Gregory

Your small business won’t survive long in any industry without a strong digital marketing campaign. The ways in which you choose to reach out to your target consumers will make the difference between a successful campaign and a sad waste of resources.

Dig into the various tools available to business owners that are aimed towards making your marketing campaign easier to manage. Start now, and read through this brief summary, highlighting some of today’s most useful marketing tools for small business owners.

Automated marketing opportunities

Digital marketing is a full-time job, and often there’s simply not enough time in your busy day to do everything needed to keep up with the pace of technology.

Automated marketing platforms like HubSpot and Act-On can help you bundle a handful of duties into one simplified process. Your digital marketing efforts will be more continuous, and you won’t have to spend all day to leave a mark on consumers.

Utilize MailChimp for email marketing

MailChimp is the leading platform in email marketing communications for business. It’s the best way to make a large impact with a small effort, and MailChimp has a reputable history of excellence.

MailChimp is free, and integrating this single platform will save you loads of time, as is needed for a busy small business owner. Make email marketing easier on your business, and employ the capabilities of MailChimp.

Social media is a tantalizing tool

Social media presents a prefabbed connection with a wide audience, and your business deserves the benefits of a large marketing base. Millions of people pass through the virtual doors of the most popular social media platforms every day, and there’s no reason your business shouldn’t hop aboard.

Do some research to find out where your target audience spends most of their time in terms of social media, and set up a business profile on a couple of the most popular platforms.

Add social media sharing icons to your website and other digital content you spread online, so web users can easily share the things they find useful or interesting.

Appeal to mobile users

Mobile devices are the number one method of access online today. Steer your digital marketing efforts towards the mobile crowd online, and you will be more successful building a presence for your business.

Optimize all of your digital content to display and function easily on a range of mobile devices. Make it easy for consumers to access your business no matter where they are or what device they are using.

WordPress will facilitate a capable design

Use WordPress to help create digital content that speaks the language of Google’s search algorithms. The platform allows designers to add various interactive elements to your pages, and engagement helps boost the efficiency of your marketing efforts.

No business today works without an extensive digital marketing effort. The world is increasingly dependent upon digital means, and your business has to keep up with the trends.

Spread your digital wings, and reach out to your target consumer in new and exciting ways. If you’re looking to spruce up your digital marketing efforts, take some time to read through these helpful tips.

You need content for marketing

Digital marketing is largely based on the amount of content you can produce. The content needs to be quality, and there needs to be a lot of it. Build a business blog, and add it to your business website.

This concrete pump truck blog is full of helpful information regarding the industry and operation. Make sure your posts are relevant and engaging, so passing users will stop for a nice read.

You need SEO for good content

Search engine optimization tactics will help you create digital content that looks good to Google sorting algorithms. When you fully understand what the search engines are looking to find, you can design the content you create to rank well in the SERPs (search engine results pages).

Ranking higher in the SERPs will give your digital content more relevance to your marketing plans. Don’t be afraid to hire someone specifically for this job. If you’re running a small business, you likely don’t have the time to do it all yourself.

Tap into social media

Social media is one of the busiest places on the web. If you want to build a successful digital marketing effort, you can’t leave out social media. Social media operates on the frequency of the consumer.

Social media sharing icons should litter the pages of your content, and your business should have a profile on more than one platform. Do some research, and narrow down two or three platforms that seem to mean the most to your target consumer.

Always be mobile conscious

Mobile media takes up an enormous portion of today’s culture all around the world. In fact, web users using mobile devices are more prevalent online than desktop computer users.

If your digital content doesn’t work right on mobile devices, it won’t be very effective at reaching a wider audience. Consider mobile optimization a necessary part of your marketing efforts.

Use email connections to boost communications

Email connections will add a new element to your communication efforts. Use your business website and social media pages to gather willing email participants, and send regular emails to users.

Create a monthly newsletter to keep consumers up to date on the industry. Use email connections to send out confirmations. Always work to build your email rolodex, and expand your digital network.

One of the toughest parts of learning how to trade successfully in any environment, is getting used to a change in language. When you start looking for opportunities to invest your hard-earned money with the hopes of growing your wealth, you’ll be presented with terms like forex, paper trading, penny stocks, and more, that you may not understand at first. Two of the most common terms you’ll hear are “bull” and “bear”.

Though neither of these two options sound particularly friendly, it’s worth noting that your trading strategy will change depending on whether the market is in a bull or bear state. Before you get started with a forex broker like easyMarkets, let’s take a look at what bear and bull investments should look like for you.

What is a Bear or Bull Market?

The terms bear and bull are regularly used to describe the current status of the stock market and how they’re doing in general. One animal highlights the fact that assets and currencies are currently increasing in value, and the other suggests that value is decreasing. Additionally, because the forex atmosphere, like many environments, is often determined by investor attitudes, the terms can also be used to define how people feel about the ensuing trends of the marketplace.

A bull market refers to a currency that’s on the rise on forex. It’s typified by a sustained increase in the earnings that you can get from trading certain currencies back and forth. Usually, when the market is bullish, investors have a lot of faith that the uptrend will continue and remain positive in the long-term. In this environment, things are overwhelmingly positive. Alternatively, bear suggest that the value in investing in a certain currencies is actually declining. The price of the money that you’re buying might be dropping because of changes in the current political landscape or issues with the overall economy in general. During a bearish environment, the economy starts to slow down and unemployment may be on the rise.

How to Prepare for Different Markets

While it’s not always possible to predict what kind of overall state the market will be in at any given time in forex, you can make sure that you’re always prepared for the worst. Assessing your capacity for risk and coming up with a strategy that’s suitable for use in any style of investment – no matter what it may might look like – will protect you from having significant losses in the long term.

After all, while it’s scary and often risky to invest in bearish markets, there are still opportunities if you know where to use your money and how to make the most of the fast-paced forex environment. Additionally, while bullish environments are generally more positive and welcoming overall, that doesn’t mean that they don’t come with challenges that today’s spenders need to be aware of. Understanding how your environment works in every scenario is the key to ensuring that you don’t lose more money than you win in the long-term.

Contrary to what customers think, shipping is often one of the hardest things that ecommerce businesses have to master. There’s pressure for them to do so, too. Based on average values calculated by the Baymard Institute from sources like Adobe, IBM, and SaleCycle, amounting to almost 70%, it’s shipping costs that are the lead hindrance to customer orders on ecommerce site. That means that a shipping-related issue is the number one reason for shopping cart abandonment.

What with the variety of products, sheer volume of orders, shipping options, and service areas to ship to, it’s understandable that for ecommerce entrepreneurs to worry about this area of their business. But here’s a secret that all ecommerce business owners should know: as long as you are willing to modernize the way you do your shipments, you’re guaranteed a consistent profit, higher conversion rates, and higher chances at customer retention. Pair your modernization efforts with some good old-fashioned elbow grease, coordination with your ecommerce staff, and a sharp sense of what customers need, and shipping will be less of a pain point and more of a golden opportunity.

To help you make the best of shipping, here’s a list of best practices that you should apply for your own ecommerce business. You’ll find valuable input about pricing, handling products, and pleasing your customers below.

1. Explore more than one method of order fulfillment. In ecommerce, it’s a reality that some products move faster than others. They may also demand shipments in higher volumes and different requirements for storage. Given the number of situations you have to deal with, and the difference in needs for order fulfillment, it’s worth a shot to ask for additional help from order fulfillment companies USA businesses work with. The services of a third-party logistics (3PL) provider may be just what you need to up your capacities for order fulfillment, inventory management, warehousing, and delivery. And if you don’t think your customers will mind the wait on certain products, you can also opt to drop ship from the product’s manufacturers.
2. Compel your customers to ship out more products, or products of higher value, with free or discounted shipping. As stated above, customers often balk at shipping costs enough to abandon their virtual carts. You can keep them from doing so—and at the same time, get them to spend more on your site—by enticing them with free or discounted shipping. It will serve you well to offer these services for a certain minimum amount in the shopping cart, such as free shipping for $50 worth of product.
3. Increase your prices to offset the cost of free or discounted shipping. If you think your prices are too low for you to profit off of free shipping, address this side of the equation: increase your product prices by a little. The prospect of free or discounted shipping is often attractive enough to customers to make them spend on products of higher value. Adjusting prices may help you achieve that sweet spot of increased sales, plus frequent shipments.
4. If free or discounted shipping are out of the question, then be upfront about your shipment pricing. You may not be making enough to justify free or greatly discounted shipping, and that’s okay. If you’re at the point that you still need to charge for shipping, make it a point to be transparent about what the costs will be. This will prevent shopping cart abandonment from customers who are bothered by high fees—or even worse, customers who feel deceived because they incurred hefty shipping costs without knowing exactly why. Help them prepare to pay an exact cost for shipping by offering a flat rate or a shipping calculator for their product volume. Customers are more likely to buy from you, even if you don’t offer free shipping, if they perceive you to be honest and helpful about pricing.
5. Sort your products properly before they’re packed off to the customers. For ecommerce businesses that have their own warehousing facilities, it would be good to revisit your stocking practices. Make sure that the staff deployed at the warehouse know to follow the first-in, first-out policy (FIFO), which means that the older products are shipped out before the newer ones. Also practice sorting products by size, material, level of fragility, and expiry date, so that they aren’t ruined before they even reach the customer. Finish these packages off by cushioning the products (with foam pads or bubble wrap), sealing them, and ascribing them a tracking number.
6. Get your customers’ feedback on their shipping experiences so that you know where exactly to improve. Lastly, pay attention to what your recipients say about their shipping experience with you. You can do this by sending them a survey to fill out after each completed order, asking them about the speed of shipment, the condition their product arrived in, and whether the whole experience was worth the price they paid. If you think they need to be motivated to send their feedback to you, incentivize them to do so by offering them a discount coupon or rewards points in return.

In summary, make sure that you’ve covered shipment pricing, logistics options, product handling, and the customer experience in your shipment operations. Taking care of these will mean that you have done justice to this aspect of ecommerce entrepreneurship.

In the last ten years we have seen a huge rise in the number of companies who are using reputation management consultants to help repair, improve and manage their online reputations. This has come about as more and more companies learn the importance of what a positive reputation can mean for their business and the success which they have. There are a number of benefits which these services offer a company and if you are looking to improve your online reputation, this may very well be an option that you should consider. When you do use a rep management firm, here are the benefits that you can count on.

Improved Reputation

Whether your online reputation is damaged, neutral or positive, the team at a reputation management company can still offer you a great chance to improve your online reputation on the whole. These experts know exactly what is needed in terms of helping you to increase the positivity of your reputation online and with a matter of months they will have made huge strides in this regard.

Increased Sales

If your business has a negative reputation online then it is going to directly impact your sales figures and it will put off many customers from buying your products or your services. It goes without saying then that once the reputation management consultants have improved and boosted your online rep, the consequence of this is going to be an upturn in sales. It is for this reason why so many businesses view the price of a service like this as an investment rather than a cost, because the increased sales which you see will cover whatever a rep management firm is charging.

Market Share

Sales aren’t just about putting money in the register, it is also about taking up market share from your competitors. This is another great benefit which businesses can count on when they use a reputation management company. Even if your competition are already investing in the management of their online reputation, at the very least you will be able to level the playing field and get back some of that market share which you have been losing as a result of this.

Marketing

Almost every company understands the power that marketing can have on their business but there is little point in launching a marketing campaign if you don’t have a great reputation online. In fact if you do have a poor reputation then all a marketing campaign is going to do is highlight exactly why customers shouldn’t use your business, the complete opposite of what you are actually trying to achieve.

Branding

Create a loyal brand will help you to grow as a business and increase your levels of success. A great online reputation will be essential in creating a great brand and that is another strong benefit which you can count on when you use the services of a reputation management company.

If you have a passion for fabrics and textiles then this is the post for you, we have the incredible Misha Kaura helping us to deliver some great tips on how you can turn your love of velvet, cotton, linen and wool into a business and launch yourself into this competitive industry. Misha built her business from the ground up, making mistakes and learning along the way, and this is why she is the perfect person to help you do exactly what she has done. Let’s get started then with some top tips on how to get into this industry.

Working Inside

If you don’t already have a position in a textiles company then this is going to be a great place for you to start where you can really learn how the industry works. The key before you launch a business is to have a full understand of how the industry operates and a position at any level will help you to do that.

Market Insights

You aren’t going to be able to launch a huge business offering every type of fabric and textile right away so it will be essential that you have a good understanding of the market early on. Look out for customer trends and areas to focus on so that you can be sure that your limited selection in the beginning will still be desirable.

Making Relationships With Sellers

The key to getting great deals on your raw materials will be strike up strong bonds and relationships with sellers. To do this you can visit trade shows, make cold calls and do whatever it takes to start speaking with sellers about what they can offer, what prices they have and what their logistical process is. The better relationships you have with these sellers the better chance you have of hitting the ground running when you launch.

Knowing Cash Flow

To build on the point about getting to know your market, you also need to have a solid plan of attack regarding your cash flow. There is little point in you investing a large amount of your capital in slow moving fabrics as this could restrict you from buying more of the hot sellers. Understand the importance of keeping the cash liquid and use that to plan your attack in terms of what fabrics you are going to buy in the beginning.

Think of Location

Getting the right location for your business isn’t easy so you’ll have to spend a lot of time on this if you want to break into the industry. A city center location may be great in terms of getting more customers in but your rent is going to b pretty high. An out of town location will be cheaper but you’ll have significantly less chance for customers coming in. Also consider the utilities you’ll need like water and good electrics for the machinery which you are going to use.

Do this hard work before you launch and you’ll have a much better chance of doing well once you have.