5 Ways To Benefit From Customer Video Testimonials
For any business owner looking to attract and convert more visitors, one sure way is to utilize and implement video testimonials from satisfied customers. When used properly, these videos will make your website more visually appealing (and sticky!).
Getting more exposure
In today’s social media society, visibility is vital to being a leader among your competitors. A few short video testimonials can draw quite a bit of attention, which often times will encourage your visitors to share your content with others on sites like Facebook, Twitter, etc.
Not only will this help increase exposure across social media networks, it will also help your search engine rankings. This makes it easier for prospects to find your business, access your website and purchase your products and services.
Touching individuals in different ways
A video testimonial can easily answer a customer’s questions, almost acting as a visual form of a FAQ. This can provide both visual and audio reassurance of a company, its products, and its staff.
For some customers, a video testimonial adds credibility to the website and adds a personal, one-on-one experience.
Linking your videos to your social media properties
Websites that also leverage social media pages for their business can reap the benefits of these videos testimonials by showcasing clips on YouTube and Facebook for a double-dose of visibility. This can be another strategy used to gain more followers and momentum online.
Displaying important information above-the-fold
Some visitors prefer quick information when they visit a web page. Most people don’t appreciate pages of content and dozens of confusing links to navigate through.
Video testimonials, if used properly, can summarize common questions about:
- Pricing & billing;
- Discounts;
- Warranties;
- The company’s return policy.
Boosting credibility and putting your visitors at ease
Not only will these video testimonials serve as a visual source of information, but they also have the ability to put potential customers at ease. If a visitor has never used your company’s product or services before, this can boost your credibility and make them feel comfortable buying into your offering or simply reaching out directly for more information.
About the Author: Sean Rosensteel is the Head of Business Development at Bravo Video, a web-based platform that enables businesses to easily capture video from customers, users and fans – right over the web.
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5 Time Saving Systems Must Haves for the Small Business Owner
If you’re looking to grow you can’t do it all on your own. You just can’t. Your foundation must be laid so that you can be freed up to do your thing. You know, your thing? The thing that makes you money.
As much as we may look like Wonder Woman, or so as not to be sexist, Superman, and feel like them too, we cannot be a one person band and expect that the everything will just fall into place. It’ll fall alright, down, into bed, if you make it that far, from exhaustion.
A smart and successful small biz owner has back up, and I’d love to share my back up tricks honed from trial and error throughout the years that have saved me countless hours of unproductive work.
One of the best tips I’ve gotten to be constantly reminding ourselves of what is a time waster and what is a productive money making action for our day is from the wonderful business coach Jane Pollak, that goes like this: when creating your day to day tasks, use a green marker and mark which daily tasks are your business growth, money making tasks, and which are not. I usually make my list and then mark the moneymaking tasks with a green dot. If nothing else this will be a wake up call. Are you wasting way too much time on your proposals? There’s a system for that! Are you crunching all your numbers yourself for an hour a day? No need for that! Invoicing taking too long? There are a number of great programs for that.
Here’s my top 5 time saving and either free or really inexpensive systems, as I am a tightwad when it comes to these things… all designed to free you up so you can spend your day tackling the big stuff:
1) A really intuitive invoicing system
I use Freshbooks. Not only does it invoice really easily, but it sends them either by snail mail or email, does all kinds of cool numbers crunching, runs reports, allows you to send estimates that can convert to an invoice, and so much more. Bookkeeping — which I personally can’t stand to do so this forces me to do it in a fun and quick way — made easy, and quick. A nominal cost well worth the expense. Allows for customization as well
2) A proposal/Contract system
Which used to take me half a day to do — try Quotegine. It allows you to create, save, customize and re-use templates in a library, sends it out with a click of a button and allows for an e signature on your clients end so that they don’t even have to print out, excepting for themselves or mail, attach, or fax back. Just pressing a button lands it back in your hands within a fraction of the time it would take otherwise, allowing you to get going on your next project. Free up until a certain amount of clients, and again, allows you to white label it.
3) A CRM system
therwise known as a Contact Relationship Management System. Other wise known as a database. If you’re not already on Outlook, look no further than cloud based Highrise, run by the same cool, uber smart folks who created Freshbooks. If you are using your email contacts list as your database I might have to come over there and smack you. Highrise has all the bells and whistles you could ask for to allow you to keep on top of all of your prospects, clients and important business affiliates and contacts in an organized manner, create and schedule tasks and have them appear in your inbox when they come due, as a reminder to ‘get on that!’ It can also be synced with Freshbooks so that your whole client profile, jobs as well as the payments and invoicing are under one heading.
4) Housecleaning!
I know that this involves money, but again, if you are trying to be all things to all people including a family of 4 back home, something is going to cave if you’re working hard all day and then expected to come home and clean the house as well. Even if you bring someone in just once per month to do the heavy cleaning, or pay your kids to do it. A scary thought I know. The money you spend here will make itself up to you in ROI if you’re taking the time where you would have been under the bed cleaning dust bunnies to instead contact 3 more warm leads to invite them to lunch. Time much better spent. I’d give you the name of mine as a referral but am afraid she’d be spread too thin and not have time for me. Selfish, I know, but some things are more precious than others. I do know that the team at The Maids are great though. Ask for Melissa.
5) Social Media tools
I have a confession. Social media is not my biggest strength. Other than LinkedIn, I do it because I have to, not because I want to, and I make no bones about it to my clients, as they need to do it as well. What has made it tolerable for me has been a little tool called Onlywire, which allows me to share what you’re reading right here with a load of social media and bookmarking sites instead of spending oodles of time uploading things separately when I could be interacting with folks online and off. Great for the SEO.
Hope these help you be more efficient and use your time more effectively. Now run to that networking meeting!
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Small Business Cost Efficient Facebook Marketing Through Tools
Running a small business can sometimes leave little room for marketing, both in terms of budgeting and marketing efforts. One great source and channel to focus on in this case would be through Facebook. Now, how can you market your business in an effective way? One effective way is to use a Facebook campaign manager tool to take care of the job for you.
One such tool is Qwaya. This is one of only 30 companies around the world that has access to Facebook API, which makes it a reliable product which keeps your ads always updated to the latest standards. Let’s have a look how you can use a tool like this for your marketing.
First off, you can use Qwaya in order to create bulk ads. This features mean that if you provide a couple of different images, titles and bodies for ads, the system can create X amount of combinations that you can try out to see which one fits you the best. Many of these campaign tools comes in different packages and in Qwaya’s case you can with the premium account run up to 1000 ads per week.
One really important feature when it comes to Facebook ads, and any ads for that sake, is to conduct A-B testing. This means that you need to try out and tweak in order to find the best fitting ad for your products and ads. Qwaya offers an interface through which you can follow up on these ads and see how each of these campaigns worked out.
How do you know who should see your ad one their page? Well here is why A-B testing is so important! One suggestion is to try running the ads with a broad demographic group in mind. Based on this you can then see how is actually clicking in to your business fan page. More than often you’ll be surprised that presumptions don’t meet the real target group. This is what makes Facebook such an effective channel, as you have a large community full of potential customers to target directly.
Summary
Many companies have a strict view on how to market themselves through Facebook and often miss out to reach the right target audience. By using a campaign manager tool like Qwaya you are opened up to an cost efficient way of promoting your company and products. By A-B testing different ads and tightly following up on these, you’ll soon find your real audience and can significantly increase your Facebook presence and make a difference in sales. For more specific information about the features in Qwaya, please look at www.qwaya.com
About the Author: Craig Robinson works with content for Qwaya and is also a Facebook marketing strategist. Besides writing for this Facebook ads tool, he also tries to be as active as possible in forums about social media and social context.
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Photo Credit: linh.ngân
5 Things You Can Do to Start Driving Traffic to Your Site Fast
These days, getting people to your website is key to make sales. Even if you do not sell directly online, your website will often serve as a first port of call and your main marketing tool to capture prospects that search for what you are offering.
The trouble is, all this fails if no one visits your site. You can have the best online presence possible but unless someone actually sees it, it’s pointless.
Gaining traffic to your site is not an easy task. Traditional and the most effective methods such as SEO are quite time consuming, yet you might want to drive people to your site much faster than this.
Luckily, there is a number of things you can do to make this happen.
1. Use Google Places
Setting up a Google Places account should be the first thing for any business to do, regardless of their website promotion activities. However, this can be used to gain visitors to your site as well.
Google Places offers small businesses a chance to create a local listing for themselves. Your listing will only show for anything related to what you are offering and only in your location, which is perfect for most companies. Also, the Places listing will rank in Google much faster than your website and depending on your industry, it might even start showing on page one of the search engine relatively fast.
Moreover, your Google Places profile, which is very easy to set up, can include your website address, pointing people to it for more information.
2. Submit Your Blog Posts to Reddit
Nowadays, a website must have a blog. It is the most effective way for you to add new content and build an image of yourself as an expert in your field. But there is more that you can do with your blog than just create posts for it, you can use it to quickly drive traffic to your site.
Submit your blog posts to Reddit, a social bookmarking site, known for thousands of users who are there for one purpose only, to discover new content. Submission process is easy and the traffic spikes after you do so are incredible.
3. Promote Your Business With Online Press Releases
Press releases are great for many things, from announcements to raising the awareness of your business. However, they can also help you gain website visitors.
A well written press release can attract many people to your business and if it gets picked up by the press, even more people will find out about you.
By including your website address in your press release you increase your chances of getting visitors to your site from there.
4. Use social media to drive traffic to your site
Sites like Twitter and Facebook are the best places to find people interested in what you are selling. And, it is a known fact that people like to click on links from those sites. Therefore, start using social media and promote your website there as well. Include your web address in your profile but also post links to your latest posts and so on.
5. Submit Your Site to Business Directories
Just like with Google Places, you can create profiles for your business on various other business listing sites and promote your website there. Including a link usually goes beyond what you get with a free listing though so you might have to spend a little but in the end, it will be all worth it.
Promoting a website is not an easy task, however, as you can see, there are a lot of things you can do quite easily to start receiving traffic to your site. Of course, none of them will replace the long term value of good SEO but in a short term they will help you to get things moving with your site.
About the Author: Pawel is a writer and publisher of business books for beginners and through his publications helps newcomers to start and build a successful business.
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Build a Strong Online Presence for Your Business Even on a Budget
To be or not to be part of the online world? I believe in 2012 we’re well past this question. Almost any former offline-on-purpose SME has moved towards the internet at some point. We are aware of the massive benefits it brings even to hyper local small businesses.
One topic is still to debate (and you’re invited to state your point below the post): what elements do we really need in order to establish a successful online presence? Is the combination website+blog+social media necessary and sufficient?
Well, it’s simpler than that. Little goes a long way and this article will prove it’s neither difficult nor expensive to establish a competitive and robust online presence for your business even if you are not a web pro.
Why do small businesses need an online persona?
During my years of work in the small business field, I have met entrepreneurs who were internet savvy but still hesitated to bring their own companies visible online. There were two main arguments they stayed aside:
- the costs they thought to be involved
- fear of not being able to manage the online signals with tact (“if you can’t say something wise, it’s better not to speak at all”)
I admit to find the second assessment very common sensed and legitimate. Facebook, Google +, Twitter, LinkedIn, this is already an immense charge of signals. It’s best to find a certain degree of online involvement that you can handle with ease, otherwise you will be like the high street shop with no customers, well placed but poorly managed.
There are certain benefits for any brick and mortar business to go online:
1. It’s a sure way to build word-of-mouth reputation and trust, as part of your marketing strategy
2. Opens new sales opportunities and automatizes the process
3. Helps you grow the contacts portfolio and do business networking
4. Saves money on offline advertising.
Customers don’t use yellow pages or the local business directory anymore, they search the internet to find your business. Moreover, peer reviews are more and more a decisive factor when it comes to choosing where to buy from. Your company cannot miss this.
The online kit you really need
I argue that a website is not mandatory for a small business who wishes to go online. There are sure fire ways to get noticed and become popular without having to maintain a standalone portal, which, in many cases, turns into a brochure-like website. The following elements build up a reasonable online presence for your business.
E-mail address. Snail mail is a thing of the past, so you need an e-mail to appear on printed advertisements, business cards, flyers etc. It can be on a public e-mail domain such as Gmail or Yahoo, though it’s more professional to have it on your own domain. You can then go advanced and build e-mail lists for newsletter marketing using mailing management services (AWeber or Mail Chimp).
Online surveys. Occasionally, you will need to test variables such as customers’ satisfactory level or business demographics. Perform this research on the web rather than on paper, so you can disseminate surveys effectively and minimize the hassle of filling them in. An online survey builder is an effective tool for building and managing your surveys remotely, without needing a website of your own. You can send your surveys through e-mail, instant messaging or social media and have the submissions sent directly into your inbox.
A social media profile. LinkedIn is great for B2B connections, while Facebook is the thing for B2Cs. It’s best to focus effort on a single social network at first and see how much time you are willing to invest. Always monitor the level of user interaction and adjust your messages accordingly.
Google Alerts. Set one with the name of your company to see who has mentioned you publicly and maybe reply to it. You can also have alerts with the main terms your business is centered upon. This way, you will be aware of all the live discussions and blog posts over these topics that take place on the internet.
Google Places. Your online promotion will largely benefit from local listing of the company on the world’s major search engine. All you need is to sign up a Google account (it takes one minute) and register for Google Places: http://google.com/local/add. You will gain a business page on Google, where you can even run promotions for your customers.
All the investment involved in the above tasks is a couple of hours a day. Of course, at some point you will need a delegate to deal with the daily notifications on the social networks and manage your online image. However, you will certainly find the ROI was indeed worth it.
What are your experiences in going online? Please share your thoughts below!
About the Author: Laura Moisei writes for 123ContactForm web form builder that helps small businesses get in touch with their customers. Laura is a dedicated blogger and small business consultant with a passion for technology.
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Deputizing Your Online Customers
One of the newest marketing trends to emerge from the social media and crowdsourcing craze is the ability for companies, especially small, local businesses, to deputize their customers and make them brand ambassadors. Indeed, this is the unspoken objective of most location-based networks. Companies use sites like Foursquare and Gowalla in order to recruit loyal customers into becoming their own in-house (or, in this case, out-house) marketing team. Here are a few ways that savvy businesses are taking advantage of social media in order deputize their customers:
Crowdsource and deploy
Use crowdsourcing sites like Yelp in order to cull your most loyal customers and then recruit these customers to become mobile advertisements. Take the case of Jared from Subway. A one-time customer turned into a spokesman/mogul for the company. This kind of transformation is even easier these days due to social media. If need be, you could even fund public speaking training for particularly enthusiastic customers and have them represent you at town hall meetings and conventions.
Viral video contests
Use YouTube and other sites on which people share viral videos and take advantage of user generated content. Many companies sponsor contests in which consumers and fans make videos, infographics, and slogans for a small business. These create a viral buzz that in some cases can be more powerful than TV advertisements. Microblogging sites like Twitter have streamlined this process to an incredible extent. Many contemporary marketing campaigns eschew television entirely and focus solely on creating viral content for the Internet. This is sometimes indistinguishable from guerilla marketing, which tends to avoid traditional media outlets in order to make a brand or business seem underground or under-the-radar. This strategy works well with younger demographics.
Find an admin for fan pages
Recruit customers to be the admin of a Facebook fan page. These pages are building loyalty for many small businesses. Deputizing a customer to actually run the page increases the chances that there will be interaction on a local level. Your Mayor on Foursquare would be another example of a customer admin. These brand ambassadors are invaluable to a small, growing business in need of word-of-mouth.
These are just a few ways to build your small business brand by using the lifeblood of your company—the customers—in order to create loyalty. There are more ways than ever to deputize your customers to become independent and enthusiastic marketers. Use viral videos, social media, and crowdsourcing to make a buzz for yourself in your local community.
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10 Ways to Achieve LinkedIn Failure
LinkedIn is a rapidly evolving social media platform that caters more exclusively to business individuals than do Facebook or Twitter; especially, business-to-business (B2B) opportunities. You most likely know that. Most of those people want to prosper with LinkedIn marketing and generate new leads, business, or career options. What you may not know is how profoundly you can fail on LinkedIn as a super-busy entrepreneur or small business owner. It’s simple! Just follow these 10 simple steps.
1. Don’t fill in your Profile Summary section
This is vital to failure on LinkedIn. Lots of people want to show up in People searches, but not a radical like you. Leave that Summary portion blank since it is the key area that the LinkedIn search, and Google for that matter, index to evaluate about your value. Who wants it? Invisibility rules!
2. Restrict who can contact you
People can be downright bothersome, so keep your configurations so that you’ll minimize contact with them. Go to your privacy controls on the Settings tab and pick the most minimalizing restrictions, like switching off your activity broadcasts (you’re not doing them anyway!), making sure only you can see your activity and networks, and guaranteeing that you snoop other profiles incognito. Victory is yours.
3. Put your current job only
Reality says that no one is worried about your past work history anyhow, so just post your current employment. Keep in mind the KISS principle, so keep it simple and short and avoid using repetitive phrases that these SEO types call ‘keywords’. By uploading only one job, you won’t have to worry about having to mess around with the mundane writing of keywords in your former roles either.
4. Don’t post a photo
Pictures are for models. As a programmer, consultant or other business pro your work speaks for itself and your face ain’t your money-maker, so screw the personal comfort that humans since birth seem to feel when they see a real person’s face behind the computer lingo. This is business, not warm and fuzzy socialization!
5. Avoid References
These are fabricated and everyone knows that, so why make an effort. Who cares if LinkedIn references really hyperlink back to the referrer for effortless confirmation of who’s doing the talking? If I ask other business joe schmoes for references, they’ll just want something else from me, and who has the free time?
6. Don’t accept just any connection
Hold your contacts close to your heart and only have that handful of network associations that you presently do business with, that way you can contact any of them with an inquiry and not feel bad about it. What good can a large number of connections do for you anyhow, they will just bug you for their little jobs you have no interest in at all. It’s not as if LinkedIn functions like Google and those connections are like backlinks that boost your search relevance to get on page 1 when your keywords are– Ouch! No keywords written into our profiles in an understandable manner.
7. Don’t show your work
LinkedIn offers Applications for you to post more material about you, supposedly to distinguish you from other professionals. The “theory” is that when people get to your profile, you stick out by already showing what you flourish at via slide presentations, case studies, video (ah-hem!) et cetera. Balderdash! Just something else to maintain. Why put something up that only 10 or 20 people might read or look at.
8. Groups are for losers
Subject matter interest groups abound on LinkedIn, from job search groups to industry verticals. Who has the time to pay attention to a few “professionals” spout off about one subject or another and post links to their blogs to develop conversations. Besides, why must I share my valuable knowledge about my industry for FREE? I’m not crazy! I get paid to deliver expert discourse. Damn straight!
9. Fill it out and quit it
The allure of a LinkedIn profile or any site is that once you go ‘live’, you are finished with it for good. The more you alter it the more you can upset your search engine ranks, no? That is the perfect motto for LinkedIn implosion. Don’t you wish you thought of it? Changing stuff around requires a lot of time to boot. Post the dang site and be done with it.
10. SPAM your contacts
If you’ve got a few contacts, you can make it even fewer by making persistent inquiry or pitches to buy your product or service or go to your site. Contacts will leave you faster than if you attempted to eliminate them, because they’ll do it in mass, so send a few overly smarmy emails each week and your LinkedIn demise will be finished.
The truth is: you’re not striving to fail on LinkedIn. You desire to succeed as well and create more LinkedIn business leads and use LinkedIn as a bona fide advertising tool for your website, but perhaps you just don’t know how. If you’re like a lot of small business owners, however, and can look at yourself under the microscope and see any of the Top 10 LinkedIn Failure Methods explained above in your talk or actions, perhaps it’s time to question assumptions and transform your approach. It’s opposite day and this ain’t Seinfeld, so have a look at what NOT to do, and do the opposite and then watch your LinkedIn statistics soar and your telephone start to ring.
About the Author: If you actually want to SUCCEED on LinkedIn, check out LinkedIn Profile Optimization help by Smart Company Growth, a company owned and operated by Karl Walinskas to provide unique lead generation tools to white collar professionals. He’s authored Getting Connected Through Exceptional Leadership and many, many articles published in print and online.
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Marketing for Small Businesses on YouTube
All small businesses these days require a web presence if they are going to get by on on anything but walk-in clients and still, internet presence is a vital source of proof of the business authenticity. Those who want to broaden their companies online also know that video clips of any sort are usually an advantage for websites. It stimulates stickiness or prolonged view time on the website, offers value and entertains the viewer if it’s at all good, and is positively loved by the search engines — Google, Yahoo, Bing, and all the particular niche engines.
Using YouTube Video to Promote Your Business
No dialogue of web video could be complete without mentioning the king of all video hosting sites, YouTube. If you’re swimming with the seals off the coast of South Africa, you should to know about the sharks. Well, suppose in your small business realm, you could be the shark as opposed to the seal? Look at the video below to find out how.
The video above was inspired by an article I read at marketingprofs.com concerning marketing on YouTube. It lists various business examples of businesses that creatively and innovatively exploited YouTube to get viral and dramatically increase sales.
I explained Executive Video Interviews on Skype for small business marketing, in which in 30 minutes you can make a refined business interview video from your own office or house without any business disruption. Find out how you can affordably cultivate branding videos for your business using this method, and take a look at the growing list of videos in our portfolio for happy customers.
So how are you using YouTube or online video to propel sales to your business? Comment your creativity below.
About the Author: Karl Walinskas is the CEO of Smart Company Growth, a business development firm that helps small to mid-size professional service firms builds competitive advantage in an online world of sameness. He is author of numerous articles and the Smart Blog on leadership, business communication, sales & service, public speaking and virtual business, and Getting Connected Through Exceptional Leadership, available in theSmartShop. Get your FREE LinkedIn Profile Optimization eBook & Video Course, Video Marketing video and course, or Mastermind Groups e-course & video now.
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3 Essential Social Media Optimization Tips for SMEs
Having an active Social Media presence can make a big difference to small and medium sized business, especially in sectors where companies rely on word of mouth for a lot of their custom.
1. Set up an Official Google+ business profile
Utilising Social Media to promote your company can be a very effective way to increase its visibility and market the goods and services that it has to offer to millions of potential customers. Google+ business profiles are set to become very popular as they combine the advantages of Social Media marketing with the power of the world’s most popular search engine. The number of votes that you receive from other users will help to improve the position of your page in results when people search using keywords that are relevant to your business. For this reason, it is well worth taking the time to make your Google+ page both informative and entertaining, to ensure that people are encouraged to visit on a regular basis and give it their seal of approval. Status updates also feature in Google search results now, providing companies with another opportunity to appear in search engine results pages (SERPs).
2. Branding your Facebook Business Page
Many companies have already taken advantage of the opportunities that this extremely popular network has offered them to promote themselves to consumers across the globe at a very low cost. However, simply creating a page and including a few details about your firm and what it has to offer is just the starting point when using Facebook. Updating your page on a regular basis is crucial if you expect repeat visitors and the inclusion of eye-catching images and informative videos will help to ensure that people have a reason to come back. It is a good idea to run a feature on specific products or services every so often as this will help to make sure that your page remains of interest to visitors and will give you the chance to showcase some of the things that your company has to offer. Including a link to your corporate website is obviously important and whilst most companies choose their home page, you can link to any page on your site that you wish. Use visual elements, including graphics that match the layout of your website, to help give a sense of professionalism and brand identity to the page.
3. Interaction
One of the biggest advantages that Social Media has over static websites is the ability to interact with potential customers that it offers businesses of all sizes. Consumers are much more likely to buy from a company that they already know and trust and it is possible to build a rapport with people on Social Media networks by answering their queries promptly and engaging them in discussions about your company’s products. The Facebook Notes application enables companies to add articles on a regular basis, which is a good idea if you wish to build up a following. Establishing yourself as an expert in a particular field by offering free advice and tips is an excellent way to attract new customers, as people are keen to do business with firms that they perceive as helpful and knowledgeable. Competitions are another way to attract visitors, who may well turn into valued customers in the future.
About the Author: Emma Tomlinson is the Head of Retail at Smart Traffic, a leading SEO company based in Bristol delivering successful campaigns to both SMEs and major brands
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