50 powerful call-to-action phrases

3 Helpful Tips To Improve Your CTAs To Generate More Leads

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Calls-to-Action (or CTAs) are images, buttons, text, etc. that prompts one of your website visitors take some kind of action. CTAs could be trying to get visitors to download a white paper, read an article, or contact for more information. Improve CTA is the beginning to convert website traffic into leads.

Here are three ways for you to improve your CTAs and to make sure they are maximizing their presence on your website and generating the most contacts.

1. Use Action-Verbs and Be Specific

2. Grab Attention Immediately

3. Test Your Results

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How to Develop an Outstanding Business Development Plan

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Developing a great business development plan requires a strategic mindset, comprehensive analysis, and meticulous execution. This may involve pursuing new market opportunities, diversifying products or services, expanding into untapped regions, forging strategic alliances or partnerships, or enhancing customer engagement. The strategies should be realistic, measurable, and time-bound to ensure effective execution.

The business development plan should include a well-defined implementation process with clear responsibilities and timelines. It is essential to allocate sufficient financial and human resources to execute the plan effectively. Regularly monitoring and evaluating progress against the set targets is critical, allowing for timely adjustments and corrective actions when necessary. By creating a well-structured plan that aligns with the organization’s goals, identifying growth opportunities, and implementing effective strategies, businesses can position themselves for long-term success and remain competitive in a rapidly evolving marketplace.

Here are 8 proven steps to developing a winning business development plan:

1. Conduct a Comprehensive Business Analysis

Conduct a thorough analysis of various aspects of the business, such as market trends, customer demands, competition, and internal capabilities. This will provide you with invaluable insights to inform the development plan.

Through a comprehensive analysis, you can identify your business’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT analysis) and capitalize on your advantages while mitigating risks. It helps in understanding the market landscape, target audience, and emerging trends, enabling you to effectively align your development plan with market demands and customer expectations. Additionally, analyzing competitors’ strategies and industry benchmarks allows you to differentiate yourself from the crowd and gain a significant competitive edge.

2. Define Clear Goals and Objectives

Clearly defined goals and objectives provide a sense of direction and purpose, guiding the entire development process toward success. By setting specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) goals, you can effectively chart your path to growth and expansion.

Furthermore, clear goals and objectives provide a basis for evaluating the plan’s progress and success. They enable your organization to track key performance indicators (KPIs), measure performance against targets, and make data-driven adjustments if necessary. Regularly reviewing and assessing the progress towards these goals allows for continuous improvement and ensures that your plan remains aligned with the evolving business landscape.

3. Identify Target Markets and Ideal Customers

Identifying target markets and ideal customers enables you to concentrate your efforts, align your strategies with customer needs, and seize lucrative opportunities for sustainable growth and success.

Pinpointing ideal customers also empowers you to discover untapped opportunities and niche markets that align with your strengths and capabilities. This knowledge allows you to position yourself effectively, stand out from competitors, and tailor your offerings to meet the unique demands of your ideal customers.

4. Craft a Compelling Value Proposition

A compelling value proposition serves as the foundation that defines the distinct value your business offers to its target customers, setting it apart from competitors. By presenting a clear and engaging message, the value proposition becomes the linchpin of the plan, resonating with the intended audience.

Additionally, a compelling value proposition guides the strategic decisions and actions outlined in the business development plan. It assists in identifying target markets, shaping marketing strategies, and determining pricing and positioning approaches. The value proposition ensures that all activities and initiatives align with your business’s unique value, creating a unified and consistent customer experience.

5. Create Lead Generation Strategies

Lead generation strategies play a critical role in attracting potential customers and nurturing them into loyal patrons.

By implementing robust lead generation strategies, you can generate a consistent flow of qualified leads, nurturing them through the sales funnel and converting them into loyal customers. This drives revenue growth, enhances customer relationships, and fuels the overall success of the business development plan.

6. Establish Sales and Conversion Processes

Establishing effective sales and conversion processes can help streamline your operations and maximize the conversion of leads into paying customers. Having well-defined sales processes enables businesses to effectively manage leads and guide them through each stage of the sales funnel. This includes activities such as lead qualification, nurturing, and closing.

By implementing standardized processes, you can ensure consistency, efficiency, and effectiveness in your sales efforts. This helps identify bottlenecks, optimize the customer journey, and improve conversion rates.

7. Monitor, Evaluate, and Adapt

Monitoring involves tracking and evaluating the implementation of the plan’s strategies and goals to ensure effective and efficient execution. By monitoring progress, you can identify areas of success and areas that may require adjustment, enabling you to stay on track and achieve desired outcomes.

Regular monitoring allows you to assess key performance indicators (KPIs) and measure progress against set targets. This data-driven approach provides valuable insights into the plan’s effectiveness, enabling timely adjustments and corrective actions when necessary. Monitoring progress ensures you allocate resources appropriately and align activities with the plan’s objectives.

8. Build Strategic Partnerships

Strategic partnerships allow you to access new markets or customer segments that may have been difficult to penetrate independently. By leveraging the partner’s existing customer base or distribution channels, you can significantly accelerate growth and expand your customer reach more effectively. Moreover, strategic partnerships help in fostering knowledge sharing and innovation.

Bottom Line

Developing a successful business development plan requires a strategic and systematic approach. By following the steps outlined above, B2B organizations can drive customer base expansion, lead generation, and sales growth. Regularly monitor, evaluate, and adapt your plan to ensure sustainable growth and profitability.

Fostering a culture of innovation, adaptability, and continuous improvement is crucial for developing sustainable business growth. It encourages collaboration across different departments, facilitates knowledge sharing, and promotes a customer-centric approach.

 

What Are Behavioral Biometrics and How Do They Fit Into Marketing?

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Companies often hold focus groups in order to get direct feedback about products, services, and even website experiences. The drawback to focus groups is that people often aren’t sure how to articulate what they feel about certain things. However, new behavioral biometrics, such as eye-tracking software, has made it easier to determine exactly how someone feels about a website experience at any given moment–and they can allow you to do so without holding a focus group.

What Are Behavioral Biometrics?

Behavioral biometrics is a way to measure a user in a passive manner. This means that they don’t have to make specific gestures in order to determine who the user is. For example, a behavioral technology system might be able to identify a person by the way that they walk. Even the angle at which they hold their smartphone can tell us a lot . The use of mobile devices along with the recent spike in IoT (Internet of Things) devices has made behavioral technology systems much more useful than ever before.

How Can Behavioral Biometrics Improve Marketing?

Typically, behavioral biometrics exist for security reasons. However, marketers have realized that there is a lot of value to using these metrics to identify users. For example, they can greatly improve the user experience of a customer.behavioral biometrics

For instance, a behavioral biometrics software could identify the speed at which a user types in their password in order to log into their website account to make a purchase. This password may be available to a whole family. The speed at which the password is typed in can help identify which person in that family is logging on. This makes it easier to engage with them with appropriate messaging and offers. Basically, behavioral data can help personalize customer experiences. It can even further and improve predictive experiences.

5 Different Types Of Behavioral Biometrics-system

Keeping that in mind, the following are five different types of behavioral biometrics:

  1. Anything directly created by a user, such as an email they sent or the text they wrote when using your chat feature, can be analyzed using authorship-based biometrics to create a unique identity.
  2. Human-computer interaction-based biometrics refers to how a user interacts with computers and devices; for example, how they move their computer mouse, how quickly they type, how much force they use to press the keys, and more.
  3. Indirect HCI-based biometrics measures common computer usage, such as how a user surfs the web, how they use certain software applications and more.
  4. Motor skill-based biometrics refers to the measurement of a user’s movements to help identify them.
  5. Purely behavioral biometrics refers to the measurement of behavioral traits that make it easier to identify unique individuals.

The more information you can gather from users about how they feel and what they are doing, the more you will be able to personalize your marketing efforts. Behavioral biometrics systems, like eye-tracking software, could have a big impact on your ability to do this in the future.

Download Our White Paper Guide To Learn How To Perfect Buyer Personas For Your Business

5 Ways to Revamp Your Email Marketing Strategy and Increase ROI

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Email marketing is an affordable and effective tool to help your rand stay in touch with customers to ensure more revenue. In fact, studies show that robust email marketing strategies have an ROI of about 4400%.

If your email marketing performance is subpar, there are several strategies you can implement to ensure better results. The following tips can help improve your email marketing results and grow your business.

  1. Plan Your Emails

Your emails may contain helpful and resourceful content, but you may not get optimum results if they’re not well-planned.

The email subject line is the first aspect your recipient sees before opening the message. Ideally, the brief statement should grab your recipients’ attention and compel them to open and read your email.

Similarly, no one wants to read a disorganized email with a cluttered layout. This overwhelms your recipients, increasing the chances of abandonment.

Instead, plan and organize your layout to maximize user experience. This means you should incorporate white space and strategically place the visuals and text to make the email easy to navigate and digest.

  1. Build a Quality Email List

Building a quality email list is one of the most complex parts of email marketing strategies. However, you can simplify the task by determining your business’s best subscriber acquisition method.

If your website attracts many visitors, you can use it to convert the traffic to subscribers. Most importantly, even a slight increase in subscribers can impact the number of people that become your customers.

You can start by improving the exposure of your lead magnets by including them in relevant content across different channels. Alternatively, depending on your brand offers, you can develop quality lead magnets focused on the type of subscribers you want to attract.

The goal is to optimize the available opportunities for visitors to opt into your email list by ensuring your most popular content has valuable downloadable resources for your audience.

  1. Segment and Personalize Your Emails

When you send a similar message to your email list, you forego the opportunity to get optimum returns in your campaigns. Instead, break down the subscribers into different segments depending on their engagement levels and stages in the buyer journey.

Ideally, you can use the purchase frequency or other significant customer data to group your subscribers based on your goals.

Your subscribers want different content depending on their needs, so you should customize the messaging to serve their needs. However, this doesn’t happen in a day. Start with two segments –frequent customers and non-customers and proceed from there.

Personalization works in tandem with segmentation to ensure optimum email marketing performance. And since open and CTRs are the top KPIs in email marketing campaigns, personalization is critical to enhancing engagement rates. Typically, custom emails have a 26% higher open rate and generate more transactions.

For instance, addressing your audience by name can boost engagement due to higher open rates. Most importantly, using various data sets, like customer interests, demographics, and engagement behaviors, can enhance your personalization strategy. This helps establish and nurture a relationship with your audience, essential for higher conversions.

  1. A/B Test Your Emails

People often get comfortable once they establish a routine. While routines are critical in email marketing, tweaking the approach can be beneficial. It helps you gain the invaluable insight necessary for improvement.

You can pick an element in your email marketing strategies and adjust it to determine the performance. For instance, you can start with email length and format to see which version performs better. If your emails are concise, but some of your customers want more content, you can add more sections and observe the performance of your newsletters.

Regardless of the size, ensure the content is resourceful and awesome to ensure high customer engagement levels.

Also, you can test different subject lines for specific groups and analyze the performance. After some experiments, you can determine the best variation for different groups in your email list segments.

For instance, you can test different CTAs, like buttons and links. You divide the subscribers into two groups and send a different CTA for each group. After collecting and analyzing the data, you can quickly determine the most effective option since the two groups share specific characteristics.

The insights can inform your present and future decisions when adjusting or deploying your next email campaign. The idea is to pick the best format based on your results.

  1. Mobile Optimization

Most subscribers open and read emails on smartphones, accounting for 41% of email views. Therefore, mobile optimization is critical to maximizing your email marketing ROI.

Maximize your use of plain text and break content into scannable sections that fit into smaller screens. In addition, keep them brief to enhance engagement. Quantity doesn’t always win when it comes to mobile users.

High-resolution images may look stunning on a desktop, but they may work against you when targeting mobile users. Therefore, make sure to use lower resolution for mobile content.

However, you can still use high-resolution images with the right tools to compress the images based on the user’s device. It’s always a good practice to consider the resolution capability of most device users to ensure the images are crisp across all devices.

Bottom Line

The email marketing process consists of multiple parts that require careful planning. While the process can be overwhelming, you can make the project manageable by developing a robust strategy to implement and track your campaigns.

Most importantly, you should create email marketing strategies you can use to simplify things depending on your business goals. Regardless of your approach, it would be best if you implemented a measurable strategy that streamlines your efforts when creating targeted campaigns.

 

email marketing program

 

Benefits of Public Speaking

The Benefits of Public Speaking: How it Increases Your Brand’s Visibility

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It can be a challenging task for a small business owner or entrepreneur to get off the ground floor. While inbound marketing will certainly be effective, it’s important to keep in mind that there are thousands of other companies just like yours that are likely doing the same thing. It’s why you should take every opportunity you can to increase your brand’s visibility. You can benefit from public speaking.

The Benefits of Public Speaking

The following are some of the benefits of public speaking:

Showcase your brand

Public speaking is one of the best ways to introduce audiences to your brand. This is because they are there to listen to you. They are giving you their time, which means you don’t have to put nearly as much effort into earning it (like you would if trying to market to them online). When you have an audience’s undivided attention, you’ll have a better opportunity to showcase your brand.

Establish your brand’s authority

You can showcase your knowledge about your industry when speaking to people in person. If it’s obvious you know what you’re talking about, then that authority will translate to your brand. The stronger your brand authority is, the more people will trust your brand.

Engage with your audience on a personal level

Speaking to people in person will allow you to interact with them on a much more personal level. Talking to a human has that effect.  Your audience will be more likely to relate and engage with you on an emotional level.

Increase your brand exposure

The more people you speak to in person, the more you are able to increase brand awareness. This is because your in-person audience are more likely to act as brand ambassadors. Not to mention that a successful speaking engagement can lead to invitations to future speaking engagements.

4 Tips to Improve Public Speaking

The following are a few tips that can help you get the most out of your public speaking engagements:

1. Establish credibility

Begin by providing your audience with some information about your background and how it relates to your industry. This helps establish your credibility so your audience knows they can trust what you’re saying.

The Power of First-Person Experience Videos

2. Use storytelling

The easiest way to connect with an audience is to use storytelling. Don’t just spout facts–tell the story about who you are, what made you start your company, and what you’re trying to achieve.

3. Use visual aids

People are visual no matter what the context is. This means that they are going to get tired of looking at you and listening if you go on for too long. You can keep your audience engaged for much longer if you use visual aids when you speak.

4. Rehearse

Not rehearsing is like publishing the first draft of an article without rewriting or proofreading it. Rehearse what you’re going to say so that you’re familiar with the words and the timing. You don’t want to find out that you don’t have enough time to finish what you wanted to say or that you don’t have enough to say when you’re in the midst of a speaking engagement.

The benefits of public speaking can’t be overstated. Engaging in public speaking, whether it’s by speaking at conferences, trade shows, local business meetings, or any other type of business-oriented speaking event, helps to increase brand visibility while also providing your brand with a voice and personality that your audience can relate to and connect with.

Learn The StoryBranding Process

How Having a Real Time Location System Can Benefit Campaign Performance

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As you likely know, mobile marketing is an incredibly effective way to reach a significant part of your audience. Companies that aren’t leveraging mobile marketing at this point are at risk of falling behind their competition if they haven’t already. However, while most businesses understand that they should optimize their online content for mobile use, not everyone is taking full advantage of what mobile users can offer. For example, a real time location system can tell you where your audience is, which can be incredibly beneficial for improving campaign performance.

Using a Real Time Location System to Improve Campaign Performance

Smartphones have built-in GPS that pinpoints where the user is. This is data that you can access as long as you have permission from the user. You will need to offer an app that the user can download in order to access this data. Some users are going to disable the real time location system as a way to keep their privacy. However, a lot of people don’t mind if your app provides a helpful location-based feature.

The Benefits of a Real Time Location System

Being able to track the location of your users can come in use in numerous ways. Not only can you use this information to measure the effectiveness of your inbound marketing strategies, you can use it to better target your audience. The following are a few examples of how using a real time location system to improve your marketing efforts:

  • Target users near your stores: You can automate certain push notifications to be sent out to users who are within a certain radius of your stores. This is a great way to target users who may not know that they are near one of your stores. Even with users who know about your store’s location, you can send out content that might convince them to drop in. Sending them a special discount code that they can use there is a good example. It’s an incredibly effective way to increase foot traffic to your physical locations.
  • Target users near your competition: You can even use your real time location system to steal customers from your competitors. For example, your users might be headed to a competing store or are near a competing store. You can send them an offer to match any promotions they might be offering.
  • Improve reach: You can figure out what areas the majority of your users tend to be in. This can give you a lot of helpful information that you can use to improve your reach. For example, if you’re based in Philadelphia but you notice that a lot of users are in the NYC area. You can then use that information to target those areas. You can do soCampaign Performance by creating more location-based content or even by opening a store in that location.
  • Measure foot traffic. Measure how effective your mobile marketing efforts are by measuring foot traffic in your physical stores. For example, if you send out notifications of an in-store sale to your users, you can then identify how many users ended up going through the store on the day of the sale. You can use the foot traffic you measure at your stores to judge the performance of specific marketing tactics in many other ways as well.

As you can see, using a real time location system can be hugely beneficial to your cross channel marketing efforts. The trick is knowing how to implement it. These are just a few examples of how you can use the location data you have access to. This can help optimize your marketing campaign and improve sales.

Learn To Use Social Media To Find New Leads

Strategies and Trends for Effective Digital Advertising

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Every business, regardless of its niche or size, relies on marketing to build brand awareness, reach a target audience, foster customer relationships, and increase sales. But marketing is broad and relies on several networks, platforms, and systems. Digital advertising, for instance, is a form of marketing that is constantly evolving and proving to be quite effective when combined with other forms of digital marketing.

What is Digital Advertising?

Before a customer purchases a product or service, they often go through three critical stages, namely: the awareness stage, the consideration stage, and the decision stage. During these stages, they take their time to understand the business, the team behind it, and how that product or service stands out from the competition.

If a prospective customer doesn’t know of your product or service, you can bet they won’t consider you for business. Therefore, digital advertising plays a critical role in the awareness stage. It ensures that your product or service has a name in the market.

Digital or online advertising relies on various platforms such as social media, search engines, mobile apps, and websites to build brand awareness, engage audiences, and drive desired actions or conversions.

Digital Advertising vs. Digital Marketing 

Many people use the phrases digital advertising and digital marketing interchangeably. And while the two are related, they mean two different things. Simply put, digital marketing is an umbrella term that encompasses all marketing efforts using digital platforms or channels. It involves various strategies and activities to promote business, build awareness, and drive conversations.

Digital marketing may include offline and online tactics such as Search engine optimization, email marketing, content marketing, social media marketing, influencer marketing, etc.

Digital advertising, however, is a subset of digital marketing, specifically focused on promoting products or services using online advertising channels. It often involves paid placements or ads designed to reach a specific target demographic.

If you are keen enough, you have probably seen a steady change in how businesses advertise their products and services. These changes or trends are no accidents or coincidences. Rather, they are a result of careful adaptation to the evolving digital landscape and the ever-changing consumer behaviors.

Today, for instance, you will find personalized, five-seconds video ads instead of random 5-minutes videos. Ads are also becoming more dynamic, with some incorporating variables such as the current weather, location, or time of day to enhance the user experience and increase the effectiveness of advertising campaigns. Here are the other digital advertising trends to keep an eye on:

  • Interactive ad formats: This is a technique where you involve users or viewers in the ad experience. Standard procedures include incorporating polls, quizzes, interactive videos, or mini-games to encourage user engagement and participation. Another advantage of interactive ads is that you can collect critical data and insights into the audience’s behaviors and preferences.
  • Behavioral targeting: Random ads aren’t effective in engagement and conversion since they don’t speak to the interests and preferences of the target audience. By tracking online interactions and user actions, such as previous purchases, website visits, and search history, it’s possible to deliver personalized and more effective ads.
  • Mobile dominance: The number of mobile users in 2023 is estimated at 6.8 billion, representing an average annual increase of 4.2%. These figures are pushing marketers to rethink their ad campaigns with a specific focus on optimizing them for mobile screens and utilizing mobile apps.
  • Intelligent advertising: AI and automated algorithms are pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in digital marketing. Today, AI in digital marketing enables cost-efficient ad placement across multiple channels and allows for precise user targeting.
  • AR and VR Integration: Several companies, such as IKEA, Adidas, and Volvo, increasingly embrace AR and VR technologies in their advertising campaigns to demonstrate products and provide virtual try-on experiences. These technologies increase engagement and boost conversion.

Ways of Advertising Online

Digital or online advertising comes in various forms. However, they are often categorized into two main groups: display ads and native ads. Display ads are the digital evolution of flyers and billboard ads. They feature an ad copy, images or graphics, and a CTA. Examples of display ads include:

  • Popup ads: These are often considered very annoying since they interrupt browsing and require the user to take the specified action or manually close them. Popup ads are still in use, but there are ways you can make them less disruptive.
  • Video ads: include video commercials, TV ads, and Facebook and YouTube ads. Modern video ads across social media channels are highly engaging, personalized, and interactive.
  • Banner ads: These are image-based ads often displayed to the side or above the web content.
  • Rich media ads: Rich media ads may feature text fields, scroll or swipe functionality, and even 360-degree rotatable images.

Native ads, on the other hand, are designed to blend seamlessly with the platform or content used. And as the name suggests, native ads should speak to the audience in a way that makes sense to them. Examples of native ads include:

  • Paid search ads: As a website owner, you pay Google to rank your web pages on the first pages of the Google Search Results Pages (SERPs).
  • Social media ads: You pay your favorite social media platforms, such as Facebook or Instagram, to get posts to rank higher in the platform’s algorithm and appear in the feeds of non-followers with similar browsing or shopping habits.
  • Promoted listings: You pay a listing site to rank your business at the top of the platform’s search results page.
  • Sponsored content: You sponsor a podcast or video, and the owner features your business or displays an ad letting the audience know about your business.
  • Influencer partnership: You pay or partner with a social media influencer who creates awareness for your brand. This technique is powerful, but you need a solid influencer marketing strategy to make this work for your business.

Bottom Line

Now that you know how online advertising works, its examples, and its benefits, it’s time to put everything into action. Typically, you want to have a plan or strategy for how you’ll drive your digital advertising campaign.

This involves understanding your goals and KPIs and knowing your target audience, distribution channels, content materials, and budget. If you are new to digital marketing and online advertising, seek expert help from an experienced and reputable digital marketing firm.

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blog vs vlog

Blog Vs. Vlog: Why Your Business Should Begin Vlogging

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The blog has long been one of the preferred tactics for content marketing strategies. Using a blog, you can easily publish a variety of different content, from written articles to infographics and more. However, blogging isn’t the only content marketing tactic that works. More and more businesses are beginning to vlog as well. The concept of a vlog is simple — it’s a blog in video form. The question is how do you decide which to choose between blog vs. vlog for which type of content?

The Benefits Of A Vlog

These days, vlogging can be done with nothing more than a smartphone, making it both affordable and easily accessible. It’s important to have content available for your prospects and clients that prefer video to text. The following are some of the major benefits of utilizing vlogs.

  • Vlog content is easy to produce

    With advancements in technology, the equipment you need to produce a vlog isn’t as expensive as you might think. Of course, you’ll want to spend some money to ensure that the quality of your video content stands out from the pack, but it’s more affordable to do so now than ever before. They also give you an easier way of explaining blog topics that you think would be better demonstrated visually. Words alone can not properly convey every idea.

  • Vlog are engaging

    Vlogs are incredibly engaging and there’s a simple reason for this. Not only do people more easily consume visual content, but vlogs also allow you to showcase your personality. They provide a person, whether it’s someone in your company, a customer, or an actor, to represent your brand. By having someone on screen, viewers will be able to engage on a personal level much more easily. This is difficult to do with written content since you can’t immediately convey a personality.

  • Vlogs are mobile-friendly

    It’s much easier for people to watch videos on their smartphones than it is to read blogs. Reading is more challenging on smaller screens, while videos can display in full HD and will run smoothly. It’s why half of all video content is viewed on mobile devices. Additionally, people who are watching videos on mobile are more likely to share. It’s estimated that 92 percent of people viewing videos on their mobile devices tend to share videos.

How Businesses Can Use a Blog To Strengthen Their Online Marketing Efforts

Choosing Blog Vs. Vlog

Many of the benefits of a vlog are advantages as well. Because of the fact that vlogs are video content, they are inherently more engaging, shareable, and mobile-friendly than blogs. However, you could argue that blogs are easier to produce — although some might not agree since blogging does require writing and editing skills. The thing is, there’s no necessity to choose between blog vs. vlog. Why not implement both? Both written content and video content have a place in your content marketing strategy. And when it comes to content, it’s good to have a variety. By providing your audience with content they can both read and watch, you cover all of your bases. Now the question becomes when do you blog and when do you vlog?

How to Have a Successful Blog (Expert Tips)

When to Blog or Vlog

Blogging is a great way to get a lot of information across to your audience. For example, if you have a lot of statistics that you want to share, then an infographic or a bullet list can be more effective than rattling them off on video. However, when it comes to things like tutorials or demonstrations, vlogging is going to be more effective since you can show your audience instead of having to tell them. It also depends on the message you want to convey. If you want to build a real connection with your audience, a vlog might be better suited as they can see and hear another human being. Even if you already have a strong connection with your blog audience, vlogging can only improve it.

Vlogs also work well for your social media posts. Platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are great places to share vlogs and get more people interested in your content due to easy sharing features. Since it’s a video sharing platform, YouTube is the best place to be uploading vlogs. Users receive video recommendations based on other content they have watched which makes the likelihood of the correct audience finding your videos greater. While links to blogs can be shared on social media, audiences are unable to view the entire content without going to another website. Vlogs can usually be viewed directly on the platform they’re shared on such as Facebook or YouTube, or a snippet of them can be shared on Instagram and Twitter, depending on the length.

There are advantages to both blogging and vlogging, but there’s no reason to limit yourself to one or the other. Both can be incredibly effective at informing and engaging audiences as well as attracting and converting more leads. In the end, it’s the quality of the content you create that matters most.

25 Website Must Haves

How to Leverage Influencer Marketing for Your Brand’s Success

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Starting a business is one challenge, and building it into a success story is another. Several startups fail due to factors ranging from poor planning and ineffective marketing strategies to economic downturns and operational inefficiencies. As far as marketing is concerned, there are several lessons to learn from some of the most successful companies. In the sections below, we’ll discuss influencer marketing and how influencer collaboration with the right influencers can be a recipe for business success. You’ll also learn how to maximize influencer collaborations and make this marketing strategy work for you.

What is Influencer Marketing, and Why Does it Matter?

 

As the name suggests, influencer marketing is a technique where you partner up with a popular figure or celebrity to help promote your products or services. Influencers can be individuals or a group of people with a huge following, especially on popular social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and TikTok.

Whether your business is a startup or an established entity, influencer marketing can help drive brand awareness, increasing traffic and conversions. It’s worth noting that every business is unique, and how effective influencer marketing will be for your business depends on factors such as:

  • Nature of the business. Beauty, lifestyle, and fashion businesses have a natural fit with influencers, while those in the B2B sector may find this marketing technique challenging.
  • Online presence. A robust online presence, characterized by a well-designed website and active social media profiles, will attract the best influencers and may translate to better conversions.
  • Target demographics. The influencer’s ready audience should be your preferred target market. Otherwise, a mismatch will see your marketing campaign struggle.
  • Choice of influencer. Consider the influencer’s values, reputation, and audience engagement before striking a partnership deal. More on this later.

Besides having an engaged and loyal following willing to buy your products or services, influencers put a personality and face to your brand, making it more reputable and trustworthy. The right influencers will also push your product or services to a broader audience, thanks to the varied platforms they’ll use to promote your brand.

How Can You Leverage Influencer Collaborations to Drive Business Success? 

Most influencers have great ideas on how they can partner with you to market your brand. Even so, you may specify how you want them to promote your products or services. And while there’s no wrong or right way to promote your brand, some influencer marketing techniques are more effective than others. Here are a few ways to leverage influencer marketing for maximum impact:

Try Podcast Endorsements

According to PEW research, 49% of adults in the United States have listened to a podcast in the past 12 months. Therefore, it makes economic sense to partner with podcast hosts to promote your brand among their loyal following. To make this strategy work best, you want to sponsor specific episodes of several podcasts your target audience is already subscribed to.

Use Influencer Content as Paid Ads

Standard ads on social media platforms rarely convert since everyone sees them as a nuisance. However, this won’t be the case if you partner with an influencer and let them create a social ad with their face or voice on it.

Use Brand Ambassadors 

Over the years, businesses have used brand ambassador programs to build trust and win customers. With this technique, companies tap into loyal customers who already use their products or services and partner with them to recommend their brand to their following or audience. This program works well when the loyal customer you want to pick has a huge following that can convert easily.

Try Contests and Giveaways 

With this technique, you’ll provide your influencers with a product or service they can reward or give to their followers. You can modify this technique to have the influencer’s followers like your brand’s page or post. The giveaways may come in the form of contests or challenges meant to boost social media engagement, brand following, and awareness.

Gift Influencers and Obtain Honest Reviews 

Another way to leverage influencer marketing is to gift an influencer your product or provide them with your services for free and let them give their followers an honest review of what they think about your product/service. If the influencer thinks your product/service is excellent, they’ll recommend it to their followers. Otherwise, they won’t.

How to Identify the Right Influencers for Your Target Audience 

Before comfortably trusting an influencer to promote your brand, you must follow due process throughout the sourcing and selection stages. The right influencer for your brand is someone you can trust and who believes in your business. Here are a few things to look out for when choosing an influencer to partner up with:

  • Relevant audience. Not all influencers have an audience that resonates with your business or target demographic. Do your research to ensure you partner with someone who will directly add value to your business.
  • Brand Values. The right influencer will have values that resonate with your brand and target audience. You can check the influencer on social media platforms to learn more about their values and belief systems.
  • Communication and professionalism. One of the pillars of the 4Cs marketing model is effective communication. Customers always want to know how buying your product will benefit them, meaning the influencer should do a great job selling your brand. Similarly, you want to work with a professional influencer who has strong communication skills.
  • Content Quality. As much as the influencer is authentic, trustworthy, and meets the brand alignment metrics, you also want to ensure the content they produce meets your expected quality standards.

Bottom Line

Whether turning your employees into influencers or picking celebrity figures to partner with, influencer marketing is generally a true and tested technique. The goal is to choose a trustworthy person with a reasonable social following committed to walking the marketing journey with you, one step at a time. Use the tips above to guide you throughout the influencer marketing campaign, and where necessary, seek professional help from a reputable marketing company.

emotional advertising

Emotional Advertising: How Brands Use Feelings to Get People to Buy

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Emotional advertising uses emotions to connect with consumers and encourage them to buy a product or service. This type of advertising appeals to the heart rather than the head, and it can be quite effective in leaving a lasting impact on customers. Informing your audience is important. You want potential buyers to understand what their problem is, and how your products or services can solve that problem. Unfortunately, people don’t generally make purchases based on information alone. It turns out that people are more prone to making emotional purchases than informed purchases. It’s why commercials consist of much more than an explanation of a product’s use. Instead they use emotional advertising to target the viewer.

It’s effective, and it’s why connecting with your audience on an emotional level will benefit your marketing strategy.

The Benefits of Emotional Advertising

emotional advertising

Targeting your audience’s emotions through your advertising efforts makes it easier for your audience to connect with your brand on a personal level. Purely informational advertising can be difficult for people to connect with. One of the issues with that kind of advertising is that the audience might remember the information you’ve provided, but not the brand itself.

Connecting to your audience using emotional advertising is important. Whether you’re pulling at their heartstrings or making them laugh, this makes your brand more memorable. Your audience is more likely to trust you if you appeal to their emotions because it makes your brand more relatable. It means that they’re more likely to engage with your brand, resulting in stronger customer loyalty even after you’ve closed the sale.

Not only does emotional advertising make more of an impact on audiences, but it also makes your content more shareable. Nobody is going to share a video or a blog post that is purely informational. However, they will share something they find funny or uplifting. It makes it easier to increase brand awareness.

 

Read more on Integrating Storybranding With Your B2B Marketing Strategy

Examples of Emotional Advertising

The following are just a few examples of how different emotions can be used to connect with your audience:

  • Happiness
    Making an audience feel happy is a good way to develop brand association. It also makes them more likely to share your content. They will want to share that happiness with their friends and family. Coca-Cola has been running campaigns that make audiences feel happy for decades. From their iconic “I’d like to buy the world a coke“ to their “open happiness” tagline, Coca-Cola is a great example of this type of marketing.
  • Pride
    Appealing to your audience’s sense of pride makes them feel good about themselves as well as about your brand. A great recent example is of Nike’s Kaepernick ad, the tagline of which read “Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything.”
  • Fear
    You don’t always have to appeal to the emotions people like. In some cases, fear can be a very effective emotion, especially if you’re trying to drive audiences to take immediate action. The WWF created a campaign using fear to drive the importance of stopping climate change. The ad read “Stop Climate Change Before It Changes You” and showed a man with the head of a fish–a terrifying image.
  • Anger
    Anger is an emotion that brands can use to get their audience to side with them over an issue. You’ll notice many political campaigns focus on generating anger for emotional advertising. They highlight aspects of their opponents their audience should be angry about, thereby aligning their audience with them.
  • Greed
    We live in a consumer society. As such, people tend to want the newest and latest of everything. Although greed tends to have a negative connotation, it’s an emotion commonly leveraged by businesses by advertising limited editions and collectible items as well as using short-term promotions and sales. Such a strategy incorporates both greed and fear since people will make a purchase based on both desire and fear of missing out.
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How To Implement Emotional Advertising

Getting your audience to feel a certain way can be an effective way to engage them. However, eliciting specific emotions can be more challenging than you realize. First of all, just because you’re targeting a certain emotion doesn’t mean that your audience will feel the way you want them to.

Secondly, if you go too far (especially when it comes to anger, fear, and sadness), it can backfire. Your audience could end up becoming upset with you as a result. Take for example Pepsi’s infamous commercial with  Kendall Jenner. The idea was to elicit feelings of hope and happiness in the audience. Instead, it resulted in controversy and outrage towards Pepsi.

With that in mind, if you plan to use emotional advertising, you should keep the following tips in mind:

1. Understand Who Your Audience Is

You can’t elicit real emotion from someone unless you know who they are. For example, you can’t just go up to a stranger on the street, tell them a joke, and expect them to laugh. You don’t know what their sense of humor is like, after all. The same goes for advertising. You need to understand who your target audience is. It’s why you should develop buyer personas.

Buyer personas help you pinpoint the fears, needs, desires, and demographics of the various segments of your audience. If you know what their specific fears are, it becomes easier to create ads that leverage those fears. Knowing who your audience is will also make it easier to identify what makes them happy, angry, and sad.

2. Use Storytelling To Create Emotional Engagement

For an audience to feel a lasting emotion, they need context. For example, a picture of a baby might make people feel happy, but they won’t know what they’re happy about. As such, that feeling will be fleeting. However, if you tell a story that provides context, it will make a bigger impact.

For instance, maybe the baby was adopted by a couple who have been trying to have a baby for over a decade. Within that story, you present two main characters (the couple), a conflict (inability to have a baby), and a solution (they adopt). Audiences will relate to those characters and their conflict. As a result, they’ll feel an emotion that they understand and that will last.

3. Make Sure You’re Being Authentic

Nobody likes it when someone is trying to manipulate the way they feel. Audiences are smart and they can see through companies that are inauthentic.

Again, consider the previously mentioned Pepsi ad. Audiences immediately felt that the ad’s message of “can’t we all get along” was inauthentic and tone-deaf, especially at the time it ran. If you want to elicit authentic emotions from your audience, you need to be authentic yourself.

As you can see, emotional advertising can be extremely effective when done right. This means using attraction marketing and story branding ensures your audience will emotionally connect with your brand.

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