growing your business Archives - Page 2 of 15

Search Engine Optimization: What Are You Getting Out Of It?

May 23, 2019September 5, 2023 Nancy Boisvert Newsletter agapi marketing, building your business, growing your business, online marketing, search engine optimization, SEO, small business marketing

Is your SEO strategy working?

Are you getting a return on investment on your search engine optimization campaigns? You’re not alone if you’re not sure how to answer that question. Indeed, 40% of marketers say proving the ROI of their marketing activities is their biggest marketing challenge according to HubSpot.

But measuring the ROI of your SEO efforts is possible, and we’re here to help you do just that.

Here are 3 things that need to be in place in order to calculate ROI:

1. The right attribution model. Attribution models are the basis for allocating credit to each marketing channel. There is no right or wrong attribution model. Each one is different and comes with its own strengths. We’ll help you find the model that’s the best fit for your business.

2. Google Search Console and Google Analytics. You may already have these tools in place for your website(s), and if so, that’s a great start. GSC is a key SEO tool for capturing and understanding website metrics. And the data from Google Analytics (GA) or a comparable website analytics package is crucial for understanding ROI.

3. Marketing automation and CRM. These tools supplement website analytics data by providing data on individual buyers. This helps you ascertain the lifetime value of individual customers, which in turn help you determine the lifetime value of a particular marketing channel.

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.

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Don’t Be Anti-Social! Putting the ‘Social’ Back into Social Media Marketing

May 9, 2019September 6, 2023 Nancy Boisvert Newsletter agapi marketing, client engagement, growing your business, marketing, online marketing, small business marketing, social media, social media marketing

Be social on social!

If you’re among the business owners who are posting and sharing content through Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms, then you’re off to a good start.

But if you’re not getting the results you’re looking for, chances are that’s because your social media isn’t actually very social. Posting and sharing content just isn’t enough!

However, how do you put the ‘social’ back in social media and take your social media marketing game to the next level?

Here are four ways to create opportunities for your customers to get involved in the conversation and get to know you and your brand.

1. Post conversational status messages.

This will humanize your brand. Remind people that your business is run by individuals who care about their products and their customers, not by some faceless corporate machine. Allow your customers to connect with you on a human level.

2. Post videos of yourself talking to your target customers.

As a business owner, showing your face builds trust and, again, humanizes your brand.

3. Ask questions. Hear their story.

Ask about their needs and get feedback on your products or services. The exchange will benefit both you and your customers. You’ll be helping your customers feel like they are a valued part of your business, and as a business owner, you will gain valuable insight about your target customers.

4. Respond to comments.

Being social means engaging in a two-way conversation. When your customers reach out to you, make them feel heard and keep them engaged by responding thoughtfully to their comments.

Do these things, and your business will not only have gone social, but it will start taking off.

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.

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Organically Building Your Brand Via Content Marketing On Linkedin

May 7, 2019September 6, 2023 Nancy Boisvert Newsletter agapi marketing, building your business, growing your business, linkedin, online marketing, small business marketing

Sharing your content on LinkedIn is a great way to grow your brand.

LinkedIn has many marketing tools that can be used to grow your business. Using these tools to raise awareness for your business, its credibility, and its impact will put you on the path to building your brand in an organic way.

Here is a brief guide on some of these tools and how they work.

LinkedIn Company Page

Catch the eye of your prospective customers with a Company Page. It should be a place where you can engage your target audience with things relevant to them such as links to your best white papers, e-books, case studies, how-to content and thought leadership content. Your Company Page should spread your company’s overall message by publishing content you know your target audience will want to see.

Showcase Pages

You love your business and think of many different parts of it as equally important in their own ways, but does your audience know that? Showcase pages are for creating a distinct platform for each aspect of your business that has its own message to share with its own target audience. By giving each part of your business its own distinct voice, you can extend your LinkedIn presence to reach the audience it needs to reach.

Long-form Posts

Should you go long on LinkedIn? The answer is yes! Publishing long-form content can position you as an expert and thought leader on the subject, giving your business credibility and authenticity. Another benefit to writing your own posts is giving a chance for like-minded professionals to interact and contribute while simultaneously spreading your message. If your post becomes a hot topic of discussion it will be a trending topic where it can be distributed and recommended to a much broader audience, giving you even further reach than before!

These tools and more are part of a larger LinkedIn toolbox that can help your business grow in an impactful way.

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.

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How To Beat Bigger Brands And Grow Your Business

April 25, 2019September 6, 2023 Nancy Boisvert Newsletter agapi marketing, building your business, growing your business, local business, marketing, online marketing, small business marketing

Looking to beat the bigger brands?

Are you a Small Local Business?

Being small doesn’t matter when you are offering bigger value and personalized services. What you need is to become more visible online to people looking for what you provide.

What are the advantages of being a small, local business that will enable you to compete with bigger businesses.

Here’s a short list:

Technology Tools

In no other time has technology made it easier for us to do business, communicate, promote, and expand our businesses on such a far-reaching scale. The Web, SEO, Social Media Marketing allow us to market our businesses in the same way bigger brands do.

Flexibility with Changing Conditions

Small business owners have way more flexibility to make immediate and necessary changes that are essential to dealing with changing local market conditions. Most often than not, observation, analyses, and recommendations go through many levels bureaucracy before decisions are made at the top. Execution suffers the same delays going down to personnel on the ground.

Personalized Customer Service

You have the opportunity to deliver personalized, unexpected and exceptional customer service.

How does it feel when you are served by the owner of a restaurant you often dine at, and get asked if the food is good and what can they do to improve their menu?

There is something very warm and fuzzy feeling about local interactions for both owners and customers.

Access to Digital Marketing Expertise

There are no longer barriers to access digital marketing expertise when you can hire an expert by the hour to oversee your marketing strategy and activities.

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.

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Get Customer Reviews To Rev Up Your Revenue

April 23, 2019September 6, 2023 Nancy Boisvert Newsletter agapi marketing, building your business, client engagement, growing your business, marketing, online marketing, online reputation management, online reviews

Something as simple as customer reviews can increase your revenue.

Online reviews are crucial to managing your reputation, gaining trust and building confidence. After all, trust is a key element to gaining and maintaining customers.

Do you remember asking for a friend’s opinion about a product before deciding to buy? Didn’t you become more excited after hearing encouraging feedback?

That’s exactly how online reviews work.

Let’s take a look at these statistics from BrightLocal:

• 84% of people trust online reviews as much as a personal recommendation
• 7 out of 10 consumers will leave a review for a business if they’re asked to
• 90% of consumers read less than 10 reviews before forming an opinion about a business
• 54% of people will visit the website after reading positive reviews
• 73% of consumers think that reviews older than 3 months are no longer relevant
• 74% of consumers say that positive reviews make them trust a local business more
• 58% of consumers say that the star rating of a business is most important

Your potential customers are now checking what others say about your products or services before buying!

You need to always provide a good experience, earn those positive reviews, get them published, and see more repeat and new sales coming to your business.

There are additional benefits to getting positive reviews and 5-star ratings:

Improved Organic and Local Rankings
Google gives priority to businesses with stellar reviews on rankings.

Increased Click-through Rate
Consumers will most likely click on a business with impressive reviews in the search results.

Create Consumer Loyalty
Your customers who take the time to leave a 5-star rating are far more likely to feel a certain bond with your business.

Let your Customers Do Your Marketing for You
Even just a handful of positive online business reviews are worth a great deal and can attract new customers to our business.

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.

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How Much Should Your Marketing Budget Be?

March 29, 2019September 6, 2023 Nancy Boisvert Newsletter agapi marketing, budget, building your business, business, growing your business, marketing, marketing budget, marketing strategy, small business marketing

It’s important to set a budget for marketing.

Do you have a set rule for marketing budget allocation?

Or do you just allocate marketing whatever is left after all of the projected business expenses for the year have been set?

USBA suggests 7% to 8% for small businesses. However, you can shoot for up to 20% if you really want to smash it hard in the marketplace.

A survey from the CMO Council, on the other hand, comes with similar results with 74% percent of marketers allocating 4% to 6% of their annual gross revenue to marketing, while only 2% apportion more than 20%.

The size of your marketing budget will fuel your marketing efforts, and so if you’re in a very competitive industry, and most especially if you’re in the early stages of your business, then you should really have a strong budget.

How do you structure your marketing budget?

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.

Leverage Digital Word-of-Mouth Marketing for Your Business

March 27, 2019September 6, 2023 Nancy Boisvert Newsletter agapi marketing, building your business, digital marketing, growing your business, marketing, online marketing

Word-of-mouth marketing is the best recommendation you can get.

But many businesses seem not to be taking advantage of online word-of-mouth marketing.

In fact, some businesses don’t understand how it can be leveraged so that they can take advantage of the huge rewards it brings.

One thing to remember when it comes to word-of-mouth is that friends and family will believe what they hear from each other over any other form of advertising. Word-of-Mouth has moved to the digital realm.

Online review sites exist for a few reasons, but one of the most popular reasons is that these reviews attract a lot of attention to businesses they are written for, and people love to read reviews.

They especially like to find reviews on a business they are thinking about doing business with. And some businesses have taken advantage of this situation like Zappos.

Zappos decided to do something different than other big companies and instead of spending tons of money on advertising, they invested that money into creating an exceptional customer experience by having the best customer service they could offer.

The result has been nothing short of amazing as Zappos is well known for providing the best in customer service. The reviews they get drive their bottom line because those happy customers leave reviews, and those reviews get read by other prospects. Not to mention that this form of promotion costs less to manage than other forms of advertising.

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.

Why Customer Lifetime Value Is Important

March 25, 2019September 6, 2023 Nancy Boisvert Newsletter agapi marketing, building your business, CLV, customer lifetime value, growing your business, marketing, online marketing

Are you measuring your CLV?

When starting a business, it’s easy to overlook some of the more important details once you start getting a customer base. Most businesses rely on getting as many customers as they can as cheaply as they can. This may have been the way to do things in the past, but now things have changed.

So what is Customer Lifetime Value? CLV is something that all big businesses focus on because of its importance. It is the measure of dollars coming in from a customer over the entire relationship with that customer to the business. However, since you cannot speculate how long each customer you have will stay loyal to you, you look at it over a certain period of time. Once you start doing this, the data you collect can show you some fascinating things.

One of the things you might find is where your marketing efforts fell short compared to one customer over others. The other thing measuring Customer Lifetime Value can do is help you refine your marketing strategy so that you are targeting the right customers.

There are many benefits that come from analyzing Customer Lifetime Value including maximizing your return on marketing campaigns, helping to identify and reward those customers who are loyal, and managing your customer relationship as a monetary investment instead of counting them as a number.

Huge industry leaders in eCommerce are outperforming all the rest because of their focus on retaining customers. Some eCommerce giants are reporting 60-80% retention rates while others are reporting only a 20% rate!

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.

Agapi /NEXsteps

Tag: growing your business

Have you ever thought about using your reviews as marketing content?

Here are five tips to start using today:

Is your SEO strategy working?

Here are 3 things that need to be in place in order to calculate ROI:

Be social on social!

Sharing your content on LinkedIn is a great way to grow your brand.

Here is a brief guide on some of these tools and how they work.

The BBB brand builds consumer confidence.

Looking to beat the bigger brands?

Are you a Small Local Business?

Here’s a short list:

Something as simple as customer reviews can increase your revenue.

There are additional benefits to getting positive reviews and 5-star ratings:

It’s important to set a budget for marketing.

Word-of-mouth marketing is the best recommendation you can get.

Are you measuring your CLV?