Effective and low-cost marketing tips every marketer should consider
Many marketers have found themselves in a situation where they are spending a lot of money in advertising and marketing but end up wasting their money. According to Forbes, almost 50% of advertising is wasted. That is a lot of money, considering the fact that companies spend billions of dollars to gain customers. So how do you ensure that your marketing efforts are strategic, practical, and low-cost? Here are some tips you need to consider.
Know your market
It is imperative to have a clear understanding of your market if you are to succeed in online marketing. Before you even start spending on marketing, you need to figure out your market. That invariably entails knowing your product very well. Once you know your product and how it can help solve your clients’ needs, it will be easier to identify your target market. Once you can identify your target audience, it easy to design a winning marketing strategy without even having to hire an expensive marketing agency.
Your advertising decisions should be based on research
No one goes into the battlefield without designing a winning plan. The case is no different when it comes to marketing and advertising. It is essential to come up with a well-researched and well-thought-out marketing plan.
The plan you come up with will help you to determine the best and most effective marketing channels to reach your audiences.
Things like demographics, bounce rate, conversion rate, acquisition, and audience should be familiar to you. It is important to know how each marketing channel will contribute to your overall growth if you want to make a difference and reap big from your efforts.
Networking
Did you know that networking is one of the most effective marketing tools you can use without the need to break the bank? Join a local business community and be an active participant. If they like your brand, they will tell their friends, colleagues, and relatives without even your knowledge.
People are your greatest assets. Do not underrate what they can do for you.
Content marketing
One of the most effective forms of marketing is content marketing. It is not only cheap but a very effective way of building relationships among people who are genuinely interested in your products. Serious marketers and small business owners have a blog. When writing your blog (or using video and/or podcast) try to offer genuine information to your audience.
It shouldn’t always be about advertising your product because you don’t want to come across a salesman who is only interested in selling his/her products.
Leverage social networks
LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are all popular networks that you can take advantage of to market your products and services. They can be a great source of traffic if you share interesting stuff.
By creating and sharing great content, you will grow your audience. However, it would be best if you were patient as it can take years before you build a strong following.
Emotional Branding and How to Build a Lasting Memory in Your Customer’s Mind
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.
Example: look at this video by Google. In it, you well sense deep emotional connection with the product.
- 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.
Other Important Branding Tips
- Creating 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 messages 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.
- 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.
Multi band strategies are likely to suffer from dis-economies 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.
- 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.
- Create a slogan
Let us consider Apple for example. As they became big, they adopted the tagline “Think Different.” This was a perfect fit for their marketing strategy because a large portion of their customers didn’t want to use PC’s like everybody else. Choose a slogan that is consistent with your brand and fits your market slogan.
Take care of your staff
You need to build your reputation to attract the right staff and customers. So treat your staff well because they are one of the most important people in your business. Ex-employees are important for leads and new business. Also, reward them for not only making sales, but for being great ambassadors for your business.
Top 10 WordPress Plugins You Must Have
Why WordPress in the First Case?
Did you know that WordPress powers more than 60 million websites online? Generally, WordPress is a content management system that is rocking in the online world. As opposed to the traditional HTML websites that would require a lot of time and money to set up, WordPress has made work much easier for most bloggers and website owners. Perhaps this explains why a whopping 22% new websites launched are powered by WordPress in the USA. Apart from that, WordPress makes it convenient for your to manage your content, it is flexible, and it is SEO friendly.
The Role of Plugins
That being said, you also need cool plugins to go with your WordPress website. Having the right plugins can do a lot of things for you, which includes: improving your SEO and user experience, usability, and various conversions. The following WordPress Plugins are just what you might need. As a matter of fact, these are the plugins that have been given a vote of confidence by the online community; most of them are free.
1. All in One SEO Pack: This is exactly what any blogger or website owner would want. All in One SEO Pack has been downloaded over 15,000,000 times. What it does is that it automatically optimizes your blog for the search engines. It also generates Meta Tags automatically. All you need to do is just to download it and install it, and the rest of the things will work themselves out. If you are an advanced user, you are free to fine-tune its features. Another alternative to this plugin is the WordPress SEO by Yoast
- Contact Form 7: you will love Contact Form 7 if there is need for you to manage multiple contact forms. You have the option to customize the contact forms to suit your unique needs. There is a CAPTCHA integration option for you to help you fight spam. Contact Form 7 comes in over 50 languages. If you need to create a fancy Contact Us page, Contact Us Page - Contact People, is the plugin for you. There are actually very few websites whose contact us page is stunningly vibrant.
3. Clicky Web Analytics: You’ve got to love Clicky Web Analytics if you have a lot of Google data you are handling in Google Analytics. Unlike the Google Analytic tool which is so cumbersome, this plugin is so refreshing, and it provides a clean interface for you to view your data even if you are the type of person that likes checking your statistics more than once a day.
- Secure WP: this plugin gives you thorough security check and makes a number of changes in your WordPress installation so as to make it as secure as possible. For instance, it hides your WordPress number version.
5. Buddy Press: BuddyPress lets you build a community from your visitors by enabling users to create profiles, send messages to one another, and interact through chat. It is a kind of creating a social network in a box.
6. Feedweb: Every website owner needs to get feedback from the audience on how they getting on with the content. This plugin will allow you to receive feedback from your visitors on how they are experiencing your services or who they feel you can improve on the content.
7. Members: Members is a plugin that contributes to making WordPress one of the coolest Content management systems for web sites. It extends your control a little further by letting you control the roles of members of your blog. It allows you to create, edit, or delete the roles played by various members. It gives you powers to control permissions of the members as well.
8. Social Gallery Lite: This is a great way for you to boost your social network for your blog. The Social Gallery Lite is your Ultimate Social Lightbox Plugin which is a good substitute to vanilla image lightboxes.
- Tumblr Importer:Tumblr importer helps you to import blog posts from a Tumblr blog. This is the ultimate Tumblr Importer that will maintain the format of the blogs, as well as the backgrounds. It can also import drafts and pages.
- Hotfix: Hotfix will fix common WordPress without having to wait for next WordPress core release. In other words, you’ll fix bugs quickly even if you have not updated your WordPress.
There are actually countless plugins floating in the online sea. The type of plugin you need depends on your specific needs. However, there is no need to install every other plugin you meet as this can slow down your WordPress site.
Web design Tricks to Build Customer Loyalty
What are some of the elements in website design that one must include when looking to build customer loyalty? If you are looking to build a website for your small business, you know very well that nurturing customer loyalty is an important priority. Unfortunately, many businesses miss the opportunity to build customer loyalty and retain existing clients through their websites. You can get more out of your existing customers as well as new prospects if you incorporate the following elements in your website.
- Responsive Design
More and more business owners and agencies are embracing responsive web design and in this age of mobile technology, why would anyone be left behind?
Customers don’t want to struggle with websites that aren’t mobile friendly. Statistics show that non-responsive websites are likely to lose more than half of their potential customers because more than 50% of searches are now done through mobile devices. Moreover, customers who access your site are likely to access it in future using multiple devices. In other words, even if people visit your site via their desktop, they might get disoriented the next time they visit it using their mobile devices and it is not responsive.
You can have the best product in the world, but if your website isn’t designed to be mobile responsive, you are losing tons of customers to your competitors.
Therefore, it is important to look for a professional custom web design service that can create a responsive website.
- Encourage referrals
Did you know that a well-designed website can help to facilitate referrals? The most loyal customers are acquired through client-to-clients referral networks and recommendations. Looking for web design packages that are network-driven can make the difference between struggling to get clients and enjoying a constant stream of new leads.
You can encourage your existing customers to refer your business by giving them special bonuses for every new business they bring. People are more likely to believe friends who have done business with you than some ad in their sidebar. So you should make it easy for customers to refer other customers to you.
- Social media share buttons
Social media buttons are essential if you want your content to be shared widely. When your audience find your content valuable, they are likely to share it via their social media accounts. This is a free and effective way of marketing your website. In order to incorporate unique social media share buttons in your website, look for a custom web design agency that knows how to create elegant buttons.
As a rule of thumb, your social media share buttons should big, prominent, unique and beautiful. The only way to achieve that is to look for a web designer that knows what they are doing. Incorporate social media share and like buttons into every page of your website to enhance maximum engagement with your audience.
- Offer great value/offer irresistible value proposition
Customers come to your website because they want or need something. Give them solutions that will solve or help them solve their problems.
Through a custom website layout that promises value to your customers, you are able to gain more customers. It is advisable that you offer a freebie such as free eBook, webinar, and course or trial product so that your customers can have a taste of your services and content before paying for them. If it is what they are looking for, they will be more than ready to pay for the full service.
Having said that, your website layout must be neat, impeccable and functional in order to capture the attention your customers and entice them to sign up with your free offer or trial.
- Get customized web design
A customized web design enhances personal engagement with your customers. Customers want to enjoy personalized services. Customers also want to get assurances they can get hold of you through your phone or email when they want to. Therefore, your email, phone number and physical address should be prominently displayed in case customers want to reach you for whatever reason. It is also inspires confidence in your customers.
Don’t forget to include a comment form so that customers can give you feedback. In addition to that, it is good to have live chat capabilities. The more your customers are easily able to get in touch with you the better.