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Marketing, Social Media, Uncategorized, Website

4 Words That Will Power-Up Your Website & Generate More Sales

Sales is the life-blood of any B2B business. Feeding the pipeline and closing become the challenges that all sales driven companies will focus on. I believe you should keep it simple and master the art of inbound marketing to get your audience development going. Here we discuss 4 key elements that can help you amplify your website and generate more sales.

Free

There still is no more powerful word in copy writing or web copy than Free.

Even if you are selling a high priced service or product, Free still reels them in.

Ever notice that high end car brands offer you the opportunity to Come in for a Free Test Drive?

All test drives are free, of course. But, they position it in a way where they’re giving you something. It’s subtle, but it works.

Same goes for:

Free Estimate
Free Inspection
Free Information
Free Whitepaper or Tip Sheet
Free eBook
Free Samples

You

If Free is the most powerful, You is a close second.

Good web copy, no matter what kind of business you run, should focus on the customer and how they’ll benefit from your product or service.

Even if you are using the Velvet Rope approach, you still need to focus on why the customer will benefit, or want to gain access to what’s behind the rope.

Scan your marketing materials: your website, your flyers, your direct mailers, your business cards, etc.

Highlight every time you use I or We.

Can these be changed to You?

If so, change them. Your customer will never tire of hearing about themselves or how they’re going to win by choosing your company.

Questions

Use questions for headlines and sub-headlines on your site and in your marketing.

Inject a benefit into the question whenever possible, then reinforce the benefit in the subhead.

For example:

Header: Where Can You Go to Find a Great Chiropractor?

Subhead: You Can Stop Suffering Sleepless Nights with a Bad Back!

Sub-Sub Header or Opening Line: Smith Chiropractic Can Cure Your Pain – Come in Now for a Free Back Inspection

There you’ve used a question to flag your customer’s attention. You injected You and Free into the copy, and you’ve laid out benefits in the answers.

Savings

This one can be tricky if you’re going after a high-end audience. But, if you want to help shoppers looking for a reasonable price, the words Saving, Savings, and Discount are powerful attention grabbers.

You can reverse this if you are offering a high-ticket service or product by painting your competitors into the “savings” category, implying that your service is superior while theirs is best left to price shoppers.

March 12, 2017/by chris

Culture, Digital, Marketing, Website

Do You Really Want More Clients and Customers?

If you’re running a small business, or are a solo entrepreneur, you probably spend much of your time thinking about how great life would be if you could only get a few more clients, get a few more customers, or land that one big account.

But, before you go big time, you should take a moment to make sure you’re ready to scale your small business up.

From Barley in Business to Busty to Death

It happens all the time.

A small business is doing ok, but the cash flow isn’t exactly overwhelming. When you run an online or service based business, especially if you’re running the show alone or with a small group, this can be a frustrating time.

Then, all the work, all the banging your head against the wall, and all of the planning takes a turn. You hit the tipping point. Whatever you want to call it, your business goes from scraping by to breaking through.

Now, it doesn’t have to be breaking through to super-stardom. Even if your business grows 20% suddenly, that can translate to a lot of extra income.

And a lot of extra work.

Are You Ready to Grow Your Business?

Take a minute to assess your current work load, productivity, and efficiency.

If you have a few customers or clients and you’re behind on orders or fulfilling service agreements, you’re probably not ready to grow. Getting more contracts might help your bank account, but it will not magically cure your productivity issues.

However, if you are consistently knocking your work load out of the park, you might be ready. If you work with a team, make sure everyone is on board. Having a key employee bail during a growth surge can leave you and your customers frustrated.

Think Big

When you’re ready to grow, start thinking big. If your firm normally handles 10 clients per month, or 20-customers per week, start to think about how it will be to take care of 100 clients a month or 200 customers. Then, think a little bigger.

This isn’t an exercise in daydreaming. It’s actually part of the planning process. If you’ve planned how you’ll handle the extra customers, you’ll be ready when it happens. Sure, no plan is fool-proof, but you’ll be in a much better position if you know where you’re going vs winging it, failing, then losing your new customers.

Find Financing

If you’ve bootstrapped so far, it may be time to consider financing or investors.

If you’re a solo-business, this can be intimidating. But, if you want to jump to the next level (and the levels beyond), finding funding may be necessary.

Before you panic and lose your nerve on this one, understand that funding can mean as little as a few thousand dollars to invest in equipment, marketing, or anything that will help you service more customers.

Concentrate on What You Do Best

The E-Myth by Michael Gerber talks a lot about how most entrepreneurs have one area of expertise, i.e., the baker who opens a bakery. But, most small business owners don’t just do the baking.

They do the baking, the ordering, the marketing, the cash register, the clean-up, and the book.

When you’re ready to scale, you’re ready to hand off some of these jobs. Stick to baking and you’ll have the best baked goods in town. Leave the marketing to a marketer, the books to your accountant (or bookkeeper), and the minutia to your employees.

January 29, 2017/by chris

Content, Marketing, SEO, Social Media, Website

How To Get Better Targeting on Your Organic Traffic

Everyone wants free traffic. Organic traffic is the best traffic. It is free and it is natural – like the food and its good for you. There is a way to further benefit from organic traffic and that is to optimize the targeting on your organic reach on social media. If the targeting is laser focused then there is a much higher chance of converting that free traffic into a paying customer and making money. Savvy marketers are increasing their organic traffic, but optimizing the targeting on their organic social media reach. Retaliate1st provides our guide to growing your organic traffic.

Targeting To Grow Your Organic Traffic

Better Targeting on Organic Social Media Reach

Much like you can target your ideal audience with paid facebook ads, you are now able to do something similar with organic posts.

This could help you reach much more of your audience through non-paid ads. It’s still not going to reach everyone, but it will expose your messages to many more people than are seeing them now.

Not everyone who follows your page will want to see every post you make, nor will the be interested in all of your news and events. But, when you target your audience for your posts, you can reach those who have:

Liked, shared, or commented on similar posts in the past
Took action on similar posts in the past
Have interests that match your news/event/post
Are in the demographic you’re targeting

While it’s important to target the best possible audience, the best part about this is that you can now leave out those who won’t be interested in what you’re saying this particular time. This increases the juice of each post, gaining more engagement with your audience.

Paid Engagement Posts

These do cost a little money to boost, but for next to noghitn you can boost yoru paid and non paid engagement. First, make sure you use this on your best posts.

Content Is Key For Organic Traffic

A little research will show you clearly that some of your posts or post types are in the top 1 – 5% of yoru best interatcions – likes, shares, clicks, etc.

Forget the stuff that gets very little recognition, stick to only our best content.

Now, after posting your best stuff, you can reach more people by boosting post-engagement. Yes, it will cost you $5 – 20 per post. But, you help your organic reach as well because you are almost guaranteed that:

This top-quality post will get likes, their friends see these likes and can interact with your page
This post will be shared. More shares = a ton more organic views (which leads to likes, further shares, etc.), thereby boosting your organic juice for each of these posts

Use More Video

The rise of video content on Youtube, Vine, Snapchat has lead to less text-based posts being viewed on Facebook.

If you want to overcome this hurdle, simply post more video content. Producing video is easier than ever, with the iPhone and top android phones shooting super high quality video. Video, quick edit, post. Use a good Call to Action and your post engagement will soar.

October 22, 2016/by chris

Creative, Marketing, Mobile, Website

3 Tips To Increase Your Email Open Rates

Email is still the number one channel for driving sales for e-commerce business. For many years marketers have touted the decline of the channel, but it is still here. It is still getting strong. With new tools such as AppBoy, Marketo and HubSpot, the abilities for customizing and refining campaigns is endless. However, the original principals of email marketing still hold true. Retaliate1st list their guide to increasing your open rates.

How To Increase Your Email Open Rates

Don’t Send Unnecessary Mail

As business owners and growth hackers, we subscribe to a ton of mailing lists. We consume info at an amazing rate. Some of the lists are better than others, and though we love to learn, we all know that there are those businesses that send garbage email blasts. It annoys us, but we stay subscribed. Then they do it again. We unsubscribe.

They lost a warm lead.

Don’t be like them. Keep your mail marketing messages to the most important. Do not simply send out blasts because you think you should.

New product, really exciting news, a big re-cap of the latest info, discounts, sales, or free stuff? Send it.

Short emails pushing half-hearted promotions because you either feel you haven’t emailed enough, or you want to generate a few extra sales? Don’t send it.

Personalize Your mail

Yes, we all know that it’s auto-generated, and most customers realize that at this point.

However, seeing our names in the subject is a powerful attention grabber.

Dear Customer, or Hey Business Pro are horrible ways to start an email. Hi Jennifer or Good Morning Darryl are going to get your email opened, and will get your first few lines read.

You can further increase your open rate by adding “Re:” before the personalization, even if it’s the first email in the chain. This can be used in your personal and intra-office communications as well, though over-doing it will diminish it’s power.

Personalization and Targeting

You should also personalize your “From.” Use your name or Name + Business. Jim at WidgetCo or Domenica from SalesBooster gives your list a warmer feeling than an email from SalesBooster.

Write Powerful Headlines

We’re talking about email marketing. Remember that every word you write for your business is marketing. And, email subject lines are pure copywriting.

Weak subjects don’t get opened.

If you are doing a lot of email, it can be fatiguing to come up with killer headlines consistently. The way around this is to split test subject lines, and parse your list so that you can use variations of the same subject for multiple parts of your audience.

The words Free, Incredible, Sale, Deal, and Discount are always powerful
Name + benefit is still a great lead
Re: Name + benefit is even better (save this for your most important email)

While it can be tempting to write “weird” subjects to get higher open rates, please remember that they have to relate to the content of your email, your product, and your brand. For example, one large personal training and fitness related business was famous for sending out emails with salacious subject lines that had zero to do with their product:

“Weed, whores, and whiskey”

“Re: A duffle bag full of guns”

“Re: Are you in the mafia?”

They’re now out of business.

October 22, 2016/by chris

Creative, Culture, Marketing, SEM, Website

The Three Reasons Your Landing Pages Don’t Convert

Landing pages are still the most important pages on your website. They are the funnel that allows you to convert your ad traffic and social media traffic into paying customers. landing pages are the pages that showcase your value proposition, your product and close your leads. These landing pages are the life blood of your business. At Retaliate1st, we specialize in developing landing pages that convert, that achieve their goal. We want to showcase the landing page mistakes we continually see, so that your business can thrive.

Why Your Landing Pages Don’t Convert

Too Many Options

Barry Schwartz wrote about the paralysis that sets in in many shopping situations in his book the Paradox of Choice. He uses the example of a man shopping for shampoo at a grocery store. He is faced with hundreds of choices – for dry hair, for brittle hair, for oily hair; olive oil base, coconut oil base; flower scented; and just about every color imaginable. This leads to frustration, and often people with either simply leave the store, or buy the closest option and later be unhappy with it.

Now, take a look at your landing pages. Are they leaving your customer in the isle frustrated because there are so many options they’re not sure which to choose?

If so, narrow it down to one choice (two, maximum).

What’s the goal of your landing page?

Email opt-in? Make sure the opt-in form is easily accessible, easy to read, and has a strong, clear call to action.

Do you want phone calls? Make your number big and visible and clickable.

Would you take either a phone call or a web form opt-in? Make it clear that either option gets them the same result: contact, free estimate, discount, services, etc.

Too Many Visual Distractions

It can be tempting to overwhelm your visitor with slick graphics. You may think you’re helping them find their way to your CTA.
But, there is a point where the graphics cause confusion.

When using infographics, pictures, video, or graphics, make sure they are absolutely essential to achieving the page’s goal. If they’re not, cut them. You can use them elsewhere (Thank You page, in email marketing, on blogs or pages).

Customer Centric Landing Pages

Put yourself in your customer’s shoes. They’re asking “What am I supposed to look at?”

If your landing page is littered with graphics, it will confuse them. This includes going overboard with exotic background colors, text colors and fonts, and headline sizes. Keep it simple… white background with black text is still the best option because it’s easiest to read.

Entry Pop Ups

Pop up windows upon entry are, unfortunately, overused. Some sites will display the pop-up every time you refresh the page, visit a new page on the site, and every time you vist the landing page, even if you’ve already opted in. IT can be frustrating for your user, especially if they’re viewing your content on mobile.

Your better option is to use an exit pop-up. At this point, on a true landing page that you’ve driven traffic to, if they’re leaving, they’re gone. An exit pop-up is a last-ditch effort to salvage the lead. It can work fairly well, and will increase your leads significantly over time.

October 22, 2016/by chris

Creative, Digital, Marketing, SEM, SEO, Website

The 6 Best Extensions for Your Site’s SEO and Adwords

SEO is the perfect tactic to optimize to drive free traffic to your website. While organic traffic is fantastic and can be created through optimizing web pages, this organic traffic can be amplified by using SEO extensions. Here Retaliate1st list our favorite SEO extensions to boost your organic traffic.

The 6 Best Extensions for Your Site’s SEO and Adwords

Google Tag Assistant

IF you are running your company’s SEO without help from a professional firm, or if you just want to check up on your SEO investment, Tag Assistant can help you verity that Adwords and Analytics are up and running properly. The best part about this extension is that with one click it lays out everything you need to see without digging around in the minuteau of Adwords (and it’s oft-lugubrious interface) or analytics.

Builtwith

Builtwith works with Google Chrome, and Is an excellent way to see what your competitors are up to by letting you know what they’re using to build their site. You can see

PageRank for Firefox

This is a great tool for evaluating other sites when it comes to building links, guest posting, forming joint ventures, etc. The best part is, you don’t have to dig at all – the site’s Page Rank is displayed right in the toolbar at the top of your browser.

Further SEO Extensions

Majestic SEO Backlink Analyizer

If linking building is part of your SEO strategy, you need to make sure those links are not coming from bad neighborhoods. Further, you want the best quality links possible to your site. You can check out anchor text, site reputation, as well as Page Rank and a few other key indicators.

Boomerang

This isn’t so much for SEO as it is a productivity tool. Boomerang for Gmail allows you to schedule emails to be sent later, schedule follow ups. IF you are dealing with multiple clients, and working with people in different time zones, this tool is a life saver. No more worrying that you’re emailing your Japanese clients at 4am Tokyo time… just schedule the emails to hit their offices during work hours. This can cut down on a lot of back and forth.

For any sales pro, follow ups are essential. Boomerang will do all of these for you.

Keywords Everywhere

This Chome extension can cut down on your keyword research time dramatically. When you search something in Google, it will display the volume of searches for this term and gives you the average cost per click for that keyword or phrase. This will help you cut out a lot of groundwork when searching for perfect keywords and phrases, and you’ll get a quick idea of what you’ll need to invest in Adwords to make them work for you.

October 15, 2016/by chris

Creative, Digital, Marketing, SEM, Social Media, Website

Buying Facebook Ads Directly

Facebook is the great advertising platform of our time. Were once television ads and billboard ads were the go to platforms for advertisers, they have now lost ground to Facebook ads. Retaliate1st discuss the reasons why you should focus on this platform for your advertising.

Customers Can Buy from You Without Leaving Facebook

This is huge for both your business, where can sell directly to a warm audience that you’ve built a strong relationship with, and for Facebook, which can help businesses sell more products, buy more ads, and have the whole thing take place on Facebook’s platform, without having users click away from the social media giant.

It works by giving your customers the option to buy products in Facebook messenger. If they’ve already filled in their Name, address, phone number, etc. for their profile, all they have to do is click “pay.” If not, they can do so at point of purchase.

Payments will go through PayPal or Stripe. At this point, these are the only two usable payment platforms, and you can only sell in the U.S. However, both of these rules will likely change as the program grows.

If you’ve ever fretted about the transition your customers make between Facebook and your landing or sales pages, now you don’t have to worry. If you crafted a great ad or promoted post, your customer can now buy with one click.

How to Sell In Messenger

This will take some finesse. Facebook is allowing click from ads in the newsfeed to be sent directly to messenger now. This is a slow roll-out, but it will take off soon enough. Obviously, some customers will be put off by having their messenger blow up with ads, but it seems Facebook will allow consumers the ability to choose who they receive ad messages from.

Once there, your customer can chat with a “sales bot” or they can buy direct. And, in a further move toward utilizing similar buy-sharing options as Amazon, Facebook will allow your customer to send the ad copy to their friends if they need help deciding between multiple products. So, if your customer can’t decide between the wing-tips and the quarter-brogues, they can now share it with their friends.

This helps them take the plunge and make the purchase, and it exposed your products to an even larger pool of warm prospects.

October 15, 2016/by chris

Content, Digital, SEM, SEO, Uncategorized, Website

3 Steps To Designing a Landing Page That Converts

Running adwords, Facebook ads, or even pouring time and effort into SEO campaigns only to drive traffic to a landing page that doesn’t convert is maddening. It’s also a waste of resources. Even if you craft a fantastic ad, your landing page must walk the visitor from curious clicker to lead. This is an art and a science, and its why designers and marketers charge so much to develop high-converting landing pages.

If you have the budget for it, get a pro to build your landing page. If you don’t, learn how to do it yourself until you can raise the capital to hire someone.

Follow these – tips and you’ll build a landing page that converts visitors into leads, and leads into sales. Even if you do have the budget to go pro, you can use these tips to evaluate what the marketer has designed for you.

3 Steps To Designing a Landing Page That Converts

Every Page Must Have a Clear, Powerful Headline

Many businesses make one of two mistakes when developing landing pages:

Their headline is weak and does nothing to inspire visitors to take the step of buying/signing up/calling.
Their headline is well-written, but is confusing or doesn’t mesh with the test of the ad and landing page

Writing great headlines has been the subject of countless books and sales courses, so it’s beyond the scope of this article to explain it fully, but if you lead with benefits, ask a question or create interest, you’ll be head-and-shoulders above your competition.

If you manage to create a great headline, don’t waste it by matching it to a landing page with text that doesn’t quite fit the main message. Also, keep your headline in form with your ad text. The headlines of your ad and landing page can be very similar, or at least close enough so that your visitor knows they’re in the right place.

Bullets are Weapons

The current fashion is to build a great headline, then follow it up with a few bullet points worth of text, then ask for the sale or sign-up.

Great idea. But choose your bullets wisely.

Bullet Points

In reality, bullets are just sub-headlines, and should be bursting with benefits. Not features! Don’t waste a bullet telling me your product is blue unless that somehow benefits me. Now, you can say

Our Widget Only Weighs .5oz, So it Fits in Your Pocket (and we now offer it in blue!)

That statement pairs benefit with feature, which is common practice on landing pages and sales letters because it’s proven to work. In this case, it’s a good idea to follow the bold benefit, and italicized parenthetical feature.

Pick your strongest 3 – 5 benefits and turn them into your bullet points. Put your strongest first and last, since your last bullet point will be just above, or to the left of the call to action.

Call to Action Better Call Them to Action

Your call to action is vital. Weak CTAs lose leads.

Online, most companies turn to the simple, and ineffective, “Submit” to get the customer’s info. Submit is a terrible, boring, and is loaded with subversive subtext. No one wants to submit to anything, especially when giving their info to strangers online.

Use strong CTAs on web forms:

Click Here (basic but proven to work)
Click Here + Benefit (Click Here to Get Your 10% Discount/Free E-book/Free Estimate)
Yes! Give Me My Benefit (discount/info/estimate)

Match the benefit in the CTA with the major benefit promised in your headline for maximum conversions. For more tips on converting using inbound methods check out our optimization page.

October 15, 2016/by chris

Content, Creative, Digital, Marketing, Mobile, Website

How To Optimize Your Thank You Pages to Increase Sales

Every page of your business website counts. Don’t waste one of the most important pages, the ‘Thank You’ page. Many businesses do this by leading buyers to a simple, near-blank page with little more than “Thank you for your order, check your email for the receipt.” If developed properly, the Thank You page can help you increase sales. It can also help gain social media followers, and build brand awareness. Wouldn’t you do anything to increase sales, so check out the Retaliate1st guide to increase sales.

5 Ways to Optimize Your Thank You Pages to Increase Sales

Link to Your Strongest Content

Adding links to blogs and articles related to their purchase is a great way to keep your customers on your site while they’re in a buying state of mind.

If your content is informative, but pulls them toward a sale, you will increase your sales just by driving “hot” traffic to these pages.
Plus, the extra views on these pages will help with Google’s rankings, so you win even if your customer doesn’t make a second purchase.

Show Off Your Testimonials

Listing your best reviews and testimonials on your thank you page helps in two ways:

It helps reassure your customer that they’ve made a safe purchase, so it decreases buyer’s remorse
It shows your customer that you’re a great company, and gets them excited to do business with you again

If you link to strong content (as in number 1) under your testimonials, you should see a spike in both page views and sales.

New Product Debut

Debut a New Product

Have something new that’s not on your site yet, or hasn’t been promoted heavily? Are you thinking of coming out with a new product or service? Show it to your customers while they’re still in a buyer’s mindset. If your product or service isn’t ready for sale, this is a great opportunity to encourage customers to sign up for a special mailing list. It’s a basic pre-sell, but it plays well on your Thank You pages because you can demonstrate value to someone who’s already convinced that you’re worthy of buying from.

Make New Friends

Thank you pages are excellent places to add members to your social media tribes. List your Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pintrest, and other social media accounts and encourage buyers to follow you. If you can give a discount or something free for following, you’ll dramatically increase engagement.

Discounts

Upselling on a thank you page is increased when you offer a “special” discount for customers. Tie it into your other products, specifically, and you’ll see an increase in sales.

October 8, 2016/by chris

Content, Digital, Marketing, Website

How To Optimize Web Forms for More Leads

Leads are the life-blood of any sales driven organization. Businesses focus on ways to create more sales opportunities and that means that leads become critical. While driving traffic is important, it is also critical to make sure there is a system in place to capture those leads as they come in. This is why Retaliate1st recommends making an effort to optimize your lead generation via perfecting your web forms. Here we list our 4 ways to optimize web forms for more leads.

4 Ways to Optimize Web Forms for More Leads

Don’t Neglect Your Headline

Almost all lead forms come with a space for a headline. Most companies waste this opportunity to gain a lead. You may be super excited about your product or service, but to the stranger who just landed on your page, you are just another business trying to get their email address. What can you do to turn stranger danger into a new business relationship?

Promise something that they want, and deliver on it. But, get to the point. Your form’s headline should promise a benefit for your visitor – an ebook, a discount, free stuff, etc. Don’t waste prime site real estate being pithy or cute. Promise something that they want, then give it to them.

Don’t Ask Too Many Questions

Or, ask the bare minimum. Studies by Marketing Experiments have shown, over and over, that the more fields you add to a lead form, the lower your opt-in rate. If you’re giving away a White Paper or Discount, then you may only need their email. First Name is usually a safe bet, too. Last Name is going to lower opt-ins a bit. Do you need their phone number? If you do, ask for it. If you’re selling a high-ticket item or service, or you set leads over the phone, then get the number. If you don’t really need it, don’t ask for it.

The Phone Number field can decrease opt-ins by more than 5%. If you do need the phone field, consider making it optional. One site doubled their opt-in rate after adding “Optional” to their phone number field. What about physical address? Again, only ask if you absolutely need it. If you are doing home improvement services or selling home-related items, address may be needed, and simply asking for it will eliminate tire-kickers.

CTAs To Close Leads

Benefit-Rich CTA

Does your call to action button display only the lowly “Submit.” If so, you’re losing leads every day. “Click Here” is simple, direct, and it works. So does adding the benefit – “Click Here for Your Free Estimate,” “Click Here to Download Your Free Book.”

Test Forms

Like any other aspect of marketing, you won’t know what works best on your web forms until you test them. A simple A/B test is a good start. Continue until you find the version that pulls the most. Remember, all these percentages add up quickly when you have thousands or tens of thousands of visitors on your site daily. A 5% dip for a phone number, 4% more for the address field, 2% for “Birthday,” can cost you hundreds of leads per month. This makes testing a must.

October 8, 2016/by chris

Do You Really Want More Clients and Customers?

3 Tips To Increase Your Email Open Rates

How To Increase Your Email Open Rates

Personalization and Targeting

The Three Reasons Your Landing Pages Don’t Convert

Why Your Landing Pages Don’t Convert

What’s the goal of your landing page?

Customer Centric Landing Pages

The 6 Best Extensions for Your Site’s SEO and Adwords

The 6 Best Extensions for Your Site’s SEO and Adwords

Further SEO Extensions

3 Steps To Designing a Landing Page That Converts

3 Steps To Designing a Landing Page That Converts

Bullet Points

How To Optimize Your Thank You Pages to Increase Sales

5 Ways to Optimize Your Thank You Pages to Increase Sales

New Product Debut

How To Optimize Web Forms for More Leads

4 Ways to Optimize Web Forms for More Leads

CTAs To Close Leads

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