10 Tips for Generating More Leads in 2017 Posted on February 1, 2017July 12, 2018 by Jessica Lunk Fresh leads are fuel for your conversion funnel. Without them, your funnel will dry up and so will your revenue. Capturing high quality fresh leads from many different channels should be at the top of your priority list. Here are 10 creative ways to generate leads and build up your sales pipeline this year: #1 Repurpose Old Content If you’ve been actively creating content for a while, you should absolutely go back to some of your existing content and share it again (or update it with fresh perspectives). You can also recycle some of your high-performing eBooks and A/B test them with new titles. Ideally, some of these tests will attract new eyes to your strongest content and bring a bump in conversion rates. Need some ideas on how to reuse and recycle existing content? Check out our blog post for 9 ways to create content – without actually writing it. #2 Event Marketing There are plenty of ways to generate leads through events. You can come as an attendee and simply network and exchange business cards or you can even run your own events through Meetup.com. Meetup.com is a great way to build a community and generate high quality leads. If you don’t want to go through all the hassle of starting your own meetup group, you can find popular, established meetups and sponsor them. Usually it will simply cost you some beers and pizza. If you’ve got a bigger budget and are attending a national conference or event, you can always go guerrilla and try an out-of-the-box tactic, like hijacking an event-related hashtag on Twitter, or offering free transportation at a conference – branded with your logo, of course. Image Credit #3 Guest Blogging and Republishing If you haven’t been guest blogging, you should start right now. Identify relevant blogs and publications and pitch them your original content. If you’re already an authority in your field, you can follow an even better strategy – republishing your existing content (in a unique way to avoid plagiarizing yourself) in large publications. A popular productivity blogger, James Clear, famously used this tactic to get from 0 to 250,000 visitors a month. #4 Use Your Email Signature If you recieve and send a lot of emails, use it to your advantage. You can add a CTA to your company’s email signatures and promote your recent content, a video, free trial, latest update, or free demonstration. According to Email Stats Report, the average employee sends 38 emails a day. That’s about 6000 emails a year that you could be using to your advantage. #5 Interview an Influencer As you know, influencers generally have extensive social capital and reach. They often have notable followings and high levels of social proof. Getting an endorsement from these guys is hard but worth your time. A few creative ways to grab their attention include: roundups, ‘best of’ lists or interview requests. In an influencer roundup, you can reach out to get a short answer from various influencers for the same question to show different perspectives. ‘Best of’ lists are usually the place to start as they require zero work from the influencer and are a fantastic form of flattery that they’re likely to share. When done correctly, these pieces of content will be shared by your designated influencers, allowing you to tap into their following and help get your brand in front of your target audience. #6 Run a Viral Giveaway AppSumo, a daily deal website for entrepreneurs, used to be really good at this. They’ve done successful giveaways such as 100 books about entrepreneurship or a lifetime Evernote subscription. The key here is that they offer a prize is extremely valuable to their audience – not just the general population. If the prize isn’t meaningful for your ideal buyer, they have no reason to waste their time or give up their information. Likewise, if the prize is attractive to everyone, you’re going to waste time and money attracting unqualified leads. Use your marketing automation software and integrate with a tool like Optin-Monster to capture giveaway entrants on your website. Social media contest tools can also be an effective means for spreading the word about your giveaway and capturing new leads on social. #7 Try New Ad Channels There’s a world outside of Google AdWords and Facebook Ads. There are Reddit ads, StumbleUpon Ads, Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter. You can even try offline advertising or get your ads featured on popular podcasts. Many of these channels may not have the reach you can get on the big platforms like Google and Facebook, but, if your audience is there, they could be the gold mine your small business is searching for. Set aside a small monthly budget and test different channels one at a time so that you know what’s producing results and what isn’t. #8 Engineering as Marketing Engineering as marketing is a term that was first introduced in the book “Traction” by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares. It’s when you build a free product that’s relevant to your core market to generate more leads. A great example is Pablo by social media scheduling tool Buffer. It allows people to create beautiful images with quotes to share on their social media. It targets exactly the type of people that are most likely to use Buffer – social media managers. The tool is useful; thus, it gets a lot of shares and brings the right audience to Buffer. #9 Implement Live Chat Direct customer engagement and improved customer service generates higher satisfaction, better experience, and higher quality leads. Having a live chat widget on your website is one of the best ways to directly engage with your audience. With live chat, you can immediately engage people who are browsing key pages of your website. This means that you can capture their interest and convert them before they bounce from your website. #10 Use Chatbots Although chatbots may feel like just another fad, in reality they can be turned into a highly valuable lead generation tool. Chatbots can help you boost engagement and direct your audience to some of your best performing content assets and lead magnets. And, since chatbots let AI do the heaving lifting, you can be there live for your prospects and customers – without hiring extra help. You can hire a developer to build your own bot or you can simply use services like Chatfuel and Smooch, which allow you to design bots with no coding involved. If your funnel seems dry (or even if it’s full of leads), don’t take your foot off the gas. Stay creative with your lead generation efforts. You never know when your tried and true tactics will be considered old hat or won’t apply to your audience any longer.
19 Killer Social Media Tools To Save You Time (And Get Results) Posted on January 31, 2017August 12, 2022 by Allie Wolff Social media marketing is a must for small businesses today. But by nature, it’s highly demanding and can become a serious productivity killer. It’s not just sending a few tweets or liking posts. It’s about engaging with followers, finding relevant content, scheduling future posts, community management, and so on. For a small business, it can become overwhelming. As a business, you want to automate as much of your social media content as possible without losing the personal touch with your followers. Here are some solid tools to help you with that. 1. Social Media Dashboards There are bunch of full-fledged social media management tools and it’s hard to recommend just one. It’s a matter of personal preference. Among the leaders in this space are Hootsuite, Sprout Social, and Agorapulse. One of the exciting new tools in the market also is Falcon.io, which allows marketers to create, launch, and measure social media campaigns in real time. Image Credit: Hootsuite 2. Buffer There are also a bunch of scheduling tools, but we fancy Buffer above all the rest. The platform allows you to easily schedule your posts across social media accounts including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn and more. It integrates with many other tools, provides a browser add-on to make it easy to schedule new content as you browse, and has some great analytics features. 3. BuzzSumo BuzzSumo is an excellent tool to help you uncover the trending topics and content that performs across various social media the best. You can also identify influencers (and spy on your competition if that’s what you’re into). 4. Bit.ly A url shortener and a click reporting tool all in one. Great for Twitter if you’re a manual user, as it allows you to track the clicks to help you understand which posts are performing and which posts aren’t. 5. Warble Searches Twitter for specific keywords, phrases, hashtags, and mentions and creates alerts that get delivered to your inbox daily. 6. Rival IQ A great tool to compare your social media engagement and the top-performing content against your competitors’ content. Easy to use and highly insightful with automated, custom reporting. 7. Edgerank Checker Edgerank Checker helps you optimize your Facebook content. It provides insights necessary to help you create content that boosts your reach and engagement. 8. Cyfe Cyfe is business dashboard. Unlike social media dashboards, it aggregates data from multiple platforms including social media metrics. The great thing about it is that it helps you see the big picture and assess and evaluate engagement impact and ROI. Geckoboard and Leftronic are two other great tools in this space. 9. Crowd Booster A social media analytics tool that measures and optimizes your social media marketing and provides analytics and recommendations on Twitter and Facebook. 10. MeetEdgar MeetEdgar helps you recycle your content, so that you can reach a larger percentage of traffic using your existing content assets. 11. IFTTT IFTTT is a powerful automation tool that’s incredibly simple and easy to use. You create or pick ‘recipes’ to automate specific tasks on Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks. Also remember to share the wealth, IFTTT can also help your non-marketing team members. 12. Sendible Sendible is the recommended social media tool for agencies. Whether you have 1 client or 100, Sendible is built for effortless team collaboration. Integrating with the main social platforms, Sendible also allows you to connect to popular blogging sites too. This feature-rich tool allows you to set up a user hierarchy that works for your agency. Assign social conversations to different team members, send posts for approval and even create different dashboards for each client, ensuring the quality of work your team is producing aligns directly with the client’s expectations. Sendible also gives you the ability to securely connect your client’s social profiles to your account without having to request their logins. Finally, improve client retention with the reporting feature that shows off your agency’s success. 13. Canva Visual content gets much higher engagement and conversion rates than text only content. Canva helps you create beautiful images and other visual assets. 14. Socedo Socedo identifies new prospects on Twitter and automates engagement with them on your behalf. 15. Tailwind Tailwind is a comprehensive Pinterest marketing tool to help you run your Pinterest marketing campaigns and efforts. It’s the official partner for Pinterest marketing. You can create and manage multi-board pins, bulk uploads, scheduling your content, and optimizing the best times to send your pins to get the highest engagement. 16. Traackr A powerful tool to help you find, engage, and manage relationships with the most relevant influencers in your market. 17. Oktopost A lead generation tool designed for social media. While social media dashboards like Hootsuite help businesses schedule content, Oktopost is designed to help you make money. 18. Mention Mention is a brand management and social media monitoring tool that lets you track social mentions, analyze competitors, find influencers, and generate leads. 19. SocialBee SocialBee is an outstanding tool best suited for entrepreneurs, startups, small businesses, and freelancers, perfect for sharing content across all major social platforms (Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, and even Google My Business) – while saving you up to 8 hours per week. Thanks to its multiple features, SocialBee is your true ally when it comes to your marketing efforts! You are able to categorize your content, set a schedule, and then analyze the performance of your posts. Recycle your evergreen content, customize your posts for each channel and use the expiration features for maximum results with SocialBee. Your small business most definitely does not need all 17 of these tools at once. And you most likely don’t even need 10 at once. Your best bet is to start small. Test out a scheduling tool like Hootsuite or Buffer. As your social media audience and influence grows, identify where your marketing strategy needs some muscle and explore tools that meet those needs.
In Defense of Snacks: 5 Office Perks Every Small Business Needs (and Why) Posted on January 30, 2017January 10, 2018 by Erin Posey Happy employees make a happy company, which is why workplace perks—like the oft-referenced foosball tables and free lunch—aren’t as silly as they sound. Those perks and others are a seriously important factor when it comes to employee engagement and successful recruiting. In a recent study of workplace benefits, Guardian Life found that two-thirds of workers rate workplace benefits, including company perks, as “very important” when choosing whether or not to stay with their current employers. And Glassdoor’s Employment Confidence Survey released at the end of last year found that almost 80 percent of employees would rather have new or additional benefits than a raise; a whopping 90 percent of Millennial workers prefer perks to cash. That said, it’s not easy for someone running a 10-person company to compete with the likes of Twitter – with its on-site acupuncture and improv classes – or Google, which offers so many perks it’s impossible to list them all, but among them are never-ending snacks, free gourmet food, free on-site day care and massages. So how can you compete with these deep-pocketed giants? By being nimble and creative. That’s what separates small businesses from the big guns anyway. Your perks can reflect that as well. Here are some perks small businesses can offer employees that won’t break the bank. They will, however, let your people know you appreciate them and want them happy, healthy and engaged in the work at hand. Free Lunch We get it. Gourmet lunches in a subsidized cafeteria is not within the realm of possibilities for most small firms. But that doesn’t mean you can’t offer free food once or twice a month, depending on the size of your workforce. Quality, free food makes employees happy, and if it becomes a company-wide event, it’s also a chance to get your people to take a break from their desks to socialize in one place. Food can be a great way to unify your team and create a relaxed and supportive culture. Find a restaurant or two that everyone likes and work out a deal with them to cater. Let everyone know that on those days, lunch is on the company. Wellness Programs While your budget probably doesn’t allow you to provide an on-site fitness center for employees, even a very small business can provide simple wellness benefits for employees. Try to partner with a gym near the office to get discounted memberships for your staff, or partner with a yoga studio to offer an on-site yoga class a couple of days a month. If you don’t have the space to host in-house sessions, consider reimbursing employees for their gym memberships or one-off classes. It’s a relatively small expense for a perk that will incentivize your employees to stay healthy. Space for Downtime Provide a space for employees who may need a place to rest or wind down a little. A half hour power nap can make us feel far more awake and productive than if we just keep fighting sleep the whole day. It’s a healthy alternative to the usual remedy for mid-afternoon sleepiness– pounding coffee, energy drinks and candy. A well-known study done by NASA in 1995 found that a 26-minute nap improved performance by 34 percent and alertness by 54 percent. Also a nice perk is a space for relaxing that allows employees to play board games or do puzzles. Employees that play well together generally work well together too, and games like Scrabble or Scattergories have the added benefit of sharpening our minds. Flexible Hours Lucky for you, this perk is often much harder for big, entrenched companies to provide their employees. But for small, nimble companies, it’s extremely manageable. In fact, flex hours are one of the least expensive, most effective employee benefits. Giving workers choices about telecommuting or staggering hours encourages them to take time to recharge when they need it, and tacit permission to spend time with children or parents when that’s important. It also creates a corporate culture that clearly cares about work/life balance. A recent survey from the Society for Human Resource Management found that 91 percent of HR professionals agree that flexible work arrangements positively influence employee engagement, job satisfaction and retention. Get Out of The Office Several times during the year—maybe once a month, maybe quarterly—hold an off-site event for your employees. It could be a group skydive or something less dramatic—a day at a rock climbing gym, an outing to a baseball game, a concert or even a karaoke night at a local bar. Social events for your employees outside the office is essentially team building, and the more cohesive and happy your team is, the better it is for your business. Although these perks may seem like they’ll have a minimal impact on your company culture or recruiting efforts, you might be surprised by the results. With minimum effort, you can make your employees feel valued and make your company stand out to prospects.
The Key To Achieving Both Personalization and Scale Posted on January 27, 2017 by Jonathan Herrick Small businesses face a paradox. On one hand, the goal of every business is to grow. On the other, modern businesses want to offer the feeling of more personalization for their prospects and customers. The larger a business grows, the harder it is to scale personalization. Lucky for you, the answer to this age old question is actually quite simple: a small business CRM. With the help of a CRM, you can achieve both goals. You can boost sales and leave your customers secure in the knowledge that you care about their individual needs and concerns. Here are a few ways a small business CRM can help you grow while also staying connected to your customers. Pick Up Your Customers’ Signals Perhaps the most basic reason that sales opportunities are lost is that the salesperson doesn’t pick up on the buyer’s signals. Compounding this problem, many sales teams have limited data about their prospects and customers. The signals they do receive are usually limited to short interactions via phone or email. Using CRM software for small businesses provides amazing insights into customer behavior and gives you numerous signals you couldn’t detect before. Being able to see who has accessed pages on your website, who has clicked on links within emails you’ve sent, and exactly where in the sales funnel every single person is will lead to a powerful increase in sales. Having all of this data means that you can now tailor and deliver specific content for specific customers based on your knowledge of their behavior–providing them with an intuitive and organic level of service in which they truly feel like individuals. See your business in “3D” To achieve personalization at scale, your business must utilize what The Harvard Business Review calls the “Three D’s.” These stand for data discovery, decision-making, and distribution of content. Data discovery refers to gathering behavioral data to gain personal insights about your customers. Decision-making refers to software that is able to gauge customer responses and adjust the kinds of emails and offers they receive. Distribution of content refers to ensuring specific customers end up on specific landing pages, receive tailored offers, and essentially providing a customized experience across your various channels. The bottom line? Small business CRM can help you tap into the “Three D’s” to tailor deliver more personalized offers and a more refined customer experience. Ultimately, the bigger your business gets, the more important it is to have CRM in place to achieve business and customer relationships that are meaningful and personal. CRM lets you gather data, segment, and communicate with customers -making them feel like you’re personally speaking to them and their needs. Client data and segmentation Without CRM software in place, small businesses default to a “one size fits all” model. And even if segmentation does occur, it often begins by targeting at a high level (for example, creating a customers list vs prospect list.) Some businesses rely on firmographic characteristics such as segmenting by industry. But this approach is primarily useful only if there is little variety among your customers businesses. The risk here is losing out on the personal touch you want to have with each and every person. The truth is that each customer and prospect has different needs and wants and is in various stages of the buying process. To truly stay personal and accelerate the growth you need to thrive, you need to leverage your customer relationship management system. A small business CRM gives you the right data to hyper-segment your customers by behavioral info such as status, tags, and online activities. That means you can treat each group according to their needs and interests. This helps with customer service, problem-solving, sales…the list goes on. Best of all, though, it feels more personal to customers because, compared to a one size fits all approach, it is more human. The feeling of personalization in service and sales is an undeniably important part of 21st-century sales and marketing. By leveraging a CRM, your small business can accelerate sales and still keep that friendly, personal touch.
Simple, Yet Powerful Secrets For Building A Small Business Marketing Strategy Posted on January 25, 2017November 11, 2022 by Jessica Lunk Outlining a solid and effective marketing strategy can feel like a scary feat for a small business marketing team or solopreneur. Luckily, there are a range of tools (free or reasonably priced) that can lead to a massive boost in sales and revenue for your small business. To take advantage of them, you can’t simply fly by the seat of your marketing pants. Having a solid system in place will add clarity to your efforts and consistency to your results. In other words, if you want your small business to flourish, you need to have a systematic approach in place. That’s what having a strategy is about. Here’s how to build and create one. Define Your Goals Before any planning and strategizing takes place, you need to be clear on your ultimate goals. That’s the first and the most important step. Ask yourself; what are you looking to accomplish? What are your ultimate business goals and how do they relate to your marketing objectives? Maybe you want to expand your business, increase revenue, or boost lifetime value of your customer base. All of that will determine your final strategy. Clear goals also provide you with benchmarks to measure your success. But most importantly, it will make everything much easier – clear goals trigger many relevant questions and narrow your focus. Define Your Target Customer “He who tries to please everybody, pleases nobody.” In marketing, narrow focus on your market is the winning strategy. In other words, you need to know who your ideal customers are and focus on them. In marketing, there’s a term called “customer persona.” You want to start by creating yours. By definition, first established in 2002: Customer personas are research-based archetypal (modeled) representations of who buyers are, what they are trying to accomplish, what goals drive their behavior, how they think, how they buy, and why they make buying decisions. (considering it’s 2016, we should also add where and when they buy). Answering all of these questions will determine your copywriting language, marketing channels, type of offers, and so on. Nail the Basics First Before you can become a titan of industry, you need to plan out your small business’s most basic marketing functions. These include the following: SEO: While there aren’t any SEO shortcuts to boost your search rankings, you want to optimize your website and include searchable keywords on each page. Design: Successful website design builds trust and improves conversions. Your website may be the final stage between prospect and customer, but it can also be the quickest repellant. What does your website need to help you meet your business objectives? Content: The content on your website should speak directly to your ideal buyer and highlight the important benefits and solutions they’re searching for. You should update your content frequently to make sure it’s current and unique. Email: We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again. Email delivers an incredible ROI. No matter what, your email newsletters and autoresponders should be spot on and follow a clear strategy and schedule (see: marketing automation). Mobile: Mobile took over desktop. In other words, more than 50% of people use their mobile devices to browse the internet. You want your website to be mobile-optimized and maybe even take the plunge on going mobile-first if it makes sense for your target demographic. Social: Unless you spend on ads, for most companies, social media is not the most effective (or immediate) way to acquire customers. Either way, you should count on maintaining a presence across different networks and pick one or two to focus on. It’s important for prospective customers to be able to recognize, trust and reach out to your brand, and the first step toward recognition is an online presence. Master Your Top Marketing Channel Finding your top marketing channel is something that requires action. Initially, you won’t know which is the most effective, but the best way to find out is to take out a portion of your marketing budget, break it down into smaller line items, and test different channels to acquire customers. This process should give you an general idea of how different channels perform. Some, like content, are hard to assess, because it takes time for content to yield results. Overall, you want to be out there testing the waters and building a presence, but put your top effort (and budget) into the tool that performs best. Always Measure What you don’t measure, you can’t improve. While planning, you want to determine your key metrics to measure your progress. Avoid vanity metrics, i.e. metrics that make you feel good but mean nothing; for example, pageviews. A good metric is: Actionable: That means it allows you you to take action and change something based on the data you collect. Understandable: Should be easy to understand. If nobody understands it, it won’t change anything. Comparative: If you can compare your metrics across time periods, groups of users, or competitors, you can understand which way things are moving. Ratio or Rate: Ratios and rates are inherently comparative. Plan for Improvement How are you going to improve over time? Even if you put your best effort into your marketing strategy, chances are you’ve got many things wrong. There are many tools to keep improving and finding the right way to do things. You should plan for doing surveys, gathering feedback, A/B testing, and so on. Testing isn’t a one-off event. It should be at the core of your marketing strategy. As marketing legend David Ogilvy famously said, “Never stop testing, and your advertising will never stop improving.”
Boost Morale (and Set Ground Rules) With Pets In The Workplace Posted on January 24, 2017October 2, 2024 by Erin Posey There’s no shortage of research showing the benefits of having a pet. Pets calm us, lower our stress level and blood pressure, and help us to be more focused and productive. Pets even make us a little nicer to one another. That’s why about 20 percent of companies in the U.S. allow their workers to bring pets to the office. According to research from the American Pet Products Manufacturers Association, the most common pets hanging around the cubicle are dogs (at 76 percent), then cats and, after that, small pets like guinea pigs, hamsters and fish. Benefits of a Pet-Friendly Office If you don’t allow Fido in the office you’ve got good reason to reconsider. A recent study from Virginia Commonwealth University found that employees who brought their dogs to work had lower stress during the day, higher job satisfaction and overall, a more positive view of their employer. A study a few years ago by Central Michigan University found that when dogs were present in a group of employees, they were more likely to trust each other and collaborate more effectively. Those are big benefits to an employee’s well-being and comes at a relatively low cost to business owners. He also made it clear that ground rules need to be put in place to make sure that pets are a positive addition for everyone, not just pet-loving employees. One of the participants in the VCU study told researchers that his job required complicated problem solving and that it was “amazing what a four-block walk with a dog will do.” When you have a team member wrestling with complex problems, customer service difficulties or maybe just having a crummy day, grabbing a leash and heading outside with a dog is a mental and physical break they may not have taken otherwise. Yet despite all the benefits to workplace culture and employee health that can come from allowing pets in the office, there also has to be a clear policy around what’s acceptable and what’s not. You may have to adjust expectations if you have an employee with dangerous sensitivity or allergies to pets, or someone that is legitimately afraid of dogs or other animals. Here are some things to consider when setting up a pets-in-the-office policy at your business: Find out what your employees want. Before you put in a pet policy, survey employees and allow them, anonymously, to really say what they think. Do they want pets in the office? What animals would they be comfortable working around? If someone wants to bring their pet snake to the office and swears it will stay put on their neck, that could be a real problem for others nearby. Ask about allergies and fears. For some people, a fear of dogs or other animals can be debilitating, and they won’t be able to work in an environment where dogs run free (or snakes). Even if it’s just one person, in a small company especially, that’s may be a deal killer. Consider the fact that the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America says somewhere between 15-30 percent of the general population has a pet allergy. For some, those attacks can be life threatening. To leash or not to leash. Let’s face it, a lot of dogs are really cute. And having one roaming among the cubicles, in and out of offices, in the kitchen looking for a handout, can make people smile, laugh and just feel better. On the other hand, this is an animal, and you can’t hold a pet accountable for snapping at someone when that pet feels threatened. The last thing a well-intentioned business owner wants is to be sued after an employee gets bitten. And depending on the kind of business you run, it may not make sense to have pets present, like a laboratory or food production business. It’s a good idea to have a policy that requires dogs be leashed in the office, with reasonable exceptions. For example, if a pet owner has an office with a door that can be closed, a leash isn’t necessary. Some businesses that have the room for it establish pet-free zones for employees who have allergies or just don’t feel comfortable around animals. Additionally, having a designated dog house or cozy corner with a bed and toys can make the office environment more comfortable for the dogs, providing them a space to relax and feel at home while they’re there. Get your office pet-ready. Just because someone’s pooch is in the office, contentedly watching everyone peck away at their computer keyboards, doesn’t mean that same dog isn’t going to need a bathroom break, food, water, a little exercise and some stimulation. Provide the basic necessities like pet water and food bowls (or a pet water fountain), treats, chew toys and self-cleaning litter boxes. Allow employees the flexibility to take a limited break for walking or playing with pets. Establish clear rules for animal behavior and health. Put in place a written policy about acceptable and unacceptable behavior for both pets and their owners during the workday. The policy would include rules for where can pets go and where they can’t. They should also be clean, flea-free, trained, well-disciplined and have no history of biting or other aggressive behavior. Despite legitimate cautions, If the overwhelming majority of your employees miss their pets during the day–and there are no serious health concerns or debilitating fears–allowing pets in could bring a lot of joy (and fun) into the daily lives of your hard-working team.
Kiss These Three Cringeworthy Marketing Trends Goodbye in 2017 Posted on January 23, 2017 by Jeanna Barrett At the start of a new year, it’s time to let go of old habits and look back at the previous year to laugh — and cringe — at trends we all participated in. Many of us have done this type of end-of-the-year reflection with our personal lives, but we can also do this with business too. There are a number of digital marketing trends that have cropped up throughout the last year that we’re hoping to see hit the road in 2017. From Snapchat filters and Pokemon Go to unplanned Facebook Live videos… here’s what we had enough of in 2016: Snapchat Filter Mania When Snapchat filters became all the rage this year, we started to see them everywhere — posted as profile photos on Facebook, Tweeted and re-posted to Instagram. We just couldn’t help but to love photos of ourselves with sparkly gold eyes and a flower crown. But, the jig is up. We’re all aware that the Snapchat filters make you look a little prettier (or more horrific) than normal. And since Snapchat has 150 million users a day — more users than Pinterest, Twitter and LinkedIn combined — Snapchat filters aren’t a new thing, and people no longer wonder where you got that cool feature that made you puke rainbows. Image Credit: Business Insider We’d like to see the filter trend subside and see more brands truly leverage the platform for growth. Since Snapchat grew as much in one year as Twitter did in four years, we can expect this platform to be a huge trend in 2017. If you’re a brand interested in using Snapchat, look into how you can reach millennials through exclusive content that speaks their language and is quick and to the point. Pokemon Go as the Go-To Game During the first half of 2016, Pokemon Go took over the internet, mobile phones and even the real world. Individuals were wondering why mobs of people were clustering in parks in their city, staring at their mobile phones in front of their face. Image Credit: Herald-Dispatch Everyone was trying to nab the latest Pokemon via augmented reality. At the height of Pokemon’s popularity this year, it earned $10 million a day in new revenue. But then, it just fell flat. We’re not sad to see the height of Pokemon Go die down and clusters of mobile phone stare-ers subside. But, we still expect augmented reality (AR) to be a big player for brands this coming year. Due to the success of Pokemon Go and its augmented reality, we’ll likely see more brands experiment with AR advertising, games and apps in the coming year. Unplanned (or Fake) Facebook Live Videos I’m sure a number of you fell victim to the automated Facebook notifications from brands — a little red badge on your app that told you someone was “live.” Too many of these videos were awkward social media managers in a 20-second cut at an uninteresting conference, upside down videos without sound, or click bait videos that weren’t actually “live” at all. A number of brands tested the new Facebook video streaming platform this year without realizing that it sent a notification to every single one of their followers. Now that more and more platforms are offering video streaming, it’s time for brands to figure out how to effectively use video livestream. Enough of the improvised video fails. It’s time to come to the table with a planned strategy. Stick to a strategic, branded story to tell your followers – and you’ll get your message across whether you’re going live with a meticulously planned storyboard, or jumping on a newsworthy event impromptu. We can expect live video to increasingly become more of a thing in 2017 — there is more of an demand for in-the-moment content through platforms like Instagram, Facebook and Snapchat. Users seem to enjoy having a sneak peek into something they can’t attend themselves, whether that’s the Grammy’s, a conference or a sporting event. So, as the trend increases throughout this next year, don’t be afraid to jump on the train, just make sure you have a plan for what your videos will be so they come across crisp and part of your threaded brand story. While each of the aforementioned are trends we can’t wait to see subside in the coming year, they each represent larger digital marketing strategies that we expect all brands to be a part of in 2017. We can expect to see a lot of live videostreaming, augmented reality and Snapchat in the coming year.Avoid the mishaps of 2016 and focus on the bigger takeaways to become the type of digital trendsetter others want to follow, not ignore.
5 Things You Can Do Every Day To Be A Better Leader Posted on January 20, 2017 by Jonathan Herrick As the force behind your business, you have many titles—founder, owner, CEO, president, CFO, head of recruitment and hiring… and the list goes on. But the one thing behind all of the titles, is leadership. Your leadership, specifically. And a really good leader is more than just effective; it’s someone who is inspiring, motivating and crucial to the success of the enterprise, especially small enterprises, where there are fewer people and thinner margins, so less room for mistakes. Your leadership abilities may be something you’re not particularly conscious of day-to-day but rest assured your employees are—they are judging your competency as a leader and the decisions you make every day and look to you for guidance as leaders themselves. The success of your business is connected in many ways to your leadership ability and traits. Even if you believe in such a thing as a “born leader,” every one of us can find ways to improve our leadership skills, enhance our abilities and become better, all the way around. Here are five critical steps to take toward better, smarter leadership: Put yourself in your employees’ shoes. The operative word here is empathy—trying to understand what it feels like to work for you. One of the best ways to improve as a leader is to ask those around you for some feedback. Your employees have the most immediate and relevant perspective, so get them to weigh in—anonymously—about your strengths and weaknesses. Rather than being really specific about it, create an employee survey that asks employees how they feel about the company generally and include questions about your leadership performance. Ask for suggestions about where you might improve. Leadership expert Lolly Daskal says it best: “What’s empathy have to do with leadership? Everything. Because leadership is about having the ability to relate and connect and listen and bond with people for the purpose of inspiring and empowering their lives.” Be positive. Being a positive leader may sound trite, but your business’ culture and your employees attitude can shift depending on your attitude. When the going gets tough, smart leaders remain calm and confident, and can either see a way out or embrace the failure. Good leaders see failures (those, of course, that aren’t threatening to topple their business) as opportunities to learn something. And having a positive outlook on failure will encourage your staff to innovate and ask questions, and they will feel positive toward you and the business too. [Tweet “”When times get tough, smart leaders either see a way out or embrace the failure.””] As the company’s chief executive you are also the role-model-in-chief, and that means your actions and attitude set the tone at your company and help define its culture. Your actions and conduct should be ones you want your employees to emulate and should implicitly establish expectations for how employees will behave at the office, treat one another and treat customers. Learn from others. It’s lonely at the top, which is why organizations like Vistage and the Entrepreneurs Organization exist. Especially at a small business, where you function as more than one C-level exec, you need to understand what you’re doing right and wrong, and changes you can make to take your leadership skills up a notch (or two). To be the best leader you can, look at those who have held similar positions and both succeeded and failed. They can be peers or well-known business leaders– analyze their performance and the performance of their companies and compare it to your own, taking into account variables you can’t control like where they are located and what the economy is like both locally and nationally. It’s also a good idea to find a mentor. There is always more you can learn and to do that, find someone you trust—whether it’s an old boss, a friend, a colleague (former or present)–to meet with regularly and get feedback on specific issues or your general job performance. Ideally, you connect with another senior executive, but one with significant experience running a business in your industry. Raise your emotional IQ. Emotional intelligence is widely accepted today as a critical characteristic of good leaders. It’s defined as an ability to understand and manage our emotions or the emotions of those around us. Having a high emotional IQ gives you the ability to manage relationships and influence others. It also makes you a self-aware leader, able to recognize your own emotions as they form, and see them rising to the surface in others. If, for example, someone on your team just missed a deadline and starts to point fingers, you can see—before you choose to react—that they are feeling defensive, worried about their job, fearful. Knowing that, you can choose to respond in a way that reassures them and tells them you support them and together, as a team, you’ll work through the difficulty. [Tweet “”Emotional IQ makes you a self-aware leader, able to recognize your emotions as they form.””] Emotional intelligence gives you an understanding of your own strengths and weaknesses and you can see what is happening as your employees respond to different situations, actions or a crisis. A high EIQ benefits leaders in other ways too, by enhancing communication skills, especially knowing what to say to motivate employees and to resolve workplace conflicts. Be an effective communicator. One of the most effective ways to improve your leadership skills is to communicate with your employees. Make sure your team knows they can discuss any workplace issue with you. Be approachable and a good listener—make eye contact when an employee is speaking with you (don’t, for example, look at your phone or down at the sheaf of papers on your desk). Give them real attention by listening and, if necessarily, repeating back to them what they say, showing you heard and making sure you understood, correctly. Let your employees know their conversation with you is confidential, and that will help build trust. The best corporate leaders also adopt a constructive and encouraging tone with employees, one that’s never patronizing or critical in a negative way. Instead, take a breath before you drop a snide or sarcastic remark and instead find a way to respond that’s both constructive and measured. Don’t give knee-jerk emotional responses. Stop, breathe and think about how you want your employees to hear you.
Surefire Strategies for Increasing Website Traffic Immediately Posted on January 19, 2017July 12, 2018 by Jeanna Barrett Social media matters to your business now more than ever. Since all internet users have an average of 5.54 social media accounts, if your customers are online, they’re using social media. The heart of social media has always been to connect and communicate with online fans, customers or community members. But it can also be a great channel for driving traffic and even new customers for your business. Here are seven easy strategies for driving website traffic using social media: 1: Focus Your Energy On the Right Social Media Accounts As a business owner, you’re likely strapped for time and resources. A lot of businesses incorrectly think they need to be on every social media site, and they then struggle to create enough content to keep every social site thriving. The best thing you can do is choose two or three social media sites to focus your energy on. Based on the demographics of your target customer, choose what sites are best for your business. Here’s a quick guide to social media demographics for you: Facebook: 72% of all internet users and 62% of adults worldwide. 77% of women use Facebook. 82% of online adults ages 18 to 29 use Facebook compared to 79% of those aged 30 to 49, 64% of those aged 50 to 64 and 48% of those 65 and older. Twitter: 23% of all internet users and 20% of entire adult population. More popular among urban dwellers than rural dwellers. 30% of online adults under 50 use Twitter, compared with 11% of online adults ages 50 and older. LinkedIn: 25% of adult internet users and 22% of entire adult population. Popular among working-age adults as well as college graduates and those with relatively high household incomes. Usage rates are higher among 30- to 49-year-olds than among 18- to 29-year-olds. Instagram: 28% of adult internet users and 24% of entire adult population. Popular with non-whites and young adults: 55% of online adults ages 18 to 29 use Instagram, 47% of African Americans use it and 38% of Hispanics do too. Online women continue to be more likely than online men to be Instagram users (31% vs. 24%). Pinterest: 31% of adult internet users and 26% of entire adult population. 44% of online women use the site, compared with 16% of online men. 37% of Pinterest users are under 55, compared with 22% of the users who are 55 and older. Snapchat: 200 million active users worldwide and 100 million use it every day. 60% of users are under 25, and 23% have not yet graduated from high school. 41% of all 18- to 34-year-olds use the app. In 2013, roughly 70% of Snapchat users at that time were women. 2: Brand Your Social Accounts & Link to Your Website Your social media accounts are an extension of your brand messaging and website, so ensure that all of your social media sites have a cohesive messaging strategy. Since most social sites require a bio, write a 30-second elevator pitch for social media that is pithy and explains your business. And because social media sites send signals to Google for search traffic, you want to make sure to use keywords throughout your social media bios and link back to your website too. 3: Stick to a Social Media Content Calendar The most important strategy to drive traffic back to your site from social media sites is to create content to post on social media on a regular basis. The best way to do this is to create original content for your business blog and then share that content to social media. Unique and interesting content from your point of view will naturally attract visitors to your website. They might even stick around to read more content or research your business. Enable Google Analytics so you can clearly track what traffic is coming from social media, what pages they visit and if they eventually become a customer. 4: Reshare Your Content & Test Your Messaging Don’t just share your content once and then forget about it — each share on social media can drive traffic to your site. Users sign in at different times of day, and your community is bound to miss a post if you only post it once. Set a schedule to share and reshare such as once when a blog post is first posted, one again the week after, one again the next month and then finally again in three months. You can schedule these posts to autopost using tools such as Buffer or HootSuite. Test different messaging each time you post the content, and then pay attention to what posts are the most popular and what messaging speaks to your community. Finally, when you see a post getting high engagement, be sure to reshare and reap the benefits. 5: Connect with Social Media Influencers Another great strategy to drive traffic to your website using social media is to connect with online influencers. These influencers are usually media creators (bloggers or YouTube personalities) who have large communities that follow them. When influencers read and share your content, it helps amplify your message and drive even more traffic to your site. Identify influencers who target an audience similar to the audience you’re trying to reach. Twitter is a super effective tool for finding influencers and building a relationship with them through conversation. Or, you can launch a more formal influencer program by using a tool such as Traackr. 6: Get Exposure with Hashtags, Videos, GIFs, and Images Including thought-provoking images, eye-catching videos, funny GIFs and hashtags with your social media posts can blow your engagement out of the water and significantly increase your reach. Here are some great statistics to understand the importance of using hashtags and visuals: Tweets with hashtags attract 2x more engagement, and Tweets with images and videos can get up to 200% more engagement over simple text Tweets. Using 1-2 hashtags per Facebook post can get you an average of 593 interactions per post and image-based posts attract 39% more engagement. LinkedIn posts with images attract 98% more comments. Instagram posts with 11 or more hashtags receive up to 80% engagement, compared to just 22% when using ten and 41% when using two. 7: Amplify Your Message with Social Advertising With the control each social media site has over its algorithm and newsfeed, it can be difficult to drive organic, “free” traffic with some of the major social sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn. A great way to ensure your posts drive maximum traffic to your site is to create a social advertising strategy and monthly budget. Since this can get expensive and time consuming, it’s best to find an ad agency or tool to help manage your social advertising campaigns such as AdEspresso. Use these seven strategies in your business’ social media strategy, and you’ll be surprised how effectively social media can grow brand awareness, traffic and new customers for your business. As you have success, track your efforts and spend to provide a clear picture on what tactics work the best to drive social media traffic to your business.