Here Are Four Reasons Your Small Business Should Consider Digital Signage

As a small business owner, finding economic ways to gain exposure and attract and retain customers is imperative to the success of your business. Placing traditional ads on TV and billboards are still common options that can have some potential benefits for many small businesses. Another option to consider is digital signage, which provides you greater capabilities in connecting with potential and current customers, allows for more flexibility in when and how to display ads, collects usable data, and saves money over the long term. There are software companies, such as https://www.navori.com/digital-signage-software/, with multiple plan options, allowing you to choose the one that works best for your business.

Customer Connections

In today’s competitive marketplace, standing out from the crowd requires a diverse and creative approach to reaching potential customers. Social media and blogs are two of the most effective marketing tools for reaching consumers. Using digital signage software increases your ability to connect with customers on these platforms by giving you a tool to create, alter, and store multiple marketing messages tailored to your target audiences.

Flexible Campaigns

Digital signage gives you increased control in managing your marketing campaigns. You can create promotional campaigns quickly and alter them as needed. You have the ability to schedule multiple targeted messages across broad audiences in any location, even rotating your campaigns throughout the day, if you wish. Additionally, changes that are made are automatically implemented across sites from one centralized location.

Data Collection

With the digitization of marketing comes the ability to gather data more rapidly and effectively than traditional marketing approaches. Data collection can help you hone your message, adjust your campaigns, and understand how your target audience responds to your campaigns. Data allow you to respond in meaningful ways, increasing the likelihood of your campaign’s success.

Long-Term Savings

As a small business owner, purchasing digital signage software is an investment. The upfront costs of the software can seem expensive, making the decision to buy a difficult one. Over the long-term, however, digital signage can save money. Maintaining the software is inexpensive, and you do not incur the expenses that come with creating new ad campaigns for TV or traditional billboards. Another cost-benefit can be found in the potential to reduce the money spent on ineffective campaigns.

Digital signage is common among large businesses and corporations, but its usefulness is not limited to those markets. More small businesses are realizing the potential for digital signage software to increase their exposure, provide more campaign flexibility, obtain useful data, and save money. If you are a small business owner, digital signage software might be an investment worth considering.

4 Ways to Promote Your Business Online and Offline

Rosana Beechum

To succeed as a small business, it’s necessary to promote it. While this isn’t always what a new business owner wants to hear, the reality is that customers rarely just walk through the door unless you’re a retail store in a central position. If the business is office-based, no one knows about the company until it’s been established for some time unless you’re proactive about promotion.

Here are 4 ways to promote your business on a small budget both online or offline.

1.     In-person Marketing with Classy Promotional Materials

Producing well-designed product brochures, glossy flyers, and eye-catching posters offer a great way to promote your business to new customers. Whether you send out a brochure in the mail or market at a business expo, having exceptional marketing materials provides exposure for your company and shows your financial ability (and hence success) to do so.

An inexpensive graphics designer hired from Upwork.com or Fiverr.com is going to be able to knock out some interesting designs to get you started. Additionally, cheap printing online which you can get by visiting zoeprint.com keeps the quality up while ensuring the printer costs stay even lower than expected. You can also use an online brochure maker for easy design.

2.     Guest Post on Related Websites

Getting your brand mentioned on other websites is an effective way to drive new visitors to your site. Writing a guest post that appeals to another website’s audience and has some overlap with your own is ideal.

Develop genuine business relationships with the owners of the other websites you wish to approach to get a guest post published. Engage with the owner so they know your name when you contact them later with a guest post request.

3.     Sponsor a Local Event

To develop local business, look beyond Google's local search results. There’s an opportunity to get your brand in front of local people by sponsoring an event. Event managers need corporate funding to help cover the cost of running their event so they’re usually happy to place your company’s branding prominently in exchange. When the event is in support of a great cause, that’s even better.

4.     Advertise Selectively Online

Online advertising doesn’t need to be overly expensive. By using Facebook’s advertising platform, it’s possible to target people by location. Additionally, demographics can be selected to narrow down a specific audience to the market target. This makes advertising more affordable because it avoids marketing to larger groups of people, most of whom aren’t suited to your company.

It’s also possible to use the Facebook pixel, which visits your website and lets Facebook identify previous visitors to your website who are also their users. They can then be re-targeted with ads to tempt them back with a special offer. This also makes it possible to show adverts to people who are similar to your existing customers, Facebook finding people in their database with close interests.

Promoting your business doesn’t need to be overly expensive. Whether spreading the word about the brand in the local business community or using online advertising to drive targeted traffic, being strategic about marketing can drive higher growth rates in your business’ early years.

Please note, this article contains affiliate links.

Why E-commerce Businesses Need to Develop a Brand

By: Kayleigh Alexander

A strong brand is essential for any business, whether you’re a freelancer or run a multinational corporation. But in an environment as competitive as online business, a failure to create a strong brand puts you at a huge disadvantage.

Every business must have a brand. It has always been important, but now it is more important than ever. Here’s why you cannot afford to neglect building a brand—along with some tips for how to go about doing so successfully.

Recommended reading: 7 Easy Business Concepts Every Founder Needs To Know

Why branding is essential

Branding has never been more important for ecommerce stores. Your brand will have a strong say in whether your e-commerce business is a success or a failure.

With any business—but e-commerce in particular—you need to create a bond with your customers. After all, there are plenty of other e-commerce stores waiting to take their money if you don’t provide what they want. 

While people are more comfortable with the idea of spending their money online than they were even a few years ago, they still need to feel comfortable when they arrive at your store. They need to trust you before they type in their credit card details, and this is where your brand can help.

It boosts brand recognition

Branding also boosts your recognition online. You need to be recognized online because you need to stand out. There may be dozens of stores selling what you sell, and you have to find a way to make your store memorable for positive reasons.

Your brand makes you unique. It’s something that other stores cannot offer, and it is what helps to set you apart.

It creates (and capitalizes on) emotion

Branding is all about the emotional connection and how you make your customers feel. When people think of your store, you want them to immediately feel a positive association with it, which will help to drive more business. 

Essentially, you want them to feel good when they shop on your site because this increases trust and increases the chances that they will choose your store rather than the competition.

It inspires loyalty

Finally, a strong brand inspires greater loyalty, which is essential for your e-commerce store to survive and thrive.

You want your customers to not only come back but to tell all their friends how great you are. You want to convert them into brand advocates so they will promote your business for you and provide compelling social proof.

It helps you stand out in a saturated market

The market is saturated. Competition from other e-commerce stores is tough enough, and then you have marketplaces like Amazon to compete against. 

Your brand can make the difference, not only in tempting customers away from the industry titans either. It also gives your business value beyond its essential operations (should you ever want to test out direct selling, an increasingly-popular pursuit for e-commerce entrepreneurs, that value would be essential).

How to brand an e-commerce store

Now you know the importance of branding, you need to know how to build your brand.

It all starts with your design

Start with the basics, which means setting up a website that is well designed, mobile-friendly, blazing-fast, and with a simple and straightforward checkout. When people come to your store, they should have a memorable experience from the off, and that starts with your website design. 

Focus on strong and attractive design. Make wise choices with your color, fonts, logo, tagline, and more, and use the same style in everything you do to increase recognition, including your emails, blog posts, social updates, and guest posts.

It’s a good idea to use a reliable and popular platform for your eCommerce store, as this will generally have features available that make branding easier. One of the most popular platforms tends to be Shopify. You can read a Shopify review here.

Implement a strong content strategy

Part of a successful website involves creating amazing content. Create blog content based on user guides and helpful information surrounding the products you sell. Consider the tone of your content and decide whether you want it to come across as funny, upbeat, friendly, welcoming, or anything else.

A quick hack is competitor research. Identify what your competition is doing and the topics that they cover, then do the same, but better. Check out ecommerce websites for sale in your niche and get a feel for the kind of content they publish. Find those e-commerce businesses that command a higher price than their competitors — these are the ones that have perfected their brand, boosting their value as a result.

Look out for trends and popular posts. These will help you flesh out your content strategy quickly without resorting to (often expensive) research tools.

Create a genuine customer relationship

Engage with your customers on social media and in your blog comments. Always reply to their comments, and use every contact as an opportunity to build your brand. This extends to your customer service too. 

Provide exceptional customer service, whether on your website, over the phone, or via social marketing. Amazon is known for its focus on brilliant customer service, and you can do the same. Get known for this, and you’re sure to drive more business.

Appeal to your USP in everything you do

Know what your unique selling proposition (USP) is. Work out what makes you different and why people should shop at your store and not the others. 

It could be that you offer more choice, better prices, better customer care, free shipping on everything, no-questions-asked returns, or something else entirely. Ensure you keep your USP at the heart of everything you do, from sure everything you do has this as the focus.

Write a brand story with heart

Create an About Page that tells your story. Provide details about the people who started the store, why they did this, and what your mission is. Make it personal — by giving your brand a human history, you breathe life and personality into it.

And get creative with your story delivery too. A written story works fine, but so too does a video telling. Interviews with your brand founders, Q&A sessions, or even an interactive timeline all make for an engaging brand story delivery.

Embrace a multichannel social presence

Be present in more than one place. Build your presence on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and other sites. People find brands in different ways, and you want to make sure they encounter you.

And creating a sprawling social presence gives a human element to an otherwise flat business. Regularly posting on social shows that you’re more than just a business — you’re a lively, active brand that your customers can engage with on a human level.

Your brand is how people feel when they think about your business, and you want to make sure that emotion is a positive one. The more people trust you and enjoy buying from your store, the stronger the relationship will become—and the more they will want to continue being your customer. 

Everything you do affects your brand. So decide how you want people to feel about your business, and then set about defining a strong brand in everything you do to make your business more competitive in the e-commerce space.

Building and optimizing your website from an amateur’s point of view

By: Rachel Kassinger & Rebecca Britton, co-founders of Twinnks 

When we decided to start Twinnks, we knew it would be primarily sold online. Therefore, our website and online presence were very important. If you’ve seen our previous blog post, you know how we feel about preparing as well as you can before you launch your company. Since a lot of startups don’t have the capital to hire a web developer—at least we certainly did not—we had to turn to good ole fashion learning-and-doing-it-ourselves.

Building your website

Luckily, there are a ton of eCommerce-ready sites designed for beginners. As a full-time Marketing Manager, I’m most familiar with WordPress, so that’s what we used. The platform offers a ton of themes and tutorials to walk you through building your website. There are a few reasons why it's so important to start building a website early:

1. You can secure your domain. Even if you aren’t ready for the website to launch, you can have at least have the domain in place and use a “draft” site until you’re ready to go for it.

2. You’ll learn how to navigate the website. The last thing you want is to have a live eCommerce site and no idea how to change text, pictures, or products. Don’t add stress.

3. You’ll start understanding what you really need out of the site. With WordPress, you’re not stuck with the theme you select. You can change it out if you start working with one and realize it's missing functionality that you realize you need.

If you’re planning to sell your product primarily online, sites like WordPress and Shopify have a very user-friendly eCommerce integration. However, it may be smart to learn what you can about setting up your online store, then hire a freelance web designer to implement it. If there is one place to spend a little money on your website, I personally think it is on the eCommerce end. You want it to be as secure and customer-friendly as possible and while I’m pretty confident in my WordPress skills, that part makes me a little nervous. 

Optimizing your website

If you’ve done any preliminary research on building websites, you’ve probably seen the term “SEO” 100 times. In the most basic sense, SEO (search engine optimization) is a strategy to get your site to come up on search engines organically, increasing the quality and quantity of website traffic. What good is having a website if Google can’t find it?

Below is advice to help your website come up through the ranks.

1.     Research Keywords

What keywords or search phrases best describe the product you’re offering? If someone Googles it, will you come up? The main purpose of SEO is to help those who are looking for you to find you. Therefore, your content needs to match the phrases people are searching for. Tools like Google Keyword Planner, which is free, allow you to type or upload various keywords and they’ll give you the trends based on actual Google searches. They also tell you how competitive the keywords are and give ideas for new ones. The goal is to find keywords that have:

●      High search volumes

●      Low competition

●      Relevance to your product

Depending on your product, it can be difficult to zero in on search terms that offer all three of those factors, especially high search volumes and low competition. If a lot of people are searching for it, chances are competition is high. So start focusing on “long tail” keywords. Long-tail keywords are more specific, so they tend to have lower traffic, but collectively give you better results in the long run. For example, Twinnks is a comfortable t-shirt bra that doesn’t show lines under clothes.

When you type in “t-shirt bra” or even “comfortable t-shirt bra”, there are millions of other bra companies that come up. It’s going to be very hard to secure a good spot on Google against so many other options. However, “no bra lines” or “t-shirt bra that doesn’t show lines” is much more specific and even though it’s not a common search phrase, I definitely want those people to find my website because they’ll likely convert.

Great! You’ve identified the key search terms. Now, where do you use them?

2.   Incorporate Keywords

If you have a blog (Which you should. Read our thoughts on that in this post), use those terms and phrases throughout your posts and in your website’s product descriptions. Lastly, install an SEO plugin on your website. If you’re using WordPress, I recommend Yoast. It lets you put in title tags and focus keywords for each page. It also analyzes your content for readability and gives suggestions on how to improve it. They have an extremely helpful blog and SEO courses to help you understand this insane and every-changing optimization nonsense.

3.   Monitor your site

In order to see how your SEO is doing, you’ll need to monitor it. If you haven’t already, get Google Search Console. It’s a free service Google offers that monitors your site for search queries, page rank, impressions, and click-through rate. It also allows you to submit content to be crawled, shows you any errors, and how to fix them and much more. It’s a great tool and again, it’s free.

4.   Patience is a Virtue

Once you optimize your site, let it run for a little bit. Don’t expect to incorporate your keywords and immediately see them on Google. As mentioned above, submit your site to be crawled through the Google Search Console and keep an eye on the traffic results, but be mindful that it may take a few months to see the results. Your page rank and queries should start improving within a week or two, but seeing real conversions tend to take a little longer, unfortunately.

5.  Keep Learning

Google also makes minor changes to its SEO algorithm 500-600 times a year, so every once in a while read SEO blogs and articles to make sure you’re all up to date. I recommend the following blogs/courses:

●      Yoast

●      Kissmetrics

●      Moz

If you find yourself struggling, you can always consult with professionals who have in-depth knowledge and expertise in the field of SEO for websites of all sorts. Seek out someone who specializes in your niche. This could be SEO for franchises, for example. They’ll be able to maximize your site’s potential, helping you to scale the search engine rankings and maximize your sales and profits as a result.

25 Ways To Improve Your Content Marketing & Get More Traffic

How effective is your content marketing strategy? Which of the following tips do you implement regularly?  Strive to write blog posts that are 1,000 words or longer and interview industry leaders for maximum impact.

Content marketing has become a huge part of attracting the right audiences online, which means that most brands (small and large) are doing it and it's harder to stand out than ever before.

But to help you produce enticing and compelling content that resonates with your target audience, follow these top content marketing tips.

Blog Post Length: Start with your blog posts.  Instead of writing five 500-word blog posts per week, try to write three blog posts and make each one 1,000 words or longer (although you should strive for 2,000 words or more) to help with search engine rankings and generate more traffic. The more value your blog posts provide, the more your target audiences will be engaged and the higher your content will rank.

2). Guest Blogging: I know you've heard it time and again, but guest blogging is one of the best ways to reach more audiences and build your website's authority. Pick five to 10 blogs or websites that you'd like to write for, find the right contact person (usually under the "Contact" or "Submission" page), and send a short intro with two or three topics you'd like to write about. If you don't hear back right away, send a follow-up email or two a few days after you sent your initial email.

3). Headlines: Make your blog post headlines short and powerful. Choose headlines that are searched for often (like this blog post headline).

4). Keywords: Incorporate the right keywords into your content marketing to help with search engine optimization. However, make sure your content is top quality.

5). Recycle Old Content: It can difficult to come up with new blog posts three or four days a week, so recycle old content by updating statistics or adding new trends. After you've written four or five blog posts, add them to your email marketing strategy. In fact, I've taken five of my older blog posts and turned them into an email course which has helped grow my list significantly over the last month or so.

6). Social Media Marketing: Post your content to the right social media networks. Remember, your target audience isn't on every platform. Pick one or two social media sites to post your content.

7). Visuals: Today, text marketing just isn't enough any longer. If you want your content to stick out, then add a visual element to your blog posts or social media content. Video seems to yield the highest levels of engagement right now. If you can't afford to add video to your content marketing, then pick beautiful stock photos to add to your posts.

8). Buying Cycle: Have your content meet the needs of your visitors at every phase of your sales funnels to increase email conversions and sales.

9). Lead Magnets: Create compelling lead magnets for each one of your blog posts to increase email opt-ins. Lead magnets can be checklists, a video tutorial, or some other type of free offer that makes visitors sign up for your email list.

10). Editorial Calendar: Develop an editorial calendar for your blog so you know what you're going to write about weekly. Not only will it help you stay focused, but it will help you create content regularly.

11). Social Media Advertising: If you want to reach more audiences, then try Facebook.com advertising or promoted pins on Pinterest.

12). Shareable Content: Make sure all of your content is shareable. Add social share buttons to your website. You can do this free by signing up for SumoMe.com.

13). Infographics: You don't need to hire a graphic designer to create an infographic because you can use a service like Canva.com or Venngage.com.

14). Call to Action: Make sure every blog post and social media update has a strong call to action.

15). Slideshows: Turn your most popular blog posts into slide shows and upload them to SlideShare.net to generate targeted traffic to your website.

16). Types of Content: Create roundup stories, trend stories, interviews/Q&A's, top 10 tips, checklists, mistakes to avoid, etc., for your blog.

17). Guest Bloggers: In the beginning, it might be difficult to attract guest bloggers if you have low traffic levels, so why not target newer bloggers and entrepreneurs who are looking to get exposure for their brand or website? It's a win-win for both of you.

18). Case Studies: Highlight a case study that features one of your customers who used your product or service.

19). Challenge: Create a 5-day challenge to keep attract new followers and keep existing ones engaged.

20). Recycle Social Media Content: Recycle your social media posts. If you write a blog post on Top Marketing Hacks for Bloggers, post it to Twitter and Facebook several times throughout the week. Just be sure to change up the language to keep followers engaged.

21). Podcasting: Although I don't consider podcasting to be "traditional" content marketing (I think of it more as publicity), these unique interviews can help with your search engine rankings because you'll receive backlinks to your website.

22).  Voice and Tonality: Make sure your brand voice is consistent throughout all of your content including your blog, website, press materials, and social media platforms.

23). Goal Setting: I probably should have included this higher up the list, but it's so important to know your goals. What do you want to achieve with your content marketing campaign? Do you want more traffic, enhance brand awareness, increase sales, or generate more email subscribers?

24). Optimized Content: Make sure your content is optimized properly with the right titles, headings, tags, and alt text on all of your images.

25). Social Media Automation: Use a social media scheduler like HootSuite for Twitter and Facebook and TailWind Infographics for Pinterest to streamline your workflow.  

Keep in mind that nothing worthwhile happens overnight. Content marketing - just like all other forms of marketing - it takes time to develop, but the more consistent and thoughtful you are with your content, the more traffic and authority your website, blog, or brand will earn.

What content marketing tactics have worked for your small business or blog? Describe your experiences in the comment section below.

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