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6 Ways to Give Your Content Marketing a Boost

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If you’re investing your company’s time and resources into blogging, social media, video content and other forms of content marketing, you will almost certainly need to have some form of strategy. Otherwise, it can feel like you are creating content just for the sake of it. With that in mind, let’s take a look at six ways you can give your content marketing a boost and get the results that your business needs to be a success:

Have a Set Plan in Place

Creating content without a plan will soon see your creative minds getting lost, and you could find yourself stuck for ideas as a result. There needs to consistency across the board, including writing and uploading blog posts on your website that is filled with insights, knowledge and helpful advice for your readers, which are then shared on your social media channels like Facebook and Twitter.

These posts should be happening on a regular basis, and many should be planned out in advance, so you keep on message and ensure that you’re not repeating yourself. Your readers/subscribers will soon move elsewhere for their content if you’re not piquing their interest on a regular basis.

The same rules apply to your social media accounts. It’s great to have your fingers in all the social pies, but if you don’t have a plan in place, you’re just going to neglect these valuable and powerful tools and waste your time. Understand each platform, and this includes understanding what content works and when is best to post on each social network. This way you can start devising your content plan accordingly.

Know Your Goals

While it’s great to have a content marketing plan, the best way to boost it towards getting great results, including more newsletter subscribers, social shares, and blog comments, is to know your goals, and then plan and focus your content towards achieving those goals.

If your end goal is to boost the number of book sales, offering your subscribers access to discount codes and advance copies is the kind of content marketing method that will help you achieve this goal. Sit down as a team and talk through your individual goals, before making a wider decision on the content and the marketing methods that are going to help you achieve those goals.

Measure Your Success with Tracking

Whatever your content marketing goals, you need to be tracking them in order to know for sure what methods are having success and which ones need tweaking in order to achieve more success. Tools like Google Analytics will help you keep tabs on your web traffic- including where the traffic is coming from (emails, social media, Google searches, etc.) and which of your posts and/or pages are bringing in the most traffic. If you have product pages on your site, it will also highlight how people find them, and if there are any holes in the navigation of your website that is preventing them from finding them quickly and making a purchase.

Every social media tool will have its own insights feature, which means you will be able to see which posts on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and co. are getting the most likes, shares and most importantly sales, as a result of following links to your products and services pages.

Encourage Collaboration in Meetings

While it’s great to have access to the best plans, tools, and platforms, what really matters is having the best team around your business, in order to create the best content for all of your channels. Some businesses have set creative teams for these tasks, whereas others believe that content marketing should be a collaborative process that everybody should be a part of, and this is why meetings are so important.

Many businesses have forgotten the power of face-to-face meetings because of the access to technology that makes remote working more affordable and easy. However, there is nothing more creative and rewarding than getting a bunch of people together, getting the whiteboard out and brainstorming ideas as a team. For a great post about the importance of the whiteboard in the office, read more here. You will have more content, more ideas, and a more collaborative environment if you take the time to have regular meetings with your team.

Find the Ideal Home for Each Piece of Content

Ask any social media expert, and they will tell you. It doesn’t matter if you have the great written blog post, the most epic photo or the most informative video content. If it’s in the wrong place, nobody will see it, and it won’t get the results and rewards it deserves.

Knowing where to place your content is essential to reaping the rewards it can bring. For example, Instagram is perfect for photos and short video content, so put your best content in these forms to that account. For blog posts, stats and insights, try Twitter, which is more of a conversational social platform. Facebook is the best place for your more sales-oriented posts, and is great for placing news, discounts and offers because it’s wide reach.

If you’re not sure what to post and where to post it, test your content on different mediums and track the results with Google Analytics. You’ll soon see what works and what doesn’t.

Have Both Free and Premium Content Available

Customers like to feel like they’re being rewarded for their loyalty to businesses, and you can grant this to them via your content marketing by giving them access to plenty of free content, including blog posts and special offers via email. However, to give your content marketing an extra boost, try the addition of premium content.

This could come in a variety of forms, including e-books, paperbacks, podcasts, audiobooks, one-to-one consultations, advance warning of tickets for events you might be running. Whatever you decide to do, make sure that you track the success of the premium offers, and get something in return, which in the vast majority of cases, is contact information. These details could be very useful when you have new products and services to offer, and could massively boost your sales as a result.

How to Create a Professional Online Presence For Your Startup Business

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The Internet has made it easier than ever for budding entrepreneurs to start a business, but the nuances of “being online” can be confusing. If you’ve recently launched a startup, the first thing you’ll want to do is create a professional online presence, so people know who you are, what you do and how to reach you. Whether or not you intend to sell your products or services online, it doesn’t matter; you still need a website and some active social media profiles for your business to grow. With this in mind, here’s how to build an online presence for your startup business in five easy steps.

Step One: Do Your Research

Before you start marketing your business online, you need to know who you’re marketing it to. Find out who your target audience is and how they use the Internet, and then you can target your efforts more successfully. You probably already know your business goals (perhaps to turn a profit or fill a gap in the market), but you also need to think about the goals of your customers. What do they want and why are you best placed to provide it?

Step Two: Create a Website

As a startup business, your first investment should be a professional-looking website. There are tools you can use to set this up for free, but if you want to make an impression and stand out in your field, it’s best to consult with a web design agency. Web design can be tricky; as well as layout and branding, you also need to consider security, mobile responsiveness and search engine optimization to help people find and use your website.

Step Three: Get Active on Social Media

To connect with a modern audience, you need to know how to use social media for your business. Refer back to your customer research to decide which platform is most likely to reach your target audience. The key here is consistency: you don’t have to be on every site, but you do need to provide communication and consistency if you want to build trust in your brand.

Step Four: Promote Your Business

Social media provides the perfect platform for promoting your business, but don’t fall into the trap of thinking it’s free or even easy. Paying for ad space and running targeted campaigns is an excellent way to drive traffic to your website and build a following. Without investing at least some time or money, you’re unlikely to make much of an impact.

Step Five: Keep Up the Good Work

Now you have a professional online presence, which will attract high-paying clients, help spread the word about your products or services and enable you to build a glowing reputation. The work doesn’t end here, however. Creating a professional website and setting up your social media accounts is just the first step in marketing your startup. You also have to maintain your online presence to keep growing your business.

How to Set Up Your Business’s New Website the Easy Way

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These days, the first thing most customers will see of your business is your website. They’ll be most likely to find it via a search engine or some form of online advertisement. But what matters is what they think when they eventually click that link and see what the website can actually offer them. You want them to be impressed and satisfied with the experience, but it’s not always as simple as that. First of all, you need to get your new and improved site up and running; here’s how.

Compare the Pros and Cons of Each Potential Platform

There are many different platforms out there that you can utilize for creating a new website for your business. Whether you use WordPress, Squarespace, or another website builder is up to you. Each platform offers something new and interesting to users, so it’s up to you to find the one that’s right for you. Compare the pros and cons until you’ve come to the best fit for your needs.

Find Tools That Streamline the Process

There are plenty of great tools out there that you can start to make use of when you’re trying to streamline the process. You can try Unbounce for free if you want to. It’s this kind of thing that you should be doing if you want to get ahead of the competition because there’s no way to succeed if you don’t. It needs to be as straightforward as it possibly can be.

Create the Most Important Pages First

Some page matter more than others when you’re trying to create a new website. It’s pretty much always the case, and you can’t get away from it. You want to think carefully about what you want to achieve and where you want your customers to look. You can’t afford to ignore the pages that matters most, so these are the ones that should be sorted first.

Choose a Simple But Effective Theme

Themes matter a lot on websites because them immediately set the town and make it clear exactly what kind of tone you’re trying to set from the get-go. Ideally, the theme you choose should say something about your business and what kind if values you’re trying to push forward to people. It certainly doesn’t have to be over complicated, but it has to cut through.

Engage People With Imagery

People aren’t going to be impressed with nothing more than the words you deliver; you also need to engage with them on a visual level too. You can’t ignore just how impactful images and video can be on a website, so don’t underestimate those things. The right images can go along way.

Your business’s new website could be exactly what’s required right now if you want to push on and reach out to younger demographics. If your website still looks like it was made in 1999, the changes can’t come soon enough. It’s not an overstatement to say people won’t take your company seriously if your website looks like a joke.

Lending Credibility To Your Small Business

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Credibility is crucial to business success, after all, if you customer haven’t got faith in you they are very unlikely to pick your over your competitors in the first place. However, for small or one person businesses being seen as credible can be something of a problem as they often lack the resources and staff to execute it properly. Luckily, there are some ways that you can raise the credibility of even the smallest business, keep reading to find out what they are.

Professional branding

One way to increase the credibility of your small business is to ensure that your visual branding is on point. Visual branding includes thing such as business cards, headed paper, and logos as well as company colors and marketing materials for shows and exhibitions.

Clear, visual branding is essential to credibility.

Remember though that there is nothing that says amateur outfit more than a poorly drawn logo that you got off someone’s brother on Facebook! With that in mind, invest in an experienced professional to design your logo, and get the best quality cards and paper printed that you can. It may seem like only a little thing, but it can genuinely help create the credible image that you are looking for.

Outsourced services

Next, another way to increase the credibility your small business is to use outsourced services. In particular, it can be useful to find a virtual office service that will be able to answer your call and take messages, as this present a much more professional and credible image to customers calling to place an order.

In fact, using such a service can be hugely useful to you in regards to productivity as well, as you don’t have to suffer constant interruptions to the task you are doing and therefore can be more focus on the job in hand. Something that means it not only useful in creating a more professional image but can also benefit you practically as well.

Endorsements

Endorsements are a fantastic way of boosting your business’s credibility, and these can work in two different ways.

Firstly, you can get key influencers to endorse your product. This can be useful as such influencers will have a specific demographic that they appeal to and this will raise your company’s credibility with them.

The second way that endorsements can be useful for credibility is by approaching professional bodies or organizations for their seal of approval. For example, a first aid company may seek the support of the red cross, something that potential customers will associate with increased credibility.

However, if you do go down this route, be sure that you follow official channels and guidelines. Also be very sure that you have permission to use another organization’s logo on your packaging or website before you go ahead.

Great reviews

Lastly, another worthwhile tactic for boosting your company credibility is to work on getting the best online review possible. We are not just talking about carefully selected testimonials here either, but authentic and independent reviews that have the power to convince new customers to go with you over your competitors. Something you can find out more about how to do here.

If You Haven’t Thought About Outsourcing, You’re Missing Out

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If you are just in the middle of getting ready to launch your business, there might be some avenues of freeing up time and energy in the early days that you haven’t considered yet. Most entrepreneurs are ready for long hours, the grind but you don’t have to accept that as rote. There are a few things that you can outsource early on and maximize your time for running the business and getting creative.

Bookkeeping – this is pretty much a vital part of keeping your business running well, and keeping firm hold of your finances. Head to a couple of freelance sites, have a chat with other business owners and see if you can find yourself a bookkeeper you trust and has a proven track record.

Accounting – they go hand in hand, and excellent bookkeeping can help your accountant make the most of those deductibles, and they are experts in the field. You won’t get silly mistakes or in hot water for not completing something correctly.

Appointments – while you might want to be the point of contact for all appointment setups, it is highly likely that you would benefit from something like TimeTrade, Setmore or SimpleBook.me. They are automated systems that check availability, book appointments, notify you or the person responsible for the meeting, plus they have many other functions to explore.

Storage – Rather than have a lot of paper or HDDs hanging around, look into ways to lighten to load and make your data accessible anywhere. Use of Cloud storage or an outsource fax server can help manage how you’re sending data to employees and clients.

Admin tasks – If you have a lot of admin tasks, and are spending more time taking care of those than managing your client work, then it might be time to think about hiring a VA. A virtual assistant can take care of a lot of tasks for you:

  • Social media management and scheduling
  • Research
  • Blog Writing
  • Data Entry
  • File Management
  • Commenting and responding to social media messages
  • Transcription

And, so much more. If you manage to find a VA that understands what you are trying to achieve they can be a tremendous asset to you and your business. It’s like having two of yourself.

Social Media scheduling – Set up something like Hootsuite, SocialOomph or Buffer. Other platforms work just as well, but those are highly rated. It will take you, or your VA a few hours to curate a month or more of content across all of your platforms.

Do you have the time to manage your content marketing? If not, hire a freelancer to take care of that for you. It is basically the use of easy to read and digest content, that educates and informs your target audience without being salesy. Lead generation, relationship building and vital.

Look at what you aren’t great at. Every CEO in the world has at least one thing that they aren’t great at taking care of or getting done. Check what yours is and spend the time to find someone who can take care of it for you.