2nd brain collective Archives - Page 2 of 22

Guest Post: Up Your Marketing Game: 4 Ways to Make Your Business Stand out from the Rest

As a business owner, you have probably come across the disheartening statistics around the high business failure rates. There are plenty of reasons why businesses fail with the lack of ideas to beat the competition, topping the list. Standing out from the rest in the same industry is vital to your firm’s success. Unfortunately, even though most people understand that concept, far too many business owners fail to put it into practice. So, here are four hacks that will make your firm stand out.

Provide Unique and Extraordinary Services and Products

“What makes your business different?” You will need to back up your answer with tangible evidence either through how you provide your services or the uniqueness of your product. Clients have to mark you from the rest of the market, and it’s only possible when you offer something unique. For instance, custom fit jogging shoes has become a norm today. But how do you deliver the service? Perhaps include activities such as watching the client walk or run, advise them professionally and get down to business.

Address Customer Complains and Suggestions

If you want to bring more customers in and retain initial clients, you have to alleviate their pain and give them what they deserve. But you can’t do this if you do not listen to what your clients want. Consider asking them for feedback after purchases and services. Address sensible pain points that they might have brought forward and also apply suggestions that could work for your business. You might also try explaining to them why their tips cannot work at the moment for your business. Engage them to create that business-clientele relationship.

Narrow Your Niche

You cannot specialize in everything. This is a straightforward rule that most businesses ignore. Pick your strongholds and focus on delivering the best. Adapt a unique model that other companies don’t offer, recruit the best experts in the industry, and your target market will get your attention. You could bring in a marketing agency to help you reach your specific target market. Always remember, when your business tries to serve everyone, you end up serving no one.

Build an Excellent and Attractive Company Culture

An attractive company culture not only helps you attract and retain top talent, but it’s also proven to be a powerful marketing tool. You want to build a firm that potential employees are fighting to be part of or perhaps one that people are excited to go on Monday mornings.

These four great ways are an excellent place to start. They should give you more inspiration to stand out rather than fitting it.

Emma Sturgis

Emma is a freelance writer based out of Boston, MA. She writes most often on health and education. When not writing, she enjoys reading and watching film noir. Say hi on Twitter @EmmaSturgis2

New Video: A Fahrenheit Massage Story

Kristin is not your normal massage therapist. Her ability to know where your pain is and to focus on that area is an art. Also, her knowledge of how your body is responding to that pain and what to do between trips to see her. She is based in Lansing, MI and you can schedule some time with her on her website.

For more information: https://www.fahrenheitmassage.com

Guest Post: 5 Ways to Growth Hack Your Business and Make It Thrive

Even though it’s become a buzzword in corporate and marketing circles, growth hacking is not without its merit. These quick and low-cost methods of marketing can have a huge impact on growth, especially for smaller businesses. Below we offer a guide on how to take these less travelled paths and use them to stand out from the crowd.

What Is Growth Hacking?

Growth hacking itself isn’t all that easy to define. Essentially, it means using a number of marketing techniques and design choices in order to quickly generate sales. All this is done with only one goal in mind: growth.

The process itself is pretty straightforward: first, you run any of the number of analytics tools that will help you determine which pages or sections of your website generate the most traffic. You then focus on one of these areas and run a brief experiment trying to convert that traffic into sales.

This could mean anything, from redesigning your contact page to adding social media buttons or testimonials. As long as the change you made is quick, easy to implement, and results in the growth of one or more metrics, it’s considered a success.

If you are a small or mid-size business owner, hacking growth has the potential to take your business to the next level. All it requires is thinking outside the box and not being afraid to experiment. In the end, you can end up achieving great results with minimum time and money spent.

Below are five examples of growth hacking you can try out right now.

Focus on Quality Content

Simply having a blog section on your website will do wonders for the growth of your business. This is due to the fact that content marketing costs much less than traditional marketing, while generating as much as three times more leads.

Aside from this, posting regularly on your blog lets your visitors know you are an expert in your field. This, in turn, builds your website’s trustworthiness in Google’s eyes, increasing your search results ranking, and making your website visible to more people. It’s a virtuous circle that can have a great impact on your growth.

Make sure that the content is high in quality, though. Going in-depth with your articles and providing useful information about your niche will improve your SEO ranking and convert visitors to customers at the same time.

Leverage Reviews and Social Media

Anyone who’s ever bought anything online knows how important reviews can be. A quick and easy way to convert new customers is to show positive reviews and testimonials from your previous customers right on the pages of your website.

Also, consider using social media as a part of your advertising strategy. You can do this either by creating a profile for your business and regularly posting updates, or by signing up for Facebook and Google ads.

If you decide on the former, don’t be afraid to ask your followers for help. Adding a call to action to your social media updates will encourage your followers to share and promote your content, basically giving you free marketing space. Also, you can use smaller social media platforms such as The Dots or Profit.ly, where your competition is not likely to have a large presence.

Take Advantage of AI

We’ve already mentioned one of the possible uses of AI in hacking the growth of your company: using it to analyse which parts of your website attract the most visitors. However, the applications are limitless, from analysis and administration, to content generation and customer support.

One area where the use of AI can really benefit your business is customer support. Using software like chatbots can let a small business provide 24/7 support to their customers, without spending extra money on hiring support staff. This level of availability is sure to result in more conversions, and thus growth.

Give Away Free Upgrades (And Make Them Count)

It’s one thing to offer free signup bonuses or sales to prospective customers, but approaching free upgrades in a creative way can truly take your growth to the next level. A good example of a free upgrade scheme is Dropbox, where both the person referring and the new person signing up get upgraded storage space.

Make sure your free upgrades are a win-win company and they’ll become simply too good for potential customers to pass up.

Constantly Test and Tweak

All the techniques we described above are likely to have some influence on the growth of your business. However, this effect will vary on a case to case basis. If you only take one thing from this, let it be the fact that you need to constantly try out small-scale experiments like these. Test and tweak your marketing methods until you find the right ones to boost your growth.

Conclusion

Using the methods described above and remembering to focus on the big picture of growth is sure to take your business to the next level. Innovate, test, tweak, and in no time your business will grow faster than you ever thought possible.

Michael Deane is one of the editors of Qeedle, a small business magazine. When not blogging (or working), he can usually be spotted on the track, doing his laps, or with his nose deep in the latest John Grisham.

New Video: Ingham County Health Department – Issues on Housing

In this video for the Ingham County Health Department, we go into the economic and health issues concerning home ownership and rental properties.

For more information: http://hd.ingham.org/

Guest Post: No More Newsletters! Modern Methods to Keep Your Customers Updated On Your Business

With email open rates at 20% – 30%, businesses need to try more innovative ways to reach their customers. By using new advertising strategies and taking advantage of popular tech innovations, businesses are able to keep customers updated. Consider the following four ideas when trying to replace email marketing.

Use PPC Ads

When making the shift from using email newsletters to marketing through other avenues, businesses should use PPC or pay-per-click ads. This type of advertising allows businesses to purchase ads that will be listed within search engine results. When consumers search for relevant keywords, these PPC ads will show up alongside the regular search results. Businesses only pay for the percentage of ads that are clicked on.

Send SMS Updates

When it comes to SMS marketing, businesses can expect to see open rates as high as 98%. This incredibly high open rate means businesses are able to reach their audience much more effectively through text messages. With the help of SMS services for small business, companies are able to guarantee that more of their customers will open, read, and act on the information.

Use Social Media

With 3.49 billion people on social media, businesses that use social media marketing are able to expand their reach in ways they can’t with email marketing. By focusing their efforts on social media campaigns for Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and similar platforms, businesses are able to actively engage with interested users. With regular posts, DM’s, and sponsored ads, businesses are able to target their audience through all forms of social media.

Create a Business App

Most brands today are hopping on the trend of developing an app. While customers have to download and use the app, most brands find that having a mobile app helps to improve brand recognition, build customer loyalty, foster customer engagement, and stand out from the competition. When customers might otherwise not open an email after receiving a notification, many businesses find that customers are more likely to open a brand’s app after receiving a notification.

While still used in some circles, email marketing isn’t quite as effective as it used to be in the past. By turning to more effective marketing techniques, businesses no longer have to worry about how to entice their customers to open their emails. With PPC ads, SMS marketing, social media campaigns, and the use of mobile apps, businesses can improve the way they connect with their customers.

Meghan Belnap is a freelance writer who enjoys spending time with her family. She loves being in the outdoors and exploring new opportunities whenever they arise. Meghan finds happiness in researching new topics that help to expand her horizons. You can often find her buried in a good book or out looking for an adventure. You can connect with her on Facebook right here and Twitter right here.

Guest Post: Avoid these Common Facebook Ads Pitfalls

Facebook is one of the best platforms for growing your audience and driving conversions, but many businesses impact their results by making simple mistakes that are easy to avoid. Improving your approach to Facebook marketing will have a significant effect on your ROI.

If you’re not getting the Facebook marketing results you’re after, it might be time to reevaluate your strategies and change the way you approach the channel. These are some of the most common Facebook Ads errors that stop brands from achieving their goals.

Not Focusing on Conversions

Customer journey mapping is one of the hottest trends in digital marketing, and more and more businesses are beginning to look at conversions as a long-term goal. While it’s important to promote long-term engagement, making a sale should be your objective with every Facebook ad.

With that in mind, each ad should be developed to push readers toward making a purchase. Adding a lead to your contact list is a good secondary goal, but only because subscribers are more likely to buy something. It’s important to keep sales at the front of your mind in each Facebook marketing campaign.

Using the Wrong Statistics

Facebook offers more marketing analytics than any other platform, and these give you unparalleled insight into every piece of content. That said, it’s easy to get distracted by some of the less important numbers and lose sight of the ones that really matter to your business.

Taktical, a performance marketing agency, recommends looking beyond metrics such as reach or likes towards metrics like cost per conversion and cost per click. These tell you exactly what your money is getting with every campaign, and they make it easy to identify which ads need to be revised or replaced.

Sending the Same Ads to Your Entire Audience

Digital marketing used to be as simple as displaying the same ads on different channels, but that approach is now hopelessly outdated. The best marketers take full advantage of Facebook’s audience segmentation features to fine-tune audiences and personalize their content as much as possible.

Facebook allows you to build custom audiences using a wide range of data points including location, age, interests, and previous interactions with your brand. You can also develop lookalike audiences based on your existing leads, helping you identify others who might be interested in your products. Experiment with different custom audiences and see which ones fit your customer personae.

Effective Facebook marketing is crucial for any business, and improving your results is often as simple as making a few quick changes. These are some of the best places to start if you’re looking for ways to update your Facebook marketing practices for 2019.

Rae is a graduate of Tufts University with a combined International Relations and Chinese degree. After spending time living and working abroad in China, she returned to NYC to pursue her career and continue curating quality content. Rae is passionate about travel, food, and writing (of course).

New Video: DayStarr Communications – Our St.Johns Business Partners

We were tasked to tell the story of three area St Johns businesses and how they enjoyed the fiber internet service that was provided by DayStarr Communications. For more on DayStarr Communications: https://daystarr.net/

Guest Post: 4 Resources to Help Business Execs Grow the Biz

Being a successful businessperson is no simple feat. That’s the reason that it’s such a rare one. If you’re an executive who is trying to expand your existing business, though, you don’t have to feel like your goal is hopeless in any sense. There are dependable resources out there that can make business growth something that’s a lot more realistic for you and all of your team members.

Industry Conferences

There are all sorts of conferences that take place annually. These conferences cover all sorts of industries and fields as well. If you’re a business executive who wants to expand your healthcare clinic, you should attend events that are relevant. If you’re an executive who wants to strengthen your advertising or marketing agency, you should attend events that are relevant to those specific fields, too.

CEO Coaching

CEO (Chief Executive Officer) coaching can be an invaluable tool for business executives who are looking to get ahead. If you want to figure out all of the secrets that help talented CEOs go far, then startup business CEO coaching can aid you significantly. Look for a CEO coach who has a fantastic track record. Look for a coach who seems eager to teach you the ins and outs of leadership as well.

Career Books

There are all sorts of credible books that delve into many kinds of career matters these days. If you want to learn about all sorts of pertinent strategies that can help you move your business up several notches, then you should read books that make sense. Head to your neighborhood library to search for books that go into business expansion. Head to your shopping mall’s bookstore to do the same exact thing. Prioritize books that have been game-changers for masterful business leaders in the past.

The Internet

The Internet in general can make a wonderful resource for the most ambitious and committed business executives around. There are all kinds of trusted websites that discuss executives and their intricate growth strategies. There are even forums and message boards that cater to people who are trying to thrive in the business sector. If you want to figure out the secret to business expansion, you should assess trusted online sources at length.

Business growth may seem elusive. It’s always within reach for executives who are unwavering and persistent, however. If you want to expand your company, then you need to have a determined spirit.

Bio: Rachelle Wilber is a freelance writer living in the San Diego, California area. She graduated from San Diego State University with her Bachelor’s Degree in Journalism and Media Studies. She tries to find an interest in all topics and themes, which prompts her writing. When she isn’t on her porch writing in the sun, you can find her shopping, at the beach, or at the gym. Follow her on Twitter and Facebook: @RachelleWilber; https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100009221637700

New Video: Elder Law of Michigan – MiCAFE Network: Nance’s Story

MiCAFE Network client Nance Conner shares his experience working with Bridging Communities to receive assistance with his utility bills.

For more info https://www.elderlawofmi.org/micafe
877-664-2233

New Video: Cristo Rey Community Center – Kalena’s Story

Kalena Baldwin discovered she had thyroid cancer in 2015. In 2017, she was diagnosed with stage IV cancer. In order to take care of her five boys and herself, she leaned on the Cristo Rey Community Center for assistance. The CRCC were able to help her with getting food, clothing, and more while she was dealing with medical bills.

For more on the Cristo Rey Community Center: https://www.cristoreycommunity.org