Are you ready to cash in on the holiday shopping craze? If so, you need to create a few holiday marketing campaigns to attract customers to your store. But, creating marketing campaigns takes time, and who has extra time during the holidays?
To take the hassle out of the holidays, we’ve put together a list of four holiday marketing ideas that every business can and should use during the holidays.
Run a Social Holiday Marketing Giveaway
Speaking of Instagram, another great way to utilize the platform is by running a social media holiday giveaway. We’d recommend running a social campaign across all the major platforms your business uses to get more and more eyes on your business.
And who doesn’t like free stuff, especially during the holidays? Whether it be a big discount, a free add-on with an order or just something completely for free, get into the holiday spirit of giving. Typically, asking followers to comment, share, like, etc. are great tactics to get even more engagement with your giveaway.
Make Seasonal Emails
If you’re not incorporating the holidays into your email marketing campaigns, you’re making a big mistake! Holidays instill powerful memories into your shoppers’ minds, so enticing them with fun seasonal emails is a great way to connect in their inboxes.
Pull at their Heart Strings
While holidays may not be loved by all, most people have an emotional tie to them. And we all know that emotions drive action, so now is the time to get emotional with your marketing.
Emotional doesn’t mean you need to make every one of your audience members cry – even using humor in your messaging can go a long way during the holiday season.
Build Customer Loyalty with Personalized Gifts
Lastly, don’t forget about marketing to your customers.
Small acts of personalized kindness towards your customers make a huge impact and can strengthen the relationship, turning a happy customer into a brand advocate.
Use these tips to make all of your holiday marketing dreams come true!
Have any questions on how to increase the reach of your holiday marketing? Contact us here!
Since website performance and optimization is affected by things such as bad links, sloppy code, and poor content, it is a great time to do a semi-annual tidying to eliminate any problems. What does something like this do for search engine optimization efforts? Here are a few ways to be sure any essential SEO for fall areas that tend to collect internet ‘dirt’ is cleaned.
Analyze with Analytics
Using analytic software such as Google Analytics and run a full array of reports normally monitored, especially important ones like site and page errors. Error reports are the most significant and probably the lengthiest. Don’t put off the work! Every error detected by analytics tools is one more that is affecting website efficiency.
Review Your SEO for fall
Since it can be somewhat difficult to systematically review websites for SEO, content, and other aspects, adding this job to the twice-yearly cleaning can help make sure it actually happens. Be sure content is correct and complete; review upcoming content ideas to be sure of current relevancy. Discover the latest trends in SEO and coding; update any techniques or HTML to benefit the overall website.
Site Errors
The annoying truth of the matter is that site errors need to be fixed. Many will be simple such as dead links or URLs with typos; others may be quite important. SEO reports can point out errors such as pages missing header tags, nonworking links, and other such information. Troubleshooting site speed may show other types of problems that unknowingly exist. It may be tedious; however, it is necessary to fix page issues regularly. This will improve site speed and result in fewer problem pages on the website.
Social Profiles
Check those important social media pages to be sure that they work, especially for any unknown issues. Be sure links from main websites to different social pages are not broken, out of place, or have been forgotten. Such problems should be corrected quickly, as this can potentially affect website traffic both to social sites and back to the corresponding website.
It probably seems like a lot to go through twice a year; however, doing so can keep any website and its search engine optimization efforts functioning smoothly and reaching planned goals with very few concerns. Don’t overlook this important fall website tidying effort – and keep that website running like new!
Have any questions about updating your SEO for Fall? Contact us here!
Fall is the season of change. It’s a great time to update your strategy and promote your business with some fall marketing tactics.
Read on to find our 3 favorite methods for marketing your business in the fall.
1. Photo Fun
A fun idea for fall marketing is to invite your customers and followers to engage in a photo contest.
You could have them post pictures of their favorite fall activities, like jumping in piles of leaves, picking apples, going to a football game, or anything else!
It’s even better if you could have the activities align with the products or services you offer.
2. Go, Team!
Fall is also the time of big team sports. Basing promotions, deals, and sales around games and events are a great way to market your business in the fall.
You can base promotions on local, college, or big team games. Examples of ideas you can try are having a discount or sale if the local or college team wins their game. Or you could offer a percent discount based on a star player’s number every game day or every home game.
3. Happy Holidays!
Fall is a marketing season filled with Holidays. Halloween and Thanksgiving are 2 of the major Holidays, but you don’t just have to focus on them.
You can make your business stand out with fun, social media friendly holidays unique to your business, like a “National Taco Day” sale or an “International Coffee Day” sale.
Are you looking for assistance in your marketing strategies or ventures? Contact us here!
Over the past couple of years, Instagram has become a power house in the realm of social media. With over 700 million monthly active users, the platform has become a great place to share content with your audience.
Whether your strategy needs an update or you’re a newcomer to this social media network, you can use these 6 tips to help your improve your Instagram marketing.
1. Your profile is key
As a company, don’t get too caught up in fitting all of what you do in 150 characters. Focus on your most important description or your next big thing – be it an event, promotion or product launch. Since the only clickable link is in your Bio section, make a habit of updating it frequently. Think about promoting more than your website. You can include the link to event registrations, app downloads or even purchases links.
2. Get Creative
Focus on the solution you provide to your audience, not the products you sell. On Instagram, it’s necessary to show value to your customers and look great while you do it. Never underestimate the fact that the most important asset on this social media network is visual content.
3. Stop, collaborate and listen
Instagram is one of the strongest social media channels for highlighting collaborators and sharing customer success stories. Take into account that not everyone is monitoring hashtags on social media, so tagging an account is usually a better choice if you want to get noticed.
4. Analyze your Instagram ventures
Without taking a step back and analyzing what worked and didn’t, marketing becomes a guessing game. Make sure to regularly measure your follower count, engagement, and clicks, all to refine and improve your strategy.
5. Show them the business behind the curtain
Customers have a natural curiosity about where their products/services come from, and you can use Instagram to show them the whole lifecycle.
If nothing comes to mind, you can share something that everyone has – sketches, notes, and filled whiteboards or blackboards. You may find that it’s best to try out different post types until you strike gold with the one that will engage the audience.
6. Use hashtags wisely
Use hashtags to expand your reach. These can be campaign specific or general – all that’s important is that they are relevant. This makes it easier for people to find content related to you as well as your main account. It’s best practice to use between three to five hashtags and consider how you add hashtags. Whether they’re added at the end of the post, in a comment or in the actual post.
Have any more questions about Instagram marketing or about any other social media? Contact us here!
It’s easy to get caught up in the latest and greatest marketing tips, but it’s important to take a step back and make sure that you find advice that works for you and your local business.
In local marketing, businesses put a lot of effort at the start and then let it fall by the wayside as the year moves on.
Check out these marketing tips for your local business:
Facebook Advertising
Social media networks aren’t always the first thing companies think while building local marketing strategies, but Facebook advertising is an exception.
It’s an inexpensive way to advertise your business to the target audience. Like Google, Facebook also knows buying and click patterns of all their one billion plus users. They are experts in putting the ads in front of a relevant local audience.
Ask for Reviews
Reviews are a must-have for all companies who focus on local search marketing.
You should get your business listed on all of the major reviews sites and then make sure that you’re managing those websites. Sites like Yelp, TripAdvisor, OpenTable, Consumer Reports, and even Amazon are great places to start.
Keep your information up to date and complete, and be ready to tackle any negative reviews in a healthy way. By putting a “Review Us” link on your homepage, talking with your loyal customers, and urging your social community to get involved.
By putting a “Review Us” link on your homepage, you can talk with your loyal customers whose opinions matter most.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Local SEO means you’re optimizing your website for the local web search so that your business shows up in a location-specific query. For example, “Laundromats near me” or “best coffee in New York City” would both be considered local searches.
How do you get started with local SEO?
It’s a big topic, but it mainly has to do with making sure you have local accounts on all of the major search engines (Bing, Yahoo!, and Google) and use of right local keywords for the target audience and area.
Attend, Speak, and Host Local Events
You should try to get involved in the community as much as possible. You could Join your local Chamber of Commerce, advertise in the local papers, and or host a local event.
Need help with your marketing ventures? Don’t hesitate to contact us here!
With outbound, as soon as you stop paying, you stop seeing results. With inbound, your content is always there and if you’re in the right business, so is the need.
Leads are drawn over time, and the longer your article gets traffic, the higher it will rank, making it even more likely to gain traffic. That’s why blog content creation is the number 1 priority for a majority of marketers.
It’s a gift that keeps on giving.
2. You Can Learn More About Your Audience
Inbound marketing is all about communication and dialogue. By engaging in content and social conversations, you can learn useful things about your audience that will help you convert.
This will enable you to ask the right questions on your landing page forms. Social media listening will enable you to pick up trends and anticipate what content you should be producing.
Actively listening to your customers is a huge key to success in inbound marketing.
3. Outbound is A Dying Practice
A few years ago, it was easy to create a piece of content or an outbound message and grab the attention of your target audience.
In 2017, white space is GONE. People are bombarded with advertising everywhere, on every device, at home, and at work.
Consumers have become incredibly skilled at narrowing their attention to focus only on what they want to see.
4. Inbound Focuses on Growth
Inbound marketing takes time. You can grow sustainably, instead of perpetuating the boom and bust culture that has caused so many problems in the world economy.
As the inbound marketing snowball gets bigger, in turn bringing in more leads. It should pay for itself, and always deliver more than it costs. Content will gather momentum with less and less energy required from you for it to grow. It will grow itself.
5. Inbound Can Save You Time AND Money
Time spent on inbound is time spent on strong leads. Time spent spamming emails to hundreds of people who don’t know or care what you offer is time wasted.
Inbound allows you to focus your time effectively. Which means less time on marketing and more on building your business.
6. Inbound Builds Trust
Inbound Marketing is like building a friendship with your audience. What are the qualities you want in a friend? Trustworthiness, reliability, a sense of humor, basic competence, and a unique perspective.
When customers see that you are creating useful content, that you’re professional, that you’re knowledgeable in your field, they can’t help but have more respect and trust for you.
If someone trusts you, of course, they are more likely to buy from you. This is the essence of inbound marketing. If you remember nothing else from this article, remember this.
Have questions or want to learn more about inbound marketing? Don’t hesitate to contact us here.
In today’s market, you can’t go to any marketing blog without them telling you the importance of having social media, and using it for marketing. How do you get the most from your social media? Sure, it’s great to have it, but you’ll lose money if you’re not using it correctly.
Today we’re talking about 3 main insights on how to use social correctly.
Visual Content is Key
One major point of your social focus should be in visual content.
As humans, we are much better at remembering pictures than words. When you post a text-heavy post, your customers will only remember 10% after a couple days. But if you add in a picture, they’ll remember 65%. Your posts will have much more impact if you included a relevant image or graphic with it.
Keep it Consistent
As with most things, consistency is key with social media marketing. Having a consistent and quality strategy will keep your current customers more engaged, and help you attain new followers, leads and customers through your social media pages. People will be less likely to follow your page if you go weeks without updates, and then bombard your audience with updates. If you infrequently post on your page, it’s shown that people will likely lose enthusiasm for your page, and could even unlike it. This is the same effect that posting too frequently could have.
Strategy and Analysis
One of the most important tasks to do on your social media is to always have a strategy, set goals and analyze your pages to see if you’ve hit those goals. One the best things about developing a strategy are that it gives you direction. It’ll help you define your goals and objectives you want to achieve using your social presence.
You should set SMART goals in your strategy. These are goals that are: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Time-based. Setting goals will help you intelligently use your social media to its full potential.
If you’d like more insights or need help developing a strategy for your social media, don’t hesitate to contact us.
Think video killed the radio star? And YouTube killed the video star? Think again. Radio is still a compelling marketing medium and has the power to target consumers who don’t use the Internet. Here’s why you need to incorporate radio commercials into your digital marketing strategy. You’d be a fool not to.
1. Radio Commercials Target Lucrative Markets
You hear a lot about millennial, the so-called lucrative consumer segment that most brands spend all their money on. However, the over 50’s are one of the fastest-growing and richest demographics in the United States, according to research [1]. And with a great radio commercial, you can target this group effectively and generate more leads to your business. It’s not just the over the 50’s, however.
All age groups listen to the radio at some point, providing you with ample marketing opportunities.
2. Online Radio is Big Business
Online radio might play second fiddle to more dominant digital marketing platforms like video streaming, but it still provides a hefty return on your investment. In fact, studies show that the number of Americans over the age of 12 who listen to online radio has skyrocketed in recent years, and was the highest it’s ever been in 2016 [2]. Online radio offers customers more choice and lets you get your message across in mere seconds. The result? More customers, higher sales, and greater revenue. Use radio as the basis of your lead generation strategy.
3. People Listen to Radio For Longer
Radio resonates for longer than other mediums. In fact, studies show that average radio listening times have more than doubled in the past five years [3]. While a YouTube ad or banner ad might be momentary, radio commercials continue to produce results. Consumers hear the radio on their commute to work, for example, making this a profitable marketing opportunity.
Radio advertising is known as the “theater of the mind.” This is because the images created by radio are ones that come from inside your mind. With only 60 seconds to convey a message compelling your otherwise distracted audience to act, you can see why radio commercial production is such an exciting challenge.
There are three main parts of creating a radio ad you must always consider. These include:
Casting is vital.
Without the right voice talent, you’ll waste a lot of time and money. For this, you’ll need to really understand the ad’s tone. Not only do you want the voice to grab attention, but it must also be believable and resonate with your audience.
Directing the voice talent towards creating an effective ad occurs in several steps.
It’s important that your pre-session consists of just one person talking to the voice talent so they’re not overwhelmed. You must also be ready to produce any sounds you’re envisioning. Make sure you can articulate this to your voice talent. In this regard, you’re acting as a coach.
Producing crisp, clear sound is important.
Loud music either distracts your audience or drowns out your voice talent. In either case, you don’t want this to occur. So, if it isn’t necessary, don’t include music in your ad. Once you have your ad created, make sure you save it as a .wav file so quality isn’t lost when you’re working on different drafts, which happens with MP3 files.
Killerspots Agency, specializes in radio marketing, creative creation and strategic media buying that is not only engaging but trackable. ROI that turns listeners into traffic through your doors.
Hearing is believing. Click to hear some of the custom Radio commercials produced for businesses all over the United States in many different industries. It may just inspire your creative juices for some effective radio to drive sales!
What does your social media audience want? How do you get them to tell you what they want? These used to be hard questions for businesses to get reliable real-time answers to. That just isn’t the case anymore. In fact, they will tell you more than you ever wanted to know if you let them. Too Much Information or TMI is a thing, after all. Today the question is how do you get the information you want and skip the pictures of what they burned for dinner last night? The answer is social media management.
Social Media Management
It is about what you share and how they respond. Whether they are your friends, your customers. Or hopefully both, they need to see your best face. If they are going to buy your products or believe the things you tell them. Therefore, they need to see you have standards and that you aim for reliability and good business practices.
They also need to know you care. That means reading their comments and responding to their posts appropriately, even the negative ones. If you are running a business or have your own content to produce this can take a chunk of time from your day you may not have to give, as much as we all want to hang out on social media hitting the like button for new ideas and defending our own positions from the occasional troll.
Social media management can take the reins of your online presence while you get some work done, building relationships with your customers and your industry as a whole. The people at Killer Spots have the time and the technical prowess to handle all of that for you, and to improve your position on top of that. Contact Killer Spots to learn more about social media management.
Is it David Ogilvy, who literally wrote the manual on sales strategies, or Dale Carnegie, who convinced you it was possible to win friends and influence people?
Whoever your sales icons are, they weren’t born overnight. It took years of fine-tuning their skills to become the amazing salespeople they are. While there’s no shortcut for hard work, we do want to help you streamline the process to achieving sales success. That’s why we gathered the most secret secrets from the best salespeople to share with you as you start on your path to becoming a master salesperson. But, as any good seller knows, what you should do is as important as what you shouldn’t do, which is why we’ve also compiled some of the most common, yet easiest mistakes to avoid. If you’re ready to start to become like your sales heroes (or even surpass them), nailing down these sales strategies skills is the first step. Ready, set, go!
7 Expert Sales Strategies the Best Reps Use
1) Sell benefits, not features.
Research by Impact Communications found 70% of people make purchasing decisions to solve problems, while only 30% make decisions to gain something.
Although your product may have a lot of features that will add to a business, they are more likely to buy something that solves an existing problem. That’s why you want to present them with benefits that reduce the problems the company faces.
2) Set and stick to your ideal buyer personas.
Efforts spread too thin are inefficient and ineffective. Use ideal buyer personas to help you understand the “why” of your ideal customer.
Your buyer personas, which are detailed descriptions of different types of ideal customers for your product, should outline more than basic demographic information, and get to the heart of why a customer needs your product.
By setting clear ideal buyer personas and sticking to them, you’ll stop wasting time with supremely unqualified prospects that suck your energy away from people who could really benefit from your product.
3) Spend time wisely.
Time is money in the sales world, and beyond knowing your ideal buyer personas, you need to have a plan of action each day to maximize your productivity. In fact, the 2014 Sales Execution Trends by Qvidian found that 59% of a salesperson’s time is not spent selling, but is wasted with hunting for sales resources.
Start each day by understanding your goals, and have a clear plan for how you’ll accomplish them. Find a sales or project management platform that can help you keep a strict schedule to maximize productivity.
Another way to increase sales strategies productivity is to limit multitasking. It may seem counter-intuitive, but it takes you twice as long to get a single task done when your brain is pulled in a million different directions. Give yourself a time limit to finish one task at a time; you’ll be more efficient and have a better understanding of what actions are time sucks and when you can get the most accomplished.
4) Personalize your message.
The best salespeople know that developing a personal connection with your clients is the key to success. Start relationships off on the right foot by sending personalized messages to prospects and avoiding “one size fits all” scripts.
Identify the prospect’s unique pain points and tailor your message to address how you can solve those needs. When a prospect feels like you care, you’ve already made the greatest first impression possible, without even stepping inside the room.
5) Make your process measurable.
In order to learn and grow, your process should be measurable, which means you should have a process for collecting quantitative (useable numerical data) and qualitative (details that help you gain an understanding of underlying motivations) information about your process.
To gather both types of information, practice being obsessive about your process. Keep track of each move you make from initial contact to closing the deal and use that information to pinpoint weak spots. You should also keep track of how many cold calls, follow ups, and meetings you do each day. The goal is to document everything so you can optimize your process.
When you do find weaknesses, make improvement actionable, instead of just telling yourself to “do better.” This will give you specific direction on how to improve, and also help you monitor your success.
6) Take notes.
As smart as you are, you don’t have perfect memory (and if you do, we want to hire you). It’s important that you record the promises you make to clients so you can deliver. You also want to take down feedback and important information about their business; clients should never have to repeat themselves, so pay attention.
Additionally, taking notes does more than give you a hard copy of the conversation—it shows clients you care. Take notes using a pen and paper. This gives clients the impression that you’re more attentive and involved in them than if you simply used a laptop or your phone.
7) Tap into the buyer’s emotions.
Use emotion-centric language to address a buyer’s concerns, since our brains rank feelings above logic when making a decision.
Answer objections with the words “feel,” “felt,” and “found,” and work phrases like “I know how you feel…” and “When this customer used the product they felt…” into your presentation.
9 Rookie Sales Strategies Mistakes You Shouldn’t Make
Feel like you’ve got a lot to practice tomorrow? Well we aren’t done yet! Instantly jump from sounding like a beginner to a seasoned pro by avoiding these mistakes most new salespeople make.
1) Don’t forget to define a goal for meetings.
Every interaction with a prospect or client should have an end goal. Make sure you outline the purpose of every meeting and have a metric to measure your success at the end.
2) Don’t be your only advocate.
There’s a limit to how many bold claims you can make about you and your company to a client. Collect endorsements from objective advocates to back you up.
Additionally, don’t be afraid to ask for referrals from other clients. According to the Dale Carnegie Group, 91% of customers say they’d give referrals, but only 11% of salespeople ask.
3) Don’t make too many follow-up calls to unqualified buyers.
If a buyer is unqualified or clearly not engaging with you, drop it. Don’t waste time on impossible sells.
Master salespeople take the guesswork out of this step. Use 20 Miles to help you track when emails are opened, which attachments are viewed, and how long the prospect spent going through your files. You can use this information to follow up with the prospect with a targeted pitch, now that you know what about your product is interesting to them.
4) Don’t forget to listen.
If you listen to the prospect’s needs instead of overselling them you can directly answer how your product can soothe their pain points. Master salespeople believe you need to see, hear, and process that information before speaking.
5) Don’t leave a meeting open-ended.
Remember to set clear next steps that outline expectations and prompt action from both parties. If you leave a meeting unsure of what the next step should be, send a simple and straight-forward follow up email asking for clarification.
6) Don’t distract clients with irritating crutch words.
Practice pitches beforehand so you can cut out “umms,” “hmms,” “ers,” and “ahs.” These distracting non-words weaken your argument and lose the client’s attention.
7) Don’t bail on commitments.
Don’t develop a reputation as a salesperson who lacks follow-through. Build trust by keeping your word, or stop making promises you can’t keep.
8) Don’t ignore the budget question.
You can easily waste time pitching a service that’s way beyond your prospect’s budget. Ask questions about their budget upfront so you can determine how high they prioritize your service and you can better tailor your offer to fit their needs.
9) Don’t use statements instead of questions.
You want your close to be firm, but not ambiguous. After a prospect agrees to work with you, clarify the sale with a pointed question. Don’t assume you know the final deal without confirmation from the decision maker.
In truth, the secret to becoming the ultimate seller is practice, practice, practice. Understand your own sales strategies process as much as possible and educate yourself constantly.
Recently I was looking over notifications for one of the Facebook pages I manage when I stumbled into this message alert atop the page about a beacon:
Figure 1 Screenshot of beacon invitation
Facebook is certainly one for new innovations that usually aren’t introduced. But rather implemented. Therefore, I was less than shocked to see yet another “Facebook update” that I hadn’t heard of. Even working day-to-day in the Marketing and Social Media world doesn’t necessarily grant you awareness of current trends. But being that I like to have know-how of such events. I thought I’d investigate these new Facebook “beacons” and find out if indeed this was a special invitation.
Basically what I’ve found is such:
Figure 2 Photo c/o Facebook Help Pages
A Beacon is a Bluetooth device.
Facebook plans to send these devices to businesses with great activity on Facebook within their local area for early access trial runs.
The beacon will interact with your customers’ Facebook apps while visiting your business. To let them know inside “tips” about your business. These tips are based off of comments your friends have made on Facebook, reviews of the business, photos that have been posted and more of that liking.
Figure 3 Screenshot explaining the beacon further
According to an article posted in Facebook’s Help Center: “Your location is determined using cellular networks, Wi-Fi, GPS and Facebook Bluetooth® beacons. Viewing place tips doesn’t post on Facebook or show people where you are.”
When I clicked “Get Free Beacon” I was taken to a form to fill out name, address and business name. There’s also an option to send the device to a different address. Than that of the business page you were on. If you are like me and managing a page for another company.
Is this the future?
So far as I see it, this new addition to Facebook technology could either be a fantastic advantage for businesses and their customers. Or it could be taken as yet another creepy invasion of technology that we now need to block in our privacy settings. As a Social Media Maven and voice for many businesses soon to receive these beacons. I’m obviously pushing for the former to be true.
At this time we have not yet received the device or put it into action so only time will tell how people react. We will update once we have more information for you and try these little Bluetooth gems for ourselves.
Have you heard about Beacons? Were you invited to use one? What are your thoughts on this technology and Facebook introducing it to their platform?
