Benefits Of Using Digital Marketing

What is Digital Marketing?

Digital marketing is an umbrella term for all of your online marketing efforts. Businesses leverage digital channel such as Google search, social media, email, & their websites to connect with their current and prospective customers. From your website itself to your online branding assets – digital advertising, email marketing, online brochures, & beyond — there’s a huge spectrum of tactics and assets that fall under the umbrella of digital marketing. And the best digital marketers have a clear picture of how each asset or tactic support their overarching goals.

What Are the Main Benefits of Digital Marketing?

Unlike most offline marketing efforts, digital marketing allows marketers to see accurate results in real time. If you’ve ever put an advert in a newspaper, you’ll know how difficult it is to estimate how many people actually flipped to that page and paid attention to your ad. There’s no surefire way to know if that ad was responsible for any sales at all.

Why digital marketing is important

Digital media is so pervasive that consumers have access to information anytime & any place they want it. Gone are the days when the message people got about your products or services came from you & consisted of only what you wanted them to know. Digital media is an ever-growing source of entertainment, news, shopping and social interaction, and consumers are now exposed not just to what your company says about your brand, but what the media, friends, relatives, peers, etc., are saying as well. And they are more likely to believe them than you. People want brands they can trust, companies that know them, communications that are personalized and relevant, and offers tailored to their needs and preferences.

Main Advantages of Digital Marketing

Digital Marketing benefits allow you to evolve your marketing plans and stay competitive in your industry. With digital marketing, your business can:
• Use content to connect to consumers online

72% of marketers think branded content is more effective than advertising in a magazine, and 69% say it is superior to direct mail and PR. Maintaining a dominant online presence is crucial to both customer convenience and marketing success.

• Optimize for conversion

The ability to track a customer’s journey beginning at the first click allows you to test and optimize your website for conversion on an ongoing basis.

• Connect with mobile customers

Having a dominant online presence that is optimized for smartphone and tablet users can influence buying behavior. 82& of mobile searchers use their phones to check on prospective in-store purchases and 65% look for the most relevant information to their queries. 33% of mobile users have purchased from a different brand than the one they had in mind because of the information listed.

• Realize higher ROI and revenue

Increasing your digital outreach is a more predictable way of increasing your revenue than traditional marketing methods. Additionally, digital marketing provides you with real data, and predicting and realizing ROI is much easier done with real data in hand.

• Become more competitive

Digital marketing is how businesses are working now and will continue to work in the future. If your business is not already in the digital marketing, then you’re behind. Ensure your business is competitive by employing a smart digital marketing strategy.

Get in touch with Infoeye Nigeria to provide the best Digital Marketing services. We offer a wide range of Digital Marketing & Web Development Services.

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5 Essential Principles For Growing Your Small Business

It isn’t all it takes, but these five essentials will help you build a solid base and become one of the small businesses that succeeds.

Leading a small business can be more stressful than raising children or maintaining a healthy relationship with your spouse. Here are some basic principles to get you started on a sane journey toward growth.

When John Mackey and his then-girlfriend Renee Lawson opened a vegetarian food store in their Austin, Texas home 34 years ago, nobody–including the couple themselves–would have dubbed him an entrepreneur. Today, a clean-shaven Mackey is most likely unrecognizable to patrons of the bearded college dropout’s first shop. He built his venture into the $15.5 billion Whole Foods empire, with more than 300 supermarkets that boast organic and grass-fed meats along with an array of vegetarian fare.
Few will ever rise to the ranks of Mackey, who made the cut for Fortune’s 12 greatest entrepreneurs of our time. Mackey created a repeatable process of selling high quality natural and organic products in communities with the right appetite for a brand that relies on customer affinity. It takes a combination of understanding market demand and market size and having repeatable processes to support that market to have a scalable business. And Mackey had to strive to sustain innovation in a world where even Walmart peddles organic foods.

So many business founders come up with a good idea, yet they are unable to scale their companies for growth. Through my own journey as an entrepreneur, I’ve learned that every business is unique, but there are certain key precepts to follow for success. The few that do succeed do so with unmatched focus, discipline, and unconventional thinking.
Although it takes more than just this to be a success in business, here are five essential principles that you can begin implementing right away as you begin your journey toward growing your business:

1. Timing is Everything
The timing of your product or service must be right in the marketplace. Mackey bit on the organic and natural food revolution just as the public’s palate for these products oozed into the mainstream, but if the market isn’t ready and you are way ahead of the market, then you must possess the drive and the willingness to sacrifice in order to make that product or service work.

You will need to choose to either wait for the market to catch up (requiring the resources to survive during that period, and accepting the risk of emerging competition), or you’ll need to adjust your offering to something more palatable to the market’s current readiness.
Smaller businesses have the advantage of being able to make choices and implement changes without the exhaustive process and conflicting points of view that slow down major corporations. You need to anticipate your market and customers’ needs and constantly innovate to stay ahead. This requires leadership with agility, resilience, and a willingness to fail–and to recognize that failure quickly enough to adapt and move forward.

2. Brand, Brand, Brand
Today’s economy requires business leaders to create positive memories for customers and partners, like Mackey has, or customers will turn to a competitor in search of a better experience. Whole Foods shoppers are loyal and believe they are embracing a healthy and socially conscious lifestyle by shopping at the stores. If you want to create a scalable business, you have to understand just how crucial it is to build brand equity. The emotional attachment that links customers to your product, as opposed to any other, translates into sustainable growth.
Here are some basic rules to connect, shape, influence, and lead with your brand:

Choose your target audience. The surest road to product failure is to try to be all things to all people.

Connect with the public. Your objective is to make your audience feel an emotional attachment to your brand.

Inspire and influence your audience. An inspirational brand message is far more influential than one that just highlights product feature functions.

Reinforce the brand image within your company. Make sure employees at every level of your organization work and behave in a way that reinforces your brand image.

3. Scale Your Sales
Creating a unique product and a unique brand isn’t enough. It takes repeatable sales processes to create a scalable business. It is one thing to sign up a few customers; it is another thing entirely to identify, design, and implement repeatable sales and customer delivery processes. You’ve created a repeatable and scalable sales model when:
You can add new hires at the same productivity level as yourself or your sales leader.
You can increase the sources of your customer leads on a consistent basis.
Your sales conversion rate and revenue can be consistently forecasted.
Your cost to acquire a new customer is significantly less than the amount you can earn from that customer over time.
Your customers get the right product in the right place at the right time.
A repeatable sales model builds the platform to scale. Like the search for product/market fit, it can take major experimentation/R&D to find a repeatable and scalable sales model.

4. Embrace Technology
Nearly two thirds, or 64%, of the recent
Bank of America (BofA) Small Business Owner Survey respondents said they wish they took better advantage of technology innovations to help manage their business. If a small business can identify a genuine need, technology likely exists to fulfill that need both locally and globally. There are few barriers to entry in an age where anyone with wireless can cheaply and quickly access the enabling technologies needed to execute their business model. It comes down to creating the right operating blueprint that connects the dots between your business model and the application of accessible technologies.

5. De-Stress for Success
Most small business owners consider managing the ongoing success of their business to be twice as stressful as maintaining a healthy relationship with a spouse or partner, nearly three times as stressful as raising children, and more than four times as stressful as managing their own personal finances, according to the same Bank of America report mentioned earlier. The survey indicates that small business owners routinely forgo physical fitness and other personal priorities to keep up with business demands.
Thirty-eight percent of small business owners maintain full or part-time jobs while running their own business.
The stressors can be relentless. But if you’re not happy, healthy, and motivated, you can’t create a business model that provides a positive market experience. You also set the tone for everyone who works with you. Nobody wants to do business with a grouchy, bitter, and exhausted owner. Therefore, investing the time and effort to adequately take care of your physical and mental well-being will further increase your chances for long-term success. Mental health is not just about going to the gym to let off steam. It’s about achieving a state of mental calmness to see you though the relentless challenges–but that’s another topic in itself!

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Ten benefits of SMS marketing

Bulk SMS is great Marketing Tool because of the following reason, As marketers, we’re constantly thinking up creative ways to get our message out to existing and potential customers; whilst also ensuring we get good results from our efforts. One of the basic practical rules in marketing is to think like your audience, to keep up-to-date with their buying habits and where they are looking.
Whatever your product or service is, it’s important to ensure its visible wherever your customers go, with a ratio now of four mobile devices to every computer, it’s clear where our customers are. Mobile marketing is no longer something you can afford to put on the to-do-list for the future; you need to make sure you’re on a mobile device, now.

Below are the reasons you should choose Sms marketing.

1. Immediate:

There’s no long waiting time for designs to be mocked up or campaigns to be printed, just decide what your message is, sending a bulk SMS to your customers takes no longer than sending a text on your own phone. So, not only will you free up some precious time, but with over 90% of messages read within 3 minutes of being received you could see results immediately.

2. Mobile-friendly:
Making your business mobile-friendly is no longer something to consider ‘later’. Mobile is here and it’s not going anywhere. SMS is compatible with pretty much every mobile phone so you won’t need to worry about alienating some users, or getting your customers on board with brand new technologies.

3. Customers love:
SMS is a really simple and accessible way of engaging with each other and with an open rate of 98%, it is heads and shoulders above any other communication method in terms of read rate. Most people send and receive text messages on a daily basis so we know your customers will like, have access to and know how to use SMS .

4. Eco-friendly:
In comparison to email, direct mail and face to face meetings; a text message has the lowest impact on our Carbon Footprints In fact it’s almost a Carbon Free way of communicating, so if you’re looking for ways to make your business greener, SMS marketing is a big step in the right direction.

5. Direct:
Most of us don’t leave the house without our mobile phone, in fact it’s probably within arms-reach 24/7. Besides meeting face-to-face or calling each customer, I can’t think of a more direct way to communicate your message whilst ensuring the message is delivered straight into the right hands, at the right time.

6. Simple:
As we try and juggle our busy lives, it can sometimes feel like we have too much information to take in. Emails go unread, adverts ignored and leaflets discarded. SMS is small and simple and gets the message across instantly without any messing around. How many text messages do you receive that you don’t read?

7.Trackable:
Most service providers will offer simple delivery reporting to check your messages have successfully been sent. If you’re looking for more intelligent tracking, the top players in SMS marketing will not only tell you when your messages have been sent successfully, but will also provide you with details on who, what and when links have been clicked ensuring you get the most from your campaigns.

8. Generate leads:
Keywords are easy to set-up on an SMS shortcode and can be anything from your brand name to a memorable word. Advertise your keyword on your website, printed media or in your store, allowing customers to opt-in to your mailing list. E.g. Text SMS to 52525 for exciting news and special offers.
Not only does this provide you with lots of new contacts to communicate with but it also generates an instant lead with little effort required from you or your customer.

9. Personal:
Most peoples email and direct mailboxes are swamped with junk mail and spam. Customers will only opt-in to SMS updates from companies they want to interact with, so you know you’re delivering the message to the right person without it getting lost or ignored. If you want to make your customers feel really special, it’s easy to personalise each message and won’t take any extra time.

10. Cost-effective:
Not only is an SMS campaign affordable for budgets of all shapes and sizes, but you’ll also see a healthy return on investment from SMS marketing. At just a few pence per messages, you can be really targeted with your campaigns without it breaking the bank.

If boosting sales and improving communication with customers are on your list of resolutions this year, but you don’t have a hefty budget and hours of spare time; SMS is a small, yet powerful, marketing tool not to be overlooked.

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The Keys to Success for Marketing Your Business

Marketing is the process of interesting potential customers and clients in your products and/or services and persuading them to choose them over those of your competitors.
The key word in this marketing definition is "process". Marketing involves researching, promoting, selling, and distributing your products or services ( the four P ’ s of marketing — Product, Price, Promotion, and Place).
It's a huge topic, which is why there are tomes written on marketing, and why you can take a four-year marketing degree.
Whether you’re running a large corporation or a small business, marketing involves everything you do to get your potential customers and your product or service together.
The purpose of marketing is to drive sales. Good marketing can get potential customers through the door or onto the website and even put a product into a potential customer’s hands, but it’s not successful marketing until the customer has bought it.
6 Keys to Success for Small Business Marketing.

1. The first key to small business marketing success is knowing what you’re really selling. It's said that people don’t buy products or services —
they buy emotions and experiences. For instance, the Keg Steakhouse moves a lot of steaks, but look at their ads: What they’re really selling is good times with family and friends. Why did Michelin use a baby in a tire with the tagline “Because so much is riding on your tires” for years? Because Michelin is really selling safety, not just tires. And the baby in a tire campaign told people that one way they could feel like good parents was buying Michelin tires.

2. Once you figure out what you’re really selling, you’re ready to target your market . As a small business, you can’t afford blanket marketing; you need to get your marketing message directly to potential customers, not to everyone. Target marketing lets you zone in on those who have the highest likelihood of buying your product or service.

3. Know the difference between a marketing strategy and a marketing plan .

4. When you're putting together a marketing plan for your business, concentrate on the basics. These are the four key components of any marketing plan :
•Products and services: What goes into this section will vary depending on whether your company is creating an original product and developing it from ideation to prototype stage and onto market or marketing a product that’s already fully developed. Remember too that marketing a service is different than marketing a product. But whatever you’re selling, this section will focus on what is unique about your product or service and contain your Unique Selling Proposition .
•Pricing: The starting point for any pricing strategy is a breakeven analysis . After all, you want to make money, not lose it! But beyond that, the ideal price is a combination of how you want to position your product or service and what the market will bear. Learn more with this Guide to Pricing Strategy.
•Place (Distribution): The details of how and where your products and/or services are sold. As you’ll see when you look at the Sales and Distribution plan section of the marketing plan, this section outlines the distribution methods going to be used, the transaction process between your business and your customers, and your sales strategy.
•Promotion: The section of the marketing plan that describes how your company is going to present your products or services to the buying public. Your challenge here will be choosing the promotion activities best for reaching your target market but within your
marketing budget. The marketing tools section below will help.

5. Invest in market research . It’s market research that lets you learn which customers will be most interested in your products or services and gain specific information about them, learn about your competition and develop competitive strategies, keep abreast of economic trends and even find new markets.

6. Make sure your marketing campaigns are aligned with your marketing strategies and plans. For marketing success, you have to have consistent messaging. Integrated marketing will keep your marketing focused and
increase your sales .

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Low-Cost Ways to Promote Your Business

What's the best way to promote your business? How can you advertise your business and get your name in front of potential prospects when money is tight or you're just starting up? How can you get the word out about your business in the most affordable way?

Promoting a business is an ongoing challenge for small businesses. Whether you're just starting out or have been in business for years, these proven advertising and marketing strategies will help your business find new customers without spending a fortune.

1. Plan your attack . Define who your best prospects are, and then determine the best way to reach them. Be as specific as possible. Is the decision maker the CTO of the company, the director of human resources, or a 37-year-old working mom? Will you find them on Twitter, Google Plus, Pinterest, Facebook, YouTube or Instagram? What about in-person
networking at local business meetings ? Will you find people at those meeting who are likely prospects or who know and could recommend you to likely prospects? What about
advertising ? Will customers be searching for your type of product on Google or Bing? Do they look for coupons in newspapers? Do you want to start promoting your business to them at the start of their buying cycle, or when they're about ready to pull out their credit card and make the purchase. Write your answers down, and refer to them before you start any new marketing tactic. Use this marketing plan worksheet to gather your information.

2. If you don't have a website, get one set up. If you can't afford to have someone custom-design your website, put your site up using one of the companies like Wix, SquareSpace or Godaddy that provide templates and tools that make it easy to create a basic website.

3. Set up a listing for your business in search engine local directories. Google and Bing both offer a free listing for local businesses. To get listed on Google, go to Google My Business .  To get listed on Bing, go to Bing Places for Business. Yahoo charges for local listings, but you get listed on a lot more than Yahoo if you buy their service. The service, called Yahoo Localworks, costs $29.99 a month and lists you in 50 directories including Yahoo Local, Yelp, WhitePages, Bing, Mapquest and more. The benefit of paying: You have a single location to enter your data to make it consistent and available on multiple online directories that your customers might search to find what you sell.

4. Set up your business profile or page on social media sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Google Plus,Twitter and Pinterest . Be sure your business profile includes a good description, keywords and a link to your website. Look for groups or conversations that talk about your type of products or services and participate in the conversations, but don't spam them with constant promos for what you sell.

5. If you're just starting out and don't have a business card and business stationery, have them made up -- immediately. Your business card , letterhead and envelope tell prospective customers you are a professional who takes your business seriously. Be sure to list your website address on your business card, letterhead and any handouts you create. Include your main social media profile link, too, if possible.

6. Sign up for an email service , and send an email newsletter and/or promotional offers to customers and prospects for your business. Be sure you ask for permission to send email before putting any person's email name on your list. One good way to build a permission-based email list of people who want your mailings is to give something away. It could be a free ebook, or even a free tip-sheet on how to do something related to your business. If you're a health coach, for instance, you might offer people who sign up for your free newsletter a tip sheet with "10 Easy Ways To Lose Weight Without Going on a Diet." If you don't have anything to give away, try offering a signup discount on products or services as an incentive. An email service like Constant Contact* makes it easy to manage your list and send professional-looking mailings.

7. Get your business cards into the hand of anyone who can help you in your search for new clients. Call your friends and relatives and tell them you have started a business. Visit them and leave a small stack of business cards to hand out to their friends.

8. Give several business cards to your customers if you are a service provider. That way, when their friends and neighbors ask them for a recommendation, they have an easy way to pass on your business name and contact information.

9. Talk to all the vendors from whom you buy products or services. Give them your business card, and ask if they can use your products or service, or if they know anyone who can. If they have bulletin boards where business cards are displayed (printers often do, and so do some supermarkets, hairdressers, etc.), ask if yours can be added to the board.

10. Attend meetings of professional groups, and groups such as the Chamber of Commerce, other local business groups, local chapters of national groups, or civic associations. Have business cards in a pocket where they are easily reachable. Don't forget to ask what the people you speak with do, and to really listen to them. They'll be flattered by your interest, and better remember you because of it.

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WAYS TO PROMOTE YOUR BUSINESS ONLINE FOR FREE

You may not have wads of cash to spend on marketing in the early stages of your startup, but that doesn't mean that there aren't effective ways to get your brand out there.
Before the Internet, small businesses only had a few ways to market their products cheaply, through methods like printing out fliers or sponsoring little local events. Now there are all kinds of opportunities out there on the Web—you just need to know where to look.
Here are seven ways to promote your business online that won't cost you a dime:

1. Use the three big local listing services
Registering your business with Google Places allows it to be found more easily on Google searches and it shows up on Google Maps. All you have to do is fill out the form and register, then get your business verified through their confirmation process, which can be done either with a phone call or snail mail. Yahoo! also has a big database of businesses called Yahoo! Local. It's free, and is certainly worth the few minutes it takes to set up. Microsoft's Bing has a similar service that's easy to sign up for.

2. Embrace social media
Social media isn't just a tool to gain exposure—it has now become a necessary time investment for every business to make. You can tie in ads and offers on your Facebook page and have a direct channel with your customers on Twitter. Networking on LinkedIn—both at the personal and company level—can be another way to help your startup.

3. Start a blog
A blog not only helps your company get its name out through followers, but is a way to connect with your consumers more directly. But remember that one of the major keys of blogging is to keep your stream updated as frequently as you can. A dormant, abandoned blog is worth nothing.

4. Put up multimedia on YouTube and Flickr
YouTube provides a free way to distribute creative promotional videos, but in order to succeed you must put up content that people want to view and are relevant to your business—a simple ad will not work. A Flickr profile can also help by giving you one place to compile all the photos for your business, and allows you to link back to your website.

5. SEO your company website
Search engine optimization cannot be underestimated in the world of constant Googling. Pick up a book or head over to an online how-to-guide on SEO and make sure your site is primed for performance on search engines.

6. Press releases
Every time your business does something newsworthy, don't hesitate to shoot off a press release—maybe folks will pick up on it. They're a powerful media tool to use to help generate publicity, and having free distribution of them is a bonus. There are dozens of websites out there that you can use for your press releases, such as PRLog and 24/7 Press Release .

7. Join a relevant online community and contribute
Every niche has communities online that you can get involved in. But just signing up for a forum and posting every once in a while about your business isn't beneficial for anyone, and will likely just annoy people. Actively contribute and build a rapport with the community, while keeping your business out of it. Passively promote your business by putting a link in your signature or mentioning it only when the context is appropriate.

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Ideas You need to Grow Your Business Without Spending Money.

Here are ideas you need to grow your businesses without spending money.

1. Bill faster. Your receivables can count for 40 – 50% of your actual assets. Don’t batch invoice: bill as soon as you can.

2. Simplify your business . Weed out the unprofitable and the hard-to-see.

3. Simplify your marketing message. Read Made To Stick by Chip and Dan Heath.

4. Get your business and your web site listed in relevant directories . To find directories, Google the name of your town plus directories url” (e.g. “cobourg directories url”).

5. Learn to delegate . Figure out what you do that turns dollars. Then delegate the rest.

6. Encourage employees to explore more efficient approaches to their tasks instead of relying on their standard way of doing things.

7. Don’t forget suppliers. They might not be on your payroll, but they are more apt to do a few things for you at no charge because you really take care of them.

8. Work faster. If you can condense three four-month jobs into three three-month jobs, you can do one more job in the year.

9. Reward your team for meeting budgets and time lines. A 5% bonus is cheaper than a 20% increase in costs.

10. Cut overhead by automating most of the non-producing items like accounting, customer care, voice mail, sales reporting, ordering and record keeping.

11. Make sure you’ve clearly outlined project scope , and don’t be afraid to charge your customer for changes.

12. Offer to be a spokesperson on your specialty when your local media need an expert opinion. Send them a relevant press release every month.

13. Give something valuable away on your web site; at your front counter; when you send out your invoices; when you deliver goods. This should be free to you, but valuable to the recipient, for example, coupons or a “How To”.

14. Highlight offers, features, promotions and news in your email footers, invoices and letter signatures.

15. Start social accounts with Twitter.com, Facebook.com and LinkedIn.com and post articles .

16. Go where your audience is on the web. If your potential audience hangs out on forums, then post to those forums. Become a trusted advisor.

17. Get your supporters to refer you. Check out “ Make A Referral Week” to learn more about how referrals can build business.

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