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Retaining existing customers is almost always more profitable for a business than acquiring a new one. This is because the efforts and costs involved in gaining new clients is exponentially greater than retaining the existing one. Enter the need for a CRM.

If you want to retain more of your current customers, you should invest in a  Customer Relationship Management system (CRM).

A CRM system is a valuable asset for your business because it keeps control of all your customers and contacts; and is an effective way to build and maintain good business relationships with all your existing and potential customers.

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Why Invest in a CRM?

  1. A CRM helps you track your customers’ needs, questions, complaints, issues and interactions in a simple way. This helps your customer service team deal with problems (and potential cross-sales, upsells, and referrals) fast, and without complicated spreadsheets or multiple mailing lists. Responding to customer queries quickly helps your customers bond with you, which increases your customer retention rate.

2. A good CRM system will also analyze your customers’ behaviors and help the sales team to find out customers’ needs. These needs can then be converted into business leads and sales opportunities because these provide excellent data and market research. And, satisfying your customers’ wants is going to lead to in increase in referrals. Similarly, historic data of purchases can be used to predict customers’ behaviors or purchasing patterns.

3. A CRM allows you to collaborate with your team, and your customers using a single tool. The days of maintaining customer lists in notebooks, excel sheets, and word documents, then mass emailing your client list are over. You can manage and reach everyone with one tool, from one place, and any of your employees can join the effort even if they’re out of the office.

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4. Because the workflow is automated through a CRM system, it helps in reducing the operational cost, which increases your company’s profits. And, through analysis of current customer behavior data, you can make forecasts for future profitability.

5. It retains your most valuable data in one safe, secure location. You can choose which employees have access to this data. This prevents lead theft and client poaching by employees that leave your company. Simply alter the password, and their access is cut off.

bounce rate

Your business devotes a good chunk of your advertising budget to pay per click ads. You put in a ton of effort on your site’s SEO.

Don’t waste time and money by losing visitors after they hit your site. If your bounce rate is high, you could be throwing money away.

Bounce rate refers to the percentage of single visits where your potential customer leaves your webpage without navigating further. Search engines like Google calculate and report the bounce rate of your website under Audience overview tab of Google analytics section. You can check on your site’s stats there.

According to a study published by Rocketfuel, bounce rate for most of the websites ranges between 26% to 70%.

If you fall in this range, it’s time to lower your bounce rate.

What makes people leave your site quickly?

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Slow Page Loading

Google wants to give a positive experience to your visitors. A slow loading page is not a positive experience. It’s frustrating and makes users reach for the BACK button quickly.

Fixing the loading speed is a continuous journey for webmasters and SEO specialists. As your site grows, it can slow down. More content = more “loading” when someone visits your page. However, you can stay on top of this by continually working to lower page load speed as your site grows.

You can review your webpage speed through different tools like Pingdom, Google PageSpeed Insights & GTMetrix. These tools also provide insights specific to your page e.g. reducing third-party scripts, compressing the image size/quality, reducing browser caching etc.

Misleading Meta Description or Title Keywords

Always make sure that your website’s content is relevant (preferably it will match perfectly) to the title tag and meta description. If not, your customers will become frustrated and leave.

If you had a brick-and-mortar store and the sign outside said “Fresh Baked Bread,” but your customers walk in and see you selling T-shirts, they’ll bounce. Treat your meta descriptions and titles the same way you would a side-walk sign.

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A Few Bad Pages

If your site’s content, in general, has a low bounce rate, but your website is still seeing a lot of people bounce quickly, then you may have some pages which are contributing disproportionately. Check which pages aren’t pulling their weight. Either add content to them, or give them the ax.

Blank Pages

Check for any blank pages or pages with technical errors like 404 on your websites because such errors can drop your page from search engine results. You can also search for these problems from Google’s perspective by going to Crawl > Crawl Errors in Google Webmaster Tools.

Obnoxious UX and Ads

Don’t bombard your customers with Pop-ups for surveys, opt-in forms, and banner ads.

You can have an exit pop-up, and web forms in-page. But, if you are hitting your customers with “Sign Up NOW” pop-ups the second they land on the page, you can be sure that many of them are bouncing away in anger.

 

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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.

you

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.

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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.

 

How Do You Get Your Site Featured in Google’s Snippet?

Getting to the top of Google’s search pages is no longer enough to dominate your completion. While good SEO keeps your site on the first page, and well-written ads keep you atop the PPC results, there is a newcomer in the search world: Snippets

Snippets

Google wants to help searchers. It’s what launched them to become the dominant search engine that they are today. Anyone who remembers the frustrating search results on Yahoo, Lycos, or Dogpile will attest that Google simply delivers better search results.

With mobile and “question” searches rising, Google has changed the game again.

In almost any search you’re now bound to find a snippet of info, often enumerated, in a small box between the final PPC ad and the first organic listing. Below is the snippet that appears for the search “How to Get More Leads:”

Snippets Are Quick Answers

Google puts up snippets with the best info available. This allows users to get the answers they’re looking for without clicking the link. However, since the snippets tend to display only part of the info, the links inside of the snippet box tend to be clicked a lot.

  • Google can source simple, direct answers from their own knowledge base.
  • But, most business or product related queries are sourced from third party sites, i.e., your web site.

Imagine the potential traffic that would result in an SEO strategy that lands you in the top 3 of the PPC ads, with a featured snippet, and then the top organic search result.

How to Get a Featured Snippet

The problem is that getting your site featured isn’t easy. But, that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. And, with snippet results being so new, we’re not even exactly sure how Google pulls the info. Or, if they will rotate results in the future.

But, we can speculate and improve our business sites so that we have the best possible chance of being featured. At worst, you’ll improve the content of your site and make your customers very happy. An informative, easy-to-read site will almost always bring in more leads, clients, and sales.

Step 1:

  • SearchEngineLand recommends the following tactic for your first step:

Identify a common, simple question related to your market area. Provide a clear and direct answer to the question. Offer value added info beyond the direct answer. Make it easy for users (and Google) to find the information

The advice is solid. Their answer is actually the featured snippet for the search “how to get a featured snippet.”

Step 2:

  • Answer Questions

Research the most asked questions about your product, service, or industry. Create pages and blog posts that answer this question.

Be direct

– title pages and blogs with the exact question wording. Then, answer the query with as much info as needed. Use numbered lists and bullet points.

Break up info to make it both easier for your customer to absorb (or skim), and for Google to pull the best bits.

Step 3

  • Make your snippet-worthy information easy to find

This requires some basic SEO housekeeping:

  • Giving each article or blog a strong title that uses the question
  • Using the question and its variation in the content
  • Adding pictures or video, with proper tagging, as needed
  • Over deliver on info. Don’t skimp on the answer. You can provide long copy while also using bullets and numbered lists.

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.

landing-page

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

  1. 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.

  1. 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.

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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.landing page

  1. 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.

In the early stages of your business, or during the initial launch of a new product or service, you may not have an unlimited budget to promote your new venture online. But, this doesn’t mean that you have to skimp on your digital marketing efforts. You can bootstrap your digital marketing.

Even if your business is brand new, you’re probably familiar with the concept of Bootstrapping, or using cash flow and profits to fund the next phase of your business. The concept is battle-tested, and it works.

But, do the rules apply to online businesses? How can you best re-invest profits to grow your business by marketing online?

In the early stages of your business, or during the initial launch of a new product or service, you may not have an unlimited budget to promote your new venture online. But, this doesn’t mean that you have to skimp on your digital marketing efforts.

digital-marketing

Even if your business is brand new, you’re probably familiar with the concept of Bootstrapping, or using cash flow and profits to fund the next phase of your business. The concept is battle-tested, and it works.

But, do the rules apply to online businesses? How can you best re-invest profits to grow your business by marketing online?

Bootstrap your Digital Marketing

  1. Start with Social Capital

Using social media to promote your business on a budget is nothing new. In fact, it’s not even very effective when you try the totally cost-free route. If you have an amazing product or service that goes viral, great. But for most businesses, that’s not happening right away.

You start a Facebook page, an Instagram, a Pintrest account and are faced with the social media equivalent of a writer’s blank page fears: there’s no one there. You can promote to friends, like other pages, and go through the litany of low/no cost promotion options. You should do those. But, it’s going to be a long climb if you rely solely on these methods.

The good news is that Facebook ads are great for small or new businesses on a budget.

Promoting your posts and “buying” likes is amazingly cost-effective. If the thought of advertising, and losing your shirt, on Google’s pay per click program, Facebook ads are for you.

First, for a few hundred bucks, you can grow your audience to several thousand people. If you are focusing on ads rather than followers, the cost is largely the same. So, it’s possible to spend under a grand and get the word out to thousands of potential customers.

If your site, landing pages, product pages, and copywriting are on-point, you’ll generate sales and leads. Now you can use these profits to expand your ad campaigns.

Digital Marketing for Beginners

  1. Do Work In-House… for Now

You’ve decided to take to Facebook to run ads.

Facebook 2

Who’s doing your ad writing?

Who’s doing the copy for your landing pages, product pages, and website?

These should be done by copywriting professionals. Great copy equals leads and sales; poorly written ads and web pages cost you leads, sales, and losses in ad revenue.

But, early on, you may not have the budget to hire top copywriters. You may not even have the capital to hire mid-level writers.

You’ll have to either:

  • Write ads yourself – this is a free option, but comes with an enormous challenge: writing great ads is not easy.

However, writing passable ads isn’t impossible. There are dozens of books on how to write good Facebook ads. Pick one up, study it, practice writing ads (on paper), then try a few out online. Testing is the only way to know if ads work, so take mini-budgets and test two versions of the same ad. Pick the winner and run with it. Once it generates a few sales, take the profits and hire someone better than you.

digital marketing

  • Hire a copywriting intern – there are a lot of talented copywriters still learning their way, or studying marketing in college. One of the easiest ways to land big copywriting gigs is to have a killer portfolio.

Newbies need to build their work, so will be willing to work just to build it up their portfolios. Find a few good writers, have them produce ads and your web copy that generates some capital, then use the profits to hire pros. This method is great because you can continue to utilize up-and-comers to produce content while you funnel profits into getting high-end work done on your sales funnel.

For many businesses, Pay Per Click advertising is their go to tactic for paid media. Pay Per Click has been the largest spend for over 85% of online advertisers since its inception. However, with the market being saturated, it can be difficult to market your ads to maximize your clicks. The first thing any advertising team must do is to eliminate the mistakes. Here we list 3 of the biggest mistakes that PPC advertisers make:

3 Reasons Your Pay Per Click Campaigns are Tanking

  1. Your Ad Stinks

Listen, no matter how many metrics you can drown yourself in… no matter what new analytic buzzword is being written about on the digital marketing blogs… no matter what new secret trick is being spewed by the experts, one truth remains about pay per click ads:

  • They mustn’t suck

Look at your PPC ads. Are you proud of them? Would you run them in a magazine? If you were handed budget to run that on page 3 of the NY Times, would you use that ad?

Granted, print ads have a different structure, but, the content of the ad is key.

Frankly, most PPC ads are nothing more than follow-the-leader, me-too marketing pieces that are written with weak wording, and yawn-inducing calls to action.

Your headline must be strong. If it wouldn’t pull in a newspaper, sales letter, magazine, billboard, or direct mail piece, then it won’t pull on Google, either.

You can take a different approach. You can get more creative since the feedback loop is faster. But, if the headline is weak, forget about sales.

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You literally have to drag someone by the eyeballs from the white, black, and blue jungle of the SERP to your ad. To do that, you need a strong headline.

You get very limited space in the body, so make it count. If you’re giving something away for free, say it now or lose the sale. PPC ads are nothing more than headline/subhead/CTA. Don’t waste even one character of space.

  1. Your Landing Page Stinks

You wrote a great ad. Congrats.

Now, go make sure your landing page matches the content of your ad, represents the product or service that you sell, and is written with a strong headline, strong benefit-rich copy, and a benefit-rich call to action.

Where most businesses fail with their Pay Per Click Ads

Where most businesses get into trouble is trying to send 100+ keyword-driven ads to the same (or a few) landing pages. Using broad match over a litany of keywords is fine… if you can match the content to the keyword. We all use the internet in a similar way. We are multitasking, multi-windowing, and listening to Adele’s new album while shopping for running shoes. And our phones are buzzing with texts, SnapChats, and Whatsapps.

pay-per-click-2

In that chaos, you can not expect your customer to make the subtle (but really profound) leap between what they searched for, what they saw in your ad, and what they’re now reading on your page. It’s kinda close but not exactly what I’m looking for… lemme go back to Google and keep looking.

  1. Your Bids are Too Low

In the early stages, it pays to overbid. The number of clicks your ad gets plays into how much a click costs, where the ad is displayed, and the overall adrank.

Early on, it’s better to pay extra and get those clicks so you can:

  • Get a better adrank
  • Formulate data about which keywords are working, which landing pages are testing the best, and which headlines are pulling leads

After you gather this info, you can begin to scale back, underbid, then work your way up.

But, this only works if the first two rules are followed. No matter what your bid, bad ads produce no leads. Check out Retaliate1st and our PPC services to optimize your campaigns and save you time and money.

On-page SEO factors are fast becoming underrated and undervalued. But, their importance is actually increasing. If you implement these three factors on your site, you’ll leapfrog your completion. Let them deplete their budget on excessive link buying and the latest fads while you strengthen your on-site SEO and dominate them.

How Content can be the tip of your spear, with the other points being social and SEO

How Content can be the tip of your spear, with the other points being social and SEO

3 Key On-Page SEO Ranking Factors

  1. Title Tags

All of your SEO efforts are wasted if you don’t have good title tags. If you’ve outsourced the building of your site, or its digital marketing, do a quick search of your title tags to make sure they’re strong enough to grab Google’s attention.

Do your titles sound natural?

Do they describe what your service or product is about?

If you’re a local business, do they let potential customers know where you’re located?

A huge problem with small businesses is that when they farm out the building of their sites, the SEO firms either mis-title their pages, giving them generic names, or they only put effort into the site’s homepage.

off-page-seo

Every page, every article, every blog must have a strong title if you want to rise to the top of the rankings and stay there.

A good way to start is to make sure the keyword of that page is in the title.

Selling smart phone covers in San Diego? Start with:

“Smart phone covers stores in San Diego”

In general, the closer the keyword is to the beginning of your title, the more weight it will carry. But, make it sound natural.

You can build content, and great titles, many times over by repurposing

  1. Content

Better content means better rankings. And, good content meets Google’s criteria for being:

  • Uniquely valuable (pages that would be described by 80%+ of your visitors as being useful and high quality)
  • Sharable (remarkable videos, pictures, and text aid your shareability)
  • Naturally keyword optimized

Good content provides a breeding ground for your keywords and key phrases. It allows you to optimize your site without sounding unnatural, because you’re using your key phrases as a way of informing your audience.

on-page-seo

Note for pictures and video: don’t get lazy when it comes to optimizing images and video. Alt tags are extremely important for your media. Sometimes just optimizing your images can push you over the hump, and get your site on page one.

  1. Contact Info Consistency

This is a minor factor with Google, but a major one with customers.

Make sure that a potential customer could land on any page on your site and easily find your contact info. Don’t assume that just because your phone number or email is in your header, that this will be enough. Place your contact info (forms, email link, clickable phone number) throughout your content, as appropriate.

Remember that not everyone will discover your site through your home page. Many will land on deep pages. Give them a way to contact you and you’ll pull more leads. Plus, Google does reward this practice, and specifically penalizes sites that have less than optimal contact information listed.

Has your site been stuck on page 2 or 3 of Google’s search engine results pages (SERP)? Or, worse yet is it foundering in the great beyond of pages 4 through oblivion? Well that could be based on how Google is crawling your site.

Maybe you’ve managed to tweak your site and get it onto page 1, but you can never seem to nudge it into the top 5 results.

In all of these cases, a quick focus on both your on-page search engine optimization (SEO), content, and your site’s craw-ability will boost your rankings, and may even push you into the top three spots on page 1.

What is Crawling?

Crawling is a term for how search engines read a website. They send out bots that search or “crawl” through the content, internally, of every site on the web. The exact pathways are unknown, as Google never reveals all, but the basics are well established.

The good news is that many of the ways your site is crawled by Google are similar to how it’s read by your human visitors.

The bad news is that technical issues need to be turned over to a professional because they are complicated.

crawling 2

Internal Links

If you build a site that is easy for humans to read, Google will favor your website. In the early days of Google domination, a common theme was that Google liked to give a site the Grandma Test. Could the average grandmother navigate your website without becoming confused and frustrated.

This is still a good measure. And one of the ways to make your business’ site more Grandma ready is to increase interlinking.

  • Link internally on your site, from page to page
  • Make sure your home page is easy to find no matter where on the site the user is – no more than two clicks, one is preferable
  • Link to all email, phone numbers, and contact methods

Think of interlinks like tiny bridges. If your site is a huge park with lots of paths, small streams, islands of grassy land, it can become easy for someone to get lost. But, if you install enough bridges with good directions, it will be easier to find one’s way home.

The easier it is for Google Bot to crawl your site with well-placed interlinks, the higher it will rank your site. Good interlink pathways increases the number of pages the bot will crawl, increasing your Page Rank.

crawling 3

Detours Wreck Rankings

Do you hate driving through traffic then being forced into a detour without much direction for an alternate route? So does Google Bot.

Broken Links, 404 Errors (page not found) and dead-end links frustrate the bot, and your users. If you have 404’s fix them with good re-directs. Use Google Webmaster Tools to scan your site for broken links. Find them and either delete them or have them fixed with a re-direct.

Most business owners fall into one of two categories: those love and embrace social media, and those who loathe the very mention of it.

It can be confusing for the small, local business owner because the articles that spew the virtues of social media are seemingly never-ending.

The Social Media Landscape

The Social Media Landscape

The truth is, traditional Social Media (Facebook, Twitter, Google +, etc.) methods won’t generate enough leads to support your business.

But, having a presence, even a small one, on these sites is an absolute necessity.

Why?

  • It Puts a Face on Your Business – This is becoming increasingly more important both online and off. Study after study have shown that people want to do business with other people, not faceless corporations. Interacting with people on Facebook or Google + is a perfect way to make your business real and relatable. 64% of Twitter users and 51% of Facebook users are more likely to buy the products of brands they follow online. (https://www.aabacosmallbusiness.com/advisor/15-social-media-statistics-every-business-needs-know-001509118.html)
  • It Powers Up Your Home Shows – If you use home shows, trade shows, or any other large event to generate leads, there is no better place to promote them, and link your company to the big shows, than on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.
  • It Makes You Likable – Getting “Likes,” comments, or shares is now being used as a signal of credibility by Google in their search results. It’s not a huge impact, but it’s an increasingly important part of the puzzle. Interaction with your customers makes you more trustworthy to Google, and helps your site move up in the rankings.
  • It Adds Credibility with Your Customers – We all want to be with the in-crowd. More likes, shares, and “friends,” leads to more trust. If most of your competitors have 200-followers on Facebook, and you have 5,000, potential clients pick up on this. It’s subtle, but it has a huge impact on making you appear trustworthy because there’s strength in numbers. Studies show that over 50% of consumers have based their decision to buy on a recommendation from their social network.

If in doubt on what social media channels to use, you can always refer to the Ogilvy Guide on how to use social media:

Ogilvy's Guide To Social Media

Ogilvy’s Guide To Social Media

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