Key Benefits of Cost-Effective Digital Marketing Strategies

Online, digital marketers use digital marketing strategies to effectively market their products/services. These strategies help marketers to get good traffic, increase their online visibility, get more leads and conversions and subsequently make more sales. On face value, these activities may appear to cost a fortune in marketing expenses but with some cost-effective digital marketing strategies in place, you can increase your online visibility and achieve more beneficial marketing results. Online, digital marketing can be effectively used on social media platforms, websites, search engines, emails, or even by way of mobile applications and it works perfectly fine. Its effective use tends to make a significant difference in the marketability and profitability of any online business.

Discussed below are some key benefits your business gains when you use cost-effective digital marketing strategies to market your products/services online.

Improved Return-On-Investments (ROI)

Every marketer is in business to get returns. If you make investments, the Return on Investment, ROI is a direct measure of how well your business is doing. That effectively makes ROI the primary goal of any marketing campaigns. If you are using cost-effective digital marketing strategies, it is evident you’ll save a lot on spending. Good savings on spending has a positive impact on the returns you get. ROI is the value you get when you divide the investment on spending by the sales you make. When you run your ads campaign for a while, you can collect enough data to evaluate your ROI. If the strategies you are using are cost-effective, your ROI will be going up. But, if not, your ROI will be decreasing over the course of the campaign. ROI is one highly beneficial business indicator to know how well your marketing campaigns are doing at any point in time.

Reduced Customer Acquisition Costs

Among digital marketers, Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) is a measure of how much any business spends to acquire new customers. CAC is one very important metric that enables marketers to gauge their performance from time to time. When you deploy cost-effective digital marketing strategies, they help in no small measure to reduce the spending on many costs, CAC inclusive. With digital marketing, you can effectively reach most of your users through very minimal or no cost channels. These are primarily emails, website/blog content and social media platforms and they are hugely effective to boot. When it comes to CAC, the cost to use these channels is quite low and may even be negligible particularly on social media if you use the right platforms and target your ads well.

Using Quality Content Strategically

If your content is qualitative and unique, you can strategically use it to get good marketing results. Among digital marketers, content is king. Good content is what marketers can create with minimal budgetary investment and much less budget spending and your business will still manage to attract a lot more customers when compared to some other marketing techniques. You can quickly build online visibility for your business if in your content, you habitually use catchy creative headlines, ad ideas, quality content, and engaging creations. These together with daily trending info in your content can help to induce better customer engagement, generate leads and conversions.

Leveraging Social Media Networking

With 4.62 billion active users worldwide, social media platforms are the most user-updated and happening platforms at the moment. Now that’s one huge market out there on social media. On social media, you practically take your business to where your audience is. Marketing info is easily shared on the platforms and it can go viral just like that. If you market with creative content that easily gets the attention of consumers, it can help them to make very crucial buy decisions. For best social media networking results, you can effectively monitor your audience by tracking their interests and targeting them accordingly. Once your content is relevant, engaging and informative, your audience helps to share it widely on social media. That translates to more traffic, more leads and conversions even at very minimal marketing investment.

Diligently Tracking Campaigns with KPIs

Performance indicators tell marketers how well they are doing in their marketing campaigns. So, marketers can use their key performance indicators KFI to track how well their marketing campaigns are doing. Marketers can track how well their digital marketing is doing when they look at their business conversion rates, ROI, customer retention, leads and sales. These are essentially key performance indicators KFI in any digital marketing arrangement. These KFI metrics directly determine the efficiency of any marketing campaigns. If the KFI are not going up, it means your campaign is not doing well. By addressing the reasons for this poor performance, you can take positive steps to minimize them by optimizing your campaign strategy for better results.

Prudent Use of PPC

Yes, pay-per-click (PPC) ads cost money. There is no question about that. But when it comes to saving up on ads budgets, PPC is where to go. When you are marketing with PPC, every ads cent counts a lot. This is why you must use the most relevant keywords and phrases wisely for your ads to hit the desired targets. Because PPC works faster than SEO, it allows marketers to limit their spending on customer conversion. Even at that, PPC still manages to generate higher ROI for marketers.

Tactical use of Re-targeting Ads

Re-targeting ads are ads directly deployed to arrest the attention of online visitors who are looking for a specific product and not just surfing around online. Such visitors are identified to have visited your website earlier and moved on elsewhere. Targeting such a specific audience increases the chances of improved conversion rates. This is because such audience is more likely to move ahead with the final purchase of what the marketer is offering. Re-targeting ads are also for past customers who might be interested in similar products and repeat purchases. For best results, marketers can also re-target ads according to available metrics, collected data, including demographic and behavioral details of online searchers.

How to Start, Run, and Operate a Successful Blog

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

 
Decide what you want to Blog About

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

Carefully Select a Blogging Platform

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

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

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

Network to Build your Community

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

Be Diligent and Patient

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

8 Ways to Quickly Grow Your Network

 Everyone in business needs a network. Networking is one great way to meet more people and expand professional/business connections. It is about building relationships, sharing information and finding sources of support.  When it comes to meeting people, building relationships and networks many young and successful entrepreneurs readily give away some tips on how to get it done successfully. Here now are some 8 of such tips for mastering the art of meeting people beyond the boundaries of your business interests and connections:

1. Start a network

If you must grow a network, first, get involved. It is not enough to think about it, all you need to do is get started. To become influential at anything, you’ve got to dig for information. You may start by reading any and everything you can lay your hands on out there. Next is to commence networking with people in the niche you have chosen. You become ardent at it by writing about it, speaking about it, attending events on it and gradually becoming the voice of the expertise in the niche. The network grows from there.



2. Become active on Social Media

These days, nearly everyone is on social media. These media provide simple platforms for 24/7 social interactions with people around the world. Now, that’s great for networking! With social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest, it is easy for you to reach many people beyond the natural niche of your products/services.  With the ease of sharing photos and information on these platforms, building a network can occur real quickly.

3. Volunteer to serve

This is one easy way to get noticed by others. By volunteering some hours of your time to serve an organization working on a cause you really care about, you get to work closely with other people with whom you can form a network. Working with others as volunteers provides you a very valuable opportunity to meet people who care about similar things but most likely work in different industries. Great opportunity to grow a network develops from there.

4. Connect with an experienced networker

Experienced networkers always have traits you can benefit from. It pays therefore to seek them out in a crowd and make their acquaintance. If in a gathering you do join in a conversation with such persons, other people may naturally be drawn into such conversations. One great way to gain valuable knowledge, meet new people and build a network thereafter.

5. Join a business organization

When you join a business organization, you can easily build relationships and networks. With business groups like Rotary International, YMCA and many others which regularly bring together business leaders from diverse markets, you get to meet many vibrant people with a lot of ideas suitable for a network. Meeting with them regularly helps to grow the network pretty quickly.

6. Use alumni networks

Many successful business leaders attest to the fact that old school Alumni chapters are a great way to stay connected and network outside your own company and niche. Because these chapters often include graduates from different majors, they provide the forums to have fun and to learn from people you don't normally interact with. It is one great way to meet new people and to build valuable networks.

7. Consult Venture Capitalists

Venture Capitalists are always business persons who are very familiar with the business environment they operate in. For that reason, consulting them for information about the business environment is a very smart thing to do. Many of them always have a wide portfolio of companies they work with. As such, they can at will connect you with entrepreneurs at different companies and ventures who you might not otherwise meet. Now that’s really great for building a network!

8. Host events

If you want to grow a network quickly, it is smart to occasionally host events rather than attend other events always. By inviting more people outside the niche of your industry to your events, you get the opportunity to meet, talk to and interact with such people. As the host of an event, you and your space are natural focal points for your guests. That attention provides the leverage for you to get to know them very well. A network naturally grows from there.

How to Attract Amazing People to Your Business

 If you are in business and you want to do real good, you need a network. These days, networking is vitally important to your business no matter what the business entails. If you’re looking to improve yourself or change the fortunes of your business for the better, you need to network. Since every network inevitably involves interacting with people, you’ve just got to find ways to get these people. To get people into your network, you need to do the following.

1. Joining a professional networking group. If you’re looking to get into a business or meet people in a specific business, you can arrange to join a professional networking group of the business you are interested in. Online groups found in IBOtoolbox.com, LinkedIn, Facebook, Google+ can be very useful here.



2. Doing things you love to do together with others. The most exciting way of networking is simply to do the things you love and you’ve always wanted to do. Things like singing in a choir, playing a musical instrument, sky diving, hiking, taking a cruise, flying and so many other things ordinary people have fun and excitement doing. Moving your life and your business forward begins by attracting new and amazing people into your life. So, it is good to get out there, get to meet exciting people and make their acquaintances by doing the things they love to do together with them.

3. Seizing every opportunity to meet other people. You can form the habit of meeting and talking to people at every opportunity.  Even perfect strangers! Because of the unpredictability, meeting and talking to new people daily can make life very exciting. Fact is, every single conversation you have with a new person is potentially life-changing. That helps you to get to know a lot more of very exciting people you can do business with.

4. Changing hobbies to meet new people. Everyone I know has at least one or more hobbies. If you’re looking to build a network, it might be worth changing up your hobbies or taking up some new hobbies. The essence is to get to meet new people in the new hobbies you’ve got involved with. If you look very well, you will find that people involved in certain businesses tend to gravitate towards same hobbies where they get to meet up regularly. I read somewhere that many business analysts play squash, writers go to book clubs, and middle managers for consultancy firms go road cycling. These are only some of the hobbies you can take up depending on who you want to meet.

5. Leveraging on the people you meet. As human beings, each person always knows somebody else who knows somebody else ad infinitum.  Because of that, many successful networkers always like to remind everyone that: “It’s not who you know, it’s who you know knows.” Any person you get to make a new acquaintance of daily probably knows someone else who can help you in your business. That helps in no small measure to expand your network of exciting people you can do business with.
 

How Newbies Can Help Newbies in SFI Business

Permit to take on this topic with a real time truism in SFI business. “Nobody knows everything in SFI business.” Even the founder, Mr. Gerry Carson himself admits that much. Having said that, be informed that even if you are new in online marketing, you are not alone. Very many other affiliates are new to online marketing too. We are all still learning this business day in day out. Even if you do not know how but know where to refer your PSA where he can get valuable information to help him, you are doing great. Therefore, even if you are new in online marketing, you can refer the PSA to many specific areas in SFI for guidance and encourage him to be honest and diligent with the information therein. All the information is accessible in every affiliate’s Home Page. Just advise your PSA as follows:

1. To learn the basics of the business, use SFI BASICS.
2. For a detailed 30 day lessons, use the LAUNCHPAD.
3. Use the FORUMS to interact with fellow affiliates.
4. Join a2a for the purpose of interaction and networking.
5. For information and articles on Sales, Sponsoring, Getting Started etc, use the TRAINING PAGE.
6. Access real valuable information at the ASK SC forum.
7. Lastly, encourage your PSA not to shy away from the following:
- seek help when in doubt.
- read very far and wide in SFI.
- rely and depend on fellow affiliates to make progress.
- be honest and diligent in the business.
- be open to continuous learning.
- allow others to inspire you.

If you are able to use this advice as given above, I believe even if you are new in SFI business and new to online marketing, you can successfully help a new PSA who needs guidance. Good luck!!!