9 Effective Startup Digital Marketing Strategies

No matter what expert marketers say, building an online business is by no means easy. Least of all, a successful start-up, which at times is a very huge battle to get noticed online! Everyone gets to fight against very fierce competition in today’s business world. Getting noticed and patronized is what everyone out there craves for. For a start-up, your chances are brightest if you carefully use some effective digital marketing strategies to help launch your business out there. With the internet, things can become fairly easier since almost everyone now has access to the internet. This is a digital age remember! If you can handle the online marketing aspect of your business correctly, your start-up gets brighter chances of succeeding and flourishing.

Here are a few tested strategies which can help you out in that quest.

#1. Content Marketing

This involves writing and getting your message out there in form of what you know and want to share with others for their own benefits. It is providing valuable information to help others solve their problems. Content marketing is a strategic approach to modern digital marketing efforts. It is where blogs and bloggers become highly relevant in the marketing process.  Online, all bloggers are focused on creating, publishing, and distributing quality content for a specially targeted audience. This relationship helps to build a base for drawing traffic which ends up becoming potential clients/customers and customers.

#2. Search Engine Optimization, SEO

Any content not read online is not useful for online marketing efforts. It takes search engines to help rank and distribute content online for the benefit of readers. For that reason, every content needs optimization for search engines like Google, Yahoo and others. Search engine optimization, SEO, is a methodology involving strategies, techniques and tactics most bloggers use to achieve the sole objective of a high-ranking placement in the search results pages, SERP of search engines. The higher they rank your website content, the more traffic they send to it.


 
#3. Influencer Marketing

Welcome to the world of celebrities and influencers. Depending on what your business is, if you have the endorsement of persons with large social media followers, you get traffic and patronage through such influence. Simple ads from influencers get to reach millions of followers easily because of the influence of social media. Persons with large followership in social media platforms like YouTube and Instagram by mere words of mouth can help build a formidable and trusted brand. Reason, the growing trend on social media mostly revolves around influencers. Potential customers and customers easily trust the authenticity of products/services linked to influencers. If you are a brand, that helps to influence customers to get engaged with your brand.

#4. Chatbots and Artificial Intelligence, AI

Chatbots are like intelligent talking machines. Instead of humans, you can easily deploy chatbots in your frontline base to assist potentials customers take business decisions. Chatbots are usually imbued with Artificial Intelligence AI, with which they can engage in meaningful business conversations with customers and potential customers. Start-ups for cost reasons cannot afford to hire many people for their customer service departments. That is the gap chatbots step up to fill. When properly deployed, chatbots usually work with pop-up text messages which you cannot fail to notice as a website visitor on mostly the top right hand corner of the website as soon as the landing page opens. That is where they nicely welcome website visitors and invite engagement.

#5. Web Analytics

Every start-up needs analytics to help make meaning out of the dark recess of zillions of activities on the internet. For that reason, web analytics is a must-have tool for start-up digital marketers. When deployed, they help to collect, analyze, measure and report website data for understanding and optimizing web pages. The analysis of Internet data and user information through various means is referred to by expert marketers as Web Analytics. Data concerning traffic, its source and what keywords that bring them to your website can be deciphered for web analytics data. Google web analytics is about the most popular and easy to deploy in this category.

#6. Social Media Marketing 

These days and around the world, nearly everyone who has easy access to the internet is on social media. Really huge market no doubt! Social media has thus become a major marketing platform and an increasingly rising trend for promoting products and services online. It is simple to use and deploy by creating and sharing content on social media networks, like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and others. The first thing a start-up really needs to do is to create business profiles on as many of the social media platforms as convenient and suitable for the type of business to be promoted. From these platforms, you gradually build trust and followership which benefits your brand. Getting out a promotional message to millions of people is fairly very easy on social media platforms. The real reason they are very good places to build a brand from. The mere presence of a business on most major social media platforms is a very smart primary step for start-ups to build brand trust and influence in the target market.

#7. Digital Advertising
 
Just like billboards carrying ads offline on the streets and highways, digital advertising is the promotion of your business on the internet. The usage of the internet as a unique platform for promotional work requires its own techniques designed for effective on the internet. Specially worded messages deliberately and uniquely deployed to be noticed be search engines help to make digital advertising very effective. These unique massages get deployed by banner ads, text ads, emails, social media ads, blogs, mobile apps and other marketing channels available and effective in the digital media space.

#8. Optimizing for Video Search

Advertising professionals now say “effects” is always very useful for every online ads massage. That is where videos alongside text ads are becoming increasingly popular. The videos help provide most of the “effects”. Even search engines can now index videos for search purposes. So, if you optimize your video messages alongside your text ads, the messages reach farther and are more effective. Most online surfers like to see video ads alongside text ads. In fact, the videos are usually more attention-captivating than even the text ads they accompany. For effects, you must habitually rename your videos with the relevant keywords then add the keywords in your video description as well. Marketing experts believe that adding videos to a start-up website makes the start-up to achieve a more significant market presence and growth much faster.

#9. Optimizing for Voice Search
 
With the improvements and updates in their algorithms, search engines now distinctly recognize sounds and voices. For that reason, digital marketers now benefit from voice optimization. Welcome to audio digital marketing! Voice search technology has become an excellent step for improving user experience for devices such as telephones and audio CDs now widely used by a huge population on the go. Start-ups because of their characteristic low ads budgets can benefit a great deal from these cost-effective devices in their marketing efforts.

Current Trending Digital Marketing Strategies

The best digital marketing strategies currently trending with marketers derive hugely from sophisticated technologies like Machine Intelligence and Machine Learning. These technologies are daily evolving very rapidly and smart marketers are latching on. Right now, this technological onslaught has greatly redefined the whole marketing ecosystem and even the entire cyberspace. Internet businesses are now compelled to look deeper into their marketing strategies and reinvent themselves continuously if they must survive. This is the reason they have to continuously innovate to keep pace with the changing lifestyles and future marketing trends. Business survival is and remains the bottom line in all these.

Here is what marketers are now embracing for survival in digital marketing world.

Repetitive Tasks Automation

It is smart to assume that repetitive tasks in digital marketing can be automated and they are being automated. With the use of technologically advanced software, you can now automate repetitive marketing tasks like email marketing, social media or website actions and many more. Time is of the essence in any business and software that help businesses to save time must find usefulness any day. The reason tasks automation is now trending. 


 
Inbound Marketing

 Content still remains king and with the deft combination of visual and written content, marketers still get inbound traffic from evergreen content which they have posted even a long time ago. Content still remains at center stage to get traffic from keywords searches largely responsible for organic traffic. Even now, fresh and original content remains a hot favorite for major search engines like Google. Searchers rely on them for marketing information and that translates to inbound traffic. Great content is thus still very relevant to marketing efforts even now.

Growth Hacking

As the name implies, how growth hackers manage to remain on the right side of the law is really amazing. It is a great credit to their professionalism. Growth hackers ply their trade by playing with data and creativity to give rise to revolutionary products. They craftily use some groups of small and simple techniques to stimulate growth and demand for businesses. Because of their high success rates, growth hacking has emerged as one of the best marketing strategies in this age and time. The reason it is trending right now.

Chatbots

Chatbots are smart internet bots which can be programed to do many wonderful and amazing things in digital marketing. Their potentials are enormous and marketers are still discovering them. They are smart and able to strike very intelligent and meaningful conversations real time with customers thereby doing effectively what the business owner may have been required to do all by himself. Many customers are comfortable speaking to chatbots instead humans because they find them efficient and are very quick in their responses to inquiries. Some chatbots are very cordial and helpful in recalling a whole purchase history. With chatbots helping out in automation of repetitive work, business owners can then free up their valuable time to attend to other more important tasks.  The reason marketers love chatbots even more right now. They are really trending.

Video Marketing 

In digital marketing, content is still highly valued provided it is original and visual content characterized mostly by original videos helps to enhance that value. Smart marketers know this, the reason they cannot afford to ignore video marketing in their marketing strategies. Visual content in a deft combination with written content tends to work wonders in digital marketing world right now. With the prevalence of smart hand-held devices everywhere, videos streaming has become much more competitive. Smart marketers thus cannot afford to miss this trend as videos are more likely to result in conversions than plain text. Right now, around the world, every second of the day 24/7, someone somewhere is watching a video. Can you see the huge marketing potentials therein? 


 

How to Promote Your Website like a Pro

If you have a website, and you greatly need to have one if you are a serious marketer, you must devise ways to promote it with a view to attracting traffic to it. You need very clear strategies to do so if you want your efforts to yield good results. What requires the most attention is how to use these strategies not just to increase the visibility of your site but most importantly to increase the quality and standing of the site. To promote your site like a Pro, you must do what the Pros like to do. Here are some of the strategies real Pros recommend particularly about design, layout, aesthetics, presentation, hosting and actual operation of any website meant for online business marketing purposes.

Make it simple to use and navigate

Depending on your type of business, simple sites always give better results than complex and complicated sites. The Pros always advise that such sites must be clean, simple, sleek, and very fast in loading time. If can avoid excessively large images and too many fancy features on the site, that can help a great deal on its navigation since large images and fanciful features tend to slow down navigation on any site. The easier you make it for someone to browse through your site, the better their chances of staying longer on the site or even winding up subscribing or making a purchase.


 
Have on it many channels of feedback and Interaction

In any business, a 2-way communication is very vital. The more and easier ways visitors can interact with your site, the better chances of your site becoming more and better known. The more you allow users to interact on your site, the more they will do so. The more they interact with your site, the more likely they are to become interested in it. How do you better enhance this interaction? Install on the site, email contact button, allow users to comment and even engage in conversations with some token moderation. Allow users to rank the site and vote on comments with likes and dislikes. Even sharing and live chat features on the site are helpful as well.

Foster an onsite community

Community is where group interaction and communication really takes place and works well. As you design and build your site, you must factor in and think of the type of community that you want to foster. By allowing interaction, responding quickly, and moderating the discussions onsite, you are, in essence, creating a community. It is not good for business to always push your product/service on everyone you come across. Pros advise that it is best to always create awareness first before you make your product/service available. Fostering and working in an onsite community of like-minded fellows enables you to do that fairly easily.

Be very liberal with visitors’ participation
 
If you want to sell and sell well, you must be ready to deal with people at all times taking into account the complex nature of every human being. In our complex world of today, most people not only want to be seen, they want to be heard as well. Everyone thus always has an opinion to express about any and every issue. You must therefore device ways on your site to allow visitors to interact freely with your site and with others. People always like to bring their knowledge and wisdom into any conversion. By allowing them to freely do so, a bit of moderation directly by you is of essence. Set and maintain boundaries by monitoring and moderating your site yourself. This type of check should not in any way be seen or construed as akin to command and control. Real freedom particularly of expression and choices is very good for business. So, you must allow liberal freedom to visitors to your website.

Respond to feedback very quickly

Quick response to inquiries is very good for business. Your site must be known by others as a quick response site. That notion helps to promote it a great deal. No matter the type of inquiry, even if it is mere commenting, filling out a form or sending an email, online visitors always want a quick response from a responsive site. The real reason you must make your website responsive and quickly too. Timely responses always manage to help move relationships forward while the interest therein is still keen and fresh.

Personally monitor and moderate your website 

Freedom of choice and decisions is very good for business. Allowing real time interaction onsite is crucial to a successful website operation. But, too much uncontrolled freedom is a danger to it as well. As the site owner, you must set boundaries for all your visitors to stay within. Adequate allowances must be made so as not to allow these boundaries to be unduly restrictive. If they are too restrictive, you may end up scaring away visitors you are keen on retaining. People tend to abuse excessive liberty online by spamming and being abusive. Both must be checked directly by the site owner who may need to invest a bit of time and energy to delete or moderate spammy and offensive comments. That is what the Pros do.


 
Integrate your site into larger online communities
 
To integrate your site into larger online communities, you inevitably must turn to social media. Because of their huge popularity and ease of sharing messages by millions and millions of users, social media is the best place to integrate your site and latch into the activities of a huge and very active online community. Social media sites are best used not only to draw traffic to your site, but to demonstrate how your site and eventually the community you desire to create on your site manages to fit into larger communities which online platforms represent. A very fitting and productive goal is to design your site with the social media features that allow for easy integration with these larger communities. That is what the Pros do and they highly recommend.

Last Line!

Aside from having interesting and entertaining content on your website, deploying the foregoing strategies will make it more attractive to others. Websites give better results if you use a format that works well on different types of media. For flexibility and versatility, your website should be readable and attractive to read on different devices like smart phones, tablets, TVs and desktops, irrespective of whatever operating system or browser used to view them. That is how the Pros get it done and they highly recommend too.

5 Ecommerce Marketing Strategies Your Small Business Needs

If you are running a small business online, just pay attention. One major challenge many small business owners face daily is how to increase online sales. One fact you must know is that it is a rat race for small businesses out there online. That makes it a really difficult task to know where to start and how to stand out from the thousands of other e-commerce sites online. A real challenge no doubt! That is where e-commerce marketing strategies come in really handy if you know what you are doing. Give a try to these here 5 marketing strategies that have been proven to work for many e-commerce businesses in the past and are still working for others.



Content Marketing

One of the most popular marketing strategies right now is content marketing. It is the process of creating online material like blogs, gifs, videos, infographics, photos, or any other form of content that suits your target audience, with the aim of increasing visitors to your website. It can also educate your customers so that they can improve their performance within the niche. The more of your content someone sees, the more familiar the potential customer becomes with your brand.

Social Media Marketing

If you run a small online business and you are not on social media, there is a tendency to ask, where are you? If you are on social media and you are using it right, it can have a big impact on your sales figures within a very short while. It is also one of the quickest and easiest ways to create brand awareness. You can easily create an account on social platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest then test and find out what works best for your type of business. Your marketing strategy gets worked out from the information you gather and your business prospers as a result.

Email Marketing

There has been talk that email marketing is waning in popularity. Well, that is neither here nor there at the moment. For many e-commerce business owners, email marketing still drives the fastest immediate results in terms of webpage traffic and sales. It may take awhile to build your email list but it just has to be done if you hope to make any success out of email marketing. Here is how, according to experts. You can build your email list in one of two ways or both. Firstly, by asking customers to opt into your newsletter when they check in/out and secondly you can choose to add an opt-in form to your homepage or other popular pages of your website.

Guest Blogging

If you are a good blogger, guest-blogging by publishing blogs on other sites can be a great way to connect with a whole new audience as well as establishing yourself as an authority in your industry. The bottomline is traffic to your own linked site if readers find your material interesting and rewarding. That is why you must not restrict yourself to publishing blogs only on your own site if you want quick results.

Search Engine Optimization, SEO
 
SEO techniques are a bit too technical for a newbie in e-commerce marketing. You can get expert help if necessary to get your site ranking high in search engine results. Very significantly, your website has no significance if a user cannot find it on the most popular search engines particularly Google. SEO makes your website organically visible on search engines. With a proper mix of the right keywords in your content both on-page and off-page, the site can be optimized to make it search engine friendly. That helps to attract the much needed traffic to your website making it a good e-business strategy.


 

Marketing Strategies Every Small Business Needs

The first major challenge everyone faces as a small business owner is competition. That gets stiffer by the day. So, if you want your own business to survive, you must always have your thinking cap on. Resolve to think strategically at all times. These here strategies are not one-size-fits-all strategies. You must look at yourself and your business very well to decide what will work for you and what won’t. Here are some of the best marketing strategies that can help you get your business in the right direction now and the years ahead.

If you’ve been around for a while, you may have deployed one, two or more of these here strategies to promote your small business in the past. Exact same strategies that have proven useful to many others around the world! Here's a list of a few proven strategies that are right now helping businesses across the world:

Building an email marketing funnel
Speaking at, sponsoring and or hosting events/seminars/webinars
Offering free business consultations
Traditional media advertising
Advertising on social media, particularly Twitter, Instagram and Facebook
Adding your business profiles on directories such as Google My Business
Investing in content marketing
Writing a column/articles factually, consistently and continuously

More hands-on strategies:

Write about your products/services: You may not know how to write a blog but not to worry. At least you are literate enough to write something. You may not need to worry about blog writing skills if you are literate enough to write something readable. Just write stories and articles about your products and or services and how they help your customers. Even if your platform is social media, so long as you are consistent and factual, you can build a reputation for your brand online and patronage naturally follows.

Create online visibility for your business: What that means is to be sure your business is visible and accessible online 24/7. To be able to do so, you must create your profiles across all available social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and others. You must keep your contact details updated there so that people can drop a message anytime of the day. That is one great way to generate very valuable leads.

Maintain email contact with your customers: You can build a reliable email list from your online visibility. Thereafter, you can regularly send emails to your existing customers and also to potential customers you are targeting. This is one very useful way to promote your content, improve sales and nurture existing leads for the future.

Using word of mouth promo: A satisfied customer is a very big asset to your business. You should encourage your customers to speak about your business to others. You must therefore strive more to satisfy customers than turning a profit. Businesses that enjoy good customer satisfaction not only benefit from good customer retention, they also benefit from good word of mouth promos and customer testimonials on your website and even on social media platforms. The better and more the reviews your business gets, the more customers it continues to attract.  

Strategies for Link Building in Affiliate Marketing

 These days, most serious marketers routinely build links in their websites or blogs. This is because it is no longer in dispute the importance of link building in the business. Link building is important because, the number, quality, and relevance of links pointing to any content is an important ranking factor used by foremost Search Engines like Google. Once your content is on-site SEO compliant, a little link building will boost its position in the search ranking. That is what most marketers really need to succeed in affiliate marketing. So, every smart marketer has got to build links as part of their on-site and off-site SEO strategies.

Some of these link building strategies include:

Blog commenting on other people’s blogs then linking back to your site.

Guest Posting on sites which allow it then link back to your own site.

Posting on Relevant Communities and Forums and linking back to your site.

The next very effective strategy is to build internal links to an evergreen content.

What exactly is Evergreen Content? If you manage to post an evergreen content, it is like finding gold in affiliate content marketing. Such content is usually the type people search for continually irrespective of its age. What an evergreen content does is to ensure that once you rank well in Search Engines you will be getting steady traffic from the content. Because such old content keeps turning in a steady traffic of visitors, your traffic is bound to grow as you increasingly add more relevant content linked with it. If you have managed to post evergreen content in the past, you may not need to write too frequently anymore. Even if you write once or twice a month, you can still get loads of traffic if you can handle your on-site and off-site SEO bit well enough.


 

6 Smart Ways to Make Unhappy Customers Happy

“Success is nothing more than a few simple disciplines, practiced every day.” - Jim Rohn

Smart business owners are coming to terms with the fact that happy customers are good for business. How to keep customers happy has therefore become a common concern for many business owners. If as it happens often a customer isn’t happy, it is smart to use some tried-and-tested strategies to turn things around. Here are some of the strategies some top entrepreneurs routinely use to handle unhappy customers.

01. Take full responsibility for mistakes. When any of your customers gets agitated about your product or service, do not make the mistake of shifting blames. Take full responsibility and get to work on the issue immediately. Be sure to personally communicate with the concerned customer. Never make the mistake of delegating this duty. When customers realize they are dealing with the “real man” behind the business, it gives them real assurances and that makes them happy.



02. Give your customers a listening ear. Be available always for your customers no matter how busy you are. Many times, customers are unhappy because no one actually listens to their complaints. That is very true! As a business owner, when such disputes arise, you can listen directly and resolve them yourself. A direct telephone conversation with the complaining customer comes very handy here. That goes a long way to douse tension and calm frayed nerves most of the time.

03. Habitually engage your customers. Doing this shows that you value your customers and their concerns. You can directly engage your customers through feedback throughout the buying process or by asking for their preferences even during product development. It is generally true that the more businesses engage with customers, the happier they are.

04. Show empathy and never forget to say sorry. Sorry is a very powerful and highly emotional word to use in business. Never forget to connect to your customers’ emotional levels as a way of reminding them you're only human and are trying everything possible to make them happy. Show genuine empathy with their concerns and be as transparent as possible to make them understand you are doing everything to have the issue of their concern resolved very quickly. That somehow manages to make them happy to allow you resolve the matter.

05. Respond fast to customer concerns. Quick response is always a very vital key in any dispute resolution. In resolving customer disputes, speed could be more essential that even the solution. Without speed, many customers probably won’t even give you the opportunity to find a solution. They could be that impatient.

06. Resolve customer concerns without delay. Always remember that no matter what business you are in, you always have real competitors out there snapping at your heels to take away your customers. Quick fixing of problems could be their selling points to achieve their goals. So, to keep your own customers happy and loyal to you, you must find practical and credible ways to quickly resolve customer concerns. Customers are always happy when they have the full assurances that your business can deliver quick solutions to their problems.

Real Difference $100 Can Make in Your SFI Business

In SFI business, $100 is a lot of money which can go a long way to advance your business. Depending on what your business strategies are, you can use the money like this:

1. $100 can buy you 4 slots of S-Builder Co-Op Units to build residual income in your business.

2. It can buy you 5 numbers, 50 TCredit packs to use in TripleClicks purchases, Pricebenders auctions and many other things in TripleClicks shop.

3. It can buy you up to 60 credible PSAs at $25 for 15 PSAs.

4. It can buy you up to 6 months credible advertising of your various Gateways.

5. It can buy you very many E-books which can help you to grow your business.

6. With $100, you can secure up to 3 month’s subscription for IAHBE.

7. You can buy 100 WAVE3 X-Card in 100 packs, etc, etc, and so many other things too numerous to mention here.

Come to think of it, I believe you can do so very many other things in SFI for $100 that it is practically impossible to list them all here. However, what matters the most is what you do with your extra $100 to maximize and help grow your SFI business? Your choices clearly depend on your strategies and goals. Arising from the above, the choice of what you do with your extra $100 therefore is absolutely up to you and yours alone.