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Ready to Grow Your Business? How to Appeal to Niche Audiences

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StrategyDriven Entrepreneurship ArticleRunning your own business means that you must make major decisions daily, but the one decision that a lot of owners tend to struggle with is when to expand their business. It’s a big leap, and you must prepare well for the transition, but how do you know when it’s time to take the first steps?

Here are 5 signs that you are ready to expand:

1. You have a loyal customer base

Loyalty is the key word here. If you have regular repeat customers, you are on to a winner. It’s a sure sign that the products or services that you are offering are quality and that you are providing customer satisfaction. The more interactions and positive experiences that your customers have with you, the more likely they are to convert from consumer into a brand advocate, and so the message of your brand will spread organically.

2. Your business is stable

You can’t base your desire to expand your business on the fact that you have had a good quarter. It needs to have been making a stable profit for at least a couple of years before you contemplate expanding. This delay may frustrate your plans, but it is essential so that you can gauge seasonal variations and confirm that your boost in profits is not just a temporary position.

3. Your team is A1

If you are planning an expansion, you need to have an efficient and strong team behind you to cope with the demands of growth. They need to be agile and dynamic to respond to the new challenges expansion creates – increased demands on their knowledge, skills and time.

4. Your processes are A1

When your operational and back office processes are aligned you work efficiently and productively. Your streamlined processes mean that you have the capacity to take on more work and the time to devote to growing your business.

5. You identify gaps

If you have steady sales of the products and services that you offer, you may repeatedly be asked for associated items that you can add to your product list. Associated items that will complement the products or services that you offer are a natural way to grow your business.

You may also recognize that you are not servicing niche audiences and that you have gaps in your products’ appeal. By adapting your marketing strategy, you will be able to target new audiences for your products and services.

Let’s look at the niche markets that you can tap into boost your business’s growth and profitability:

Seniors

With life expectancy typically increasing and medical innovations positively impacting people’s health, for the first time since records began there are more seniors than children under 5 years. This means that products or services that appeal to the older generations are tapping into a huge market with an equally impressive potential profit – something to consider for your business and perhaps where to invest your profits.

Shares in companies that supply products for seniors have a very healthy return – the health sector, pharmaceuticals, and even the leisure industry have been boosted by the change in demographics. Do your research into how to invest in a global aging economy to become inspired as to how different markets are making serious profits from seniors.

When marketing for seniors you need to pay great attention to the content that you produce, especially online. Your content should primarily focus on their abilities rather than the things that they can no longer do. You shouldn’t use over the top language; they want to know who, what, where and how – they don’t want over descriptive language that dilutes the message that you are communicating.

Moms

Nearly 60% of mothers who work control the household expenses, and make the key decisions within the household. Moms are keen to make purchases that offer solutions to the challenges they face bringing up their children – whether it’s saving them time, saving them money or offering them products that satisfy their values.

Your marketing strategy should be focused on making your content snappy – this particular audience values efficiency. Avoid trying to appeal to the stereotypes of moms who are on the edge of coping, too perfect or other stereotypes – you risk labeling women in a way that they won’t appreciate. You want your campaign to be inclusive and not something that restricts the idea of diversity.

Bilingual Consumers

In the United States, there are approximately 20% of the population speak a language other than English as their first language – Spanish and Spanish Creole being 12% of that figure. It makes great sense to provide information about your products or services in more than one language.

The rise of the internet means that you are not limited to just serving your local community with products and services. Even small businesses can embrace using different languages in their marketing strategy. The most obvious sector to benefit is the tourism industry, but other sectors can thrive by appealing to non-English speakers – we all have the same needs and requirements. If you market to consumers in their native tongue, you will inspire confidence in your offerings and profit from referral within their communities.

By tapping into niche audiences, you can access a new market in which to promote your products. The senior, mom and bilingual consumers are examples of niche markets that you can target, and by doing so, you have the very real opportunity to become a market leader by exploiting the gaps that others have not yet identified. To do this successfully, you must spend some time to understand who your consumers are and what their needs are. You can then deliver a better solution to their problem that other firms have failed to address.

Recognizing when it’s the right time to grow your business is key to its success. Your timing is critical. You want the decisions you make to support a long-term strategy to achieve your goals, expand your business and accomplish success.

Why a Company Blog Should be Incorporated into Your Marketing Strategy

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StrategyDriven Marketing and Sales ArticleAs a business owner, you’re open to any and all tips to aid in the growth of your business. But, if you haven’t started your company blog yet, you may want to reevaluate your marketing strategy.

A company blog has influential benefits, such as improving your website authority and raising awareness of your brand, which in turn produces loyal readers which translate into customers. A major component in the success of your business is the marketing plan that you’ve implemented. Optimize it by introducing well-written, professional, informational, and engaging content that’s sure to take your company to the next level.

Search Engine Optimization and Traffic

Regularly publishing fresh, updated content containing your relevant keywords will boost your SEO and help you rank higher for those keywords in Google. In addition to rankings, your engaging and informational content will attract new readers and land them directly on your page. If you utilize you call-to-action properly and effectively, those visitors will be converted to leads, hopefully generating loyal and happy customers.

Establish Authority and Grow Your Backlink Profile

A blog gives you the chance to establish yourself as an expert in your field. For example, I create the blog content for a cubicle manufacturer and office furniture supplier, Skutchi Designs. “Cubicle specialist” is how I refer to myself in the blog. I am building my credibility for related topics in this field. People will begin to trust my blog and writing and specifically search for our site when they have a question or are looking for a product related to office spaces.

As your blog gains traction and becomes a more popular, reliable source, you’ll find yourself gaining natural backlinks from sites in related industries as well. This will only increase your site’s authority more and help you rank higher, driving even more visitors to your site.

Spread Brand Awareness to Reach a Larger Potential Audience and Customers

As you continue to publish content of exceptional quality to your blog (hosted on your primary domain), you’re spreading awareness of your brand. Using Skutchi Designs as an example again; someone who has never heard the name “Skutchi” before may be searching for tips on cubicle organization. They come across the blog post, “25 Office Cubicle Organization Ideas,” and click on one of our cubicle organizers I suggested in the post, then decide to buy. The blog content just converted a stranger looking for a solution into a customer. If they’re happy with the product, they’ll become a loyal user of our blog, website, and products.

The trick is to create content that people are genuinely interested in. Through some keyword research, you’ll discover what topics in your industry people are searching for. If you can develop great content, your blog and website will expand and gain popularity through likes and shares and backlinks from other sites or industry leaders. Your goal is to develop trust and relationships with your customers and influencers through the use of your company blog.

Ultimately, a blog just makes sense. It’s a free and effective way to grow your business, spread brand awareness, establish authority, and acquire new customers. Give yourself a boost above your competitors by establishing yourself as the most credible and trusted source in your industry and grow your search traffic naturally.

Best eCommerce Marketing Tips

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StrategyDriven Marketing and Sales ArticleAre you currently dissatisfied with your ecommerce business venture thus far?

Maybe you haven’t achieved the levels of success that you know you can reach. Or maybe your little ecommerce shop is bursting with customers and you’re ready to take things to the next level.

Whatever your reasoning may be, just know that there are powerful marketing tips that make it more than possible to grow your e-commerce site by leaps and bounds.

Let’s take a look at our best recommendations for 2017 and beyond.

Create a Powerful Content Marketing Plan

Whether you realize it or not, content marketing is one of the best ways to gain additional exposure for your ecommerce business.

But coming up with a plan might not be that easy.

As you will learn, or even already know, there are a few different ways to approach content marketing. The most effective way that I’ve personally come across is through blogger outreach.

Putting a customized blogger outreach plan into effect will be time-consuming and you’ll have a lot of moving parts.

Instead of leaving things to chance, and potentially creating a system that fails, I recommend using time-tracking software like Clockspot to track everyone working to help implement your plan. This includes tracking the projects of staff writers, freelance writers, project managers, virtual assistants, and anyone else involved in your content marketing strategy. Also, you might want to check some the best live chat software to help your team stay organized.

Why content marketing?

For starters, this is an excellent way to build backlinks to help improve search engine optimization. And once you start ranking in the search engines for your most valuable keywords, customers will find your products a lot easier.

Second, content marketing helps you become an authority in your niche.

By putting out high value content all over the Internet, potential customers will see that you and your company know what you’re talking about. This will help make you an expert in your industry.

Do yourself and your ecommerce site a favor and harness the power of content marketing through blogger outreach sooner rather than later.

Create an Automated Email Marketing Campaign

If you ever want to have an effective e-commerce business, you need to begin incorporating powerful strategies for your ecommerce business.

For many successful ecommerce owners, they look at email marketing as the bedrock of their strategy because it’s a great way to influence your customers to buy the product that they recommend.

Through email marketing, your customers will receive regular marketing messages from you. If you automate this system, they will be in regular contact, hear about excellent products that you recommend, and if you write your emails persuasively, you can convince them that your recommendations are worthy of their time and attention.

Consumers like opening emails, especially transactional ones like welcome emails or cart abandonment emails. That’s the bottom line and it’s never going to change. They look forward to getting emails in their inbox.

So do not hesitate to build up a big mailing list.

Make sure your emails contain helpful information about your products. Answer questions and concerns that your customers might have. And always remember to recommend and sell your products.

To automate your email marketing campaign, make sure you have access to a top email autoresponder. It costs a little bit of money, but it’s a worthy investment that will pay for itself tenfold over the long run.

Diversify Your Social Media Platforms

Right now, you may have a strong presence on one or two social media platforms. And that’s perfectly okay for the moment.

What happens if one of those platforms falls out of favor? You’re going to lose access to a major part of your customer base.

Instead of leaving yourself vulnerable, diversify the social media platforms you post on. By building a strong presence on multiple platforms, you’ll be insulated in case one or more eventually falls out of favor.

Keep Track of Your Productivity Time with Helpful Software

It’s also important to mention the in order to get things organized, you would also need to check out what are the best tools out there that will help you maintain things tidy. Whilst there’s so many apps out there, it’s very hard to suggest a specific software generally, as every business is subjective. Aside from time monitoring, website running and data organizing, there are also packages that will be useful especially to developers, applications that test quality and errors of your app, which basically points out red barriers you need to keep in mind in order for things to run smoothly. See more in this source: https://stackify.com/what-is-load-testing/

Needless to say, if your project runs about application development, these kinds of apps built from devs to devs, are something you, as a developer, definitely must have.

Conclusion

Building an ecommerce business is hard and it takes time and dedication. But if you use these tips, you’ll be on the right path to success for many years to come.

4 Things You Must Do If You Have A Startup

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StrategyDriven Entrepreneurship ArticleIf you are willing to enter the competitive, field and engage in some high intensity battle for the title of a successful executive then you cannot avoid a few things at all costs. You will be likely to go against some of the most seasoned competitors in the market and therefore being aware of the conditions is the need for the hour.

The seasoned competitors will be always on the lookout for opportunities to take down your venture. One mistake and it could cost you years in the race, potentially discarding you from the competition altogether. Certain steps however will ensure that your business takes off in the right manner and thus gains the potential to make it really far.

The right time to begin

Everything has its very own time and nothing happens ahead of the designated time. The right time to enter into any business is highly dependent on the niche of the venture. Owing to the fact that each market has its very own growth pattern, sighting the right time to begin the venture is important.

A core fundamental regarding the aforementioned aspect is to ensure that you have the requisite financial stronghold to take your company forward. If you were short on funds or having a crunch now, then it would be beneficial to wait for the right moment until finances settle down.

Banking in on the competition

This might sound a bit crazy, but in order to take the business off to a global arcadia, you need to be a bit wayward. The competition in the market is fierce and there are thousands of individuals willing to crush each other. Sighting the intensity of the competition, a large proportion of the incipient companies will back down, some will fail and some will never get off to a good start. The key here is to hold on take it slow. The growth initially might be slow and monotonous but you will be able to make it through the rough phases of the competition. You can also read more posts at TodaysGlobalNews.Net.

Work on your social skills

It is vital for any business owner to have the correct socialising skills up their sleeve. The social media for instance is one of the greatest assets to any modern day business. While the social media platforms allow people to be pretentious, your social skills will come into play when you address the public in seminars and business meets.

Developing social skills will ensure that people are drawn to you and will help to instill the wow factor. At the end of the day, a charismatic charm is always appreciated.

Brand development

The initial phase of any business venture is pretty tough and susceptible to fiascos. As an entrepreneur, you need to focus on brand development ahead of maintaining the profit margins alone. The brand reputation will be the deciding factor for the business in the longer run.

A larger brand value will help the business stay afloat and make it a global venture with the passage of time. Profit margins look lucrative but they have very little to contribute to brand development.

Keeping these 4 aspects in mind can help to consolidate the business amidst all of the volatility and help keep the business afloat in the days to come.

Making a Start in Social Media Marketing for Your Business

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StrategyDriven Marketing and Sales ArticleSocial media marketing can seem like a quick win for many businesses, but if you don’t fully understand how to utilize these platforms, the millions of likes and followers won’t mean much if they are not converting. Many businesses are fixated on high numbers when it comes to social presence, but in fact, engagement is an accurate representation of the quality leads you can expect from this form of marketing. By focusing on the bigger picture, you can implement a precise strategy to make the most out of this vast arena. It’s not enough to just upload content and hope for the best, as most people want to be a part of the brand experience plus if you interact and communicate on a deeper level, this can have enormous benefits for your company.

Take a look at the ways to make a start in social media marketing, so that you can utilize its potential.

Understand what you are trying to achieve

When you create content or promotions for your social media platform, it’s naïve to think that if you just pop it up that people will find it. Feeds change every second, so if you haven’t got anything interesting to shout about, it’ll get lost in the ether. Unless you know what you want to get out of the post, you will have no idea how to measure its success. It could be a simple tally of likes, or how many followers you achieved but delving deeper could identify the engagement level and what type of people are looking at your content.

You can’t be good at everything

You will rarely see one brand doing every platform well. There are so many to choose from that spreading yourself too thin will mean that each may fall under the radar in the long run. Looking at how the different platforms work and what type of people they attract will help you decide on where to focus your efforts. For example, young people love Snapchat and Instagram, whereas professionals will be on LinkedIn, so knowing your audience is key to delivering the right message and not wasting your time trying to promote to people that have no interest.

Make it visual

Posts that are wordy can put people off reading them, but if you have a succinct, snappy message with a high-quality image, you will generally grab people’s attention. You can also use free resources such as MailChimp landing pages to create a call-to-action to share on your social media. This helps to give your audience a specific message such as promotional offers, sign up page or competition entry form in a simple way.

There are many things to think about when using social media to target new and returning customers. By utilizing these platforms and creating content that is interesting and shareable, you will begin to see excellent results both in engagement and sales. Like all marketing efforts, this aspect can take time to grow so unless you’re one of the very few lucky ones to get that moment in the viral spotlight, you’ll have to be patient and persistent.