Category: Technology

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Brand Community Examples and Why They are So Successful

Building a community around your brand is vital in today’s marketing and consumer world. Consumers are looking for trust, credibility, and authenticity. Without these factors, you are unlikely to make any sales or make an impact within your industry, which is why many of the top brands today work hard to build a specific community around their values, products, services, and more.

 

Dissecting how the top brands take advantage of their communities can provide you with more tools and resources to grow a winning brand community of your own. The following are four brand community examples to emulate and why they are so successful:

 

  • Airbnb – You know all about this community because everyone talks about verified hosts. Verified hosts take part in this private community to learn how to make the most of their Airbnb business and rentals.

 

  • Once they make it to a certain point, YouTube- The creators on YouTube are invited to a private creator’s community that gives them motivation, tips, and more to make their channels better. In some communities, this is taken outside the online community right into co-working hubs.

 

  • Lego – This community enables enthusiasts to share what they are creating with Lego and helps drive product creation and innovation. Members can submit ideas, and they can win prizes and contests.

 

  • Airstream – They offer owners or wishful owners a community that allows them to share the interest and love of their airstreams. They can also learn about events and places to stay less expensively.

 

  • Harley Davidson – This close-knit community offers a sense of connection to Harley riders and their loved ones. They use the group to inspire loyalty, market the latest items, and more like big events and gatherings.

 

  • Trader Joe’s – You can join a discussion board, listen to their podcast, and find all about new products and how to use them before they come out. People love TJs so much that even in areas without a store, yet they build a fanbase using communities so that before they even break ground, they know they have enough customers to make it work.

 

  • Gone With the Wynns – This YouTube sailing couple spends a lot of time within their communities on YouTube publicly and privately within Patreon. Due to their active community, they have raised money to help animals and clean up the ocean.

 

  • High Carb Hannah – This YouTube star has a fabulous community based on her website where she has generated enough income through her offerings to build a house and live a very happy and active life outside of just work.

 

  • Apple – This community is very large and full of users and would-be users who love everything about Apple products. The community offers peer-to-peer support and a place to hang out with other like-minded folks.

 

Now that you think about it, you can find many communities for any product or service, or problem that you have. The advantage to creating a community yourself for your brand is enormous to you and the customers you want to help. The more they know about you and feel safe with you, the more likely they will buy and become repeat and long-term customers.

 

Top Influencer Marketing Mistakes to Avoid

 

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Common Email Marketing Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

While email marketing may be the best way to engage and increase sales, you can easily make mistakes. The email marketing process requires preparation, review, and evaluation to keep it running smoothly and successfully. Unfortunately, if you don’t know what you are doing, you can fall into some common poor habits that result in a poor return on investment.

 

The following are some of the most common email marketing mistakes and how to avoid them:

 

Only Using Email to Make a Sale

If the only emails you send are promotional and full of sale links, you are already doing a disservice to yourself. No matter how many links you try to send, the value you provide will translate into real results. Use email to teach your readers something you want them to know instead, and even better, make sure it solves a common issue or problem for them. Then add other smaller promotional sequences throughout.

 

Ignoring Your Bounce Rate

Meaning the deliverability of your emails is likely poor as you are probably ignoring key steps to ensuring your subscribers get your emails. For example, using emails with your website works better than third-party addresses like Google and Microsoft. Using third-party addresses can easily signal spam warnings, while using your email address better verifies your authenticity.

 

Poor Goals and Understanding of Audience

Lastly, not taking the time to understand your goals and audience fully leads to poor quality content and communication within your email campaign. Email marketing is powerful because subscribers view it as more personal – providing you the opportunity to form a deeper connection and understanding through personalized and quality content.

 

Disregard of Subscriber Mediums

In other words, you are ignoring the device your readers use the most to read and engage with your content. This is crucial as not every email service provider or platform is optimized for mobile devices. However, smartphones are far more available to people than computers. Meaning most of your subscribers likely read your emails and other content on their phones. Therefore, you must ensure your content is optimized to view and click-through for mobile phones.

 

Poor Call-To-Actions or None at All

Every email should have a clear goal which means they should also have an easy-to-use and understand call-to-action that translates to achieving it. An email without a call-to-action is like a company without a business plan.

 

You must avoid these common mistakes if you want to see high conversations and a return on investment from your email marketing campaign. Lackluster call-to-actions, poor follow-up, nurturing, and understanding of your audience can all potentially affect your email marketing results.

 

 

 

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Six Secrets to Creating the Perfect Email Funnels

Email marketing has by far one of the largest returns on investment compared to other forms of marketing. However, that doesn’t mean it is straight forward nor will you see results just because you have a campaign set up. Like most things in life, there are important rules to follow to get to success.

 

Here are the six secrets to creating a powerful email marketing funnel:

 

Lead With Your Goals in Mind

Better Goal Setting Tips for Maximum Productivity

Before you develop any content, you need to know what your marketing goals are. For example, do you need more exposure to increase your sales, or are you hoping to educate your audience more? As you can see, these are important questions, so you know exactly what type of information you need to create and how to develop the right call-to-action to see proper results.

 

Add Readers to Multiple Sequences and Segments

Remember, many of your readers will be on different journeys. Some will be brand new, and others will be avid users of your products. Meaning they shouldn’t be on the same email sequences or segments. Likewise, if you have multiple products, they may not all be interested, making segmentation important. Welcome emails, abandon carts, or re-engagement emails are a few different examples.

 

Keep Your Content Funnels Varied

In other words, don’t just sell to your readers. Make sure there is a mix of value, promotional and fun. If every email you send to your readers encourages them to buy something, for example, your audience is more likely to be turned off and eventually unsubscribe to your email campaign.

 

The best policy is to lead with generosity. You don’t need to make a sale after every email you send. Providing value without anything in monetary return is often time the best way to see success. This is what establishes your credibility, trust, and awareness as a brand that eventually works together in return on profits.

 

Take Advantage of Your Titles

Titles are the most important part of the funnel. Sure, you need their email address; however, just because you have it, doesn’t mean they will read it. So you still need to work to capture their attention. In fact, you will want to create more than one and then test them on different readers.

 

Test Your Funnels

Nearly 47% of marketers, in a HubSpot “Ultimate List of Marketing Statistics for 2021” report stated, that they test different titles to see which ones perform the best. Some key aspects to keep in mind when developing your titles include clarity, urgency, curiosity, and relevance. In other words, make sure they know what they will get but don’t give too much away. Then be sure the copy or email you present to them satisfies the expectations of the title.

 

Focus on Retention

You got the sale, but that doesn’t mean the work is over. You must further nurture and inspire your customers to keep them interesting and to come back. One sale won’t lead to sustainability.

 

Be sure you get the results you need from your email marketing campaign by following these six secrets to creating a powerful email marketing funnel. As long as you have the secrets and take action, you will see the results in no time.

 

 

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The Four Benefits to Conducting Email Marketing Audits

Email marketing audits are about reviewing everything it takes to create your email marketing campaign, from developing your goals to reviewing your content creation process and comparing them to your current metrics. It also includes identifying your strengths and weaknesses to build an actionable plan to improve your conversions and better connection with your audience through email marketing.

 

The following are four important benefits to conducting email marketing audits:

 

To Improve ROI

Return on investment (ROI) is the most important metric when keeping track of any marketing strategy. If your return is low or less than what you put in, it is not worth your time or investment. Meaning adopting strategies that provide a high return on investment are where you should spend most of your time. For example, email marketing is the top priority as it converts more sales than social media and gives you as much as forty-eight dollars back for every one dollar you spend.

 How to Easily Crank out Content Daily

To Identify Winning Content or Strengths

Knowing your brand’s strengths and weaknesses is crucial to improving your content, nurturing your relationship, and engagement with your readers. Your weaknesses are red flags or indicators that tell you what you need to do to better engage and connect with your audience, and your strengths can be used to improve them. If you know what you are good at, you can better use it to your advantage.

 

To Highlight Marketing Holes or Weaknesses

Highlighting your weaknesses easily is a strength within itself and vital to running a successful business. Of course, business is never perfect; it is a roller coaster that requires constant evaluation and improvement to keep up the speed and stay on track. However, if you know exactly what to fix, you can develop a better plan that directs it straight to success.

 

To Optimize Your Company Mission and Values 

A valuable benefit of email marketing includes spreading brand awareness, authority, and credibility. Three factors are needed to convert your readers into loyal customers. First, through email auditing, you can keep this message more consistent and ensure you provide the value your readers expect while also ensuring your trust throughout the process. The more your readers trust you and value your authority, the more likely they are to make a purchase and become loyal followers.

 

These benefits show that you are likely to fail if you don’t perform an email marketing audit and are only wasting your time and effort by skipping over steps. Instead, you must continuously track your results and commit to improving and understanding your audience to successfully and fully optimize your email marketing campaign.

 

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Email Funnel Red Flags to Take Notice Of

To perfect your email marketing funnels, you need to be aware of certain factors that hinder your success. Many red flags are obvious if you just know where to look. Thankfully these red flags have plenty of solutions to them as well.

 

Here are five common email funnel red flags to take notice of in order to see proper conversions:

 

Low Open Rate

While this is not a metric you usually want to use on its own, a low open rate at least indicates that your subscribers are not reading the content. Meaning your deliverability could also be low, the titles don’t spike their interest, or you are simply sending them at the wrong time.

 

However, a high open-rate will not always translate to success, so you should always track other metrics to measure your results more accurately—for example, a high open-rate with a low click-through rate.

 

High Open Rate with Low Click-Through Rate

This means you are on the right track as your readers are interested, but something about the product you are advertising is off. Maybe the price is too high, or it doesn’t actually solve their problem.

 

High Click-Through Rate with Low Conversions

Again, this can be associated with the same problem presented above. The readers are clearly enjoying the content as they click through; however, you cannot make the final conversion. This could indicate a disconnect in your landing page from your email. Your email had enough detail to persuade them to click on the landing page; however, the expectations were not set. Be sure you don’t have any misleading discounts and that your email and landing pages have similar expectations.

 

High Unsubscribe Rate

This can happen for a couple of common reasons. First, you are either marketing your opt-in copy or forms to the wrong people, sending out too many emails, or are developing copy that is not compelling enough or too spam-like for your audience.

 

A great way to solve this is to keep your sequences and segmentations short and direct. Don’t send emails too often. If you know your target audience well, including how you can help them, you can develop the right content, products, and services to prevent a high unsubscribe rate. Usually, unsubscribe rate is not a problem if you start with your buyer personas in mind.

 

Varying Unsubscribe Rates Per Sequence

Some email sequences may be too long, short, or seen as spam. Some customers may end up in the wrong sequence, too, leading to them unsubscribe. Meaning you should be sure most of your readers are in more than one sequence.

 

Keep these red flags in mind to know where to improve your email marketing content when a problem arises. Successful email marketing will always require consistent reviewing and updating.

 

 

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Tips to Using E-mail to Work with Influencers

One of the best ways to contact influencers is through e-mail. Unfortunately, when it comes to content creation and content marketing, lines can often be blurred and disorganized due to all the information and different people required to run successfully. Here are a few tips for using e-mail to work with influencers and streamline the influencer marketing process.

 

Use and Create Templates

 

Don’t start over every single time you start a campaign. Instead, start using and creating templates for each type of action you take. Then, simply fill in the blanks to get it done much faster while not forgetting to include some information.

 

Make Goals and Intentions Clear

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When you communicate with anyone, remember that it’s your job as the sender of the message to ensure understanding by the receiver. To ensure that you do this, be very clear about your goals and intentions in each e-mail message you send. Even if it feels redundant, explain everything. E-mail doesn’t offer the ability of the reader to decipher your tone or body language, so clarity is a must.

 

Create Innovative E-mail Headlines

 

Creating subject lines or e-mail headlines takes practice and persistence. Instead of using the first one, you create, try creating 50 every single time you need a headline. Do it very quickly, within about 15 minutes, just writing down all the headlines that come to mind. This type of brainstorming will improve innovation and get more results.

 

Highlight Their Compensation

 

When you communicate with an influencer, make sure you highlight the compensation you’re giving them because that will help motivate them more. In addition, your campaign can be even more effective if you’re offering them affiliate marketing deals in addition to their flat influencer fee.

 

Keep it Personal

 

Don’t act too business-like. Influencers are all about building relationships, but, at the same time, you want to keep your e-mails and messages personal, so they don’t feel too spammy to the receiver. For example, mention something you like about them or point out a particular video or post they did to make them stand out to you.

 

As you can see, using e-mail can make the process of communication with different influencers easier.  Using e-mail to communicate with your influencers can ensure that organization and communication are clear before the campaign starts. It also streamlines the process and makes it easier to understand as it can be pretty tedious to outreach to many different influencers.

 

 

 

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Important Influencer Performance Metrics

When you begin an influencer marketing campaign, you must figure out what metrics to track. Part of goal setting includes identifying the tracking metrics, so it won’t be as hard as you think to accomplish as long as you take the time to set up your goals and objectives properly.

 

Here are the top metrics to keep track of depending on your influencer marketing goals:

 

Audience Growth

 

How has the influencer grown its platform over time? If you want to ensure that they are consistent in their efforts, you only need to check the metrics to find out. You can easily check by looking at their stats which they should provide to you, or you can use a third-party system to help like Socialblade.com but realize that these are only estimates.

 

KPIs to track for audience growth include:

 

  • Number of subscribers – How many subscribers are they getting each day, and how long did it take?
  • Social media followers – How many people follow them on other social networks, and how long did it take them to get to the level they are?

 

Brand Awareness and Reputation

 

While you aim to create more brand awareness for your brand and improve your reputation, you must ensure that the influencers you choose also have the same goal so you don’t accidentally select someone who doesn’t represent you properly.

 

KPIs to track to determine awareness and reputation:

 

  • Page views – How many viewers are going to find you on that platform potentially? You can find out by how many average pageviews the influencer is getting to find out how it might work out for you.
  • Impressions – Even if they don’t click, the information still shows and is called an impression. So the more people who view, even if they don’t click, the more awareness you’ll build.
  • Social media followers – How many followers does the influencer have now, and how many do you have now. Again, knowing how this grows during the campaign will help you see if it’s working or not.
  • Brand mentions – You can set up an alert with Google or use a third-party app like Hootsuite.com or Brandwatch.com to track who mentions your brand web-wide.

 

Engagement Rate

 Tools and Tips to Help You Automate Engagement

One of the things that really help build your business online is engagement. So if you choose influencers who are good with engagement, it’ll boost your own engagement. Once the customer clicks through the influencer’s mention, they’re going to expect the same sort of engagement and personality from you.

 Free and Low-Cost Automation Tools You Can Implement Today

KPIs to track to ensure your engagement is what you want it to be:

 

  • Likes – Getting likes on your posts is one way to notice engagement and increase your reach. Ask your audience to like your posts to help.
  • Shares – When your audience really likes what you’re posting, they’ll do more than like. They’ll also share. Sharing will expand your brand in a multitude of ways that can’t be duplicated any other way. People trust their friends, and if a friend shares, it’s much more powerful.
  • Comments – This is a better form of engagement than the other two in many ways because useful comments increase reach and help you get to know your audience better.

 

Website and Social Media Traffic

 

You can’t get any type of engagement or sales without traffic. So one of your main goals and objectives is always going to be traffic generation. Of course, when you get more traffic, you make more money, but of course, you want the right traffic.

 

KPIs to track to ensure you are building your influence via traffic generation methods:

 

  • New users – How many new people visit that site, influencer, page, or product each day?
  • Session time – How long they are sticking around is also a good indication of whether they’re consuming the content or not. You want your pages to be “sticky” and keep them as long as possible.
  • Total number of sessions – How many times has that same person come back to your information?
  • Pageviews – How many pages views have you delivered for that campaign, product, or advertisement?
  • Click-through Rate (CTR) – This is how many times someone has actually not only viewed the page or info but clicked and followed your CTAs. If you get 100 page views and ten clicks, that’s a 10 percent clickthrough rate.
  • Cost per click (CPC) – Likewise, knowing how much it costs you to get those clicks will also inform how much you can afford to pay for advertising and influencer marketing. If you’re making $100 a click on average, you can reasonably spend 33 bucks to get that click.

 

Sales

 

Of course, all that work you are doing, the hiring and working with influencers and offering amazing value, is ultimately to make sales. So, therefore, of course, you must track sales. You don’t even have a business until you make sales.

 

KPIs to track to ensure you’re making a profit from your sales:

 

  • Sales conversion rate – How many clicks and views does it take for you, on average, to make a sale? Knowing that helps you determine how many touchpoints you need to create.
  • Number of sales – Finally, tracking how many sales you’re making during any period you want to follow can help determine the cause of those sales so you can repeat it.

 

Lead Generation

 

Did you know that most people will not buy anything from you by going to your website and clicking to buy unless you’re pretty famous, like Amazon or Etsy? But if you take that traffic, you receive it and turn it into a lead. Then, you can boost your conversion rate exponentially. After all, once a customer is on your e-mail list, you can now promote them and communicate with them anytime you want to.

 

KPIs to track to ensure your lead generation is working:

 

  • Signups – How many people have signed up for the freebie or low-cost offer you have promoted to them?
  • E-mail Subscribers – How many people subscribed to your newsletter due to the promotion you created?

 

Finally, track your return on investment or ROI for every KPI listed above. No matter your goal, you should always keep track of your ROI to ensure you are not spending more than the value you receive from the influencer contract. Again, it’s easy to determine by simply doing the math. You can keep track in a simple spreadsheet or use the platforms you have with their native tracking ability.

 

 

 

 

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Putting It All Together And Developing A Routine That Will Keep You On Track

Over the course of the past six blog posts, we’ve talked about the importance of consistency and how it can help you grow your traffic, your subscribers, your customers, your product catalogue, and most importantly your income. Now it’s time to bring it all together and create a daily, weekly, and monthly routine that will keep you on track to continue to grow your business.

 

Any online business can be broken down into three different areas that need your effort and attention. They are traffic, list, and offer. You need visitors to your website. Then you need to convert those visitors into subscribers. Finally, you need to make those subscribers an offer so you can make money. Keep this in mind as you build your routine.

 

Do something every single day to send more traffic your way. This could be content marketing. It could be social media. It could be tweaking your SEO. Or it could be paid ads. Start by making a master list of things you can do to get more traffic. Pick things you can quickly do and rotate through one or more of them on a daily basis. Things that take a bit longer should become part of your weekly and monthly routine. For example, you may choose to learn how to run Facebook ads this month as one of your bigger projects. The most important part is to do things consistently to drive more traffic to your website.

 

Next, think about what you can do to get more subscribers. Adding an opt-in box to your latest blog post is a quick task that could go on your daily to-do list. Setting up a new opt-in funnel with a fresh lead magnet may make a great weekly project. Writing a book to tap into a new market via Amazon would be more of a project that takes a month or more. Come up with a variety of different things you can try, tweak, and do more to grow your list consistently.

6 Things to Include on Your Freebie Opt-in Page

Last but not least, you’ve got to make an offer. This could be something evergreen like crafting a new autoresponder email for your flagship product. It could be a daily task of running and tweaking ads. Or it could be a free SEO and social media campaign that you work on for a few weeks. Make a list of what you can do to get your offers in front of fresh eyeballs and get to work. And don’t forget to set aside some time each week to work on the next paid product as well.

 

Keep chipping away and continuing to build and fine-tune your routine. Your consistent efforts will start to pay off and more importantly, they will begin to compound as you get more traffic, grow your list by leaps and bounds, and add more products each new customer may be interested in. Keep at it. Consistency is the key to long-term profit.

 

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Work On Your Funnel Each Week And Continue To Branch Out

You should already have at least some very basic funnels set up for your online business. To make sure we are all on the same page, let’s quickly define what a funnel is when it comes to your website. It’s a way for people to work their way through what you have to offer. This could be going from the content of your blog, to signing up for your email list, receiving a series of emails and getting an offer for one of your products or services. That’s one simple funnel and I hope you already have that one set up.

 

While that’s a great start, it should be your only funnel. The goal for any business is to continue to find new ways to draw in more potential customers and engage them. That may mean setting up several new opt-in offers. It may mean sending out a monthly or weekly newsletter. It should always mean creating new products, or making offers for existing things. And of course it could mean presenting affiliate offers.

 

Funnels are great and they are never done. For starters, things change. Links break, you find better offers, and you learn more about your subject matter and have more or even better information to present to your audience. That’s why it’s a good idea to audit your existing funnels from time to time, updating, editing, and fixing them as needed.

 

It’s also a great idea to test and optimize your funnels. For example, you could split test two different lead magnets and see which one converts better. Test what product you present to your subscribers when. Tweak and test to improve your overall conversions, open crates, and click-through rates. Split test your sales pages … The sky’s the limit when it comes to testing and tracking your funnels. The goal will always be the same – try to do a little better than what you have been doing. Over time, you’ll make huge improvements that translate into a bigger bottom line.

 

In addition to improving your existing funnels, you also want to set aside some time each week to consistently work on expanding and adding new ones. This could mean adding a couple of new autoresponder emails to your first funnel this week. And it could mean creating a new lead magnet next week that attracts a slightly different audience into your circle of influence. The important part is that you work on your funnels every single week. Consistency here, like in so many other areas of your online business is key. Doing a little bit each week, will help you grow, expand, and improve your funnels.

HBA Funnel Builder…

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Struggling With Social Media? A Calendar And System Can Help

Do you have a hard time with social media? Either you aren’t finding the time to get around to posting regularly and getting discouraged by a lack of results you’re getting. You know what I’m talking about. You aren’t getting a lot of new followers on your page on Facebook for example and when you post something only a small fraction of those people see the post. It can be discouraging and feel like you have to pay to play by buying ads if you want your content to be seen. Thankfully that’s not true. What is true however is that consistency can help you grow your reach on any social media platform. It can help you with Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, and anywhere else where your ideal customers choose to hang out.

 

This brings up an important point. Before you dive in and invest a lot of time and effort on every single platform, take a look around. Where are your people hanging out? What media does your tribe prefer? For example, if you’re running a recipe blog, you have to be on Pinterest, and depending on your particular niche, you may also want a Facebook presence, including a group, and possibly a YouTube channel. If you’re into sourdough, you’ve got to be on Instagram… Do your research and do your best to determine where you want to be before you get started.

 

Once you have that figured it, it’s time to come up with a posting schedule. Remember, consistency is key. You’re better off doing fewer posts and shares more regularly than overdoing it and burning out. Start with a conservative number that you’re comfortable with across all platforms and write it down. For example, you may choose to do 5 tweets per week, 10 pins, 3 Facebook posts, one Facebook Live video, and a new YouTube video every other week.

 

Once you have your schedule, it’s time to schedule the actual content using a calendar. You can use Google Calendar or an old-fashioned paper one. The key is being able to stay organized and having your social media goals in writing to ensure it gets done and posted regularly. How far out should you schedule? That’s up to you. If you like to plan in big batches every few months, go for it. If you prefer to be more spontaneous, do it once a week. Play around with different time frames and see what works best for you. When you know what you’ll be posting about and have the text and images ready ahead of time, it’s quick and easy to keep up with social media.

 

To save even more time and make social media content more hands-off, take a look at some of the scheduling tools available. I like Hootsuite, MeetEdgar, PostPlanner, and Tailwind (for Pinterest). Use them to schedule and loop posts that will go out without you having to log into your social media profiles every single day.  Instead, you can set aside time once every couple of weeks to do the bulk of your work. Then check-in from your phone throughout the week to respond to comments etc. Getting organized and figuring out a system that works for you can be such a game-changer when it comes to being consistent on social media and growing an engaged following. When you have those main posts going out on schedule, you can then pop in and interact & post in real-time as and when time allows.

 

Tools and Tips to Help You Automate Social Media Marketing