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8 Marketing Tips That Can Catapult Your Business Into Success

Growing a business takes time. There are some people who can make a lot of money in a short period of time, but most of the time, these are the people who have a large customer list and have been in business for a long time already.

But if you have neither, then this article will be particularly useful for you. Because inside this article, you will learn 8 great marketing tips that you can use to take your business to the next level. It won’t happen overnight, but with time and a steady focus, it will happen eventually. Let’s take a look at the first tip:

1) Generate leads

You will want to generate leads so that you can follow-up on these leads over and over again to make it easy to close the sale. It’s hard to sell your products in a small ad, therefore you want to generate a lead so that you can present your full sales presentation in future contacts with your prospects. Here’s the next tip:

2) Operate in a niche market

If you try to market to everyone, more than likely, you’re going to have poor conversion rates. If you can operate in a niche marketing and structure your message according to one kind of prospect, then you will have more success with your marketing efforts.

Niche marketing is all about separating yourself from your competitors and marketing to a specific kind of prospect. The more specified your marketing efforts are, the better your results will be when it comes to closing sales.

3) Create a free offer

Everybody loves things for free, so with a free offer, you give yourself the opportunity to generate a lead or inspire people to come into your store. And you don’t have to limit yourself on ways to apply this to your business. Your free offer can be a free report, a free consultation, a free sample of your product, and more. You want to mention this free offer in your ad to get as many people as possible to respond to it.

4) Use a variety of marketing tactics

You want to find multiple ways to get your message out in front of your prospect. You can do direct mail, yellow page advertising, newspaper advertising, press releases, joint ventures, val-pak advertising, and so much more.

The possibilities are endless and wherever you advertise, be sure to include your free offer to generate the most response.

5) Contact your current customers more often

You’re missing out on a lot of business if you’re not contacting your customers on a monthly basis. 80% of all business profits come from the backend, so this is why a strong backend marketing strategy is key.

You can send your prospects a free monthly newsletter, or simply coupons with special offers every month. You always want to find good reasons to contact your customers so that you don’t lose them to a rival competitor.

6) Promote one product a time

When contacting your customers, it’s best to focus on one product at a time. If you have a catalog of products that you sell, this is fine, but you should highlight one product at a time to your customers so that you don’t confuse.

Your opinion has weight in the eyes of your customers, so if you recommend something useful for them, they will take your word for it and purchase the product that you recommended. But recommending more than 1 similar product will only confuse them, so be sure not to do this.

7) Offer a money-back guarantee

You want to offer a money-back guarantee on all of your products. This will only increase your response rates and will inspire trust amongst your prospects. By offering a money-back guarantee on your products, it means that you stand behind all of your products, and it also lowers the barrier to making the sale.

8) Track everything

Testing and tracking is important because you want to know what is winning for you and what is not. This way you can cut out all the losers and only market the winners. This in turn will decrease your marketing costs while improving your profits. So testing and tracking is key.

Use these 8 tips to boost your business now while you still have the chance. They will prove to be very useful for you.

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How to Leverage Video to Market Your Business

It is reported that YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world, used by almost 47% of Australians. Given the enormous use of Search by consumers these days, these facts alone should convince you that video really should be a part of your marketing mix. If not, this article may convince you – plus it provides tips on how to really maximise video for marketing and make it work hard for you.

Don’t tell me SHOW me.

Apart from the cold hard facts, there’s the human element. Video is eye-catching, it can help you stand out from the crowd and draw in potential customers. Video can clearly define your business and in a succinct, much more interesting way then text. And importantly, video can bring faces, voices, personality and heart to your operation, while also demonstrating your authenticity. So if a picture speaks a thousand words, a video speaks a million!

Spread the word. Strike that… Spread the video!

Like any content, video can be shared easily to help spread the word about your products and services. Create a YouTube channel and embed your YouTube videos in your website, blog and all social channels. Links between your YouTube channel and website can boost your rank in search engine results, as can the added visitor count if your video encourages viewers to visit your website.

What Kind of Content?

Different types of content work for different types of businesses, here is a list of ideas to get you started:

  1. Success stories – bring case studies to life.
  2. A brief company intro or value proposition video.
  3. Product demonstrations (even for simple products).
  4. Interviews or Q&As with your CEO, clients, industry experts etc.
  5. Record any external conference or seminar presentations you give.
  6. Product reviews and testimonials – check out Bravo to capture user generated content.
  7. “How-to” videos or short tutorials, eg. if your business sells child safety equipment, create a video on how to child proof the home featuring your products.
  8. A video tour of your premises – if this acts as a selling point or benefit for customers, then show them.
  9. Introduce users to staff that have consumer contact, such as customer service – it’s nice to put a face to a voice.
  10. Record internal training presentations – this content could be valuable for both consumers AND staff. Important company announcements – don’t just post an update or press release.

What about production?

Your videos don’t have to be big Hollywood productions to be engaging and effective. In fact, you should focus more effort on video planning & marketing, than video production. You don’t need to use expensive camera equipment or even record in HD when for the web. It’s possible your web cam or smartphone will do the job just fine. And in terms of editing, YouTube offers its own free video editor, Windows Movie Maker is bundled with Windows, and iMovie with Macs.

Here are seven tips for creating your own videos:

  1. Short is sweet – and definitely no more than 5 minutes.
  2. Focus on first 10 seconds – engage viewers from the very start.
  3. Work to a topic guideline, not a script.
  4. Maintain a fairly fast pace to keep the content punchy and interesting to watch.
  5. Lighting is important. (Avoid windows behind you).
  6. Camera shy? Try Animoto or screen capture such as Ezvid.
  7. Include a call to action.

Share, post, blog, tweet, update…

Once you’ve created your video content promote it everywhere! Upload to video sharing sites – YouTube (see below), Blip.tv, Vimeo, Viddler, Metacafe – post on Facebook, tweet on you know where, share on LinkedIn. You can even (and should) embed videos in your email marketing. And encourage your staff to promote via their network and social channels. To reiterate, you should focus more effort on video marketing rather than video production.

Leverage YouTube – it’s free!

Nowadays YouTube is much more than an entertainment channel to watch funny cat videos or hear Harry announcing that Charlie bit his finger. It’s a powerful (and cost effective) communication tool so be sure to create a YouTube channel for your business. And like all your web content, your YouTube videos must be optimised.

  1. Give your video a title that includes your strongest keyword (relevant to the content).
  2. Complete the description with a short synopsis of what the video entails, including keywords and a link.
  3. Use tags that are true to the content of your video and include your business name too.
  4. Because consumers won’t necessarily be watching your video on your channel, embed your logo via YouTube’s Channel Settings (InVideo Programming).
  5. And maximise links to your website from your YouTube channel.

In summary if you run a business or manage the marketing for one, there’s a lot of compelling evidence suggesting that online video marketing should be a part of your marketing activity.

For more advice, or assistance with your marketing get in touch via our website or call 03 9504 6216.

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Additive and Subtractive Programs

The terms additive and subtractive bilingual education came into use in the last quarter of the 20th century as it became apparent that substantive differences existed between two major forms of bilingual education. The terms suggested totally different aims and goals. They are commonly attributed to Wallace Lambert, who used them in a 1975 publication. In their simplest definitions, the terms relate to the linguistic objectives of the program: to provide students with an opportunity to add a language to their communicative skill sets or, conversely, to insist that children participating in the program subtract their home language from active use and concentrate all efforts on rapidly learning and refining their English skills.This simple statement of differences between program types masks important attitudes and ideas that underlie the ways in which language diversity is viewed by school people and education policymakers. In this entry, these differences are explored. Other entries in this encyclopedia delve more deeply into related topics mentioned here. Factors affecting the choice: additive or subtractive? The choice of either a policy aimed at fostering and enhancing the child’s home language as part of the goals of bilingual education or one that seeks the opposite-abandoning home language use as quickly as possible-does not occur by chance.Such choices are rooted in underlying assumptions concerning the benefits, risks, utility, and cultural valuing of languages other than English in the wider society. Similarly, whether native speakers of English are included in these programs determines in part what the objectives of the program will be. In the main, children who are native speakers of English would not be involved in programs of subtractive bilingual education.When such children are involved, the programs are often referred to as two-way immersion programs, also known as dual-immersion programs, because the learning of the two languages occurs in both directions. This distinction does not always hold in n in other countries. Hence, the analysis below is limited to what is clearly the case in the United States.

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