How To Master Marketing When You’re Brand New

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StrategyDriven Marketing and Sales Article |Marketing|How To Master Marketing When You’re Brand NewStarting a business can often be quite daunting. When you’re not a natural entrepreneur or you’ve not had much business experience, you can be fearful of it. But you needn’t be. There’s a lot about business that you can learn as you go along, and this definitely applies to marketing. When you start a small business, you really don’t have to be an expert of professional in order to get results. You just have to be willing to learn and grow. Because as you’re starting to absorb different ideas and tactics, you can try them all out for yourself. Most of the time, you just need to drop the fear and have fun with it instead.

Yet, even when you know you need to do this and you feel willing to step up, you won’t always know how to get started. And that’s only natural – because you’re brand new. So, you’re not expected to be a marketing master right now. But you can be soon. You just need to try out some different ideas, work with different tactics, and get creative too. And you really do need to let it be fun. So, take a look at some of these ideas and see what works for you.

Set Goals

To start with, you need to make sure that you have goals in place. We all need goals. And you need them for different parts of your business – but you definitely need them for marketing. So, ask yourself – what do you want to achieve with your business? What do you long to create? When you write this all down, you’ll find that it’s easier for you to come up with the most suitable campaigns.

Know Your Audience

But then also, you need to make sure that you know your audience incredibly well. Because you have to remember that your business isn’t about you. It’s about them. Serving them, creating something for them. And if you’re going to be able to promote what you do and market to your audience effectively, you’ll need to know your audience well. So make sure that you know exactly who you’re talking to, and what they need.

Do Some Research

From here, you then need to make sure that you’re doing research – and enough of it. You don’t have to spend weeks and weeks on this, however. The aim is to just get enough knowledge of the areas of marketing that you know nothing about. You don’t need to become an expert, as you’re going to learn a ton as you go along.

Consider Working With Professionals

Next up, you may want to think about working with different professionals to help you here. Maybe you don’t want to do it all alone, or you feel as if you could use the help of experts in your industry. Whether this is finding a specialist PR person, a team that knows franchise marketing, or a consultant in your field, take a look around. You may find that working with professionals is exactly what you need here.

Identify The Right Platforms

If you’re going it alone, or even if you’re working with a few professionals, the next thing that you need to do here is work out which platforms you’re going to be on. And this isn’t about the ones you want to be on. But rather those that you know your audience is on, and that you feel you can connect with them on. Because that’s the winning formula here. Remember, it’s about them.

Set Up Social

When you’ve made that decision, you need to set up your social profiles. And there’s a way that you can go about it. You could think about setting up the bare bones of the profiles on each platform, then creating your strategy. Or, you could look to master one platform first, find your feet with it and connect with your audience, and then move on to the next.

Aim For Engagement

But now you need to make sure that you’re using your social platforms properly. It’s not enough to just get set up or to start talking. You need to be doing more than that. You need to engage your customers on social media, and connect with them. You need to get in front of the right people and start to build relationships with them. It isn’t a numbers game. It’s a quality over quantity thing every single time.

Master Your SEO

If you’re not already concentrating on your own SEO, it’s time to do exactly that. Because it’s simple, especially with an SEO guide. Sometimes, something with a fancy title can scare you. But when you step back and learn the basics of SEO, you’ll realize that things are starting to come together. By just using the right words and aiming to get your best content out there on the web, you’ll start to appear in searches properly.

StrategyDriven Marketing and Sales Article |Marketing|How To Master Marketing When You’re Brand NewTry Something Paid

At some point, you’ll also want to try out something paid. And this can be fun. You may often find that there’s only so far you can get with your organic activity, and that at some point you’ll need to run ads. But whether you do this with paid search or paid social, it’s down to your own data.

Push Your PR

The next thing that you’ll want to be able to do here, is really push your PR. And no, you do not need a PR professional to support you here, you can absolutely do your own PR. You just need to be consistent with it, know what constitutes a good story, and start to put things out into the media. Stay on top of it, and watch buzz for your business start to grow.

Harness WOM

From here, you’re then going to want to make sure that you start to harness the power of conversation. Never underestimate the power of recommendations. If you do a good job and you know that your customers love you, they’ll be more than happy to recommend you. And there are plenty of strategies that you can go for here, but you just need to be authentic and truthful to yourself. And your customers will start to do the rest.

Work With Your Data

Above all else, you need to make sure that you’re always checking in with your data. If you know that you want to go with decisions that’ll pay off and allow you to connect more, you need to look at your own results and data, and go from there.

Be Creative

Finally, you’re then going to want to make sure that you’re being as creative as you can when it comes with your different ideas. Don’t just follow the crowd. It’s cool to come up with different campaigns and to go with new and exciting tactics to get your business out there. Try to let yourself be as creative as possible and come up with fun ideas because of it. You’ll see you get better results when you do.

To summarise, when you’re new to the world of business marketing can seem confusing. It’s also something that has the potential to make you feel vulnerable. However, it doesn’t have to. Because as you can see, there are a wealth of ideas that you can turn to in order for things to work out for you. Just handpick some of the different options and see what kind of success you can make because of it.

Spice Up Business Prospecting with Video

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StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article, Spice Up Business Prospecting with Video
 
We’re all creatures of habit. We find something that works and tend to stick with it. So long as we’re still seeing growth, why mess with the recipe?

The fact is that no matter your lead generation situation, everyone working with email prospecting can stand to explore some new concepts. If you rely on the same strategies regularly, you run the risk of losing that ability to grab attention, and wind up playing catch up in the funnel.

Video is a fantastic method to layer in some creativity, spicing up your prospecting in the process. It transcends the idea of tactics to encompass an entire new subsection of prospecting that can greatly benefit your efforts. The stats support it: prospecting reps that use video in their prospecting and sales emails get opens at over five times the amount of those that don’t, subsequently generating eight times higher open-to-reply rates.

And sure, video requires a certain amount of proficiency, but you don’t have to be a Hollywood director to get the job done. Most of us have some experience behind the camera without even realizing it, through social media and video chat applications. The reality of 2019 is that this alone represents a large scope of the necessary skill set to get started using video at the sales level. Using these key methods:

  • Drawing Attention to the Video
  • Avoid Overly-Aggressive Sales Call-To-Actions
  • Remind Viewers of Your Partnership
  • Edit in 30 Second Intros to Pre-Existing Videos

…we can tackle the process of incorporating video into our sales prospecting, and see the largest returns on our time investment.

Drawing Attention to the Video

How do you use video to transform the cold prospecting experience? What you need to note is that you’re trying to reach for an audience that, put simply, may not have a clue who you or your company are. Just like we noted in the opener, let them know about video right off the rip. You can do this by something as simple as including “video” in the email subject line, coupled with a thumbnail of the video in the email body. You can also explore embedding video links in email through the thumbnail to generate greater click-through. These methods will focus attention on the video, which is proven to generate a stronger response than plain text.

Avoid Overly-Aggressive Sales Call-To-Actions

Your videos and attached emails should be friendly in nature. Start up a conversation and avoid sales-speak. Remind your prospect that you’re there to introduce and provide education on products that are built to help their business grow. Be natural, use phrasing and terminology in your videos that are more conversational; avoid too much jargon. At the end, present a call-to-action, but there’s no need to be overt. “BUY NOW” can turn a lot of people off, so instead find creative calls-to-action that extend the conversation and foster a relationship that will last.

Remind Viewers of Your Partnership

Whether you have a pre-existing relationship or are building one from the ground up, remind customers that this pursuit is a partnership. If there was a particularly successful venture that you’re aware of in the past that your product assisted with, remind them of it. Make notes and utilize them in videos; feel free to mention particularly complimentary words they’ve shared in the past. Keep your reps consistent in videos as well; often times, people view themselves as working with an individual, not the company as a whole. Use first names when appropriate and leverage your relationship in the video. It’ll show that you’re consider them and their needs with your approach.

Edit in 30 Second Intros to Pre-Existing Videos

Make use of product videos, and feel free to share them with your customers. Go the next step by editing in a 30 second intro to personalize the content. This takes very little time and can be filmed with a camera at your desk. Say hello, tell them you were thinking about them when a new product was released recently and wanted to share it with them. This small touch can make a huge difference in your clientele relationship, and signals yet another way that video can augment the email prospecting experience with a dash of creativity.

About the Author

Sean Gordon has an extensive track record recruiting, hiring, training, and unlocking the talent of people. For 20 years, Sean has been on the front lines of business across North America. He started with AT&T, where he built award-winning teams in sales and operations from coast to coast. He delivered equally stellar results for EMC, Aetna and West Corporation before becoming CEO of a technology company in need of innovation.

Sean founded vidREACH.io to engage candidates, prospects, customers and employees – all on one platform. Sean has created new lines of business, reinvigorated stagnant company cultures, and mentored hundreds of employees who have gone on to do great things.

Connect with Sean Gordon on LinkedIn.

What are the benefits of poster advertising?

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StrategyDriven Marketing and Sales Article |Poster Advertising|What are the benefits of poster advertising?It may be one of the oldest forms of advertising still in existence but, to this day, poster advertising remains one of the most popular. While the world may be gradually becoming more and more technological and internet-focused, the high visibility that posters can provide makes them one of the best methods for advertisers to use.
You only have to walk down the street to see their power in full effect – poster adverts are literally everywhere. Whether it be a clothing brand advertising a new sale, or Netflix showcasing a new TV programme, posters are one of the most effective ways of reaching new and existing customers.

Here, we go through each of their benefits in further detail, clarifying why poster advertising remains such an effective and widely-used form of advertising.

Design

Posters are, in effect, a blank canvas. They are ideal for brands and businesses who want to show their creative colours, providing a design freedom like no other. Depending on the type of business or purpose the advert is being used for, it is easy to be as creative as you like in their design; if you fancy using bright, attention-grabbing colours – go for it. Want to inject a bit of humour? Why not. How about filling the advert with tons of text? You can, but it’s probably not the best idea.

Nailing the design can make a big difference to how or whether a customer will respond to it. Most businesses tend to hire the help of a professional digital printing service at this stage, to ensure that the poster they want to print is both of sufficient quality, and meets the relevant printing guidelines.

Location

Inside, outside, wherever – posters can be used everywhere and anywhere. You will often find them in shops and on windows, billboards, walls and hoardings – wherever they are likely to be seen. For instance, bars and restaurants often use posters in toilets or bathrooms to advertise particular events, such as quiz nights, happy hour deals and live music events. In essence, wherever you come across people, you are likely to find a poster or two.

Size

The size of posters really varies depending on its location. For a poster placed inside a retail or business premises, smaller posters – such as A4 or A3 – are the most commonly used sizes. Whereas, at a large shopping centre, outdoor poster sizes are normally much larger.

The chosen poster size will largely depend on how customers are expected to interact with it. For example, an A3 poster may look huge when you’re holding it in your own two hands, but it will barely be seen if used outdoors. Similarly, while an A1 or A2 poster may be perfect to use outside, if it takes up half of the wall when using it indoors, then it probably isn’t a practical choice.

However, having this flexibility to decide the ideal size is one of poster advertising’s key benefits. If you are looking to print a poster, here are some of the most common sizes used:

  • A4 – 210 x 297mm
  • A3 – 297 x 420mm
  • A2 – 420 x 594mm
  • A1 – 594 x 841mm
  • A0 – 841 x 1189mm

Visibility

Since posters are typically located wherever people are, they are incredibly visible. Whether a business worker walks past a particular advert at 6 AM, or a dog walker sees the same advert at 12 PM, the advert is always available and able to reach a wide range of people, whatever the time of day may be. This means that a huge number of people will be able to see, interact with and respond to a wide variety of brands throughout the day, which could lead to several potential conversions.

Plus, posters which feature a particular call-to-action on them, such as an email address, website, or social media information, will encourage customers to engage with them, influencing their online and buying behaviour.

Durability

The longevity of a poster really depends on the quality of the material it is printed on. Most good indoor posters are printed on strong, heavy matt or gloss laminated paper, with a ‘Grams per Square Meter’ value between 90gsm and 350gsm.

Outdoor posters, on the other hand, are typically printed on durable water-resistant paper that adheres to the material without cracking or tearing. Take a look next time you walk past a large outdoor poster – there won’t be a crack or blemish anywhere in sight.

Cost

Having a number of stunning posters produced can cost a lot less than you might think. Compared to a large interactive billboard or another form of digital advert, poster advertising can be a much more cost-effective method to use. It could also potentially reach a lot more people, so could offer a better return on investment. Likewise, it is generally considered a more trusted and tolerated form of advertising to consumers over digital or online alternatives.

Final thoughts…

There you have it – the various reasons why using poster advertising can be such an effective way of reaching more customers. It may not have the interactive pizzazz that digital adverts can provide but, as one of the oldest and most widely-used forms of advertising, it certainly is a cost-effective and incredibly popular choice.

Market Your Business The Right Way With These Helpful Solutions

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StrategyDriven Marketing and Sales Article |Marketing|Market Your Business The Right Way With These Helpful SolutionsMarketing your business is directly related to how well it is going to perform on the market, and for this reason, it should be something that you are placing a lot of focus on. However, we also know that a lot of business owners don’t see this as being the case, and then end up missing out on huge opportunities when it comes to marketing. If you are looking for ideas on how you can market your business in the best possible way, then you have come to the right place because we are going to be looking at some of the solutions that you need down below.

Keep Up With Social Media

The very first thing that you should be doing is keeping up with social media. So, if you don’t currently have an account on all of the major social media platforms, then this is something you need to correct immediately. Your company should have a business page on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn for this to be most effective. Once you have created the profiles, you need to ensure that they are being updated regularly with SEO content. What this means is that your content will rank well in the SERPs, maximizing the number of people who will see your business when they search for certain keywords and terms.

As well as this though, keeping up with your social media is important to your clients as it lets them know what is going on in your business at any given time, and makes them feel as though they have a closer relationship with you. Using tools like Live is a great way to establish this connection, and being sure to reply to direct messages is always going to go a long way. As long as there is something fresh on your page every day or every few days at the bare minimum, this is going to drive your marketing campaign forward.

StrategyDriven Marketing and Sales Article |Marketing|Market Your Business The Right Way With These Helpful SolutionsTry Something Different

Something else that you should consider is trying something different. So, there are some of the basic marketing techniques that are employed by almost every business across all industries, and that is because they are effective. We are not saying that you should ditch these marketing methods as they are clearly providing you results, but while you are doing this, you should also be trying something new on the side. For example, video production is something that you can hire an external company to help you with, which will help you create a video for the purpose of marketing your business. This is an excellent way to do something that not all companies do, and show potential clients why they should choose you over your competition. It gives a more personal feel than a post on your website or a leaflet in the mail.

We hope that you have found this article helpful, and now see that if you market your business the right way like with the solutions above, you are going to see more customers in no time.

Huge Mistakes To Avoid When Planning A Corporate Event

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StrategyDriven Marketing and Sales Article |Corporate Event|Huge Mistakes To Avoid When Planning A Corporate EventBeing an entrepreneur means making mistakes. A lot of mistakes. Although it isn’t ideal, these situations allow you to learn and grow as a business owner. That being said, there are some errors that you’re better off avoiding. Corporate events are a very important part of business. They provide an opportunity to get your name out there, impress clients, and make money at the same time. The last thing you want to do when hosting an event, therefore, is make a mistake. With that in mind, here are five huge blunders to avoid when planning your own.

Beginning Planning Too Late

Once you’ve made the decision to host your own event, you should begin the planning process as soon as you can. Far too many entrepreneurs underestimate just how much time, and work must go into organizing an event of this size. Many elements of the day will have to be booked or purchased well in advance. If you fail to do this, you might miss out or could be left with a much larger bill. Don’t put your event at risk by waiting until the last minute to get organized.

Hiring Too Little Help

Never attempt to run a corporate event by yourself. With so much to take care of throughout the day, even trying to do so would make it impossible for you to enjoy yourself. There is also a very big chance of you making a mistake, which could cause chaos for both you and the guests. Instead, you should bring in plenty of help. If you can’t spare any employees from the office, then hire temporary workers for the day. You may want to book an event planner to lend a hand too.

Expecting Guests To Show

Putting time, money, and effort into an event won’t make people show. The only way to guarantee this is to promote it. However, you shouldn’t just advertise the event itself. Many guests will come for the local area too, so make sure you highlight that. If the event is in Geelong, for example, you could mention the quality conference centre accommodation within easy reach of Geelong’s waterfront and the Botanic Gardens. Promoting your event at similar ones is also a good idea.

Offering Nothing To Do

Although many people attending your event will be busy with their own stands, most will have nothing of the sort to keep them occupied. The last thing that you want is for these attendees to be stood around bored all day. This wastes your time, as well as theirs, and could damage your reputation. To avoid this, you should organize activities to keep your guests busy. Speakers, contests, bands, and games are all typical ways to pass the time and entertain guests at events.

Forgetting A Backup Plan

There are so many things that could go wrong on the day of your event. While it might cause you stress to think about these potential issues, you can’t afford to bury your head in the sand. If you ignore these risks, you’ll have no way of resolving them if they do happen. For this reason, you should write a list of all of the issues that you can think of and plans to fix them. If a speaker were to not show up, for example, you should have another one waiting in the wings.

Avoiding these mistakes should ensure that your event is a huge success.