The old model of sending batch email to a list is no longer effective — no matter how awesome that list is. And due to the huge success of this “oh so great model”, certain things changed. Gmail for example, has made unsubscribing from annoying emails a lot easier and other email providers followed…

Fast forward…

Email marketing has evolved.

Blogging has evolved, social media has evolved, so why shouldn’t email evolve?

Today, your emails must truly engage your prospects and customers. More importantly, your emails need to fulfill the following five criteria:

Sounds exhausting?

Well, here’s the deal:

If you want engaged customers, you’d better think of ways to include all these attributes into your next email marketing campaign. If not, simply disregard all of the above and continue to invest in “hope marketing”.

Unlike Facebook, Twitter, Instagram & Co., good old email is a static form of communication. And yes, its reputation has been destroyed by all kinds of spam and phishing attempts.

BTW did you ever get one or more of those “Hi, I’m the Prince of Nigeria and I’m reaching out to you to let you know that you’re the lucky one to get $1 million as soon as I receive your bank details”…. Sounds familiar? Annoying? You bet.

OK, so evolution is on the way… and most marketers have adapted their email marketing strategies to meet the new requirements of savvy users.

Time to dig deeper and have a look at the latest stats and numbers…

1. For every $1 invested in email marketing, the average return is $43. [Source: Direct Marketing Association]

2. 91% of consumers use email at least once a day. [Source: ExactTarget]

3. Email is almost 40 times more effective at acquiring customers than Facebook and Twitter combined. [Source: McKinsey & Company]

4. Email conversion rates are at least 3 times higher than social media. The average order value is 17% higher. [Source: eMarketer]

5. When asked which medium consumers would like to receive updates from: 90% opted for email newsletter, while only 10% chose Facebook. [Source: Nielsen Norman Group]

6. 48% of consumers cite email as their preferred channel of communication with brands. [Source: Kentico Software]

The numbers are indicating that email marketing is alive and well. The substantial ROI you get from this marketing medium seems to encourage businesses across industries to increase their email marketing budgets, develop and implement stronger email marketing campaigns to finally reap the tremendous rewards this traditional online channel has to offer.

I encourage you to build email relationship equity. The key ingredient is trust.

And the way you build it is through:

Email marketing is way more than just bombarding an audience with as many emails as possible.

Effective email marketing requires you to first get to know and understand your audience’s needs, wants, desires, fears and frustrations so that you can create relevant campaigns that are perceived as valuable and helpful by your users.

Goodbye old-school batch and blast email marketing.

Welcome modern and engaging email marketing.

What are your thoughts about the future of email marketing? Is email dead, or alive and thriving? 

The post Email Marketing Isn’t Dead, It’s Evolving appeared first on StrengthInBusiness.

Why do you blog? What’s your goal?

Simply writing and publishing a blog post won’t get you very far. If you want traction and are looking to go beyond providing informational and educational material to your blog audience, you’ll need to change some things. To be able to get the results you want — provided you know exactly what it is that you’re aiming for — you’ll have to improve your current blogging strategy.

You might be a superstar when it comes to creating amazing content and you might even be great at getting traffic, however, if your ultimate goal is to elevate your brand while generating sales and profits, something else needs to come into play.

In this article I’ll share with you four actionable steps to building your blog audience and achieving success with blog marketing.

This one might seem like a no-brainer, however, I’d like you to focus on the first word in the headline for a second longer.

DISTRIBUTE…

Distribution doesn’t equal social media. It’s way more than social media.

Yes, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn & Co. are awesome distribution and promotion channels, however, if you want to maximize your blogging impact, you need to look beyond social media.

And this includes making your content available across the following distribution channels:

Do you want to know how to take your blog marketing to the next level and achieve even better results?

Integrate the distribution and marketing channels I mentioned above. Separate, individual silos in marketing can get you to a certain level. However, if you want to leverage your marketing efforts and finally boost your results, you need an integrated approach.

Ready to delight your blog audience even more?

Provide quality content and do it on a regular basis. Be consistent. Set up a blogging schedule and stop random acts of marketing.

Now, you don’t need to write and publish a blog post every single day — unless you want to, obviously. You can do it on a weekly, bi-weekly or monthly basis.

What works best for your particular blog audience?

To find the answer to this critical question, you’ll need to dig deeper and identify the needs, wants, frustrations, fears, and desires of your ideal visitors, prospects and future clients.

Let’s say your blog audience loves and expects to be greeted with new content every week on Wednesday. If that’s the case, do whatever it takes to publish a new blog post every Wednesday. This will keep your loyal fans and followers engaged and on the lookout for it.

I guess you’re already familiar with the slogans

The fact of the matter is that you need to offer your blog audience a subscription method, better yet, several different subscription options.

So, what are some of the common ways to subscribe?

Most people, even less tech-savvy individuals are familiar with email. Besides email, there are numerous other ways to subscribe. This could be via RSS, Facebook, Twitter, a LeadBox, an exit pop-up and so on. Remember, different subscription methods appeal to different people and preferences.

Lastly, whatever subscription options you choose to offer, make sure they are clear and easy. Don’t over-complicate the process.

For those of you looking to join the Strength In Business community — a community of highly-committed, driven and passionate entrepreneurs, business owners and multinational corporations, who are eager to receive exclusive content that I never share with the public audience, make sure you subscribe here.

ATTENTION:

The content I share in my exclusive weekly newsletter is NOT for freebie seekers and looky-loos. It’s for serious business people who are 100% implementation and results-oriented!

Last but not least, repurposing your content.

This one is such an amazing marketing weapon and yet, so few use it intelligently.

Why should you let your best blog posts only be a blog? Why not leverage your efforts and turn those blog posts into videos, slideshows, podcasts and more?

Repurposing your blog posts is a great way to expose your quality content to a larger audience and get even more traffic.

Expanding your current blog audience isn’t such a big deal after all if you:

This is the art of repurposing content and you can master this art too.

So, what are you waiting for?

There is a lot of noise in the market, and even more online. And it’s going to get even noisier as more and more people join the “blogging crowd” to grab a piece of this tasty-looking cake.

Blogging is hard work. If you want to get rich quick, you gotta look around for something else — I’m sure you’ll find some online guru eager to sell you the next shiny strategy…

But blogging is also very rewarding… in many different and unexpected ways. You get to dive deeper into the minds and hearts of your ideal blog audience, you continuously improve your writing skills and get to master the art of copywriting, you mingle with other like-minded bloggers from different industries, you get to share your stories with people who have similar backgrounds, paths, dreams and ideas… and I could go on and on and on with the benefits of blogging.

I’d like to end this article with an epic quote by world famous blogger Darren Rowse who has mastered the art of blogging. Darren is the Founder of ProBlogger, a leading blogging platform for passionate writers looking to consistently add more value to their blogs. If you want to continue to WOW and delight your blog audience, take Darren’s words seriously.

“There are no magic wands, no hidden tricks, and no secret handshakes that can bring you immediate success, but with time, energy, and determination you can get there.” ~ Darren Rowse

What strategies do you use to build and grow your blog audience?

The post 4 Ways To Building Your Blog Audience appeared first on StrengthInBusiness.

The Internet is a great space — it allows individuals from all walks of life, as well as entrepreneurs and small businesses to compete with big budget companies and win. Actually, the less budget you have, the more you have to rely on your creative juices and a systematized process to manage information, leverage your efforts and achieve the results you want.

Writing random content and inserting keywords willy-nilly won’t get you very far. Writing the right type of content for your dream prospects and clients is a whole different game.

Now, there’s a lot more to content marketing than simply writing blog posts. However, there are still a lot of folks who associate content marketing with blogging.

So, what else is considered content marketing?

Let’s have a look at what Wikipedia has to say:

“Content marketing is any marketing that involves the creation and sharing of media and publishing content in order to acquire and retain customers. This information can be presented in a variety of formats, including news, video, white papers, e-books, infographics, case studies, how-to guides, question and answer articles, photos, etc.”

Gosh, how could they leave podcasting out of the list?

OK, so podcasts are also a form of content marketing.

In today’s blog post, I’m going to share with you seven content marketing tips to help you create great content faster, to WOW and engage your readers, and more importantly, to mesmerize potential clients so that they choose working with you over all others in your industry.

Sounds good?

BTW, you don’t need a corporate budget to drive awareness, generate leads and make sales. Just to get that out of the way…

This one might seem like a no-brainer to you, however, you should be aware of the fact that only a few apply this marketing strategy — AKA, they do it the right way.

Why not use that amazing blog post you created and turn it into a video or podcast show? Why not create a few slides and upload the presentation to SlideShare?

You don’t need gazillions of dollars to do this. If your budget is a whopping zero, do it. It will cost you nothing… well, not quite true: it will cost you time, however, it won’t cost you any money.

So here are a few guerrilla hacks to get more done and have more fun:

Do you see how all these marketing tactics tie together?

Everything is intertwined. What you do, is you create a process, a marketing system, a recipe for success you can model and replicate every single time. And that’s exactly how success takes off.

BTW, the “vice versa recipe” applies to all of the above-mentioned options.

This is by far one of my favorite content marketing tactics when it comes to email and newsletter marketing. If you’re already subscribed to our weekly marketing newsletter, you know exactly what I’m talking about.

If you’re not subscribed to the Strength In Business Newsletter, here’s your chance to do so. Make sure you grab your free gift – it’s a marketing toolkit with loads of powerful insights to help you increase the impact of your marketing campaigns. Sign up here for the newsletter and download free marketing toolkit.

Moving on…

I use this tactic in podcasting too. All my shows start with a question that I received from you. Before I get into the nuts and bolts of the main topic I always pause to answer one or two questions that I received from my loyal fans and followers. It works amazingly well. People love it because they are engaged AND because they know I take their questions very seriously.

So, how can you use this in your own business?

Well, create a list of questions from your past and current customers. Include questions you receive from your prospects, website visitors, webinar and workshop attendees, or from people who come to your live events.

Furthermore, make sure you check out Quora, the leading Q&A website and have a look at the most frequently asked questions in your niche or industry.

Once you’re done with the list, pick a series of questions and provide useful feedback. Share your knowledge and expertise in a genuine and authentic way.

You can use the Q&A format to write blog posts and articles, record videos and audio podcasts, or create a webinar series. The only limit is your imagination.

Created and delivered correctly, customer surveys are one of the most effective ways to identify potential areas of growth, measure and analyze customer satisfaction (or dissatisfaction) and obtain valuable feedback as to what needs to be improved and what’s already working great.

Don’t be afraid to conduct surveys and share the results with your audience. Stop avoiding criticism and negative feedback. Use it to your advantage. Use this valuable information – provided it comes from the right people AKA your dream customers and prospects – and improve your marketing plan, pimp the products and services you have in your portfolio. Be on the look out for dialogue and reap the rewards of substantive feedback. 

Yes, visual content is great. Nothing new; we all know that by now. However, don’t forget those who love stats, facts and everything that revolves around numbers.

Content marketing without a list of facts and stats is like an empty slice of bread. If you have an empty slice of bread for breakfast, lunch and dinner seven days a week, you get bored. Really bored. So, use some statistics to provide evidence-based information and get your point across better. Give that slice of bread some life. You get my point….

Guess what are some of my most popular blog posts and articles?

Bingo.

It’s tools. It’s productivity hacks.

And here are three examples:

The obvious question to ask next is…

Why are people so obsessed with tools?

According to researchers at Princeton University, our obsession with tools is the product of millions of years of evolution. Our brain is actually hardwired to love tools.

Let’s look at this from a marketing perspective…

If you buy Nike sports shoes you’ll be able to play basketball like Michael Jordan. If you purchase an XYZ type of microphone your chances of becoming the next Jay Leno are exponential. Really? Do you actually buy into that?

Even if the answer is no, you must admit, it works. This marketing approach works. It speaks to people’s hearts, emotions, dreams, wants and desires. It always worked and it will continue to work for the next tens, hundreds and thousands of years.

The next content marketing tip that I wanted to share with you goes as follows:

Identify key industry influencers and connect with them. Partnering with influencers yields in increased brand awareness and revenue.

If you have a podcast or web TV show, ask those who have a strong voice within your target market to join you for a quick interview. The influencer gets to share his / her knowledge and expertise with a highly-relevant audience. Your listeners get some cool insights and personalized tips. You come across as the expert and authority on your chosen topic. WIN-WIN-WIN.

Obviously, you can extend this concept to further content marketing elements and dimensions too.

Have you ever thought of partnering up with an influencer in your space to cover a top challenge in your market? How about putting all those insights into an eBook or offering your ideal prospects and clients an exclusive video training series?

This content marketing tactic can be so powerful. Yes, it requires work. It requires you going out and first of all looking for the right strategic partners, gaining their trust and building a genuine, long-term relationship to best serve your target market.

Yes, it can be done.

And yes, you’ll be amazed by the positive impact this strategy has on your business.

Eager to give it a go?

Obviously, there are loads of other content marketing tactics and options waiting for you to be discovered and implemented.

The above-mentioned guerrilla hacks are proven to work. Test them out for yourself and see which ones generate the best outcomes for you and your business.

I’d like to finish today’s article with a quote by Michael Brenner. It goes like this…

“Content marketing is more than a trip down the rabbit hole. It’s the thing that will save marketing itself.”

Over to you…

What’s your take on content marketing? What guerrilla hacks are working best for you and why do you think they generate better results than the others you use?

Image: Simón Arroyave / Pexels.com

The post 7 Guerrilla Content Marketing Tips To Help You Win Business appeared first on StrengthInBusiness.

WHO is buying from you matters more than WHAT they’re buying.

This insight was a game changer for me. It shaped the way I do marketing and how I onboard my own clients. Fortunately, I learned this important marketing lesson early on thus enabling me to focus on building strong pillars for future growth and not fall into the many traps that are easily encountered.

A lot of businesses get trapped into all kinds of fancy marketing strategies… They pour a ton of money into advertising, waste numerous hours on different social media channels, attend workshops and seminars to learn new marketing techniques and acquire further skills but they seldom put time aside to sit down and really think about the needs, wants, desires, fears and frustrations of their clients and prospects.

And then, they wonder why all their efforts lead to little AKA poor, or no results at all.

Isn’t that kind of insane?

Here are three tips to help you find and get in front of the right prospects, and more importantly, to stop marketing insanity once and for all.

First, you have to KNOW whom you’re dealing with. Before you create your marketing campaign or hop on to Facebook, Twitter, or any other social media to share your message, you have to “make friends” with your avatar. Better yet, you have to get into the hearts and minds of your perfect audience. How can you accomplish that?

Answer the following two questions:

Here’s an example to help you get the most out of this exercise and ultimately, understand the psychology of marketing to the right prospects AKA group of people.

Example #Deepest Fear:

If I fail to close the next five deals, I’ll be forced to close my business. I see no way out. And as a result of that, my family will be devastated and all those naysayers will prove right. I won’t be able to send my oldest daughter to college and my wife will probably leave me as this is the second time I’m not delivering on my promises.

Example #Secret Desire:

I want to prove all those naysayers and above all, my two poker-buddies Tom and Nick who didn’t believe in me, that I can do it. I can be successful. I want to make my wife and children proud of me. I want Martha to tell me, she’s proud of me and happy to be married to me.

I made the examples sound a bit dramatic, however, don’t let the above portrayed keep you from answering the questions. Often times “reality” is not what it appears to be.

This task can be pretty daunting especially when you’re dealing with corporates and bigger organizations. It’s not so much of a challenge when you’re targeting small businesses.

So, what techniques can you apply to reach key decision makers?

If you have a blog or podcast show for example, you can invite them to do a short 15 minutes interview and share their valuable message with your community. This is a fantastic way to establish a direct connection, see whether they’re open for a business opportunity and sell your expertise without being salesy.

Ever thought of leveraging your network? When a relevant person (keyword: relevant!) introduces you to a key decision maker, your chances of getting attention are very high. Therefore, build a strong network of relevant people.

Are you bold enough to reach out directly? You should. If you keep it simple, genuine and you get right to the point, you’ll be amazed how well this technique works. To soften up the “cold process” a little bit, use LinkedIn, Twitter & Co. and enjoy the social benefits of this approach.

Whatever you do, be authentic.

Yeah, you can accomplish a bunch of things via Skype, Facebook, webinars and email.

However, if you truly want to skyrocket your business and develop a personal relationship with the right prospects and possible future clients, you got to leave your virtual world every now and than, and attend all of the good old-fashioned events to make powerful direct contacts.

Nothing beats face-to-face communication.

Start with the end user in mind – your perfect audience, the right prospects and group of people – and work yourself backwards. Focus obsessively on the WHO.

Once you know and understand your target audience, you can develop the appropriate marketing strategies, pick the relevant distribution channels and craft a powerful unique selling proposition (USP) that will make price irrelevant.

And that my friends is one of the secrets to massive marketing success.

What about you? Still trying to desperately please everybody in the market and wondering why it doesn’t work?

What are your favorite marketing strategies and tactics to attract more of the right prospects?

The post How To Find The Right Prospects And Make Price Irrelevant appeared first on StrengthInBusiness.

Paid tools are great… but “what if I’m just starting out and I don’t have the money to invest into all those fancy tools”?

This is the “BUT” – question I received from one of our amazing readers after publishing the last blog post. It’s true, at least two of the Twitter tools I mentioned in my recent article are paid tools. Obviously, SocialBro and Sprout Social are both awesome resources to use if you’re not exactly on a restricted budget.

So, I took this input seriously and I decided to share with you a set of content marketing tools that you can use for free. On top of that, you’ll be able to utilize these tools in your day-to-day work thus being able to reach your goals faster, with less efforts and in less time.

Let’s dive into it, shall we?

If you want to know whether the movie “The Wolf of Wall Street” gets more searches than “Transformers”, have a quick look at Google Trends. This is the best place to go and search for that kind of information.

Seriously tough.

Google Trends is a fantastic content marketing tool to look at trends of various keywords. Furthermore, you can compare different search terms, find related searches and evaluate regional interest for a specific keyword (TIP: Do a search for long tail keywords!).

Lacking inspiration as to what to write about in your next blog post?

Checkout Übersuggest – the Google suggest tool on steroids.

You might also want to have a look at the following free keyword suggestion tools:

Use these free content marketing tools to compile a list of highly relevant keywords.

SEMrush is a great tool to help you analyze your competitors. Simply enter the URL of your competitor’s website and hit the search button. SEMrush will than show you the top 10 keywords driving traffic to your competitor’s site.

Bare in mind the following:

You get 10 free queries before you’re asked to pay. So, use these queries wisely.

Say you’ve used your ten free shots and now you’re wondering how to get further analysis without signing up for a paid account.

Here’s another free research software tool to help you accomplish your objectives: KeywordSpy.

Use KeywordSpy to quickly unveil your competitors’ most profitable ad copies and keywords.

First off, I’m referring to WordPress.org in this article (NOT WordPress.com!).

WordPress gives you full control over your content. It’s free and easy to use. You can customize your web layout, pick the fonts and colors you want. On top of that, you can experiment with different plugins, compose and publish as many blog posts as you wish. WordPress is a robust platform putting you in the driver’s seat of your online marketing efforts.

I’ve mentioned BuzzSumo in numerous blog posts. It’s a phenomenal tool that enables you to identify the type of content that gets shared the most across different social media channels thus enabling you to create articles, videos, infographics and podcasts around similar topics.

Have a closer look at the channels that drive higher engagement; combine these insights with the knowledge you have about your target audience and your industry specifics to be able to craft content that cuts through all the noise and clutter and reaches the right people — aka your best prospects and possible future clients.

Other free resources to help you generate content ideas are:

Manage all your social networks and schedule your messages in one place. Use Hootsuite’s free plan to do just that.

Are your social media marketing efforts paying off? What are people saying about your brand? Do you know what is working and what not?

Hootsuite is a great tool to organize your social media activities, schedule tweets and engage with your community. This is the first tool I used when I started my online journey on social media. It’s a content marketing tool I continue to use along with other amazing resources.

One of Jing’s best features is that it lets you record short five minute videos for free. How helpful is that if you want to do a quick tutorial and share the insights with your team? Pretty neat, right?

Furthermore, you can use Jing to capture screenshots, mark up your screenshots and share them through IM, email, and social media.

Sign up for Canva and stop worrying about your graphic design skills.

Canva is a simple design tool enabling you to produce impressive images for your blogs, flyers, Facebook and other social media covers, promotional campaigns, and loads more.

Stop waiting for your designers to deliver the images you want. DIY fast and easy.

MailChimp is great if you’re just starting out and you have no list or only a few subscribers. Obviously, I’m talking about MailChimp’s “Forever Free” pricing plan. As soon as you have more than 2,000 people on your list, you’ll be asked to upgrade to a paid account. Until than, it’s free to use.

Similar to aWeber, GetResponse, and Constant Contact, MailChimp is an email marketing service provider that enables you to send emails and newsletters, manage contacts and measure results.

You don’t know what to do next? Get Evernote and start prioritizing in advance.

Evernote helps you capture everything that is important to you in one place. Take notes and snap photos on the go, and let Evernote sync everything between your devices. Stay effortlessly organized.

When inspiration hits you, it’s good to have a collecting tool like Evernote on you.

If you don’t know your numbers, you don’t know what you’re doing. Relentless testing and tracking is the secret sauce. Use Google Analytics for traffic stats and monitor your performance closely.

How many new vs. returning visitors do you have? What devices do people use to access your website (desktop, tablet, mobile)? Where do most of your visitors come from?

Google Analytics is the most widely used web analytics tool. It’s fairly easy to set up and it comes at no cost.

Yes, you don’t need the most expensive and fancy tools in the world to accomplish great things.

The above mentioned free content marketing tools come with a bunch of features to appeal to entrepreneurs and small business owners who don’t have the budget to invest in additional manpower or hire an agency.

Obviously, this list of *freebie* tools is not complete. There are other awesome content marketing tools on the market, ready for you to be discovered and used.

The eleven resources I have mentioned above are fairly straightforward and easy to use. They will definitely help you improve your productivity, and achieve your goals and objectives in a more systemized way.

What are your favorite content marketing tools? What other resources would you add to the list?

Image: StartupStockPhotos / Pixabay.com

The post 11 Free Content Marketing Tools To Increase Your Productivity appeared first on StrengthInBusiness.

Yes, 140 characters can help you achieve unbelievable things. Twitter enables you to use shortcuts, omit needless characters and bylines, turn words into numbers, shorten links and show you’re a hashtag king / queen. On top of that, if you want to access relevant information FAST, Twitter is definitely the place to go.

Well, all that sounds great. BUT…

…How can you actually cut through the gazillions of tweets, find what’s most enticing to your audience and ultimately, improve your social media marketing efforts?

This is where tools and resources can come in handy. There are a ton of awesome Twitter tools out there and it’s quite difficult to choose the ones that will help you get the most out of your Twitter marketing strategy.

To help you pick the right toolkit for your specific business needs, I decided to put together a list of Twitter tools that have helped me effectively filter relevant tweets, closely monitor performance, increase productivity and maximize outcomes.

See what these tools can do for you.

When it comes to digging into demographics, identifying key influencers, analyzing competitors, tracking interaction and monitoring performance, SocialBro is my very first stop.

This tool is hands-down one of the most powerful Twitter tools available; a game changer.

SocialBro has an intuitive and robust interface with great features. You can check your latest stats and manage your followers within just a few clicks. No more guessing around. SocialBro puts an end to all that!

If you have a team, this Twitter tool will make it easier to collaborate, respond to customers and publish across multiple social profiles.

On top of that, Sprout Social lets you:

As a side note: Combining SocialBro and Sprout Social has helped my team and I cut the time we spend on Twitter by more than 70%!

When I started my journey on Twitter, Hootsuite was amongst the very first social media marketing tools I used. And to this day, I still use Hootsuite due to its easy to use browser interface and clear overview.

If you’re new to Twitter and you don’t want to spend money on all kinds of fancy tools and resources without first testing out whether this social media platform is worth your time and efforts, sign up for a free Hootsuite account and give this comprehensive management tool a go.

Are you a community manager? Do you love to keep track of all the people you’re influenced by and the ones you’re influencing?

Commun.it will help you accomplish just that. This Twitter tool is great for engagement and identifying key industry influencers you’ve lost track of due to all the noise in your stream.

Are you looking for an easy way to get rid of all those who are inactive? Get Tweepi.

This Twitter management tool will help you sort your followers in groups, find relevant and interesting accounts, spot people that are following you, but you aren’t following back, and cleanup the inactives in your account.

Pam Moore is the CEO and Founder of Marketing Nutz. She is recognized by Forbes as a Top 5 Social Media Woman and Top 10 Social Media Power Influencer.

I met Pam Moore last month in San Diego. She was one of the Twitter keynote speakers from this year’s mega-conference Social Media Marketing World 2015. In her session <>, Pam shared proven strategies for integrating Twitter with other social networks and events such as Google hangouts and webinars, and a series of advanced Twitter tactics including Twitter chats.

Pam’s session was jam-packed with valuable social media marketing information and practical Twitter tips to increase brand awareness, generate leads and drive sales. As she has a similar corporate background as I have AND on top of that, she’s an advocate of systems, processes and “putting in the work” to get results – no chasing shiny objects, no Random Acts & Hope Marketing – I decided to have a little chat with her after the session.

And one of my questions was: “Pam, what online marketing strategy had the highest impact on your success?”

Pam’s answer:

Most would expect it was Twitter. Instead, it was blogging!

However, she continued — simply writing blogs won’t make you successful. You still need a sound promo and distribution system in place, as well as the proper tools – and that of course includes powerful Twitter tools and marketing systems to increase productivity and get business results.

Check out Pam’s full Advanced Twitter Strategies presentation below.

http://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/embed_code/key/iqjxjFfrfz5AIU

The benefits of having the right tools in place range from increased productivity and scalability, reduced cycle times to improved accountability. Using the above mentioned Twitter tools will help you cut through the noise of your Twitter stream faster, identify influencer, focus on sharing content and tweeting stuff that is actually relevant to your audience.

Goodbye, Random Acts of Tweeting.

Hello, Systemized Twitter Marketing for Human Beings.

What are your favorite Twitter tools? Why do you prefer them over others?

The post 5 Top Twitter Tools To Increase Your Productivity appeared first on StrengthInBusiness.

Facebook ads are a powerful marketing weapon when it comes to expanding your reach to highly relevant audiences.

Provided you haven’t purchased your Facebook fans or email list using some scam tactics, and instead you’ve invested your valuable time and resources into getting to know the pain points, needs and wants of your target audience better so that you’re able to provide help and support long-term – suppose the latter applies, you’ll now have the power to setup Facebook ads and target a super relevant audience to you and your business.

So, you’ve built an engaging email list and now you’re wondering how to provide even more value to your most loyal supporters and customers.

Here’s how.

In this blog post you’ll discover three powerful ways to target your most relevant audience using Facebook ads.

When a visitor comes to your website and opts in, he or she should be added to your email list. When someone buys a particular product from you, they should also be added to your list. This is where segmentation becomes your savior.

Those who opted in but haven’t purchased from you, should be automatically added to a segment “optin” for example.

Those who opted in and purchased product X from you, should be added to the segment “optin + product X” of your email list.

Here’s where it gets really interesting. Say you want to target the people in your email list who have opted in but haven’t purchased anything from you thus far. Prepare this particular segment in an Excel spreadsheet (turn it into .txt or .csv file) and follow the instructions below.

Go to Facebook’s Power Editor and choose Audiences. Next, click on “Create Audience” and pick “Custom Audience“. You’ll be given 3 types of audiences to choose from. Go ahead and click on “Customer List”.

Facebook will now give you several options to choose from. The easiest option – in case you’re not using MailChimp as an Email provider, is to upload a file in .csv or .txt format.

The beauty of this custom audience among other things, lies in the ability to upload specific segments of your email list thus ensuring you’re targeting the people who are most relevant to your specific offer.

Website Custom Audiences (WCA) allows you to retarget those who have visited your website in the past 180 days – that’s the maximum length of time Facebook enables you to use.

In the screenshot below, I decided to create a WCA that includes people who have visited any of my pages that contain the URL www.strengthinbusiness.com in the last 30 days.

How can you use this audience when setting up your next Facebook ads?

First off, this tends to be one of the most relevant and powerful options currently available. You can use this 30 Days WCA to promote your blog posts or to drive traffic to your landing page and increase optin rates.

The third option I’m going to share with you today is Lookalike Audience.

If you don’t have a lot of website traffic and your email list is still “in the making & baking” this is definitely a powerful way to leverage these smaller audiences. Allow Facebook to do the job for you – that is, to find people similar to your website visitors and email subscribers.

Take your Lookalike Audience to the next level by layering in interests and / or behaviors.

What do I mean by that?

Let’s say you want to target lawyers. You have created your Lookalike Audience based on your 30 Days WCA. The next thing you want to do is add “lawyer” as an additional layer (you do this within “Interests”).

Why is this important?

Because not everybody who has visited your website in the past 30 days is necessarily a lawyer. And if you want Facebook to target lawyers and show your ads to this particular audience, you better specify that when creating your next ad set.

Start with a Lookalike Audience 1% to help Facebook isolate the people most relevant to your business, the folks most likely to engage or convert.

Obviously, there are other relevant audiences you could target, like for example your fans. However, this implies your Facebook page audience is built properly. If your fans are genuine, go ahead and target them. It’s super powerful.

Take this information and test everything out for yourself. Find your most effective targeting method. Experiment!

Do you use Facebook ads to promote your business? What tactics have worked best for you? 

Image: Pexels / Pixabay.com

The post 3 Highly Relevant Audiences To Target Using Facebook Ads appeared first on StrengthInBusiness.

More than 60 million new posts are being published on WordPress.com each month. Wait a second, that’s just WordPress. Let’s not forget the other blogging platforms such as Blogger, Tumblr, TypePad, and Posterous.

That’s overwhelming, right?

This is where smart content curation can go a long way. Let me explain the concept quickly.

The world is changing fast. Offline, we’re no longer willing to go to the butcher to buy fresh meat, than drive the car to Mr. Pete’s “tech store” to purchase some batteries for the remote control and on the way home stop at Emma’s to get milk. Nowadays, we are more interested in the Walmart or Tesco model. The game is called: one-stop shop.

The same applies to the online world. We no longer want to visit all kinds of websites that provide content specific to a niche; we prefer to bookmark one or two killer websites that do all the work for us — that is, they filter killer posts and provide us with the best stuff in one place. This is content curation. It’s basically the online version of the Walmart and Tesco offline concept.

Mike Kaput of PR 20/20 describes the evolution of content curation as follows:

In a world of nearly infinite content, consumers are looking to one-stop shop.

Never underestimate the importance of the human element.

Robots, machines, and algorithms can do a great job in terms of searching for blog posts that meet your criteria, however, nothing can beat handpicked content curation. Giving your articles that human touch makes your writing stand out. No machine or algorithm knows the pain points of your prospects and clients better than you do, and no robot can draft content that speaks directly to the heart of your audience.

Here are three significant benefits of content curation for your website:

To wrap this up, I’d like to cite Mark Sherbin who wrote an interesting article about content curation on Content Marketing Institute:

Content curation features handpicked content, often introduced with a snippet of copy from the curator. Performed correctly, content curation can create a big value addition.

A couple of weeks ago I was in San Diego at the mega-conference Social Media World 2015 (#SMMW15) organized by Social Media Examiner. It’s one of those conferences where:

One of the best sessions I attended was “How to Create Your Integrated Social Media System” by Neal Schaffer.

I’m a huge fan of integrated systems and processes that helps you increase ROI and save time. I don’t like those woo-woo marketing strategies where you act randomly, guessing around and hoping that one day someone will hand you over a $1,000 check.

Neal is just my kind of type and I resonated with everything he talked about in his presentation, cause let’s face it:

“If you can’t describe what you are doing as a process, you don’t know what you’re doing.” – Edwards Deming

So, here’s the 911 or 9-1-1 rule of content curation Neal talked about:

Now, to give you an idea on how to implement this concept in your own marketing activities and thus boost the pulling power of your tweets, shares, pins etc. — here’s an example from my recent Twitter feed. All tweets are blog posts written by industry experts. The last tweet in this feed is a quote by Henry Ford.

Model successful marketing systems, processes and strategies. Test the 911 rule of content curation and let me know how this concept works in your business.

Success leaves clues. Implement the above mentioned system for content curation, stick to proven processes and strategies, and stop wasting your valuable time on lousy advertising and marketing.

How do you see content consumption changing? Is content curation part of your online marketing strategy?

Image: mastersenaiper / Pixabay.com

The post Content Curation: How To Apply The 911 Rule appeared first on StrengthInBusiness.

Facebook advertising can help you drive targeted traffic to your website, get quality leads and make more sales. To squeeze the best juice out of your Facebook ads and stop spending more than you should on a campaign, you need to have the right components in place.

There are plenty of experts and marketing pros sharing best practices and lessons to learn from that will help you cut the learning curve and speed up the process while steering you away from the common mistakes that hold many small businesses and startups back.

Here are three common Facebook ad mistakes you need to avoid when setting up your next big Facebook advertising campaign:

Targeting everybody that has a pulse is probably one of the biggest mistakes people make with Facebook ads.

If you want to show your ad aka promote your business to an audience that is highly relevant, you need to leave most people out of the targeting party.

Instead focus on:

Put your ads in front of the right demographics. Don’t pick generic categories and don’t target a broad group of people. This increases the likelihood of your Facebook ads NOT being marked as unwanted or spam.

Furthermore, if you don’t keep a close eye on this rule, the level of engagement and the number of clicks will be low. This again will lead to a lower relevance score thus damaging your ROI.

RECOMMENDATION: Put your ad in front of the right people. Get as specific as you can about your ideal customer. It’s time to stop throwing away money with poorly targeted ads.

The first element that Facebook users get hooked to are your images. Assuming that a certain image will get more clicks than another one is a very bad idea. Test your assumptions (!) and let the results speak for themselves. If you don’t split test your Facebook ad images, you’re missing out on some key marketing opportunities.

The next thing you want to test is your copywriting and the call-to-action, or CTA. Always test a few different versions of copy and include a CTA to make your ad compelling and ensure ample follow-through.

Furthermore, do yourself and your audience a huge favor, and stop sending them to a crappy landing page. If you want to increase your conversion rates make sure that the content on your landing page is supported in your Facebook ads.

RECOMMENDATION: Start your copy with a question and see how it works. Also, test different copy elements for the desktop news feed and right column.

Publish your landing page as a separate Facebook tab and set up an ad set that drives traffic to this tab. Create a second ad set and drive traffic to the landing page outside of Facebook. Keep everything else unchanged and see which one of the two options mentioned above converts better.

Guessing, hoping, neglecting and speculating – this is how NOT to go about Facebook ads.

Don’t wait until you spend hundreds of dollars on Facebook campaigns to discover you targeted the wrong people, chose the wrong images and used bad copy. Go to your analytics dashboard and monitor your results. Stop the ads that are performing weakly and make the necessary changes to improve the response.

RECOMMENDATION: Familiarize yourself with the reports and key metrics. The juicy data you get from Facebook is mesmerizing and on top of that, it’s free! Track conversions and website clicks; focus on the right metrics.

One more thing: Even the best Facebook ads burn out after a while, therefore keep your creatives fresh and relevant.

Don’t over-complicate the process. Get your hands dirty and start targeting the right people. You will make mistakes and that’s OK. The key however is to bounce back quickly, fix the mistakes and move forward with laser-like focus.

Remember: a lot of people use Facebook ads to onboard more of the right customers and grow their businesses. You can do it too. Avoid the common pitfalls most people get stuck in with Facebook advertising. Use these tips to your advantage.

What are some of the Facebook ad mistakes you made, and more importantly, how did you fix them?

The post 3 Facebook Ad Mistakes You Should Avoid appeared first on StrengthInBusiness.

Whether you’re a small business owner or a marketing pro working for a corporate – you use the same social media channels Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. The difference between the small guy and the big boys lies in the marketing tools they use. Corporates may afford to spend millions on fancy CRM systems but the rest of us are in the market for something easy and cost-effective.

Are you looking for social media marketing tools to perform tasks more efficiently?

Running a small business requires time and energy. You need to keep an eye on your team, ensure you have a steady stream of cash coming in, focus on attracting more of the right customers and increase client retention, develop new products and services, and so on. And than there’s social media marketing to help you spread the word and make more sales.

All this can be pretty overwhelming, right?

Well, to help you minimize the time you spend on social media networks and maximize your outcomes, I’ve put together a small set of social media marketing tools that are straightforward and easy to use.

See which ones resonate best with you.

To make it easier to navigate through I grouped the tools into three categories:

Let’s get started.

Canva is a simple, yet intuitive and powerful online photo editing tool for all non-designers. This design tool has saved me hours, if not days of work. Instead of waiting for my team to design all those fancy images in Photoshop I can use Canva to create my own “non-designer” images. The online tool has a drag-and-drop interface allowing you to add text, symbols and icons, use templates, or even upload and edit your own images. Canva is a free tool and it takes less than two minutes to create an account. If you decide to use something from Canva’s library of stock images you’ll need to pay $1, but other than that, everything is free. There are two more things that I totally love about Canva and that is:

Using Canva helps make the process of creating and resizing your images much less labor-intensive. It’s a great social media marketing tool to boost your productivity and allocate your valuable time for other important tasks.

Social Media Image Maker is another great tool to help you resize your images so that they match the preferred dimensions of the most popular social networks including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Tumblr, Vimeo, YouTube and About.me.

Let’s face it, finding suitable images and than resizing each to fit the requirements of all the different social channels can be very time-consuming indeed. Use these two social image tools and put all those worries behind.

For those of you reading my blog posts, the tool I’m going to mention next will sound very familiar. BuzzSumo is my go-to search engine for content research. Use this tool to gather content ideas and identify the conversations that matter. Find out who are the brand influencers in your niche and what type of content gets shared the most on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, and Pinterest. Have a look at the headlines and see what works best for the leaders in your field. Is is numbered or “how to” headlines? Put these insights into practice and keep tweaking until you get the results you want.

Lacking ideas for your next newsletter or blog post? Jump over to Feedly and with a click of a button you can start following relevant blogs and websites in your industry. The share counts next to each story will give you a quick info whether that post gets a reasonable level of engagement thus enabling you to pick the most valuable piece of content fast. Pretty neat, right? Here’s what pops up when you search for “marketing trends”.

Ever wonder whether your social marketing efforts pay off? Stop guessing around and start using Cyfe. Cyfe let’s you monitor, track and analyze all your activities, measure their impact and track ROI. If you want to evaluate how good your social media campaigns are performing, make sure you sign up for an account. It’s free. If you want to take your analytic skills to the next level and spy on your competitors, you might want to have a look at Rival IQ. During the 14-day free trial you can get valuable insights into your industry as to what content is most likely to go viral and monitor your competitors’ activities on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+. Furthermore, the tool lets you benchmark your performance on social media and SEO against your competitors. Staying on top of the game is vital. Use these social media marketing tools to course-correct and make adjustments quickly.

Often times we get overwhelmed with all these social media responsibilities. A lot of business owners don’t have the resources necessary to hire a team or to outsource their social media activities. Therefore, having the right toolbox in place and knowing how to use some simple and cost-effective social media marketing tools to get the job done is of great value.

Obviously, there is a seemingly endless list of social media tools available at your fingertips. It takes time to test different tools and sort out the ones that best fulfill your needs. I’ve gone through this more or less painful process myself and the tools I mentioned above are my “best of” tools I’m using today. Try them out for yourself and let me know whether you were able to improve your productivity.

What other social media marketing tools would you add to the list?

Image: dbreen / Pixabay.com

The post 5 Social Media Marketing Tools To Increase Your Productivity appeared first on StrengthInBusiness.