They are an excellent way to broaden a brand’s audience, drawing in new viewers who prefer to access information whenever and however they choose. This offers a customized experience that boosts engagement. People receive important points and insights at their convenience and on any device they prefer.

Until now, the two main drawbacks of podcasts were: A) the time it took to produce them and B) the effort needed to turn them into other usable formats. Now, ArticleX is addressing both of these problems at the same time. In the short run, it’s significantly boosting the return on investment for the average podcast. It’s also paving the way for new possibilities in podcasting with the help of AI.

ArticleX: Invaluable For Content Creation, Consumption, and Everything In Between

ArticleX is an AI podcasting tool that uses artificial intelligence to turn your slick, professionally produced podcasts into well-written, SEO-optimized blog posts. The goal is to eliminate the need for content creators to manually transcribe and summarize long audio content, thus freeing up as much of their valuable time as possible to focus on more important matters.

One of the factors that makes ArticleX more than just another AI podcast summarizer is its inherent versatility. Other existing technologies have long created written transcripts of the entire conversation, which can be challenging to follow, especially when it comes to lengthy podcasts. Compiling a whole episode into an easy-to-digest written article allows readers to glean the necessary information without wading through the inevitable extra vocal cues or rabbit-trail sidebars. This can be helpful, especially when it comes to supporting people who may have accessibility needs. Just because someone is hearing impaired doesn't mean they won't want to learn more about the important topics being covered in your podcast. Now, they can do it in an easy-to-digest format. ArticleX can accomplish this regardless of whether you're talking about an audio or video podcast and with any number of speakers that may have been present.

Instant SEO Thanks to Artificial Intelligence

But ArticleX really shines in its ability to turn those podcast episodes into fully formed, comprehensive, SEO-driven articles. Using OpenAI's most powerful language model, ArticleX can transform content from audio or video to the written word.

It does this all while keeping your brand's unique voice in mind. It can include all relevant keywords and other techniques used by your search engine optimization strategy. It can even include multimedia elements like audio and video to supplement the text, creating a richer and more fulfilling experience.

Bring All Platforms Together for the First Time

What makes ArticleX such a compelling value, however, is a few core factors. Maybe the most important is its cross-platform functionality. It's just as easy to generate SEO articles from content you've posted on Apple Podcasts as it is from Spotify Podcasts or Instagram, YouTube, and any other source you might be working with.

You can even create smart automation to streamline the content creation process further. Once properly configured, you don't have to "tell" ArticleX to do anything. If you post something on Instagram, it can automatically convert it based on your pre-defined settings. You can even automate content into your content management system, such as WordPress, HubSpot, or other popular options.

Historically, even if you used an AI podcast summarizer to turn your podcast episode into an "article," you'd still have to spend significant time editing it. In addition to looking for redundancies or areas where the transcription wasn't entirely accurate, you'd always need to put in additional effort to ensure that the finished product matched your brand's voice.

Even if both the podcast episode and the article convey the same information, you always want to ensure they're doing it the same way. Every piece of collateral you put into the world must feel like it's coming from the same "voice," or you risk creating a confusing (and off-putting) brand identity.

ArticleX handles this flawlessly by allowing you to customize prompting to output content in your brand tone and writing style, regardless of its uniqueness. You can even do this in English, Spanish, French, and more.

A Paradigm Shift Has Arrived

Ultimately, an AI podcasting tool like ArticleX truly showcases what is currently possible in using artificial intelligence to enhance the podcast realm and what will be possible in the future. Whether you're talking about podcasting for pleasure or as a core part of your brand's inbound marketing campaign, the overall goal remains the same.

You want to create highly engaging, relevant, accessible content that resonates with people. You want to get the right message in front of the right person at the right time in a way they can't help but respond to. You don't just want to gain someone's attention - you want to keep it for as long as possible.

By ushering in a new era of intelligent, personalized audio experiences, ArticleX has proven capable of accomplishing all this and more. Just as the podcast format itself has evolved enormously over the last two decades, it will continue to do so moving forward. From that perspective, a tool like ArticleX is poised to become the rock-solid foundation upon which that future is built.

The post ArticleX Is The Future of Podcasting AI appeared first on Business2Community.

An effective marketing strategy is essential for your company's marketing success, influencing everything from your brochure's messaging to the user experience on your website. Sadly, many small and medium-sized businesses approach marketing projects reactively, focusing on immediate needs rather than planning ahead and addressing projects as they arise. As we enter a new year, it's beneficial to consider practical ways to enhance your marketing strategy. Think of it as a new year’s resolution – to make your marketing in 2022 the best it has ever been!

Kicking off 2022, B2B marketers must focus their marketing strategy on what they’re trying to accomplish, who they’re trying to reach, when they’re to reach their audience and how they will achieve their desired results. Follow these four tips to help ensure your marketing strategy is set up for success across all your marketing efforts in the new year.

Define or Reevaluate Your Buyer Personas and Target Audience

Your business exists because there was a void in customer needs that wasn’t being met by other solutions in the market. You know your product or service better than anyone – but do you know your ideal customer better than anyone? Taking time to evaluate who is buying your product or service, who is most successful in using it, and what their overall profile looks like can help in understanding what marketing tactics to implement next.

Resolution for 2022: Reevaluate current buyer persona and target audience characteristics and add or change any that may have emerged over the past year or you expect to be important moving forward.

Set Goals and Establish a Plan to Reach Maximum ROI

One of the greatest benefits of marketing in the digital age is the various options available. With digital marketing becoming marketing, tactics like social media, email campaigns, online ads, webinars and events are all instrumental components of a successful marketing strategy in 2022. But knowing your capability to execute these endeavors is equally important. Setting marketing goals that are realistic and fit into the overall company goals is a good place to start. Consider things like resources, budget, time, analysis and team members involved when setting goals as these are all critical elements when setting achievable goals. A clear marketing timeline with key milestones, deadlines and associated tasks helps supplement your marketing strategy.

Failure to set up goals can cause a loss of focus in your marketing efforts and leave marketing teams feeling unorganized. To reach maximum ROI, marketing teams need to be aligned with the marketing strategy and collaborate and communicate effectively to reach set goals.

Resolution for 2022: Set goals that are in line with achieving the maximum amount of ROI. This is critical to a successful marketing strategy.

Kick-Off Your Marketing Plan

Once you’ve created a marketing plan with clear dates and milestones, it’s time to get started on the activities included. Holding a kickoff meeting with stakeholders can get everyone engaged and aligned on what’s upcoming, who is involved and what the overall marketing strategy looks like. Schedule weekly standing meetings with your team to check in on the progress of ongoing marketing campaigns to ensure the activities being worked on and completed are aligned with your marketing plan.

Resolution for 2022: Align everyone involved in the marketing plan before starting on activities. This ensures tasks are delegated and there is a clear understanding of the marketing strategy.

Analyze the Successes and Failures of Marketing Activities

Analyzing the data and feedback from marketing activities helps determine what is working and what isn’t. If you’re sending email campaigns and no one is opening them, but have attended an event that yielded more qualified leads than you ever dreamed of, this uncovers which tactic is working better compared to the other.

Make sure you have the appropriate reporting systems in place to track and monitor the results of your various marketing campaigns and use the data you collect to make data-driven recommendations and improvements for your campaigns.

Resolution for 2022: Evaluate marketing reporting processes to ensure data collected is valuable and presented in an easy-to-understand manner.

Marketing in 2022

Establishing a marketing strategy and plan for the year can seem like a challenging task. But, by following these four tips, you can ensure marketing success for your business while maximizing your efforts and achieving the highest ROI. And, as the year unfolds with new obstacles and unexpected bumps in the road, remember to be flexible and adapt. Marketing strategies are not set in stone and marketing in 2022 will be something completely new!

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• Five Tips to Make Your Business Boom That You Can’t Afford to Ignore
• Best SMS Marketing Software: 10 SMS Marketing Platforms for [cur_year]
• Best Email Marketing Software – 10 Best Email Marketing Services for your Business

The post 4 Tips to Level Up Your Marketing Strategy in 2022 appeared first on Business2Community.

Although online marketplaces facilitate a vast centralized supply and demand platform, there is still a need to improve cooperation and functionality among parties. Each e-commerce marketplace has its own unique dynamics and a useful and effective analytics regime can mean the difference between success and failure

Below I’ve curated everything you need to know about measuring the performance of online marketplaces.

Financial Metrics

There are two primary financial metrics to measure when analyzing marketplaces: sales and ad spend. Measuring these elements can help a marketplace chart a feasible growth course.

Sales metrics, put simply, represent the multiplication of the sales price by the number of units sold on the platform. Ad spend, on the other hand, refers to budget spent on either digital and non-digital ads. For marketplaces, the ad spend metric is always digital. For a more robust insight into the cost, however, marketing teams may also consider non-digital ad spending.

It’s never necessary to evaluate sales and ad spend daily, monthly reports will do. As indicators for your company’s path, however, you can adjust them as often as you like, daily or even hourly (if you so choose), in order to find the sweet spot.

Marketing Metrics

Marketing metrics are designed to help brands in the marketplace understand the landscape and make actionable plans for growth. Here are marketing metrics every business needs to prioritize.

Return on Advertising Spend (ROAS)

This metric is more of a subset of return on investment (ROI). ROI is different from ROAS because the ‘investment’ in this context most likely involves budgets beyond just advertising, including elements like taxes and shipping costs. ROAS is specific to ad spend alone.

It’s an important metric because it allows your company to analyze the results generated from your investment in ads. For ROAS to be a useful measure usually depends on the brand’s target market, ad type, and products.

Although the ROAS concept itself isn’t actionable, it’s effective in giving context to the overall marketing efficiency of your brand.

Cost Per Thousand (CPM)

The CPM metric amounts to an analysis of what you’re paying for your digital impressions. Grouped together in thousands, you can gain a general insight into whether a brand awareness campaign is making headway.

Although some say CPM is basically inaccurate as a metric, it depends on what CRM you use and your campaign. Above all, you’ll want to keep your costs per thousand impressions as low as possible.

Cost Per Click (CPC)

This metric refers to a form of advertisement where you only pay for the clicks. This is the best ad campaign to opt for if your business is working with a specific budget. Here, you’re going beyond just awareness—you are paying for attention.

Consequently, CPC is an expensive marketing strategy but promises a better engagement ratio. The better the engagement, the higher the chance of having a better ROI. However, to make the CPC technique more effective, ensure that you carry out daily analysis and adjustments.

Cost Per Acquisition (CPA)

This metric reflects your conversions and is the best strategy if you have a minimal budget. It prevents you from spending money on efforts that don’t directly influence growth. As a result, campaigns based on this model have a higher chance of improving ROAS.

Click Through Rate (CTR)

You get the CTR value by dividing the number of clicks by the impressions. Marketplaces use this metric to quantify search intent. When the CTR is high, it indicates that the customer finds the ads relevant to the marketplace and, hence, efficiency increases.

The effectiveness of a CTR depends on several values. If any of these factors aren’t up to par, you must make a change.

Conversion Rate (CVR)

This is the metric to focus on to know just how valuable people find a product or ad. A high conversion rate means the product serves the right people at the right time and place—basically that you’ve hit your target audience. To improve the CVR, focus on enhancing CTAs, prices, audience, and ad imagery and quality.

Search Impression Share (SIS)

This is the actual impressions count divided by the potential impression count. It may sound a little vague, but all you need to know is that the higher the impression share, the higher your chance to scale above your competition.

You shouldn’t need a restricted budget to have a better search impression share. To improve the SIS, focus on optimizing CVR, CTR, targeting, and bids.

From Data to Insight to Action

To maximize the benefit from data marketplaces, you can follow these steps.

1. Strategize!

You can’t conduct marketplace analysis blind. First, you must have a clear understanding of goals and audience and you must have a strategy that applies clarity, consistency and alignment.

Above all, knowing your target will inform the strategy you employ. This requires audience analysis and a smart marketing team with a good CRM.

2. Centralize Marketplaces

Ensure you manage your marketplaces from a central dashboard. Doing this will save time and resources. You’ll get a better overview of platforms you sell as a (data) vendor, and having centralized marketplace analytics is vital to success.

3. Analyze and React

It’s vital to find ways to improve your systems continually. Analyze areas where you can improve efficiency. Know your goals, study the realities, and make decisions that bring your closer to your target.

4. Refine Strategy

Marketplace analytics exists to help you improve your strategy, so always refine your approach until you see steady growth. And then—keep refining! Analyzing your data helps you identify underperforming areas and effect changed, but that doesn’t mean one day you will attain perfection. Your brand and team have to find a structure that ensures the facilitation of data-driven decision-making.

The Takeaway

Today, it’s critical to get a measurement and analytics foundation setup correctly so that you get the most out of an online marketplace. Hopefully these basic example metrics shared here can help guide you toward success.

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The post What Are Marketplace Analytics? appeared first on Business2Community.

According to the Qualitative Research Consultants Association, qualitative research helps identify customer needs, clarify positioning and messaging, address market-fit, and gain perspective on how a product, brand, or solution fits into a customer’s lifestyle. It employs methods such as interviews, focus groups, observation, open-ended surveys, and recordings (audio and video) to gain insights into people’s opinions and experiences.

You can use this investigative approach to better understand why people feel, think, or respond in a particular way in a particular situation. Because it captures the voice of the participant it provides what is referred to as the color behind quantitative data. For example, solid quantitative data guides product development. Qualitative data from customers add the emotional context to the story for why customers feel your product is better than the competitors. Compelling and relevant stories weave in this type of information. Stories help people make decisions.

How Answering the “Why” Builds Customer Connections and Fosters Growth

Powerful stories can help your business gain traction, overcome competitors, expand your presence in the market, accelerate product adoption, and retain customers, employees, and partners. A well-developed story for your company communicates your organization’s purpose and articulates your value proposition and your competitive advantage. It serves as an umbrella for your company’s positioning, brand, messaging, and content.

If you ever took a writing or journalism course, you’ve heard of the 5 W’s: Who, What, When, Where, and Why. These questions form the structure for every story. Quantitative data can tell us who, what, when, and where. It can answer the question of what people want.

To grow, you need a story that enables you to connect. So, start with why:

• Why your company exists
• Why something is important to an existing or prospective customer, employee, or partner
• Why someone cares about or needs a solution to achieve what they want.

The question “Why?” can rarely be answered with quantitative data. Answering the “Why” takes qualitative data.

Use Qualitative Results to Add Color and Depth to Quantitative Data

Qualitative research clarifies quantitative findings. To use qualitative research to build out the story, you will want to create a discussion guide. Think of a discussion guide as a structured script without creating a bias that will slant the story. Craft your discussion guide to help clarify, illuminate, and expand on learnings from the quantitative data. For example, you may have quantitative data around a customer problem, perhaps even its frequency and magnitude.

The value of conducting a qualitative study is in being able to understand how customers experience the problem, how it makes them feel, how the problem impacts their life, what it might feel like if they could solve it, and how they would feel about someone (a company) who can help them solve it. This becomes the foundation for your discussion guide because this information supports creating the story.

The results of the qualitative research give dimension to your quantitative data. What makes the story relevant and compelling is drawn from qualitative research. The words used by the participants add color and depth to numerical data.

There are many texts that can walk you through the ins and outs of qualitative research. One you may want to check out is Robert E. Stake’s book, Qualitative Research: Studying How Things Work. As you consider conducting this kind of research, keep in mind that the key to success, especially for a qualitative study, depends on asking the right questions in the right format to the right people.

In-depth interviews and focus groups (or a hybrid of these) support the kind of probing that is essential to story building. In both, the questions are typically captured in a tool known as the discussion guide. Its purpose is to help with the flow of conversation.

6 Best Practices for Creating a Discussion Guide

There is a science and expertise to creating discussion guides. Regardless of why you are conducting the qualitative study, best practices include (but are not limited to):

1. Avoiding jumping into any questions. Introduce the role of the research (external, internal) and explain the purpose of, and process for, the discussion to participants.
2. Setting the tone at the beginning. Aim to establish rapport.
3. Starting with broad questions. Asking a participant to describe a typical scenario relevant to the topic can be a great opening question.
4. Using the funnel approach so as the conversation progresses, you can delve into more detailed and specific questions. A good qualitative researcher thinks like an investigative reporter who is skilled at asking follow-up questions as needed.
5. Allowing time for participants to expand on their answers and to ask questions .
6. Thanking participants and inform them of any next steps

Your business exists to create and keep customers. To grow the value of your customers you need to touch your customers’ lives. The more you can construct a narrative that resonates, the better customers, employees, and other key stakeholders can connect with, and relate to your message. Qualitative research provides the means to go beyond facts and weave in the voice of these key stakeholders. In today’s data-to-insights environment, remember to collect and integrate qualitative data into your story to create context, humanize your business, and fuel your growth.

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The post How Does Qualitative Research Support Captivating Story Creation? appeared first on Business2Community.

Hi, welcome back to another edition of common mistakes first-time entrepreneurs make in their marketing. Trust me, I’ve made them as well. In today’s blog, I will discuss digital marketing KPIs, or the metrics to monitor to determine if your marketing efforts are effective.

The important digital marketing KPIs

But before I tell you which metrics to track, I'm going to talk about which metrics NOT to track. These are called vanity metrics. Simply put, vanity metrics are any metrics that the public can see. Because of that reason, we focus on improving those metrics rather than the ones that really matter for our business.

Some examples of vanity metrics could be followers on any of your social media platform, likes and comments on your posts and reviews / ratings. Not that these metrics are not important - they definitely are because these metrics actually act as social proof. When somebody comes to your social media profile or to your website and sees the number of people who are recommending you or who are saying good things about you, of course they'll want to do business with you. But as a business, this is not what your focus should be. These metrics are actually an outcome of what you are doing in your marketing. If you market your business well, and if you provide a great service or a great product to your customers, then you'll automatically get these great reviews.

As I said, for marketing to be successful, you really have to focus on the correct metrics, and these metrics are defined by your objective.

Let's say, the objective of your campaign is ‘brand awareness’. Then the first metric that you should be measuring for that campaign is the reach, which is how many people have seen your campaign. Bear in mind that your campaign can be digital or it can be print. What is important is how many people have seen that campaign because that's what you want to achieve. You want to increase your brand awareness. Another way to measure your brand awareness is by looking at the views. The views could be of a webpage, or could be of the social media post. If your marketing campaign for brand awareness is actually an offline campaign - maybe you've put up a stall in an exhibition - then the number of visits to your stall would be a brand awareness metric.

The next objective, which requires a little bit more engagement from your customer, is the ‘interest objective’. This is where you want your customers to start engaging with you personally. Any marketing campaign that focuses on interest should be measured for those metrics. Common metrics for interest are leads, signups, subscribes, downloads, and so on. Anything that requires a potential customer to take an action and give you their details, counts as an interest objective.

The third important objective is ‘conversion'. This is where you want your customers to actually do business with you. Of course, if you're selling a product, then sales is a conversion objective, or any person that converts into a client will be counted in the conversion metric.

Breaking down the KPIs

The common mistakes that entrepreneurs make here are looking at vanity metrics (as I mentioned before) and not looking at your entire funnel.

All of these objectives that I spoke about are actually your macro objectives. These are your larger objectives that you want your business to achieve. But each of these objectives is defined by smaller actions that a customer would take to achieve that objective. So when you are looking at your macro objective, also make sure that you're looking at the smaller metrics. These smaller metrics will help you identify the weak link in your marketing campaign and then you can improve it.

Let me explain with an example. For an e-commerce site, if you are looking at conversion metrics, then you're obviously counting the number of sales on that side. But what happens if you are not getting any sales? How do you optimize the marketing campaign so that it results in sales? This is where your smaller metrics come in. One way to break this down into smaller metrics is to look at how many people came to your website. Obviously, if not enough people are coming to your website, then you won't have enough to convert. You can check out my previous ,blog to know how to benchmark the conversions for any campaign.

• To get X number of sales, you would need to back calculate and say how many people you need to bring to your website. So the budget becomes an opportunity for improvement.
• The second thing you could look at is how many people came to your website, but then left the website after looking at only one page. Looking at this data will tell you which pages perform poorly. Maybe there are certain pages that people visit and then they leave because they don't understand what you're trying to get them to do. Maybe there are some pages that perform very well and people go to the next page and maybe head towards a sale from that page onward. You can look at your data and decide which of the pages that are better performing. And if you know that you can get the better performing pages in front of the people who are coming to your site.
• The third one you can look at is how many people added a product to their cart, but left. If you look at this data, maybe you're able to identify a pattern. Perhaps people are adding one product more than the others and they are abandoning the cart after adding that product. You have to do some research to find out why that is happening or you may find that visitors from a particular source. It could be from a Facebook ad, where they come and add a product to their card, but they don't check out. This could signal that people from your Facebook ads are not really ready to buy or they are not the right audience.

So you can really break down your bigger metrics into smaller metrics. As I showed from this example, there are a lot of opportunities for you to improve your large metric by focusing on the smaller metrics that contribute towards it.

Do let me know if this blog helped you to look at your objectives and metrics much more clearly than before. And I'll be back next week with another marketing mistake that I made.

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The post Marketing Mistake 6: Not Knowing the Important Digital Marketing KPIs appeared first on Business2Community.

One barrier to reaching international customers that persists, however, is language. For companies in the U.K. or U.S., it can be tempting to assume that an English website is enough — especially considering how many people around the world speak English. Although potential international leads might be able to muddle through, attracting new customers requires more than just conveying information.

To effectively connect with an international audience, you need to meet potential customers in their moment of need in the language they know best. That’s how you develop rapport quickly, make your company seem familiar and safe, and ensure your brand truly resonates with customers.

3 Translation Strategies for Reaching an International Audience

Effective translation involves more than just running content through Google Translate and putting it out on the web. You need to put time and care into a targeted approach, and you need to know what’s required to operate in specific regions.

This might sound intimidating, especially if you’re a small or midsized business with limited resources. But companies of any size can expand their online presence in different countries. You just need to know what effective translation entails.

1. Start with sales and marketing collateral.

One of the most intimidating aspects of translating your content can be figuring out where to start. While all of your content undoubtedly holds value, the areas you should focus on in the beginning are the ones that help create new leads.

That means focusing your translation efforts on sales and marketing materials, including elements like landing pages that help bring in new customers from Google. With more than 50% of Google searches occurring outside of the U.S., the search engine acts as the front line for generating international leads.

2. Narrow down your languages at the start.

You don’t need to start by translating your content into every language under the sun. Instead, focus on a few languages of particular value to your business and see how everything goes before expanding your efforts.

You could start with the native languages of existing customers, for instance, or choose targets based on where you’d like to expand first. Alternatively, you can focus on the languages that are the most active online. Spanish, Chinese, and Arabic have seen significant rises in popularity online over the past 10 years — far more than English.

Don’t be afraid to go granular and take a city-specific approach. Materials work best when they’re linguistically and culturally consistent. This takes it from simple translation to even more effective hyper-localization. By focusing on a specific French dialect, for instance, you can home in on the culture and language of a particular city in France or one of the many other French-speaking regions of the world, such as Quebec, Belgium, Haiti, or French Guiana.

3. Make sure your translations are accurate.

One benefit of narrowing down your starting languages is being able to spend more time ensuring your translations are accurate. When it comes to localization, quality should always be prioritized over quantity. If you’ve ever watched a movie or TV show in another language, you understand the importance of an accurate translation.

Mistranslations hamper clear communications and can also lead to public relations blunders. At best, you might just embarrass yourself by trying to sell Barf Soap to customers. At worst, you could actively offend the same people you’re trying to target. That was the case in Ireland when Nike tried to market its trainers using a phrase with negative historical connotations.

Effective translation can be the perfect path to expanding your customer base throughout the world. As long as you start small and prioritize accuracy, you can engage new audiences and make it clear that you value their patronage.

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The post How to Reach a Global Audience Using Effective Translation appeared first on Business2Community.

According to an article from Harvard Business Publishing: “Telling stories is one of the most powerful means that leaders have to influence, teach, and inspire. Storytelling forges connections among and between people and conveys the culture, history, and values that unite people.”

Storytelling is also essential when it comes to marketing your business. Being an engaging storyteller can make the difference between an average marketing campaign and a memorable one. Consumers love a good story; if your brand doesn’t have one, chances are the audience will not stay interested.

The good news? Storytelling is a skill that can be developed. Keep reading to learn how to become an expert brand storyteller in ten actionable steps.

When Were The First Stories Told?

The first step to becoming a great storyteller is to know the origins of storytelling. Humans have shared stories in various ways since the dawn of time. Storytelling began with visual elements, then evolved into oral traditions, and later included written and multimedia forms. A blog post from Words Alive mentions that the Chauvet cave in France, which is 36,000 years old, holds the oldest known example of visual storytelling. The post also notes that in 700 B.C., the first recorded stories appeared, such as the “Epic of Gilgamesh” and “The Iliad.”

Though the mediums of storytelling have changed throughout the centuries, stories and storytelling at their core have remained an important form of communication.

Why Is Storytelling Important In Marketing?

Now that we have a better understanding of the history of storytelling and stories, what do they have to do with marketing and branding your company?

Think back to a time as a consumer when an ad or social media post really stuck with you. Chances are, you are thinking of an advertising or marketing example that included an incredibly strong story.

Though it is nearly impossible to get an exact count, it is estimated that in 2021, the average person encountered between 6,000 to 10,000 ads every single day. With so much content available to consume, it can be hard to make noise in the marketing world. In order to stand out from the crowd your brand needs to tell a very memorable story, often in a short amount of time.

But how do you make your story stand out among thousands of others?

10 Steps To Become A Memorable Brand Storyteller

1.) Put yourself in the consumer’s shoes

One of our most important pieces of advice is also one of our simplest: Take a step back from the marketing and brand perspective and put yourself in the shoes of the consumer.

Think about what you like to see and what stands out to you when hearing or seeing other brands. Earlier in this article, we had you think back to a marketing or advertising campaign that stuck with you. What about that story resonated with you so much that you still haven’t forgotten it even with the thousands of ads you see every day?

Thinking about storytelling from the viewpoint of the people who will receive that story is crucial to becoming a memorable brand storyteller.

2.) Be clear and concise

People have short attention spans. If you are already in the communications field you know the importance of every single word you use. Storytelling for marketing is no different. Depending on the medium or form of your marketing piece you may have a specific word count or time limit you need to work within, but even if you don’t, remember that every single word counts.

Another way to make your story clear and concise is to make sure that you have one overarching point. If you are not clear on the point of the story, it will definitely not be clear to the audience.

3.) Consistency is key

While all of your stories should be unique and different to some extent, they should have some consistent overarching brand theme they fit within, otherwise your audience will be very confused about your brand and most likely will not choose to support it. This article from All Good Tales also mentions that while overall you do need to stay consistent in your brand storytelling, it is also necessary to revisit your brand’s overarching story every once in a while to make sure it still fits and is relevant to what your company stands for.

Being consistent with your brand storytelling will help your audience and consumers become familiar with your brand. Brand familiarity, if done correctly, can lead to brand trust.

4.) Each story your brand tells should include four elements

In one of our recent blog articles, we discussed the four elements of a strong story. For more details, read it here. In short, these are the elements to include in each brand story you tell.

• Theme: Know your industry
• Plot: Know your story
• Structure: Present readable content
• Characters: Include your audience

5.) Add emotion: Tell a story from the heart

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="300"] Storytelling should come from the heart.[/caption]

Tapping into your audience’s emotions is key to telling a story they will not forget. Consumers are much more likely to remember an ad or marketing element that makes them feel something. When you tell an emotional story, it adds depth to your brand that consumers really appreciate. When choosing a business to support, people often prefer the ones that make them feel a strong emotion.

Neurofied digs deeper into the science behind emotional marketing with the article linked here.

6.) Mediums: Be intentional about where your story is told

Today, there are so many different mediums a brand can use to tell stories. It can be overwhelming to choose where to start. Radio, television, blog articles and social media platforms are some of the many storytelling platforms to choose from.

Start by choosing a broad medium: oral, written, visual or a mixture of all three.

To narrow it down from there, think about the audience you are trying to reach. Do they tune into the radio or are you more likely to reach them through Snapchat? Different mediums can also reach a different number of people. If you want to reach as many people as possible, it would be worth looking into the number of users each platform has. If you are a small brick and mortar business in Seattle, for example, you will want to target a much more specific audience than a national business wanting to reach people from all across the country.

Another aspect worth noting is that even if you choose to tell your story on multiple mediums, you may have to adapt the story to fit each specific platform. For example, the story that you tell on a television advertisement might need to be adapted to fit better on Facebook.

Being intentional about where your story is told and not just putting it everywhere you can think of is a necessary step to ensure your story is doing the most possible for your brand.

7.) Stand out from the crowd

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="300"] How can you ensure your company stands out in the crowd?[/caption]

Unless your business fits into an incredibly niche sector, chances are you are competing against hundreds or even thousands of other companies. So how do you make your brand’s story stand out from the crowd?

Think about what makes your company unique and incorporate that into your storytelling. Why was the company started? Often people start a business because of something personal they may have experienced. Incorporate that into your storytelling! This can also be a chance to partner with a nonprofit who may have a more compelling story than your own. If you can find a partnership that makes sense, make it happen and tell a story together.

8.) Keep your story relevant

As we mentioned earlier, attention spans are short. With the rise of social media, something can be relevant one minute and not the next. Here are a few ways to keep your brand’s storytelling as relevant as possible.

• Be bold: Take risks! As long as it fits within your company’s morals and makes sense, doing something big can be an incredible way to stay relevant.
• Keep up with media trends: Constantly monitoring the media, especially in your brand’s sector, is crucial.
• Try new things: Along with being bold, don’t be afraid to try something new. Since trends are constantly changing, don’t be afraid to change your storytelling methods!

9.) Be inclusive in your storytelling

In a lot of circumstances you want to nail down a specific audience as a marketer, but you also want to make sure you are as inclusive as possible when doing so. Try to limit bias as much as you can in your brand storytelling, and don’t use words or phrases that are not commonly known to a large audience.

If you use photos of people or have real people acting in your stories, make sure they are diverse in all senses of the word. Forbes shares an important article about how to achieve equity in brand storytelling. They share that the best first step to equity in storytelling is “to invite diverse storytellers at all levels of the storytelling process to the table.”

If your goal is to create value for all sorts of communities, which it should be, then input from said communities is necessary to the process.

10.) Consume all kinds of content

Consuming content as a content creator is absolutely essential. If you are a writer, you have probably heard many times that the best way to become a better writer is to read. The same goes for storytelling, especially if you are in a creative storytelling rut. Consuming stories from other brands can be a helpful way to get out of any slump.

Read More:

• Best Email Marketing Software
• Best SMS Marketing Software

The post How to Become a Memorable Storyteller In 10 Steps appeared first on Business2Community.

This claim is not just rhetorical, as the statistics speak for themselves. Surveys have shown that around 20 percent of all American households subscribed to some form of retail service during the pandemic. This increased activity resulted in overall sales leaping to $23 billion.

You can put down some of the increased activity to people wanting to treat themselves at a time when good news seemed scarce. Such activity is not restricted to the pandemic; it also occurred during the global recession. At this time, sales of beauty products quadrupled compared to the previous five-year period.

Therefore, it is unsurprising that over half of subscription service consumers signed up because they wanted to bring some cheer to their lives (and the lives of their loved ones) during the pandemic.

However, we are now navigating through the new normal in the post-pandemic world, and scalability has become more challenging to achieve.

With that in mind, here’s what you should be doing for your subscription brand, to stay on track for continued growth through the course of 2022 and beyond.

Improve data collection and activation.

Having the infrastructure for data connection analysis and activation is essential to support your subscription brand's growth in the future. Increasing your relevant data will increase your chances of achieving successful growth.

You can boost your chances of success by incorporating more zero-party data, which refers to information that a customer gives you proactively and intentionally. It includes their preferences, purchase intentions, and how they want to be recognized by your brand.

Using zero-party data will help you gain a better understanding of which customers demonstrate high LTV, and enable you to acquire more customers who demonstrate similar LTV. This is especially the case when you use an LTV predictive model.

How do you get hold of zero-party data? It's pretty simple; you ask them the right questions from the start.

Ask the right questions from the start to combat churn.

As your subscription service starts scaling, it is often easy to overlook resurrection or win-back potential. You also need to consider how you can convert previously churned subscribers into paying customers once again.

Churn is inevitable, even if you are one of the more prominent brands. However, you can reduce it and start with a focus on high-value users. Of course, this raises another question—how can you identify these users? The simple answer is to ask them the right questions, and you can do this by using questionnaires. Questionnaires can be your force multiplier in the user acquisition game.

When you use questionnaires, you can gain valuable information that helps predict the actual value of users. Therefore, you can focus your marketing on a high-yield audience that will boost your profits. However, before compiling your questionnaires, you need to get some fundamentals into place.

For instance, how will you incentivize your audience to complete the questionnaire? For example, in the case of a beauty box subscription service, you could let your customers know about new products faster if they share their preferences with you.

You also need to give your customers context that aligns your questionnaire with their interests. Similarly, careful consideration needs to be put into freezing your questions, as you want to avoid creating a negative impression through miscommunication.

Questionnaires are valuable during the onboarding process, and they have considerable utility throughout the whole customer life-cycle. Therefore, you can use them as a guide for developing future acquisition strategies.

Investigate cohort retention and higher loyalty-focused campaigns.

Focusing on cohort retention and developing higher loyalty-focused campaigns can considerably benefit your brand. It is particularly so when you use predictive models to ascertain which customers have higher LTV and others. Doing so will enable you to signal users who are more prone to purchase over time.

Using predictive modeling for these campaigns will make your growth team's life much easier. That's because you will eliminate much of the guesswork and amplify your efforts by predicting long-term profitability. Moreover, you can do this efficiently and cost-effectively while checking your performance against retention benchmarks.

Be aware that cohort investigation should not be based solely around a set percentage of subscribers within a specified time. Instead, you should do this into the outer-month ranges of your analysis. As a general rule, the flatter and more asymptotic your curve, the better state your subscription businesses are in.

Win back customers after churn

Do not give up hope of recovering customers after churn. This is why having a win-back strategy can prove beneficial.

Winning back lost customers is totally achievable because you already have an existing communication channel. Also, if you have already provided them with your questionnaire, that puts you in an advantageous position.

The open communication channel lets you present them with quick deals and personalized offers to win them back.

Give your acquisition strategy an overhaul

Plenty of subscription brands are changing from CAC strategies, to one based on payback to overhaul their user acquisition strategy.

Their motivation for doing this is due to recent changes in operating systems and ad networks, leading to rises in CAC. These rises make it increasingly difficult to maintain the same momentum and profitability as they had previously.

CAC limits your ability to scale as you lock the price and lock the customers LTV. Although this works on average, it does not facilitate scale as it does not distinguish between good and excellent customers.

On the other hand, a payback strategy allows your growth team to focus on the return and stretch limits. By stretching limits, you're not confined to the number of customers in a particular bracket.

Capitalize on upselling and add-ons.

You can gain significant value from offering last-minute add-ons and upselling before an order is finalized. Therefore, you should understand what percentage of your users and revenue comes from last-minute purchases and how you can capitalize on this.

You can do this by optimizing your funnel, product, or marketing. A good LTV model will help you better understand who your most valued users are.

Increase your subscribers' appetites.

There's plenty you can do when it comes to increasing your subscribers' appetites for buying more. For instance, you could start by offering a small and affordable product to entice them into a more significant purchase.

Another effective tactic is to offer a slight discount for purchasing a bundle of products. This tactic certainly works for Amazon Prime.

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The boost you may have experienced during the lockdown may have lessened through the course of the new normal. However, there is still time for you to get back on track to achieving sustainable growth in 2022 and beyond. There is no time like the present for you to revamp your UA strategy, and explore the benefits of using predictive marketing to achieve exponential growth.

The post This Is the Most Efficient Process for Subscription Brands to Continue Exponential Growth appeared first on Business2Community.

Building a website from the ground up can be overwhelming, especially for those without coding experience. There are many logistical and technical hurdles that can make website development difficult. To address this issue, users turn to a Content Management System (CMS). A CMS is a tool that helps manage web content, allowing users to create, edit, and publish their material easily. Essentially, a CMS enables users to set up a functional website in straightforward steps without needing to handle the technical aspects of building and maintaining a site.

WordPress is arguably the most popular and used CMS in the world at the moment. WordPress is omnipresent on the web because of its ease of usability, having a robust database for storing and organizing all user data — content, pages, media, user accounts, URLs, etc. Owing to its multidimensional usability and reputation, WordPress has emerged as the CMS of choice for digital marketing management.

If you want to learn more about the role of WordPress in marketing, keep reading.

In this article, we will discuss the importance of WordPress as a CMS and the reasons why WordPress enjoys a spectacular reputation among a vast majority of internet users. We will dive into the benefits of using WordPress for digital marketing, followed by some tips and tricks that can make your WordPress marketing journey easier to navigate and more fruitful than ever before. Let’s begin.

Why is WordPress the Most Preferred CMS out there?

Although there’s no dearth of capable CMS in the market, WordPress takes the lion’s share of the pie when it comes to choosing one. It is used by business websites, small-medium scale websites, and blogs alike. WordPress provides the options of changing the content, layout, and functionality of a website built on it whenever needed. No prior knowledge of coding or complex programming languages is required for building a fully functional, beautiful-looking, and easily navigable website on WordPress.

It’s not like WordPress has no other alternative in terms of the ease and features it provides its users. Today, it is easier than ever to find a CMS from a plethora of options, most of which provide all the required tools for making a pretty solid professional website in just a couple of hours. But for a new user looking for a CMS to build their blog or website, choosing between these plenty of options is equal parts confusing and challenging. If we compare WordPress with all other CMS available out there, some crucial factors stand out in differentiating it from the competition while putting it ahead of all of them. But before we discuss those factors, let’s get a basic understanding of what a Content Management System platform does.

A Content Management System (CMS) serves as a platform where one can create, edit, and manage content for a website, using simply navigable steps, without coding or learning the technical expertise required for it. There’s no need for possessing any working knowledge of concepts like CSS and HTML — which are essential for modifying the appearance of a website. It allows placing videos, images, and graphics with text for making a website attractive and pleasing to look at. Having a good-looking functional website attracts more users to a website, making it a hit on search engines — a recipe for marketing success.

Now, it’s time that we learn about the factors that set WordPress apart from other CMS:

• Easiest to use

Starting right from installation, WordPress is the easiest to install CMS — it takes 5 minutes to set it up. Out of all other CMS, WordPress offers the easiest options to create a website without the need for any technical website-building knowledge. Its dashboard is super easy to use.

• Best CMS for SEO

Search engines are known to crawl WordPress websites more than the ones built on other platforms. The simpler code of a WordPress website allows search engine algorithms to understand and index its code easily. The Ping feature on WordPress instantly notifies search engines whenever any change is made to a WordPress site. All of this makes WordPress an SEO favorite.

• Pocket friendly with design flexibility

It offers a wide range of free themes and designs to choose from while deciding a look for one’s website. Unlike other CMS platforms, it charges a minimal amount of money even for the paid ones, making it pocket-friendly.

• Makes Website Management Easier

It’s very easy to make changes to a WordPress website by using uncomplicated tools provided by WordPress. A user doesn’t have to depend on any website manager for taking care of small or big changes to content, design, or practically any other element of their website. WordPress also provides the multi-user capability for allowing multiple users to work on the same website at the same time.

• Provides Scalability

One of the best parts about WordPress is its ability to offer scalability to websites by not having any effect on the speed of a website with an increasing number of pages or posts.

• It has a dedicated community of users

WordPress boasts of one of the largest communities of regular users who are always ready to troubleshoot the problems faced by their fellow community members. It is a dynamic and ever-growing community, where users can avail help from WordPress Forum or agencies specializing in WordPress web design.

Benefits of using WordPress for Digital Marketing

Now that we have learned why WordPress enjoys the reputation it does, it’s time to understand the benefits provided by WordPress and how businesses can leverage its easy usability, cost-effectiveness, easier management, the option of scalability, and SEO friendliness to achieve their digital marketing goals. Major marketing benefits provided by WordPress are as follows:

• Setting Up, Executing, and Managing Content Marketing

Content has emerged as a new currency in the digital world. Knowing your audience well enough to design and publish consistent and quality content according to their needs paves way for more traffic and increased opportunities for achieving marketing goals. WordPress is a platform where businesses can easily publish and manage their content which can be promoted on social media, paid platforms, email, and other channels, to reach the target audience.

The ease of publishing valuable content provides an opportunity for building backlinks via sharing options readily available on WordPress. Targeted phrases and keywords used by marketers can attract more target audiences by improving search engine ranking. Having started as a blogging tool, WordPress has come a long way and established itself as an ideal candidate for content marketing.

• Utility Marketing through Website Portal

WordPress makes available plenty of customization options for building a website, adding to its already massive functionality. A business can turn its website into a custom resource as per the requirements of its users. WordPress provides a variety of plugins for managing most needs of users like accessing payment options, sale of merchandise, managing interests, scheduling events, etc.

WordPress allows for turning a website into a digital marketing portal that provides access to relevant information, actionable goals, and more with the help of the multitude of plugins on offer. Having such a diverse set of tools to make a dynamic marketing website is called Utility Marketing.

• Increased Visibility with Search Engine Optimization

Without adequate online visibility, no marketing campaign can be effective or remotely successful in achieving goals set by the website owner. Search Engine Optimization is the process of optimizing a website for better visibility in google search results. Based on specific phrases and keywords, the Google search algorithm can be influenced to show a website in the topmost results of the first search results page. Users are known to click on the top few links, and therefore, SEO is a vital part of digital marketing.

WordPress is useful for customizing page titles, META descriptions, and adding relevant keywords & phrases for optimizing a web page. Many online keyword tools like ‘free keyword research tool’ can be used for finding relevant keywords to be added. It also removes content obstructions and allows for regularly updated content — which helps in improving rankings.

• An Opportunity for Community Building

WordPress websites and blogs help in building a community of customers, clients, members, and other factions of the target audience. A well-established community can help with the social media promotion of the content of your choice. Discussions about website content, merchandise, and events result in content sharing among the community members and their extensions. Therefore, a dedicated community of users helps in providing a better reach to informational posts on the website — which helps in generating more leads.

• Driving Conversions

The next step in the marketing process is converting the leads generated through various channels into customers of a service or product. WordPress is a one-stop solution as a CMS for keeping track of shares, visits, comments etc., based on which a business can make relevant changes to underperforming content. Better performing content attracts more leads and increases the chances of conversions. WordPress provides a vast selection of calls to action for aiding the conversion process. It also helps in gauging the success rate of various calls to action used on the website — based on this information they can be tweaked or changed for a better conversion chance.

Some Tips and Tricks for Effective WordPress Marketing

• Always Optimize Images

Knowing the importance of the visual elements on a website for making it more appealing to the incoming visitor, images are an essential means of making text easier on a webpage. One picture can tell a story worthy of a big chunk of text. The issue with images is the slowing down of a website because of the large size of an image. To mitigate this problem, always optimize an image or an infographic before adding it to your website.

• Be Mindful of Making Perfect Links

Links are an essential part of affiliate marketing and citing useful resources. Therefore, some things must be kept in mind while adding links to your WordPress site:

• Be cautious of broken links: Broken links can be detrimental to your website’s search rankings as Google flags pages and decreases their ranking if they have errors in links. Use one of the various available plugins to check for broken links and correct them.
• Make Permalinks Shorter: A permalink is nothing but the simple address of a page on your website, automatically generated by WordPress. What you need to do is remove any redundant characters from these links — to avoid confusion for visitors and search engines.
• Work on Page Speed

Page speed is a crucial metric in determining user experience. User experience is the criteria based on which Google ranks pages in its search results. Therefore, improving page speed is a must for increasing the chances of ranking on the top page of search engines. Refer to Speed Up WordPress for finding out possible ways of increasing page loading speed on your WordPress site.

• Add SEO Plugins

In the effort of improving search ranking, overall SEO performance can make a huge difference. Along with better quality, greater informational value, and usability of the content you post on your website, also add some of the widely available SEO plugins on your website. Plugins can help with SEO score, heading lengths, readability score, image quality tips, etc.

• Integrate Social Media

Shares on social media help generate a considerable amount of traffic. Social media integration is an important feature of WordPress. Integrating social media handles allows visitors to share content and increase its visibility even more.

Conclusion

WordPress is a powerful and cost-effective CMS that is suitable for designing and executing a successful digital marketing strategy. Finding the right tools can make all the difference in making the best use of WordPress. WordPress plugins are designed for simplifying marketing, and therefore, one must be mindful in adding relevant plugins to their website. Overall, if one follows the steps mentioned above, WordPress can do wonders for their business.

Read More:

• Best Cheap WordPress Hosting
• Best SMS Marketing Software – 10 SMS Marketing Platforms for [cur_year]
• Best Email Marketing Software – 10 Best Email Marketing Services for your Business

The post A Comprehensive Guide To WordPress For Marketing appeared first on Business2Community.

“This is f%#$ing stupid”.

I didn’t “get” them, so I didn’t think much about them.

In early 2021, we partnered with a client to create a strategy to launch an NFT project.

The client project forced me to dive deep into the world of NFTs are understand them.

I came to the realization that NFTs are something we all have to pay attention to.

Especially as marketers and business owners – NFTs have already impacting our industry.

NFTs can be a little scary because of how unnatural they feel…Both the technology and why people are paying so much money for a JPEG.

The truth is once you can wrap your head around NFTs, they’re not overly complicated. In fact, they’re incredibly simple.

That's why millions of people each month are searching for how to buy an NFT and, if you're one of them, you can find our guide here.

To make things easier for you, we put together a video walking you through why NFTs are so important right now, and 6 use cases of NFTs being used in marketing right now.

I promise, if you watch this video you’ll not only feel better about NFTs, you’re going to be excited about them.

FWD THIS VIDEO TO A FRIEND WHO DOESN’T “GET” NFTS

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gSb-XO8AWg

Timestamps:

• 2:40 – Understanding Web 1.0, Web 2.0 and Web 3.0
• 4:48 – WTF is an NFT?
• 5:52 – WHY are NFTs so hot right now?
• 12:15 – Use Case 1 – The Mint
• 14:47 – Use Case 2 – The Community
• 16:49 – Use Case 3 – The Utility
• 19:30 – Use Case 4 – The Smart Contract
• 22:33 – Use Case 5 – The TRUE Creator Economy
• 23:43 – Use Case 6 – The Future of Advertising

How did we get here?

In order to understand NFTs, we first have to understand the history and future of the internet.

• Web 1.0 – The information economy, this stage was all about setting up infrastructure and providing one-way information to web surfers. Desktop dominated, pretty much all you could do at this point was read.
• Web 2.0 – This stage, known as the platform economy, allowed for easy two-way information sharing. Social networks led to a surge in content and new business as the internet became the top place for commerce and buying. However, the same factors that helped Web 2.0 grow are also contributing to its decline, with platforms like Facebook dominating the internet, our data, and our privacy.
• Web 3.0 – The token economy, returning control to us (also known as fully “decentralized”). This new version of the internet empowers users with tokens, or property rights. It allows us to own a part of the internet and get rewarded for it, a dream that was impossible in Web 2.0.

Image Credit

WTF is an NFT?

NFT = Non-fungible token. “Non-fungible” means that it’s unique and can not be replaced by something else.

For example, a dollar bill is fungible — trade one for another dollar, and you’ll have the same thing.

A one-of-a-kind piece of art however, is non-fungible. If you traded it for a piece of art, you’d have something different.

Ownership of the token (NFT) directly reflects ownership of the asset / good / product that’s stored on the blockchain.

NFTs are exploding in popularity according to Google Trends

WHY are NFTs so hot right now?

NFTs are so hot right now for a number of reasons…

1. The technology that backs NFTs is going to take over the world (blockchain)
2. NFT projects are being launched and supported by some of the world’s largest, most innovative brands
3. NFTs tie into a subconscious need for humans to belong, be part of a community and express who they are through possessions

I want to focus on point 3, as it’s the most important part of this from a marketing point of view.

NFTs give us insight into one of the most powerful reasons why people buy things they don’t need – as a marketer you have to understand this concept.

Let’s break down why this pixelated image (aka Cryptopunk #7523) sold for over $11,000,000.

To illustrate, let’s use an example of a Hermes handbag.

Why do people pay $5,000 for a bag that was made in the same factory, with the same materials, as a bag that costs $500?

It boils down to how the concept of “value” is human centric. We assign a value to items based on the demand for that item.

That demand is driven by brand, perception and status.

We believe that carrying a bag with an Hermes logo will communicate something about who we are and our value to society.

This is exactly what’s happening with NFTs right now.

The value of an NFT has little to do with the “quality” of the art, but rather what owning that NFT can do for our status. It’s a simple, fast and effective way to communicate our status for the entire world to see.

“…Ok…but who cares about a digital token (NFT)? It’s not like you own a physical good with actual value…”

Let me answer that with another example.

Last year my wife and I bought a home, then spent A LOT of money renovating it. Naturally, you want to share this with others.

We had a housewarming party so our friends and family could see it, but due to COVID not many people came.

So naturally, my wife took to social media to post the house (before/after, etc).

Why did she do this?

For credit. For validation. For status. And also because way more people are going to see it.

I love my wife more than anything in this world, so please don’t take that as a slight towards her – she’s human, and this is what humans do.

This isn’t a trend or shift in technology, it’s an exposure of human behavior as a whole. Just like how social media has exposed us in so many ways (racism, shaming, etc), NFTs are doing the same x10 (the hype machine).

“Ok…But can’t people just screenshot them?

Yes and no. They can screenshot it, but the having a screenshot does not equal ownership. That’s the power of the blockchain – you’re able to see the owner, the value and all who have possessed it before.

The easiest way to understand this is the Mona Lisa – millions of people have pixel perfect replicas hanging in their homes, but we all know it’s not the real thing.

This is a crucial shift that will have a huge impact on everything we purchase in the next 10 years.

Think about how much of a struggle it is to verify authenticity in luxury goods alone?

An NFT becomes the only verify a purchase / item / good / experience is truly authentic and not fake.

In the next decade, everything you buy will come with a token as the receipt. A way to verify the purchase you made as real, locked forever into the Blockchain.

6 Use Cases for NFTs in Marketing Campaigns

Let’s put some context around NFTs and bring it back to the marketing world through a series of use cases.

NFT Use Case #1 – The Mint

“Minting” refers to the process of turning a digital file into a crypto collectible or digital asset on the Ethereum blockchain. What we’re really talking about here is creating your own NFT and making it available for the world to see / purchase.

Anyone can mint an NFT – it’s actually not an overly complicated process.

Brands like Adidas, Budweiser, Twitter and hundreds more have been jumping on the bandwagon to create their of NFT drops.

Most of these NFTs are more than just a JPEG in a digital wallet, they come with “utility”. For Adidas, that meant you get exclusive clothing and first in line access to future drops.

Adidas made over $22M from their first NFT mint.

The key to successfully NFT launch / minting campaign is attention. Getting your project out in front of as many people as possible and creating a hype machine around it.

Keep in mind what I said earlier, that humans assign the value to NFTs, that value is simple supply and demand economics.

The more people want them, the higher the price can go for resale. So if you have a big following, minting is a great opportunity to make money or provide other value (tax offsets, charitable donations, DAOs, funding).

Also, sales on the secondary market (where luxury goods and sneakers brands get killed in today’s market) get compensated for every re-sale of an NFT. This is really where things become interesting and we can see the power of the blockchain technology.

NFT Use Case #2 – The Community

If you’re going to mint an NFT, you need a string community around it to drive up the value. It’s the foundation to drive up the demand for your drop.

However, the community itself is also a massively important tool for marketers.

Discord and Twitter are the most popular platforms for NFT communities

We’re moving to a cookie-less internet, which is going to make it impossible to track and advertise the way we have over the last 5 years.

As we move off of cookies (aka 3rd party data), 1st party data becomes king (aka owning that data inside of a community).

NFTs give brands the opportunity to start building the “new email list” for a decentralized, private web 3.0.

NFT Use Case #3 – The Utility

More and more NFTs are being created with “utilities”, or added benefits to owning that given NFT.

In other words, NFTs are evolving away from being solely valued on hype and intrinsic value, but also the real world utility they can provide.

For example…

• If you own a Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT, you get access to meetups, party access that only token holders can access. When celebrities like Steph Curry own one, this becomes an enticing perk.
• Traffic Think Tank is an online community and learning platform for SEO professionals. Tokens are awarded based on merit within the community and unlock access to premium content, events and coaching.
• Some NFTs provide “gamified” value inside of games and the metaverse. Owning an NFT could mean access to traits, characters or collectibles inside gaming platforms as well.

The easiest thing to think about utility when it comes to your business is customer loyalty. Providing tokens with additional value to your top / nest customers is the easiest way to contextualize utility right now.

NFT Use Case #4 – The Smart Contract

Right now NFTs are mainly contextualized as digital art, but the true long term value comes in the technology – the blockchain and smart contracts.

A smart contract is some code that runs on blockchain and enables a secure value exchange. Smart contracts can remove the need for a mediator when two parties want to exchange valuable digital or physical assets.

In 10 years, everything will run on smart contracts, from business deals to purchases of everyday goods.

This technology is going to dramatically change our day to day lives as marketers by impacting the software we use.

I reached out to Nick Eubanks, a marketing entrepreneur who is deeply involved in the NFT space for a quote on this…

“I see huge opportunities for NFTs within the broader business ecosystem, specifically due to smart contracts and the ability to programmatically build and deploy utility that can go beyond financial aspects, such as access to events and other premium content. I think one of the more exciting (and obvious) applications for NFTs is within affiliate marketing, and for brands and publishers to leverage the additional layers of commissions including ongoing transaction revenues that are retained by the original owner of the token (the wallet that minted)”

NFT Use Case #5 – The Paid Creator Economy

The blockchain technology will give the power back to creators, for real this time. No more stealing content, the true creator will always be recognized (and potentially compensated) for their work.

“The biggest shift is perhaps this new expectation of having equity or skin in the game. If social media gave customers a voice in the brand conversation, [NFTs] take this a step further.”

Simon Kearney, Strategy and insights director, Wolff Olins

This can be contextualized in something as simple as a meme. Memes are some of the most viewed pieces of content on the web, yet we usually never credit the creator. They simply get screen shotted and re-shared with no gain for the creator.

The blockchain will be able to credit all re-shares back tot eh creator, potentially compensating them for the value they’ve created.

NFT Use Case #6 – The Future of Advertising

Cookies are dead. In a matter of months the way we advertise and market will be changed forever.

The move to web 3.0 means more privacy and less ability to reach customers the way we do now.

Platforms like Google, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok will likely cease to exist as we see them now.

This cuts back on massive marketing channels that we’ve relied on for years to acquire customers. Instead, we’ll need to look for new opportunities…

• Building 1st party communities and experiences for customers (likely inside the meta verse)
• Finding advertising opportunities inside of games and meta verse real estate
• Partnerships and collaborations with creators to leverage their audience

This is a big, big shakeup that’s coming sooner than you think.

Don’t get overwhelmed – people are people…

These changes are happening – they’re here, and they don’t care what you think about them.

As a marketing professional or business owner, it’s incredibly important that you start to wrap your head around these shifts.

While you don’t have to go out and start collecting them or rushing to your nearest NFT marketplace, i do recommend you go through the process of setting up a wallet, buying come crypto and trying to understand the WHY behind all of these.

If you want to keep growing your business over the next decade, you have to understand the shift in consumer technology, behavior and most importantly – the psychological cues that make us human beings.

The post 6 Use Cases for NFTs in Marketing Campaigns appeared first on Business2Community.

However, this very factor can become a challenge when you have to deal with negative reviews and feedback.

If you want to have a strong social media presence, then you need to make peace with the fact that you will get negative responses from customers. It’s inevitable because of technical issues, real mistakes, and misunderstandings.

But what isn’t a given is that you have to deal with it poorly.

Do you want to grow your business and your personal brand on social media? And to deal with negative feedback in the best way possible? Then, let’s get started and look at ways social media professionals can handle negative feedback.

Give time for your audience’s real opinion to come through

One of the things you should remember is not to gauge your content’s reception based on the first feedback you get. For example, on forums like Reddit and others, getting a negative reaction to a post at first can be disheartening. But if you give it some time, for example, a few hours, you’ll see more balanced viewpoints and feedback appear.

Some content takes time to appear in people’s social media feeds and to create responses. So, it’s a good idea to look at how people engage with your social media posts but to wait until later to understand the real consensus on your post.

This helps you understand if you should be concerned about your content’s quality or whether it’s good.

Listen actively

Active listening is a form of listening where you learn to take in feedback without judgment.

It’s a well-known communication strategy that creates advantages for all parties involved.

If you want to engage more people on social media, learn to listen without judgment at first. And listen to everything your audience or customer has to say.

Whether their comment seems fair or inaccurate, there’s information that you can use to better your relationship with a customer and your business.

Build your listening skills and you’ll find that even negative feedback can be valuable for your growth. You can also train your staff to listen more effectively and to separate emotions from the real content of a conversation.

Realize it’s not personal

You need to realize that even highly negative responses to your social media aren’t personal. This is because it’s not possible for a customer to capture your entire business or your persona with a few online interactions.

However, you have to be mindful and stay away from topics that are complex and out of the realm of your work. And you do need to follow ethical business and communication practices - that’s something that goes without saying.

Whenever customers express a negative viewpoint, it reflects their experiences at that moment. And learning to listen without taking it personally will help you grow as a leader and make positive changes to your business too.

Use humor

Wondering how to respond to negative feedback? A great way to do this is through humor.

This doesn’t mean that you take negative reviews or other forms of criticism lightly.

Rather, you learn to look at criticism as having some layer of truth to it but you also remove unnecessary self-criticism.

Also, you can use humor to respond to reviews that genuinely deserve a calling out. For example, here’s an image of a humorous response to an unfair review of a restaurant.

Image Source

In this example, the response of the business owner would only serve to appeal to other rational and fair customers.

So, an important question to ask yourself is ‘How can I find both truth and humor in this feedback?’

Remembering to look for something funny and interesting can you keep you in a positive mind frame and also come up with replies that build your brand image.

Go offline

Are you dealing with too many negative reviews or is there a customer that’s unhappy and continues to bring up their issues on social media?

You can deal with matters by going offline.

One way to take things offline is to ask a customer to contact you directly, either via a phone call or via email. This moves the conversation away from public view and gives you the chance to have a one-on-one meeting with your customer.

At other times, you may want to go offline by disconnecting from social media until you feel like you’re ready to cope with comments, posts, and other communication.

Disconnecting from social networks can give you a much-needed break and you can come back to your online interaction with a fresh perspective.

Conclusion

Are you ready to grow your business on social media?

Dealing with online interactions means that you should be prepared for customers who express their unhappiness in a public way.

However, such events are opportunities for growth if you know how to deal with them well. I’ve shared several ways you can deal with negative feedback. So, the next time you have an unhappy customer, look for ways to apply these tips and change things for the better.

Read More:

• Best Email Marketing Software
• Best SMS Marketing Software

The post 5 Pro-Tips for Marketers Who Hate Negative Customer Feedback appeared first on Business2Community.

Just imagine this. The year was 2011. The marketing automation landscape was picking up, and marketers had a mere 150 marketing technology tools. Fast forward to ten years later, and that number is more than 50 times higher at 8000 and counting.

What is a Marketing Technology Stack?

Gartner defined Marketing Technology Stack or ‘Martech Stack’ as “a set of software solutions used by marketing leaders to support mission-critical business objectives and drive innovation within their organizations.” A Marketing tech stack is categorized into:

• Email Marketing Tools
• Social Media Tools
• Advertising Tools
• CRM Tools
• Analytics Tools
• Collaboration Tools

It is evident that there’s no dearth of marketing technologies in the market, as businesses are constantly in search of tools that streamline tasks and aid with workflow challenges. After all, there’s just too much a business can achieve with the right set of tools and fetch ROIs.

So this is the picture. Too many choices, and there’s no other option but to choose those that would be fundamental to your business goals. How do you pick the best?

There’s a way out, and that’s what I’m going to address. From our experiences and team insights, we’ve shortlisted a few tools that have now significantly transformed the way we work. For good.

Let’s have a look.

1. ActiveCampaign

A typical sales conversion funnel requires an average of eight touchpoints. Most businesses receive a lot of leads through inbound and ads but fail to recycle or reuse them. This task ultimately falls upon your sales rep to follow up with the leads manually. This process isn’t just time-consuming but also mundane. And since it’s humans executing these tasks, accountability remains a big concern.

Instead, why not automate all of it?

ActiveCampaign is a tool that helps automate your follow-up and outreach strategy while also letting you personalize each touchpoint that drives conversions. It enables you to categorize your sales funnel in different stages and track consumer preferences across all of those conversion steps.

Email marketing has proven, time and time again, to be a very efficient and cost-effective method of lead nurturing. The more targeted and focused your emails are, the more subscriber engagement you can expect.

With the ability to create drip campaigns and split testing, you can improve email sequencing, encouraging better open rates and engagement from your audience.

The most common ways companies use ActiveCampaign are,

• Onboarding new customers
• Nurturing existing leads
• Reviving lost leads
• Sending Newsletters
• Behavior-based emails

2. Heap Analytics

Data is at the core of everything in marketing. It dictates future plans and gives insights into what’s working and what’s not. An analytics tool is the most common and easy way to read your marketing data which makes it an essential inclusion in this list.

There are a lot of analytics tools in the market, dominated by Google Analytics, that let you track online traffic, understand user behavior, and improve your overall marketing activities. But to use them, you need to have some know-how on how to use the tool, get well-versed with its features, etc. It becomes a challenging task for those who do not have experience with it.

Heap Analytics solves that. The product is made in a way that makes it seem simple and easy, no matter if you are a pro or a beginner. Heap collects all the data beforehand, leaving you only to define the critical events you want to track.

Create reports for the metrics that are important to you and even add multiple reports on a dashboard.

You ought to take a trial to see how they truly make analytics easier.

3. Getsitecontrol

It takes mere 7 seconds for visitors to make up their mind about a website and move on to something else—just 7 seconds. So what your visitors need is the motivation to stay and explore your site to give them a push and get one step closer to closing the sale.

You need to grab their attention, and Conversation Rate Optimization (CRO) tools helps you do just that.

Getsitecontrol is a CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization) tool that lets you convert more visitors into leads from your website. It’s an easy-to-use tool that allows you to build pop-ups and sticky bars so that visitors stay longer on your site and convert eventually.

You can do all sorts of things with Getsitecontrol, like running surveys, announcing updates using sticky bars, capturing visitor information using pop-ups, displaying coupon codes, eventually helping you push them down the sales funnel.

A few reasons why Getsitecontrol should make it to your marketing tech stack are,

• Easy to use interface
• A plethora of triggering options
• A/B test between variations
• Analytics on each widget
• Customizable widgets

4. WotNot

Your marketing tech stack is incomplete without an automated demand generation and customer engagement tool, and we have a few reasons why we think you should pick WotNot.

First, you spend thousands of marketing dollars to bring visitors to your website, but they visit and go away. That’s leaving you with nothing but numbers on an analytics tool. What you need is to engage with every visitor coming to your website in a conversational manner to probe them to understand why they’re here, gather their contact information, and eventually convert them to sales-qualified leads.

Second, WotNot is a no-code bot-building platform, so you don’t have to worry about its setup and know-how. And even if you don't want to, opt for our done-for-you service, where our experienced team understands your challenges and develops your bot accordingly.

Third, owing to the integrations that WotNot offers, whenever there is a new lead generated, you can simply push the data to your CRM, Email management system, etc.—making it seamless for you to take up the next steps in the sales funnel.

Lastly, you have data. Data represented in a business-centric helping you identify and analyze the conversion %, the business value generated, contacts generated, geo-location-based insights to improve your conversational flow for an even higher conversion rate.

5. FeedHive

With too many tasks on your hands, let’s face it, you don’t have the time to be active on your social media handles. You cannot overlook it, too, since it’s a critical medium for audience engagement, at least given in this digital age.

FeedHive is a social media marketing tool where you can create a content backlog and schedule them to post at a specified time, as well as leverage AI to create fresh content.

While you do have a lot of social media tools in the market, what makes FeedHive special is that it aids you with not just scheduling but also creating posts by learning from your post history, suggesting reposts to recycle content.

It has a vast library of post templates that helps you save time in creating and publishing new tweets regularly.

It does all this at a very reasonable price. Given the benefit you get out of it, it’s a steal.

6. HotJar

Let’s say you’ve built a fantastic website. Thousands of visitors visit your website and perform various actions - like page views, button clicks, etc.

However, there are still questions that remain unanswered as a business. How are visitors from the US scrolling through page A? How many visitors clicked on the “Sign up” button? What exactly did prospect A do during their visit to the website? Where do visitors drop off from a feature page?

HotJar answers all these questions for you.

HotJar is a product experience insights tool that gives you insights and feedback to understand your customers better. It is an easy-to-use product with tools like heatmaps, session recordings, surveys, funnel tracking, and incoming feedback widgets.

The heatmaps and recordings allow you to understand where the visitors are losing track and what sections are performing the best. This will help you know what CTAs to use, which design element resonates with the users, and what website layout to use in the future. You can also verify if your A/B test campaigns are working effectively, and it allows you to capture feedback that explains your user behavior.

Surveys and incoming feedback widgets are added bonuses that help you get valuable insights from your visitors on their experience and how they actually perceive the product based on how they see it.

7. Calendly

When you already have so much on your plate, you want to be rid of the administrative tasks of scheduling appointments. You aim for inbox zero and fewer back and forth emails to find a time that works with both parties’ schedules.

Calendly is scheduling software that helps you book appointments, interviews, calls, demos, and more. You can simply define your availability and fields to be captured to book a slot (Name, Email, Phone) and embed it on your website or share its URL. Using it, your visitors/customers will easily see the available time slots to book a meeting.

Research says that booking a meeting with the prospect has a higher likelihood of the prospect coming on the call, as compared to filling a form and then your sales reps reaching out. Because the intent to purchase would be at the highest when on your website otherwise, your sales rep will keep following up to prospects to no avail.

Apart from your website, you can also use Calendly on conversational tools like chatbots where the bot automatically qualifies the leads and schedules a meeting on your calendar. Calendly also takes up the tasks of sending the invites, timely reminders for the event, and updates on schedule changes. All in all, it becomes effortless for you to juggle appointments daily and enhance your chances of generating quality leads.

8. Salesforce

Think about all your sales goals - increasing your pipeline, nurturing leads, qualifying them, customer management, etc. But before you do all of this, you need to have all your customer data under a single roof. You need a platform to access and manage all your contacts, leads, and accounts and know at what stage of the customer journey your prospects are on.

Salesforce is that platform and your go-to CRM software for numerous reasons. It is a cloud-based Customer Relationship Management software that acts as a collaborative hub where various departments can centralize data of its customers and prospects, from the in-product activity to contact information. And being cloud-based, accessibility is real-simple.

With its ability to customize the product to your needs, you can tailor-make workflows, objects, reports, and dashboards to your liking. Thereby helping your teams work together effectively and hand you the most critical aspect for running successful marketing campaigns - data!

Create skill-based routing rules so that the right leads to the right sales reps for an even better conversion rate.

9. Slack

If you want to reap benefits from your marketing efforts, you need a tool that strengthens organizational efficiency. Slack is a well-known team messaging and project collaboration tool that facilitates real-time communication between teammates and organizations through channels.

You can create private and public channels and share messages, posts, articles, etc., with anyone in the workspace.

However, Slack’s use-case goes beyond a communication tool for teams.

Slack offers integrations with a ton of marketing tools through which you can get real-time updates of all your marketing activities.

Got a new sign-up? Received feedback from HotJar? Push notifications from all your other Martech tools under a single interface, displayed for all the concerned teammates to view.

This paves the way for discussions and collaboration across teams and improves team productivity based on events.

10. Ahrefs

All your sales and marketing activities start after you get site visitors, but how do you first generate site traffic?

To truly stay ahead of the game online, you need brand visibility. Search Engine Optimization activities help you garner those views online, making potential prospects more likely to click and visit your website. SEO also instills trust amongst your prospects. The bigger your SEO score, the higher the chances of ranking at the top of search engines.

But if you’re intimidated by the word ‘SEO,’ you have Ahrefs to the rescue. Ahrefs can help with all your SEO activities, such as keyword research, ‘clicks’ data, tracking backlink activities, keyword click distribution, ranking history, monitoring outbound links, and a lot more metrics that help you eventually help you get more traffic.

The best part is it doesn’t just allow you to check your SEO activities but also helps with a competitive analysis where you can check how your competitors are ranking, which are their top pages, which keywords are they running ads on, so you can learn and improve your marketing strategies.

Some of the top metrics you have to check on Ahrefs are,

• Website Audit (Health Score)
• Keyword Research
• Backlink Growth or Decline over Time
• Analyze SERP History
• Content Explorer
• Rank Tracker
• Domain Comparison

While all of these tools provide individual benefits, they work best when integrated. So, if you’re building a marketing tech stack, you need to assemble them all to create a cohesive experience for your prospective customers. More than adding a bunch of tools, you’re instead building a product ecosystem that will dictate your workflows and impact your customer relationships in a manner to complement your growth strategies.

Originally published here.

Read More:

• Best Email Marketing Software
• Best SMS Marketing Software

The post Top 10 Tools to Have in Your Marketing Tech Stack in 2022 appeared first on Business2Community.

I must confess, I absolutely love every aspect of guerilla marketing. In fact, the book that really convinced me that I could actually have a career in marketing is the book Startup Guide To Guerilla Marketing by Jay Conrad and Jeannie Levinson.

The book really resonated with me because it confirmed and expounded on what I always believed were the core principles of marketing. Those principles ultimately consist of creating concepts to connect with consumers. And out of those principles, the one that the book focuses on the most is creation.

For those of you that may be unfamiliar with the concept of guerilla marketing, Guerilla marketing is a marketing philosophy that was created by Jay Conrad Levinson. In Startup Guide To Guerilla Marketing, Jay Conrad and Jeannie Levinson describe guerilla marketing as, “Going after conventional goals using unconventional means. It means that in marketing, your main investment should be time, energy, imagination, and information – not money.” Pretty cool description by the Levinson’s right?

But enough of me ranting about how much I love guerilla marketing. Here are five guerilla marketing tactics that you can utilize to generate publicity for your startup. Which will lead to the most sought-after commodity that every marketer covets – brand awareness.

Declare Distinction

Have you ever been on a job or college interview and the recruiter asked, “So, can you tell me something about yourself that makes you different?” Kind of a complex question wouldn’t you agree?

The reason recruiters ask that question is that they’re hoping that you’ll help them make the best decision on whether they should select you or not. And the way that you answer that question can determine whether they'll advance or eliminate your candidacy.

This means that it’s a pretty important question in the interview process that you’d probably want to nail whenever it’s asked. Well, the same logic applies to brands aiming to get publicity – there has to be something distinct about your brand.

I cannot emphasize enough how important it is for a brand to be different from its contemporaries when it comes to generating publicity, and here’s why. In order for your brand to be able to stand out, it has to be distinct from every other brand that’s out there in order to be newsworthy.

I'm sure you're probably thinking, "How in the heck is declaring distinction a tactic?," Which would be a great question. Declaring your distinction is a tactic because a tactic is defined in Oxford's Learner's Dictionaries as "the particular method you use to achieve something." And what we're out to achieve is getting your brand publicity (which starts with declaring distinction).

If you want to know how to make your startup distinct, here are a few ways to do it. Once you’ve identified what makes your brand different, declare it by reaching out to reporters and the “gatekeepers” in the media that decide which stories get featured on their respective platforms.

Once you contact them, articulate exactly why it would be in their best interest to do a feature on your brand. If you’re wondering how to do that – it’s all in your pitch, which I’ll break down next.

Pitch a perfect game

When speaking to reporters or gatekeepers in the media; it’s best to speak a language that they'll understand – and that language consists of views and higher ratings. So while making your pitch, focus on an angle in which a potential feature of your brand on their respective platform would result in grabbing the attention of their viewers.

To give yourself the best chance at securing a feature, be sure to reach out to the media companies that are most closely associated with your brand’s niche.

In their book Free PR, authors and public relations experts, Cameron Herold and Adrian Salamunovic stated, "A good story angle that will grab both a journalist's and an audience’s attention will make you stand out. Is timely and offers new or interesting information. That information will specifically appeal to a certain audience. In short, a good angle answers the questions, “So what? Who cares? Why you?,” Getting your story angle right is the single most important element of capturing media interest.”

So, let’s break down how to answer the three angle questions that Cameron and Adrian posed:

So what? - This question can be answered by simply stating what it is that makes your product or brand distinct from the others out there.

Who cares? - The people that care will always be those that’ll have a vested interest in a particular outcome that a product or a brand has to offer. And most people only really care about things that they love or things that they hate. So focus your pitch on how it’ll make a particular audience's lives better by either getting them what they want (love) or by alleviating something causing them a problem (hate). Here’s something to remember, the more shocking that something is – the more likely people will share it. And shares equal views and ratings.

Why you? - The answer to this question is the reason why I emphasize distinction so much. The rarer that something is, the harder it is to replace. So if your brand is offering something so distinct, so important, so compelling, so superior to anything else out there; instead of asking why you? The better question from reporters will be “Which day is best for you?”

One of the points of emphasis in Free PR, is that it’s only your job to think of an angle and convey that angle to the media in an effort to convince decision-makers how featuring your brand would be mutually beneficial. Cameron and Adrian stated to, “Keep in mind that you are not writing the actual story, but rather packaging it so that the journalist can put their stamp on it and shape it into a final product.”

Help a reporter...and yourself out

Another way to generate publicity for your brand is via HARO. HARO is the acronym for "Help a Reporter Out." HARO is a great resource for publicity for your brand because it's a website where reporters go to get quotes and insights from experts and professionals from various industries to place in articles, books, news segments, etc. Which is different from cold pitching to reporters. Reporters on HARO are actually relying on you to contact them.

The best part about HARO is that you can reply to reporters' inquiries on the website for free and it's a standard courtesy for the reporters to give you proper attribution on their respective platforms for your contribution to their inquiry if they use it. This means they'll mention you, your job title, and your company – without you even having to make a pitch! Sounds too good to be true right? Well, it certainly is true. And those reporters are ready to hear from you.

Invoke shares

I’m sure you've probably heard the old adage that “sharing is caring.” Well, that adage is definitely true as it pertains to social media. Or as author and marketing professor Jonah Berger stated in his book Contagious: Why Things Catch On, “When we care, we share.” Sharing things on social media can come in the form of a retweet, a share on Meta, or simply someone copying and pasting a link of any of your brand’s content and sending it to a friend on any social media platform.

These days, getting people (especially social media influencers) to share your content or information about your brand is just as important as getting a reporter to give you a feature. Don't believe me? The next time you're waiting in line at a store, look around and see how many of your fellow shoppers are looking down at their phones. They'll probably be looking at their social media page or something someone texts them from theirs.

According to Jonah, the way to get people to share your content is through emotion. He stated, “Naturally contagious content usually evokes some sort of emotion. Blending an iPhone is surprising. A potential tax hike is infuriating. Emotional things often get shared. So rather than harping on function, we need to focus on feelings.”

In order to invoke others to share your content, create content that will make people so happy that they’ll have to tell others in hopes it’ll help them as well. Or something that makes people so angry they’ll have to ask their friends “Can you believe this?” Or something that’s so funny they’ll feel compelled to share it with others on their timeline because it may boost their social status. Whatever method is used, always remember that emotion invokes action.

Podcast blitzing

Podcasts are a great way to generate publicity for a brand. That’s because the audience for the average podcast is geared towards a specific niche. And that niche consists of people that have a high enough interest that they searched for and found a podcast based on a specific genre.

For example, you wouldn’t need a marketing degree to create a pretty accurate consumer profile for someone that would listen to a Rachel Ray podcast about her favorite recipes. You can imagine that the people that would tune in to her podcast would be people that are interested in cooking for themselves and preparing meals for others.

One way to utilize podcasts to generate publicity for your startup is simply to start a podcast of your own and feature guests that are leaders in your respective industry. By doing this, people that are interested in those leaders will tune in to what they have to say. And by tuning in – they’ll also learn more about you and your brand (because you’ll shamelessly mention it in every episode).

If you’re wondering if industry leaders will appear on your podcast – the answer is that most of them probably will. Why? Because every entrepreneur loves to promote their business every chance they get (myself included). And if your podcast is in the scope of their industry – they’ll jump on board to be a guest so they can get the free promotion.

However, if you really want to maximize your brand’s reach through the power of podcasts – I suggest a podcast blitz. You probably already heard of a media blitz and if not, Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines a media blitz as, “a lot of information about something on television, radio, in magazines, etc., all at once.”

A podcast blitz consists of leveraging the power of your platform (your podcast) in order to appear on other podcasts. So, let’s say that you wanted to do a mass promotion for a new product that your company was launching – and wanted to promote it for free.

You could do a podcast blitz by reaching out to others that have podcasts related to your brand and offer them an appearance on your platform in exchange for you appearing on theirs. Don’t you just love it when everyone wins?

Conclusion

The key to guerilla marketing is utilizing creativity as opposed to currency. It’s about what I believe is the true definition of marketing. Which is creating concepts to connect with consumers. There’s a plethora of guerilla marketing weapons that Jay Conrad and Jeannie Levinson provided in Startup Guide To Guerilla Marketing. Which is why I suggest that you purchase the book whenever you get the chance.

As a guerilla marketer, your ultimate weapon is your creativity. The best thing about creativity is that it’s free. Which means that anyone can afford it. The same goes for publicity. In fact, Jay Conrad and Jeannie Levinson defined publicity as, “An unpaid message that is prompted by newsworthy activities…usually prepared by the company itself, but with no guarantee of inclusion in the medium since it is unpaid.”

The tactics above are just that – tactics. It’s on you to use your creativity to create the best strategy to properly execute those tactics. So get used to utilizing your creativity because you’re definitely going to need it once your brand does get all of that publicity and you're doing all of those interviews (I hope I didn’t scare you with that last part).

Originally published here.

Read More:

• Best Email Marketing Software
• Best SMS Marketing Software

The post Guerilla Marketing Tactics That Will Generate Publicity For Your Startup appeared first on Business2Community.

Today, precise marketing approaches involve customer tracking while the purchase of your products and services. That being said, traditional marketing comes with proper research, marketplace planning, customer monitoring, explicit promotion tactics, and selling the products in a personalized fashion.

The ability to reach a wider audience and cater to the people's needs with the specific products makes traditional marketing outperform digital marketing in certain scenarios.

Now the question among many marketers is, “Does Snail Mails Work Out?” It's worth noting that Snail Mail is alive and performing well.

However, every day people are receiving hundreds of email messages with a few letters or direct mails. Besides this fact, Snail Mail with the personalized touch to the promotional materials is still important.

Snail Mails are significant, as, unlike scammers, Snail Mail doesn't send out emails in the form of spam. Rather they stick to giving notice through direct mail.

Digital Marketing vs. Snail Mail Marketing

It's worth noting that digital ads are working pretty well in this era because of the 0.14 percent click-through rate, and the average conversion rate is around 2.35%. Again for email marketing, the average click-through rate is around 2.71 %.

The overall conversion rate for direct mail turns out to be 1.0 to 3.7 %. However, it depends on the recipient working in the form of the prospect list or the house list while evaluating.

Surprisingly 70% of the people have reported that they consider Snail Mail in the form of a more personalized mail system than online ads and emails.

Around 59% of the Americans also reported that they enjoyed reading the promotional mails from brands. And 66% of people have bought a product after receiving direct mail.

The Impact of the Snail Mail Marketing

Snail Mail marketing can create more interest than simple emails and is also more reliable with security for both customers and the companies. If you're looking for a lesser chance of being tagged as “spam,” it’s worth considering Snail Mail Marketing.

With that, you can rest assured about adding more personal touch to the promotional materials while building good relationships with the customer base. The utilization of direct mail catalogs, flyers, and other printed materials are still better performers with traditional marketing techniques.

Companies also use social media and digital marketing approaches. However, your audience will rely on your brand only if you reach out to them with a personalized touch be it traditional marketing or digital advertisements.

How is Snail Mail Still Turning Out to be Effective?

It's the era of endless technology expansion, but sometimes it's worth considering the personalized touch. Traditional marketing communications are still important among people who are far from the digital approaches.

Traditional communications like the Snail Mail are pretty good in highlighting the important aspects of your brand. Many government agencies feel comfortable sending out important documents and notices to the people with personalized mail over the digital channels of communication.

Direct mail marketing works in the form of the standard marketing strategy that involves the enablement of the physical piece of the promotional material. Only you need the courier service or the Postal service that will be well linked to your business. The channel-agnostic form of advertising is perfect for both non-profit organizations and businesses to develop direct communication approaches.

The traditional marketing methods stick to the customer goals, and the traditional promotional techniques are better sometimes over many other digital marketing techniques. The involvement of the cell phone text messages, cell phone email, interactive consumer website, display ads, database marketing, catalog, brochures, flyer, and similar others make the service even better.

The cost-effective packages for direct mail marketing are effective for various businesses. With this method, you can set business goals and deliver the right message at the right time.

Benefits of Involving with Snail Mail Marketing

Snail mail marketing is still alive and is good enough to give a swifter conversion rate. Here are its key benefits:

• The digital communication methods are sometimes impersonal and cold, and it turns out to be better with snail mail marketing methods.
• Bringing improvements across marketing methods and achieving business goals in a short time become easy with snail mail marketing.
• You can set customized messages and notes with the help of snail mail marketing.
• Handwritten card scheduling in any quantity is possible through automated snail mail marketing.
• The authentic and precise handwritten materials ensure that the business owners will appreciate the automated features of mailing.
• The letters with the release date and the software to take care of the rest give a nice personal touch to the promotions.

How Snail Mail builds Good Customer Relationships

Snail Mail offers you opportunities to build good relationships with customers by becoming more personalized to them. You can also include the high-end customer appreciation notes that can work in the form of gift cards, invitations, or a catalog. Snail Mails with the combined efforts of the marketers can give a customized feel to the targeted users.

How to Use the Snail Mail

First Step to deal with Snail Mail

You can turn the snail mail right into a printed direct mail.

Incorporating the Mailing of Bulk Letters

With the involvement of automated marketing methods, you can get custom-made large quantities of printed content that will be personalized for every recipient. The diverse mediums of Bulk Snail Mails are continuously working to increase the business profits by getting new customers when you have the print media to draw the consumers' attention.

Scheduling a Printed Card

Send your business contacts a gracious printed card or letter. You can enable handwritten communications more compellingly than your digital counterparts. Sense of authenticity with handwritten effect allows business owners to appreciate this approach. Automating and scheduling all sorts of mails have become easier with the latest software techniques.

Use of Automation for the Unique Cards on Demand

You can utilize the range of integrations to simplify the creation of the digital Snail Mail. This approach is good enough for businesses to just integrate marketing automation in the same. Automation tools with custom integrations alongside the API's utilization can make instant access to bulk Snail Mails.

Mailing the Letter Right Away

You can get the opportunity of mailing the letter right away, where the recipient will be getting it delivered within a quick time. You can get the availability of the prints for the format, including images (JPG and PNG), HTML, and PDF.

Key Takeaways

For businesses, sending emails is an option that is available for free. But you can get a more personalized touch to the business advertising when you incorporate Snail Mail Marketing. Sending the letters using the Snail Mail requires effort and time. But the procedure turns out to be easier when you get access to it using the automation tools and following the precise steps for doing the same.

Read More:

• Best Email Marketing Software
• Best SMS Marketing Software

The post Does Snail Mail Marketing Still Work? Here’s How to Use It appeared first on Business2Community.

And we’ve got tons of easy and creative marketing ideas to last you all month long.

Read on to find:

• A full list of January awareness themes, holidays, and national days.
• Tons of creative ways to use them for unique and meaningful marketing.
• Marketing planning tips and ideas to stay successful all year.

Let’s dive in!

January awareness themes

January is the national month for:

• Slavery and human trafficking prevention
• Blood donor
• Mentoring
• Oatmeal
• Slow cooking
• Soup
• CBD
• Sunday supper
• Bath Safety
• Braille Literacy
• Hobby
• Hot tea

#wearblueday occurs every January in support of anti-human trafficking.

January holidays and national days

We’ve included the full list of January national days and dates at the bottom of this post, but here are a few highlights:

• Martin Luther King, Jr. Day (third Monday)
• Technology Day (Jan 6)
• Invisible Pain Day (Jan 7)
• Vision Board Day (second Saturday)
• Law Enforcement Appreciation Day (Jan 9)
• Cut Your Energy Costs Day (Jan 10)
• Clean Off Your Desk Day (Jan 10)
• Nothing Day (Jan 16)
• Get to Know Your Customers Day (third Thursday)
• Compliment Day (Jan 24)
• Data Privacy Day (Jan 28)
• Backward Day (Jan 31)

Creative & meaningful January marketing ideas

Here are some ways to use the awareness themes, holidays, and national days of January to connect with your audience.

Share holiday recaps & roundups

The holidays might be over, but don’t miss out on the opportunity to squeeze every last drop of cheer you can out of the last month! You can still make the holidays part of your January marketing by creating and publishing holiday roundup posts on your blog or on your social media sites.

Here are some ideas:

• Did your catering company work a holiday party? Post pictures or recipes!
• You can also take advantage of #tbt (Throwback Thursday) on Twitter and Instagram and post pictures from just a couple of weeks ago to share with your followers.
• Cleaning services or home goods shops can provide post-holiday cleaning or Christmas tree disposal tips.

The holidays are busy, and customers might have missed all you had going on, so this is an easy way to create content for your business while making sure they’re in the loop.

Honor Martin Luther King, Jr. Day with a day of service

MLK Day, observed on the third Monday of January every year, celebrates Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday and commemorates his Nobel Peace Prize for Civil Rights leadership. Don’t use this holiday to promote your business. Make it a day of service, celebration, and education around this civil rights legend.

• Many communities create a day of service you or your team can participate in.
• Post quotes, photos, and facts about Martin Luther King, Jr. on social media.
• Post stats and raise awareness about civil rights on social media.
• Run your own day of service, whether for your community or in your company.

Image source

Get involved during Blood Donor Month

Even today, blood supply is still recovering from the pandemic. January is National Blood Donor Month, so get involved!

Image source

• Participate in a local blood drive or host one of your own.
• Run special promotions for those in your community who donate, such as a free gift, discount code, or special deal on your products or services.
• Raise awareness on social media and encourage your followers to give blood.

Dish em’ out on National Compliment Day

Who doesn’t love a nice compliment? National Compliment Day occurs every January 24—here are some ways to celebrate:

• Show another business some love on social media or by writing a review (they may even return the favor!)
• Start a compliment train. Ask your followers to tag someone in your post and give them a compliment. The tagged person then tags another friend and gives them a compliment and so on.
• Give your employees hand-written compliments to show them you appreciate them.

Run fun weather-based promotions

Much of the United States is covered in snow in January. Love it or hate it, you can’t stop it, so use it to your advantage! Make the snowy weather a little less gray with content, promotions, and posts celebrating the cold.

• Daycares can share safety tips for playing or dressing children in the snow.
• Contractors, construction, and snow removal companies can write about winter hazards in the home—carbon monoxide detectors, salt versus sand for ice and snow, or how to winterize drafty windows.
• Give a snow-day discount. Anytime your city gets snow, offer a discount based on the number of inches you’ve received, like 20% off for 20 inches of snow!

• You can also keep your customers up to date on the latest snow closures on your social media pages.

Take part in National Clean Off Your Desk Day

I know what you’re thinking, and, yes, this is a real observance. With so many people working from home and becoming obsessed with cleaning and organization shows, it’s clear people are spending a lot of time thinking about how to keep their workspaces tidy.

• Tidy up your desk and share a before and after picture on social. Ask your audience to do the same!
• Give organization tips and ideasperson who shares their pictures will win a special prize.
• Run a contest or a poll

Share & encourage New Year’s resolutions

No explanation needed for this annual favorite. Here are some ideas:

• Hold yourself accountable and share them with your audience. Then create content around them!
• Fitness centers can have a weekly accountability post to create a support community.
• Restaurants and catering services can write blog or Facebook posts with healthy recipes.
• Daycares can blog about toy organization ideas for playrooms and toy areas.
• Ask followers on social media what theirs are—you could even run a poll and then write a blog post providing tips and advice for the most common resolutions.

Start a customer loyalty or referral program

Loyal customers not only bring you ongoing business, but they are also more likely to refer other customers to you. Providing the best customer service is the first and foremost loyalty marketing strategy, followed by intentional loyalty or referral programs. And with people feeling enthusiastic and motivated for the new year, this is the perfect time to start one.

Here are some ideas for your customer loyalty program:

• Create and print a simple stamp card for customers. Each purchase or service equals one stamp. After 10 stamps, customers can receive a free product, a discounted service, or a swag item.
• Offer current customers a discount for each new customer they refer.
• Create a tiered loyalty program so customers can move up in tiers based on their purchase history – the higher the tier, the better discounts.

Essential but not-so-creative January marketing ideas

These aren’t the most fun marketing ideas, but they are essential if you want running your business to stay fun, through the month and year-round.

Start with a clean inbox

There’s nothing less exciting than seeing the number of new emails in your inbox when you get back from the holidays.

Actually, I lied because there is: It’s going through them. Did you know January 25-29 is actually Clean Out Your Inbox Week? Use it as motivation to get organized and start with a clean slate.

• Go through those old emails you “starred” and never followed up on…
• If you don’t already use folders for your emails, create some to help you keep your inbox organized.
• Go through the settings your email platform has to offer. There are integrations, color coding, rules, and more that can make your life a whole lot easier. That half hour could translate into hours saved this year.
• Create an ideas folder where you save marketing emails you’ve received that you like or find effective. You never know, you might just find your next great idea buried in your own inbox!

Solidify your yearly goals or marketing plan

Whether you’re an agency, business owner, or freelancer, it’s important to have both personal and professional goals for the year. Take some time at the beginning of the month to make sure your goals and your marketing plan are solidified.

As we know, things can change quickly, but having a documented plan or a growth strategy in place can make the difference between hitting your revenue goals for the year and missing them.

Revisit what worked last year (and what didn’t)

Now that you have a full year of data available, take some time to see what worked in your marketing last year and what didn’t.

Here are some ideas of what to look at:

• What content or webpages performed best for you?
• What resonated with your audiences on social media – top posts, most engaging posts, etc.?
• What email subject lines got the best open rates?
• What marketing strategies, campaigns, or channels drove the most leads?
• What didn’t perform as well as you thought it would – and how could it be improved?

Read up on the latest marketing trends and predictions

With the new year comes a ton of new content around what to expect in the world of marketing and business in general. Find some articles or blog posts that will get you up to speed on what the experts expect to be big this year in your own industry—and jot down some ideas or trends that you might want to try out!

Announce your events for the year or coming months

Market your business both online and offline by highlighting upcoming events for the year. Some upcoming holidays include President’s Day, Valentine’s Day, Mardi Gras, and St. Patrick’s Day.

If you have anything planned for these events, like upcoming Valentine’s Day deals at your spa or a special Valentine’s menu at your restaurant, let customers know! A calendar of promotions is a great way to keep customers informed about upcoming promotions or events your business is sponsoring or hosting.

Update your Google Business Profile

Last, but not least, update your Google Business Profile. If you want to show up when local searchers are trying to find businesses like yours on Google or in Google Maps, a complete and optimized Google Business profile is the place to start.

Take a minute to make sure your profile is claimed and then take it a step further by optimizing your listing:

• Make sure to respond to all reviews.
• Add some images or a video that showcase your business.
• Populate the Q&A section of your profile with frequently asked questions.

Get more tips to optimize your Google My Business profile here.

Commit to growing your skill set

The digital marketing world is never in a resting state. Set a goal for yourself to build on your existing marketing skills or develop new ones.

Hmm, looks like our next roundup will need to have 10…

See? Creative January marketing is easy

January can often be a stressful time for business owners, but with the right marketing ideas and plan in place, you can relieve some stress without losing out on new customers and engagement. Happy new year!

Full list of January social media holidays and dates

As promised, brought to you by National Day Calendar

January 1
New Years Day
National Bloody Mary Day
National Hangover Day
National Play Outside Day – First Saturday Every Month

January 2
National Buffet Day
National Cream Puff Day
National Personal Trainer Awareness Day
National Science Fiction Day

January 3
National Chocolate Covered Cherry Day
National Drinking Straw Day
National Fruitcake Toss Day
National Thank God It’s Monday Day – First Monday in January

January 4
National Missouri Day
National Spaghetti Day
National Trivia Day

January 5
National Bird Day
National Keto Day
National Screenwriters Day
National Whipped Cream Day

January 6
National Bean Day
National Cuddle Up Day
National Shortbread Day
National Technology Day

January 7
National Invisible Pain Day
National Bobblehead Day
National Tempura Day

January 8
National Argyle Day
National Bubble Bath Day
National English Toffee Day
National JoyGerm Day
National Winter Skin Relief Day
National Vision Board Day – Second Saturday in January

January 9
National Apricot Day
National Balloon Ascension Day
National Law Enforcement Appreciation Day
National Static Electricity Day
National Sunday Supper Day – Second Sunday in January

January 10
National Bittersweet Chocolate Day
National Cut Your Energy Costs Day
National Oysters Rockefeller Day
National Save The Eagles Day
National Clean Off Your Desk Day – Second Monday in January

January 11
National Arkansas Day
National Human Trafficking Awareness Day
National Milk Day
National Step in a Puddle and Splash Your Friends Day
Shop for Travel Day – Second Tuesday in January

January 12
National Curried Chicken Day
National Kiss A Ginger Day
National Marzipan Day
National Pharmacist Day

January 13
Korean American Day
National Peach Melba Day
National Rubber Ducky Day
Stephen Foster Memorial Day
National Sticker Day

January 14
National Dress Up Your Pet Day
National Hot Pastrami Sandwich Day
Ratification Day

January 15
National Bagel Day
National Booch Day
National Hat Day
National Strawberry Ice Cream Day
National Use Your Gift Card Day – Third Saturday in January

January 16
National Fig Newton Day
National Nothing Day
National Religious Freedom Day
National Without a Scalpel Day

January 17
National Bootlegger’s Day
National Hot Buttered Rum Day
Martin Luther King Jr. Day – Third Monday in January

January 18
National Michigan Day
National Peking Duck Day
National Thesaurus Day
National Winnie The Pooh Day

January 19
World Quark Day
National Popcorn Day

January 20
National Buttercrunch Day
National Cheese Lover’s Day
National Disc Jockey Day
Get to Know Your Customers Day – Third Thursday of Each Quarter

January 21
National Granola Bar Day
National Hugging Day
Squirrel Appreciation Day

January 22
National Blonde Brownie Day
Celebration of Life Day
National Sanctity of Life Day

January 23
National Handwriting Day
National Pie Day

January 24
Beer Can Appreciation Day
National Compliment Day
National Peanut Butter Day

January 25
National Florida Day
National Irish Coffee Day
National Opposite Day
Plan for Vacation Day – Last Tuesday in January

January 26
National Green Juice Day
National Peanut Brittle Day
National Spouses Day
Library Shelfie Day – Fourth Wednesday in January

January 27
National Chocolate Cake Day

January 28
National Blueberry Pancake Day
Data Privacy Day
National Have Fun At Work Day
National Kazoo Day
National Big Wig Day – Last Friday in January

January 29
National Corn Chip Day
National Puzzle Day
National Seed Swap Day – Last Saturday in January

January 30
National Croissant Day

January 31
National Backward Day
National Hot Chocolate Day
National Inspire Your Heart With Art Day
National Bubble Wrap Day – Last Monday of January

Read More:

• Best Email Marketing Software
• Best SMS Marketing Software

The post 43+ Creative January Marketing Ideas to Start the New Year with a Bang appeared first on Business2Community.

Social media influencers are a relatively recent trend. From their beginnings exploring beginner photo editing tutorials to amassing millions of followers, these influencers have made significant progress. Today, they are true celebrities, often as recognizable as actors, athletes, and musicians. Collaborating with an influencer in your marketing strategy can help your product or service connect with the right audience.

Not only do these influencers set trends and connect with/entertain their audiences, but they can also help businesses grow. If you work directly with a major influencer, it can lead to a lot of reach and exposure for your product or service.

In order to do influencer marketing right, you need a strategy. This article will go over a few helpful tips to help you build up a successful marketing strategy featuring influencers.

What is influencer marketing?

Influencer marketing is a type of social media marketing where a business partners with someone who is a trusted authority in a particular industry or with a target audience. These influencers have a dedicated following and are viewed as experts in their niche. They have earned trust with their audience. When they recommend or review a product or service, it serves as a quality reference to your potential customer.

Find an influencer in the right niche

A lot goes into choosing the right influencer, such as their reach, how they connect with their community, and even how reliable they are. But perhaps the biggest thing is to find an influencer in the right niche. For your journey into influencer marketing to be successful, you need to work with someone who has an audience that is closely related to your target market.

You want a lot of crossover to ensure you have the best chance of getting new customers. If you sell a skincare product or type of makeup, you will want to work with a beauty influencer and not a fitness influencer. If you choose the wrong influencer, their audience might have zero interest in your product. This partnership would be a huge waste of time for you.

You want fans of the influencer to be excited and interested when they show off/talk about your product or service. A good way to ensure you are choosing the right influencer is to track your results and make sure the marketing efforts are effective.

Communicate well

Communication is important in any business relationship, but especially one between a company and an influencer. You need to work with them to ensure the content they put out highlighting your product is what you want. But it also should fit your brand.

Working with influencers isn’t always cheap. You need to make sure they are showing off your product in a way you like. If you simply let them do exactly what they want, you may find that they miss mentioning certain things and don’t get their fanbase excited about what your product or service offers.

However, avoid being overly involved in the creative process of the post or video. If you try to boss them around and direct them, many influencers will simply back out of the agreement.

Instead, a good idea could be to give them a light script of things you want them to say or tell them about some features you want to ensure they mention. Give them some freedom, but ensure you let them know the points that you want covered.

Consider Micro-Influencers

When many companies are looking for influencers to work with, they often go for the mega-influencers with tens of millions of followers and fans. While these individuals can help a company grow, they also command a large fee to do so. For small businesses, this may not be practical.

A better idea can be to work with a micro-influencer. These are individuals with generally 10,000-100,000 followers. This is still a significant amount, but they are often much more affordable to work with.

In addition to being cheaper, many of these micro-influencers have a better and closer relationship with their audience. This often means the fans will trust these influencers more and feel more connected. These fans will be more willing to check out the things the influencer promotes or talks about.

Also, for the price of one mega-influencer, you can often work with several micro-influencers to gain access to each of their unique audiences. Many of these micro-influencers are easier to reach and will be more willing and excited to work with you in many cases, too.

In conclusion, we hope this guide has been able to help you create your influencer marketing strategy and find success.

Read More:

• Best Email Marketing Software
• Best SMS Marketing Software

The post Building a Successful Influencer Marketing Strategy appeared first on Business2Community.

These roundups are entertaining and have their takeaways, but from a small business standpoint, they’re not very useful.

So we sought out to come up with a more practical best-and-worst round-up for small businesses. No, you won’t see any new ice cream flavors in here, but you will find plenty of simple tactics that yielded very gratifying results—plus how you can apply them yourself.

The best of small business PPC

We asked 20 marketers from a variety of industries for their campaign highs and lows this year. Their answers, which follow, include a range of new and old tactics, as well as the lessons learned from each. Let’s start with PPC.

1. Countdown ads

Angela Blakenship, CEO of neighborhood comparison site Best Neighborhood, noted adding a countdown timer to Google Ads was “a unique PPC campaign strategy that worked really well for us.” These ads yielded higher click-through rates (CTR) compared to other active campaigns, along with a higher conversion rate.

How to apply it

We show you how to use countdown customizers in Google Ads here. On a broader note, urgency is the tried-and-true element of any good marketing campaign. Check out our 13 urgency-inducing tricks to drive sales, which include:

• Super-specific CTAs
• Risk-averse payment language
• Pre-suasion

2. Target CPA + location targeting

Nick Thorsch, founder of Share2Seed.org, a platform that encourages entrepreneurs to think sustainably, said he helped scale revenue for a storage container brand from $2 million to $10 million with a campaign that set out to push higher-margin metal containers and refrigerated containers via Google Shopping ads.

He set up unique product pages and pricing to match local markets and used the target CPA bidding strategy, which sought as many customers as possible at a target $100 per conversion.

Thorsch asked sales reps to report the click ID back to Google to measure offline sales. He then expanded to Bing with a similar strategy.

How to apply it

There are a few applications here.

• First, a local strategy is key to any business, even those with global reach, so make sure you know the ins and outs of Google Ads location targeting.
• Notice that Thorsch measured offline sales. In our recent Google Ads updates roundup, we cover Google’s new OCI helper tool (offline conversion import). Check it out!

• Thorsch was also smart to transfer this strategy over to Bing. We can’t stress enough the importance of a multi-channel marketing strategy. But do be sure to avoid these cross-channel marketing mistakes!

3. Promotion extensions

Daniel Foley, marketing specialist at vaping site 88Vape, tried out promotion extensions on Google to grab visitors’ attention by highlighting exclusive deals under 88Vape’s ads. And while he wasn’t expecting much, within a few weeks, sales of promoted items increased as much as 60%.

“The results were better than what I could have even imagined in my wildest dreams,” Foley said. “Because of these tremendous results, it is still running to this day.”

How to apply it

We’ve talked in the past about how promotion extensions can drive super-high CTR. Learn how to use promotion extensions here to gain extra visibility and add more appeal to your Shopping ads.

And if applicable, don’t miss these must-know-tips for using promotion extensions during the holiday season.

The best of small business video marketing

Video marketing comes in many shapes and sizes. Find out how two businesses used YouTube to promote their business and got better-than-expected results.

4. YouTube live

Jeff Moriarty, creative manager at jewelry retailer Moriarty’s Gem Art, said the brand tried out a live show on YouTube this year, which resulted in more than 1,500 viewers and $10,000 in sales. Now, the retailer hosts live streams once a month. Its Black Friday stream resulted in $30,000 in sales. They plan to continue this strategy in 2022.

The brand has a large following on YouTube and sought a solution to reach customers who were no longer will to shop at Moriarty’s brick-and-mortar location.

Image source

How to apply it

You can learn how to run a successful live stream in our guide to going live on YouTube. If YouTube is your bread and butter, consider also building out your channel and creating a killer trailer to attract more subscribers. If YouTube isn’t your channel, you may be interested in Facebook Live or Instagram Live.

5. Video targeting tools + influencers

According to Paula Glynn, director of search marketing and digital strategy at digital marketing and web development agency Pixelstorm, her most successful PPC campaign was a YouTube campaign focused on products endorsed by celebrities. She used a video targeting tool to overlay ads on videos related to Pixelstorm’s partner celebrities. The result was an ROI of nearly 200%.

“YouTube isn’t a platform where PPC shines the best, but it becomes a very efficient strategy through the use of targeting tools,” she added.

How to apply it

• Remember, you don’t have to create video ads to advertise on YouTube! Learn how to run YouTube display ads here, and how to optimize YouTube network and placement targeting here.
• There are plenty of video targeting tools out there, outside of the targeting options available in Google Ads.

Image source

• Know your audience! Pixelstorm was successful because it had its personas nailed down and knew which influencers were relevant to its audience.

The best of small business SMS marketing

Just one campaign in this category, but for the better. This is a tough act to follow!

6. The Squid Game SMS campaign

Vitamin and supplement retailer My Supplement Store wanted to increase its SMS subscribers before the holidays, so it created a campaign that taps into the popularity of Squid Game, which was streamed for nearly 1.7 billion hours in its first 28 days. In each order placed by a customer who was not already an SMS subscriber, the brand included a business card that looked like the cards used in the Netflix show with a number to text.

Once they texted that number, “this then took them through the marble game where they could win a big discount or be eliminated,” said Marketing Director Brian Anderson.

The result was a 20% increase in SMS subscribers. Anderson noted customers loved the creativity, “emailing us how much they enjoyed it.”

How to apply it

Keep your tabs on pop culture and current trends. You never know when you’ll have an opportunity to get creative and capitalize. Also, gain inspiration from the big brands. Check out the five best marketing campaigns we’ve ever seen (which includes tips on how to DIY) and the same roundup for ad campaigns.

The best of small business social media marketing

Influencer marketing, Facebook groups, and Instagram giveaways are by no means groundbreaking strategies, but take a look at the approach these businesses took that helped them win big.

7. Influencer marketing tools

Darshan Somashekar, CEO of game site I’m a Puzzle, said he uses online tools to identify potential influencers who can create user-generated content (UGC). The brand gives away products in exchange for video reviews and testimonials. It also has a collaboration program in which influencers give access to their Facebook and/or Instagram pages to advertise their content.

I’m a Puzzle pays these influencers $100 per month with 5% rev share for all sales generated through their links. Somashekar said the result is site traffic and social media growth.

How to apply it

If influencer marketing makes sense for your business, consider allocating enough of your budget to this channel to see a significant ROI. For example, you may want to invest in influencer marketing tools like Darshan did.

Image source

And you don’t have to do influencer marketing on a one-to-one basis. Influencer collaboration programs can help you cultivate more meaningful relationships with influencers while scaling your influencer marketing strategy.

8. Facebook groups

Daniel Veiga, founder of marketing firm Danny Veiga Marketing, runs a Facebook Group that now has nearly 60,000 members. It’s a public group (you just have to request to join), and he updates the page multiple times a day with posts and links to articles. It has grown into a supportive community in which members share tips with students about applying to and thriving in college.

Veiga said the Facebook Group has helped him invest in relationships and directly answer questions and engage potential customers where there wasn’t one-on-one time available.

How to apply it

Facebook groups are an age-old feature of the platform, but still an effective social media marketing tactic to this day. In fact, in LOCALiQ’s roundup of social media marketing trends for 2021, Facebook groups is #2. Check out the post to learn how to build a community that has a positive impact while also driving your marketing goals.

9. Instagram giveaway + brand partnerships

Melanie Bedwell, ecommerce manager for DTC soda brand Olipop, said the brand launched a giveaway on Instagram in partnership with reusable bag brand Stasher. Each offered $100 in prizes to followers of the brands who tagged friends in the post.

Bedwell noted the contest was “a great way to bring awareness to our two brands and engage our customer base.” It also helped the brand team up with a like-minded company that “shares the same values as we do.”

Image source

How to apply it

Running a giveaway on Instagram is easier than you think. You can try contest types like tag a friend, like to win, post and tag, and repost and tag. We also have a comprehensive guide on how to run an Instagram giveaway to help ensure your success.

The best of small business email marketing

Email marketing has an ROI of $42 for every $1 spent. If you’re not iterating on your email strategy, you’re doing yourself a disservice. Consider these simple tactics that brought success to two small businesses this year.

10. Email personalization

Amy Wampler, marketing manager of HVAC service provider Spartan Mechanical, conceded the company faced some financial constraints due to a dip in sales during the pandemic. That’s in part why they opted to try an email campaign.

“I was aware that cold, impersonal emails would just be ineffective. Therefore, we made an attractive, trendy template and personalized each email for every customer segment,” she said. “Not only was it attractive in our eyes, but our sales also increased substantially after cold emailing.”

How to apply it

Wampler said the lesson is to not write off older tactics, but rather modify them to meet existing needs. We completely agree with this, which is how we came up with these creative PPC strategies that follow the same principle.

And of course, personalization is now a standard in marketing, but the ways to do it are always evolving.

11. CTA and video embeds

Richard Lubicky, founder of search site RealPeopleSearch, works with a children’s clothing brand that wanted to generate leads. He crafted email copy with “Expires Tomorrow” as the call to action at the end, along with a video. After a few hours, sales volume increased by 36% versus the prior month. The brand followed up with an offer extension, which boosted sales volume 42%.

How to apply it

• First and foremost, using “Expires Tomorrow” as the CTA is a brilliant idea. You may want to check out these creative call to action phrases to get your customers to act.
• Second, whether in your emails or elsewhere, keep your audience engaged with videos! Use a killer hook in your Facebook videos, create memorable YouTube video ads, and use video editing software to polish it off.
• Third, measure your results! Email automation software and Google Analytics will do the trick, or if you decide to run a video campaign, these YouTube Studio reports are your best friend.

The best of small business prospecting

Just one strategy in this section, with lots of applications.

12. Client conquesting

Brett Downes, marketing manager of digital PR company Haro Helpers, noted a competitor has a habit of posting the URLs with client mentions on its website daily. He uses this to cross-reference the companies mentioned with the number of mentions to determine which brands are clients. He then reaches out directly to “offer them a better deal.” Per Downes, he has a 25%+ success rate when he is able to reach the decision maker. The cost outlay is $500 and ROI is $50,000 so far.

How to apply it

Different prospecting strategies work for different businesses. Brett had a very specific opportunity here, but that doesn’t mean you can’t find your own. There are a number of tools out there for competitive analysis that can help with this. Either way, the key is to monitor your competitors’ websites, social media profiles, and ads and be on the lookout for details.

You can use LOCALiQ’s Free Online Presence Grader to get a read on your web, social, and ad presence as well as how you compare to competitors.

The best of small business offline marketing

Offline marketing is considered “traditional” marketing but it is no less important than digital marketing.

13. Community workshops

Web development firm Website Rating started offering free home brewing workshops in nearby communities to increase brand awareness. The result was a 3X increase in traffic.

“We are positively obsessed with small businesses and we do go out of our way on our website to help people learn how they can brew their coffee, so our marketing officer suggested this as a content marketing and engagement strategy,” said Founder Mathias Ahlgren.

Ahlgren said the moral of the story is “as long as you love what you do, you’ll build communities around your work and it will always be fruitful.”

How to apply it

Tap into the power of event marketing. We have a list of creative, brand-building event marketing ideas to give you some inspiration. Whatever you choose, consider boosting attendance with Facebook ads.

14. Direct mail

Kyle McCorkel, owner of Safe Home Offer, a marketing company specializing in finding off-market real estate deals, said the strategy with the best ROI has been direct mail, even if it seems “a little old school.”

He attributes this success to name recognition when consumers he has mailed see his brand and “remember it when they’re googling to find a solution to their home-selling problem.”

How to apply it

Whether you use a list of addresses you’ve collected in your marketing efforts or a third-party tool, you can create professional, eye-catching postcards super easily in Canva. Choose from hundreds of customizable templates and get started.

Canva postcard templates. Do it.

The best in small business content marketing

Many of the ad, email, and social media strategies in this post could fall under this category, but we’ve reserved it for two content types: webinars and blog posts.

15. Free webinar consultations

Amazon sellers are always keen to learn more, which is why Ian Sells, CEO of coupon site RebateKey, said he decided to start doing free talks on marketing, campaigns and the basics of growing a brand online.

While their goal was to provide value, the webinars also helped sellers see the potential value RebateKey could bring, which resulted in new leads.

“It may seem counterintuitive to give out your knowledge when what you want is for them to come to you instead,” Sells said. “However, helping and providing value helps build trust and converts mere audiences into loyal customers.”

How to apply it

Those two statements above? That’s inbound marketing in a nutshell. That’s content marketing at its finest. Whether via blogs, videos, webinars, guides, and more, your goal should be to provide the useful, interesting, actionable information your target audience is seeking. If they are able to DIY with your tips and advice, then they’re not a good fit for your business anyway. If they can’t, or if they can but don’t have the time or resources, then you’ll their first choice because you’ve shown that you know your stuff and that you have their best interests at heart.

16. Help a Reporter Out (HARO)

Artur Prokopchyk, business development manager at software development and consulting firm Code Inspiration, noted the brand has started focusing on research projects on topics like negative feedback culture.

The brand used the journalism resource site Help A Reporter Out (HARO) to find more than 100 experts to interview. Questions included how to share and deal with negative feedback.

Image source

Once they had their answers, they spent several weeks analyzing responses and then published the findings on the corporate blog, as well as in an article on Forbes.

The blog post is now ranked #2 in Google search and is read by 200 to 500 visitors each month.

How to apply it

Clearly, HARO was key here in helping Code Inspiration build its online presence and generate interest, but there are many other ways to rank on Google and drive traffic to your website through blogging.

The “worst” in small business marketing

There are major marketing fails like the Kendall Jenner Pepsi ad or the aforementioned Burger King UK tweet, but for the sake of our small business-friendly guide, we’re going to share some smaller ones that you can learn from.

17. A social media ad mishap

Emily Anderson, head of marketing of ROI Hacks, an education company that focuses on teaching social media marketing, said her worst campaign of the year was a TikTok ad campaign for an ecommerce client. The campaign was “quite successful” on Facebook, but “flopped completely” on TikTok.

Anderson admitted her mistake was forgetting that the products targeted older consumers who aren’t using TikTok She also noted the creative was not customized for TikTok, so “the campaign was destined to fail from the get-go.”

How to avoid it

Just as great Facebook ad creative may not do well in display, or as great Google Ad copy may not perform as well on Bing, you can’t expect one post, caption, or offer to perform well across all social media channels. Each platform has a different feel, purpose, and audience mindset. Head to the LOCALiQ Social Media Marketing Lab to get a complete breakdown of each platform, their user demographics, and what to post on each.

18. An Amazon ad oversight

Angela Blakenship from earlier called her experiments with Amazon DSP a “significant failure.” The ad linked back to her company’s website—not Amazon. And so it yielded “quite a number of clicks,” but not conversions.

“We believe this happened because viewers were expecting to be led to Amazon and not our website,” she added.

How to avoid it

We often get so familiar with the campaigns we’re building that we forget to test them out from the shoes of our audience. In Angela’s case, running the ad was the test—so we wouldn’t call this a failure altogether. But if you’re going to try out a new ad network, poke around on that network to get a feel for what the ad experience is like there so you can align with expectations.

And when it comes to emails, website pages, and navigation menus, run your iterations by someone outside of your business if possible before going live.

19. LinkedIn adsfor B2B (what?!)

Because software development firm Atiba is a B2B company, SEO specialist Jake Peterson said a paid social campaign on LinkedIn seemed most logical. However, Atiba didn’t generate any leads through LinkedIn.

The brand actually had better success on Facebook, which allows advertisers to target more specific audiences and refine even further later. That being said, Peterson noted an early Facebook campaign focused on web design, which is an easily understandable topic for even consumers who aren’t tech-savvy, did not generate any real leads. A second campaign on Atiba’s larger offerings with more broad messaging had better results.

How to avoid this mistake

No, the answer is not to stop advertising on LinkedIn. But the takeaway is that when you have a cross-channel advertising strategy, you need to do your testing to see which types of offers work best on each channel. Perhaps Atiba’s broader ad worked better on Facebook not just because of the targeting abilities, but because it was more top-of-funnel.

Different PPC channels often call for different ad copy or even different KPIs

20. Automation backfiring

After automating tasks like email and social, Abe Breuer, CEO of portable restroom brand VIP To Go, said he was able to devote more time and energy to connecting with consumers in an authentic manner. His business was therefore in a better position to meet customers’ unique demands, increasing the likelihood of those customers returning.

However, over the long term, Breuer noted VIP To Go made “a few basic blunders” that “negated the whole point of utilizing this in the first place.” That’s in part because VIP To Go sent out messages too frequently, resulting in unsubscribes.

How to avoid this mistake

Breuer said he learned nothing can replace human interaction. He also said automation should be used to save time, not to be lazy. “The goal of automated marketing is to simplify your team’s routine communication chores,” he added. “It isn’t intended to be a complete consumer outreach and engagement tool.”

And there you have it. The practical, small business-style roundup of the best and worst marketing campaigns of 2021. What were your highs and lows from the year? Tell us in the comments, we just might add it to the post!

The post The 20 Best & Worst Marketing Campaigns of 2021 (The Small Business Version!) appeared first on WordStream.

Read More:

• Best SMS Marketing Software – 10 SMS Marketing Platforms for [cur_year]
• Best Email Marketing Software – 10 Best Email Marketing Services for your Business

The post The 20 Best & Worst Marketing Campaigns of 2021 (The Small Business Version!) appeared first on Business2Community.

Are you looking to create a referral marketing strategy for your company?

If so, you’re not alone. Few things are more valuable for a business’s reputation than having its customers do their promotion for it. Even better, word-of-mouth marketing doesn’t have to cost anything.

Think about it: most of the marketing strategies you might come up with probably involve some sort of cost to get started. Advertising is an obvious example, but even organic marketing methods often demand a lot of work to set up.

When you encourage customers to refer a friend, you’re literally getting them to do your marketing for you. Even though there is some work involved in setting up an effective referral marketing program, it can still be a cost-effective way of gaining new customers.

However, that assumes your referral strategy ends up working as planned. And for most businesses, simply asking customers to share them with their friends may not cut it. So what does it take to make a successful referral marketing strategy?

You’re about to find out. To learn how to get your customers to actually refer a friend when you ask them to, keep reading.

Elevate Your Customer Experience

It goes without saying that unless your customers’ experiences are positive, they won’t recommend your business to others. If you know that your business isn’t as great at pleasing customers as it could be, you should focus on improving the experience for your customers. Asking them to share you with their friends while they’re dissatisfied with your services won’t result in the kind of promotion you want.

Even if your average customer experience is positive, it’s still a good idea to think about how you could elevate it even further. People recommend brands and products to their friends when they’ve been delighted by their experience. It’s one thing to satisfy your customers’ expectations, but going further and actually delighting them is better.

If you make your existing customers’ experiences your primary concern, the referrals will likely take care of themselves. And when you do ask your audience to share you with their friends, they’ll be more than happy to oblige.

Align Your Brand With Your Customers’ Values

It’s one thing to meet the basic expectations of your audience, and it’s another to exceed their expectations and intentionally delight them. One important way of delighting your customers is to ensure your business stands for something they consider important. Your customers should feel that they are making the world a better place by supporting your brand.

To align your brand’s values with those of your audience, you need to know what your audience’s values are. You can find out what values your audience holds by asking them directly, such as with a poll. Or you can make an educated guess by looking at their demographic data, such as age range and locations.

However, it’s important to make sure your brand represents your customers’ values authentically. You can’t make up a nice-sounding slogan about world peace and expect people to take you seriously. Instead, try to identify where your own values and those of your audience overlap and focus on those.

Incentivize Word-of-Mouth Promotion

Hopefully, your customers are so excited by their experience with you that they’ll jump at the chance to share your brand with others. But you should be wary of assuming they’ll all want to help out for nothing. No one likes to work for free, and your audience might respond better if you offer them an incentive.

Incentivizing referrals can take many forms. You could keep it simple and give your fans a valuable downloadable freebie in exchange for a Facebook share or tweet. Or you could set up an entire referral program where customers use a unique code or link to encourage others to sign up, then give them gift cards or free items in exchange.

To run an effective referral program, you need software to help you monitor and incentivize referrals.

Image source: Princess Polly

Make It Easy With a Template or Email Friends Directly

Let’s be honest: most people are pretty busy, and your customers are no exception. There are probably people in your audience who would love to share your brand with their friends but don’t feel they have the time. After all, describing to someone why they should use a service you like isn’t always easy. Solving this problem is simple - provide a place where customers can easily insert their friend’s email address, and you can do the rest. This will increase the amount of referrals you will get.

This email is a great example because it tells the user that they have been gifted $25 by a friend and then introduces the brand. They make it easy for the end user to click and claim their discount.

Image source: Brooklinen

Another option is to give passionate fans a template to use when approaching their friends, for example an email or text.

A simple, broadly appealing script can make it easy for your audience to share you with their friends.

Leverage Social Media Posts

No discussion of business referrals would be complete without mentioning social media shares. After all, social media is almost entirely based on sharing things people enjoy. If you aren’t using it to get the word out there about your brand, you could be missing out.

It isn’t enough to create posts at random linking to your website, however. You need to focus on making social media posts that people naturally want to share.

There are lots of strategies and secrets out there for making highly shareable social media posts. The most important thing is to ask yourself what your audience would feel good about sharing. Then challenge yourself to create posts like that.

Image source: Sephora Facebook page

Invite Various Kinds of Brand Advocacy

Brand advocacy takes many forms, and a customer needs to be pretty serious about your brand before they’re willing to talk about you with their friends. Instead of expecting all of your customers to be ready to share your brand with others, keep in mind that some of them might not have that kind of brand loyalty yet.

With this in mind, offer other ways for your customers to help support you. Ask them to leave reviews on your website or submit testimonials. You might even ask some of them to serve in a case study.

Set Up Your Referral Program

A referral program is a more elaborate way of incentivizing word-of-mouth promotion. It allows your audience to sign up and recommend your products or services using special links in return for a reward. This can sometimes be confused with affiliate marketing.

It’s best if you have a highly valuable, broadly appealing product or service and a large fan base that’s in love with your brand. From there, you can offer your audience the opportunity to promote your business and earn rewards on every sale made through their links. It’s one of the best ways to incentivize promotion because you’re allowing your audience to share in your success.

Supercharge Your Referral Marketing Strategy

By now, you’ve discovered some of the best tips and strategies for a successful referral marketing program. You’ve seen how running a business on referral marketing starts with providing an excellent customer experience. You’ve also discovered ways to incentivize word-of-mouth promotion. Every business is bound to find different things that work for it. But one of the best ways to leverage your audience for promotion is referral marketing.

Read More:

• Best Email Marketing Software
• Best SMS Marketing Software
• Best Affiliate Marketing Programs

The post How to Get Your Customers to Actually Refer a Friend appeared first on Business2Community.

We do not just help you buy a domain or sell a domain, we can also help your business with branding. Market segmentation can help you target the specific audience that are interested in your products. In this article we will cover the basics of market segmentation, the four main types and how it can benefit your business marketing strategy.

What is Market Segmentation?

As a marketer, it is your job to know your target audience like the back of your hand. You should know their location, age, interests, dislikes, etc. Market segmentation allows you to identify the correct market for your company’s products.

Essentially, market segmentation is the practice of dividing a target market into approachable, organized groups. These groups are created based on the target market’s needs, culture, priorities, demographics, interests and more. By dividing your target market into smaller groups, you may better understand the people you are serving.

What Are the Types of Market Segmentation?

When branding a business, you need to know your market. There are many types of market segmentation. However, below are the four main types of market segmentation.

1. Demographic

The demographic market segmentation asks the question – who is your customer?

For a B2B, business to business model, you would look for customer traits like type of industry, company size, etc. For a B2C, business to consumer model, you would look at traits such as age, gender, occupation, income, etc. This is the most common type of market segmentation when starting a company or introducing a new product. Additionally, the data is easy to obtain through U.S. Census Bureau data.

Understanding the demographic of your customer is crucial when launching products and creating marketing campaigns. You can not assume every customer will have the same wants, needs and purchasing behaviors. However, if you organize your customers into a certain demographic, this can be assumed. For example, useful information would be that people ages 40-50 are much more likely to purchase your product than people ages 20-25.

2. Psychographic

This segment looks at the audience based on their personality. Psychographic information does require more resources to conduct research and gather information. However, it is worth it to better understand your customer. Some traits within this segment include interests, beliefs, lifestyle, values, etc.

We recommend paying attention to several psychographic traits when forming your marketing plan. If you pay attention to your customer and your marketing targets someone’s personality, it is more likely individuals will be loyal to your brand.

3. Behavioral

You can also segment your market based on consumer behavior. Specifically, behavior interacting with your brand. Traits within this segment include purchase patterns, previous purchases, awareness of your business, etc.

You can collect this data from customer relationship management (CRM) software or by installing cookies on your site. This data is useful because it shows you how people directly interact with your business, website and products. Additionally, it will help you create a more effective marketing plan for the future. What will keep customers on your site, longer? What will make them purchase the items in their shopping cart?

4. Geographic

The geographic market segmentation divides your audience by where they are located. These traits include region, continent, country, city, town or district. This segment is useful for when the location of a customer impacts their overall purchase decision. Most customers are, in fact influenced by where they live.

This form of segmentation is very important for international companies. Customers from around the globe have different wants, needs and expectations – which you can target with the right marketing plan. For example, if you have one region that prefers print ads and one region that prefers online ads, you can do both and utilize your resources wisely.

Additionally, this segmentation is important when building a website. If you are an international company, you could look into acquiring a region-specific domain name. For example, if you have a large customer base in the UK you could acquire a co.uk or a .ca for Canada.

Benefits of Market Segmentation

By paying attention and truly understanding your target audience, your business will benefit and you will have a better relationship with your customer. Using marketing segmentation can strengthen everything from your marketing plan, to product development, your website and your overall business.

The four marketing segments can be utilized while developing a new product or ad campaign. However, you could also use marketing segmentation when starting your business, choosing a domain name, designing a website, social media page, etc.

Read More:

• Best SMS Marketing Software
• Best Email Marketing Software
• Best CRM Software

The post What is Market Segmentation? appeared first on Business2Community.

Hi. I'm back with another edition of this blog, where talking about the marketing mistakes I made as an entrepreneur. Do you know what a buyer or customer persona is? You've almost likely come across these terms if you've ever looked into how to sell to someone.

A buyer persona is the profile of a customer who fits your target customer profile. We normally have a pretty broad sense of who our customers will be when we start a business and try to figure out who they will be. You could describe your customer as someone of a specified gender, who lives in a specific city, and is of a certain age. When it comes to marketing to customers, you need to break them down into much smaller groups.

Why do you need a customer persona?

Let’s understand it with an example of my first venture, Neev Magazine. Our customer was any Indian parent between the ages of 30 and 45. We recognised that a parent who lives in India would be sold to differently than a parent who lives elsewhere in the world. However, when we began marketing to parents, we discovered a new problem.

Our publication was an online publication. This was in 2015, when children's online presence was not as strong as it is now, following the pandemic. As a result, we discovered that there was a group of parents who did not want their children even near a computer. On the other hand, parents of children who were already using a lot of devices were much more technology savvy. They were asking about security and privacy. And they wanted features that their children were already familiar with, which they could get in various apps or on other websites. So, having the same approach for both of them was not going to work. We couldn't simply tell them, "This is what we have to give," and leave it at that.

To make matters more challenging, we had to modify our methodology for each of these customers. Even within these groups of parents, there were parents who were avid readers. They had grown up reading books and enjoyed reading, so, encouraging their children to read came naturally to them. They already knew that reading was important for a child's growth, so telling them about a magazine and discussing the benefits of reading wasn't necessary. However, talking to parents who did not read and placed a greater emphasis on activities was tough, because we had to consider not only whether they were digitally native or averse, but we also had to talk to them and explain the benefits of reading, which was not our core marketing pitch.

That’s when we realised that we weren't discussing the product; we were truly discussing the product's benefits. So, when you're looking at your business and beginning to develop a marketing strategy for it, make a list of the various types of customers you can encounter. You'll notice that it's not only their age, region, or gender that matters. You can segment them on a variety of factors, not only these. You must begin generating these segments based on their areas of interest. How do they make their purchasing decisions, which platforms do they use the most and what price range do they prefer? And once you've done that, you'll be able to link each customer category to a product or service you provide.

Understanding how customer persona affects your marketing pitch

You may have a marketing pitch where you discuss the benefits, the value system, price, and a variety of other topics connected to your product or service. However, once you've established your consumer segments, you'll be able to attach each of them to a fraction of your marketing pitch, rather than the complete pitch. The advantage of having a client persona is that you will have a pitch that is very targeted to the requirements and issues of a specific segment. As a result, when you're talking to them about what you're offering, you'll be able to pinpoint exactly what's upsetting them and help them solve their problem. As a result, the odds of conversion will be substantially higher.

So, why did I label this as a mistake? Because customer persona requires a great deal of effort. It not only requires that you understand your customer, but it also requires that you begin to consider what you are supplying from the viewpoint of someone else.

It may not come easy to you to look at your business through the eyes of others, but one of the few methods to do so is to speak with a variety of people. Start by talking to your closest friends and family members and asking them questions about their opinions on your company. And if you talk to enough people, you'll see that patterns emerge. And those patterns could be tied to what that person is interested in, their stage of life, and a variety of other factors that may surprise you.

Another example I can provide is that of a spice business. When I asked an entrepreneur friend of mine who sells spices who her target market was, she said that anyone who was health conscious would buy spices from her because the quality of her spices was really high. As we talked more about how her audience could be broken down, we found there were more segments to it. Someone who was health-conscious but didn't want to spend money on expensive spices would be a different group, and you'd want to sell to them differently. Whereas someone who was health-conscious but didn't care about cooking and didn't understand the value of good ingredients, would need to be sold to differently.

How often to create a customer persona for your business?

Creating customer personas for your company is incredibly valuable and should be done on a regular basis. When you try this for the first time and end up with five or six customer personas for your company.

However, as your company grows, you may face a variety of people who want to do business with you. You can even come across an unexpected situation that you hadn't anticipated, like I did.

We were completely focused on marketing our magazine to individual parents during my time at Neev Magazine. However, after an encounter with a former teacher, we recognised that our publication could be utilised as a learning tool for younger kids. Teachers were using storytelling as part of the curriculum to help younger children learn languages and values. So we held a workshop for them to use our product. That was something we hadn't considered. However, once it was recognised, we were able to repeat and grow it with other teachers.

If you already have a consumer persona defined for your brand, please let me know. You can contact me through the many methods listed in my profile. I will see you next time with a different marketing experience.

The post Marketing Mistake 4: Not Having a Customer Persona For Your Business appeared first on Business2Community.

With Thanksgiving behind us, holiday marketing is already in full gear. If you haven’t started already, you’re late. That doesn’t mean you don’t have time to pull together some powerful marketing ideas for your local business. If you really want to grab some attention, these tips will help.

Adjust Your Target Audience

One thing many retailers forget to consider during the holiday season is the major shift in buyer personas. While your products may be created with a particular target audience in mind, during the holidays, people don’t often shop for themselves. Instead, spouses, moms, dads, siblings, grandparents, and friends do the shopping for their loved ones.

Your marketing must target those who are planning to make the purchase for someone else, and that means you must be ready to change your ad audiences, educate these potential buyers, and provide ample return and refund information.

There are a few key ways to get this information to the right audiences, and we’ll discuss those next.

Video Marketing

The best way to make the target user for a gift clear to the person planning to buy it is through video. Within a few seconds of viewing, gifters can get a sense of who the gift could be for, how it might be used, and even perhaps how it is delivered. Video is also a great way to help recipients learn more about their gifts.

The holidays aren’t the only time video is useful for retail and ecommerce. Surveys show 96% of consumers appreciate video marketing efforts when choosing products. Even more importantly, 99% of consumers actually like watching branded videos, so some may not make a purchase the first time but you could eventually convert them.

Create Gift Guides

Another way to present gift possibilities to givers this year is with gift guides. These can lend a high-end feel to any brand, while showcasing your most popular products. Gift guides can come in various forms, such as the videos we mentioned earlier, or as download options from your ecommerce site for lead capture information.

You may also seek out local organizations that create gift guides in partnership with businesses in your city or town. For instance, local banks might present gift guides as part of their service to banking customers. Some non-profits in your area may also organize gift guides to share with their donors. These are great options for spreading awareness beyond your current audience.

Local Influencers

While mega-influencers and celebrities may come to mind when you consider an influencer marketing program, the real engagement comes from micro- and nano-influencers. That’s perfect for small businesses, as local influencers often fall into these categories.

You may expect to pay for an influencer’s services, but many who fit the target audience you’re trying to reach will gladly accept sample products in exchange for posts and reviews. Whether you pay for the service or the influencer offers a trade, your best bet is to allow the influencer to use their own creativity to create the posts.

Influencers will share where they believe your business will receive the best exposure. TikTok may be the hottest social media platform right now, but remember that you’re trying to reach the givers and not the recipients during the holidays. Influencers understand their audience, and they’ll know that to reach grandparents who are choosing gifts for their grandkids, Facebook and Instagram are a better fit.

The post Attention-Grabbing Ideas to Market Your Local Business for the 2021 Holiday Season appeared first on Business2Community.

The 3 Keys to a Successful Marketing Operation

Every marketing operation is unique, yet every brand faces similar issues. Some manage to deal with these challenges effectively, while others struggle. Your position on the Fortune 500 list doesn’t change this. We've observed large brands with poorly functioning marketing teams, alongside small startups that run like a well-oiled machine and achieve impressive results. The 2021 State of Marketing Maturity report from Integrate highlights that what truly matters is developing and enhancing your main marketing foundations: organizational structure, technology, and strategy.

So, if you’re ready to take the steps you need to get the success you want, this is the first place to start. Take an objective look at how well you’re doing in each of these areas, and follow our tips to get where you need to be.

1) Organizational Structure

If you’re misaligned internally, working over-capacity, siloed, or struggling to get the resources you need, you can’t do your job well. Hence, your organizational structure is the first thing you need to focus on, ensuring that your team is well-structured, your goals are clear, and you are all on the same page.

Only 28% of marketers identify their current organizational structures as optimized.

—2021 State of Marketing Maturity report by Integrate

To strengthen your organization…

• Focus on communication. From asking for more budget to tactical things like writing a strong creative brief, a good team excels at good communication. In fact, we find most challenges boil down to a miscommunication or misalignment (that stems from a miscommunication). To improve the way you communicate, find out about the different types of creative thinkers, identify what type you are, and think about how different people’s approaches can affect team dynamics.
• Clarify your goals. This is the number one problem we see in teams. It’s not necessarily a lack of goals but a lack of clear goals that are aligned across the organization. For example, your brand strategy informs your content strategy, which informs your brainstorming process, and so on. If any piece of the puzzle is misaligned, you will not be effective.
• Build the right team. Your team structure can greatly help or hinder your progress.
  Instead of focusing on job titles themselves, we take a roles-based approach, ensuring that each responsibility is covered—regardless of role. Find out more about how to build the right team.
• Share your metrics of success. A single piece of content marketing can be touched by many people, from a copywriter to a project manager. You want people to take pride in their work (and be inspired to push themselves), but without success metrics that are understood across the organization, it can be difficult to keep everyone aligned and accountable. If you’re not sure how to measure success, find out which metrics you should consider and how to improve your ROI.
• Improve your processes. Working smarter, not harder is one of the hallmarks of a successful marketing organization. Help your team do this by learning more about how to optimize your content creation process at every stage.

60% of marketing teams fail to align their department goals with company goals.

—2021 State of Marketing Maturity report by Integrate

One last note: The more you communicate, understand, and empathize with the people on your team, the easier it will be to solve problems and produce higher-quality work together.

2) Marketing Tech

We’re lucky to be living in a time when technology has made it easier to be a marketer than ever. But whether it’s automation or data-collecting, you need the right infrastructure and ability to make the most of what tech can provide.

To strengthen your tech…

• Use the right tools. From copywriting and designing to distributing and measuring, there are a wide variety of tools that can help you improve every aspect of your marketing. Using these tools well can save you hours of mind-numbing tasks—and save your brain space for the things you really need to focus on. To start, here are 100+ tools and resources to help at every stage of marketing.
• Focus on simplicity. Tools are wonderful, but admittedly there are so many it can actually be overwhelming, particularly if you’re facing budget restrictions that make it difficult to get the funds you need to put every tool to use. This is why we suggest focusing on a few foundational tools to inform a single source of truth, which allows you to see your efforts, identify ways to improve, and keep your team informed.

Most importantly, you need to be able to synthesize the data you’re getting from these tools, understand the stories that data is telling, and turn them into actionable insights that can benefit the entire team.

3) Strong Strategy

With the right tech and organizational structure in place, you can focus on the most important piece of your marketing puzzle: strategy. We’ll say it until we die. You cannot be a successful marketer without a solid strategy. It is your guiding light and the only way to track your success, identify how to improve, and make the most of the resources you have.

To strengthen your strategy…

• Focus on people. While there are tools and robots and organizational structures to refine, good marketing is ultimately about the people you’re serving. The more clarity you have about who they are and what they need, the better you can craft a strategy–and stories–to serve them.
• Create omnichannel experiences. When you target the right channels with the right content, you will get the right kind of results.
• Refine your messaging. Saying the right thing at the right time is crucial to connect with your audience.

You can start with our content strategy toolkit, a free resource to help you build the strategy you need to get the results you want.

How to Improve Your B2B Marketing

A good marketing operation is always growing, always evolving, always reshaping. Whether it’s internal issues or industry changes, what matters most is staying flexible and adaptable.

• Experiment often. Stagnancy is the death of any marketing operation. Whether it’s a different format, a different landing page, or a different subject matter, take calculated risks to see what pays off.
• Vet your ideas. Brainstorming a bunch of ideas is great, but choosing the best one is its own art.
• Bring your coworkers into the process. You don’t always have to tackle content marketing alone.

You may not be able to do everything alone, and that’s OK. If you need a little more guidance or a few extra helping hands, you might need a partner who can help.

The post 3 Things You Absolutely Need to Run a Strong Marketing Operation appeared first on Business2Community.

Today I have some target market research resources to help you learn from the competition in your niche.

You can succeed at building your brand online if you know what’s working with your specific audience. Staying up to date with the latest strategies from your competitors can help you effectively reach them better. There are several tools that can help you discover what’s working and what’s not. Would you like to improve your marketing campaigns? Take advantage of these resources, and let me know how these work for you!

1) Effective advertising strategies – WhatRunsWhere

Find out how to create and implement the most effective ads in your industry. WhatRunsWhere allows your business to learn what is working well for other brands. Optimize your own campaigns according to gathered data and charts. Gain insights what’s going on in specific mobile ads and gather valuable traffic source information. Features include powerful research on affiliate campaigns, research top traffic sources, and daily updates.

2) Discover what’s happening online – SimilarWeb

If you would like to learn what brands in your industry are doing in their online marketing strategy, but don’t have the time for research then this tool will help you get information quickly. SimilarWeb provides global online ranking information as well as traffic sources for leaders in your industry. Get a better understanding of customer intent while spotting emerging trends for your target market. This is a great tool for creating better SEO content, dive deeper into competitive analysis, improve leads and sales, and more.

3) Reveal conversations about your brand online – Awario

Find out what people are saying about your business online. With Awario you can find the latest social mentions through over 13 billion web pages. This intuitive tool will enable you to better communicate with your community and and improve your brand reputation. Join in on discussions as they happen in real time as well as gather important research on what’s trending in your target market.

4) Powerful backlink research – SEO SpyGlass

Would you like to improve your website’s links as well as find the best content from your niche? SEO SpyGlass helps you to clean up broken links as well as providing competitive analysis. This comprehensive tool pulls directly from Google Analytics and the Google Search Console for the best backlink results.

Hopefully you will find these target market tools useful to your competitor research strategy. Are there any that you would like to add as well?

Have fun with these tips and tools.

Read More:

• Top SEO Marketing Tools
• Best Email Marketing Software
• Best SMS Marketing Software

The post Get Ahead of the Competition with These 4 Target Market Research Tools appeared first on Business2Community.

In this blog, I'll talk about a common mistake that entrepreneurs make when they're unfamiliar with marketing. They don't know what type of outcomes they can expect for the money they're spending. And this hampers their ability to make informed decisions about whether they are getting enough marketing conversions.

Knowing the benchmark

It's important to know what kind of results you can expect and when you can expect them, whether you're a marketer or an entrepreneur. You'll constantly be surprised by what you get if you don't know that, and it won't always be pleasant.

Consider this scenario - you've paid ₹1000 on a Facebook ad to collect leads for your free workshop, and you've received 30 leads. But only 2 people show up for the free workshop out of that. Now tell me if this was a successful marketing campaign?

You may be inclined to say no. Some of you who have done this before may not agree. Let’s look at why the answer is ‘No’. This was not a failed campaign. In India, the average cost of a lead is around ₹30. You've got enough leads for the money you paid on your marketing because for ₹1000, you have 30 leads.

Let's assume you're writing them an email in the next stage. According to MailChimp statistics, only 15% of people will open the email now. That suggests that only 4 people out of the 30 leads you emailed actually read the email. Included in this email is information regarding the workshop. If no one else has read it, that means they are unaware of the workshop date and do not have access to the workshop URL.

According to a webinar benchmark, barely half of those who signed up for a workshop will show up. As a result, you only have 2 participants who attended your workshop. So, do you think that marketing campaign was a flop? No.

The reason I told you this scenario was to show you that you should know what your benchmark is. And if you don't, feel free to ask a marketer, "What am I going to get when I spend this much money?"

Optimising your budget

If you're operating your own marketing campaign, you'll have to go through a process to figure out what your results will be.

First of all properly organise your marketing campaign. To do so, you must first define all of the stages that the consumer follow in order to complete the activity that you require.

So, in the last example, when I was discussing the workshop, we know that the first step that the customer needs to take is to fill out a lead form on your Facebook ad. The next step is that they will need to open the email that you have sent them. And the third thing is that they need to click that email to attend your workshop on the right day.

Those are all the steps you need to take for that specific marketing campaign. For each of these steps, you should study conversion rates and cost benchmarks. These are freely available on the Internet. You may come across data that isn't relevant to India, but if you get the ratio correct, you should be able to estimate how many people will really take the action you want them to take. You can also go back and look at previous campaigns to see what your cost per lead was, how many individuals filled out the lead form, and so on. Alternatively,ask your marketer; if your marketer has dealt with a large number of clients, they should be able to assist you.

You now have a better understanding of your conversion rates and cost benchmarks. You may now do a back calculation to discover how much money you'll need to attain the desired result. Clearly, if you wanted more than two people to attend your session, you'll have to pay a lot more money.

Giving up too early

Another related mistake that entrepreneurs make when they don't know what their standard is or what type of results they're getting, is that they may stop a marketing campaign too soon if they don't know what their benchmark is. So, if you run this Facebook ad and just 2 people attended for your ₹1000 workshop, you might never want to try another Facebook campaign. Instead, you should concentrate on each and every step of the road. Is there anything you can do to assist in the conversion of more people?

As an example, if you're sending an email to a specific set of people about a workshop, send it twice. The first email is sent immediately after someone fills up the lead form, and the second email can serve as a reminder a few hours or a day before the workshop, increasing the likelihood of people coming. Or you might offer that if you come to my workshop, you'll give them a discount code, but only if they come to the workshop. Consider what you can do to improve the conversion rate at each stage of your marketing campaign, and perhaps your marketing budget will become a little more manageable.

I hope you enjoyed this insight into your marketing spend and found it useful to determine your marketing conversions. Please let me know if you've made this mistake before and what you learnt from it, and I'd be happy to feature your story on my podcast or social media. I hope to see you again next time.

The post Marketing Mistake 3: Are You Getting Enough Marketing Conversions For Your Budget? appeared first on Business2Community.

The latest data suggests UK shoppers could be ready to spend big once again this year. In this article, we look at the key insights into consumer attitudes from Google Search and other sources – and how they can inform your search marketing strategy for the holiday season.

Interest for retail in the UK is up +24%

According to search data from Google, overall interest in retail searches is up by +24% from November 2019 and growing by +0.4% week-on-week. This marks a -1.7% drop from the Covid bounceback in November 2020 but the numbers are impressive considering the current inflation rate in the UK.

Last year, a majority of UK shoppers said they expected to spend more for Christmas 2020 than previous years, too.

The data suggests consumers are ready to spend big this Christmas but purchase decisions could look very different. While Covid-19 spurred a wave of home and garden improvements, searches are down by -12.9% from 2020 and consumer electronics even more, by -13%.

The biggest increases are in apparel searches (+16.2%) and health searches (+7.3%) as consumer interests change. It seems people are, once again, more interested in looking their best and this is supported by beauty searches being up by +14.3% from November 2019.

UK consumer confidence increases in November 2021

In 2020, the UK public defied concerns over Christmas spending, providing a much-needed boost to the economy during the most challenging year in modern times. Once again, the British people are gearing up for the unexpected, by the looks of the most recent consumer confidence report from Market Watch.

Despite inflation rising to a 10-year high of 4.2%, consumer confidence has actually risen in November, to minus 14 from minus 17 in October.

This means consumer confidence is higher than expected and significantly higher than last year when the UK was facing lockdown restrictions and the potential of Christman being “cancelled”.

While the UK economy is clearly losing momentum and the rebound from easing restrictions earlier this year is fading, the public continues to show its resolve when it comes to retail spending.

UK among the top countries for eCommerce penetration

Consumer surveys show that over the past two weeks, UK consumers have done 34% of their shopping online, retaining their place as one of the top markets for eCommerce penetration.

In fact, declines in other markets mean the UK is currently the top country in the Western world for online shopping, showing resilience for online spending even after the economy opened up.

The UK was already the top country in Europe for eCommerce penetration before the pandemic but many nations have experienced a decline as economies opened up this year. However, shoppers in the UK continue to spend big online and Google data shows a dramatic increase in UK shoppers planning their purchases online before they visit stores.

From the 61% of shopping carried out in retail stores over the past two weeks, 60% of shoppers made a prepared list before visiting stores after researching purchase ideas online. As a result, 16% of consumers in the country say they discovered new brands or stores while researching online for purchase inspiration.

YouTube a major channel for purchase inspiration

According to a 2020 consumer survey by Talk Shoppe, YouTube is an established channel for purchase inspiration in the UK.

Here’s a summary of some of the key stats:

• 34% of UK viewers use YouTube to see a product demo before buying
• 33% of UK viewers say YouTube is the place to find out more about brands, products or services
• 29% of UK YouTube viewers make an online purchase after watching a video
• 19% of UK YouTube viewers make an offline purchase after watching a video

The same survey reveals 51% of UK viewers have made a purchase after seeing an ad on YouTube with the highest conversion rates being tech (19%) and home (13%) vs the average 12%.

Christmas lights drive an increase in high-street footfall

Footfall across UK retail destinations rose by 1.5% in the week starting November 8 with the switching on of Christmas lights throughout the week attributed to the rise. Even higher jumps were seen on Friday, November 12, which is a popular day for many cities to switch on their Christmas displays, resulting in an 11.7% increase in footfall across UK high streets.

High streets and shopping centres benefited most from the increased footfall while retail parks experienced significantly lower increases and, sometimes, declines from the previous week. The slump for retail parks is also attributed to the switching on of Christmas lights and displays, most of which take place in city centres, retail high streets and shopping centres.

The overall increase in footfall could provide an early indicator that shoppers in the UK are geared up for a busy period of festive shopping.

While this is hardly conclusive, it’s a positive sign when interest in retail searches are also up +23.9% from 2019 and consumer confidence increased in November, despite all of the press coverage on inflation rates.

How can retailers use these insights for the holiday season in 2021?

From the insights we’ve looked at in this article, retailers can take several steps to maximise festive revenue this year:

• Make full use of search data: Keep track of search data throughout the holiday period to understand what consumers are most interested in and concerned about – all the answers you need are in this data.
• Online purchases: Make sure customers can find you online and buy from your website – or through online channels, such as Amazon and eBay.
• Product listings: Run Shopping ads in Google Ads and free product listings in Google Search to promote your most in-demand and seasonal items.
• Bridge the online-offline gap: Allow people to find your store and products online with the option of completing the purchase in-store with reservations, pickups and collections.
• Deliveries: For online purchases, offer free delivery with guaranteed delivery dates, tracked shipping and other incentives to reassure people they’ll get their items in time.
• Inspire purchases: Use online channels to inspire purchase decisions, including content in organic search, YouTube content/ads and other inspirational platforms, such as Instagram, Pinterest and TikTok.
• Promote local inventories: Use local inventory ads and “in stock” labels in product listings to show local shoppers you have the items they’re looking for, in stock and ready to buy.
• Remarketing: Keep your offers in shoppers’ minds by delivering remarketing ads on the Display network.

A key lesson from the pandemic is that an online presence is crucial for retailers. Despite restrictions easing, people are still doing much of their shopping online and the majority of consumers are researching purchase ideas before they hit the high street, even when they do buy in-store.

This is a crucial insight because it tells us retailers not only need a platform for selling online but also channels to capture interest from shoppers while they’re in the research and planning stage of the buying process.

For retailers that already have eCommerce websites, the priority is optimising the experience to maximise online sales and bridge the gap between online and offline interactions, if you’re also selling in-store.

Consumers turn to search when they’re looking for inspiration and bridging this gap with services that ease the purchase process, such as free deliveries and in-store pickups, helps shoppers buy from you on their preferred terms.

Does your search marketing strategy need a Christmas boost?

If your search marketing strategy isn’t primed to take full advantage of the Christmas period this year, there may be time left to implement some quick fixes that’ll make the difference to your revenue reports for 2021.

The post Retail News and Search Marketing Tips for the Holiday Season appeared first on Business2Community.