Why Email Marketing is More Important Than Social Media

Entrepreneurs have been using email to communicate with their customers for decades. Social media has become a popular alternative to email marketing in the past few years. However, marketers and entrepreneurs realize that email is still more effective than social media at generating sales and leads.

 

Email still has an average user engagement rate of forty percent. Compare this to Facebook’s at four percent and Instagram and Twitter’s at one percent. Your success requires regularly staying in touch with your target audience to stay at the top of their minds. Email marketing is a powerful tool for anyone running a solo business, as it helps them build and maintain relationships with customers.

 

Here are four primary reasons why email marketing is more powerful or essential than social media:

 

Email Marketing Generates Higher Conversion Rates

The cost-effectiveness of email marketing makes it highly desirable for small business owners to use. Even if you personally don’t enjoy email, understand the stats. The average email open-rate is around forty-three percent. The click rates are approximately 3.2 percent. In comparison, the average click rate for social media is roughly 1.3 percent.

 

Email Marketing is More Personal and Direct

Email marketing is personal and direct, so it’s more effective than social media. Unlike other forms of advertising, email marketing messages are less likely to be blocked by spam filters, and emails are delivered quickly to inboxes. Email marketing also makes it easier to segment your market and only share certain information. For example, sending your new readers an email about who you are and a newsletter to your current readers. This allows you to diversify your communication and engage in many different ways.

 

Email Marketing is More Affordable

Email marketing produces the best return on investment than any other type of marketing out there. Email marketing campaigns are also not that costly. It’s much lower than running a successful social media campaign. The average cost per lead for an email campaign is one to two dollars, while the same metric for Facebook is roughly six to eight dollars per lead.

 

Email Marketing is Easier

Building a list with email is simpler, but it’s also more effective than a social media following for building a hungry list of buyers. This is because most people use email. It is estimated that roughly ninety-four percent of users on the internet have or use email. In addition, email is straightforward to understand and doesn’t require a lot of time to implement as social media does. However, depending on the social media platform you use, you will need to take the time to learn the distinctive features to maximize your results.

 

While this information is important to be aware of, that doesn’t mean you should ignore social media. However, it does point to not choosing social media over email marketing, as it can significantly impact your success as a solo entrepreneur.

 

 

The Key to Content Marketing as a Solo Entrepreneur

Content marketing is part of the entire process of developing content that builds trust with potential customers. It can be done by creating and sharing useful, valuable, and engaging content on your blog or website, email, or social media platforms. Content marketing effectively generates leads for companies of all sizes. Whether a startup or an established company, content marketing can help you reach new audiences and generate leads cost-effectively.

 

The following tips are important when creating your content marketing strategy as a solo entrepreneur:

 

Have Clear Goals and Know Your Target Audience

By having clear goals and knowing your target audience, you will be able to create more engaging content. In addition, crafting clear and specific goals will lead to higher conversion rates and a more satisfied audience. On the other hand, a content marketing plan without goals means you will likely waste time developing content your target audience doesn’t care for or need.

 

A content plan without goals will be unsuccessful. You need to set specific, measurable, and achievable goals for your content if you want it to succeed. These goals should include the number of subscribers you need, increased likes and engagement rate, how many leads the content will generate and how much money the content will generate in advertising revenue.

 

Attract Your Target Audience with Value and Useful Content

Content marketing is about creating content your audience wants to read, watch, or digest. This requires a deep understanding of who they are and what they do throughout their life. It helps develop multiple customer personas to help you achieve the message you want to the right audience. A customer’s persona is a fictional representation of a person who might use the product or service that you are developing. This profile aims to understand the customer’s background and motivations and make decisions about the product or service based on their needs.

 

Utilize More Than One Type of Content

This means creating videos, written content, and live content such as podcasts or webinars and sharing pictures. The more mediums you use, the easier it will be to connect and engage with your target audience. People learn in many different ways, so creating different types of content will help you attract more people. In addition, this means you can repurpose a lot of your content to reach even more people.

 

Overall, the key to content marketing is understanding your audience and providing the content they want or need to become loyal to your brand. It does not matter how much content you deliver if your target audience does not value it or see it as applicable. Remember, taking the time to craft useful and valuable content is a primary key to your overall success as an entrepreneur.

 

 

Three Important Brand Community Practices to Follow

A strong brand community increases your reach, business revenue, and loyalty. However, to achieve these benefits, you must nurture, support, and commit to providing value to it. Only when you do the right work for a community can you expect anything positive in return – adopting the common practices that many find success in can get you started in the right direction.

 

Here are three important brand community practices to follow for increased member satisfaction and success:

 

Listen to and Engage with Your Target Audience

 

Everything you do in your business is about ensuring you’re reaching your ideal audience. The only way to be sure is to actually listen to and engage with your members in a deep way that ensures you find out the information you need to help them most.

 

While you can outsource to a community manager VA to get help with your community, you are the one who needs to show up occasionally to engage with the target audience because it will make them feel like VIPs that you take the time to be with them.

 

Address the Needs of Your Audience

 

Once you realize what your audience really needs, it’s time to address those needs with your messaging, education, products, and services. Everything you do is designed to provide solutions to your audience to help them solve their problems as easily as possible.

 

Use analytics, surveys, questionaries, freebies, engagement, contests, and more to determine what gets your audience’s attention based on the information and data you collect. The data you collect will inform you what their needs are and help create amazing content for them.

 

Choose the Right Platform or Community Structure

 

Today, community-building platforms are ubiquitous. Because of this, you can choose your perfect community to help you promote your business to a captive and interested audience. It really just depends on your own criteria. Do you want a message board that can be threaded? Do you have concerns regarding using the technology? Do you want to allow your members to make in-platform purchases? Do you want the ability to accept uploads or provide downloads? Whatever it is that you need to deliver to your audience is out there.

 

Write down what you need in a community, and then compare your needs to what’s available. You can always start easy with a Facebook Group, but there are many other options. Don’t assume all the different options are too expensive. Facebook may be free for you to use, but there are compromises to using anything free, just like there are compromises to be made even if you pay for a platform.

 

Many brands can get a community started easily; however, keeping it organized, engaged, and beneficial to your core audience is where many fall through. Not following or incorporating these top three community practices will only lead you down one road: failure. Adopt them today to build the brand community you want to achieve all your goals and more.

 

 

Community Engagement is Key to Growing Your Business

Three Steps to Building a Highly Engaged Brand Community

Communities work because they are engaged. Engaged people feel connected and form relationships that keep them around long term. Thus, allowing you to grow a healthy and sustainable business. In addition, through these communities, you can inspire your members to take action that benefits your business and them.

 

Follow these three steps to build a highly engaged and active brand community:

 

Step One: Define Your Business Values and Align Them with Your Customer Needs

 

Your customers’ needs come first, but you need to understand what your business values are. When you can share what you stand for and show that it aligns with your customer’s needs, you’ll really stand out in a big way. For example, if your business holds the value of a commitment to the customer, that needs to be very clear in every interaction you have.

 

Step Two: Choose the Right Platform and Community Structure

 

Lots of activity on every platform is not required to succeed. However, it is important to start an account if your customers are there. Social media platforms come and go, so even if you focus on one more than others right now because that is where your customers are, that doesn’t mean that will be the same one you’re focused on later.

 

The right platform to use to build your community is the one your customers will use. That may seem like a cop-out to say, but it’s true. The platform you choose needs to be the platform your customers like, even if you don’t like it. For a lot of businesses right now, that means Facebook Groups.

 

Step Three: Share and Engage with Relevant Content

 

More important than anything is not the platform as much as what you share with them on the platform. Provide interesting information, education, and offers for them to take advantage of throughout the year. Try to offer something new to them every single day if you can.

 

Content is where engagement and interaction breed and continue. Without content, you won’t be able to inspire and influence your audience to act. Without action from your target audience, you won’t find success within your community. An active and engaged community leads to success because they share the valuable information they appreciate with others or make direct purchases. The way to grow their trust and find value from you is through the content you share.

 

Following these steps will ensure you set up the right community for your business and target audience. These steps are essential to review and not overlook if you want to build a thriving, inspired, and engaged community. Knowing what your brand stands for, and using the platform your audience prefers, while keeping them active with relevant and actionable content will make your community exceptional.

How to Repurpose Your Influencer Marketing Content

 

 

How to Create an Influencer Contract or Agreement

Developing your influencer contracts isn’t as hard as most people make it. The truth is that it’s always a good idea to get a lawyer to help you create your contracts but signing a document that you create is also acceptable in a court of law.

 

The following are the basic requirements for any social media influencer contract:

 

  • Parties To the Agreement – Include the legal names of the people subject to the contract terms, including their business name and entity type and address and contact information.

 

  • Terms Of the Agreement – One way to put all the terms you’ve agreed to in the contract is to just list out by number each person’s responsibilities in order of importance.

 

  • Timeline Of the Campaign – Dates and the timeline are imperative inclusions into any contract if you want it to be enforceable.

How to Search and Vet Potential Influencers

  • Content Creation Expectations – Be very specific about what you’re expecting the influencer to create for your payment.

 

  • Compensation Amounts – Describe not only how much but what signals the payment to take place and how it’ll be done. For example, you might want to pay them half up front, half after the campaign, or some other schedule.

 

  • Advertiser Policies – Always include any policies that you want to have, such as not including bad language, grammar, and punctuation, as Facebook’s Advertising policy states.

 

  • Confidentiality Agreements – If you have one, put it in the contract and be very specific.

 

  • Non-Disclosure or Exclusivity Agreements – If there is something you don’t want to be disclosed, such as the private marketing stats you provided to them, make sure it’s in the contract. Likewise, if you don’t want the influencer recommending your competition, make sure to say so.

 

  • Breach of Contract Clause – What happens if either party breaches the contract? If you describe what should happen now, it’ll make it easier should something go wrong.

 

  • Governing Law – Always include which state, city, and county (or country) law’s will be the guiding force of this agreement should there be a disagreement.

 

  • Signatures of All Parties – Don’t forget to get it signed. It doesn’t have to be notarized, but this can help. Using software to sign is also helpful.

 

Lawyers aren’t required to make contract legal, but they are required to know what you are permitted to put in the contract as you cannot contract illegal things. If you write an agreement on a napkin and sign it, it’s legal as long as the items put in the contract are also permitted. A self-designed contract is better than no contract, but it is advisable to seek help from an attorney or paralegal to perfect your arrangements.

 

 

 

Tools and Tips to Help You Automate Your Marketing

One of the best things to start automating as soon as you can is your marketing. Automating is a lot easier and less expensive than it was just five years ago. Today, even a one-person business can implement marketing automation that assists in exploding their business and taking it to new heights never considered in the past.

 

These tools and tips will help you get marketing automation right:

 

  • Understand Your Sales Process – You should easily be able to describe the journey your customer takes from awareness through to delight. Because when you know what your customer’s intent is, you can put the right tools and information in front of them.

 

  • Know Who the Customer Is – Of course, part of understanding your customer’s journey is also simply knowing who exactly your ideal customer is. You must be able to describe who they are in detail if you want to know how to market to them. This fact never changes whether you are doing things yourself, using automation, or letting a contractor do it.

 

  • Create, Plan, and Publish Content in Advance – All marketing starts with content. Before you even start using automation, you need to have content for each level of the buyer’s journey to get their attention.

 

  • Pick the Right Software – For example, software like Hootsuite is helpful to manage the social media platforms all in one place. In contrast, software like SocialOomph.com can automate your content distribution by prepopulating content. Know what the point of the software is before you buy it and use it.

 

  • Focus on List Building – Whether you are marketing using automation or doing it yourself, the main focus you should have is on list building. Building your list with hungry customers is your first priority for any marketing you do.

 

  • Know What You Want – If you don’t know what you want, it’s hard to find the software. One issue with automation is you may not realize how much you can automate, so you don’t even know that you want it because you don’t know it exists. For this reason, educate yourself on various ways others use automation because the truth is if you can think it up and it’s repeatable, you can probably automate it.

 

  • Focus on The Basics First – When you first begin implementing automation, focus on the easy things you do now. For example, automating your sales pages to deliver a freebie, sign your lead up to your list, and then deliver automated nurturing messages is the first place you should consider automating.

 

Take a look at what you already are doing in your business, and then look up whether or not you can automate that. Posting to social media, sending new content to your email list, and offering self-help customer service are some simple but powerful ways that you can start automating your marketing.

 

Get More Subscribers: Use This Autoresponder Sequence to Keep Your List Engaged

You may wonder what your autoresponder sequence has to do with getting more subscribers. After all, you’re building the list before anyone sees what type of emails they’ll receive. What happens once your ideal customer joins your email list is just as important as what happens before. You want to keep engaged members on your list in order to build a robust list of hungry customers, and the type of messages you send can help.

communication
content creation

First, you need to know the goal of the list. You may have goals such as keeping contact with your subscribers, promoting other products and services (yours or an affiliate’s), and providing more content to your subscribers. Not only that, you can use your list to bring people back to your content on your website so that they can see your offers.

 

The best way to choose a goal is to go with the goal of the opt-in you create. So, if you have an opt-in designed to build your list and promote your signature product, it’s a lot easier to figure out what needs to be said once you attract a subscriber. Who is the person who wanted that opt-in, and why did they want it, and what do they hope will be accomplished by acquiring it?

 

The order of operations looks like this.

 

Marketing Content

 

This content markets the lead magnet or opt-in. This can be a landing page, a blog post, social media posts, and more. In fact, the more points of entry you can create to lead to the opt-in, the better. Always create a landing page for each lead magnet just like you do for each product or service you sell.

 

Opt-In or Lead Magnet

 

The freebie you’re offering will need to be created before you start anything. The freebie itself is going to help you choose the messages to follow the opt-in. For example, a Yoga instructor might offer a freebie PDF download with drawings of 5 daily poses that help lower back pain, or perhaps you might want to offer a download that is a guided meditation to help reduce anxiety.

 

Whatever it is, the problem you want to solve with this freebie is essential to understand in order to create the follow-up autoresponder series. From there, you can better understand how each email will help guide your subscribers to take future actions such as reading more of your content, buying your signature product, or using products you recommend.

 

  • Welcome Email – The welcome email should be particular based on how the new subscriber has signed up. If it’s due to the freebie, you need to mention that freebie. If it’s due to a product, they purchased that should be mentioned too. Whatever it is, mention it by name and explain to your subscribers what to expect from you going forward from the first email.

 

  • Download Page – You can include a link to the download page in your welcome email, or you can tell them in the welcome email to be on the lookout for the download link for their freebie or product. However, it’s always best to send them to a download page instead of attaching the freebie. You can use automation to deliver it immediately, too, if you use software like Leadpages.net, for example.

 

  • Content – Send them some information about their problem, or the product that they downloaded and the ways in which it can help them. Ensure that the information you send is relevant based on how they got on your list.

 

  • Content – Send more content related to the reasons they downloaded or received the freebie. For example, a blog post with tips regarding relaxing to reduce anxiety that goes along with the freebie and helps them get the most from the freebie.

 

  • Related Promotion – After you’ve warmed them up, you can send related promotions of products and services you have created or that others have created as an affiliate marketer. For example, you might want to send them a link to that awesome app you are using that helps you stay mindful all day.

 

  • Content – Do the same thing. Keep sending them related content, articles, news reports, blog posts, and tips related to the initial issue you wanted to help them solve while tipping them off on the next problem you can solve.

 

  • Content – Keep teaching, informing, and engaging with your subscribers by sending only relevant information via email. Keep the emails clear. You want to avoid being long-winded in email. Use subject lines that make them curious but are straightforward. Cross-promote your social media platforms to help your audience engage with you more.

 

  • Related Promotion – Every couple of regular emails that you send, you’ll want to send a promotion for a product or service that you recommend whether you’ve created it or not. Remember to set up your autoresponder service to automatically tag or segment the list members based on their behavior.

 

Create a new sequence like this for each product, service, or behavior you want your subscribers to perform.

 

For example, if you ask them to read a blog post and they click through, your email marketing software can allow you to tag that person differently from someone who did not click through, which can enable your system to automatically send even more messages to them designed to move them through their buying journey and your product funnel.

 

The reason this works is that the more engaged your subscribers are, the longer they stick around, the bigger and stronger you can build your email list, earning that first 1000 subscribers or next 1000 subscribers in no time.

 

10 Ways to Get to Know Your Audience Better

The only way you or any business owner can truly be successful in attracting their target audience is by understanding who they are. Many small business owners, especially people who start their business alone from home, often skip a few steps in the process, causing issues with finding an audience for your product.

Get better

 

Instead, focus on who you want to serve before you do anything in your business—knowing who you want to serve and why will help you fill your email list with people who are ready to buy from you. These ten ways to get to know your audience better will inform products, services, and even the words you use to communicate to them the value you offer.

 

  1. Research Your Industry – When you first start, you need to know what industry you are in. Those industry metrics will help you know where you can start making goals and setting standards in your own business. Look at business organizations, associations, and nonprofits to help you do the research both online and offline.

 

  1. Study Your Competition – Even if you don’t have the first customer, you can get to know your audience by studying your competition. Participate in their groups, join their email lists, and network with their customers for the most traction into getting the right information about them. When you become part of the community, you’ll get so much more inside information.

 

  1. Create Customer Personas – As you get to know your audience, create customer personas that match the person you’re directing the information to. You may have many client avatars or personas based on the customer’s buying journey.

 

  1. Monitor Engagement – An enjoyable way to get to know your audience is to participate in their social media engagement and discussions. Social media should be a two-way conversation that helps you get insight into their deepest fears so that you can help them.

 

  1. Ask Them – Once you’ve identified precisely who you want to market to, you can simply ask them questions about what they want and need when you’ve incorporated yourself into their communities. You’re going to get far more insight when you participate and network with your audience.

 

  1. Do a Test to Determine Interest – Another way to check if you have the right audience is to generate a test of some kind. Create a checklist for a topic that you think they care about, offer it as a freebie to see who takes it. Then ask for feedback.

 

  1. Identify Their Pain Points – When it comes to knowing your audience’s pain point, you’ll need first to understand your expertise and the niche you want to be of assistance to your audience. In other words, choose pain points you can solve.

 

  1. Be a Resource – Sometimes, you may not be able to fix a problem on your own due to a miss-match with the audience. When this happens, don’t force it. Focus on being a resource to your audience, and it’ll be a win-win.

 

  1. Use the Tools of The Trade – Don’t skimp on software that helps you get to know your audience and network with them. Use paid versions of the software that you want to help you get more done, such as email marketing software, landing page software, and others.

 

  1. Build Relationships – As you get to know your audience, make the focus relationship building. When you build a close relationship with your audience due to your honesty, transparency, and ability to stay on the topic, you’re going to build strong relationships.

 

As you work on getting your first 1000 subscribers, you’ll want to keep each of these tips in mind. Don’t reinvent the wheel. Instead, do what works repeatedly, and you’ll soon find that you’re building your list with an active and interested audience who needs what you offer.

 

How To Build A Wildly Profitable Income Stream From Home Without Lies, Hype, Manipulation or Pressure…


https://flawlessfreedom.com/SalesVideo

 

Linkedin Conclusion

Using LinkedIn as a marketing tool is a great start for generating new leads and increasing sales. LinkedIn is used by over half a billion people, with 40 per cent of the members in positions of decision making.

Between the mergers with LinkedIn and other useful business ideas and the purchase of LinkedIn by Microsoft, LinkedIn is set to become even bigger and reach more people, providing you and your business the opportunity to dramatically increase the number of leads you receive.

laptop lifestyle
laptop lifestyle

Creating an engaging and informative profile is critical for turning a casual browser into a highly targeted and qualified lead.

Your profile photo, along with a complete and detailed profile section and published content can help you build your brand credibility and establish you as an industry leader and encourage more people to look to you and your business for the best, quality solutions to their needs.

The use of content marketing will not only help you to build leads and make sales, but it will also allow you to build stronger relationships and create loyal customers as well.

Click Here: For more information on Content Creation

Upgrading to a premium account will allow you to go farther in marketing your company. With the many tools and features included in premium accounts, like access to advanced searches and suggested profiles based on saved searches, you can create, target, distribute, and analyze your marketing materials and makes your audience more streamlined and easier to manage.
Using a premium account can also help to show stability in your company.

Now that you’ve gained more information about the many features and tools you can utilize to generate more leads on LinkedIn and increase sales, the next step is for you to take this information and apply it to your business. Get started on creating a killer profile and gather your marketing data so you can create a solid brand strategy that will help you generate even more leads and increase your company sales.

PS: Check out Income # 3 in the 30 Minute Work Day System: 

How To Build A Wildly Profitable Income Stream From Home Without Lies, Hype, Manipulation or Pressure…

https://flawlessfreedom.com/training