By Hailley Griffis
This week’s great article roundup is all about our bread and butter — marketing. From LinkedIn marketing and marketing strategy, to email marketing and content creation. Business Insider, Forbes, Entrepreneur.com and Social Media Today all give excellent tips and tricks. Enjoy.
How to use LinkedIn to boost marketing and increase sales
Business Insider explains just how powerful LinkedIn can be. With more than 225 million professionals worldwide using it, it is the hub for professionals to network and share online. Business Insider states that 24 per cent of salespeople increase their sales when they start using social media. Organizations can show off their expertise on LinkedIn and use company profiles and groups to build an influential presence.
Creating a successful marketing strategy
Andrew Klausner talks about the importance of a robust marketing strategy. Although many companies operate off of referrals, if ever the referrals slow down, they need to have a strategy in place to pick up sales. But you cannot simply decide to market one day, and stop the next. Klausner points out some key elements to a successful strategy, including being realistic and consistent over time.
10 questions to ask when choosing an email marketing service
Email marketing is still in full swing, having grown exponentially since 2009. It is now responsible for 7.5 per cent of new customers, according to recent stats. There are so many email marketing services out there, Kim Lachance Shandrow outlines some important things to first look over before deciding on one. She highlights setting goals, determining costs, picking a design and deciding on platforms, among others.
5 key elements of viral content
Mark Smiciklas knows that every marketer dreams of having their content shared like wildfire. He shares an infographic that reveals the secret sauce for making content viral. The infographic looks at elements like scarcity, share buttons, skim-ability, practical utility and consistency. One interesting fact is that the average user consumes only about 20 per cent of the content on a web page.
By Peter Hanschke
We’re finally getting close to the end. I must say that although it has been fun, I’m looking forward to the end. Maybe because I’m thrilled to have an app in the store; or maybe because the long nights and weekends are getting to me; or maybe both. Not sure why, but I’ll be glad when it’s over. My last post talked about the importance of marketing your app and not relying on the app store to get the word out. Today we’ll talk about taking your app on the road and engaging others for the first time with your app …all in the name of testing it.
Whether you are developing for iOS (as I am), Android, windows8, or BlackBerry, there are a number of variants that you need to test. On the iOS platform you have iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad and various generations of each device and the OS. At the outset you have to select which combination of devices and operating systems you want your app to run on; this defines the device section of your test plan. For my app, I narrowed the field down to iPhone and iPod Touch (fourth and fifth generations), running OS 6.x. With Apple cranking out new devices and new operating systems frequently AND (by witnessing lineups at Apple stores on launch days) users upgrading to have the latest, I figured that my narrow field is a significant enough market for me to tackle. Android, on the other hand, is different. Many versions of Android are still in play today, which makes the testing a more difficult and longer process.
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By Megan Totka
You may or may not have heard this recently, but SEO seems to have introduced a new sibling into the online marketing family. ASO (or App Store Optimization) is the online marketing of mobile apps through items like their descriptions, keywords and titles. Because apps are marketed somewhat similarly, but not the same way as traditional web content, the industry has dubbed this area of optimization accordingly by giving it the name ASO, and thus identifying the “store” as the means through which one attempts to market their app successfully.
Instead of optimizing content for a search engine, like with traditional SEO, ASO requires one to optimize apps specifically for app stores. The two most popular app stores currently on the market are iOS (Apple’s mobile operating system) and Google Play.
The proliferation and use of mobile devices is ever-increasing in today’s world, and accompanying that mobility is the demand for mobile web access, as well as access to mobile apps. The goal for marketing your business should be to reach your customers where ever they are, and that will likely mean going mobile.
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By Hailley Griffis
This Friday we have two distinct trends in our favourite articles of the past week.
The first is the importance of looking to the future of marketing. Articles by Marketo Blog and featured on LinkedIn discuss the changing landscape of marketing, the new roles that will be required in the future and suggestions for accomplishing your goals while you can.
The second trend is that of customer service, something this blog always makes a point to highlight. Articles by CopyBlogger and FastCompany look into why you may be losing your prospects’ trust and how to avoid it. Also, should you actually listen to your customer? What if they don’t really know what they want?
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By Francis Moran
There may be nothing quite so ubiquitous in the normal sales cycle for the enterprise software market as the software demo. And there may be nothing that kills as many promising deals as the software demo done poorly. And yet, the demo is such a critical part of the sales cycle. Delivered at the right stage in the sales process and sharply tuned to the prospect’s real needs, there are few tools in your sales kit more potent than a well-run demo.
The karmic gods must believe I deserve punishment for some dire past offence for they have obliged me to sit through well more than my share of wretched demos. The only solace I can take is that I don’t seem to be alone in this; a quick scan of colleagues plus my own experience made the following list of software demo failures all too easy to compile.
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