In today’s competitive landscape, your business needs to leverage as many distribution channels as possible to increase sales.

By now, I’m sure you understand the basic concepts of applying a social media marketing strategy.

You’ve created business profiles on the most popular networks. You’re sharing content on a regular basis. Your efforts have helped you get more followers.

But you’ve got to elevate your game and learn how to convert your social media followers into customers.

According to research, 74% of consumers use social media to guide their buying decisions. And 71% of people are more likely to buy something based on a social media recommendation.

Simply put, consumers are eager and willing to use social platforms to find new brands, conduct research, and aid the purchase process.

As a marketer, you need to recognize the latest social media trends and use them to your advantage.

Instagram is the fastest growing social media platform. This social network makes it very easy, friendly, and appealing for brands to reach their target audiences.

Take advantage of everything Instagram has to offer. I’ll show you the top 11 ways to drive sales on Instagram.  [click to continue…]

Emotions drive our lives.

Whether you recognize it or not, you feel a wide range of emotions on a daily basis. You might even be feeling some emotions right now as you’re reading this.

The word emotion is defined by an instinctive state of mind as a reflection of mood, circumstances, relationships, knowledge, or reasoning.

Sometimes emotions can cause erratic behavior, depending on the circumstances.

Other times, emotions can make people do great things. If someone is feeling inspired, they may create something that changes their life and the lives of people around them for the better.

As a marketer, you need to find ways to put yourself into the minds of the consumer.

You should be developing a customer persona to improve your conversion rates.

Once you can understand how people think, you can use that information to your advantage.

Marketers who know how to leverage the emotions of consumers will have greater success over extended periods of time.

In fact, 43% of emotional advertisements had positive effects on businesses for three or more years.

Ads that trigger stronger than average emotions create a 23% increase in sales volume.

That’s right. If you can elicit an emotional response from your customers with an advertisement, you will increase your sales volume today and potentially for years down the road.

But where do you start? Which emotions work best?

Depending on whom you ask, humans have up to 6, 27, or even 100 emotions.

Honestly, the number doesn’t matter. As long as your strategies can trigger a response that impacts the way the consumer feels, you’re getting the job done.

I’ll show you some of the best ways to generate sales by guiding consumer emotions.  [click to continue…]

You’ve done a great job of finding new ways to drive more traffic to your website. But if that traffic isn’t translating into conversions, you’ve still got plenty of work to do.

I see this common misconception in my consulting work all the time.

Businesses spend much time and effort trying to improve their organic SEO while simultaneously running PPC campaigns to get more website visitors.

There’s nothing wrong with this strategy, but increasing site traffic isn’t the only metric that matters. You also need to focus on how visitors behave after landing on your pages.

Are they converting?

If not, that traffic isn’t translating to dollars. That’s why you need to learn how to use continuous A/B testing to increase conversions.

These experiments will help give you a better understanding of how to optimize certain design elements of your website. Subtle changes can make a major impact on getting your traffic to convert.

To those of you who have never run these tests before, I recommend reviewing my guide on everything you need to know before you start A/B testing.

However, if you already know how to run A/B tests but just don’t know what you should be testing, this list is perfect for you.

In reality, the number of things you could test on your website is seemingly endless.

That said, I narrowed down the top 13 elements you should start with. You can continue to tweak these and run several tests for each component on this list.

I’ll even give you some examples and real-life data to explain how other websites improved conversions by testing specific elements.  [click to continue…]

How are you managing the reputation of your company?

If you are struggling to find an answer to this question, you may need to re-evaluate your strategy moving forward.

There are certain aspects of your brand’s reputation you have control over, e.g., the way you distribute content through your marketing channels and use website elements to add credibility to your website.

But a news story or a review of your product on a third-party site can be out of your hands.

Your public relations strategy encompasses all these scenarios.

Public relations, or PR, can help expose your business to new audiences.

Simply put, public relations is how businesses communicate with people.

There’s a common misconception about PR. Many business owners I work with don’t have a PR strategy.

They believe it’s only for companies that made a mistake, needing to run PR campaigns to issue apologies or make their businesses look better in the public eye.

While that would fall under the public relations category, that’s not the only reason why you would implement a PR strategy.

Your PR efforts will manage how you spread information. It’s part of your overall branding strategy, except it focuses more on your reputation and communication as opposed to things like your company slogan and logo.

In a digital era, information gets spread faster than ever. That’s why every business needs to have a public relations strategy in 2018.

It doesn’t matter how new or old your business is. Even if you’re trying to create an effective marketing strategy for your startup company, it’s not complete without PR.

I’ll explain everything you need to know about the basic concepts of PR and how it can help your brand gain more exposure.  [click to continue…]

As a B2B company, you need to learn how to properly market your brand to the right audience.

That’s because your target market doesn’t consume content the same way as the average consumer does. Following the habits and trends of a typical consumer won’t help you.

This is especially important for businesses operating as B2B as well as B2C companies. You need to be able to segment your content for each audience.

If your company is strictly a B2B operation, the content creation process should be even easier for you. You won’t have to worry about consumer content at all.

But regardless of your situation, to do this effectively, you need to understand how B2B audiences engage with content.

Then, you can adjust your B2B marketing strategy accordingly to reach these people.

The majority of B2B marketers believe that their content marketing strategy is still in the early stages.

Further, 91% of B2B companies use content marketing to promote their brands and reach their audiences.

But as you can see from the metrics above, the maturity levels of their marketing efforts are all over the board. Unless you’re in that top 9% who believe their strategies are sophisticated, it’s safe to say you could use some improvement.

That’s why I created this guide.

I’ll tell you exactly how B2B audiences engage with content. Then you can take this information to tailor your content strategy accordingly.

As a result, you’ll be able to generate more leads for your B2B company. Here’s what you need to know.  [click to continue…]