Inbound marketing strategies to grow your business: I

Inbound marketing refers to the technique of drawing customers to products and services via content marketing, social media marketing and search engine optimization. Inbound marketing provides information, an improved customer experience and builds trust by offering potential customers the valuable information they desire via company sponsored newsletters, blogs, and entries on social media platforms.

Inbound marketing

We have mentioned a number of inbound marketing strategies to grow your business:

1. Leverage the power of keywords:

In order to rank higher in SERPs you need to identify the most relevant keywords and optimize your content accordingly. This will help you to successfully gain traffic for relevant keywords if you use those keywords on your site. So, you need to focus on keywords, specifically long tail keywords that are important. Having a quality website and content optimized for SEO ensures that Google’s web-crawling technology is able to identify and index your site’s content to have it appear for free to people searching and rank higher in the search results.

Keyword optimization
Keyword optimization

2. Social media interaction:

This is an era driven by social media. These days, potential customers find companies, follow those companies, and interact with those companies.Since there are real people behind every like and share, so, in order to connect with those people, you need to ask questions, answer questions, respond to tweets, and be a presence. Each of these social mentions provide an opportunity for your business to interact with the mention, thereby increasing its brand image and its reach into other social networks as well.

Social media engagement
Social media engagement

3. Use guest blogging:

Guest blogging is a new way to promote your web blog or website. In this strategy you may post your article or blog on others blog by getting their permission. Guest Blogging is used by bloggers to increase traffic for their blog by posting published blog on other blogger’s blog.

Guest blogging
Guest blogging

Lead nurturing tactics: I

Lead nurturing refers to the process of developing relationships with buyers at every stage of the sales funnel, and through every step of the buyer’s journey. It focuses marketing and communication efforts on listening to the needs of prospects and providing the information and answers based upon their requirements.

1. Deliver the right content, to the right people, at the right time:

An efficacious inbound marketing strategy requires strategically nurturing your leads using targeted content. In order to deliver the right content, to right people at the right time:

i) you need to understand each of your buyer personas

ii) you then need to cumulate targeted content designed to nurture each of your personas based on their interests, goals, objectives, and marketing triggers.

iii)  you need to have a marketing automation platform ready to help you identify, categorize and target your unique buyer personas for inbound marketing strategy.

Targeted content
Targeted content

2. Social media:

Social media can be leveraged for lead nurturing as it has the capacity to facilitate something all businesses want most – the ability to engage in 1 to 1 conversations with their target audience.

Social media for lead nurturing
Social media for lead nurturing

3. Remarketing:

Remarketing is a clever way to connect with those visitors to your website who may not have made an immediate purchase or inquiry. It allows you to position targeted ads in front of a defined audience that had previously visited your website while browsing elsewhere around the internet. In other words, it is a form of online advertising
that can help you keep your brand in front of bounced traffic after they leave your website.

Remarketing
Remarketing

4. Multi-channel lead nurturing:

According to a research, almost four out of five marketers say their email open rates don’t exceed 20%. Also, 79% of marketing leads never convert into sales. The main cause behind this poor performance is a lack of effective lead nurturing. Effective multi-channel lead nurturing refers to a technique that most commonly involves a combination of marketing automation, email marketing, social media, paid retargeting, dynamic website content and direct sales outreach.

 Multi-channel lead nurturing
Multi-channel lead nurturing

5. Provide a personalized website experience: 

The likelihood of a person engaging with you further is greatly increased if you offer a much more personalized website experience. This can be achieved through smart content. With the aid of smart content, you can deliver content specifically tailored to where a prospect is in the buying process, or content targeted to people the very first time they visit. Smart Content lets you target content based on anything you know about your contacts through research.

 

Personalized content
Personalized content

How to increase customer lifetime value : Part III

1. Let your customers know how much you appreciate them:

Fans who show their loyalty every now and then by sharing your content on social media deserve to be rewarded, right? So, you can actually embed social media posts from fans who have shared your content or said something great about your brand to their followers. Put them in the spotlight and let them know how much you appreciate them and their efforts. They’ll make your brand a priority, once they see the reciprocity, The most common example is that of Soda Stream.

Soda Stream
Soda Stream

2. Send surprizes to your fans:

Who doesn’t like surprises? So, make it a point to send surprises to your fans so as to show your gratitude. Take a look at their social accounts to see what kinds of things they are fond of, and then send them something you know they’ll love. They’ll definitely share this experience with their friends, family, colleagues, and anyone else who will listen. Make sure that you do a little research and find something unique or, at the very least, different from what most people are talking about rather than sending something obvious.

Surprizes
Surprizes

3. Provide full experience to active customers:

This means keep your fans updated with your products and services. For example, if you have a product line, send them something they aren’t familiar with. If you have a premium service, give them the upgrade free of cost. This is truly the most effective way of increasing the customer lifetime value.

Service upgrade
Service upgrade

4. Acknowledge your customers’ suggestions:

Convince your customers that their suggestions are always welcomed. For this, always leave room for your customers to make suggestions that you didn’t list, and always offer some kind of incentive for participating in the poll. Even if it’s just a chance to win something small like a gift card or early access to an upcoming feature, it will make a huge difference in the number of people who actually participate.

Customer suggestions
Customer suggestions

5. Help your customers with their interests:

You can help customers do something they love. If possible, you may start “sponsoring” customers’ things that they are compassionate about.

 

 

Best customer retention strategies: Part VI

1.Make sure no engagement is left behind:

One of the best things that you can do to improve your customer retention is to adopt a policy in your company that no customer engagement is ignored and a response is sent as soon as possible. There are a variety of tools out there like Mention, Hootsuite, and Sproutsocial which are all great for monitoring social media. You can leverage these tools to increase your customer engagement rates and gain higher exposure.

Customer engagement
Customer engagement

2. CRM:

Customer relationship management (CRM)  refers to practices, techniques, and technologies that companies use to manage and analyze customer interactions and data throughout the customer lifecycle. CRM helps improve business relationships with customers resulting in customer retention and driving sales growth.

CRM systems are further designed to compile information on customers across different channels.

 

3. Set up an exclusive club for your loyal and highly active customers:

As a matter of fact, people like to feel special and considered important. So, that’s exactly what you should strive to do in order to achieve customer retention.

Setting up an exclusive VIP club takes time and money but will help you stand out from the crowd. Also, if done well, and optimized, will bring you positive returns.

Benefits for high performance customers
Benefits for high-performance customers

4. Make the most of social media:

Social media, today, is undoubtedly the most efficacious way of engaging with customers and retaining them. It can play a vital role in building more meaningful connections with customers, so they stay with you longer.

You can keep your customers updated and let them know about your latest offers. Moreover, you can also provide benefits like digital discount cards for following you on these platforms.

Social media
Social media

5. Upgrade your customer experience:

You should keep upgrading your website. You further need to consider these aspects while enhancing your website features:

i) redesigning your website

ii) considering solutions for device compatibility

iii) optimizing the load time

iv) providing easy navigation to customers

v) offering transparency and much more!

Lead generation strategies : Part IV

1. Display and sell your wares at trade shows:

Trade shows, exhibitions, and fairs are such events where many serious prospects will be present. Such events are great opportunitues to strengthen you lead generation efforts. But there is an art to successful exhibiting which, if learned, generates immense rewards. There are few other sales forums where prospects and clients come to you. Also, you can use this opportunity to get valuable opinions on your products and services.

Besides attracting new business, exhibitions can be used to introduce existing customers to additional products.

Trade shows

2. Database marketing:

Database marketing is a systematic approach to the gathering, fortification, and processing of consumer data (both for customers and potential customers) that is maintained in a company’s databases. With the aid of database marketing, much more consumer data is maintained, and that the data is processed and used in more sophisticated ways.

Among other things, marketers utilize the data to:

i) learn more about customers

ii) identify and focus on target markets for specific campaigns (through customer segmentation process)

iii) compare customers’ value to the company and

iv) provide more dedicated offerings for customers to live up to their expectations.

Since database marketing provides an extended access to potential customers so lead generation becomes much efficient.

3. Target marketing:

Sweepstakes and contests with large grand prizes tend to attract more entries regardless of the odds of winning. Therefore, the value of smaller prizes usually totals much less than that of the top prize. Firms that incorporate target marketing such as Publishers Clearing House and Reader’s Digest, have also found that the more involved the entry process, the more entrants. Businesses often obtain marketing information about a customer from sweepstakes entries which leads to an active participation further leading to a boost in sales.

4. Card deck offers and inserts:

A card deck offer is a product description on an individual card. The card is about the size of a postcard generally placed within a pack along with 50 or more other cards. It’s a quick and enticing way for many busy people to “shop” through a variety of product offers. You can normally target and send your offer to a large number of carefully selected prospective customers.

This method is less costly as compared to other marketing techniques. On the other hand, inserts give you a direct approach to both homes and businesses in the desired geographical area, giving you the flexibility to drop any number at any time.

5. Social media visibility / Viral marketing:

Social media makes the process even easier because of all of the information that people readily share, and also because of the large number of users on sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and more! 40% of people spend more time socializing on social media than face to face in today’s era. So needless to say, social media makes for the perfect place to identify your target audience and turn them into new sales leads benefiting your business.

Lead generation with LinkedIn: You won’t believe how easy it can be!

Lead generation using LinkedIn

How important is lead generation for a business?

Okay, let’s relate it to real life. How important is it for the humans to eat, drink or breathe to survive? Just like all of these activities are inevitable, lead generation is critical to a business’s survival!

That’s why businesses around the globe leave no stone unturned to generate and nurture leads. The most effective lead generation today, can be achieved through social media platforms especially LinkedIn. Here’s how it can be done effectively.

Continue reading “Lead generation with LinkedIn: You won’t believe how easy it can be!”

Here’s why social media listening is significant for your business

SML

Social media listening is the process of keeping an eye on what’s being said about a brand/business/company on social media platforms. With the customers being more empowered than ever today, word of mouth is the most influential form of marketing. So, monitoring what kind of perspective the customers’ have regarding a brand is very important to thrive in today’s competitive market. Read on to know the significance of social media listening:

Continue reading “Here’s why social media listening is significant for your business”

Providing an exceptional customer support through social media

Social media customer support

Customer expectations are increasing with each passing year. This calls for the creation of a seamless experience that spans the showroom floor to the social media platforms. This can be done by providing exceptional customer support through multiple channels including social media. Let’s have a look at the best strategies to provide an unmatched customer support through social media:

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