Which Lead Tactics Work Best

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The worst number in business is one. If you have just one source of leads, it is only a question of time when the price per click goes up or the targeting options change or the viewership of the publication changes.

Because of this, you want to have several lead generation mechanisms in place. This way, if something happens to one of them, the other ones will continue working for you and generating new leads. This article will introduce you to five tactics you can use in your business.

1. Media Buying

Media buying is the process of negotiating and purchasing advertising time and space.

The secret to successful media buying lies in knowing your audience. One of the biggest mistakes a marketer can make is to advertise a niche offer to a broad market. The ad campaign will be expensive and the response will be small. This is not how you want to run your campaigns.

You need to know the age of your buyers, their gender, level of education, income, family status and interests. You also want to know what publications they read, how they spend their free time and what websites they visit.

Once you have this data, you can start making intelligent choices about how and where you can advertise to them. One of your goals should be to find media that are not obvious to your competition. This way you will be able to purchase space and time at reasonable rates (because the competition is not yet there) and be the only advertiser in your category in that media.

If there are certain media that you would like to use for advertisements, but can’t afford, call them or email them and tell them how much you can pay. Often, you’ll be able to get a last-minute offer if one of their advertisers pulls out and they have some free time or space. Many media are very negotiable as to how much they will sell advertising for. This is not something they advertise upfront, but if you negotiate, you will often be able to get a great deal.

2. Affiliates

Affiliate marketing is a great way to market products and services because in affiliate marketing you don’t have to pay for advertising upfront and you don’t have any risks.

Typically, you pay for advertising or lead generation activities first. These activities generate leads. Then, you have to do the work to convert the leads into paying customers. If the work is successful, only then you get your money back and a return on your investment.

This is not how things work in affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketers do all the work for you. In exchange, you pay them a percentage of the sales or a pre-agreed amount per sale for all the sales that they make.

The best way to use affiliates is to scale your sales systems that are already working. Nobody wants to pay money to test something that is not proven. While you may get affiliates to test your offers, if they lose money, they will not work with you again. If, however, you have a system that works and need more leads or need to convert more leads, then working with affiliates is a great way to go. You will make more money and your affiliates will make money, which will make them want to work again with you in the future.

3. Social Media Marketing

Today there are all kinds of social media, from Pinterest to Facebook to Twitter to LinkedIn. However, this does not mean that you have to be everywhere. You need to be where your customers are. If you are selling a consumer product, you probably do not need to be on LinkedIn. If you are a high-end executive recruitment boutique, then being on Pinterest may not be a good strategy for you.

Find out where your customers spend their time. Then, get in front of them.

The good news is that social media today offer a variety of tools and ways to reach prospects and existing customers.

Using Facebook Pixel or Google Tag Manager, you can mark everyone who visits your website or certain pages on your website. You can also create audiences based on sequences of pages that people visit, videos they watch, elements of pages that they click on and parts of the pages they scroll to. Then, you can retarget these visitors with custom ads on social media and other websites. The opportunities for marketers today are virtually unlimited.

4. SMS

SMS or text messaging can be a very effective way to target customer but you need to be very careful with how you use it. Today most people use text messaging to communicate with their friends and family. They don’t get a lot of advertising messages via text. For this reason, you want to only text them about something important. Reminders typically fall into the important category and work really well. For example, you can send a reminder about a webinar. You can also send a reminder about a demo or a sales call that you have coming up.

You can also offer your existing customers to notify them via text about special sales and events.

At the same time, sending regular updates and marketing messages via text messaging is probably not a good idea. Most people check their text messages very frequently and if you are sending them messages that they don’t find valuable, they may feel as if you are spamming them and interrupting them with no good reason.

5. Ringless Voicemail

Ringless voicemail is a relatively new technology, which is why it is extremely effective.

Ringless voicemail works only will cellphones. According to studies, over 90% of adult Americans own a cellphone, which means that you can reach virtually any person with ringless voicemail marketing.

Ringless voicemail works by completely bypassing cellular networks. It contacts the cellular provider directly via a business landline call and drops a message on the server of the cellular provider. The provider then moves the message to the server space of the recipient and notifies the recipient about the message. This way there is no call made to the recipient, no charges to the recipient and no interruptions.

When the recipient checks his or her voicemail, he or she can listen to the message. The message can be as long or as short as the sender likes. This means that you can create ringless voicemails that are really effective.

A ringless voicemail can have options that connect the recipient to a sales person or drive the recipient to a website. By using these options you can measure the ROI from your ringless voicemail campaigns and make sure that you are spending your marketing dollars wisely.

3 Ways to Improve Information Security in the Workplace

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In the new digital world where everything is shared and connected, there is a growing concern about information security and integrity of the data you keep. This includes both company records and client files. Treating security breaches has become increasingly difficult, and thanks to recent advances in technology, all of your sensitive data could be uploaded to a malicious party at once in a matter of minutes.

While we know that there is no such thing as an unbreakable system, we can use some ground rules to improve data-security. This will make your data unavailable for malicious software and potential hackers. Here are a few steps you have to take in order to reduce the possibility for breaches.

Plan Ahead

In the world of digital information security, hindsight isn’t worth a lot. Make your security strategy in advance, selecting who will have access to which information and when, where that information will be stored and what will be the procedures to access it. If you know everything you need beforehand, there will be no loopholes that you will need to rush to fix afterwards.

Use Professional Help

There are plenty of companies dedicated to information security, and you should use their assistance in the planning process. These companies will help you formulate your protocols, manage your filing system and select which data can only be accessed with ID cards for instance.

Professionals in this field were often once on the other side themselves, and they will know all the IT security holes that companies miss and can help you prevent them in your information security policy.

Analog vs. Digital

No matter how complete a security suite is, there are thousands of hackers who are actively trying to break them. What hackers and malicious software can’t break is the lack of a physical connection with the sensitive data mainframe.

You can work with a company like IDSecurityOnline to make ID cards to limit access. You could have a separate locked room that only reliable personnel will be able to access and transfer very specific data from manually. Having this physical barrier will make your data un-hackable, as there is nothing to hack. There are hackers who are able to pass even the most sophisticated firewalls, but there are none who can pass a literal one.

In this case, even if you have a security breach, most of your most sensitive data will remain secure, and you will be able to patch your system and move on.

Destroy After Use

If you are working with sensitive data, you shouldn’t leave your hardware unattended, even after you have no use for it. If you can, try to destroy anything containing sensitive information.

Believe it or not, but there are people out there who will dig through your trash for your old hard drives. This is why every information security professional will advise you to rinse your hardware in acid before you discard it, and by hardware, we mean everything: hard drives, printers, VoIP phones, everything.

As you can see, reducing the chances for security all boils down to a few sets of procedures. But more importantly, it’s all about having a plan and doing the steps necessary to safeguard critical information from prying eyes.

The Top 4 Benefits of Introducing Unified Communications into Your Business

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Unified communications sounds like another corporate buzzword, the sort of thing that a bouncy, over-eager sales rep would try and sell to you with vague promises of efficiency and taking your business to the next level. Regardless, there are a number of perfectly valid reasons that introducing a unified communications system into your business is a smart move and one that virtually any business can benefit from.

Really small businesses, where you and your coworkers are few enough and close enough that you can simply speak to each other, won’t benefit from unified communications. However, any business that consists of multiple departments and requires that employees are able to efficiently and easy communicate with one another will benefit from unifying their systems.

Easier to Manage

Having a single, unified system is much easier to maintain and to manage than having a number of different, disparate systems. All of your unified communications go through a single server and can be managed through a single interface. You don’t need to have any hardware on-site, instead everything is hosted in the cloud. Should there be any hardware issues, then backups can take over, meaning that for your business there is little to no interruption in service.

Reduced Costs

Instead of paying for a number of different products, each of which have to be individually managed, a unified communications system is largely cloud-based and the only cost to your business is a subscription fee. For that fee you will be covered in the event of any issues at no extra charge. If yours is a business that needs to make phone calls to other branches or locations, then making these calls using a VoIP (Voice over IP) protocol, such as SIP Trunking as offered by Masergy, is cheaper and more reliable.

Reduce Your Carbon Footprint

Consumers are more vigilant than ever when it comes to demanding that the companies they do business with minimize their carbon footprints. Even if customers are not actively selecting businesses because of their green credentials, being able to tell them that your company takes environmentalism seriously makes it much easier to market your products and services. Switching to a unified communications system is a simple yet very effective means of reducing your carbon footprint and boosting your business’s green credentials.

Improve Productivity

By unifying all of your communications systems you will make it much easier for your workers to get to grips with the most effective ways of communicating with one another. Even if every member of your team has to learn how to use the new system, once they have done so, you will notice some major productivity gains, gains which would be hard to obtain any other way.

A unified communications system offers numerous advantages to any business. The benefits that they bring more than justify the financial cost, as well as the time that you will need to invest in training your team in using the new system.

Why Video is Such an Important Part of a Media Campaign

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Running a successful and effective media campaign requires some careful forethought and planning, as well as a good understanding of what it is that you want to achieve and what your target audience expects. Different audiences will require different approaches to effectively convey your messages. They will respond to different forms of media in different ways and it is crucial that these distinctions are appreciated if your campaign is to be successful. However, regardless of the specifics of your media campaign, you will almost certainly need to incorporate video elements to effectively sell your message.

For this article, we have put together a list of just some of the reasons why video is an especially powerful and important part of any media campaign, an aspect that you can ill-afford to overlook when planning your campaign, and something that needs to be at the front of your mind throughout the entire process.

Universal Power

There are a number of reasons why video is such an effective and universally powerful way of conveying a message. Because it is a medium with such a broad reach, and almost endless potential, video has been used to convey all kinds of messages and has been very successful in instigating both large-scale changes, and changes in individual’s behavior. For proof of just how effective video is in conveying messages to entire demographics with great effect, consider public information campaigns.

Public information campaigns are used to inform large groups, sometimes entire nations, of changes that affect everyone. They have proven to be a highly effective way of doing so. To learn more about how media campaigns have been so effective in changing behaviors on a large scale, check out this article on behavior change myths.

Videos Boost Conversions

Videos have the potential to make you some serious cash and they are by far the most effective medium through which to advertise. Some studies suggest that they can boost conversions by as much as 80%. The effectiveness of video over other mediums is not as surprising when you consider that our most dominant sense is our vision. The majority of the information that our brain processes is visual, and it is visual information that we are most adept at interpreting.

They Offer an Excellent ROI

When questioned for a survey, over 80% of businesses said that the videos in their media campaigns lead to what they considered to be a good return on their investments. Producing a high quality, professional looking video isn’t cheap or quick, but it is incredibly effective and whatever money you spend you can expect to make back, and then some. Videos don’t have to be perfect in order to be effective. They only have to convey your message effectively and in a way that your audience responds well to.

Videos are an important part of any media campaign. When used well, they all but guarantee a boost in sales, as well as providing the best medium through which to convey your message. They are a worthwhile investment and one of the safest that you can make in the course of putting together your campaign.

Don’t Fire Your Employees, Improve Them!

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Now, when businesses begin to struggle, there are various places that you can look as a business owner to determine where things are going wrong. Perhaps your products just aren’t appealing to the current marketplace. All you need to do to rectify this is work on product design and development. Maybe your advertising isn’t drawing enough attention. You need to reconsider your marketing campaigns and the way that they are put out to consumers. Perhaps you could try out PPC marketing or sponsored social media advertising. But every now and then you may find that problems are a direct result of your staff base just not meeting your expectations and standards. Staff errors or incompetency can bring a business to its knees. After all, your employees are the backbone of your company! They’re the individuals who keep things together, interacting with your customers, sealing sales, and acting as the face of your brand. So what do you do if you find that the root of your company’s problems are the very individuals who are meant to keep things running smoothly? Well, many employers will simply fire their staff in their rage. However, this isn’t always the best answer to their problems. After all, it costs a surprising amount of money to source new staff. You also have to invest a lot of time in the process. Instead, why not look at improving your current employees? Here are a few ways to go about it!

Gather Staff Feedback

First things, first, you need to communicate effectively with your staff. Often, problems arise from deeper sources than sheer laziness. There may be underlying issues in your business practice that you are currently unaware of. Perhaps you need to upgrade your software to allow your staff to do their jobs more effectively. Maybe staff merely need to feel a little more appreciated to put proper effort in. Gathering staff feedback will help you to unearth issues and rectify them.

Offer Additional Education or Training

Your staff can never be too education or overly trained. So offer them the chance to expand their knowledge and improve upon their existing skillset. Put on role-specific training programmes, seminars, or training days. They will quickly become more proficient and confident within their positions. You can also engage in a little self-improvement in this area yourself. Something like msc business management could offer you a more in-depth understanding of how to run things as effectively and productively as possible.

Put on Team Building Activities

Your staff will always be better when they are working together. After all, every individual member will have specific knowledge or skills that work well alone, but put together almost anything could be achieved! Take a look at this creative list of team building activities for you to consider.

No matter what staff issues you face, never act hastily. Firing individuals should be an absolute last resort. Not only does a consistent, permanent staff base offer a sense of consistency in the workplace, but keeping staff content and comfortable in their positions will result in better brand loyalty and higher levels of productivity!