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8 Tips to Start a Successful Online Community

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StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article | Online Community | 8 Tips to Start a Successful Online CommunityOnline communities boost brand recognition and help in lead generation. These communities are one of your most powerful marketing platforms if they have a defined purpose and proper moderation.

Below are valuable tips on how to create a successful online community.

1. Choose the best online community research software

It’s critical to have the appropriate tools to support your online community if you want to get the most out of it. Because each online community has unique requirements, choosing an online community research software with the appropriate functionality is critical. First, it should be mobile-friendly and must have enough levels of privacy and security.

2. Choose the best community manager for the job

Your Community Manager is critical to the success of your neighborhood. If your manager is not properly managing the group, members may be upset by other members, quit, and negatively perceive your brand.
Members will quit if they do not believe they are receiving the value promised to them when they applied for membership in the community. Members will also leave your community and forget about it if they are constantly bombarded with alerts.

3. Selecting the Best Platform

To develop your online community, there are literally thousands of tools and programs to select from. You might use a social media program such as Facebook or a custom software solution.

Consider the following questions while selecting a platform:

  • What platform and device do the bulk of my community members use?
  • Is the platform simple to use? (Single sign-on, as part of an app the person is already familiar with, and so on.)
  • Is it simple to share material and communicate with other members of the community on the platform?
  • Is the platform compatible with your CRM/database?

4. Set up reports to keep track of crucial community indicators

The long-term sustainability of the online community is heavily dependent on how you can demonstrate its worth in relation to your overall company goals. Do you want to enhance possibilities, decrease client turnover, or promote brand awareness?
Whatever your aim, you must define the key performance indicators (KPIs) that you will report on and utilize to measure your progress. You might want to think about the following:

  • Engagement (discussions, likes, comments, and shares)
  • Followers/members
  • Referral traffic
  • Active members
  • Conversion rate

These are just a handful of the essential metrics you should be paying attention to.

5. Satisfy a need

To begin with, you cannot build community if you cannot satisfy people’s desire for community.Every community meets a need. They assist us in staying educated about the world around us or assist us in feeling protected, proud, or good about the world. They assist us in carrying out more significant and more daring efforts. And maybe one of the most strong needs: groups make us feel less alone in the world.

6. Celebrate the members of your community

Your community exists to serve its members. While it’s a wonderful marketing technique for increasing product sales and brand recognition, it only works if you treat your members well.

Highlighting your community members is an integral part of maintaining a thriving online community. You may accomplish this by mentioning members who are successful with the product, performed well in a challenge you organized, referred the most new members, had the greatest participation rate, and so on.

What makes these individuals feel unique and respected is determined by your community. It might be showcasing them in a case study, providing them with a free month’s supply of products, mailing them a t-shirt, or making a post about how glad you are to have them as a member of your community.

7. Create a content strategy

The sort of material you provide is essential to your community’s effective activation and growth, so make it relevant to your audience. Before you reveal your community to the world, make sure you thoroughly understand your target demographic.
When crafting what you want to say, keep the community’s goal in mind, as well as your broader approach. Are you advertising a new product launch, informing your audience about industry trends, or generating fresh ideas?You most likely have a plethora of content ideas; however, bear in mind that how you contact your community, as well as the type of your material, may differ from typical one-way marketing interactions.

8. Participate in and learn from other communities

It is not necessary to reinvent the wheel. Several online communities have discovered the formula for success. You may take ideas from other thriving communities, put them to the test with your audience, and adjust as necessary. Learning from other communities may assist you in growing your community more quickly, increase participation, direct visitors to your website, and scale your business.

Conclusion

Building a community is a labor of love that takes time. Consider the resources you’ll require, from community managers who will live and breathe the community to having the proper design and content assets in place.

5 Tips For Improving Productivity and Lead Generation Within Your Company

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StrategyDriven Managing Your Business Article |Improving Productivity|5 Tips For Improving Productivity and Lead Generation Within Your CompanyOnly those who have managed their own business understand the proper pressure and expectations for a company leader. This is mainly because of you having made all-important business decisions and various families relying on them. Whether it’s a small, medium, or large enterprise, the pressure remains the same for the ones in charge. Operating a business in this regard isn’t easy at all, and this, in many cases, leads to companies becoming stagnant as you get comfortable where you’re at now. This is common and not always the wrong decision; when you’re comfortable and can see that your business model will remain sustainable, why risk anything? With the current economic state and people innovating like they are, it won’t be long before the competition gets even more as the leads get less. You have to ensure you deliver the best service, products, and turnaround times than your competitors. This article will look at five aspects that might increase your efficiency within your business.

1. Outsourcing Relevant Departments

One of the most challenging business challenges is when the finances get tight after a few bad months. After a pandemic like covid-19, many businesses are in this exact position; they need the staff to start working but can’t afford them. With technology on the brink of taking over so many parts, innovative companies are offering other businesses the opportunity to outsource departments to them by utilizing technology. This means you get the job done for a fraction of the price, and you don’t even have to accommodate the cost to the company for various employees doing the same thing.

2. Improving Products

Your product and service will be vital in your path to success. It’s challenging to produce the best quality product or service as a start-up, but after some time, as you develop and learn, you should treat your product accordingly. By continuously creating what you offer, customers shouldn’t even be a thought, and it should be a must. You have to remain competitive within your market; other companies are constantly innovating, so should you. You should also find the perfect balance between price and quality; offering the best quality product at unaffordable prices might not always work out. You have to consider what your competitors offer and for what price and react accordingly.

3. Reliable Suppliers

When you’re a business that uses external suppliers, it will be increasingly important to build and maintain a strong relationship with all of them. If you do well, they’ll appreciate your business anyway. But, maintaining good relationships with suppliers offers you a range of ways to become more competitive than your competition. You should also ensure you find the best and most reliable suppliers for fabrication, Heat Treatment Equipment, and industrial machinery to maintain your operations supply. Your suppliers will have an enormous impact on your business and how effective you’ll supply the demand.

4. Effective Marketing

Marketing has played a continuous role in the development of some of today’s most prominent organizations. In previous years, marketing was measured on how many people you reached; now, it’s measured how many relevant people you achieved. Marketing to the wrong people is pointless, it’s like not marketing at all, and you’ll most likely waste your budget. Let’s look at three effective marketing strategies professionals can quickly help you with.

Google Ads

When you need immediate results with your marketing campaigns, you can look at paid marketing means like Google Ads. Because it delivers near-immediate visitors to your website, it is somewhat more expensive than other marketing strategies. You bid against competitors for the highest ranking on relevant searches from Google. On your website, you’ll need to convert these visits into leads and sales once they’re interested.

Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing has become more influential as more people started using it. On platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and linked in, you can reach millions of potential customers with a simple click of a button. The pricing also depends on your industry and which keywords you’re marketing for. The more companies that advertise to a specific demographic, the more expensive it becomes. However, it’s also an excellent means of marketing if you need immediate results; remember, the time of the month will also have a massive impact on sales in your area.

Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization, SEO in short, is the process of increasing the quality and quantity of your website traffic by making use of organic search engine results. It’s an unpaid means of advertising and should be more of a long-term focus instead of short-term like the previous two. It’ll ensure once you’re ranking well, you’ll have a consistent stream of website traffic without even paying.

How to Boost Your Retail Store Sales with Task Automation

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StrategyDriven, Business Management, Retail Sales, Marketing Automation, Lead Generation,Every business owner needs a little more time and money on their hands. But both resources can be hard to come by, especially if your everyday tasks are bleeding you dry.

Enters task automation and you can save the day and your sanity. Task automation saves you a lot of time and money, while allowing you to close more sales on autopilot.

Thanks to automation, you can effectively boost productivity, lower costs and offer better customer service online and offline.

With a clever automation strategy, your cash registers keep ringing and you spend less time on mundane and repetitive tasks.

At the end of the day, you end up with more time and money to channel towards business growth. And when you hit your growth goals, automation scales with you making your job easy.

With the preamble, continue reading to learn how you can easily boost sales in your store(s) with task automation.

How to Use Task Automation to Boost Sales

Automation uses software to carry out most of the tasks that were traditionally performed by a team of people.
Nowadays, and thanks to advances in technology, you can automate many tasks including marketing, lead nurturing, sales, daily operations and customer service among others.

In the following section, we cover several areas you can automate in a bid to increase sales while saving tons of time and money.

That out of the way, let us get down to business.

Marketing Automation

Businesses spend a huge amount of money marketing their products and services. Usually, most businesses don’t achieve the desired ROI thanks to poor execution, human error and so on.

Automating your marketing strategy can save you a lot of money and time. If you run a website for your store (and you should), automating your marketing efforts include adding features such as newsletters and social media.

Once a visitor sign ups to your newsletter, you can send them automated emails to convert mere subscribers to ready-to-pay customers. To automate opt-ins on your website, you can use a service such as OptinMonster and Thrive Leads among others.

If you didn’t know, email is a powerful marketing channel for online and offline businesses. You can easily send automated offers to your customers, which can boost both online and instore purchases tremendously.

Most email marketing providers offer you automation with a basic plan. For popular players in the industry, checkout MailChimp, AWeber and Campaign Monitor among others. Once you sign up, you can offer free content on a regular basis to win over customers, a practice known as content dripping.

Further, you can schedule social media posts that feed your social media marketing campaigns on autopilot. You don’t need me to tell you that posting on various social media platforms daily can eat up a lot of your precious time.

To be on the safe side, you can pick a few hours to schedule a month’s (or a year’s) worth of social media posts, and automate everything with a tool such as Hootsuite or BuzzSumo among others.

Lead Nurturing

Lead nurturing involves actively participating in the customer’s journey from lead acquisition to purchase and beyond.

Many first timers to your businesses aren’t ready to purchase. However, you can turn the tables in your favor by automating lead nurturing – the process of converting a mere visitor to paying customer.

For starters, you must respond to contact requests immediately. If you delay your responses to customer queries for more than 30 minutes, you are 23X more likely to lose leads left, right and center.

What to do? Automate the contact process. How? Automate email/SMS responses that are sent out as soon as the visitor contacts your business.

As soon as you send out the canned response, automatically assign the lead to a sales rep who then follows up immediately. The prospect appreciates the fast response times, and you smile all the way to the bank.

Additionally, you can incorporate an automatic system that helps you to master phone calls. Such a system allows you to win leads you’d have otherwise lost due to phone tag.

On top of that, follow up with networking connections to generate more leads. However, following up manually can cost you a lot of time. You can automate the whole process, so you can follow up on prospective customers while saving time.

You can automate lead nurturing using a combination of tools such as email marketing, LeadSquared, Zapier and so on.

Sales Automation

Netting that one elusive sale doesn’t end with lead nurturing. Once you or your team has qualified a lead, it’s time to move on to the next phase; closing the deal. But inefficiencies can arise and kill the sale when you’re so close.

Your best bet is to automate the sales pipeline. There are couple of stages involved in closing the sale, and the fewer problems you have in the workflow, the better your bottom line.

A typical sales pipeline involves four main stages namely:

  • Identifying the new opportunity harnessed via lead nurturing
  • First contact when you or your sale representatives contact the prospect
  • Engagement, where your team finds out the prospect’s needs
  • Qualification, when the sales representative goes full throttle and closes the deal

To avoid problems, it’s best to automate the sales pipeline, such that the sales team focuses entirely on the hottest leads, without wasting time on trivialities.

With a great sales automation strategy in place, your sales team can move the lead from stage to the next without any hiccups, saving you plenty of time and money.

On top of that, you should also engage with interested leads who are not ready to buy yet. With a little automated persuasion, you can convince such leads to make the leap and become a customer.

Other than that, always welcome your new customers with automated welcome emails/SMS/phone calls. A huge chunk of customers loves welcome emails, and if you do your homework, you can even score repeat business automatically without trying hard on your part.

For sales automation tools, we recommend EngageBay sales CRM, Pardot, Hubspot Sales, and Keap (formerly InfusionSoft) among others.

Office Operations

Daily office operations can take a lot of time. On top of that, many stores don’t carry out next-day tasks, which results in huge losses. The best scenario for all businesses is to boost employee engagement and productivity.
And did you know you can leverage the power of automation to boost employee engagement, productivity and achieve consistent store execution? That’s right, you can automate plenty of instore tasks to save time and money, boost employee morale and promote effective customer service.

You can easily automate tasks such as office communication with a tool such as RetailZipline. Additionally, you can use the same tool to automate sending and receiving of important documents, set up daily task checklists, and foster store participation via surveys.

Other than that, you can automate inventory tracking (you can use Zoho Inventory), job applications, employee onboarding (you can use RetailZipline) and so much more.

Other Areas

You can further automate areas such as:

  • Events such as instore sales or networking events
  • Ecommerce including tasks such as recovering abandoned carts, updating credit card numbers, generating repeat business, etc.
  • Customer service such as making it easier for customers to seek help, gauging client satisfaction, asking for referrals by offering small gifts e.g. coupons, remembering client birthdays, and cleaning your email lists among others

Conclusion

Task automation can save you a lot of headaches, time and money. Provided you know the right strategy and tools to use, you can easily automate your business.

As a store manager, HQ or district leader, it is important to invest in task automation to take your business to the next level.

Have concerns, suggestions, favorite tools or questions? Please share in the comments. Cheers to happy automating.

3 Marketing Processes Your Business Should be Automating Right Now

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StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article |Marketing Automation| 3 Marketing Processes Your Business Should be Automating Right NowThere isn’t enough time to do everything, yet most small business owners try. When it comes to marketing your business, there are things you can do to automate some of these processes. Automation helps you make sure everything is done, ensures everything is done at the right time, and helps give you more time to focus on tasks that can’t be automated. If you haven’t started automating some of your marketing processes yet, give these three a try first.

Lead Generation and Tracking

There’s a “contact us” button on the website, but just getting potential customers to contact the business is the first step for lead generation. Emails should be responded to immediately. Even a 30-minute delay can decrease the chance of the email leading to a qualified lead. Instead, start automating lead generation, so emails are responded to immediately. These are form responses, but there are ways to make it sound more personal for the customer, so they know they’re important to the business.

Along with automating these responses to generate more leads, use automation to track the leads. It’s possible to use white label reporting software to generate CRM and other reports automatically and have them sent to your email address. The lead management software tracks everything, then sends a PDF with the information neatly arranged, so it’s easy to keep an eye on lead generation for the business and how effective the current marketing processes are.

Social Media Marketing

Social media is used by just about everyone today, so it’s an excellent way to generate new leads for a business. However, to get the most from social media, it’s a good idea to post every few hours. This ensures posts are seen, but it can be difficult for someone to do all of this by hand. Content needs to be created or curated, then posted on social media websites at just the right time to have the biggest impact.

Instead of spending a couple of hours every day just curating and posting on social media, automate some of this. Automating software can find content that your potential customers might be interested in and automatically share it at set times. It’s still a good idea to post original content periodically, but this makes it easy to post more and to keep the business in the view of potential customers.

Email Marketing

Automation is great for sending emails as soon as a customer reaches out, but there’s more that can be done here. Email marketing campaigns, when done right, can be highly effective. Use automation to make sure an email campaign is more effective by sending out emails at exactly the right time. Evaluate your current email marketing plan to see how it can change and improve with the use of automation and find out how much time you can save. When emails can be written at any time, even months ahead, and sent out at the perfect time to grab a potential customer’s attention, they can lead to a lot more conversions.

There’s no need to try to do everything on your own. Instead, try implementing these automation techniques to reduce your workflow, make your marketing processes more effective, and to bring in more leads for your business. Automating the right tasks can make a huge difference in how much time you spend on marketing and can leave you with more time to work on tasks that just can’t be automated.

Which Lead Tactics Work Best

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The worst number in business is one. If you have just one source of leads, it is only a question of time when the price per click goes up or the targeting options change or the viewership of the publication changes.

Because of this, you want to have several lead generation mechanisms in place. This way, if something happens to one of them, the other ones will continue working for you and generating new leads. This article will introduce you to five tactics you can use in your business.

1. Media Buying

Media buying is the process of negotiating and purchasing advertising time and space.

The secret to successful media buying lies in knowing your audience. One of the biggest mistakes a marketer can make is to advertise a niche offer to a broad market. The ad campaign will be expensive and the response will be small. This is not how you want to run your campaigns.

You need to know the age of your buyers, their gender, level of education, income, family status and interests. You also want to know what publications they read, how they spend their free time and what websites they visit.

Once you have this data, you can start making intelligent choices about how and where you can advertise to them. One of your goals should be to find media that are not obvious to your competition. This way you will be able to purchase space and time at reasonable rates (because the competition is not yet there) and be the only advertiser in your category in that media.

If there are certain media that you would like to use for advertisements, but can’t afford, call them or email them and tell them how much you can pay. Often, you’ll be able to get a last-minute offer if one of their advertisers pulls out and they have some free time or space. Many media are very negotiable as to how much they will sell advertising for. This is not something they advertise upfront, but if you negotiate, you will often be able to get a great deal.

2. Affiliates

Affiliate marketing is a great way to market products and services because in affiliate marketing you don’t have to pay for advertising upfront and you don’t have any risks.

Typically, you pay for advertising or lead generation activities first. These activities generate leads. Then, you have to do the work to convert the leads into paying customers. If the work is successful, only then you get your money back and a return on your investment.

This is not how things work in affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketers do all the work for you. In exchange, you pay them a percentage of the sales or a pre-agreed amount per sale for all the sales that they make.

The best way to use affiliates is to scale your sales systems that are already working. Nobody wants to pay money to test something that is not proven. While you may get affiliates to test your offers, if they lose money, they will not work with you again. If, however, you have a system that works and need more leads or need to convert more leads, then working with affiliates is a great way to go. You will make more money and your affiliates will make money, which will make them want to work again with you in the future.

3. Social Media Marketing

Today there are all kinds of social media, from Pinterest to Facebook to Twitter to LinkedIn. However, this does not mean that you have to be everywhere. You need to be where your customers are. If you are selling a consumer product, you probably do not need to be on LinkedIn. If you are a high-end executive recruitment boutique, then being on Pinterest may not be a good strategy for you.

Find out where your customers spend their time. Then, get in front of them.

The good news is that social media today offer a variety of tools and ways to reach prospects and existing customers.

Using Facebook Pixel or Google Tag Manager, you can mark everyone who visits your website or certain pages on your website. You can also create audiences based on sequences of pages that people visit, videos they watch, elements of pages that they click on and parts of the pages they scroll to. Then, you can retarget these visitors with custom ads on social media and other websites. The opportunities for marketers today are virtually unlimited.

4. SMS

SMS or text messaging can be a very effective way to target customer but you need to be very careful with how you use it. Today most people use text messaging to communicate with their friends and family. They don’t get a lot of advertising messages via text. For this reason, you want to only text them about something important. Reminders typically fall into the important category and work really well. For example, you can send a reminder about a webinar. You can also send a reminder about a demo or a sales call that you have coming up.

You can also offer your existing customers to notify them via text about special sales and events.

At the same time, sending regular updates and marketing messages via text messaging is probably not a good idea. Most people check their text messages very frequently and if you are sending them messages that they don’t find valuable, they may feel as if you are spamming them and interrupting them with no good reason.

5. Ringless Voicemail

Ringless voicemail is a relatively new technology, which is why it is extremely effective.

Ringless voicemail works only will cellphones. According to studies, over 90% of adult Americans own a cellphone, which means that you can reach virtually any person with ringless voicemail marketing.

Ringless voicemail works by completely bypassing cellular networks. It contacts the cellular provider directly via a business landline call and drops a message on the server of the cellular provider. The provider then moves the message to the server space of the recipient and notifies the recipient about the message. This way there is no call made to the recipient, no charges to the recipient and no interruptions.

When the recipient checks his or her voicemail, he or she can listen to the message. The message can be as long or as short as the sender likes. This means that you can create ringless voicemails that are really effective.

A ringless voicemail can have options that connect the recipient to a sales person or drive the recipient to a website. By using these options you can measure the ROI from your ringless voicemail campaigns and make sure that you are spending your marketing dollars wisely.