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Focus Groups for Sound Financial Decisions

Wednesday, July 7th, 2010

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Magnified Dollar
Creative Commons License photo credit: Brooks Elliott

Every business owner should be absolutely in love with their product or service. If you don’t have a passion for what you do you’ll surely wind up in an insane asylum from unhappily grinding through all of your work. However, passion for your product can also blind you. A budget-draining pitfall occurs when businesses simply assume their offer is superior and fail to diligently gauge their audience’s response.

Even if you know that your product or service can truly help others live better lives, you must make a strong effort to keep a pulse on the public. That massively beneficial offer of yours could simply be suffering from the wrong marketing angle. Incorporating focus groups in your business plan will help you understand exactly how the public views your offer, and how you can best present it to them in the future as well as how you can improve specific parts about your business or service.

Improve Focus for Targeted Marketing

Focus groups support the most efficient and targeted use of your budget and marketing energy. Polling a focus group could tell you that you’re wasting a huge amount of money on marketing and advertising that simply isn’t reaching the right people. Getting direct feedback will let you know what marketing tools are making their way into people’s lives, what direct response mailers get opened at home and which got tossed without hesitation, which emails are clicked on, whether they pay attention to radio or TV ads regarding your industry, and much more. It’s similar to an army campaign: War never goes as planned, and sometimes you’ll need to reposition your troops to win the battle.

Plus, the valuable feedback you’ll garner will help you best tailor your offer to the public. Perhaps the public actually loves the idea of your product or service but thinks your marketing message is too spammy, sketchy, cheap, snooty, or detached. There may be six reasons why people love your product, but a dozen more reasons why they simply don’t like the way you’re talking about it. Get focused feedback to correct these issues.

Achieve Focus on what to Fix

Focus groups will also clue you in on specific, potential problems, helping you foresee them instead of jumping right into a budget-draining catastrophe. These groups also help you maintain a positive public image instead of cleaning up a massive, public faux-pas. The effort you put into focus groups now will be much less than the effort required to put out major fires caused by not keeping a pulse on the public.

How to Select Your Focus Group

Here’s where some simple statistics come into play. You must be sure to use a random selection for your focus group for the most accurate results. Select from a very specific pool of participants and your feedback will be highly biased, which could easily steer your business in the wrong direction.

You must also choose your demographic wisely to get accurate results. For example, if you’re selling high-end TV’s and you do a focus group in the projects, you’re probably not going to get the feedback you were looking for. Yes, that was an extreme example, but it’s definitely worth noting since many businesses test the wrong market or target audience.

While your friends and family may provide a good place to start for some immediate feedback, this will surely produce some naturally biased results. Instead, you can use online polls, customer and prospect newsletters that feature a quick questionnaire, or a link to a quick and simple form on your website. You can even publish a notice in your local newspaper, promising free breakfast for an hour of their time. (Offering something for free always increases participation.)

And what do you do after you’ve conducted a successful round of focus groups? Magnify that focus and test again a few months later. Even Donald Trump is still finding ways that he can improve his business—test, test and test again to continuously increase your sales.

To your success,
Andrew Rossillo

Andrew Rossillo is Content Crooner’s Marketing Blogger and Staff Writer. He’s ready to put his years of copywriting and online marketing experience to work for your business—he’ll help you get noticed!

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Posted in Business Tips, Online Marketing, Public Relations, marketing | No Comments »

Boost Your Net Worth with Networking

Monday, July 5th, 2010
Frosty Morning Web
Creative Commons License photo credit: foxypar4

Whether you are a brick-and-mortar store or work solely on the wonderful world wide web, if you’re not networking then your business is slowly dying. Networking helps keep the blood flowing through your business. Here are a few networking tips for on and off the Internet to generate leads and improve sales—put them into action today!

Who do you already know?

Whether it’s personal or business, those you already know always form your best resource. Talk to your friends, family members, and business associates about your business. Those are the people who truly want you to do well and will surely have the most open ears.

Even if they’re not interested in your offer, if you deliver your pitch well enough there’s a good chance that they may know someone else who could benefit from your offer. And don’t hesitate to straight up ask them if they would tell others about your business. The simple act of asking them for a referral dramatically improves your chances of successful word-of-mouth marketing.

It’s understandable that many people don’t like to talk about their business with friends and family because they feel as though they’re pressuring them, guilting them into the purchase. But you can easily prevent any discomfort by delivering your business message in the softest of selling voices. Maintain a genuine excitement (excitement is contagious) and discuss specific examples of how your product or service has helped others. People want to hear about how they can be helped with their needs, not the features of your business.

This is also an excellent opportunity to use testimonials from your customers. Bring a printout along that features both written testimonials and pictures of you and your customers. You can top this by bringing your laptop and showing them video testimonials.

Offer Something for Free to Get Everything You Need

One of the best ways to initiate a new networking contact is to offer them something for free. Doors will swing freely open if you initiate contact by offering something instead of asking for something. You automatically build a degree of trust, introduce them to your business, and get them to try your product or service; all at the same time.

The presentation is key here. First, you must fully believe yourself when you say that you want to help others. Come at this from the angle that you don’t even care if you get the sale—just as long as you made the effort to help someone today. This will help you avoid too hard of a sell in your networking efforts. What will probably take you less than 30 minutes could earn you 30 years of loyal clientele.

Two Ways to Play

You can take a super soft, yet highly effective sales approach: Help them for free and then simply walk away—they’ll come to you.

You can take a slightly harder, still highly effective sales approach and offer something for free in the same message.

Here are a few examples you can incorporate in your business today:

Consulting:

I took a look at your website and I love what you have to offer. However, I think your approach is a bit scattered. I’m sorry to be a bit brutal there, but I’ve seen all too many businesses fail because they lacked focus in their approach. So I’d like to offer you a free 30-minute consultation to see how we can help you make more money.

Copywriting:

I took a look at your website and I love what you have to offer. However, I’d like you to take a look at some of the errors in your copy that I highlighted in the attached document. I also added some copy that will help you convert more readers to active buyers.

Web Design:

I took a look at your website and I love what you have to offer. However, when I tried to click through to your virtual shopping cart your site navigation got a bit confusing. You could be losing dozens of customers every day just because they’re getting lost within your site.

You can significantly improve your sales by improving your website’s navigation and ease-of-use. I can also give you a free crash course on how Web analytics can help you catch these leaks and plug them before you lose any more potential customers.

Online Social Networking

And one of the other most popular ways to network today is done online, using highly effective tools such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Google Profiles, Twitter, and Google Buzz. First, these social networking tools will help you establish more touch points for the search engines. Second, you can use social media tools to remind people of what you can do for them. Third, by getting your profile, name or business on someone else’s social media account or linked to their profile, you automatically multiply your exposure. Think of it this way: Connect with just one person on LinkedIn and you will then be connected with all the people they are connected to. Potentially 100 more contacts through just one extra networking contact—now that’s using the power of leverage.

Fortune Is in the Follow-up

Every lead you generate for your business should be considered a gold nugget. Generating leads can easily be considered one of the most challenging tasks for any business. But the potential return far out ways the difficulty of the challenge. Follow up with every single person that has ever had anything to do with your business.

Maintain Meaning with Your Marketing Messages

And with all of the networking you do, it should all lead back to your website or main point of sale. Sad but true, many people go through all the motions of networking without having a purposeful message behind it all. Always make it very clear as to what your prospect’s next action step should be.

To your success,
Andrew Rossillo

Andrew Rossillo is Content Crooner’s Marketing Blogger and Staff Writer. He’s ready to put his years of copywriting and online marketing experience to work for your business—he’ll help you get noticed!

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Posted in Business Tips, Content Crooner, Email Marketing, Online Marketing, Public Relations, Social Marketing, marketing | No Comments »

Let Your Prospects Talk themselves into a Sale with Web-based Chat Rooms

Wednesday, June 23rd, 2010
NerdsOnBeer
Creative Commons License photo credit: Marco Gomes

Chat rooms create instant interactivity on your website. They not only promote an open platform for idea sharing, they also create a sub culture for your business. Give your business as much substance as possible and you’ll amass enough stability to stand up to any level of competition and market fluctuations.

Who do you listen to the most when considering a significant purchase? Your friends and family…always! While a chat room won’t necessarily have friends and family members participating, it will eventually create a friendly atmosphere that generates a much more relaxed sales environment, guiding your prospects to your virtual shopping cart.

Plus, if you are willing to let your customers and prospects freely chat directly on your website then that does a great deal for establishing your credibility. Businesses who aren’t wholly proud of their product, service or the way they do business will make great efforts to do as much behind the curtains as possible. Pull back the curtains and show your online audience that you’re the real deal and your sales are bound to grow.

Bootstrappers Can Do It Too

Think you’ll have to pay your programmer a pretty penny to redesign your Web pages? Not true. Simply search the term “free chat room software” and you’ll be able to pick and choose from dozens of options. Every business owner with a bootstrapped budget should check out their free options first to make sure they don’t toast their budget on something that doesn’t work or something they find out they simply don’t need.

  • Random SEO Note: I accidentally wrote “free” with a capital “F” and this reminded me of an important SEO tip that might be often overlooked. Search engines actually distinguish between capitalized and lower-case words. While one doesn’t necessarily carry more clout over the other, it may help boost your pages if you include both capitalized and lower-cased keywords in your meta tag information for proper nouns, acronyms, etc.

Today’s chat rooms are even easier to integrate, featuring user-friendly software that is embedded directly into your website. If you have access to your website code, then you can plug this in yourself. If not, it shouldn’t take your programmer long at all to do this, so make sure they’re not overcharging you for this simple task.

Let Them Have Their Chat

All proud business owners will surely be eager to jump right into these chat sessions on their website. But the main goal of your chat room should be prospect-to-prospect or prospect-to-customer. If you’re looking for the opportunity to direct topics of conversation and really get involved with discussions then we suggest you also set up a separate forum as an added resource for your website.

Remember, today’s Internet users are a bunch of doubting Thomases, and rightly so with all the scams going on. If you jump into the chat pool it’ll be like those parents who think they’re cool, milling around the pool party until they’ve thoroughly embarrassed their children and all their friends are too scared to talk about the things they normally do without a parental presence.

Importance of Moderation

Although you’ll want to promote freedom of speech in your chat rooms you will still want to be sure you’re moderating comments. First, check your settings to see if you can automatically flag or block messages with vulgarity (some allow you to manually type in words you want blocked).

Second, you’ll want to see that people aren’t outright knocking your business. However, make your chat room too squeaky clean and some chat room visitors are sure to feel that the whole thing is a setup; a false environment to dupe people into buying. Instead, concentrate on removing the truly malicious and leaving in reasonable suggestions for improvement.

Accomplish these things and you’ll provide the perfect virtual environment for your prospects to talk themselves into writing you a check.

To your success,
Andrew Rossillo

Andrew Rossillo is Content Crooner’s Marketing Blogger and Staff Writer. He’s ready to put his years of copywriting and online marketing experience to work for your business—he’ll help you get noticed!

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Posted in Online Chat, Online Marketing, Public Relations, SEO and SEM, Social Marketing | No Comments »

How to Set Up a Lucrative Online Forum

Monday, June 21st, 2010
Summer business party invitation illustration
Creative Commons License photo credit: Ajda Gregorčič

Attract and magnetize new clients instead of constantly chasing after new business. Here’s a guide on how to structure an online forum for your prospects and clients. While this venture will require some steady effort from you, if you take the right steps now you will succeed in eventually creating a self-sufficient forum. It will essentially feed on itself without you having to inject much effort. And when it finally builds a large enough number of users your forum will turn into a money making perpetual-motion machine.

What gets people talking?

Boring material never gets people to buy. You’ll need to execute some initial brainstorming and make a spreadsheet of bird’s-eye-view topics. Generate these topics by taking a careful look at your products or services. Regardless of what you’re offering, there are always multiple categories that can be discussed. Many forums wither up and die because they were forced into an extremely limiting field of categories. Unless, you’re a black-hole physicist (owners of the infinite-conversation title…get it…infinite…black hole…never mind), there’s a good chance you’ll need to eventually expand your conversation topics or you’ll lose your forum members from repeatedly discussing the same material.

Consider topics such as the technology behind the design, special manufacturing processes, unique applications and so on. And for the truly bold forum builders, finding a way to tie in politics, sports or celebrities has always proven to be an immediate pot-stirring, conversation-starting virtual rocket fuel for forums.

It also helps to conduct some research on the Web. You can do some basic queries in the search engines to check for keyword strings related to your business. It’s also quite helpful to look into websites that serve the specific function of providing search and popularity information regarding specific topics and websites. A prime example of this is Alexa, which is a free resource and is quite easy to use.

Get Your Friends and Family Involved

What do successful network marketing companies tell their members? Go get your friends and family involved! They’re your initial support network for any venture you do. You’re sure to be able to find at least a few friends or family members who will pitch in and start some topics and participate in your forum discussions. Having trouble finding willing participants? First, try reminding people of how much time they apparently have to send you 10 e-mail forwards a day with pictures of cute cats in boxes and you might successfully guilt them into it. Second, you can try some simple bartering.

Keep It Legit

If you’ve been working hard enough at your business to garner some wiggle room with your budget then you may consider opting for hired guns. And you won’t necessarily have to pay standard copywriter rates since forums are naturally more relaxed and don’t necessarily require top-notch writing.

Warning! Achtung! Attention!

Never take the intelligence of your audience for granted. If you’re not careful with whom you have submit content to your forums then you could risk its integrity. Today’s Internet users are a savvy bunch—thanks to hours and hours of everyday Internet browsing and online applications, we’ve all been put through the ringer of spam, phishing (unlawfully attempting to capture sensitive information), identity fraud, hacking, and viruses. This has made Internet users much more aware of possible scams and online threats. If your content smells phishy then they’ll not only stop using your forum, they’ll also tell their friends and family that your forum is bad news—word-of-mouth goes both ways!

360 Degrees of Business

To help motivate you through this forum venture, you should remind yourself that this forum does more than help drive people to your website or get them to contact you. A successful forum will help round out your business portfolio. If a prospect needs to spend a significant amount of money, then you can be sure that they are doing a background check on you via the Web before they write you a check. You’ll look like a true expert in your field when your forum pops in their search. This is an excellent way to promote a positive image online. And you can also feel good about providing both entertaining and useful information to others!

To your success,

Andrew Rossillo

Andrew Rossillo is Content Crooner’s Marketing Blogger and Staff Writer. He’s ready to put his years of copywriting and online marketing experience to work for your business—he’ll help you get noticed!

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Posted in Online Forums, Online Marketing, Public Relations, Social Marketing, marketing | No Comments »

Create a Solid Online Identity and Ignite Your Sales

Friday, June 18th, 2010
A Peruvian Child and his Favorite Toy / Un niño Peruano con su juguete favorito
Creative Commons License photo credit: AmazonCARES

Your prospects may know what your product or service is, but they won’t buy from you unless you establish a solid online identity. A comprehensive blend of classic and neo marketing tactics, including the latest in social media, creates a solid online identity and an unbreakable brand.

The more places you pop up on the Web, the more clients you’ll get. People are comforted by being able to easily find your and your company’s names. When they fail to find your name within the first page of the search engine results they’ll automatically doubt your legitimacy. Read on to learn about achieving a lucrative presence on the Web.

Social Media Still Sizzlin’

Despite some residual skepticism, social media is indeed still firing on all four cylinders. While you may occasionally hear some folks refer to social media as impotent, that’s probably because they’re expecting immediate sales from it. They call it “social” for a reason. Think about the total number of friends you have. Have you made all of the friends within the last six to 12 months? Of course not! Social media mirrors real life in that it takes time to build up a number of meaningful relationships.

When used right, social media tools such as Twitter, Facebook and Google Buzz will improve your sales. One of the leading ways they do this for you is through data mining and prospect-list building. Don’t count on your one-time social media interaction to get them to visit your site and buy. Instead, count on it to help you create a lead generation machine.

Caveat: Again, executing a successful social media campaign takes time, making this endeavor a bit risky for first-year businesses looking for quick cash. Because it does have lucrative potential though, single-operator companies should start off by dedicating about an hour a week to their social media marketing. After you start to get some positive cash flow going, you’ll then eventually want to hire someone to take over that portion of your marketing. Remember to stick to your core capabilities and your highest-income producing activities.

Financial Gold-mine Forums

It’s actually not all that often that we hear about businesses using online forums to improve their sales. This makes it worth discussing again. Although online forums have seemingly been overshadowed by the latest wave of social media tools, they can still do wonders for creating a solid online identity. Forums provide an ideal virtual environment for positioning yourself as an expert in a niche.

Remember, it’s all about positioning, not prospecting. Create threads within various forums that provide useful information and insights subtly related to your product or service. Likewise, comment on other people’s threads within forums, planting your business’ name in as many places as possible.

You’ll not only create the opportunity to set yourself up as an authority, you’ll also have the chance to plant links back to your website or promotional landing page. This does two stellar things: 1) Provides more ways for people to find your website and click through; 2) Increases your inbound link count which helps boost your search engine ranking. Sweet, right?

Profitable Public Relations

While having your name register under a number of different business projects helps build credibility, having your name paired with benevolent acts will take your business credibility to a whole new level. Of course, we should all be on the lookout for ways to contribute to philanthropic endeavors anyway, but showing your online audience that you care about your community will make them want to do business with you.

Don’t just donate—any business can write a check:

Scenario 1)

  • You: “Hello everyone, we’re proud to announce we wrote a check for our local Habitat for Humanity chapter.”
  • Prospect: “That’s nice.”

Scenario 2)

  • You: “Hello everyone, we’re proud to announce that we had our entire staff visit our local Habitat for Humanity chapter and helped them build a new home for a family of six.”
  • Prospect: “That’s awesome! I feel I can trust your business to treat my needs with great care.”

Get out there and get involved with local non-profit and charity organizations. Not only will you accomplish something that you can genuinely feel good about, you’ll also create the perfect opportunity to draft a press release about your involvement. (Click here to get sales-boosting press release writing tips.) Submit that press release to as many sources as you can throughout the Web and you’ll crank up your credibility in no time.

To your success,

Andrew Rossillo

Andrew Rossillo is Content Crooner’s Marketing Blogger and Staff Writer. He’s ready to put his years of copywriting and online marketing experience to work for your business—he’ll help you get noticed!

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Posted in Public Relations, SEO and SEM, Social Marketing | No Comments »

How to Create Healthy Competition and Attract Clients

Monday, June 14th, 2010
Usain Bolt
Creative Commons License photo credit: Phil McElhinney

Karaoke phenomenon: People with unusually poor singing voices are even more eager to sing than those with beautiful voices. There are countless online users starving for attention, searching the Web for a place where they can finally be heard. Use this desire to create a forum for healthy competition among your target audience. Give your prospects a voice by building an online forum, get them involved, and you will build a solid client base.

Create Your Own Money-making Microcosm

Yes, you can simply choose to post comments and create threads (forum lingo for new topic) on other people’s forums and save yourself some time. But you will only be able to do so in a limited capacity. The owners or site administrators for those forums have full control over what gets posted on their forums. Although this approach can yield some great results, those forum controllers can still snuff out your existence in their forum if they sense the least bit of competition.

Building your own forum gives you the power to create your own virtual microcosm. As the administrator you can create any topics you wish and accept or delete comments at your will. But since you have all the power it’s especially important not to forget that this is all about your forum audience.

Before you reach for your wallet, browse the Web for free forum software. There’s a good chance you’ll be able to find something that will at least be able to provide you with a basic level of functionality to help you get going. You might also consider asking your regular website programmer or designer to help you with that. But you small business owners will want to look into your free options first before you dig into your budget.

Your Marketing Campaign Must Keep Touch with Reality

One of the reasons why many online marketing campaigns fail is because they are created inside a vacuum. Business owners forget that sales and business are a direct reflection of life, and that their marketing efforts need to mirror that. A common departure from realistic online campaigning occurs when business owners lose sight of what gets people excited in their everyday lives. While we like to think that our product or service is enough to get people amped up, it usually isn’t the first thing to get our blood pumping. What is? Competition!

Whether it’s because our parents didn’t coddle us enough and we desperately seek the praise of others or we live to put our skills to the test and see how they match up against others, we love the inherent thrill of competing against others. Look for ways that you can incite healthy competition throughout your marketing. A forum provides a perfect opportunity to both encourage competition and get people talking excitedly about your product or service.

Dare your forum visitors to come up with the most unique way to use your product. Ask them how they would improve your service (remember, you can delete comments that full out attack your service). This will also help you get some useful feedback on how you can provide better service. You can also try asking about how the type of service you provide might evolve in the future. The point is to get people excited to share their insights. And always remember to be gracious and open to their comments and feedback.

There’s Always Something to Talk About

Your product or service may not initially have much that readily fuels competition. No problem! All you have to do is dig down a level or two and think of finite aspects regarding your offer that you can discuss. Don’t automatically think that you have to maintain a broad address of your business offer. Auxiliary topics are completely acceptable and help keep your subjects fresh.

To your success,

Andrew Rossillo

Andrew Rossillo is Content Crooner’s Marketing Blogger and Staff Writer. He’s ready to put his years of copywriting and online marketing experience to work for your business—he’ll help you get noticed!

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Posted in Public Relations, Social Marketing | No Comments »

How to Market What Your Customers Really Want

Friday, June 11th, 2010

(This post is offered by a guest blogger and fellow Content Crooner author)

Tens of thousands of dollars in sales are lost every week; both online and off, by marketers selling the wrong thing. It’s sad but true.

Why? It’s simple really: they are marketing their products or services, and not what their prospects are really looking to buy.

What people are looking to buy is not a tangible product or service. It is something more ethereal than concrete.

It has little or nothing to do with the product or service offered for sale. That is not what people are buying anyway when they make a purchase.

Let me explain:

Most marketers focus their efforts on features of their product or service. Now, I’m not saying that features are not important, because they are. But they are not what sell a commodity.

People are not primarily concerned with how fast a widget goes, how high it bounces or what color it is. They are more concerned with “what’s in it for me?” Benefits offer that morsel to them; features do not.

This flies in the face of the general concept most marketers hold, but bear with me for a moment. To understand this, you must first understand the psychology of the sale.

People don’t buy with the logical center of their mind. They buy from their emotional center. Furthermore, they only buy for one of two reasons:

* To feel better or
* Hurt less

People make purchases to solve a problem they are facing. It doesn’t matter if that’s the need for a new automobile, a romantic vacation for two or legal advice. They are buying a solution that makes them feel better or hurt less.

Features may tell you how fast a sports car can go, but the benefit is how good you feel as the owner of such a vehicle. An accountant may offer ways to save money on your taxes, but the benefit is the loss of stress that’s kept you awake nights.

This is where the majority of business people make the same marketing mistake. They market the features and not the benefits.

Features appeal to the logical side, benefits appeal to the emotional side. People only buy from the emotional side and reinforce their purchase decisions after the fact from the logical side.

So, you see, what you market and what you actually deliver to customers are two very different things. What you market is hope for a solution to their problem. They hope your product or service will make them feel better or hurt less.

This is why an accurate, realistic understanding of your target market is imperative. Know what problems your potentials face and what their hopes and expectations are for relief.

Above all else, help them realize their dreams and aspirations by using your product or service as the vehicle to get there. Helping achieves their goals must always be your first consideration.

Give them what they really want and you’ll have found the goose that lays golden eggs many times over. Appeal to their motives for buying with benefits, reinforce that notion with features and watch your sales increase proportionally.

To your success,

Mike Lawson

Mike Lawson is a freelance consultant to internet marketers. His service provides quality reviews for article marketing automation programs. Read a review of Content Crooner.

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Posted in Affiliate Marketing, Email Marketing, Public Relations, Social Marketing | No Comments »

Give People the Gift of Social Media, Not the Curse

Wednesday, June 9th, 2010
Crowd before night time
Creative Commons License photo credit: addhass

We now have more information at our fingertips than ever before. But it’s getting to a point where sifting through it is an almost impossible task. Help people make sense of all the information out there and they’ll thank you with their wallets.

An ideal place to start is with a social media campaign using tools such as Twitter and Google Buzz. These tools are incredibly simple to use and their limited text fields naturally lend themselves to an easy user experience. Instead of leaving prospects to wade through the masses of useless tweets and buzzes regarding what people ate for lunch, give them clear, succinct information that acts as a virtual GPS system, guiding them on to information and feedback that they can actually use. Remember, being social also means helping others—don’t be afraid to talk business.

Create Your Own Map before You Map out a Course for Others

If you don’t go into your social media campaign with clearly mapped objectives you’ll be like that person at the party who trails off mid sentence and then begins a completely new topic of conversation. Create a clear plan of your objectives and this will create a smooth flow throughout your entire campaign. The hardest part is generating initial interest in your material and this flow will help glide people along, encouraging them to continue reading your social media posts.

The main reasons you should be executing a social media campaign are: branding, networking, exposure, relationship and credibility building, and customer relations.

Place Your Business Last to Be the First One to the Sale

Yes, friends use their social connections to learn about great discounts, sales, promotions and generally solid economical deals. But that doesn’t give you the green light to constantly pitch your sales offers and product promotions. You must maintain your prospect’s perspective and consider what they want to get out of their social media interactions. The top reasons people use these tools are for entertainment and staying current with topics of interest.

Think you’re clever? While you may be able to dupe a visitor here and there, today’s Web users are a savvy group to be reckoned with. For the most part, purely pitching your business will be quite transparent and your tweets and buzzes will become fodder faster than you can say “Hello muddah, hello faddah, here I am at Camp Granada.”

Quality Content Feeds Social Circles

How do you avoid this reputation-damaging transparency? The simple answer is that you should be honest with your audience. Fortunately, it’s possible to pitch your business and still maintain honesty. Provide interesting information that they can apply the very same day. Find subject matter that indirectly relates to your product or service and provide regular updates and insights.

  • Hint: Maintain a consistent voice/tone as well as a regular posting schedule.

This next tip may seem a bit paradoxical, but in order to successfully market your business through social media campaigns you need to forget about marketing. Keep your focus on providing entertaining content that people can use. Succeed in doing this and your copywriting and content will naturally market your brand for you. This also increases your chances of your audience digging, stumbling upon and bookmarking your content for others to see. Always strive to capture what makes content go viral.

Provide people with buzz-worthy topics and they are sure to start sharing it. Once you get enough people sharing links to your content the search engines eventually pick up on this activity and will reward your content with higher search engine rankings. And yes, social media tools are crawled by search engines, so you’ve got some free, powerful potential here.

To your success,

Andrew Rossillo

Andrew Rossillo is Content Crooner’s Marketing Blogger and Staff Writer. He’s ready to put his years of copywriting and online marketing experience to work for your business—he’ll help you get noticed!

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Posted in Online Marketing, Public Relations, SEO and SEM, Social Marketing | No Comments »

Promote Sales-boosting Interaction with Social Media

Wednesday, May 26th, 2010
Dinosaurs and Cavemen
Creative Commons License photo credit: Orin Zebest

As demonstrated throughout history, the greater degree that a community exists, the more commerce takes place. Imagine a group of cavemen…excuse us, cavepeople. They usually lived in smaller groups and typically shared tools and materials with no real commerce taking place because survival was at a premium and everyone needed to work together. As society evolved, groups eventually joined together, forming larger and larger communities. This created an awareness of different skill sets among people and so trading, bartering and eventually commerce came to be.

The interesting thing is that cavepeople were able to survive and live full lives (perhaps a bit shorter) just like we’re able to today, but they did it with much, much less. So we can see that as we’ve become more social beings, the more we perceive and desire the existence of a higher quality of life. Harness this desire by using social media to build a community of loyal clients and prospective buyers by engaging your audience and encouraging interaction. An active buyer is always best!

Use Social Media Tools to Strike Fear in the Hearts of Mankind

Well, we’re not suggesting that you preach that the end is nigh in order to get your prospects to max out their credit cards thinking that the world will end before they get their monthly bill. We are suggesting that you address genuine concerns, one of the premier, classic reasons why people purchase a product or service, in your blogs, Twitter, Google Buzz and other social media tools. It’s okay to use fear to your advantage as long as you provide a genuine solution for an existing fear—don’t create rumors in an attempt to dupe the public into buying.

Here’s an example of what we mean (Yup, these are probably slightly longer than the text fields in some social media tools, but you can simply post two in a row.):

Your social media post:

  • “Did you know that today’s fruits and vegetables now contain a slight fraction of the nutrients that they used to, leading to higher disease rates and more mental and physical disorders?”

Prospect’s response to your post:

  • “I’m already eating the daily recommended amount of fruits and veggies—I can’t force myself to eat any more—what do I do to avoid serious health risks?”

Your follow-up response:

  • “I feel your pain. I used to try and cram in 12 different fruits into a smoothie just to get the bare minimum of nutrients. Now I’ve been using Supplement X to fill the nutrient gap…feeling great!”

Winning formula: Play on an existing concern, wait for a reaction, swoop in as the hero with a legitimate solution and eliminate their fear.

Create an Idea Exchange to Create Sales

Use your social media tools to get others to talk about your product or service. It’s one thing for prospects to be talked at, being force fed the features and benefits of your offer. It’s quite another thing to hear about your features and benefits from a fellow consumer. There’s a real feeling of camaraderie when it comes to looking out for each other on the Web, helping one another find the best deals while avoiding scams. Your offer gains immense credibility when it’s discussed by a third party. It’s similar to a testimonial, but maintains even more believability because it’s not posted in an artificial and staged manner as most testimonials are. This is a living, breathing account of how your offer can improve people’s lives.

Use a very honest and transparent approach, asking your social media followers about unique ways they’ve used your product to better their lives. (People love an opportunity to get in the spotlight by sharing something that only they thought of.) You might also ask them about funny anecdotes that might have sprung up while using your product. The point is to get people talking, laughing, crying…encourage emotion among your community.

A common fear of business owners is that they don’t want to make their product or service open to public conversation. However, if you maintain integrity and wholeheartedly believe in your offer then you should have no fear of submitting it to the wolves. Provide the best quality and you’ll come out as the resilient Mowgli (You know, the little guy raised by wolves in The Jungle Book) instead of wolf food.

To your success,

Andrew Rossillo

Andrew Rossillo is Content Crooner’s Marketing Blogger and Staff Writer. He’s ready to put his years of copywriting and online marketing experience to work for your business—he’ll help you get noticed!

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Posted in Content Crooner, Public Relations, Social Marketing | No Comments »

Build Your Online Credibility and Win More Confident Buyers

Tuesday, May 25th, 2010
Campo del al-fil-er
Creative Commons License photo credit: Manel

One of the cornerstones to successful sales is credibility. You can’t build a successful business on top of a foundation that fails to establish your credentials. People not only use the Internet to research the specifics of your product or service, they use it to perform background checks. Without the opportunity to meet you face to face, your prospects require more credibility points online. But don’t worry, consistent online marketing methods make it easy to provide your prospects with all the information and material they need to gain enough confidence to become a lifetime client.

Provide Unique Information

The power of the Web not only makes it much easier to conduct research and find useful information, it also enables countless businesses and individuals to essentially regurgitate all that information. While content is surely king on the Web, passing on content and information that has been discussed more than Michael Jackson’s death is ultimately a waste of your and your prospects’ time.

For one thing, if you don’t differentiate your content enough you will likely be facing some immense competition for similar topics and keywords, which means that few, if any, will even see your offer. In addition, people want to learn new things that will help them in their daily lives, with their businesses and more. It can get very frustrating when looking for unique information and simply finding countless resources that all mimic each other’s content—your prospects will appreciate your effort to keep the knowledge pool fresh.

Besides being completely illegal and an act of plagiarism, copying the same exact (or slightly modified) content from other sources will register as duplicate content in the search engines and eventually significantly harm your search engine ranking and even get your business flagged or blacklisted for black hat SEO (the wicked-witch sister of white hat SEO).

However, it should be noted that there is a careful balance that can be struck when relaying certain points of interest or news in the media. While you don’t want to hop on the bandwagon and simply rewrite what others are saying about hot topics in the news, you do want to harness some of that excitement and popularity by adopting a unique twist on the same topic.

Provide Hard-to-find Information

Remember when you used to have to go the library to look up information? Neither do we. The Web’s lightning quick, seemingly endless information retrieval capabilities has spoiled us rotten, and we now expect to find anything and everything in just a few seconds. In fact, that’s why entire industries are now popping up that boast faster and more accurate search results derived from the leading search engines.

So much information available and so little of it addresses our specific needs and desires. Conduct a think tank with your business associates or do some brainstorming on your own to generate completely unique, useful topics that you can provide on the Internet. (Verify the degree of uniqueness of your ideas and topics by doing a simple search on the Web). You will establish immense credibility by preventing people from having to jump through so many hoops to find what they’re looking for. Plus, generating unique content and offers also means you’ll have much less competition online.

Display Sample Work

You can talk the talk, but can you walk the walk? Don’t just tell your prospects what you can do for them—show them. Provide links to current work, snapshots of projects and portfolio pages for a wide variety of past and current projects. Simply listing the names of businesses and individuals you’ve helped isn’t enough. While listing well-known brands and companies does lend some credibility to your business, it doesn’t show the prospect what you’re capable of. Make it as clear as possible exactly how you can help them achieve success.

To your success,

Andrew Rossillo

Andrew Rossillo is Content Crooner’s Marketing Blogger and Staff Writer. He’s ready to put his years of copywriting and online marketing experience to work for your business—he’ll help you get noticed!

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Posted in Article Marketing, Article Writing Tips, Public Relations, SEO and SEM | 1 Comment »

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