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Want to Build Credibility in Your Market? Try These 15 Strategies

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Sourced from Newsweek.ogin

Industry credibility and brand recognition are critical if you hope to optimize your business for its target market.

With major competitors vying for the top spot in any industry, making a name for your business and improving the market can be a difficult journey. As a new business owner, this means you’ll need to dedicate plenty of time to learning and researching the industry to understand where your business can offer improvements.

As business leaders, the members of Newsweek Expert Forum have dealt with the challenge of breaking into the industry and gaining credibility and recognition. Below, they offer 15 tried-and-true tips for entrepreneurs attempting to optimize the market.

1. Collaborate Rather Than Competing With Competitors

Be authentic and original. Collaborate and don’t compete. As an entrepreneur, don’t look at what the competitors are doing and answer them. Instead, find what the market needs and fill it with your own authentic style, practice and invention, amplified by self-promotion utilizing the power of social media. If you let people know that you are good and worthy of recognition, they will applaud you. – Dr. Abraham Khoureis, DrAbeKhoureis.com

A business owner can build credibility by sharing their expertise with local business groups and with their clients through workshops and seminars. They can then leverage those experiences in social media posts and by asking the attendees for reviews that can be shared on their website and in marketing collateral. – LaKesha Womack, Womack Consulting Group

3. Have Street and/or Educational Credentials

Once you have had success in your endeavours, people then tend to pay more attention because there are facts to back it up. When you have that “story doing” to match the storytelling, that helps. The other way entrepreneurs can boost their credibility is by having genuinely insightful things to say about their industry. – April (Margulies) White, Trust Relations

4. Establish Your Business as a Trusted Resource

By sharing knowledge on your chosen expertise, you can become a thought leader in the market and field. This thought leadership typically makes the owner a trusted resource and therefore more credible. You can share knowledge on social platforms like LinkedIn, write guest articles, appear on podcasts and speak at events. The key is being where your audience is and looking for information. – Mary Cate Spires, Reputation Avenue

5. Offer Products or Services That the Market Values

It’s critical to deliver a high-quality product or service that the market values and one that is also trusted and secure. Simple, essential and consumable communication and marketing techniques will help build brand reputation and market demand. – Margie Kiesel, Avaneer Health

6. Surround Yourself With Those Who Have Experience

Be the subject matter expert and surround yourself with people who know what they are doing. Always walk the extra mile and be honest about the obstacles. – Krisztina Veres, Veres Career Consulting

7. Make Yourself ‘Everpresent’ on LinkedIn

With so many different opportunities to publish and connect, LinkedIn provides the key opportunity to connect and grow your professional circle in any way you want. This includes referrals, new leads, partners, investors and more. – Chris Tompkins, The Go! Agency

8. Get Yourself Out There on Social Media

Social media, giveaways and specials will put your brand out there. With exceptional value and a great product, your company will grow and flourish. – Tammy Sons, Tn Nursery

9. Consistently Be Where Your Audience Is

The rule of seven says it takes seven touchpoints before someone remembers your business. Use online and offline marketing touchpoints to surround your customers consistently with your brand. The more they see you, the more they know, like and trust you. This translates into both short-term sales and long-term brand building. – Krista Neher, Boot Camp Digital

10. Be a Thought Leader

Establish yourself as an expert in your field by writing articles or blog posts, giving speeches or presentations or even teaching classes. By sharing your knowledge and demonstrating your expertise, you will be able to build trust with potential customers and clients. Attend trade shows and conventions, join professional organizations and make connections with other professionals. – Umang Modi, TIAG, Inc.

11. Use Your Connections

Who you know is important, and people want to share experiences for you to learn from to avoid making the same mistakes they have. Look to mentors and people in the industry to see what worked for them and if you can implement those optimizations. Specifically, social media is a great way to start to gain momentum and flourish as a business while also placing the business in a media article. – Paul Miller, Miller & Company LLP

12. Be Seen

If people don’t know what your business does or who you serve, they will not be able to find you. Entrepreneurs need to ensure their ideal clients know what they have to offer. This can be done through social media and LinkedIn, providing value to podcasts, articles and the media. The more entrepreneurs get their message out, the more people they can serve. – Donna Marie Cozine, Consult DMC

13. Build on Small Successes

Proof of concept and early success is one of the best ways to build credibility, yield support and generate referrals. Track your wins, create a strong story around them and have a process in place to easily promote them. Building upon small successes leads to larger success and gives you a better ability to achieve long-term goals. – Jacob Kupietzky, HCT Executive Interim Management & Consulting

14. Create a Sustainable Business Model

I’m a big fan of sustainable business models–long-term growth plans that create sustainable cash flow. If you’re a new business owner, the first thing you have to do is prove is product market fit, then you need to get yourself a phenomenal salesperson. From there, you will get the insights you need to execute strong grassroots marketing strategies. Market penetration doesn’t happen overnight. – Melissa LuVisi, tab32

15. Gain Recognition and Credibility

Providing free, exceptionally high-value and original content that meets a need or solves a problem ensures that an entrepreneur is going to be viewed as trustworthy and reliable. These are two critical aspects to gaining recognition and credibility with both existing and potential customers as well as market influencers. – Lisa Lundy, Lisa A Lundy

Sourced from Newsweek.ogin

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6 Ways to Use Video Marketing to Strengthen Your Brand

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By Jacob Tanur.

Become recognizable for the things that set you apart.

Video is one of the best windows your consumers have into your business. It allows them to see for themselves what you can offer them and why they should trust you. But for it to be effective, your videos need to build on and strengthen your brand so that consumers have a clear picture of what to expect and why they should come to you.

In light of the pandemic, 30 percent of marketers have indicated that they plan to increase their video production, which means it’s more important than ever to ensure the strength of your brand through your videos. That’s what will set you apart.

Let’s get started.

1. Be clear from the start.

The first few seconds of your video are not the time for ambiguity. Your audience needs to recognize your business early on. This maintains consistency and ensures that they spend the rest of the video associating everything they see with you and your brand.

Additionally, be clear about your message from the start, whether your goal is to teach your audience, introduce a product or tell a story about your services. This reminds your audience what your business is about and keeps them hooked throughout the video. If your audience stops watching, your video will do nothing for your brand.

2. Establish your target market.

Before you even think about designing a video campaign, you need to identify your target audience. Generalizing your video to everyone won’t do you any good when it comes to strengthening your brand.

By focusing on the audience your business appeals to, you not only create a more focused brand but you increase the likelihood of getting through to your audience and seeing real results. Pro tip: More business helps your brand, too.

3. Tell a story.

Use your videos to tell a story, whether it’s the business’s story, an employee’s story or a consumer’s story. This shows your audience that there are real people behind the logo and allows them to connect with your brand on a human level.

Putting real faces and stories at the forefront of your marketing strategy builds a sense of trust and understanding between you and your audience and helps craft a brand that appeals to people on a personal level.

4. Include testimonials.

Don’t just rely on yourself and your employees to sell your company. Let satisfied consumers do it for you. If your video displays real consumers who enjoyed your product or service, it lends your brand credibility and shows that you’re a business that can be trusted.

Think about it: Who are you more likely to believe? A happy customer sharing their positive experiences or the employees that get paid for every product or service sold?

5. Use your expertise.

You are where you are for a reason. Let your audience see that. Make how-to videos or case study videos. Give your audience real advice that they can apply to their lives to show that you know what you’re doing or show them your real results and how you got there. Make sure that your brand is associated with real expertise and knowledge in addition to good human relations.

According to a 2021 report, “94 percent of people have watched an explainer video to learn more about a product or service,” so your efforts won’t be in vain.

6. Incorporate calls to action.

You need more than just a goal for your video. You need your audience to know what you want them to do. Including a call-to-action in your video shows that you are a brand with direction and purpose and gives the audience direct instructions on how to get involved with you if they’re interested.

A successful call to action will also strengthen your brand through the business it brings you. Although most put their calls to action at the end, studies have shown that calls to action in the middle of a video actually have the highest conversion rate. Play around with it and see what works best for your video.

It’s important to remember that when it comes to video marketing, standing out and being unique is important, but that in itself isn’t enough to bring in business. You need to ensure that everything you do works to strengthen and build upon your brand so that you not only gain your audience’s trust and confidence but become recognizable to them for the things that set you apart.

Remember, it’s not your product or your services that sell. It’s your brand.

Feature Image Credit: Getty Images

By Jacob Tanur

Founder and Creative Director at Click Play Films, a video production company specializing in premium branded content.

Sourced from Inc.

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The End of Targeting As We Know It

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In a fundamental way, a target market is like a galaxy. Both seem like comprehensive, discrete entities, complete unto themselves, until we look closely. But ultimately, a galaxy is an aggregation of micro-phenomena – stars, planets, comets – each with its own discrete existences and properties.

This is true of target markets as well. A target market is a personification of the audience we think is most likely to buy our product. But the reality is that all members of this “market” have unique characteristics, and they often respond to different stimuli.

The New Age of Exploration

Ultimately, then, if we really want to understand either a target market or a galaxy, we need to zoom in and focus on the individual objects and phenomena that compose it. The good news is that just as powerful telescopes and discoveries in physics have allowed us to see into the depths of our galaxy and predict cosmological events, advances in tracking, ID resolution and data science allow us to expand and refine our vision of our audiences, enabling us to understand – and thus better serve – the entire range of people who might be interested in what we have to offer. In this way, we significantly expand our potential universe of consumers, while improving every communication and interaction.

Marketers have historically determined the most likely buyers for their brand by defining the demographic and behavioral patterns of their best customers. This has involved researching preferences, understanding passions, examining purchase motivations, and more.  

But there are known flaws with this approach. Specifically, we see time and again that stated purchase intent has been shown to have low correlation to actual sales. And the limiting nature of a lowest common denominator target segment is an even bigger problem. We know there are always people who don’t fit neatly into our target market, but who would still be interested in our product.

The Expanding Universe

Now that computational processing power and data science techniques can simultaneously make sense of the thousands – or millions, or billions – of data points we have about the members of our audience, we have opened up a much more robust form of marketing intelligence; one where there are really no limits to whom we market our products to. This enables us to move past the limitations of targeting to a handful of segments. With all of this data, why not open up the potential to acquire all audiences that we can responsibly identify, reach, and profitably convert?

To test the idea of a single audience versus multiple audience approach, marketers will need to experiment more with pitting traditional research directly against behavioral data targeting.  While traditional research may show that an audience is performing well, automated testing with multiple undiscovered audiences may perform just as well – and often exponentially better.

The Final Frontier

As we move into what is conceivably the end game of marketing – a future where a target market is a segment of one, where virtually every individual can be precisely targeted with highly relevant messages (albeit anonymously and with appropriate permissions) – brands need to begin executing at the intersection of data science and creativity. This means rethinking the relationship between disciplines – branding, media, creative, production and data science – If we are to leverage our new, expanded consumer pool. To operate in this new world order, we need to recalibrate how all of our marketing disciplines adapt to enable the individualization (as opposed to personalization) of communications. 

For companies of all sizes, new audience identification modeling can generate significant new revenue.  The time to experiment with marketing to many audiences is now. By doing so, we can more deeply understand and better communicate with an entire human galaxy of individuals who find value in our brand.

Cosmic.

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Sourced from MediaPost

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How to Write Digital Marketing Copy Which Attracts the Right Consumers

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People often ask me how I’m able to write such compelling copy – which is funny to me because I remember a time when a second-grade giraffe could’ve strung together a better sentence than I could.

Sitting down at my computer to force out a Facebook post which sounds inspirational, but not cheesy, but still value-centered, but not too sales-y, was a daily struggle for me. Writing a sales page that articulated all of the necessary elements – the testimonials, the program break-down, the fast-action bonuses, the emotionally triggering personal before-and-after story – combining all of that without it coming out a complete mess is tough at the best of times.

Sound familiar?

You too might feel like you pour your blood, sweat, and tears into every email, every lead magnet, and every social media post. But when it comes to a reaction, it’s crickets.

That’s what we’re looking to fix here.

In this post, I’m going to outline five core elements I’ve implemented which have enabled me to start producing copy that has gone on to generate hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue, attract thousands of die-hard fans and gain the attention on massive international publications.

Essentially, these are my hacks for attracting “Believers” – which, in my digital community, is what we call enthusiastic buyers – over and over and over again.

1. Before worrying about copy, make sure your target market is right for your offer

“Lena, everyone says they can’t afford me. How do I attract better people with my content?” 

I hear this a lot – but sometimes (actually, a lot of the time), the issue isn’t the people. It’s your offer that’s making the crucial mistake.

Ask yourself – are there really Believers who will buy what I’m selling?

Sometimes, it doesn’t matter how brilliantly written your copy is – if your product isn’t built for Believers, they won’t buy. This comes down to the “50 to 100 Rule”, which I’ll explain further in a minute. But first, let’s start with some examples of offers which are inherently designed for people who are not going to buy, no matter how many times you flip it.

  • You’re selling vegan educational courses that teach people how to be vegan on a budget
  • You’re coaching college students on how to study better
  • You’re showing travelers how to backpack across Europe on $7 a day

These audiences are not going to become paying customers – no matter how good your copy is, it will never change the fact that…

  1. They can find a lot of resources on all three of those topics for free on YouTube, blogs, and Pinterest, and will opt for free options 9 out of 10 times
  2. These issues aren’t urgent or pressing for the potential buyer
  3. Even if they do buy, they won’t invest at a high-ticket level, since they’ve framed their entire lives around the Budget Mindset

In order for your offer to attract High-Ticket Believers, your offers need to get people from 50 to 100, not 0 to 50. Not beginners. Not budgeters. Not half-in-half-out folks.

People who are already committed to your area of expertise, people who have already put their money where their mouth is, people who feel the urgency of solving their problem and a commitment to improving their lives.

People who are already 50% of the way there – they just need to get to 100%.

Three offers that would be aligned with the 50 to 100 Rule, verses 0 to 50, are…

  • A vegan health retreat for older women who are committed to losing weight and regaining their energy through natural lifestyle choices. They also want to come together with like-minded women to eat delicious food, have a relaxing vacation and learn from various vegan experts on its benefits.
  • A coaching program for busy CEOs and executives who want to be more focused, organized, and energetic throughout their workdays. They know that if they don’t get a hold of this now, they’ll be completely burned-out by the time they’re 60, and will feel that they’ve wasted their lives away.
  • A course on how international speakers and experts can leverage credit cards and airline points to get extra vacations throughout the year.

See the difference? These are all people who are already invested in their goals, people who urgently want to solve a problem, and people who walk their talk, and are committed to reaching a solution.

So before blaming the wrong people for being attracted to your offer, examine what you’re selling and see if it’s inherently designed to attract low-commitment, low-budget people. And if that is, in fact, the case, change it up.

2. Learn which language to avoid

Certain phrases, ideas, and words will attract plenty of people, but most of them, again, will be low benefit consumer at best. Once you eliminate them from your vocabulary, it will drastically change your conversions.

Here are some classic topics you want to avoid in any format:

  • Struggling to pay for rent, car payments or bills
  • Just “scraping by”
  • Feeling limited by finances
  • Feeling broke
  • Struggling with debt
  • Operating on a budget

Any topics that will resonate with uncommitted people – who are generally looking for a quick, overnight solution – is what you want to avoid.

At the same time, you also want to avoid big, shiny, general promises that fall into phrases like:

  • “You can make X amount of dollars in X amount of time”
  • “Zero risk to you​”
  • “10X your income this year”
  • “Make sales/change your life/lose 10 pounds/fix your relationship this week”
  • “Building a business/losing weight/fixing your relationship has never been easier”

Why?

Because:

  1. Low target audiences love quick, easy overnight solutions
  2. Believers can spot “its too-good-to-be-true-ness” from a mile away and won’t opt-in
  3. The above statements are “easy access” – they aren’t dialed into a particular demographic, which means that anyone can say “Yes Please”. You don’t want to attract everyone, and by stating broad, shiny promises, like these above, there is a low barrier for entry.

Think about it – when you go to the nail salon, do you want a big sign out in front that says “We do all nails, including those that are covered in warts, for free, no risk to you”. Obviously not. Access to all is not what you want for your business. Stay exclusive. Have standards. And if that means “scaring” people a bit by showing that the transformation you’re offering isn’t easy, and it requires hard work, then do it.

In my business, we would rather be blatantly transparent and turn people off – but have the right people join our high-ticket offers – then have everyone be booking sales calls with us.

This is why it’s important when people are reading your sales pages or applying for your programs, to clearly state who this offer is not for. Why it isn’t for everyone.

Remember: Only use language that attracts 50 to 100 Believers.

3. Become obsessed with your target market and their whole experience as humans

Once you fully understand this, you can embody it, and empathize with their experiences to the point where you can articulate it better than they can. And the more specific you can be in your copy, the better.

Answer the following questions to get to this level with your target market, as it pertains to your expertise:

  • What are your target market’s deepest fears? What keeps them up at night?
  • What excuses (or “barriers” in their minds) prevent them from taking action in your area of expertise?
  • What motivates them on a daily basis? If they solved the problem that you helped solve, how would that change their lives?
  • What are their ultimate life goals? Where do they want to be five years from now?
  • Why have they not achieved that goal, or made progress, on their own?

​You want people to read your copy and say, “Wow, I feel like “so and so” knows me so well – how is that possible?”

The deeper that your target market feels that you truly understand them and their struggles, triumphs, and goals, the closer they will feel to you – and the closer they will become Believers.

4. Get hyper-specific with your target market and/or your strategy

If you’re speaking to everyone, you’re speaking to no one. Get clear on one of the two in order to attract the Believers you want:

The specific person you serve

OR

The specific strategy you teach

This is what will attract Believers, and turn you from being a generalist into a specialist.

For example, if you’re a mindset coach for women, you want to identify the target market or strategy within that market sector which you’ll focus on.

Potential Target Markets:

  • Women in corporate jobs struggling with time management, overwhelm and burnout
  • Women who are mothers and are having a hard time prioritizing themselves and have lost their self-worth
  • Women who are full-time entrepreneurs and are scared to become leaders. They need help gaining confidence around getting on stage and speaking, going Live on Facebook and positioning themselves as an expert

Potential Strategies:

  • Practical thought work application
  • Journaling and reflection
  • Meditation and yoga
  • Mantra development

If you’re a mindset coach who serves all women, you won’t attract the women you want. So again, get clear on your niche and work that into all of your copy. Don’t be afraid to turn people away. The more specific you get, the higher quality leads you’ll attract.

5. Read

I personally have read dozens of autobiographies written by women I love, and the ways in which they’ve articulated their stories, experiences and values have resonated with me so deeply that it’s influenced how I connect with my audience.

Basically, I didn’t re-invent the wheel with my approach – I studied what I saw others doing well, and adopted what I liked.

Aside from practicing, the best way to improve your copy is to read the copy of those you admire. If there are specific entrepreneurs you look up to, study their lead magnets, blog posts and email blasts. If there are specific authors you admire, read their books repeatedly, if there are specific journalists you admire, read all of their articles.

This is the “behind the scenes” work, which isn’t sexy – and it’s work that no one sees. But it’s what turns an average writer into someone who can create engaging, effective content.

I also recommend reading physical books, not just listening to them on AudioBooks or some other app. The reason why is because you pick up a lot of grammar tricks and see how to break down ideas in a way that isn’t overwhelming, but compelling.

As you can see, this is not an ‘easy trick’, there’s work that goes into being a better writer, and appealing to the right audience. But if you put in the time and effort, you’ll eventually see the results. Take my word for it.

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How to Write a Great Retail Business Plan for Your Store

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By Tiffany Walden.

Every successful business has a strong retail business plan. It’s one of the first things many investors and donors ask for when inquiring about your business. Why, you ask? That’s because a business plan details your business’ short- and long-term goals, and lists the steps and financial requirements necessary to achieve those goals.

To help you get started, we’ve outlined what you should include in your retail business plan. If you follow these tips, you’ll be well on your way to creating a strong foundation for a viable retail business.

Provide a company description

Your company description is one of the most important aspects of your retail business plan. This section should reflect how you want people to envision your business. It should include the logo, concept, ownership and business structure, design, and layout. Think of a retail shop that you enjoy. What is it about that business’s logo, concept, and design that stands out to you?

Include information from target market and industry analysis

A retail market analysis is a deep look at your industry, competition, and geography. All of these things need to be defined in your retail business plan in order for investors to have a full picture of what your particular brand is and how it fits into the overall retail puzzle.

  • Target market and customer analysis: You’ve probably heard business owners say they want to target anyone interested in their brand. However, defining your target market makes it much easier for you to see who your audience is and how to best market your company to that audience. When researching and analyzing your target market and customer base, it’s important to figure out the characteristics of your ideal customer. From there, dig deeper to determine your ideal customer’s age, location, gender, income and education levels, marital status, and more.
  • Industry analysis and industry segment: An industry analysis is a qualitative and quantitative assessment of your retail market. It looks at upcoming trends in retail, what’s selling and what’s not, and more. Once you know the state of the overall industry, break it down a bit further. What trends are you seeing for specific products and categories?
  • Competitor analysis: You need to take a deep look at how your competitors fit into the puzzle. When analyzing your retail market and location, research which of your competitors has the biggest market share, how close competitor retailers are to your location, and what advantages your brand has over the competition.
  • SWOT analysis: The last thing to check out is your SWOT analysis, which looks at strengths, weaknesses, opportunities your brand can capitalize on, and threats from tough competition. When you add SWOT to your retail business plan, you can identify and focus on your strengths so you can minimize weakness and stand out from your competition.

Explain your products

This is where the fun begins. Everyone, especially investors, wants to know exactly what they can buy at your store. In your retail business plan, you want to be as detailed as possible about the items you’ll be selling.

If it’s clothes, include whether there will be tops, pants, and/or shoes. Will customers be able to purchase accessories there? What sizes will you carry? What about plus sizes? Here is where you want to show your vision for your retail shop and feed the imagination with vivid descriptions of what your products will look and feel like.

Additionally, you should include information about your supplier and any contracts you need to have with suppliers to keep your shelves full. Will your items be made overseas or in the U.S.? How will you manage inventory? What will happen to the items you don’t sell? You should also detail your pricing strategy: how much will items cost? Will there be regular sales? How much will your sales be?

Address operational needs

Thinking about how to run your business is an important aspect when first starting out. Therefore, it’s important to assess various retail operations and determine a custom strategy for your business.

  • Supply chain: This is part of inventory management. Making sure that your supply chain runs smoothly is the best way to ensure profits. Include how you’ll control and oversee ordering inventory, store that inventory, and control the amount of product for sale. This helps to ensure you never run out of product or overpay for it.
  • Merchandising: You need a merchandising plan to show how you’ll plan, buy, and sell your products to maximize your return on investment while meeting market demands.
  • Technology: How will you complete transactions? One way to streamline everything from sales and inventory to orders and customer directory is through Square for Retail. Square for Retail allows you to keep track of every aspect of your business in a way that helps optimize business profitability.

Create an organizational structure

If you’re going to run a successful business, investors will want to know its legal structure. Will you operate as a sole proprietor, general partnership, limited partnership, LLC, or corporation? Choosing a business entity determines how you file state and federal taxes each year, which affects your earnings and profits.

Additionally, you need to include how many team members your retail shop employs. Who will serve on the management team? Who will work under the managers? How will this play into the overall structure of your company?

When you’re thinking about your team, technology such as Square for Retail can help make life much easier. You can integrate your POS system to centralize payments and sync calendars. You’ll have a centralized place with customer information, in case you want to market promotions or sales directly to them via email.

Assess marketing

Here is where we start getting into the nitty gritty of your retail marketing strategy. You want to include a positioning statement, which explains how you want the outside world to perceive your brand. For your positioning statement, write a description of how your retail shop differs from others, how customers will enjoy your brand differently than that of competitors, the category in which your brand competes, and any compelling reasons why your target audience should have confidence in your claims.

Additionally, you want to include which channels you’ll use to open your business and which channels you’ll continue to use to promote your business. This can include digital channels such as a website, social media platforms, and rewards and loyalty programs.

Provide a financial plan

Your financial plan helps investors understand how your business will make money to achieve its strategic goals and objectives. For your retail shop, you need to conduct a financial analysis and analyze your startup costs, funding options, break-even point, and projected profit and loss. Using these plus a cash flow analysis benefits your financial plan, as well.

When analyzing your startup costs, you should look at everything it takes to run your business. That includes everything from the products you sell in your store to the technology you use to build and maintain your store’s website and point of sale. Investors need to know how much money your retail store will cost up front, and how long it will take for them to see a return on their investment.

Another important area to look at is your break-even analysis. Investors will want to see this breakdown. Essentially, the break-even analysis is a look at how much revenue you need to justify how much you’re spending.

Running a business is no easy feat, but Square is here to help. We have all the tools you need to start, run, and grow your business, whether you’re selling in person, online, or both. And we’ve made all our tools to work together as one system, saving you time and money — and making decisions easier. So you can get back to doing the work you love and focusing on whatever’s next. See how Square works.

By Tiffany Walden

Tiffany Walden is a contributor at Square where she covers everything from the importance of mentorship for minority entrepreneurs to how business owners can use technology to combat challenges within their respective industries.

Sourced from Square

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Why A/B Can Be the Key to Marketing Success

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Sourced from Inc

This form of testing can yield important insights.

With the amount of competition you face to get your email seen by your target market, you need to eliminate the noise by grabbing your audience’s attention. People are attracted to different options for different reasons. A/B split testing will tell you what your audience prefers, so you can create successful email campaigns.

A/B testing is when you compare and test two different versions of your email to see which brings in higher conversions and why. This allows you to create future campaigns that increase engagement and expand reach, because you’re giving your audience exactly what they want.

Consider testing your subject line, call-to-action copy, call-to-action button color, color scheme, and images. It’s important to test only one element of your email at a time; otherwise, it will be difficult to track why conversions went up or down, because there are multiple variables to consider.

Feature Image Credit: Getty Images

Sourced from Inc

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How to Define and Analyse Your Target Market

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By Colleen Egan.

To create happy, loyal customers, small businesses need to know who they are. Not everyone who buys your products or services will fit the same profile, but it’s far more effective to focus on a core customer base than spread the net too wide. Beyond helping you streamline your offering, it equips you to give those customers the best possible experience.

Understanding your target market

Another way to describe your core customer base is your ‘target market’. These are the people whose desires, values and needs most closely align with what your business can offer them. Ultimately, they’re already looking for what you have. Understanding your target market requires research over assumption. It’s about trying to grasp on a much deeper level who those people are, what motivations they’re driven by and how you can reach them.

Demographics such as age, gender, education level, occupation and family situation give you a broad idea of their lifestyle. Beyond this, consider the minute detail of their daily lives. Where do they work? What gives them enjoyment outside of work? What are their goals in life? The answers to questions like these help you create an authentic understanding of who they are instead of relying on a hunch.

How to determine your target market

Hoping for a certain demographic or using guesswork won’t help you determine your target market. It requires an in-depth review of your products and services, the behaviour of existing customers and the marketplace as a whole. Breaking down the process will give you focus, direction and maximum insight.

Analyse your offering

What do your products and services solve? In turn, to whom do they appeal and why? Try to be as granular as possible when you’re answering these. For example, a gardening business helps people manage their outdoor space. If that business is based in a city, its services become specifically useful for busy professionals wanting to make the most of limited space, and people without the means to travel to out of town garden centres.

It’s important to drill into the detail when you’re running this analysis. Make note of everything you stumble across — the niches and finer points will be crucial in giving your business a unique edge against competitors.

Conduct market research

To analyse your target market fully you need to go beyond your customers and understand the marketplace. Analytics tools like Quantcast, Alexa and Google Trends identify and assess potential competitors, helping you find new customers and determine ways to improve your competitive offering.

Well-known sites like Yell help you see what competition exists in your business’s locale — and don’t underestimate the power tools like surveys, focus groups and in-person discussions. These are a great way to tap into the mindset of people who are already buying from your company or competitors: what they need, why they are (or aren’t) shopping with you and what you can do to make your offering more appealing.

With an integrated POS system you can also look into the specifics of what people are buying from you, when and how often.

Create customer profiles and market segments

Market segmentation is the process of organising a group based on various categories, such as demographics and psychographics.

  • Demographics describe the more fundamental characteristics of a person, like their age, gender, education level, ethnic background and marital or family status.
  • Psychographics offer deeper, psychological insights into who people really are as individuals, like their behaviours, values, personality and lifestyle.

You’ll find yourself with more accurate segmentation and profiling when you consider both demographics and psychographics in your analysis.

Assess the competition

Use the online tools discussed above to get a comprehensive view of the competitive landscape. Who are the businesses offering comparable products and services? How much do they charge? What are they doing differently?

You could create a SWOT analysis chart to demonstrate weaknesses, strengths, opportunities and risks for both your business and theirs. This will give you a good idea of what improvements you can make, and where you’re excelling already.

If you’re going after customers in a densely competitive space, make sure you’re well aware of your USPs. It’s harder to succeed when you’re contending with numerous others, so thoroughly develop an understanding of how why you excel above them.

Using your target market analysis

Once you’ve completed your analysis, put that data to work. Here are some ways to use the insight you’ve gathered to grow and improve your business:

  • Product development.
    If your analysis exposed holes in the market, plan how new services and products or an improved subset of your existing offering can plug them.
  • Niche markets.
    Did you identify an underserved group? Instead of going after the same customers as your competitors, explore these untapped markets.
  • Expansion opportunities.
    If you identify underserved areas while assessing your local market, you might consider franchising or adding a new location.
  • Pricing strategy.
    If the insights into your competition reveal that you’re either pricing yourself out of the market or not charging enough, use comparative data to determine competitive prices or deals.
  • Curation.
    There is such a thing as offering too many options, and it can confuse and deter customers. Try specialising more instead. If you offer many of the same items as your competitors (especially if they aren’t big sellers anyway), pare down your inventory to focus on top-selling and exclusive items.
  • Marketing.
    Your target market should be the foundation of your marketing strategy. Use what you know to determine which channels and messages to use when communicating with customers. Whenever you think about implementing something new, whether it’s a social platform or a promotional campaign, check your analysis to see if it’s likely to reap a positive response.

By Colleen Egan

Colleen writes for Square, where she covers everything from how aspiring entrepreneurs can turn their passion into a career to the best marketing strategies for small businesses who are ready to take their enterprise to the next level.

Sourced from Squareup

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How I Went From Consultant To Coach And Others Can Too

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By Sheryl Lyons

My entrepreneurial experience as a consultant has been quite a wild ride with many ups and downs, both financially and emotionally. I have learned by now that business is cyclical with ebbs and flows. So how can other consultants like me make the best use of their excess capacity when business is not as strong as they would like? Personally, the answer was “invest in yourself.”

For the past four years, I have run my own consulting business that focuses on helping leaders to manage their workplace culture. Last year, I had an increasing number of clients and colleagues ask if I could provide individual coaching services. As a leader and entrepreneur with a background in human resources and leadership development, their requests seemed logical and in alignment with my skills and talents. However, I have hired my share of coaches in my own career with mixed results. I knew that whatever I chose to do, I wanted to do it with the right knowledge, credentials and credibility. My journey to coaching and my advice to others can be summed up in five essential steps:

1. Find a coaching course.

In an initial online search, I learned that demand for coaching was growing faster than supply. That gave me confidence in my timing. To ensure I was doing it properly, I researched coaching certification providers and enrolled in an online class. There were many certification classes available, so I selected one that fit all of my criteria: It was accredited by the International Coach Federation, had positive student reviews and offered courses online with a feasible class schedule. I loved it so much that when the first class ended, I immediately signed up for the next one. These courses commanded a good chunk of my time for two months, but because my client count was manageable, I had the time and energy to commit.

As I progressed through each class, I also rediscovered a love of learning. This was the first investment I had made in myself since completing my MBA some 12 years ago, and I had forgotten how fulfilling and rewarding it was to venture into something new. At the end of the courses, I became a Certified Master Coach (CMC), thereby taking the first step in creating a completely separate business line to complement consulting.

2. Define your target market.

In addition to learning the ethics and proper techniques of effective coaching, the courses helped me define my target market, which was different for nearly every student in the class. Coaches specialized in health and wellness, marriage and relationships, career transition and — my specialty — business leadership and executive coaching. Knowing your target market will help inform your overall marketing strategy and approach.

3. Create a coaching agreement.

Next, it was time to establish packages and pricing and create my coaching agreement. I conducted my own anecdotal research in my hometown of Houston, Texas by polling my network on whether they had ever hired a coach and at what price point. That data, coupled with my own experience of previously hiring two coaches, solidified my pricing structure. The coaching course also allowed participants to review and compare one another’s agreements. From that exercise, I streamlined and reduced my lengthy legal document and took pieces from several in our cohort to include clauses I hadn’t considered, such as cancellation, refund and record retention policies.

4. Market yourself as a coach.

Once I had those components solidified, I strategized with my marketing team on how to showcase our new coaching offering and build a client base. We began with an email campaign announcing coaching opportunities and my new coaching credential. We then updated all sales documents and my website to include the coaching option as a complement to consulting. I also worked coaching into the conversation with existing and prospective clients to practice and hone the messaging.

5. Encourage others to invest in themselves.

This journey has served as a reminder that our employees desire to be invested in as well. That feeling I had rediscovering a love of learning is not unique to me, and it inspired me to be more intentional in supporting my clients and my employees in their ongoing development. I was reminded that, as leaders, we have the privilege of setting the example and showing our employees that you’re never too old or too established in your career to try something new.

There’s a saying that goes like this: What you choose to do when you have nothing else to do reveals your true character. Today, I have as many coaching clients as I have consulting clients. It is my hope that other professionals can learn from my experience and use a slow season to master a new skill that can propel you forward.

By Sheryl Lyons

Founder & President, Culture Spark, LLC. Culture Spark helps leaders build culture as competitive advantage and turns managers into leaders. Read Sheryl Lyons’ full executive profile here.

Sourced from Forbes

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4 Things You Find In Every Successful Marketing Plan

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By Nurdin Budi Mustofa

Whether you’re just starting out or you’ve been going for a while and you’re considering expansion, your business needs a solid marketing plan. If you don’t have a clear strategy that outlines how you’re going to keep your existing customers and attract new ones in the future, your marketing efforts won’t have a direction and they’re not likely to be very successful. If you think that your marketing plan needs an overhaul or you’re just about to write your very first one, these are the key things that you need to include.

Identify Your Target Market

You can’t run a marketing campaign if you don’t know who it’s aimed at, so understanding your target market is the first thing that you need to do. The best way to do that is to use master data management. What is master data management, you may be wondering? It’s a process that you can use to bring together all of the data that you hold about your customers from sales and marketing, accounts, and social media. By looking at the general trends in your customer data, you can get an idea of exactly who they are. This is essential if you’re going to create a marketing campaign that really resonates with them. If you don’t understand your customers, you can easily end up wasting resources on a marketing campaign that doesn’t connect with them at all.

Understand Your Marketing Goals

The next thing that you need to do is think about what your marketing goals are. If you’re just starting out, you should be aiming to get your first customers and promote your brand identity. If you’ve already been operating for a while, you might be focused on a new product launch or perhaps trying to break into a new market segment. Whatever your goals are, it’s important that you’re clear on what they are from the outset so you can focus on them and not waste resources on other areas.

Research Marketing Tactics

Different marketing tactics have their own benefits and drawbacks so it’s important that you do some research. For example, if you’re trying to increase sales to the older generation, advertising on social media might not be the best route. You will probably have more success with traditional marketing techniques. Think about what your goals are and who your marketing campaign is aimed at and then look at which techniques are best suited to those things.

Set A Budget

The biggest mistake you can make is going in without a budget. If you don’t have a cap on your spending, it’s so easy to keep funneling money into marketing campaigns indefinitely. But it’s important that you’re weighing up the cost of marketing with the return on investment that you’re seeing. If you spend more on the marketing campaign than you get back in sales, you’re losing a lot of money. That’s why it’s essential that you set a realistic budget and stick to it when you’re running marketing campaigns.

If you can include all of these things in your marketing plan, it should be a huge success.

By Nurdin Budi Mustofa

Sourced from Digital Hints

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