#make sales

Are You Advertising or Engaging?

The traditional view of advertising is a bit of a one-way street.  You create a marketing strategy that is designed to deliver a particular message to your target audience.  This can be used to tell customers how your product is better than others, how it’s more affordable, or how it’s different than anything they’ve seen before.

The problem with all of this is not what it does, but how it does it.  The internet has changed society in countless ways.  One of the most relevant to marketing is that people now expect some sort of interaction.  Your audience wants to do more than just read something, they want to discuss it…with you, even!

Learning to market in a way that engages your audience will increase the effectiveness of everything you do.  Let’s take a look at a few common engagement strategies and how they benefit marketers.

Discussions

Nearly every website will have a comments section.  Visitors stop by to read an article and then stick around to discuss it.  The same is true on social media sites such as Facebook.  This sort of engagement is so popular, in fact, that websites such as Reddit are designed to do nothing else but hot these kinds of discussions.

Learning to Earn

Everyone wants to make money online.  They dream of sitting at home and raking in the millions.  While it’s not quite that easy because it does take a lot of work, you actually can sit at home and create a truly profitable business.  The key is to find the right educational resources that will point you towards your dreams.

The biggest obstacle with this, however, is the sheer amount of information on the web.  The internet was created to share information, so it should come as no surprise that there are mountains of text to sift through.  Some information is simply better than others while a small percentage is absolute garbage.

Making the Jump from Traffic to Sales

One of the biggest blinders that hold people back in online marketing is the focus on traffic numbers alone.

Now obviously, websites need visitors.  The more visitors a website gets (or so we’re told) the more profitable it will be.  What many marketers soon find out, however, is that traffic numbers are not always related to sales numbers.

Visitors are great.  Your website needs to get people visiting it and engaging with the information you present.  It also needs to convert these visitors into paying customers.

But how do you do that?

Two Different Objectives

Part of the problem comes from the fact that sales and traffic generation have two different objectives.  Traffic generation (generally) focuses on getting the greatest number of people on a website as possible.  Sales, on the other hand, focuses on your specific target customer.

You can’t simply put a million people in front of your sales page and expect to rake in the cash.  It just doesn’t work that way.

Domain Metrics to Improve Marketing

The use of domain metrics provide a look into how you or your competitors behave. Details such as server metrics, page speeds, specific rankings, and more will give you much needed insight into what areas need improving.

An important part of SEO, branding, and social media is metrics tracking. Do not take these metrics lightly, as they could potentially make or break your SEO strategy. You want to make sure your page speeds, backlink information, and Google rank are optimal in order to prevent slow page loads. Paying attention to these metrics and tweaking them as necessary can help you attain your objectives.

Marketing with Periscope

Periscope is a great tool to use to grow your customer base and business. Even though the application interconnects with Twitter, it provides innovative ways to connect with potential customers and followers.

Live streaming is slowly becoming a player in the social media market, and while it hasn’t experienced the explosion Instagram and other social media platforms have, it has shown steady incremental increases.

Let’s discuss some of the ways your company can use live streaming for marketing purposes.

Unveiling New Products

When it comes to unveiling new products, there are many options from which to choose. You can do a live product release with a clever unboxing. Another option would be to talk about key points and features of your product.

Managing Your Marketing Funnel

With the over whelming success of the Digital Marketing Age, you may think that the concept of a marketing funnel is now defunct. And, yes, what used to be a fairly direct route from drawing in leads to converting them into clients has now exploded into a multitude of micro processes.

However, the concept of a Marketing Funnel is still a good way to create a marketing plan that needs multiple levels of engagement to convert leads into clients. Today, in this era of social media and smart phones, we are definitely in a (sometimes) brave new world of marketing plans.  Even when we’re ready to run screaming from our computers after trying to make sense of all the rapid changes that have evolved.

Using Craigslist to Market Your Business

From e-commerce websites to furniture wholesalers, small businesses are discovering the marketing capability of Craigslist.org.

If you provide a service or sell wholesale or resale products, Craigslist is a tool to add to your marketing arsenal.  On Craigslist, users know they will find what they are looking for nearby, so they don’t get stuck sifting through ads for service providers that are located on the other side of the country.

Posting on Craigslist does require that you follow their rules.  The site has some general policies as well as specific ones that vary based on the category of your ad.  Failure to follow these will cause your ad to be flagged and removed from view.

Excessive flags could lead your account being closed permanently, so stay up to date on any changes in policy that may occur from time to time.

It is possible to adhere to the rules and still get plenty of engagement with prospective buyers or clients.