by Ahmed Muzammil | Jul 22, 2017 | Business, Marketing, Social Media, Startup |
You’ve got into your own business?
Got a neat professional website?
Have your own short – term and long – term goals in terms of sales and revenue?
Gained enough resources for developing your small business?
Framed a small budget for marketing and promotional purposes?
If your answer is a big ‘YES’ for all these questions, come on and jump into marketing your product worldwide to start making money out of it. There are lots of marketing ideas that you can do manually in your own area to make people come to know about you. But, your goal is to reach all over the globe man!!! But how? Here’s the answer to that too – “Online Marketing”.
Did you know that 61% of global internet users research products online?
Did you know that almost 40% of the world’s population (3 billion people) are using the internet?
Did you know that 71% of internet users are more likely to purchase a brand that they are following in a social networking site such as Twitter or Facebook?
All these facts prove the importance of online marketing for your product to get visible worldwide, thereby getting your potential customers.
Hey, but you don’t need to worry about how to start marketing your business online at the start. With the little number of bucks you have and the least amount of resources or even by yourself, you can make your business online marketing like a cake-walk.
Here are ten perfect ideas to start marketing your business online. Have a keen read on these tips and start using it for your marketing giving a brand image for your business worldwide.
1.Build Your Own Blog
It’s important to have your own blog in your web page and you gotta add posts on a daily basis to reach your target audience effectively. Saying it more clearly, let your blog posts directly or indirectly speak about yourselves and your product to get sold. People always look for useful info that might influence their purchases. So write up posts that would induce your potential customers to buy your products and keep them coming back to your page.
Go through these simple tips about what kind of content you can have in your blog posts.
- Collect statistical lists related to your business that might be interesting and make it into a post and share it.
- Curate content from other sources and add your own taste of unique content to it, giving due credits to the sources..
- Teach your readers by providing ‘how to’ and ‘top10’ kind of lists posts.
- Check out your Analytics account every now and then and see which posts have gained more visibility and popularity among visitors, and rewrite or write posts related to such topics.
- Be keen on writing catchy titles because only if your headline is attractive, one will have the urge to look into it.
- Make good use of templates, infographics, graphs, and charts in your blog posts as people always go for visually appealing content rather than plain-text ones.
So, the key points to keep in mind for promoting your business through the blog are churning out quality content, inviting bloggers/influencers who might be interested in your business and share it over the web platform to reach worldwide.
2.Brand Your Business
What’s branding in marketing?
Assigning a name or a symbol or a design unique to your business can be called as a brand.
A logo is the principal branding identity that provides a distinct image for your business. You want to make your product reach over the globe and the first thing you have to do is to design a special logo.
Just think about some branded companies like Apple, Nike, Reebok,…….All that pops up in your mind is that logo right?
Logos are the face of your business. So, be careful while designing it. The way your logo is designed greatly impacts your customers coming forward to buy it.
Some reminders before designing a logo for your business:
- Your logo should be tempting to your target audience.
- Let your logo be a unique and special one.
- Your logo should be classic lasting with time.
- Setup your logo with a trend and not copying from others.
- Your logo should be simple conveying its own special message.
- Your logo design should support your brand.
- Use colors, fonts, white spaces and shapes correctly such that it reinforces your product.
- Your logo should be flexible for big screens/mobile screens and its print in black/white color.
Examples of some best Logos
3. Get On Some Stylish Business Cards
The best marketing tool that is handy for your business is a business card. Having an attractive set of business cards in your pocket and handing it over to ever people with each handshake, doesn’t it sound good?
Design your business card with a benefit-driven headline always. It should be like:
“Benefit + How”
For example, “We provide the best home-based food for you by adding organic ingredients” can be the headline for a home-based food style restaurant.
Another point to be kept in mind is, always provide your business card to the other with a specific call to action.
For example, render some firsthand offer for them to download from your website by collecting their email address.
Give a handshake…Slip on your business card into their hands…Let them take a glance into your card and that’s more than enough buddy!
4. Get Your Business Listed On Business Directories
Do you know that nowadays people search on the internet for businesses? It’s necessary that you list your business in some of the main business directory websites so that people can come to know about your business.
Some of the common popular online business directories where you can list out your business are Craiglist, Yelp, Yellowpages, Google, Yahoo, Bing, Angie’s list, Manta, Foursquare, MerchantCircle, LinkedIn, The Business Journal and so on.
There are also so many business directories specific for your business and you can also list yourself in those niche-specific websites.
Guess you don’t have to think over this as it’s completely free!
5.Promote And Advertise Your Product
There are various ways by which you can promote and advertise your product online, thereby gaining potential customers for your business.
Go through these simple ideas that are put forward for promotion and advertisement of your business.
- You can implement to cross-sell your product by establishing a joint venture with other business owners who sell products that would complement yours. By this marketing practice, you can easily make your customers buy your product.
- Begin a customer referral program by offering your existing customer a free month of service, a free product, or some other profitable reward for referring new customers.
- Providing giveaways/free stuff/ sweepstakes for your target audience can again promote your business. This technique is easy and also you can ask for a free email subscription with the submission form.
- Make up a Press Release (PR) that’s newsworthy and interesting about your business based upon your data and share it widely.
- You can also offer free work or pay a little amount for your website visitors.
6. Send Cold Mails And Make Cold Calls
The next way to trigger up your sales is to send cold emails and make cold calls to potential customers all over the globe.
The main hints for sending a successful cold mail that would generate a good number of leads for your business are subject lines, and then the body of the mail. Subject lines should be always targeted towards the customer focusing on what benefit they would reap out of your product.
Making cold calls is always executed by business owners all over the world to make common people know about their product. This technique has also been successful in generating sales for businesses as people talk over phones and convince customers to buy their product.
7.Adopt Social Media Marketing
Social media has been the recent trend in online marketing and the one which gets you good business online. Social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Linkedin, Pinterest and the like have taken millions of small business owners to great heights.
Continue reading below to know how to create a brand image for your business via social media marketing.
- Make use of your blogger profile for commenting on other peoples’ blog posts so that you’ll be visible on their platform. You could provide useful information to their blog visitors, and automatically people would check your public profile and website.
- Setup a Facebook page for your business and start posting updates.
- Setup a Google+ page for your business and be active in it.
- Setup the LinkedIn Company page and let people know about your business.
- Setup Company page on Pinterest and start sharing images and infographics.
- Setup Twitter profile for your business and tweet on an everyday basis.
- Sign up a Youtube account and start posting videos about your product, teach the viewers and address their common questions too.
8.Gear Up On Email Marketing
Email marketing is taking its grand place in promoting your business online to potential customers. It helps to retain current/previous customers and also gain new customers. Let’s see how it works.
- First of all, make sure that you’ve implemented Opt-in for your marketing emails which mean that you obtain prior permission from the customer or recipient of the mail for allowing you to send more emails. This would surely increase your credibility with the customer.
- Start an e-mail newsletter and make your new website visitors subscribe to it by offering any bonus content price for subscribing. Then you can slowly grow your subscriber’s list and transform them into paying customers by sending quality emails about your offers and promotions.
- Build a candid e-mail signature and add a link to your giveaway content and auto subscribe the person who downloads that.
You can start and continue your email marketing campaigns using free services like MailChimp.
A Sample Simple Newsletter Subscription Form
9. Be A Part Of Networking
Networking plays a vital role in connecting with people doing businesses similar to yours and to other potential customers all around the world. If you have started your business, and just sitting with a cup of drink on your desk, you’re not going to succeed in it. The success of your business lies in how much you get connected with prospective buyers through various networking groups and events.
- You can make yourself as a part of local events in your area by either sponsoring food or any giveaways (like custom balloons printed with your business name). The trade show or event that you’re participating should be related to your business so that you can visit and talk about your product to the visitors.
- Join Mastermind Groups related to your business so that you can meet partners over there.
- You can also get good contacts by joining Membership groups on LinkedIn and Facebook and other forums.
- Host your own free webinar.
Finally, don’t forget to send out gifts and handwritten Thank you cards to your customers via post.
10.Publish Great Content
Content Marketing is becoming the backbone of so many businesses and it yields good returns in turn for the owners.
Just grasp these key points on how to publish good content which will, in turn, yield good revenue for you.
- Focus on your audience
- Add visual elements (infographics, videos and slides)
- Interview experts in your industry and publish it in your blog
- Let your titles focus on Top 10 lists which attracts people to read
- Write e-books, whitepapers, guides and publish it in your website
Don’t just stop with framing up with good content. Get on with publishing and sharing it on top social networks and your email subscribers and then you get to see its results soon.
by Ahmed Muzammil | Jul 22, 2017 | Business, Social Media |
There’s a person called Henry who’s a small business owner. Let’s have a virtual look-up into a day of his life.
The alarm clock ticks at 6 a.m. in the morning……Tweeeeeeeet tweeeeeeeeeet tweeeeeeeet….
As usual, he presses the snooze button to 15 minutes and finally manages to wake up at 6.30 am.
Then brushes his teeth, goes out for jogging and stretching out his muscles and while relaxing for 10 minutes, he puts up a mental plan in his mind of what he’s gonna do for his business that day. Feels happy and with a positive mind, he reaches home.
Now the time is 7.30 am. His wife’s ready with a hot cup of coffee and while sipping off his coffee, he gives a quick glance into the newspaper having a casual chat with his partner.
At 8 am, he goes in for a shower and by 8.30 he’s at the dining table for breakfast…finishes it off…goes in and gets ready grooming himself…gives a sweet hug and kiss to his kids and wife…and there he’s all set to greet the day at 9 am!
From 9.30 am, he’s seated up as the boss of his apparel shop with one employee by his side, waiting for customers.
You know what? He’s already invested lots of bucks for marketing his business locally by giving ads in newspapers, giving off pamphlets with seasonal offers and referring to friends…all that he can with his full might to make his shop known to people. And now he’s resting his back on the seat waiting to sell products to customers.
The whole day, with short breaks in the middle, there were a couple of customers who walked into his shop and had a look. And just one sale of a dozen hankies worth $10.
Man, he has invested nearly $1,00,000 in this business and all he has got in one day is mere $10! He returns home pale-faced.
Yes, there are lots of Henrys over the world not knowing where they’re lacking in their start-up and what to do about it.
The main reason why he wasn’t able to get a good number of customers for his shop in this digital era is his marketing strategy. He has done everything manually but nothing online.
Online marketing is the only thing that gives new wings for your business to fly all over and make good customers.
Let’s see how this works.
1.Online Marketing – Your Sales Robot
Marketing is actually communicating with your customers and making them buy your product. In direct marketing, it’s that 5 or 10 minutes of spending time talking to them about your product and handing over your brochure. They may just slip it off and walk away dude.
But online marketing makes you stand in the web platform firmly and becomes your sales robot doing the marketing job very efficiently. It creates brand awareness for your business. All you have to do is
- Create a nice website and sign up on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. Post updates on a daily basis and sit up and watch the number of followers and visitors to your website
- Build up an informative blog providing lots of guidance and tips on what your customers desire. Also, participate in online forums and express your thoughts and views. Let people come to know about you.
- Integrate SEO tactics into your website by seeking help from content writers or SEO professionals; or you can even do this on your own if you do some self-study on the subject.
- Startup e-mail marketing campaigns by sending promotional emails on a frequent basis to your target audience.
With less marketing investments, you can adopt online marketing techniques so that it’ll act as your marketing assistant or robot bringing visibility to your business. Do all these and just forget about your sales. It’ll act as an automated sales machine running round the clock for you.
2.Online Advertising – Your Marketing Guy
Did you know that once you advertise your business online, it’s like having your own marketing guy who’s doing everything for your success?
As a small business owner, you gotta rack your brain a little and adopt a wise marketing strategy that will make you reach your customers within no time. Online Advertising is proven to have given great sales records for most companies all over the world. Just make sure you use the right tools, services and way to implement online advertising for your business.
- Video / commercial production
- Blogging
- Social Media
- Online Paid Ads
With these simple strategies at the start, you can slowly see how your online ads are marketing themselves about your product. It’s more like hiring a marketing professional for free!
Come on, no more of the daunting task of printing hundreds and thousands of flyers and distributing among the streets.
No more of hiring special Marketing professionals to go around publicizing your business.
No more of even taking time visiting tradeshows and showing off your face and products to make people buy your product.
Sit cool and catch up with online advertising!
3.Focus More Towards Your Target Audience via Online Marketing
Long since Marketers and business owners invest their time and money researching on how to market their product and how to attract their target demographic.
Register this in your mind: “Move towards social media and strategize your company’s marketing efforts towards the online consumer behaviors, because this is exactly the place where you can find most of your prospective customers.”
The following facts may help you decide why to choose online marketing to focus more towards your target audience.
- Most of the online consumers are spending 1 out of 6 minutes in social networks. Since they spend a significant amount of time online, your strategic marketing plan should be such that there’s an everyday dose of online marketing via emails and social media posts.
- Content is what really matters. Marketing is all about two-way communication such that your customers would really be attracted towards your products and respond back. Couple your online marketing with good content that will trigger discussions from your target demographic.
- If your goal is to engage your consumers via social networks, then the right place to land is Facebook. Facebook captures almost 14.6% of Internet users’ time when compared to a combined 2% for all other social media sites.
- With the advent of more gadgets like smartphones and ipads, people are getting more engaged in mobile devices. Make sure that your website is mobile-optimized. Frame up a mobile strategy and create content that’d be easy to view and respond for mobile users.
Target marketing is just about attracting customers who will buy what you sell and the easiest way to do this is through online. Once you identify your niche market by researching on who (Demographics), where (Geographics), why (Psychographics) and how (behaviors), you can reach your target audience easily sitting before your PC / Desktop.
4.Website – Your Virtual Shopfront
You would very well know how much important it is to have your own shop where you can display your products. What matters is not just about owning a shop, but the footfalls! Yes, how many customers checked in to your shop and purchased your stuff.
You don’t be surprised by hearing that a good website will be the best virtual shop front for developing your business. When your product/service are easily accessible to customers, automatically there are more chances of sales success with it. Much of the retail world now exists in the internet, and so for a strong footprint of your brand image, your business should enter online, via a website first.
Some key points that justify the website as your virtual shop front are as follows.
- Owning a website is one thing and having a more visible website is another thing. Make sure that online location is everything and build up your website such that your potential customers can each easily reach you through search engines.
- Appearance is the next step of making your brand popular. The color, style, and background of your website speak tons about your brand’s professionalism and credibility.
- Content is the true key for any business website. How well you’ve clearly stated the details about your product makes you stand out of the box and generate leads for your business.
Ensure that your virtual shop front gets good traffic so that users can step into it and become customers.
5.Video – Your Business Salesman
If you’re going door to door knocking to sell your product, it’s not going to work out in this internet era.
People are getting more interested in watching videos online. Short 5 to 6 minutes of video advertising your product would get you more attention from your customers. Videos are proved to be the best salesmen for businesses as they speak for themselves giving both visual entertainment and information.
- 50% people say that they trust video in making purchasing decisions for products.
- 70% of the top results in Google search are videos.
- 92% of B-B customers watch online videos.
Why do you even wait when you have video marketing to use as the perfect salesman for your business?
6.Online Payment Providers – Your Accounts Manager
Business is all about money finally, which is why you’re into it. And it’s a headache for you to manage your accounts, the payment transfers and so on. But when there’s facility for monetary transactions online, why do you have to worry about it much?
When a customer visits your website and likes your products displayed for sale, he/she would immediately place an order (if you have an e-store) and transfer the money. For this, you gotta setup payment gateways like PayPal or WePay or Gumroad by which money automatically comes in and fills up your bank account.
Customers are also more interested in purchasing when there’s an automated payment provider in the website itself rather than going for other options like manually depositing money to your account. So, why not let these online payment providers take control of your accounts and taxes?
Follow all these online marketing options for your business and sit back and relax independently while your business automatically gets visible over the web. Hope now you know where our Henry lagged behind for his business’s failure.
by Ahmed Muzammil | Jul 21, 2017 | Business, Marketing |
Being the owner of a small business is not so easy job as you’ve to look into so many tasks, one at a time. One such prime tasks are business development. To develop your business effectively, you should have the good store of marketing knowledge in your brain. Only then you can catch those fishes easily in your net man!
You may have an idea on how to market your product by getting first-hand information from experts, surfing through the web and so on. But do you think all this is enough to take that level of success you’re aiming for? Surely No!
Only if you set aside some personal time of gaining knowledge through writings from experts, you’ll know how to do it in the right way.
Neil Gaiman says, “A book is a dream that you hold in your hand.”
Yes by reading books on Marketing and getting the good understanding about the know-how of promoting your product, you can achieve your dreams and goals in your venture.
Here are 10 most recommended marketing books that you should read to get a clear idea of marketing your business.
1.How To Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie
My friend, Marketing is all about influencing and attracting people. To buy your product, first they should like you and they should heed to what you’re trying to say to them, isn’t it?
This is the best handbook for you to learn more about people and how to win over them. Note that so far 15 million copies have been sold worldwide.
With this book, you can
- Enhance customer relationships
- Become a better salesman and market your products effectively
- Win people applying psychological theories while handling them
- Grow your earning power
- Become popular
“Talk to someone about themselves and they’ll listen for hours.”
This is how this book gives many tips as to how to talk to people and impress them. There are six main sections in the book.
- Principles of handling people
- Ways to make people like you
- Win people’s minds
- How to be a leader
- Letters that return good results
- How to make a happy home
On the whole, read this book and you’ll know how to get people coming to buy your stuffs.
2.Influence : The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert
The title of the book speaks about itself. The books talks about how to influence and persuade people to say ‘Yes’. It indeed takes you into the path of different applied psychological principles and teaches you how to become better persuaders.
The author Dr. Robert Cialdini, with his 35 years of deep research into this subject and a three-year program study, has effectively put out his thoughts with anecdotes and examples in a simple writing style, about how to influence people. This is a must-read book for marketing professionals, they say.
You’ll read six universal principles about persuasion and influence and how to apply it in your daily life, and take up marked success.
“Often we don’t realize that our attitude toward something has been influenced by the number of times we have been exposed to it in the past.”
This quote of Dr. Robert from the book ‘Influence’ is an example of what and how we come under the influence of different people or things, knowingly or unknowingly.
Read it and you’ll find this to be a quite interesting book.
3.Tribes by Seth Godin
“Tribes: We need you to lead us” by renowned business blogger Seth Godin is a book about leadership. It says that we all are groups of people belonging to multiple tribes, and if you’re the one who wants to bring a change in your community, then you gotta take up the leadership status and do it buddy.
Internet can provide a variety of sources and tools, but who’ll lead us? Its only people like you who can lead up resources and make them accomplish great tasks. So, as a business leader, you’ll get to know how to make things work out for good under your leadership.
“The secret of leadership is simple: Do what you believe in. Paint a picture of the future. Go there. People will follow.”
With encouraging words like these, this book will surely kindle up your spirits to rise up and go and make a change in the world. It makes you understand that the term ‘marketing’ is all about building up that fire or passion inside you and throwing it upon others, and make them believe you as well.
All about leadership and social change, this book with short chapters, will be a treasure hunt for those business owners who want to lead people.
4.Inbound Marketing by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah
“Stop wasting money blasting the world with marketing messages that nobody cares about. Instead, learn to get found with Inbound Marketing.”
From the back cover of the book “Inbound Marketing: Get found using Google, Social Media, and Blogs” written by the two co-founders of HubSpot Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah, hope you can clearly get an idea about this book.
Swiping off the traditional outbound marketing techniques like cold calling, emails and so on, people are now turning their heads towards Social Media, blogs and Google to find their preferred products and services. Inbound Marketing is becoming a boon for today’s business owners to market their products online and get good returns from it.
The book ‘Inbound Marketing’ is a perfect how-to-guide that provides you with useful insights about the following.
- Getting your business found by social media sites, Google and blogosphere
- Increasing your Google ranking for gaining more traffic
- Creating a blog and promoting your business
- Growing your community in Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn
The authors have put up the facts to be known about Inbound Marketing in a very crisp and easily understandable way. So, it’s a must-buy for you!
5.Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook by Gary Vaynerchuk
“Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook : How to tell your story in a noisy social world” by Gary is one of the highly recommended books to any business owner who’s looking to build up their brand.
Gary, the social media expert comes up with useful tips and ideas as to how to build up your social media marketing in the right way. He clearly puts up the vital points needed to convert your website’s traffic into sales. If you’re marketing your product via Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, or Tumblr, then you must read this book.
While planning up your social media strategies, you may always look up for ways to take the ‘right hook’ which is sales and revenue. So, you go up jabbing your customers to take up the right hook and Gary easily helps you how to do it through his book.
“Your number-one job is to tell your story to the consumer wherever they are, and preferably at the moment they are deciding to make a purchase.”
Gary is a wonderful storyteller and he teaches you as to how to tell your story to your target audience and followers in Social Media platforms and make them buy your product. Content is the main part in Social media marketing and he tells you how you should frame up sales-inducing content.
Why waiting to buy such an incredible book?
6.Traction by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares
This book “Traction : A Startup Guide to getting Customers” is a gem for all start-up business owners to keep control of their business tractions. The main reason why many products / businesses fail at the beginning is due to the owners’ failure to take up proper marketing tactics and get customers.
So this Traction book serves to be a great guide for all employees and start-up founders to employ the right principles of traction for their company. The traction frameworks are supported by interviews with some founders of top companies like Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia), Alexis Ohanian (Reddit), Alex Pachikov (Evernote), and many more.
The authors have covered 19 marketing channels that help companies achieve good traction. Some of the marketing channels covered in the book are
- E-mail marketing
- Public Relations (PR)
- Business Development (BD)
- Trade shows
- Offline Ads
- Sales
“This is what we call the 50% rule: spend 50% of your time on product and 50% on traction.”
Yes, this book can be said to be a Bible of Traction.
7.The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing by Al Ries and Jack Trout
Al Ries and Jack Trout, the famous Marketing Consultants, in their book, “The 22 immutable laws of marketing: Violate them at your own risk” have given out 22 unchangeable laws of marketing that would stand over time.
The Law of
- Leadership
- Category
- Mind
- Perception
- Focus
- Exclusivity
- Ladder
- Duality
- The opposite
- Division
- Perspective
- Line Extension
- Sacrifice
- Attributes
- Candor
- Singularity
- Unpredictability
- Success
- Failure
- Hype
- Acceleration
- Resources
All these laws are very much applicable for your Marketing strategies. The following quote from the book summarizes it.
“Marketing is a battle of perceptions, not products.”
Go ahead buying this book without a second thought.
8.The Brain Audit by Sean D’Souza
Sean D’Souza, in this book, has clearly brought out points about how your customers’ brain goes through decision – making before buying your product. It simply educates you with the information needed for your customers to make purchasing decisions. So, you’ll come to know how to present that info needed for your customer effectively.
“The Brain Audit: Why customers buy (and why they don’t)”
As this headline of the book states, as a business owner who intends to sell your product, you’ve got everything in this book that you needed to know about marketing. This book is worth every penny as you get deep insights into marketing after giving it a read.
9.Ogilvy on Advertising by David Ogilvy
David Ogilvy, who are popularly known to be the ‘Father of Advertising’, has written this book in such a beautiful way that the one who reads it will know everything about advertising. Advertising, being the number one way of marketing your product, is something which every business owner should know and execute as a part of their marketing strategy.
“What you say in advertising is more important than how your say it.”
Ogilvy has given many simple tips like this describing how to advertise your product such that it reaches your customers and makes them to buy your products.
10.Ask by Ryan Levesque
“Ask: The counter intuitive online formula to discover exactly what your customers want to buy…..create a mass of raving fans….and take any business to the next level”
This headline of the book itself gives you a proper understanding of what the book is about. It renders a unique formula to capture what’s in your customers’ mind in terms of buying and provide them with their needs.
Once you buy and read this business book and put the formula into practice, you’ll automatically see the positive results of it. It’s found that the Ask formula outlined in this book has been a great aid in building multi-million dollar businesses in 23 different countries, generating over $100 million dollars in sales in the process. That’s something great man!
Expert online marketer Ryan has presented a neat step-by-step process to analyze your customers, get to know what they want and how to provide it tactfully. If you’re a business owner looking out for your selling your products online and boosting up your business, then you need to ask the right questions and ‘Ask’ helps you in that way.
by Ahmed Muzammil | Jul 21, 2017 | Business, Startup |
WordPress.com serves to be one of the best blogging platforms for sharing information about your website, its products, and services over the web. But, on the other side, it does have lots of limitations too. Once you’ve decided to develop your business and take it to the next level to make more money, that’s when you could better move into a self-hosted website (WordPress.org) rather than sticking back into WordPress.com.
Hosted WordPress (WordPress.com) is similar to staying in a rented house. Of course, you have so many favors like someone else looking into plumbing works, electricity, or any other maintenance. But, if you feel like changing the bedroom color and paint it, can you do? No. This is how it works in WordPress.com too.
On the other hand, self–hosted website is similar to having your own space or house. You can have an outdoor spa or a swimming pool or even a kennel for your dog, totally according to your own taste and satisfaction. Doesn’t it sound so good? Same is the case with a self – hosted website for your business where you can customize your website exactly in accordance with your customers’ needs and your wish and have full control over it.
Just have a look into ten main reasons why you can opt to move from WordPress.com to a self – hosted website.
1.You Need Advertising For Your Website
With WordPress.com, you can never be allowed to run your own ads in your website. Rather it adds its ads in your site, which is not going to get you anything fruitful. You got to pay $30 per year, in order to remove their ads completely.
But still there’s no possibility even through ad plugins or embedded codes to integrate your ads in WordPress.com. Also, WordPress.com doesn’t allow third-party advertising networks or image ads like Google AdSense, BuySellAds or OpenX, which limits potential revenue that can be gained through your website.
So, with the powerlessness to add your ad in your own website, it’s better to switch to a self – hosted website than staying back at WordPress.com.
2.You Can Use Your Own Personalised Domain Name
Your website’s domain name is something which first catches the eye of your potential customer. It’s not going to be catchy if your domain is too long with someone else’s brand attached to it, like x. WordPress.com. It’s your website and it’s always essential that it holds a unique domain name for it. With WordPress.com this is impossible.
With a self – hosted website, you can have your own unique domain name. And if needed, you can even connect it to your blog for free. Though WordPress.com too offers custom domain upgrade services, you have to spend some handful of bucks like $13 per year – ever year – to enjoy the privilege.
It’s better off to move into a self hosted website with your own personalised domain name, thus gaining a unique identity for your business.
3.You Can Install Third – Party Plugins
Third – party plugins have always proven to be the best tools in inserting additional functionality to your website. With WordPress.com you’re just forced to execute functionalities in your website with the standard implementation that it provides. This is because WordPress.com doesn’t allow you to add third – party plugins into your blog or website.
But when you move into taking up a self – hosted website, you can have access to a number of third-party plugins offering you different features for your website. Some examples of the functionalities offered by installing third-party plugins in your self – hosted website are as follows.
- Adding a nice drop – down banner at the top of your website. It can be for any promotional offers or ads that you can use in your page.
- Improving the user experience of your blog by decreasing the download time of your images or themes and by optimizing the performance of your server.
- Optimizing your WordPress blog for search engines (SEO). This can be done by customizing the meta data for each post.
Similar to these functionalities, there are a lot of other features that you can embed by getting into a self – hosted website than WordPress.com
4.You Can Customize And Modify The Code
As a business owner, you’ll need to make constant changes and improvements in your website in order to keep it ‘live’ and dynamic. For this, you need to have considerable control over the code of your website to do instant changes in your website. WordPress.com doesn’t allow you to make free changes in its code which may become frustrating for you at times.
The best option is to get a self – hosted website so that you can simply modify the site’s style.css file and adjusts the spaces between the bulleted texts; and move the date of the post from the top to bottom by just modifying the single .php file. On the contrary, with WordPress.com, you cannot modify the CSS. It can be done only with a $30 per year upgrade and PHP files cannot be modified at all here.
Again, this justifies that you can freely use your website only when you opt for a self – hosted one.
5.You Can Setup a Web Store
As you move up on the ladder of business development, you’ll require selling your products online on your web platform itself to gain potential customers on the spot. But with WordPress .com, your desire will remain a day dream as there’s no opportunity for selling here.
Either selling ads or setting up a web store, both becomes possible only when you own a self – hosted website of yours. Only with your own self – hosted website you can sell your products online and monetize your site, which will yield surplus income for your business. Till date, WordPress.com doesn’t provide any e-commerce solutions.
6.You Own And Control Your Home Base
Ownership and control are two important aspects that you’d expect to have as an owner of a business. So, your website also has to be a ‘home base’, a place online you can own and control. This is unlike an ‘embassy’ similar to WordPress.com where you can just have your credentials and presence, but no ownership or control.
A self – hosted website is a perfect ‘home base’ for your website where you can own and control your business. Rather, WordPress.com may prove ideal for an initial – level blogger, but not for a business owner or pro who wishes to generate lucrative earnings from their website. You won’t have any control over your website.
7.You Can Access More Themes
Themes of different styles and designs are inevitable when creating your website. Only when you have access to a number of themes and styles, it’d be convenient for branding your website uniquely in the web world.
WordPress.com is very selective and limited in providing the number of themes you can install from it. Now it’s around 146 free themes and 55 premium themes (costing you approximately $55) that’s offered by WordPress.com
This number is less compared to the innumerable numbers of free and premium themes you can get if you switch on to your own self – hosted website. Yes! With a self – hosted website your options are wide and you can just personally brand your website within minutes using the premium themes you get there.
8.You Need To Have A Growing E–Mail Subscriber List
Being the owner of a small business website, you’d surely be concentrating on sending frequent e – mails to your target audience for gaining good amount of leads for your business. WordPress.com doesn’t seem to provide enough features for e – mail marketing. Getting an ample amount of subscribers is essential to make your readers of your mail come and visit your website.
WordPress.com renders a very limited simple email subscription feature. It doesn’t provide you enough space for personalizing your e-mail design and sign up forms. There’s no provision for even embedding a sign-up form like Mailchimp which is a big drawback for growing businesses.
Moving to a self-hosted website can make you gain an appreciable amount of subscribers as it’s easy to maintain an email list and also embed signup forms like MailChimp to send your promotional emails and newsletters.
9.You Can Have Analytics And Optimization Tools
Owning a small business website, you’d always have the urge to keep track of the analytics of your website. You’d wish to know the number of visitors to your website, number of clicks per minute, an origin of your website viewers, the most focused reading content in your website, and so on.
WordPress.com does provide this stats feature, but it does not support third-party analytics such as Google Analytics which is crucial. When you upgrade to a self – hosted website, you can get these options successfully done by installing conversion optimization and A/B testing services.
10.You Want To Experiment And Tinker Your Site
Apart from seriously using the website for all revenue – generating purposes, you may also want to experiment and have fun with your website to try out how things work. Every now and then, you may develop an interest towards tinkering your site as it’s your own property.
But, unfortunately, WordPress.com is not a place for you to learn things on your own and test things more like a self – hosted website. A self – hosted website becomes a great platform to tinker because it provides license and encourages a huge community of users who can learn from each other, help each other and create new themes and designs for the website platform. It helps you connect with this community through numerous official event, Facebook groups and official forums all over the globe.
So, if you’re a business website owner who’s enthusiastic enough to learn new skills and experiment around with your website, then opting to a self-hosted website is the best choice for you.
by Ahmed Muzammil | Jul 21, 2017 | Business, Marketing |
As a small business owner, you’d have come across so many people using the terms ‘Public Relations’ (PR) and ‘Marketing’ interchangeably. Mostly these two terms are thought of to be same. But did you know that they’re not the same, but do have a slight borderline of differences between them?
Being the boss of your company, first, get to know how PR and marketing are different from each other. Only then you can know which one to adopt for your business.
First, let’s look into these quick definitions.
- Marketing: The process of promoting, selling or distributing your products/goods/services to your customer.
- Public relations: The action of building up public understanding and goodwill/trust towards your company and its products or services.
Wanna get it clearer? Now, look at these examples.
Let this be more interesting ok…You love a girl and you’re proposing directly to her, “I love you, Rachel.” This is in Scenario 1.
Oh no…You don’t want to tell her directly that you love her. But you pretty want to let her know how true your love is and how much you are obsessed with her.
Call up Tom your friend. Tell him about your feelings and now Tom stands before Rachel and says, “Jack loves you so truly that he can’t live without you. And he’s a guy who deserves you more than anyone else on this earth. He’s such a lovable human!” This is in Scenario 2.
Scenario 1 is Marketing and Scenario 2 is Public Relations.
You yourself taking up steps and promoting your product is marketing and making the public to know about you through some other third party is Public Relations. Got it?
See below the sample Ad and PR of the same service offered by Amazon.com.
First comes the advertisement and next comes the PR (news article).
Advertisement (Marketing) about Black Friday
PR about Black Friday
Key Differences Between PR and Marketing
PR and marketing are related to each other. But both are employed with totally different strategies. These are the main differences between PR and marketing which will help you to draw line between them and get to know which one to implement for your small business.
1.COST : Paid / Free
Marketing your product involves your pocket to be emptied. Yes, you need to have a marketing budget for executing ads and other marketing campaigns to sell your product. And your ad appears as planned. So, advertising comes to underpaid media.
In contrary, PR is based upon a third party endorsement of your company and its something similar to earned media. This mostly involves publishing press releases or other newsworthy articles about your product in any news outlet at free of cost. And you cannot have much direct control over it as to when and how to publish it.
2.MAIN OBJECTIVE : Value / Image
Both marketing and PR’s basic focus is to promote the brand and gain popularity. But, the chief purposes differ: Marketing targets on selling selling selling……whereas PR targets on gaining trust and relationships with the public.
Marketing strategies mainly shoot upon making customers buy their products. It’s complete sales – oriented. Whereas while speaking about PR, it’s about building positive relationships with your target audience through exposure and broadcast media such as TV, radio, newspapers and so on.
Marketing = Customer Interest; PR = Customer relationships.
3.CONTENT: Twist / Straight
In marketing, content is one of the main aspects of advertising the product. It involves all attractive twisted content to induce your customers to buy the product.
In PR, content is all about straightforward facts without spins or turns. It’ll be mostly in the form of news just informing people about your product.
You’ll understand this correctly by looking at the ad and PR of Black Friday example.
4.CONTROL: Full/Free
You can have 100% control over the marketing efforts of your company. It can be ad or campaigns or contests or whatever way in which you’re trying to promote your brand, everything lies in your hands. How? What? And Where? You can decide everything man!
But in PR? Oops! You have zero control over it once you hand over any news release to the PR agency or media. They are not compelled to publish it and even if they do, they can pitch something, drop out something or do whatever tricks or twirls they wanted to do with it.
Differences between Advertising and PR
Though these are the four key differences between PR and marketing, there are still more distinctions between the two, which are as follows.
- Activities or Tactics employed:
Marketing -> promotional, direct marketing and advertising to boost sales
PR – > reputation management by creating positive media coverage and stakeholder communications
Marketing -> potential customers alone
PR -> anyone in the public who’s interested in the organization or brand
Marketing goals – Sales focused actions to reach consumers and sell the product. Its direct goal is revenue.
PR goals – Maintenance of positive image between the company and its public thereby indirectly boosting the company (product)’s reputation. Its direct goal is Good name.
Articles or press releases or any content written by PR professionals are considered to be more credible and legitimate by the consumer group. Whereas, advertising content is very well known by the audiences that it’s the company’s own effort to boost their sales. So, people consider PR as more trustworthy than ads.
Your Return on Investment (ROI) is easily measurable in marketing than in PR. Because Marketing is more focused on direct sales, you can easily make out how many leads have been roughly generated with your marketing tactics.
But, since PR’s focus is on building an image, trust, and relationships with your prospective customers, there can’t be many possibilities for ROI in terms of revenue.
Marketing – Short term activity because its goal is about yielding instant revenue or sales
PR – Long term investment because over time, the benefits of its positive reinforcement towards the public can be recognised for future success.
Benefits of PR and Marketing
Though PR and marketing are considered interchangeable in the business world or PR comes under one of the marketing strategies, its benefits are often not much realised. This is because its outcomes are not measurable. But still, PR’s benefits can be measured and can reach more audience when adopting it in the right way.
Similarly, Marketing also can reap out many benefits only when executing it according to your business. There are many marketing tactics like Social Media marketing, direct mail, campaigns, ads and the like. You should know what and which strategy you should adopt for your business to reach that level you’re trying for.
Following are some of the advantages of both PR and Marketing.
- With PR, your company gets increased awareness.
- With Marketing, your product gets brand recognition through increased contacts.
- With PR, your company’s image gets strengthened.
- With marketing, interaction with your customer’s increases.
Which and How To Choose: PR or Marketing For Your Business?
You’ve seen the differences and benefits of both PR and Marketing.
But as mentioned earlier, there’s only a slight boundary between the two.
Considering PR, though it boosts your company’s image and positive opinion, that alone is not enough for your business. All you need is favorable returns in the form of monetary profits, isn’t it? So, PR cannot stand alone but can be incorporated into your marketing strategy.
“PR is just knowing…..but Marketing is doing”. – This is the key boundary.
Since it’s only a fine line of differentiation between PR and Marketing, there’s a bridge which merges both these. That is ‘Social Media’.
Social Media has broken up the barriers between the two as sites like Facebook and Twitter post both press releases as well as advertising Materials. Although PR and marketing services to be operating under two different strategies and purposes, Social media has blurred their boundaries. As a result of this, for your business to take up the next level, coordination and communication between both PR and marketing teams can lead up to mutual success of your brand’s promotion.
On the whole, if you want to boost up your business, instead of focusing on which is better, it’s best to go for how to integrate both of them into your marketing strategies and climb up the ladder of success. Since the lines between PR and marketing have started to soften due to the emergence of Social Media, it’s possible for business owners to blend them together and complement each other for receiving favorable outcomes.
What’s best for your business depends highly on your particular needs so that you can create a strategy that will work out for the best.
Do you prefer total control via marketing or slightly released control via free publicity?
Are you more interested in sales and branding, or just the positive image of your company matters first?
So, with answers for questions like these, you can decide and devise up the best strategy, whether it’s PR or Marketing or a combination of both.
But, be alert enough that you reach your goal successfully.
by Ahmed Muzammil | Jul 21, 2017 | Business, Marketing |
The first step in promoting your business is marketing which involves lots of time, money and preparation to start with.
The best and effective method to make your marketing efforts successful is to develop a marketing plan. When you prepare this business document before entering into marketing, it serves to be a great tool to plan and reach your customers. A marketing plan clearly describes who your customers are, where they get information, and how you’re going to reach them.
Let’s now just have a sneak peek into the importance of developing a marketing plan.
- It serves to be a guide to the road of creating customer relationships.
- It clearly forecasts the survival of your product in the market by analysing the current market position.
- You can neatly fix up the pricing range of your product/service by looking into your competitors’ services.
- It’ll serve to be a strategic document that you can use any time to track and measure the results of your marketing efforts.
- It helps you to control your business to go in the right way in terms of gaining customers and increasing sales.
- It aids you in staying focused towards your target rather than moving off the track.
- It makes you to professionally set goals and also assess your efforts from time to time.
Preparations Before Developing a Marketing Plan:
Before you start putting up into your paper, first know that it should be your easily understandable company document. A Marketing plan should outline all the elements of marketing and provide you with a clear direction of your marketing efforts for the coming year.
- Hey, stop here! Before starting to write, you need to gather all the necessary info to go in your writing flow without any break. Collect your company’s latest financial reports, list out your products along with the target markets, your competitors, and current distribution channels, types of customers, geographical regions, updated demographic data, and latest market trends.
- Analyze and write down your current market situation. This includes what your products/ services are, sales and distribution setup, geographic area, target audience, competitors and how well your products have sold so far.
- Go a little more deeply into the subject by studying the threats and opportunities that are waiting for your business. This simply means examining both bad and good indications of your products’ market. What market trends favor/against you? Are there competitive trends that are threatening/beneficial to your business? Are the demographics of the market currently against/ in favor of you? Talk to business professionals, ready trade journals and collect as much information you could about the impending threats and opportunities for your business.
- Now clearly state your marketing objectives and their corresponding goals. Note that each marketing objective should be followed by a set of goals and goals can be split up into practical marketing tasks (actions) to be implemented. This is the core descriptive process that you’re going to do setting up responsibilities and even delegating tasks among the resources you have.
- You cannot work out anything related to marketing without some money. So, just calculate the amount of money that you’d set aside for each marketing task and frame up a Marketing budget. And have control over your marketing plan by reviewing it at least on a quarterly basis so that changes and adjustments can be made as and when required. Schedule quarterly meetings and discussions on what you’ve accomplished, what’s yet to be and how to do it.
OK and that’s it! You’re well prepared and you can get into developing your marketing plan.
STEP BY STEP GUIDE FOR DEVELOPING YOUR SMALL BUSINESS MARKETING PLAN
1.Outline Your Marketing Strategy
Before writing up your marketing plan in detail, you need to know what you want to accomplish in your business (that is, your business goals and objectives). This is your Marketing Strategy.
Marketing Strategy clearly outlines the WHAT & HOW of your business.
- What you want to accomplish and
- How you’re going to do it
Say, for example, all that you own now is a retail apparel shop and you wanna transform it into an online e-store.
What would be your marketing strategy for that?
To introduce your products to a new national market segment.
How would you do that?
You can further break down this marketing strategy into future long-term and short-term objectives. And then again reframe it into your specific marketing message.
Your marketing plan should be a more realistic and practical one by including a specific time frame too (like a 90-day plan).
2.Frame Up Your Mission Statement
A Mission statement for your business should be an answer to the questions WHAT & WHY.
- What you’re trying to do?
- Why are you doing it?
The Mission statement is the basis for your marketing plan. It doesn’t have any direct role in your business activities. But it focuses on the goals of your business and helps in making sure that the marketing efforts that you undertake support your business objectives.
3.Identify Your Target Market
Target Market will be your audience or the specific group of people that you wish to sell your products to. The more clearly you describe and recognize your target market, the more detailed and transparent your marketing plan will be in terms of potential customers. .
Find out
- Who your target audience is
- Where you’ll find them
- What do they value as important
- What are they worried about
- What is their need right now
Finding out answers for these questions can help you build a sketch of the business or a person whom you would term as a ‘potential customer’.
4.Conduct a Detailed Competitive Analysis
The next step after identifying your target market is to know who your competitors are.
Who is selling something similar to your product out there? Who is selling those products to customers that fit your ideal target audience?
The best way to decide your marketing activities to your target audience is by looking at the competition in your business. Watch keenly and take note of what they’re doing right and where they’re lacking.
The ideal method to conduct a competitive analysis is by SWOT analysis, which is a strategic tool that finds out a company’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. You have to evaluate your competitor company’s SWOT and your own SWOT so that you can measure up your level of competition and where you are.
By conducting a complete competitive analysis only you’ll know how and where to beat the competition, select your niche market and make sure you’re completely ready to jump into the competitive platform in business.
5.Come Up With Your Unique Selling Proposition (USP)
My friend, now that you know who your target customers are and who your competitors are, next is to take a wise step towards developing your marketing plan. You require a distinct approach that no one else adopts in the market in order to stand out of the crowd.
Find out
- What makes your business, products, and services unique and desirable to your target audience?
A Unique Selling Proposition (USP) is a statement that outlines how and in what way your business is unique from other competitors in the market. It stresses how you’re best than your opponents and why potential customers need to choose you over other sellers.
6.Work Out Your Pricing Strategy
At the start-up of your small business itself, you’d have very well worked out the prices of the different products/services that you offer. In your marketing plan, you gotta relate that pricing information to your marketing activities. Saying it more clearly, you have to analyse and work out your pricing strategy fit into your marketing sense.
Generally, while marketing you’ll always have to support your pricing points with the value and benefits that the customers get in return for using the product. And when you provide a high-value proposition the customer will automatically purchase it.
So, decide your price wisely to win your customer!
7.Organize Your Promotional Plan
Promotional Plan for your business includes all the communication that you build up with your customer. In other words, it answers the question:
- How you’ll get the word about your Unique Selling Proposition to your target market?
This comprises of some of the marketing activities like Advertising, Direct sales, Internet marketing, Marketing Materials, Sales promotion and so on.
The key point is instead of mixing up all marketing actions, just select 3 or 4 activities and include in your promotional plan as per your outlined marketing strategy. It will work out wonders.
8.Calculate Your Marketing Budget
Side by side as you prepare the promotional plan, it’s essential to work out your budget too. As you’re a small business owner with limited money on hand, you gotta intelligently plan your promotional plan based upon how much you have.
You’ll have an annual marketing budget; split it up into affordable monthly budgets for carrying out the marketing activities such that they get you profitable Returns on Investment.
9.Create Your Action List
Yes, now you’re entering into the action part of your plan. Create a realistic task list that will help to carry out your marketing activities effectively. Find out
- What do you need to do?
- When do you need to do it?
And jot it down in your action list with timelines for each of the actions. This is the best step to achieve your goal as your action steps will help you to stay on track rather than going back each and every time.
Check out that your action list is created in a way such that it helps progress. Keep up due dates for actions and in smaller steps for actions to get completed on time perfectly.
10.Track and Measure Your Marketing Metrics
Well, you’re done with everything and you know what? All these preparations and planning will fly away with the wind if you do not possible measure and track your results and progress. Transforming your marketing plan into a breathable live blueprint lies in how effectively you adopt different metrics to measure and analyse how far you’ve put up your written marketing strategy into actions.
For example, online marketing can be tracked via Analytics.
On the whole, you can know how much success you’ve been in implementing this marketing plan only when you adopt different metrics for measuring it.
