Tag Archives: sales

Monday Marketing Mash-up: Learning from Business Failures

entrepreneurship, weekly reading, ,

Failure’s been on my mind lately. It started a while back, with this startup founder writing about the inevitable end of the business.

And of course, last week I wrote about another startup failure, inspired by the TechCrunch article reporting it.

So today I share some more stories of failure with you, hoping we can avoid their mistakes and their fate. The next three links are from this Business Insider article.

This entrepreneur started his business of selling condom key chains: he failed, but it’s a great story.

This blog post has some interesting insights, including this:

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Monday Marketing Mash-up: Get More Conversions

content, website, weekly reading, , , , ,

Likes and retweets are all very well, but what you really want is conversions: someone signing up to your newsletter, filling up your lead form, or buying your product. This week, let’s work on improving conversions.

First, are you tracking conversions on your website? You can do this easily by setting up goals in Google Analytics.

Neil Patel offers copywriting tips that will increase your conversions. The first few are great copywriting tips for any piece of writing: focus on benefits (i.e., the reader, not you), format your text, use images, and so on. But there are some less obvious tips in there too.

The Leaky Bathtub offers an easy way to get your prospects to take action: treat them like dogs. What does this mean? Tell your prospects what you want them to do, not what you want them to not do.

Search Engine Land explains how to optimize all your pages, not just your “landing pages.”

The Visual Website Optimizer blog explains five conversion best practices.

Now let’s get to work! Use some of these tips to improve your website’s conversions and get more money pouring in.

Liked this post? For more links to interesting things we read, follow us on Twitter.

Monday Marketing Mash-up: Marketing Tips for the Fourth of July

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The Fourth of July is the American Independence Day. If you’re marketing to customers in the U.S., don’t miss this opportunity of doing a special promotion or marketing message. I’ve put together some ideas from other bloggers.

This blog post has a ton of ideas on marketing for the Fourth of July, including special tips for bakeries, consignment stores, cafes, salons, spas and health clubs, tattoo parlors, florists, restaurants, or retail stores of any kind.

And here are some more tips just for restaurants.

This blog post has more ideas: all about offline marketing.

If you’ve noticed, all the posts I’ve linked to are heavy on the offline marketing. What can you do on social media? Watch out: I’ll do a post just about that tomorrow.

The Most Important Marketing Metrics for Small Businesses

entrepreneurship, social media, website, , , , , ,

In our interview series, we asked marketers and entrepreneurs we admire about their marketing practices. One question I asked most people was about metrics: what metrics do they measure or think are most important for small businesses should measure?

Website Metrics

If your website is also your product (content sites like Ask A Manager and YourStory, product startups like AppSurfer, e-commerce sites), website metrics are of paramount importance.

The AppSurfer team tracks website metrics regularly, especially engagement-related metrics: pages per visit, bounce rate, etc.

We met Jubin Mehta of YourStory recently, and he told us that YourStory focuses on the number of unique visitors — not total visits or page views, but the number of readers.

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Monday Marketing Mash-up: All About Pricing

entrepreneurship, weekly reading, , , ,

Pricing’s something many of us struggle with, and is a really important part of marketing strategy. And it’s something I’ve been thinking about as we move closer to a paid plan for Markitty. So here are a few interesting posts that talk about how you should price your product.

Different kinds of greens in a market
Customers like options they can compare, even if they’re similar

Here’s why research or surveys usually don’t help you much:

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Presentation: Measuring Marketing Performance

marketing concepts, , , , , , , ,

On Saturday, we conducted the second of a three-session workshop on marketing for small-business owners for members of the Pune Open Coffee Club.

Unmana presenting at Marketing Measurement workshop for entrepreneurs

We talked about setting marketing objectives based on the business challenges you are facing, and how marketing can — and should! — help not only with getting the word out about your business, but nurturing your followers and leads till they become customers, and nurturing customers and encouraging them to stay with you.

I thoroughly enjoyed the discussions we had: and if you were there, thank you for being an active participant! And here’s the presentation.

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Using LinkedIn for Business: Interview with Ed Steinberg, LinkedIn’s first Relationship Manager

interviews, social media, , , ,

Edward_SteinbergWhen I first knew Ed Steinberg, he was the head of human resources at the company I was then working at. Since then, he’s gone on to do interesting things, becoming LinkedIn’s first Relationship Manager and working there for several years before moving on to training other sales people on using LinkedIn effectively.

I asked Ed for tips on using LinkedIn that small businesses can use. Read on! My questions and comments are in bold.

Let’s start by talking about you: tell us about how you landed up in LinkedIn and what your role has been.

I worked in Human Resources for a long time, 15 years or so. My primary responsibility was hiring. I realized that referral hires made the best hires and helped grow a company from 4 employees to over 500 people. I had opened up offices on 3 continents and hired a tremendous group of employees.

While working as Global Head of HR at StarCite, a LinkedIn rep came to my office to sell me Corporate Solutions. When I realized what it was, I saw that this was a large extension around the concept of referral hiring that had worked so well for me. It made perfect sense!

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Weekend Reads for Better Marketing: Twitter for CEOs

social media, weekly reading,
Remove the mask and reveal yourself on social media
Time to remove the mask and reveal yourself on social media

This week, I want to tell you all about Twitter. If you’re a startup founder or a business leader, you should be using Twitter.

This article about top companies’ CEOs in Australia and their low use of Twitter explains why:

By deliberately avoiding Twitter, CEOs are shutting themselves off from engagement with a range of stakeholders including customers, staff and shareholders.

The Wall Street Journal has also discussed what seems to be top executives’ “fear” of Twitter.

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Weekend Reads for Better Marketing: Sales and SEO

content, entrepreneurship, social media, weekly reading, , , , ,
Little girl with make-up and rollers
This is about how fake I feel if I try to sell

Vijay Anand, the founder of the Startup Center and a well-known name in the Indian startup space, answers the question, “What will it take to build 1.000 Startups in a year?”

Tech columnist Farhad Manjoo writes about Facebook’s Graph Search (which Nilesh wrote about here).

You’ll immediately notice Facebook search’s amazing user interface and flexibility. You’ll also spot one glaring problem: The search results aren’t that good.

…

After just a few queries, I started asking the engine for more and more complicated things, just to see if it could keep up… It didn’t have any trouble.

I can’t wait to try it myself, though apparently Facebook is rolling it out “very slowly.”

Are you making these 9 mistakes on LinkedIn?

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Social Media Marketing for Restaurants and Content: Interview with Sahil Khan of the Tossed Salad

interviews, social media, , , , , , , , , ,

We recently met up with Sahil Khan, whose online lifestyle magazine, the Tossed Salad, has a dedicated following. Sahil is also very active on Twitter, and he has been successful in helping restaurants use social media effectively. But hold on — you can listen to the details in his own words in the video below.

And if you’d rather read than watch, the transcript is below. My questions and comments are in bold.

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Weekend Reads for Better Marketing: Website and Social Media

content, social media, website, weekly reading, , , , , ,

Do people really think content marketers don’t care about sales? This and other myths here.

Outspoken Media has an easy, excellent guide to link-building in 15 minutes a day.

And here are a few quick ways to improve your website’s usability.

If you aren’t using photos on Facebook yet, here’s more evidence to convince you: photos get 53% more likes.

Here’s another blog post laying out why LinkedIn’s Endorsement feature is awful.

Have a great weekend, and make your marketing better next week!

Weekend Reads for Better Marketing: A Wide Assortment

content, entrepreneurship, social media, , , , , , , ,

Cheesecake with assorted fruits

With the five links below, you can learn about blogging, websites, advertising on social media, motivation, and sales. Let’s start!

Hubspot tells you how you (yes, you) can be a business blogger.

Copyblogger tells you how to set up a WordPress website in fifteen minutes. (Though really, if you’re new to this, I think it will take you at least half an hour. Or a couple of hours — speaking as someone who’s technically-challenged but got this website up and running, with a little help from the other guy.)

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