The 22 Best WordPress Themes of 2018 Posted on January 15, 2019January 15, 2019 by Allie Wolff Your website is one of the most versatile, and powerful, tools in your marketing arsenal for several reasons: It’s a validation tool, showing prospects and customers that you’re a legitimate business with a good reputation. It’s a sales tool: a place where anyone can go to engage with your brand and connect with your sales team (or make a purchase). You own it. Unlike third-party platforms like social media or industry review sites, anything you publish on your site is yours, meaning you get to choose exactly how and when you interact with and sell to your customers. If you’re doing business in 2018 and beyond, it’s no longer enough to simply have a web presence: your site also has to be good. Outdated website designs, or sites that aren’t mobile-friendly, will frustrate your prospects and leave a negative impression of your business. But you don’t have to hire an expensive programmer, or spend hours learning code, to create a unique website with a gorgeous page layout. With a WordPress theme, you can download a pre-designed page template and customize the copy and images using a drag-and-drop page builder. Here are our picks for the 22 best free and premium WordPress themes of 2018 to give your website a makeover that’s sure to result in increased sales. Image courtesy of StudioPress Monochrome Pro Monochrome Pro claims to “crush minimal design,” and we think it does. It’s a mobile-optimized theme with stylish blocks and customizable colors and settings – plus an intuitive site builder for speedy editing. Price: $129.95 Business Pro Business Pro is exactly what it sounds like: a professional-looking theme for businesses and agencies of any size. This theme balances great design with user-friendliness, so you can showcase your value while providing an easy navigation experience for visitors. Price: $129.95 Image courtesy of StudioPress Parallax Pro Parallax scrolling is all the rage, so if you want a well-designed theme with a touch of tech pizzazz, here’s your theme. Plus, this theme comes with unlimited support – a must-have for the busy business owner. Price: $99.95 Infinity Pro Responsive, elegant, photo-based and integrated with WooCommerce: what more could you need from a WP theme? Price: $129.95 Technico Technico is designed for the construction industry, but we think it would look stunning on any business. Get the theme and you get its drag-and-drop builder, making it easy to add custom content where you see fit. Price: Starts at $49 Image courtesy of CSSIgniter Solstice Solstice is easy to use, even for the least tech-savvy among us. Headers, colors, fonts, and layouts are customizable, meaning you can modify this theme quickly and easily. Price: $59 Hugo Hugo’s a great pick for eCommerce companies that need WooCommerce support and SEO optimization. Price: Starts at $49 Struct Ideal for showcasing custom designs or high-end photography, Struct is a versatile WordPress theme that’s extremely customizable and user-friendly. Price: Starts at $49 Image courtesy of CSSIgniter Nozama Need WooCommerce? Then you need Nozama. This storefront theme is both modern and customizable (it boasts over 100 options for customization) and features a search bar at the top for easy site navigation. Price: Starts at $49 Zephyr Zephyr boasts a five-minute setup time, and features luxurious typography and colors. Ideal for high-end agencies, this is a flexible theme that communicates class. Price: $49 Pixzlo Pixzlo is a theme designed for professionals, whether solo entrepreneurs or large business services firms. It’s fun and stylish, and best for businesses that would rather highlight illustration and typography than photography. Price: $49 Image courtesy of CSSIgniter Centaurus Centaurus is a gorgeous, clean design that’s ideal for eCommerce sites, but is modifiable to fit any industry. Its regular license comes with support and documentation. Price: $59 Freyja Is blogging a major part of your web presence? If so, Freyja was designed with you in mind. Featuring 10 distinct layouts to start with, Freyja is as clean as it is responsive. Price: $59 Business3Ree Business3Ree has a variety of content types, from portfolios and slides for creative services to team, partner, and testimonial pages for any business. And with licenses starting at $39, it’s a cost-effective option, too. Price: $39 Image courtesy of CSSIgniter Potenza Potenza would work excellently for an agency, or a professional services business, with a one-page layout designed with SEO in mind. Price: Starts at $39 Mumbrass This theme has a futuristic feel, with unique graphic elements and highly responsive design. Add up to four columns and a wide range of widgets to make it yours — a highly powerful theme for a reasonable price. Price: Starts at $29 Anchord Anchord is an affordable theme designed for agencies and freelancers, with elegant widgets for showcasing your work. Price: Starts at $29 Businex Ideal for agencies and professional services, this responsive theme follows many modern best practices for site design and UX. Price: Free Image courtesy of WordPress Relia Looking for a sleek, WooCommerce-ready theme with modern, parallax design? Relia offers an array of widgets and customizations that fit any type of business. Price: Free Parallax Frame If you’re on the hunt for a free parallax scrolling theme, Parallax Frame is a good pick. Modify this responsive theme to fit your needs, without having to worry about your design becoming too complex or slow for your visitors. Price: Free Image courtesy of WordPress Baton If photography or design is at the forefront of your branding, you’ll like Baton’s open design. On top of that, its drag-and-drop editor makes it easy for those new to WordPress to get a beautiful site up and running quickly. Price: Free Twenty Seventeen Twenty seventeen may be well over, as far as the year is concerned, but this theme is still going strong. It’s one of the most popular free themes in the WP library and looks fantastic on every device. Price: Free
7 2019 Tech Trends to Take Note of Posted on January 11, 2019 by Jonathan Herrick Neophiliacs unite: with 2019 comes another year of technology innovations for business, and we have a lot to look forward to. We’ve rounded up the seven of the more promising technology trends we’ll be seeing in the new year and how you can use them to do better marketing and better business. Chatbots According to Forbes, the global chatbot market is seeing a massive annual growth rate (24.3%). In addition to Facebook’s built-in chatbot, there are plenty of vendors offering build-your-own chatbot solutions for your website, giving you complete control over how and when your bot interacts with your customers. How to use it: If your business is the type that handles a lot of routine questions from website or Facebook visitors, a chatbot can save you serious time and money — while also answering your customers’ questions faster and more accurately. If you don’t do business with the mass market, or if your product or solution is complex, a chatbot might not be the most effective customer service tool. Marketing Personalization Though GDPR and recent data scandals may have been a setback for some advertisers, there is still more data than ever that we can capture from our customers and prospects. The trick is harnessing this data and using it to improve your clients’ lives — whether by sending the perfect email that speaks to their most immediate challenge, a highly customized offer by mail, or a direct message on social media that refers to a topic they’ve shown interest in. How to use it: In email marketing, explore the settings of your CRM to see how you can better segment your customers based on their interests, problems, and demographics. You don’t have to create an entirely new marketing campaign for each segment, but rather, think in terms of how you can swap out generic words or images with more personalized data. Automation Since the dawn of the Industrial Age, humans have been fascinated with increasing efficiency through automation. Jump to 2019, and while our technology has changed, our obsession with accomplishing more (and faster) hasn’t. How to use it: Try out a workflow management tool like Zapier, Automate.io, or IFTTT to connect disparate data and processes across your organization. Couple that with the power of automated email marketing, and you can just about create a marketing engine that runs for you while you sleep. VR, AR, and IoT While virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and the Internet of Things (IoT) are all fun to think about, these haven’t been entirely practical for smaller businesses to implement — yet. Things might change in 2019, however, as more of these smart devices hit the market and we see new applications for this technology. How to use it: If you’re a retailer (or a physical experience for your customers is key to your business model), AR and VR can create dynamic, memorable in-store experiences. The same goes for IoT, in which you can create interactive displays that increase customer spend and brand engagement. Drone Photography and Videography Drone photography and videography has been around for a while now, but as it becomes popular across different industries, the hardware has become extremely affordable. You can find decent drones for beginners around $200, with more powerful models running upwards of $1,000. How to use it: Agencies, real estate pros, artists, YouTubers and more can dramatically benefit from the perspective and novelty of drone photography. You can even get an AR headset that shows a heads-up display of your drone’s activity so you can “see” through its eyes while still viewing the drone in the air. Voice Search Savvy Googlers are using voice search to find your business, and it’s changing the nature of search engine marketing. According to Brightlocal, an amazing 58% of consumers used voice search to find local business information. It’s not hard to imagine, either: when driving, walking, cooking, or engaging in some other activity, it’s far more convenient to ask your mobile device a question than to stop and type a query into a search bar. How to use it: Give your SEO strategy another look to make sure you’re accounting for voice search queries. While optimizing for more formal phrases used to be the standard, your web content should take spoken language into account going forward. Blockchain Though plenty of tech-savvy business owners and marketers have heard of blockchain as it applies to cryptocurrency, fewer are familiar with uses for blockchain outside of the Bitcoin world. But first, here’s a quick summary of how the blockchain works. Blockchain technology creates a ledger of digital activity that shows, chronologically, the entire history of a digital object — whether that’s a type of cryptocurrency, a coupon, or a valuable object in a video game. How to use it: Blockchain technology can be applied to marketing to ensure the validity of coupons, gift cards, and rewards points. Say goodbye to gift card fraud, and improve the transparency of coupon redemption across different platforms, both online and offline.
Our Favorite Marketing Trends of 2018 (and What We’re Looking Forward to in 2019) Posted on January 10, 2019 by Jessica Lunk Marketing is a living industry, quickly adapting to changes in the business world and the ways that we communicate. The best marketers stay on top of the various marketing trends that emerge each year, learning from the best and finding better alternatives to the rest. Being able to tell the difference between positive trends and soon-to-pass fads is one of the top skills that a marketer can have. At the start of a new year, it’s important to look back on the trends of 2018 to see which ones were truly the best of the best. At the same time, it’s also a good opportunity to look at the year to come and see what might be headed our way. With that in mind, here were some of our favorite marketing trends of 2018 and a few things we think will be big in the coming year. Influencer Marketing Influencers and brand ambassadors have been big in marketing for a while, but they really reached new heights in 2018. Companies large and small started to realize just how much of an impact good influencers could really have, and started putting more money into so-called “micro influencers.” These are the people who aren’t celebrities but who have a small-to-moderate following (generally 1,000 to 4,000 followers). Even big brands like Macy’s are embracing brand ambassadors with smaller audiences. In 2018 Macy’s rolled out a successful influencer program that harnessed the brand power of their employee base. Through the Macy’s Style Crew, micro influencers among their employees get rewarded for driving sales through their social media profiles. Macy’s plans on expanding this program in 2019. However, you don’t have to be a global brand like Macy’s to capitalize on micro influencers. Smaller businesses and B2Bs are seeing the benefit of driving sales through these types of influencers – paying commission rather than shelling out big bucks for a post from a more established influencer. Most consumers see these micro influencers as being more relatable than big names with millions of followers. Marketing done through them often appears more natural than big-name influencers, resulting in a higher probability of conversions due to it being less obvious that the influencer was making a marketing push. Perhaps the best thing about them is how accessible they are to businesses of all sizes; you no longer have to have a corporate-sized marketing budget to reap the benefits of influencers. Content Marketing Web content fell out of favor several years ago when Google made major changes to its algorithms, followed soon after by the rise of social media as a major marketing powerhouse. Many of the large content producers either went under or suffered serious setbacks, and content production shifted to have a greater focus on short-form social content instead of the web content of yesteryear. In the last few years, though, businesses have started to realize that there’s still a place for well-written content in their marketing plans. This became really evident in 2018 with a number of companies using social media to direct visitors to content on their websites instead of using the web as a way to attract followers to Facebook pages. With social media powerhouses like Facebook facing more uncertainty and obstacles in 2018, it feels good to invest in owned media. Good content will stand the test of time, and it’s encouraging to see that trends are shifting back toward high-quality content again. Big Data It seems like big data just keeps getting bigger. These days it seems like everyone has a customer loyalty program collecting data on shopping trends, and marketing efforts just keep getting more personal as businesses have more data to feed into them. This is a trend with no definite end in sight, so the sooner you embrace data, the more time you’ll have to ride the big data wave up to the top. The difference in 2019 is that consumers are hyper-aware of how their data is being collected and used. In 2018 we saw the launch of GDPR – an effort to increase transparency into data collection and provide more protection over data privacy. This means brands will have to continue to build trust and stay increasingly relevant to their base to continue to eek out those valuable data insights. With consumers demanding data privacy and data security, making sure that your data is secure is paramount in 2019. Even if you think that there’s no one out there who would want the data you collect, take the time to secure it nonetheless. Few things will hurt your business faster than a data breach. The Rise of AI Marketing This is another trend that’s been around for a few years but that really saw a major uptick in 2018. AI-powered marketing gives businesses new ways to use customer data, especially when it uses that data to train machine learning algorithms that can make predictions based on historical shopping patterns. There are so many ways that AI can improve your marketing efforts that we can’t even list them here, and the power of AI in the marketing world is just going to grow. Live Streaming One big thing that social media brought to marketers is the ability to go live with video from the scene of an event. It’s one thing to post descriptions and pictures, but it’s quite another to really show viewers what they’re missing. We saw some amazing uses of live streaming video in 2018, and it’s all but assured that it’s going to be even bigger in the new year. Even the always-amazing Arby’s marketing team embraced live streaming, holding a few special events such as recreating pictures sent in by visitors out of meats and sandwich toppings. The sky is very much the limit here. Trends to Watch in 2019 Obviously, several of these trends are going to continue right into the new year (and possibly into 2020 and beyond.) There are a few other trends that weren’t quite ready for prime time in 2018 that might make a big splash this year, however. Here are the ones that we’re most excited about: Micro-Moments: In-store and mobile marketing targeted specifically at those little moments that influence decision making. These are the “I want to know” moments, “I want to go”, “I want to buy” and other “I want” moments that present opportunities to nudge decisions in the right direction for your business. Augmented Reality: Using smartphones and other devices, you can overlay important marketing information on top of real-world camera views or provide points of interaction (such as special discounts) that are only available from your company’s app when you’re in the right location. Voice Search: Not only are Amazon Alexa and the Google Assistant common in in-home hardware devices like the Echo, but more people than ever are using them on their phones and tablets as well. Ignoring voice search as a marketing target will go about as well as those early-90s marketers who dismissed the Internet as just being a fad. Authority Content: In a world of fake news and alternative facts, visitors want content they know they can trust. Being seen as an authority is going to be huge in the coming years. Again, this is only the tip of the iceberg. As technology and the internet continue to evolve, new marketing opportunities may emerge that we can’t even picture this early in the year. We can say one thing for certain, though: as new trends emerge, we’ll be right here to give you the information you need to keep your company on top of the marketing wave.
7 Tips for Setting Your Marketing Agency Up For Success in 2019 Posted on January 8, 2019January 8, 2019 by Katie Culp It’s a new year, ripe with possibilities for your growing marketing agency. For many, January is the time to kick off your detailed growth plan and put it into action – the plan you might have spent all of December fine-tuning. For the “winging it” types, the end of the year may mean deadlines and endless client work (i.e., business as usual). It doesn’t matter if you’re more of a year-end planner or procrastinator; here are some things we can all agree will help set your agency up for success in 2019. #1: Update your sales and marketing platform. If you don’t have a CRM or sales platform to manage leads and customers, you’ll need one in place before you can really commit to growing business. Even if you’re a boutique agency with only a handful of clients at a time, an all-in-one sales and marketing CRM will keep your industry contacts and leads organized while making it easy to provide top-notch customer service. Plus, having a complete CRM and campaign automation tool is an immense value-add in the eyes of your clients. It’s one less thing for them to manage, and your familiarity with one platform will make you that much better at drumming up killer email campaigns. #2: Organize and segment your industry contacts. If growth is on the top of your agency’s to-do list, you’ll have to organize your current contacts and establish a system for categorizing new ones. In your CRM, segment your contacts in the ways that make the most sense for your business. Use status, demographic data, your customers’ interests, or their behavior on your website to put them into meaningful groups. From there, you can hone your lead nurture campaigns to turn stale contacts into interested leads. #3: Audit your marketing channels. It’s time to get brutally honest. Which channels are working for you, and which aren’t? Is your blog bringing in new site traffic as you’d hoped, or falling flat? Are your daily Pinterest or Twitter posts resulting in more leads, or are they just another item on your to-do list? As a marketer, you know how important it is to be intentional with your inbound efforts – now, you need the objectivity to recognize what’s working, what needs improvement, and what you might be able to ditch altogether. #4: Revisit your pricing. Pricing is a tricky topic for any business, and some budding agencies avoid it altogether by creating custom plans or packages for every client. However, always doing custom work can become extremely time-consuming, and it tends to invite scope creep – which can cost you a lot in the long-run. Though it’s complicated, revisiting your pricing model annually (whether value-based, hourly, or project-based) helps ensure you’re getting the best possible profit margins as you take on new clients. It also helps ensure you’re charging enough for your services as you evolve and get better at what you do. #5: Don’t stop at employee reviews. While it’s a common practice for small and large organizations to conduct employee reviews at the end of the year, it’s wise to review your contractors, subcontractors, and vendor relationships as well. Who is helping your business run smoother, and who, if anyone, is a drain on your time and resources? Identify if there are any jobs being done that aren’t essential to the health of your business, or if there are subcontractors or employees you could hire that will relieve some of your burden. Even a very small marketing agency can benefit dramatically by grouping menial tasks and hiring them out to a virtual assistant. #6: Automate what you can. Automation isn’t just a buzzword: it’s a serious timesaver when implemented correctly. Identify any time-consuming tasks that you and your employees do manually, and investigate tools like Zapier to create workflows that will free up your team for tasks that only humans can do. #7: Celebrate what went well. Agency work can feel like a never-ending to-do list with constantly tight deadlines. The beginning of a new year is the perfect time to stop and call attention to the successes of your business in previous months. Celebration serves the dual purpose of boosting morale and creating a much-needed sense of completion to your ongoing work. It’ll motivate your employees, strengthen bonds with contractors, and remind you that you’re not a hamster on a wheel – but a fantastic business that gets results for its clients.
The 2019 Guide to Top-Quality Content Posted on January 7, 2019 by Allie Wolff When you’re passionate about your business, it’s hard not to talk about it, right? Chances are, you’re thrilled to be able to do what you do best — and what you love — each and every day. You get the flexibility of calling the shots, the privilege of working with a small team, and the connection with your origin story. And all of these benefits give you a huge advantage in terms of creating quality content. The secret to creating top-quality content is to be memorable. To connect with readers or viewers, and thereby make a lasting impression. In the modern digital age where “content” can be created by anyone with a digital device and an internet connection, saturation is high. Schedules are packed, time has become even more valuable, and your audience doesn’t want to waste theirs consuming uninformative marketing speak. If you spend your time creating “marketing material disguised as value,” not only will you bore your audience — you’ll be on their mental blacklist. To make a lasting (and positive) impression in 2019, your content must be authentic, transparent and valuable. What is Valuable Content? Quality content isn’t about selling your products or promoting your company. Instead, quality content provides some sort of value to your audience — for example, through education or entertainment. Giving value positions you and your team as industry or niche experts, which boosts your KLT factor (know, like, and trust). Content that’s informative, entertaining, and absolutely authentic allows your audience to start to trust you, and trust is the cornerstone of loyalty. Is My Content Authentic? Authenticity proves that you (and your small business) truly care about what you say you care about. Authentic content is both informative and engaging, offering a deeper look at company activities. Here are three criteria you can use to evaluate the authenticity of your content: Does it align with the existing message and goals of your business? Does it help your clients/customers accomplish their own goals? Does it increase comfort around your business and encourage further participation? Quality Content Brainstorm Feeling stuck around content topics? Chances are, you’ve already got a lot of great content ready to unleash: What questions are you asked on a frequent basis? If they’re not top of mind, you can go through feedback forms to look for patterns. Research groups and membership sites related to your business and write down the most common questions and/or complaints. Use each of these as the topic for a piece of content. Take inventory of your existing content and make a list of ways to repurpose it: Strip the audio from any video and release it as a podcast. Create an audio version of an informative blog post by reading it out loud (and perhaps interjecting additional side notes). Go back through past long articles or blog posts, breaking them into components. Go deeper into your topic by creating a piece of media to address each relevant chunk on its own (for example, breaking an existing blog post into three sections and creating a series of three new videos — one per section). Stand Out by Making Connections The easiest way to personalize your content and actively involve your audience is to simply reach out and engage them. Be both personal and interactive. Reach out to past and active clients to discuss their experiences. Make use of live video platforms (Facebook, Instagram, YouTube) to host live Q&As, interactive how-to videos, behind the scenes reveals, and more. Create tools, workbooks, checklists, or videos to hand-hold your audience through a process, or to accompany other content you’ve created. Stand Out through Transparency One way to be memorable to your audience is through voluntary transparency. People are curious to know what goes on behind the scenes, and to be a part of the mystery “behind the curtain.” That sense of belonging and exclusivity is desirable. (The Patreon platform is one example of this; patrons exchange a monthly fee for access to exclusive content.) Here are some ideas for Inviting your audience into your inner circle: Employee profile blog posts with quirky, relatable personal facts and direct quotes Podcast interviews with team members or department representatives Facebook Live videos showing works in progress or the behind the scenes of your office environment, such as the process of getting ready for a client presentation Facebook, Instagram, or YouTube AMA (Ask Me Anything) livestreams where team members answer audience questions as they come in — the “face to face” interaction of video also builds trust. Stand Out Moment-by-Moment Modern audiences are often looking for quick answers to immediate questions. Google calls these “micro-moments:” I want to know I want to go I want to do I want to buy To meet the immediacy of your audience’s in-the-moment needs, create short-form content that solves these micro-problems. (Efficiency is just as important as giving them what they’re looking for in terms of perceived content quality): Create FAQ pages or posts. Make use of the immediate and interactive (in terms of your audience’s ability to interact and respond) stories feature on Instagram and Facebook. Create short audio snippets or videos, keeping them as brief as possible to answer targeted in-the-moment questions. Now that you’ve got an idea of how to make your 2019 content top quality, go out there and do it! If you take it on step by step, moment by moment, the overwhelm will subside and you’ll be able to infuse your content with the same excited energy that flows through your business in the first place! The more relevant, high-quality content you create, the greater the likelihood of you being seen by the right people. And the more you aim to actually connect and engage with your audience through your content, the greater the likelihood you’ll be remembered favorably — and sought out when you’re needed.
4 Simple Steps for Establishing Your Business’s 2019 Goals Posted on January 4, 2019January 4, 2019 by Jonathan Herrick Many of us look at the New Year as the time to set personal resolutions, but it’s also a great moment to embrace new goals at our businesses, too. Setting goals—and meeting them—can be a powerful motivator as you grow your business. Here’s how to put yours in place for 2019. Get ready. Making a conscious effort to look at your business with fresh eyes can help you think bigger. It’s easy to get stuck in a rut if you let past performance dictate future expectations. Take a look at your effectiveness as a leader and of the overall performance of your business as objectively as you can. To choose the right goals, it helps to identify areas where there are opportunities for growth and improvement. When it comes to your role at work and your actual business, ask yourself these questions. Did you demonstrate any growth in 2018? Did you see enough growth? With an eye on building a stronger business, how would you prioritize your areas for improvement? What resources do you need to move ahead? Let’s say 2018 was the first year you added employees and you had to learn how to lead them. When looking how you did as a leader, you might look at: Your success in coaching employees. Did you learn how to coach your team in a way that led to great business results and helped you build a strong culture? What your office culture was like. Did people seem happy to come to work and inspired as they did their jobs? How you handled the administrative and financial demands of having employees. Were you organized and on top of record keeping—or did you enlist the services of someone who is? The impact of the new employees on cash flow. Were you always ready to make payroll or did you find yourself scrambling or skipping your paycheck to do so? Get set. Once you’ve taken stock of where you are, committing your goals to paper is essential. Choosing a theme—like “Excel as a leader,” “Build a Great Culture,” “Get Really Organized,” or “Double Revenue,” can help you stay focused. Let’s say your number one goal is to grow a leader in 2019. List your number one goal for growing in that area — for instance, learning to communicate more clearly with your direct reports in writing and in meetings. Your number two might be to prioritize one-on-one coaching sessions with your key managers by scheduling them into your calendar regularly. Don’t list more than three for each area. Your better off with one goal you actually meet than 10 goals you never get to. If you have goals for other areas of the business, list those, too, along with the key area where you want to improve within each area. For instance, maybe you’re hoping to double profits in 2019. Your main goal might be to set up a dashboard so you always know how the business is performing, profit-wise. Or it might be to discontinue working with the least profitable 10% of customers and redirecting your energy to doing more business with the most profitable 10%. List them in order of priority, so if you have to triage, you’ll stay focused on the most important ones. Decide how you’ll keep score. The only way to know if you’ve met your goals is to track your progress. There are certain numbers that matter most in every business in meeting its goals. These are often called “key performance indicators,” or KPIs. Limit your KPIs to a small list, or it will be hard to stay on top of them. The point is to create a good snapshot of how your business is doing in the areas that matter most. Let’s say you want to double revenue in 2019, without eroding profits. You might choose KPIs such as gross revenue and net income, and monitor how you are doing on those fronts on a regular basis, such as weekly and monthly. But that’s not the only KPI you could use. If you know that doing more business with the top 10% of your best, most profitable customers was the best way to double revenue while protecting your profits, you might instead choose to track metrics like average revenue per customer and average profit per customer. KPIs don’t have to be tied directly to your balance sheet. At a business where word-of-mouth marketing was most important to growth, a good KPI might come from an external tracking system, such as the Net Promoter Score, a measure of how readily customers would recommend the business to others. And at a firm that was trying to recruit and hold onto great employees, the KPI that mattered most might be the company’s score on an employee satisfaction survey or the average tenure of a new hire. You know your business, so pick the numbers that really matter in the end. Go!!! Setting goals is motivating, but what’s even more energizing is meeting them. Every Friday before you leave work or every Sunday, before you start the week, list the one most important action you will take toward your annual goals in your calendar for the coming week. For instance, if you want to do more business with your ideal customers to achieve a big revenue and profit goal, your one goal for the week might be to invite one of these customers to lunch or to schedule a catch-up call with them. Even if these actions seem small, they will add up over time. If you have one lunch or conversation a week with a high-value customer, it will be hard not to bring in more revenue and profits. In business, execution is everything. Setting the right goals and tracking your progress in meeting them can help you get more done than you ever dreamed possible.
How to Build Your Small Business Email List Like the Big Guys Posted on January 3, 2019March 8, 2023 by Jessica Lunk Attracting subscribers to your small business email list takes a combination of great creative, marketing prowess, technical know-how, and a dash of luck. Still, you can take all of these steps and not get the results you’re hoping for. It may leave you wondering how the big companies do it – how do corporations grow their email lists to tens of thousands of eager subscribers? Before we offer up some suggestions you can start using right away, there’s one essential point to consider upfront. Lots of small businesses talk about wanting more subscribers, contacts, and customers – but your product or service isn’t for all seven billion of the world’s residents. Rather than focusing on email capture as a broad numbers game, look at it strategically. You’ve likely heard the adage that 20% of your customer base is responsible for 80% of your revenue, and this is close to the truth for most small businesses. This means that you’re far better off collecting a few email addresses from perfect prospects than hundreds of lukewarm prospects. Even big corporations don’t target everyone in their email campaigns. They send emails automatically on a schedule, but they’re also very judicious about who those emails go to. The email addresses they collect are high quality, and they use powerful tools to keep them that way. With that in mind, let’s walk through the steps you can take right now to start growing your email list. 1. Establish your email marketing goals. An email list for the sake of itself doesn’t help your customers or your business. If you’re going to grow your list, the first question to ask yourself is this: how am I going to bring value to my customers through their inboxes? Define what you want to achieve, and this will help determine the best channels for obtaining email addresses. 2. Start with what you have. Though your competitors may be pulling in subscribers with their daily blog content, it doesn’t make sense for you to take the same approach if you only have a couple of blog posts. To build your email list quickly, take a look at the processes and resources you already have in place. Here are a few golden opportunities to add email into the mix: Your website. Add a popup or a non-invasive announcement like a Hello Bar to alert visitors about your list. Third-party sites. Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram profiles are great spots to let people know they can subscribe to get company news, free resources, or exclusive offers. Customer service. Whether you have phone support, in-store service, or AI doing your bidding, add a new step to your customer service process – asking if customers would like to subscribe to your list. Email signatures. If you and your employees do business online, have everyone add a “subscribe for company news” or “join our list” link within their email signature. Your store. If you have a physical location, allow visitors to sign up for your email list in-store. Add subscription information to your business cards, or set up a spot where visitors can drop their business cards in exchange for a gift. From there, you can start thinking up interesting and engaging emails. But if you need some help crafting the perfect pitch, you can check out a few B2B cold email templates online. 3. Use smart content marketing. One of the most popular ways to collect email addresses from prospects is to offer a valuable resource on your website or on a landing page in exchange for an email address. Here are some resources you might offer: Free eBook or field guide Webinar or consultative call Template or customizable resource Case study or whitepaper Quiz results App download 4. Decrease the odds of capturing fake or invalid email addresses. To keep people from entering invalid email addresses, provide the digital content over email instead of by instant download — this may cut down on the volume of addresses you collect, but it’ll significantly increase the value of these contacts. And like we said above, the quality of your contacts is far more important than the quantity of contacts, so this is a step worth taking if you want qualified leads on your list. 5. Use social media to spread the word about your business. A simple paid ad campaign with an email opt-in form can broaden the reach of your business. This is a good tactic to use if your main marketing goal is to increase your customer base or stretch into a new market. If you’d rather not pay for ads, you can still use organic social posts to capture email addresses from your existing audience. You may have plenty of potential customers already following you on social, now it’s just a matter of letting them know they can subscribe to your blog or get exclusive discounts through email. 6. Use direct mail. If you’re already using EDDM or direct mail to advertise to customers, why not create a series of mailers that encourage people to join your email list? This is an especially powerful tactic for SMBs who do a lot of business locally. First, connect with new prospects by sending top-funnel offers to mail carrier routes within a 20-mile (or more) radius of your business using the USPS EDDM service. Then, convert those strangers in to email subscribers by providing them an irresistible offer in the mail. 7. Get some positive PR. Nothing says “expertise” like having your name or business featured on a popular site or media outlet. Not only do guest blogs, special appearances, and interviews boost your own website’s domain authority, but they’re also great opportunities to let new audiences know about your mailing list. Email marketing is a long-term strategy that can take time to get results, but it’s absolutely worth it. As long as you’re focused on the unique value you bring to your customers, your list will grow — and who knows? It may come to rival the big guys.
4 Killer Closing Strategies to Skyrocket Sales Posted on January 2, 2019January 2, 2019 by Tegan Arnold The ability to successfully close deals can make or break your career in sales. Fail, and all of the hard work you put in leading up to that moment was for naught. That’s why choosing the right strategy is so important. Whether you’re a sales newbie or you’re just looking for some ways to up your game and improve your results, check out these four proven closing techniques and give them a try. The FOMO Technique Fear of missing out (FOMO) is something most of us have experienced at some point in our lives. This is why creating a sense of urgency can be such an effective sales strategy. The goal is to trigger an immediate response in your target audience, prompting them to take action right away rather than waiting (and probably never actually making a purchase.) Some examples of how a salesperson can leverage the FOMO technique include saying things like: This is the last one available at this special price. We’re offering a 25% discount for new customers that sign up today only. If you commit to signing up now, I can fast-track your implementation. The ‘Up the Ante’ Technique Prospects routinely ask for things like additional discounts or product add-ons because they know they have the upper hand. You can plan for this in advance by seeking approval and getting the green-light for certain offers. The trick here is to make your offer conditional. For example, if the prospect asks for a lower price, you could say, “Sure! But the only way I can do that is if you sign the contract today.” This sweetens the pot for your customer while speeding up the closing process for you. Win-win! The Closing Question Technique Successful salespeople know the value of asking probing questions. This enables them to uncover the need, desire and/or pain point of each customer as well as potential objections that might arise so they can be prepared for in advance. Closing the sale in the form of a question can also help you to gauge where your prospect is in the process. For instance, if you ask, “Does what I’m offering solve your problem?” and the customer says “no,” you can continue selling. A yes would be the green light to sign on the dotted line. Or, you might ask something like, “Is there any reason we can’t proceed right now?” This will help reveal whether the prospect is ready and, if not, exactly why they’re not yet convinced. The ‘Take Away’ Technique This last strategy is rather interesting because it’s based on reverse psychology. It plays on the concept that when you take something away, it can create an even stronger desire. If you’ve got a customer that’s objecting based on price, remove a service or feature and then present them with the discounted offer. Chances are, they’ll focus more on what you took away rather than the lower price. The art of closing the deal is something every salesperson strives to master. For some, this comes naturally. For most, it’s about learning, developing and strengthening the right techniques. Give the four strategies above a try. Chances are, you’ll start seeing improved results before long.
Year in Review: The Top 5 Hatchbuck Blog Posts of 2018 Posted on December 31, 2018December 31, 2018 by Allie Wolff As we round out another fantastic year in Hatchbuckland, we can’t help but reflect on everything that happened in 2018. We got named to lots of top lists like this one from TrustRadius. And this one from G2 Crowd. We released new sales and marketing dashboards. We expanded our partnership with Zapier through a new two-way API integration. We moved into a sweet new office. We completely revamped our educational course for Hatchbuck Partners. (Learn more about the program here.) We helped Loaves & Fishes for St. Louis feed over 300 families for Thanksgiving. We hit 25,000+ loyal followers on Twitter. We published 250 blog posts. We could share so much more about 2018, but that’s enough about us. As we looked back on the year, we sorted through the 250 blog posts we published to see what you loved and to help us plan our editorial calendar for next year. So if your New Year’s resolution is anything like ours, and your goal is to never stop learning, you’re in luck. We’re here to share the top five most popular blog posts of the year in case you missed them. And we pinky promise to keep publishing educational, actionable, interesting content on the Hatchbuck blog in 2019 and beyond. Cheers! The 14 Best Landing Page Builders of 2018 There are loads of statistics on the value of landing pages and why they’re so vital to business growth. And because our platform doesn’t include a landing page builder (don’t worry – we easily integrate with lots of tools!), we want to make sure our readers are in the know about the best-in-class solutions that are out there. In this post, we’ll give you a breakdown on price and features of the 14 best builders so you can find the one that works for your business. What is ABM? An Introduction to Account-Based Marketing 2018 brought a lot of buzz about ABM – although it’s definitely not a new strategy. If you’re new to the concept or you need a refresher on the value of account-based marketing and how Hatchbuck can help, don’t miss this overview article from our co-founder, Jonathan. We’ve got a whole category of posts dedicated to ABM on the blog, so if it strikes your fancy, we’ve got plenty of resources to fuel your 2019 success. The Top 9 Best CRMs for Agencies In case you hadn’t noticed, we’re a CRM. So why would we publish a list of CRMs we compete with on our blog and promote them to you? Because we care. We know that Hatchbuck might not be a fit for every business’s needs. We’re a really great option for thousands of SMBs and agencies across the globe, but your agency may need something different. So in the interest of transparency and keeping true to our company values, we’re just looking out for you. And if Hatchbuck isn’t a fit for your agency, you might be able to find another great option on this list of the best players in the game. 7 Tips for a 10-Minute Sales Pitch You may have heard that we humans have increasingly shorter attention spans in today’s modern world. So what does that mean for sales in 2019? That you’ve got even less time to capture the interest of that prospect you’re pitching to. Use these tips to write sales emails that convert creatively or your list of hot prospects will shrink like those attention spans. How To Create Animated Display Ads With Adobe Creative Cloud 2018 seemed like the year of the GIF. Those attention-grabbing animated loops are everywhere – and they’re surely capturing more eyes than static images on social these days. So whether you pronounce it “jif” or “gif,” it’s probably most important to know how to make one. If you’ve got access to Adobe Creative Cloud, check out this step-by-step walkthrough on creating a GIF to wow your audience and animate just about anything. (If you’re not creatively inclined, check out GIPHY. They’ve got you covered.) We’re looking forward to all that the next year has in store for your business and ours. Wishing you a happy New Year. See you in 2019!