Author Archives: Jon Allo

About Jon Allo

MD of ad agency & internet marketer. 26 yrs+ in adv & marketing. Always providing business tips and advice for today's entrepreneur.

Are Facebook Sponsored Posts Right For Your Business And Audience?

How Do Facebook Sponsored Posts Work?

As organic Facebook reach continues to decline for businesses, it’s becoming increasingly more important for your brand to leverage paid content in order to boost its visibility.

If you want to make sure that a greater number of your fans and followers are able to see your content on Facebook, you often have to pay to get better reach. Facebook sponsored posts appear in the Facebook user’s news feed just as any other post from your brand might.

On Facebook, a business can sponsor a post through their business profile by selecting the post they want to sponsor, setting a maximum budget for a set number of days, and choosing their targeting options. By giving a post a broader reach, it’s seen by more people, leading to increased brand awareness and user engagement.

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How To Create A Successful Sales Funnel For Your Business

What Is a Sales Funnel?

A sales funnel is a process that businesses use to turn strangers into customers, and customers into brand advocates. To create a successful sales funnel, it’s often broken down into four steps:

Attract: Use marketing and advertising methods to attract potential customers.
Convert: Incentivize potential customers to share their contact information so that you can nurture the relationship.
Close: Motivate potential customers to take action and become paying customers.
Delight: Overdeliver and delight customers in order to retain their business and turn them into brand advocates.

Create A Successful Sales Funnel

Image via HubSpot

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How To Start Influencer Marketing And Boost Your Business Reach

4 Steps To Start Influencer Marketing

Start Influencer Marketing

Regardless of the influencer, content is still the king of the modern marketing mix.

In a nutshell, influencer marketing is a step-by-step process where a business identifies and utilizes a high-profile individual who has an established and sizeable social media relationship and following with a core audience. This core audience are the same people who need and are known to purchase the goods and services that the business sells.

Influencer marketing builds and expands upon the idea of the old celebrity endorsement, with emphasis centered around a content-driven marketing campaign.

However, like any marketing tactic, when you start influencer marketing, it takes deliberate targeting and planning.

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Is It Time To Clean Your Email List?

Email marketing is still one of the most effective ways to connect with your target audience in order to build a relationship and make sales. But have you ever taken the time to clean your email list? If the answer is no, then you’re wasting money, time and effort on marketing to people who aren’t interested in your brand.

Cleaning your email also refers to email scrubbing or purging. It means removing unengaged subscribers from your email list so you can only market to people who want to receive your emails.

This is an essential part of targeting your marketing and you should review your email list hygiene at least twice per year.

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10 Marketing Lessons From Apple

As good as Apple products are, their marketing is even better. The simplicity of Apple’s advertising campaigns coupled with the air of mystery around each new product launch is just some of the reasons why this tech giant is considered a leader in the world of digital marketing.

But that’s not all! Apple is also known for relying heavily on product placement. That’s why you’ll often see Apple products in videos posted by influential Instagrammers and Snapchatters. Once an influencer shares your product and shows millions of their followers just how beneficial it is, the seed is planted for leads to grow.

Another effective marketing strategy from Apple is leveraging reviews and testimonials. Something as simple as offering a free trial or sample in exchange for an online testimony or a review is a great way to get more customers in your sales funnel. Just make sure that each testimonial has the person’s name and image or avatar. If it’s a B2B relationship, don’t forget to add a link back to their website for further credibility.

If you are in need of some more marketing inspiration, take a look at the infographic below by The Website Group and discover 10 marketing lessons you can learn from Apple.

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3 Types Of Ads That Improve Your Conversion Rate

How To Improve Your Conversion Rate

To improve your conversion rate, you need to know what works with your audience and what doesn’t. Your potential customers have specific expectations, needs, wants and pain points. So make them an offer they can’t or won’t want to refuse!

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Sometimes, it’s fine if people don’t convert the first time. Maybe they don’t have the money to buy your product or maybe they won’t need it until later. But a well-written ad copy with good visuals, intriguing offers, and a compelling call to action will stick in your customers’ minds. And they may come back later and convert.

Let’s look at three types of ads that can improve your conversion rate.

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3 Content Creation Tools To Capture Your Readers’ Attention

Why Good Content Creation Is Important

Content Creation Millions of blog posts are published daily, yet only a small percentage attract readers and gain traction. Among those readers, 55% read the blog post for 15 seconds or less.

Content creation and crafting engaging content are two major challenges that the majority of marketers face. Marketing surveys show that more than half of marketers struggle with creating enough engaging content. And over 70% want to create more content this year than they did last year, which makes this problem even bigger.

Many marketers have realized that tools can help them capture their readers’ attention before they abandon their content. 56% of marketers use content marketing tools in their content workflow.

There are great tools out there that can help you keep your readers engaged. Here are 3 tools that can help you get on the right path.

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The Pros and Cons of Starting a Membership Site

How Easy Is Starting a Membership Site?

There are many ways to earn money online, and starting a membership site is a favorite of many marketers. A membership site is basically anything that you offer as a subscription where the customer receives a product or service automatically on a schedule until they choose to cancel or the subscription runs its course.

Delivery is usually on a monthly basis, but it can be more often or less. And the subscription can have an ending date or go on forever.

There are many reasons for starting a membership site, but it’s essential to take a balanced look at the subject because membership websites that make money do face a number of challenges.

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How to Create Clickable Social Cards in Seconds

If you’re looking for an effective way to drive more traffic from social media to your website and boost engagement rates, clickable social cards are a good best bet.

Social cards normally consist of an image and descriptive text underneath, but there’s one thing that sets them apart from regular images. Whereas regular image posts simply expand when clicked on, social cards send users directly to the landing page of your choice. This allows you to have more control over how your business is perceived and attract new customers.

There’s one problem, though. Creating clickable social cards from scratch can be a rather time-consuming and challenging process, especially for less-experienced website owners or those with no access to the back end of a website.

Luckily, the free online tool AnyImage allows you to create as many social cards as you want in just seconds. To find out more, check out the infographic below.

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Writing Blog Posts That Readers Want To Dive Deep Into

How To Start Writing Blog Posts That Your Audience Want

Content is an essential part of online marketing. If you have nothing worth reading or sharing, you’ll never be able to build an audience, earn traffic or leverage the power of your social media platforms.

The best place to create content to share is your blog. But it’s not as easy as writing a few hundred words, hitting publish and waiting for traffic and shares to roll in. When you first start a blog, not every blog post you write will interest your readers.

Don’t worry, though. Here’s how to start writing blog posts that your audience can’t resist reading and sharing.

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5 Customer Service Do’s For A Great Customer Experience

How Do You Create A Great Customer Experience?

Great Customer Experience

Does your business have examples of good customer service situations?

Every customer wants a great customer experience when they interact with a business. So creating a customer experience strategy is as crucial and pivotal as providing quality products to your customers.

But some businesses lack a customer-centric culture, and this makes them more likely to feel the backlash of dissatisfied consumers. In any business, things do sometimes go wrong and you are more often judged on how you rectify a problem more than the actual problem itself. Regardless of whether a customer is buying something or they’re filing a complaint, your customer support should accommodate their needs and ensure they resolve the issue on time.

When you provide excellent customer service it creates customer loyalty and makes clients refer your business to family, friends, and colleagues.

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9 Digital Marketing Examples For A Small Business

Digital Marketing Examples For Today

Digital Marketing Examples These days, whether you have an online business or an offline business, you can’t ignore digital marketing if you want to keep ahead of your competition and remain in front of your customers.

Most people use their mobile devices to search for and find information about their problems, so if you’re not findable online it will be hard for you to compete in today’s digital world.

The benefits of digital marketing are not exclusive to big businesses with big budgets. Here are 9 digital marketing examples that are effective and don’t cost the earth to implement. Some don’t cost anything at all.

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9 Things To Test To Make A Sales Funnel Work More Effectively

How To Make A Sales Funnel Work For Your Business

Firstly, what is a sales funnel? In simple terms, it’s the journey that you guide a prospect as they first discover your product or service to the point of them buying and becoming a repeat customer.

Part of making a sales funnel more effective is offering related products as part of your original offer. These are upsells, where they buy your product and some extras and even downsells, where they buy something different from you at a lower price.

Upsells and downsells can increase your average price point for every single order that your customers make. It also increases the lifetime value of every customer.

When you make a sales funnel that is a well-thought-out and includes the right offers at the right time based on your buyer’s journey, you’ll increase your ROI and bottom line. Here are 9 things to test when creating upsell and downsell messages to make your sales funnel work more effectively.

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What Do Customers Actually Think About Your Business?

7 Ways To Discover What Customers Think About Your Business

Your business wouldn’t be here without someone to buy your products or services. But there are most likely many other businesses selling the same products and services you’re offering. The opinion that a customer has about your business as compared to your competitor’s business will determine whether the customer will buy from you or from them.

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The best way to cement customer trust and loyalty is by asking them what they think of your business. Do you know how your customers would answer this question? Getting customer opinions and feedback is one of the best ways to keep them satisfied with your products or services.

Here are 7 ways to help you discover what your customers think about your business.

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5 Steps For Scaling Your Business And Preparing for Growth

The Effects Of Scaling Your Business

Scaling Your Business

Growing a business too fast can cause as many problems as growing a business too slowly.

The difference between a start-up or a small business and a successful and profitable business lies on time and experience. There are many factors that play a big part in how those businesses became successful. These include things like focus, hard work, having the right people and timing.

Scaling your business can make or break it. If you scale up too quickly or recklessly, you’ll create organizational problems that will be difficult to undo. Also, premature scaling can cause your business to fail. On the flip side, scaling your business too slowly could cause you to miss out on important opportunities that come with greater revenue and more resources.

So, as you prepare to take the next phase of business development, these five steps will help you have a successful and profitable scale-up.

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Is Disruptive Marketing Part Of Your Online Marketing Strategy?

What Does Disruptive Marketing Mean?

Disruptive Marketing

Can you make your audience see things differently and open their minds in a new way?

Over the years there have been several terms that describe innovation that disrupts the status quo. For example, “Killer Apps” and “Disruptive Innovation” both describe what happens when something new comes along and disturbs what people are accustomed to. A few classic examples are typewriters, VHS tapes, Floppy Disks and so forth. As you see, each of these things was useful until something came along to replace it.

Disruptive marketing is a lot like that idea. But instead of a product replacing another product it fills in the gaps from the typical marketing strategy by challenging conventional thinking or connecting the old way with a new way of doing something. The new way is the disruption that can get the attention of the audience in a way that might even go viral.

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How To Make Your Business Better Than Your Competition

Make Your Business Better Running your own business is rewarding and challenging. When you start, there’s so much to do, you’re full of enthusiasm and every day seems like a new adventure. Sadly, for many, if they don’t get the (financial) results they’re hoping for, their dream business can turn into a nightmare.

Fortunately, there are a number of ways to make your business better and make the most of the opportunities it offers. Refining and mastering your craft is one of the best.

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10 Ways To Build Successful Habits In Your Business

How To Build Successful Habits

Most people think of habits as a bad thing. However, habits can be good too. Just as you can develop a habit of doing something unhealthy, you can also build successful habits.

Habits are one of the most powerful influences in a person’s life and are sometimes called ‘second nature’. They are actions, which we do almost automatically. They can become second nature and this can influence the results of your business. Of course, there are good habits and bad habits, so it’s essential that business owners work on building good habits, which will result in their success.

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