Top working 8 business growth hacking strategies
Small businesses are a huge part of the economy in the United States. According to the Small Business Association, there are 28 million small businesses in America alone. These businesses represent 99.7% of all employer firms and 67% of net new job creation in the U.S. This is why it's so important that small business owners continue to look for ways they can grow their companies while staying on budget and minimizing expenditures.
In this guide, we'll share eight proven small business growth hack strategies to try in 2022. You can use these tactics to improve your business and expand its reach so you'll be able to take on more clients or customers than ever before.
- Optimize Your Website for Conversions
- Get Help from an Agency
- Leverage Social Media Marketing
- Partner with Other Businesses
- Use Influencer Marketing
- Focus on SEO
- Focus on Paid Advertising
- Try Content Marketing
Optimize Your Website for Conversions
Conversion optimization is a systematic approach to improving your website's performance, which can help you boost revenue and grow your business. Even if you are a small start-up or an established MSP services business you can take help of these steps -
Here are the steps involved in conversion optimization:
* Identify a specific goal
* Research to find out what needs to be improved on your site
* Create tests and hypotheses based on this research
* Implement changes (or A/B tests) that are based on your hypothesis
Seek assistance from a company.
Don't try your hand at marketing because it's a challenging job right now. Various vocations pay between 60 and 100 thousand dollars per year. It's too difficult to play this right now for digital marketers - seasoned pros like Formula 1 drivers - and you don't want to be in the back seat and grab the wheel when we hit 200 mph or the next thing you know, there'll be a big burning disaster. Some micromanagers can't stop themselves from taking the wheel of a seasoned driver... and the car never shifts out of first gear. However, if you delegate the task to the correct rider, you stand a strong chance of winning every race. Training is an investment made by the most effective firms and managers.
Take advantage of social media marketing.
Small businesses can benefit from social media marketing. Small businesses can use social media platforms to connect with customers and build brand awareness.
For example, a restaurant could post pictures of their food on Instagram or Facebook and grow their business by attracting hungry diners.
You can also create targeted ads on social media platforms like Facebook to reach your target audience.
Partner with Other Businesses
In cross-promotion, you collaborate with other companies with whom you do not compete directly, but which target a similar clientele, and then actively promote one another to that audience.
You can work with local hotels if you have a car rental business. Visitors from outside the city and tourists are not in competition with each other.
You become the automatic recommendation whenever the hotel has a visitor who wants to rent a car. And you reply by recommending them whenever they are seeking a place to stay.
You can also promote each other on social media, in blog posts, in newsletters, and through any other marketing platforms you already use. It's a win-win situation for everyone involved, and it's nearly free.
Use Influencer Marketing
The simple truth is that influencer marketing works. But it’s not just the big-shot influencers who deliver results, even micro-influencers can help you achieve your business goals.
Micro-influencers are social media users who have around 10,000 followers or fewer. As a result, they can be more affordable and easier to work with because they don’t have all the trappings that come with being a celebrity.
Further, micro-influencers do not lead unique lives, so your audience may relate to them better than mega-influencers or celebrities. By itself, this is a major advantage of partnering with local influencers. How so? Because people consider them to be regular people like themselves, their recommendations are more credible. Their importance increases when they are inspecting a product or service personally.
Focus on SEO marketing
SEO can do wonders for a small business. Not only does it help your business gain visibility in search engines, but it also helps you build brand awareness and trust. And if your website is easy to navigate, offers a great user experience, and has the information users want, they’re more likely to convert into customers.
Another growth hack that small business owners can try is to create a blog for their business. A blog will help you build credibility in your industry and present yourself as an expert, which will encourage people to buy from you over competitors.
When it comes to marketing strategies for small businesses, one of the most important ones is email marketing. Not only does email marketing help you reach potential customers at minimal cost, but it also allows you to keep in touch with existing customers, which will help you increase your sales over time.
Paid advertising is a profitable investment
Compared to organic growth efforts, paid advertising might not even seem worth it at first glance. It proved to be necessary, however, since social media and their algorithms are constantly changing.
Paid advertising opportunities on platforms like Instagram allow you to reach demographic groups that may not be familiar with your brand from the start. The format options include standard photos/videos, carousel posts, and story ads. It is projected that Instagram ad revenue will reach $12.32 million this year, which shows a platform is a valuable tool for businesses.
Choosing to invest in paid advertising may help accomplish specific marketing goals such as building brand awareness and ultimately, converting to sales.
Try Content Marketing
Content marketing is a proven small business growth hack.
It’s the practice of creating helpful and relevant content that solves common problems your target market faces. Your product or service will not be explicitly marketed in this type of content.
Your goal is to establish yourself as an authority in your field.
As long as your content solves their problems, customers will keep coming back for more, and you will be engaged. Involvement leads to a closer relationship with customers.
A key growth hacking tip is content marketing, which has become an increasingly important part of small business development.
Conclusion
The takeaway here is to be aggressive and do the work that needs to be done, even if it's not the most comfortable thing in the world. As the saying goes, failing to prepare is preparing to fail. You can take a proactive approach and set yourself up for actual success by picking one or two of these growth hacks and implementing them in your business right now, rather than sitting on your hands and wondering what could have been. Check out for more tips for preparing your business for SDN network transitions.
Reasons Why You Need Growth Hackers
Given the technological advances happening around the world today, many new e-commerce marketing tactics are coming aboard to make businesses more feasible. Growth hacking is one such technique that has gotten popular with time. It may seem complex, but growth hacking carries the same fundamentals of traditional marketing. It is an online alternative to concepts of guerrilla marketing. If you hack a unique way to garner your audience’s attention, then you are exercising growth hacking.
What is a growth hacker?
According to Andrew Chan in his article titled Growth Hacker is the new VP Marketing, “growth hackers are a hybrid of marketer and coder, one who looks at the traditional question of ‘how do I get customers for my product?’ and answers with A/B tests, landing pages, viral factor, email deliverability, and open graph.”
Why do we need a growth hacker?
As per the latest internet advertising report from the Interactive Advertising Bureau, digital ad spending in the US exceeded $100 billion for the first time in 2018. It accounts for a whopping total domestic expenditure of $107.5 billion that marked a 22% increase from 2017.
This goes on to prove that tech-savvy organizations have started to walk hand in hand with today’s generation and are willing to spend billions on marketing their channels and have a full-blown digital transformation if it comes down to it.
So let’s find out why entrepreneurs need growth hackers or growth managers for business.
Why Entrepreneurs Opt for Growth Hackers
Going for a growth manager instead of a digital marketer is best suited to entrepreneurs in the early stages of their businesses when they need higher growth in less amount of time, in a limited budget.
Find the right market for your product
A growth hacker helps first and foremost in hacking its way through to find the precise target market your product is being offered for. The product placement is then designed for the vital audience who are willing to pay for the commodity sold. It is not about just putting the product out there but using the correct tools, iterations, and revisions to come up with a product that, when given to the market, is received as a ‘must-have.’
The commodity should be something that, if people don’t buy, would feel the need to buy it and justify their need by actually becoming a customer. Such a technique can be tricky to master, especially when challenged with budget limitations. But then that is the need for a growth hacker, fulfilled.
Perform rapid testing of campaigns and viral strategies
A growth hacker has been given the name because they are actually expected to hack their way with experimentation, instead of carrying on with a pre-planned formula-based approach. Being a growth hacker, you are supposed to have mastered the art of persuasion, running multiple text ads, to conclude all to one profitable campaign for the product and business.
You have been recruited to perform with an under-budget startup. You won’t be offered a lavish amount to undertake all excelled advertising and fresh marketing techniques. Instead, you would be expected to perform best to your creativity and justify spending the amount assigned successfully. Growth hackers do not act on impulse or spontaneously start churning out ideas. They abide by the limitations put on them and come out successfully.
Optimize landing pages
A landing page is a vital part of an internal marketing strategy. A growth hacker carries tips and tricks up their sleeve, to use whenever needed. From designing highly engaging landing pages to establish multi-variation A/B testing, growth hackers can optimize any webpage to the best converting landing pages for the product in the budget provided. The trick here is to get it right as soon as possible because optimizing landing pages for conversion only happens successfully after launching, testing, and learning.
Going through each step of the way requires expertise that, in turn, requires money, something the startup has a limited amount of. Therefore, it is crucial to get a well-trained growth hacker on board, ready to take on the challenge of working under challenging conditions.
Qualify lead generation
When starting out, it should not be all about generating traffic to your webpage. It should be more about creating healthy traffic that generates quality leads. Just the hits don’t take your business forward, but the clients that engage with you through business transactions.
Therefore, a growth hacker uses market funnelling techniques to design lead magnet that converts. They create a multi-channel strategy to generate qualified leads by integrating earned, owned, paid and shared media.
A growth hacker understands the media language like its own. They follow the trends according to how they are presented on each platform. For example, one such pattern can be the hiring of writing services to buy dissertation online. The growth hacker would create such a package that suffices the students’ needs.
Increase conversion
Increased traffic and generating leads become a measurement of validation for companies, but to be profitable, they need to convert into sales. It is where a growth hacker steps in to use successful applications of ideas like email and social media marketing.
A growth hacker works to provide consistent value through webinars, case studies ad consultations to help in the growth of leads and traffic into actual sales. A growth hacker is actually a pro at conversion than regular marketers because hacking your way through unconventional ideas is a challenging task.
One can never be sure of how fast a trend would climb to keep the applied technique profitable. It is why growth hacking consultation has become a thing. Recently, marketers have started to believe that instead of wasting time and money on testing out tactics gradually, it is more efficient to take expert advice to work your way through faster and affordable means.
Automate marketing
With so many competitors right at each other’s game with newer techniques and technology ever-expanding, it is even harder to retain customers. Market funnelling is not easy. Even though technology has aided immensely in leading conversions to actual sales, as customers gain awareness online nowadays. But a growth hacker takes a step by step approach to automate marketing by:
- Designing and implementing a looping system to acquire leads
- It works like a lead magnet to lure the customers in
- Then the customer is taken through an automated conversational pattern for successful growth
- The end goal is not just to make a profitable conversion for the current period but to retain the customer for a long time.
Integrate product-design marketing
Product design teams have their own set of goals to accomplish. They strive to understand that the decision they make is valuable enough to either add or remove a feature from the product that might make a difference in the overall product design and its market integration.
For example, marketing a particular movie jacket with the movie’s launch is a step that holds significance for the overall product. It is where a growth hacker should be made part of the product design team to make every such decision add value to the product and not take away from it.
Bottom Line
In conclusion, growth hacking can be used as a cost-efficient tool that generates quick results aligned with organizational goals. It is one technique you can turn away from if it does not deem successful results and start over again without any long term waste to recover from.
Author Bio:
Amanda Jerelyn is currently working as a Digital Marketing Manager at Crowd Writer, one of the best essay writing service provider. She is a tech-enthusiast and often shares her interests through blogging at Australian Master. She aims through her writing to make people aware of new technological advancements and their advantages.
Featured image source: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/580ce28729687f5fbc52b1cc
Why you should automate Social Media
If you’re a business owner or entrepreneur, when you’re first starting out, you likely don’t have extensive resources to invest in outreach campaigns. And even if you did, the truth is that it simply wouldn’t make sense to pour huge amounts of time and money into growing your audience. You have a million things to worry about: budgeting, campaign strategy, product development, customer service... the list goes on. And in your early days, there’s simply no guarantee that you’ll get a high ROI when you try to increase audience engagement.
This is not the message you typically see, though.
Everywhere you look, articles are urging you to pour funds into audience-building right from the beginning, set up a marketing team, and drop a few grand on social media marketing campaigns.
This is why it can be hugely beneficial to hit the ground running with plenty of automation. There are two big payoffs in concentrating on automation.
It allows you to have a consistent presence.
Imagine seeing campaigns from two new businesses which interest you. You investigate their web presences, popping over to their social media feeds to see what the latest news is on Twitter and Instagram.
One business has put up a post every few days. The posts are enthusiastic but irregular. Some of them seem to be done in different styles. There’s one short video. You have to dig back a couple of weeks to find out information about their newest product.
The other business has multiple posts for every day. They have a consistent style, with simple, aesthetically-pleasing images attached to each post. Some of the posts are repeats, but within the most recent ones you can easily find information about their most recent product release, a press statement about the product, and a link for where to buy it.
Which company do you trust to be more professional? Which one are you more likely to make a purchase from?
It allows you to invest your resources efficiently.
Not just your finances, but, most of all, your time. You can spend an enormous amount of time scrambling back and forth, trying to log in and out of your business’ various social media accounts each day, taking photos and editing them and trying to think of appropriate content to write. But it’s a much smarter use of your time to simply set up your content for the entire week. Social media management tools are a great option for this goal. Choose the most appropriate for you and give it a try. You’ll see the difference at once.
You’re also going to be able to plan more effectively if you take a few hours once per week to set out your content calendar because you’ll be able to get an overview of the type of content you’re posting and ensure balance and variety. You can be sure that some of your posts are useful information for your target audience; some are updates about developments in your business; some are about your latest product launch; some are pictures or video of customers using the product. You can also have better control over when you repost material (which you should absolutely be doing!). It’s good to re-post content on Twitter two or three times to ensure it gets seen in a rapidly-scrolling world.
One more tip for expanding your outreach potential using these tools, with no investment: set up a group promotion. Reach out to creators who are promoting similar products and promote them together, whether that is by building a newsletter or mailing list together or selling your products together as a bundle. This may seem counter-intuitive, but when you’re just starting out, it works. You get the benefit of different audiences building on one another, essentially pooling your customer base. Additionally, customers will appreciate it if you introduce them to new, useful products. This will even increase their feelings of trust, because now you’re catering to their interests, trying to help them to find better resources, not simply promoting your own products endlessly.
In short, using tools will allow you to streamline the work that goes into maintaining an online presence so that you don’t have to invest nearly as much time. And many of these tools have free versions or at least free trials. Do your own research to determine which tools are right for you-- some have versions that cater to specific fields - but remember: more money does not always equal more benefits.
Do Printed Catalogs Still Have a Place in Marketing in 2019?
As the majority of brands are spending heavily on digital marketing, it’s easy to assume that the era of print marketing is gone. Many innovative brands are claiming that print is still working for them and in some cases much better than other marketing mediums when it comes to grabbing the attention of their customers.
But are printed catalogues worthy of having in your marketing arsenal in 2019? Should you invest in print marketing when driving sales online has never been easier than it is now? Read on to learn about the latest marketing insights on the topic that will help you make the decision.
The Coming Era of Modern Printed Catalogs
If you have been observing the evolving marketing landscape closely over the past few years, you already know that printed catalogues aren’t just old-school marketing tools anymore. Printed marketing materials are all set to stand out once again, considering the overwhelming amount of digital information that web users are gradually growing desensitised to. Even in an era when more and more brands are born online, modern printed catalogues are offering an opportunity to grab the attention of buyers much in the same way as they did in the 20th century. It is also a plus that you can get extra income by selling ink cartridge.
What the Latest Research Suggests About Effectiveness of Printed Catalogs in Marketing
Did you know most people spend an average of 15.5 minutes going through a catalogue? (SOURCE: USPS, Catalogs: Trends and Updates, May 3, 2017) Not just that, they typically hold on to printed catalogues for several weeks if not months. This makes catalogues a great customer acquisition and retention tool.
Another USPS study found that we process digital and physical media quite differently. So, while people tend to process digital content much quicker these days, they spend more time when it comes to looking at physical ads. Plus, they show a stronger emotional response towards physical content and remember it for a longer period of time. This proves that physical content does seem to leave a stronger and longer-lasting impact on consumers’ minds than digital. (SOURCE: https://www.uspsoig.gov/sites/default/files/document-library-files/2015/rarc-wp-15-012.pdf)
Now, here comes the best part. According to DMA (Data & Marketing Association), the response rates for printed catalogues have risen significantly in the past few years. What’s the reason behind this? It’s because the current generation of millennials haven’t received a huge volume of promotional mail as the previous generations have. This gives the experience more emotional impact when they receive print marketing materials from a brand they know about. (SOURCE: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/21/millennials-are-more-interested-in-catalogs-than-your- grandmother-is.html)
How You Can Use Printed Catalogs for Marketing in 2019
Printed catalogues, just like other pieces of physical marketing content, can play a very important role in a brand’s overall marketing strategy. As with other common forms of content marketing used today, it’s best to leverage a printed catalogue to drive traffic to physical stores, websites, landing pages, or mobile apps. Find opportunities to help your catalogue readers cross over to a digital platform (a microsite, for example) using QR codes or other innovative techniques.
Using customer data from digital ad campaigns and other sources, retailers are now using printed catalogues to focus on reaching more of those consumers who actually spend more, or at least are likely to spend more. This way you can derive better ROI from your print marketing campaigns, which include the printed catalogues.
Wondering how would you figure out the conversion rate of your printed catalogues? It’s not as complex as it seems at first. All you need to do is link those who received your catalogue with the sales data. If the catalogue initiated the customer interaction and resulted in a sale, you know that it worked well for you.
Final Thoughts
Even though printed catalogues may well seem old-school, but considering their performance in recent times and their brand-building potential, they are likely to remain in retailers’ marketing arsenal.
Since digital content has become ubiquitous, the current generation finds it appealing to experience the change of format. So, it’s no longer a competition between print and digital. It’s all about utilising the strengths of each of the available marketing mediums to inspire, engage and satisfy your customer while growing your company’s bottom line.
In 2019, use printed catalogues to help consumers make informed decisions and make them feel like your brand is a part of their lives. Make them feel familiar with your product offerings, and give them the much-required break they need from all too frequent digital content consumption. They will thank you for it, and your sales figures will most likely show the positive signs you are looking for.
Author Bio
Adam Smith is the Marketing Manager at Mixam.
Having successfully launched in the US, the UK based company is rapidly expanding by disrupting the online market with fresh ideas, new innovations and a real passion for printing.
Should Your Small Business Consider Selling on Amazon?
Amazon’s marketplace is huge and a major part of online consumer culture. Sales figures from 2017 showed $177.9 billion. So, it no surprise that Amazon is the investment market’s favorite bet for long-term dominance in sales, even compared to Walmart’s future sales predictions.
With the Amazon benefits that make their Amazon Prime account so popular, it is clear why customers prefer buying from the Amazon marketplace rather than any others. Amazon can offer a unique and successful platform for product sellers.
For these reasons, it can be a no-brainer for a small business to start selling on Amazon. Here are a few of the things you should know before you decide to become a seller on Amazon.
Selling on Amazon Can Develop Your Digital Marketing Strategy
When you are a small business, it is essential that you have a decent marketing strategy in place to help you become more visible to potential customers. However, this can often require a lot of time and a big financial investment, which is something you may not have access to if you are only a small business.
While a digital marketing strategy can be developed by using social media such as Instagram and the use of blog articles, selling on Amazon is one of best contributions you can add to your digital marketing strategy. By becoming an official seller on Amazon, you will be able to benefit from their algorithm that gives your products priority when customers search for the products you are selling.
Is Your Customer Service Good Enough?
One of the reasons behind the massive success that Amazon has achieved is due to its reputation. Amazon is a strong believer in the motto “it’s all about the customer” so their customer service is one of the strongest aspects of their business. Therefore, it is important to them that their sellers also have a strong customer service procedure.
Amazon has a very high standard of expectations for their sellers and they state that sellers need to have responded to customer inquiries within 24 hours. Amazon does take this very seriously and you can face having your visibility reduced or even have Amazon issues penalties against you for failing to respond within a satisfactory amount of time.
Assess Your Delivery Options
Customers often decide to use Amazon because they are well known for their quick delivery times. Therefore, if you want your small business to fit well within the Amazon marketplace, it is important that your delivery options are up to speed. This can include having faster delivery options that may be at an extra cost, but also cheaper delivery options that will take a little bit longer. Organizing delivery is often the last point of contact you have with a buyer before the sale is completed. Therefore, if you do not have good delivery options, this can make a buyer decide against buying from you and instead of going elsewhere.
You should check out delivery comparison websites and assess who are the best delivery providers and how much they will cost. By arranging your own delivery options, you can decide which company is best suited to the needs of the customer you are currently selling to. It may also be possible for you to negotiate discounts for multiple delivery carriers.
Consider Using Fulfilment by Amazon
Fulfillment by Amazon (often referred to as FBA) is an additional service provided by Amazon that allows you to ship your products directly to an Amazon warehouse, where they will sort out your packaging, delivery, and any return issues for your buyers. This is often a great option for small businesses that don’t have the manpower to be able to carry out many orders at one time.
Often, businesses decide to use the FBA services as it enables them time to develop their small business in other ways. For example, if you were more interested in the product development aspects of your business, this would mean you wouldn’t have to employ staff to package and send off your orders, as Amazon would do this for you.
However, FBA does not come for free and there are additional costs associated with it. But, a major benefit of using the FBA service is that Amazon customers are aware of the perks associated with FBA sellers. A customer that is deliberating over a purchase may be more inclined to go ahead with their order if they see that the product is fulfilled by Amazon. FBA also gives Prime customers free delivery, which may increase your number of sales significantly.
It is important that you research whether FBA will save you money. There have been some claims that Amazon errors can cost a company money. Common errors include lost inventory, damaged goods, and destroyed goods, so make sure that you recoup money using an FBA reimbursement service.
Increase Your Feedback Score
Online shopping and the increase in online sales is all based on trust between the buyer and seller. One of the easiest ways to show potential customers that you are a trusted and reliable seller is through your feedback score attributed to you by previous buyers. Amazon’s feedback facility is a very popular way for customers to assess how trustworthy and effective a seller is before they go ahead with their purchase. Therefore, it is essential that you build up good feedback stores for your business in order to encourage new customers to buy from you.
You can do this by asking your customers to leave feedback on your page after they have been sent their product. However, it is extremely important that you respond to any negative feedback you may receive and make it clear that you deal with any issue that your customers may have quickly and effectively.
As a small business, you should try not to feel overwhelmed when considering selling on Amazon and use this as an opportunity to expand your business. Expansion through becoming an Amazon seller does not require a huge influx of staff or considerable extra financial investment. Instead, it involves developing your already existing business by making it more online customer friendly.
These 7 Questions are the key to Growing Your Business
This is not a growth hack, this is simply getting to know your customer.
Ask these 7 questions to as many of your initial paying customers as you can to uncover the insights that will lead to growth:
1. How did you discover (Product)?
Insight: What channels are effective for user acquisition.
2. How would you feel if you could no longer use (Product)?
Insight: Determine product/market fit. 40+% of respondents should answer that they would be very disappointed.
3. What would you likely use as an alternative to (Product) if it were no longer available?
Insight: What your users consider to be your competition.
4. What is the primary benefit that you have received from (Product)?
Insight: Determine the main benefit that your customers receive from your product.
5. Have You Recommended (Product) to anyone and how?
Insight: How your customers describe your product to others — important to help you narrow in on compelling company messaging.
6. What Type Of Person Do You Think Would Benefit from (Product)?
Insight: Know the perfect use case for your product.
7. How Could We Improve (Product or Company Name) To Better Meet Customer Needs?
Insight: Where your product is falling short, and how you can fix it.
Original article published here
7 Cost-Effective Ways to Generate Leads For Your Small Business Like A Pro
Once upon a time, brands used to have the upper hand and only convey information they wanted the customer to know. Gone are those days, though. Your customers today have unlimited information, including the prices and range of products your competitors are offering.
As a result, lead generation today is a new challenge altogether. While some companies manage to generate leads through search engine optimization, others choose to use the social media route.
Hence, here are seven cost-effective methods you can generate leads for your business:
Content Marketing Is Vital
Did you know the average American spends 24 hours a week online? It goes to show the influence of the internet on our lives today. Hence, your aim should be to generate content on these topics and promote it on various online platforms to increase your company’s visibility.
There's a variety of content you can produce to fulfill the educational needs of your target audience, including articles, infographics, and videos. Providing content that's high in quality signals your buyer that you have the expertise to meet their informational needs and emerge as the market leader.
Invest In Video Marketing
An important aspect of content marketing is video marketing. Video marketing, in particular, has risen to new heights of popularity with internet users. Video marketing statistics show that approximately 84 percent of consumers have bought something after watching a video. Not only that, but 79% of consumers prefer watching a video to reading about a product.
Hence, it's safe to say that your target audience is more likely to find appeal in visual content rather than content they have to read. Keeping this in mind, it’s a great idea to create videos of your product range and share the videos across different social media platforms. You can also branch out by offering informational videos, such as tutorials or solutions, that may tackle any questions that arise in your target audience’s minds. Every video should subsequently end in an effective call-to-action that directs viewers to your website or social media pages.
Pay Attention To Search Engine Optimization
A post about lead generation can never be complete without time devoted to search engine optimization (SEO). SEO lies in the middle of any successful lead generation strategy. It’s the tool you need to master to ensure your business is turning up on popular search engines like Google.
Today, just creating a website for your business won’t suffice. You need to develop an effective strategy around it to ensure you’re ranking high for particular keywords. You should reevaluate your website to determine whether each page is optimized.
Getting your connections to talk about your business and share your content is also a great way to improve rankings. With a multitude of SEO strategies out there, you can easily experiment with a few to determine which ones are the most effective in generating traffic.
Change Your Approach Towards Networking Events
Back before the internet took the world by storm, companies used to generate leads by participating in trade shows and other kinds of networking events. You don’t need to invest time, money, and effort in organizing a huge event or conference. You can easily book your own space in someone else’s event and promote your brands or contribute to these events as a guest speaker.
It’s important to remember, though, that the traditional way of generating leads through such events is still useful, but the way you go about them has changed dramatically.
Gone are the days where you would use fish bowls and paper forms at these events to generate leads. Investing in a tablet and a lead capture app doesn’t cost a lot, and the return is extremely high. Data input through a tablet leaves less room for error and can potentially lead to 150 percent more leads.
You can attract attendees through different contests, such as a trivia quiz, that they can participate in through the tablet. You should ensure the app you opt for should have badge scanning features to cater to those who don’t have time to participate in contests.
A lead capture app also offers the advantage of being able to qualify leads there and then by asking a question before entering their email address. Once the event is over, you can use an easy to use CRM for small business to follow up.
Partake In The Best Social Media Group
There’s a reason why businesses are focusing their marketing strategies on social media, and that’s just because of its potential. Platforms, such as Facebook and LinkedIn provide businesses with endless opportunities to connect with potential customers, with the former being more useful for B2C companies and the latter working well for B2B lead generation.
Groups on these platforms are extremely popular so join the one that’s the largest for your target audience and see for yourself what people are interested in and how they respond. These groups comprise people who are at least remotely interested in your business through the affiliation.
Once you’ve gotten past the initial phase, write an article these group members are bound to read and share. Publish it in PDF format with your branding and host it on a landing page. You can even consider outsourcing this task if it doesn’t fall under your expertise. The landing page should be accompanied by a CTA that encourages people to share their email address to access the full article.
All you need to do, then, is to promote the article within the group. It appears more credible when the group owner does it instead of you, and you can also offer something in return, such as inviting him or her as a guest blogger.
Co-Host An Engaging Webinar
Co-hosting a webinar with someone with similar interests as yours is the latest trend that’s proven effective for small businesses. Why is that? Well, that’s because, through the webinar, you’ll have exposure to your partner’s email list, resulting in new
leads for your business. This audience is already pre-qualified as potential customers since they’ve expressed interest in what you’re offering.
It’s important to cover a topic that appeals to new and old audiences, both. The good thing about webinars is that they’re useful in targeting B2B, as well as, B2C customers. You could also reach an agreement with an established brand by promoting their product on your webinar. For the promotion, they’ll simultaneously promote your business to their extensive email list.
Don’t Forget Email Marketing
Email marketing is a strategy that’s still effective as it was in the past. By using every opportunity you have to attain your potential audience’s email addresses, your ability to generate qualified leads skyrockets to new heights.
Once you create a website, you can easily use it to make visitors sign up for free tutorials, newsletters, update, and other relevant content. Keep your email list interested by sending relevant content on a regular basis to ensure they stay subscribed to your emails.
Small businesses have many different opportunities to generate leads in cost-effective ways. Lead generation isn’t a “one size fits all” strategy and what works for another may not necessarily work for you. Every business has a different blueprint which is why experimentation is essential.
You should test methods according to your budget and use test runs to decide what works best. Once you’ve identified an approach that’s yielding positive results, you can scale up your plan.
and yet one more little beauty:
Cost-effective LinkedIn lead generation
Close to 13% of LinkedIn users are senior-level executives carrying out important decisions for their organizations. This, in addition to the relative ease of obtaining their contact information, contributes to the fact that more than 80% of B2B leads come from LinkedIn. Here are a few ways to acquire leads on LinkedIn for your business, without breaking the bank:
- Data Extraction: You can use tools like LeadGrabber and Voogy to extract contact information from profiles if you want to supplement your prospecting with outbound LinkedIn lead generation.
- LinkedIn Groups: While this is the most time-consuming way to gather leads, it’s cost-effective and builds brand equity. Post relevant content, drive discussions, and provide value to group members without being too salesy. Focus on building relationships first!
- Content marketing: Continuous posting of engaging content on LinkedIn Pulse is a great way to supplement your inbound marketing strategy.
Create a free tool for lead generation
Simple and free tools could be a great lead magnet for B2B lead generation, especially if you want to promote a SaaS product.
Free tools can help you to promote your core product with them. If someone used a free tool, you could be sure these people are very close to your target audience. Moreover, if you helped them to solve their problem with a free tool, they will be more likely to upgrade or try something that will help them even more.
I really like how CoSchedule uses this approach. Their primary products that generate revenue are a blog calendar, a marketing calendar, and a marketing suite. It’s pretty evident that their target audience is marketers (CMOs, content marketers, social media managers, etc).
For each of their core products, they developed free tools. For example, Social Message Optimizer helps users to write better social media posts.
On each of the free tools pages, you can find very targeted CTAs to try their core products.
Hunter is also a great example of creating free tools for lead generation, tools like MailTracker and TechLooku
Have you tried any of these strategies before? Or do you have any recommendations of your own? Let us know in the comments below!
Author’s bio
Dave Schneider is the founder of LessChurn, churn reduction app. In 2012 he quit his job to travel the world, and has visited over 65 countries. In his spare time, he writes about SaaS and business at DaveSchneider.me.
How to Increase User Engagement and Retention
What exactly your user engagement looks like will depend on the product. A travel app is not likely to be used as often as a shopping account. As such, there’s no one single engagement metric that we take to be the golden standard for all products.
However, engagement is nothing more than a user who is engaging with your product repeatedly. It’s what all businesses want. The more engaged a customer is, the more satisfied they are with what you’ve got to offer.
In this article, we’re going to take a look at how to increase user engagement and retention via the user journey. These are ways to increase user engagement and retention via the user journey.
Read More: How to Increase User Engagement
Original article published here
Sales Funnels Are Great Tools To Help Drive Conversions
If you have a business and you aren’t using a sales funnel, you should be. Sales funnels are valuable and effective tools. Although they have only recently become mainstream, sales funnels aren’t new. By definition sales funnels are simply tools to help you visualize where prospects are in their buy cycle. It is referred to as a funnel because of its shape. A sales funnel is wide on top and smaller at the bottom. This is because all prospective customers are captured at the top. The top of the sales funnel includes all levels of engagement, regardless of intent to purchase. As prospects move through the buy cycle, they move through the funnel. The number of prospects actually shrinks as it moves through the funnel. At the bottom of the funnel are the high-quality prospects that will be turned into sales. This is always a smaller number of prospects than at the top of the funnel. When done properly, these prospective customers can even be turned into repeat customers for your business.
Sales Funnel As A Tool
A sales funnel may be purchased or built. However, each sales funnel is unique to a business. This is because the sales funnel should be built from the sales process it represents. For instance, a business with five stages in its sales process will have five stages in its sales funnel. The sales funnel stages should duplicate the sales process for each individual business. The sales funnel is used to gently guide prospects through the buy cycle. It is both a visualization and a process. It is how people move from prospects to customers in a business. Some sales funnels are shorter than others. Not everyone makes a purchase on their first encounter. Many sales funnels include email marketing and retargeting efforts. This helps capture pass through business that may have otherwise been lost.
Optimize Your Sales Funnel
Regardless of the number of stages in your sales funnel, it should be split into three levels. There should be a clearly defined top, middle and bottom. This helps isolate and identify exactly where prospects are in the funnel. It also shows you how they are engaging with your company. If you really want to use your sales funnel to drive conversions, you must optimize it. You can’t get away from optimization. Optimizing each stage of your sales funnel helps maximize its performance. The top of the funnel is for driving traffic. You should know exactly where your traffic is coming from and which sources are best. Isolate sources of the largest amount of traffic as well as highest-quality traffic. Concentrate on maximizing those sources. The middles of the funnel is where your conversions are. This is the harder work. Concentrate on building trust and conveying urgency through your content. That is how you ultimately make the sale. The bottom of the funnel is customer acquisition. You’ve made the sale, now you want to hold on to the customer. This is where you reinforce their decision to buy and introduce additional products that compliment the previous purchase. This section is best optimized with follow-up efforts, case studies, news and customer service.
The Truth Is In The Sale
Most people assume the conversion is the bottom of the sales funnel. This accounts for massive failure utilizing sales funnels. It also accounts for not achieving the success people expect. Their sales funnel is short and mislabeled. Many times, it is not optimized. It can also be optimized incorrectly because it isn’t set up the right way. Know your sales funnel and optimize each stage. This is the best way to use sales funnels to drive conversions. Still in doubt? Let us help you! Contact Growth Ledge Agency.
Photo by Shengjun Shi on Unsplash
How Cold Calling Can Help You Drive More Sales
Closing more sales are crucial to the growth and success of every business. That’s why brands and marketers constantly experiment with various tactics to engage their prospects and drive more sales.
Cold calling is a traditional tactic businesses used to sell their products or services. Some people say that cold calling is dead today. That’s perhaps because just 1% of cold calls ultimately convert into meetings.
However, if you think that cold calling is dead, chances are that you don’t know how to approach your prospects in an effective and engaging way.
But before we talk about cold calling strategies that can work for your brand, let’s learn what cold calling refers to.
What is Cold Calling?
Cold calling refers to calling your target audience, which includes people you barely know anything about. The aim of such cold calls is to create awareness about your brand, build trust, and eventually convince them to buy from you.
How to Effectively Use Cold Calling for Your Business
The process of generating sales using cold calling can be extremely difficult. Since your prospects likely don’t know you or your brand, it can be hard to establish trust. However, many brands leverage cold calling as a great opportunity to fuel their sales pipelines.
To use cold calling effectively, you should:
- Put in the effort to understand your customers’ needs and preferences.
- Use tools and techniques such as modern CRM platforms and social listening to learn when your customers are looking for you.
- Target your prospects at the right times, such as right after they opened your email. This can result in a 32% higher engagement rate.
- Provide value to your potential customers to build their trust in your brand.
- Plan and personalize your cold calls to drive the best results.
If you are still not sure on how to approach your customers effectively, the cold calling strategies mentioned in the below infographic by Salesmate can help you:
Author: Samir Motwani