Category: Marketing

Provide High Value to Visitors

When people search for information online, they look for about the same things that a search engine does. They do the search and then evaluate whether or not the information is authentic and useful to them. If you always seek to provide high value information to your visitors, you’ll be a lot more likely to not only attract a high quality of customer to your website, but also to keep them there. Here are some great ways you can provide that high value that people are looking for.

* Develop White Papers – A white paper is an authoritative paper that either persuades a consumer toward a particular product using facts, or describes problems and offers multiple solutions to the consumer. You can provide white papers on a variety of topics for your audience that will be seen as high value to your audience, whether they’re free or not.

* Create Videos – A great way to provide high value to your audience is to make videos for them. You can create “how to” videos, explainer videos, and other types of demonstration videos, or even just informational videos about topics that your audience cares about. Make them short, no more than three to five minutes. The value will be perceived as very high when it’s information they want.

* Write EBooks – Another way to provide high value to visitors is to offer eBooks about the topics they care about. In this way that they can read the information on their Kindle or other reading device away from the website.

* Form an Inner Circle – One really great way to provide a super high value to your audience is to create a members only area, paid or free, where people have to be approved to join. You can now do this via Facebook private and secret groups. People like feeling exclusive, and this is a good way to do it.

* Host Monthly Webinars – Offer periodic webinars or teleseminars for your website visitors. If you offer them monthly, based on various topics of importance to your audience, you’ll up your authority quotient with your audience exponentially.

* Conduct Case Studies – Once you’ve been around long enough, you likely have some success stories that can be shared. Collect case studies about people who have used methods you describe. You can even collect studies about people who have succeeded using methods like yours. This will make the audience feel like they’re truly getting a lot of value out of the information provided.

* Interview Experts – Your audience will absolutely love it if you interview movers and shakers within your niche. What’s more, the more you interview experts, the more people will view you as an expert. That’s how Oprah became the guru we now know today. Not only has she learned from those she’s interviewed, but her audience sees her as an expert in a variety of fields.

Most bloggers don’t really understand the power in providing value to their visitors, so they miss out. But now you know that providing high value through the various types of content you offer can increase the traffic and even improve traffic loyalty.

Categories: website Tags: Tags:

Why Social Media Matters to Your Small Business

Social media is here to stay. It offers individuals and business owners alike a great deal of ability to get the word out about any event or happening. Most people use social media of some kind – and what’s more, they keep it close to them with their mobile devices at the ready. People share everything on social media, from their baby’s first steps to more mundane things like what they’re eating for dinner tonight.

Being online and using social media to promote your business offer many benefits.

* Brand Recognition – If you want people to recognize your brand, it’s important to develop a branded appearance that you use across all social media networks. Use the same logos, in different sizes, and stay true to your brand at all times.

* Slow Marketing Converts – When you provide information over a long period of time, your audience becomes accustomed to your message. Over time they develop trust, and after being exposed to you a few times they are more likely to place an order.

* Improves Authority – When you often post a lot of accurate and helpful information, people start viewing you as an authority on the topic. Once you’re viewed as an authority, you will start making even more money because people will be waiting to hire you or buy your products.

* Increases Brand Loyalty – The more people see your brand out there, the more loyal they will become toward what you offer. Your offerings should represent what your brand stands for and you’ll find that people become more loyal to you as you stick to what you know and believe in.

* Increases Traffic to Your Website – Use social media to share and promote your blog posts, and new offerings will increase the traffic to your website exponentially. One of the best ways to rank higher on search results is to be active on social media.

* Is Inexpensive – Social media is not an expensive form of marketing. It can also be fun. Guard yourself from getting sidetracked, but always be interactive and engaging with your followers. Remember, time is money. Automate what is not direct communication so that you can get more done in less time.

* Allows for Useful Consumer Engagement – Social media can let you engage with users in a very beneficial way. You can have deep conversations about many topics. Just remember to keep it professional and handle controversy carefully.

* Works with Mobile Devices – Better than most websites and email, social media works effortlessly on mobile devices. Social media and mobile really go hand-in-hand. People take their devices on dates, and to bed – you’ve never been closer to your audience than now.

If you’re not participating on social media then you need to change that right now. You don’t have to be everywhere; just find out where your audience hangs out and go there. Then, use that social network to your fullest ability.

Categories: social media Tags: Tags:

Reduce Bounce Rates

When people click through a pay-per-click advertisement, or a link on your message board, or guest blogging bio, you want them to go to your webpage and stick around. You want them to read your content, see your offers, and then finally take the next step to answer your calls to action. But, many people do bounce off the site. Bouncing means they visited but left quickly.

You can view your bounce rate in Google Analytics. So, how can you reduce your bounce rates?

* Increase Speed – When you can increase the loading speed of your website, you’re going to automatically have fewer bouncing visitors. People are impatient and do not like to wait around for something to load.

* Don’t Burn Out People’s Retinas – Certain colors, like blue and gold, do not translate well to online reading. In addition, you need to space out your paragraphs differently than you would for print. It’s okay to separate your text into more paragraphs for online reading.

* Improve Your SEO – Search engine optimization is important for your website. If you have a lot of bounces you may be using the wrong type of content to attract your ideal audience. Or, worse, your content is boring. Improve the content and the SEO, and you’ll have fewer bounces.

* Study Your Target Audience Better – Another factor in bounce rates is poor understanding of your target audience. If your advertisements, blog posts and content marketing (and any marketing for that matter) is not well-targeted to your audience, then you need to improve your targeting.

* Avoid Pop-Ups – Some pop-ups are fine, but you need to not have them show up the moment someone gets to your site. A better option is to have a slider come up from the bottom right of the website or for the pop-up to appear as the person is trying to exit the website. Immediate pop-ups scare people away from your website.

* Create Natural Navigation – The best navigation is not very noticeable but naturally leads your visitors to where they want to go. Don’t be clever with link and button names. Instead, be direct about where the link is going to send your visitor, and use less navigation on the front page. Having fewer choices will avoid confusion.

* Use Proven Design Techniques – Don’t try to reinvent the wheel. Look at well-made websites that have good traffic ratings. You can get a plugin for Chrome to find out what page rank each site has.

Link to plugin – https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/open-seo-statsformerly-pa/hbdkkfheckcdppiaiabobmennhijkknn?hl=en

* Know the Reason for Your Website – If you don’t know the purpose of your website then no one else will know either. Ensure that you have mapped out the website before building it so that you know and your visitors know that the website is clear about its message.

Bounced traffic has a variety of causes that you need to research. You can use Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools to help you discover ways to reduce your bounce rate. But, one of the most important things is to ensure that your website speaks to your target audience so that you attract the right people in the first place.

Categories: website Tags: Tags:

Remember the Call to Action

When it comes to online marketing, nothing is more important than your CTA. The call to action tells the viewer what exactly you want them to do. Usually when it comes to CTAs, less is more. You want your audience to have one or two choices of actions to take for each video, no more. Some will be “share,” some will be “like,” and you may ask people to comment. There are different ways to do it all without seeming like a used car salesman.

You know that CTAs are important in all your written content, but you may not be so sure how to go about it with your video content, or why it’s so important. But, CTAs are important in all your communication with your audience. Having said that, each video will have a different purpose, therefore a different type of CTA.

* Remember the Buying Cycle – Your CTA will depend on the part of the buying cycle the video addresses. Some people will come to a video due to wanting to learn more information; in that case they may want to “subscribe” so that they can learn more.

* Use Specific Action Words – Instead of trying to be tricky when it comes to the words that you use for your CTAs, let them know what they get if they like, share or comment. “To get more videos just like this please subscribe.” “If you want to enter the contest, answer the challenge question in the video below.”

* Avoid Niche Jargon – It’s tempting to use words that are considered jargon within your CTAs, but it’s a mistake. You need to use CTAs that speak to your audience in a clear manner that makes no mistakes about what you expect from them.

* Remember the Audience – Everything is always about your audience, and never about you. Everything you say and do needs to be something that shows that you understand their pain and can help them.

* Think: One or the Other – When it comes to CTAs it’s imperative that you don’t give them too many choices. You want to think in terms of “this or that” to ensure that they follow your CTAs smoothly.

* End Cards Work – An end card is a picture or video added to the end of each video that gives them a CTA. The CTA can change depending on your purpose for the video. You can create various end cards to add to the right video, depending on the purpose.

* Have a Contest – A great way to draw attention to a CTA is to host a contest of some kind. A contest can help encourage more shares of a video without even trying, while drawing attention to a different CTA such as engagement via commenting.

* Send Them to Another Video – A CTA often not considered is to send them to another video via an annotation or link in the description. Sending your viewers to more of your videos is a great way to improve views.

The CTA is likely the most important part of your video. Without it, people may not watch more, like your video, share it with others, or comment. While it may seem like you are selling and yes, you hate selling, if you don’t have a CTA in your video you’ll miss out on the benefits of having videos in the first place.

Categories: website Tags: Tags:

12 Ways to Use Market Research for Your Business

Market research is the best way to ensure longevity of your business. Many small business owners often overlook market research – to their detriment. Market research is an essential and ongoing component of all successful businesses. Here are twelve ways to use market research for your business.

1. Discover Your Target Market – Many people make products, and then try to find a market for them. However, the truth is that you should first find the market you want to work with, then create products for it. But, even if you skipped that, you can now find your target audience so that you can get your marketing materials right.

2. Get to Know Your Potential Customers – The market research that you conduct will allow you to get to know your potential customers better. When you know them better, you’ll be able to create customer personas that help with creating content and marketing which really gets results.

3. Develop New Products and/or Services – When you know what is going on in the marketplace you’ll get more ideas about products and services that your audience needs. You may get the ideas from reading industry news or from what the competition is doing.

4. Refresh Your Marketing Efforts – Sometimes marketing becomes stale and even though your audience doesn’t change who they are, they do change how they feel about things. For example, what was acceptable marketing for companies in the 1960s isn’t acceptable today. You need to refresh your marketing as needed.

5. Determine Who Your Competitors Are – It’s important to identify your competitors so that you can keep an eye on them and what they are doing. Sign up for their lists and purchase some of their products. Don’t copy them, but do use them as a standard bearer so you can be better.

6. Educate Yourself to Become an Expert – The more information you learn about your industry and the market for your products and/or services, the closer you’ll become to being an expert. Reading as much as possible keeps you up-to-date and knowledgeable.

7. Confirm Your Ideas – It’s important that when you have an idea or assumption about anything to do with your business, you do the research to determine if it’s right. Sometimes anecdotal stories are wrong; sometimes a result is an outlier and not true. Only market research can help determine what is genuinely right and wrong.

8. Learn New Opinions – During the market research you’ll also learn totally new ideas and opinions you never considered. You may find during your research that they are wrong or you may find out that they’re right. Only proper research will help.

9. Keep Up with New Technologies in Your Industry – Keeping up with market research will also help you learn about technology as it happens. Every day new technologies are being discovered that can help you with your business. Without research you won’t know about it. It’s easy to get trapped within your four walls and not realize what is happening.

10. Identify New Trends – As you’re doing your research, you’ll start to be able to identify new trends that are happening right now. These trends are things that you need to jump on because as fast as they come, they change.

11. Avoid Marketing Snafus – Business owners who avoid market research are prone to making horrible marketing mistakes. They are at risk of believing their own biases. If you want a laugh and a cringe or two, see Ad Week’s list of advertising and marketing fails.

Link to Ad Week – http://www.adweek.com/topic/fail

12. Track Your Own Brand – Many people don’t realize that during market research you’ll also be able to determine how you’re doing as a brand getting information out to the public. If you do not run into your own articles, interviews, blog posts and research while searching, then you need to start working harder.

The fact is, without market research your success is in jeopardy. Some business owners will achieve accidental success but it will be hard to keep up. If you plan for success by conducting market research for your business, you will be set up for success from day one. If you started already, it’s not too late to conduct market research to ensure that you achieve and maintain success.

Categories: Marketing Tags: Tags:

The Importance of a Great Website for Marketing

One of the most important marketing materials that you can have today is your website. Your website will help you find business, quality business, and make more sales. The website works for you when you’re sleeping to provide your audience with information and access to your thoughts and ideas.

* It’s Your Online Storefront – Whether you have a bricks and mortar store or only an online presence, you need a good website to act as your storefront online. This will be available all the time to your audience and help you get more customers.

* It Works 24/7 for You – A website is on 24/7, 365 days a week. If you set it up right with a good FAQ, easy contact information, autoresponders and more, it can sell for you without you even being there.

* Load Time Matters – When it comes to how fast your website loads, there are many ways to make it quicker. Your audience will not give you much of a chance when it comes to loading times. If your website doesn’t load quickly within a couple of seconds, they’ll click away and go to another site.

* SEO Makes a Difference – Using proper search engine optimization practices can not only help your audience find you, but it will also keep them interested enough to stay on your website to search for information.

* A Good Website Elicits Trust – When a website has good design, loads fast, and has top-notch information, it really makes a big difference. You want your audience to come to your website and feel trust in your offerings based on what they see.

* The Right Layout Gets More Action – Understanding how your audience looks at and uses websites can help you make the website more useful. Most people read in an F-pattern, and like to scroll and read major points on a site before reading the meat of the information.

* Your Color Scheme Makes a Difference – You don’t want to blind your audience when they come to your website. You want the colors to help them feel comfortable and able to read everything that you offer.

* It Represents You – Your website represents who you are and can be unique to you and your niche. You want the website to be something you are proud of sharing with the world, and truly represent who you are as a person and business owner.

It’s important to understand that every aspect of your website is important. If you don’t know how to build a good website, you can outsource it to someone who does. When you do hire a professional, be sure to check out the websites they’ve created to ensure that they are getting good traffic and look professional.

Categories: website Tags: Tags:

Common Market Research Mistakes

Market research is an essential component of any business, large or small. It helps identify trends as well as gaps in products or services, and it keeps you up-to-date on anything going on within your industry that can affect sales. However, there are certainly some mistakes that you’ll want to avoid while doing market research. Here are nine of the most common ones.

1. Setting an Unrealistic Budget – You don’t want to spend too much money or too little money. First, see what research is already available and whether or not you can use what exists. If you can use what’s already there, you can save a lot of money. But, if the things you want to know aren’t out there yet, get bids to get an idea of the cost. Alternatively, you can use software like SurveyMonkey.com to conduct some of the research and only hire someone to help you decide the questions.

2. Not Having a Specific Plan of Action – Know what you want to research before starting. Devise some questions that you need answers to. Know why you want those answers and how it affects your business before even starting.

3. Not Understanding What Constitutes Good Sources – You can find anything to support your assumptions on the internet. But, not every website is a good source. Check up on anything that someone else says and realize there is a huge difference between an opinion and a fact.

4. Not Researching Your Competitors – It’s essential to know what your competitors are doing. You know the saying, “Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer.” No, your competitors are not enemies, but you do need to know what they are doing.

5. Not Understanding in Advance Who Your Target Audience is – If you don’t know who your target audience is, it will be difficult to ask the right questions during your research. Make the first research you do learning about your audience.

6. Spending too Little Time on Survey Creation – When developing questions for surveys, it’s important to understand how to come up with good questions in terms of phrasing, and the order of questions and the type of answers they’re allowed to provide.

7. Not Spreading the Word about Your Research – When either conducting research or putting the research to work, you’ll need to spread the word about it. If you want a lot of participation, spreading the word is essential. If you want to be seen as an expert, you need to act like one.

8. Not Getting More than One Source – One set of data is not enough to prove anything to you or anyone else. True scientific research requires multiple sets of data that prove your assumptions.

9. Not Using Your Research – There is no point in doing all the research if you’re not going to put it to work for you. Some people do the research, don’t like the answers, and move forward with their original plans anyway. This is a huge mistake.

Avoid these common market research mistakes if you want to have a long-term successful business. By simply educating yourself about the market you work in, it will pay big dividends by helping you avoid mistakes in marketing and stating ahead of the competition.

Categories: Marketing Tags: Tags:

The Importance of Having a Website with Regularly Updated Content

If you want to have a successful business today, you must have a website with regularly updated content. The reason is that this is how your audience will find you. Search engines love new content, and your audience will love new content. New content adds value to your website and blog for your audience as well as for the search engines.

* They Have a Website So You’d Better – It’s a fact that your competition likely has a website. If you want your audience to patronize you over your competition, then it’s imperative that you have a website. It will help you stand out among the crowd.

* Websites Help You Provide Better Service – With the technology that exists today, you can create a helpdesk easily that will automate a lot of customer service issues and education. For example, you can set up a course on your website for your audience to sign up for or download. Or, you can provide a FAQ for your audience to help them with common concerns and problems.

* You Can Educate Your Audience – A fabulous way to educate your audience is via your website and blog. You can post articles, videos, podcasts and more about different issues that affect your customers and audience. This enables them to self-help before seeking out direct help from you.

* Websites Are a Number One Advertising Method – Most people use their mobile devices more than any other method to search for businesses to patronize. Because of this fact, if you don’t have a website and online presence you may miss out on a lot of business.

* Websites Never Close – This is especially true if you sell products over services. People can order from your website 24/7. You can be open all the time instead of only when you’re present.

* Everyone Is Online – Well okay, maybe not everyone, but most people are online today using smartphones and mobile devices. This means having a website gives you a good opportunity to get information to your audience if you’re online too.

* You Can Make Income When You’re Sleeping – Want money deposited into your PayPal account while you’re asleep? Then get a website and sell your products on it and you’ll be cashing in while you’re dreaming of the beach.

* Enables You to Deliver Info to Your Audience – A website is a lot of things. It’s a brochure, a blog, a community, and interactive educational space. It’s also a way to deliver information to your audience in a way that they will understand and like.

The fact is, if you don’t have a website, you’re missing out on more than half of your audience. Some people won’t even do businesses with you if you don’t have a professional-looking website. Therefore, you need to do what you can to ensure that you have the best website you can afford. Fortunately, you can either create a website yourself or pay someone to make one for you relatively inexpensively.

Categories: website Tags: Tags:

Facebook Ads Best Practices

Facebook ads are a great way to get the word out about your products and/or services. Facebook offers PPC and CPM ads. A PPC campaign is a pay-per-click campaign that you only pay when people click, while a CPM ad means that you pay a set amount for views. Both are good ways to run ads, but you’ll see that using CPM is a little better and easier.

Set Your Goals

Knowing why you’re running a Facebook advertisement is important. You need to know what you hope the results are. Do you want to build your email list, sell an actual product or service, or something else?

Learn Facebook’s Power Editor

Facebook has a wonderful editor so you don’t need to use any outside sources to create your ads. Use Power Editor. It allows you to manage many different variations of the same advertisement and is very useful. You do need to use Chrome to use the Power Editor, but it’s simple to use.

Link to Power Editor – https://www.facebook.com/help/194355723944655/

Target Your Audience Carefully

When running any type of advertisement, it’s important to understand who your audience is and what they want. On Facebook ads you can target your audience down to the exact person you want to see the advertisement; this is a huge leap forward in marketing for any business. Even though you’re a home business, you can compete with bigger businesses due to these features.

Segment Your Audience for Different Ads

The power editor allows you to duplicate ads, and then edit them to change the demographics. Doing this serves a couple of purposes. It allows you to conduct an A/B test to see who responds better to your ad, but you can also change the images, headlines, etc. to fit each segment of your audience better.

Use Custom Audiences

A custom audience allows you to reach people who have already been to your website but are now surfing on Facebook. This is called remarketing or retargeting, and it is a very powerful way to market to targeted people and get a high rate of return.

Use Facebook’s Optimized CPM

This is an amazing thing because it makes it easy for you to get views for your advertisement. CPM stands for cost per thousand impressions. Facebook’s algorithm knows what’s best in terms of this set-up, so let Facebook choose for you. It will really work better and save you money too.

Build a Responsive Website

As of April 21, 2015 Google is ranking responsive websites higher than those that are not responsive. A responsive website is one that works on all mobile devices as well as PCs. It’s best that your websites are responsive. You don’t need one for mobile and one for PCs – you need one site that works regardless of the platform your audience uses.

Get Professionally Made Graphics

Don’t skimp on graphics, but you don’t have to spend that much. You can do it yourself too and have them look professional if you use Canva. Try using Fiverr to save a little money on finding someone to help make your ads. You can get stock photography that is good to use on Stockfresh or iStockphoto.

Links:

Canva – https://www.canva.com/
Fiverr – https://www.fiverr.com/
Stockfresh – http://stockfresh.com/
iStockphoto – http://www.istockphoto.com/

Hire a Copywriter

Writing content is different from writing copy. Copywriting is a specialized skill. Let a copywriter take what you’ve done and improve it. If they start with something you’ve written and then fix it to work better, you’ll save a little money on the copywriter. And overall you’ll save a lot of money on running the advertisement because you’ll get better results from professional copy.

Using Facebook to run ads is a great way to get involved in online advertising. Pay-per-click and CPM campaigns can be overwhelming, but Facebook has it set up so that you can do it without even being a professional. It’s a great way to put your toe into online advertising for your business.

Categories: social media Tags: Tags:

Should You Outsource Your Market Research?

At some point, every business owner must assess the benefits and disadvantages of outsourcing. A small business owner cannot hope to grow a business without outsourcing some aspects, or else the entire point of having a business will be lost. Losing all your freedom and making tons of money isn’t what you want. You want to have freedom and a balance of life and a business. Therefore when you want to outsource something, it’s important to look the pros and cons of outsourcing that particular project or task.

Cons of Outsourcing Your Market Research

* You must give up control – For some people this might enter into the pros of outsourcing marketing research. However, for most people giving up control is very difficult. You will have some say over the research and what deliverables you want but other than that you’ll have to be hands off and let the experts do what they need to do.

* It can be pricy – Hiring experts to conduct marketing research isn’t cheap. But, you don’t want to lowball it either by hiring people who aren’t really experts, because that can also be pricy. If you don’t have the right budget, you may as well do it yourself.

* They may survey or reach the wrong people – Research companies often have huge databases of consumers that they use to conduct the research with. This may miss the mark as it might not be the right people.

* They don’t know your business like you do – The fact is, no one knows as much about your business as you do, and you cannot expect them to. When letting go of control over the research you’ll also lose some of the personalization that you can offer.

Pros of Outsourcing Your Market Research

* You don’t need to spend the time – The saying that “time is money” is true. If you are busy doing what you do best, it’s going to be really difficult to find the time to conduct market research at all, much less appropriately.

* You get an objective source – Another company isn’t going to be as emotionally attached to the outcome of research as you are. Therefore, they may be able to get more accurate results.

* Professionals have the right tools – Some research tools are super expensive for one business to pay for. Research companies have to buy software and mailing lists and other services that would not be feasible for one business to buy for its own research.

* You can get fast results – Since this is what they do for income, they will have a team of people on your project and be able to offer fast turnaround times.

Once you write down the pros and cons that are unique to your situation, assess your budget and determine how you will go forward. But, whatever you choose, do not skip conducting market research. It is one of the main differences between businesses that succeed long term and those that do not.

Categories: Marketing Tags: Tags: