Archive for February, 2016

Three Social Media Best Practices For Small Businesses

For small business owners, social media marketing is one of the most underutilized marketing tactics.

How can you say that?

social-media-icons

Everyone has or should have a Facebook page, LinkedIn profile, Twitter account, and Google Business page. While it is true that most companies have dabbled with social media channels and set up their pages, most small companies pay little or no attention to these low cost and potentially high impact marketing opportunities. Most small company social media accounts are a barren waste land of blank avatars, little to no postings and small followings.

If you are a small business and are looking to kick start your social media efforts, here are 3 best practices to get you started and impact your bottom line this year.

Update Your Profile

Your social media profile is an extension of your business brand. For savvy customers particularly the growing in influence millennial generation, social media channels are one of their first stops in their decision-making process.  If you have blank avatars on your Twitter or Facebook pages, or profiles that look like they belong to a different company, you’ve got a problem.  When someone checks you out on Facebook, Twitter, Google, or LinkedIn, you want them to know that they are dealing with the same organization. Use the same colors, logos, and similar images as you do with your other marketing collateral, so that it is instantly recognizable.

Also make sure that you use a consistent tone or voice. If your brand is professional, maintain that vibe, changing it up to a youthful and snarky tone will only confuse and potentially alienate your ideal customers. While your business may serve different customers, your marketing should be aimed at your target audience.

Consistency is Key

Arriving at a Twitter account or Facebook page and seeing that the last post was two years ago says something about a business. Unfortunately for many of the small businesses that we come into contact, this is precisely what we encounter. Publishing once in a while is a step in the right direction, but it will not yield the primary results that you are looking for – building and audience and driving targeted traffic to your website.

Determine which social media channels will yield the best results for your business and then work with your team to establish a regular publishing schedule for each channel that you will be working with.

Our friends at Buffer (yes, we are clients) have a great social media posting guide that can help you determine the ideal frequency to post for each social media channel. Regularity, like brand consistency, helps establish a sense of reliability in your audience (a very important trait in a company you’re considering doing business with).

At a minimum if you are just getting started, consider the following schedule.

  • Twitter: 3-5 original tweets a day (morning, afternoon, and evening)
  • Facebook: 1 post a day (original content or shared, ideally mid-day or early evening)
  • LinkedIn: 1-2 posts a week (original content or shared)

Once you have maintained some consistency, you can start to track the impact of your postings and determine the appropriate frequency and timeframes for your posts.

Speak With, Not at Your Audience

Whether its Google, Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn the goal of your social media activities is not to close sales. While increased sales can be a by-product of an effectively operated social media strategy, its biggest opportunities lie in creating awareness for your product or service, or maintaining communication with your legions of satisfied customers. It is important for companies to dialogue with their audience and avoid engaging in a one-sided conversation.

Unfortunately, many small companies just starting out with social media make the mistake of making overly salesy posts, or just posting a few pieces of content and never engaging with their audience.

Active engagement is the key!

Participating in group discussions on LinkedIn, or hosting chats on Twitter are just a few of the opportunities to speak with your audience and not at them. What are your followers concerned with? What problems are they struggling with? Are there solutions that you can provide to these issues? Will some of the content that you created answer their questions?

Regardless of the channel, social media offers your brand or company the opportunity to connect with your ideal customers on a personal level. Don’t take it for granted!

This article was originally posted to the Business 2 Community Blog by David Cuevas on February 14, 2016.

 

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Why Artificial Intelligence is a Huge Gift for Salespeople

Inside SalesI recently read a report that said the inside sales market is growing at rate of over 42,000 new jobs per year in this country. That’s three times faster than outside sales and a real testament to the fact that this part of your sales organization deserves a lot of attention – if you are not already providing it.

There are any number of best practices that can increase the results from your inside sales team. Five that readily come to mind are

  • motivation techniques
  • establishing a strong culture
  • outstanding training and development
  • establishing specific goals and metrics
  • optimizing productivity

At the same time, you need to make sure you have the right recruitment, retention, benefits, and salaries that allow you to find and keep the right people. Each of those areas requires time, money, energy, management, and focus you may or may not have. But you really don’t have a choice.

Or do you? What if you could hire your next inside salesperson and not bother with any of that?

iStock_000000865796XLargeTechnology may once again have found the answer. Artificial intelligence, which has captured our imaginations for decades, is finally beginning to make headway into the workplace. According to Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce.com, we are in an AI “Spring” and will start to see more artificial intelligence applied across sales and marketing. Companies are already starting to use AI virtual sales “assistants” that can take the most onerous of inside sales jobs – slogging through a mountain of leads to find out which are hot and which are not. Once found, they can be passed over to a “real person” to do what they do best: sell and close. If you haven’t looked into this area yet, let me give you five reasons you should.

  • Artificial intelligence can handle an unlimited number of leads.

Many sales executives run into the problem of how to efficiently increase lead engagement and conversion. Good marketing automation tools and techniques can generate mountains of leads, but who has the time to get through even a portion of them? Inevitably, your people end up wasting a great deal of their time trying. But AI software today can actually engage an unlimited number of leads in email conversations to find out who is ready to talk to a salesperson…and they can engage so convincingly that most prospects would swear they are interacting with a human.

  • Artificial intelligence can create a more positive workplace.

Speaking of frustrating, the atmosphere in the office can make or break your department. If your salespeople are not happy or are feeling even slightly discouraged, their productivity will take a nosedive. If you can eliminate the grunt work so your salespeople don’t have to waste their limited time chasing cold leads, it can definitely lift their spirits – along with the bottom line.

  • Artificial intelligence never asks for a raise, vacation, or time off.

Your virtual assistant is never going to ask for a raise. You’ll never have to worry about scheduling vacation time because “she” will never take one. No benefits, no time off, no sick leave, and a total workaholic putting in as many hours and as many days as you choose. No complaints over working the early or late shifts here. And HR will love you.

  • Artificial intelligence never resigns, so you don’t have to deal with turnover or training.

This “employee” doesn’t require training. She’s a professional lead engagement machine that already knows how to do her job, having learned from millions of email conversations. She quickly learns the intricacies of your business and never departs for a sweeter offer or to go to the competition.

  • Artificial intelligence could cost less than a quarter of the average salesperson and is probably the best hire you’ll ever make.

In a nutshell, humans cost more a lot more than software and aren’t nearly as scalable. Artificial intelligence software doesn’t have to be expensive. In fact, in most cases the cost per “assistant” is a fraction of what you would pay a new human employee. And you’re not replacing people with technology; instead, you’re removing the boring and inefficient work and freeing up your human team to do their best work closing deals.

So, instead of considering that next human hire to build out your inside sales team, take a look at how artificial intelligence can scale your existing team. If AI can handle repetitive, boring tasks and free up the rest of us to ring the bell, then I’m all for it. It’s certainly worth exploring. You can bet your competition already is.

This article was originally posted to the Selling Power Blog by Alex Terry on December 9, 2015.

 

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