by Dotun Olagbadebo | Nov 27, 2017 | Online Marketing
6 Creative Ways to Market Your Small Business
Are you a small business with big marketing ideas? Budget can limit the executing of these ideas. However, not every successful strategy requires a lot of money. Here are six inexpensive, effective and creative ways to market your small business.
1. Get personal.
Customers love the opportunity to make something their own. Take the “Share a Coke with” campaign by Coca-cola. If there’s a way for you to allow customer customization, give it a try and see how your audience responds.
- Promote customer engagement.
We live in a “tweet it, post it” world so, whatever you can do to make your small business more shareable is good for marketing. Create an opportunity for photo ops and increase your social reach without spending a kobo. Add a prize as an incentive to get people to use your hashtag or tag your business in their posts.3. Say thanks.
How often do you let your customers know that you appreciate them? You’d be surprised the power a simple “thank you” can have on creating customer loyalty. How about hosting a special event where guests can sample new menu items, or showcase the season’s new arrivals with a fashion show? Any event that builds excitement and celebrates the customers will do the job.
4. Develop a loyalty program.
If you’re losing customers, you need to establish a way to cultivate repeat business. Your loyalty program can be as basic as a punch card or as elaborate as a membership that rewards customers based on how often they visit or even how much they spend.
5. Utilize LinkedIn.
LinkedIn is one of the most frequently skipped social media networks for small businesses. While not the most exciting platform, it does provide unique opportunities for marketing your business. You can connect with people in your community by creating a group and reaching out to other small business owners and potential customers in your area without spending a dime.
6. Do a Customer Survey.
If you’re not sure what types of marketing or promotions your customers will respond to best, ask them. A simple survey can provide endless insight into what you’re doing right and wrong, and what you’re not doing that you should be. Include a raffle-like component, where one participant will win a prize to encourage your audience to take part.
by Dotun Olagbadebo | Nov 20, 2017 | Web Design
Give Your Work a Boost with These Web Apps
Find below some hot web apps guaranteed to give your web design work a boost in terms of workflow management, online sharing, form field analysis, and product marketing.
InVision
With this web app, you can upload design files, add animations and transitions, and create a high-fidelity prototype in 5 minutes or less. InVision provides solid solutions to many of the day-to-day issues designers and design teams typically have to deal with; ranging from prototyping activities to collaboration and task management. This web app’s user base is made up of corporate customers, startups, design agencies, and individual designers.
Proto.io
Proto.io helps everyone from entrepreneurs to design teams or product managers improve their design processes and boost their productivity, by the ease in which they can create realistic, interactive, and code-free sharable prototypes. The Proto.io package includes beautifully crafted iOS, Android, Windows, and watchOS UI components. You can import your Sketch and Photoshop designs. It becomes only a matter of taking your static designs, and incorporating animations, interactions, and transitions to bring those designs to life.
Sendloop
Sendloop gives you the ability to grow your web design business using effective email campaigns that can cause conversion rates to soar. It offers some pretty hefty marketing capabilities, and it doesn’t require any coding or special technical expertise to put them into play. All that is required is the ability to brand and customise any of this web app’s 100+ professionally designed email templates.
Paymo
A Kanban board is a proven work and workflow visualization tool. Paymo offers the Kanban approach to web designer teams. This modern project management tool provides online, offline, and automatic time management and time tracking functions. Paymo highlights progress toward project goals and objectives. It provides summaries of past and current workflow activities. It stores and shares project information
MeisterTask
MeisterTask solves a common problem web designers encounter. You have your website and mobile app design, and prototyping ducks in order, and you’re good to go. Part way into your project however, you realize that keeping your workflow running smoothly is taking up way too much of your time. You’ll recoup that time, and more, by allowing MeisterTask to manage your workflow for you. This intuitive web app adapts its flexible Kanban-based project boards to fit your workflows.
Form Analytics by Use It Better
If you are experiencing lower than anticipated conversion rates, and you rely on forms for customer feedback or call to action support, those forms could be partially, or totally to blame. Form Analytics by Use It Better collects and analyses form field data. It indicates which fields are completed, and which fields, or forms, are abandoned. This web app is free for small scale users. It is worth its weight in gold when it gives you the information you need to take remedial action, so your forms can contribute to your conversion rates, rather than holding them back.
by Dotun Olagbadebo | Nov 20, 2017 | SEO
Essential Tips to Master Your SEO Conversion
Search Engine Optimisation is a staple when it comes to any digital campaigns. Through SEO, you can accurately provide what your customers need as they search the web. The options online are endless. As a marketer or business owner, make sure that you master your SEO Conversion. the following are easy steps you can take to master your SEO conversion.
1. Use Your Data Wisely
Google Analytics can help you identify your target market properly. You will be able to understand what your customers need and know just how to address them.
Your website, social media channels, and blogs are brimming with data that you should not ignore. Study and analyse this data because this can give you the following information:
The behaviour of your audience on your website.
- Items or links commonly used by the users.
- Website features that are not used.
- The best performing social media channels.
- The impact of pictures, videos, articles, and other elements.
- Time of the day when there is more traffic to your website.
- The features on your website that need improvement.
2. Conduct A/B Tests
After collecting and carefully analysing your data about customers, never assume, but rather test your hypotheses. One of the critical elements in SEO conversion is testing. Any marketer or business owner must run A/B tests to know what works and what doesn’t, what needs troubleshooting and what to avoid altogether. A/B testing means running a test between two version of a website to check which ones perform better. Consequently, the version that wins is the one which gives a high rate of conversion. Check out various A/B testing tools on the web to run your comparison.
3. Highlight the Features of Your Product or Service
Your customers see many advertisements every day. Various products and service promos are right in front of their eyes. Do not let your product or service drown among all of these things. Once customers visit your website, make sure that they see the focal points of your product and service features.
4. Excite Your Visitors When They See Your Landing Page
Upon arriving at a website, customers only have a few seconds to view your site. If nothing seems attractive to them in that span of time, they will automatically leave and go on to another website. Stay simple and straight to the point.Show premium quality.Offer the exclusivity of a feature.Create something fun.Always be authentic.
5. Do Not Ask Everything
Limit the information you request from customers. Do not exhaust your website visitors by asking a lot of questions, if you do they will automatically leave your site. Ask only a few necessary items.
6. Create a Guarantee for All Purchases
Give your customers peace of mind by telling them that you will give them a refund should something go wrong with the product or service. You can offer a 1-year warranty service, free-replacement within a specific period, or a no-questions-asked full refund. This offer is a useful SEO conversion trick because it reduces risks on the part of the customer. Furthermore, they can just buy your product knowing that their money is safe.
7. Make Payment Easy
Make the buying process easy. One way to promote SEO conversion is by offering various payment options to customers. Below are some of the payment options you can explore:
PayPalCredit or Debit Cards
- Wire Transfers
- Online Banking
- ePayments
- Electronic Check
- Mobile Payments
8. Highlight Great Customer Reviews
Let your website sell your products through customer reviews. Allow customers to leave comments and feedback about their experience with your website and the offers you provide. When your visitors see that others are satisfied, it will make their buying decision easier. In addition to that, do not discourage negative reviews. These comments will help you improve.
9. Chat with Your Customers
Sometimes, your customers are too tired to go through your website. They need immediate answers to their urgent needs. To address this, offer a live chat feature so that you can provide real-time information to your site visitors. Chat tools are an excellent SEO conversion feature.
10. Provide Contact Details to Your Audience
Make correspondence easy by including contact details on your website. Providing these makes you more reliable to the customers, too.
Also, some of your customers would prefer to speak to an actual person. They will look for a contact number on your website which they can call. Make your contact details easy to find and clear.
by Dotun Olagbadebo | Nov 13, 2017 | Social Media Tools
Top Tips to Make Your LinkedIn Profile Pop
Though LinkedIn is more business than social, like every other social media, a boring profile is a huge turn off. LinkedIn is one place you can’t forget. The more you put in, the more you’ll get out of it. A killer LinkedIn profile is mandatory if you want to grow your personal brand and company.
Wow future connections, and grow your influence on LinkedIn with these top tips to make your LinkedIn profile pop.
1. Update your Profile
Many people forget to keep their LinkedIn profiles updated. Whether you’re a newbie, just starting a new job or starting to explore new opportunities, outdated information on LinkedIn will reflect badly on you. There are two areas you must keep up to date; your Professional Headline and your Location & Industry. Doing these two simple things will help more people find you and help you find more relevant potential contacts.
2. Professional Photos Only
LinkedIn profiles that have a picture are 11 times more likely to be viewed.
Your LinkedIn photo should be up to date and show you as you look now. It shouldn’t look like it belongs on a dating site, or social network. LinkedIn is for professionals. Be one.
3. Brand Your Profile with a Background Photo
Give your profile page a bit more personality, or branding, with a visually appealing background image. LinkedIn advises users to use an image (PNG, JPG, or GIF) with a resolution of 1400×425.
4. Write a Good Summary
Your summary should expand on what appears in your headline, highlighting your specialties, career experience, noteworthy accolades, and thought leadership. Keep your ego in check, focus on the most relevant details about your career, avoid meaningless jargon, and ensure it’s easy to read.
5. Check your Grammar and Spelling
Poor grammar, typos, and misspellings are a sure way to kill your profile. Avoid typos at all costs.
6. Use the right Keywords
Identify the words you want to be found for when people use LinkedIn search and use those keywords in your headline, summary, and profile. Using the right keywords will expose you to more potential connections and opportunities.
7. Pick the “Other” Website Option
Under your Contact Info, LinkedIn gives you the option to link to a website or blog. But by default, the text that shows in your profile is the extremely dull “Blog” or “Website.” Anyone visiting your profile has no clue where they’ll end up if they click on that. When editing the Websites area of your profile, select the “Other” option. Now you can add your own website title and URL.
8. Own Your Media
Visual content is only growing in importance. Help your LinkedIn profile pop by adding documents, photos, videos, and presentations.
9. Tidy Up Your Endorsements
People are going to endorse you for all sorts of skills–sometimes even skills you don’t actually have. LinkedIn lets you remove any irrelevant skills and endorsements. You should avoid “lying” about your skill set, even if it is by omission.
10. Connect With People You Don’t Yet Know
One of the biggest mistakes people make on LinkedIn is failing to reach out to connect with people you want to know but don’t yet. That’s the whole point of networking–getting to know new people, not just established connections. Building out your LinkedIn network has many benefits. You get in front of influencers. You get more endorsements. More people see your best content, share that content, and visit your website. And it’s great for personal branding.
11. Personalize Invitations to Connect
When you invite someone to connect, make it more personal–mention where you met or a topic you discussed in a LinkedIn group, over email, or during a phone interview. This personal touch will increase the odds they’ll accept your request.
12. Publish Amazing Posts
LinkedIn posts offer another way to grow your influence, gain more visibility, and acquire new followers. Your existing connections are notified whenever you publish. New people can discover your posts via search. Always think about the audience you want to reach. Highlight your expertise and interests by posting awesome content. Just make sure your posts are appropriate for the 400 million business professionals who use LinkedIn.
by Dotun Olagbadebo | Nov 13, 2017 | Web Design
10 Hot WordPress Plugins for Business Websites
Having the right set of tools can help you take your business to the next level. Below are the hot WordPress plugins for business websites.
- OptinMonster is the most popular conversion rate optimization software. It allows you to convert abandoning website visitors into email subscribers. If you want to grow your email list, then this is a must have WordPress plugin in 2017.
- As a business owner, allowing your customers to contact you should be your top priority. WPForms is the most beginner friendly contact form plugin for WordPress. This drag & drop online form builder allows you to easily create contact forms, email subscription forms, order forms, payment forms, and other type of online forms with just a few clicks.We use it on WPBeginner and all of our other sites. There’s a free WPForms Lite version available for those who are looking for a simple solution. If you want more advanced features, then get the Pro version.
- MonsterInsights is the best Google Analytics plugin for WordPress. It allows you to connect your website with Google Analytics, so you can learn more about your website visitors such as where are they coming from and what are they doing on your website. You can then optimize your site accordingly to improve your earnings.
- Constant Contact is one of the best email marketing service providers. It allows you to build an email lists and send emails to your subscribers. It is by far the most beginner friendly platform, with quick and easy setup. It comes with built-in tools to add signup forms and also works well with lead generation software like OptinMonster.
- Sucuri’s web application firewall is probably one of the best protection you can get for your site. They monitor and protect your site from DDoS, malware threats, XSS attacks, brute force attacks, and basically every other type of attack. If you don’t have a firewall on your website, then add one today.
- Yoast SEO (formerly known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) is one of the most popular WordPress plugins. It allows you to optimize your WordPress site for search engines. It not only helps you add meta tags, it optimizes your site as a whole.
- Speed is one of the most important SEO factors. Faster websites rank higher in Google, this means more visitors for your business website and more conversions. W3 Total Cache allows you to serve compressed and cached files to your visitors. This reduces the load on your server and your website becomes faster.
- Testimonials allow you to showcase your past clients and their feedback about your services of products. People love to hear what others have to say about your business. It helps you gain trust and build lasting relationships with your clients. Testimonials Widgets makes it super simple to add customer testimonials on your WordPress site.
- If you need a solution for your business website where your users can book and pay for appointments, then BirchPress is the solution for you. It allows you to easily add a complete online booking system to your WordPress site.
- When launching a new product or website, you may need to add a FAQs section in WordPress. You can add a new page with all the frequently asked questions (FAQs), but in most cases FAQs grows as your product evolves and as your customer base grows. By adding the FAQ section, you can significantly reduce your support overhead and improve conversion.
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