Successful Blog

Does Your Business Profile Get Enough Love?

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Digital marketing revolves around building an online presence, at the core of which is your online business profile.

When you first brought your business profile online, you probably set up a few social media accounts, posted a few pictures on your Facebook page and maybe even Tweeted an announcement that you were open for business.

But without continual maintenance, your business profile will collect cobwebs faster than a tavern during the prohibition.

What Have You Done for Me Lately?

Your followers are always looking for the latest and greatest offerings from your social media accounts.

It’s not enough that you announce your grand opening or a 20% off sale three months ago. You have to keep the offers flowing.

Whether you’re offering up fashion tips from your online clothing store blog, or posting pictures of your company employee outing on Pinterest, the posts have to keep coming.

Assume your followers have short-term memory loss. They don’t remember today what you did for them yesterday, so you have to keep reminding them why they follow you.

You Never Know Where Gold Will Turn up

If you think that simply having a website and a stagnant online business profile is sufficient, think again.

Business networking is still the key to drumming up leads, referrals and long-term business relationships. Just like in the old days when you handed your business card to everyone from the plumber to the guy sitting next to you on the subway, you should network everywhere.

You never know where the gold will turn up.

Don’t assume that certain social media sites are only for one specific demographic. Pinterest started out with women posting pretty pictures of hairstyles and tea sets.

As the following article looks at, now savvy business people post their business profile on Pinterest, like the Bob Pratt profile, because they recognize that people from all walks of life visit a variety of social media sites. Market your business profile everywhere you can.

Give People What They Want

To really make your business profile stand out, make it about the people, not about you. In other words, your posts and tweets should have value to the people, helping you increase and improve your brand profile along the way.

Of course, it’s fine to toot your own horn just a little. For example, if you’ve made a sizable donation to a charity, you can certainly announce it.

But most of your posts should be about giving the people what they want. In order to do that, you have to find out what they want. This is where business marketing surveys really come in handy.

A short survey with a few simple questions should be able to tell you if your followers are interested in receiving things like information, coupons, infographics, or investor tips from you. Whatever it is, make sure you comply.

Try to put your own agenda in the background, and your followers’ wants in the foreground of your online business profile campaign.

Make sure your business profile is getting enough love.

Post often and everywhere with information that your followers want.

Photo credit: Image courtesy of Stuart Miles at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

About the Author: Kate Supino writes extensively about best business practices.

Do You Have the Right Brand Promotion Mix?

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marketing-words-blackboard-shows-selling-promotion-and-sales-100211117Are you looking to grow your company, gain exposure to the media and market your business to a specific clientele?

If so, you’re going to need to carefully plan exactly how you should go about marketing your business. There is no “one size fits all” method, but rather a mix of strategies that work together to give your business the type of growth it needs.

Popular ways businesses go about marketing include networking with other businesses and individuals in the area, asking for referrals, using free forms of advertising (such as Craigslist), developing an online social media presence, placing ads in the newspaper or print media, creating a mass email or text message list, offering deals and specials, donating to a local charity and more.

There are hundreds of ways to market your business, but the trick is finding a mix that works best for your specific industry.

Get More Social

Social media is quickly rising to the top when it comes to marketing. Not only is it an effective way to advertise for nearly all businesses, regardless of industry, but it’s also a free way to advertise.

To market via social media, you first start out by setting up your business accounts on various social media sites, such as Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, LinkedIn and more.

Then, start networking with other business and individuals, post information on your company including any specials or promotions you have going on, interact with customers and start developing a following.

Finding the Right Combinations

While growing your online presence is one of the best ways to market your business, it shouldn’t be the only way. A business that markets well knows that it’s a combination of marketing strategies that are the most effective.

The article “Integrating social media, text and email” suggests that the best social media marketing strategy incorporates text messages and email marketing into their plan. Instead of having three separate plans, it’s best to have them work together to form one larger marketing campaign.

So how do you get all three to work together?

A few ideas include asking customers via email to “like” your Facebook page, getting customers to “opt in” to your text message service by offering a discount on your product or placing a “subscribe to my email” option on all of your social media accounts.

By offering discounts or free products to the customers and making it easy for them to share and follow you, you’ll have a much better chance at growing a following and gaining customers.

Once you’ve combined your social media marketing strategy with your text and email campaign, you can begin to seek out other ways to advertise.

Its trial-and-error, as some methods will work wonderfully and others will crash and burn. Your strategies will also change over time as new and improved ways of marketing come on to the market.

Be flexible and be willing to try a variety of methods in order to figure out what works best for your business.

Photo credit: Image courtesy of Stuart Miles at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

About the Author: Sarah Brooks is a freelance writer living in Charlotte, NC. She writes on a variety of topics including social media, small businesses and personal finance.

Sales – The Best Way To Do It

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By Lindsey Tolino

Sales gets a bad rap. It’s kind of earned it.

We’ve all experienced pushy sales people – ones who didn’t listen, ones who weren’t trying to serve you, ones who were trying to pushing you to buy so they’d get their commission.

No solicitors allowed

It’s off-putting to say the least.

We’ve gotten sales really backward. It shouldn’t be a pushy job. It shouldn’t be dominated by sales people’s self-interest.

Sales should actually be quite the opposite: Sales should be a position of servanthood.

Yes, you may be responsible to make certain quotas. But your job isn’t to sell indiscriminately to hit quotas. Your job is to serve people.

Your job is to serve people by finding those who need your product, serve them by informing them about your product, serve them by respecting their decision to buy or not buy your product, and serve them being a resource after they decide to buy or not buy your product.

Things get all messed up in sales when you put your interests first. Potential customers can tell if you’re selling just to make money. It’s incredibly unattractive. Not only that, you create way more work for yourself than you need to.

You know it’s better to have solid, consistent relationships with your customers than to be scrambling to find new prospects because you’ve treated past customers transactionally.

Yet, we tend toward transaction. Why? Why would we sell ourselves short of a solid relationship for a quick, one-time transaction?

It’s ultimately not because we’re selfish. It’s ultimately because we’re fearful. We don’t trust the process. We fear that we may not have enough for ourselves. So we go out and try to make a quick sale to take care of ourselves, instead of trying to serve others. Our scarcity mindset pushes us toward putting our own interests above others’.

Let me explain. If you put a small pile of food in a field and release a bunch of dogs that haven’t eaten in a week, there’s likely going to be fighting over the food.

But, if I take away the food bowl from my pit bull while she’s eating, she won’t become aggressive or fight me. She’s still interested in it. She wants it back. But she trusts me. She’s fed twice a day without fail. She knows I’ll give her food, even if I have to take it back for a moment because I forgot to put her medicine in it.

The first set of dogs have been conditioned into a scarcity mindset. My dog hasn’t. The great news is, we’re not dogs. We may have been conditioned into a scarcity mindset, but we can refuse to keep that mindset any longer.

We know that serving people is better for them and better for us in the long run. We can choose to sell to people out of a desire to serve them excellently and not out of our own self-interests. When we choose that, we create more sustainable relationships with the people we serve, which benefits us as well.

Refuse a scarcity mindset. Sell out of a desire to serve others. It’s better for all of us.

Author’s Bio:Lindsey Tolino is small business management consultant that uses her intentional creativity to make businesses better. She serves business owners with her words at ToBusinessOwners.com. Follow her on Twitter @LindseyTolino or connect with her on Google+.

Image info: Royalty-free image by Mark Brannan. (http://www.freeimages.com/photo/622720)

How to Kickstart a Product-Based Business

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This week I’m pleased to interview the two creative minds behind the Ryo adaptor (launching today on Kickstarter), Lori Liu and Kevin Lieber. Crowdfunding is a great way to road-test an idea, gauge market demand, and obtain financing for your project.

I thought it would be interesting to get the insider scoop on what it’s like to take the leap from idea to Kickstarter campaign.

Ryo adaptor

1. What are the backgrounds of your founders?

We are a team of four made up of a creator/entrepreneur, a legal adviser, an auditor, and a Youtube channel producer and host. It’s a good mix of creative talents and business acumen.

2. How did you come together for this project (since some are in New Zealand and one is in the US?)

The three of us in New Zealand are associates and we came together because we believed in Julian’s idea and also because we just wanted to go all in and take a real shot at creating something outside of our day jobs. We needed a US partner to be able to launch a US based Kickstarter project, so we pitched our idea to Kevin as he is active in the science and tech space and seemed like somebody who would be interested. Our pitch was honest and personal, and Kevin jumped onboard quite quickly. We’ve found that if you are open and honest with people, you will get the same back.

3. Any tips or advice on working together remotely with a business partner?

It really isn’t hard if everyone shares a common goal and is invested in the project. The logistics are a bit more difficult than working with local people, but we’ve found that there’s almost nothing you can’t sort out over email and Skype (of course, Julian had to fly over to the New York to shoot our video with Kevin). The only difference in working with a remote partner is that there needs to be a clear division of labour so that he can be a lot more independent in what he is doing. Back home we just tag team a lot and pick up the slack for each other whenever it becomes necessary.

4. What made you decide to use Kickstarter to get the product launched?

We are a small startup working on a very tight budget. Kickstarter is fantastic because it is basically free market validation, and it’s a great platform for newbies like us to build a following for future projects.

5. Any tips for someone considering going to Kickstarter with their project?

It’s still a bit early for us to be giving advice as we’re still testing the waters ourselves. Rather than a tip we can share the approach that we’ve taken with Kickstarter. We have invested a LOT of time and energy to create a good Kickstarter page. Everything from the video to the visual assets and the text has been created with the utmost care and attention to detail. We believe that while the idea itself is important and is obviously central to the project, it takes a good looking campaign page to give people that extra push to really want to check out what you’re doing. At this point we just really really really hope we’re right.

6. How do you go from product to business? Do you have a strategy in place for how you will scale and grow?

We have a business plan for taking the product to retail after the campaign. Of course that will depend on the success of this campaign. If we are successfully funded we will be able to do our first run of production and get the ryo adapter and kushi out to our backers. If we get a decent amount of funding we will be taking this to local retailers here in our relatively small New Zealand market. If we raise a significant amount of funding we will be well placed to take this to the larger retailers overseas. We have also looked into exit strategies for our worst case scenarios. We are all at pretty critical points in our respective careers so if we don’t hit certain targets, then this project will not be worth quitting our day jobs for. In this case we will have to look for a buyer to take over. I think if that happens the best deal we could reach would be agreeing to a majority takeover with the original founders taking reduced shareholdings as silent partners.

7. Can you share any tips from your marketing plan? Any successes so far?

I don’t think our success can be measured until we launch. As a startup we aren’t too focused on a commercially driven marketing campaign that shoves the ryo adapter down people’s throats. We really just want people to know we exist and we’ve basically tried to use every avenue available within budget. One thing we’re definitely limiting our spend on is banner and sidebar ads. It might have been good a while back, but if you think about the sheer number of startups we have today vying for ad revenue versus the slower growing target audience, it just doesn’t make financial sense. We were pretty blown away by how much these ads cost, the prices have been driven up by the fast growing number of startups and other ad sellers all chasing a limited pool of money.

8. Anything I forgot to ask about that you’d like to share?

Yeah, my credentials! I’m so new at this myself and I don’t feel qualified at all to be giving any tips. I hope my answers are of some value to your audience. You should hit me up again after the campaign and hopefully then I’ll have some gems to share!

I think that’s a great idea. Look for a followup article here, once the campaign closes!

Author’s Bio: Rosemary O’Neill is an insightful spirit who works for Social Strata — makers of the Hoop.la community platform. Check out the Social Strata blog. You can find Rosemary on Google+ and on Twitter as @rhogroupee

Time to Automate Your Social Media?

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social-media-100183509Social media has been proven to be an effective tool for performing a wide range of business tasks, from marketing to recruiting. As such, businesses around the world are adopting social media at a rapid rate.

If you have already joined the social media fray, you should know that you need to invest a substantial amount of time and effort in order to be successful on social media. One thing you can do to make your social media activities easier and less time-consuming is to use social media automation tools.

Here is a look at three great tools that you can use to automate your social media efforts.

Post Planner

If you want to promote your business and engage with consumers effectively on social media, you have to make a point to share interesting and helpful content regularly.

Post Planner can help you save time and effort by automating the publishing of content on your Facebook page.

This tool enables you to publish content based on a predetermined time schedule; target your content based on details such as age group, gender and education level; look for trending content and add it to your queue; crowd-source content from other people who use Post Planner; access a database with thousands of updates to find new ideas for updating your status; and upload bulk posts.

Additionally, it can perform simple analytics to show you the percentage of users who “liked”, clicked or commented on a certain post.

According to the article, “3 Great Tools to Automate Your Social Media“, Post Planner comes in four different versions, including the free Pro Planner and the paid Guru, Master and Agency plans.

Dlvr.it

When you have new content to share, you want to post it on all your social media channels. However, it can be time-consuming to do this if you have many posts to share on a regular basis.

Dlvr.it is a tool that you can use to deliver content to multiple social media networks.

All you need to do is specify the source and destination of the content. Whenever you create a new post, Dlvr.it will send out your updates automatically.

Currently, this social media automation tool supports Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Delicious and App.net.

Social Oomph

Evergreen content is content that will not be outdated.

As your social media following grows, you will have fans or followers who have never seen some of your previously posted content. So, when you post content that is evergreen, you should continue to share it in the future.

Social Oomph features a queue reservoir that allows you to add content that you want to re-share to a queue, and you can specify how often the content should be shared.

Also, you can create variations of a post, so that you will not send out identical posts when you re-share content. Social Oomph can also help you find the right people to follow and monitor your social media activities.

Social media automation tools are becoming more advanced and useful.

If you do not have enough time to manage your social media activities, you should try using one of these tools.

Photo credit: Image courtesy of ddpavumba at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

About the Author: John McMalcolm is a freelance writer who writes on a wide range of subjects, from social media marketing to Cloud computing.

Cook Up More Revenue with Consumer Text Marketing

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couple-enjoying-dinner-at-a-restaurant-100234263If you’re a restaurant, fast-food establishment or local eatery owner, you know that getting customers through the door is a constant focus of your business.

Even when business is good, there are always those quieter times of day when it can be hard to get enough patrons into those seats.

Using mass texts is one way your eatery can draw in more customers, get people excited about your food, and entice them with special offers and exclusive deals.

So just how can you use text marketing to increase your eatery’s revenue? And what are some examples of restaurants that are already doing just that?

Text Marketing Gets Customers’ Attention

As the article “Mass Consumer Texts Driving Up Sales At Restaurants” points out, using text marketing means you can reach a large number of potential customers in your immediate vicinity.

A text message has a personal feel. Unlike an online ad or billboard, a text message arrives directly in front of each customer, inviting them to open and read it, and grabbing their full attention for a few minutes.

Text marketing gives you the chance to start a personal interaction with each customer, putting your restaurant and food at the forefront of their mind, and ensuring they’ll think of you when it’s time to grab lunch or dinner.

Text Marketing Gives Them a Reason to do Business

The beauty of text marketing is that you can use it to entice your customers to eat with you. Text marketing is the perfect vehicle for sending them delicious offers, such as buy one get one free deals, or money off coupons.

If you particularly want to increase revenue at a quieter time of the day or week, you can use text marketing to send out time limited offers for those periods, encouraging people to come and eat with you at that time.

In addition, why not consider sending out weekly specials, daily discount coupons, text-to-win sweepstakes, or even conducting surveys to find out what your customers think of your restaurant, what works and what doesn’t.

Eateries Finding Success with Text Marketing

Several big-name eateries have already seen success with text marketing:

  • McDonald’s used a text-based sweepstakes competition with a wide range of prizes. 1.5 million customers joined in, showing that text marketing can be very effective indeed;
  • Chuck E. Cheese used text message marketing to encourage customers to join their email list – not only did it become the most successful method for getting customers on the list, but customers who joined via text were more likely to open the emails than any other customers;
  • UK pizza place Papa John’s sent out text offers for cut-price pizzas to customers on their text list, and saw a 33% jump in revenue for the duration of the offer;
  • Dunkin’ Donuts asked their customers to join their mobile marketing list, and got a fantastic response, with stores in the Boston area seeing 21% more customers walk through their doors;
  • Taco Bell branched out into using mobile marketing to connect with their customers, offering a free drink to those who opted in to their mobile marketing list. As a result, they garnered 13000 subscribers.

Text marketing is an immediate way to reach many customers quickly and easily, and it’s frequently more cost effective than other forms of direct marketing.

By reaching your customers when they’re out and about you can encourage them to stop off at your establishment and take advantage of your special offers.

Photo credit: Image courtesy of stockimages at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

About the Author: Tristan Anwyn writes on a wide variety of topics, including social media, SEO, restaurant businesses and SMS marketing.