Top Ways to Promote Your Business

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StrategyDriven Marketing and Sales ArticleGetting your business to stand out from the rest is something that every company struggles with at some point. With more businesses emerging every day than the last, there is no surprise that this is a struggle that is deepening. However, that doesn’t mean it is impossible. When more people are dealing with the same issues, there are more solutions for businesses of any kind to follow. Whether you are a new start-up hoping to make a storm, or a business giant falling on hard times, there are some old and new tricks you can follow that are the best ways to promote your business.

Flawless website design

When you are thinking of promoting your business, you must always bear in mind that it is not just customers you should be impressing. Investors, clients, prospective employees, and competitors should also be at the forefront of your strategy. Ideally, you should start by visually impressing people. Often, the first thing they will see is your website; moreover, its design. Focus your efforts on building a sleek website that can tell everyone what your business is about from a first glance. You can do this with color, font, and your logo, and it’s best to employ a trusted professional to help achieve your vision.

Regular blog posts

Content marketing is one of the oldest methods of promoting a business. The reason it has stuck around is that it works. If you put out regular content related to business practices and your company’s relation to the wider world, you will be able to put a more human face to your brand. Where content used to mean just the written word, it has now moved on to include high-quality images, sound and video, which you can use to connect with readers more. These are also an excellent way to bolster an ethical message, which is an important business feature in today’s world.

Social media

Having great content is always a plus, but it means nothing if you don’t promote it on social media, as SEO only does half the work. As a tool which is becoming increasingly hard to ignore, you should make sure your business has a presence on every social media platform appropriate to your business, even the smaller ones. Once there, you can engage with your target market, and run advertising campaigns that are guaranteed to help your business make a name for itself. When it comes to selling a product or service, it becomes even more useful.

Marketing influencers

Businesses have always made use of marketing influencers, where they partner with people who can promote their brand or products on different platforms. Where it used to mean having contacts within the press, it now also alludes to those who have a big online following. From bloggers to social media influencers, there are many people you can contact that can promote your product for either a small cut of the business profits or simply a free product. Sometimes, this helps you reach a much larger audience, but it will also ensure your conversion rate is much higher.

Good customer service

It seems that social media is shaping the way businesses promote themselves, and customer service is no exception. Although it’s wise to have customer service providers active on telephones and via email, there are some other ways you can connect with customers. Social media allows businesses to engage with customers in a more efficient, friendly way. There is no better publicity for a business than your customers going on to tell their family and friends about the great care they have received. Make sure you capitalize on this the most by making use of instant messaging services like WhatsApp.

Build a community

Building an online community has never been easier with innovations like social media, but you should also build one in your local area. If your business has humble roots, you should make sure you never pull yourself away from these. Holding charity days and promotional events are just a few ways you can maintain your community at home. Even better is if you document these days on your blog, as this will encourage your online community to grow even more after connecting emotionally with your brand.

An effective pitch

You will be aware of the business ideal of always having an elevator pitch saved in your head. Before you can start giving your pitch out to investors, it’s wise to make sure it’s polished, snappy, and effective. Sitting down and working this pitch out may seem tedious, but you never know when you need to pitch your business. It often happens in times you don’t expect, hence the nickname of being an elevator pitch. If you have a pitch that works, you can successfully promote your business to investors and business partners alike.

Networking

This pitch should also be reserved for special networking events, where you can promote your business to a wide range of prospective investors. It is also great to have if you want to do a one-off partnership with another business. At such events, you should remain cool and collected, but it is also essential to take promotional products with you. Having the right ones made by expert companies such as Dynamic Gift will ensure that anybody you meet is reminded of your business long after you have met them. They are also great to give out to your target consumer market at promotional events.

Free samples or trials

Consumers love free products in all their forms; giving out promotional ones like pens and bags is a great start. What they also love is having free samples of products and free trials of services. These are a great talking point and will create a handy ripple effect among your target market’s friends and family. If they like what they are using, they will more likely talk about it online and come back for more. If they don’t, you can collect feedback and make the appropriate changes to market your product the next time around.

Promoting Your Business The Right Way

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StrategyDriven Marketing and Sales ArticlePromoting your Florida business is critical to your long-term success. Good marketing means that people will hear about your business and that adds to your customer base. Before you can get into any complicated marketing tactics, you need to make sure you cover the basics and start off by promoting your business the right way.

The Right Sign

The biggest misconception in business is that only companies that rely on foot traffic need to invest in a good sign. If customers cannot find your business, no matter what you do, then you will have a hard time growing. You need to talk to a reputable Florida sign company to get a professional sign that is not only easy to see, but gives your business some personality as well.

Social Media

Ignoring social media as a business owner in today’s world is the same as ignoring the telephone Yellow Pages in the 70s and 80s. If you were not in the Yellow Pages, then your business did not exist to customers. Social media is free and it is where people go to find the businesses they will buy from. You need a social media presence, including imagery and video, and you need to be active with your social media accounts. The imagery and video can be handled inexpensively using these free creative commons zero licensed and public domain image sources and this online video maker.

Word Of Mouth

You could pay for hours of television and radio commercials, but that will not be as effective as getting a small army of people to personally recommend your business to their friends and family members. Create a referral program that gives your customers a small financial reward for recommending your business and you will see your revenues soar.

It takes time to grow a successful business, but it also takes a lot of smart marketing ideas. Before those marketing ideas will take off, you need to focus on the basics. Once you get your business name out there to the right people and create ways for people to easily find your business, your other marketing programs will start adding plenty of revenue to your bottom line.

The Importance of Having a Cohesive Marketing Strategy for Promoting Your Business

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StrategyDriven Marketing and Sales ArticleAs a business owner, your marketing strategy needs to be cohesive if you want to market your business successfully. Here’s why you need to have cohesion as an Internet marketer and some ways you can go about it.

What is Cohesive Marketing?

When we talk about cohesive marketing we are referencing the need to bring all your platforms that promote your business together under one main strategy. This gives you a better return on your investment or ROI and helps to keeps things consistent. In the marketing world, you can’t just fling out ideas and hope they stick, you need a strategy. You may hop on a new trend but find that it doesn’t do much for your business. You need to find a strategy that works for the needs of your business and then bring everything together in a cohesive way so you’re not all over the place.

How Your Business Can Stay Cohesive

When your marketing strategy is cohesive and consistent this helps to showcase your brand a positive light to your clients and customers. There are many ways to approach your strategies such as having a robust email marketing campaign or a consistent social media presence. Whenever you make your next marketing decisions, you should take time to figure out how this is going to fit into your overall marketing strategy. You want to make sure that your customers will receive it well and that it’s showcasing your brand or service in the best possible light.

Social Media

One way to bring cohesion to your brand and your marketing is to maintain the same social media presence across all platforms. You want people to recognize your brand no matter what platform that you’re using. Try to use the same logos, fonts and include the same information about what you’re all about on every platform. You want customers and clients to instantly recognize your brand. When you’re cohesive with your social media presence, you won’t create confusion or send mixed messages.

Email Marketing

You need to learn how to do email marketing if you want to stay in touch with your customers as email can be critical to your marketing strategy. You also want to have a cohesive email marketing campaign and your email marketing messages need to be consistent. You should send them around the same time each month or week to engage with your customers. Make sure you plan out the email before you send it and always give the end user something of value when you send the email so they have the incentive to click the email and read it.

Content Marketing

When designing your content marketing strategy, you should have a good idea of what you want to create and to ensure that that content is always consistent. You want the content to provide some sort of value for the reader and not just random articles. If you stay consistent then the reader is going to know that you’ll have something that they can use each time they visit the site or read an email from you. Have a clear idea of how you plan to share that content, the call to action you want, and what the content is going to be about before you create it. You should have some clear goal in mind with the content you create.

Summary

Your marketing strategy should sync everything up and stay consistent as this is going to give you more value for your dollar and help your business grow. This helps to establish your brand and bring you more customers or clients as your giving them a clear message about your business and what you have to offer.

How Your Business’ Digital Marketing Strategy Can Best Utilize Online Platforms

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StrategyDriven Marketing and Sales ArticleIf you run a business, you will most likely have a digital marketing strategy in place, and this will probably be one of the main methods in which you communicate with your current customers, and reach out to further potential customers as well. Utilizing your online platforms effectively can see you easily boost your business, but to do this, it is important to understand how best to use the online platforms that are available at your fingertips.

Blogging

Blogging is a brilliant way in which you can not only connect with your customers and potential clients but further keep them interested once they are part of your community. Starting a blog or adding a blog as a permanent feature to your website shows potential customers and consumers that you are interested and engaged in current issues and matters, and you are also a company that values customer retention through the means of sharing information. With appropriate consideration, your business can easily develop and start a blog, where you can post informative pieces that your customers can relate to, and learn from. You can keep up with trends by publishing content that is relevant to your customer base, and the regular posts will mean customers are more likely to come back to read more as time goes on. Of course, adding a blog to your website or business will require a certain amount of effort and research, as it will be obvious if your content is not of a strong quality. You should aim for a balance of quality as well as quantity, with varied posts with the aim to inform and entertain your immediate readership. It is a cost-effective way to promote your business easily, and what you stand for, so what are you waiting for?

Social Media Strategy

Your social media strategy is another vital part of your digital marketing strategy that, when properly implemented, can bring in serious opportunity for your business. Social media can even be a free method of marketing, which you can tailor to suit each platform, as different social media platforms cater to different audiences. Instagram, for example, will require a completely different marketing strategy to a Twitter feed, due to the nature of the content you are sharing and the demographics of each platform’s users. The younger generation that has grown up in a digital age will use social media more, so effectively targeting certain age groups with a media strategy that will specifically appeal to them is a great way to boost business and see potential growth.

Unsure as to whether this is the case? Let’s take the travel industry as an example. It may interest you to learn that a whopping 68% of Millennials found inspiration for their most recent trip through Facebook, and 60% through Instagram. These stats go to show the way in which businesses need to market themselves is rapidly changing. Be sure to stay ahead of the curve if you have a business in the travel industry. Through photos, offers, and blog posts, you can maximize interest in your business and be one step ahead of your competition, in this case, travel agents. To find out more about developing an effective social media campaign, check out a professional Facebook ads agency for hotels who can help you to market your venture using avenues such as paid social for hotels, to inspire potential customers on social media.

Conduct Surveys

Conducting surveys and asking for regular feedback is another way to easily further customer retention as well as potentially gain further business. With every visitor to your website, you are essentially given an opportunity to see how your business appears to ‘the other side.’ Feedback surveys are a win-win situation, as not only are you showing your customer base and potential clients or consumers that you care about the experience they are having, but you also gain an understanding of the areas of your business where you can improve. Getting a customer’s perspective can be invaluable in terms of understanding the best way to improve your business for the better.

Four Risks to Avoid During B2B Web Development

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StrategyDriven Marketing and Sales Article

A basic tip provided by start-up technicians, expert technology specialists, self-help experts, and network experts on how to start an online business is: “Be Effective.”

Start-ups in e-commerce do their best, often taking part in courses tagged “Start-up 101” that are being promoted as the “easiest”, “fastest” and “best”, and they all seem to disappear in one or two years for reasons unknown. The people who have created new e-commerce enterprises ask the same questions raised by slick and motivational articles about success, instead of clarifying their vision. Unfortunately, none of these resources contains a single piece of advice on how to avoid at the typical errors synonymous with web development during the creation of platforms.

Our company is not just a web development agency; we are the technology partners of several start-ups. Our focus is on quick launch, and long-term projects have also become our priority. Our company is not only interested in the development hours paid by the project owner, but also in the success of a project, the development of additional features, maintenance capacity, and scalability.

Without further ado, we will talk about the main risks involved in web development:

Risk No 1: Contractor’s Experience

Most decision makers try to find an experienced web development company with skills that align with the planned project. If all companies were the same, there would be no single company or proposal that matches the needs of a specific project.

Solution: Look for a web development contractor with extensive expertise. Brendan Wilde of Discountdomains.co.nz believes that it demonstrates the contractor’s ability to implement different business models and bring the experience of other business areas to the benefit of the system. ‘A contractor with limited experience can be a star in a specific field but cannot always see the system in a broader sense’, Wilde added.

Risk No 2: Shortcuts

Some decision makers believe that if they find a contractor with the same experience in implementing the same type of project, then there’s no use to invest in research, analysis, lists of features, prototypes, etc. This may seem reasonable for small business websites or blogs, but when it comes to B2B systems and e-commerce platforms, these errors could lead to huge losses.

Solution: Take your time. Analyse the functionalities and their means of implementation, plot production, create prototypes and align the system’s professional outlook with marketing experts before coding. This will save costs on redesign, or solve technical bottlenecks created by lack of planning. This phase requires between 2% to 7% of the project budget, but saves a large amount of funds for long-term projects. Since start-ups are high-risk on their own, we suggest you avoid all possible dangers whenever you can.

Risk No 3: Length of the Project

This risk also relates to the cost of the project. The trick is to combine the financing model and the development calendar. In a linear process, different experts participate in various parts of the project, passing the baton to the next phase and to the team of experts. This approach may be suitable for small projects, but for large platforms it can ruin the whole idea. This is because the project could be obsolete before you even launch it.

Solution: Look for web development agencies aware of this risk. We have seen a huge positive impact when involving all types of experts in every phase of the project. This workflow ensures a faster transition of expertise among project team members at every stage of development, reduces repetitions and over-clarification, saves development costs in general, and shortens the development cycle.

Risk No 4: Linear Development

As per practical implementation, consider linear workflow as an example. The customer decides to create a B2B web platform from scratch. In a linear workflow, the first two months would be devoted to engineering requirements, creating feature lists and creating prototypes. The following two months will be dedicated to the correction of the prototype with the designers, the outlook design, the correction of the design (because the customer takes on a marketing agency for the purpose of the project) and the fine-tuning of the design. Development will begin in the fifth month simply because the corrections made in the second phase would return to the previous phase and would be used again in the second phase. This process is long, boring, complicated and risky in a competitive environment.

Solution: Try to reduce these repetitions, since the amount of work done by the requisite engineers in two weeks is enough to start working on prototypes, present the marketing agency with results, demonstrate the concept, and implement the changes and subsequently adapt to the market.

In this way, the client can start receiving comments from project experts in four weeks instead of four months. In addition, several specialists work at the same time: the developers are involved in the requirements analysis phase to discuss the performance of features and in the prototype phase to share their vision of coding design with the highest engagement ratio during the phase of development. The participation of designers is at the highest during the design phase, but also influences prototyping because they share their UI/UX experience and continue to support developers during the development phase.

With projects created in two weeks, you can start the development phase faster, using good WordPress plugins. Since the start of the design work is two weeks after design requirements, one month of preparation in this model is sufficient to initiate the development of back-end and front-end, and align the design or functionality with the recommendation from the marketing agency.

Think big, ask relevant questions, act quickly and pay attention to the details of hidden importance. These can ruin the entire project or bring it to the highest peak of business.

Conclusion

The team of web developers over at ALT Agency believe that with any web development project the key to success comes down to project management.

When projects aren’t planned correctly from the start they tend to fall apart mid project and leave to unexpected delays and often increased costs for clients.

By sitting down as a team and planning correctly and using tools such as Trello and Invision it allows for a much clearer outcome and with through planning with all requirements and elements of a development broken down it’s easy to identify issues before they arise.