Nancy Boisvert, Author at Agapi /NEXsteps

Grow Your Business through Storytelling

March 6, 2019September 6, 2023 Nancy Boisvert Newsletter agapi marketing, building your business, client engagement, communicating with clients, growing your business, how to communicate with clients, marketing, marketing strategy, science of marketing

Get the attention of your audience through unique and authentic storytelling!

“A story can cross the barriers of time – past, present, future – and allows us to experience the similarities between ourselves and through others,” says Andrew Stanton, a filmmaker at Pixar.

Customers are looking for something that is unique and relatable to them and storytelling is an age-old method that allows businesses to relate to potential buyers.

Here are 3 elements of storytelling that can help turn the mundane into something of great appeal:

Emotion. Take your customer back to those times they will never forget with emotional appeals, such as sympathy, envy, or intrigue. Move them through from one emotional state to another as the narrative unfolds. This only intensifies their connection with your product and brand.

Authenticity. Be honest. Speak truth and life about the brand and the audience it is speaking to. This will grab their attention while also creating a reputation for your brand.

Relatability. Make a connection to your audience. Do your research on who you are targeting. Appeal to your audience through situations they have also experienced, and also challenges they have overcome.

Use these strategies to make a connection with your audience:

Make Your Story Centered around their Situation and Needs
Make People Feel a Part of the Story Experience
Listen & Create a Relevant Context
Showcase Your Values

Once you have made an effective connection, your message will be absorbed deep in their hearts and minds.

Are you ready to grow your business now? If you’re ready to take the next step and make your business more profitable, please reach out to us.

If you like the information you are receiving, please share this post.

How The Voice Of Your Customers Is A Valuable Marketing Tool

March 4, 2019September 6, 2023 Nancy Boisvert Newsletter agapi marketing, building your business, client engagement, marketing, marketing strategy, online marketing, online reputation management, online reviews

reputation marketing is the voice of your customers

Do you care what your customers think?

Digital marketing generally means getting the word out online about your brand and getting customers to see why they should buy from your business.

But in today’s hyperconnected world, your customers can also shape the reputation of your business online in (nearly) real time. This is very important as 77% of consumers read online reviews before making a decision.

While talking about how good your products and services are is of course useful and necessary, what your customers say about your company can also be used as a marketing tool. This is called Reputation Marketing. What makes this strategy different from other types is that it puts the “voice of the customer” as the central focus.

What your customers say about your business is not something you can control, buy, or make them do, but you can use the positive reviews they do leave to shape the narrative of your business’ reputation.

It’s amazing how many business owners are keen on running all sorts of online marketing campaigns, yet they don’t take the time to have their customers write a comprehensive review about their products.

Can you imagine how many of your “would-be customers” end up buying from your competitors, all because they couldn’t find any reviews about your product or service?

It’s essential for potential customers to know that others have used your business and had a good experience doing so, giving your business a reputation of trustworthiness.

Reputation marketing today is a must.

How do you get these positive reviews for your business and strengthen your reputation? There are many ways.

Are you ready to grow your business now? If you’re ready to take the next step and make your business more profitable, please reach out to us.

If you like the information you are receiving, please share this post.

Should You Hire A Full-time Marketing Director?

March 1, 2019September 6, 2023 Nancy Boisvert Newsletter agapi marketing, building your business, how to grow your business, marketing, marketing director, marketing strategy, small business marketing

Should you hire or contract the services of a Marketing Director?

To get your marketing performing at its optimum, you would need a Marketing Director to oversee the strategy and implementation. However, a Marketing Director would cost at least $11,000 a month. This is a huge cost to deal with for most small business owners like you.

As with any HR activity, there is additional work required of you to hiring a Marketing Director, such as;

Job Description Preparation
Job Posting/Advertising Cost
Interviewing
Background Checks
Qualification/Certification Checks
Evaluation
Employment Agreements
Onboarding
Training

Do you think hiring a marketing consultant to perform a marketing director role for your business at an hourly or contract rate for a few hours a month would make more sense?

Are you ready to grow your business now? If you’re ready to take the next step and make your business more profitable, please reach out to us.

If you like the information you are receiving, please share this post.

Aligning Your Digital Marketing Strategy With Your Business Goals

February 27, 2019September 6, 2023 Nancy Boisvert Newsletter agapi marketing, branding, marketing, marketing strategy, online marketing, small business marketing

Your digital marketing strategy needs to be aligned with your business goals.

Nearly half of businesses (44%) don’t have a clearly defined marketing strategy. For firms that are active in digital marketing, nearly half do not have a defined digital plan or strategy (47%).

No wonder many small businesses are struggling to understand why their online marketing campaigns aren’t delivering an ROI.

Successful businesses that are running online marketing campaigns that impact their bottom line are NOT doing it merely because their competitors are doing it too, but because they have drawn a clear path to how online marketing can help achieve their business goals.

A Marketing Audit has to be performed for you if you have a digital marketing campaign currently running or had one in the past. The next step is to consult with an expert to identify your goals, budget, benchmarks, implementation plan, and targets — producing an online Marketing Blueprint in the process.

Can a building be constructed without a blueprint? Can a building stand without a foundation? No. These principles hold true for your marketing.

Here are some variables that will shape your Marketing Blueprint:

Marketing Audit
Business Goals
Budget
Benchmarks
Consulting Services
– Strategy Recommendations
Marketing Services
Backup Plan
Targets

Your marketing needs a foundation to stand on — your business goals. You need a plan for your marketing with all of the parts working together to reach new heights in line with your goals.

Your goals could be a mix in any of these categories:

Brand Exposure
Social Media Engagement
Website Traffic
Sales Targets
Target ROI

If you are willing to spend $1,000 to $3,000 a month – or $12,000 to $36,000 a year – on your marketing, doesn’t it make sense to invest in a Marketing Blueprint to ensure a spot-on marketing campaign.

Are you ready to grow your business now? If you’re ready to take the next step and make your business more profitable, please reach out to us.

If you like the information you are receiving, please share this post.

8 Reasons To Use Google Analytics for Your Website

February 25, 2019September 6, 2023 Nancy Boisvert Newsletter agapi marketing, branding, building your business, online marketing, small business marketing, web design, website, website marketing

Here’s 8 reasons to use Google analytics!

As business owners, we must ensure that our marketing efforts are worthwhile.

We need to make sure that our website’s design and structure is at optimal levels to maximize our marketing campaigns.

Having someone on your team that can analyze your website traffic data will help ensure that your efforts are worth every little bit of time and money you spend on marketing.

Installing Google Analytics makes acquiring this information easier than ever. Understanding this information will help you strategize and improve your marketing efforts.

Here are 8 simple ways to use Google Analytics to advance your business to next level:

1. Identify the Sources of Your Traffic

Use analytics to track the traffic on your website. This will help you understand what sources send the most traffic to your business.

2. Determine the Path that Leads to Conversions

Determine what pages are driving conversions for your business. Conversions could be making a sale, the download of a white paper, a filled out contact form on your website or one of many other actions that positively impact your business.

The quality of your traffic relies on if you’re bringing the right buyer personas to your website who are genuinely interested in your company’s offerings.

3. Understand Which Relevant Keywords Drive Traffic

Analytics informs you how your business is ranking for key search queries.

Ranking highly for the most important long-tail keyword phrases related to your business can drive quality visitors to your website on a regular basis, which is why marketing around these search phrases is essential for your business.

4. Understand Time on Site

Start by understanding how engaged your visitors are by using the engagement report to better understand their time on site.

The reason why this is so important is that the longer someone is on your website, the more likely they’ll perform an action with your business whether that’s a download, completing a transaction, etc.

5. View Multi-Channel Funnels to Locate Understand a Visitor’s Path

The multi-channel funnels report in Google Analytics is one of the most important to monitor. It provides an overview of the most common paths to conversions. Take a look at which funnels are driving the most activity for your business and try to spur more movement across these channels.

6. Know Which Device Users Drive Results

Improve the quality of your ongoing traffic by analyzing and catering to where your traffic is coming from –desktop, mobile or tablet devices.

7. New vs. Returning Visitors

This report is important to monitor regularly to see if your existing audience is continually returning to your website, while also informing your business of your audience growth over time as seen through new visitors.

Ideally, there should be a healthy balance of both new visitors and returning visitors to inform the quality of your website.

8. Manage Your Backlinks

This can help your business understand what websites are linking to your site, which is a major factor that Google and the other search engines take into consideration when ranking your website and driving traffic to your business.

Your backlink profile is a crucial factor to help ensure that only quality websites are linking to your business and that you’re building trust with your customers and the search engines.

Are you ready to grow your business now? If you’re ready to take the next step and make your business more profitable, please reach out to us.

If you like the information you are receiving, please share this post.

Using Reputation Marketing to Gain Customer Trust

February 25, 2019September 6, 2023 Nancy Boisvert Newsletter agapi marketing, client retention, communicating with clients, marketing, marketing strategy, online marketing, online reputation management, reputation marketing, small business marketing

Looking to gain customer trust online? Try using reputation marketing.

Any smart business that is keeping up with current business trends will know all about how reputation marketing can affect their business, and how it directly affects things like customer retention, brand awareness, and most importantly, consumer trust.

And if you aren’t taking advantage of online review sites for your business, you could be missing out on gaining more customers and clients.

Having a good reputation marketing strategy where you have someone manage the aspects of online reviews can be very rewarding especially when it comes to building trust for your brand.

Getting listed on these review sites is the first step in wowing potential customers, and at the same time showing these future prospects that you care about your brand, and care about customer experience. If you don’t do this, your competition will, and are already likely taking advantage of getting positive reviews.

Don’t wait a minute longer to find out that your business has unchecked reviews online. Take control of your reputation marketing strategy now.

Are you ready to grow your business now? If you’re ready to take the next step and make your business more profitable, please reach out to us.

If you like the information you are receiving, please share this post.

The Whys and Hows of LinkedIn for B2B Leads

February 24, 2019September 6, 2023 Nancy Boisvert Newsletter agapi marketing, linkedin, marketing, online marketing, social media, social media marketing

LinkedIn is a great resource for B2B leads.

It seems that in social media lists, LinkedIn is always thrown at the end as another, lesser, option to the bigger sites.

However, if you are looking to make B2B connections and grow your leads there is no more effective social media platform than LinkedIn!

Unlike the other social media channels out there, LinkedIn was specifically designed for business leaders to share ideas and make connections.

Studies have shown:

1) 92% of B2B Marketers leverage LinkedIn over all other social platforms.
2) 79% of B2B Marketers view LinkedIn as an effective source for generating B2B leads.
3) 80% of B2B leads come from LinkedIn.
4) 43% of marketers say that they have sourced a customer from LinkedIn.

So hopefully those statistics have demonstrated why using LinkedIn is an effective choice for your business. Now, let’s focus on how you can best utilize the site.

Just showing up to the party isn’t enough, you are going to have to enter the conversation. In order to do that your company needs to begin posting engaging content for your target decision makers to read and share.

Here are three points for you to think about regarding LinkedIn content:

1) 94% of B2B marketers use LinkedIn to distribute content

Businesses are sharing tons information with one another and making connections. It is time for you to join in and boost your visibility by posting useful content for your future customers.

2) 10 pieces of content are consumed before a purchasing decision is made.

People are constantly taking in information and researching before buying, especially on LinkedIn. Now through the content you post, your business has a direct way to speak into their decision-making process.

3. LinkedIn SlideShare reaches 70M unique visitors a month.

The site is now among the top 100 most-visited websites in the world. The audience is already right there for you to reach out to!

Are you ready to grow your business now? If you’re ready to take the next step and make your business more profitable, please reach out to us.

If you like the information you are receiving, please share this post.

Online Advertising Benefits vs. Traditional Advertising

February 22, 2019September 6, 2023 Nancy Boisvert Newsletter advertising, agapi marketing, building your business, marketing, marketing strategy, online advertising, online marketing, small business advertising

What’s better? Online or traditional adverting?

There are many benefits to doing online advertising over the traditional model. One of those is the cost between the two. Traditional advertising, such as billboards or television spots (commercials) can cost quite a bit of money for a single 30-second spot.

Online advertising uses a platform where you are charged by how many times an ad is clicked. This is called Pay-per-click or ‘PPC’ advertising. It’s not nearly as expensive with an average cost per click of 0.60 cents.

With online advertising, you’re getting instant traffic. You could run traditional advertising and online advertising in a race side by side, and you’ll get online customers a lot quicker than traditional.

However, the biggest benefit is that with online advertising is that you can get detailed data on everyone that sees your ads.

You can also split test ads for the same cost, find out who interacted with your ads, where they were from, which ad they liked better, and what converts and what doesn’t. You can then optimize your ads with the data you collected.

Let’s say you ran an ad and 100 people clicked it, but no one bought anything, then you would know there is a problem somewhere and be able to fix it and optimize each ad.

Once you spend money on a television ad, that’s it. No way to optimize it. Having control over your online ads such as when they are shown, and how much money you are spending is crucial for success, while not breaking the bank on ads that aren’t converting.

But running a successful online advertising campaign can be tricky. It takes some knowledge and learning how to setup everything properly to run highly successful campaigns.

There is a lot of competition, and you need every bit of experience you can get on your side.

Are you ready to grow your business now? If you’re ready to take the next step and make your business more profitable, please reach out to us.

If you like the information you are receiving, please share this post.

Making Your Business Stand Out from the Crowd

February 22, 2019September 6, 2023 Nancy Boisvert Newsletter agapi marketing, building your business, marketing, online marketing, online reputation management, reputation marketing, SEO

How do you make your business stand out from the crowd online?

SEO is a great marketing tool. Social Media is a great marketing tool as well. You have Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, etc. at your disposal.

Many businesses fill their feeds with discussions about how reliable and celebrated their products or services are. Many have the persuasive copy needed to convince people to buy from them.

All of these tactics are good. Nonetheless, self-promotion alone is not enough to make yourself known to your target market. This is where Reputation Marketing comes into play.

Reputation marketing is about building a positive online reputation, which allows you to use that stellar reputation to gain the trust of your target customers.

With reputation marketing, you now have more authentic content. Content that draws people’s attention to how reputable your business is!

As your customer is contemplating their next purchase, they go through a process to decide if they want to buy. Some of these stages include Awareness, Interest, Desire, and Action. For some, this process is instantaneous, and for some, it could take months. Your reputation and reviews can help them jump into action!

Use reputation marketing to validate your potential customer’s decision to buy from you!

Are you ready to grow your business now? If you’re ready to take the next step and make your business more profitable, please reach out to us.

If you like the information you are receiving, please share this post.

Get the attention of your audience through unique and authentic storytelling!

Here are 3 elements of storytelling that can help turn the mundane into something of great appeal:

Use these strategies to make a connection with your audience:

Do you care what your customers think?

Should you hire or contract the services of a Marketing Director?

Your digital marketing strategy needs to be aligned with your business goals.

Here are some variables that will shape your Marketing Blueprint:

Your goals could be a mix in any of these categories:

Here’s 8 reasons to use Google analytics!

Here are 8 simple ways to use Google Analytics to advance your business to next level:

Looking to gain customer trust online? Try using reputation marketing.

LinkedIn is a great resource for B2B leads.

Here are three points for you to think about regarding LinkedIn content:

What’s better? Online or traditional adverting?

How do you make your business stand out from the crowd online?

You’ve heard about it, but what is a Google algorithm?