Jack Smith, Author at Smith Marketing

9 Effective Marketing Strategies To Grow Your Business

by Jack Smith | Feb 12, 2020 | Marketing

A lot of business owners make that mistake of just jumping right into a business without actually establishing a marketing strategy first. Sure, you can have the best products and services in the world, but without a proper plan to match it, it may not sell.

If you’re currently struggling in getting enough leads or sales, don’t worry because we’ve listed down nine ways on how to reach more customers, while growing your business.

1. Create A Brand For Your Business

Your brand represents who you are, and this is what sticks to the consumers. The market is full of competitors and having a “brand” will make you stand out from the crowd.

There are three factors that you need to consider when branding your business, and these are:

A. Brand – Your brand makes up the whole image of what your customers perceive you to be. It’s the emotional connection that you have with your target market.

B. Identity – These can be the colors, fonts, interior store design, product packaging, and other visual aspects of your brand.

C.Logo – Your logo can either be an icon or text. It’s one of the essential elements of your brand.

It’s also important to take note that rebranding can happen from time to time. A lot of businesses do it because they want to catch up with the trend, or they want to cater to a new market. Several big brands have done it for the past few decades, such as McDonald’s, Nike, and Starbucks.

2. Find Your Target Market

The biggest mistake that business owners and marketers do is not finding their target market. This stage of business planning is crucial because it will determine how you’re going to market your products and services.

The right way of doing this is to create research-based buyer profiles. These are fictional characters that represent your ideal customers, their buying patterns, hobbies, interests, age, location, purchase power, and everything about them that is relevant to your business.

3. Create A Visually Appealing Website

Have you ever clicked on a product that you really wanted but ended up not buying it because the website looked sketchy? That’s how most businesses lose customers because of a poorly designed website.

Just imagine the amount of effort and money wasted on getting those clicks. Still, a customer decided to cancel the purchase because the site wasn’t user-friendly, mobile-responsive – or it was just plain ugly.

Apart from getting the essential elements of a great website, it’s also important that you incorporate your branding elements into it. You can use your brand colors, fonts, and even the writing style on your content.

4. Set Up Social Media Accounts

This is actually a no-brainer! Businesses who don’t have social media accounts are losing sales at the moment. Being on social media doesn’t cost a penny (unless if you’re using paid advertising), and it only takes a few clicks here and there to post your products and services.

In addition to that, social media is a way to “humanize” your brand. You can post more about your business, like showing photos of your employees, how you create your products, feedbacks, and more. Social media helps build that connection between you and your customers.

5. Utilize SEO Properly

Don’t ever underestimate the power of SEO! A properly optimized website that has the right keywords and placements will show up on the first page of search engines, and this will result in more traffic and, eventually, result in sales.

Please take note that SEO doesn’t only apply to websites, but it also applies to social media accounts and every online material that you have. Even if you don’t have a website, your social media accounts will show up on the search results if it’s optimized.

6. Use Google My Business

Google My Business is an underrated tool that most local businesses miss out on. It’s the perfect tool to attract customers in your local area, or people are visiting.

You can register your company on GMB and add your location, store hours, and even photos. For example, if you own a restaurant in New York City, having your business on GMB will be shown to people who search for local restaurants in NYC through Google.

What’s good about it is that people can leave reviews on your GMB listing, which can help boost your credibility.

7.Get Involved in Sponsorships

You might think that this is an expensive form of marketing and only applies to more prominent companies, but it’s actually not.

We understand that not all businesses can afford to sponsor major sports teams and celebrities, so what do you do? Go Micro!

Support your local fun runs, high-school sports teams, or whatever it is that attracts people on a regular basis and associate your brand with it. Make sure that you post it on social media too!

8. Run Contests and Do Giveaways

If you really believe that your product is as great as you think it is, do giveaways and contests. Everybody loves free stuff!

Don’t ever think of this as an expense but think of it as an investment. Your ROI might not be in the form of sales, but it can be an increase in social media following, website traffic, and engagement. This data can help you craft paid campaigns later on to get more leads and sales.

Another thing you can do is to work with micro-influencers in your industry. These are people who have a fan base that are your perfect target market. Send them over a few products and have them review it and you’ll be surprised to see an increase in your sales.

9. Create a Referral or Loyalty Rewards System

While it’s a good thing to have sales coming in from new customers, you can always make use of existing customers too. You can do these by creating loyalty rewards or referral systems.

There’s a reason why airlines have rewards programs for their flyers, and Airbnb has these referral systems for their hosts – it’s because they work.

Final Thoughts.

Put together a marketing plan for your business prior to starting your new business. If you’re an established company, review your current marketing plan on a quarterly basis. Try different marketing methods and tactics until you find the ones that work for you. And when you do, focus all of your efforts on it and scale using that strategy. Before you know it, your business will grow in terms of sales and market share.

Paid Marketing vs Organic Marketing

by Jack Smith | Dec 15, 2019 | blog

Starting a business is already hard work, but what makes it even harder is marketing it. You’ll also feel a lot of pressure seeing other businesses implement different kinds of marketing strategies that you’re totally new to. So let’s step back a little bit and talk about the two different types of marketing: Paid Marketing and Organic Marketing.

Whatever niche market your business is in or target market that you serve, marketing will fall into these two categories fields. Paid marketing and organic marketing are often used together, but knowing the difference between the two will help you better plan your campaigns so that they’ll result in higher brand recognition and increased sales.

What is Organic Marketing?

The overall goal of organic marketing is to tell your brand’s story and develop customer loyalty whether it’s interacting with them on social media, providing valuable/educational content or showing some behind-the-scenes action of what happens in your company.

A strategy can be considered organic if it meets the following criteria:

Authentic
Natural
Value-Based
Long-term

Let’s take Business X as an example, who sells juicers and blenders online, and come up with a simple organic marketing strategy. Don’t worry if you’re not in this line of business because the concepts can still be applied to any kind of business.

Business X sells blenders and juicers but there are also other companies who do that. In order for Business X to stand out from its competitors, it can publish weekly videos on YouTube about juice/smoothie recipes that its customers can follow while using their blenders.
The weekly videos can be posted on the company’s website and social media accounts too. They can even come up with a unique name for this weekly segment so their audience have a name to associate it with.
The company can also re-purpose the videos into blog posts to cater to those people who don’t always spend their time on YouTube or people who prefer reading than watching a video.
Working with influencers to promote the blenders and juicers can also work! Business X can contact influencers who are in the fitness, health, and other relevant industries that they think would attract potential customers.
After implementing these organic marketing strategies, Business X can now analyze the data and information it has gathered to think about its next strategies. A few examples that the company should look at would be the top-performing blog posts, most-viewed videos, and high-engagement social media posts.

Try to look at the strategies mentioned above, you’ll notice that there’s no aggressive selling involved. The purpose is to create a community around the brand and eventually gain the trust of the consumers. Always remember that trust is one of the most important things in business and organic marketing is the best way to achieve that.

Key Performance Indicators for Organic Marketing

Even though organic marketing is all about authenticity but it doesn’t that you don’t track your strategies’ performance. If you want to know whether your efforts are paying off or not, here are some KPIs that you would want to track:

Leads or Sales – You need to track the number of sales or leads you get from your videos, blog posts or social media posts. What you can do is you can put discount codes, CTAs (Call-to-Actions), and product links on your content so you would know which specific content the sale or lead came from.
Traffic – Whether it’s website, social media or landing page traffic, the purpose of measuring this is to understand what content works best for your business. This will help you to better understand the needs of your customers so you can serve them better.
Formats – Tracking formats (social media, blog posts, videos, and etc) is important for a business because even though it’s important for a business to have marketing campaigns on all platforms, you need to put into consideration on what works best. For example, if Business X (as mentioned above) gains more traffic from social media compared to its newsletter, then it’s safe to say that it should exert more efforts on social media.

What is Paid Marketing?

While Organic Marketing aims to build brand identity, Paid Marketing aims for conversion in a swift and straightforward manner. It doesn’t tell a story to its audience but it tells them exactly what it wants them to do.

You don’t just rely on natural traffic but you put money in to push your strategies forward. For example, instead of waiting for people to naturally discover your video on Facebook or Instagram, you try to push it by making it a sponsored post (ad) with the goal of either getting traffic, followers, email subscribers, etc.

Artificial
Aggressive
Short-term

Now, let’s continue what we’ve discussed above and come up with a Paid Marketing strategy for Business X.

Business X aims to hit its target sales for its blenders and juicers for the last quarter of the year. Since the holiday season is coming up, it needs to come up with a winning Facebook Ad that will produce sales. To do this, the team creates 10 ad sets that will be subject for testing for a month.
After the testing period, the marketing team will determine which ad worked best so that they can scale this and put more budget behind it.
Once the campaign is finished, the Business X will now look at all the data and check their return on ad spend.

In this case, the goal of paid marketing is sales and you can see that there’s a timeline set for it which is to achieve a desired amount of sales before the year ends. There is hard-selling involved because those ad sets will be shown to consumers multiple times within a day.

Key Performance Indicators for Paid Marketing

Platforms – You need to measure the kind of traffic, engagement or whatever metric you’re using to track the performance of the ads you’ve placed on different platforms. For example, your ads may work better as messenger ads compared to the normal ad that shows on your feeds.
Conversion Rates – This would refer to the desired result or outcome that you’d want your ads to have. These can be email sign-ups, purchases or webinar registrations.

Ad Engagement – Ads have components that you can optimize to boost its performance such as images, text or call-to-action. Measuring these components during the testing phase will allow you to come up with better ads in the future.
Ad Types – This measures the performance of the different ad types you’ve used for your paid marketing campaign such as look-alike audience ads, re targeting ads, and more.

Paid Marketing and Organic Marketing are both important. The two can be combined together, but you need to assess which one should focus your efforts on.

It usually boils down to sales and marketing goals you’ve set for your business. Now that you know the difference, which type of marketing do you think would best serve your business right now? Is it Paid Marketing, Organic Marketing, or a mix of both?

Facebook Advertising In A Nutshell For Startup Businesses

by Jack Smith | Nov 2, 2019 | Social Media

Decades have passed and Facebook has drastically transformed from a simple social website where friends and families can communicate into a global platform that is meshed into everyone’s daily lives.

It’s the biggest social network worldwide that recorded 2.45 billion monthly active users and 16.89 billion U.S. dollars in revenues just in its second quarter of 2019.

Most of the company’s revenues were generated through advertising so there’s no denying that a lot of businesses are using Facebook to also generate income for themselves.

In the first quarter of 2019 alone, the company released a statement that it has more than 7 million active advertisers on its platform.

Number of Active Users Who Use Facebook Advertising (1st quarter 2016 – 1st quarter 2019)

This number is both composed of big brands and small businesses so if you’re one of those businesses who isn’t into Facebook advertising, it’s not too late to start now – even if your competitors are already on it.

Facebook Users Statistics

You might not be convinced at this point how this can help boost your business, probably because these statistics aren’t that convincing.

Don’t worry, we’ve also came up with other statistics that might get you to jump off the fence of uncertainty and take a leap of faith into Facebook advertising.

Facebook has an average of 63 billion daily active users worldwide as of September 2019.
In 2018, there were 5 million people who use Facebook in the United States which was a 0.9% increase from the previous year.
Facebook stories has reached 500 million daily users.
Outside of the U.S and Canada, there’s about 80% of active Facebook daily users.
The average Facebook users spends around 37 minutes on the platform daily.
1 billion Facebook users come from Asia and 385 million users come from Europe.
The platform has 57% male users and 43% female users.
In the US, 78% of consumers bought goods and services that they found on Facebook.
In 2018, there were 26% of Facebook users who clicked and purchased through a Facebook Ad.
There were1 million users from the U.S and 2.9 million users from the U.K. who are using Facebook in January 2018.

What Makes Up A Good Facebook Ad?

1.Good Strategy : Facebook advertising isn’t just about boosting a post, putting your money into it, and expect that our dear old friend Marc Zuckerberg and his team will bring you a good ROI.

If you want your customers to actually buy what you are selling on your ads, here are some things that you should consider:

What is my goal for this ad? Is it sales, downloads, engagement or traffic?
Who is my target market?
How is my product going to benefit them?
What are their pain points?
Are they a cold audience or a warm audience?

Ask yourself these questions first because these are the building blocks on how you will put your ideas into action. These questions will also determine what you are going to put on your videos, photos, and captions on your ad.

2. Relevant and Trendy

Take note that you aren’t just competing with your competitors, but you are also competing against other brands that aren’t even in your niche.

Consumers are bombarded with content and ads on a daily basis so it’s a must that you get their attention by staying relevant in this fast paced world of social media.

Take this ad for example. Who would have thought that you can put Halloween and Coke together all in one photo?

You might think that it’s just a simple and funny photo, but these are the ads that drive engagement. Engagement is very important in Facebook because it makes the algorithm think that your content is relevant so it’s shown more on people’s feeds.

So how do you keep up with trends? Make a list of all the holidays and events that are relevant to your target market. For example, if you own a coffee business, you might want to come up with campaigns on International Coffee Day.

Aside from events, you can also make use of viral trends and incorporate them to your ads.

Do you remember the #KiKiChallenge that went viral back in 2018? It was a popular dance craze that a lot of people got into, but for business owners, it was a marketing opportunity.

Take this shoe brand called Veldskoen as an example who took advantage of the trend by showcasing their products through dancers wearing their shoes (click to see the full video here).

3.Simple and Straight to the Point

Craft your ads that even a fifth grader can understand it. You really need to KISS or “Keep It Simple Stupid” for your customers. You are competing for their attention and if you create complicated ads that takes so much of your consumer’s time, they won’t end up buying.

Here’s an ad from Hootsuite, a social media scheduler. You would notice that there’s not a lot of words on their ad.

The whole point is that their product can do everything for you when it comes to organizing, scheduling, planning, and executing your social media plans and they were able to put this together in just one sentence

You would also observe that the offer, which is a 60-day trial, and the call-to-action, which is to sign up, are very defined. As you scroll through your feeds, you would immediately know what they want you to do.

Is Facebook Advertising For Me?

This is the question that’s hard to answer because how would you know if you have no idea how it works? There are two ways on how to figure this platform our and it’s either you do it by trial-and-error or you let experts do it for you.

If you have any questions on how Facebook Ads work, you can always contact us or email us at info@smithmarketing.com.

5 Ways Businesses Can Kickstart Their Instagram Presence

by Jack Smith | Oct 30, 2019 | Social Media

Let’s face it, Instagram marketing is undeniably an integral part of promoting your business these days. All the top brands out there are on this platform so if you’re a business owner, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be on it.
In 2018, Instagram was able to hit 1 billion monthly active users wordwide and it will only keep on growing as years go by. This platform is all about visual presentation so it’s the perfect place to showcase your products and services in a way that will capture your target market’s attention.
The result? SALES of course. Statistics show that 72% of Instagram users have purchased products that they’ve seen on Instagram. However, having an Instagram account doesn’t automatically translate to sales. You need to have the right strategic plan to properly execute your social media campaigns so here are 5 key principles that you need to take note of.

1. Content Is King

As cliche as it may sound, this principle will always be relevant because customers slowly develop loyalty to a brand through the content that they consume from you. There are different categories of content that you can provide for your audience but the three basic categories are educational, entertainment, and inspirational content.
Educational content are those that provide valuable information for people that they can use in their daily lives. Some examples of these are “how-to” and “do-it-yourself” videos that you will see on IGTV.

For entertainment content, the best examples would be memes, funny videos or any content that puts a smile on your audience’s faces. On the other hand, inspirational content are those that motivate your audience to do something and the perfect example would be podcasts or those short clips coming from inspirational speakers such as Gary Vaynerchuk.

The kind of content category you use will always depend on your niche. Just make sure that you are consistent when creating your content by using color schemes, filters, and feed patterns so your audience can easily remember your brand.

2. Create A Posting Plan

Once you’ve figured out the kind of content that you will craft, it’s now time to create a content calendar. What this means is that you need to determine when to post your content on specific days and times of the week. You can do this by using Instagram insights to know when your followers are online.

It ‘s also important that you are consistent with your schedule. A good example would be Taco Bell UK posting its #TacoTuesday campaign on Instagram every Tuesday. The human mind is wired to recognize patterns and it’s best if you take advantage of that. Come up with at least one weekly content that’s relevant to your business.

3.Make Use of Geotags and Hashtags

You don’t have to be a social media expert to know what hashtags are but if you are a total newbie, then let’s break it down for you.

A hashtag can be any word the has a “#” before it. For example, if you go on Instagram and type the hashtag #food on the search bar, this is what you will see:

What the platform does is that it categorizes all content with that same hashtag and ranks it according to popularity (top posts) and chronology (recent posts). The proper way of using hashtags is by using relevant tags on your posts to make them more visible. It wouldn’t make sense putting #shoes on a photo that’s all about food, would it?

Another way of maximizing the use of hashtags is to create branded tags that are unique to your business. A perfect example would be Nike’s #JustDoIt campaign. Obviously, that is there slogan but they utilized it well and turned it into a branded hashtag so when you type it on the search bar, most of the posts you would see are related to Nike.

Meanwhile, geotags are basically locations that are added to your posts. It will look like this:

You might be asking what this does to your business. Well, just like hashtags, it makes your business more visible. A lot of consumers these days are turning to Instagram as well to search for stores in their local areas.

For example, if someone wants to find restaurants in this local city of Murray Bridge, South Australia, all they need to do is go to “places” and type this:

This would then give you a list of all the restaurants and their addresses in the locality. You can tap each one them and have a look at their photos or photos from other people who have visited them.

There have been lots of success stories that were a result of geotagging so don’t miss out on it.

4.Dive Into Instagram Stories

There are more than 400 million active users on Instagram that are posting stories on their accounts. If you think that stories are only for personal accounts, then that’s where you’re wrong.

Statistics show that one-third of the most viewed stories on Instagram are coming from business accounts. What stories do to your business is that it makes your brand more authentic. For example, a restaurant can take behind-the-scenes footage of what they do in the kitchen or what they did during their team building event.

Giving your consumers an inside look to what you do is a good way to create brand loyalty.

5.Videos Are Important Too

We all know that Instagram started out as a photo-sharing app but videos have been taking over the world of content marketing lately. Not to mention, videos are comment magnets so they can definitely boost post engagement.

Instagram limits videos up to 1 minute only so make sure that you craft your videos well that you’re able to deliver your message across your audience properly.

However, if there is a need for longer videos, you can always post on IGTV. Whenever you post on IGTV, you will also have the option of posting a preview on your feed. You can basically give your consumers a teaser of the video content that you have in store for them.

If your business is not on Instagram, you’re definitely way behind your competitors now, unless they’re not on Instagram too. Kickstart your business by building that page and applying these five core principles

Boosting the Conversion Rate of Your Website

by Jack Smith | Aug 28, 2017 | blog

While you may spend a great deal of time and money driving traffic to your company’s website, what is your site’s conversion rate?

This is the measure used to see what percentage of visitors to your site take action, whether that includes a purchase, filling out a contact form, downloading your eBook, or initiating a phone call. The higher that number, the greater your chance of achieving online success. To figure out your conversion rate, take the number of conversions (visitors complete a desired action) and divide it by the number of visitors to your site. For example, a site with 100 conversions out of 10,000 visitors has a conversion rate of 1%.

The conversion rate metric is a critical tool for your company’s online marketing success. Because of the increasing cost of PPC campaigns, a higher conversion rate means a higher return on your investment. What I’ve learned over the years is that it’s essential to continually enhance and improve your company’s web presence. It’s never fun to get left in the dust by your competition, that’s why you have to be on the constantly moving forward on improving metrics like conversion rate.

Focus your efforts by taking a visitor’s point of view when designing your website. Greater user experiences are the heart of having a great website. How easy it is to navigate through your site? How quickly can someone find your phone number or contact form? Consumers tend to better engage with what they can relate to and when they read something that’s relevant to their lives. This perspective is an important exercise to utilize when looking to improve the user experience with your site.

That said, let’s get to the heart of this article and help you find ways to maximize your company’s site conversion rate. Working on just these few simple items will pay off for your business in so many ways:

Have a Clickable Phone Number In Your Site’s Header

How crazy is it when you find a site that you like and you can’t find the company’s phone number to call them? Make it easy for someone to get in touch with you by having a clickable phone number with an auto dial for those visitors using a smart phone.

Use Action Words In Your Site’s Headline

Let visitors to your site know what you’re about and what action you expect from them. Make it easy for your audience to understand the value that your site is going to bring to them, and why they should keep reading.

Have Engaging Content

Text and images need to motivate your site’s visitors. People want to read what seems interesting to them, and if they can’t really get attached to what they are reading, you might as well have lost them at word one. Plus, if there is an action desired for your audience, make sure there is a clear picture or understanding of what that might be, so they don’t have to spend time wondering.

Add a Call to Action On Every Page

Every page on your site needs to “ask for the sale”. In this case, that compares to whatever action is anticipated of the audience. You want to ensure that each page a visitor sees has a specific purpose, and isn’t just a “filler” page.

Include a Short Contact Form On Your HOME Page

Now that you have visitors coming to your site, it’s time to get their contact information to follow up with them in future marketing efforts. You don’t want an uncharted visitor, that could potentially be valuable, to miss out on a contact opportunity with you and your services.

Use Testimonials

People love to read about personal experiences with a business and service they are considering utilizing in the future. Great testimonials can build not only instant credibility with potential customers, but a person that the visitor can possibly relate to, whom saw value previously.

Use Video to Enhance Your Message

A growing trend to give your company a personality. A video is nearly impossible to ignore and a great way to entertain and engage with your site’s visitors at the same time.

Each Key Company Product/Service Should Have Its Own Landing Page

Landing pages are a great way to dramatically improve your company’s visitor conversion rate. They are a great way to segment your market, whether by product/service offering or by target audience. Landing pages can also be used in conjunction with PPC campaigns.