Archives for June 2014

How to Encourage Word of Mouth Marketing

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While it's always important to engage in marketing through a wide variety of channels, there will never be another form of marketing more powerful than word of mouth. If you can get people to start talking about your business and recommending it to others, you'll much more easily bring in new customers and encourage longer, more lucrative business relationships.

But how do you get people to start talking about your business in the first place? Here are some tips that should help you to encourage word of mouth marketing:

And of course, remember that word of mouth advertising doesn't just take place on social media (although that can certainly be a big part of it); it's very much about forging real connections with your customers.

For more tips about encouraging word of mouth advertising and to help put the spark back into your business, work with us at Viral Solutions!

infusionsoft certified consultant

 

 

Thomas von Ahn | Chief Elephant Slayer | Viral Solutions LLC
thomas von ahn

Watch out elephants! This slayer of business challenges comes with 30 years of record breaking sales, marketing, operations, training and leadership experience . He has worked face-to-face with 100’s of small business owners as well as large firms. His love of creating, communicating, developing and executing results for clients shines with each project, publication and training event. His entrepreneurial spirit, passion, industry experience, education, problem-solving prowess, charismatic personality and been-there-done that attitude leads his client focused approach.

 

Filed Under: Analytics

Website Items to Check Before Launch

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Whether you're launching your business's website for the first time or you're completing a major overhaul, it's important that you do your due diligence in making sure it's completely ready before you put it live. The last thing you want is to run the risk of having a clunky, ineffective website on the internet for even just couple days.

Here are three of the biggest categories that you should concern yourself with before launch:

Functionality of your site's measurement tools

As important as the functionality of youlr site itself is, it's also extremely important that all of the ways you use to gauge its effectiveness are working well. Make sure all of your analytics tools are properly installed and running. You should be able to figure out where your traffic is coming from, when it's coming, how long people are visiting the site, total number of site visits and plenty more information.

Search engine optimization (SEO)

For the most part, you can easily adjust keywords on your site over time without having to do a whole lot of extra work in making the edits. However, one of the biggest SEO-related steps that people tend to skip over before website launch is examining every single one of the links on your website. All links should work. This is especially a problem if you originally had your website on a staging area, and forget to change links over to the correct destination. Visitors will quickly get frustrated with your site if you have broken links, and it makes your website and your business seem unprofessional. Click through every link on your site before taking it live, just so you can be sure that they're all working properly.

Visitor experience

Are all of the forms on your site (contact forms, order forms, etc.) working properly and located in the correct place Are all of your pages, forms and other content easy to understand? Is the content on your website interesting, engaging and helpful? Do all of the special features and plugins on your site work properly? These are just a few important questions that you should ask as you make your final checks before launching your business's website. You should aim for an outstanding user experience, and sites with malfunctioning features or sites that are difficult to navigate only serve to frustrate the visitor.

We at Viral Solutions are pleased to help you fine-tune your website before launch. Contact us today for more information about the last checks you should make before putting your site live!

infusionsoft certified consultant

 

 

Thomas von Ahn | Chief Elephant Slayer | Viral Solutions LLC
thomas von ahn

Watch out elephants! This slayer of business challenges comes with 30 years of record breaking sales, marketing, operations, training and leadership experience . He has worked face-to-face with 100’s of small business owners as well as large firms. His love of creating, communicating, developing and executing results for clients shines with each project, publication and training event. His entrepreneurial spirit, passion, industry experience, education, problem-solving prowess, charismatic personality and been-there-done that attitude leads his client focused approach.

 

Filed Under: Analytics

Using Text Snippets with Social Media

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Do you ever find yourself answering the same questions or discussing the same benefits on social media? It’s not all that unusual as your customers will likely have a lot of the same questions. While the answers may be readily available on your website, many social media users prefer to ask a real person on Facebook or Twitter. A personal response is always preferred to a canned one; however, using text snippets as a starting point can make you more efficient and ensure that you deliver the accurate information each time. Here’s what you need to know.

What are Text Snippets?

If you use email signatures in your email client software, you’re using a text snippet. Text snippets are stored words, phrases, or even paragraphs of frequently used text. They’re usually associated with a keyboard shortcut.

Working with Text Snippets

Text snippet applications, such as Text Expander and Phrase Express, allow you to associate longer snippets with keywords. For example, you could associate different email signatures with the words “sig,” “sig1,” and “sig2.” Any time you need to add one of your signatures to a message or Text Snippetsdocument, simply type the keyword and let the software fill in the details.

Note: Make sure to select uncommon but memorable words or abbreviations so that you don’t accidentally insert text inappropriately. You may even want to use a semicolon in front of your keywords such as: ;signature, ;bio, and ;greeting.

You can also use your word processor’s auto-correct feature to create text snippets. However, these snippets will only work in your word processor. If you intend to use text snippets on social media, you’d need to copy and paste the expanded text from your word processor to your social media interface. Thus, you may want to invest in a text expander app that works across your entire operating system.

Using Text Snippets on Social Media

Once you have a text snippet application, it’s time to start using it. Let’s start with the basics. For example, you might want to create snippets for the following:

Once you have a nice set of text snippets, you have a fantastic starting point to respond to questions on social media. The next time someone asks where you are located, you can simply call up a few text snippets by typing:

;greet1 ;location ;thx1

Your text expander software would then fill in your message such as:

Hi there. Thanks for reaching out to us on our Facebook page. We’re located at 123 Main Street on the corner of Main and First Street. If there’s no street parking, go through the alley to the rear where you’ll find plenty of parking and easy access to our store through the bright yellow doors. Thank you for the opportunity to be of service. If you have any further questions, please don’t hesitate to ask.

Remember, your text snippets can be edited as needed to ensure that you don’t sound like a robot. Feel free to address the customer by name, too.

infusionsoft certified consultant

 

 

Thomas von Ahn | Chief Elephant Slayer | Viral Solutions LLC
thomas von ahn

Watch out elephants! This slayer of business challenges comes with 30 years of record breaking sales, marketing, operations, training and leadership experience . He has worked face-to-face with 100’s of small business owners as well as large firms. His love of creating, communicating, developing and executing results for clients shines with each project, publication and training event. His entrepreneurial spirit, passion, industry experience, education, problem-solving prowess, charismatic personality and been-there-done that attitude leads his client focused approach.

 

Filed Under: Social Media

Aligning Your Offer with Your Customers’ Pain

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Whether developing a new service offering, crafting a sales letter, writing an “about us” page, or communicating with customers on social media sites, understanding your target audience’s pain points is essential to your success. In short, you need to know what problems your customers have before you can possibly solve them. Likewise, this same understanding brings empathy to your message and helps customers to better relate to your company. It can build trust and help you to position your product or service as the solution. Use the tips below to align your offer with your customers’ pain.

Now that you know what problems your customers have, what they really want, and the features and benefits that solve your customers’ pain, you can create an effective story, advertisement, campaign, social media contest, or other message that clearly positions your product or service as the solution.

For example, you could create a campaign around messy ink cartridge refills featuring ink-stained office workers, ruined business suits, and splotchy printouts. From there, you could reinforce the benefits of your printer’s high-capacity ink tanks and stress that users will never need to resort to messy do-it-yourself ink refill kits ever again. You could even show a side-by-side cost comparison that shows that not only does your solution eliminate the mess, it’s also cost effective. If customers come out money ahead, even better!

Knowing your customer’s pain points allows you to address them and position your product as the solution.

infusionsoft certified consultant

 

 

Thomas von Ahn | Chief Elephant Slayer | Viral Solutions LLC
thomas von ahn

Watch out elephants! This slayer of business challenges comes with 30 years of record breaking sales, marketing, operations, training and leadership experience . He has worked face-to-face with 100’s of small business owners as well as large firms. His love of creating, communicating, developing and executing results for clients shines with each project, publication and training event. His entrepreneurial spirit, passion, industry experience, education, problem-solving prowess, charismatic personality and been-there-done that attitude leads his client focused approach.

 

Filed Under: Social Media

How to Be a Better Listener

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It's certainly important in the business world to be a good talker, but one could argue that it's far more important in business (and in life) to be a great listener. True leaders know that active listening is a valuable skill to have, and practice certain skills to make sure their colleagues or employees know they are listening to and care about what they're saying.

Here are some tips on how you can be a better listener in the working world:

Remember: it's important that you actually listen, and are not simply waiting to talk. You will establish much more effective channels of communication with colleagues, employees and customers in this way.

Christine Kelly | Queen Bee | Viral Solutions LLC

Prior to joining Viral Solutions, Christine held executive leadership roles at some of the largest small business consulting firms in the USA. Her experience includes leading direct reports of over 130 remote sales agents who generated $38mm in annual revenue. She obtained her Marketing degree from British Columbia Institute of Technology. Bring her C-Suite experience to your small business. Although our company is virtual, and we can work with you wherever you are located, she is located in Denver, Colorado and owns a second home in Vancouver, BC Canada.

Filed Under: Analytics