editor, Author at Mediastreet

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5 Strategies Entrepreneurs Can Incorporate To Build Brand Awareness

October 14, 2021 No Comments

Online marketing is the new-age reality and has opened a bold new world for entrepreneurs. However, the plethora of opportunities and promotional strategies available can be crippling to many entrepreneurs. Several startups and small businesses struggle with developing an effective strategy for enhancing their brand awareness. Given below are 5 expert-curated strategies to help entrepreneurs build their brand awareness.

1. Stay Updated About What Is Going Around You

Building brand awareness also calls for ‘awareness’ from your side. Based on the niche of your brand, stay updated about what is happening in the industry. Also, constantly analyze whether the requirements of your target audience have changed. It’s also essential that you remain in constant light about the latest marketing trends. For example, online video consumption has enormously risen in recent times. A study says that 83% of marketers believe that video is an important way of constant marketing, and it’s not a trend to be simply ignored. Hence, staying updated about all that’s happening around is very crucial for building brand awareness.

2. Create Resources For Your Audience

What do creating resources suggest? Brands can provide ‘how-to’ information and educate the audience about how their products or services are beneficial and provide solutions. Also, resources help the audience to understand the expertise of the brand and the team behind it. Most importantly, resources are shareable. Audiences share and re-share resources they find interesting and engaging. Infographics, tables, slides and how-to guides and videos are all examples of resources.

Confluencr – India’s largest influencer marketing agency partnered with Mirraw- a humble young brand with ambitious goals. Mirraw focuses on Indian ethnic wear, jewellery, and accessories with a clientele across India, Europe, and the United States. Mirraw’s goal was to build an enhanced presence in the market in the coming few years. The campaign that Confluencr designed for Mirraw was pivoted around building brand awareness across Instagram. Our campaign involved the promotion of resourceful content and hence we launched the ‘Your Kurti Fit’ campaign. What was it about? It was about spreading awareness about the importance of finding the perfect fit for apparel- because every person is unique. Micro and nano influencers collaborated with the brand for this campaign many of whom were lifestyle, fashion, and mom bloggers. The campaign received 43K+ engagement, 325K+ total views, 23K+ total likes, and 2,301 comments. That’s how powerful resourceful content is.

3. Build Your Brand Around Community And A Sense Of Belonging

A sense of belonging is a basic human need. People respond positively when they feel that they belong to a certain place or people. A study says that 13% of consumers are willing to pay 31-50% more if they notice that a certain product or service is making a positive impact on society. Hence, people’s sense of self is hugely reliant on the feeling of being a part of a community. Hence, if a brand promotes a sense of ‘we’ and relates itself to a bigger collective, people will sense that it shares common values and purpose. Hence, position your business with the community and people will realise that your brand is not just another name for a product or a service, but an extension of their lives.

4. Enhance The Customer Experience And Satisfaction

A brand, especially a young business should always go above and beyond to provide both potential and present customers ultimate satisfaction. This should be the ultimate goal of a business. Unsatisfied customers are a piece of bad news in the age of online reviews. Happy and satisfied customers will leave positive feedback and will likely recommend the brand to several others.

5. Consistency Is The Key

A lack of consistency will create a barrier between the customers and the brand. Hence, consistency is one of the most effective strategies for amplifying brand awareness. People will not remember everything they see or hear on social media or online platforms. Hence, Entrepreneurs should keep in constant touch. Research says that consistent presentation of a brand will enhance the revenue by 33%. Hence, a brand should stay consistently connected with the audience until it builds significant momentum.

Conclusion

Effective strategies can amplify brand awareness, help reach more prospective customers and also build value for your brand. They positively impact the scalability of your brand, helping you to inflate your brand awareness with each step you take. Don’t rely on quick fixes. Rather, think of long-term benefits. That way you will be able to increase brand awareness in the right manner with the right audience.

By zainliaquat

Sourced from odyssey

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11 Creative TikTok Ideas For Businesses

October 14, 2021 No Comments

Sourced from Forbes

With people’s attention spans growing shorter by the hour, it’s no wonder that TikTok has become an addictive source of content for millions of busybodies around the world. From comedy to advertising, TikTok users can use the platform to create any 15-second video clip they dream up and share it with the world.

TikTok has become an interesting part of many business’ marketing campaigns, which can be wildly successful if the clips tick all the right boxes. Below, members of Forbes Business Council share some of the most creative ways businesses can use this popular platform to advertise their products or services.

1. Use Your Account To Connect The Community

When doctors create a TikTok account, it’s a great way to improve online visibility and connect with the community. It gives them a platform to talk about current issues, like vaccine misinformation, and answer questions patients frequently ask. It can also help build trust with patients who increasingly rely on online sources to find a new doctor. – Ty Allen, SocialClimb

2. Promote Health And Well-Being In Fun Ways

Who doesn’t want their workplaces to be fun and healthy? I think that because of the fact that TikTok engages a larger audience as compared to creative banners, organizations have started to use them for spreading or promoting messages in a lighter way. I recently have seen organizations promote the importance of getting vaccinated through TikTok videos and I found it extremely interesting. – Neha Madaan, Vanator

3. Make Videos Funny, Memorable, And Catchy

TikTok is best used by businesses in the advertisement angle they take. I say, funny always wins on TikTok. Video ads that are too professional will be overlooked. Make them funny, memorable and catchy and everyone wins. A good strategy is to consider the flight date of the campaign and match it to whatever is trending by putting a business spin on it. As it’s said, don’t make ads, make TikToks. – Olivia Friedman, Institute of Higher Global Studies

4. Encourage Users To Use Products In Unique Places

Recently, I saw a consumer products company hold a contest whereby they encouraged their users to post TikTok videos of them using the product in strange and exotic places. I saw videos from the pyramids, the Taj Mahal, the jungle, a safari in Africa and more. The videos were highly entertaining and a creative use of a social media platform. – Adam Coffey, CoolSys

5. Experiment In A Playful And Humorous Way

TikTok is by far my favorite social media platform because it’s authentically entertaining and you don’t have to struggle to come up with unique ideas. It’s a perfect place for brands to experiment in a playful way and your videos can go viral if you post often. Telling a story with a little humor will always work, so add a bit of it when trying to advertise. – Abigail Aboitiz, 247 Health Solution LLC

6. Use Hashtag Challenges To Boost User Content

I have seen businesses using hashtag challenges like Samsung did while launching their new Galaxy phone, which helped them to boost user-generated content. It’s a very creative idea, and you can encourage many users to watch and join your challenge. When they tap on it, the hashtag takes them to other videos that your team has developed, explaining the challenge and promoting it altogether. – Sanket Shah, InVideo Innovation Pte Ltd.

7. Share Personal Experiences To Build Authenticity

TikTok is yet another platform to share personal experiences. Skincare companies ( The Ordinary, Curology, Glossier and Clinique for example) have excelled in utilizing this feature by working with people to share their testimonials in user-generated content, building an authentic brand image and trust with their consumer base. – Jill Strickman, GENUINE: The Real People Company

8. Show Kindness With Charities And Global Missions

Businesses that are utilizing this platform for showing kindness done with charities and global missions for good have stood out to me. The benefit is the awareness toward the causes being supported that others may not have been aware of by way of a business showing an act of kindness. There is a social benefit to this and it usually returns goodwill back to the business. TikTok for good and get a ROI. – Paul L. Gunn, KUOG Corporation

9. Share Bite-Sized Pieces Of Information

I love the way young financial management experts share bite-sized information on TikTok to make wealth building and management more accessible to the masses. This is innovative and encourages the next generation to think differently about finances, as well as build personal financial skills — something large financial institutions have struggled to achieve. – Kamales Lardi, Lardi & Partner Consulting GmbH

10. Show The “Why” And Brand Story In Your TikTok

It’s great to see businesses that show the “why” in their TikTok. Your brand story is incredibly important for connecting with customers, and what better way to share a message than a medium created for that. TikTok can help share your story, your mission and humanize you. It’s more than sharing your business; it’s sharing your life’s work. Plus, you can do it however you like. – Steve Byrne, EquiSource

11. Make Sure Platform’s Tone Matches Your Brand

The largest demographic of TikTok users are ages 16-24, which means the platform is especially effective in driving product or service trials amongst this group. I’ve seen the platform used effectively by skincare and beauty brands, but it’s important to make sure it’s the right platform and tone for your desired audience to avoid embracing a trend that’s not strategic based on your objectives. – Muraly Srinarayanathas, Computek College

Sourced from Forbes

Forbes Business Council is an invitation-only, fee-based organization for successful entrepreneurs and business leaders.

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6 things to consider if you’re thinking about changing careers

October 14, 2021 No Comments

By Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic

Behavioural science may help you assess potential opportunities for changes, as well as your own readiness and potential to leverage them.

The average person in the U.S. will change jobs 12 times during their life. That figure is even higher for Gen Z. This was measured before the pandemic. The COVID crisis exacerbated career mobility by prompting a large number of people to reconsider their work prospects which led to a great resignation. While this may sound concerning, it’s part of the natural process of economic and skills readjustment in which labour markets reorganize to reduce the gap between supply and demand of talent to better match people’s abilities and interests to available jobs.

Amidst ongoing uncertainty on the future landscape of work and careers, it is easy to feel overwhelmed, confused, and perplexed. But here’s some good news: There is a well-established and practical science around the forces that enable and accelerate success, irrespective of the context and circumstances. This research may help you assess potential opportunities for changes, as well as your own readiness and potential to leverage them.

Here’s what we know about what enables successful career changes:

Your job satisfaction is more likely to increase through meaning and purpose than job prestige. Perhaps this is why engagement levels have been low and stagnant for decades: people pick careers based on pay, glamour, and status, but it’s a sense of meaning, belonging, and genuine interest and motivation that drive both engagement and performance at work.
Your career satisfaction and success will tend to improve with age if you are self-employed or an entrepreneur. Many people transition from full-time employment to self-employment or entrepreneurial careers, often after being disappointed with their employer (or boss).
Your success is largely dependent on your adaptability. This, in turn, is a function of being curious, confident, concerned about improving, and able to control the changes. Luckily, adaptable people are more likely to seek career changes to begin with, which means that people tend to self-select into new careers, just like in any area of life people tend to seek out activities and experiences that are congruent with their personality. So, curious people are more eager to explore new career horizons, which in turn further amplifies their curiosity. So, being curious will make you more adaptable, and if you are not very curious about alternative career paths then you should probably stay where you are.
Who you know is often more important than what you know so find the right mentor. Ideally, someone with experience in your new career destination. This will often require having a diverse network of mentors, and the ability to persuade someone to not just advise and coach you, but also champion you—someone who makes you their protégé. Much of the career success literature focuses on personal attributes (e.g., expertise, intelligence, EQ, grit, etc.), but this seemingly heroic and individualistic bias is at odds with a basic fact about real-world career success.
You are more likely to regret not changing than changing careers. People are less likely to regret changing jobs than changing relationships, which suggests that the average person stays on the job longer than they should. It is somewhat ironic that we always tell people to be more resilient at work, when in fact the solution to people’s job problems may not be to develop a stoic and tough mindset that allows them to put up with unpleasant or masochistic levels of adversity, but find a more rewarding and enjoyable career instead. Yes, resilience has a dark side.
Thinking big, breaking with the past, and truly reinventing yourself, are more likely to pay off as strategies than following conventional and predictable transitions. In that sense, you may as well “go big or go home.” Career changes are a chance to pivot, restart, and venture into the unknown. They are more than a natural progression or transition into the next phase of your career. Allow yourself to be passionately bold and to experiment, learn, and change.

Finally, remember that nobody knows whether a career change will work—not even you. The only way to find out is to try. And even then, it may not be entirely clear whether you did the right thing. This means there will be uncertainty and ambivalence, which renders any conviction you may have—now or later—somewhat delusional.

So be as rational, pragmatic, and calculating as you can be, but remember this isn’t rocket science, it’s human life. Embracing the inevitable element of human serendipity, irrationality, and luck, may increase your openness and elevate your mindset for the future. A perfect plan may not be as good as a pleasant surprise.

By Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic

Dr. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic is an international authority in leadership assessment, people analytics, and talent management. He is the Chief Innovation Officer at ManpowerGroup and a Professor of Business Psychology at both University College London and Columbia University. His latest book, Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders? (And How To Fix It), was published in March 2019, and you can find him on Twitter at @drtcp or online at www.drtomas.com.

Feature Image Credit: Jason Strull/Unsplash

Sourced from Fast Company

In News

What does the colour of your brand say? This infographic teaches you how to send the right message

October 13, 2021 No Comments

Sourced from Entrepreneur Europe

Choosing the correct tone for the graphic identity of your company will help you position yourself and sell with the correct audience.

You have already registered the name of your business and now you are developing the logo and graphic identity. Do you already know what the colour of your company will be?

Believe it or not, the colour of your logo conveys a message. Leatrice Eiseman advises communicators to use the same colours throughout their strategy to create a complete “brand experience .” Here are five questions you must answer to select the appropriate shades for your brand.

1. What emotions do I want to invoke?

2. What shades are “ideal” for my industry?

3. What is the personality of my brand?

4. What colours are associated with my competition?

5. Do the colours obscure my message?

Take note of the following considerations if you are creating the image of your business.

Feature Image Credit: Depositphotos.com

Sourced from Entrepreneur Europe

In News

TikTok takes aim at Facebook and Instagram with its new shopping features

October 13, 2021 No Comments

By Scott Nover

TikTok unveiled new shopping features for brands, positioning it to compete with the largest social media companies on e-commerce.

The Chinese company, owned by ByteDance, has been steadily rolling out shopping features over the last year, partnering with Shopify and Walmart among others. Now, TikTok is giving marketers a suite of shopping tools including shoppable links, livestream shopping, and product galleries in ads. TikTok Shopping first piloted in the US, UK, and Canada in August.

This functionality pits TikTok against Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest, which dominate US social commerce, effectively the buying and selling of products through social media. According to the research firm Insider Intelligence, Facebook will sell to 56.1 million users in 2021 on its main app and to 32.4 million on Instagram. Pinterest will attract the third-most buyers with 13.9 million expected, the research firm said.

Mike Proulx, vice president and research director at the research firm Forrester, said in an interview that social commerce is becoming “much more of a native user experience within social media apps.” Forrester research shows 38% of US adults buy products monthly on social media.

Claiming 1 billion global users as of this week, TikTok poses a rising threat to Facebook in one of the most important potential growth areas for both companies.

Social commerce has swept China

In the US, social commerce is still nascent compared to China. Chinese consumers will spend about $351 billion on purchases mediated by social media in 2021, Insider Intelligence projects, while Americans will spend about $37 billion. It’s a growing sector: social commerce sales are expected to rise 36% in the US this year.

WeChat, the ubiquitous chat app owned by Tencent, dominates social commerce in China. But ByteDane tripled its sales on Douyin, TikTok’s counterpart in China, to $77 billion in 2020, according to one Chinese media outlet. While livestream shopping in the US focuses on apparel and beauty, Chinese consumers are accustomed to buying everyday goods like groceries and meals off of influencer-led live streams. It’s uncertain that those habits will translate to the US market, but social commerce is widely considered a promising slice of growing e-commerce sales.

TikTok made me buy it

Since it rose to prominence in the US, TikTok has played a small but growing role as a recommendation engine for shoppers. While dwarfed by direct sales from competing platforms, viral posts on the platform have driven huge sales for a few products: CeraVe skin products, a cleaning paste called The Pink Stuff, catnip called Cat Crack and certain pair of now-famous leggings.

One of the company’s new slogans, “TikTok Made Me Buy It,” has become a rallying cry for creators trying out viral products, but until now the company has not equipped businesses with the tools to actually sell direct to consumers. That’s finally changing as US customers become increasingly comfortable shopping on social.

Feature Image Credit: REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration

By Scott Nover

Sourced from QUARTZ

In News

Getting Brand Communities Right and How to Build One

October 13, 2021 No Comments

By Toby Britton

Every marketer knows that the holy grail of marketing is the all-important word-of-mouth recommendation. In search of this, brand advertising has, in recent years, leaned heavily on influencer marketing, to both gain reach and approximate the word-of-mouth recommendation as closely as possible. In reality, influencer marketing is no match for direct brand advocacy from the customers themselves.

With only 4% of customers trusting paid influencers (according to a UM Wave study), the importance of authentic people-centric marketing is something that brands simply can’t afford to ignore. So, while there’s a strong case for paying for reach and awareness via sponsored influencer tricks, brands who are not leveraging earned media from their most vocal existing advocates could be missing a trick.

Many brands have been tapping into the power of user-generated content for a while now. However, the savviest are going one step further, and building brand communities.

What is a brand community?

A community is a group of individuals with similar values and interests, who are bonded by their difference from outsiders, their traditions, and their sense of obligation to each other. When a community forms around a brand, it taps into people’s fundamental emotional and social needs, creating strong bonds between the people in it and the brand they love. When they express passion for a brand in a brand community, it resonates strongly and is reflected back through relationships with other community members. In a successful brand community, like-minded individuals are able to bond over not only a shared love of a brand but over the possession of particular skills and interest in similar experiences. Naturally, when this happens, a stream of authentic earned media is developed, with community members sharing content with little encouragement.

By allowing brand communities to self-support and flourish with minimal input, brands have the chance to form profound personal connections with customers for a fraction of the cost of a traditional marketing campaign. With the rise of brand community marketing, the new generation of marketers will need patience, plus a new skill set and a knowledge of specific systems and principles to develop and manage effectively. However, once mastered, community marketing will richly reward brands with dedicated and enthusiastic customers, leading to word-of-mouth growth, increased customer-made content, and outstanding return on investment.

What do members of a brand community look like?

Brand communities are as diverse as the brands that work with them. A community could be composed of regular enthusiastic customers, or brands can recruit a subset of creative customers to collaborate with. What tends to be the most important criteria and one of the biggest differences between community marketing and influencer marketing, is brand love; an authentic love for the brand that exists regardless of any community membership, where such super fans genuinely want to help that brand succeed.

One of the biggest sources of community power for brands is the Creator Economy. This is an economy created around over 50 million passionate and highly skilled individuals around the world who have built businesses and communities around their own personal brands online. They can range from musicians to hairstylists, to business experts, and more. They tend to be present on the main social media platforms such as Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok, and adept at utilizing their talents to create well-presented, top-quality content. In a brand community, individuals from the Creator Economy, regular customers, and those who fall somewhere in between have the chance to interact with a brand in a fresh way.

How to use technology to grow a brand community

Building a brand community might sound tricky and time-consuming at first, and while it’s possible to sustain brand communities using existing social media, specially built digital community management platforms will do much of the heavy lifting for you. Through social listening using hashtags and @mentions, such a platform will identify the super fans and creators that would be the best fit for your brand community.

Brands can then easily recruit these potential brand advocates to their brand community using such a platform, and provide them with an exclusive digital space in which to connect with fellow community members.

Inside this digital space, brands can brief super fans on projects and collaborate with them on campaigns. You’ll be able to provide them with the tools they need to get started, and, in exchange, they’ll bring both their creativity and customer knowledge to the table. You can also use the community space to get feedback on new products and reward super fans ethically in a number of ways, which could include providing them with a platform for their work, workshops, courses, or charitable donations. Often, being able to play a meaningful role in your business is reward enough.

UGC generated by super fans can then be carefully curated and licensed through community management platforms, and published directly to brand channels such as websites and social media, or exported for use in other marketing campaigns.

Examples of great brand communities

Lego Ideas is a community website where anyone can submit new builds using existing Lego bricks, new designs are lightly moderated, showcased, and put up to a community vote, and the winning designs have a chance of being turned into a commercially available Lego set and earning 1% of royalties. Since 2014, this open-to-all marketing model continues to successfully the growth of a thriving community of Lego fans, as well as ethically rewarding the most creative and dedicated amongst them.

Dove’s ground-breaking marketing campaign #ShowUs is a fine example of community marketing in the social justice space. Facilitated by community technology, Dove collaborated with regular consumers who had extraordinary stories to share, in the Dove community to generate a photo library that truly reflects the diversity of beauty around the world, with the aim of improving the representation of beauty in advertising.

Although it can be tricky for brands to champion social causes without seeming superficial, Dove’s existing brand authenticity and willingness to celebrate its shared values with brand fans proved to be a recipe for community marketing success. The challenge set to creators resonated incredibly well, resulting in the world’s largest photo library of women and non-binary individuals, and winning the campaign multiple awards in the process.

Conclusion

As we’ve seen, the key to a thriving brand community is to tap into existing creator talent and enthusiasm, by taking the time to develop a new marketing skillset alongside taking advantage of the best in cutting edge community management technology. Get the balance right and you can nurture a sharing culture; one that can thrive and deliver endless earned media with little intervention and no financial transactions.

Feature Image Credit: John Cameron

By Toby Britton

Sourced from Brandingmag

In News

4 tips to effectively use digital marketing for your business

October 12, 2021 No Comments

Sourced from BOSS Magazine

Digital marketing enables businesses to extend their reach through a variety of channels

Before the internet took the corporate world by storm, businesses would buy commercial time on television, place ads in the local newspaper and send information about sales to their customers through snail mail.

Now, thanks to the advent of digital marketing, companies are able to get the word out about their products, services and sales through digital channels such as websites, social media, apps and emails.

In order to help use the power of this effective medium as effectively as possible in your own company, consider the following digital marketing tactics and tips:

Strive for Interactive Digital Content

When it comes to effective digital marketing strategies, strive to create interactive content. Unlike passive digital content (such as a blog post or video) that is merely read or watched, interactive content requires the user to be more actively engaged. In turn, the user will receive extra relevant information he or she can use when making a purchase. This approach should not only help improve a site’s conversion rate but can also lower the bounce rate and lead to more shares and backlinks, which is a key component of SEO.

Speaking of SEO, it Continues to Be Important

Today’s customers frequently use the internet to search for companies and products. To help ensure that your business pops up near the top of these searches, entrepreneurs must pay close attention to search engine optimization, or SEO. Search engines such as Google are constantly making updates and changes to their algorithms; this means that SEO is always evolving and must be updated and reviewed. While you don’t necessarily need to understand the variety of algorithm changes and how they work, it is imperative to have someone on your team who does. Or you could hire a digital marketing company that can help with this crucial task.

Know Your Target Customer

Before spending a lot of time and money on a digital marketing strategy, make an effort to know your company’s target demographic. This includes learning the social media sites your customers are most likely to use and then creating meaningful content on those sites. For example, while Facebook is definitely a useful social media site for business owners to use, younger shoppers may prefer to spend more time on Instagram and they may be more amenable to getting texts with information about sales and new products. As a business owner, you can check your customer data for demographic trends and you can also send surveys to gather specific info on how/where people would like to hear more about your company.

Mobile Optimizations are a Must

To get the most bang for your digital marketing buck, everything you do on social media, your website and on search engines must be easily visible on mobile devices. Mobile-friendly formats are not optional — they are virtually a requirement now for all business owners. Keep in mind that customers who are in a hurry for information will probably not have the patience or time to try to expand the information on their smartphone’s screen to see your site — they will simply click out and go to the next one.

When Done Well, Digital Marketing Can Be Highly Effective

Granted, TV commercials and print ads are still valid ways of advertising. But to really reach as many potential customers as possible, entrepreneurs must embrace digital marketing. From creating interactive content and making sure your website uses keywords that will boost SEO, to knowing your customer base and having optimized for smartphone viewing, your digital marketing strategies should help to grow your customer base and sales.

Sourced from BOSS Magazine

In News

If You Haven’t Hired a Business Coach, You’re Holding Yourself Back

October 12, 2021 No Comments

By An Bui

Entrepreneurs are more effective when they have the right coach at the right time. Coaching is an intense process where someone helps you find, grow and reach your highest potential.

So you’ve made the shift from employee to business owner. Congratulations, you’ve just joined the ranks of individuals who will become successful entrepreneurs — or failed ones.

Naturally, once you’ve established your start-up company, the question becomes, “How can you maintain an amazing functioning organization as a new entrepreneur?” Being an experienced professional in one’s field is one thing; being a professional and successful business owner is another.

Business owners believe they know everything and no longer need anyone to look after them. At the same time, as their businesses get larger and more prosperous, successful entrepreneurs seek new instructors and more accountability. That’s fantastic if your start-up is performing well. Be mindful, however, that new accomplishments will bring new challenges.

In any event, a decline always sets in beyond a certain point. It is impossible to reach the top without help from others. The situation occurs all the time. You can think of it as a phase in a start-up’s life.

Entrepreneurs face a range of issues that require a variety of answers. If you lack a clear goal and plan, you will be distracted and stunted at every turn. The most important thing you can do for yourself as an entrepreneur is to connect with a coaching program. A coach can help you expand quickly and oversee your business’s growth.

Why do you need a coach?

The only way to discover what you’re capable of is to be pushed out of your comfort zone. Here’s why you should consider hiring a business coach to do just that.

He or she will help you come up with brilliant ideas.

“No one is smarter than all of us,” the adage goes. A coach adds vitality to the brainstorming process by emphasizing the strength of the combined power of many over the sole strength of one. However, doing so is both an art and a science.

The scientific part is that anyone can develop amazing ideas by using free online brainstorming software. Taking previously unknown personal values and ideas, on the other hand, and connecting them to your aspirations and intentions is the part we call “art.” Sometimes you need to approach the problem from a different angle in order to see an existing connection.

You can bounce ideas off each other.

You won’t find anyone else who is totally dedicated to providing you with guidance. Coaches put all other thoughts out of their heads, which allows them to pose questions that reveal deeply ingrained principles that might otherwise be overlooked.

The good news is that the coach will not pass judgment on you. Unlike the gossipers in your neighbourhood or business, a coach’s job is to lead you toward your own goals by suspending judgment.

A coach can hold you accountable.

Isn’t it strange how easily we break our own promises? The difficulty increases when other people are involved. A coach encourages you to set goals and strategize and coordinate your efforts to achieve them.

He or she can give you advice.

A business coach challenges your assumptions, aspirations and willingness to learn. A coach acts as a role model. He or she has “been there, done that” because of his or her experience. You will also gain new insights from a coach that can help you broaden your business awareness.

How to identify the best coach

You have now recognized the value of hiring the right coach to help you with your business. Now let’s see how to pick the right coach.

Employ coaches who have been where you want to go.

You might consider finding someone who has experience in your sector as a mentor or coach. As an entrepreneur, you need mentorship from someone with an established track record. All you have to do now is learn from your coach’s success and apply it.

You can bet there are hundreds of so-called business professionals operating “scam” geniuses. With some copywriting magic, anyone can plan a con and convince you that he or she knows what he or she is talking about. But that doesn’t mean that person actually does.

How can you determine whether a coach is real or a scammer? You should first do your research and make sure the person has a track record of success. If there are no case studies or testimonials on the website, it’s possible the individual isn’t as knowledgeable as he or she claims.

Meet other entrepreneurs who are dealing with similar issues.

Entrepreneurship can make you feel as if you’re stranded on an island, cut off from the rest of the world and with no one to turn to for support.

For that reason, enrolling in a coaching program can offer significant advantages; these programs bring together entrepreneurs from closely related companies dealing with similar challenges and can help you figure out which mentors or programs are worth your money and time.

Make connections with successful business owners.

When you join a coaching program or hire a coach, you also want to network with other entrepreneurs. Not only will these connections potentially help you identify the best coach to take your business to the next level, but your network is an invaluable tool in its own right.

Your network determines your net worth. Whether you like it or not, the people you spend the most time with affect you the most. By spending time with successful small-business owners, your earnings are likely to increase. And how can you search for successful entrepreneurs? By participating in a coaching or mentoring program.

Today’s top entrepreneurs spend thousands of dollars on coaching, even when their businesses are doing well, because coaching helps people find effective mentors who are able to assist them with their most challenging challenges.

Your company will grow faster if you find the right coach for it. The best athletes and performers hire coaches to help them succeed.

Why don’t you give it a shot?

By An Bui

Entrepreneur Leadership Network Contributor

An Bui is the founder of Online Career Accelerator. Online Career Accelerator is a remote job training program that helps people land remote jobs without any previous experience, skills or education.

Sourced from Entrepreneur

In News

Nine Effective Email Marketing Strategies That Aren’t Just About ‘Selling’

October 12, 2021 No Comments

Sourced from Forbes

Email marketing can be extremely effective for advertising products, whether through sale announcements or updates highlighting new items. But this marketing channel can also be leveraged in a number of other ways to connect with customers on a more direct and personal level, ultimately leading to more purchases.

If you’re looking to expand your current email marketing efforts, it’s important to explore and execute the right strategies for your business. Below, nine members of Young Entrepreneur Council shared some of their favourite email marketing strategies that go beyond just selling a product.

1. Include Relevant Information And Advice

Nobody wants to be spammed with a hard sell through newsletters. We try to add value to our audience with content and we include a segment called “Management Minute” with tangible business advice relevant to them. Create digestible nuggets of information for them to get real value and then in every two or three newsletters, include a selling element. It operates like any other relationship. You can’t just be taking from them—you also have to give something in return. – Saana Azzam, MENA Speakers

2. Offer Free Materials

Email marketing is an essential component for any successful business. It can be used to reach potential customers, drive traffic and increase sales. However, in order for it to be effective, it needs to be leveraged correctly. In my experience, I have found offering valuable free materials such as an ebook or newsletter to be very helpful in getting readers’ attention. It’s important to remember that just because someone is receiving your email does not mean they are engaged in reading it. In order to have engaged readers, you need to offer them something worth their while. – Nic DeAngelo, Saint Investment Group

3. Create A Narrative

Reel in the audience with a storyline. Create a storyline or a narrative with drips of emails. You reinforce or introduce your brand creatively, increase your rates of engagement and get them looking for your next communication. Leverage autoresponders so every new subscriber goes through this story-based email sequence. Audiences get offers and deals all day long for products, but to really stand out from competitors, you want to give them something to look forward to that is not simply you asking for them to buy your products. Start to entertain an audience, and you will sell more products and increase engagement. – Matthew Capala, Alphametic

4. Focus On Product Education

Email marketing should be used as a way to stay in touch with your customers over the long run. In fact, you don’t want to advertise your products too often. Instead, focus on things like product education and helping people understand how to use your products to achieve their goals. When users know how to use your products effectively and see positive effects in their life, they’ll see the value of being your customer. Email marketing, when done well, leads to customer retention, which saves on marketing expenses and helps grow your business. – Blair Williams, MemberPress

5. Add ‘Get To Know Us’ Interviews

Interview your employees. Make the interviews fun and about the hobbies, interests and professional experiences of the person you are interviewing. This will make them more engaging to the viewer. You can name the series “Meet the [Your Company Name] Team” and release a new interview weekly and send it to your customers and prospects via email. If possible, you should leverage video since you’ll be able to post it to your YouTube channel. You can also post it to your blog along with written takeaways or a summary. Once you have the content, you can then share it across your social media channels, highlight it in a company newsletter and, of course, use it for emailing. – Kristopher Brian Jones, LSEO.com

6. Address Customer Concerns

Use email marketing to proactively address customer concerns, increase loyalty and reduce return rates. A lot of times, customers have questions but they might ask them only at crucial moments when they’re already frustrated. With strategic post-purchase emails, you can educate them more about the products they purchased, different use cases and strategies for resolving any common issues they may come across. The more you highlight these things, the more customers are able to take full advantage of the product while also resolving their own issues. This reduces the risk of them turning around and getting upset over email or the phone, and they’ll be more likely to love and keep the product. – Firas Kittaneh, Amerisleep Mattress

7. Encourage Customers To Submit Reviews

You can grow your business through email marketing by encouraging customers to submit their reviews. Online reviews are a form of social proof that can boost sales and encourage visitors to take action on your site. You can add a call-to-action button to your emails after customers make a purchase that leads them back to your site where they can write a review and insert a rating. This will help other customers make informed buying decisions so you can grow your business. – Stephanie Wells, Formidable Forms

8. Share Your Successes

Sharing updates via email marketing lets your customer know that your business is active. We send emails from time to time that tell people about the new features we’ve added and important milestones we’ve hit. Such updates build confidence in our business. This keeps people loyal to the brand because we’re offering them features they want and can use to achieve their goals. For example, one of our accelerator brands experienced a milestone where its customers crossed one billion in payments received. It was a landmark event that we shared on different platforms. Such an email update builds your reputation and encourages all customers to continue buying from you. – Syed Balkhi, WPBeginner

9. Send Event Reminders

You can use email marketing to grow your other marketing channels. For instance, if you’re holding a free webinar, you could send a notification to your email subscribers just in case they don’t follow you on sites like Facebook and Twitter. This small gesture of reaching out will lead to more event signups and engagement. There’s a good chance some of your attendees will end up purchasing a product from your business, even though that wasn’t the intent of your email. – John Turner, SeedProd LLC

Sourced from Forbes

YEC is an invitation-only, fee-based organization comprised of the world’s most successful entrepreneurs 45 and younger.

In News

Merging offline and online marketing is a smarter way to drive sales

October 11, 2021 No Comments

By M Muneer

E-fulfilment, or an electronic response, blended with traditional methods is the key to optimising a company’s one-to-one marketing efforts

E-fulfilment, an electronic response to a direct marketing request, can be an important part of a company’s marketing strategy to reach customers directly. In the right situation and to the right customer, it can offer several advantages.

The three biggest advantages of e-fulfilment are:

1 Speed: You meet targets quickly.

2 Cost-effectiveness: In some instances, it makes it cheaper to reach the customer.

3 Control/customisation: It allows for adjusting your campaign in real time, test and move forward.

One to one with customers—when content is completely personalised, including the cover letter/note, types of attachments and the content of each attachment—is expensive and time-consuming using land-based methods.

But not all situations call for solely an e-fulfilment system. Careful consideration of the types of the target being reached and the company’s marketing objective will determine the appropriate combination of e-based and land-based fulfilment components to be utilised.

For example, if a credit-card provider’s database identifies a person with an outstanding credit rating and a high income, that person may get a customised email that includes an offer to upgrade their card and links to exotic vacation destinations with special offers.

Someone else with a good credit history may get an offer for a balance-transfer offer or personal loan proposal.

Tweak as you go along

Flexibility is an important benefit of a fully integrated e-fulfilment system. Such a system makes it easy to evaluate a campaign’s rollout in real time—watch the pick-up on the first cell, tweak the campaign, watch the second cell go out, make another adjustment, and so forth.

With the proper systems in place, e-fulfilment offers direct marketers a wide range of options. It permits increased analysis and customisation of future messages, allowing marketers to see when people open the emails, and track as they click through to website links.

Real-time web reports of hits are available, detailing soft bounce-backs (server is temporarily down or a mailbox is full) and hard bounce-backs (service no longer exists or e-mail address is not valid).

If an email bounces back with a bad address or full mailbox, companies may have a call centre representative double-check with the intended recipient to confirm how they want to receive information.

The following examples offer an overview of possibilities and a preview of where things are heading for SMEs.

Case 1: Fewer reminders, more completions

A liability insurance company was using mail fulfilment as a marketing tool with its professional services clients. Names and detailed information were generated daily, with policies printed and mailed twice a week–incorporating e-fulfilment. Maximising its effectiveness was simply a matter of designing a system that converted content into a PDF file at the point it would have “gone to print” in the traditional fulfilment process.

These files are created in the same pre-printed format that customers would have received in hard-copy form. Like its traditional counterpart, the body of the e-fulfilment text message is highly personalised based on a client’s insurance history, with rate and coverage information, policy type, brand and payment method received/requested but it also includes a link to the insurer’s website for more information.

The policy itself is attached to the email and incorporates client-specific information. In addition, the insurance company finds that email enables it to send fewer reminders to get policy renewals and it is receiving more payments at a faster cycle. This could be modified for individual customers today with technology.

Case 2: Talk directly to your prospect

In many instances, customers and potential customers can request information through a variety of channels, including a call centre, website or mail.

In one such instance, a pharmaceutical manufacturer generates data daily from these sources. Based on the depth of information in the marketing database—gender, age, products requested and used—the development of highly customised text messaging and rich format attachments are possible.

The system also enables custom e-mail messaging with links to specific parts of the company’s website. In this case, the company is developing a true one-to-one marketing campaign that, over time, can be refined based on this interaction loop.

Today, companies using e-fulfilment with rich content are also engaged in parallel mail campaigns. They are not looking to abandon traditional fulfilment methods but rather want new ways to get closer to their customers.

As consumers click through the company’s websites via email links, each visit adds to their profile for future e-marketing efforts. As the file on each person is enhanced, marketers can cost-effectively move into more focussed cross-selling and up-selling campaigns.

Overall, the trend is for companies to implement one-to-one marketing tools. More and more, they are looking for expertise from direct marketing service providers that enables them to reach customers and prospects within a very structured campaign but target each one with a specific package of information via their mailbox, e-mailbox, over the phone or a website.

E-fulfilment enables you to watch a campaign unfold in real time and improve it as needed, including the way individual follow-up is done. And blending e-fulfilment (with its reporting and campaign management capabilities) with the appropriate traditional fulfilment methods is the key to optimising a company’s one-to-one marketing efforts.

By M Muneer

M Muneer is the managing director of CustomerLab Solutions, a consulting firm.

Sourced from moneycontrol