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How to Perform Keyword Research

Content is King, but Keyword Research Takes the Crown

Most people are familiar with keyword research, but for those of you who don’t, keyword research is when you research various words and phrases that people may enter into search engines. Keyword research is important because these terms can help you formulate an effective content and marketing strategy. Without proper keywords, search engines won’t be able to determine what content is most relevant to the person searching. Even for those of you who are familiar with keyword research, some of you don’t know how to go about it. I am going to outline 3 basic steps that will help you implement a successful marketing strategy and get people to find your business online.

Keyword Research Step 1:

Determine the topics associated with your business and Come up with a list of keywords based on those topics

Brainstorming is the first step in any successful keyword research. By coming up with topics associated with your business, such as products and services, it will allow you to narrow down what keywords you should be considering. Once you have your main topics you want to cover, come up with a list of keywords that not only you, but your customers will be searching for. A great idea is to wear your buyer’s shoes. Take into account what they would be search for since they are the one’s you’re trying to target. A way to do this is to take a look at your buyer persona’s (given you have already done them) because that will give you a better idea as to which customers will be searching for what. You should also consider talking to other employees, customers, and even friends to determine what they would type into Google if they were trying to search for your product or service.

Keyword Research Step 2:

Look at other relevant search terms on Google and see what keywords your competition is using.

Google is your best friend in this process. Google is where you’re trying to appear so looking at Google before any other software can save you a lot of time. With those keywords you compiled in the last step, begin typing those into Google and see what comes up. This will help you determine who’s ranking for what and whether it’s your direct competition or not. If it appears some keywords may be more difficult than others and you need other ideas, scroll down to the bottom of the page and take a look at Google’s related search terms. This will help you compile a larger list and once typed into Google, analyze whether those keywords would be more effective.

Keyword Research Step 3:

Use software to help you figure out the best keywords

There are many tools out there that will help you determine keyword difficulty levels and search volume. What we like to use is Google’s Keyword Planner and SEMrush. Use these softwares to plug in various keywords and flag any terms that are too difficult to show up for or have too low of a search volume. These tools will also give you estimates on whether your business has a chance to show up for the list of keywords you compiled in the previous steps.

Final Thoughts

Once you finish step 3 and narrow your list down even more, you’re finished. Now it’s all about tackling your on-site optimization and content. Incorporate these keywords (without stuffing) throughout your SEO titles, meta-descriptions, page URLs, and content. Just remember, keywords aren’t everything. Even if you get people to your site, if your content isn’t valuable, you won’t see any return. Use your keywords and content as your yin and yang in your marketing strategy. Once you do that, nothing will be able to stop you!

How to Create an Email Marketing Campaign

What is Email Marketing & Why is it Important?

Email marketing is a method of marketing that is meant to reach audiences through the use of email. This is usually done in conjunction with advertisements, newsletters, free resources, or other means in order to build a relationship between your company and the customer. This is important because email marketing can reach a large number of people without needing to spend countless hours and money as you potentially would with other methods.

How to Create an Email Marketing Campaign

Set Well-Defined Goals:

The first step in creating an email marketing campaign is to set well-defined goals. Without goals, you’re really just grasping for straws. For instance, are you creating an email marketing campaign for brand awareness or do you want your customers to do something. Do you want your customers to sign up for a newsletter or do you want them to go to your Facebook page? Do you want them to go directly to your website or to a landing page because you’re trying to capture their business for one particular product? Once goals are established, you’ll have a better sense of what you’re trying to achieve and have a better strategy that way.

Get Your Pieces in Place:

Once you have defined goals, you can move on to the next step which is to get your pieces in place. It’s not recommended to simply email-blast people. No one likes getting blasted by emails so you’ll want to give them a reason to open your email and act on whatever it is you’re trying to get them to do. That means you need to add value to your emails. Whether that means giving them a free resource and the opportunity to sign up for more resources or an educational video that enables them to follow your Youtube page. Once you have your resources in place, you can begin compiling your contact list and separating them into categories.

Separate Your Contact List:

The reason why you want to separate your contacts into categories is because not all contacts communicate the same way and some may want different resources than someone else. Email marketing is all about building credibility, loyalty, and funneling your customer to the right places so they act on whatever call-to-action you have put in place. Without segmenting your customers, you won’t see a high conversion rate.

Decide on Email Marketing Software:

The next step is simple; determine what email marketing software you want to use. Whether it be getdrip, mailchimp, constant contact, or the many others out there. You’ll want to use a software that will handle however many emails you’re trying to send and has the features you’re looking for.

What to Include in your Email Marketing:

After you have your goals, resources, contacts and software, you can begin crafting your emails. Many people ask us what they should include in their marketing emails. We have compiled a small list of what to do in order to have a successful email marketing campaign.

  1. Create a unique and interesting headline
  2. Add a personal touch to your emails
  3. Give them a reason to open the email
  4. Ask questions
  5. Include a call-to-action
  6. Give them a reason to act on your call-to-action
  7. Don’t sound automated
  8. Keep it short, simple, and sweet
  9. Make it easy to subscribe to your emails
  10. Make the email easy to read
  11. Include images
  12. Schedule your emails to be sent during appropriate times

Final Thoughts:

If you follow those guidelines listed above, you’ll have a greater of success with your email marketing campaign. If you want your customers to subscribe to your emails and funnel them accordingly, remember to provide value and don’t be spammy. No one wants to feel like they’re reading an email from a robot. We’ve all been a customer before so place yourself in your customer’s shoes and consider what would make you open an email and subscribe. For additional information on how to create an email marketing plan, don’t hesitate to contact us. It may be what separates you from your competition!

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Top SEO Mistakes

3 Common SEO Mistakes

Ranking your web pages on search engines are usually the foundation to any digital marketing strategy. Unfortunately, most people don’t know how to properly execute a solid SEO plan. This article is meant to provide you a quick and easy list that addresses the top 3 SEO mistakes and how to fix them.

SEO Mistake #1: Duplicate Content

Duplicate content is one of the most seen problems with a website’s SEO. Webpages are considered duplicate if they contain identical or nearly identical content. Excessive duplicate content may confuse search engines as to which page to index and which one to prioritize in search results. Using duplicated content across multiple pages may lead to traffic loss and poor placement in search results, and it may even provoke search engines to ban your page. Keep in mind, duplicate content can obviously be due to writing the same content on various pages, but it can also result from duplicate pages or internal issues.

How to fix duplicate content:

  1. Provide unique content on the webpage.
  2. Remove duplicate content.
  3. Add a rel=”canonical” link to one of your duplicate pages to inform search engines which page to show in search results.

SEO Mistake #2: Duplicate and missing meta-descriptions

A meta-description tag is a short summary of a webpage’s content that helps search engines understand what the page is about and can be shown to users in search results. Duplicate meta descriptions on different pages mean a lost opportunity to use more relevant keywords. Also, duplicate meta descriptions make it difficult for search engines and users to differentiate between different web pages. It is better to have no meta description at all than to have a duplicate one.

How to fix duplicate and missing meta-descriptions:

  1. Remove duplicate meta-descriptions and provide a unique description of the page
  2. Provide a unique, relevant meta description for each of your webpages.

SEO Mistake #3: Low text-HTML ratio

Your text to HTML ratio indicates the amount of actual text you have on your webpage compared to the amount of code. This warning is triggered when your text to HTML is 10% or less. Search engines have begun focusing on pages that contain more content. That’s why a higher text to HTML ratio means your page has a better chance of getting a good position in search results. Less code increases your page’s load speed and also helps your rankings. It also helps search engine robots crawl your website faster.

How to fix low text-html ratio:

Split your web page’s text content and code into separate files and compare their size. If the size of your code file exceeds the size of the text file, review your page’s HTML code and consider optimizing its structure and removing embedded scripts and styles.

In Conclusion

There are a significant number of other issues that can arise when optimizing your site for search engines, but begin addressing the one’s mentioned above and you’ll notice a difference. Just remember to take your SEO fixes one step at a time. Patience will go a long way when it comes to SEO.

Why High Quality Photos Matter For Your Website

A picture can really speak volumes in the digital world.

You grab your laptop, tablet, or phone and decide to get online. No matter what website you land on, they will all have (the good ones that is) something in common; relevant and high quality photos. You probably have some basic marketing knowledge and have heard of inbound marketing, content creation, SEO, and the works, but that doesn’t mean much unless you also have relevant photos.  People are visual in nature and without visuals, people tend to lose interest.

Let’s say you’re a 5 star restaurant and you have a decent online presence. You have a website, some positive reviews online, and participate in social media, but your analytics is showing you have a high bounce rate on your website and there’s no increase of traffic to your restaurant. That’s obviously a problem and one of the reasons may be a lack of appealing photos. I’m sure most of you have gone to a restaurant’s website for their menu and wanted to see how good their food looks. This is a pivotal moment in capturing your customer’s business. It’s like when you’re at a restaurant and see someone’s food coming out and you say to yourself “wow, I should have ordered that. That looks amazing.” That’s the same type of feeling you want people to have when seeing your pictures. Whether you’re in the restaurant industry, retail, real estate, manufacturing or aerospace, photos can be used to draw people in.

Images and SEO

SEO must always be managed and adjusted due to Google’s algorithm changes, but one part of SEO that will always remain important is high-quality images. Images are important because more and more people are using search engines’ image-search tool. This means the relevance and quality of your images play a factor in how you rank in Google, Bing, and Yahoo. If your website contains high-image quality photos with the appropriate alt-texts and keywords, your image search alone can pull in a significant number of people to your website.

Better Images Means Better User Engagement

High quality images are shown to drastically improve readability. Here are some compelling statistics from Steamfeed:

  • Articles featuring images get 94% more total views than those without images
  • Photos and videos in press releases are shown to increase views by 45%
  • Over half of customers are inclined to contact businesses which display an image when their content comes up in search results
  • 67% of consumers think that the quality of an image depicting a product plays an important role for them when following through with a purchase
  • 37% more engagement on Facebook occurs with posts with photos than posts without

There are many reasons why photos are an important part of any website. Photos are important for SEO, engaging with your customers, and providing the image you want for your business. Websites or even social platforms that contain high quality images can bring in more users and engagement. Not to mention more sales for your business.These aren’t the days of polaroids, but we are living in a time where digital photos can truly be worth a thousand words.

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How to know if you need a new website

If you don’t have these 4 things, you need a new website.

Online shopping has become one of the easiest and efficient ways to shop. That’s why more and more people are going online to look for products and services rather than going to a physical location. That means your company’s website is crucial to keep up with the times and capture your consumer’s business.

First impressions are everything

I’m sure you’ve heard that expression before. The same goes for your website. Consumers need good experiences so if someone goes to your website and it looks outdated or they can’t find anything, they will more than likely go somewhere else. You may not be hearing complaints about your website, but that doesn’t mean there’s not a problem. If you had an updated website, you could be getting even more traffic, leads, and sales. What we tell customers is to redesign your site every 2-3 years with periodic updates to ensure you’re giving your customers exactly what they want: content, user-experience, and appealing design.

Is your website optimized for mobile?

If not, you need a new website. Something to keep in mind is the importance of mobile. Whether you’re a manufacturing company or a retail company, your customers have phones. There are a vast number of searches every day on mobile devices so that means your site must be designed as such. Responsive design for mobile devices will ensure your consumers have a good experience wherever they look at your website and services.

Is your site SEO capable?

If not, you need a new website. Search engine optimization, or more commonly referred to as SEO, is where your site will appear on search engines. Consider this, you have a solid website, enticing brand messaging and a cool logo, but your website isn’t optimized so no one will ever find you to even see that. That makes all your previous efforts meaningless. Having a site that is ready for SEO is huge so if you don’t have a site that gives you that ability, you are already way behind the game.

Does your website take forever to load?

If so, you need a new website. If your site is slow, your rank on Google will be drastically lowered. Not to mention, people want things exactly when they want them. If your page takes forever to load, people will bounce off your site and onto your competitor’s.

Can you link social media on your website?

If not, you need a new website. We mentioned people go to your website to look at your services and may look up your website on their mobile device, but we haven’t talked about the power of social. A large number of people also want to know what other people have to say about you and whether they want to do business with your company. That means they may go to social platforms to make their decision. It’s important to be on social to funnel your potential customers back to your website. If you aren’t on social, that’s an opportunity to gain even more business, but if you are on social and don’t have a website that links with them, that’s just as bad!

Final Thoughts

There are plenty of reasons to update or get a new website, but if you don’t believe us, just look at your competitor’s website. Technology is always changing and so is the way people do business. If you want to ensure your business is future-proof and continues to do solid business, you may want to consider updating your website.

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How to Get Reviews for Your Business

How do You Get People to Review Your Business?

For most industries, it can be difficult to get positive reviews. This is most certainly something to focus on considering Google’s algorithm penalizes your company’s organic search results if you have negative reviews.

Bounce Back From Negative Reviews

Have you ever went to Amazon to buy something but looked at the reviews and because most were negative, you decided not to make a purchase?  Most of the time that’s because your customers don’t usually review their gym, grocery store, retail store, and most especially, B2B companies and their products. Most consumers typically review when they have a negative experience.  So what does that mean exactly? Is your company and/or products tarnished for life or will those negative reviews hurt your sales or reputation? The truthful answer is that it absolutely can, but there is also good news: you can bounce back from it. All you have to do is ask for positive reviews from happy customers. Sounds easy, right? Well, let’s take this one step at a time.  

Tip The “Review-Scale”

Capitalize on your happy customers and have them fight on behalf of your brand. As mentioned earlier, i’m sure you have been to Amazon and saw a product or company that had a significant number of negative reviews. I’m also certain you saw negative reviews at one time, but you decided to purchase anyway because the positive reviews drastically outweighed the negative ones.  It’s all about tipping the scales back in your favor and making sure the bulk of your reviews are positive.

Ask for Reviews in Person:

The best way to get reviews is by asking in person. Asking for reviews in person is much more personal than an online initiative, especially if you and the customer had a great experience. For example, let’s say you walked into a health and wellness store, but you don’t know what products would be best for you. When you ask an associate for help, they steer you in the right direction and you two have a lengthy conversation that included anything and everything. If that customer asked you to give an online review so it helped him and  others who are researching where to shop, you would probably be more inclined to do so.

Another way to gather positive reviews is by providing incentive. Research has shown most people respond to free incentives and give-a-ways. For instance, you could start a campaign that gives the customer a chance to win $100 (You may want to do something else, but that’s a start.)

Ask for Reviews via Email

Another way is by asking via email. If you already met the customer, there shouldn’t be a problem reaching out through email. Obviously, if the customer wasn’t happy with the experience then it’s best to leave that person out. You can find out by pre-screening your customers by survey so you don’t rack up the negative reviews (though, let’s hope that never happens.) Email may not perform as well as asking in person, but is still a valuable option to gain positive reviews.

Here are some of the best practices for your email request letter:

  1. Have the email come from a real person’s email address (Even better, have it come from a name they’d recognize, such as someone they worked with).
  2. Have the email written as a personal request from that same person.
  3. Have a very clear call-to-action link/button. Remove random social media or website footer links — just as with good conversion rate optimization, have a singular goal of users clicking the review button.
  4. Test using a plain-text email versus an HTML email.
  5. Test different subject lines: We’ve found that using the person’s name in the subject line works well in many instances but falls completely flat in a few others.
  6. Test different email copy to see what performs best.

One way to ensure success of any review-gathering initiative is to make sure everyone in the organization is on board and stress its importance. Ways you can do this is by:

  1. Making better reviews a top-down focus; executives need to communicate the importance.
  2. Obtaining organizational buy-in on the importance of reviews by helping employees understand the direct impact they have on the business.
  3. Training key employees on how to ask for reviews.
  4. Developing a scorecard that tracks reviews by locations (similar to our SERP score, but for reviews).
  5. Providing bonuses and awards for the locations that have the best online reviews.

Final Thoughts

As with any good campaign, you must strategize and go through a series of tests. See what works best for you and your customer base. Just make sure you’re focusing on gathering  positive reviews, you’ll thank yourself that you did.

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Should I Hire A Marketing Agency?

Should I Do My Company’s Marketing?

So you’re a business owner who wants to boost sales by doing some marketing. You don’t know whether you should do this yourself, how to do it, or where to even start. You have so many various tasks that need done each day so there’s no way you can take upon the task of marketing your company as well. I understand though, it’s difficult to let someone else take the reigns of your company’s image and sales strategy, but you want to focus your time elsewhere and make sure it’s done correctly. Let’s face it, you probably don’t know how to do graphic design, computer programming, write a blog, or properly manage social media accounts. It’s not that you can’t learn, you just don’t have the time for it. Well, you’re not the only one. Most business owners seek out marketing professionals for several reasons: to save time, make money, and to make sure their “baby” is marketed the way it should be.

 

Should I Hire an Employee or Marketing Agency?

Business owners who don’t have the time or resources to learn how to properly execute marketing strategies are left with a decision: Should I hire an employee to handle the various marketing or an outside agency? Typically, companies hire an employee so they have someone in-house and feel agencies will be too expensive. In reality, agencies can be significantly cheaper than hiring an in-house marketing manager. Shocking right? Well, let’s break it down. One reason why hiring a marketing agency is the better choice is because most business owners will hire someone with a base salary rather than hire agency with an hourly rate, which is a huge mistake. Hiring someone with a base salary includes taxes, health insurance, retirement plans, vacations, sick days, training costs, etc. The average income of a marketing manager is around $80,000. If you combine that with all the other costs mentioned above, you will be spending well above $100,000. A marketing agency averages $40,000 a year for all different types of marketing. For the sake of argument, let’s say you hire in someone at $40,000, with all the additional costs you’re still spending more than if you were to hire a marketing agency. Not to mention, by hiring a marketing agency you’re able to have an entire company dedicated to growing your business, which means more resources and expertise without all the additional costs.

Winner: Marketing Agency

With a marketing agency, you’re able to know exactly what you’re paying and determine how many hours you’re willing to devote to a marketing plan. The point is, there are so many other variables that prove why hiring a marketing agency is better than hiring an employee to handle your company’s future. If your goal is to save time, money, and have assurance the job will be done correctly, then hire a marketing agency; it’s a no brainer!

 

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3 Ways Automated Marketing can Rev-up Your Sales Engine

Do You Know How Your Customers Shop?

Let’s face it, you don’t always buy a product the first time you hear about it or look at it. Usually you go through several different buying stages. Most commonly those stages are awareness, consideration, and decision. Consider for a moment if you just decided you wanted to buy a car, you wouldn’t go to the first lot you see and buy the first car that catches your eye (unless you were a billionaire, which hats off to you if you are.) Realistically, you would research and become aware of the different types of vehicles, such as SUVs, coupes, trucks, etc. Afterwards, you would narrow down a few options and consider only those. Finally, you’d go to the best lot and buy the car you decided on. It’s all about process, but unfortunately so many sales and marketing teams don’t incorporate a process. Most sales teams want to go for the jugular right off the bat, which hardly ever works. I’m here to help you teach your sales team the proper way to classify and market to your potential customers by automated marketing.

Are You Failing at Sales?

The whole objective is guiding people through the sales funnel and ultimately deciding to do business with you. However, most sales and marketing teams make 3 huge mistakes.

  1. They lack proper and engaging content to last the entirety of the sales cycle.
  2. They repeatedly use the same content for each step of the sales process.
  3. They send emails one time and never follow through.

Most sales teams don’t always see they’re making those mistakes, but with automated or “drip” marketing they can make sure they send content at the right time and capitalize on every opportunity.

How Automated Lead Marketing Can Help You

It is common knowledge that nurtured leads increase sales, but it’s typically a long process and labor intensive. As mentioned above about buying a car, most buying processes are long and complex. Therefore, every piece of content should be tailored for the 3 buying stages of awareness, consideration, and decision.
Automated lead nurturing allows for detailed tracking of lead engagements with your content and site, and accurately placing your customers in the correct stage of the buying process. That means you can drip feed appropriate content at the right time and to the right people.

Key Points How Automated Lead Marketing Can Help:

Your sales team doesn’t put in efforts that could be best used elsewhere nor waste their time going over the benefits of your product or service. With automated drip marketing, your leads are already informed so you can use your efforts toward closing the sale.

  1. Automated lead marketing takes time, but if done well you can see significant sales growth.
  2. Create relevant content to support each buying stage and track your information along the way.
  3. Automated lead marketing can show where in the funnel your leads aren’t “biting,” and allows you to develop your content based on such.

Automated lead or drip marketing can do wonders for your business. Never again let your sales team make rookie mistakes and in turn, capitalize on your leads. I mean, who wouldn’t want to give their sales team resources to save money and time. As always, go get em’!

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Simple Social Media Management Tips To Live And Die By

Social media has become a major player in the realm of online marketing. We can all agree on the advances of social media since the old days of MySpace.com in 2003. And now with 27% of total U.S. internet time spent on social networking sites (Source: Experian), businesses are expected to have a social presence online.

Social media is a way for customers to interact directly with the brands they love. It’s not enough to just have a presence, implementing a strategy to correctly reach and cultivate these communities on social media websites is a must. In many cases business owners are just too busy, which is completely understandable. This is where you and I come into play as the savvy “social media specialist” we are. Follow these simple steps below and you will be on your way to social media bliss. These are some steps I would take to manage a company’s social media accounts.

Communication Is Key

The first step is to communicate with the client to discover the purpose of creating their social media profiles. Every industry is different, therefore there is no one size fits all strategy. Nor, is there an official right or wrong way to manage a social media profile, so communication is key to stay on the same page with the client.

Here are a few questions I would ask a client before I set up their profiles:

What do I want to accomplish through social media? What Are Your Goals? Example: To drive sales or to supplement customer service

  • What is your target audience?
  • Will there be anyone else, beside myself, who will be managing your social media accounts?
  • What’s your social media policy on what can be said and by whom?
  • What are some important topics you would like to cover?
  • Who are some of the industry influencers?

These questions will give you better insight to create the correct content, to reach the correct audience.

Research and Planning

The next step is to do preliminary research on your client’s industry news and trends. You want to create content that is relevant to the industry now. This would be a good time to set up Google Alerts to alert you of any new or interesting trends Google indexed, related to your chosen topic.

*Note: It is also good to speak to your client about any discounts, sale promotions, or any other company related news their audience may want to hear.

Keyword research would also be beneficial to stay on topic when creating content for a social media post.

There are tons of tools to help you conduct keyword research. My favorite tools are a Raven Tools, Google Keyword Tool, and Spyfu.

Once you have a finalized, client-approved list of keywords it’s your choice of how you want to organize the list on a content calendar, which brings me to my next point.

Organize Your Content

The next step after the research is completed is to organize the information in a content calendar. Again, how you organize the information is completely up to you. I recommend using a keyword as a theme for each month. Once that is completed you can further brake down the monthly theme into weekly segments, where you cover different topics for that week.

For example:

For month one your theme is chocolate candy.

Week 1 can be the health benefits of chocolate.

Day 1 of Week 1 can be “ Top 5 reasons Chocolate Can Lead To A Healthier Lifestyle.”

Content Calendar Example:

A content calendar is an amazing way to organize and create actionable content. It’s also a way to keep you and the client on the same page.

Again, there are tons of tools to manage social media profiles. Currently, an industry favorite is Houtsuite. Houtsuite is relatively inexpensive and offers ways to manage and schedule content on multiple profiles simultaneously.

Conduct A Reputation Audit

After research and planning is complete and you feel confident that you can effectively manage your clients social media profiles, its time to see what others are already saying about your client’s brand. 25% of consumers who complain about products on Facebook or Twitter expect a response within 1 hour (Source: American Express). Social media is an amazing tool to connect with your customer base, acknowledge them by responding to their concerns.

You should conduct a reputation audit. There may be various ex-employees, demanding clients, or even competitors that may have written bad reviews or complaints. These complaints, no matter how ridiculous, needs to be addressed. By conducting a search on Ripoffreport.com and other similar websites, you can start to get a handle on what’s being said.

You can also do a simple search in Google by typing the brand name and adding “scam” or “reviews”.

Monitor, Promote, Report

Once your audit is complete and all of your marketing ideas are organized into actionable items, the next step is monitor you’re content on the profiles, promote and report your successes . Once again, there are a plethora of tools available to monitor your audience and create custom reports. Followerwonk is amazing for monitoring a Twitter account. I use the reporting and monitoring features on Raventools, but you should find the one that fits best for your budget and your clients needs.

Marketing on social media is about brand exposure, acquiring new customers, and cultivating your client’s online communities. Social media produces almost double the marketing leads of trade shows, telemarketing, direct mail, or PPC. (Source: HubSpot) So, correctly managing a brand’s image is vital for any business. Remember to stay organized and respond to customer inquires because this is a two way conversation.

I welcome any ideas to do my job better, what are some ways you monitor your client’s social media accounts?

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7 Steps to Building a Top Online Business

So, you want to start an online business? It doesn’t matter whether you’re selling lava lamps, tuba lessons, or web design services: you need a plan of attack. It’s easier than ever to toss up a website and set up shop—which means that for every bona fide brand out there, there’s an impostor who’s all talk and no follow-through.

Here’s how you can make your business stand out:

1. Do your research. Chances are there’s already a business out there similar to yours. Size up the competition, and see if there’s something unique you can offer. Learn what problems people are having with related products and services. Then, build your business to meet a real consumer need.

2. Define your products or services in detail. An awesome business idea is no good if no one understands what you’re selling. That’s why you need to write unique, compelling descriptions that speak to visitors’ needs. Check out Copyblogger for tips on writing must-read sales copy.

3. Create a plan for online sales. There are different factors to consider in building an online shop vs. a physical storefront. For example, how will you manage leads, sales, and fulfillment? How will you follow up with buyers post-sale? How will you handle unhappy customers?

You can always modify protocol over time, of course—but planning for problems will save stress as your business grows.

4. Build an awesome website focused on your customers’ needs. Create informative, entertaining content (including text, photos, and video) that shows visitors how your product will improve their lives. Explain services clearly, and offer a call to action to convert visitor traffic into sales.

Create an easy way for customers to reach you, like a contact form. You can use a ticketing system to organize and answer questions, or a CRM to manage communications across your business.

5. Decide how you’ll find your customers. Selling online is a combination of getting your name in the right places (through SEO, pay-per-click marketing, and social media) and in front of the right people (through thought leadership and email marketing to existing clients). Figure out what channels are best for your business, and put yourself out there.

Don’t know where to start? Try out different strategies, measure your results, and see what works.

6. Grow—and maintain—your reputation. Show potential clients that you’re the real thing. Maintain a regular blog and try guest posting on industry-relevant sites. Build a social media presence. Sign up for programs like Yelp and Google+ to enhance credibility.

7. Whatever you do, don’t set it and forget it. Building an online business takes time and effort. And these days, it also requires significant upkeep. Continually improving your business isn’t just good for SEO—it also forces you to keep up with changes in the marketplace. And it shows your clients that you care.

Follow these steps and you’ll be on your way to a budding online business. Now, all you have to do is sell.

Need help getting your business off the ground? Atomic can help you build a web presence that rocks.