Become a Maven of Marketing

Marketing is all about getting your name out there and making sure that people recognize you and trust you.  These helpful tips will make sure you an impression on the right people at the right time in the right places.

Preparing for a speech is the best way to be sure you give a quality and effective presentation.  Not everyone is comfortable making speeches in front of large groups so in this article I will give you a few bits of advice that may help you make great speeches. 

Public speaking is an important skill in both business and professional life. Having the ability to articulate, connect and persuade are all crucial skills for success. This is particularly true if you own and run your business. Public speaking can be extremely important to growing your business and improving your long term prospects.  In this section I will give you some tips that will let you see how public speaking can help you grow your business.

Demonstrate Your Expertise

 The best way to prove to others is to show them with your actions. Speaking offers a unique opportunity for you to connect and show others the subjects you are expert on. You actively demonstrate your subject matter expertise while connecting with an audience and helping them understand what you can bring to the table.

Make the "Soft Sell"

Soft selling isn’t the pushy selling that many of us are used to seeing and hearing from sales men/women. It doesn’t even pitch anything but rather it hints at the fact that you have the expertise and experience to solve challenges or problems. 

Connect and Network with Decision Makers

Public speaking gives us a larger and more varied platform to let others know we are knowledgeable in the field and can give quality advice they can use to improve their business and careers. It also gives us a chance to network in a large way.  When you speak at an event you may be speaking to someone who needs what you can offer but you may have never met otherwise.

No matter if you are presenting to a group of 15 or a group of over 100, there are so many things you can do to prepare in advance. 

Connect

You need to make sure that you connect with your audience. One of the major factors is understanding why your topic is important to the audience.

Knowledge

It is also important to know the level of knowledge that the audience has about your topic. That way you can give the information in the correct tone to keep everyone engaged.

Three P's

Another key factor for great public speaking are the Three P's. Prepare, Practice, and Personalize.

• Prepare - By knowing how long your presentation will take you can better prepare for anything that may arise unexpectedly at the last moment.
• Practice - Make sure that you practice your presentation out loud. This helps you get used to the sound of your own voice, and lets you learn your material so that you can engage the audience face to face and not be looking at your notes the whole presentation. 
• Personalize - Be yourself. If you have a great sense of humor or you are out going then use it to your advantage. Likewise if you are not outwardly emotional don't try to be during your presentation.  

Venue

When you are planning a speaking event it is important to keep your audience in mind.

• Comfort - Make sure that your audience has enough space to move and mingle.
• Simple - You want to make it easy to find and easy to navigate.
• Budget Friendly - Be sure you can afford the space that you need.

Taking to time to make sure everything has your audience in mind is a good way to get your event off to a great start.

You're doing this to grow your business - how do you leverage that to get more business after the event has ended.

Be Accessible

Host a lunch or block off your calendar, you can also reach out with blog posts and social media articles.

Materials

When you promise materials in your presentation make sure that you send them out as soon as possible.

Calls or Meetings

By reaching out or letting others know they can you are going to be able to get great insight into new ideas or ways to set your ideas into motion.

Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter, and so many more. 

Drive Targeted Traffic

A recent Pew Research Center study found that 68% of American adults are Facebook users. Among 18 to 24-year-olds, 78% use Instagram and 45% are on Twitter. Even among Americans 65 and older, 37% are social media users. That means no matter your business or industry you can target the audience that you need. Most of the shares that you get on social media is from people who are already customers/clients. And when they share you are getting put in front of more potential leads that already match your demographics.

Boost your Business with Social Media for Business

Make sure that your business has a place on social media. While some clients/customers will look up your personal accounts it is good to have a strong business presence. Search engines crawl pages to find the ones consistently earning traffic and which are just out there hanging around, forgotten. Although your content strategy may be amazing it is the most important factor in your search rankings. By driving traffic to your optimized pages you will cause them to climb in authority much faster.

Understand your Audience

What makes social channels like Twitter and Instagram powerful marketing tools is the interaction your customers. By reading their tweets, status updates, and posts you can gain insight into their daily lives and consumer behaviors. By learning what your customers are buying or what posts they like to share? Knowing the answers to these questions can help you write and share better content to get them engaged.

Customer service

Making sure that you have the best customer service is a great way to engage with your customers. If someone finds a problem with your product they do not want to wait for you to have time to make it right, they expect it done now. And as we have all seen they will take to social media if they think they are being ignored or brushed off. It costs less to have a repeat customer than to make a new one.

Social channels know a lot about people - where they work, who they are in relationships with, where they shop, where they live and a lot more.  As a business owner this information is powerful.  You can run ads targeting your precise demographic and spend your money wisely.

Targeting and Retargeting

Because social media platforms offer the ability to create highly targeted ads, that you can customize to your customers’ needs. Facebook ads, as one example, can target customers by factors like age, location, education level, industry, user behavior. This means that you can make ads that are exactly what your customer/clients are looking for or the problem that they are trying to solve.

Do you need to generate new business? Or are you trying to get past customers/clients back through your doors? Email marketing is a great way to let people know about what you have going on. In this section I will let you know just some of the great things that you can do with email marketing to help your business.

Email marketing is a form of direct marketing instead of going to the post office and getting a list of addresses, it uses electronic mail as a way to communicate commercial or fundraising messages to your audience. In a broad sense, every email that you send to a potential or current customer could be thought of as email marketing. Email marketing has some great key advantages like:

• The ability to track return on investment
• Reach larger more diverse groups
• Personalized
• Respond automatically 

People don't buy from companies - they buy from people.  By sharing helpful and informative content through email you start building a relationship.  Bonus points if you use an email software that lets you send email from your personal email address with your signature so it's more personal.

It helps you by keeping you top of mind.  Building on that relationship.  Giving them reasons to come buy again.  Making it easy for them to refer people to you.

Your brands needs a video marketing strategy this is not new. What has changed though is how important video has become on every platform and social channel.  It’s no longer just one piece of your marketing plan. It’s central to your outreach and campaign efforts.

Video marketing is vital for the growth of your business. Know what kind of content you need to reach your customers. What will get them to see you as an authority on the subjects you are talking about. Here is a great article for you to check out to learn more.

You need to engage your audience and focus on connecting with them and not selling to them - let them get to know you and what your business can do for them. In this article we teach you some important information to help you start making the right choices when blogging. 

The purpose of your video is to provide value to the viewer - but don't forget to circle back to the next step that you want them to take.  This could include watching another video, subscribing to see more videos, heading over to your website for more information, giving you a call, leaving a comment, etc.  You want to keep them moving on the journey to becoming your customer or a referral source.

We all read blogs. Sometimes they look more like an article on a news site so that it seems to have more authority.  If you want your customers/clients to see what you have to say then you need to speak to them like they are human. You don't want to make it seem like a term paper or something that they need to learn from. 

The people that we respect and trust the most are the ones that teach us something we need to know.  Business owners have a wide range of knowledge about their industry that potential customers need to know in order to make educated decisions.  Your knowledge and experience is invaluable to them.  Using a blog to answer questions helps them learn to trust you.  Blogging is a platform for sharing knowledge through short and informative articles - much like this one.

Start by answering questions that your customers ask.  Then think about what their thought process was before they asked those questions and what questions they would have been asking then.  Next think about things related to those topics - or what might be going on in their life around that time.  For example, if someone is moving into a new home - they are likely interested in things related to organizing and decorating in addition to their questions about moving.

Blogging is an investment that grows over times.  You deposit a couple of new articles to your site each month and steadily your bank of articles grows so you have dozens and eventually hundreds of articles that answer all sorts of questions your target prospects and current customers will find helpful and entertaining.  These articles continue to drive in traffic and create fans and customers without having to increase your monthly investment.  It just makes sense as a smart investment in your business.

Event marketing is the process of developing a themed exhibit, display, or presentation to promote a product, service, cause, or organization. Events can be participated in, hosted, or sponsored. You can promote these activities occur through various inbound and outbound marketing methods. 

You want to make sure that you get the word out as many ways as possible.  Take to social media and let some of your current or past customer/clients spread the word for you. They will be able to reach someone that you may not. You can even take out ads in the newspaper or radio. 

You have to make your product/service memorable to make an impact. The desired impact depends on what your goals are, but most companies want events to be more than just advertisement for their brand. When done well, events have the power to create lasting and powerful impressions on what your company can do. By allowing people to experience and interact with you you are connecting with potential clients/customers.

Making sure to follow-up after an event will set you apart from the competition and keep you at the forefront of the mind of potential prospects. Always plan your follow-up strategy before the event begins. Your email follow-ups should be written and designed before the event, offers should be decided on, and any other communications should already be prepared well ahead of time.