by Stefanie Blackburn | Content Marketing, Customers, Reputation Management
Social proof is one of the most powerful tools you can use to market your business. Seeing the happiness and success of previous customers is a proven way to increase confidence, which ultimately leads to more people buying. According to eMarketer research, online reviews are by far the most trusted source of business information. In fact, 8 percent more people 18+ trust online reviews compared to their own friends, family and colleagues. But most businesses don’t have a proactive strategy for incorporating customer reviews in their marketing plan. If you’re one of them, we want to encourage you to change that! Your business can add credibility and complexity to its content when you regularly incorporate the positive feedback your customers leave. This practice has an added bonus of rewarding customers for their praise, strengthening your relationship with them and encouraging others to follow in their footsteps. Your content becomes richer, and your brand name becomes more credible. That’s a win for you and your customers! Here are a handful of proven strategies you can put into action to incorporate customer reviews into your marketing strategy: Share like a pro When incorporating testimonials and feedback on your web pages, it’s important to follow best practices that respect both the person leaving the review and the prospect that will ultimately see it in your marketing. Be sure to use the following best practices to share like a pro: Take a second to re-read the third-party reviews site’s policy on sharing reviews. They may have limitations on how you use them. Always ask the reviewer for permission. Nothing hurts worse than having...
by Stefanie Blackburn | Social Media
For a small business, gaining steam on social media is undeniably an uphill battle. You have to contend with algorithms that make it nearly impossible to get discovered until you achieve a certain level of visibility. This situation puts you in a catch-22: you can’t get anyone to view your content until you get engagement, which requires views! Nevermind the fact that social media overwhelmingly prefers silly or opinionated content—two things that really don’t gel with the average business’s branding. Sure, you can gain thousands of shares by posting ridiculous cat videos, but there’s a slim chance all that attention will aid your business goals. Despite all these challenges, putting your business out there on social media isn’t just worth it; it’s necessary. According to research from Stone Temple, 63 percent of all web traffic in 2017 came from mobile devices. In the U.S., 87 percent of mobile internet time is spent in apps. What are the most common apps? Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and Snapchat, to name a few. Following this logic, people on the internet spend the majority of their time looking at social media apps on their phone. While Google Search is another top app—meaning SEO is also critical for businesses—social media is by far the most common way people discover content. Consider that two thirds of U.S. adults say they get their news from social media. Put simply: if you aren’t on social media, you will have an incredibly hard time gaining brand recognition for your business. You will also have a tough time getting attention for your laboriously crafted content. So how can you climb...
by Stefanie Blackburn | Video Marketing
A simple browser extension makes it easy for salespeople to create videos for prospects. Videos are one of the most effective and powerful ways to communicate a message and add personalization to a salesperson’s follow up process. But creating videos can be a challenge for a lot of people and we certainly don’t want to bog down our salespeople with video editing and too much administration. We’d rather have them talking to prospects. Enter: Soapbox A new Chrome browser extension, called Soapbox, created by Wistia, allows anyone to create really nice looking videos that have an easy transition between screen shares, talking head videos, and split screen. Even if you’re not a video editor and even if you don’t have any real experience creating videos this app will work for you. It is designed, specifically, with salespeople in mind. Some of the features that salespeople will find very attractive about this service are that you can easily add branding and messages specific to your prospect or client to video thumbnails, and landing pages that are automatically created to go with your video. You can also easily edit the video without any video editing skills right within your browser. So you don’t have to download the video to any third-party application to do your editing. Features One of our favorite features is that as soon as you’re done with this video, it is immediately shareable via a link that’s generated by Soapbox. So as soon as you’re done, you can take that link and send it to your prospect or customer to immediately deliver your message. And because this was...
by Stefanie Blackburn | Facebook
Facebook has become the most powerful advertising platform for small businesses. The combination of being able to reach people by their interests, social connections, pages that they’ve visited, as well as by their location makes them a very effective and powerful option for small businesses to reach new prospects and customers, and grow their attention and revenue. Facebook has four primary location targets available that allow you to create very powerful, local-focused ad campaigns. Facebook’s Help articles define them as the following: Reach everyone in this location You can ‘Reach everyone in this location’, which is the default option. This option allows you to reach people whose home or most recent location is within the selected area. You might want to advertise to large fairs or high-profile sporting events. For example, everyone in a particular location. Let us say, everyone in Florida. It will automatically advertise to everyone in Florida. People who live in this location The second option is people who live in this location. This includes people whose home is within the selected area. You might want to advertise a retail business. For example, to people who live in a specific location, perhaps, a service like a real estate agent would want to advertise only to people that live in a certain location. People recently in this location People recently in this location, is the third option. With this option, you’re reaching people whose most recent location is within the selected area that you’re advertising to. You may want to advertise time-sensitive sales. For example, to people who are recently in the location that you choose,...
by Stefanie Blackburn | Facebook
You no doubt heard over the years that you should build your list and that usually refers to building an email list. Having a good list of prospects and customers that you can email on a regular basis is one of the easiest, most affordable and most effective ways to increase sales and build your business. You should absolutely build your list. Though email marketing has become less effective due to the volume of email that’s now being sent, it’s still a very effective and important strategy for all businesses to take advantage of. However, as the title of this article suggests, audiences are now the new list. Audiences: The New List Here’s what we mean by audiences are the new list. Audiences are a reference to the collection of people that you can build inside of an advertising platform like Facebook, Instagram, Google Ad Network, and LinkedIn that have interacted with your ads or your content or your videos or your website. You can literally build a collection of people that you’ve had some sort of engagement. With your collection, you can then run ads to in the future. This is, of course, an incredibly effective way of advertising because you are advertising to people that you know you. You already have some sort of relationship with the people you are advertising to. That’s very similar to being able to send an email to somebody that is already subscribed to your list because they have some sort of relationship with you. How to build an Audience Here’s how to build audiences. Every ad network, or social media platform,...
