, , ,

3 Ways to Turn Prospects into Paying Customers

3-ways-to-turn-prospects-into-paying-customersIn the B2B world, one of the marketer’s primary goals is to generate new leads. Most businesses have no trouble acquiring leads. The problem is, many of them fail to realize another important component of the sales funnel – lead conversion.

There is no point in generating leads if you can’t convert those leads into customers. After all, that’s how your business thrives and succeeds. Make sure you implement these strategies to prevent prospects from slipping through your fingers.

Quick follow-up

Time is of the essence in the business world. The speed at which your sales team follows up on the lead is important. Make sure that you follow up within 24 hours or all your efforts will be put to waste. Call them or just send a follow up e-mail. Offer to answer any questions that they might have. Sometimes, this is enough to get them into purchase mode.

People lose interest faster than you may think. As such, a quick follow up is recommended. If your sales team aren’t fast enough, they will move on to your competitors. Don’t let them wait.

Herd mentality

People are often influenced by the behavior of the people around them. This includes their buying behavior.

If you want a consumer to buy a particular product, you can use this to your advantage. Let them know how many people have bought your product in the last few weeks. This simple strategy can help boost your sales. If they see other people jumping on the bandwagon, they are likely to do the same.

Qualify leads

Not everyone who visits your site is interested in what you have to offer.  As such, it is important to determine which leads are worth your effort.

Qualifying leads can mean the difference between wasting lots of time and energy and landing a new, juicy business. You want to make sure you’re selling to right people. Check to see if they fit your buyer profile and their activities on your site before passing them off to sales.

/by
, ,

Simple Ways to Generate Leads from Your Blog

Simple Ways to Generate Leads from Your Blogs

Your business’ blog can do a lot of different things. Blogging does more than let your followers know about upcoming events or recent news. Rather, it can help you develop better customer relationships, position your brand as an industry leader and generate leads.

If you’re not happy with the leads you’re getting from your business blog, then we urge you to keep reading. Use these lead generation tactics to drive more traffic and attract more high quality leads to your website.

Pen a killer headline

Make sure your title is interesting enough to capture the attention of your target audience and will compel them to click through and read your blog post.

Go social

Since you own a blog, you probably know how to write a blog post that that will generate leads. Now, your goal is to extend your reach to those people who know little about your business. Consider sharing your blog posts on social media so that people will come, learn something valuable and share them to their family and friends. This will help spread the word about your business.

Build a mobile-friendly site

A huge percentage of visitors use their tablets or mobile phones to access the internet. If they find it hard to read your blog posts or navigate your site through their mobile devices, they’ll leave even before they start reading your posts. Make sure your site is mobile-friendly or you’ll lose visitors.

Be consistent

Publish new content more frequently if you want people to visit your blog regularly. We know you’re busy, so you don’t have to write a blog every day. However, it is important that you keep up with your posting schedule.

Show up regularly and your readership will grow faster. You can’t expect people to return to your blog if you don’t have new content for them to read. Make sure you offer some valuable content to inspire them to keep coming back.

 

/by
, ,

4 Ways to Use Twitter for Business and Marketing

4 Ways to Use Twitter for Business and Marketing

Business of all sizes use Twitter for a variety of reasons – provide information, interact with their followers, promote their products and services, generate leads and monitor conversations about their company.

Maintaining an effective Twitter presence can be a powerful part of your marketing strategy. Despite its growing relevance, a lot of small businesses are still not using Twitter to its full potential.

In this blog post, we’ll teach you how to turn 140 characters into online marketing gold. Read on for some useful tips on how to use this popular social media platform for business and marketing.

Engage in two-way conversations

Twitter is a great platform to reach your audience. As a business owner, your goal for using social media is to build a community around your brand and to foster relationships.

Don’t go overboard with promoting your business. If you do so, people will stop following you. Keep an eye out for particular issues you could help with. Join the conversation and feel free to give some tips and advice.

Retweet

The last thing you want is to bombard people with tweets about your business. It is worthwhile to retweet particular tweets from other users that you find particularly useful or interesting. Sometimes, this encourages people to follow you. Plus, retweeting shows your followers that you’re also willing to share tips and advice, and you’re not just about flogging your products and services.

Customer service

80% of customer service interactions take place in social media. In fact, a lot of people post complaints and product queries on Twitter. Twitter is a great tool for customer service because it allows you to resolve issues in real time. Be sure to respond in a polite and professional manner. Don’t forget to thank the customer publicly once the problem is resolved.

Make twitter a daily activity

Social media marketing success does not happen overnight. You need to spend time posting updates, responding to DMs, thanking new followers, following new accounts, liking and re-tweeting other content and responding to other users.

Because twitter moves so quickly, it is not something you can handle whenever you have the time. Daily postings and engagement is important. Otherwise, people will forget about you.

/by
,

3 Ways Social Media Can Help Your Business

3 Ways Social Media Can Help Your Business

As a business owner, you have probably considered using social media to help you get the word out about your business. Building a strong social media presence may take a lot of time and hard work, but the pay off can be incredible.

Social media can be extremely beneficial to companies of all sizes. Here’s how social media can help grow your business.

Reach new audience

Sharing content to thousands of people at once is one of the biggest benefits of social media. But instead of trying to reach everyone, you need to find the right people to engage with. Social media provides the perfect opportunity to help you reach your target audience. Plus, it is one of the fastest and least expensive ways to connect with your audience.

Identify who your target audience is, and then determine which social platforms they spend most of their time in. If you share really interesting and engaging content, you are likely to reach thousands and thousands of people in no time.

Create meaningful relationship with your customers

Social media encourages two-way communication. It’s not enough that you share your knowledge or provide some updates about your products, services and upcoming events; you also want to communicate with your fans and followers.

Social media allows you to communicate with your prospective and current customers. Once you have earned their trust and goodwill, they would be much more willing to recommend your products to their family and friends.

Customer service

Providing stellar customer service is likely already a top priority for your business. Since most customers want immediate response, many of them would post their questions or concerns via social media. If they do, it is important that you respond and address the issue in a timely manner.

If you acquire positive feedbacks, ask the customer if you can share it on your page. People will trust and appreciate you when people say good things about your business.

 

/by
, ,

4 Ways to Increase Your Visibility on Social Media

BIMS

Implementing a strong, multifaceted online marketing can help increase your company’s visibility. Social media marketing opens up a business’ doors to customers they wouldn’t be able to reach.

Here are a few suggestions to give your page maximum visibility and to ensure your posts are being seen by your fans or followers.

Content is still king

The more engaging and informative your content is, the more interaction you’re going to get. As a result, more people are going to see your posts.

In order to get this right, you must first know your target audience. This way, you can focus on creating contents that would be of value and interest to them.

Create conversations

Business owners and marketers use social media to stay in touch with their customers and clients, as well as to reach potential customers.

Make it a point to communicate with them on a regular basis. Use plain, straightforward language when communicating with your target audience. No corporate speak, no jargons, no acronyms. Speak directly to that person and make your communication personal.

Be on different social networks

Social networks are the perfect channel to improve the visibility of your brand or company. It can also be used to connect with your prospective and current customers. If you want to generate visibility, consider being on different social networks. But if you find it difficult to manage different social media accounts, you might want to concentrate on platforms in which your target audience spends most of their time in.

Partner with other visible brands

A direct partnership is a great way to build your own brand visibility. If you sell coffee makers, consider having a direct partnership, an affiliate partnership or an implied partnership with a coffee manufacturer.

Viral or video marketing

Videos commonly go viral. Living a busy and fast-paced life, most people choose to watch videos instead of reading a long article. Information is easier to consume and they’re easy to share. Because of this, video marketing gives you the ability to reach a large group of people in a short span of time.

/by
, ,

Reasons Why Your Content Marketing is Failing

Flat design vector illustration concept of computer and connected mobile devices with links of transmission information on various data storages and cloud computing service. Isolated on stylish colored background.

So you set up a blog. You were so thrilled at the prospect of sharing your expertise with an eager audience. You started creating valuable content assets and created a few downloadable pieces. You have done everything experts said you should, and yet you’re conversion rate isn’t increasing.

Here are 3 things that might be affecting your content conversion rates.

You’re attracting the wrong type of traffic

If you’re successfully driving people to your blog or website, but your conversions aren’t increasing, you’re probably targeting the wrong people.

Some people assume that an increase in traffic means an increase in conversion rate, but that’s not always the case. While visits, email sign ups and exposures are all great to see, they are not going to make much of a difference to your bottom line. You want conversions. In order to turn traffic into conversion, you need to attract the right kind of traffic.

Your calls to action suck

If conversion is the goal of your content marketing, then you need to create a compelling call-to-action. Most blog posts, however, do not have a call-to-action. Even if your messaging is consistent and you’ve hit the right audience, visitors won’t advance further into their buyer’s journey without a clear call-to-action.

Telling your readers where to click, what they can get in exchange of their email address and how to take advantage of your offer can noticeably increase your conversion rates.

You think SEO is not important

There are lots of great content out there. But the problem is that these contents do not reach their desired audience. Why? It’s because they have taken SEO for granted.

SEO is a vital part of content marketing. This will help your content rank in search engines; thus, bringing it closer to your intended users. All you need is a little bit of keyword search and a few minutes to put proper title tags, meta descriptions, tags etc.

/by
, ,

Tips for Creating an Effective Facebook Ad

facebookadsThere are 890 million people signing in on Facebook every single day. Given that number, it is safe to assume that your potential customers are a part of this massive community.

Facebook ads have enormous potential to drive traffic and grow your business. But how do you get people to click on your ad and get them to buy your products? Here are a few tips.

Define your goals

You first need to define your goals before you spend a single cent on Facebook ad. What are you hoping to accomplish? Do you want more fan engagement? More Facebook likes? More website visits? More sales? The type of ad you should use depends on what you want to achieve.

Choose images that stand out

If you’re planning to promote a post, be sure to use powerful images. Remember, your ad photo is the first thing people are going to see. These photos can make your ad be more eye-catching.

According to studies, ads that use pictures of people do really well. Take a look at the ads, and you’ll notice that most of them use pictures of people. Why? It’s because people likes people. If you want to promote your products, you might want to use a photo of a person using your product.

Include a call to action

An ad with high quality content and powerful photos is great, but without a call-to-action, people might not understand what’s in it for them or don’t not know what to do next. As a result, your ad fails. Adding a call-to-action encourages people to take your desired action. Plus, they won’t waste time figuring out what to do next.

Ad placement

When it comes to where your Facebook ads will appear, you have 3 options: right column, mobile and news feed. Instead of going for all news feed ads or just choosing right column ads, why not test the different placement ads? This allows you to determine which one performs better.

/by
, ,

Tips to Improve Your Email Open Rates

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAYou’ve put a lot of work into those emails. You came up with some exciting content and even added a compelling call-to-action. You also ran some email tests in the hopes of getting better results. In spite of all those efforts, your open rates are still not improving.

What can you do to bring that up and get people to actually read your emails? Here are some tips to make sure your emails get delivered, opened and read.

Start with a good subject line

If there is one opportunity to convince recipients to read the email, it is the subject line. After all, it is the first thing they see on any email. Your subject line must be clear and concise. It should tell readers what to expect from the email.

Provide quality content

Offer something of value in every email you send. Subscribers will be eager to read your emails if they know that there is something valuable on the other side of the subject line.

Send your emails at the right time

Timing is everything in marketing. If you send emails too early in the morning or too late at night, they can get lost in the shuffle of other emails. If you send it too late in the afternoon, they may decide to put off reading until the morning since they might be too busy accomplishing some tasks before going home. The best time to send emails is during lunch or after work, when you know they’re reading.

Be consistent

Send too frequently and you may end up losing subscribers. Send too infrequently and you may cause your readers to stop interacting with your email. Send your emails at a consistent frequency to build your email reputation. A good rule of thumb is to send no less than 1 email a month and no more than 1 email a week.

Make it personal

Studies show that subject lines that contain the first name of the subscriber boosts open rate every time. This is a subtle trust builder and an instant attention grabber. Make sure you personalize subject lines with first names.

/by
, ,

How LinkedIn Can Help Your Business

Since LinkedIn went public in 2011, the social media platform has grown to be the center for making connections, developing careers, and many other business related activities. With 2 million new users joining every second, and with 107 million users in the US alone, LinkedIn is continuing to skyrocket in the world of social media. Why should you your start making LinkedIn a priority for your business? It helps to attract new clients and accelerate market opportunities, while also allowing you to create and become a part of online communities and groups, helping your business to generate rewarding leads. LinkedIn has become a power tool for helping to strengthen millions of businesses around the world. Here are some tips on how to use LinkedIn to your business’ advantage:

Using Sponsored Updates:linkedin

Sponsored updates help raise awareness about your brand, build relationships, and drive leads. One of the greatest things about using sponsored updates is that it allows you distribute your content to the right audience, including those outside of your following. Sponsored Updates allow you to target your audience by geography, specific companies, industries, company size, job title, and more. You are also able to determine how effective your updates are with the help of the detailed analytics provided by LinkedIn. But, if not carefully planned, investing in sponsored updates could cost your business instead of benefiting it. To ensure that you’re getting the most out of this investment, make sure you are sponsoring posts that will be perceived as valuable to your target market. Focus your energy towards careful planning and great content, and this tool will help your business gain credibility and become more established in its particular industry.

Optimize Your Personal Profile:

When putting your business out there on LinkedIn, it’s important to make sure you are also building your personal profile. Having an equal focus on your personal profile and your business profile will help put a face to your business, help you gain credibility, and grow your relationships with your consumers. By optimizing your personal profile with related keywords and rich media content such as videos and presentations, this will help your business generate more leads. Make sure your personal profile is professional and not a “business logo”. Steer your focus towards grabbing the attention of your “perfect” audience. Also, remember to make sure your LinkedIn profile links back to your business website and blog.

Develop Relationships:

One of the greatest parts about social media for your business is being able to strengthen your relationships with your consumer. LinkedIn is especially great for this because it allows you to precisely choose who you want to connect with. Instead of worrying about the quantity of your connections, it’s important to focus on the quality of the relationships with your connections. Decide which of your contacts you’d like to know better and start reaching out to them periodically from your personal profile and business page. Share information, ask them questions and learn more about them. The bond with your customer is one of the most crucial aspects of growing your business. When you continuously reach out to your audience on LinkedIn and strengthen your bond over time, you’ll eventually become a go-to source if your customer needs help or has a question.

/by