The Marketer’s Creed: 3 Qualities of Great Marketers

Marketing is the engine of any business. Whether you are a small business owner or the Chief Marketing officer of a big corporation, you need to have the right mix of traits to stay successful. The foundation of responsibility is no doubt the most important component of any success in business. In this article, I am going to talk about some touch points around this necessary quality in your life in order to help you achieve your business goals.

  1. Get motivated

The renowned author and speaker Zig Ziglar said that motivation, just like taking a bath, doesn’t last. One should constantly recharge their batteries of motivation to stay motivated. That is why it is recommended that you stay motivated on a daily basis.

The only way to keep your momentum is to stay motivated. This is like a muscle that needs to be exercised daily if you want to stay on top of your game. Of course there are days you wake up and feel like you would rather stay in bed and abscond your obligations. So many people give in to the temptation and end up wasting a lot of time.

One way to build motivation is to form daily rituals where you perform certain set of actions, every day, which get you ‘in the zone’. If you establish a routine that puts you in the path to maximum productivity early in the day, your body and mind will learn that it is time to get going.

For instance, if you are a runner, you may choose to wake up, put on your shoes and start running every time you wake up from bed. In the office, the ritual could be visualization, meditation before going for a meeting or making a sales presentation.  

Our bodies and minds are like engines, they must be kept in optimum working conditions to function correctly. The engine must first be fired before it can start working. Get yourself motivated first thing before you start doing what you planned.

  1. Assume responsibility

If anything is to be, it is up to you. There are no accidents. Responsibility is the hallmark of successful entrepreneurs and is a way of being, not just what you do. When you are truly responsible, you accept the fact that success or failure is in your hands no matter what. Blaming outside forces or people for your failures shows that you are irresponsible.

Great leaders claim responsibility even when things go wrong not just when they are buzzing. Being responsible means not blaming anyone or anything for the things that go wrong. Being responsible means taking an introspection approach and looking at what you could have done differently to produce better results. 

You should be aware at all times the impact you are creating around you and the examples you are setting for others. You have the power to create the circumstances you want. No one prevents you from creating the business you desire.

  1. Accept no excuses

If you are personally accountable to your business or quality of life, you should be honest with yourself; you should face realty and accept no excuses. Acknowledge where you have done mistakes in the past and commit to improving things in the future. 

You really need to be honest with yourself about where you are slaking and resolve to honor your commitments. Do not break promises. Every time you break a commitment or a promise to yourself, your self-worth is eroded and eventually, your inner self’s worth is destroyed.

As a serious entrepreneur, you should choose accountability as your minimum standard in everything you do. If you do so, you will find that your business will have more meaning and you will experience more success.

 


Are you publishing Great Content? Try These SEO Tips

When you are writing articles for your website/blog, you have to ensure that you have got critical things covered so as to guarantee SEO-friendly articles. The aim of SEO is to ensure you optimize your content so that search engines can understand what your content is about and at the same time make it easy for your audience to find you. Having said that, there are no guarantees whatsoever that your content will rank well in search engines even if you write a mouth-watering SEO article. That is because there are critical components SEO article should have, besides producing a great story.

  1. Post title and Meta title

The main difference between post title and Meta title is that the post title is what the reader sees as the title of the post while the Meta title is what the search engines use to display to your readers in search engine results. If you fail to create a Meta title, search engines will treat your post title as the Meta title. Have a keyword included in your Meta title to improve your ranking fortunes. Also, keep your Meta title less than 66 characters.

  1. Meta description

You can add a short description to your Meta title to give your readers an idea of what your post is all about. In other words, the Meta description of your post acts as the sales copy of your post. If your post does not have a Meta description, make sure you include it to optimize your traffic. Your Meta description should not be more than 156 characters.

  1. Include Image descriptions

The long and short of it is that Google can’t read images. So it relies on the image Alt description to understand what the image is about. When you upload images to accompany your article, remember to name your images appropriately. For instance, if you are writing an essay about invisible man and communism and you decide to include an explanatory graphic, you can name your image as invisible-man-and-communism-illustration.

  1. Anchor and Interlink Text

Did you know that it is always good to link back to your other articles in your website? This enables readers to stick around for longer. This is particularly advantageous because search engines end up re-crawling the old posts. Interlinking your old pages also improves the sites readability and reduces bounce rates. When interlinking your site, remember to use appropriate anchor texts. An anchor text is the title of the link you are creating.

  1. Heading

A good article should be easy to read. An article that comprises of blocks of long paragraphs are not desirable. No one has time for boring stuff. Use appropriate headings especially if you are drafting a long post. It is also good practice to include your keywords in your headings.

  1. Length

Long articles are better than shorter ones. First of all, longer articles easily get noticed in search engines because it is assumed they provide in-depth analysis of the topic. Secondly, longer articles tend to have a wide range of long-tailed keywords spread throughout the content. It is difficult to achieve this with 200-word articles.

  1. Write for people, not search engines

Search engines are becoming very sophisticated, so much that it is nearly impossible to cheat them. Google wants you to offer your clients great content instead of simply stuffing your keywords for the purposes of ranking. This means that you should ensure your keywords are not only relevant to the article but also provide value to the readers.

As you can see, writing good articles takes patience, skill and time. That is why many people prefer to outsource their SEO articles needs to writing agencies, which is perfectly okay.


Why and How to Use Social Media for Local Business

Whether you are an individual entrepreneur, or part of a small, medium or giant business set-up, you certainly know that your customers are using social media. Therefore, there is no reason why you shouldn’t use it too if you want to reach them.

The good news is that it costs almost nothing to use social media, and it is easy to get started, yet it has the potential of having an enormous financial impact on your business. Another reason why you need to establish an online presence through social media is that it is a timely way of obtaining feedback from customers.

Social media is also used to market the business’ brand and products, as well as build relationship with customers. If used well, social media can also help in SEO performance of your site. A research conducted by Pan African University provided the following interesting statistics:

  • 88% of fortune 100 companies use twitter daily to connect to their customers and 85% of companies worldwide use twitter at any stage of their recruitment process.
  • Facebook has over 500,000,000 users worldwide (although this figure could be more because many people have since signed up).
  • 45 billion of content is uploaded daily on Facebook.
  • Twitter has over 156 million users.
  • YouTube is the 2nd most searched site after Google.

Moreover, In an Altimeter Group survey of 700 executives and social strategists in 2012 found that 100 percent of participating enterprise organizations run to varying extents an active social media strategy.

How: Strategy and Tactics

As you can see, social media presents a fertile ground for you to register your business presence online. The next thing is to learn how to launch your social media presence. The truth of the matter is that it is difficult to succeed in social media without using strategy and tactics.

Strategy and tactics are inseparable here. You can’t design a successful online presence through social media without deep, firsthand knowledge of the tactics you’ll be using. Strategy will guide you on how to implement the strategies. Otherwise, aimless actions might not yield much. Here is how to go about it.

Know the Market: some market research will be critical. This will help you to understand the market, where your target audience is, as well as understanding the competition. Once you know the market, you can now begin penetrating it with the right messages.

Time and Quality Updates: Providing your audience with good updates, engaging contents, and timely news will enable your media presence to grow to unprecedented level. The more regular your updates are the better; don’t give updates every month. You also have to make a schedule so that you are consistent. For instance, you can issue updates twice a day, once a day, and so forth.

Social Media Tools: learn how to use a variety of tools to make your social media campaign an easy and effective way of reaching your audience. For example, you can use micro blogging tool to simultaneously your messages to the masses. A number of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn apps are available. If you have a website, remember to include your social media comment/like/follow tools.

 

 

 


Cheap Marketing Ideas you can implement on your Online and Offline Business

 

Don’t have many bucks to spend on your small business or start-up? Establishing an efficient marketing strategy is sometimes a challenge for small business owners in Australia because they are unable to allocate considerable funds for marketing; most of them operate on a shoestring budget. You don’t have to break the bank to market your small business in Australia.

Moreover, very day, we hear from small business owners who think they need special skills to reach their customers. Many of these Australian small business owners eventually get overwhelmed by the number and the complex marketing options available, and end up sitting on the sidelines because they are confused where to start. In this article, we will look at 77 local marketing ideas for small business owners in Australia.

 Positioning and branding

  1. Build brand identity

Building your business brand identity can have a big impact

  1. Add emotion to your brand

Emotional branding is defined as the successful attachment of a specific emotion to a brand.

At one of the Business Marketing Association (BMA) conferences in Chicago, Jay Baer asked a room full of roughly 1,000 B2B marketers, “Are you more interesting than my wife?”

 

Can you think of the people you have had an emotional connection with in your life? How did they impact on your life? Now think about the brands and see the common threats among them.

It is true for brands as it is for people: to break through in modern marketing, small business owners in Australia need to be more interesting and relevant in the moment.

 

Brands need to connect with people in the way a close friend would—through emotion—in order to build, long-lasting, and quality relationships. There are huge opportunities for retail stores to take advantage of emotional branding.

 

According to one research, smell is powerful when it comes to persuading someone to buy a product. Stores using certain scents in their stores have been found to have a 30% increase in sales.

 

A study by University of Wollongong and Murdoch University in 2012, emotional branding is becoming widely used globally. According to Dr Steve Bellman of Murdoch University’s Audience Labs, marketers are tapping into customer’s feelings to market their brands. Another study shows men who show love for their brand beer purchase 38% more beer than the average. 

 

Therefore, emotional branding can lead to substantially more sales without companies having to rely on discounts and promotions. On the flip side, however, creating that emotional connection can be a difficult task.

 

How brands can connect emotionally

 

  • By telling a story that inspires an emotional connection:according to Beth Comstock, General Electric Chief Marketing Officer, you can’t sell anything if you can’t tell anything. Every brand has stories to tell.

 

  • By allow their audience to be the real heroes: imagine who emotionally connected your brand would be by showcasing how your product has changed lives. Simply give your audience a voice, a platform and face to be heard.

 

  • By being authentic: don’t be afraid to embrace your inner geek. Remain who you are and don’t try to be like who you are not. At Bizify, we try to remain true to ourselves. We try to help startups find their feet and we intend to remain true to that mission.

 

  • By embracing the opportunity to surprise and delight:surprising and delighting customers can be an effecting marketing strategy. Use social media and mobile to spark moments of happiness in customers and you will be surprised at its effectiveness. Coca-Cola has really perfected this art. 

 

  1. Create an irresistible value proposition

A value proposition is a statement that explains what value you provide to your customers and how you do it uniquely. Establishing a substantive value proposition is critical if you want to stand above the crowd. Unfortunately, many entrepreneurs loose out because they fail to articulate a unique value proposition.

Be clear on what your business stands for. What is your promise? How will you put out a consistent and passionate message that attract the right candidate? This will also help you to hire the right people and develop products and services that are aligned with your unique value proposition.

 

  1. Be careful with launching too many brands

The big problem for many businesses is they think more brands will make them more successful but they have neither the architecture nor the capacity to manage a multiplicity of brands well. Businesses can increase profits by deleting none-performing brands.  Even though revenue may fall in the process, reducing the number of brands will be beneficial in the long run. 

 

Multiband strategies are likely to suffer from diseconomies of scale because of the hidden costs. By letting go off weak, declining and marginally profitable brands, you will be freeing resources to make your few remaining brands better and more attractive to customers.  Thus, killing some brands in your portfolio may sometimes be the best way for your business to serve the customers. 

 

  1. Package your products

Packaging is an important element when it comes to marketing. How you package your products can attract or repel customers. Is your packaging visually attractive through shape, color, design and does it communicate the right brand ideals. If not, it might be time to revamp the way you package your products.

 


Importance of Website Mobile Responsiveness to Search Engine Ranking

According to Pew internet report, more than 31% of Americans own a tablet computer. Further, the USA phone market represents about 58% of smartphones owned.

Mobile search will surpass desktop search by 2020

It has also been established that users are surfing the internet several times a day using their mobile devices like smartphones and tablets. Here is the big one! If the current trends are anything to go by, it is predicted that by the year 2020, there will be more internet searches through mobile devices than through laptop or desktop computers.

At the moment, laptop/desktop computers and mobile devices share the searches equally, that is, 50-50. What does this tell us? It simply means that mobile-friendly websites are increasingly becoming popular and if you are a marketer, you should ensure that your web site is mobile responsive. For now, let us focus on why it is important for marketers and small business owners to focus a lot of their efforts in developing mobile responsive site.

What is the rave about mobile optimized sites?

Clearly, the issue of having a mobile responsive site is no longer a choice, but a necessity. If your web site is not mobile optimized yet, the question therefore should be, “when are you going to do it?” Rather than, “are you going to do it?”

Mobile optimization improves navigation across multiple devices:

With a true mobile optimized website, a person accessing the website using either a tablet or a mobile phone will be able to view and navigate the web site easily because the web site will load as it was meant to be seen on that particular mobile device.  Thus, you’ll not see skewed pages that don’t fit on a page, for example. Please note that if your mobile visitors are not able to scroll and navigate through the pages as smooth as they would like, they will swiftly go to your competitor.

Mobile optimization improves the overall design of your website across multiple devices:

Apart from the fact that a mobile responsive site is easy to browse on a mobile device, it also makes your site look great. This in turn ensures that users are having great time browsing the site since the content and images do not get distorted. Because a mobile site is designed to load and respond within the small screen boundaries of a mobile device, it makes it easier for contents to maintain their design within the boundaries of a mobile screen.

Mobile Optimization is ultimately a big factor when it comes to search engine rankings:

Consequently, you’d experience lower bounce rates if visitors are coming to your mobile optimized site using their mobile devices than if they were to visit a site that is not mobile optimized.  So, what does this tell you? It means that a mobile optimized web site will have better search engine rankings than a corresponding site that is not mobile optimized.

Remember that high bounce rates negatively affect your search engine performance. Also, if you lock out traffic from mobile phones, then you are digging your own grave in the online world.  Visitors like convenience; they prefer to have a site that they can browse anywhere without difficulty.  Therefore, a mobile responsive site is very critical if you want to reach as many people as possible.