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Top Marketing Strategies that Really Work

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StrategyDriven Marketing and Sales Article
Paying per click to Google isn’t how you make money. It isn’t how you make new, organic hits, and it isn’t how you make sales. Instead, it’s how you pay for a click. There is no guarantee how long that person stays there, whether it was a bot, or even a real person. When you market, especially as a small business, you need to be smart. You need to ensure that you are getting the right message out to the right people. You need to use these five marketing strategies that really work, instead of paying for ones that make every sale an uphill battle:

1. Improve Your SEO

The whole point of pay-per-click advertising is that it takes your listing to the top of the SERPs. This means you can cut out all the hard work and be the first result that someone sees when they search for a keyword you have chosen. The other way to get to the top spot is to improve your on-site and off-site SEO. There are many different methods and strategies for improving your SEO, and they continuously change as Google rolls out new and improved programs to fight against spam and to improve the quality of their links. Focus on improving your SEO, and you will be ranked more highly on relevant searches, without paying for everyone who clicks on your site.

Once you reach the coveted #1 spot, you’ll have organic hits coming in for years.

2. Social Media Marketing, With Emphasis on Social

Using bots and buying followers is a thing of the past. Not only is it pointless regarding your sales, but it can also make you look like spam. Instead, work on building up real relationships and real connections. Post great content that is shared and interacted with. Communicate not only with those who comment and message you, but to also engage with the community at large. The more genuine and real you seem, the better. Having a few repeat customers is better than battling it out for every new sale, and the same is true for your social communities. Real relationships will lead to sales; fake ones will make you look like spam, so work on improving your social media marketing strategy.

3. Daily Marketing with a One-Time Cost

The more people see a name and a brand, the more they learn to trust it. When you work in a neighborhood or small-town marketing by wrapping your vehicle will pay off greatly. Neighbors will see their neighbors use your service, and will call you up themselves. Similarly, just seeing your name over and over again will help them remember you, and trust you.

Start today by picking up some great used cars for sale, create the branding and the car wrap, and benefit from marketing yourself while you work. Create a few yard signs as well so that after you are done with a project, you can market your services on your client’s lawn (with their permission, of course).

Marketing is all about making connections. It is about creating relationships with your customers, even if they never see you in person. Use these proven marketing strategies, and benefit from the increased sales and repeat customers.

Boosting Your Customers Confidence in Your Brand

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Attracting and keeping customers, especially for small businesses is a delicate balance. You need to ensure that they are getting a quality product, but also a good service. If either of these things is not up to standard, then it can cost your business money. Your customers and clients need to feel wanted, appreciated and safe for them to do business with you. If your business is struggling to give your customers confidence, then there are some simple ways you can try to boost it.

Let Them Deal with People

One of the biggest complaints from customers and clients when dealing with customer service is that everything is too automated. If they try to contact your company and are met with an automated email reply or an automated message on your telephone, then they are more likely to walk away. Make sure that your customers can get through to a person as soon as possible without going through too many steps. Also, send them a personalized reply to emails advising that you are dealing with their request. By allowing your customers to deal with real people, you can dramatically raise the confidence and happiness of your customers.

Be Approachable

In the same way as eliminating automated lines, you also need to be approachable to your customers when they need you. You can use social media and emails to let your customers get in touch easily, though it is important to reply to them promptly. It is also important to show how your customers can contact you on your website. If you bury your customer service number at the bottom of the page, then your customers will become frustrated.

Keep Them Informed

There is nothing worse for a customer that not being told when something is wrong. If their order has been delayed or cancelled, you must inform them as soon as possible. If you do not, then they may have wasted time waiting for a delivery that hasn’t arrived. In the same vein, you need to be honest and open about any problems with customers data. If you suffer a data breach, you need to inform them as soon as possible so they can protect their personal information. You should also employ digital forensic services to look into the breach and feedback any loss of data to your customers and the authorities.

Make Payment Easy

You might be surprised that some companies don’t make ordering or paying for their goods especially easy for their customers. They are so concerned about informing them of the goods and services they provide that they don’t make the payment systems obvious. It can frustrate and put your customers off purchasing if you don’t give them a quick and easy way to pay.

Your business relies on its customers, so why not make them feel important by giving them what they need? It will not only boost your customer’s confidence but also boost your sales as a result.

How to Get Your Dentist Business Online

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Many businesses including ones like dentist practices rely on their customers for return business. They also rely on their families and through word of mouth to attract new customers. However, sometimes those ways alone won’t drive enough patients to your door for you to be a viable practice. If that’s the case, then you will want to start thinking about other ways to attract clients. You may have used traditional methods before such as newspapers and local advertising. Although these are great ways to get more interest, you can also use other methods such as creating a presence online.

First Thing is a Website

Before you think about getting your business online, you will need to set up a website. It will enable you to put all the information people will need and create a good base from where to grow your online profile. You don’t have to spend a lot of money creating a website; there are many online site creators that allow you to design and build your own site for free. It is a good place to start, and you can add as much or as little as you want. It is also easy to use, so you don’t need to worry about not being technically minded. The other thing you will need to do is to create your domain name. You will need it to reflect your business name, and what you do; you can then get your site uploaded onto the internet.

Hosting Your Site

When you have a site and a domain name, you can find a company to host your website online. There are many to choose from, so you need to look at a few and see what they offer. Most will give you an amount of space for your site, plus they will keep it up to date for you. All you will need to do is change or add details as you need to. Although there are free hosting sites out there, you will get more functionality from a paid host.

Create Your Website Content

There are a couple of avenues you can use when it comes to content for your site. Some companies prefer a site that has all their information and prices already on there, they then leave it until something changes. The other method is to have the same information, but also add other parts such as a blog post at regular intervals. Having a blog or something that keeps people returning to your site can create more potential patients. You will have to think about what you want to blog about; it can be anything in the dentist news or special offers and services you may be running. You can also ask some of your patients to write a short testimonial that you can put on the site. New customers like to have reviews and testimonials to read, and it creates more trust for your patients.

Get Social Media Working for You

One of your biggest tools is going to be social media. Almost everyone now has at least one social media account so that you will be placing your business in front of millions of potential customers. Because you are a local business, you will only be interested in those people in your area, although if your business is in a tourist area, you may also get those looking for emergency treatment. By having your business on social media, you are also encouraging people to spread the word. Get your existing customers to like your page and become followers. Then, when you post something on there, they are likely to share it with their friends and family.

Online Marketing

Just like other forms of traditional marketing, online marketing can be tailored to your location and your particular business. There are many ways you can use online marketing including placed advertising on social media, mobile phone advertising and even online streaming services and YouTube. Getting the right balance to attract new patients can take time to get right. Instead of trying this yourself, you can use an online marketing company to do all the work for you. You can learn more about how these companies work by visiting their websites.

Working with Others in the Same Market

Starting a partnership with other companies or businesses that offer complementary services can be a good way to get your business online while saving money. If you have been thinking about using online advertising, then you can share the cost by having both companies on the same ad. There may be some companies that will also want you to advertise their products alongside your company. It could be a brand of toothpaste or toothbrush, that they would like you to help them market.

Email Marketing

Email marketing has been around for some time, and it is still one of the most effective ways to get your message across to your clients. You can start by asking for your existing client’s email addresses as part of the registration form; then you can email them when it is near their time for a check-up or appointment. Along with this email, you can also add special deals or new services you are offering. As you gain more clients, you will get a bigger email list, and you can start adding more products to the email. A good way to generate new email addresses is to have a contact form on your website. It will ask them to enter their email address for you to reply to their query and then you can also send them email marketing to encourage them to come for a check-up.

By embracing the online world and seeing what it can do for your business, you are opening up your dental practice to a huge number of people. Many of them will be local to you and may not even know your practice existed. With so many people looking for services online through their smartphones and tablets, having an online presence has never been more critical.

How to Sharpen Your Digital Marketing in 2017

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Everyone is doing digital marketing as a way to promote their products, services, and brands these days. The measurable nature of digital marketing and the fact that even small businesses can achieve great results with a good campaign make digital marketing very appealing to more and more businesses.

Simply doing just an ordinary internet marketing campaign is no longer enough. To reach the right audience and the ensure maximum return on investment, your campaigns must be sharp and highly targeted. Here are some of the things you can do to sharpen your digital marketing efforts in 2017

Leave It to Experts

There are a lot of tasks to tackle when you’re doing digital marketing, from formulating a suitable campaign for the target audience to actually producing the content and executing the campaign itself. Instead of trying to do everything yourself, it is much better to leave certain parts of these efforts to experts.

There are several reasons why hiring experts to help you with your digital marketing campaign is a great idea. For starters, top services are now more affordable than ever. When you need to produce quality content for content marketing, for instance, turning to service providers such as yourcontentshop.com will actually save you a lot of time and money.

On top of that, the time you save working on details of the campaign can then be used to take care of other, more important tasks. Instead of getting caught in micro-managing the digital marketing, you can allocate more time towards ensuring the campaign’s effectiveness and monitoring its results.

Tell a Story

I can’t stress enough how important it is to tell a story when doing digital marketing. Good stories are what the audience actually follow on the internet. The story of your brand or product doesn’t have to be particularly complicated; it just needs to be compelling and relatable enough for the target audience you’re aiming for.

Instead of telling the audience about product advantages, for instance, you can get better user engagement and responses by telling stories about how the product was developed. More importantly, you can share more information about why the product was created in the first place.

The “why” matters. Your reasons for doing things will be what that set you apart from the competition. In a market as crowded as today, having a compelling “why” will make all the difference.

Maintain Consistency

Digital marketing is never a one-time thing. It is a campaign that needs to run continuously in order to capture the audience’s attention over a longer period of time. This means transitioning from one digital marketing strategy to the next smoothly and maintaining consistency at all times.

In fact, maintaining consistency is perhaps the greatest challenge in internet marketing. Not all businesses can remain consistent with their digital marketing campaigns. Do it right, however, and you will be able to enjoy a perpetual series of impacts that will catapult your brand and the products you offer to the top of the market and the audience’s mind.

Mobile CRM is Now the Sales Rep’s New Intelligent Assistant

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The smartphone, whether an Android or iPhone, is not so much a telephone as it is a computer that lets you make phone calls.

It is an incredibly powerful piece of electronic technology that most people carry around.

The smartphone, whether an Android or an iPhone, is more of a computer than a telephone that lets you make calls. But in the life of a sales rep, the smart phone takes on even more important role. It becomes their key tool in communications, and enables greater flexibility, and higher functioning in the sales arena.

With the correct mobile CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system like Pipedrive or an advanced address book app like Covve which has CRM features, there is quick access to any information swiftly such as contact information, opportunity status, pipeline, and much more. But also, helpful insights such as: follow-up reminders, buyer activity alerts, and suggestions on what to do next with opportunities and buyers.

Laptops are not going away anytime soon, but the time that sales reps go back to the office or home and sit down, and turn on their computer is dramatically shrinking. Smartphone CRM apps enable reps to do most of the things they used to have to do on their computer—only much more conveniently. And smartphones fill the unproductive void when reps are on the go. No longer does out of the office, or a personal obligation, mean things don’t get done. Smartphones give reps their freedom to be places they need to be, and remain productive.

Mobile sales reps are better prepared than their non-mobile counterparts. They are doing more research before a client meeting then their counterparts because they have access to more resources at their fingertips, and virtually no limit to the amount of data they can access.  The important tools a sales rep can have at their disposal is listed below:

1. Lead Records – If a mobile sales rep is headed into a meeting with a very important potential client, they can brush up on the account details and recent activity on the ride over, straight from their phone.

2. Dashboards – A mobile CRM solution provides up-to-the-minute analytics and data on sales performance in easy to digest and mobile optimized dashboards and reports.

3. Paperwork – Mobile sales reps don’t have to wait until they are back in the office to send over the paperwork to close a deal. They can access, sign, and process a deal, straight from a mobile device, with no painful faxing necessary.

4. Pitch Decks – As technology progresses, products are changing fast and corporate messaging and pitch decks can change even faster. Sales reps with a mobile CRM always have access to the most up-to-date decks and selling resources.

5. Sales Collateral – If a mobile sales rep knows the perfect piece of content or sales collateral for a prospect, there is no need to send it in a follow up email. They can access their company’s library of resources, and explain or send documents right from their device.

6. Task Lists – Sticky notes on the computer is a thing of the past. Today’s sales reps have their daily tasks curated and organized for them in their mobile CRM solution, right next to their daily agenda.

7. The Entire Office – A sales rep equipped with a mobile CRM solution has access to social collaboration tools that allow them to tap into their entire company for expertise and advice.

If you are a sales rep, and not utilizing the amazing power of your smartphone, you are behind the curve.