Online Marketing | Web Design | Social Media
Hey, have you heard these before?
“E-mail marketing is dead, kaput.”
“No one reads emails, they’re too busy scrolling Instagram.”
“Social media ads are the real moneymakers.”
“We’re swamped already; who has time for newsletters?
With 14 years in the digital marketing trenches, I can tell you email marketing is an overlooked gem. By ignoring email marketing, you’re leaving loads of cash on the table.
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Today I walked past a $2 Shop and cringed when I saw Christmas decorations in the window. Then I though, s*** it’s only 13 weeks to Christmas. Maybe you personally don’t care much about the festive season, but if you own a business, you should be thinking about strategies to leverage the overall shopping madness. People are in the ‘buying mode’, and they don’t shop just for presents…they shop, period. So if you position what you’re selling in front of your ideal clients, you’re highly likely to make more sales, then at any other time.
The Guardian forecasts that Christmas online shopping will increase by 17% this year, so a well targeted Christmas marketing campaign will help you boost sales.
Here are some Christmas marketing tips:
1. Start Now
There is still time to prepare a good Christmas marketing campaign but you must start now. It all starts with planning. First write down what you want to achieve. Of course you want more sales, however also think weather you want to:
Your Christmas marketing campaign will need to look different depending on what your answer is. For example, the fastest way to get new customers is through paid advertising (Google Ads, Facebook Ads, etc), while existing customers will be encouraged through email campaign.
It’s important to know your goals, so that you can tailor your marketing campaign to your needs, then measure and track results.
2. Educate
There is still plenty of time to educate your audience about your services and products. Rather then pushing hard for thesale, educate your target market about the benefits they are getting with your products and services. Create awareness, excitement and demand. So that when the time comes to present your offer, your audience will be in anticipation and have a desire to get your products or services.
3. Think outside the Santa bag
Get creative! We’re all bombarded with Christmas messages but if you think outside of the standard Christmas messaging, I’m sure you’ll come up with something unique around Christmas theme that appeals to your audience. Remember the “Elf Yourself” campaign from Office Max that went viral?
The best ideas are always the ones that ask for participation of your audience. Ask them to share their images around Christmas theme or run a competition that ask for engagement. Such content always performs well as it get people to comment and share more then usual.
4. Create content in advance
If you plan out Christmas marketing campaign now, you have plenty of time to create quality content around your products and services. Think about how you can leverage the same content in different ways. For example, a review about your product can easily be broken into short posts for social media and turned into a short video about the product and how to use it.
If you prepare and schedule your content in advance, then you only need to think about driving traffic to your website to make sales. That’s much easier then doing everything whilst also enjoying the joys of festive season.
5. Be mobile ready
According to IBM, 45% of online sales during 2013 Christmas season were via mobile devices. If you’re website is not optimised for mobile, I don’t need to tell you that you may be missing out big time.
Your website should be built so that it’s responsive, which means it’s design adjusts depending on the device and size of the screen it’s been viewed on.
If it’s not and your website is build on WordPress you can add a plugin that turns your website into mobile ready website when it’s viewed on mobile, until you’re ready to get a new website with a responsive design.
If you need help, just send us an email or give us a call on 0432 698 913 and we’ll help you set it up.
Extra Tip: Leverage Social Media, especially Pinterest
It’s a no brainer, right?
Take a step further and start actively growing your fan base by identifying pages and groups, which have your target market. Then start regularly engaging with them by participating in discussion with good comments. This way your brand will be visible to much wider audience then just posting on your page.
Why Pinterest? You only need to know that:
Now, you make up your mind if this is worth your time.
Have you ever heard this saying: “You can have the best offer but if you are pitching to the wrong audience you will not make any sales”?
Knowing who your customers are is essential for any marketing campaign.
To know them means to know who they are as a person, what they like and respond to, what makes them angry, what excites them. Once you know them you will know exactly how to advertise to them, which will result in making more sales.
It sounds pretty easy, so why are many businesses still struggling?
Most business owners fail to plan their marketing and as a result they are too many things to too many people.
This means that lack of clarity and identifying who your targeted audience will result in shooting your message to potentially wrong audience or sending mixed messages. Imagine for a second, that you are selling designer women’s fashion with a high end price tag and you are advertising your products in a teen fashion magazine. You will not make many sales. Teens may grow to like your brand but are probably not in a position to buy from you yet. If you would advertise exactly the same products in a magazine that targets women with high end earnings, your sales would be skyrocketing.
How do you determine your target audience?
This is as easy as asking yourself few questions but it’s probably one of the most important tasks you need to complete as a business owner before you start any marketing campaign. In fact, it is so important that you should do that before you even start your business.
If you haven’t done so, you need to do it as soon as you stop riding this article. I cannot stress enough how important this is. Without in-depth knowledge about your target audience, you can forget about successful marketing campaign.
So, where do you start?
I’m confident that in general you know who your products or services are for. To be really effective in advertising you need to get few steps further and really get to know these people. You need to consider:
All these details are important and will make your marketing campaign successful. The better you know your targeted audience the better you can communicate with them. Once you have a good understanding of them then you will know exactly how to appeal to them. Makes sense?
Then once you know them you have to become them. This means that when you are creating your marketing campaigns, you need to put yourself in a position of your audience and consider your add from their perspective. You need to step in their shoes.
The easiest way to achieve this is to create you perfect customer Avatar. If this brings blue tall creatures to your mind, you are half way there. Because imagination is important part of creating your customer Avatars, you need to get ‘under their skin’
Your perfect customer Avatar is a list of traits that your ideal client portrays. It’s their inner desires, hidden fears and all the things that keeps them awake at night.
Your avatar represents a whole group of people that you identified as target audience. When you communicate with your target audience, you always talk to your Avatar. This means you always communicate in first person, like you are talking only to your Avatar. If you studied your targeted audience well, then each person will identify themselves in your Avatar.
Everything you communicate to your prospect market is designed around your Avatar and speaks directly to your Avatar, which makes it the most valuable marketing tool for your business.
Creating your Avatar might feel a bit strange at the start but it’s actually heaps of fun. They are like your marketing campaign buddies that you can turn to every time you are creating ads. Visualize yourself looking at your ads from your customer avatar perspective and take into account all relevant factors.
So now that you know the secret to successful marketing, all you need to do is get thinking and spend couple of hours considering your Avatar.
I’ve created a report for you that will take you through the process and the most common questions you need to ask yourself to create your ideal customer avatar. You can download it HERE.
Now that you know your ideally customer, keep the Avatar in mind anytime you are communicating with your target audience, whether it be via ads, blog post, videos, social media…and you will notice it’s sometimes easier to talk to one person then a big group.
I would like to know what you think about Avatars and how will you use this secret powerful marketing weapon.
As a business owner you are probably always on the lookout of how you can increase your visibility and attract more customers. It’s true that paid advertising is the fastest and easiest way to achieve this. But in the great world of the Internet, not all advertising needs to cost a lot of money to be efficient.
You probably heard about content marketing and if not, you need to read on, as content marketing is one of the best low-cost and high-return marketing forms that will get your business visible and increase your credibility.
The idea of content marketing is that you create a content that educates and/or entertains your target market. In return for sharing valuable information, your followers will reward you with their appreciation, trust and loyalty. Once such relationship is established, your educated followers will buy from you, even though you haven’t really pushed to sale to them. How wonderful is that.
This cute image explains how it works (courtesy of Aweber)
Content marketing is very popular with online marketers and if it works for them, then it works for anyone who has a website or uses social media marketing.
How to make it work for you?
The reason why many don’t tackle content marketing is the good old excuse of not having enough time. It’s a bit of a BS, as content marketing can all be done in advance, all you need to do is plan ahead. So the first step to make it work for you is, you’ve guessed it:
Planning
It’s simple. Answer these questions and you have your plan:
Once you answer these questions, you have a plan. Now all you need to do is write your content.
Writing
The most efficient and productive way of performing tasks is to bulk them up. So, if you need to write content, the most time-efficient way is to sit down and write as much as you can in a given time. Once you have the content ready, then schedule it for posting. This way you will save heaps of time and you know how it is, once the pen (fingers J) runs smoothly, you don’t want to stop the creative flow.
Consider setting up one day in a week; let’s say Monday morning for 2 hours, to write one blog post, email newsletter and 10 Facebook posts. Then schedule them in WordPress and Facebook and you are done for the next week with your content. Now you can concentrate on other aspects of your business.
Think about which day best suits you to write. Unless you really have to, refrain from opening your email of Facebook until allocated time is over and you have some content.
Content marketing does not stop with writing and publishing. The next important step is:
Monitoring and responding
You need to regularly check all platforms where you publish your content for any comments, questions, so that you can respond in a timely manner. Especially when it comes to social media you need to respond quickly to elevate engagement, which prolongs longevity of your posts and give you more reach and exposure.
Set up reminders to check your posting platforms daily and for social media make sure you are available for at least 30min after your posts are publish, so that you can promptly engage with fans. Then set your smart phone with push notifications to follow any comments throughout the day. (Warning – create a discipline to only check business account notification, to avoid getting pulled into private conversations and checking upon your friends – this can wait until later. You have business to run J
Remember, a good marketing strategy combines paid and free advertising. Content marketing is not only cheap; it allows your potential customers to get to know you and build relationship with you. It also helps you build credibility by educating your market and presenting your product and services.
If you are already using content marketing, share what works for you in comments below.
Everyone is raving about how important is to include social media marketing in your marketing campaigns and it seems that most small businesses are starting to grasp this message. But there is another component of online marketing, which brings real measurable benefits to your business. I’m talking about email marketing.
Have you ever heard that to make money online you need to build your emailing list? You might say ‘I don’t have online business, so I don’t need this’, but am I right to say that you run various adds, promotions, sales, product launches and similar?
Email marketing is as important for online businesses as it is for any other physical store or service provider. Email marketing helps you build relationship, trust and loyalty with your subscribers. And once you gain that, you know your subscribers will buy products and services from you, not your competition.
Email marketing is also the cheapest and the most targeted form of marketing. Why?
For 2 reasons:
#1:
People who sign-up to your emailing list are already warm leads. This means they will highly likely buy from you in the future. Why? People will not give you their email address unless they think you have something valuable to them. This means that anyone who is on your list is a potential buyer and you know that because they expressed an interest in your business. You cannot get more targeted campaign than that.
This is further enhanced by possibility to collect data on how your subscribers behave, which helps you to refine your approach and messages.
#2
A cost of running an email campaign is nothing comparing to any other form of marketing. With Aweber you can try your email marketing campaign for as low as $1.“I want to try it”
So why are so many small businesses still reluctant to use email marketing in their marketing strategy? The most common reasons are:
If you fall in to the first category – excuse me from being blunt – sooner or later you will be out of business. How we do business today is changing and unless you change with it, your future is not bright.
According to Aweber’s 2012 survey, “the most business owners said they spend between 1 and 3 hours a week on their campaigns.” With 77% of surveyed business owners stating that email marketing increases their profit, it is worthwhile finding that time.
Thirdly, if your clients are human, there is no reason why it won’t work for you. The question is; are you willing to give it a try to find out if email marketing works for you?
I accept that for some, technical tasks can be a bit daunting. You might not be up for learning how to set-up your email marketing campaign or you might not even know where to start.
That’s fine. I can help you with that.
Programs such as Aweber really make email marketing a breeze. With auto-responding follow ups and drag-and-drop email templates sending messages is quick and easy.
I know that you can learn. So, once your email marketing technical parts are set up, I will show you exact steps how to use email marketing tools and support you until you are confident that you can do it on your own. Worth giving it a try? Get in touch.
As for the excuse that email marketing is too expensive, there are free email marketing software providers out there you can use. I personally use Aweber which is used by most online marketing gurus. Here you can Test Drive it:
Can You Have More Sales, Too?
Helping over 115,000+ businesses like yours raise profits and build customer relationships using AWeber’s opt-in email marketing software for over 10 years.
I hope I gave you enough reasons why you should try email marketing or if you are already doing it, why you need to continue. But enough of me talking, let’s have a look what other 3000 small business owners and entrepreneurs have to say:
Data and infographic by AWeber
Share your thoughts in comments below or share it with your friends. Thanks