Archives for September 2014

Why You Should Constantly Ask Questions

September 20, 2014 by Christine

Basically every market you can think of is constantly becoming more and more saturated with products for customers to choose from. As a result, it’s extremely important that you are able to understand exactly what customers are looking for and how you can differentiate your products or services from everything else that’s available to them.

Why should a potential customer choose you?

What can you do to make their life better or easier?

Those are just a couple examples of questions you should constantly be asking. But sales isn’t the only reason that you should ask questions as a business owner. Consider the following reasons why you should harbor an inquisitive nature in the business world:

You learn.

Whether your questions are specifically related to your business or industry or not, chances are your questions will lead to some new sort of discovery. Who knows when that discovery will benefit your company?

You find new perspectives.

For example, when attempting to find a new sales strategy, you may benefit greatly from asking the customer about their thought process when looking at or purchasing a product rather than attempting to tweak your sales processes and hoping for the best. You could ask employees what they’d do differently about your company and find new ideas you’d have never considered before. These new perspectives can be extremely valuable.

You find a better understanding.

People love to answer questions about themselves. You can create much better relationships with employees and customers by asking about them and getting to know who they are as people. Rather than constantly pushing your own message down their throats, take a moment to ask about who they are and their feelings and backgrounds.

You problem solve.

Whenever you face a problem or issue with your company, asking questions can help you to find people who have had similar situations and learn how they solved their problem. It’s also an opportunity for you to take some of the responsibility off your shoulders—you don’t necessarily have to solve every single problem that comes across your desk all by yourself. If you have children, you know that they learn about the world around them by asking a constant stream of questions.

Take that mindset in your business—question everything around you and learn more about your business and your customers.

by Christine Kelly

CEO and 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 Tagged With: christine kelly, marketing strategy, small business, small business tips, viral solutions

Re-Evaluating Your Marketing Plan: 4 Questions to Start Strong & Strategize Stronger

September 19, 2014 by Katie

4 Questions to Start Strong & Strategize Stronger Are you a proactive marketer prowess or non-active, don’t really know your market, customers, or even your own specialization, differentiation, and unique selling position kind of dude? The difference between the two is night and day. Night and day within the aspect of understanding, strategy, and success.
Below are four simple questions to ask yourself that can help you to identify if you’re the prowess or the dude.

Whichever side of the fence you land on is fine because you have the choice to stay or work towards actions to move you to the other. These questions simply help you see where you’re today, and can aid you in determining next steps to help you strategize stronger today.

Who is your customer? Yes. I am asking you that question. Can you quickly and specifically identify who your customer(s) is/are without providing a generic whoever buys your product or service response? If you can’t or struggle to identify, the lack of knowing is a huge indicator that you need to research your market, your very best customers, and even your worst customers. You need to truly know the demographics and psycho-graphics about your very best customers. Demographics gives you key characteristics about your customers, such as a age, income, education, location, gender, etc. Psycho-graphics provides with the motivation as to why those best customers buy. Truly understanding who your best customers are, what they are like, and what motivates them to buy and biggest fear that makes them not buy, will provide you such insight that can be used to customize a stronger marketing campaign. Ask yourself, do you really know who your best customers are, their characteristics, and motivations to buy? If not, this is the first place to start your market research.
What is your specialization strategy? This is the product or service you focus all of your efforts. This is what you provide to your customers to fit the wants and/or needs of your customers. Truly understanding your best customers helps you to see what it is they want, need, and motivations as to why they purchased it from you. However, without that clarity as to who your best customers are and why, what you provide and why you provide it can be just as vague. The vagueness can cause mixed messages to those prospective best customers and lead them to purchase from a competitor that not only knows his or her best customers, but shows it through it’s engaging marketing, website, posts, product details, testimonials, and so on. Here, ask yourself what is it that you do that gets customers start, stay, and grow their wants and needs with your product, service, and/or organization? Are you proactive, reactive, or not active with this strategy? Why?
What is your differentiation strategy? How and why are you different? This is your competitive advantage. Understanding your clear competitive advantage that you do better than anyone else. Getting this right is the difference between so-so to outrageous success. If you’re saying something generic, like “people buy from our company because of our quality and service,” – you’re missing the boat. This is why it is so essential to truly know your best and worst customers. You need to know their demographics and psycho-graphics so that you can effectively focus your specialization and differentiation energy and resources to meet the characteristics and motivations as to why and why they don’t buy. To build a strong campaign, you must have a strong understanding of you, your customers, and your own positioning. Otherwise, strategy is like a plastic bag floating in the air with no clear direction and waiting for someone to notice and pick it up. If you can clearly understand your best customers’ why factor and your own aspect of what makes your firm different than competitors, you can synthesize that into your unique selling position.

What is your unique selling position strategy? Here, it’s really asking how you position your product, service, or organization to get people to purchase from you. Positioning is simply the message that you send to customers that get them to buy from you. Do you know why they buy from you? Why not if you don’t? What is it that gets people to not only buy from you, but continue to buy from you. Is it your culture, your dedication to innovative products, your love for truly understanding your customers and engaging with them before and after a sale. Is it treating your customer like they’re more than a customer, but the lifeline of your organization? Whatever it is, it is essential identify why it is so special, how it impacts your business, and what you can do to expand it to provide more value to your best customers. Doing so, will heighten your awareness, customer relationships, and sustain your unique selling strategy for years to come.

How did you do? Are you a prowess or a dude? Do you truly know your customers, specialization, differentiation, and unique selling position strategies? Are you off in one area and feel like a little research could help you strengthen your other categories? Similar to sitting on a wobbly chair, if one part of your marketing plan is off, it will impact the others. Identification as to where, how, when, and why you can improve will aid you in strategizing stronger. Take the time to truly investigate these areas and then synthesize your findings to create a specific plan that leads to specific actions that make you a prowess.

Additional Great Read…
Tracy, B. (2014). Enhance Your Marketing Strategy , Increase Your Sales. Retrieved:

Copyright Viral Solutions llc © 2014. All Rights Reserved
by Katie Doseck, Ph.D.
Chief Visionary and Strategic Ace Up Your Sleeve | Viral Solutions LLC

Katie Doseck, PhD | Chief Visionary & Strategic Ace Up Your Sleeve. I catapulted my experience with extensive education, trainings, and personal coaching; earning a PhD in Organizational Management with a specialization in Human Resource Management, MBA in Organizational Leadership, and BA in Law & Liberal Arts. Subject Matter Expert (SME) areas: Human Resource Management, Employment Law, Organizational Change, Change Management, Resource Planning, Strategic Planning, Talent Management, Selling & Sales Management, Training & Development, Decision Making Models, Project Management, Customer Relationship Management, and Motivation. Dr. Doseck is based out of Logan, Utah.

Filed Under: Analytics Tagged With: marketing strategy, strategy

Re-Evaluating Your Marketing Plan: 4 Questions to Start Strong & Strategize Stronger

September 19, 2014 by Katie

Below are four simple questions to ask yourself that can help you to identify if you’re the prowess or the dude.

Whichever side of the fence you land on is fine because you have the choice to stay or work towards actions to move you to the other. These questions simply help you see where you’re today, and can aid you in determining next steps to help you strategize stronger today.

Who is your customer? Yes. I am asking you that question. Can you quickly and specifically identify who your customer(s) is/are without providing a generic whoever buys your product or service response? If you can’t or struggle to identify, the lack of knowing is a huge indicator that you need to research your market, your very best customers, and even your worst customers. You need to truly know the demographics and psycho-graphics about your very best customers. Demographics gives you key characteristics about your customers, such as a age, income, education, location, gender, etc. Psycho-graphics provides with the motivation as to why those best customers buy. Truly understanding who your best customers are, what they are like, and what motivates them to buy and biggest fear that makes them not buy, will provide you such insight that can be used to customize a stronger marketing campaign. Ask yourself, do you really know who your best customers are, their characteristics, and motivations to buy? If not, this is the first place to start your market research.
What is your specialization strategy? This is the product or service you focus all of your efforts. This is what you provide to your customers to fit the wants and/or needs of your customers. Truly understanding your best customers helps you to see what it is they want, need, and motivations as to why they purchased it from you. However, without that clarity as to who your best customers are and why, what you provide and why you provide it can be just as vague. The vagueness can cause mixed messages to those prospective best customers and lead them to purchase from a competitor that not only knows his or her best customers, but shows it through it’s engaging marketing, website, posts, product details, testimonials, and so on. Here, ask yourself what is it that you do that gets customers start, stay, and grow their wants and needs with your product, service, and/or organization? Are you proactive, reactive, or not active with this strategy? Why?
What is your differentiation strategy? How and why are you different? This is your competitive advantage. Understanding your clear competitive advantage that you do better than anyone else. Getting this right is the difference between so-so to outrageous success. If you’re saying something generic, like “people buy from our company because of our quality and service,” – you’re missing the boat. This is why it is so essential to truly know your best and worst customers. You need to know their demographics and psycho-graphics so that you can effectively focus your specialization and differentiation energy and resources to meet the characteristics and motivations as to why and why they don’t buy. To build a strong campaign, you must have a strong understanding of you, your customers, and your own positioning. Otherwise, strategy is like a plastic bag floating in the air with no clear direction and waiting for someone to notice and pick it up. If you can clearly understand your best customers’ why factor and your own aspect of what makes your firm different than competitors, you can synthesize that into your unique selling position.

What is your unique selling position strategy? Here, it’s really asking how you position your product, service, or organization to get people to purchase from you. Positioning is simply the message that you send to customers that get them to buy from you. Do you know why they buy from you? Why not if you don’t? What is it that gets people to not only buy from you, but continue to buy from you. Is it your culture, your dedication to innovative products, your love for truly understanding your customers and engaging with them before and after a sale. Is it treating your customer like they’re more than a customer, but the lifeline of your organization? Whatever it is, it is essential identify why it is so special, how it impacts your business, and what you can do to expand it to provide more value to your best customers. Doing so, will heighten your awareness, customer relationships, and sustain your unique selling strategy for years to come.

Additional Great Read…

Tracy, B. (2014). Enhance Your Marketing Strategy , Increase Your Sales. Retrieved:

by Katie Doseck, Ph.D.

Chief Visionary and Strategic Ace Up Your Sleeve | Viral Solutions LLC

Filed Under: Analytics Tagged With: marketing strategy, strategy

Don’t Listen to People Who Tell You It’s Time to Quit Facebook

September 18, 2014 by Christine

I recently read an article on LinkedIn that suggested it may be time for businesses to step back from Facebook and focus their marketing endeavors elsewhere. The author cited regular changes in algorithms, decrease in overall reach and a poor bottom line as reasons that people may consider pulling the plug.

social media marketing on facebook with positive roi

Today, Viral Solutions’ mission is to provide its clients with the assistance needed to experience bursts of growth in their operations, and a big part of that is through the use of technology. When business owners feel overwhelmed, burnt out or unmotivated, Viral Solutions steps in to give them the tools they need to achieve new levels of success.

However, I couldn’t disagree more with her conclusion that it may be time to quit Facebook.

Yes, Facebook has evolved quite a bit over the last few years—this happens to all publicly owned companies that have investors to satisfy, especially companies as relatively young as Facebook. When it comes to using Facebook as an advertising tool, we need to understand that it’s up to us to evolve with Facebook, rather than keeping our strategies the same throughout all the changes, which basically amounts to trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.

Consider the case of Google—the world’s most popular search engine has changed its algorithms so many times over the years, and they’ve increased their prices for services like Adwords and other tools. But do you ever hear about people telling you it’s time to ditch Google, because it changes too frequently and old marketing tactics no longer work on the site? Of course not! There’s an understanding that everyone has, which is that Google is the number one search engine worldwide, which gives it a unique advantage and usefulness when it comes to marketing.

The same is true with Facebook. While the changes made to the algorithm and other aspects of the site over the years may have made it a bit more difficult to obtain the quantity of leads you’re used to, there’s no doubt that there’s now an enhanced ability to obtain a much higher quality of leads. And even if the quantity issue frustrates you, consider this—what else is there? Facebook is by far the most-used social media network available, and it is free to have an account. To not take advantage of a free service that allows you to connect to more than a billion people across the world would be lunacy.

Remember: Facebook, like everything else we use in marketing, is a tool. Nothing more, nothing less. If you’re not finding success in your marketing on Facebook, don’t point fingers at Facebook itself—instead, take a look in the mirror and figure out what it is that you can be doing better to find better success on the social network.

Ask yourself:

Do you have your Facebook Look-alike list mapped? Do you have Facbook pixel installed on your site? Have you rigidly defined your perfect prospective customer and targeted them through Facebook advanced features? Have you analyzed Facebook page insights for engaged users and mapped your posting, boosting and advertising plan to those insights? Are you engaging with your followers with every share and every post comment? Do your advertisements appear on Facebook mobile only, on Facebook desktop only – or both – why?

This takes work to make the outcome be what you need. Viral Solutions does this for its customer every day!

Thomas von Ahn | Chief Elephant Slayer | Viral Solutions LLC

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 Tagged With: advertising, facebook, google, strategy

Tips to Increase Business Conversions

September 17, 2014 by Christine

Business has come a long way since the days of the door-to-door salesman. It’s a much more complicated field now, with a wide variety of channels through which sales can be made. Now, more businesses than ever before are relying heavily on online sales, which means trying to figure out ways to convert clicks into sales.

It’s not just enough that you have a lot of people visiting your website. You need to be able to take advantage of that traffic and drive more people to take action and make purchases.

Here are some tips that could help you turn clicks into revenue:

With these unique services, we teach our clients about the Seven Stages of Lifecycle Marketing and how they apply to their businesses. You will learn to ask questions such as: What is your perfect customer? Where in your lifecycle do you gain or lose customers? These questions and others will help you to gain more insight into your business and how you can continue to grow.

Offer a wide variety of payment options. The more options you have available, the more people you’ll be able to serve. Take as many forms of credit cards as possible, and be sure that you allow your users to pay with PayPal as well. However, great payment options are only those that your customer loves, trusts and that your system can process and execute with ease.

Make your website easy to navigate. Anyone who visits your site should instantly be able to determine where they need to browse to make a purchase. Every second is key here. When you speak with your web designer about creating your website, make sure that finding the sales portal is the top priority. Websites that are difficult to navigate are frustrating to web users, which means they won’t linger for very long on your site.

Improve load times. The longer a website takes to load, the less likely a person will want to sit around and wait for it, which means fewer sales conversions. If you’ve got a ton of animation or high-end design features on your site, consider toning it down to make it easier on users with a slower connection.

Keep an eye on reviews. You may be able to glean some information about what stopped people from making a purchase on your website, which will help you to improve for future customers. Establish an internal policy on just where these reviews are to be maintained and populated. On social media only? On your site?

Branch out across the web. You can make conversions outside of your website as well by using social media and other outreach tools. The more ways you can get people back to your website the better.

Be grateful. Make sure that you follow up with all customers that make purchases online by thanking them for their order, and perhaps sending them a discount code for their next purchase. This will make them much more likely to come back.

Follow these tips and you'll be off to a good start in creating more conversions through your website!

Thomas von Ahn | Chief Elephant Slayer | Viral Solutions LLC

Filed Under: Social Media Tagged With: infusionsoft, Lifecycle Marketing, website