and machine learning to significantly increase brand awareness, enhance customer engagement, improve user experience, meet customer expectations and to find solutions to even more complex business problems. 

 
Direct Marketing Benefits of AI

You can achieve many milestones in your online business which allow you to acquire new customers and retain existing ones if you do the following.

Use AI-powered social media tools to help you monitor and gain valuable insights about your brand.
Use AI to identify gaps in your content marketing strategy. That way, you can manage to create content that’s relevant to your target audience.
Integrate AI into your e-commerce site to reduce shopping cart abandonment.
Use AI to significantly improve your website user experience by making it intuitive, accessible, and easy to navigate.
Use AI to help you generate high-quality leads that are likely to buy your products and become customers.
Use AI to personalize and tailor-fit your product recommendations based on your customers’ preferences thereby increasing repeat purchases.

No matter the nature of your online business, it is possible for you to acquire and retain customers more efficiently than what it normally takes to get same things done manually. Here is what you need do.

Improve Your Website User Experience

As an online business owner, your business window into the internet world is your website. That is where visitors can interact with your brand, respond to your call-to-action, and to purchase products. To make these interactions smooth, it is important that visitors to the site have a great experience while navigating through the site. With AI, you can improve your website user experience several fold by way of personalized recommendations, search relevance and seamless customer service through AI chatbots. In particular, the presence of AI chatbots on your e-commerce website contributes to a great user experience on the site because they provide 24/7 assistance and support in the absence of human customer service.  They help users to get accurate answers to their inquiries more quickly and efficiently when compared to manually scrolling through text-based FAQs.

Evaluate the Performance of your Content

This you can do by using AI to identify gaps in your content marketing strategy. If you’ve been creating content for a while, by deploying AI, you can easily identify the gaps, find fixes, and evaluate the performance of your content marketing campaign. Even if you’re into retail or e-commerce business, you can use AI to identify the gaps in your content marketing. Your content may be directly focused on your products and their features, but through AI, you can better determine the relevant content that addresses your audience’s needs and pain points faster and more accurately.

Pre-Qualify Prospects and Leads

When your new leads are not converting into sales well enough, you can rectify the situation with the help of AI. If you have a bit of experience in online marketing, you’ll know when you’re not getting good sales despite the high traffic your website is receiving. If you are experiencing this, it could mean you are not taking some marketing actions correctly. It could mean your CTAs are ineffective, your content marketing strategy is poor, you are targeting the wrong audience, you are promoting your products through the wrong social media channels or you are using the wrong type of Sign-up form. With the help of AI tools, you can extract relevant data to help you learn more about your target audience. These tools also provide predictive analytics on your customers’ behavior. By using them efficiently, you can improve your lead generation strategy because they’ll help you to identify which leads to pursue, where to find them, and how to effectively engage them.

Cut Down on Cart Abandonment Rate

If you run an e-commerce business and you experience a high cart abandonment rate, it could mean certain things are just not right with some operations in your website. Many online shoppers may abandon their shopping carts because they’re not ready to buy yet, high extra costs, privacy concerns, complicated/cumbersome checkout process, privacy concerns and most commonly, not enough customer-friendly payment methods. AI-powered chatbots can come in handy to address these issues by diligently guiding customers through their shopping journey. AI chatbots can with smooth conversational approach give customers a nudge to prompt them to complete their purchase. They also act as a virtual shopping assistant or concierge that can let a customer know about an on-the-spot discount, a time-sensitive deal, a free shipping coupon, or any other incentives that will encourage them to complete the checkout. Even lost orders due to cart abandonment can be recovered with the help of AI. If AI does these for an e-commerce website, it can lead to an increase in conversion rate for the business.

Social Listening

Marketers can deploy AI for social listening for potential customers. This is simply a process in which AI can be used to analyze the conversations, trends, and buzz surrounding your brand across different social media platforms. Social listening effectively analyzes what’s usually behind the metrics and the numbers. It determines the social media sentiment about your brand and everything else relating to how people feel and relate to your brand. Such AI generated data/information you get through social listening can be used as a guide in your strategy to gain new customers. Without a doubt, getting this type of intricate data can constitute an enormous and very daunting task for human beings. AI helps out very nicely.

Increase Repurchases

Marketers can increase repurchases with predictive analytics made possible with the use of AI. Predictive analytics is the process of making predictions based on historical data using data mining, statistical modelling, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and other techniques. Through it, marketers can generate insights, forecast trends, and predict behaviors based on past and current data. Its practical use is when marketers rely on it to predict customers’ propensity to repurchase products as well as its frequency. When used to optimize marketing campaigns, AI-powered predictive analytics can generate customer response, increase repurchase, and promote cross-selling of relevant products. Predictive analytics helps marketers to focus their marketing resources on customer retention while targeting a highly motivated segment of their markets that may be happy to return and repurchase more products. This helps to save on ads costs for marketers. AI makes it possible.

Provide Personal Recommendations

Most online shoppers really value personalized marketing experiences. The reason brands are able to boost their sales when they tailor their recommendations based on consumer data. Recommendation systems’ algorithms typically rely on data on browsing history, pages visited, and previous purchases. Thus, smart AI can accurately analyze customers’ interactions with website content and find relevant products that will interest the individual customer. This is how AI makes it easier to target potential customers and effectively put the best products in front of the site visitors. With AI, recommendation engines are able to filter and customize product recommendations based on each customer’s preferences and correctly match the customers’ preferences with the right products. Because of this element of personalization, marketers can effectively acquire and retain customers with the help of AI.

Social Media Marketing Tips for Newbies

If you are new in digital marketing and you haven’t joined social media yet, you are missing a lot. You are missing the power of social media platforms you can effectively leverage to market your business. Social media provides excellent opportunities for marketers to build a strong online presence, build a strong brand, nurture leads/customers, share quality content, do promos as well as effectively engaging and retaining customers. What else do marketers really need online they cannot get on social media? If you are new in social media marketing, here are tested ways you can start out and get real benefits from marketing on social media particularly when you open accounts on the most popular platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and Pinterest.

 
 
Always Create Unique and Compelling Content

Content matters a great deal on social media. If your content is unique, educational, informative and of high quality, it helps to establish a distinct personality for your account. That is what makes your business distinctively different from your competitors and your customers notice. It evolves into some unique social identity for your business. You can nurture this identity with your own unique style of posts, unique content, visuals, graphics, logos, comments, interactions and unique hashtags. Doing these things regularly and consistently helps to build a great audience of followers for your business. You can validate and amplify your USP by posting links to blogs and articles that are talking about your business, highlighting its accomplishments or promoting its news. That helps your business a great deal because third party validation is one of the cornerstones of a successful social media marketing strategy.

Make Yourself Valuable

Social media users are always online to look for value. Without providing real value, you cannot hope to build a good following fast enough. Your first major challenge should therefore be to go about building a community of followers that are organic, relevant and engaging. Expert marketers recommend that you can go about this by introducing yourself to the social media community and getting them to notice you. Follow other accounts, engage and interact with these accounts by way of intelligent, relevant and unique comments. You can deliberately comment on popular influencer accounts and offer genuine input, feedback or expertise, helping your followers find what they’re looking for online, answering their questions and meaningfully engaging with them online. If you can do these things consistently, genuinely and intelligently, more people will start to pay attention to you. That helps to build your own audience of followers pretty quickly.

Take Advantage of Social Media Tools

Every social media platform has its own unique tools to assist marketers. You can take advantage of these tools to market effectively, promote your brand, grow your online authority, schedule your posts, share your posts, and interact with like-minded marketers by joining groups and suchlike marketing activities. You can save good time to create more content if you use tools like HootSuite to link all of your social media accounts together and schedule posts to appear at per-determined times across multiple social media platforms. With the help of these scheduling tools, you can develop a calendar of the best times to post based on the audience you would like to interact with and let the scheduling tool do the rest. Doing this allows your content to be automatically posted for you without having to manually do it yourself multiple times a day thereby enabling you to have audiences in different time zones and servicing them all adequately and simultaneously.

Network with Your Connections

Even when new in social media marketing, you can leverage the power of your connections when it starts growing. You can effectively market on social media and generate sales if you are able to use the media as a great tool to create a wide global network you can dependably leverage on to market your business. It allows you to get to meet a lot of people in your industry you can relate with and do business with. To enhance this, you can purposefully create relationships with thought-leaders and people of influence that have a wide group of followers in their own right. That helps to expand your network exponentially. You can identify influencers in your business niche, reach out and collaborate with them and they will in turn reciprocate by helping to promote your brand. On Twitter, a single re-tweet from the right influencer can help your brand/content to get in front of a whole new lot of hundreds or even thousands of potential customers.

Be Genuine and Authentic with your Followers

Reputation matters a lot in social media marketing. The reason you must endeavor to be authentic and genuine at all times in the content you post. Why people respond to authentic content positively is because they always want to interact with real people and not computer bots. That way, they tend to take appreciations and acknowledgments more personal if they know it is from real people. To enhance this, never fail to acknowledge and thank members of your audience/followers for complementing, posting and sharing your content. If you endeavor to return these little favors whenever you can, it will help grow your community/followers. Your audience engagement will grow in tandem as well.

Adhere to Community Rules of Each Platform

This is hugely important. Many social media platforms take their community rules very seriously. If you breach any of these rules, you get sanctioned. Such sanctioning may include but not limited to cautioning, taking out your content, temporary suspension or outright ban. You are visited with these sanctions when for instance you use the wrong or abusive language, bullying or when you promote any prohibited merchandise like drugs and firearms. Most social media platforms can greatly enhance your business if you stick with their community rules. Opening an account on social media platforms is free of cost. All they demand from you is to strictly comply with their community rules and regulations. That in all fairness is not too much to ask when weighed against the huge benefits you derive from being on the platforms.

Social Media Content Optimization Best Practices

Is your business on social media? If it is not, you are missing a lot from the benefits of social media marketing. You’ve got to optimize your content for social media if you want to remain relevant in online business. If you want to supercharge your online engagement, content is key. By taking deliberate steps to adorn your content with the right keywords, tags, titles, links and images, it can help you target the right customers, get leads and even sales. An effectively distributed and optimized content helps create a direct line to customers who are actively searching for products/services using the keywords the content is optimized with. When your content is optimized for social media, it helps to drive engagement and meaningful interactions. After all, social media optimization is all about making everything we post on our social platforms as engaging and as fruitful as possible with conversions as the end result.
These here are some of the best practices your business needs to optimize your social platforms for better results.

Streamline Your Strategy

To market successfully on social media, the strategy you adopt is vital. This strategy must be streamlined well enough to enable you establish a clear, regular and consistent posting schedule. Meaning, as far as your audience is concerned, they can be rest assured that you’ll always be there for them. This translates to reliability and dependability which somehow helps to build trust and guarantees engagement. So, if your posting schedule drives engagement satisfactorily, it is best to stick with it so as not to disappointment your audience who keeps coming back for more of your content.

Optimize Your Accounts

This is a given. Optimized social media accounts leave no one in doubt even with a very brief interaction what your business is all about. For this reason, you must be sure that all your social media accounts/profiles align with your business message, brand image goals and ethos. You can always guarantee and maintain this posture through regular and consistent content audits. When you habitually use consistent visuals, logos, tones of voice and marketing messaging in your social media accounts, your engagement is better enhanced.

Make Your Content Searchable

Unsearchable content cannot be engaging. Because search is a major feature of most social media platforms, making your content searchable helps engagement. Diligent optimization helps that process. Most prospects search on the social platforms themselves and they find products through the right keywords. Even from major search engines like Google, prospects can search for and find social pages themselves. Marketers do take advantage of that by embedding appropriate search-friendly keywords and hashtags (but with utmost caution), in their published social media content. If keywords are excessively used, you could be guilty of keywords stuffing and search engines’ algorithms can penalize your content for that.

Last Line

To compete favorably online, businesses should focus on content optimization. Content is king in online marketing. For this reason, marketers must not just post content for posting sake. Any content worth posting must be high in quality, informative and educating enough to attract engagement. Marketers must therefore ensure they consistently write content in such a way that it engages their target personas. Of course, to engage your target personas, your content has to first reach them. An optimized content serves that purpose better. 

5 Cost-Effective Ways to Harness the Power of Social Media

No question about it, social media has made tremendous impact on digital marketing. Aside the huge popularity of social media, sharing marketing messages on the platforms is relatively very easy and effective. Even though the competition in digital marketing is tough and hugely challenging, social media helps to ease things up a bit for many marketers. With over 4 billion active users on social media at the moment with most logging into at least one of the platforms daily, digital marketers cannot ask for a more fertile marketing environment. The icing on the cake is that marketing therein is hugely cost-effective. If you visualize social media as some kind of Public Square where everyone interacts freely, you don’t really need to spend any money for this interaction since it is an open space for everyone. However, standing out and getting noticed in such free space for everyone has its own challenges. Marketers can always weave their ways around these challenges if they have the right marketing strategies and are consistent enough to make a real difference out there. That too is not at a great expense.

 

Here are 5 cost-effective ways to market on social media without stressing yourself financially.

1. Go Live on Videos: Marketing videos are very easy to make and easy to deploy on social media. You make more impact as a marketer when your audience hears directly from the “horse’s mouth.” This impact is more when you endeavor to go live on the most popular social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Marketing with live videos on these platforms is a great way for your audience to meet you live. That is hugely impacting and it is a free social media feature to boot.

2. Pay Genuine Attention to Your Audience: Make a habit of talking to and listening to your audience. By doing so, they feel cared for and do reciprocate as well. There is no question about it. Everyone likes attention particularly when that attention looks genuine. If and when your social media followers feel like you are giving them genuine attention, they will key into your content and support you. You can practically demonstrate this attention by devoting quality time to read comments/inquiries on your posts and respond to them all. By doing so, you are showing real concern and attention to what bugs your audience. They reciprocate and respond to your marketing messages as if it is person to person real time. That can be hugely impactful.

3. Be Consistent: There is no better way to show consistency than to show up every day. If you do, your audience will like and appreciate you better. Consistency helps you to build a connection with your target audience and imprint your brand in their minds. It makes you easily recognizable as a brand allowing others to find and notice you online with relative ease. Aside making regular and qualitative social media posts, you can ensure consistency in your social media profiles if you set them up using the same avatars, logos, descriptions and tone to make for easy recognition.

4. Make your Posts Creative and Interactive: Out there on social media, everyone is making a post every minute of the day. That is really a very huge trove of posts. For your posts to stand out from the crowd, you must endeavor to be creative in crafting your posts and making them interactive. No question about it, lots of people love the creativity offered by social media stories and marketing pitches. Always have that at the back of your mind when designing your posts particularly when such posts involve product launches, discounts, price adjustments, promos, and special announcements. If you are so inclined, you can post special snippets of your day-to-day life at work to give your audience some behind-the-scenes ideas about what you do and how you do it in your business. You can create quizzes, a poll, host a Q&A session and even make jokes to attract and engage the attention of your audience. These are all free but very effective marketing tools on social media.

5. Incorporate Hashtags Generously: Marketers use hashtags as little communities of content online. They do so by pairing their content with the right and appropriate hashtags. When they do this, the content automatically becomes part of these specific communities. That helps the content with very cheap online visibility. When your content is appropriately tagged, hashtags have the power and authority to help multiply your engagement provided they are correctly used. Many online searchers rely on hashtags to locate posts online that are relevant to their interests. That makes the use of hashtags some fantastic, cost-effective and incredible way to get your business noticed online. As a marketer, you can either create your own unique hashtags, or you latch on to any hashtags relevant to your business and content. Whichever you use, be sure it makes sense and relevant enough to help online searchers locate your business and your content.

Wrapping Up

Social media is now very deep and still developing. The reason digital marketers cannot afford to overlook social media in their marketing activities. If you are a creative marketer wanting to cut back on marketing costs, there is a lot you can do to leverage social media. The foregoing tips are very handy in that quest. Even if these tips will help you to save on some marketing money, to get good results, you must invest some more of your time and efforts. In the long term, it is worth the while for you to put some more efforts into finding the right tools, resources, and platforms that will help you build a sustainable online marketing strategy at minimal financial costs.

Digital Marketing Strategy Best Practices to Improve Your Online Business

If you market online and your digital marketing strategy is not good enough, no matter how awesome the products/services you are marketing, your business cannot grow fast enough. As most marketers very well know, if you can’t market your products/services well, people will not patronize them. An effective marketing strategy helps to resolve this challenge. In digital marketing space, competition is characteristically very stiff.  For marketers to stay on top of their game, they must think outside the box and be innovative enough to stay on top of trends and implement marketing strategies to make their businesses thrive. To do this effectively, marketers need to rely on some best practices for their digital marketing strategies to help reach customers through various digital channels. 

Here under are some of these best practices your online business really needs to thrive well.

Be Genuine and Authentic

Authenticity confers authority and business respect because it is through authenticity your business can strive to be really true to its values and mission. Customers never fail to note and appreciate it. Your transparent authenticity helps customers to build trust in your business. You must therefore project an authentic image in your marketing activities at all times. This you can do by deliberately creating marketing messages and strategies that are authentic and based on the core values, mission and vision of your business.

Continuously Analyze and Evaluate Your Content

In digital marketing, content is king. Creating good content is the real icing on the cake. How do you know if your content is good? It is by continuously evaluating and analyzing it to know how it is performing in the market. For better insights, you can perform a content gap analysis on your content. Through it, you’ll get to know what types of content perform well for your competition and what does not that may require a review or even discarding. You must do your research well to see what people are asking Google using tools like AnswerthePublic and BuzzSumo for content gap analysis.

Embrace Innovation

In online marketing, if you cannot innovate, your business cannot grow fast enough. You can innovate on your products, marketing strategies and processes. If you are creative enough as a marketer, you’ll discover many opportunities for innovation in your marketing activities. Combining new trends with old trends and doing most things everyone else does but doing these same things differently can help to stand your business out. That way, you can manage to capture the attention of your audience much more effectively and stand out from the competitive crowd.

Leverage Different Marketing Channels

From experience, there is no single marketing channel that delivers everything marketers need. Because they deliver very good results, most marketers rely more on social media and SEO as the only ways to get traffic and connect with their audiences. But there are other effective ways as marketing experience reveals.  Therefore, marketers can explore new emerging technologies and channels such as augmented reality and virtual reality that marketers need to know, explore and use in their marketing engagements.

Align Your Goals with Your Strategy

Aligning your goals with your strategy is to avoid time wasting conflicts. You can align your tactics/techniques with the right synergy for a common purpose. That helps to improve your marketing efficiency no matter which tools or channels you are using. It also opens up many opportunities for you to execute your strategy for best results. If your goals, tactics and strategies are well aligned, you’ll benefit from better traffic, leads, customers and more sales.

Research Your Competition

Researching your competition allows you to have the insights to know what they are doing better than you that can help you to make some improvements in your own marketing. If you study their digital marketing strategies, you’ll have great opportunities to improve on yours. You’ll get to know which areas to focus more on if you’ve been neglecting those areas. This focus includes where to better channel your marketing investments, whether it is in paid ads, SEO, content marketing, website versatility, marketing channels and so on.

Wrapping Up

Online marketers really need to invest more in digital marketing if they want to rapidly grow their online businesses. The above best practices come in very handy in that quest. Through digital marketing, marketers can easily create very clear and comprehensive plans to reach their target audiences and build a direct relationship with them. The versatility of the internet guarantees that. Therefore, your digital marketing strategies must align with the changes on the internet to give your business more access across multiple devices, platforms and channels. 

How to Promote Your Products Online on Low-Cost Budget

Online marketers always face huge challenges about tight marketing budgets. But, they must market all the same. The reason they look for the most cost-effective ways to get on with their marketing activities. Embracing digital marketing is one great way around these marketing challenges. Marketers can promote their products effectively by using low-cost digital marketing tools. Digital marketing is a fast and often low-cost way to market products to a global audience and to create brand awareness with quick results. The icing on the cake is that with online tools, you can easily track and measure results from your digital marketing activities. That provides the all-important insights to deploy your scarce resources in a cost-effective way. If you are low on your products promotion budget, here are tested low-cost ways to promote your products online.

Reach Out to Digital Media

If you can up your game as a great PR person, you can at times promote your products for free. Because of budget constraints, you cannot afford to place too much premium on traditional press coverage to promote your products. Reaching out and embracing digital media is the way to go. Collaborating and working with bloggers and content marketers is one great way to promote products on low budget. Marketers like to help one another for mutual benefits and they easily do it with blogs and content marketing. You can write great press releases and distribute to your multiple media contacts. Guest blogging also helps out as well to promote products at near zero costs.
 
Generously Share Your Products on Social Media

Smart marketers like to refer to marketing on social media as cheap publicity. The reason is simple. Unless you can afford to pay, every social media platform allows some form of free products promotion on their platforms. The magnitude of this allowance varies from platform to platform. That calls for a social media marketing strategy which you must have in place. Part of that strategy is to subtly promote your products on a few specially selected platforms to enable you target your ideal audience better. These chosen platforms must be the ideal places your target audience spends most of their time. Many social media platforms have in-house analytics that marketers can take advantage of to get free insights into their marketing activities. They can rely on these analytics to determine the best days and times to post quality content, and create a manageable schedule that they can commit to in their daily, weekly and monthly marketing schedules. That helps to create some order and save costs.

Nurture Your SEO

You must go back to the basics to address SEO concerns if you want to promote your products organically. It starts from the design of your website or e-commerce shop. Specially selected keywords related to the products you are promoting help search engines to rank your website in their SERPs. When searchers use those keywords to search for products, search engines send them to your website along with others. That’s free organic traffic. You can use Google Keyword Planner tool to find popular and relevant key terms to your products. It is advisable to settle for keywords which have a high search rate and low competition. You can tactically weave these keywords into your website and content to make them look natural on them. That helps search engines to understand what your website is about and to rank it appropriately. Good meta descriptions and image descriptions also help this SEO process. If properly done, search engines will reward your website with good organic traffic from these efforts. That is tantamount to promoting your products for free.

Don't Ignore Email Marketing

Email marketing remains one of the most cost-effective digital marketing strategies for promoting products online. Once you have a credible email list in place, you can further segment it for marketing effectiveness. Promoting products through such lists usually gets good results at little or no costs at all. Even if you choose to make some investments on email marketing, the ROI is usually great. What is really fantastic about email marketing is that you can deliberately tailor products promotion messages to certain segments of your audience and you get to engage directly with them. Results from such efforts are usually very good. Besides, you can automate your emails using email marketing platforms like MailChimp to cut costs as well. But, you must remember to always write emails with catchy subject lines, short to-the-point messages and a great CTA. That is what helps to improve the chances of your mails being read at all by your recipients.