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Tips for Creating Awesome Visual Content for Social Media

In today’s mobile-driven world, producing content on a regular basis is a must in order to maintain a strong online presence. But with so many creative minds joining the social media sphere and great blogs emerging on almost a daily basis, capturing the attention of your target audience has become extremely difficult.

How do you cut through the noise and stand out in the online world? Visual content can help. Don’t believe us? Studies show that content with relevant images get 94% more views, likes and comments as compared to those without.

Here are some tips for creating awesome visual content for social media.

Customize stock photos

Stock photos have been tremendously helpful for those who don’t have a sizeable design budget and those who need them fast. But in order to stay with your brand and visual identity guidelines, it is important that you customize these photos. Plus, you wouldn’t want your audience to see the exact same photo in other sites, right? Tweak and customize stock photos to make them your own.

Use online editing tools

Creating visual content can be challenging. The good news is that you don’t have to be an expert in photo editing to create great images. There are several online editing tools like Canva, Picmonkey and RelayThat that can help you create stunning visual content that looks like it came from a professional graphic designer.

Add a call-to-action

Ideally, great visual content should eye-catching and entice people to take action. Now that you have successfully captured people’s attention, let them know what you want them to do. Do you want them to share, like or comment on your post? Or do you want them to click through your content? You can either add a call-to-action on the image, in the description or both.

Be consistent

Colors can help make your visual content pop. It can help you capture the attention of your target audience and provide amazing results. But it is also important to stay consistent with the type of visual element you use like colors.

Choose 2 to 4 colors and stick to them when creating visual content. Use it in your logo, texts, images etc. Remember, having a consistent color palette is a must.

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4 Social Media Habits to Avoid

social-media-habits-to-avoidSocial media has been an integral part of our lives. Since most people check on their social media accounts several times a day, having a stellar social presence is essential for your business’ growth. Most business owners, however, tend to develop some bad habits that prevent them from growing their audience.

Start by determining your bad habits and try to correct them before they cause any more harm. Here are 4 social media habits you need to stop doing right now.

Too much sales pitch content

Most people follow your brand because they find your content informative, valuable or entertaining. Either way, these people are interested in the content you share. Although we understand that you are running a business and you are looking to increase your sales, it’s definitely not a good idea to bombard your followers with advertisements. If you do so, you are likely to lose your followers.

For your brand to succeed on social media, you need to develop a good relationship with your fans and followers. Focus on engagement, rather than selling.

Posting too much

Being active on social media can help you build a strong online presence. You need to post consistently to keep your followers engaged and to stay relevant, but that doesn’t mean that you should post about something every hour. If you do so, people are likely to unfollow you because of the torture you put them through.

Post at least once a day and focus on content that your fans and followers are interested in. Eventually, you’ll be making friends and earning followers fast.

Not determining your brand

In order to build an online presence, you first need to define your business’ personality. Ask yourself how you want people to envision you. Also, define a consistent brand voice to drive consistency in your content creation efforts. Even if people view your content on different channels, you want to make sure that they could identify the content as coming from your brand.

Abusing the hashtag

Hashtags are a great way of categorizing content, providing context or curating information. Sure, hashtags can be powerful when used correctly. They generate attention and help you gain more followers, but too many hashtags in a single post can be distracting. Plus, it takes away from the message you’ve posted. Stop hashtag abuse!

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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.

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3 Ways to Turn Prospects into Paying Customers

paying-cutomersIn 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.

 

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How to Get People to Promote Your Business

How to Get People to Promote Your Brand

Start-ups and small businesses are always looking for ways to get maximum exposure for their business with limited budget. Value is the most important word when allocating budget for your marketing campaign. But what if you could find people who are willing to write about your products and promote them to their friends for free? Yes, it’s possible.

Getting your customers to promote your business will likely spur some level of success. Here are some tips on how to get people to promote your business.

Find loyal customers

Keep an eye out on people with a history of buying from you. Now, you want to find people who are committed to your brand and loyal to you in more ways than one, and make sure you remember their names. These people are more likely to help you spread the word out about your business than those who made a single purchase.

You won’t be able to turn every single customer into an advocate, so you need to find those people who believe in your brand. Not all people endorse products for money. Some people do it because they like the product or they believe in the company.

Offer awesome customer service

If you want to get people talking about your business, then you need to go above and beyond their expectations. Meeting their expectations is good as well, but chances are, they won’t be singing your praises either.

Build a relationship

When it comes to building advocates, you should aim for ongoing engagement. You cannot just push people to do you what you want if they don’t trust you, so focus on the relationship first. Spend more time engaging them. Reach out and always respond to your customers. The closer they feel to you, the happier they’ll be to tell others how amazing your products and services are.

Referral program

Studies show that 83% of customers are willing to refer a product or service to their family and friends, but only 29% actually do. It’s because most businesses do not ask them to.

Referrals are the best form of advertising. In fact, they are incredibly well equipped to market and sell your products and services. All you need to do is ask. Don’t forget to say thank you every time a successful referral is completed.

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Tips to Get More Email Subscribers

emailmarketing While everyone is focusing on building a strong social media presence, others tend to forget about the importance of email.

Your email list plays a big role in your marketing campaign. It can help you build relationships with your target audience, generate buzz about your business and attract new customers. That said, it makes sense to continuously grow your email contacts.

Interested to grow your email list and grow your subscribers? Then you came to the right place. In this blog post, we’ll be sharing with you some effective strategies on how to get more email subscribers. Follow the tips below to get your first 1,000 subscribers.

Place a subscription box on every page of your website

Most website owners think that people would first access the home page before navigating through the site. But that’s not always the case. They may check your products, scroll through the “about us” section or any other page on your site. In order to get people to subscribe to your newsletters, make sure your sign up box is a prominent feature of your website. The more visible it is, the more subscribers you’ll get.

Content is king

You won’t have a hard time getting people to sign up for email updates if you have great content on your site. As a marketer, it is your responsibility to constantly supply your readers with fresh, relevant and informative content.

Offer an incentive

People love receiving free stuff. If you can give them something like a free trial of one of your products, a free ebook with useful information or access to an exclusive video, you’ll make an impact to your target audience. When done correctly, it can help you build a relationship with your audience and grow your email list.

Your offer should be interesting enough to your ideal customers. Find out more about your target audience and know what’s keeping them up until 3:00 am.

Run a contest

Social media contests are one of the most effective ways to get email addresses from folks who want to hear from you. You are free to hold whatever contest and on any social media channel you want. But since majority of the adult population has a Facebook account, you might want to start there. Also, ask people to enter their email address in order to participate.

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Tips to Find Your Target Audience on Social Media

Content is king, they say. But even if you create high quality content, it won’t have an impact unless it is pitched to an appropriate audience. With millions of people on social media, it’s not always easy to find and reach your target audience. How can you break through the walls, cut through the noise and use your content to establish a connection with your audience?

Content is king, they say. But even if you create high quality content, it won’t have an impact unless it is pitched to an appropriate audience. With millions of people on social media, it’s not always easy to find and reach your target audience. How can you break through the walls, cut through the noise and use your content to establish a connection with your audience?

In order to achieve success with your social media marketing campaigns, you need to know who your target audience is and where they are.

Start with the demographics

Demographics are the best place to start when identifying your target audience. Are your typical customers young or old? Are they male or female? What type of job does your target market have? Is your product sold in certain areas of the country?

Answer these questions and use these information to give you a deep and clear understanding of who makes up your target market.

Know where your customers spend their time

With the increasing number of social channels, it would be waste of time and effort to build a presence on each one of them. The best thing you can do is to determine where your audience spends most of their time and focus on that social channel. Use the information you have gathered above to help you select the right networks to reach them.

Linkedin is popular among college graduates. Users of this site are between the ages of 30 to 64. Instagram and Pinterest remain popular among female uses, particularly between the ages 18 to 29. Facebook continues to be the biggest social media site. In fact, 58% of the entire adult population are Facebook users. When in doubt, use Facebook.

Identify industry influencers

According to studies, 92% percent of people trust the recommendations of the people they know – family, friend and influencers. No matter how many times you share your content, people won’t pay attention. Well, that’s until someone they trust asks them to actually read it.

Industry influencers have good online reputation and are often considered as experts. People listen to them and even ask them for advice.  Seek out influencers and engage with them. Once you’ve build a relationship with them, you’ll be able to gain more followers.
Tips to find your target market on social media: Content is king, they say. But even if you create high quality content, it won’t have an impact unless it is pitched to an appropriate audience. With millions of people on social media, it’s not always easy to find and reach your target audience. How can you break through the walls, cut through the noise and use your content to establish a connection with your audience? In order to achieve success with your social media marketing campaigns, you need to know who your target audience is and where they are.

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Reasons Why High Quality Content Still Matters

content creationContent is the new method of advertising. Over the years, business owners and marketers have realized the importance of utilizing content in their marketing strategy. Because of this, most companies have made a commitment to push content out there to keep feeding the masses with information. Audiences today, however, have wised up. That said, the importance of quality content cannot be stressed enough.

Forget about the dry press release and the hard sell. Rather, provide your audience with good content that they can to share with others.

Here are 3 reasons why high quality content still matters

Helps improve your ranking on search engines

Every user is searching for content in some form or another. Some businesses, however, think that the more content they have, the better their chances are of appearing in Google or other search engines. What they fail to realize is that quality is one of the key ingredients of a successful content marketing.

Google’s primary goal is to provide users the best results possible. Search engines are getting better at sniffing out bad content. Google, for instance, constantly update their algorithms to ensure that top-ranking sites contain high quality and relevant information. Just having something on your site is not necessarily good.

First impressions matter

In this digital age, people first visit your website and read through your content to decide whether you’re a credible business. It is often the first interaction a prospective customer has with your brand. Hence, it is important to take time to make your website as appealing as possible.

If your site is full of bad writing and grammatical errors, users are likely to migrate away from your site. Remember, contents that aren’t well written convey incompetence and laziness. These are two things you certainly don’t want associated with your business.

Attention is getting harder to grab

With professional services firms now churning out more content than ever, there is far more marketplace noise to cut through in order to capture the attention of your target audience. Companies that provide high quality content are those that are succeeding in reaching their audiences and converting their visitors into paying customers.

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Tips to Get More Online Customer Reviews

BIMSReviewsWith today’s savvy buyers, you know how important online reviews are to your business. People would share their experiences and what they have to say about your company. Given that majority of the adult population spend most of their time online and would read reviews before buying stuff, these reviews, whether they are positive or negative, can have a big impact on your business.

Customer feedbacks do not only affect buyer’s decision, it can also help give you an insight as to what customers think of your business; thus, allowing you to make certain changes that would make your products, services and business better. Remember, it’s your customers that pay you, so make sure you listen.

Here are a few simple ways on how to get customers to review your business online.

Just ask

After you’ve delivered a product or a service, try to ask your customers for feedback. It does not necessarily have to be a good review, just an honest review. Don’t be pushy. Rather, let the customer know that you are very much interested to know whether or not they were satisfied of the transaction and that you value their opinion.

Offer incentives

Sometimes, the best way to encourage customers to create reviews is to give them something in return. It doesn’t have to be expensive. If you own a restaurant, you can offer a free dessert on their next visit. You can also offer a free gift or a free trial version to those who will send in a review. The better the incentives are, the more reviews you are likely to receive.

Increase customer satisfaction

Happy customers will be very much willing to share their experience with the masses through the web and social media. This can help scale positive world of mouth and attract potential customers in the process.

Improve your services and people will start talking about your business. Remember, it would be impossible for you to get good reviews unless you have happy customers to write them.

Customer survey

Customer surveys are a great way to get feedbacks. This allows you to get customers to answer specific questions and find out what they really think about your services.

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Tips for Writing a Killer Call-to-Action

bimspicIt’s not easy to get people to visit your site. Once you’ve hooked your audience, you want them to stay a little longer in your site and do something. That something could be sharing your content, providing information, downloading something, adding products to their shopping cart or purchase your products. Unfortunately, most people will not know what to do unless you give them clear instructions.

This week, we’ll be sharing with you some tips on how to create a clear and effective call-to-action. Here are a few.

Offer a free trial or download

Sometimes, you may have to sweeten the deal to encourage people to complete a call-to-action. One of the best ways to capture the attention of people is to offer them something of value, and give it to them for free. Offer a free e-book or a free trial. People will thank you for it.

Size matters

Size does play a huge part in getting your call-to-action button noticed. Make sure it’s big enough that online users won’t miss them, but not too big that it looks like a monstrosity. Remember, your call-to-action needs to be sized sensibly. You should also consider the position of your call-to-action on the page.

Be direct

Keep your call-to-action short and simple to ensure that majority of visitors will click-through on the action you ask them to. If you want people to leave their email address, then tell it to them straight. Make sure people will understand it at just a glance. Don’t get all whimsical and critic.

Add a sense of urgency

If you have reduced the price of your products, let visitors know that the offer is only good for a limited time. If they do not purchase within the specified period of time, then it will result in a missed opportunity. Add a sense of urgency and include words such as today, immediately or now.

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