Driving Sales

Getting More Bang From Your Business Blog

In what seems like the blink of an eye, blogs have risen to the forefront of the online landscape as a powerful and personal tool for businesses. Quickly and cheaply, a blog enables you to reach out to prospective customers, create buzz for products, services and ideas, and enrich understanding and appreciation for what you have to say and offer. 

As easy as blogs are to set up, seed with content and update, using them to build trust, visibility and mutually rewarding relationships takes a host of ingrediants and techniques that add up to initial and ongoing success. Here's a few choice tips that can make the process of blogging to build your business more productive.

Make the title of your post a "grabber" that will get people to stop and take notice. "Canned Advertising Kills" was the title of our recent post on the low readership and recall of generic, recycled advertising. We could have called it "People Don't Pay Attention to Uninteresting Ads," but the "grabber factor" was missing in action.

As a rule, brevity is a blog's best friend. More people are drawn to blog posts that offer them something useful, entertaining or interesting in a "snack-size" portion than those that read like a State of the Union Address.

Write "open-ended posts." By not structuring every post with a beginning, middle and end, you encourage others to jump in and add to the discussion. This increases participation in your blog and the growth of an engaged community of potential customers and partners. Sometimes all it takes to open the lines of communication are ending a posting with a simple "What do you think?"

Link out to other blogs as often as possible and comment on other blogs when you have something to contribute. Nurturing relationships is one of the most reliable ways to expand your community and build traffic to your blog.

Be committed and consistent in your blogging. Blogging daily may not be a realistic goal, but once a week should be a minimum and more is better.

For more ideas to drive sales check out archives or visit Ambit Advertising and Public Relations.

Gaining Business in a Sour Economy

To market or not to market during a recession - that is the question.

The straightforward, historically-proven answer is:

When the economy dips, opportunity knocks for those who view marketing as an investment, not an expense.

It has been demonstrated again and and again that businesses that have expanded their marketing during downturns positioned themselves to benefit when the upturn occurred.

Kellogg's, Campbell Soup, Coca-Cola, Pillsbury, Levi Strauss and Chevrolet are just a few familiar companies that can vouch for the benefits of maintaining or increasing their ad budgets during recessions.

The fact is, advertising during a downturn provides an ideal window of opportunity to reach new customers and re-energize your existing customer base; build brand equity and get your name recognized; and make inroads on your competitors who have cut their advertising.

Ambit can work with you to:

• Make your marketing budget more efficient by merging social marketing opportunities with your traditional advertising and public relations.

• Refocus your marketing messages to be more responsive to changing consumer needs during the recession.

• Find new places and ways to promote your business and gain exposure.

• Explore partnerships with other companies or sponsors who would benefit from reaching the same audience as you.

Why wait for better days when you can raise your visibility and sales results now? For strategic marketing ideas designed to bring you real bottom-line breakthroughs in difficult times, contact us today at (954) 568-2100.

For more ideas to drive sales check out archives or visit Ambit Advertising and Public Relations.

When the Economy Gets Tough, the Tough Get Marketing

Remember when you were a kid lobbying your parents for permission to chase your next adventure? The last words you wanted to hear were "let's wait and see," which you correctly interpreted as "permission denied."

Ironically, that wait-and-see attitude, passed down from mom and dad to a legion of cautionary economic and business observers,  is keeping many anxious marketers from pursuing opportunities that are theirs for the taking.

Instead of playing the perennially unsatisfying "waiting game," consider these sound reasons to zig while so many marketers are zagging during the economic downturn.

Big Fish, Smaller Pond. As companies cut marketing budgets and wait for better days, your opportunity to stand out in a smaller field of active competitors can increase dramatically. Less marketing clutter translates into a more direct connection between you and your audience, which can have an immediate impact on your sales performance.

What's more, your investment in marketing during a transitional time can swing brand awareness and preference your way for a gain in market share that holds steady even after the economy recovers.

Shake up your marketing mix. While opportunities to do business exist in this tough economy, "business as usual" doesn't. Success goes to those who take a fresh look at their marketing dollars and find innovative ways to get more out of less.

By redirecting a percentage of your budget to technology assisted marketing tools like email promotions, search engine optimization techniques, Google Adwords, and business blogging, you can tap into more cost-efficient channels of delivering your messages and expanding the influence of your traditional advertising and public relations efforts.

One final word of parental caution: For the best results, use these new tools wisely with guidance from marketing people who know how to blend technology and creativity to impact your bottom line. If you don't, as mom and dad use to say, "don't come crying to us."

For more ideas to drive sales check out archives or visit Ambit Advertising and Public Relations.   

  

Hungry for Web Site Traffic? Feed a Search Engine

Web sites are like faces; everybody has one. Which is why it's so easy to be just another face in the online crowd: anonymous, overlooked and unappreciated. 

So what can you do to draw attention and traffic that makes your Web site a source of curiousity, customer conversions and sales? The answer can be summed up in a four-word rallying cry of self-preservation: "Feed the search engines."

If you're new to the ways of search engine optimization (SEO), or just haven't gotten around to implementing the basic necessities, here are four simple things you can do right away that can make a major difference.

Identify your keywords. Singling out those select, highly-popular keywords that search engine users type in to explore your particular category every day is a vital part of creating effective, traffic-building content for your Web site. Google has a keyword tool that will show you the average number of keyword searches matching your category online so you can fine-tune content to include the most searched for, relevant words on your Web site.

Install Google Analytics on your Web Site. Many of the mysteries of who is visiting your Web site and how they're finding you can be solved with this free tool. How much traffic is your site getting? What portion of it is coming from Google, Yahoo or MSN? What portion of it is coming from referring Web sites? What keywords are people using to discover you? Put Google Analytics to work and start getting the answers you need to make your site more search friendly for prospective customers.

Think global, act local. Even on the world wide web, local coverage can be your springboard for greater visibility and business. Local directories and search submissions are a great way to increase your rankings and results. Google has an excellent "Local Business Center" that lets you put your business on a map, get customer reviews and more. You may also want to investigate and take advantage of some of the many other free and paid for local directories that you can register your site on.

Distribute your press releases online. You can maximize your Web site's exposure by using an online distribution service such as Send2Press.com to syndicate your press release at a local, regional or national level. When your release, which includes links back to your Web site, gets syndicated out to other Web sites, those sites include an inbound link to you, increasing your site's relevance in search engine rankings.

For more ideas to drive sales check out archives or visit Ambit Advertising and Public Relations.  

Rise and Shine Online: A Multi-Pronged Approach to Business Exposure

Thanks to advances in technology, the opportunities to forge productive connections with customers and prospects online have never been greater.  So what's the secret to building relationships, producing leads and orders, and increasing quality business exposure? The simple answer is this: Never miss a chance to let people know who you are, what you think, and what you're doing.

To get your name, brand, news and ideas in front of the groups and people you want to reach and influence,  commit to a multi-pronged approach to online communication that uses every available means to achieve your objectives.

Here's four core tactics that can start a buzz and bring you attention and results that pay dividends over the long haul.

Join in on forums and discussions. Regularly exchanging views with potential customers in various online communities can earn you and your business the "insider" status that leads to bigger things. Add insightful comments to blog postings, answer a question raised by another member of a forum, post a link to a resource on your Web site or blog.  It all adds up to stronger lines of communication and more possibilities for doing business.

Put your press releases online. Each time you send a significant release to the media, maximize your potential exposure by including online distribution services, such as Send2Press.com. At the same time, add the release to the media room of your Web site to establish an official and robust repository of all news and information relating to your company.

Post articles online.  Add original content to your blog or Web site and invite readers to comment. Take opportunities in your everyday business communications to encourage people to link to specific articles of interest.

Start a Facebook business page. Having a Facebook business page is like having an e-mail database of super-interested contacts, only with one major difference. With Facebook, you're providing the tools for them to stay connected, be engaged, personalize their communications, and be ambassadors of your brand wherever they go.

For more ideas to drive sales check out archives or visit Ambit Advertising and Public Relations.

Potent PowerPoint Presentations in Five Easy Pieces

With its ease of use as a presentation tool,  PowerPoint can be a pleasant, eye-catching visual aid or a weapon of mass distraction overflowing with text, charts, stats and images. (Admit it. We've all sat through the mind-numbing pain of an overstuffed presentation while our imaginations wandered off on a mental vacation to a beach in Barbados.)

If you've done your share of PowerPoints through the years, you know that "less is more" and that trying to jam too much onto your slides will guarantee your own slide into the abyss of audience indifference. Fortunately, focusing on five key components of the PowerPoint experience can not only save you from bombing, but lift you to that elite plateau were presenter and presentation come together in the most crowd-pleasing way possible. 

1.) Keep it simple. While visual effects have their allure, the most effective PowerPoint presentations feature easy-to-understand charts and graphics that support what the speaker is saying. Keep text to five words or less per line and no more than five lines per individual slide.

2.) Edit, edit, edit. When you've drafted your PowerPoint slides, put them aside for awhile, then revisit them with your overall objectives and audience fresh in mind. If any words or images strike you as unnecessary, confusing or off target, edit until you've stripped away all the clutter. Your presentation will look and communicate better and so will you. 

3.) Don't mimic your PowerPoint. The surest way to lose an audience is to not make eye contact with them for long stretches of time while you redundantly read, word for word, what's on your slides. PowerPoint works best when you've prepared remarks that expand and elaborate on what appears on the screen while you directly address your audience.

4.) Use numbers selectively. It can be tempting sometimes to heavily season your slides with numbers and statistics that support your message. Not so fast. Too many numbers and figures can overwhelm your viewers and neutralize their intended impact. A better approach is to package most of your statistics in printed handouts for more thorough digestion at a later time.

5.) Hold off on handouts until the end. Your audience's attention is already split between watching and listening to you and viewing the PowerPoint slides that support your message. Unless it's crucial that people read a certain handout while you're presenting, things will go a lot smoother if you distribute printed materials after you're done.

For more ideas to drive sales check out archives or visit Ambit Advertising and Public Relations.

 

Inspect Your Copy for Sizzle and Substance

You've written some copy or you're reviewing copy written by someone else. You want it to get read, to make a connnection with your audience, to spark their interest and move them to action. It's not brain surgery, right? Just words to deliver a message.

Here's the challenge: If your copy is confusing, uninteresting or just plan irrelevant to your reader, it will not only fail on its mission, but it will make it harder the next time you try and get through to your audience. The karma of copywriting works essentially like this:

• Producing vague, weak, meaningless copy will make prospective customers turn a blind eye to your current and future communications.
• Producing clear, memorable, persuasive copy will keep your audience tuned in and ready to take the ride with you each time you have something to say.

Books and seminars abound on how to incease your copy's ability to grab attention, cultivate interest and motivate action.  But by conducting this quick 5-point inspection each time you review copy in development, you'll have a process for making adjustments (here's where the "surgery" comes in) that can add up to a higher-impact, results-oriented message.

1) Does your copy pay off your headline? On average, five times as many people read headlines as read body copy, so crafting an attention-getting headline significantly increases the chances of your ad accomplishing its goal. But not if you drop the ball and fail to deliver what the headline promises. If your headline is "Start Your Healthcare Career Today," the copy should spell out the who, what, where and how of swiftly launching a healthcare career. If it doesn't, you've duped the reader and they will hold it against you.

2) Is your copy compelling? Keeping things simple and factual isn't enough to draw the reader in and create real interest in your message. Find fresh ways to say routine things, be a storyteller, appeal to the reader's emotions, needs or desires, and make your copy crackle with imagery, rhythm and clarity. It's not about being clever or "cutesy," it's about presenting your message in a way that generates enthusuasm and makes a strong connection to your audience's self-interests.

3) Is your message easily understood? A lot of copy challenges the reader to sort out what's being said by leading them through an obtacle course of wordplay, puns, unnecessary adjectives, redundancies, run-on sentences and technical jargon. Remember: Your job isn't to show how clever or knowledgeable you are, it's to speak the language of your audience and remove all obstacles to getting your message across to them. Keep it short, sweet and effortless to digest.

4) Does your copy persuade and motivate?  Crisp, reader-friendly copy is a big step in the right direction, but unless you write convincingly about the sales points that will motivate your readers to buy a product or service, it's all for nothing. Make sure your copy is as sales-minded as it is communication-minded by knowing your customers and what's important to them, explaining logically why they need what you're offering, writing about benefits (not features), and asking them to take a specific action. 

5) Is your copy relevant? It's easy to forget sometimes that the purpose of advertising copy is to communicate ideas and information about a product or service that's of value to the reader. Going on about yourself, your business or your achievements is a self-indulgent waste of time when what your reader really cares about is what they need, want or desire.  Stay relevant by uncovering the reasons why your best prospects would want to buy what you're offering and place 100 percent of your emphasis on how they will come out ahead by doing business with you.

For more ideas to drive sales check out archives or visit Ambit Advertising and Public Relations.

Three Big Keys to Choosing the Right Marketing Firm

From advertising and public relations agencies, to interactive and social marketing firms, to some mixture of all of the above, the options for businesses looking for support in achieving their marketing goals are endless.

Unless you decide to just "go with your gut," there's no real shortcut to researching a potential marketing firm's capabilities, professionalism, body of work, roster of contented clients, and price structure. Once you've narrowed the playing field to a promising few, however, there are three key elements that your final choice should encompass. If they lack any one of these "big three" move on to the others and don't stop until you have a winner.

1) Chemistry.  Effective marketing campaigns come from working closely with smart, talented people who believe in your vision, are passionate about your success, and become a partner in building your business. There's no getting around it -- chemistry is key to making great things happen as a shared commitment creates a mutually rewarding relationship and produces marketing that has a major impact. It's a philosophy of working and winning together.

2) Creativity. Instead of trying to outspend your competition, invest your time and effort in outsmarting them. Sure, a huge budget is nice, but it's no guarantee of success. The only thing you can really rely on to get a competitive edge is sound creative strategies.  Your marketing firm should have the ability to get your target audiences attention by packing substance and orignality into every message. Whether it's an ad, website, email, commercial or billboard, look for a consistent track record of creating memorable, cut-through-the-clutter work.

3) Results. All work -- from scrupulous research to eye-catching creative to innovative marketing methods -- should have two fundamental purposes:

• To help your business and paying customer base grow
• To bring you the top-of-mind recognition that builds long-term success.

Measure a prospective marketing firm's abilities by the results they achieve for their clients. When all is said and done, it's the only criterion that counts.

For more ideas to drive sales check out archives or visit Ambit Advertising and Public Relations.

R U Using SMS 2 Market?

If you sent someone a text message recently, welcome to the club. According the Nielsen Company, 77% of U.S. mobile subscribers used Short Message Service (SMS), otherwise know as "text messaging," by the end of 2007.

As SMS has grown to become a popular mode of personal communication, it is also emerging as an exciting new way for marketers to reach and engage targeted, on-the-go audiences quickly and efficiently. Several studies have found that by using SMS, advertisers are getting recall rates of more than 50% and open rates of 85%. Those are excellent results by any standard, but attaining them requires an understanding of how SMS works and what its strengths and weaknesses are as a marketing platform.

Here are a few "get smart" tips to put your  SMS marketing efforts on the right track.

Take time to target your audience.  Whether by consumer interest, geographical location, or carrier-supplied subscriber demographics, it's essential to the success of your SMS campaign to target your message to your audience. While "one size fits all" marketing is a bad approach in most situations, it's especially ill-suited to the highly personal world of SMS. Delivering a meaningful personal message that's contextually relevant to your audiences' search or opt-in content is the only sure route to SMS acceptance and results.

Choose your words wisely.   In SMS marketing, the visual aspects of your message give way to pure text content with no fonts, sizes or colors to choose from and only 160 characters to get your point across. Under these challenging circumstances, crafting a message that is relevant, direct and with a clear call to action is absolutely critical. (Keep in mind: If you go over the character limit, your intended receiver will get a disjointed communication broken into multiple messages and possibly incure additional costs for more than one text message.)

Sweeten the SMS experience. While SMS starts with text and text only, that can be a "jumping off point" to deepen the customer connection and leverage the initial response to further interaction. By using the text message as a bridge to another medium such as email, voicemail, mobile web, or video, you can engage your customer and lead them to a richer experience that culminates in a sale or other commitment. One SMS platform that works particularly well is to create a short ad with the option to reply with a keyword for additional information that leads the customer to participate in games or quizes and receive coupons or special offers.

For more ideas to drive sales check out archives or visit Ambit Advertising and Public Relations.

Taking Your Blog From Wallflower to Life of the Party

You remember what a wallflower is. It's that person who gravitates to the periphery of things, lingers in the shadows, blends in with . . . the walls.

The life of the party, on the other hand, has no such anonymity. They may make you laugh. The may make you cringe. But they get your attention. And on the way home from the party, you will talk about them and you will remember them the next day, the next week, the next month.

Loud and Bold Beats Low Key

If you have a business blog that's not getting noticed by search engines or the people you want to engage and influence the most, you may have a wallflower on your hands.

So how did you get in this situation? How did you wind up with a business blog that has relevant, topical things to say to people who could be your clients, but is as invisible as to them as the wallflower cowering in the corner at the big party? Well, it's a complicated situation, but we can tell you this: At a time where approximately 100,000 new blogs are being created every day, many helpful, intelligent, low key business blogs underestimate the need to be loud, bold, Life of the Party business blogs.

In Copyblogger, one of the most consistently interesting marketing blogs of any kind, editor Jon Morrow points out that people are far more drawn in by "the class clown" than the valedictorian.

Think about that. If you're like most people, you probably don't remember a single word that your high school valedictorian said. On the other hand, you can vividly recall your class clown and how his antics made you laugh in class when that was a dangerous thing to do.

Coming Out of Your Shell

So where does that leave you? There is a fork in the road here, make no mistake. You can continue to be helpful, friendly, intelligent business blogger. But where has that gotten you -- the Express Train to Blog Oblivion?

The other option is that you can reinvent your blog to become the louder, bolder, Life of the Party. How do you do that? The good news is you don't have to sacrifice your integrity or your dignity. We don't have to start from scratch. You don't have to start over. Everything is a work in progress.

Just keep one important thing in mind: Your role as a business blogger isn't to educate the world.

People will buy a book or take a course if they want to learn. If you want to have a blog that generates buzz and brings you new business, you need to deliver an interesting, entertaining diversion with a few valuable lessons.

Grab your reader's attention. Make them curious. Make them smile. Wake them up. Shake them up. Strive for bold simplicity.

If you do all of that with your business blog, you may not always get to be the life of the party, but you will bring more life to all that you say and do. And only good can come of that.

For more ideas to drive sales check out archives or visit Ambit Advertising and Public Relations.