Learn The Secret To Online Success

Many may wonder how businesses, both large and small can continue to be successful in today’s 24/7 mobile obsessed world. Sure, large businesses can hire employees to be present wherever necessary at all hours of the day, but is that really the path to success?

There are many stages in the buying process and many opportunities to reach and engage a customer. The secret to online success - be accessible and flexible.

Once upon a time, marketing used to consist of reaching out to customers and piquing their interest with a postcard or catalog. However, times have changed and buyers shop differently than they used to. How do you adjust your marketing to fit today’s shopping habits?

While there are a number of actions you can take to increase your success rate, focus your efforts first on being accessible. A buyer needs to be able to find your business through search, and read the information available on your website quickly and easily. If they can’t find you, or read your details, they will leave and not come back. Therefore, the first secret to success is to provide a website that is viewable via mobile.

1. Responsive Design:

80% of buyers searching the Internet are doing so using a mobile phone. As a result, it is imperative that your company website is responsive.

Responsive design is an approach to web page creation that makes use of flexible layouts, flexible images and cascading style sheet media queries.  The goal of responsive design is to build web pages that detect the visitor’s screen size and orientation and change the layout accordingly. – whatis.com.

In order to capture the attention of potential buyers, your company website needs to ensure your information and website is viewable and easy to navigate via mobile. And, 66% of consumers are more likely to purchase from mobile-friendly sites.

Another reason to make your website as easy to view and navigate as possible is to increase your rankings within Google. 48% of mobile users start their research using search engines. With such a large number of mobile users starting their research with a search engine, responsive design becomes an even bigger issue. Beginning in April, Google’s new algorithm will identify and label websites that are mobile-friendly. Those that identified as mobile-friendly will rank higher in the mobile search results. Make sure you are ready for the update before the Google update.

"Change before you have to." - @jack_welch

The second secret to success is establishing and maintaining a social presence. Make your presence online accessible to followers and be flexible, ready to adjust to unexpected posts or updates within your industry.

2. Social presence

Successful companies have a presence wherever their buyers are spending time. This doesn’t mean you need to be active on every social media platform that exists. Simply determine where your buyers are spending their time and put your efforts there. If you are not sure, start with establishing your goals for social media:

• Are you looking to attract prospects?
• Are you interested in becoming an influencer within your industry?
• Is building an online community essential to your company?

Once you have defined your goals, next define your target customer:

• Who are they?
• What do they do?
• What are their pain points?
•  Where do they get information?

Knowing where your target customer gets their information will help to determine where you should spend your time and effort establishing and maintaining a presence. A successful presence is one that is active, provides insightful and educational information and is flexible. Flexible in communications with potential buyers and industry trends.

“We are stubborn on vision. We are flexible on details….” ― Jeff Bezos

Marketing today is not just about pushing information out into the web and waiting for buyers to bite. Establishing a presence, providing useful and timely information, and having the ability to adjust when necessary is a key to success.

The 5 Steps To Getting Started In Social Media

Social Media may seem like a black hole of time, money, and energy for many companies. And yet the number of dynamic social sites and the number of participants keeps growing. To keep up with how and where customers are actively looking for information, having an online and active presence is key. For many businesses, they may not be sure how to get started, or where to spend their time.

5 Steps to Getting Started in Social Media:

1. Define the customer.

The purpose of spending time on this step is to understand who you are trying to reach which will then help you to create the right type of content, then determine where this content will be distributed.  A buyer persona, also known as your ideal customer, is defined as a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on real data and some select educated speculation about customer demographics, behavior pattern, motivations, and goals. Get started by using information you currently have – research your current customers through interviews or surveys. Use this to help build your buyer persona and identify their pain points.

2. Where are buyers getting their information?

Which social sites are helping buyer’s get the information they need to solve their problem? Are you present where your buyer’s are? 65% of B2B companies have acquired a customer through LinkedIn. And 80% of consumers connect with brands on Facebook. With over 60% of the buying process complete prior to contacting a sales rep, having a strong presence online, where your buyers are doing their research is important. The benefits of engaging with buyers through social media:

• Drives people to your website
• Generates leads
• Great for search engine optimization
• Grows social presence online
• Having a presence on social, helps to establish your brand. Another benefit of publishing on social is that it gives you the chance to show your personality through engagement with buyers. Make sure you publish on a regular basis and always include links back to the original source of content.

3. What type of online presence does your company have?

Starting with your website, does your company URL make your website easy to find? 98% of website visitors will never come back to your website. Therefore, it is essential that your website load quickly (no large images) is responsive (viewable via mobile), and is easy to understand the purpose of the business. Easy navigation helps your visitor to quickly and easily locate information leading to a positive experience that will encourage them to come back. Set a goal for what you’d like to accomplish with your website. To help make your website pages effective, provide clear headers, use short sentences that provide the benefits (not features) of what you have to offer, and include social sharing icons to help others promote your business.

4. How do you rank in SEO?

The purpose of search engine optimization is to make it easy for buyers to find you.

Is your website optimized for SEO? 70% of the links search users click on, are organic, not paid. Make it easy for search engines to find your website with a clean design (no large images, simple navigation, clean color scheme), your content and topics utilize keywords, and the formatting of your content is easy to read:

• Headers/subheads should be different size fonts
• Include relevant images
• Use bullets, bold, italics and hyperlinked content where applicable
• Here are a few on-page SEO tips with regard to using keywords. Use only ONE keyword or phrase per page and include:
• Page Titles
• Page URL
• Page Header
• Content
• Meta Description

5. What content do you already have that you can leverage?

Now that you have identified your buyer persona, take a look at the content that you already have available. Look for content that is relevant – see what will work for blogs and posts, then determine what will need to be created. Map your content to the buyer’s journey with more focusing on the top of the funnel, the rest for the middle. 80% of your content should provide information about what buyer’s want to hear – content that answers their questions and solves their problems, with 20% sales related (talk benefits not features). Keep it educational first, and promotional last. Your goal is to provide helpful, relevant content. BE what the customer wants. Blogs are easy ways to provide helpful, educational and valuable content that target your audience. 57% of companies have acquired a customer through their blog. Use blogs to familiarize buyers with your business. To help manage content use an Editorial Calendar. The purpose of an Editorial Calendar is to organize your content and plan when to publish that content. An Editorial Calendar includes your goals, topics and titles, keywords, focus within the buyer’s journey, task assignments and distribution channels. 

All it takes is a few steps to get you started with social media, reaching buyers where they are present. The benefit of being socially active is that it increases the likelihood that you are a part of the consideration process in their quest to obtain information. Engage with your buyers, and make a connection. Be helpful, insightful and educational.