Category: marketing

Read More

8 Tips for a Good Social Media Strategy

Creating an efficient Social Media strategy for your company may be a frightening task. But with a selected plan and resources, it is accomplished. Therefore, before launching into the deep trenches, I’d prefer to offer the following do-it-yourself tips to help you organize your thoughts and develop and execute your plan:

1. Know your ultimate goal. What’s it that you’re seeking to accomplish? Are you trying to realize new customers for your product or service? Are you trying to expand brand awareness or provide customer support? Or is it a mix of all of those things? If it’s, that’s fine. But you want to know your ultimate goal to realize any of the above. Developing your end game strategy will facilitate your remaining task and target executing your social media game plan. This way, you will not waste it slow or money.

2. Pick One Social Media Network to Master. The ugly truth is that you can’t master every Social Media networking site. My advice is to choose the one that you love the foremost and master it. Then use the others as filters to disseminate your content. Today there are such apps/programs, like TweetDeck and Hootsuite, that you can use to automate this process. It only is smart not to waste some time trying to master all of them.

3. Create a Content and Marketing Strategy that Supports Your Ultimate Goal. With Social Media, remember that content is king. It rules the day. Content is everything from your daily posts or tweets, to your blog posts, to your engagement pieces/contests to your videos, audios, books, e-books, e-courses, etc. an excellent example of a content strategy would be if you’re an author who wants to sell more books, you’ll break the text into more bite-size pieces and re-purpose the content to draw in more book sales. The thought here is to administer the people touch and that they will desire a lot.

4. Post Links to Your Social Media Network Sites from Your Main Website. Your website or blog should have social media icons that link to all of the social media networking sites you belong to. This makes it easy for those individuals that visit your website to attach with you via social media, and it also allows you to expand your viral reach by tapping circles or tribes.

5. Add Social Media Share Buttons to any or all of Your Blog Posts and Newsletters. Whenever you create blog posts or transfer a newsletter, you ought to include social media share buttons. This helps expand your viral reach as your friends, fans, and followers begin to share your content with their social media networking base.

6. Visually Link Your Networking Sites. What I mean by this is often to use the identical graphics/logos on your social media sites that you use on your website. That way, when someone goes to your Facebook page or follow you on Twitter, they shouldn’t see something drastically different from your homepage.

7. Stay in Present and Relevant. Don’t found your social media networking profiles and pages only to disappear for months at a time. You wish to stay people returning for more and more. Give your fans something to expect regularly.

8. Track and Analysis of your Efforts. You may know what’s working for you in your social media strategy after you begin to trace your results. This tracking can are available many forms, but at the very least, you’ll be able to use source codes to spot where your traffic is coming from, and you’ll use web analytics to determine what varieties of piques you had during a truck with specific posts. But don’t just limit yourself with numbers.

Understand that it doesn’t matter what percentage FB Fans or Twitter Followers; you build none of them belong to you. Facebook can stop working or shut you down, and then can Twitter. Therefore, your ultimate goal is usually to maneuver your friends, fans, and followers out of social media, to your website, on to your list, and into your pocketbook. If you follow this straightforward formula, you may fail.

Read More

How to Tell You Need A Digital Content Management Solution

Being a sales representative is becoming increasingly challenging. As buyers become more sophisticated, the pressure to deliver in both sales and marketing is intensifying and forcing sales and marketing professionals to rapidly adapt. Sales force expansions, as well as the increased responsibilities of the average rep, have created new professional obstacles and added to ones that have always existed.

A digital content management solution could be the answer you’re looking for. If you haven’t already, here are five reasons why you should invest in one now.

1. YOU LACK FEEDBACK ON DOCUMENTS DURING CUSTOMER PRESENTATIONS.

Many sales professionals believe that the lack of feedback on their presentations means that they are totally persuasive pitches. Unfortunately, it really means that these are likely ineffective presentations that were given on outdated platforms. A lack of feedback on documents during customer presentations can also prevent sales and marketing professionals from identifying which communications or channels generate the most sales. And really, getting feedback, and, hence, engagement, from your prospect is the best sales presentation technique of all.

2. YOU DON’T HAVE A SINGLE MEANS TO ACCESS APPROVED MARKETING CONTENT.

It’s important to give sales staff widespread access to marketing-approved materials. With a digital content management solution, marketing teams can approve the right materials for the right users and create personalized content. The ability to customize content for each user allows sales reps to perfect collateral without having to ask the marketing team for something specific for each sales conversation.

A digital content management system can offer both your sales and marketing departments the ability to create, upload, edit, share, translate and distribute content globally, and all from one platform.

3. YOU DON’T STAND APART FROM THE CROWD.

In today’s crowded marketplace, it’s necessary to communicate your message quickly and distinguish your company from the rest. There are a couple ways a sales representative can let prospects know that he or she isn’t just any other salesman or sample-dropper. The way to differentiate yourself is to know more. Because if you know more and are able to have an intelligent conversation with prospects, you’re able to show that you provide value to them.

With a digital content management system, you can be better prepared for sales conversations, gain access to selling tools to engage more effectively and learn more about your audiences through analytics and ultimately close more deals.

4. YOU FIND IT DIFFICULT TO INTERPRET MARKETING DATA AND REPORTS.

The marketing world is continually bombarded with more and more data, which can make it difficult for a marketing manager to accurately interpret reports. Staying up-to-date on linguistics will help managers get by, but it won’t make them proficient in assembling and processing data.

A digital content management system helps teams work more efficiently and generate reports automatically. Marketing professionals can better interpret data with analytical tools to configure insightful reports. The Pitcher solution, for example, goes beyond traditional reporting by collecting sentiment analysis and true data points, as well as collecting and analyzing field data. It offers full-featured business intelligence to create custom reports and dashboards. Following interactions, all call-related data is synced with just a few clicks to the existing CRM system, no other action required.

5. YOUR MARKETING TEAM CAN’T “CLOSE THE LOOP” WITH THE SALES TEAM.

When your marketing strategies are producing quality leads and generating significant amounts of great traffic but it still seems that the company is not getting any new clients or customers, you might want to take a look at how well your company is closing the sales loop.

It’s vital to have an effective feedback system in place between your marketing and sales teams. There should also be clear communication between sales and marketing about whether or not the leads that are coming through are quality. After all, this is about teamwork, so it’s important to share data and collaborate to improve processes.

Using a communication platform and digital content management solution will facilitate alignment between the field and office teams. Such a solution will help to streamline customer interactions with the ability to capture and report on sentiment reactions to marketing collateral, thus effectively closing the marketing feedback loop.

TAKE THE NEXT STEP

Organizing and keeping all of your sales support content up-to-date can be a challenge. Ensuring your content warehouse, so to speak, is easily accessible and searchable can be even more challenging. Marketers can reduce the dispersion of off-brand content and help their sales reps maximize selling time by housing their content in an effective and comprehensive content warehouse, such as a digital content management solution.

With Synepsis Consulting‘s digital content management solution, content, as well as any other customer-facing interactions, such as actionable data, daily tasks and team collaborations, are findable, presentable and trackable—instantly and intuitively, all from one place.

Read More

Tips to Build Your Online Presence

Your Google CV is vitally important to your online brand and as a result you will need to strive to occupy as many of the listings on page one of the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) as possible. There are a variety of ways to achieve this, but for now let us have…

Young man using smartphone with modern work table and computer laptop and cityscapes view from window.Business concepts ideas.Strategy analysis.office life

A Quick Look at Blogging

Derived from the word weblog, a blog is essentially a website that sports continuously updated information in the form of posts that are displayed in reverse chronological order. Typically, a blog will sport the following features: content area, title, comment area, an archive of older posts and a feed which user can use to subscribe to it.

A blog allows individuals the opportunity to foster an online identity, engage with a community and establish themselves as experts in a given arena. Blogs enable you to participate in conversations taking place in your industry or area of specialization as well as allow you to build your own voice – all the while heightening your web presence.

To promote yourself online via blogging you will need to implement a solid blog strategy. Think about the goals you want your blog to achieve and ensure that each post is geared at achieving them. But remember, a blog cannot be a purely promotional tool – if readers wanted information on you or your offering exclusively, they would visit your website.

Better Blogging Tips

There are millions of blogs in existence with new blogs being launched every second. But not all blogs are created equally, in fact more than half of the blogs launched do not make it past the first three months. If you are serious about utilizing blogging to establish an online presence, you will need to make a commitment to do just that. Blogging does take work, but the rewards are worth it.

In order to make sure that your blog is attracting readers and that its profile (and by association yours) is being raised daily, you will need to pay special attention to the flowing tips for better blogging.

Promote your blog – With millions of blogs in existence, you will need to promote your blog in order to attract readers. There are many ways in which you can promote your blog. Listing your blog in blog directories like Blog Hub, Technorati and Blog listing is a good start.

Using your preferred social networking or business networking site is another excellent way of alerting your friends, colleagues, and clients to the existence of your blog and where they can find it. Your blog will be tied in to your professional self – the “you” that you want potential clients, invertors, or employers to meet. If you are in the online marketing game, a link to your blog which details your daily TV viewing habits should be scrapped in favor of a blog which offers insight into your industry.

Participate – Conversation is key to blogging. You need to not only participate with your audience, but with other bloggers operating in your sphere too. By leaving insightful comments on other blogs the authors, or their readers, may follow the link back to your blog and if they like what they see chances are that they will come back.

Frequency – Posting too often may overwhelm readers and posting too infrequently may mean that your readers will come back, find nothing new and as a result not come back again. A post a day is ideal, but very few individuals have that kind of time on their hands. Try for at least three new posts each week.

Good content – How many times have you heard that content is king – well, it is true as long as it is good content. If your readers are gaining value by visiting your blog and if you are giving them what they are looking for they will come back. Use the feedback you receive via the comments in order to tailor posts to your audience. You can also introduce features, like our weekly online promotion tips. It is important to try things out and re-evaluate your blog strategy as you go.

SEO – Search engine optimization is an eMarketing tactic which sees bloggers and website owners optimizing their sites for certain search phrases in order to get their sites listed as high up on the SERPs as possible. You may want to conduct some key phrase research and ensure that your posts target those pages. The higher up you are on the SERPs the more likely searchers are to find your blog. Keep an eye out on our blog for future posts that will guide you through the process of utilizing SEO to build your online presence.

Monitor – The sheer amount of consumer generated media has made online reputation monitoring essential. Ensure that you are tracking what is being said about you online so that you can be aware and respond accordingly.

Good luck and happy blogging!

By allowing you to create or improve your online presence, Anna Dajero can help you to take control of your Google CV and start branding yourself online. Visit the site for more tips on how to build your Google CV and increase your online visibility.

Read More

How Can Internet Marketing Help Your Business Grow?

If you own a well-anchored business or a startup, you are probably familiar to online marketing or wish to know more about it. In our current era, our lifestyle is almost inseparable from online activities. Almost all milieus and all professions need access to the Internet for the smooth running of their business activities. Businesses need the Internet or online access to maintain their market share and target new customers as internet users are always looking for various information throughout the web. Any information they need is almost available; hence online-marketing is very appropriate as it can attract consumers with a variety of information provided on the business website. Information made can be in the form of articles or text, videos, images or even certain research results.

Let’s have a look at the different ways in which the Internet can help you to expand your business.

Visual marketing and better branding

It is a fact that an image speaks far more than a lengthy text. A picture is worth a thousand words. Visual marketing strategy creates and brings forth images representing the products that consumers are seeking. You will have the opportunity to develop more consistent branding- From displaying your name, logo, and slogan across social media platforms to create a website with professional graphics, the Internet bridges the branding gap for large brands and small businesses alike. 

Global reach

There is no traveling and no extra investment while you can access millions of clients worldwide. For example, mobile marketing is a marketing strategy that reaches customers who use mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones. Most of the online shopping takes place on smartphones so focus on mobile users. Create a mobile-friendly app with all your business features, which indicates to potential customers that your business is reliable and expanding.

Continuous marketing and social media

Continuous marketing emphasizes on promotional activities on social media networks. Social media plays a significant role in modern advertising mainly because customers look at reviews and comments posted by other consumers online. Your business can easily incorporate social network tools in their advertising campaigns and generate profits from customers that rely heavily on social media.

Low cost

Some internet marketing strategies are free such as posting on Facebook or Instagram and others. However, you might have to invest a little bit more when it comes to paid promotions and advertisements such as PPC (Pay Per Click). Yet, it is cheaper than investing on television advertising and the newspapers.

Building lasting relationships 

As long as your business has an online presence, your customers will always find you. With internet marketing, suppliers can easily access contacts or email addresses of both the buyers and the prospects. Businesses make use of this information to send updates to their customers regarding new products, services, special discounts, products available, and new coupons. Furthermore, your business can continue interacting with its clients after sale.

One to one marketing

Electronic marketing enables your business to customize your advertising techniques to suit the needs of your target audience. Your business can also personalize communication between your clients and you. Personalized marketing assumes that every customer is unique and meant to be treated differently. This type of marketing strategy is therefore very appropriate for e-commerce since online stores can display their products depending on the user’s location, hobby, interest, age group and gender.

One to one marketing ensures that your product or service reaches your prospects promptly. Furthermore, it strengthens the presence of the company and the brand image.

Blogging 

Content reigns on the Internet and it attracts natural links. If people enjoy reading your blogs, more people will be directed to your website to refer to it. Make sure your website is consistently updated with relevant, fresh and educative information that your users are looking for.

Visual and targeted marketing

Online marketing can boost your sales by allowing you to target consumers who are most likely to invest in your services or buy your products. While advertising on TV cast a wider net, paid online marketing campaigns offers you the opportunity to narrow your focus by showing your advertisements only to those users who have opted into your niche in some way.

Your Competitor is Doing It

Bear in mind that your competitor is doing online marketing for their business to cope up with the competition. The number of online stores has rapidly increased, which means you have new competitors every day. So make sure you do not lag in marketing!

Online marketing connects you to your customers. It is an opportunity to update your customers with all the new features of your product or business. You can ask for suggestions and comments about your existing services or products. Do a review and contact all your customers to know what they additionally want from you. Your current customers will stick to your business and attract new ones at the same time.

Read More

Best Ways to Market Self Published Books

Whenever you self-publish a book, and you do not have the benefit of a traditional publisher’s marketing, you need to find other ways to help you spread the word. Word-of-mouth is the most powerful and successful way to sell books.

Here are some affordable but highly effective ways to market self-published books.

1. You must make sure the book is available through all major channels. For print books, this includes online shopping websites.

2. Establish a presence on sites where readers congregate, like social cataloging websites for books. Set up an author page, do promotions, engage with your readers, and do not argue with people who post negative reviews. Bite your tongue and move on.

3. Create a website with information about you (people are curious about authors) and your books. Include book signing schedules, links to articles and blog posts about you, pictures, excerpts from the book, and other goodies that may get people engaged and interested so that they’ll buy the book.

4. Anchor a strong presence on social media, and check it regularly. When people ask questions, answer them promptly.

5. Market to the bookstores if you think your book has potential. The bookseller associations have many ways to market for their members. If there is a bookstore in your town, introduce yourself to the owner, give them a review copy of the book, and ask if they would be willing to have you do a book signing in their store. Contact any bookstore in an area you are willing to visit and ask them, too.

6. Give away some free copies. Get your book into the hands of bloggers, book reviewers, magazines, and anyone that will agree to review it. Prepare yourself for the fact that some of those reviews won’t be good.

7. Contact any appropriate regional booksellers association and try to get yourself on their signer list. This often requires paying a fee or giving them a stack of free books, but it gets you in front of many people that spend their whole day selling books to others.

8. Talk to magazines and newspapers to see if they’d be interested in running an excerpt from the book as an article, or perhaps doing a story about you, the book, or something in the book.

9. Send out press releases to radio, TV, blogs, newspapers, magazines, trade journals, and businesses that may have an interest in the book.

10. Once stores are carrying your books, stop by every so often and offer to sign their stock. Buy a roll of “Autographed Copy” stickers to put on the books after you sign them. It helps in selling more books, hence lucrative for both the bookstore and yourself.

11. Look for other places to talk about your book. For example, if it is a children’s book, offer to talk about it in schools. If it is nonfiction, offer to speak at conferences, museums, and colleges.

Read More

Importance of Branding Your Business

Every business has a brand, and branding defines how your customers perceive you. Your business’s ability to serve products or services to your customers by fulfilling their satisfaction determines how strong or weak your brand is. If you want to grow and if you plan to remain in your business for long, you will want something between your product or service and your audience, which will resonate with your offerings and also have a lasting impression in their minds.

Branding helps differentiate

In today’s time, when you can easily find a “me-too” product, it is branding that helps differentiate. And even if you do have a unique or innovative offering, it is through branding that you could gain credibility and respect for your product.

Branding is a process

Once you have gone through the process of choosing the right name for your product. You will want it to be remembered. So branding is the process through which your product communicates with your consumer.

Branding creates an experience

Branding helps create a story around your product or service. Branding is everything that goes around the product. It is the experience your customer has with your product. Branding is what connects with your customers through various touchpoints, even before your customer actually gets to see the product. Branding is what can and needs to appeal to the senses of your customer for them to even notice your product.

Branding is a mind game

Well-thought branding is not just about logos, colors, and packaging. It is more of a strategic decision about the image you want to create. It is positioning your product in your customer’s mind.

Branding is an internal commitment

It is the belief the creators & promoters of the product dearly hold. Working towards a shared vision, you build the brand’s essence and value. With this foundation, the brand’s identity is created. Logos, fonts & colors, tag line, message tone, visuals, and packaging are all a means to personify the brand and give it a distinct personality, style, and a voice of its own.

Branding creates an opportunity

Branding further gives the opportunity of extensions for a new product or even a new product category. Thus the scope of branding is vast, and so are its benefits.

Branding builds loyalty and can be measured

Measures like brand equity and brand value help estimate how much worth a brand is. Brand equity is the premium value a company generates from a product when compared to its generic competitor. While brand value is the financial worth and market value of the brand.

The more powerful your brand stands, the stronger the connection with your audience. Strong branding delivers the values to the customer, getting the latter attracted to your product and service.

Read More

How to Go About Building A Social Media Presence for Your Business

Creating a social media presence does not mean posting every day about anything. Far from it. It would be an impossible task for someone who’s running a shop alone and who has no social media manager. Below are 18 suggestions to help you stay on top of your game:

1. Set your goals

Setting goals is key to achieving any measure of success. However, if these goals are unattainable from the get-go and not time-bound, you are not only setting yourself up for failure but also increase the chances of you giving up on the whole project.

2. Create a Great Profile

You’ll want to complete your profile with all the required information when you first join a social media platform. A complete bio will help in the growth of your social media presence.

3. Choose the Right Networks

From Instagram to Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr, there are a lot of options out there. You’ll want to research those social networks and choose one that’s more appropriate for your target audience.

4. Make Your Presence Known

Once you’ve created our page, it’s important to start let the world know. You can try cross-promotion or try to get traffic to your page through other social channels to increase your number of followers.

5. Your business plan should include your social media pages

Find ways to promote visits to your platforms as this is the best way to grow and maintain your online presence. Whenever you are reassessing your business goals and marketing plan, include a strategy for your social media pages.

6. Have a consistent voice

This is a big one. Although you have to make sure that every post reflects your brand and image, you don’t want to be just a faceless corporation to your followers. That’s why it would be best to avoid having several people responsible for posting. You may even consider hiring a social media management company to do it for you.

7. Stay Active

Because inactive social feeds don’t look good for companies, you need to stay active by prioritizing your pages based on where most of your audience is. You could also try to spend some time each day to answer questions.

8. Create a schedule

Posting regularly will maximize engagement on your page. Not posting consistently and in a timely manner will most definitely affect visibility. That’s why you should try to make use of an editorial calendar to help you in this pursuit.

9. Know your audience

It is impossible to please everyone and if you set out on that path, you might end up alienating potential or already existing customers. Instead, learn to know your audience and create your content around their challenges and what they need or expect from you.

10. Build a relationship with your followers

This point is a continuation of the previous one. You want followers who engage with your content rather than thousands who do not even view your posts. For that to happen, interact with your audience by participating in conversations, addressing complaints and answering questions.

11. Help your followers 

Unless you are an eCommerce, you might want to steer clear of hard-selling your products or services. Instead, help them find a solution to their problems. This will help establish your company as an authority in the specific industry.

12. Automation

While automation does facilitate the management of your page, it most definitely cannot be applied across the board. If you automate customer response, for example, your answers will be generic and come off as insincere. Instead, try to automate other processes such as certain pre-written posts going live on certain days or at certain times.

13. Optimization

Optimization on social media isn’t the same as SEO (search engine optimization). What it means is that you should make use of images, keywords, and links that promote or advertise your services and/or products.

14. Use visuals

Live videos are now getting way more engagement than any other type of content. So, try to include graphics and imagery such as photos of events, quote photos, behind-the-scenes videos to your page. But try to keep it consistent so that you are easily recognizable. 

15. Know what’s trending

From trending hashtags to the latest meme and breaking news, as a brand, you must be able to make use of these in your content. This ensures that your audience naturally gravitates towards your content.

16. Monitor your progress

Using analytics tools to track your progress will help you develop a better strategy for your content because you’ll be able to identify which of your content performs well. Hence, you will no longer be taking a shot in the dark with your content.

17. Create content people actually want to see

Using the previous step, you can now create original content that will help you stand out from the websites out there. This will help foster a longer and more loyal relationship with your clients.

18. Consider paying for certain things

While you can organically bring traffic to your page, constantly changing the algorithm of social networks may sometimes make it more challenging. You should plan a budget for the times you may need to buy advertisements to grow your following.

Follow us

Localbiz blog

Partenaires