Posts

Spice Up Business Prospecting with Video

/in , , /by

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.

The Ridiculously Simple Ways You Can Get People To Read More Of Your Content

/in , , /by

Content creation is an effective yet epic task. It takes up hours of your time and is a massive drain on your marketing resources. Because of this, you want to make sure that it’s useful. But how?

It turns out that creating compelling content that people actually want to read is more complicated than many company owners imagine. If you’re like most professionals, you’re focused on what you know – the nuts and bolts of your business. Your bread and butter, if you will. Content marketing is usually little more than an afterthought.

Get it wrong, and you can waste a tremendous amount of time and money. Get it right, and you can dominate.

The trick to successfully getting people to read more of your content is understanding how people consume material on the web. Most of the people on your site probably aren’t reading every single word that you type. Typically, they’re scanning pages, looking for information they need, and then moving on. Bearing this in mind, therefore, is essential when creating content. Your content needs to have pertinent details highlighted or under particular headings so that people can visually scan your document and pick out the information they need.

That’s just one example. There are many more. Take a look at these ridiculously simple ways to get people reading more of your content and get them closer to conversion.

Start By Using Bullet Points

Using bullet points is a compelling way of engaging your users while at the same time giving them a break from a block of text.

  • Bullet points look different from regular prose
  • Bullet points break up the text
  • Bullet points provide white space
  • Bullet points succinctly collect information
  • Bullet points help readers to memorize your content
  • Bullet points organize all of the most critical information in your post

Enrich Your Text

StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article | The Ridiculously Simple Ways You Can Get People To Read More Of Your Content | Content Creation | Entrepreneurship
Photo courtesy of Diggity Marketing

The art of lead magnet creation involves doing much more than writing, say, 1,500 words. It’s also about including a catchy title, moving images, calls-to-action, landing pages, branded document designs and much much more. Creating a visually compelling document is an ideal way to encourage people to investigate more of what you have to say. People want to read articles that tell them about the pictures they’re looking at, for example.

Place Helpful Links Whenever Possible

StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article | The Ridiculously Simple Ways You Can Get People To Read More Of Your Content | StrategyDriven | Content Creation | Entrepreneurship

If you’re writing a blog about a particular food ingredient, it helps to insert a couple of links to recipes that use it. Likewise, if you’re writing an article about personal finance, it might be helpful to give users a link to an investment calculator so they can see how much their portfolio will be worth in ten years.

Placing helpful links is helpful to users and helpful to you too. People will want to come back.

Double Check Your Formatting

Once you’ve written your article using the advice above, double check it to see whether the format actually communicates your core message. Put yourself in the shoes of your reader and ask whether they can glean the information they need.

Creating A Website For Selling

/in , /by

Website design experts offer the ability to have the perfect shop front for your business. It is so important in this day and age for your business to be found online, regardless of your trade.

If you’re new to the trading world and looking to be a success, then Internet shopping is the way forward and you’ll soon find that you will need an ecommerce site. Building an online shop is not easy for the average business person though; so seeking a digital agency will ensure your site is amongst the best and is going to work for you and your business.

In this blog post, we are going to take a look at creating a website for the purpose of selling in further detail. We hope this gives you the assistance and inspiration you need for your own e-store.

StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article | Creating A Website For Selling

Some advice and recommendations for new businesses

You have a new business and you have the stock you need, now you just need a multitude of customers. Simple, right? But, where can you find these customers, or more importantly, how can your customers find you? It’s all very well relying on word of mouth, or passers-by if you have a shop front, but why limit yourself when you could reach a worldwide audience? With the use of the Internet, the sky is the limit when it comes to attracting an audience, meaning more potential sales for you, resulting in more revenue. Sounds good? The difficult bit is knowing where to start.

Thankfully, there are professional website design experts who are also eCommerce experts. These experts can build you a bespoke ecommerce site, meaning you can instantly start to benefit from this growing market. If you do it right, ecommerce is the way to go, attracting both men and women of all ages. It’s a great time to be a start-up business in the ecommerce world.

Another advantage of using a website design company to build your ecommerce site is that they are also likely to be professionals in SEO. This means they can ensure that your shop will be found more easily by people searching for your products. They can also maintain your site, ensuring you remain higher on those search engine results. A good SEO agency will have a number of different techniques and tools at their disposal to make your website more visible online. After all, you can have the most amazing website visually, but if no one views it, you’re not going to make any sales, are you?

Have you considered using Shopify?

There are many options for ecommerce sites available, so what makes Shopify the perfect choice? Firstly, the cost. Shopify is one of the more affordable shopping sites to run, with low monthly costs but a reliable website. Businessmen know the key to a successful start-up is keeping outgoings as low as possible, but still keeping the quality high.

Companies specialising in Shopify can ensure this happens. Shopify offers reports on your click-throughs, and even includes features that can improve your SEO. The reporting system can inform you of which search terms have brought the most visitors to your site.

Other tools available on Shopify include discount codes and gift cards, integration of social networking sites, and email marketing options. All of these can improve the success of your site, when used properly. There are more advanced packages available if you are looking for something else specific, such as pop-ups or similar.

Design and imagery can be a big part of a purchase. The layout of Shopify is simple and eye-catching, making it easy for the user to navigate and therefore resulting in a purchase is more likely. Teamed with website designers, your online shop will soon be turning heads. If you’re looking to purely run your business and sell your products, without the hassle of website hosting, payment gateways and software maintenance, then Shopify is for you.

All things considered, there is no denying that there is a lot to think about when you are selling products online. However, we hope that this blog post will help you on your journey by outlining some of the things that you are going to need to do in order to get started.

A Business Blog Should Be 20% Of Your Marketing Strategy

/in , , /by

StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article | A Business Blog Should Be 20% Of Your Marketing Strategy | Business Blog

If you aren’t interesting as a business you’re not an entity that is going to hold the attention of the masses. They want businesses and business leaders that speak to them, share ideas they feel passionate about too and also, just be fun to be around and interact with. Businesses have got to stop being so rigid and focuses on their corporate images. But how do you do this day in and day out? What is the outlet which can give you this space? Your own business website of course. Your business blog is where your personality has to shine through. In the content you must be able to explain your ideas well but also use it as a platform to build links, create new followers and be able to spread your word around the search engines that people use. Just how big a proportion do blogs take up when it comes to marketing?

Make the news before the news

Social media is like a forest sometimes. It’s so full of content, videos, links and viral adverts that you can be intimidated. However, know that the media companies of the world are dying to hear about you. To become viral you don’t need their own platforms and say so. Your business can make the news before the news even knows. This is why business blogs are so powerful. You can release exclusive information on your blog and watch the media report on it in a heartbeat. But you give your customers and interested potential consumers vital information about an update, a patch, a new product a totally new and improved service etc. The blog is therefore used as a news website for customers to come visit and read what you have to say. It’s a phenomenal tool to communicate with the world in this way.

Almost a quarter

Perhaps the best reason for a business blog to exist is that it’s almost one quarter of the SEO world for businesses. Content and a blog for a business amounts to around 19% of the overall SEO duties and marketing strategy aspects. That is huge. It’s about 1/5 of your overall SEO management requirements. The other aspects are link building, Google plus, social media, on page and off page links, keywords, Google AdWords, YouTube etc. A blog is worth so much to a business because it’s the space where all other marketing aspects can exist together. You can add a YouTube video to your blog, create off page links whereby you use evidence by another media or well respect news company to back up your claims.

Active and fresh

A business that doesn’t publish blogs can seem kind of dormant. Unless someone is actually following your business on social media, they won’t be seeing you anywhere else other than the search engine results page. Your blog can appear in the search results with great SEO techniques employed so you cover that base as well.

Content isn’t just about getting material out there, it’s about sharing your personality as a business with the consumer. It’s also a great way to make news before the news reports on you.

Master These Vital Aspects To Digital Marketing

/in /by

StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article | Master These Vital Aspects To Digital Marketing | Digital MarketingYou really can’t expect your business to get far at all without a good, strong focus on digital marketing. Any digital marketing campaign you have will need to have a lot of focus and drive behind it, and generally you will find that it is important to make sure you are putting whatever effort into it you are able to. Digital marketing will prove to be an essential aspect to running your business and ensuring that it remains popular and continues to grow. But what do you need to think about in order to make sure that you are approaching it in the right way? In this article, we will look at just a few of the essential things that you need to do as part of your digital marketing campaign. As long as you are focused on these, you will be moving in the right direction.

You really can’t expect to get anywhere at all without a decent website, and in fact it is worth putting a good amount of your energy into this before you do anything else for your marketing efforts. The website is where it all comes back to, and as long as you are happy with that you will find that you are going to have much more success with your marketing overall. A good website needs professional designers to ensure that it is operating properly and working as well as possible. Fortunately, these days it is easy enough to find affordable web design which is going to work out well for you, so you should be able to do just that. With a website which you are happy with, you can then start to look at some of the other vital elements to digital marketing.

StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article |Digital Marketing |Master These Vital Aspects To Digital MarketingSocial Media

You will find it is essential to have a good grasp of social media if you are to market your business online successfully, so make sure that you are looking into this as early on as you can. You will want to start building a following on Twitter, Facebook and the rest as soon as possible, and it’s important in particular to focus on actually having decent conversations with people on those platforms. If you do that, and develop a branded voice in doing so, you will find that people are much more likely to respond positively, and this will have the kind of effect that you are hoping to have for your digital marketing. Social media is incredibly powerful, so make sure that you are thinking about this.

PPC

Finally, it’s important to remember too that there are some ways of approaching digital marketing which have a more traditional advertising feel to them, and one in particular you might want to focus on is Pay-Per-Click advertising. This is essentially where you have a banner on websites which people click on to get through to your website or a particular call to action, and it is amazing how effective this kind of method can be. Be sure to make use of it, and you will find that your business has much more chance of success.