Top Tips to Leverage Word of Mouth Marketing

Let’s take it old school for this blog post. I’m talking the original craft of marketing. For example, let’s take Coca-Cola in 1888, a true staple in branding and marketing in the business world. Asa Candler, the business mogul behind Coca-Cola, created an incredible marketing initiative giving away coupons for free Coca-Cola to consumers. He then gave free barrels of Coca-Cola syrup to stores reluctant to stock this drink. As customers with coupons flocked to those stores, store owners rapidly returned as paying customers. And thus, one of the most influential brands in the world set foot on the path towards its purpose. By incentivising both store owners and customers to talk about Coca-Cola, Candler was able to produce buzz and build his brand. The cool thing about WOMM is that its contemporary efforts to create experiences worthy of being passed from person-to-person has evolved incredibly. In this article we’ll be examining some tips and tricks for you to leverage WOMM effectively in your business!

Focus on Quality over Quantity

Over the past few years, marketers have focused on gathering a following base on various social media outlets, however this doesn’t really help. Connecting with your followers is incredibly important as opposed to gathering and increasing your following base. Having 100 really passionate fans that live, breath and vouch for your brand is more effective than 10,000 fans who signed up for a contest of sort. Now, how do you ensure that you’re properly connecting with your followers? Engage, Equip and Empower!

– Engage: Be a part of the conversation. Listen to what your customers have to say about your product/service and understand where they are coming from.
– Equip: Give your customers various reasons to talk about your brand. This includes your value proposition, services, competitive advantages, etc. Different customers can be triggered by different topics of conversation, so play on that to understand what they want and where they’re coming from.
– Empower: Let your consumers speak on various platforms. Some people are more comfortable DM’ing you, some feel more comfortable commenting on a post, or some feel more comfortable calling you. Give your customers the power of speech!

Leverage Technology

Technology has improved social connectivity creating for an easier consumer experience to do your marketing for you. Take a simple post for example. This post, if it resonates with your following base, will be shared across multiple platforms to friends, friends of friends and so on. Hundreds of people will see their trusted friends vouching for a post and brand. Fueling conversations and driving passion will make a huge difference for your brand, especially when taking technology into consideration.

Focus on Reactive Word of Mouth

A friend of yours is going on a trip to New York City for the first time and asks you what restaurants he should check out! You being a food connoisseur start suggesting a few of your favourite restaurants. That’s an example of reactive WOMM. When you refer to someone, you are reacting to the situation. These forms of WOMM work very well as they are a part of the discussion. Keeping on top of mind sharing relevant information with your following is incredibly important for reactive WOMM to transpire.

Focus on Proactive Word of Mouth

Now, working off of the same example above where you and your friends are simply talking and you randomly mention how you recently visited NYC and checked out all these amazing restaurants, that’s an example of proactive WOMM. You’re not waiting for the conversation to come up, you were simply so amazed by the good restaurants in NYC that you had to tell your friends about it. Proactive WOMM is by far the most superior type because it necessitates your customer to be so captivated with your product or service that they are obliged to find a way to bring it up in discussion, even if it’s not on topic. Telling a story when asked is one thing. Telling a story without being asked is something else entirely. It requires more conviction and more passion. To make sure the WOMM is proactive as much as possible, you need to make certain that your Talk Trigger is truly distinguished. You have to do something diverse, that your customers do not expect, and then find desirable.

People are 90% more likely to trust and buy from a brand recommended by a friend. Although the demographic of people is smaller than your overall following, it is the sect of followers that you should focus on. Converting your followers to actual brand advocates will help you grow your ROI incredibly.

29.01.2019 Digital Marketing, ROI Comments Off on Top Tips to Leverage Word of Mouth Marketing

Top Link Building Strategies

Link building has more recently become one of the most talked about methods for optimizing your website’s search rankings on Google and other popular search engines. It can have powerful results and may be more simple than you might think. With SEO being more important than ever, creating and executing a powerful link building strategy can have immense positive long term effects. This article will cover the top link building strategies that can help your company increase its domain authority and move its SERP rankings up to the top.

1. Content, Content, Content.

Everything comes down to content. Good content generates good results and bad content generates bad results. The first step is simple, in order to get other websites to link to your content, you need to start with writing good content that resonates with your readers. Understanding your core audience is a must so that your content can be reflective of what your audience is looking for, thus generating more buzz. You should also strive to have content that is written informally, well structured, and with SEO keywords in mind.

2.  Social Media

You are providing good content, but people need to see it. Social media is a perfect way to reach new audiences, and get loads of backlinks in the process. It is imperative to post your content on all of the most popular social media platforms to attain the highest reach possible. Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn are all good ways to reach a new and specific audience for your content.

3. Private Blog Networks (PBN’s)

Everyone seems to be talking about Private Blog Networks, but what are they? In layman’s terms, PBN’s are high authority domains (usually previously expired) that are used to send high authority links back to your site. This type of strategy can be defined as “grey hat” SEO and so it must be done properly to ensure that you and Google can maintain your everlasting friendship. PBN’s should be used with caution and are typically safe when they don’t exceed over 20% of your overall link portfolio. PBN’s should only be leveraged by an experienced individual to avoid getting de-indexed and rendering your time and money obsolete. Read more about creating and utilizing a PBN here.

4. Reaching out to prospective websites.

This is the old school version of link building, but as they say, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” If you’ve put the time and the effort into creating great content, then people will generally not have an issue sharing it and linking back to your site. The fastest way to do this is through simply reaching out. This can be done through social media platforms, email, phone calls, etc. You should always be sure to reach out in a friendly way, and not to sound like a robot with hyper-automated emails.

22.01.2019 Business, Digital Marketing, SEO Comments Off on Top Link Building Strategies

Local SEO for Small Businesses

Small-to medium-sized businesses contribute to approximately 41% of Canada’s gross domestic product (GDP). With small businesses playing such a big part in our nation’s GDP, it’s time to shine a light on how important digital marketing- more specifically localized digital marketing is to the success of an SME. As a result, we’ve outlined three amazing tips that will help support independent business owners in attaining the right strategies to bring in leads through the door.

  1. The importance of localized keywords

At the end of the day, you want to make sure that your website shows up first on every search engine. That’s why it’s incredibly important to focus and know your localized keywords, essentially words that people in your local community would search to find you. A great way to figure these words out is by surveying some of your customers to see which search terms they would use to find your business. This will vary from area to area, hence the localized aspect of it.

  1. Configure your Google Plus business page

Your business can benefit from using Google Plus in many ways such as:

  •   Standing out – You’re able to share your latest information with customers such as directions, opening hours, pictures and offers
  •   Compare – Now your customers can compare you to multiple business so you can show how much better you are
  •   Engage – Customers have the ability to leave you reviews and let you know how you can improve your business. This is also a great platform for you to speak to them and understand their needs and wants more intimately

Google My Business is a significant online directory that no localized business can ignore. So make sure you optimize your Google My Business page as it can help you get targeted exposure from your local audience.

  1. Online Directories

Getting listed on various online directories not only helps with your SEO but can also help you generate qualified leads. The more local you get the better, so check out your local newspaper to see if they might have an online directory. Also look into your local chamber of commerce and any other local directories.

In short, local search engine marketing or local SEO as it is commonly called, is here to stay. It’s slowly yet steadily turning out to be a crucial part of a successful small business online marketing strategy, so make sure to hop on this wave for 2019.

16.01.2019 Business, Digital Marketing, SEO Comments Off on Local SEO for Small Businesses

8 Questions to Ask Regarding Marketing Automation

Scaling is hard. Marketers have so much going on from email marketing to social media management and other website requirements. These to-do lists for scaling deem to be an incredibly difficult task. That’s where marketing automation comes in. If done properly, marketing automation can facilitate the lives of marketers and business owners. The difficulty arises when you need to make sure it is properly done. Why does everything have to be so difficult? Winston Churchill said it best, “a pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity: an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.” Marketing automation isn’t easy but nurturing your leads in an efficient way will produce actual paying customers.

To make your lives easier, we’ve put together a list of 8 questions you have to ask when implementing Marketing Automation for your company.

  1.     When should I start implementing a marketing automation strategy?

When a company grows, it becomes more difficult to speak to every individual lead at each section throughout the customer journey. Not only that, but it becomes more difficult to track every conversation with your potential leads and record proper follow-up steps after each conversation. You have the option of  hiring a few new sales and marketing professionals, however this can be expensive and inefficient. When you find that manually managing your lead relationships is at stake, marketing automation should be your go to!

  1.     What are some features I should look for when looking into marketing automation tools?

Marketing automation is more than just managing email campaigns- it’s a life saver! Marketing automation helps you automate everything from drip campaigns, auto responding to leads, lead tracking and scoring, CRM integration, social media integration, marketing asset management and more! The bigger your company is, the more features you’ll need. So choose your marketing automation tool properly.

  1.     Can both marketing and sales team use it?

Marketing and sales are directly related! So both marketing and sales teams can and should be using the marketing automation tool. When looking for marketing automation tools make sure that you can add enough users for your needs.

  1.     How is marketing automation different from CRM?

Marketing Automation is all encompassing. Automation tools are mainly designed for marketers so they can see where sales are coming from and what marketing campaigns to focus on in order to drive more leads. CRMs are more tailored towards when leads are actually generating and passing them along the sales funnel.

  1.     Can I automate social media outreach?

Social media is a lot in today’s day and age, everyone is connected. It’s a great way to show off your brand and even generate new leads. Automation can help you target the right demographic with an easier and more effective strategy . The underlying question that you have to ask yourself here is can you reach out to more people and the right people using your automation tool? If the answer is yes, then kill it!

  1.     How does lead nurturing play into this?

Not everyone converts into sale right away, so making sure that your marketing automation strategy is able to nurture your leads is incredibly important. Lead nurturing has many actives that are incredibly hard to accomplish manually when you have many leads. The tools you should be looking for should not only help acquire new users, but also help nurture and retain potential leads and clients.

  1.     How important is price when choosing a marketing automation tool?

Budgeting is important. You don’t want to overspend, but you also don’t want to penny pinch when it comes to marketing automation tools…and they’re not usually cheap. Saving at first might cost you more in the long run. Marketing automation is an investment that will help your company grow.

  1.     What sort of data and analytics should I expect from my marketing automation tool?

Without numbers and metrics, marketing automation can be thrown in the trash. Making sure your automation tool gives you the right data and analytics is incredibly important with the right integrations. These analytics will allow you to make the right business decisions in real time to get the most out of your tool.

Every business has different needs and expectations from a marketing automation tool. It’s a long and difficult process, however once set up, it’ll make your business run at full efficiency allowing for business growth and scale. Efficiency and organization? Sign me up!

09.01.2019 Business, Digital Marketing, ROI Comments Off on 8 Questions to Ask Regarding Marketing Automation
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