Tag: marketing tips

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Guest Post: 5 Important Social Media Tasks for New Businesses

by Guest Contributor February 26, 2019 No Comments

This week’s guest post is from Kambre Glover of Ka Media:

Building the social media presence for your business can be difficult in the beginning. You know that you need to be on social media, but you are not sure what you should be doing or how often. Social media is a great tool for businesses to connect with their audience, build trust, and convert followers to customers. Knowing what needs to be done on social media in order to build a community around your brand will not only help build your vanity metrics, such as likes and comments, but also create loyal customers and a community around the brand! I am breaking down 5 important solutions for your business’ social media growth. Understand Your Goals

Understand Your Goals

You want to use social media for your business but why? If you want to be successful at using social media for your business, you need to clearly define what success means for your page and your business specifically. When working with clients we typically identify 3 goals, so we can measure success and adjust our strategies as necessary. A few goals some businesses have are, to reach at least 10K followers (to benefit from specific features), increase website traffic, build email list, and so much more. Clarity is the first step to reaching your goals. Once you define your goals you need to define the strategy you will use to reach those goals. Social media is constantly changing so having your goals and plans clearly written and defined will give you something to refer to as time goes on and allow you to adjust your strategy when necessary.

Engage with Your Target Audience

Engaging on social media daily is a large part of growing your community. Stay active and communicate with your target audience and followers daily. When you have a small community, your audience may not be very engaged in the beginning but there are a few ways to help them become more active and start communicating with you! One way to increase your engagement is to ask your audience questions, by doing this you help your audience understand that you care about them and it also keeps them interested in your brand. Everyone wants to be included, right? Involve your audience in some behind the scenes activities to help them feel included. You can involve your audience behind the scenes by going live, using your Instagram or Facebook stories, or sharing the journey throughout your posts.

Share Relevant Content

Your target audience does not want to follow you if you are not sharing content that they are interested in. In order to gain their attention and keep it you must understand what they care about and give them more of that. You audience does not want to constantly see what you are selling, they want to be able to engage with you in other ways too. A best practice for sharing content is for 80% of your content to be engaging, informative, and entertaining and only 20% should be directly selling your product or service. This strategy ensures that you are building relationships with your audience and not constantly pushing your products or services on them. Testing different types of content and topics may result in a flux of engagement but it will also help you understand your target audience better. You will begin to understand what your audience likes by paying attention to what they engage with the most and the content that they share.

Use Calls to Action

What are calls to action (CTAs)? CTAs are what you ask your audience to do within your posts. Using relevant CTAs means you are using to copy of your content to get your audience to take a specific action whether it is liking or commenting on your post, reading your blog, or booking a meeting with you. In order to increase the amount of people who follow your CTAs, you must build connections and trust with your audience. Your CTA needs to clear and simple, so your audience will be more willing to do what it is that you are asking of them. A good practice I have implemented is to read the caption aloud then follow the directions I gave in the post exactly I wrote it to make sure it makes sense. If you have other people on your team, it may be good to have them or someone else do the same. Try using at least one call to action in every post to increase your audience’s interactions with you.

Be Consistent

Consistency is key. Being consistent will pay off, even when it does not feel like it. Consistency is another thing that helps build trust with your audience. Being consistent does not just mean you have to post every day, it means showing up for your audience consistently and having a consistent brand. Your brand should eventually become recognizable and to your audience but that cannot happen without consistency. For example, there are plenty comedians on social media, but the most popular ones typically have something they do or say in their videos that makes them recognizable. Try relating this tactic to your business to find out what part of your brand relates to your audience the most. Consistency also relates to the look and feel of your brand, your audience needs to understand what they can expect from you.

Social media for your business does not have to be as stressful and overwhelming as it has been for you in the past. Using the 5 solutions explained here will help increase your business’ social media presence. Successfully using social media for your business requires testing and paying attention to trends and changes on each platform. If you are looking for additional strategies to help you on social media, specifically Instagram, download the printable 10 Strategies to Grow Your Instagram. This downloadable list explains the 10 strategies I have used to build my Instagram. Download Here.

Kambre’ Glover is a digital brand strategist and the owner of KaMedia. She is dedicated to helping her clients on social media, so they can turn their followers in to loyal clients and customers. She has a passion for helping people reach their goals. Her passion began to develop before she even knew it, as she cheered on my family and friends through various endeavors.
Her love for helping others turn their skills and knowledge into money is what led her to begin working with entrepreneurs, particularly women. 

She loves seeing women succeed and help businesses flourish which she portrays through her involvement in events and projects surrounding women empowerment. She truly believes that anything you love doing can and should be a source of income for you and she will help you on that path. 

For more information on how KaMedia can help your business grow through social media take a browse our website to learn more! www.QueenKaMedia.com


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Guest Post: Ultimate Guide to Growing a Startup’s Social Media Audience

by Guest Contributor December 5, 2017 No Comments

It’s guest post week here on New Venture Mentor and today we’ll hear from Dan Taylor of Squadhelp about how a new business can grow its social media following. Here’s Dan: Continue Reading

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What Kit Harington Can Teach You About Marketing

by Cate October 30, 2017 No Comments

I’m a pretty big Game of Thrones fan (just like a zillion other people) so a story about the April Fools prank that Kit Harington (Jon Snow) played on his fiance, Rose Leslie (Ygritte) caught my eye. Continue Reading

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Guest Post: Why Guerilla Marketing is Alive and Well

by Guest Contributor August 14, 2017 1 Comment

Today’s guest post comes from Colour Graphics and is a great reminder that guerilla marketing tactics should not be overlooked by small business owners, so long as their ROI is being tracked. Here’s Colour Graphics with more details about how to make the most of your limited marketing budget: Continue Reading

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Guest Post: How to Market Your Small Business on a Small Budget

by Guest Contributor April 24, 2017 2 Comments

Advertising is an important aspect of any business strategy, especially when it comes to small businesses. As a small business owner, you need to figure out how to promote your company and get the consumers’ attention. Although this can sometimes require a lot of investment, you can still find low-cost, but effective marketing ideas for getting your business to the top. Owning a start-up means a lot of expenses and a limited budget, so you’ll be happy to hear that some of the following advertising options won’t cost you at all.

Creating a Professional Website

Nowadays, it’s impossible to expand and advertise your business without going online and building a website. Even if you don’t possess all the necessary skills, this has never been easier! All you need to do is find a free website builder and you’re good to go. If you really have no idea what you’re doing, you can either browse the Internet for a tutorial, or seek help from your friends, since the chances are that one of them will know how to create a website. Just one additional tip – when you get down to business, make sure not to build a website that is too complex to use, but follow the principle “the easier, the better”.

Starting a Blog

Another marketing strategy that anyone can afford is blogging. Similarly to creating a website, even if you don’t have experience in the area, you can easily find guides for starting a business blog. Once you start blogging, you should try to be consistent and publish on a regular basis. Feel free to write about various topics, from business-related to entertaining. This is a perfect opportunity to keep your customers up-to-date and in touch with you.

Joining Social Media

Social media play an important role in advertising, and, according to the statistics, 97 percent of the global businesses use social media for marketing. Depending on the nature of your business, you can create a profile on a variety of different social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Twitter. Once again, you should be active and post different materials regularly; otherwise, you’ll be forgotten in the sea of other posts.

Running Facebook Ads

The estimates show that there are more than 1.79 billion Facebook users who are active on a monthly basis, which makes Facebook a prolific platform for marketing. You don’t need a lot of investment for running a Facebook ad – with a limited budget you can reach out to consumers who differ in gender, age, education and interests. Even if they don’t immediately contact your company, they might like your page and become your potential consumers.

Content Marketing

Content marketing is a strategic approach that has been embraced world-wide. This marketing strategy differs from the others in that it focuses on creating interesting and relevant material, rather than simply promoting a product or a service. This way, you are able to address the problems and issues of your customers and help them find the solutions. The key feature of this marketing approach is content, so make sure that yours is interesting, of high quality and based on credible information.

Posting Commercials

You don’t need to create high-budget commercials in order to gain public attention. All you need is creativity and a well-developed plan, and the rest is just following the steps. Just find decent equipment, develop a scenario and start filming. During post-production, you can add some filters or cut out the parts that you don’t like. Afterwards, you can upload the commercial to YouTube. This won’t cost you a dime, and, with little effort, your commercial can go viral!

Producing an Email Newsletter

This is a great way of staying in touch with your current customers and contacting the potential ones. However, make sure not to send them ads; otherwise, your email will end up as a spam. Instead, inform your customers about the latest happenings and provide them with valuable information. You want to establish a relationship that will make them think of you when they need your type of product.

Distributing Flyers and Business Cards

Distribution of printed material is a great opportunity for promoting your business locally. This is another strategy that doesn’t require a sizeable amount of money. You can develop your own design for flyers and business cards and opt for custom printing to create unique material. When it comes to distribution, you can hire some students to hand out the material, or you can do it yourself with the help of your friends and family if you have enough time.

Joining LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a great business platform where you can connect with other companies and potential business associates. You can form a LinkedIn Group with the businesses from the same industry and share your interests. Additionally, you can even use this platform for posting about job openings and recruiting employees.

You don’t have to spend a fortune on promoting your business as long as you use some of these strategies efficiently. Find out which marketing approaches work for you and then focus on implementing them in a creative and innovative manner.

Emma Miller is a Sydney based writer with a degree in marketing. Interested in digital marketing, social media, start-ups and latest trends. She’s a contributor at Bizzmark blog.

 

 

 

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And don’t forget to support me as I rappel down the side of a 35-story building in downtown Chicago to raise money for minority and female entrepreneurs!

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Guest Post: Lessons a Small Business Owner Can Learn from a Professional Logo Designer

by Guest Contributor October 25, 2016 No Comments

We’re back with another guest post this week. This one comes from freelance writer Melissa Lang:

No matter what size of business you run, every business needs a company logo. When considering changes or rebranding to your original logo think about what it currently says to customers that have no prior experience with you. The big question is, how likely are you to engage with a brand that had a poorly designed logo?

A small business typically needs a logo more than an established brand. Your branding style has the ability to connect with your customer, and your company logo design is a representation of your brand.

For that reason, a great logo should subconsciously influence consumers to believe that your business sells great products. Show your customers your high standards of business with an enticing, quality logo and it is sure to build a connection quicker.

SMALL BUSINESS LOGO DESIGN ADVICE

“Symbolize and summarize.”

Logo Designer, Saul Bass created some of the world’s biggest businesses branding from Kleenex to American Airlines. He believed that a logo should send a message to consumers, even at a glance.

Do you believe that first impressions count? Truthfully, Business owners only really have one chance to make a good first impression and this is why so many rebrand. If you are running a small venture, an impressionable logo design could be a great way to catch your future customer’s eye whereas a poor design could damage your businesses reputation make consumers distrust you from the start.

There is a lot of work behind the logo design process and it should not only look attractive but it should show your business’ personality from just one look. It should also be transferable and useable across multiple mediums. There are lots of things to consider, but firstly have a look at our logo design tips, to gain some inspiration for your design:

HIRE A PROFESSIONAL LOGO DESIGNER

Remove all personal connection between you and your business logo design. The colours or images you love may not fit in with your business’s needs. By hiring some assistance, a professional they will be able to tweak the design from your imagination for business use. A professional logo designer’s perspective will take a more systematic approach to your design than an amateur would as they will break the process into:

  • research,
  • sketching
  • conceptualising
  • testing
  • final design

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CHOOSE COLOUR WISELY

In a study by ColourCom, it was proven that colour can increase a brand’s recognition by a huge 80%. Every colour has a different meaning, by telling your logo a bit more about your brand’s personality they will know exactly which of the following colours to use:

  • Red: signifies passionate, high energy and demands a call to action. Brands who use red: Red Bull and Virgin.
  • Blue: portrays trust and stability, often used by banking and finance brands. Brands who use blue: RBS and Facebook.
  • Yellow: stimulates optimism and positivity. Brand who use yellow: IKEA and Macdonalds.
  • Green: Often used to symbolise nature, recycling, and wildlife. Brands who use green: Whole Foods and Green Peace.
  • Purple: Effective when used for luxury and calm. Brands who use purple: Cadbury and Hallmark.

DON’T BE AFRAID OF CHANGE

Has your business evolved and you would like to show this in your logo design? Social media brand Instagram have done just that. In recent years Instagram has expanded and have added several new additions to their brand. They created a new design that would reflect how the diverse way consumers are now telling their stories, not just through text and image but through video and collages.  Ian Spalter, Instagram’s head of design believes that:

“Brands, logos, and products develop deep connections and associations with people, so you don’t just want to change them for the sake of novelty”.

Therefore, it is important to consider the needs and desires of your customers before you rebrand your logo design. Deciding to change your small businesses logo can be risky but changing to a professional logo design could freshen up the appeal of your brand.

LOGO DESIGN AND THE ART OF SIMPLICITY

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“I  strive for two things in design: simplicity and clarity. Great design is born of those two things.”

Lindon Leader, The FedEx Logo Designer hits the nail on the head with this statement. Any professional Designer should know when to close the design and accept that sometimes, less is more. Overworking your design shouldn’t distract you from other elements of your business.

Minimalistic design is becoming more popular for corporate organisations and millennials are starting to declutter their company logos. MasterCard is the most recent example of a brand which has stripped back their logo.

Creative Review claims that their “radically simple design that could only work for a brand as well-known as Mastercard” but there are many benefits of using a simple logo for a smaller business.

BENEFITS OF A SIMPLE LOGO

Clear: Sometimes a company’s purpose can get lost in a busy logo design. Your small business should create a logo which future customers can associate with your brand. By keeping your logo simple you are keeping it targeted. The message your small business will be sending out will be clean and clear.

Memorable: Think about it this way, what would you find easier to remember – one sentence or one paragraph? The fewer elements there are on your logo design, the easier it will be for your customers to remember, think McDonalds and Coca-Cola! These may be larger organisations but they have barely touched their logo designs – proving that simple can be just as effective.

Understandable: Consumers connect better with designs that they can understand. If a consumer can describe your logo it makes your business more accessible and familiar. This will also be beneficial if your consumer is trying to recommend your brand, as they will be able to describe it.

Convertible Across All Media: The simpler the design they easier it is to publish across different media. Consider how your logo will look on anything from print, web, stamps, material, signs, transfers etc.

PROFESSIONAL LOGO DESIGN

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Your logo is an extension of your brand just like your e-commerce website or physical business space. It is true that Humans respond better to images than they do to text and can process visuals 60,000 times faster than plain text

This shows the importance to small businesses about having a professional logo design which uses great imagery and typography. A visual identity creates a familiarity between your company and the customer.

Make sure your logo design strengthens your brand and supports your business’ message. There are lots of great logo designer’s out there that can design something that is both eye-catching and unique for your small business.

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Melissa Lang is freelance writer from Glasgow, Scotland. She is currently working for Repeat Logo and has a keen eye for all things design.

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A Marketing Homework Assignment for Business Owners

by Cate August 9, 2016 No Comments

I have a homework assignment for you today 🙂


We all know that it’s incredibly important for us to make the right impression on our potential customers, yet not many of us actually check in to see if the image we think we’re portraying is what our potential customers are actually seeing. So, I have a homework assignment for you to help you check just that. Continue Reading

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Guest Post: The “Promised Land” of Viral Growth

by Guest Contributor July 6, 2016 1 Comment

It’s guest post week. Here you go…

Startup companies can be exciting and challenging to run. Every day there’s a new trend emerging from the web or a new tactic to implement, but how do you get the best results in the shortest time? How to move the needle and lead your startup to the promised land? Viral growth.

Viral growth is when your company starts to exponentially grow at a super-fast pace, regardless of any increases in promotional investment. All your previous efforts pay off and your business surfs the wave of being promoted and endorsed by countless evangelists for absolutely no extra cost.

But that’s easier to say than to do. Very few startups reach this special condition and they all utilized the following tactics to achieve their viral growth:

Landing Page Optimization

Landing pages aim to be a simple and straight to the point first contact for potential customers so they can get a taste of what the company is about, presented in an inviting/teasing way. They are important since users will access only the most important information, without wasting time and reducing the risk of misinterpretation and bounce. There are great tools that even help you build a landing page.

Email Marketing

Email Marketing is still proven to be the best way to reach after businesses. There are two different approaches here: to send one single email model to all the companies at the same time (pro: saves time / con: reader might treat it as spam) or to write tailored emails to each company (pro: reader will definitely read the entire email since it will be unique / con: it’s more time-demanding).

Public Relations

Public relations is sometimes considered free advertising, but that’s a misnomer since one has to spend time to make it work. Good practices here are to reach out to industry bloggers through email or through their own blog contact section to propose to guest-blog for each other. Another path is to contact local business associations such as chambers of commerce to develop partnerships. Finally, local newspapers are another good channel for PR, but this one could be harder to fulfil.

SEO

SEO is also one of the main tools for startup success. The key here is good content creation. Invest time on blog writing using the right keywords to both attract readers and increase spiders-effectiveness, share content and engage on social media channels to make users mention your name/handle/page, and post comments and answers on websites while mentioning your company name and website URL. Use tools such as MOZ or SEMrush to find out the best keywords for us to use and write our content with that in mind.

Analytics

This (measuring) is at the core of viral growth strategy. However, using statistical tools such as Google Analytics to run A/B testing is not that doable for small companies because they simply don’t get enough traffic for that. For a company to run a test between only two different options it needs to have at least 24k visitors/month to achieve trustworthy metric results, otherwise the results might be misleading. The best alternative is to do qualitative research, which means asking your customers what they like and what they don’t like, what they want, etc. and the best way to do that is through quick surveys (Survey Monkey is your friend here). Besides that, analytics tools can be used to evaluate progressive overall results.

Behavioural Economics

This is all about understanding how customers make decisions and why they make them. Customers need to change their behaviour in order to start using your product. You have to offer a great product that’s glitch-free and that delivers more than the customers were expecting. 

Product Management

Companies always have to keep in mind the main problem their products aim to solve; what the core benefit is. In SlickPie’s case, we offer a tool for small business owners to do their accounting online. We offer this solution through a simple and easy-to-use software and we offer it for free. That’s it. This is what we solve, what we do, how we differ from others, etc. Every improvement we develop for our product needs to have these points as a north.

User OnBoarding

The goal with user onboarding is to improve the activation/retention steps. Users need to feel comfortable while exploring your website, learning about your product, and using it. Good tutorials are a must-have for SaaS businesses. Effecting onboarding is also used to motivate customers to help “spread the word”. Some useful actions to take here are to ask users to import their email contacts list or social media friends right after they sign up or to incentive users testimonials.

UX

Last but not least, user experience! This part is crucial for any startup to thrive. Even if your startup is not in the software industry, it’ll have a website, so a good user experience is also necessary. UX is especially important for SaaS companies since positive user experience leads to increased word of mouth, engagement, and growth. Here at SlickPie our greatest goal is to deliver delightful online accounting software experience to our customers. Some of the best approaches to achieve this are to track the features that are not being used by most of the users and end it to keep delivering a simpler experience.  We can’t simply ask them what they want or use, we have to measure what they actually do while using the software and find the bottlenecks in their way to solve problems.
These are the tactics used by all startups that turned into successful companies. They are pretty straight forward approaches, but they demand a lot of time investment to be accomplished.  However, if you do accomplish them, the promised land will eventually come!

 

Nick ChandiNick Chandi is the co-founder of SlickPie Online Accounting Software. SlickPie is a Vancouver based cloud accounting software helping start-ups, freelancers and small business owners by providing them with a simple and easy-to-use alternative to the bloated, overly-complex software in the market today. Nick is also CEO of Welcome Networks Inc., a cloud based virtual desktops provider to small businesses in Canada and USA.

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3 Options for Inexpensive Local Marketing

by Cate June 28, 2016 1 Comment

Today we’re answering a question from one of my followers on YouTube. +PredeKing wrote: “I would appreciate tips on inexpensive ways to market services to new clients in a specific region.” Well, that’s a big question, but let me give you a few ideas.

When you talk about marketing and getting your name out there, there are 3 basic categories – owned, earned, and paid. Owned is stuff like your website, which you control; earned is stuff like media attention, which you probably had to work to get but you don’t directly pay for; paid is advertising – you purchase time in front of potential customers.

So, let’s give one example of each type that you can utilize inexpensively to target customers in a specific region.

First up – paid. I’m actually going to give you two ideas here, the first being online advertising. With the ability to target Facebook and Google ads all the way down to people in a specific zip code, you can definitely target just a specific region using this type of advertising. While it may take a bit of experimenting to get the right ad, this method of marketing to your clients should definitely fall into the inexpensive category because you can test it out with very little cash and it’s easy to track the ROI so you should be able to tell pretty quickly if you’re making money. If the ads bring in more than you spend on them, you can go ahead and boost your investment.

The second idea for inexpensive paid, local, advertising is to sponsor some community events or youth sports teams. Now, not knowing how far along your business is, the few hundred to few thousand dollars this might cost may not be what you consider inexpensive, but if you’re a bit more established it might be, so I wanted to throw it out there.

Next up let’s talk about earned media. Earned media is actually a lot easier to get when you do want to target just a specific area because your local news outlets are hungrier for stories to cover because they don’t have the entire country’s or world’s happenings to pull from and they’re looking for a local connection, so you’re more likely to get chosen. If you want to get some earned media in your local area, do some research about a few of the most popular local newspapers, radio stations, and TV stations, get to know the reporters and what they write about, find a way to make whatever you offer relevant, and then let the reporters know. Now, you’re not going to be able to just talk a reporter into doing a piece all about you and your business, which would basically be a free advertisement, but there are ways to get coverage. Try pulling together an industry report with data that would be of interest to the audience or hosting a charity event that benefits the local community and asking the press to cover it, or offer yourself up as an expert commentator for stories related to a particular topic. If you’re persistent, you’ll be able to get some coverage.

Finally, we have owned. When you’re targeting clients only a specific area, you should be sure that all of your owned marketing materials cater to that region. If there is something special and unique about the area you’re targeting, give it a nod in your marketing materials. If your area just experienced any big events or changes, discuss how your offering is being sensitive to the fall-out. Even more hyper-focused, maybe offer a discount to those only in the specific area you’re targeting. For example, let’s say you have a lawn care company and you lose a bunch of money having your crew drive all over town all of the time and go back and forth this way and that way – once you book a job in a particular neighborhood, send something out to the other homeowners in the neighborhood saying you’ll give them a discount if they also sign up for lawncare on the day you’ll be in that neighborhood anyway. That way, you bring in some customers with the discount but you make up for it with the savings of not having your crew traveling all over town.

Those are just a few ideas for how to market to potential customers in a specific region without spending a ton of money. Please feel free to share any others you have in the comments below.

If you’re an aspiring entrepreneur, the best thing you can do for yourself is to just get started. Pick up my business planning ebook here to be guided through the whole business planning process for less than $5. More of a video person than a text person? Click here to try my ecourses instead.