ADVICE: Personal branding strategy works well online because people prefer to communicate with other people rather than with companies.

The Internet has simplified the task of entrepreneurs and professional services providers. Anyone nowadays has access to social media channels such as a blog or Facebook page to reach a relevant audience. Personal branding strategies are especially effective online because people prefer to communicate with other people rather than with some companies.

People prefer to communicate with other people rather than with companies.
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The Power of Personal Branding

Have you ever heard of Robbins Research International? Probably not. But Tony Robbins? I bet yes!

Here’s an example of how powerful a personal brand can be. Everyone wants to benefit from the coaching, training and mentoring services of Tony Robbins. Millions of people follow him on Facebook and LinkedIn. Few of these admirers know that, actually, Tony owns a group of companies that develops and promotes its training programs. His companies hire up to 500 people during peak periods of activity! Why then, do we perceive Tony as a top trainer rather than as a CEO of a group of companies? Because his strategic choice was for the Tony Robbins personal brand to become the symbol of excellence in training and coaching rather than the name of one of his companies.

This strategy works well for small and medium companies and professional services providers. Whether you have a B2B or B2C business, your business is primarily H2H, i.e Human-to-Human.

You Don’t Have to Be Tony Robbins to Build a Personal Brand

You’ve already figured that I am an avid fan of Tony, whose classes I participated in religiously. This example could be daunting for you. Very few experts and professionals achieve the level of acclaim enjoyed by Tony Robbins. It’s ok. It’s important to became an expert in your potential’s eyes, not in everyone’s eyes.

The most frequent reasons why small businesses and professional services providers hesitate to build a personal brand are:

1. I don’t have the necessary expertise
2. I don’t have time and I don’t like to write books or blog articles
3. I’m not the kind of person to stand in the spotlight

Let’s take these “excuses” one by one:

1.The Expertise – Your expertise consists in what you know (and what your customers do not know and want to learn from you). These are the professional informations that allows you to deliver quality service. Positioning yourself as an expert in your industry is not just a stylistic choice but the best way to create interest in your services.

2. The Publication – All you have to do is repackage the information that you and your team already use (in sales processes, in delivery of services, customer services, etc.). If you have no one with writing talent in your team, hire someone quickly. You don’t have to start with the publication of a book. Start with the first small step: publishing a weekly article on your blog.

3.  Media Expose – Start by providing visibility on your personal blog and then you’ll get used to media exposure.

Why is it worth going out of your comfort zone to build a personal brand? Once your name is associated with excellence for services in your industry, you will create an enormous interest for your company’s services. Customers will come to you rather than you chasing them.

Let me tell you a secret. In my experience, the time invested to build Ozana Giusca personal brand was much shorter than the time I invested in activities such as cold selling or meetings with potential clients.

It’s important to became an expert in your potential’s eyes, not in everyone’s eyes.
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Instead of Conclusion

If you decide to promote your services through your own blog, Facebook or LinkedIn, it is good to understand something from the beginning. Nobody wants to read advertising! Be the “Discovery Channel” for your audience, not a commercial break. Educate your customers, put expertise in value and show them what to do to solve problems. So they will come naturally to you to help them implement these solutions.

Watch this 1-minute video to discover why you are not selling more in the new Internet-driven economy.  Watch now and get a free spot to my next online masterclass on how to create a sustainable lead-generating online presence!

The post Why It Is worth Promoting Yourself through the Internet by Creating a Personal Brand appeared first on Tooliers Blog.

Many entrepreneurs avoid using Facebook for business purposes, assuming that Facebook is a social network, not a business community. It’s like saying don’t use billboards because the streets are for moving between home and work, and are not for informing commuters about specific products and services. Indeed, people are not on Facebook to be assailed with advertising messages, but that doesn’t mean we can’t promote ourselves through this network.

Facebook Ads offer excellent opportunities to promote small and medium businesses. This platform enables running multiple types of campaigns by which companies can make their name in the market or generate qualified sales leads.

In this article I will focus on campaigns that aim to generate new leads, and the main mistakes to avoid for success. My aim is not to give step-by-step instructions for carrying out a campaign, but to offer some important pointers for a correct strategy.

Facebook Ads offer excellent opportunities to promote small and medium businesses.
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Why Facebook Ads?

Facebook offers access to over 1.4 billion global users. As of the second quarter of 2015, Facebook had 1.49 billion monthly active users. Moreover, on the 24th of August Mark Zuckerberg was proud to announce that his network reached the 1 billion users a day milestone. Just think about it! In a single day, 1 in 7 people on Planet Earth used Facebook to connect with their friends and family. This is a huge opportunity for any business that masters the art of creating interest for their product or service on social media.

The question is how to do it rather than should we do it?

Through the Facebook Platform, you can select a very specific audience using different targeting criteria: demographics, interests, behaviors. A well-thought-out Facebook Ad campaign can bring “good” clicks on the website when you create interest in your offer at very low prices, (cost for a click varies depending on your industry, and can be reached even under 10 cents).

When using Facebook ads don’t use advertising as a direct sale. Best to start with building the…
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3 Mistakes You Want to Avoid When You Start Your First Facebook Ad Campaign

1. Do not think of advertising as a direct sale

Your potential customers, no matter how generally they would be interested in your offer when they are on Facebook, they want movies with cats, pictures of friends vacations or to take a peek into the life of their favorite celebrities. Nobody goes to Facebook to find the best offer for certain products or services. Your ad shouldn’t be thought of in terms of a direct sale. Its purpose is to create interest for the offer you want to promote. The best approach is to start from the customer’s need and to “sell” through your advertising on Facebook i.e. an educational article about how your potential client can fulfill that need.

Example: a company that offers training in photography will attract potential participants with a blog article that describes “5 Ways to improve your street photography”. Facebook users will react positively to this educational content, because the information will be delivered only to those users who are interested in photography (targeting by interest). Instead, a direct invitation to a photography workshop is unlikely to succeed because people are not on Facebook to buy. Only after reading the article, will the potential participant be invited to the workshop.
Another possibility is that the invitation should be launched with a second advertisement which is served by a retargeting campaign to reach all potentials who arrived on the educational article page initially.

2. Don’t limit your audience by excessive targeting criteria

Facebook offers a lot of targeting criteria, but not all criteria are equally useful. Narrowing the audience too much can be as bad as not limiting the audience at all. In the first case, the ads will not have enough “reach” and will not be “served” (seen by the audience ). Secondly, the budget for Facebook Ad campaigns will be wasted on unqualified leads. A healthy audience strategy is to start by defining users’ interests and then gradually narrowing audience, using “behavior”. Thus, it is ideal to define with your team which behaviors are important, what is “desirable” and those that are contraindicated.

Another important point: avoid criteria that can mislead i.e. like professional status information. Often, Facebook users do not declare their real profession and employer. It is better to focus on “interest” and “behaviors” as they are objective criteria, whereas a criteria such as “profession” is not always completed or often completed in jest by users.

Example: The company which promotes a photography workshop may use criteria related to location (people of New York), age (19-65 years) interests (photography, photographers, Adobe Photoshop, DSLR, Canon, Nikon) and behaviors (photo uploaders). It makes no sense to add professional criteria (Occupation: Photographer) since interests and behaviors well define the audience well enough.

3. Do not waste your budget on a single all-in campaign

Many entrepreneurs give up on Facebook Ads after spending all their marketing budget in a campaign involving one or two commercials with poor results. The secret is not to invest all your budget on one campaign. In Facebook Ads you have to start with small steps and test various messages, targeting, images, titles, etc.

Your campaign will be designed in several subcampaigns (adsets) and each subcampaign will have several ads that will be tested. The ads are started on low budgets. Only after checking the results and costs for each creative should you increase the budgets for the best performing advertisements. A proper assessment means testing each time a single isolated variable is altered, and never testing more than one variable change at a time, in order to get an accurate result of that assessment.

Example: After testing several age categories for some advertising, photography workshop organizers noted that the applicant will have good results by age criteria i.e. 19-25 and 45-65.

If they invested all their budget from the beginning on the 19-65 age group, the results would be weak, with high costs per click, because it was shown that the 26-44 age category was not particularly responsive to the photography workshop campaign.

Experimenting in small steps, gathering enough information about groups that respond best to advertisements and increasing budget only for those adsets that have an optimum target, will get the maximum from the campaign.

Wanna hear more about Facebook advertising and lead generations? Join Ozana’s next masterclass “CRACKING TODAY’S BUSINESS CODE”.

Do you have questions about how to apply this tactic for your business development? Contact us using the comments box below, and Ozana will respond personally.

The post How to Launch Your First Facebook Ads Campaign appeared first on Tooliers Blog.

Email marketing campaigns are the most effective and approachable ways to promote a small or medium business. This article discusses the main mistakes that must be avoided and some best practices that can be implemented by small- to medium-sized business owners to effectively promote their products and services via email.

Is email an effective way to promote a small or midsized business? Negative words like “junk” or “spam” immediately come to mind. Nobody feels positive about the growing volume of spam! And who has time for emails today anyway? Why would anyone pay attention to promotional messages when they can’t even stay on top of emails at work?

#EmailMarketing is 40 times more effective than #Facebook and #Twitter together.
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5 REASONS WHY YOU SHOULD BE USING EMAIL MARKETING

According to HubSpot’s statistics, more than 50% of people read most of the emails they receive. What’s more, research by digital marketing advisors Convince & Convert shows that 44% of recipients of promotional emails made at least one purchase. We are talking about purchases made exclusively on the basis of promotional emails received from the trader. Further studies have shown that promotion via email is more efficient than promotion via social networking sites. Email marketing is also 40 times more effective than Facebook and Twitter together in terms of numbers of qualified sales.

Contrary to what you might believe, email has the greatest success of all online promotion strategies – when it is done properly and as part of a cohesive system of digital marketing. A major advantage of this tactic for your small business is the fact that email marketing is the cheapest way to promote your goods or services!

If you have a business, whether you’re a freelance creative, an entrepreneur with a small team or a professional consultant, marketing campaigns via email will help you:

1. Generate qualified new leads without wasting time and human resources on traditional sales activities (like cold calling)
2. Stay close to your customers without needing the kinds of advertising budgets assigned by big companies
3. Integrate all your other advertisingandcommunicationactivities
4. Increase the number of sales to existing customers
5. Convert prospects into paying customers

Your database of customers and prospects is one of your business’s most important assets!

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Learn 5 mistakes to avoid in your #EmailMarketing.
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5 MISTAKES TO AVOID IN YOUR EMAIL MARKETING

What better way to learn than from the mistakes of others? Like most entrepreneurs, I started off my first email campaigns making the usual mistakes…

Using MailChimp and following the approach recommended by our marketing consultant, we sent out two newsletters a month, each containing a how-to article for our potential customers, followed by an offer.

The results were far below our expectations: open rates of 5%, very few clicks, zero sales. The most unpleasant aspect was seeing people unsubscribe from our list.

After numerous discussions with entrepreneurs from Silicon Valley I understood where I was going wrong:

Mistake #1: I imported my personal contacts into the distribution list of MailChimp, generating a mixed list that included many people who were uninterested in our services.

Mistake #2: I didn’t sufficiently develop my relationship with potential customers, thereby annoying them with purely commercial information.

Mistake #3: I didn’t have an organic method of increasing my contact list.

Mistake #4: I was sending the same messages to everyone, irritating certain categories of subscribers with irrelevant messages.

Mistake #5: Many emails simply weren’t being delivered – and we hadn’t picked this up!

SO WHAT ARE THE SOLUTIONS FOR YOU?

After further discussions, conferences and webinars as well as tests conducted by my team, I took the following actions:

1. I cleaned up my distribution list and started to organize sublists using labels (tags) for different interests.
2. I established the golden rule that every commercial email will be sweetened with four educational messages that are informative and valuable to
3. We revamped our blog articles to be genuinely interesting for the reader.
4. We started using mail delivery software InfusionSoft to label each contact and to avoid “wearying” recipients with messages irrelevant to their needs.
5. We significantly improved our email open rates by using great designs and intriguing email subject lines.

Watch this 1-minute video to discover why you are not selling more in the new Internet-driven economy.  Watch now and get a free spot to my next online masterclass on how to create a sustainable lead-generating online presence!

The post The Secrets to Successfully Using Emails to Promote Your Small or Midsized Business appeared first on Tooliers Blog.

Reasons to get blogging properly

A blog can feel like just another item on your to-do list. You made the (smart) move to sell online and with that came a whole lot of other tasks and responsibilities. Or you’re thinking, My staff [or my budget] is stretched enough. Just because everyone is doing it, doesn’t mean I have to do it, right?

Problem is, if you’re not blogging – or are blogging badly – there’s a good chance you’re losing out on potential clients. (Rocketpost.com found that companies that blog generate 67% more leads a month than those that don’t.) And while your competitors are enjoying them, you’re missing out on these benefits of having a good company blog:

– Educate / motivate / inform your clients or customers

– Help your sales team generate qualified and educated leads

– Showcase your expertise and build trust

– Demonstrate thought leadership in your specific industry or specialty

– Increase (relevant) traffic to your website

– Have more content for your social media platforms

– Use as an additional channel for customer feedback

It may come as a relief though to hear that many companies are blogging badly. Some of the common reasons companies don’t see results from their blogs include:

– Having no clarity about why the company is blogging

– Not understanding how competitors use their blogs

– Not knowing how to write and publish blog posts, or improve existing ones

– Using weak titles that don’t draw readers in (or pushy titles that turn them off)

– Providing lacklustre content and articles that are either badly written or lack focus

– Not having a system in place to monitor and evaluate success; e.g. blogging is haphazard and done when someone gets round to it or realizes it hasn’t been done for a while

– Not sharing the blog on other blogs and/or on social media; i.e. leaving the blog to lie in isolation

– Relying on an already stretched staff to blog for the business or not having any decent writers in the team

If you’re going to blog (and yes, we believe you should), do it RIGHT

A strategically focused blog site with well-crafted blogs or articles that add value to your audience’s lives will deliver results, whether that means improving reputation, leads or sales – or all three. The first step, however, is to get clear on why you are blogging; only then can you develop a sure-fire strategy for your blogging activities.

Get clear on why you are blogging; only then can you develop a sure-fire strategy for your blogging…
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To clarify the purpose of your blog (i.e. get to grips with the nuts and bolts of your blog site) reflect on and answer the questions below:

Step 1: Get clear on your target audience

– Who are they? E.g. caterers looking for quality blenders.

– What are their main problems and needs? E.g. finding quality commercial blenders that are hardy enough for intensive use yet don’t cost and arm and a leg.

Step 2: Identify your overall blog content / themes

– What would they want to read about? E.g. new blender solutions, success stories, tips, recipes.

– What core topics could you write about to solve their problems or meet their needs? E.g. real-life stories of other caterers using your blenders, useful information about blenders including more ways to use them.

– How will your audience’s lives or businesses improve from reading your blog posts? E.g. peace of mind: able to produce items like smoothies on mass at catering events without worrying about blenders breaking down.

Step 3: Create a strong mission statement for your blog

– Why are you writing the blog? E.g. to educate / motivate / inform your clients or customers; to help your sales team generate qualified and educated leads… see the list of potential benefits of a blog above.

– Of these reasons, which are your top three priorities?

– Write that mission statement for your blog. It should be brief and communicate who your blog is for and why they should read it.

After going through this process with my team, we became very clear on the purpose of the Tooliers.com blog: It is for small business owners, to help them grow their companies by providing tips and tactics, the latest business discoveries and best practices, together with examples of how to use them. Going through this process has enabled us to focus: every blog post now has to meet these stringent criteria. Having a mission statement also makes it easier to brief external writers when we feel the need to use them, and to make sure guest bloggers stay on track with our mission too.

A blueprint for your blogging activities

Having gone through the whys, whens and hows of blogging, and radically transforming our blog site from inert to dynamic, we put together an Action Plan for our clients and other small businesses feeling overwhelmed by blogging or unhappy with their results. The Blogging Action Plan takes the confusion out of blogging by walking you through the entire process.

The Blogging Action Plan is:

– Easy to implement: Step-by-step actions guide you to developing your mission statement (as we’ve done here) and crafting perfect blogs that engage your target audience;

– Proactive: We make sure you get started ASAP. The Action Plan is centred on doing (and not on merely giving you more to read);

– Time-sensitive: Each step has a suggested time limit. We also provide strategies for getting staff on board with blogging as well as resources if you decide to look externally;

– Results-oriented: We help you clarify what you want out of your business blog and provide templates to help you monitor and evaluate your efforts.

Blogging is one of your most powerful weapons in your marketing arsenal.
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Blogging is one of your most powerful weapons in your marketing arsenal. By the end of the Blogging Action Plan, your blog will have all the elements necessary to increase audience over time. You will also be one giant step ahead of your competitors.

If you’d like get blogging like a pro, try the Blogging Action Plan here.

Ps. Blogging Action Plan is part of a series of Action Plans we’ve designed to help small and medium businesses attract the right customers. If you’d like to focus on other key elements of effectively marketing your business, have a look at our other Action Plans here.

The post Not Quite Getting This Blogging Thing? We Demystify It For You appeared first on Tooliers Blog.