Category: Marketing

To drive sales to your business, you need to be sure that you are marketing to the correct audience. And as your customers change and grow you will also need to make changes and adjustments to your marketing techniques. One way to do this is to create a buyer persona. Having a target audience is great, but having a buyer persona will give your team a clear focal point to help them build the best marketing campaigns for your target customers.

If you’re unfamiliar with the term “buyer persona” it is merely a tool to find out more about your customer. It is a detailed representation that includes the ideal customer demographic background, hobbies, career, and personal interests. To find out about these details, you will need to do some in-depth marketing research on your existing customers. Here are some tips on finding the ideal buyer persona.

Collect Data

Find data on your buyer persona through your social media presence and website. Get the data on all of the emails they open and don’t open, which page of your site has the most clicks, and analyze the results of survey data. Each aspect of this data is a part of your customer’s digital behavior.

Use Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a great tool that will give you information about the activity on your website. It works for social media posts as well, it will track the movement of your audience and show you how your posts are performing. There are several other social media analytics tools available that you can use to analyze your social media presence outside of Google Analytics, including Quintly, Followerwonk, and ViralWoot.

Define the Buyer Persona

After you’ve collected all the data, you can now ask yourself who the customer is. Start by asking specific questions such as, “how old is the customer?” “What is her/ his salary?” “What does she value?” Once you have covered a list of specific questions, you can ask the broader questions like “who is the ideal customer?” This should combine all the answers you have found through the previous answers. Once you have seen the specific personality of your ideal customer, you can now market to them on a personal level.

Discover The Way Your Buyer Persona Finds Your Business

Now that you are aware of your ideal buyer persona you can ask yourself what brought your buyer persona to discover your business? Did they Google your business and find it through an organic search? Were they referred to by a friend? Or did they stumble across your social media presence? These details will help you to identify the marketing channels that will best serve you.

Once you have discovered your buyer persona, you can use this persona to personalize your marketing strategy. Not every customer you receive from your target marketing will be the exact match to the buyer persona. You will find that only aspects of your buyer persona match your audience, but the audience will nonetheless feel that you are directly addressing them because they fit at least some part of the mold. You can also create multiple buying personas if your product is broad enough to reach people in different age groups, occupations, and interests.

With this information, you can create targeted ads, personalized email messages, and blog content that they will be interested in responding to. Once you have reached your customers on a personal level, they will turn into loyal consumers of your product.

Not only will you be providing content that your buyer persona will want and respond to, but you can also begin to learn more about your customer and their buying process. Once you have found what triggers their purchasing decisions, you will see an instant improvement in your inside sales. And at the end of the day, the most important thing is making a purchase and providing your customer with the items that they want and need.

If you are the owner of a small business, then you have probably struggled with creating an online presence that gets noticed. In your continual attempts for growth, you may feel that you and your small team are stretched pretty thin, and you don’t have the time or the resources to spend on working on your online presence. However, having a professional appearance online in this digital age is a necessity for any growing business (especially when there are many recruitment tools like browser extensions that can show all your online presence in one file), and luckily there are many tools available to you that can help you build the online presence that will drive more customers to your site. No matter what your budget is, with these simple tools your small business will begin to look like a giant company powerhouse.

However, before we get started, first you have to create a plan for the growth of your brand. Set goals and intentions. Write down your aims and objectives. Strategize ways to achieve these goals. If your goals are broad, break them down into smaller goals that are easily achievable. For example, if you want to increase views on your blogs by 40% then break that goal down into intentional steps, such as:

• I will write a blog post every day.
• I will interact with other blogs under the same umbrella.
• I will review products on my blog for free. Etc.

Each of these small steps will eventually lead back to your ultimate goal of getting more page views. This is also a great way to track small progress, so you don’t lose sight of the big picture.
Now, onto the available tools that will assist in fortifying your online presence with greater professionalism.

Time Management Tools

There are several affordable tools available that can help you manage your time and projects.
Calendly is an excellent scheduling app that you can send to your clients when trying to schedule a phone call. It will send your client time frames that work for your business, and they choose the block of time that coincides with their schedule.

Toggl tracks your work time logged on a project. Toggl can help with scheduling and precise invoicing. You can even check your work report to see when you or your employees were most productive.

Slack is the tool you should be using if you have a team of remote workers. You can keep all of your projects and pitches in one place and create a message board between workers so that you can stay on top of projects together.

CRM Software

CRM stands for customer relationship management. You can find CRM software by several software companies, including SalesForce, Microsoft Dynamics, InfusionSoft, and Insightly. This software is designed to help your small business by building trust and loyalty between the business and customers. This is done by managing your calendar and to-do lists, tracking leads, managing data, managing contacts, and assessing the value of your marketing techniques.

Intuit QuickBooks

QuickBooks is a great accounting software to track income and expenses. There are different packages that you can choose from at Intuit QuickBooks, including three different small business plans and a freelancer plan. The plans differ slightly in what they offer but even the most low-cost basic plan can help you manage tax deductions, organize your receipts, create invoices that you can track and cash from your software, and you will also be able to run necessary expense sheets.

Recruit The Right Talent

There is a way to recruit the best candidates for your small business, in the same manner, a large company recruits their talent. Plum is a tool to help enterprises to match the right employee to available positions. Plum has created application surveys to examine the workplace psychology of prospective employees and divides these people up into the areas that they would be best suited for which will help you trim down potential matches to the people best suited for the job. It will also let the prospective employees know where they stand in the hiring process so you won’t be bothered by several follow up emails.

Global Call Forwarding

Since you’re already here you may know a bit about the virtual phone company, but in case you weren’t sure how the company could help your business create a professional presence, here are a few things that Global Call Forwarding can do to make your business presence more attractive:

• Provide virtual local or toll free numbers, including vanity numbers
• The ability to use extension numbers so your customers will be directed to the office they need right away
• Record calls for later analyzation
• Call transfer services
• An account management page where all of your phone records and data is stored in one convenient place

Any business no matter how small can have the ability to look like a substantial professional corporation. If you want your business to attract more customers and make more sales, then apply these tools to achieve a professional online presence so you can begin to see results.

Obtaining a vanity toll free number is a smart move for your business and paves the way for many more opportunities. The ease of remembering a vanity number offers a business the chance to expand its branding and advertising efforts using only a highly versatile phone number. It’s like adding just one extra level of cushioning to a facet you already need and use. A vanity number can be extremely beneficial in advertising campaigns that utilize visual media such as commercials, flyers, and billboards.

Toll Free Numbers: Ideal for Billboard Advertisements

When companies use their vanity numbers in advertising and marketing campaigns, they have the ability to increase response rates and lead generation is known to increase substantially. If you decide that you are going to market your company using visual advertising on billboards and magazines, this study found that there was an 84% improvement in consumer recall rates when a vanity number was featured at the forefront. Displaying a toll free number on a billboard is a smart move for businesses because there is an immediate spike in calls because of how simple they are to remember for customers. Unforgettable vanity 800 numbers and easy to remember toll free numbers are also perfect for boosting your company’s bottom line because your customers know exactly why they’re calling 1-800-PLUMBER. Also, at that desperate moment, they need a plumber, 1-800-PLUMBER is impossible to forget. A vanity number asserts your company as the industry leader, offering customers the invaluable benefit of instant recall.

Not only are vanity 800 numbers unforgettable to your customers, they provide results. If you have a vanity 800 number, it is important that you showcase it widely. In addition, 800 numbers are toll free and the customer knows that when they call a toll free number it will be completely free for them, which encourages them to place more calls.

Billboards Get Noticed

Many attorneys use 1-800 numbers in their billboards to attract clients to their practice. Advertising with a toll free number on a billboard can be beneficial for many companies, not just attorneys.

Displaying your toll free number prominently on a billboard in front of the right location and the right audience can bring in many new clients. Billboards on popular local highways that thousands of people commute through each day is the ideal location for your billboard campaign. Contacting an advertising agency to create the best message for your brand is the next step after you have found your perfect billboard location. Make sure that your slogan is catchy, easy to read, and includes your company’s toll free number prominently. Once you have your perfect billboard displayed prominently in front of your target audience you can sit back and wait for the calls to start rolling in, as your marketing team tracks the new generation of income.

Invest in Advertising and Watch Your Numbers Grow

The price of a billboard varies from city to city. In rural areas, it can be as low as $250 compared to as much as $14,000 in New York City. A sizable amount of your business’ budget should be allocated for advertising needs, and a billboard is an affordable way to reach a broader audience. The use of a prominent 800 number will increase the response rate. Of course, it is quite hard to monitor billboard conversions. It is possible that a million people will see your billboard, but if you are an attorney and someone remembers your number from the ad and they do not have a legal situation that needs to be handled at the present time, they may call you months later.

To make certain that you can accurately calculate your ROI from billboard conversions there are certain steps that you can take. For instance, if the toll free number displayed on your billboard is only being advertised from the billboard, then you can peruse your phone records to monitor the increase in call rates since the time the billboard went up.

The next step is to ask every single caller how they heard about your firm. All businesses should ask this question at some point in a conversation with a customer as it is an easy way to track your current marketing strategies. If all of your calls are coming from your billboard advertisements and you receive zero phone calls from the people you targeted with door hangers, you can easily cut that marketing effort from your budget.

Advertising with toll free numbers on billboards is a powerful marketing tool that will yield amazing, and often proven results. Multiple studies have confirmed that companies who utilize their toll free number in media displays for advertising see high increases in response rate. If you already have a toll free number, a billboard campaign is a great next step towards growing your business.