Great Qualities for Marketers to Have in 2020
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 critical component of any success in business. In this article, I am going to talk about some touchpoints around this necessary quality in your life in order to help you achieve your business goals.
Get motivated
The renowned author and speaker Zig Ziglar said that motivation is,” just like taking a bath, doesn’t last.” One should continuously recharge their batteries of motivation to stay motivated.
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 a 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.
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.
Accept no excuses
If you are personally accountable to your business or quality of life, you should be honest with yourself; you should face reality and accept no excuses.
Acknowledge where you have made 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.
4 Costless Inbound Marketing Ideas You Should Try in 2018
Are you just getting started with inbound marketing? Have you been doing inbound marketing for sometimes now? How long do you think it should take one before they start seeing results? If you are getting started with inbound marketing, you will definitely find it very challenging. Many marketers wonder how much it could cost to regularly generate content, improve social media outreach and all aspects of inbound marketing.
The good news is that there are countless ways you can increase your inbound marketing activities without having to break the bank. In other words, the basics are not out of your reach. From writing your own content to utilizing thousands of available website tools to help you reach your potential customers, here are 10 no-cost inbound marketing ideas you can try.
- Create high quality free content
Publishing high quality content remains the key to successful inbound marketing. If you want to attract customers to your website, you must publish high quality, valuable content. Content can be in the form of blog posts, articles, videos, infographics, white papers or tweets, among others.
At the very least, dedicate a few minutes of your time to create well-written content that is relevant and useful to your audience. of course if you are unable to produce the content yourself, you can contract a marketing agency or freelance content producers to help you publish the right content that will not only be right for the search engines but also one that your users will love.
- Create a loyalty program
You can develop a simple strategic partnership with your prospects through loyalty programs. A good example is B2B referral software known as Advocate Hub. This software allows users to build a loyalty program so that the firm can trigger customer enthusiasm and boost referrals of qualified leads.
Loyalty programs are done by incentivizing partners, customers and employees so that they become brand ambassadors of your target audience. Incentives can range from discounts to reward for content created such as guest posts and online reviews and testimonials.
- Use social media networks
Social media networks have become the cornerstone of inbound marketing, thanks to their global outreach. Social media like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Snapchat, LinkedIn and Google++ can be used to promote and share content, products as well as special offers. Social media also allows you to not only interact with your customers, but also create brand loyalty.
Remember to keep track of your social media interactions both on your website and on your social media profiles/fan page.
- Lead nurturing
Lead nurturing is the process of ensuring that your prospects are ready to buy before directing them to your sales team. Sometimes your sales department can waste valuable time and resources on leads that are not qualified. Here are some tips on how to ensure successful lead nurturing:
- Ensure the timing is right: do not rush your prospects such that you start bombarding them with your sales emails soon after they hit the subscribe button or like your page. It is important to take your time to bring them closer to wanting to open their wallets
- Constantly and consistently refine your messaging: know the kind of information your prospect wants to hear based on the data you have collected. By ensuring that you keep giving them the right and relevant information, you will be building rapport and trust with your customers.
- What do you want to give them? State what you want to provide them and what they stand to gain from your offer.
- Videoproduction on demand or VPD can be one of the brightest ideas of 2018. VPD gives you the ability to produce broadcast quality visual imagery for your business. We provide Video Production, Graphic Design and Audio Video services. Instead of being left with the question of how much does it costs, you now can ask the questions when, where, and why. Mjrvisuals invites you Get started today ! Click here to learn more. Video production on demand by Mjrvisuals
Why Online Marketing is Essential for Your Business
Online Marketing is Essential for Your Business
Are you thinking that the business world has become so competitive that it has almost reached the limit of competition? The bad news is that it is not about to. You are still going to witness more rival business set-ups opening operations and more websites designed to sell the product you are selling being created. Just imagine that whatever line of business you are; whatever industry you are in, there are thousands, sometimes millions of others offering the same product as you are. What do you think will make a customer to choose you over others offering the same services or products? In this century, it is suicidal for any business owner not to have an online presence. It is part of the strategies of remaining relevant and being competitive, as well as attracting new customers, globally.
Why Being Online Matters
It doesn't matter whether you have been in business for the last five decades or you are just starting out. The internet has actually leveled the playing ground for both the big boys and the small fish; in other words, when a customer is looking for a product online, it doesn't matter who is selling the product. What matters is whether the customer is able to find your site and can trust you. Essentially, those businesses which are not yet online are in for a big trouble because sooner than later, they will be out of business if at all they aren't already.
You need to get noticed through Search Engine Optimization
If you are online, the biggest headache is getting noticed. You cannot afford to be ignored if you want to make a fortune online. As they say, creating a website is the easiest part-the hardest part is pushing your site as far up the search engines as possible. Remember, for very niche, there are millions of other individuals, and businesses who are scrambling to get noticed in the search engines.
That is why you need a professional marketing company to help you reach your potential customers. Search Engine Optimization companies are doing a wonderful job to assist businesses undercut competition by pushing their sites up the search engines. Otherwise, if you just create a site and sit back and relax, you are not going to see substantial number of unique page views from your site. Does this explain why many people who created blogs and website with anticipation of carrying home a fat AdSense check are left disappointed?
Optimizing your site isn't a simple-one-day-event as some optimists think. It requires skills, dedication, professionalism and patience for you to succeed at it. Therefore, it is important that you get a professional SEO company to pull your site out of the murk and make it recognizable in the local or global search engines. It is time to let a SEO expert company perform search engine optimization for you as you concentrate on your core business.
Of course there are many other marketing strategies you can apply to grab the attention of the potential customers such as social media, email marketing, pay per click marketing, among others. For optimum results, you ought to apply all the available marketing strategies, depending on where your target customer base is located.
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.
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.
How to Create a Smashing Brand: 5 ideas to refresh your online branding
Did you know that a strong identity helps your customers to remember you and makes you stand out in the marketplace? However, here is some news for you: branding is more than just shinny logos and a fancy name. Branding essentially involves helping customers to have a sense of belonging and attachment to your products, services, culture and values. If you want to create an unforgettable brand online, it needs to be consistent, recognizable and should appear across all aspects of your online presence. Learn how to create an unforgettable brand using these five tips.
- Are you prepared to spend some money?
When it comes to online branding, you cannot avoid spending some money. If you want to make more money, you have to spend more money. It means you will have to spend in things like social media, Ad Words, and content creation.
- Identify and convey your purpose
In order to create a powerful online brand, you need to create a defining purpose that will act as your compass. Sometimes it is good to go back to the basics. Why are you in this business in the first place? Does your mission and purpose translate into your online presence?
- Keep it real
Sometimes small businesses suffer into oblivion because of their insistence to look ‘big’ and corporate like. The truth of the matter is that you don’t have to. If you want your brand to stand out online, do not hastate to put your personality behind it. People are more receptive to people. For instance, try to include your picture in your company profile. You could also infuse some humor into the content. Authenticity should be your goal regardless of whether you are new in the market. Be passionate and you will attract passionate clients into your online business.
- Revisit your target audience
Do you really know who your target audience is? You need to know who your target audience are and where there are or where you can find them. Therefore, you need to make sure you can consistently target your audience so that your audience find content when they expect it.
- Conduct yourself professionally
Whatever you do, remember that this is business. So you should pay a close attention to how you conduct yourself. Avoid being remembered for the wrong reasons by ensuring you post or publish credible and factual content. Go for quality over quantity. You have probably heard the saying that goes: it is not what you say, but how you say it that is essential when it comes to marketing. Although your personality reflects on your startup at the beginning, the personality of your startup will become an integration of voices that write for your brand.
It is important to keep in mind that what is being said about your brand is very important; therefore, it is important to make sure you listen to your audience.
Mjrvisuals can help you increase your reach out of that content in your website through our expertise. We run the gambit of visual imagination including video production, digital marketing, video editing, print design, advertising, graphic design, graphic animation, motion graphic and media design. Be part of our portfolio of clients and let us tell your story to the world. Click here to visit our website: mjrvisuals.com/
Common mistakes while choosing a web host
Are you in the process of searching for the appropriate web host for your website? Here are some of the common mistakes that you should be aware of.
- Going for the cheapest web hosting plan
The cheapest hosting plan is not always the best because it has some drawbacks, which may be limiting to one’s business. What people should actually be aware of is that when someone offers a cheap plan, there is something they take back and that they may not offer everything else that others get at a higher cost. In other words, it is not likely that you will receive the same level of service as those who pay more because if it was possible to receive the same level of service, everyone in the planet would go for the cheapest web hosting providers. This then makes sense why we have coupon hosting for those who are involved in reseller hosting.
However, it does not necessarily mean that the most expensive hosting plans are always the best options. But it definitely means that the less you pay, the less services and features you get. When you choose a cheap web hosting, expect to experience many downtimes and poor server infrastructure and this may translate to poor quality customer service.
- Looking out for freebies
It is obviously advantageous to look for freebies, especially if you are a first timer. However, it is important to note that looking for the maximum number of freebies in one web host can make you lose focus and ultimately make the right web hosting decision. Most web hosting companies give away freebies to attract customers, but is upon you to look careful what the catch is. Some of the freebies are as good as they seem but they end up luring you to make a buying decision which could prove expensive in the long run. Therefore, ensure that the most important factors are right with host before you look at what freebies they are offering. Some of the factors to look at include: server speed and up time, great customer support, reasonable price and domain name registration policy (let us look at this next).
- Free domain
Many web masters get attracted with the offer of a free domain name. But it is advisable to look beyond this domain name trick because it can inconvenience you in future should you decide to move to a better host. What happens is that while some companies offer free domain services, they ensure that the domain name is registered under their company and not under your name. what this means is that you may not be able to take it with you when you move. However, the good news is that domain names are not expensive and it is possible to get one at a very cheap price and make it your own. So before going for a free domain name, find out whether you will own the domain name or it will be registered with that company.
Mjrvisuals can help you increase your reach out of that content in your website through our expertise. We run the gambit of visual imagination including video production, digital marketing, video editing, print design, advertising, graphic design, graphic animation, motion graphic and media design. Be part of our portfolio of clients and let us tell your story to the world. Click here to visit our website: mjrvisuals.com/