Today is Palomar Marketing's first Twitterversary. Time for a celebration!
4 Quick Tips for Successful Lead Generation
Getting new leads are essential if you want to grow your business, but lead generation isn't always easy. Fortunately, there are a few tips that can help make your program a success.
1. THE PLAN
Before starting any lead generation campaign make sure to plan out what your business goal is. Whether it’s foot-traffic, sales, clicks, or referrals, setting up an end goal will help you define your program structure.
2. THE OFFER
If your lead generation plan calls for using incentives to attract prospects, be smart about what you choose. Make sure you can fulfill the offer is whether 10 people or 10,000 decide to take you up on it. Be realistic in both what you can afford and what you can manage. You don't want your lead generation program to create disgruntled prospects.
3. THE RESULTS
Make sure to closely monitor your program and switch things up if you're not seeing the results you want. Test out different strategies to see if something else attracts better leads or proves more cost-effective.
4. THE FOLLOWUP
Finally, follow up on every new lead. If they're not ready to buy just yet, enroll them in a lead nurturing campaign. Once you win their business, you’ll want to retain them as customers so create a retention strategy and get busy.
Please contact us for more strategies on optimizing your lead generation programs.
Insider Secrets to Outstanding Competitive Analysis
If you have a business, you most likely have a competitor. You want to identify your competitor (or competitors), what their products are, who their clients are, and figure out how you can be better. We give you three little known tips.
#1 Use Social Media
Besides using Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest to spread information and news about your business and engage with your current customers, you can also keep tabs on your competitor, who his clients are and what they’re looking for, and identify new services or products you can offer before your competitor does. Also, you can see what is working for your competitors and then find ways to improve upon what they are offering. For example, if one of their best selling products is a training course on learning to code over email, you can offer one that offers training via video conferencing.
#2 Market Surveys
These surveys should be utilized after your have identified your competitors and their services and products. Pore through market surveys to find out what the market is crying out for, that you haven’t created a product for. Now compare that to your competitors’ products. Do they already have a solution? Can you create a product that solves the problem better? Do it – or improve on what you already have.
#3 All the Tools You Will Ever Need
Don’t know where to start on competitor analysis? There is one easy article that will give you more tools than you know what to do with: Entrepreneur’s 37 Marketing Tools to Spy on Your Competitors. You don’t have to use them all but use at least one from each category.
By implementing these techniques, you can make appropriate business decisions to help you out manuever your competition.
Please contact us for more guidelines on performing competitive analysis that can help you out pace your competition.
3 Killer Apps to Boost Your Presentation Development
Professional presentations take time, organization, and engaging content to be effective. You know you've gotten it right when you get audience interaction, and signs that you've reached people with your message. One way to get people's attention is to change things up a little. Try something that looks a little different to what they're used to. Here are five online presentation apps that may be just the thing you need to shake things up a little.
1. Prezi. A Web-based app focusing on the aesthetic aspect of presentations, Prezi provides a unique way to deliver messages visually and make your audience sit up and take notice. Instead of slides, Prezi has you put all of your content on a giant virtual canvas. When it comes time to present, Prezi flies the audience over your canvas, rotating and zooming to show the next chunk of content. It's a bit hard to explain, but easy to understand once you see it in action. I suggest you check out some sample prezi's to get the idea. You can download the app, or create and edit presentations from virtually anywhere you have internet access, since Prezi is cloud-based.
One of the sample presentation son the Prezi site.
2. Present.me. This web-service lets you build presentations that include you. It lets you present your ideas "face-to-face" even when you're not there to present them in person. You can think of it as a presentation you deliver on demand. It's a clever way to shake up the way people watch recorded presentations, and worth a look if you ever have to send your presentations to people unaccompanied.
Slides and video of presenter are always in sync so viewer can switch back and forth at their leisure.
3. PhotoSnack. Create artful and clean photo slideshows simply by logging into your Google, Facebook or Twitter account. Next, select and upload photos from your computer, or from photo sharing services like Flickr and Instagram. Photosnack helps you arrange your photos in themed presentation templates for a quick, easy, well designed presentation. The free version creates a small watermark on each picture in a presentation, while the paid version is watermark-free.
PhotoShack is a quick and easy way to create a photo-based presentation.
Using the 5 W’s for Better Presentation Designs
It’s happened to the best of us in the business world. We’re sitting in a large room with uncomfortable seating and doing our best to keep our eyes open. It’s not the content that we aren’t interested in it’s the presentation of the content that is putting us to sleep. Nothing can kill an employee training, a selling presentation, or a bid for a contract than a poorly developed presentation. Without a good presentation design your presentation will ultimately bore, put to sleep, and chase what could have been a strong customer base away.
Chefs in the poshest of restaurants have known the secret to presentation design for decades. The taste of the food is only half of what sells a signature dish to the customer. Presentation is what often wows and brings patrons back again and again to try out the new entrees of an established eatery. A strong presentation design can make the blandest of information interesting just like a great chef can make meatloaf appear to be a delicacy.
As a presenter, designing a presentation to attract and maintain the attention of your stakeholders is detrimental. In order to do this successfully you need to know the answers to the 5 W’s; who, what, why, when, and where.
Who
Who is making the presentation is just as important as knowing who the target audience is. When developing a presentation take into consideration the type of person giving the presentation. Is the person male or female? Do they read from the slides or are they able to speak from memory on a topic? Placing a person who cannot remember key facts with presentation slides that only list topics without information can be disastrous.
Your target audience is generally made up of the businesses stakeholders. Stakeholders are defined as any person or group of people who are invested whether financially or not in the business. To put it simply, a stakeholder is an employee, client, investor, or community. Your presentation design needs to be appealing to your stakeholders. To do this in the best possible way you should take some time to learn more about their culture or cultures, level of professionalism, and how the information you are presenting is invaluable to them. Keep in mind that although you may not be presenting to all of your stakeholders you will want to develop you presentation as if you will be. Many stakeholders wear different hats in a corporation.
What
As the developer of the presentation design it is up to you to make the information appealing and easily received by your audience. You cannot do this if you don’t have a solid understanding of what you are presenting. Furthermore, what you are presenting directly impacts how you design your presentation slides. You wouldn’t pair statistics on car crashes with a slide depicting balloons. The knowledge you are conveying needs to be understood in order to be appropriately received by the audience.
Why
Presentations are done for a number of reasons. The corporation may be interested in gaining new investors, new clients, or new employees. A non-profit organization might be looking to extend knowledge on important community topics to the public. As you put together your presentation design reflect on why this presentation is important. Answering that question will give you the ability to communicate to your audience more effectively through the presentation design.
When
Some presenters and keynote speakers may not feel that knowing when the presentation is to be given effects how it is received. Many in the business world may tend to disagree and feel that timing has a large effect on the overall success of a presentation design. As the developer it is wise to think about what time of day the presentation will take place. If it will be done in the evening then adding action and sound effects may help keep the audience engaged as attention spans tend to lessen in the evening. Presentations occurring after lunch may need more graphics and color to help with keeping interest peaked. Early morning presentations may want to skip out on loud sound effects and bright colors as these enhancers are not always well received at this time of day.
Where
Presentation design is undoubtedly affected by venue at which the presentation is to take place. Is it to be held in a large conference room, an auditorium, or a small office? Are there sound and projector capabilities available? What are the acoustics like? If possible take a tour of any unfamiliar venues where you may be presenting. Not being able to see or hear the presentation can definitely smother its effectiveness.
It’s not too late….use the 5 W’s to breathe new life into old presentation designs!
Have a few presentations that need dressing up? Give the 5 W’s a try and let the process guide you into making those old presentations refreshed and appealing. What have you got to lose but a few dried up power point slide?
Need help? Contact us here and we at Palomar Marketing will be more than happy to guide you.