Marketing

Growth Hacks

mcrmarketing

Your Value Proposition

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Top Offer Components to Consider

For each offer component consider what you currently offer and what you could offer, to maximise the potential of your offer.

Product or service

Associated services or products

Logistics

Deliverability / Availability

Customer / Technical Support

Selection / Convenience

Risk Reversal / Guarantee

Warranty / Policies

Bonuses

Terms

Pricing

Quality

Perceived Value

Status

Reputation

Joining The Club

Branding

Delivery

Performance

Scarcity (Uniqueness)

Ideally you need to include a selection of these in your offer/USP/value proposition and general marketing.

Convert Your Unconverted Leads

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Quick Win for Your Business: Convert Your Unconverted Leads!

Part of your marketing strategy should be putting time aside to review all the leads that came in but were not converted straight away, or were skimmed over and not fully followed up.

These are your unconverted leads.

These leads will have shown a level of interest, maybe they emailed, phoned, downloaded a lead magnet, they may even be just a pixel in your marketing audience!

But they are still potential leads, and a marketing plan should be formulated to catch up with these leads.

These leads may not have been in a position to convert at first touch point, but may now be ready to come onboard as a customer.

Even leads from a year ago or more should be considered for follow up.

Consumers are now spending many hours, days or weeks researching for a product or service, jumping from channel to channel, until they decide on a purchase.

The company that keeps following up, and chasing for the business, has more chance of winning.

In this climate, keeping marketing costs down, and swapping your time to follow up will often gain new relationships and even sales!

You can email, call or match your contact audiences in your advertising platforms, to reach out to prospects.

As an incentive, you could offer welcome back discounts, bundles or other offers to enthuse your prospects to convert.

Copywriting Power Phrases #1

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Power Phrases that Sell

When it comes to selling products, you have to be careful with your words.

You can’t just pitch a product to onlookers using the same tone, mood, and phrases as you would to make a suggestion to a friend. And you can’t discuss the features of a product like you might in a letter or an email.

That is, when you pitch your work or the work of another business owner, you have to choose your words carefully. You have to select words and phrases that will instruct the reader to think and act in a way that will eventually result in them buying your products.

How can you do this? There are a number of tricks. Some involve inserting certain “psychological trigger” words into your copy. These words will generate some association in the reader’s mind, which will compel them to act in a specific way. For instance, you might use the word “shocking” or “scientifically proven” in a sales letter headline to draw in the attention of a reader.

In addition to simply picking words wisely and placing them carefully, you will also need to do the same thing with complete phrases. You will need to contrive phrases and place them in the right places in order to generate the right impact.

For instance, in order to increase your conversion rate, you will need to use a well-placed and cleverly constructed “call to action.” Stuff this up and you could lower your conversion rate by 50%.

In addition to crafting a good call to action, you will need to do something similar with headlines. You will need to put words together in a way that immediately draws in a reader, so that they continue on to the rest of your content before closing the page.

In short, the construction and placement of good words and phrases can go a long way in determining the success of your marketing campaign. Fortunately for you, the following articles were created with the intention to help you do things better.

Phrases Starting With A

Absolute(ly)

Absolutely No Obligation

Accelerate

Accept My/Our Offer

A Child Could Do It

Accurate(ly)

Acknowledgment

Action

Act Now!

Act Today!

A Cut Above

Added Value

Adjustable

Admire(D)

Adrenaline

Advance(D)

Advantage

Afford(Able)

Agree(Ment)

Alert!

All New

All-Purpose

All The Difference In The World

Allure

All You Need

A Must!

Anyone Can Do This

Anytime

Anywhere

A Pleasant Experience

Appeal(Ing)

Appropriate

Approved

Approved By Major Companies

As Seen On Tv

Astonish(Ment)

Astounding

Attention

Attractive

At Your Fingertips

At Your Own Pace

At Your Request

Authentic

Auto Delivery

Autograph(Ed)

Automate(D)

Automatic

Available

Awesome

A Winning Offer

Understanding Social Media Marketing #1

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What is Social Media?

Social media is certainly the buzz of today, but what is it, how can it benefit you, and why do you really care?

Glad you asked. First, let’s stress that if you think social media is a fad that’s going to disappear you couldn’t be further from the truth. Social media is a phenomenon and it’s taking the internet by storm.

Those who were quick to jump on the bandwagon and take the time to understand social media marketing have already taken their businesses miles ahead of the competition. Over the next decade, we can expect social media’s role in marketing and business to grow by leaps and bounds.

So what is social media? By definition (Wikipedia), social media refers to the use of web-based and mobile technologies to turn communication into interactive dialogue.

So how big is social media? It’s huge! To give you an idea of how huge here are some recent stats.

• There are more than 750 million+ active users on social networking site Facebook.

• There are more than 156 million blogs.

• There are more than 490 million YouTube videos.

Social Media by Characteristics

The best way to understand social media is by grouping by characteristic.

• Openness: The majority of social media venues promote leaving comments, voting, sharing information, and removing barriers making content open to everyone.

• Connectedness: Social media thrives on being connected with other people, resources, sites, blogs, etc.

• Conversation: Traditional media is one way communication whereas social media is more of a two-way conversation.

• Participation: Social media promotes everyone to contribute and provide feedback. Media and audience blur together.

• Community: Social media sees communities quickly sprout up based on common interests.

5 Basic Forms of Social Media

If you’re wondering when we are going to get to the meat and potatoes of social media marketing, we are already on our way.

There are five basic forms of social media. Let’s have a look at them.

1. Social Networks

These are sites where people build personal and business web pages and then connect with their friends and/or family to communicate, share content and share photos. There are a many social networks although most of us think of Facebook right away.

2. Forums

Forums came before social media and were an important predecessor that remains important today. These are sites were online discussion are around a specific hobby, topic, or interest. Information is shared and exchanged and online communities are built.

3. Blogs

Blogs are a well known and popular form of social media. A blog is like an online journal. It can be personal or business. They can be based on a specific topic such as fashion or real estate, or they can be more like a diary discussing daily events or news.

4. Content Communities

Content communities organize and share based on a specific type of content such as videos or photos. YouTube is the biggest content community. There are others such as Flickr.

5. Microblogging

Microblogging combines social networking and micro blogs, which are the equivalent of little sound bites. It’s the perfect way of sharing information for mobile devices. Twitter is an excellent example of microblogging and they are considered the leader in the microblogging arena.

Content Marketing – Why Content is King # 1

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Why is Content Important?

Are you new to online marketing? Or are you one of the millions of frustrated website owners watching helplessly as your site fluctuates up and down (even on and off) the search engines?

Is your traffic suffering as you try to stay on top of the most current methods of finding traffic, only to find that they are ineffective for bringing targeted traffic or stop working soon after the search engines catch on?

There is a reason that staying in the search engines is vitally important. The amount of people who are searching for information online is increasing rapidly.

An Ipsos-Reid poll showed that people are starting to rely more heavily on the internet with increases in the frequency of internet usage in North America the UK and Asia. At the time of the poll 72% of Americans were online within the previous month, and that number continues to rise.

How are they finding information on the internet?

According to research published by GVU (Graphic, Visualization and Usability Center), most users – novice, expert, young, old, male and female – find new websites from two main sources: hyperlinks and search engines.

Pew Internet & American Life Project also published statistics about search engine use which indicated that “84% of online American adults have used search engines. That amounts to 108 million people. On any given day, 56% of those online use search engines.”

How many of these potential visitors are finding YOUR website? More websites are created each day leading to increased congestion and competition for the top spots in search engine results. How are you able to compete? Well first of all, how do search engines bring you traffic?

Two of the most popular methods of getting traffic from search engines include PPC – Pay Per Click – and SEO – Search Engine Optimization.

PPC:

Pay Per Click is advertising provided by the search engine providers (Google, Yahoo! and others) where you PAY for top placement. Their strategies for placement differ slightly. Some search engines will give you higher placement if your ad has a higher click-through rate (meaning more people click on your ad in ratio to the amount of times your ad was shown), others give top positions to the highest bidder.

In either case, you PAY. It is a quick way to get listed in the search engines and a smart way to get your traffic flowing – but it is not the cheapest AND you could spend far more than is profitable for your business if you don’t know what you’re doing.

SEO:

There are a lot of companies working ‘behind the scenes’ to help website owners get plenty of traffic from the natural search engine listings. Natural listings mean the search engine has ranked you according to the value it believes your site will offer an individual searching for a specific word or phrase.

Understanding exactly WHAT the search engines want to see when ranking sites requires knowledge of the algorithms. These algorithms change all the time as search engine providers try to outwit the search engine optimizers trying to find loopholes in the ranking system.

Some SEO companies will promise you top spots for a certain cost. Some are honestly creating optimized websites – others may be using techniques that could possibly get your site BANNED from the search engines entirely (once the search engine catches on). However, optimizing your website for better placement in the search engines is a technique that you should become familiar with and use to your advantage.

Both of these traffic methods have their pros and cons for generating traffic from the search engines. You will find out more about using them properly later on. But first you need to know what REALLY works…

… continued in #2…