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.
- 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.
- 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 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.
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.
Design tips to attract visitors to a website
Website design should always keep millennials engaged on your web page. How to get people to stay longer and keep coming to your website should always be the ultimate aim of any webmaster. The first step is to ensure that the client is happy with the way your website looks, but attracting visitors to your website is only one of the few things you must do.
It is important to note that once you have designed the website and it is up and running, it is competing against hundreds of others in the search engine. So, you need to find ways of encouraging your visitors to stay longer in your site and keep coming back.
However, no one said that creating an engaging site is a simple process. In fact, it is one of the most difficult aspects of user experience to design for because it does not only require high quality content, the content should be delivered in the most exciting way. Moreover, sites which deliver content in a variety of forms such as video, text, images and audio normally experience better customer retention than those that only use text. If you think that your website is feeling a little lifeless, here are some tips you can use to revive it.
- Turn scrolling into engagement
It is possible to get as much as 70% more engagement from one single change in the form of parallax scrolling. Simply stated, parallax scrolling is a trend that is sweeping the web design industry because it provides an eye-catching way of visually delivering a message. With parallax scrolling, several elements are moved as you scroll down the page. This results in a dynamic experience for the user. Modern web design technology means that you can now design an amazing parallax website with pixel perfect accuracy
- Iconography and symbols
This is another great way of designing an interactive web site. Designers actually have the difficult task of presenting text in the most impacting ways. So, the use of icons can assist your visitors to find what they are searching for as quick as possible. The icons and symbols play the role of helping the visitor move from place to place. In other words, they, act like signposts. If you can get a way of using icons to support your text, your sites will become more enjoyable to read.
- Vector images for responsive visuals
Providing your visitors with text only content blocks is obviously not going to help. You must integrate images as well are you are going to create an engaging content. Typically, most images are in the form of PNG, JPEG and GIF. However, the problem with such bitmap images is that their images sizes are fixed; hence, they cannot stretch or contract to fit a new layout size or resolutions. Also, using more images in your site will have a negative impact in terms of loading times of your site.
So, the solution is to use vector graphics which are designed to render dynamic imagery. Vector images can easily be scaled to sizes depending on the screen size and resolution.
Effectively build a successful online business
Search Engine Optimization is evolving very fast from a traditional SEO that overly focuses on keywords and links into one that is more holistic and integrated. In other words, SEO is not just optimizing your page for search engine ranking, but also optimizing everything from the user experience, keyword research, link building, and content marketing to social media. I like to compare SEO to building a house that will last for decades if not centuries. You need to build your SEO on a firm foundation that will last the test of time—one that will not be shaken by any form search engine algorithm changes in future.
If you fail to build your SEO campaigns on these key pillars, your business will greatly suffer as a result of low visibility in search engines and competition. Of course, SEO is still going to change drastically over the coming days, but if you focus on building your house on long-term foundation stones, you can expect to dominate your niche for many years to come. Without much further ado, here are six key areas to focus your SEO campaign.
- Good Quality Content
What is quality content?
You have definitely heard the phrase “content is king” for umpteen times. However, if you were to ask any random marketer what quality content is, you would get varied answers. For some, quality content is one that has x number of words where x can be anything like 400, 500, 700, 1000, 1500, 2000 or 5000 words. For others, quality content is relevance. But what really is quality content?
Quality content is simply content that is evergreen. It should be useful to the users who will in turn keep coming back for more. It should stand the test of time. A website with great content will always be ahead of the competition when it comes to search engine rankings. In order to produce top-notch content, follow the guidelines below.
- Understand what makes your followers tick
There is a reason why some marketers struggle to market their products. The best marketers know whom they are marketing to. They know what makes their audience tick. Therefore, they speak the language of their audience. Writing something that your audience does not care about is a waste of time. Do a proper research before creating content for your website. This will ensure that your content will resonate with your audience and persuade them to buy from you.
- Get feedback
Once you have produced the content, encourage your readers to make comments, react, as questions, add on the content, or even disapprove of the content. Some marketers make the mistake of turning off commenting.
- Provide real value
The best way you can differentiate yourself from the competition is by providing real value to your audience. When users come to your website, they expect to find unique, original, actionable and resourceful content.
- Provide easy-to-read content
Did you know that Google hates content that isn’t easy to read? People have way too many things to do and if your content isn’t easy to read, they won’t read it. Do not create content that looks like it belongs to a scientific journal. If it isn’t easy for a 5th grader, then your content needs to be redone. Follow the following simple rules to increase readability of your articles.
- Ensure your sentences are short. Paragraphs should also be short.
- Break up content into headers, sub-headers and bolding.
- Font size should not be too small or too big. I prefer size 16.
- Include images, charts, videos and other graphics that act as visual aid
- Create lists (like this one)
It does not matter how great and valuable your content is. If it is not readable, you will get high bounce rates. Make it as easy as possible for your readers to find the information they are looking for.
Content with titles that grab readers’ attention result in more shares and are read more. Your title is what sells your content. Certainly, titles act as your content’s sales representative in social media, search engine and in email campaigns. So it is no surprise that titles tell half of the story.
- Linking Strategy
Links act like streets in the search engine universe. They give search engine bots clues on how content is interrelated within pages. Although links aren’t everything in SEO, they are very important because they not only determine the popularity index of a website, they also determine metrics like spam, trust and authority. You can also compare links to votes. If you are getting links from trustworthy sites, it is a good sign even to the search engines that your site is also trustworthy. It is imperative that you get your link building right if you want to build a Google-proof link network.
Here are five quick tips to ensure that your link building strategy is right
- Avoid low quality guest posting. Google is harsh on thin, rehashed or unauthentic content that does not give value. Cookie-cutter guest post still fall in the category of scraped content as far as Google is concerned
- Avoid scarping content from popular website. There is nothing wrong with using content from other well-established and authority website so long as you modify it to suit your audience such as including relevant stats, views, opinions or data. So, do not just copy paste everything including links.
- Concentrate on link quality instead of link quantity. If you were sick, an advice from one qualified doctor is better than 100 advices from 100 random individuals. The same applies to link building in SEO. It is better to have one or two links from relevant, high authority website than having thousands from irrelevant sources. If your website is about dog nutrition, a link from the National Dog Health Association would carry more weight and relevance than one from a blog about fashion.
- The more quality links you have the better. It is a great thing if you are or can get many links from different quality website.
- Beware of link anchor text. The link anchor text says a lot about what you are good at. The text link tells the search engines what your website is all about. Most importantly, make your anchor text relevant to your content. For example, if you are talking about child toys, a link text like “horse racing” will send wrong signals to both users and search engines
- Responsive web design
Responsive web design has become an integral part of search engine optimization. With more people using their tablets and smartphones to access the internet, it is very important for marketers to create websites that can be access across multiple channels. Therefore, responsible web design (RED) means that website pages are able to render seamlessly depending on which devices they are being displayed on. This means that irrespective of whether you are accessing the website from a desktop, tablet or smartphone, the website will remain user-friendly.
Google loves RWD
Google is the divine being in the web universe that makes commandments. What Google wants is what you give it. Google favors responsive websites when it comes to search engine ranking. As a matter of fact, mobile-friendly sites, all factors held constant, generally rank higher than non-responsive sites. What this means is that Google is effectively penalizing sites that are not responsive.
- Passion for the brand
It is difficult do anything without passion. This is one item that many business owners do not take into consideration, yet it is the most important one by a mile. You must have a passion for your brand; otherwise, you will soon burn out. Before you jump into keyword research, content and web design, first make an assessment of how passionate you are with the niche. Are you willing to go an extra mile to create an extraordinary business? Are you willing to learn? Start with passion and you will build a very successful online business.
How to convert your cold leads into hot prospects
No doubt, you have worked hard to get the leads. But the difference between successful marketers and the average is that the successful ones will convert their leads into prospects while the mediocre ones will leave their leads undecided.
However, there is a general misconception among business persons that they should convert every prospect they get caught in the trap of thinking they can while in the real sense, they end up wasting a lot of valuable time in trying to do the impossible. Here are some suggestions on how to turn those cold into hot prospects
Create an email list and add your new lists into your periodic campaigns
If you run a monthly email campaign, you can use it to follow-up on those prospects that have not made up their minds. Some people will be temporarily distracted while others will have their situations change, and the best thing to keep them on track is your periodic email updates.
Simply stay in touch
With so many things happening, your name is more likely to be forgotten as soon as you speak to your lead. Therefore, you must keep in touch to keep your name in their minds. One moment they could think they don’t need to join your business but their situation could change and change their minds. Keep in touch through newsletters, postcards, letters and articles, among other things.
Approach their business executive assistants and learn about their personality
Making use of Executive assistant is important as this will help you to know the person you are dealing with and the best approach to take. They might also be able to give you the reason why you were not successful in making the sale so that you can approach the person differently in the future.
How important is the sale? 
The thing you should ask yourself is how important the sale is going to be. If the sale is important, you need to determine other approaches or actions you are willing to take to make the sale happen. You need to find creative ways of convincing the lead(s) to buy supposing the sale was the most important thing in your career.
As already mentioned there is nothing you can do if your lead suddenly turns cold and proves difficult to convert to prospect despite doing everything possible to convince them. Rather than live in denial, you should gather courage and move on. Remember you need to focus your energy on other opportunities. It is important to bear in mind that you only have a limited time to do your business and you cannot spend long periods on one prospect. Actually knowing when to quit and move on is one of the key strength of entrepreneurs.
Spinning your wheels trying to convince unmotivated prospect to change their mind is a self-defeating approach. Even if you succeed in converting them, you will not get much value from them. Simple question to ask is: “what is the best use of my time right now?” dropping a potential lead may be difficult but it is worth it.
MJRvisuals Creative Director talk about animation and modeling and keeping his head fresh from the daily grind.
You know it’s interesting that when I started doing videography and video graphics I never thought I would get into animation. Right now i’m doing a girl, robot, body armor, something. It going to be something when I get down with it with the idea of doing a cartoon. I never initially thought that A. I would be able to do animation or that it would become a viable source of work=. Being a boutique production company I say boutique because I’m not very big. A few computers and couple of employees but we have a tendency to do big things for large clients.
Watch the entire video!
Visit us at mjrvisuals.com and see our work.
Exploring the Adobe Presets in After Effects
This is Malcholm Reese with mjrvisuals.com and in this episode i’m going to break-down animation presets in aftereffects. Let me rephrase that i’m not going to break them down individual but better yet show you where you 1can go to find out visually what the presets do.
It was funny, when we were sitting around talking about making these tutorials I kept arguing that it doesn’t have to be this basic, but then I was reminded about how I learned and honestly I didn’t know about this shortcut until like 4 years into editing. When I discovered it i was like “where have you been all my life” but by then I stopped using presets really anyway but dang if I would have known.
Anyway, presets are I guess what Adobe thinks is the most used applications or maybe the most versatile applications? In any case if your new to after effects they come in handy if not for editing purposes then for really good learning tools by backwards animating them, which is figuring out what Adobe did to make it and making it yourself.
I’ll be honest, you guys are probably not as slow as me, because, when I first started I went animation presets by animation presets clicking, draging, dropping the preset into my comp to see what happens. click, drag, drop, delete, repeat Yeah that was me. Then I discovered adobe bridge, well at least I discovered bridge and the “browse animation” (as I do the air quotation symbol) shortcut located in the menu bar really at the same time.
Now what the shortcut does is actually it opens up adobe bridge in a window that allows you to view the presets one by one, like this. Pretty cool, and easy.
Now you can apply your preset in a number of fashions, you can click apply preset which will open a new window and take you to the script window where you can highlight and apply the preset you found, or you can just double click in bridge and it will apply accordingly. Now it does show a application error but the preset is on the solid you had selected. Go through, explore, take the time and look at if not all of them most of them.
I hope this save you time in your editing again this is malcholm reese with mrjvisuals.com make sure you check out my other highlight, tutorial, and animation videos see you next time.