How Can Outsourced Marketing Save a Startup Money?

Starting a business is an uphill climb made steeper by a lack of money, making it important to save on marketing costs whenever possible. The trick is to market cost-effectively as opposed to cheaply, because poor marketing can snuff a business out before it ever truly begins. Outsourcing the marketing function can save a startup’s money, while helping grow its clientele.

Lower Costs Per Lead

Generating quality leads requires effective campaign management and the right lead collection techniques. It’s also a process that takes real-world experience and technical competency, if it’s going to be done cost-effectively. Most startups do not have personnel with extensive marketing backgrounds, because entrepreneurs are typically technical gurus or innovators, not marketing experts. Marketing professionals can help drive down the cost per lead by leveraging their experience and knowhow.

Less Trial & Error

Marketing plans include a variety of online and offline marketing mediums, which in tandem are designed to attract the right types of clientele. However, it can take entrepreneurs a lot of trial and error to find the right mix of marketing programs to generate the right amount of interest in a new product or service. This trial and error period can lead to higher expenses, which in turn can make it harder to get a startup off the ground. Outsourced marketing services can make it easier to find the right marketing programs sooner, saving startup companies a lot of capital and effort.

Lower Overhead Costs

Maintaining a dedicated marketing workforce costs money in terms of salaries and benefits. In particular, benefits may be difficult for startups to pay given the limited funds they have to work with. Outsourcing to marketing professionals can lower overhead costs when capital is in short supply. The net result being a higher chance of success for startups, when they work with outsourced marketing professionals.

Marketing is something that many startups simply can’t do without, because it’s essential for bringing in new customers and enhancing brand awareness. Outsourced marketing professionals have the experience and knowhow to help startups fine-tune their marketing plans, helping them thrive during their first years in business. If you have a startup and need marketing, please contact us.

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.

Your Designer PowerPoint Presentation Is Like a Business Card on Steroids

In the days when beepers and business cards were the main connectors between the sales force and future sales, beepers were hit and miss, and business cards were informational without adding much to your presentation resources.

Along came the smartphone and digitized business cards. Smartphones now have the computing capacity many thousands of times in excess of what NASA used to go to the Moon and back, and you can dispatch a personal and company business card at the speed of light via e-mail. You can also launch an online link to your professionally-designed PowerPoint presentation via Twitter, Linked-In and Facebook -- a business card on steroids.

Out with the clunky 

In fact, your business presentation tools -- a PowerPoint deck of professionally engineered slides, for example -- have matured from the clunky carousel projector to a totally portable, scalable and shareable resource.  

The connection between the seller and the customer

Your sales rep might have picked up on the customer’s good, neutral or negative vibes during a PowerPoint sales presentation. However, even the most experienced sales rep is no mind reader, all that smartphone and sales presentation technology notwithstanding. Badly designed presentations cluttered with too much of everything reflect poorly on you and your product and could be a tie-breaker when the customer has a tough choice between you and a competitor.

PowerPoint is still a player

PowerPoint may be the platform that people love to hate, but it remains an important and accessible tool in your marketing tactics. Visuals and content are key and can be the difference between a glassy-eyed, no-sale stare and a successful sale.

Contact us and we’ll show you how to leverage all your great marketing and sales presentation work into a PowerPoint presentation that will you and your customers will actually love.

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.