Growth Marketing Archives

3 Ways to Convert New Leads Online

Google and Facebook pay per click have offered small businesses a method for competing with much larger competitors by allowing for sane advertising budgets with ads that are immediately trackable.

You can figure out your ROI from PPC ads pretty easily.

But, sometimes those figures can be depressing.

If your website or landing pages are not converting for you, stop wasting time trying to perfect your ads (you’re already getting traffic). Instead, use these three tricks to convert more of your visitors into leads:

Hail Mary Lead Generation

If you’re paying for traffic, you want to convert as many customers as possible. You can help your efforts by putting in some last-ditch, about-to-bounce-away lead conversion tactics.

Do this by:

Offering a Benefit-filled Exit Pop Up – these are annoying, but you can set them to only display one time to no annoy repeat visitors. And, if someone clicked an ad to find you and they’re about to bounce away from your site, you don’t have much to lose. Some companies convert as much as 23% more traffic by using exit pop ups.

Use a P.S. in any web or off-line marketing materials. Some people skip right to the P.S., so make it count. This goes for email and social media marketing as well.

When writing a P.S., or using an exit pop up, lead with benefits and let the customer know why they’ll be losing something if they don’t buy or submit their info.

Back up their fear of loss by giving them something to gain

Utilize Online Chat – These can be effective if you are selling a product or service that will undoubtedly lead to more questions than you can anticipate or answer in your FAQ. Use live agents because customers are frustrated by dealing with computer-based chat “agents.”

Encourage Your Potential Customer to Take a Very Low-Risk

This is key if you’re selling personal services, high-end products, or anything that costs more than a few dollars. Let your customer get something for free (eBook, white paper, tip sheet, samples) in exchange for something low-risk (their first name and email address).

Further Lessen Their Risks by Being Honest

You love your product. You could talk about it all day. You have no idea why everyone in the world wouldn’t want one!

But, let’s be honest, we’re all customers. We know when we’re on fire for a product vs when we’re on the fence, or still in the research phase.

If you’re still in the info-gathering stages, what’s the last thing you want after you’ve put your info into a website’s contact form?

Pushy, shark-type sales people calling your house
Getting spammed with multiple emails

Overcome this fear by being honest in the P.S., or under your call-to-action:

We promise no salesmen will call your house
We respect your confidentiality and never sell your information
You will receive only one email with the information you asked for

March 8, 2017/by chris

Culture, Digital, Marketing

Insurance Policies for Independent Contractors

First of all, getting sick, hurt, or being sued is something that no one wants to happen. However, in business and life, this stuff does happen. That’s why insurance is a necessity.

Paying your medical bills out of pocket is always a painful job. For employees, this is almost always solved by using company insurance. As an independent contractor, you are the company. This is where finding a solid policy comes into the picture. A good policy can save your business and your health.

There are three policies for the self-employed and independent contractors that are cost-effective and budget friendly:

1. Health Insurance Exchange Plans: This plan was designed to meet with the requirements of the Affordable Care Act. Under this act, individuals, families, small business owners and freelancers can purchase a customized and affordable health package.

The most important part of this plan is the provision of subsidy in cases where the independent contractors’ total taxable income is between 122% to 400% of the federal poverty level. This subsidy will reduce your premium amount up to 10% of your gross income.

And, you are free to cancel or amend this plan at any time without any additional costs or penalty.

2. National Association of Health Underwriters (NAHU): This association employs more than 100,000 agents in the USA. These agents guide you to select the best plan according to your needs and budget. NAHU provides services to everyone from Fortune-500 companies to small business owners and the self-employed. With NAHU, you can enjoy different benefits and savings, personal development & training, user-friendly apps and even wellness programs.

3. eHealth Insurance: eHealth insurance is one of the best health insurance solutions available for independent contractors. On the eHealth Insurance web portal, you can compare prices and benefits of the many different health plans available. There are more than 13,000 health insurance plans available on the site. In addition, more than 200 licensed registered agents are also available. Most noteworthy, this is helpful because researching thousands of plans, all with their details, can be time consuming.

Furthermore, health insurance plans do not cover diseases like cancer, diabetes and in addition, heart attacks. This makes eHealth Insurance a viable option mostly for routine medical checkups.

March 8, 2017/by chris

Creative, Digital, Marketing, SEO, Social Media

How to Bootstrap Your Digital Marketing

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.

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

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

Do Work In-House… for Now

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

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.

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.

September 24, 2016/by chris

Content, Marketing, SEM, SEO

The Pitfalls of SEO

Getting to the top of the Google rankings can be extremely difficult, especially in a competitive market. But, it is possible if you optimize your website in the right way. SEO or Search Engine Optimization is so ubiquitous at this point that it’s very meaning has become lost in the shuffle. This leads to much confusion about how a business should optimize its website.

This causes two problems for business owners:

You either have to hire an SEO firm. Finding a good one can take a lot of expensive trial and error.
You need to learn how to do SEO by yourself. This can take years, and the rules of the game constantly change. If you’re not a marketer or computer genius, mastering it alone is near impossible.

You can make your digital marketing life much easier by knowing what to look for when hiring an SEO firm. If you’ve handed your site over to a pro, but aren’t getting results, see if they’re making any of these mistakes:

5 Common SEO Mistakes for Business Websites

Entering duplicate material on your site’s pages or blogs – identifying duplicate content is essential because most of the search engines do not accept duplicate material. This will crush your ranking. There are tons of solid tools and software available to check for duplicate content.
Using bad backlinks – links to unrelated pages or directories; or to spam websites- spam links coming into your site is a sure-fire way to kill your rankings.
Over-Optimization of required keywords – Although putting your target keywords as much as possible can be a good idea, blatantly over-optimizing will hurt your SEO strategy. Make sure your text sounds natural, and you aren’t stuffing in keywords to please Google. If a human would have trouble reading your text, Google will penalize you
Bad Page Titles – When someone searches for the target keywords, the search engine displays the title page in search results. Try to make your title page with limited characters, while hitting relevant key phrases (again, naturally)
Image Optimization and Poor Meta Description – A search engine can recognize images in text form only, so it’s best to optimize your image with target keywords or phrases. Imagine describing the image to a non-sighted person. Meta data may not directly help with rankings, but Google does display it on the results page, so it is useful for drawing in visitors and helping you stand out in the crowd of results.

September 17, 2016/by chris

Content, Digital, Marketing, Website

5 Best Ways to Promote Your New Business Online

Starting a new business? You already know that a website is essential, but how else can you promote your new business online?

The reality is, if you don’t have a huge budget for pay-per-click ads in the beginning, you’re going to need to rely on organic marketing methods. These can take time. If you work them to their full potential, you’ll gain traction and the web traffic will start to trickle in. At that point, you can use some of your profits to invest in pay-per-click advertising.

Until then, utilize these 5 proven ways to get your new business noticed online:

Make a Stand-Out Website

Just about every business has a website today. But, most of them are terrible. If you want to dominate your competitors, make sure that you build a website that helps you stand out from the crowd.

Do your market research. A site aimed a tweeners buying Bluetooth earbuds should look and function differently than one aimed at seniors looking to re-finish their bathrooms.

But, no matter who your audience is, make sure your site is clean, packed with good content, and is easy to navigate. No matter how web-savvy the user, if they can’t find your product page, you aren’t going to sell anything.

Establish Your Social Media Pages

While Twitter, Instagram, Pintrest and slew of other social media sites grow in reach, Facebook is still the king of social media marketing.

Their “boosted” post feature angered a lot of small business owners who went from reaching hundreds or thousands of customers with each post, to needing to pay between $5 and $1000 per post to be seen.

But, as the program has aged, many businesses have utilized the power of boosted posts to reach deep, defined, niche audiences.

Combined with its pay per click platform, Facebook should be our go-to early on.

Integrate Facebook with the other social media sites that fit yoru business. Early on, you’ll have very few followers. But, stay consistent, use your budget wisely, continue to crank out quality content, and soon you’ll have a solid base of followers to market to.

New Business Targeting and Content

Use Local Listings

Local listing makes the search easier for your business to be found locally. Make sure you are registered with Google MyBusiness (Google Local). Then, use the same address and phone number for all local listing sites. Google likes uniformity in their local results.

Generate Content

Blogging, with no followers, may seem pointless. But, learn to create, or hire quality content creators, so that your site becomes loaded with search engine optimized quality content such as articles, blogs, videos, picture, and infographics. Google loves information like this, and gives it preferential treatment in the search engine rankings.

Write content for bigger websites. Everyone needs content. Creating great articles for bigger websites will generate links back to your site. This can help drive traffic to your site.

Don’t neglect writing for your local newspapers. Certain demographics (baby boomers, especially) still read the local paper for info. PR pieces are good, but human interest articles related to your product or service can lead to a solid flow of leads and sales because it not only exposes your business to a large pool of customers, being in the paper also lends your business a great deal of credibility.

September 17, 2016/by chris

Digital, Marketing, Social Media, Website

4 Ways Make Social Media Marketing Less Overwhelming

For a small or medium business, using social media marketing can become overwhelming and frustrating. There are multiple platforms to choose from and some are clearly not right for your business. Figuring out return on investment can be tough, since most social media marketing doesn’t operate on a dollars-in v. dollars-out model. Converting likes into sales can be a multi-step process, and is best viewed in the long term.

If you are unsure of how to get your social media marketing on track, check out these 4 tips. They’ll help you get started, or if you’re already going but find your efforts going in circle, these can help right the ship.

4 Ways Make Social Media Marketing

Editorial schedule

If you are using typical social media marketing and networking sites like Facebook, Pinterest or twitter, you need to plan, carefully, what type of content you are posting. Keeping a simple schedule of what was posted, where & when & what type of content, is key. If you have a social media team, have them keep track of this – anything from spreadsheets to old-fashioned notebooks are fine for tracking content flow on social media.

Scheduling not only helps you keep track of potential ROI, but it will help you re-purpose content, using it multiple times on multiple sites (even changed slightly), which breathes new life into your content marketing and ensures that all content is exposed to the maximum audience.

Simplify

If you are overwhelmed, it is a sign that too much is going on. It is important to simplify. When in doubt, back off, check your content schedule and start again.

Stats

What is measurable can be improved and measuring metrics on social media can be tricky. Luckily Facebook offers excellent info in their “insights” section and it helps you track likes, reach, click-through rate, engagement, etc. If you are running ads on social media then these stats can help you measure real ROI.

Free Help

Social media marketing is still fairly new and the game changes quickly. This is exciting for young marketers and finding interns to help with your social media campaigns is not difficult. Still-in-college marketers are hungry for experience and social media is time consuming. Bringing an intern or two on board can help you ramp up your production without costing a ton of money.

September 17, 2016/by chris

Posts

3 Ways to Convert New Leads Online

Insurance Policies for Independent Contractors

The Pitfalls of SEO

5 Common SEO Mistakes for Business Websites

5 Best Ways to Promote Your New Business Online

Until then, utilize these 5 proven ways to get your new business noticed online:

New Business Targeting and Content

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