Maintaining an effective online presence is vital for business owners today. The main reason is that your competition and your potential customers are looking up information about you online. If you don’t put the information out there, someone else will.
FREE Checklist: 10 Online Business Mistakes You MUST Avoid
If you maintain your online presence with purpose, you’ll stay in control of the message people receive when they look for you.
Don’t get it twisted. Yes, advertising is an expense item on your profit and loss statement but in business, advertising is an investment, not an expense.
If you don’t see a return on your investments, you stop making those investments.
Advertising is the way you get the message about your solutions to your ideal customer. When you do that, you solve their problems and you fulfill your business’s promise.
Social media marketing is all about the back and forth. Without engagement, there is no point, and sometimes businesses forget this. Social media is a relationship-building tool.
Most people spend time on one platform to another at some point during the day. This gives you an amazing opportunity to reach out to them and make them think of you by doing something to help them.
To improve your social media marketing results, use automation strategically and put engagement at the forefront of your strategy.
Content marketing builds your business by communicating with your audience, nurturing relationships with them and helps them to make good purchasing choices. However, if you don’t have a good strategy, it’s hard to accomplish your goals.
Content marketing gives you an effective means to an end that you can’t miss out on. The main reason is that content marketing works. As you’re creating your content marketing strategy and determining what to create, publish and promote, you’ll want to ensure that your content is accomplishing at least 3 things for your audience.
An affiliate marketer is a business owner who promotes other people’s products and services to their audience for a percentage of sales, a payment per click, or a price per lead. If you think of it, when you become an affiliate marketer it’s just like selling anything on commission – whether it’s cleaning products, real estate or digital products. If you make a sale, you get paid.
When you find the right product or service to promote, it’s going to fit in with the criteria you set for your business. There are enough products to go around. You don’t have to choose to promote anything that isn’t perfectly aligned with your mission and values for your customers and your business.
It’s a lot easier to keep a customer than it is to get a new one. When your business can build brand loyalty and brand advocacy with your customers, it’s a meaningful way to increase the lifetime value of every customer that you attract.
FREE Checklist: Branding For Small Businesses
Great branding requires that you understand your audience, know their values, and can add value to their lives simply by existing. Your brand is communicated through every single action your business takes.
Here are 10 ways to build brand loyalty so you can create lifetime customers who’ll tell others about your business.
Some people try to say that the days of using Facebook for business promotion are over. But the facts don’t back up that idea at all. Facebook has over a billion active users. Your audience is there even though they don’t want you to find them there.
Well, at least they’ll claim that, but the response is so significant on Facebook that every big business is using it. When a big business uses a platform, you can bet there’s a reason.
Promoting your business on Facebook is a great idea. After all, Facebook is like a country of its own. It has many different cities and in one of those cities, your audience lives. Some marketers believe that if you can’t attract your audience on Facebook, you might not even have an audience.
If you avoid these 7 mistakes using Facebook for business promotion, you’ll achieve the results you want.
One way to build your email list and segment your audience is by offering freebies. Freebies are also called lead magnets.
A lead magnet is a solution that is free to the person who is going to use it, but it usually requires the receiver to provide their personal information such as an email address and a name.
Having said that, sometimes it’s good to ask for more information to help you gather statistics. For example, some lead magnets ask you how many employees you have or how much you earn every year. If the information is essential for you to know, ask it before giving the freebie, although you’ll get more responses if you keep the questions short and straightforward.
Here are 8 ideas for freebies that will help you build your list fast.
People buy from businesses they know, like and trust. You can get your target market to know you by implementing coordinated advertising and marketing campaigns. Your audience may even like the products and services you provide.
But when you build customer trust and loyalty, your audience will buy from you regularly and spread the word about your business.
When some businesses try to be more authentic, they can try to rush through the process of building trust by using tactics that aren’t in its best interest. For example, you don’t want to buy followers or pay people to leave reviews because they won’t be authentic and people will know eventually.
Here are 10 ways to build customer trust and loyalty.
Branding is a process of building your businesses or your reputation, as well as its visibility. Your brand’s reputation will often be known by people who have never bought from you, due to what other people think or what the general public thinks and feels when your brand is mentioned or is seen.
FREE Checklist: Branding For Small Businesses & Bloggers
The truth is, branding is a complicated thing that is all about how the customer thinks about you.
You can increase brand awareness on purpose or by accident. Your best bet if you want a long-lasting profitable business is to plan the branding you want your audience to know. Create the brand from the bottom up and live the branding so that over time it becomes second nature.
SEO (search engine optimization) is how you market your website so people who are searching for information about your products or services can find it using a search engine like Google or Bing.
One of the best ways to improve your SEO and generate more ‘organic’ or free traffic involves how you write and format the content on your website and the keywords you use.
The keywords are the words and phrases a person will type into a search engine to find what they’re looking for. If these keywords match the content on your website, the search engines will direct people to your site.
One way to be more authentic in business is to work toward developing your brand’s personality. It might seem weird to personify a brand, but it works. This is equally important whether the brand is you or a separate entity.
When you give your brand a personality it will make it easier for you to come up with content ideas, develop products, packaging, and more. Your brand’s personality will inform everything – from the design of your website to the design of your products, to the words you put on your blog.
Here are 8 ways to give your brand a personality.
Many small business owners are intimidated by LinkedIn. Most go through the trouble of creating a profile on LinkedIn, but that’s as far as they go. This opens doors for you to stand out on the platform because so many people give up.
Using LinkedIn as a platform to market your small business does work. With over 310 million monthly active users and growing by leaps and bounds – adding about two members every second, when you use LinkedIn for marketing it will help you get the word out about your business.
It’s hard to remedy a bad impression. Businesses run on communication as much as money, so it’s vital to create a good impression on those you connect with from the outset.
First impressions matter in business and can make or break a company. A positive experience can create a long-lasting business relationship. Hence, it’s important to work on that first impression. This includes how you present yourself, how you venture out in public, how you communicate with customers, and the way you promote your business.
Making a good impression is crucial when meeting customers, pitching to potential clients, or during presentations. And it’s is important to realize that first impressions count just as much online as they do offline. If your website visitors see your website as boring, bland, and substandard, they’ll view your whole business in the same way.
Successful entrepreneurs don’t wait for success to come – they go out and make things happen. Hustling can help you become a better entrepreneur as it helps you manage your time properly and take your own initiatives. By improving your hustle, you can take your business to the next level.
Hustling teaches you the importance of determination despite failures and roadblocks. A successful entrepreneur understands that failure, rejection, or negative feedback are not signs of stopping, but signs to keep moving forward and persevering.
Here’s why “hustle” is important in becoming a successful entrepreneur.
There are reasons that your audience can be reluctant to buy. They may lack trust, have trouble coming to a decision, procrastinate, worry about cost, and so on. And selling a high-ticket product or service can sometimes make even the best business owner nervous.
But if you’ve done your research and you know who your audience is, what they need, and how to deliver it to them, the price will be beside the point. There are several ways that businesses can legitimately make customers buy. But beware. These are not ‘smoke and mirror’ tactics that will fool a customer into buying. They are genuine reasons to help a potential client make an informed decision.
People buy from businesses they know, like and trust. If you make customers buy because of false claims and promises, your reputation will suffer and you may never sell another product again.
The copy you write for your website performs a service for you. It helps your audience get to know who you are, showcases your solutions, and helps them trust you enough to spend their money in hopes your offers will solve their problems.
You’re not trying to trick people when you write content for your website. You’re only trying to showcase the benefits in a way that convinces them to buy and use your products or services.
Here are 15 tips on writing content for your website so that your prospects and customers find your products and services irresistible.
When your business is clear on its brand messaging, you’re going to win a lot more customers. The reason is that your customers will also be clear on what to expect from your products and services over someone else’s.
FREE Checklist: Branding For Small Businesses
The right message will engage your audience and persuade them to buy from you because they believe that what your business provides is exactly right for their needs.
Developing your brand messaging is an essential component of your marketing that can’t be skipped. Your brand message explains to the public who you are, what value you add to your customers’ lives, and why you’re the right business to do it. It’s vital to get your message straight and avoid the 10 brand messaging mistakes below.
One of the most important things you need know about your business is your customer buying decision-making process. Humans have a particular way they tend to go about any type of decision they need to make, especially when it comes to spending money.
Understanding how, why, and when people choose to buy is vital information for any business owner to know. Knowing the entire process that a buyer goes through as they make decisions about what to purchase can help you improve your products, showcase your products as the leading choice, as well as help you create and implement your advertising and marketing plans.
There are over 500 million blogs on the internet but not all of them are there to make money, so don’t be intimidated by these numbers. Instead, be motivated. Once you have a good number of blog posts and readers you can start to make money blogging online.
Blogging your way to profits is possible, and if you know what you’re doing, almost a certainty.
Social media marketing is a part of your business whether you like it or not. Remember that it’s a tool to use to get the word out about your business, help you work with your customers in the way they want you to, and to help you make more sales. The tools will change and grow and evolve, but you will still use them to find and serve your customers.
The social media marketing trends to watch this year aren’t that much different from last year. However, the 8 trends below take on a new urgency as the technology becomes more precise and effective. In other words, it works now. Therefore, it’s time for you to put your toe in.
Often we allow a mistake or wrong decision to negatively impact our lives long after the incidence occurred. By doing so, we end up being unable to actually enjoy the present and take advantage of new opportunities and experiences.
Dwelling over a mistake for extended periods of time can be very detrimental to your way of life. After all, our time here is limited, and each passing moment can’t be replayed or started over. It’s difficult to enjoy the newness offered in each day when your mind is constantly troubled by regret and negative self-feedback.
If you’re going to do any marketing at all, it’s imperative to understand why you’re doing it and who you’re doing it for. It’s very important to remember that everything is about your audience and what’s it for them. You can only do that if you really know who they are.
The more you can learn about your audience, the more you’ll be able to target your ideal customer. Here are 8 ways that you can ensure your products and services will always appeal to your target audience.
You have a lot of competition out there. The more content you create and provide for your audience, prospects, and customers the better chance you have at turning your website efforts into a successful online business.
A good content marketing strategy keeps your audience happy, and they grow to know, like and trust you, since you’re regularly giving them answers to the questions that nag them. You reliably and routinely solve big problems in the lives of your prospects, and they reward you with loyalty, traffic, sales and profits.
Some people claim that content marketing doesn’t work, but that’s because they’re doing it wrong. If you want to avoid problems, make sure you use the right content marketing tactics in the right way.
Blogging for business is a powerful way to get the message out about your products and services. And what’s more, your blog can even become your entire business. The great thing about this is that starting a blog is so easy that it’s a no-brainer for any business owner to do.
When blogging for business first came into vogue, it seemed any keyword-rich content would suffice. But today, with over 500 million blogs and over 1.7 billion websites in the world, there’s a lot of competition. Search engines are refining their search criteria so that they can send their audience the right information to avoid sending people to substandard content that doesn’t meet the intent of the audience member’s search.
Because of this fact, you need to get a lot more strategic about the content you publish online. You’ll want to use a variety of types and forms of content in your blog, along with developing a content promotion plan.