Viewing posts categorised under: Digital Marketing
After focusing on specific email marketing conundrums over the past several months, the Enlightened eMarketing blog is taking a breather to focus on a major business conundrum we all face: hiring effective help. This month's guest post on the topic is courtesy of small business optimizer Melanie Benson Strick (pictured here).
Melanie's advice isn't just for small businesses: whether you're a solo-preneur, small local enterprise, entrepreneurial start-up, or marketing professional in a large company, everyone eventually needs to hire help. (As you know, here at Synchronicity Marketing we offer digital and email marketing help: if you're wondering how we can become part of your Dream Team let's talk).
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What exactly makes people respond to your email marketing offers? What is it precisely that makes them engage and buy from you? And how does knowing these things help you drive better email response?
It’s the sixty-four-million-dollar question asked of all advertising and marketing. While the fundamentals of what makes us want to transact with a company or say yes to one offer over another remain relatively the same across channels,
how marketers employ specific tactics can vary drastically from channel to channel.
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There’s a clear correlation between the stage of your organization's digital marketing "maturity" and the effectiveness of your online marketing programs.
By "maturity," I mean the level of your organization's sophistication in digital marketing. Most organizations fall into one of three distinct stages at any point in time:
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In Part 1 of this series you learned about transparency and authenticity. Part 2 explained why creating resonance and cultivating magnetism are essential to generating emotional connections that are real and enduring.
Now in the last of this three-part series, let’s look at the final two ingredients that strengthen the emotional bond your market has with you AND each other: community and consistency.
In online marketing, making emotional connections is especially important because the digital world is immediate, urgent and can seem impersonal. It doesn’t give us the time or intimacy to know and trust people like face-to-face interactions do.
But there’s good news – the online world also offers an expanded ability to connect with others and develop communities beyond the boundaries of our physical worlds. That’s why community is one of the final essential ingredients to creating emotional connections in your online marketing.
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Creative Commons License photo credit: mscaprikell
In
Part 1 of this series, I explained that marketing is not simply about hawking your wares. Certainly it’s about communicating what you have to offer, but
how you do that is what makes the difference between feast and famine.
Whether we know it and like it or not, most decisions in life are fueled at least in part by emotion, and that goes for buying decisions large and small. Our brains are equipped with both reasoning and emotional centers, and each factors into decision making. More often than not, people buy from emotion and justify with reason, so it’s important to know how to emotionally connect with them.
In online marketing, making emotional connections is especially important because the digital world is immediate, urgent and can seem highly impersonal. It doesn’t give us the time or intimacy to know and trust people like face-to-face interactions do. That contributes to a lack of trust (and unfortunately, fraud) online, so allowing people to get to know you digitally goes a long way toward creating the confidence consumers and business people alike need to buy from you in any channel.
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Creative Commons License photo credit: Torley
You might read that title and wonder what in the world emotional connections have to do with online marketing or
any marketing for that matter.
Isn’t marketing simply about telling people what you have to offer and letting them know how to buy or work with you? Certainly it’s that, but much more. Whether you realize it or not, most decisions in life are fueled at least in part by emotion, and that goes for buying decisions large and small.
Our brains are equipped with both reasoning and emotional centers, and both factor into decision making. More often than not, people buy from emotion and justify with reason, so it’s important to know how to emotionally connect with them.
In online marketing, making emotional connections is especially important because the digital world can be fast, furious, and impersonal. There is a built-in immediacy in digital communication channels that often undermines or bypasses the opportunity to slow down the sale and deepen the consideration process that older, offline channels delivered. Plus, there’s a huge lack of trust (and fraud) in the digital world so allowing people to get to know you online goes a long way toward creating the confidence consumers and business people alike need before they're willing to buy.
So, is it easy to create emotional connections online? The good news is “YES!” thanks largely to social media and content publishing platforms that are faster, simpler and more accessible than ever before.
So, how do you do it? See more
photo credit: lukxde
One of my recent posts made
the case for opt-in over opt-out marketing. I realize that’s all well and good until it becomes time to convince people to say yes, right? So this month I want to share
four insights into what psychologically motivates people to say yes when given the opportunity to take action:
Invitation
It’s universally human that we would rather be asked than tricked or forced. Free will is one of the very cornerstones of human nature. When it’s all said and done, we’d rather be given the chance to make a conscious decision than cornered into unconscious choices we end up inevitably regretting.
So when it comes to asking someone to join your email or social media sphere, don't fall back on deception and coercion. You don’t need to sneak them in under the wire. Simply
invite them and trust that they can decide for themselves what is in their own best interests.
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photo credit: Evelyn Proimos
Most marketers used to think blogs were strictly for writers, authors, and the opinionated. With the birth of the blog, millions who needed an outlet to vent, pontificate or simply self-publish finally had a platform to do so. Soon enough, it seemed like everyone and their brother had a blog.
At last count (according to Blog Pulse and this site) there are around 130 million blogs on the Internet. There are only about a million more websites (around 235 million total) than blogs online. So if it feels like you’re the only one without a blog, you’re not imagining things – blogs are breeding like rabbits.
But why blogs for business? And if you're an entrepreneur or marketer, why should you care?
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Figuring out whom to follow on Twitter can be time-consuming. With over 75 million Twitter accounts, how on earth do you figure out who you have anything in common with? It’s easy to feel overwhelmed before even getting started.
Twitter, however, is all about engagement, so it pays not to dilly-dally but instead, jump in and begin making those connections. Here’s a three-step process to instantly see who shares your interests so you can decide who to follow and get the conversations flowing!
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photo credit: seriousbri
Sometimes we get so caught up just keeping our email programs running that we get tunnel vision. We forget that email is an essential tool in the marketing toolbox, an ingredient in the marketing mix, and not a channel to be kept unto itself.
There's been plenty written about
integrating email and social media (I know, I wrote some of it!) but what about an even more obvious connection you can make - integrating email with your blog? Here are three easy ways to do so:
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