Sales guru Jim Rohn aptly said:
‘Success is neither magical nor mysterious; it’s the natural consequence of consistently applying the fundamentals.’
I agree wholeheartedly. In order to sell better online you need to know the fundamentals, or essentials, of persuasive selling. These same principles apply whether you’re selling face-to-face or on a website. Only by doing so will you achieve your overarching merchandising goals: more add-to-carts and conversions, triggered by higher click-throughs on your website’s sales pages.
In this post I cover essential selling practices. I discuss best practices and optimisation techniques separately.
Start with the essentials
For us humans, the essentials are food, water and rest. For online merchandising, selling essentials are more emotion-based, and include:
Understanding your prospects needs and desires
Earning the trust of your visitors
Using persuasive selling tactics
Tailoring your pitch to your shopper’s stage
Creating a Product Finder tool
Offering proactive customer support
Understanding your prospects
Here’s another saying…
An outline of creative best practices across YouTube, Facebook and Twitter
The social media landscape may be constantly changing but one element remains consistent: content is king. However whilst content itself may be an essential component of any social media strategy, the creative formats and best practices for each platform are often quite different and not always transferable across one another.
There are many helpful guides, blog posts and resources to help digital marketers stay on track but I thought it worthwhile highlighting some of key creative best practices for YouTube, Facebook and Twitter in the form of a quick, bullet-point checklist. This is by no means a definitive list but hopefully a decent top-level guide and primer for anyone new to producing social creative.
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How link reclamation is the best way to save SEO rankings
Link building is one of the most talked-about subjects in SEO and digital marketing. As a search term, it’s maintained a pretty constant popularity (after peaking in 2012 right around the first Penguin release).
A lot of the conversation surrounding backlinks and link building is centered on how to build new ones, and that’s a good conversation to have. But it’s missing an important part of backlinks: maintaining existing links.
Here’s the Google Trends graph for “link building” over the last 5 years:
What is Link Reclamation?
Link reclamation is the process of finding broken or removed links to your site and fixing and replacing them with updated URLs. While not as flashy as link building, link reclamation is a vital part of getting the most out of your link profile and maintaining…
We take a look at the power of personalization in retail. How it helps you deliver unique customer experiences and a boost to retail sales
Great customer experience is about putting the customer at the centre of everything you do. It’s about giving them what they want quickly and making them feel special in the process.
But when you’re faced with thousands of customers, it can be hard to put your best intentions into practice. Personalisation changes this.
Does personalization in retail matter?
Personalization tends to be seen as a buzzword. People tell you it’s important without sharing the facts. But there’s hard proof that personalization counts when it comes to sales.
Remember the ‘Share a Coke’ campaign with people’s names plastered across the packaging? This personal approach was credited with growing Coke’s sales for the first time in 10 years.
The research shows Coke’s experience isn’t an isolated one. 75% of consumers are…
Have you heard of Google Duplex yet? You know, the AI assistant that books appointments and makes reservations on your behalf? Just your next-door robot…
As you may already be aware, Google Duplex is a new technology launched by Google at Google I/O 2018, the company’s annual developer conference. Google Duplex is an AI system that is designed to accomplish real-world tasks over the phone, by mimicking human conversation. Google CEO Sundar Pichai personally demonstrated phones calls made by this digital voice assistant.
The product was demoed by showing a phone call where the AI assistant makes an appointment at the hairdresser’s, by calling them and having an actual conversation. Now chatbots and voice assistants have been around for a while now, so that probably doesn't sound all that intriguing to you. Although, what you may find really intriguing is that…
Do your lead scoring right and it will drive sales through the roof
Lead scoring - it's one of those terms which raises eyebrows outside the world of marketing, and rolls eyes within. Do it right and it will drive sales through the roof – but it's so easy to get it wrong. And, when you get it wrong, you go haring off down dead ends while hot prospects cool off unnoticed.
That's why I’ve teamed up with Smart Insights to create a comprehensive Lead Scoring Guide that will help you land quick wins through great lead scoring.
Our guide includes:
What lead scoring is (and why your business needs it!
An introduction to the different types of leads
How to define lead qualification stages in B2B marketing
Steps towards implementing lead scoring
A guide to progressive profiling
How to avoid common lead-scoring pitfalls
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These days, social media is non-negotiable as far as marketing is concerned. You simply cannot ignore the power of social media with the number of worldwide users expected to hit three billion by 2021
If you aren’t already leveraging social media tools to acquire more customers, then you’re missing out on millions of prospects. They help you to engage your target audience in a more personal way. And social media is the ideal place to increase your brand’s exposure, generate more leads, and even service customers.
But it’s not as easy as it sounds. If it were, everybody would be doing it, and doing it well. It takes a certain level of planning and tact to get the most out of social media marketing. Hopefully, these tricks will help you with your customer acquisition strategy on social…
Content marketing is a complex, highly competitive marketing practice, so it’s important to be strategic if you want to succeed
Over years of blogging and working with content marketing, I’ve learned a lot of lessons. Important lessons that I definitely wished I knew about when I started. In this blog post, I’m going to share top essential content marketing practices that you might not be leveraging:
Strategize and plan your content marketing
Research your content and perform keyword research
Focus more on evergreen content
The future is in personalization: create audience personas
Use your analytics to optimise your content
Strategize and plan your content marketing
How much thought do you really put into your strategy? Are you:
Setting objectives for your content?
Creating content with your objectives in mind?
Creating content based on market research?
Using an editorial calendar to plan and strategize your content?
Creating a content marketing strategy helps in several ways:…
Which creators to use to raise brand awareness and maximise your ROI
In recent years, and even months, the influencer marketing industry has grown exponentially and it’s showing no signs of slowing down. In 2017, 86% of marketers reported using influencer marketing and 39% of those reported plans to increase influencer marketing spend in 2018 (Linqia, 2017). The industry is booming. As a relatively recent marketing trend, those who are new to influencer marketing may find the lingo may be a little confusing, and it may be hard to know who to use and when.
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The first phrase that must be defined is 'creator', versus the more commonly used, 'influencer'. Despite its name, those in influencer marketing generally tend to work more with creators than with influencers. Influencers are those social…
Chart of the day: Original research drives traffic but marketers aren't promoting it to its full potential.
Original research produced by b2B marketers drives traffic and social shares - but are marketers making the most of their excellent research? The short answer, according to research by Buzzsumo and Mantis Research is pretty much a "no".
The research found the main benefits of producing original research (research reports which involve conducting a survey of real people e.g. marketers) drives traffic and social shares, success!
Website traffic, social shares, PR and influencer mentions, as well as leads were reported by half or more respondents. This proves the value of conducting original research and shows why it's so popular as a content marketing methods.
When asked how marketers then promoted the research, this is what they found:
Most marketers promote…
