Starting an eCommerce store requires effort, and it is pertinent to start off this eCommerce venture by chalking out a systematic business plan, and then moving forth in a step-by-step fashion. A holistic and practical business plan should encompass necessary facets, such as a good team that one can easily work along with, a time frame required for the start-up venture to flourish, the investment needed etc. Moreover, it is extremely important to jot down the various risk factors involved when starting up an online store, and different solutions to counter these factors.
5 Tips for Creating the Best About Us Page
In today’s multi-device, micro-content frenzy, there aren’t many opportunities for your audience to become thoroughly acquainted with your brand; an opportunity to really explain where you came from, and what you’re about, so when one comes along you take it with both hands.
Your About Us page is this opportunity. Maybe it’s a personal habit but whenever I come across a new website, a new potential provider for whichever service or product I’m after, I gravitate towards the About Us page. Nothing irritates me more than a site without one. It’s like finally securing a meeting with a potential client but failing to introduce yourself upon their arrival. Not only does it clarify precisely what your business offers, but for many visitors their first impression of your brand will be formed upon reading this page. Make yours count following these five points.
5 Quick Tips to Turn Up Your ROI at B2B Events
According to the Content Marketing Institute’s benchmark report “B2B Content Marketing 2014,” for the fourth year in a row B2B content marketers rate in-person events as the most effective tactic that they use.
3 Ways Companies Sabotage Event Success
Even though in-person events are considered the strongest tactic, many B2B marketers fail to maximize their success. If you’ve planned and orchestrated an event, you’ve probably confronted the following issues yourself.
Building Bridges: Why Cross-Platform Optimization is Essential for Brand Success
Understanding how consumers interact with their chosen brands across the many platforms available to them today is fundamental to effective marketing and customer service. Cross-platform optimization essentially refers to harnessing this behavioural information to provide a unified brand experience over all digital channels, whether that’s web, mobile or social media.
In recent years, consumer technology has undergone some drastic advances. Whilst an initial technical revolution took place around the emergence of the internet itself, a second has been triggered by the recent progression in mobile technology. Christopher North, managing director of Amazon UK, commented, “I have never seen anything happen as fast as mobile.”
And as the devices we use change all the time to become more varied and sophisticated, so too does the way that we choose to interact with them.
7 Tips for Producing Highly Effective Corporate Videos
Corporate videos can be turned into productive marketing tools. The task at hand is by no means an easy one. You will have to consider several factors before you can turn your video into an aggressive marketing campaign. Therefore, the following tips will come in handy if you are vying for something impressive and result-oriented.
5 New Things That Should Be On Your Business Cards
So what can you include on your business cards to draw customers in, lend credibility to your name, and foster long-term customer loyalty? Here are five new things that should be on your business cards.
Feedback Frenzy: How to Get and Use Customer Reviews to Improve Your Business’ Online Presence
Customer reviews can be incredibly useful for your business. Not only do they make your business come across as trustworthy and open, but they can also provide a number of SEO benefits to increase your visibility and boost conversions. The problem for many businesses is how to get more reviews. Here is a quick guide to some useful techniques.
Customer-Centric Sales: What Modern Retail Success is All About
Cloud computing isn’t just for the 2000s anymore. The dot-coms of the 1990s paved the way for a new business model, even if it was a bit sloppy. Rudimentary cloud-based computing promised software in the cloud and provided simple word processors and video players. While that might be fine for the retail market, businesses’ main concern is sales and consumer-grade products just don’t cut it as “innovation.”
How to Use Marketing Automation as a Powerful Sales Tool
Marketing Automation solutions are commonly seen as tools specifically designed to help marketing teams reduce operational inefficiencies and cost. But in reality, the biggest value of marketing automation is that they’re a fantastic tool to improve both the quality and the quantity of leads for the sales team.
Let’s explore some of the ways that marketing automation systems provide tangible benefits to sales organizations, and how they can have a direct and significant impact on driving revenue.
5 Easy Ways To Improve Customer Experience
When you provide a great product at a fair price, it can be difficult to think of ways to make your business better for your customers. In order for you improve customer experience, you have to think in terms apart from product and pricing; rather, you have to consider how you can make buying from you fun and enjoyable for customers. At the same time, of course, you want to ensure you’re not going to lose revenue by making customers happier. The following lists five easy ways to improve customer experience.
5 Painless Ways to Repair Your Product Marketing Plan
Nothing can be more intimidating than having a failing product marketing plan. Business owners struggle with this on a regular basis, yet feel like spending more money on a failing plan will somehow make everything better. It’s clear that there needs to be a different approach if you are struggling with a market plan. Don’t spend another penny before trying something new.
6 Tips for More Effective Online Store Management
If you are running an online store, then you surely know that various management tasks usually take pretty much time, so that there is hardly any time left for web store improvements and enhancements contributing to further online business growth. Below, I’m going to share some effective ideas on how to improve online store management and streamline various related processes.
5 Awesome Tools for Boosting Response Rates
The following five cool marketing tools promise to help boost response rates. Which are you most interested in trying?
How To: Reward Your Customers
Rewarding customers is critical in business because it makes the buying experience more personal.
5 Ways to Slash your Ecommerce Website Load Time
The speed at which your site loads plays a significant role in converting visitors into customers: if the site takes a bit too long, people will leave without even seeing it.
3 Reasons Self-Hosted Video Is Better Than YouTube
Self-hosting your videos rather than using a third party (YouTube, Vimeo, Dailymotion) brings many benefits that can help any small business, SME, blog or e-commerce website make a return from their investment in video. Here we have listed the main three reasons businesses and blogs are turning to self hosted video….
10 Print Marketing Statistics You Should Know
Guest Post: 6 Ways to Improve Your Customer Service and Increase Sales
Improve your customer service, experience sales and increased referrals by incorporating these six simple strategies into your customer service experience.
Guest Post: 5 Ways to Increase Demand For Your Company
Companies and brands that are in high demand enjoy severe customer loyalty and a proliferation of new customers every day. If you want to enjoy the same level of success, consider the following five ways to increase demand for your company.
Guest Post: 5 Direct Mail Marketing Cheat Sheets
To help spark inspiration, better understand how you can leverage direct mail marketing to grow your business, and deploy your direct-mail marketing campaigns more efficiently, check out the following five direct mail marketing cheat sheets.
What to Look for in Selecting a Digital Agency
Since everyone and their brother calls themselves digital, it is important that you do your homework when evaluating marketing agencies. Here are a few simple suggestions I have that may help you separate the true digital agencies from the impostors…
Breast Cancer by the Numbers (Infographic)
Here is a quick infographic from PinkInitiative, a breast cancer awareness non-profit, that gives us some sobering stats about the disease.
What is Labor Day? (Infographic)
This infographic tells us a bit about what Labor Day means to some people.
An Infographic About Infographics
Here is a useful infographic for all you digital marketers that want to learn how to create awesomely sharable visual content. Thought I’d pass it on….
The 21st Century Dad [INFOGRAPHIC]
As we all honor the dads in our lives today and celebrate with cookouts and hardware store gift cards, I thought it would be good to share this little graphic depicting the modern-day father.
LEGO Crowdsources Back to the Future Design
The “Back to the Future” set design is now in development and will be released in mid-2013.
Major Brands Embracing Augmented Reality in a Big Way
Over the past few months, augmented reality has penetrated the mainstream marketing world- and in a big way. From event marketing to product packaging, augmented reality is being used to give the consumer a very unique and personal experience.
Black Friday Digital Roundup- the Apps, the Deals, the Fun
I have been sifting through the thousands of recent articles on Black Friday digital tools to bring you the most useful ones in your quest for that perfect gift….
Creating a Public Commenting Policy for a Facebook Brand Page
I just read an article on ReadWriteWeb about the grocery chain, Publix’ rapid accumulation of Facebook likes for their recently launched page.
What I found most interesting was the great ‘House Rules’ app that they include on their page which lays out the ground rules. All brands need to seriously consider doing something like this.
Facebook Tip: Now You Can Tag Pages in Photos
Imagine you just bought a new Jeep Wrangler and took your three best friends out for an inaugural spin in the new wheels. You stop and snap a picture of your three amigos in the Jeep. You then decide you want to show the world your new vehicle and post it to Facebook.
Naturally, you would tag your friends in the photo when you upload it, but now you can tag more.
TV Show Offers Facebook Fan-Only Full Episode
TruTV’s ‘Operation Repo’ is celebrating 500,000 like on their Facebook Page by giving back- they are posting an episode of the TV show exclusively for their Facebook fans.
Thank You Easter Bunny!
It has been said that if a commercial stays with you for a period of time, it is effective.
Well, here is one from about 25 years ago that I still think of every Easter. Whoever came up with this one is pretty genius.
How Important is SEO for Corporate Social Media Pages?
AllFacebook has some interesting stats on the ranking of corporate social media pages in Google searches.
It is amazing to me that, as digital marketing has been around for some time now, more brands haven’t focused on Search Engine Optimizing their social media pages yet.
Screw Conventional Wisdom…Digital Marketing on Weekends Works!
My past life was in PR. In my world, the conventional wisdom was always that all bad news should be released at 4pm on a Friday afternoon. You do this to ensure it appears in the Saturday news when no one is paying attention. You never sent anything of value out over the weekend with […]
How You Can Raise Autism Awareness On (and Off) line
Autism Speaks is working on a campaign to promote autism awareness that integrates digital and traditional marketing pretty well.
The Light it up Blue campaign encourages people to show their blue on April 1st and 2nd. Their microsite gives all the details about what you can do to help offline (wear blue, host an event, change you lightbulbs to blue, etc) and online (place a banner on your site, blog/tweet about autism, change your Facebook avatar and/or status to reflect the effort, etc).
Facebook Tip: How to Tag Something in a Comment
Now Facebook is taking tagging one step further. They are now allowing users to tag people, groups or pages in comments.
Twitter Tip: Find Your Tweet Equation
To be a true Social Media Influencer, you need to be engaging while offering something of perceived value to your followers. Twitter is the best example of how you need to balance sharing and responding to build a loyal following. To do this, you need to calculate your Tweet Equation. Your Tweet Equation is the […]
Smart SEO Requires Realistic Keyword Expectations
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is critical to any successful digital marketing plan these days. The most important factor for SEO success is to keep realistic expectations of what keywords your site should be found with. Doing so will help make your SEO plan successful and keep you on speaking terms with your SEO consultant after […]
Facebook Tip – Stop Tagging Me Bro!
Note: This is the first in a series of quick Facebook tips for brands that will be posted periodically. Facebook tagging is a great way to expand your network. You can tag friends and other pages in your status updates, pictures, notes, videos, etc. I highly recommend a healthy amount of tagging because your post […]
Don’t just Tweet….Listen!
A quick tip for brands that are starting to navigate the Twitter waters….listen as much as you tweet. It is important to get your word out, but it is equally as important to listen to what your customers are saying. I won’t lie, listening and responding properly to tweets is a lot of work and […]
Responding to Negativity – Think Before You Tweet!
With the recent Pricechopper Twitter backlash incident, I figured it would be a good time to go over an important rule for responding to a negative Tweet about your company or product – think before you tweet! The last thing you want to do is escalate a bad customer experience by reacting negatively to a […]
SEO is for more than websites: Optimize Everything!
Now, with Google’s almost daily product expansion, the emergence of digital PR and a number of new deals between the various search engines and social media platforms, optimizing everything that you create digitally has become a critical step in getting your message out and your voice heard.