Strategic Marketing Tips for 2018
2018 is the year to become more strategic in your marketing efforts. You are going to encounter stiffer competition than before because the population of both online and offline businesses is growing dramatically. As a result, only the most creative, innovative and resilient business will make it. Although you are not going to reinvent the wheel in terms of marketing, it is important to remember these 8 critical marketing tips to help you stay ahead.
1. Strategic alliance
A strategic alliance can be defined as a formal arrangement between two companies. This is used to develop the strengths and meet the business needs of the companies involved. For instance, a graphic design company can partner with a digital marketing company to enhance customer the needs of the customers. This also leads to more sales as a result of cross referrals.
2. Develop apps
Develop an app if your business can benefit from them. For instance, Uber has an app that makes it easy for customers to find a taxi and make reservations. Apps are very useful for the business and the customer.
3. Reach out to influencers
Make a list of key influencers in your local community and target market and send them a discount or free sample for your services. E.g if you own a store that deals with spare parts, you could target garages and send them free samples or offer discounts for your products. Your generosity will get them talking.
4. Video is a powerful new marketing tool
Be proactive in your marketing. Film yourself offering tips, strategies and showing someone how to do something. Make explainer videos about your products and services and share on social media. We create memorable experiences through video. Click here and see how can you engage your company using video as a marketing tool.---> Video Production and Design on Demand
Local Advertising
5. Use local leader newspaper
While you wouldn’t be betting that you will get a return on investment on those little local ads in local newspaper, they could be good for some businesses such as motor vehicles and apartments.
6. In-store signage
Use in-store banners and posters to promote your products and services or announce your value proposition. You could close a lot of sales using this method if you are getting a lot of people who are making inquiries or right in the edge of buying something.
7. Street banners
A small business on a popular highway can use a street banner to market a product. You can attract a lot of attention from people walking on the street and develop a connection with you potential customers.
8. Online Directory Listings
There are many online directories for Australian business to consider. They can also help you to be found in search engines.
Examples of online directories in Australia include:
Directory
White Pages
Sensis
Yellow Pages
True Local
Business Listings
Local
9. Establish processes that are customer friendly
Take a great look at your processes and structures and try to find if there are structures that are too rigid and which can be potential customer service roadblocks and eliminate them. Establish your company as one that is easy to deal with.
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.
Online Marketing: How to Write Great SEO Articles that Attract Traffic to Your Website
If you are relatively new to the world of Search Engine Optimization, you may have heard the term SEO being thrown around. Writing great SEO articles is not difficult if you understand the basics of SEO. SEO simply stands for Search Engine Optimization.
SEO is designed to help people find content easily in the search engines like Google. In other words, a SEO article is any content created with the goal of making it easy for people to find you in the search engines. To write better SEO articles, you must do the following:
- Carry Thorough Keyword Research
Before you start writing, do a comprehensive keyword research. Keywords or phrases are those terms that are likely to be used by the web user to find your content. For instance, if a student wants to look for an example of an essay about hotels to help him/her write their homework, they will most likely type the phrase sample essay about hotel in Google search box. So that becomes your keyword. So if you include that keyword in your article, this student will probably land in your website if you offer professional essay writing services.
- Do Keyword optimization
Simply researching keywords and including them in your article is not enough. You must know where, when and how to use those keywords. Just tossing keywords anyhow isn’t going to work. The keywords must occur naturally throughout the article. They must also be relevant to the content. Therefore, you can not use the keyword sample essay about hotel in an article that talks about Weight Loss for example.
- Organize content
You must organize your content in a logical way so that the reader can easily relate to the content. Remember if they don’t stay in your site long enough, they will navigate away, which is bad for your SEO strategy.
- Promote your content
No matter how great your content is, no one will know about it if you don’t share. Luckily, there is a plethora of ways one can share articles today including social media.
Write about something interesting
If you thought people would instantly stream to your website as soon as you publish your article no matter how bogus it is, you are dead wrong. People want to read about something that is interesting to them; something that solves their problem. You content should have a strategy so that you have clear goals on why you are publishing the article in the first place. Is it to get people to buy from you? Is it to simply inform your readers about some great idea? Do you simply want to educate or entertain your readers?
More importantly, your content should be long enough to count. Don’t be too obsessed about the word count. Rather, be more concerned about the point you are trying to make. Search engines generally give preference to longer articles of at least 600 words. In-depth content has particularly found favors in Google search engine. Therefore, if you can get someone to write you a 2,000 word SEO article, by all means go for it.
Target the right audience
Finally, it is critical to target the right audience and design your content strategy accordingly. If your business targets engineers, you might want to writer more insightful, in-depth content. You may also want to ensure you are accurate with your facts.
Need more help with your SEO articles? Do not hesitate to hire a professional SEO writer to help. Not everyone has time to pen a triumphant SEO article so it makes sense to ask for help if you need one.
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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
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/