Boom Your Business And Beat Bigger Brands

compete with bigger businesses

Are you a Small Local Business?

Size doesn’t matter when you are offering bigger value and personalized services. What you need is to create more visibility online for the people who are 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, and Social Media Marketing allow us to market our businesses in the same way that 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. For big businesses, recommendations go through many levels bureaucracy before decisions are made at the top. Execution suffers the same delays down to the 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 that 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 accessing digital marketing expertise when you can hire an expert by the hour to oversee your marketing strategy and activities.

Contact us if you want to seize the opportunities that digital marketing can offer and reclaim your domination in your own territory.

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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Stop Wasting Money! What is Your Customer Acquisition Cost?

customer acquisition cost CAC

Are you spending your money wisely?

Your Customer Acquisition Cost or CAC is the total cost spent on acquiring new customers (marketing/sales expense) divided by the number of new customers acquired during that particular period.

If you invested $1000 in marketing/sales in a one month period and acquired 10 new customers as a direct result of that marketing and promotion, then your acquisition cost is $100 per new client.

All successful businesses measure their customer acquisition costs. Luckily, promotional activity on the web can be measured very accurately.

Make sure that the pricing of your products and services cover you CAC.

Want to know more? Contact us today.

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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An SEO Audit is a Must

seo audit

When did you last do an SEO audit?

So, you’re excited to get your business back into the SEO arena… that’s great! However, don’t let that excitement make you miss a crucial step before launching an SEO campaign — complete an SEO Audit first.

Forty-seven percent said in a survey that a full  audit should be conducted every six months. How often do you have an  audit done?

It is of extreme importance for you to gain an understanding of your SEO performance through an independent, objective, and unbiased audit.

Is your SEO performing well or not? Were benchmarks and goals set before the SEO campaign started?

Without an SEO sudit, you will not have a sound SEO strategy. Without a sound strategy, your SEO campaign will likely fall through, resulting in a complete waste of money.

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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Benefit from Business Blogging

business blogging

Does your website have a blog?

Are you blogging?

If not, here are some compelling reasons why you should!

1. Companies that use blogs receive 67% more leads than companies who don’t!
2. Twenty-three percent of Internet time is spent on blogs and social networks, so you need to be blogging!
3. Businesses that blog get more visitors to their website (average of 55% more website visitors)
4. Almost half of the companies in the US use blogs to marketing their product/services because it works!
5. If you blog 16 to 20 times in a 30-day period, you will generate nearly 3 times as many leads as those businesses who do not blog.

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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Monitoring Your Online Reputation Using Google Alerts

have you set up google alerts

Have you set up Google Alerts yet?

Promote your brand along with its good reputation on social media and other platforms. However, things get a bit complicated when you have to deal with bad reviews.

First, keep a good reputation by being honest, transparent, setting clear expectations for your customer, and by being in business because you genuinely want to help people around you. It goes without saying that shady practices are a no-no.

Second, you have to prevent any dissatisfaction by a customer from escalating by addressing every complaint you get. It has to be fixed at this level immediately while the customer is still trying to reach out to you. Because once they have felt frustrated and think they have to warn others about your practice, things can get messy.

Nonetheless, you have to set your radar for negative reviews. One good way to do this is to set up Google alerts for your brand terms and name.

What else can you do to safeguard your brand?

Claim your brand name
Build a consistent identity

Whether your brand is your name itself, your business name or your product name, you need to make sure that no one else can misrepresent you online by owning a piece of your brand. Make sure that you own domain names and usernames associated with your brand.

Build a consistent identity on major channels:

Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
YouTube
Pinterest
Tumblr
Quora

Publish content regularly:

The content you publish will define and reinforce who you are, what you stand for, and what your business is all about. This will make up the values associated with your brand. Anything inconsistent with these values will not be immediately convincing to your customers who know you.

Let me know if you need more information. We’d be glad to help.

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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Important Design Elements That Every Website Should Have

Important Design Elements That Every Website Should Have

Every website can benefit from these important design elements.

There has been a lot of testing and research done over the past couple of years, and it’s no surprise that more people are using mobile devices to find products or services. The one thing that may or may not come as a surprise is that many businesses haven’t adapted to these changes, or even tested their website. Prioritizing user experience should be the first thing you or your website designer should do.

Any website needs to have design elements that make the website easily seen, and also make it easy to navigate should be on the top of this list. Many websites are starting to get rid of images because they take too long for mobile devices to load, if too many are used. However, if you do use images, they should be scaled down, and the images should use text, such as a card menu seen on Microsoft homepage. This one easy design element shows people what they are looking for quickly, and describes it easily.

And if you’re doing to use video or animation, then fast-loading cinemagraphs are the way to go for mobile devices. These small half-photo, half-animated clips, are quite popular, and load quickly. Make sure that your copy is relevant to the visitor quickly depending on their query, and what got them to your website in the first place. Give a quick big picture of what your site is all about, and what you offer the minute the customer gets there. Realize they may be on a mobile device, and test it, or have your website designer continually test and improve the experience.

Make your site easy to navigate, create different designs for the different sections, but use a consistent theme. Use eye-catching transitions from section to section to keep the user interested. And make sure the font for your copy can be easily seen. Visitors still do the quick scan, so if they quickly scan, make sure you grab their attention quickly. Use custom visual and iconography, or images and symbols, that tells your brand story and shows some personality of who and what your business is about.

All of these design trends are based on statistics. And with the statistics comes the realization that effective website design that makes life easier for users when they visit your site, should be the main goal of you and your website designer. Your competitors are optimizing their websites, if you don’t optimize your site, then you will be left behind.

If you would like to learn more about optimizing and using the latest design trends to improve customer experience, contact us today. We will be happy to help you deliver a great user experience.

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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6 Ways To Use Facebook Ads To Boost Growth and Sales for Your Small Business

facebook advertising

Facebook can boost your growth!

Businesses around the globe are cashing in on Facebook’s massive audience and unique features to increase their growth, sales, and overall success.

Is your business using Facebook Ads yet? Are you apprehensive to get into Facebook Ads?

Here are six tips to get you a well-deserved Facebook boost:

1. Capitalizing on Facebook’s huge captive audience: Facebook has over 1.7 billion active users, and features that help you target your ads so that they’re seen by your potential customers.

2. Transforming Facebook visitors into customers: turn your cash into traffic to your landing pages and conversion funnels. Facebook even lets you re-market towards users who have engaged with you before.

3. Utilizing Facebook’s powerful Call-to-Action feature: Unlike others, Facebook Ads lets small businesses choose from a variety of call-to-action options, which lets you focus on exactly what you want your audience to do.

4. Developing demand generation advertisements: The average Facebook users spends 40+ minutes a day there to explore, connect, and discover. Help them discover just how much they need what you have to offer!

5. Testing your content before you spend money to maximize engagement: Another reason to advertise on Facebook is that it lets you get the most bang for your buck. How? You can test how engaging your content is by posting it on your page for free and analyzing your Insights. Then you can put your money on the most successful posts!

6. Creating video ads: Facebook videos have high rates of engagement and can help create buzz around your 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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Ask These 8 Questions And Win More Customers

what are your customers thinking

Wouldn’t you like to know what your customers are thinking?

How are they going to act? Well, you can! You just need to track how your current customers are interacting with your business.

You or someone on your team needs to be continually answering the following questions in order to get to know your potential customers.

How many customers are you getting every month?

Even in the craziness of running your business, you need to make sure you have a way to keep track of all of your customers that you are serving. You also need to make sure that everyone on your team is on the same page and using the same system for tracking.

How many of them are coming from your website?

You need to be asking how your customers found out about you and keeping track of customers that are coming from your site.

Are they coming from your SEO efforts? Social Media? PPC?

You or someone on your team need to be monitoring how users are finding your website to learn what is working for you and what can be tweaked.

By what percent of your visitors are converting?

Track how many people who are coming to your site are actually becoming customers.

How high is your bounce rate?

Monitor the percentage of people visiting who are just viewing one page of your site and then navigating away.

Which pages are most visited?

Take note of the pages that users are going to the most often and see if they are the pages that will lead them into making conversions.

Which pages do they spend most of their time on?

You should study the pages that users are spending a lot of time looking at and see how you can make other pages interesting to your potential customers.

What’s the winning conversion path?

Find out what path the customers are taking to make conversions and make sure that your site is designed around making that path as easy as possible.

Make sure someone on your team is answering these questions often so you can optimize your website design to get a greater number of conversions.

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 a Virtual Storefront And Say Hello To The Future. Open 24/7.

open 24/7

Are you open 24/7?

The information age can be glorious. It gives customers nearly limitless information when trying to make a purchase decision, and it gives business owners like you new and exciting ways to reach those customers. It also makes it of the utmost importance to have a solidified and well-crafted website to make your case to potential customers.

Yes, your website is your virtual storefront. Open 24/7.

Not sure where to start? We can help.

Your website needs to sell you and these six things are proven to do that in the most efficient way.

1. The way that your product or service navigation is organized must be primarily based on your potential customer’s needs, and not based on, say, alphabetization.

2. With featured products or services, you can quickly direct your customer to what they are most likely to need. If the weather is heating up, make sure you don’t feature coats. Make educated guesses to showcase what’s hot for each season.

3. A product or service catalog makes sure your customers know exactly what you offer. It allows them to search through and identify what aspects of your product or service that fit your needs.

4. For each product listing, make sure you identify the benefits, features and product specifications. By ensuring you answer all the customer’s questions, you help them arrive at the “yes!” more quickly.

5. FAQs are found on almost every website. Whether they’re questions about shipping times or your return policy, you want to make sure anything a customer may wonder about is clearly spelled out.

6. Testimonials take advantage of the fact that customers trust their peers more than almost anything else when it comes to buying a good or service. If you have happy customers, make sure you utilize that to sell yourself or your products to new clientele.

Feeling overwhelmed? We’re here to help!

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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Why You Need To Optimize Your Website

optimize your website

Here’s why you need to optimize your website.

An optimized website means that it is structured, coded, designed, and has content published in a way that will allow Google to rank it.

Why is this important? Well, if Google can read your website correctly and interpret your content then it will understand the product or service that you are selling and so present it to your potential customers searching on the Web.

So, how do you ensure your website is optimized? Certain basics need completing such as keyword research, great content, and some technical criteria that a consultant can help you with such as tags, architecture, crawlability, among many other things.

Every worthwhile endeavor takes some amount of effort. Such is the case with optimizing your website to gain more visibility and traffic.

Think about your own experience when searching for information or a particular product. You will most likely click on the top results on the first page never bothering to check the second page when a list of results appears on the screen that “matches” what you’re looking for.

In today’s fast-paced world, customers have access to more information than ever, and they want results quickly. This means that they will choose from the top of the list, which is where you want your site to be.

Optimizing your site can get you there. This ongoing process requires regular maintenance and changes.

SEO rapidly evolves. So keeping up with the changes with your SEO consultant will give you an edge over your competitors.

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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