3 Reasons to Create a Sales Video

A sales video can transform your sales pitch from boring to interactive. It sells your business to clients and can heighten their interest in setting up a meeting with you. A sales video sells your product or services, and captures why someone should be interested in what you have to offer.

A sales video can transform your sales pitch from boring to interactive. It sells your business to clients and can heighten their interest in setting up a meeting with you. A sales video sells your product or services, and captures why someone should be interested in what you have to offer.

 

Why Have a Sales Video?
 

1) Pamphlets Are a Thing of the Past

 

Today, the average North American watches four hours of television everyday. Compare that to the fact that the average North American reads only one book every year. This information shows us that nowadays people get more of their information from video than anything else.

 

Business’s should consider video as the way to get the word out. Nobody wants to spend time anymore reading long pamphlets or going through a plain PowerPoint. Business videos are quick and get the message across better than any other platform. 

 

2) Sales Videos Create Impact

 

No matter how much you know a movie is not real life, it will always still impact you. Whether it gives you the feeling of happiness, sadness or sheer excitement, a video can cause emotions that a webpage or brochure cannot. It doesn’t have to be a Hollywood video. Simply adding music to a presentation can build impact.

 

3) You’ll Never Be as Good 

 

It doesn’t matter how good of a sales person you are, but you can never deliver information the way a video can. A video can be organized and edited in a way that includes photos, graphics, music and sound, that can truly capture the message you want to send.

 

Email your business video to the individual you hope to set a meeting up with before speaking with them in order to increase excitement that is harder to provide over the phone. 

 

http://www.n5r.com/blog/3-reasons-to-create-a-sales-video

 

LinkedIn Marketing: 8 Huge Benefits and 8 Awesome Tips to Master It

Ae you using LinkedIn as a platform to market your business? Do you need convincing about its benefits and want some tips to get started?

 

If you’re a B2B company LinkedIn is an absolute must, but that’s not to say a B2C company can’t achieve success too. LinkedIn offers a unique platform to build brand awareness amongst a targeted professional audience.

 

QuickSprout have put together this infographic showing the benefits of LinkedIn and some tips on how to implement your strategy.

 

 

http://blog.red-website-design.co.uk/2015/02/17/linkedin-marketing-8-huge-benefits-and-8-awesome-tips-to-master-it/

 

4 SEO Tactics to Embrace in 2015

Remember when the meta keyword tag was popular? Or when a good SEO strategy was to put keywords in everything (URL, title, description, headings, images ALT text, side nav, main nav, footer nav, in the keywords and 231 times in the body content)?

 

Welcome to 2015, where the world of search is a completely different game. In fact, in 2015 you need to check site pages to be certain keywords aren’t overused in key elements.
 So why are so many SEOs still recommending that webpages include the "targeted keyword" in the URL, title, headings, and corpus? Can you say penalty risk?

 

We can touch on a hundred different SEO strategies do improve your website, but below are 4 ways a beginner can start improving their site.

 

Hummingbird Made SEO Much Easier

 

Search engines no longer value pages filled with targeted keywords. Google’s Hummingbird algorithm drove a final nail into the keyword coffin. With Hummingbird, Google proved that they now understand what your page is about; they know the topic of the page, how unique the content is, and how well it’s written.

 

Searchmetrics released their annual white paper detailing ranking factors and rank correlations. What they found was that there is little to no benefit to strategically incorporating keywords in different page elements, and often sites can be negatively impacted. You can also read a summary of Searchmetric’s report on Moz’s website.

 

Practices that Will Strengthen the Value of a Website

 

1) Skip Meta Keywords

Remember in preschool when you’d draw on the walls and your teacher would say, "If you can’t learn how to use the crayons then I’m going to take them away from you"? You would laugh and continue drawing on the walls, only to have the teacher take your crayons.

 

Now imagine the crayons are Meta keywords and Google is that mean, old preschool teacher. Google took Meta keywords away because we didn’t use them correctly. Search engines have taken it a step further and declared that meta keywords could be a spam signal.

 

In 2009 Google’s Matt Cutts posted on the official Google Blog, "Google doesn’t use the 'keywords' meta tag in our web search ranking." Still don’t believe? Read Bing’s guidelines for webmasters to get the full picture.

 

Solution: Stop using Meta keywords
 

2) Don’t Stuff Your Content with Keywords

Nothing is worse than arriving to a site and finding content with keywords strategically (and awkwardly) positioned throughout. Let’s just put this one to bed here and now. Keyword density is no longer important and you should stop any and all strategies aiming at stuffing keywords into your content.

 

Instead, learn about an important concept known as TF-IDF, or term frequency-inverse document frequency. TD-IDF means that content should include different phrases and that some of those phrases should appear more frequently than others.

 

For example, a page about Nintendo should include the word Nintendo more frequently than the words Mario and Luigi, but Mario and Luigi should (probably) appear on the page because they are related to the topic of the page.

 

Solution: Let’s not over complicate the solution here. Cyrus Shepard wrote a comprehensive post about keyword targeting explaining what I’ll summarize in a few bullet points.

 

Optimizing Content for Users and Ranking

1. Decide upon a topic for a page or blog post
2. Extensively research said topic
3. Write content that is uniquely valuable to your targeted visitor
4. Verify that you have written a minimum of 400 words
5. Split the content into short paragraphs, consisting of 2-4 sentences, or bulleted lists
6. Add a headline to the opening of each paragraph to describe the upcoming info
7. Within the body content create anchor text links to a similar page on the site
8. Add a page title that speaks to your targeted visitor and the topic of the page
9. Make the page easily shareable on social networks

The result will be an authoritative, user friendly, search engine friendly piece of content for your site.
 

3) Don't Ignore Your Meta Description

This last one isn’t so much about what companies do, but instead it’s what they fail to do. Too often I see sites with a Meta description that has been completely ignored, or maybe worse yet, use a tool or plug-in to dynamically generate a Meta description.

 

You have about 215 total characters (or 512px by 100px) to persuade searchers to click on your listing in SERP. 215 characters include the page title and Meta description. 215 characters because SERP is dependent upon pixels and not characters (the letter 'W' is obviously wider than "I").

 

Plain and simple, Meta descriptions are a conversion factor. Meta descriptions are not a factor in ranking algorithms, though. Knowing that they impact CTR why would you ignore them?

 

Solution: Take time to write compelling Meta descriptions for all important pages of the site, and for any pages that can be shared socially. While 155 characters is target length, keep in mind that words aligning with the search query will be bolded, causing your description to be longer. So it would be advisable to keep the character length between 115-145 characters. It’s also important to include some form of a CTA or value proposition. Words like ‘decide,’ 'learn,’ or 'find out' can be considered calls to action in this situation.
 

4) Don't Forget to Markup Pages with Schema, RDFa, JSON-LD

Next time you search in Google or Bing, look at the results. Spot the results that contain more information than just a title, description, and URL. Those results have additional info because the html of the site is marked up to relay explicit information to crawlers. The result is more equity of SERP.

 

BuildVisible wrote a comprehensive guide to help with Microdata. They found that search listings with rich snippets would be clicked on up 25% more frequently.

 

Solution: Plain and simple, make microdata part of every site you create. Markup logos, images, addresses, phone numbers, business name, type of business, reviews, prices, software, and anything else that’s relevant to the site. Clients will thank you and visitors will appreciate it.

 

Conclusion

 

Once you’re using these tactics you can build upon them. Taking just these steps will help your site rank, but optimizing a website is a practice that doesn’t really end. You can stop improving certain pages, but the site as a whole can always be improved.

 

You may not be an SEO expert, but you’ll strengthen your website with the simple strategies above.

 

http://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/seo-tactics-2015

 

How To Grow A Business To $100 Million In Sales, From Someone Who's Done It Twice

Zeta Interactive CEO David A. Steinberg has lived through remarkable success and failure alike as a serial entrepreneur and executive. In his 20-year career, he's learned hard lessons that have made him wiser, more effective, and especially more prudent, he tells Business Insider.

 

Zeta Interactive CEO David Steinberg

 

Steinberg jumped into the growing cellular-phone industry a year out of college, founding the retail chain and business-to-business provider Sterling Cellular in 1992. He then founded the telemarketing company Sterling Communications, which he sold in 1999 along with his retail business, starting online cellular commerce and business-to-business company InPhonic that same year.

 

At its height, Steinberg says, InPhonic was bringing in approximately $400 million in revenue. In 2004, it was named the fastest-growing private company in the US by Inc. magazine and went public that same year. By 2007, however, it was in bankruptcy due to mismanagement and a host of other factors.

 

He quickly moved forward, founding the digital marketing firm that was rebranded this year as Zeta Interactive with his business partner John Sculley, former PepsiCo president and Apple CEO. Steinberg tells us that Zeta brought in revenue of $90 million last year and that it's already passed $100 million this year. He projects year-over-year growth of 90% and says its operating margin is in the mid-teens and rising, meaning that Zeta is on a healthy, fast-growth path.

 

Here are some powerful growth lessons Steinberg says he's learned from being at the top to being at the bottom and how they are helping him today:

 

Set Up People and Processes for Sustainable Growth.

 

One of the reasons InPhonic ultimately failed is because it grew too quickly, Steinberg says. It went from offering 100,000 phone rebates to customers to offering 1 million in the span of a year — and the company simply wasn't ready to handle it, both in terms of manpower and technology. Customer service began to suffer significantly due to the inability to adapt, and Steinberg tells us that rebate turnaround times increased from one month to six months.

 

Looking back, Steinberg says he should have eased the company into a more manageable direction, in addition to replacing certain employees that were not good fits for a new direction. "The people who got you to where you are won't always get you where you need to go," he says.

 

At his current company Zeta, Steinberg says he has chief information officer Jeffry Nimeroff focus on making sure that the company's technology is always able to handle Zeta's growth. By using a data-based growth strategy, Steinberg is able to avoid unnecessarily risky initiatives that the company may not be able to adapt to.

 

Hand Off Responsibilities.

 

"It took me 20 years to realize I'm not the best at everything," Steinberg says, laughing.

 

For example, he says that 15 years ago he wouldn't have been able to effectively manage his current chief operating officer, Steve Gerber, because he wouldn't have been able to hand off day-to-day management decisions to him.

 

Steinberg says that he's learned that to increase your chances of developing leaders within your own company, it's necessary to hire very intelligent people for your team. "You can teach smart people to do almost anything," he says.

 

Pivot Every Six to Nine months.

 

Steinberg thinks that a high-growth company needs to constantly reinvent itself to stay relevant, and that doesn't necessarily mean that it needs to go in a radical new direction.

 

Zeta started in the education sector before pivoting over to big data marketing solutions, and it's worked out well.

 

He says that as head of InPhonic he should have acquired an outside wireless company to keep InPhonic interesting and able to handle accelerated growth.

 

Never Put Yourself in a Situation You Can't Get Out Of.

 

On that note, Steinberg says he made the mistake of setting self-imposed limitations on what InPhonic could be. Part of this had to do with his former obsession with getting press for InPhonic when it was still young, which resulted in excessive coverage of certain initiatives he should have dropped when they stopped working.

 

This time around with Zeta, he focused on finding what worked before reaching out to the media. He says that today it's "the biggest tech company in New York that no one's heard of." It's better to figure out a growth strategy under the radar than limiting your ability to change course, he says.

 

Don't be Afraid to Let the Market Come to You.

 

"Most startups wait to start in a time that's hot for their industry," Steinberg says, but that's not necessarily the best option. If you sit on an idea and wait for the market to open its arms to it, then you risk reaching an opportunity for scaled growth at a time when that particular market cools.

 

If you happen to have a great idea, Steinberg recommends building a company regardless of what the market is doing. And if that great idea turns out to be a great company, then you can still find an audience.

 

Similarly, Steinberg says, he's never started a company with an exit strategy, as some serial entrepreneurs do. "The exit will find you," he says.

        
http://www.businessinsider.com/david-steinberg-how-to-build-million-dollar-company-2014-9?IR=T

How to Write an Irresistible Headline

Let’s start with a fundamental question: How are posts shared?

 

It’s not the blog post, tool, or resource that gets shared. That might be what motivates the person who is sharing it, but all that ends up getting shared is the headline. The headline is what you share with your subscribers, it’s what people see in search results, and it’s what gets passed around

.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that a good headline is going to help your traffic prospects.

 

What’s less obvious is that sometimes the best way to come up with an idea is to start with the headline. Here’s why: If you start with the resource, you might end up putting a lot of time into it before you realize that there’s no way to summarize it with an irresistible headline. This is a lot like the death sentence most products face if they don’t have an “elevator pitch” on which to build.

 

 

What Makes a Good Headline?

 

According to a study published in The Guardian, these changes help your headline’s click-through rate:1

• Headlines with 8 words do 21% better than average.
• Using a hyphen or colon will add 9% to your CTR.
• Thumbnails and images boost clicks by 27%, so use them on every platform you can.
• List posts tend to do better. They do even better if the number of list elements is odd instead of even. In fact, odd-numbered posts do 20 percent better than even-numbered posts. I suspect, however, that “10” is an exception to this rule.
• Headlines that end with a question mark do better according to this study. On top of that, a university study has also found that question headlines do better. They also discovered that question headlines did even better if they referenced the reader with “you” or “your,” as opposed to rhetorical questions or other types of questions.
• Headlines that end with three exclamation points get twice as many clicks as headlines with any other punctuation!!! Obviously, you can do this too much!!! You’ll start to lose your credibility after a while!!! But if you’re going to use an exclamation point, you might as well use three instead of one!!!

 

What Do the Top Blogs Do?

 

Using a script, Startup Moon scraped several blogs and organized the posts from most to least shared on social networks. This doesn’t necessarily mean that they are the most shareable headlines, but it’s probably a good indication that these posts attracted more traffic than usual. Posts in the top 20% tended to use the following tactics:

• Startup Moon was looking at tech blogs, but some of the most successful posts used words like “kill,” “fear,” “dark,” “bleeding,” and “war.” It looks like violent language gets attention, even when the subject isn’t about violence at all.
• The negative spin on a post tends to do better. Words like “without,” “no,” and “stop” showed up in a lot of the top posts. A study by Outbrain reached a similar result. They found that the negative superlatives “never” and “worst” performed 30% better than average and 59% better than positive superlatives. I’d bet that this all comes down to the human bias called loss aversion. Even when the outcome is the same, we pay more attention when the outcome is framed as avoiding a loss instead of gaining something.
• Obviously, people like seeing numbers in headlines. But it’s not just list posts that do this. Numbers of any kind apparently add credibility to headlines by adding specificity. Bigger numbers also tend to do better because they make things sound more dramatic. Use digits to represent numbers, not words. Time units also help, probably because they indicate exactly how much time it will take to learn something new. Finally, it’s best if the headline starts with the number.
• Guides do very well. Using words like “introduction,” “beginner’s guide,” “in 5 minutes,” and “DIY” will help your CTR.
• Piggybacking on big brands and hot topics also helps, even when the articles are only using those brands or topics metaphorically to make a comparison with something very different.
• A few random words also seemed to help: smart, surprising, science, history, hacks/hacking/hackers, huge/big, critical.
• The study also found that these words seem to hurt: announcing, wins, celebrates, grows.

 

Finally, if you want better headlines, your content needs to be built on a broader base of subjects and topics. This is where you look for inspiration from the top brands and widen your content strategy to include as many themes and ideas related to your industry as you can.

 

In another study, Ripenn analyzed 2,616 headlines on sites known for their ability to elicit clicks: BuzzFeed, UpWorthy, ViralNova, and Wimp. Here’s what they recommend as a result of their findings:

• Reference current trends, celebrities, and popular movies but with a unique spin on them.
• Inject headlines with curiosity. Elicit an interest, but don’t give it all away in the title.
• Use emotional words.
• Use action words. This is backed up by Dan Zarrella’s research on Twitter click-through rates. More adverbs and verbs will help CTR, while more nouns and adjectives will hurt it. We like to hear stories about things that are being done or learn how to do things. We don’t like stories about things just sitting there.
• Make bold claims.
• Write relatable, human headlines, and don’t get too formal.

 

Working together with Ripenn on that study, BufferApp was able to discover that these were some of the most popular phrases in successful headlines:

 

Image via BufferApp

Image via BufferApp

 

What If You Just Want to Sell?

 

While these are great tactics for sparking interest in a subject, many of them will backfire if you’re trying to target users who are already looking for something specific. Several case studies from ContentVerve at Unbounce demonstrate that, when it comes to landing pages:

• Question titles almost always perform worst. (“Need a Free MP3 Player?”)
• Loss-aversion titles tend to come in second unless there is a very clear thing people are trying to avoid. (“Don’t Waste Money on Expensive Mp3 Converters”)
• Titles expressing a very clear benefit tend to do best. (“Get Your Free YouTube Converter”)

 

The business of writing headlines for landing pages is very different from the business of writing headlines for blog posts. With landing pages, you’re trying to capture the attention of people who are already looking for something specific. Clever headlines just force them to think harder about what you’re offering.

 

With blog posts, on the other hand, you’re usually trying to elicit interest in a subject.

 

Over to You

 

Think carefully about which goal you’re trying to accomplish before you write your headline. In fact, this will probably depend on the platform. You’ll usually want to write more creative headlines for platforms like Facebook and Twitter, while you will often want to use more straightforward headlines for paid search or email.

 

It all comes down to the question of serendipitous discovery versus goal-oriented search.

 

http://www.convinceandconvert.com/content-marketing/how-to-write-a-headline/

 

36 Tried-and-True Ways to Promote Your Blog Posts

There are lots of things you need to do to have a successful blog. Not only do your posts need to be well-written, helpful, and relevant to your target audience, but you've also got to make sure you're promoting them correctly so they get in front of people who could become your fans -- and maybe even your customers.

 

Luckily, you have many creative options when it comes to promoting your blog content.

 

In the infographic below from ReferralCandy, we hear from over 40 marketing experts about their favorite blog promotion tactics -- everything from relationship building to email segmentation to social media. Check it out.

 

 

http://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/blog-promotion-tactics

 

8-Step Mantra Marketing Action Plan For Growing Your Brand & Presence

If there is one thing I have learned about marketing it’s this: marketing feels awkward and uncomfortable.

 

Why?

 

You have great things to share, you want to share them and profit from your knowledge and expertise but somehow, the marketing part feels icky and itchy, and you just don’t have the time to commit to marketing and growing your brand. Right?

 

Is that really why?

 

I bet that is part of the reason, but here’s the REAL reason why:

 

There’s a little voice inside you that starts talking and she is stopping you. She is saying: Who do you think you are? You are not good enough! You don’t deserve to have fabulous clients! Everybody knows you are not going to really deliver all that you say you can!

 

Or: fill in the blank for what your personal inner meanie tells you.

 

One of the secrets to my own personal achievement has been shutting up that little voice and creating simple actions to move myself forward. I learned through lots of trial and error that the actions don’t work unless I attach a strategy for quieting the voice.

 

This is where mantras come in.

 

A mantra is a phrase (or sound or word) that you repeat when you meditate or pray.

 

When I grew my business from 100K to 1M it took me eight years. Yep, eight steady years of intentionally (and sometimes painfully) moving myself out of the way over and over again. During this time, I found powerful mantas to be incredibly helpful.

 

So, since my area of expertise is coaching people to their own online marketing greatness I have created this 8-step mantra marketing action kit for you!

 

Why would a marketer choose the number 8? We are supposed to stick with 5, 7 and 9s for maximum effectiveness, right? Even my book and signature system is called Music Success in 9 Weeks for goodness sakes!

 

A trip to numerology.com revealed my answer:

 

“The number 8, more than any other number, puts the emphasis in the areas of career, business, finances and authority. However, as with many other single-digit numbers, the shape of the number reflects its most important attribute, and in the case of the number 8, that is, first and foremost, balance… When the 8 comes knocking, you can be assured that you will reap what you’ve sown.”

Hmmm… Coincidence that it took me eight years to build my business? I think NOT!

Meanwhile, here we go with a mantra system just for you:
 

CYBER PR’S 8-STEP MANTRA MARKETING ACTION PLAN FOR GROWING YOUR BRAND & PRESENCE

 How do you break through and get noticed on social media? Don’t try to get noticed. It’s all about relationships, conversation, and interaction. But it’s also about believing that you can. Behold:

 

Action #1: Identify Your Ideal Customer and Only Speak to Her.
Mantra: Less is More.

 

You’ve seen all of the numbers. There are a billion people on Facebook, and 500 million on Twitter etc. etc. The landscape is vast. Don’t even try to think you can talk to everyone.

 

Instead, consider the characteristics of the ideal customer you would most like to engage. What’s her name? Does she have kids? What does she like to do, eat, and read? Most importantly, what makes her tick and what objections would she have if she were buying what you have to offer? All of these questions should lead your content. Write posts and create content only to her and she will show up to read it.

 

Action #2: Don’t Hype.
Mantra: I am Helpful.

 

Sales pitches have their place and they will emerge when the time is right, however too much and your followers will tune you out.

 

If you are going to take the time to get it right and ultimately establish yourself as a thought leader in your niche, be genuine and share what is meaningful to you. People will connect to your passion and therefore connect with you.

 

Action #3: Shine a Light on Other People.
Mantra: Social Media is not a Competition.

 

If you are willing to lift people up in public, it shows that you are a person of integrity who is not threatened by others. Highlight other people’s ideas, successes, and talents often. Share links to great blog posts, congratulate a promotion on LinkedIn, and Tweet a fantastic quote from someone you admire (or even better from your competitors).

 

Action #4: Make Your Content Easy to Share.
Mantra: I Share My Knowledge & Expertise.

 

If you have a blog, be sure you include ReTweet, Facebook like and Google+ buttons on each post. Add social sharing tools into your newsletters so people can spread your compelling content. Make short links for people so they’re more sharable by using bit.ly. Always think: How can I make what I do online as viral as possible?

 

Action #5: Answer Everyone.
Mantra: I Care About Others.

 

If you don’t care about your audience, they won’t care about you. If someone comments or likes or says something thoughtful about what you’ve written or shared, take time to answer.

 

Everyone is important, so treat everyone that way. They will notice and your social karma and currency will rise quickly.

 

Action #6: Be Bold, Stay Your Course.
Mantra: I am Bold & I am Authentic.

 

Fitting in and neutrality defeats thought leadership. You have important things to say, do not be afraid to say them. Be you, be real, and be bold. Stand out from all the other voices and be consistent and authentic with your message.

 

Action #7: Invite Participation.
Mantra: My Friends Are Here to Help Me.

 

Have friends and colleagues who you consider whip-smart, funny, helpful and an asset to your community become part of your content contribution team. Ask her to guest post and add her own thought leadership to your conversation.

 

It doesn’t have to be someone with a huge social following. In fact, it’s helpful if they don’t already have a large online presence because when others Google them they will be directed to your content! So, get collaborating!

 

Action #8: Put Yourself Out There.
Mantra: Others Benefit Because of Me.

 

While building a platform you have to simultaneously do so in World 1.0 as well as on Web 2.0! Get out there and speak in public, go on TV (or make your own TV on YouTube). Use your content to eventually publish a book. Writing a book is the most amazing calling card in the world.

 

Print the infographic below out and hang it where you can see it next to your desk or bed, or on the fridge. Repeat, repeat and repeat till they sink in.

 

http://cyberpr.com/2014/02/8-step-mantra-marketing-action-plan-growing-brand-presence/