To survive, local businesses need to learn how to adapt to the modern way of marketing.

If you are seeing a plateau or decline in sales, it’s time for you to mix up your marketing strategy.

Even if your small business is profitable right now, you need to stay ahead of your competition to remain successful in the future.

Analyze the latest marketing trends. Recognize the consumer buying behavior. Learn how to get more money from your existing customers.

Unfortunately, only 33% of small businesses reach the 10-year mark. The rest fail.

I don’t want you to become the sad statistic. This was my inspiration for writing this guide.

If your company is new, you need to do everything possible to stay strong for years to come.

Local businesses that have been around for decades may be ready for a marketing facelift. Your strategies that worked 20 years ago probably won’t be as successful in 2018 and beyond.

I narrowed down the top 15 marketing tactics for local business owners. Use this guide as a reference for your future marketing campaigns.  [click to continue…]

Are you looking for a new way to spice up your marketing strategy?

Your current promotions may be effective for now, but you need to mix things up. After a while, using the same marketing tactics over and over again gets stale.

Promotional contests are one of my favorite ways to keep an audience engaged.

This is a great opportunity for you to increase brand awareness and even build hype for a new product launch.

The best promotions give something away to participants.

There are a few different types of such promotions.

Contests require some type of skill. People who enter a contest will need to put forth some type of effort in order to win. The winner of a contest gets selected by judges or through a voting system.

This differs from a lottery or sweepstakes.

Sweepstakes do not require any skill whatsoever.

The winners of sweepstakes get drawn randomly, based on luck. For example, you could randomly select one of your Instagram followers as a winner just because they follow your brand’s account.

A lottery requires a participant to purchase something to be entered into a draw.

Today, I won’t focus on sweepstakes or lotteries.

Contests are a better alternative because if you set them up properly, they will encourage user-generated content (UGC).

User-generated content increases the chances that your audience will engage with your advertisements:

As you can see from these numbers, encouraging users to share images will be beneficial as well. It’s only natural to use this information to your advantage when you’re setting up a contest.

If you have never run a contest before, you may not know where to start. That was my inspiration for writing this guide.

I’ll explain how you can run a profitable contest that encourages user-generated content.

As a result, you’ll be able to generate more leads and ultimately increase your profits. Here’s what you need to do.  [click to continue…]

How fast does it take for your website to load?

You may not think about this question very often, but it’s arguably the most important aspect of your site.

That’s because 47% of people expect pages to load in just two seconds or less. Failure to meet this benchmark will crush your conversions.

In fact, 40% of website visitors will abandon pages if they take more than three seconds to load.

If you see high bounce and low conversion rates on your website, page load speed could be the issue. It’s also worth noting that websites with simple designs have higher conversion rates.

Simply put, the longer it takes for your website to load, the higher your page abandonment rates will be:

Here’s something else you need to consider. People are impatient—80% of people who abandon your website due to slow loading times will not return.

That’s right.

Consumers are used to getting instant results.

If you can’t deliver what they’re looking for, they’ll visit a competitor’s site that loads faster and never look back. Just a one-second delay could be costing you big bucks.

Improving your page loading time will optimize the customer experience and ultimately help you increase revenue.

In addition to optimizing the design principles of your website, you also need to understand the elements impacting the loading time and correct any mistakes you’re making.

But where do you start?

I’ve identified the top principles that increase the speed of your website and boost the loading time. Go through this list, and implement these methods on your site.  [click to continue…]

Those of you who know me know how much I promote blogging.

I’ve been doing it for years, and I use blogging as a tool for lead generation. But having a blog has many other benefits as well.

Driving more traffic to your website is arguably one of the most important reasons for running a blog.

Think of it like this. How often would you say the same person comes back to your website?

Depending on the nature of your site and your brand, it may not be too often. This is especially true if you have an ecommerce site.

People don’t want to buy things from you on a daily basis. Sure, you may have had some success by implementing customer loyalty strategies, but even the most loyal customers probably won’t visit your site every day.

Blogging gives people a reason to come back to view your site on a regular basis.

If you can establish a steady audience of readers, they will continue to visit your site to read your blog. Once they’re on the site, they will be more likely to convert into buyers.

Research shows that the publishing frequency of your blog posts has a direct impact on customer acquisition:

But if you want to publish posts frequently, you’ll need to mix up your content.

Blogging about the same thing over and over again is boring. That’s why you need to learn how to write different posts to keep your readers interested and engaged.

Here are the top 11 types of posts that will drive traffic to your website.

Use this guide as a reference so you can always come up with fresh ideas for your blog.  [click to continue…]

Social media marketing has become a necessity for brand survival in today’s day and age.

But simply creating profiles on these platforms and hoping the rest will take care of itself is not an effective strategy. You need to be active on social media.

While you may have already recognized the importance of social sites such as Facebook, it’s time for you to focus on other platforms—specifcally, Instagram.

Instagram, with its features and benefits, was part of the top social media trends of 2018 I wrote about.

Instagram has more than 1 billion users. Of those users, 500 million use the platform on a daily basis.

Only Facebook and YouTube have more active users.

For the most part, Instagram users are younger. Nearly 60% of Instagram users in the United States are under the age of 30.

This is important to recognize if you’re segmenting your target audience with generational marketing.

How can you use Instagram to promote your brand effectively?

Your content might be great, but if nobody sees what you’re posting, you won’t have results. That’s why you need to focus on engagement metrics:

• likes
• comments
• views
• interactions
• clicks

You need to measure all these to determine the success of your Instagram marketing campaigns.

If you need some help with this, I can steer you in the right direction. I’ve identified and explained the top 13 ways to improve your engagement rates on Instagram.

Review the tips I’ve explained in this guide, and apply the tactics to your brand’s page.  [click to continue…]