by seller_bot | Feb 13, 2019 | Our Blog
Let’s talk about human nature for a second. If I were to offer you a succulent, moist, still warm-from-the-oven piece of triple chocolate cake…
…while simultaneously slamming my heel into your toes…
…which one would you notice?
Which one would you react to?
And which one would you still be thinking about tomorrow?
People will spend an enormous amount of time, money and energy to avoid pain. They’ll avoid confrontation with bosses, neighbors, spouses and kids to avoid emotional pain. They’ll take drugs to suppress physical pain.
Your job as a successful marketer – whether you like it or not – is to use this pain to help them find a solution.
Some might call this exploitation – digging around in the pain and agitating it to motivate people to take action. You’re making the pain worse before you finally prescribe the cure.
But it’s the pain that makes people take action. And if you can help people, then it’s your job to do it. And to help people, you’ve got to use the best method possible to motivate them to take action – which is aggravating the pain and making them feel it until they cry ‘uncle.’
I know what you’re thinking – you won’t make their pain worse to sell them the solution. Instead, you’ll motivate them with a positive picture of what their life will be like once they have the solution. Well, you’re half right. Understand this – Humans will do far more to avoid pain than to receive reward. They’ll run as fast as they can away from the stick, but they’ll creep up on the carrot and many times never even reach it.
Most people cannot clearly describe what they want, which is why they never get it. But they can tell you exactly what they don’t want. By rubbing their noses in what they’re trying to avoid, you momentarily make the pain worse until it’s unbearable. They want to take action now. They NEED to take action NOW.
And then you motivate them with the positive picture of all the benefits they’ll receive from doing this thing you want them to do. The niche doesn’t matter, either. Whether you’re selling software, information, washers and dryers or stocks and bonds, agitate the problem, then offer the solution.
Examples:
Software
– how much work are they having to do, and how much business are they missing because they don’t have your automated solution?
They’ve already wasted tons of time and lost a fortune. Their competitors are ahead of them, and soon their business will be on the scrap heap.
Unless… unless they grab your software now, because then they can get x benefit and y benefit and z benefit, etc.
Health Information
– they’re overweight, tired, catching colds and at risk for serious disease. From here, it only gets worse
– much worse. Sick, in pain, bed ridden, in the hospital, heart attacks and chemo and drugs and …
but wait. They can turn their health around, starting right now.
Washers and dryers
– think how much extra they’ve already paid in water bills because they don’t have energy efficient models.
Plus, the wear and tear to their clothes from inferior washers and overheating dryers, their shoddy appearance wearing these clothes, making a lousy first impression at work because of how bad their clothes look. But you can solve it all today…
Investments
– they’ve already lost a fortune by not using your services. Just look at the returns your clients have been getting, look at how much money they started with versus what they have today.
If only they had started with you sooner, all the time and money lost. But right now you have perhaps your best investment advice yet, but it’s a super hot market and timing is critical…
Okay, you get the idea. No matter what you’re selling, you can agitate the problem and then offer the solution.
Remember, in movies the hero doesn’t arrive to save the day until things look completely bleak and desperate and the cause is all but lost. Effective marketing is no different.
by seller_bot | Feb 6, 2019 | Our Blog
Your target market must be small enough that the resources you’re able to commit will have a big impact.
Imagine carrying the heaviest rock you can hold and dropping it into a small pond. The splash would be huge, loud and noticed by anyone around, and the ripples would cover the entire surface.
Now imagine dropping that same rock into the middle of the ocean. No one would even notice. Imagine dropping a rock 100 times that size in the middle of the ocean. Again, no one would notice a thing.
The rock, of course, is your resources.
When new marketers come to me looking for advice, I ask them who their target market is. Nine times out of ten, it’s, “Everyone who wants to ___.” It might be everyone who needs to lose weight, make money or whatever. It doesn’t matter. Their market is too big and they’ll never get noticed.
But if they target teachers who want to make extra money online, or nurses, or fast food workers, they’ll probably make a killing.
Still not convinced? Think of the pond versus the ocean, and the rock as being your marketing. How much marketing will you have to do to get noticed in the ocean? You’ll need the resources of a Coca-cola to do it.
Now imagine getting noticed in the pond. Heck, if you just stand up and say, “I’ll teach everyone in the pond how to lose 10 pounds this month, or how to make $1,000 a month online,” you’ll get noticed right away.
When someone describes their market too broadly, I know they’re going to fail. But when they know exactly who their audience is and how they’re going to reach them, I know they’ll do fine
by seller_bot | Jan 22, 2019 | Our Blog
The Secret Copywriters NEVER Tell You
It’s all about fancy copywriting and Jedi mind tricks to make the sale with your copy, right? After all, that’s what most copywriters will tell you.
However, at least half the battle is won via selection of your audience, rather than how good your message, your copy or your offer is. If you’ve got mediocre marketing aimed at a highly targeted and well selected audience, you’ll get great results.
But if you’ve got exceptional, world-class, you-hired-the-best-ofthe-best copywriter kind of marketing aimed at the wrong market or even a poorly targeted market, at the very best you’ll get mediocre results. And odds are, you won’t even do that well.
You need to know who your customers are and where to find them.
Who is your ideal client?
What do they want, what do they need, what are their objections, and what do they look for in your product or service?
Here’s an easy example – not all targeting is this simple, but it gives you the idea:
You have a pet-related product and so you target all pet owners. That is sloppy targeting, and yet I see it daily. Or, you have a cat product for senior cats who have chronic kidney disease.
Now you know exactly who your market is – no, it’s not cats with kidney disease, it’s their humans. Talk to them, find out their struggles, fears, worries, problems and so forth with dealing with this disease. Ask them why they try so hard to keep their kitties healthy rather than go get a new, younger cat (if you’ve ever loved a pet, you already know the answer to that one.)
When you have a product that can help these particular cat owners, you can have a sloppy marketing campaign and it won’t matter a bit – they will buy, I guarantee it.
Spend half your marketing time finding out exactly who your market is and targeting those people. Spend the other half crafting your marketing message, and you will have a marketing campaign that cannot lose.
by seller_bot | Jan 26, 2018 | Our Blog
The marketing budget is a sensitive area to discuss when it comes to small businesses, as in an ideal world people would flock to your site, and you could save your precious money. But, unfortunately, we don’t live in a perfect world, and marketing is a huge component to achieving success with your company.
However, there are certainly ways to keep your marketing spend to a minimum, and the most popular right now is Facebook video ads. To put it into perspective—you could pay thousands for TV commercials, be exposed to the masses and 99% of them may not be interested in your product or service.
On the other hand, you could utilize content marketing which is completely free. However, that simply does not produce results like Facebook video ads do. Content marketing is typically performed with the long-term in mind, rather than quick growth which is what a small business often needs.
But, with Facebook video ads, you can make every single penny you have count. Firstly, you can laser-target an audience that is interested in your niche to ensure every view has the potential to covert well. Secondly, the cost is extremely flexible depending on how much you are able to spend.
For instance, if you are just starting out and have very limited capital, you could begin a campaign for as little as $5 per day. This may not produce mouth-watering results, but it could get enough views to get you off the ground. In addition, you can then scale it as much as you want, in accordance with your budget.
Furthermore, Facebook video ads have been proven to produce extremely impressive engagement and conversion rates. It makes sense, right? If you’re laser-targeting thousands upon thousands of people, it’s inevitable that you’re going to receive a high percentage of views.
Then, if you’ve optimized your video for a newsfeed, and it is high quality, a good proportion of those views are likely to transition into conversions. Ultimately, for small net spending in comparison to other methods, you’ll generate leads which could be the difference between your business failing and your business flourishing.
Facebook video ads are a smart choice for the small business budget. There are too many benefits to ignore. Think about it—there must be a reason why Facebook video ads are taking the marketing scene by storm!
by seller_bot | Jan 24, 2018 | Our Blog
3 Ways to Target New Customers with Facebook Video Ads
Facebook is a platform that is home to over a billion people across the world. Now, if you capitalize on that audience correctly, you can generate tons of leads or even direct sales. So, you’re probably wondering how you can tap into Facebook’s huge number of uses, right? Well, you can set up a video ad campaign, and target specific audiences relevant to your niche.
Facebook video ads is a marketing strategy that is so effective, and that is because it has such staggering conversion and engagement rates. There have been a multitude of studies in recent times, and they all point towards people preferring to watch a video over anything else. Plus, surveys also revealed that Facebook users regularly interact with video content on the platform.
But, to run a successful campaign, you must be aware of some strategies that will ensure you aren’t wasting precious money. Here are some brilliant ways to target new customers with Facebook video ads.
Create appropriate ads for the relevant audience
If you’re starting your first campaign, then you’ll most likely be targeting what’s known as cold traffic. This is an audience that isn’t currently aware of your brand or products but should still be interested in your niche. So, you’ll need to create some exposure and introduce that audience to your brand before you do anything else.
Then, once you’ve gathered intel on who engaged with your ad and showed some interest, you can start to produce video ads that highlight your products or services. Either sell what you offer or upsell to people that have already purchased from you.
Develop your ad assuming there is no sound
On Facebook, video ads are automatically played without sound as users scroll past. To listen to the video, the user will have to turn it on, but over 85% of people do not do this. You may be thinking, “Well, how will I market my company if no one’s going to listen to the add?”
You will need to be creative, and capture people’s attention with the quality of the video. Moreover, you could utilize textual clues, jump straight into the good part without an intro, or just simply add narrative subtitles.
Always add a CTA (call to action)
Whether you want them to purchase your product, subscribe to something or just visit your site, you need to encourage them to do so. You may not realize it, but most people won’t do something unless you tell them to do it.
If we reflect on our second method, people watching with no sound only highlights the importance of a great CTA at the end. So, don’t be shy and if you want them to purchase your amazing dog collar, then say – ‘Purchase this wonderful dog collar NOW.’
by seller_bot | Jan 24, 2018 | Our Blog
When it comes to internet marketing, most businesses have made the effort to try and have a presence on at least one of the popular Social Media sites: Facebook; Twitter; Pinterest; YouTube.
These sites are viewed as the ‘fun’ cousins of the Social Media world, the site everyone seems to want to play with. But are they the only networking opportunities worth using for businesses?
LinkedIn is a very well known but hugely under-rated and under-used avenue of opportunity. Most people view LinkedIn as the ‘stuffed shirt’ of networking, and it’s true that if you go to LinkedIn, you won’t find a video of someone falling down or a cute picture of a cat hanging on a washing line. But that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
Each networking site attracts a different set of potential clients. and LinkedIn is no different. In fact you could even find yourself networking and promoting yourself to more important people to your business than you ever thought possible.
If you still need convincing of the power of LinkedIn, then take a few minutes to look through these reasons why your business should be on LinkedIn too:
LinkedIn – Business not Pleasure
Google any business or business person, and one of the first page entries in the search results will almost certainly be their LinkedIn profile (if they have one). These profile pages contain everything you want to know about the person or company, their products and services, and more.
So when creating your business profile on LinkedIn, it is vital to fill out and use every tool LinkedIn offers, including the customized ‘Products and Business’ section. This is a superb opportunity to create a stunningly professional yet informative section that can complement your website. In here, you can market your business and products with images, videos, detailed product descriptions, links to products on your website and more. What LinkedIn is really offering you is a virtual, digital brochure with tens of thousands of potential clients waiting to connect with you.
What alternative does a potential customer have if you don’t give them the information they are looking for yourself? Their only option is to go and look for the opinions of others in random blog entries and consumer forums, and you have no control over what is being said there, good or bad.
Engaging Conversations
An essential element of any network is not simply to attract people to your profile, but to engage with and retain your audience for the long term. But while contact between users on sites such as Facebook and Twitter revolves around relaxed social interaction, LinkedIn is a business-orientated network. So if you can’t post pictures of cute animals in amusing situations, how can you keep interest in your brand going?
a) Daily Status Update
LinkedIn has many useful features, but none are so easy to use as the ‘Status Update’. These status updates appear in the feeds of those who are following your business page AND in the feeds of other LinkedIn members who are networked to your followers. So by posting an update on a daily basis, you are expanding both the exposure of your brand to more potential customers and giving more people the opportunity to network with your business.
b) Use A Poll
Polls are a simple yet versatile way of gathering useful information from your followers while still keeping them engaged. You can find out all sorts of relevant information about your potential customers; what they would like to discuss in the group; information about the group members themselves. Or you can use them just as a way of starting the conversation.
c) Useful Feedback
As LinkedIn members are business people themselves, use the opportunity to gather useful and significant feedback. Asking questions which relate directly to your brand can get you some incredibly valuable insights into both how your brand is seen and in learning more about what your potential customers need and want from your products and services.
d) Raise Your Profile – Sponsor An Event
Event sponsorship offers the opportunity to meet your online contacts in person. Within LinkedIn, members of a network can see every single upcoming event other members of the same network are involved in.
You may think your events look so interesting that everyone will want to come to them. But you can’t rely on people falling over your event on LinkedIn and being curious enough to come along, because it doesn’t happen that often. You have to make it happen – so make sure to send out individual invites to the members of your network in plenty of time and then follow it up with a reminder shortly before the event is due to happen.
Don’t just sponsor marketing events either. Getting involved with a charity fundraiser shows others that your business is a caring organisation, concerned about others and not just interested in profit and sales. After the event, publish and send an update with the results of the evening, pictures of people having a good time and a few testimonials if possible.
Don’t Go It Alone – Join A Group
When first joining any network, it’s only natural to start to connect with the people that you know. But in business, you constantly need to be looking for opportunities to increase the number of people you can showcase your business to. LinkedIn is perfect for that.
As you accept invites from other LinkedIn members, your networking potential and business profile grows. You don’t have to be shy in extending invitations to other members to connect with you either, especially if you think they will complement your own services.
Remember, it’s not just one connection you are making. Connecting with other LinkedIn members also joins you to their network of
contacts, growing both your own associated network of contacts and the amount of potential traffic to your LinkedIn business page.
Groups are a great way to find and join like minded business people. Look to join various groups associated with aspects of your own business.
Once you have the confidence, you can take it further and create your own groups around different aspects of your business or industry.
Not only will you be increasing the number of business contacts you have, but you will be actively taking and spreading the knowledge and awareness of your brand throughout the LinkedIn business network.
Companies themselves can’t join a LinkedIn group but individuals can. You could, as the business owner, join yourself, but how much more impressive would it be to your fellow LinkedIn members if some of your employees actively represented your brand within the LinkedIn group discussions and enthusiastically engages others on behalf of your brand?
The Power of Recommendations
To a potential customer, nothing gives more confidence than to hear someone do more than just praise a product, but to give it an outright recommendation. It says more than ‘I am happy with it’; it says to someone, ‘You need to use this too. It is so fantastic I had to tell you about it’.
The ‘Recommendation’ is a unique feature which separates LinkedIn from other Social networking sites. On LinkedIn, these recommendations, made by both clients and colleagues, allow others to give your business and professionalism a glowing report.
At the same time, you can forge new networking connections and opportunities, recommending the services and products of other members of the LinkedIn network AND using those recommendations to build up your own brand loyalty.
How? By using the Recommendation yourself to generate a good positive connection with other LinkedIn members.
When looking to recommend someone else’s product or service, don’t just choose someone who seems to be impressive and then add a standard vague ‘this product is good’ comment. Customers won’t be impressed, and it will simply look like one business doing another business a favour.
You want your recommendations to have merit and value to your customer. You want them to be able to trust what you are telling them, and for it to build confidence in you and your brand, so they will turn to your expertise when they need a service or product, so choose your recommendations wisely. Find services and products potential customers will find useful.
The other positive result of saying good, encouraging and generally positive things about the products and services of other LinkedIn businesses is they are far more likely to say something similar about yours.
Get Found!
You want your LinkedIn profile to increase your visibility on the internet and contribute to your rankings in the search engine results. By adjusting some of your profile wording, you can improve the Search Engine Optimisation of your LinkedIn site.
Inside the ‘Websites’ section, adding keywords to the title descriptions found in the ‘Other’ section will increase your page’s visibility on the internet searches.
When starting to complete your LinkedIn profile, keep key industry keywords and buzz terms in mind.
Try to subtly add a few key search terms your customers may use when looking for your services, but don’t stuff your profile with them as search engines like Google and Bing can penalize your site if there is an overload of keywords.
Don’t overlook your URLs. When you join and create your LinkedIn profile and pages, LinkedIn automatically creates the URLs with random numbers not a name, but these links are customisable. Change it to something the search engines can pick up on – your name, job title or location. By being creative, you may even be able to get keywords in.
Statistical Analysis
Studying statistical data may not be everybody’s favourite task, but it gives an impression of how effective your LinkedIn profile is, and within LinkedIn you can get detailed facts and figures on who is visiting your page, how often (or, more worryingly, not) they come, how many times someone clicks through the ‘Product and Services’ tab, which members are following your page, and a whole wealth of other stats broken down into very useful information.
But there are even more targeted marketing opportunities available to businesses on LinkedIn.
The Admin of a business page can set up customized Product and Services pages.
This means when a visitor comes through to your page, the information shown to them will be tailored to them depending on things like: How local they are to your business; what business they are in; what position they hold in their company.
Being able to modify information in this way enables you to give other LinkedIn members more relevant business information about you.
Network Your Network
Maximising your brand exposure is an fundamental key in getting new followers, so the easier you can make it to follow you the better. LinkedIn has 2 easy ways to do this:
‘Follow Company’ Button
By putting this button on your site, it lets followers connect quickly, and they can then track your LinkedIn activity easily and conveniently from within their own LinkedIn profile. Once your followers have grown to a decent number, add the number of your followers onto this button.
‘Share’ Button
By adding this button to the articles and content in your LinkedIn pages, you show your page visitors that they can share articles from your site with their own followers.
By making your articles informative and useful to others, you encourage others to take your business knowledge and expertise to a much wider audience of potential customers.
Market To A Captive Audience
With a rapidly growing membership, with hundreds of millions of business professionals worldwide, it would be a criminal oversight not to consider marketing your business to such a captive audience inside LinkedIn.
Not only does LinkedIn offer its business users ad campaigns with a massive audience, the ads themselves are immensely flexible and customisable.
Available as Pay Per Click or Pay Per Impression, the ads can be tailored to an exact audience based on a specific customer demographic like the size of the company, the business area, and occupation, to name just a few factors.
These ads can also be shown on specific pages. So you could target profile pages, company and group pages, member’s inbox or message pages, and more.
This type of targeted approach helps in getting the relevant information to the right sector of your audience – your potential clients.
There is also a choice of Ad Type:
Display Ad – An ad that can be placed on the page in a range of shapes and sizes, rather like a classified newspaper ad.
Content Ad – An ad that lets you stream several types of contend in one organized packet – like video, Twitter, Status updates, etc.
Text Link Ad – A static html link to a specific page or place
Social Ad – Social ads are a highly targeted, highly efficient way to sign up fellow LinkedIn members and to encourage them to share messages and recommend products.
They encourage a particular course of action like the ‘Follow’, ‘Recommend’ or ‘Join Group’ ads.
Upgrade and Expand With Advanced Apps
Once you have a good work-ing knowledge of LinkedIn, it’s time to take your LinkedIn page to the next level with some of the many advanced applications that allow you to give your LinkedIn pages greater appeal and marketing power.
Here are just a few of the great Advanced apps available to use with LinkedIn:
SLIDESHARE
Rather than having a simple static photogallery of products or business statistics, you can really impress visitors with a professional and visually interesting slideshow presentation.
MY TRAVEL
This app lets you share all your future travel plans and trips with your network, so they can see not only where you are now but where you are going to be and when.
This gives people a great opportunity to arrange to meet up for different business events and functions.
BOX.NET
If you have something you’d like to share with your followers, why not make it downloadable? Box.net lets you share every-thing from photographs to portfolios, charts and presentations.
BLOG LINK
Linking your blog up to your LinkedIn page is so easy with Blog Link.
If you use WordPress, there are many specialist WordPress app or plug-ins that can do it for you simply and easily.
HUDDLE WORKSPACES
Collaborations can be notoriously tricky things.
Huddle Workspaces is designed to smooth out this rocky road. It lets you give different groups their own workspace, which means you can provide private remote access to documents that only they will see and have access to in their workspace.
TWEET
We couldn’t possibly forget the social network that many businesses use daily!
Tweets lets you access and use your Twitter account from inside LinkedIn.
Do you feel inspired to explore the world of LinkedIn?
Or have you previously registered but didn’t know about many of the features that we mentioned or have not had much success with it? If so, please contact us.
So many businesses have either not used LinkedIn to its full potential or they don’t understand.
As a result they are missing out on a lot of potential business and useful connections.
