Quick Guide to Winning Real-Time Marketing Strategy

As markets evolve, marketers have had to up their game to be successful. One of the latest tools in the modern marketer's toolkit is Real-Time Marketing. This is marketing performed "on-the-fly" to deliver the right message to the right customer at the right time: NOW! Here are three tips to help you get started on your own Real-Time Marketing campaign.

Responsive

The goal of this type of marketing is to respond to consumers. If your trying to be something you are not or come off as fake than your marketing endeavors will surely fail.  Don’t sterilize and overly censure your content until it’s bland and uninteresting.  Consumers hate the smoke and mirrors.

Simplicity Rules the world

Keep marketing simple, hone in on the basics, such as age, gender, location interest you know the targeted markets and such.  Stay tapped into those target markets, you can make leaps and bounds this way it allows you to avoid the doldrums and shift when need be. For instance, let’s say your demographic is women between the ages of 18 and 35, last year they were crazy for low rise skinny jeans, but then trends change and now they love the skinny high waited jean. Make small adjustments to marketing to meet the current interest. When your focus is too broad you are unable to notice those subtle nuances and by the time you do it’s too late and you have hit the analysis doldrums.

Excitement

Let’s face it, consumers have short attentions spans. That being the case you have to keep the brand interesting.  Real-time marketing is just that Tweets and Facebook post lose their momentum within a few minutes, or a few hours, and then it fades into obscurity. Prevent this from happening by making awesome remarkable posts that have the propensity to be shared by your followers.

By following these basic tips, you can optimize and see incredible results from your Real-Time marketing strategy.

Three Blog Ideas for Your Business Blog

Having a business blog is a great way to obtain “followers,” also known as customers. It allows a business to get their name out there, become known and follow with what the business has been doing and if anything has changed. The good news is it keeps customers up to date as well, and can make a stronger connection other than that of a business customer. It’s more personal. However, what do business bloggers write about?

Make it Personal

The best thing you can do for your business is to make it personal. Write about the challenges the business has faced, mistakes it’s made, obstacles it overcame, successes. These subjects make for compelling and unique stories because it’s personal and only this business will have these stories.

Include your Customers

Call your clients. Ask them what they’ve had trouble with; what do they like best? Have they recommended this business to anyone? Will they? Ask about the customer and their experience with your business. Use what they say to update your blog. Show your customers you care. If there’s a problem, write about it and tell people what you’re doing to fix it.

YouTube is Your Friend

Incorporate other tools to make your blog more interesting. Upload relevant content by using YouTube. People love watching videos. Make a tutorial of what your business does, if you can. Make a video of your satisfied customers. Grab people’s attention with more than just words, but by showing in a video.

By using these 3 tips, you can ensure that you are producing relevant and engaging content to grow and maintain your online business community.

Please contact us for more insider tips on enhancing your content strategy to fuel your business growth.

This Content Strategy Faux Pas Is Costing You Money

So you've got a content strategy, developed plenty of good content for your site, and you're ready to go. But wait. Have you considered how to intrigue your audience enough to click through to read your articles? There's one more thing you need to do to make sure your content gets exposed to as many eyeballs as it should be. Write great headlines!

A good headline will interest the reader enough to want to read more, without giving away your whole story. In his book, 25 Terrifying Reasons Your Content is Not Successful, Cyrus Kirkpatrick says this about headlines that reveal too much:

It’s ultimately an ineffective way to promote an article. It pretty much encompasses all the information in one short blurb, to the point where I don’t have any interest in seeking out more information—everything I need to know is already right there!

Headlines need to have a sense of mystery. People have very short attention spans when they are surfing the internet, and as result good copywriting is more than ever if you want your content marketing strategy to succeed. For instance, a headline that says, "Saving Important Documents on a USB Is Important For Your Business", is just not going to get as many clicks as it can. The headline gives away the article, and many people won't bother to click on the article once they read the headline. A better headline would be "The Best Way I Know to Back Up Business Documents". At least this title will make readers curious, prompting them to click on your article for more information about the subject being presented. 

Remember, your goal in writing a headline is to make your audience want to, "...read all about it!"

Contact us if you would like to learn more about content strategy and how it can help your business.

Lead Nurturing: Making the Conversion from Lead to Customer

Successfully generating leads for your business is a vital part of the client acquisition process. Once you've generated leads, however, your job is far from done. Lead nurturing-- and ultimately converting those leads to customers-- is where many businesses fall short. In fact, it's estimated that nearly 80 percent of marketing leads are not converted into sales. How can your company close the gap between lead generation and client acquisition? Let's consider seven tips for converting your leads to customers:

Do your research. To determine how you can best fulfill a potential customer's needs, you must first do your homework. Understanding your prospect's company and industry helps establish credibility. Stay updated on the latest industry developments and keep track of company news.

Be responsive. If a prospect sends an inquiry email and has to wait several days for a response, conversion chances are slim. Your competitors are likely reaching out to your prospects too; thus, you can't afford to have a slow response time. Research shows that you're nine times more likely to convert a lead into a customer if you respond to inquiries within five minutes.

Make a connection. You want to avoid making your prospect feel like they're just another sale to you. Try to establish a personal connection based on common ground. Maybe you share an alma mater or root for the same football team. Use these commonalities as an ice breaker to get the prospect talking. Once rapport is established, he's more likely to share his challenges with you.

Increase social media presence. While meeting face-to-face is an important part of nurturing leads, so is maintaining an active presence online. A strong presence on social media demonstrates to prospects that your company is modern and relevant. Facebook leads the pack in both online orders and conversion rates. A regularly updated blog is also an excellent way to increase your presence online.

Incentives matter. Let's face it: people like to feel like they're getting a good deal. Consider offering a discount or special to a prospect to help encourage the conversion to customer. Make sure that the offer is valuable and available for a limited time only. This encourages a sense of urgency on the prospect's part.

Make the conversion process easy. If you're making your prospects jump through hoops to work with your company, they'll likely move on to a competitor. Make the conversion process-- and every interaction with your company-- as simple as possible for your prospects. This begins with a user-friendly, uncluttered, and easy to navigate website. Make sure your message is clear and your links are easy to click. You want each prospect to have a stress-free experience with you from the start so they're more likely to stick around for the long haul.

For more information on converting leads to long-term customers, please contact us today!

To What Extent Should You Personalize Your Content Strategy?

Is it worth it to try to personalize your content for your target audience? In this blog we'll look deeper into this question and explain why personalization is such an important quality of your company's content strategy.

Let's begin by putting this in the context of milliennials. This generation consumes more content than any other, and businesses are trying to figure out a way to tap into the market's potential. 

Personalizing content for millennials seems like an impossible task, but understand that it's not an all-or-nothing practice. If you can take a few steps to personalize content on social media and in marketing emails, the investment will pay itself off. 

According to a recent Entrepreneur article, the majority of millennials share personalized content on social media:

"Achieving content personalization at the scale of millennials’ content consumption is daunting. How can you possibly scale to give everyone a unique brand experience. Yet, if you take the time to deliver content that users can care about, 50 percent of the time the survey respondents said they would share it on social media. It’s worth it to invest the time in the content that will make a connection with millennials early and make it deep."

Try to get an idea of the big picture ROI here. You have to invest a lot in your content strategy, but many members of your target audience will share it as a result. 

So in the case of millennials, content personalization is an easy decision. But before you start practicing it, realize that this might not hold true for other demographics. We've already said that the ROI of personalizing content for millennials is positive, but we couldn't estimate that for earlier generations. Before you start planning your content strategy, you have to keep in mind who you're marketing to. 

To talk more about content strategy, or anything else, please contact us. Thanks.