digital marketing Archives

3 Ways to Drive Social Sales

By Cindy Ratzlaff October 9, 2013

Turning fans and followers into clients and customers is the next step in building a Maximum Visibility Platform that connects customers to your products. These three steps are easy to implement and often overlooked but can have an immediate impact on visibility, growth, sharing and conversion.

If you want fans and followers to becomes customers and clients, make sure they know exactly what you’re selling and how to purchase it.

How to Drive Social Sales

Design an environment that smoothly, comfortably and easily guides the fan or follower to your offering and makes a compelling case for making immediate purchase decision, and reward followers and fans with a special discount or added value. Then invite them to share their purchase and share that special offer with their friends thereby helping your biggest fans gain status in their friend’s eyes because they’ve discovered and shared something before everyone else. Here are three ways to increase social sales by creating a social media customer-centric experience.

How To Decide If You Should Launch Your Product

By Cindy Ratzlaff August 20, 2012

I once had a boss who asked me why we published so many books that were not bestsellers. He wanted to know why we didn’t just publish the bestselling ones and reject the rest. It was a naive question, but one that crops up in every industry. Why don’t we all just launch the profitable ideas and not the mistakes? Shouldn’t there be a way to determine if a product or service or book will succeed before we invest time, money and resources in launching?

There isn’t a truly foolproof solution or we’d all be rich, no book would go unread, every product would have thousands of raving fans and marketing would be pointless. But there are questions that publishers and Fortune 500 companies alike ask themselves before they invest in materials, resources, marketing and everything else that goes into bringing a product or service from the idea stage to the marketplace. And, entrepreneurs need to ask themselves those same questions before they launch because their time, money and resources are their primary investment start up tools.

4 Great Marketing Ideas Your Business Can Use Now

By Cindy Ratzlaff July 31, 2012

Every day thousands of fantastic articles and marketing ideas for entrepreneurs and small business owners come streaming onto the web, and throughout social media. What’s a busy entrepreneur to do. You can’t read everything. You can email yourself great links to articles you want to read later or save the links to a private circle on G+ or even bookmark them for handy reference. I use the G+ strategy most of the time and add sites that regularly deliver to my Google Reader account.

For those who haven’t yet figured out how to scan the headlines and save the best for later, here are a few ideas are so creative and useful that I want to make sure you don’t miss them. I’ve added short introductory paragraph to tell you why they’re worth your time to click through and read and possibly save. But all of these have ideas that you can use, right now, to amp up the action on your marketing.

Personal Branding Tips | How to Start Even Before You Have A Business Idea

By Cindy Ratzlaff July 9, 2012

I received an email from someone recently asking me for ideas on how they can begin developing their personal branding even though they don’t yet have a business plan or a fully imagined business idea. I was impress they were thinking about branding at this stage of their business development and the question got me thinking about how we can all set up foundational brand elements now that will serve us as we grow an idea into a business.

But how can we brand something that doesn’t exists, you ask? We can’t. But I believe that you are always the brand. So you can and should begin to articulate what the brand of “you” includes.

Beginner’s Guide to Social Media Marketing

By Cindy Ratzlaff January 5, 2012

Using social media to market your book, brand or business is a relatively low-risk way to dip your toe in marketing waters. Most social networks are free to use, although the time required to use them well will cost you human capital.

I’m an entrepreneur, just like many of you, and I’m my eighth year of owning my own business. Statistically, if I can make it through this year, I’ll have beaten the brutal odds of business that fail in the first five years. In these first seven years, one of the biggest lessons I’ve learned is that fear of trying something new leads to failure.

Most new businesses fail in the first seven years.

I usually write about more complex tools and strategies, but in speaking to new entrepreneurs or small business owners this past year, the questions I most often get are:

How can I add social media to my marketing without adding additional employees?
How can I do everything you suggest and still have time to work on my products?

Lack of time and money are the #1 and #2 saboteurs of start-ups. So to everyone who has not yet jumped into the social fray to promote their business or service, here’s my simple beginner’s guide to using social media for business.

I believe most businesses can benefit from a simple, straightforward social media strategy that includes:

A Facebook profile for the “face” of the business; the owner or spokesperson
A Facebook fan page for the business itself
A Twitter Account
A YouTube Account
A Blog

With these five social media basics, even the most cash strapped and time deprived entrepreneur can begin to create digital footprints that lead back to their business. Adding additional social networks such as Instagram and Pinterest may be advisable for some businesses, but these five will give you a good basic foundation from which to build a large online following.

Setting up the accounts is easy and entrepreneurs should not become distracted by the bells and whistles and they wish list that comes with fully tricked out Facebook pages or beautifully designed Twitter accounts. When you’re swamped, stick to the basics and don’t let “ideal” stop you from starting with “good enough.”

Here’s a simple beginners guide to a social media marketing strategy map anyone can use.

Blog 2-3 times per week and keep posts to 500-600 words. Make them keyword rich (words you would enter into Google Search to find YOU). Make sure each post gives one interesting or useful piece of information to the reader about your area of expertise.

The same day you blog, post a link to that blog on your Facebook Fan Page, adding an invitation to join you on the blog for more posts on your subject matter.

Allow this post to auto-post to your Twitter account by linking your Twitter account to your Facebook fan page through this Facebook app link: http://Facebook.com/Twitter.

The next day press the share button under your Fan Page post and share it to your personal profile. Your friends are your closest supporters. Ask them to share your post with their friends, leave you comments and let you know if you can help them with your area of expertise.

Two days later, turn your blog post into a simple, how-to video by reading it into your web cam. Put the “script” up on your screen so you can look directly at the camera. Speak as though you’re explaining the concepts in your blog to just one person. Post the video to YouTube and tag the video with your keywords.

This is an over simplified map, designed to get you thinking about sharing content throughout social media. There are many, many subtle and more complicated nuances and strategies to increase your visibility, but this is a start. If you’re a new business owner or entrepreneur who has not yet begun to use social media in your business marketing, begin here and add new strategies as you get comfortable.

There is so much you can do in social media marketing, that sometimes the overwhelming feeling of “I can’t do everything” stops us from doing “something.” Focus on the basics first. Where do the majority of your ideal customers spend time on line? For most of you it will be Facebook. Makes sense, right? It’s the largest social network with the most active monthly users. So start there with a personal profile. Talk about your business, your products, your services and special deals. Next venture into the world of Facebook business pages to create a stand alone page dedicated to your business. Master those two properties before moving forward with the rest of the recommended steps in this article. Don’t let fear of the task ahead stop you from bringing your business to a larger audience through social media.

Business Gifts to Give Yourself | Entrepreneur’s Checklist

By Cindy Ratzlaff December 22, 2011

UPDATE: 2015

I’ve been going through the posts on my website to see if any of them needed updating. I think I’d add updating blog posts to this list of gifts to give yourself. Additionally, I’ve added one more important gift. Develop a library of graphics you can employ throughout your marketing and social media posts. This will save you time, money and a great deal of frustration. Develop a template for your graphics and use it to illustrate your ideas on platforms that require a very visual component.

Many entrepreneurs and business owners are busy closing out the books on 2011 and allocating human and financial resources for 2012, or at least for Q1 2012. At the same time, they are giving gifts to employees and clients. This is NOT the time to forget about yourself. Giving one or more of the gifts below, to yourself and your business, can pay higher dividends in 2012 than the initial gift investment. So, hop to it and play Santa to your business today.

This is the ideal time for entrepreneurs to give themselves a few gifts to start the new fiscal year off right.

Change Your Passwords

Make a new end of year ritual. Change your passwords. As a small business or entrepreneur, you’ve no doubt shared your password with designers, virtual assistants, and others during 2011. Changing your passwords sets up an automatic review of everyone who has access to your accounts. This can momentarily disrupt the flow of work as you review and reassign passwords and access to trusted contacts, but this is an essential end of year security practice. Adopt industry best practices for secure passwords by using a combination of capital and lowercase letters, numbers and symbols. Make sure your new password is at least 10 characters long. Afraid you won’t remember your new passwords. Store all your online passwords in a safe, secure site that only you can access, from wherever you are. Roboform is a terrific online resource for securing storing your passwords for easy access (by you only). This is safer than writing them down and carrying them around with you or entering them into your mobile device. Theft or loss could be a nightmare for your online security.

Training

Entrepreneurs and business owners need to honestly assess where the weaknesses in their knowledge base exist, seek training programs to resolve those weaknesses and then look for challenge or stretch goals for themselves and their teams. Training in new technologies, general knowledge base upgrades and software training do not need to be expensive or time consuming. Many trainings are served up via webinars you can view and absorb on your own schedule.

Concept Inventory

Businesses and entrepreneurs need to be thinking about new products or services to add to their offerings, as well as deleting any products or services suffering from fatigue or obsolescence. Now is the time to take an inventory of your intellectual property offerings such as coaching programs, how-to books or trainings, speeches, proprietary software, apps and other products to make sure they’re up to date. For example, if you teach people how to use Facebook and haven’t including training about the new Facebook Timeline, pull that product off the shelf and update it so future customers aren’t disappointed.

Branding in Business | Tips for Video to Increase SEO

By Cindy Ratzlaff November 3, 2011

Update 2015: Since the writing of this post, the Google Keyword Search Tool isn’t available to use in this way. All of the other information in this post is still accurate.

Many business owners, authors, speakers and entrepreneurs are simply stumped about how to rank well in search engines so that potential clients and customers can find their services and products. The answer, for most, can be creating video content that informs, engages and attracts clients while building your business credibility.

Shifting your thinking from how to rank to what to rank for can be a valuable exercise in creating a solid digital marketing strategy.

Five Simple Steps for Determining Video Content

1. Content Tools: Use the Google Keyword Search Tool to find out how clients and website visitors are currently landing on your site. While this tool allows you to search keywords and find out how many people are searching for those terms, you can also enter your own professional website URL in the “Find Keywords” feature at the top of the page and Google will show you the keywords others have entered before your site was recommended to them.

2. Research Technique: Using a spreadsheet or a word doc, keep track of the phrases or keywords that have local monthly searches of 2,000 or more and where the competition for those searches is medium or low. The reason for staying away from high volume, high competition words is that an entrepreneur or small business will most likely not have the financial resources to rank highly in these areas during their building phase. But if you were to rank on the first page of Google for a relevant keyword with lower competition and convert some of those searches into clients or buyers, without advertising, activities that caused this would be worth the investment of your time, right?

3. What to Search: I searched my own website URL and found that 18,100 monthly searches are being entered for the phrase “Tools for Twitter,” and Google tells me that the competition for this is “low.” Now Twitter marketing and Twitter Tools are right in my business sweet spot. I lecture on Twitter Tools and write about them often. So I will put “Tools for Twitter” onto my list of videos I may want to create for my website and my YouTube Channel.

4. How To Interpret the Results: Next, click on the link within the Google Keyword Tool and Google will show you a search page with the number of entries for that term in gray at the top of the page. In this test case, “Tools for Twitter” has 1,560,000 results. That’s a heck of a lot of competition for me to go up against in landing on the first page of searches for this term. But I’m considering using video to demonstrate my expertise in this area, so now, I’ll go to the left hand side of the Google results page for this search and click videos. Instantly, I see that the competition for this term in videos is significantly less, 180,000, but still steep.

5. Claiming Your Spot on Top: Next, I’ll scroll down the page and see the dates when each of the ranking videos on the first two pages were created. I can see that for this term, not all the ranking content is fresh. This encourages me and I’ll place this “Tools for Twitter” title on my To Create list for videos. I may create several and roll them out as a series. Google values fresh or new content above other content and so I have a better chance of ranking for this phrase because not all of the content on page one or two of Google (for this phrase) is new.

That’s it. I’ve used this strategy to rank on page one for many terms including a video I created for parents about “Facebook and Kids” where I rank in the #1 spot for this phrase.

I’d love to hear about your searches and the titles of videos that you’ll create. Please share your findings and I’ll be glad to watch your videos and comment, which can also help ranking. Remember to always give viewers a clear call to action, which may simply be “Please let me know what you thought of this video.”