7 Most Important Services for Small Business Development

Being the owner of a small business, it’s important to find innovative ways to grow and stand out from the competition. Fortunately, there are plenty of online services available to help small business owners streamline their operations and help them develop fast. Among these services are solutions to help businesses boost their online presence and make them stand out in search engine results.

Investing in the right online services can save business owners time and money, allowing them to focus on the things that matter. But choosing the right ones is no small feat. The secret is to find the right kind of services with the perfect combination of tools that cater to the niche of small businesses and their unique operations.

Online Services That Can Help Small Businesses Grow and Develop

There are few things as important as having an online presence in today’s business world. Over 4.72 billion people have access to the internet, and this is where they go to find services or products they need. To compete in the online sphere, businesses have to ensure their online presence is well thought through and professional. Let’s explore some of the main online services that can be used to boost small businesses’ performance:

Content Management Systems

Firstly, businesses need to set up a website that represents the services or products they offer to their potential customers. There are various tools available today to assist small businesses in creating a simple, effective website through which clients can explore offerings. WordPress is a popular CMS for beginners and enables them to create a website with ready-to-use templates and guides to simplify the process. Businesses can either follow a DIY approach or hire an IT consultant to develop a website.

SEO Services

SEO, or Search Engine Optimisation, helps businesses get noticed online by enhancing their content. SEO is a complex and tricky subject, but fortunately, there is software that can be bought or downloaded to assist businesses in navigating their way through it. SEMRush and Moz are both examples of software bundles that are highly recommended by SEO experts. Some businesses also choose to hire SEO professionals to manage their SEO.

Pay Per Click

One of the best ways to stand out among search engine results is to invest in Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising. PPC is a model of marketing in which website owners pay a fee every time one of their ads is clicked. It’s an easy and effective way to reach a larger audience.

Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing (SMM) uses social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to market products and services. With 4.70 billion people using social media, it is a no-brainer that small businesses should also use these platforms for marketing their offerings. Managing all social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram can be tricky, but it is easy when a social media management tool like Hootsuite is used. This tool can be used for planning, scheduling, and syndicating social posts and tracking their performance.

Google Services

While trying to figure out how to market a new small business via online services, it is important to remember that there is an abundance of free tools out there. Google Services such as Google My Business, Youtube and Google Maps are excellent for marketing a business on the leading search engine.

Analytics Tools

When effort has been put in to advertise a small business online, it’s important to track the results to see what is working and what is not. Fortunately, tools like Google Analytics can shed some detailed light on online marketing success. It works by tracking website traffic, where it comes from, and many other stats, so businesses can easily see which efforts are more profitable and which ones can be let go of or should be paid more attention to.

Customer Relationship Management

Managing the relationship between a business and its clients is probably the most important function to fulfill. This can seem like an impossible task with hundreds or even thousands of customers and can also be very time-consuming. CRM is software that provides trustworthy reporting on customers, improves communication between the business and customers, as well as enhances the efficiency of the business. Many businesses hire embedded systems consultants to effectively implement a CRM system.

Leading Companies That Have Been Using Online Services to Grow

Many prominent companies today have invested in online services during their major developmental stages. Let’s take a look at some of the companies and the type of services they utilized to grow.

Home Depot

When launching its online presence, Home Depot made use of a content management system, WordPress, to grow. The platform allowed them to showcase their products to a larger audience without spending too much capital.

Apple

This tech giant is known to use SEO services to boost its content online. They have invested in SEMrush to do keyword research, track their keyword strategy and that of their competition, run SEO audits of their blog, look for backlinking opportunities, and more.

Converse

To help them stand out online, Converse invested in Pay Per Click services a few years ago. They specifically wanted to increase online engagement with their teenage audience. As a result, they utilized Google AdWords to tap into anything currently important in this unique audience’s culture.

Mint

Banking app Mint was a startup when they started using social media marketing on Instagram. Their strategy was to create a feed full of fun colors and typefaces that instantly catch users’ attention. This helped them to connect to a broader audience and grow their presence online.

PayPal

A few years ago, this financial technology company migrated the scalable applications of its easy-to-use payment platform to Google Cloud. This was a significant shift in strategy to help ensure efficient services for its customers.

Uber

Uber was just a small startup when it invested in online analytics tools, specifically Google Analytics, to find out more about its customers. The tool produced important data that allowed them to transform their service to suit the needs of their customers better.

Activision

Activision is a popular gaming company. A few years ago, they started using a client relationship management system that uses data analysis to study large amounts of information. This allowed them to get better insights about their customers which, in turn, enabled them to fine-tune their products.

The Cost of Online Services for Small Businesses

Investing in the right online services can help businesses save valuable money. However, these services must be implemented correctly to effectively capitalize on them. Let’s explore some of the costs of the most popular online services:

Content Management Systems

The total cost of using a CMS depends on the number of features it contains, such as hosting and payment processing. The more CMS features it has, the higher the price. Small businesses may pay only $10 per month for a CMS, while big corporations may pay thousands. Some businesses also hire a dedicated development team, which costs more than following a DIY approach. Additionally, hiring specialists, such as a chatbot developer, to enhance a CMS can increase the cost even more.

SEO Services

SEO pricing varies largely and depends on factors such as the SEO plan, SEO professional service provider, and more. Most small businesses make use of online SEO tools that start at around $99 per month or SEO consultants that ask between $100 and $300 per hour.

Pay Per Click (PPC)

PPC advertising depends on the amount a business wants to spend. Most small businesses can expect to pay anywhere between $1,000 to $2,000 for an effective PPC campaign.

Social Media Marketing

Just like Pay Per Click advertising, social media marketing depends on the size of a campaign and the size of the reach a business wants to invest in. The cost for a good small business social media marketing campaign ranges anywhere from $400 to $1,500 per month.

Google Services

Most Google services are free to use for businesses. Tools such as Google My Business are designed to help manage how businesses appear in Google search results.

Analytics Tools

Data analytics tools can range anywhere from free up to $10,000.00 or more per year. The cost depends on how a business’ unique needs and the type of insights they want to achieve.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

For small businesses, the cost of paid CRM systems start from around $12 per user, per month.

Trends in Different Online Small Businesses Niches

Today, there are hundreds of small business niches to explore. Different niches can invest in different types of online services. Some of the most popular small business niches in 2022 include:

Digital Marketing

The digital marketing industry is a $14 billion industry. Trends in this niche include creating tutorial videos, using AI content-writing tools, hiring a chatbot specialist and utilizing customer-centric marketing. Top online services for this type of niche include SEO services, social media marketing and analytics tools.

Health and Fitness

In the US alone, there has been an increase of 2.7% in health and fitness businesses from 2021 to 2022. Trends in this small business industry include creating videos and utilizing social media for sharing information. Online services that are most suited for these types of businesses include Google Services and social media marketing.

Personal Finance

In this niche, creating a secure online presence and tracking customer behavior are some of the most important trends. For this, CMSs and analytics tools are the most essential online services.

Technology

This niche is a highly popular one with many businesses competing for the same audience. In fact, in 2020, there were around 1.35 million tech startups in the world. As a result, some important online services include PPC, social media marketing and Google Services to stand out online.

Personal Development

In the personal development field, some trends include innovative communication with customers and sharing information in creative ways. CRMs, social media marketing, analytics and Google Services are some of the key online services for these small businesses.

The Bottom Line

With all the different aspects involved, running a small business can be challenging. But by investing in the right online services, small business owners can quickly develop and grow. The key is to find out which services are best suited to a specific niche and the business’ unique needs.

***

by Anastasia Stefanuk

The Ultimate Guide to Building and Managing a Virtual Sales Team

Since the coronavirus pandemic, companies have been facing the same challenge – how to effectively manage their teams off the office. And although many businesses seem to have already got used to the new reality, for organizations that are only starting their way to growth, building and keeping a virtual sales team on track is hard.

If it resonates with you, read on this small guide to walk through the process and get a portion of tips for building and managing a virtual sales team. But let’s start from the basics.

What is a virtual sales team?

A virtual sales team is a team of salespeople who work virtually, or remotely. That suggests there’s no common office space. As an alternative, every sales rep works from their ideal location. For instance, a few of your sales reps might live in Miami, while others are based in Los Angeles.

Keep in mind that a virtual sales team is very different from a hybrid team – a model where every employee prefers working both remotely or in person in a physical office space.

What are the challenges of managing a virtual sales team?

Let’s look at the main factors that make remote team management difficult. Among the most common challenges are the following:

Collaboration problems. About 17% of employees claim they feel cooperation barriers due to the lack of face to face communication.

Productivity problems. Some employees become disorganized and less productive when they need to work from the relaxed atmosphere of home, which slows down the whole team.

Stress. By contrast, 22% of employees confess it is difficult to unplug after work. As a result, they can’t balance work and rest, feel pressure, get stressed, and end up getting professional burning over time.

How to overcome these challenges? What can you do as a sales manager to make your virtual sales team well-organized, committed, and satisfied with the job?

Constituents of a virtual sales strategy

You can’t manage your remote sales team effectively unless you have a clear virtual sales strategy in front of you. The virtual sales strategy consists of the following elements:

• a sales process
• a sales team
• sales tools
• sales metrics
• sales enablement strategy

Let’s look at these elements in detail.

A sales process

The virtual sales process may be perceived by your sales team as unfamiliar, uncomfortable, and hectic. You are not the only manager who’s facing this problem.

Take time to outline and document your sales process. Think carefully about how you’ll organize it: what communication channels you’ll use, how often you’ll gather with your team for meetings, how the reporting will be done, etc.

Remember to share the remote sales process plan with your team so everyone understands how you’re going to cooperate.

A sales team

Your virtual sales campaign won’t be successful if it doesn’t have the right people behind it. As a manager, you need to evaluate your sales people’s current performance and preferences to get a clear vision whether your team is ready to work remotely.

In addition, you should ensure every sales rep understands the scope of tasks and responsibility, knows how to maintain high productivity and efficiency while working remotely, and has no trouble cooperating with other team members.

Sales tools

Thanks to AI and automation, virtual sales teams are powered by more customer data than ever before. Sales engagement, enablement platforms, data analytics, and CRM tools help your team maintain high productivity and boost their ROI. So, you should forearm your sales reps with the sales platform which will make their virtual performance as comfortable as possible.

Source: salespop.net

For example, with such tools as Snov.io CRM, you can get your virtual sales team on board owing to unlimited teamwork opportunities, prioritize and allocate deals, and use email verification finding and sending tools to optimize the outreach.

Sales metrics

One of the best ways to manage your virtual sales team is through metrics. The amount of time spent on prospecting, the number of calls made or emails sent, the number of deals closed, etc. should be tracked on a regular basis.

Think of the metrics which make sense in your organization and again, inform your sales team how their performance will be monitored. Ensure everyone understands the criteria of their performance evaluation.

Sales enablement strategy

Apart from sales tools, your virtual sales team should be provided with knowledge, content and effective training that will allow them to demonstrate high performance. Think of how you can equip employees with all the resources they need.

Say, you may create a virtual library with necessary sales books, hold regular sales coaching sessions, provide your sales team with email templates for their virtual sales outreach, etc.

How to manage a remote sales team

Now that we’ve discussed the basic elements of a virtual sales strategy, let’s focus on practical ways of managing your remote sales team. Below you’ll find eight actionable tips on how to get your sales rep together, ensure their high productivity and job satisfaction off the office.

1. Set clear goals and expectations

Sales reps are some of the most goal-oriented individuals in any workplace. Your role as a sales manager is to adjust the team goals to the changing virtual environment and communicate expectations to every sales rep in a clear way.

Set measurable goals and KPIs that your sales people will understand. These goals must be motivational enough to make your sales team strive for improving their performance.

2. Build trusting relationships

Trust is built up in a team over time. If you’re not spending eight hours every day in the same physical office, it naturally takes a lot longer.
You should support healthy teamwork among your remote staff by giving the right mix of team versus individual recognition, clarifying roles in the sales process, and encouraging your salespeople to provide you with their regular feedback.

Ensure your team feels you value their opinion and their voice is heard. This will improve engagement and make every sales rep more involved in the process. And remember: the team that trusts their manager has less stress and demonstrates higher results.

3. Listen to salespeople’s needs

To manage your entire virtual sales team, you need to understand the needs of every member. Make it a habit to conduct virtual one-on-one meetings with your staff where you’ll encourage them to share their feelings about the job. Ask them what they like most about it, what challenges they face, and offer ideas on how their working process can be improved.

In some companies, this role may be entrusted to the HR department. The latter will gather information about sales reps and pass it to a sales manager, who’ll further evaluate the climate within the team.

4. Encourage your team to find their individual workflows

Sales is a hard routine. Don’t make it harder for your sales team by too much control. You want to build trust, remember? Start with yourself. Demonstrate you trust your reps and let them choose their own path in achieving goals.

Have private talks with the employees, grasp their personal sales hacks, and encourage them to share the best practices with each other.

5. Invest in resources everyone can use

Guarantee that your remote employees have access to the same virtual selling tools their on-site counterparts have. If that suggests moving applications and resources to the cloud, do it.

Empower your employees with everything they need for effective closing of deals. Ensure information about the sales process is transparent and all new employees get a substantial onboarding experience before they join the rest of the sales team.

6. Encourage social interaction

Low levels of employee engagement will ruin your bottom line. Engaged employees are often much more productive than disengaged ones. When it comes to remote teams, where human contact is minimal, it is easy for social interaction to slip.

That’s why it is essential for you to take steps to encourage people and mitigate factors that frustrate your employees. The ideal way to do this is by holding regular meetings each week — even if only 15 minutes — to keep your team engaged.

7. Use team communication tools

The world has increasingly been using Zoom conferencing for meetings for several years. Apart from this popular tool, find solutions for your sales team to communicate daily. Luckily, there are dozens of effective messaging platforms available nowadays like Slack, Mattermost, or simply Google Chat.

For example, in Slack, you can create group channels where you’ll share sales tips and hacks, communicate with team members via direct messages, create polls for group opinions, what not.

Source: Slack

8. Conduct regular virtual sales training

It’s essential to hold consistent virtual sales training meetings for your entire sales team. And if you think that virtual training is not so effective than in-person sessions, numbers will tell you a different story: while B2B sales reps forget 70% of the information they learn within a week of training, sales reps may retain 80% of information learned during virtual training after 2 months with the spacing effect.

Source: Vengreso

Set up your training program to teach your sales team important sales skills, some of which are:

• Product knowledge. Keep your team updated on any changes to your company product to ensure they know it inside out.
• Ability to handle sales objections. ‘No’ is a usual response sales people get from prospects. Consider all sales objection scenarios and teach your staff how to turn ‘no’s’ into ‘yes’.
• Time management. Train your sales people on how to organize their sales routine so they stay productive – e.g. through automation tools. These technologies will do the monotonous work and help your sales reps stay more focused on such activities as personalized interactions with prospects.

Skills your sales people gain during regular virtual coaching sessions are just like muscle training in the gym – they help them keep their professional confidence in good shape. And if you add a bit of gamification to the process, the training will be fun. interactive, and most engaging for your employees.

Wrapping up

If you want to build and manage a remote sales team, you need to be prepared to adjust your management style to the virtual working environment. Remember that remote work isn’t the same as on-site work.

You need new methods, strategies, and tools for engaging your staff and motivating your team to hit their targets. Whatever you plan to do, make it a part of your routine and business interactions. Your virtual employees will certainly appreciate it and create the kind of culture that people always want to be part of.

Tips to Improve Your Hiring Process

Hiring the right people is essential to the success of any business. Many business owners spend too much time and money on hiring, which can be both difficult and time-consuming.

On the other hand, hiring the wrong people can be even more costly. A bad hire can cost a company up to 30% of that person’s first-year earnings, according to a study by the Society for Human Resource Management. There are a few things you can do to make your hiring process easier and quicker.

Define the requirements for the position

The first step in improving your hiring process is to closely examine the job requirements. Defining the essential skills and qualifications needed will help you identify the most qualified candidates. Furthermore, it will also help to ensure that you are not wasting time interviewing candidates who are not a good fit for the job. When defining the requirements, consult with others familiar with the position, such as current employees or supervisors. Once you have a clear understanding of what is needed, you can move on to the next step in improving your hiring process.

Use a recruitment management software

If you’re looking to improve your hiring process, one tool you may want to consider is recruitment management software. This type of software can help you post job openings to multiple job boards with just a few clicks, and it can also help you keep track of applications and candidates. Additionally, many recruitment management software programs include a career page creator, which can help you create an online presence for your company and attract top talent. By using recruitment management software, you can streamline your hiring process and make it more efficient and effective.

Create a strong job description

Perhaps the most crucial step in improving your hiring process is to create a strong job description. After all, the job description is what will attract qualified candidates to your opening. So, what makes for a strong job description? First, it should clearly state the essential duties and responsibilities of the position. This will help to ensure that candidates have a good understanding of what the job entails. Second, the job description should include information about the skills and qualifications required for the position. This will help to ensure that only candidates are truly qualified applicants for the job.

Finally, the job description should be written in clear, concise language. This will help to ensure that candidates do not get confused or discouraged during the application process. By taking the time to create a strong job description, you can go a long way toward improving your hiring process.

Conduct initial screenings

One way to streamline your hiring process is to conduct initial screenings. By doing phone or video interviews with candidates before inviting them in for an in-person interview, you can get a better sense of who would be a good fit for the role. Not only does this save you time, but it also saves you money by ensuring that you’re only inviting qualified candidates in for interviews.

Additionally, screenings can help you identify red flags early on, such as poor communication skills or lack of relevant experience. So if you’re looking to improve your hiring process, initial screenings are a great place to start.

Do a trial run

Another way to improve your hiring process is to do a trial run. This means that you bring candidates in for a short period, typically a week or two, and have them complete some typical tasks that they would be responsible for if they were hired. This trial period gives you a chance to see how the candidate works under pressure and how they interact with other members of the team. It also allows you to get a better sense of their skills and abilities.

If you’re satisfied with the results of the trial run, then you can move forward with the hiring process. If not, then you can keep looking until you find the right fit for your organization. Doing a trial run is an effective way to improve your hiring process and ensure that you make the best possible decisions for your business.

Final thoughts

When it comes to hiring the right candidate, the process is just as important as the outcome. By following these tips, you can streamline your hiring process and make it more efficient and effective. As a result, you’ll be able to save time and money while also ensuring that you find the best possible candidate for the job. So if you’re looking to improve your hiring process, be sure to keep these tips in mind.

How to Optimize Your Social Media Funnel in 2022

Do you feel your social media marketing strategy is lacking? Perhaps, your social media engagements are just engagements — no conversions?

According to a survey by SproutSocial, 47 percent of social media marketers struggle to develop effective social strategies that align with their overall business goals. That could happen for several reasons, such as insufficient time to produce interesting content or targeting the right platforms for maximum engagement.

To make social media an effective sales medium, consider different touchpoints in the sales funnel, and connect with your audience across multiple social channels.

This blog post will teach you how to optimize your social media funnel for increased conversions in 2022.

Let’s start at the top.

What Is a Social Media Sales Funnel?

A social media sales funnel is a visual representation of your customer’s journey on social media. The funnel depicts the sales process of potential customers from awareness to conversion and beyond.

Source

The traditional marketing funnel has five stages:

Awareness: The awareness stage informs potential customers about your business using relevant social content like tutorial videos or live videos. That could help drive organic traffic to your website and build an audience.

Consideration: As potential customers become aware of your products, they move to the second phase, the consideration stage. The goal is to retarget leads who previously came across your brand but did not convert and convince those who stuck around by showing value.

Conversion: Your leads move down the sales funnel to the conversion stage when they’re ready to buy from you. You can use social proof and discounted offers to nurture and persuade them to convert.

Engagement: The engagement stage is a post-purchase phase in the social media sales funnel. Here, you should employ social media strategies that groom and nurture current customers into lifelong enthusiasts.

Advocacy: This stage of the social media funnel takes engagement a step further by converting your brand enthusiasts into fiery brand advocates. And you can only do this through referral programs and by encouraging these customers to leave reviews or testimonials of your products on their social media.

On a good day, the above funnel should be a one-way street. However, in reality, some leads could drop off before getting to the bottom of the funnel.

Chances are, you’ve optimized your social media strategy for a streamlined social media sales funnel — which is not a bad thing, by the way.

But social media’s interactive nature makes it challenging to box your target audience into a streamlined buyer journey.

Why? Different strokes for different folks.

Source

To simplify this, think of your social media marketing funnel as a spectrum of actions.

One customer can go from following you to buying immediately. Another might wait for months after following to buy.

The truth is, no cut-and-dried social media strategy exists. But if your current social media campaigns aren’t turning your leads into customers, then optimize your sales funnel using the tips below.

1. Identify Your Audience

Your target audience shapes your social media strategy.

Your buyer personas can serve as your target audience for social media. But if you don’t have one, analyze your current customers and use the data to create your personas.

Understanding your target audience before each campaign will help you target your content and reach the audience most likely to become your customers.

You can identify your target audience by:

• Creating a buyer persona from audience demographics and psychographics such as age, location, purchasing patterns, etc.
• Researching the social channels where your customers hang out
• Digging into the customer base to gather historical trends on buyer behavior.
• Analyzing your product or service to determine the kind of people who may find your products useful.
• Checking out the competitor

This information is essential to the success of your funnel because it helps to align your funnel content to your audience’s interests and challenges. It also helps you understand your target market enough to target relevant ads to an audience likely to convert.

2. Create a Strong Landing Page

Now your target audience is all set up, let’s get them into your funnel.

A critical part of any lead generation strategy is creating a social media landing page. This page will generate different kinds of conversion — clicks, sign-ups, likes, comments, or even follows — to move your leads down the social media marketing funnel. The specific action will depend on the landing page’s goal.

Source

For stellar results, you’ll want to offer information a potential customer may find quite valuable to click through (more on this later). Depending on your campaign goals, you may want to use blogging tools such as Wix or WordPress to create a compelling landing page.

Keep your landing page layout simple, mobile-friendly, and campaign-specific to ensure your metrics are measurable.

For example, Cold Stone Creamery links to their landing page from their Instagram bio.

The landing page is simple and consistent with the brand’s colorful, laid-back personality.

Source

Above, you can see a clear CTA that says “Order Online!” making the purpose of the landing page clear to visitors from the get-go.

You can also create multiple landing pages for product launches and new promotions. Use tools like Optimizely to test and revise each page’s performance through A/B or multivariate testing.

As a final step, set up tracking pixels on the landing page to gather information from the start. It’ll make it easier to create a remarketing campaign in the future.

3. Decide What to Offer

As you create your social media funnel, it’s vital to consider what attracts your ideal audience and offer it as a lead magnet in the awareness stage. These can be tutorial videos or live videos you can promote on social ads or YouTube with a link to your Instagram bio.

The consideration and conversion stage can have overlapping content that convinces and converts your audience. For instance, you can offer;

use cases,
customer reviews for social proof, or
discounted offers on either stage.
But at the bottom of the funnel — engagement and advocacy — you’ll have to tweak these content offerings to keep them invested.

You can consider retargeting campaigns. Retargeting allows you to remarket your products to people who have been in the consideration stage for too long without converting. Nothing does the final push more than an offer.

Try product demos, discount coupons, free shipping, or other incentives that entice your buyer persona. Your remarketing campaign can also include product videos previously shared on social media that explain how your product works. Video marketing works wonders.

For example, Ahrefs uses a short video to show their Twitter audience how to find content ideas using their tool.

Source

This video can be repurposed for a remarketing campaign in the future. Effective bottom-of-the-funnel offerings allow you to drive traffic to your site, develop customer relationships and increase conversions.

4. Include User-Generated Content (UGC)

It can be overwhelming to source unique, engaging content when you’re just starting a business on social media. User-generated content provides you with relatable content for your business and improves authenticity, leading to customer conversions in the funnel.

Moreover, UGC, as social media funnel content, is way cheaper to curate than influencer-type content.

Incorporate UGC campaigns like hashtag campaigns, surveys, and contests with incentives in the conversion stage of your social media funnel. That will give you free content, encourage audience participation and boost engagement and conversions.

Here’s a UGC example by a LaCroix water customer.

Source.

You can motivate customers to tag you with branded hashtags, so content is easy to curate afterward. You can even incorporate your UGC in email marketing campaigns. Just make sure you use email tracking tools that will allow you to quickly send the right follow-up that elicits your desired action from your subscribers.

While it’s okay to repost curated UGCs on several social platforms, it’s basic courtesy to seek permission from the original creators and tag them on the uploaded content.

Sharing engaging reviews, pictures, and videos uploaded by existing consumers creates available social proof that encourages conversions from new customers.

5. Create a Posting Schedule

Posting consistently on social media will increase your engagement rates. This study by Social Media Today reports that a brand that posts 3x a day gets 2.2x more engagement (on average) than one that posts once a day.

Be careful, though, as too much promotional content could be counter-effective on the wrong social media platform.

You can post on your Instagram feed up to seven times a week and on Facebook between one to two times a day. Twitter and Linkedin users can handle up to five posts a day.

Unsure of the type of content to share per week? Go for the rule of thirds.

• One-third of posts should promote your business
• One-third can share personal, motivating stories.
• One-third should focus on sharing informative insights in your field.

Identify the best time to post content on your social media platforms, as mobile users are not always online. That’s the key to maximum engagement.

An optimized posting schedule would help you access your target audience, improve engagement rate, and subsequently encourage conversions.

6. Track Your Campaigns

Finally, tracking your social media campaigns shows your strategy’s efficiency and suggests the next line of action.

You can monitor social media campaign performance using several tools like Hootsuite and Mentionlytics. Heatmaps and screen recordings can show people’s behavior on your sales or landing page.

Manually track audience engagement based on your posts’ number of shares, likes, and comments. Email tracking tools and Google Analytics can provide better, in-depth information on your campaign’s success. They help identify the best kind of content to roll out at each marketing funnel stage for increased conversions.

Implement changes to your overall social media marketing funnel based on your findings.

In Closing

Having a plan is essential to creating a successful social media funnel.

Identify your target audience before launching your marketing campaign. It’ll allow you to tailor your campaign to suit the audience’s needs.

A strong landing page retains leads and increases their chances of reaching the bottom of the funnel. Generate content from your audience and craft a well-designed posting schedule. You’d have an effective template for a social media funnel with the correct information about what you’ll offer and an effective monitoring plan.

Follow these tips, and you’ll get incredible results from your brand’s social media marketing campaign.

***

Bio:

David Campbell is a digital marketing specialist at Ramp Ventures. He helps manage the content marketing team at Right Inbox. When he’s not working, he enjoys traveling and trying to learn Spanish.

How To Use Reddit To Drive More Traffic To Your Website

Businesses and companies need marketing to grow, spread their brand awareness, and increase their sales. The various marketing strategies businesses use include earned media, content marketing, social media platforms, partner marketing, and affiliate programs. You can also use email marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), referral marketing, and other marketing strategies.

With the development in technology, many people have embraced the idea of using social media to market. You can choose to use social media platforms such as Reddit, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok. You can use social media for marketing your business by using it to drive more traffic to your website. For example, you can jump in on a TikTok trend using your business social media platform. That way, your content will appear on more people’s For You page and attract more traffic.

All these platforms work differently. One platform that isn’t generic is Reddit. Although Reddit isn’t a common social media platform, it still attracts about 52 million active users. It’s, therefore, a marketing platform that businesses should consider tapping into. If you aren’t on Reddit, don’t worry because this article will take you through the process of using Reddit to drive traffic to your website such as using tools like scrape Reddit with Python to extract relevant data and content from websites. Keep reading to learn more.

Reasons For Using Reddit

There are various reasons why people decide to join Reddit. The following are some of these:

• Reddit helps you in making better or faster decisions. If you’re in a situation where you’re torn between what to choose, you can use the information provided on subreddits. This information involves experiences and reviews of Redditors.
• You can use Reddit as a platform where you gain or learn new information. Reddit is a good source of social data. Therefore, you can use it for your social research. Even better is that there are Reddit scraping tools like cheap proxies to help make your research process more accessible.
• Reddit offers you an opportunity to find a community of people who share the same interests or personalities as you. For example, it’s easy for you to find people who enjoy the same music or movies you do on Reddit. Shared interests bring you closer and, as a result, you form a community, which can be considered a safe space.
• You can use Reddit to verify the news. Every day, there’s emerging news about various issues. At times, it’s challenging to tell which information is real and which is fake. Luckily, with Reddit, you can get to know which news is fake and which is true as the platform zaps fake, spammed, or false information.

Apart from these reasons, some advantages of Reddit make people prefer using Reddit over other social media platforms.

Advantages Of Using Reddit

Below are some advantages offered by the Reddit platform:

• Unlike other complicated social media platforms, Reddit is easy to use.
• It’s also easy to create a Reddit account.
• Reddit allows you to select an audience that you think will relate well to your content and ads.
• This platform also has a page dedicated to helping new users understand how they can use the platform to run a successful ad campaign.
• It drives more traffic than other social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.
• Moreover, this platform has a ranking system that allows you to determine how your ads perform regarding the reception.
• Reddit’s diverse audience offers the potential for your business niche to thrive.

Using Reddit To Drive More Traffic

With the above information, you can use the following steps to guide you on how to use Reddit to drive more traffic to your website:

1. Start By Making Your Presence On Reddit Noticeable

You need a Reddit account, so the first step is to create one. After you create your Reddit account, become an active Redditor. Being an active Redditor prevents other users from judging that you’re only on the platform for the sake of promoting your website. Avoiding such judgment will help attract more people to your account, which, in turn, will attract more traffic to your website.

Besides, you can become an active user of Reddit by doing a couple of things on the platform. For instance, you can start by getting subreddits whereby other Redditors will relate to your content. Posting relevant content requires you to research popular content with your subreddits. Alternatively, you can also choose to create your subreddits.

Also, upvoting is another means you can use to become active. Upvoting is a form of voting on Reddit that represents the content you support and, as a result, takes it to the top. Further, you can also comment on content that you find relatable or entertaining.

2. Get To Know And Understand The Rules Of Subreddit

After understanding how you can become an active Redditor in subreddits, it’s important to know the various rules that govern subreddits. These guide you on what to and not to do to avoid being punished. Rules of subreddits are mostly found on the sidebars or pinned posts.

The following are some common rules that are used in subreddits:

• Avoid posting common questions by confirming if another user had already posed the same question.
• No one is allowed to brigade.
• Doxing is forbidden.
• Avoid complaining about downvotes.
• Don’t post other people’s content as yours.
• Ensure that your first two or three posts aren’t aimed at promoting your website.

When you break these rules, you risk your account being shut down. Other than following the rules, there are other actions you can take to avoid losing your account. These actions include checking whether your subreddits allow self-promotion, ensuring you make posts with the right content, and following the 10% rule. The 10% rule states that only 10% of your content is what you should use to promote your website.

Additionally, you might end up dealing with bullies and abusers on Reddit. How you react to such situations determines the actions that’ll be taken. If you have to deal with rude and abusive users, you can choose to report them and let subreddit mods deal with them. Also, you can choose to ignore the harsh comments and not respond.

3. Engage With Other Redditors

After getting subreddits and being familiar with the rules used on Reddit, you can start sharing with other Reddit users. To begin with, you should get permission from subreddit admins to advertise your website. Many people prefer using Reddit because it doesn’t have many ads, unlike other social media platforms. Therefore, getting permission is essential as it proves that other users relate to your ad or website.

Furthermore, how you present your content to Redditors determines how they receive it. When it comes to the type of content you post, ensure that it’s well-written, unique, in-depth, and helpful. Posting such content will drive more people to your account, which will direct them to your website through the attached links. In addition, this will increase your karma points. On top of that, your website’s links should contain solutions for problems that people face. The more helpful you seem to be, the more the Redditors will be interested in you.

Apart from the above, take some time before posting in the same subreddit. For example, you can take a break of two weeks to a month before posting to keep off hot areas. This prevents you from looking like you’re over-promoting your website, which might lead to losing your Reddit account. Having many posts is sometimes considered spamming, and it’s punishable.

To add on, apart from subreddits, you can also find your friends who are on Reddit. Having friends on Reddit can help you spread information about your products and services. By doing so, more people will be aware of your business and attract more traffic to your website.

4. Be Open With Redditors On Matters Relating To Your Website

After introducing your business by posting about it on your Reddit account, it’s advisable to maintain openness with Redditors who consume the services or products you provide on your website. Being open fosters trust with other users, which in turn increases traffic to your website.

One way you can be open with other Redditors is by aiming at providing the best customer service. All the brands and companies that use Reddit and are successful have been proved to offer satisfactory customer service. Great customer service ensures you have returning clients who offer good reviews and refer you to other potential customers. You should note that it’s easier to have a returning customer than to get a new customer.

You can provide satisfactory customer service by discussing the experience offered by your company, whether good or bad. Strive to answer all the concerns raised, identify the problems encountered, and come up with solutions that can be used to deal with these problems. In short, try to ensure that Redditors are pleased.

5. Keep Redditors Updated On Any Changes

In any business, updating your clients about the changes you’ve made is received as a sign of care and appreciation. On the other hand, updating Redditors makes them feel valued, and this should be the case when trying to drive more traffic to your website through Reddit.

You can update Redditors on the changes you make in your business or website such as:

Introduction or withdrawal of products or services
Ongoing offers and discounts
Product and service improvement
Rebranding

While updating Redditors, ensure you don’t add hyperlinks to your posts. Instead, you can add your website’s link that’ll be on your bio and request Redditors visit your bio for more information. By doing so, you’ll create an impression that your main intention is to promote convenience for users instead of promoting your website.

What’s more, avoid using capital letters in your posts, be it in the titles, comments, or the posts themselves. Reddit’s etiquette forbids the capitalization of words as it implies that your posts might have been made by a bot. However, there are exemptions in capitalization whereby you can capitalize the first letters of your title in some posts.

6. Host An Ask Me Anything (AMA) On Reddit

AMAs are a form of interview where Redditors ask you anything they want to know from you. Hosting AMAs on Reddit is known to be beneficial when driving more traffic to your websites as they create a lot of buzz on the platform. This is because some subreddits have over thirteen million subscribers. AMAs are popular to an extent that various public figures host them. However, this doesn’t necessarily mean you need to be famous to host an AMA.

You can use it to take advantage of an AMA and plug in your website as almost no one will mind. To boot, don’t hold anything back from Redditors as they’ll think that your main aim of hosting an AMA is to get the much-wanted exposure. Instead, be respectful and give Redditors what they want.

Additional Guidelines You Can Use When Posting On Reddit

Ensure that what you post is in line with trending matters. This helps you to be in touch with your target audience. Further, apart from trying to be in trend, ensure that what you post is relevant enough to an extent that it’ll bring you traffic. For instance, you can start by forming consumer development.

If you’re in a position to do so, consider having paid advertisement on Reddit. Like any other social media platform, Reddit also has influencers who promote different brands. You can use them to promote your website. However, it might be challenging to get an influencer as they’re anonymous. Therefore, you’ll have to research the Redditors that are involved in most trending conversations to figure out which among them is an influencer.

Summing It Up

Gone are the days when people didn’t believe in the power of social media, especially in businesses. With time, people have proved how using various social media platforms can benefit your business. One of these platforms is Reddit, which you can use to drive more traffic to your website.

To effectively use Reddit, you need to be well informed about various aspects of this platform. These aspects include reasons for using Reddit, the benefits of using Reddit, and the steps to use in such a case. You can use this article to understand the said aspects as it offers detailed information. All the best!

by Editorial Team

9 Lessons Ecommerce Businesses Can Learn from Amazon

If you are running an ecommerce business, it’s hard to view Amazon as anything but a competitor, and a massive one at that. Amazon holds a whopping 56.7% of the ecommerce market in the US alone, which makes it a true juggernaut and pretty much the default option for most people when it comes to online shopping. To make matters worse, it’s hard to imagine ever coming close to it, since Amazon is sitting on a goldmine of data that enables the brand to get into the minds of its customers.

However, if you can manage to put all of your disdain for Amazon aside (which shouldn’t be too hard, as you are probably one of their customers as well), its practices and tactics can serve as an inspiration for your ecommerce business. And you only need a fraction of the sales Amazon makes every year in order to make your business extremely successful. Here are nine things your ecommerce business can learn from Amazon in order to grow.

1. Page Load Time Matters More Than You Think

Having an ecommerce website that loads quickly definitely plays a huge role in optimal UX, but it affects aspects of your business, too. For instance, with every additional second of load time (during the first five seconds), the website conversion rate drops by 4.42% on average. In this day and age, you are basically fighting for your customers’ attention. And while you can’t control their actions, you can do everything on your end to make sure your ecommerce website loads as fast as possible.

What page speeds are we talking about here? Well, the desktop version of Amazon’s website takes only 2.3 seconds to load, while its mobile version takes 1.14 seconds.

Obviously, your ecommerce business doesn’t have access to the resources and infrastructure Amazon does, but there are a number of things you can do to make your website fast. They include:

• compressing your images
• reducing your redirects
• enabling browser caching
• using a CDN, etc.

2. Make Decisions Based on Data

Amazon has all the data and the resources it needs in order to provide the ultimate user experience for its shoppers and to target potential shoppers effectively. This approach also extends to all businesses that operate through the platform, and it’s especially important for Amazon sellers who are trying to expand their reach through PPC advertising. Individual sellers can use Amazon PPC management services to optimize their advertising campaigns by harnessing valuable data to reach their target audiences.

You can use analytics software to gather data about your customers, such as the devices they used to visit your online store and whether they found your business through organic or paid traffic. Conduct A/B tests for each page element, from your calls to action and landing page copy to shopping cart layouts and checkout system.

Finally, you can simply ask your customers how you can improve by conducting surveys. Each of these things is done by Amazon on a daily basis.

3. Address Your Customers’ Major Pain Points

One of the reasons why Amazon is so successful is that it provides the best possible online shopping experience for its customers. While ecommerce makes things easier by enabling people to shop from the comfort of their homes, it still needs to address the common pain points of its customers, such as:

• High shipping costs
• Complicated checkout process that requires shoppers to create an account
• Difficulties with exchanges and returns.

All of these are major reasons for cart abandonment. In order to remedy this, Amazon offers free shipping to its Prime users. Also, if you want to return any of the products you have ordered from Amazon, you can do so for free or even drop them off at one of their stores or lockers.

4. Make Sure Your Customers Can Reach You

In addition to providing a superior user experience for customers, Amazon is no slouch when it comes to customer support. It offers multiple channels through which shoppers can reach the company, including phone, email, and live chat. But, Amazon does a lot of work so that the customers rarely reach that point by also offering different user manuals which hold most of the answers that the shoppers are after.

Your ecommerce business may not be able to be there for its customers 24/7, but you can genuinely be there for them during working hours.

And just like Amazon, you can act preemptively by producing content that minimizes your customers’ need to reach out for your support. This includes creating a dedicated FAQ page on your website with which you will anticipate the majority of customer inquiries, detailed product descriptions, as well as information that explains your exchange and return policy.

5. Nurture Customer Loyalty

This is the third bit of advice that revolves around customers, which just goes to show that Amazon’s customer-centric approach is the way to go.

When it comes to inspiring customer loyalty, Amazon struck gold after introducing its Prime subscription. For $14.99 a month, customers not only get to enjoy free next-day delivery, but they also gain access to Amazon’s massive music library and its video streaming, including their original series. The subscription model has enabled Amazon to create another revenue stream for itself on top of what its customer base already spends.

As far as your ecommerce business is concerned, you can offer incentives for certain customer behaviors, such as loyalty programs for those shoppers who decide to create an account or those who are repeat customers. You can also reward customer referrals or even create a subscription model of your own.

6. Leverage the Power of User Reviews

Regardless of how much money you put into marketing and pitching your products, customers are always going to be more trusting of other customers, their friends and family, and even influencers. Amazon was able to see that early on, so it allowed its customers to leave user reviews for products they purchased.

You could argue that Amazon was potentially hurting its bottom line by allowing both positive and negative reviews, but it did the exact opposite. The customers wouldn’t end up buying the inferior product, but they would find one on Amazon with stellar reviews.

By allowing your customers to leave reviews on your website and provide feedback on the products they bought from you, you not only get social proof, but you also demonstrate that you are behind your product or service 100%, which makes you trustworthy and genuine. In order to encourage your customers to leave reviews, you can send out post-purchase emails and offer incentives.

7. Patience Is Crucial

Patience is basically in Amazon’s genetic code, so to speak, because even though the company was founded back in 1994, it took seven years before it made its first profit. If that’s not a testament to the patience of Jeff Bezos and Amazon’s investors and shareholders, we don’t know what it is. They chose to forego the short-term gain and focus on playing the long game. Sure, they are the world’s largest store now, with a string of successes in the shape of Kindle Fire, Amazon Primer, and Amazon Web Services. But it took them ages to get there.

In order to grow your business, you need to be able to look at the bigger picture, past all the day-to-day operations and challenges that make it really tempting to give in and cash out the first chance you get. And opting to stick with it in the long run is all about patience.

8. Create a Personalized Shopping Experience

Nobody does this better than Amazon. Every time you visit the Amazon homepage, you will be given recommendations for products based on your previous purchases and behavior on the website. Each customer gets to have their own personalized experience that is created in line with their own needs and preferences. That way, the shopper never gets overwhelmed by sheer choice. Once you start browsing through specific product pages, Amazon will make further recommendations for products that are complementary to the ones you’ve purchased or viewed and even offer a bulk discount.

If you can afford to invest in personalization software, you can do more of the same. But, even if it’s out of your reach, you can still introduce personalization into your emails. Using the information your marketing team has collected on your customers, you can retarget them and send ads based on what they were looking at on your website or items inside their abandoned carts.

9. Provide Top-Notch On-Site Search

Amazon has one of the best on-site searches out there, enabling its customers to find what they need in a matter of seconds by simply typing in relevant keywords. This works well for both Amazon and its customers. Shoppers get to have a frictionless customer experience, while Amazon reaps the benefits of having customers who are intent on buying.

How so? Well, the customers who use the search bar are more likely to convert than those who are just browsing the website.

If your customers intend to make a purchase – and those who use the search bar usually do – make it as easy as possible for them to access the products they want. If you don’t have too many products to offer, make sure they are categorized in order to make browsing for them more streamlined.

In Closing

While it’s highly unlikely that your ecommerce business will be able to establish market domination as Amazon did, you can still make it extremely successful and profitable by emulating some of the practices used by Amazon. Start implementing them today and watch your business thrive!