Author: Jacob Salem

How to Write a Professional Email

Written correspondence has always been important in professional fields and particularly with people working remotely. A good email gets your message across effectively. We can all improve in written communication, so we make fewer mistakes at work and give clear directions!

To make your emails professional, clear, and concise, so you can sound your best in every interaction and make a good “impression” through writing, here are 6 ways to write a professional email.

Include an Informational Subject

The subject line is essential to the email because it is the first clue to understanding why your contact needs to read your email. Also, the subject allows the person to search for your email if they need to by using keywords. The best subject lines are short, about 6-7 words. Think of the subject line as the topic of your email. You can even write it first, so you set the tone for the body of the email, and you won’t forget to add one. Emails with no subject line are more likely to be deleted or missed.

Start With a Greeting

Start your email with a greeting and the person’s name. Use “Hello” for the first time emailing that person and “Hi” for emails after that. Informal greetings like “Hey” should only be used with co-workers you chat with often. If you use a greeting that is a time of the day like “Good morning” or “Good afternoon,” it could not be appropriate if they are checking their email at a different time. Also, be aware of their time zone if you use a time-based greeting. Lastly, please make sure the spelling of their name is correct, this shows respect, and you have attention to detail.

Introduce Yourself

You can start with an introduction if it’s the first time you are emailing them. Start the email with a short introduction of who you are. State your name, who you work with or for, and your connection to the person you are emailing. An example would be, “My name is…I work with…I will be contacting you about/when…”. If you don’t introduce yourself, it can be challenging for your contact to understand why you are emailing them and what you want them to do.

Make Your Reason Clear

Next, include a sentence or two about why you are contacting them. A professional email will have an apparent reason or question. You can start the sentence with “I am contacting you because…” and then explain what you need. Add whatever task or email you have to the end of the email so it’s the last thing your audience will read. Your message’s takeaway will be the motivator to do the task or respond with your answer.

Choose Your Sign-Off

Your sign-off, or the end of the email, can be simple. The most common sign-offs are “Thank you” and “Sincerely,” then your name and contact information. Use a pre-made signature with your name, contact information, company name, and your role at the company, with your company logo to look professional.

Proofread Before Sending

Last but not least, proofread your email before sending it. Check for spelling and typos. Once you’ve looked it over, your email is ready to send!

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Strategies for a Scalable Business

Every business starts with an idea. Big companies have to start somewhere, so even if your business is small right now, that doesn’t mean it can’t grow into a successful and profitable business!

Are you struggling with growing a business? These 5 strategies will help you scale your business and get ahead of the competition.

Build On Your Skills
Collaborate With Others
Invest In Yourself
Plan Your Goals
Create Value

Scaling Versus Growth

Scaling a business is all about how well your business grows and increases revenue. Growth and scaling are similar because they support more profits, customers, and staff. The main difference between growth and scaling is that scaling can deliver more services and products without spending more money.

For example, you may have grown your business by gathering more customers. However, you’ll need a new customer service member to handle the intake of new customers. Scaling means you’ll be able to take all the new customers without needing to hire new employees to cover the workload.

Build On Your Skills

Knowing your strengths and weaknesses is the best thing you can do when growing your business. Don’t be afraid to step aside if you need to and away from certain areas if they don’t fall under your strengths. But, on the other hand, be comfortable not knowing everything, so you always have a learning mindset. That way, you can keep building on your skills and bringing more to your business.

Collaborate With Others

One way to stay motivated is to communicate with other business owners. There are lots of ways to connect with like-minded people! Learning what others are doing will inspire you to keep moving forward and give you the insight you need to tackle any conflicts that come your way. Join groups on social media or set up coffee hours with local business owners in your area, and you can start collaborating with others.

Invest In Yourself

Investing in yourself may sound like building on your skills, and those two ideas are similar. However, investing in yourself is a shift in mindset vital to growing your business. It would help if you were in charge of your schedule, identify talent in your company, and create benchmarks. Then, only you can meet the demands of your business.

Plan Your Goals

Focus on building a solid foundation through strong skill sets, embracing your core strengths, and creating a strategic plan. With a thorough plan, anything is achievable:

Research your business’ competition and evaluate your actions to set yourself apart.
Write a plan of action to get you where you want to be with your business.
Break down each big goal into smaller steps leading you in the right direction.

Create Value

Lastly, to have a scalable business that will continue to grow, you need a service or product that is valuable to a large population of people. It should satisfy a need or provide a solution to a common problem. If there is enough demand for your product or service, that is a good sign you are ready to scale your business. Current trends may impact customer expectations and are something to consider when you start to scale.

If your sales model and processes are working smoothly, and your profit margin looks good, you should be set to scale your business up!

Growing your business can be difficult. But with EZMetrics, it doesn’t have to be. We provide tailor made ad campaigns to bring you results. Schedule your clarity call today!

3 Key Habits for a Successful Business

Is your goal to run a successful business? Then you need to have the right mindset!

You’ll be most successful when you learn to trust yourself. Trusting yourself starts with holding yourself accountable. When you stick to your routine every day, it’ll be easier to check tasks off your list, even on days when you don’t feel like it. Whatever type of business you have or want to start, you’ll need to keep these three main ideas in mind.

Have A Vision

Sit down and write everything you envision for yourself and your business. Your core values will stand out to you, and identifying your values is a great place to start. Your customers can best relate to you when they see what is important to you. Then, turn your brainstorm into a vision board, or write it into a statement. Next, you’ll be ready to type up your plan and outline the roadmap of where you want to go.

Your business plan will come together quickly when you’ve made time to get creative with it. The key to sustaining your vision and goal is to make time to get creative and brainstorm new ideas. So make time on your calendar for one hour a week to get your colored markers, and go for it!

Manage Your Time and Your Resources

Once you have your plan, devise a daily schedule to manage your time well. At first, it may seem like you’re spending a lot of time planning. However, all the work you do to set up systems to organize and plan will be helpful for you in the long run. Good planning and organizational skills can be practiced and will take some time to make into a habit. Make lists of daily, weekly, and monthly goals to remind yourself of the steps to get to where you want to be.

You’ll want to update your records promptly, keep a hard copy, and store them electronically. If your computer crashes, you’ll have everything you need to keep running smoothly. If things do not go smoothly and to plan, don’t get worked up about it! You’re going to hit roadblocks along the way. Take a deep breath and remind yourself that you got this. When you are calm, you’ll be able to figure out what isn’t working and what to do about it.

Attract People Like You

You’ll attract more positive people to your company when you stay positive. A positive attitude will look attractive to others, and they’ll want to work with you. Build positive relationships with your customers, and they will spread the word about your company.

Be flexible and able to pivot quickly to changes. Growth requires constant change, and when you want your company to grow, you’ll have to be willing to learn and seek out knowledge. Do your research and understand your competitors. You may have to make quick decisions to stay ahead of the pack!

Business Success

Sometimes it can be hard to see the growth when you’re working away daily. However, if you want to be successful in your business, you will need to understand the market and your financial situation and jump at opportunities whenever they come to you.

You can use a few strategies to increase your sales and keep growing your business year after year. One way is to boost your advertising, send out email blasts to your customers, or offer an incentive for referrals from existing customers. Focus on having a great product or service; remember, your personal growth will directly impact your company’s growth.

Take the first step to building, launching, and scaling your business. We make digital marketing easy. Our ultimate goal as your agency is to see your business increase its returns on paid advertising campaigns. Call EZMetrics today!

Human-Centric Marketing

Human-Centric Marketing
Utilizing the Emotions & Personal Motives of your Perfect Prospect

So.. What Is Human-Centric Marketing (HCM)?

HCM is about focusing on the “human” in your marketing efforts to help gain genuine insights of what kind of approach works best with them.

The Human Centric Approach requires Brands to:

Focus on utility in its communications
How does the brand work for the human and how do you explain that to your audience.
Define its purpose
Why does your brand exists and what is your brands mission.. be clear and direct.
Focus on simplicity and context when engaging in dialogue
Don’t use fancy words
Seek to engage audiences in active participation
Reply to comments on social media, give more than just a generic comment, mention their name for a personal touch
Focus on human values
Pain points aren’t the only aspects to focus on when implementing marketing strategies. The values which are considered basic inherent values in humans include:

Truth
Honesty
Loyalty
Love
Peace

Be prepared to embrace irrationality as part of human nature

People will have their options, think of clever and respectful ways to embrace and engage to help the consumer see the situation in a different light

The most common way of identifying customers is through traditional profiling approaches like their demographic profile, but human-centric marketing Ignores this.

Instead, it focuses on a combination of three things:

OCEAN Profiling

Based on Michel Kosinski, Big Five model that assesses five personality traits:

Openness
Conscientiousness
Extroversion
Agreeableness
Neuroticism

Big Data Analysis

or the digital traces of everything we do, both on and offline. Big data analytics is the often complex process of examining large and varied data sets — or big data — to uncover information including hidden patterns, unknown correlations, market trends and customer preferences that can help organizations make informed business decisions.

Ad Targeting
Which is personalized advertising aligned as accurately as possible to the personality of an individual consumer. Essentially, it becomes a “people search engine .. or a way to find similar customers based on definitive matches to correlated psychographic data.

The idea behind this is that demographic concepts should receive same treatment due to gender or race is ridiculous, considering people under the same demographic profile are still vastly different in terms of psychometry.

Marketing today should mean putting humans at the center of your brand’s story, surrounding them with experiences informed by data, and ultimately making them feel validated and appreciated.

Identify Growth Opportunities
Embracing human-centric marketing can offer insights into your customer base that traditional forms of marketing simply didn’t have access to.

The first step in crafting a human-centric marketing strategy is delving into the psyche of your clients to identify their needs, whether or not your company is meeting those needs, and how you can better address them.

By creating your buyer personas and studying them, you can identify areas to focus your messaging and frame your products and services accordingly.

Increases Customer Satisfaction
This is the key to building the message or adjusting your operations. Correspond with the type of person that you are targeting, and ensure that they will listen to your message or acknowledge your product and services.

There’s no possibility of creating an effective human-centric marketing strategy without surveying your existing customers. But by doing so, you send the message to your existing customers that you are validating their cares and concerns and actively listening to them.

This makes your customers feel more valued, leading them to purchase your products and services more often and generate more leads to your company by steering their friends and acquaintances in your direction. Make the experience personal to create these intimate bonds!

Elevates Your Brand Profile
Branding is a big deal right now in the marketing world because it’s a great way to distinguish your company from the competition. But branding is more than that – it’s also about how your target audience thinks about your products, services, and company culture.

Using a human-centric marketing approach can elevate your branding if you focus on the customer experience at every stage of the buyer’s journey.

Focus on delivering an experience that makes the customer feel valued and you’ll see the power of positive perception at work for your business.

In conclusion, Human Centric Marketing will help you truly connect with your audience and grow a quality relationship with a strong bond of trust and loyalty which in the end makes selling your product or service so much easier.

5 Tips on Building a Better Social Media Experience

Tip #1 - Your First Duty Isn’t To Sell On Social Media, It’s To Earn Trust.

Having a Car Salesman Mentality is great when your selling cars but not so great when creating a connection. People want to connect, have meaning, and be able to see a better future when in your community and using your product and or service.

A true fan of your brand will not only be loyal but will also help grow your audience without knowing it. Brand Ambassadors get paid to advertise your company.. true fans do it for free and with confidence.

People who are passionate about a business want the world to know how great it is and how it helps them. Passion is built on trust and without trust you really have no chance of connecting with your audience at all.

Don't Worry, It's A Lot Easier Than It Sounds

Tip #2 - Daily Content Is About Elevation, Not Imitation.

Genuine, Honest, Original Content. Borrow Trending Topics for Higher Reach and Traction but the Content must be original. Most just copy and paste and maybe change a word or two and then pick out a similar pictures using the same image sources on the internet. This may work for a few but most people will catch it and then your credibility is gone.

A good tip to keep in mind is to let the market help you with your topics when you can’t seem to think of what to create. I always explore google trends in the industry of what I’m designing for and try to find something of value to elevate for our audience so they get that little extra.

Tip #3 - Create Content With Thumb Stopping Power

Pattern Disrupt. This is a term you’ll see more often. Stopping people as they scroll is First! Then comes hooking their interest and curiosity with a compelling title that instantly strikes an emotion. Imagery is key because is isn’t something they are familiar with seeing it can become lost in the mix with all the others.

Know your audience and see what other imagery is being used by competitors in the same industry. Make sure your imagery stands out from there’s, use design techniques that are not common. Useful elements we use are:

Lens Flare

These mimic a sun glare which people can’t stare at or observe so image isn’t stuck in our head. These instantly Catch the eye because we can observe it without it hurting the eyes. Great for Pattern Disrupt.

Diagonal Cuts

With all platforms using the Golden ratio and Block layout for their sites, you don’t see a lot of slants and Angles. Using Colors in the shape of Diamonds, Triangles, and Circles will help stand out from the normal Boxes that one sees everyday.

Depth-of-Field

One of my Favorite Tricks! A slightly Blurred Background with a high contrast in focus and sharp foreground object is a Major Eye-Catcher! This must be done right or it will throw everything off. Try to avoid low resolution imagery when using this technique.

Striking Color Combos

Colors play a huge impact on how a picture sets the mood/tone. Grab your primary brand color and your accent color and start playing around with combinations that fit the emotion your going for.

My Favorite Tool Ever! for color: Adobe Color
It’s Free & Amazing!

Tip #4 - Start the Conversation

It’s easy for any business to share articles and posts related to their industry. But what most are missing is that they can capture a new customer with these simple shares.

Some businesses will miss out on adding a CTA in the description or better yet the Comment section, be the first to comment in your post with a call to action or just a simple P.S. to engage a little more with your audience. It helps to start conversations which will build a good relationship and allows you to guide the conversation in the direction you want it to go.

Tip #5 - Genuine Connection Is Key

It’s easy for any business to share articles and posts related to their industry. But what most are missing is that they can capture a new customer with these simple shares.

Some businesses will miss out on adding a CTA in the description or better yet the Comment Section, be the first to comment in your post with a call to action or just a simple P.S. to engage a little more with your audience. It helps to start conversations which will build a good relationship and allows you to guide the conversation in the direction you want it to go.

Conclusion

When it comes down to it, Build your social media experience with genuine content, engage with people as much as possible and give them something worth scroll stomping for.

5 Common SEO Mistakes You Should Be Avoiding

In today’s digital world, search engine optimization is regarded as an essential component of any business’ content marketing strategy. Why? It is the most powerful way to gain traffic to your website, your blog, your social media pages, and your sales funnel through the organic search results of search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo. By understanding search engine optimization techniques, you can increase sales, target your intended audience better, and establish authority in the web space. The problem with search engine optimization is that it is constantly evolving, leaving even the most successful companies using faulty SEO techniques. In this article, we will explore some of the most common SEO mistakes that you should be avoiding, regardless of whether you are a content marketing strategist, a small business, or a large company.

SEO Mistake #1: Not Paying Attention to What Impacts Conversion Rates

When it comes to getting your customers to go from prospective buyers to actual paying customers, there are a lot of elements that can impact their journey from one to the other. In this section, we will take a look at a few areas that are wreaking havoc on your conversion rates.

Your Website Site Speed is Slow. If your website doesn’t load within a few seconds, regardless of what your offer is, 40% of potential customers will actually abandon the attempt. This means that you will lose out on potential conversions because the traffic will head elsewhere. If you are looking at metrics or statistics, this is known as having a high bounce rate/exit rate. In order to speed your website up, you need to compress images into smaller files, enable browser caching so that the page loads faster for repeat visitors, and reduce server response times by using a reputable server host.
You Are Not Linking Internally. Both search engines and website visitors rely on internal linking to get around your website and find the relevant content that they want. If you do not have internal links with proper anchor text, the search engine crawlers are not going to know what your page/content is about and as such, you lose out on a high volume of traffic because your links do not get seen.
You Are Not Optimized for Mobile. More than half of the internet traffic these days comes from mobile devices, whether it be a smartphone or tablet. If you haven’t made your website mobile-friendly and responsive, chances are visitors are finding your website difficult to use. Use a readable typography, make CTA buttons clear and easy to use, minimize the need for scrolling and pinching, and always test the functionality if your website on mobile devices.

Other issues that impact conversion rates are having duplicate content, having a poor social media presence, failing to update SEO techniques, failing to provide high-quality content, and not utilizing interactive touch elements like surveys, buttons, and checkboxes.

SEO Mistake #2: Not Understanding Keywords and Their Descriptions

When you don’t understand how keywords work, it can be very easy to choose the wrong ones, which draw in the wrong crowd. The right keywords will be based on your target audience and should include long-phrase keywords as these convert better as they are specific to your business. Beyond this, make sure you are using titles, heading tags, and keyword descriptions properly as these will have a massive impact on your SEO results as search engines place more importance on these keywords than on those within your product descriptions or text content. Make sure to make your headings unique, short, and not overstuffed with keywords and include your brand name in your tags.

SEO Mistake #3: Not Knowing What Hurts Your Traffic.

Not Prioritizing Link Building. Although social media offers brands and businesses an amazing network to get their products and services exposed to the mass public, it does nothing to help build links that continuously convert. Make sure that you are also focusing on link building and gaining backlinks from authoritative sources. In doing this, you will create the opportunity to have a steady feed of long-term traffic.
Not Optimizing Link Structure. Having internal links is not enough, you have to use an internal linking strategy to ensure that your links are pointing to cornerstone content. This type of content is what you value to be the most important, educational, knowledgeable, or valuable content that you offer.
Not Publishing Long-Form Content. To put it simply, not publishing enough long-form content that is over 2,000 words means you are probably having less of an impact on your readers. Long-form content takes a lot of time and effort to create and in turn, offers considerable value to your readers. This also means that it tends to rank higher in search engines because long-form content showcases proof that you are an authority on a particular subject.

SEO Mistake #4: Not Engaging in Value-Added Content/Products/Services

The term value-added essentially means an extra feature that goes above and beyond standard expectations and provides more to the customer. You want to stick to value-added issues only, that provide the customer with a solution that goes above and beyond their initial problem. This will make them feel good about your brand/business, it will make them feel like they are getting more out of their money, and it can provide a positive customer experience.

SEO Mistake #5: Lack of Time Management.

If you do not engage in smart time management, you will have less time for working on projects, getting more clients, and building on top of your current SEO strategies. What you want to do is track how much time is being spent where and how much of that time is actually being spent working. Then record what your biggest time sinks are and give them a profit/hour ratio. Finally, find out what your most efficient profit makers are and do more of these. This way, you can optimize your time doing what is working and outsource the tasks that are necessary for your business but bog down your own personal volume of work. How does this help with SEO? It causes you to focus more on tasks that help you convert, whether it is creating affiliate pages, writing out blog posts, or capturing backlinks.

Lead Generation: The Importance of Inbound Marketing

For both large and small businesses alike, the ability to generate new leads out of potential customers is the hallmark of what makes a business successful. The process of attracting, converting, and gaining prospective customers is called lead generation and is cultivated through numerous communication and media channel methods, such as online content, blog posts, live events, job applications, contests, videos, email capture, and landing pages to name a few.

Without lead generation, a business cannot become profitable, it cannot compete with competitors in the marketplace, and it cannot expand past its current products, services, and offerings. In order to understand how lead generation works and why it is important, we are going to explore inbound marketing – what lead generation is a part of – and what you should be doing to generate leads.

What Is Lead Generation and Why Is It Important?

To put it simply, lead generation is the lifeblood of your business or organization. It is what gives meaning to why your business is running in the first place. It occurs after you have attracted an audience to your business, whether that be through your products, through your website, through your services, or through promotions such as ad campaigns, sponsored posts, guest blogging, giveaways, and contests.

Businesses rely heavily on lead generation because it is what generates traffic and the more traffic you have coming in, the more likely you are to convert the traffic into paying customers. When you are able to take your leads and convert them into customers, you gain increased sales, increased exposure, and increased profit margins that make expansion viable.

What Does Inbound Marketing Have to do With Lead Generation?

Inbound marketing is a methodology that is all about creating a positive impact and valuable experiences to your target audience. By providing relevant and helpful content through tools like online chat systems, email communication, and newsletters, one can attract, engage, and delight those who are interested in your business.

The premise of inbound marketing is to do business with your audience in such a way that you are helpful, trusted, and empathetic while simultaneously adding value at every stage of your customer’s journey with you. In business, the methodology is simple, the happier your customers are, the more energy they will provide to you, either through promoting your business, buying your products, or leaving excellent testimony, which, in turn, brings new customers to you and fuels growth. So how does this correlate to lead generation? It’s simple really, with inbound marketing you attract, engage [lead generation], and delight your prospects into converted and happy customers.

So What Do You Need to Do to Generate Leads With Inbound Marketing?

You need a lead strategy in place.
Without a lead generation strategy in place, you will not be able to optimize your lead generation tactics. There are four major areas you need to focus on when putting a lead generation strategy in place are lead captures, lead magnets, landing page conversions, and a lead scoring system. Chances are, you are not capturing the information needed from every single prospect that comes your way; one way to fix this is by using lead magnets to provide a valuable offer in exchange for email opt-ins, subscriptions, or social media follows and then using call-to-action buttons on your landing pages to convert.

What Makes an Offer a Good One?
The key with offers is that they need to provide impact, value, and a solution. Your prospective customers are coming to your website, to your socials media pages or to your blog to find pertinent information about an issue; provide them with an offer they cannot refuse based on this premise. The content that you provide your potential customers should be valuable enough that it makes them want to enter their information into your marketing offer, into your lead capture forms, or through your call-to-action buttons on your landing pages. Nurture these leads by offering a free trial, providing product demos, giving away free templates or video series. Give them something that helps them and watch as you reel in another lead.

Utilize Call-to-Action Buttons.
Whether you use these on your landing pages, in your blog posts, or on your paid ad campaigns on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, these are a huge asset to your business when you are attempting to convert your visitors into proper leads. When someone lands on your marketing elements, you want people to click-through, whether that be into your sales funnels or into your lead capturing elements. But the key here is to use the right call-to-action buttons, so which are they? On landing pages, you want to narrow down the focus, cut out excess information, and include one form of call-to-action link that makes good on your promise. In a blog post, your call-to-action may be to sign up for your newsletter to get a first-hand look at all upcoming posts or it could be a $1 trial into an exclusive series.

Where to Place Your CTA Buttons?
There are generally two call-to-action placements on a website, above the fold, and below the fold. Determining where to place them will be dependent on the complexity of what you are offering your visitor. Above the fold is a common placement choice but must be accompanied by a powerful headline, a supporting sub-header, a “hero” shot or video/image that showcases your service or product, the benefit statement and trust indicators. The CTA in this placement will work if the offer is simple and not a lot of thinking must go into understanding the page. A call-to-action below the fold works well if there is a lot of information to digest or if the offer is complex because it will require you to capture attention with a headline, generate interest with a visual form (photo/image), develop a desire and then place your CTA.

The main key takeaway here is that you need to create products/services and content that 1) solve a problem and 2) are valuable to your customers. Once you discover what these are, create simple, easy-to-understand marketing that highlights the value you are giving away and utilize a lead strategy and call-to-action buttons to convert.

5 Signs That It Is Time to Update Your Social Media Profiles

When it comes to social media, if you have been in business for any length of time, you will already know how important it is to have business pages up and live on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Not only is social media an excellent way to engage with customers, build meaningful relationships, and make lasting impressions, it is critical for outreach, brand visibility, and lead generation.

However, if your business is projecting the wrong image, is out of the loop, or has outdated tactics, information, and design, then your social media marketing campaigns will fail. With this said, it can be hard to know whether you are out of the loop or not, which is why we have compiled a list of a few tell-tale signs that it is time to update those profiles.

You Are Not Getting Any New Leads.
If you are never posting on your social media profiles, never re-sharing content, and never interacting with those who do come by your profiles, than you are not going to generate new leads. If you find that you are not getting any messages from potential customers, are not getting comments, likes, or re-shares on content that is posted, than you are not generating enough interest in your business or brand. One way to fix this is to make sure that your social media marketing campaigns and paid advertising is targeting the right audience and demographics. Beyond this, post on a consistent and regular basis with a wide variety of content types such as video, live streams, infographics, images, and regular posts. Finally, make sure that you are responding to those who do interact with you in a positive manner that reflects your business’ brand personality. You may also want to check that you have proper call-to-action buttons located across your profiles as engagement is not enough to make those sales. Give your audiences specific instructions to “click here for more information about [product]” or “sign up here for our monthly newsletter,” and watch as the metrics closely to see which call-to-action buttons work best.

You Are Unable to Measure Your Metrics.
If you are not tracking your social reach, your engagement, your social acquisitions, conversion rates, and overall activity, than how are you to know what your business needs to do to improve? You can’t without knowing the metrics. If you are unable to measure the listed metrics or do not understand how to, then your social media profiles need an update with this in mind. Utilize Facebook’s analytics program or Twitter’s engagement tools to gather these metrics. When you track your reach, you see your audience growth rate; when you track engagement you see how your actions create growth; when you track acquisition, you get to see visitor frequency rates. As you can see, tracking these metrics provides you with invaluable information about the growth, profit, and visibility of your business.

You Have an Outdated Website.
An outdated website is going to be difficult to navigate, which is going to cause users to move on quickly causing your website pages to have higher bounce rates. If your website hasn’t had a visual update in the past five years with regards to font styles, templates, image effects, background textures, and the layout of your written content, than it’s going to show when compared to newer, more modern renditions. This may cause people to ignore your business or brand completely as they will not feel attached to your website. Beyond this, if you do not have an SSL certificate on your website, which is used for data encryption purposes, than customers are not going to submit their data to you.

You Are Selling to Everyone and Not to Specific Audience.
If you are sending your advertisements, messages, and products to all potential customers, then you are running a very ineffective marketing strategy. Rather, you want to segment out your customers based on their individually assigned categories; some may respond well to social media messages on Facebook while others may respond better to updates through LinkedIn, and others may prefer to see live stories through Instagram. When you identify who your customers are and segment them based on their preferences, you can find improved success in getting them to purchase your products, use your services, or engage with your business.

Your Website is Not Mobile Friendly.
Any user who visits your website is a potential customer and a potential leads. According to Statista, about 52.2% of website traffic that was generated in 2018 was done through mobile phones alone. If your website does not adapt to those using mobile phones, you are going to lose out on conversions. Ensure that your website is mobile-friendly by using mobile-friendly templates and website hosts that offer dynamic sizing for things like banners and images. Keep in mind that it is not just mobile phones that you have to worry about but also tablets and other small devices.

For more in-depth training and resources to leverage social media marketing to generate an unlimited supply of your perfect customers, join the EZMetrics Mastermind.

social media

What Is Text Message Marketing & Why Is It So Important For Businesses?

When it comes to business marketing, keeping your customers happy, satisfied, and engaged with your brand is easier said than done, especially in today’s market where younger demographics have shorter attention spans and a major sensitivity to advertisement overload. One way marketers are getting around this is through text message marketing, where text messages are used to deliver advertisements, promotions, and discounts directly to customers. It is effective because consumers appreciate the ease of access that text messaging provides as it’s simple to open a link or click on a picture through a text and with billions of hours spent texting, it makes sense for businesses to tap into this marketing platform.

7 Reasons Why Text Message Marketing Is Crucial for Businesses

E-mail Is Not As Popular As Text Messaging. Although e-mail is excellent for selling products that are behind catchy headlines and beautiful images, the response rate is abysmal as spam filters, junk folders, and promotional e-mail tabs keep them out of sight. If an e-mail does get opened, if the intended target doesn’t respond right away, it’s unlikely that they will take a second look. Text messaging, on the other hand, lends itself to popularity with being built right into our smartphone devices and all. Customers would rather have appointment reminders, prescription refills, and promotions sent directly to their phones via text messages than any other mode of communication, because it’s easy and accessible. After all, barely anyone deletes a text message without reading it. Beyond this, the Pew Research center notes that out of the twenty-one countries they polled, 75% use texting. That’s a massive number when you look at the global scale of smartphone device users.

Text Messaging Provides One Of The Highest Reaches. Although text messaging is associated with younger generations, it’s not strictly for them. When you actually take a look at the percentages against the demographics, you see that 72% of adult use text messaging on a daily basis and 65% of those in their forties and 50% in their sixties are texting. With trillions of text messages being sent every year, the text message market has one of the highest mass media reaches possible.

Text Messages Have Extremely High Open Rates. When you compare the open rates between e-mail marketing and text message marketing, the difference between the two is massive. About one in every four e-mails are opened or about 20% while almost 90% of text messages are read within the first three minutes of being received and have an open rate of 98%.

You Can Create a Positive Brand By Sending Uplifting Messages. One of the ways that brands can utilize text messages to create a positive relationship with customers is by sending uplifting messages on a regular basis. Thanking a customer for their most recent order, sending a coupon just because they are awesome, or reminding them that life is good when they are having a bad day can go a long way to retaining customer engagement.

You Can Personalize SMS Content. Unlike advertising on billboards or the ads you see in digital website space, SMS campaigns are heavily targeted towards a specific type of demographic. You don’t have to blast your message to those who are not interested as SMS campaigns can be made to only go to those who have opted in to receiving messages from you. Like other forms of advertising, you can also segment text message marketing out into specific categories, allowing you to maximize your open rates, redemption rates, and click-through rates.

Text Messaging Is Preferred Over Other Communication Methods. Although cellphones are popular, with billions being purchased worldwide, voice calling is actually trending downward. The culture around phone calls is changing, as they can now seem rude and intrusive in our very busy lives. They can become awkward when you have to hang up in the middle of one or let the call go to voice mail because you’re driving, in a meeting, or are too tired to answer. Text messages provide time to contemplate what is being said, they don’t require you to have your phone on, and they can be referenced back to at any time. As a business, you do not need your customer’s undivided attention when you send out a promotion or coupon because they can come back to it when the time suits them.
Text Messaging Has Higher Conversion Rates. It is incredibly easy for a customer to text a reply, text-to-win a discount or promotion, or click on a link to be taken to a website. Due to ease of access, text messaging has higher conversion rates both with coupons and promotions getting redeemed and links being clicked on. To put this in perspective, text message engagement is about 6-8% higher than e-mails.

Although text messaging started out as a simple mode of communication, it is now the preferred method for brand communications due to its relevance in our smartphone-dominated world. With the ability to earn customer loyalty, provide convenience, and pack text messages with goodies and surprises, it’s easy to see why text message marketing provides high engagement and business revenue.

For more in-depth training and resources to leverage digital marketing to generate an unlimited supply of your perfect customers, join the EZMetrics Mastermind.

marketing messaging text

Brand Importance: How to Create a Personality and 6 Steps You Can Use

In order to be successful and seen in the marketplace, businesses must cultivate a unique outward expression that connects your business to your audience, yet differentiates you from your competition. This outward expression is called a brand personality and is comprised of a defining set of emotional and associative characteristics based around your business’ sincerity, message, voice, and aesthetic appearance. When done correctly, a brand personality will convey your business’ essence but will remain flexible enough to evolve and grow as your business does. In this article, we are going to take a look at the importance of creating a brand personality and a few simple steps you can take to establish one for your business.

Why Is Having a Brand Personality Important?

Having a brand personality is critical for businesses who want to cultivate a unique image, voice, and perspective that individuals connect and associate with. When you have a brand that is recognizable or one that resonates with customers, not only do you have a platform that you can reach out with, but you help bring awareness to your business. Beyond this, a brand personality will familiarize individuals with your products, services, and as such, customers will place a higher value on what you have to offer them since they are familiar with you and your identity. When customers buy into the culture or lifestyle around your brand, they will associate more with your products, will see your business in a more positive light, and will feel more loyal to you.

6 Steps For Creating a Brand Personality

Make Sure You Create The Right Look. A major part of your brand personality is the identity that you push through the design process. Your business’ identity will come from the culmination of your company logo, your website, your image choice, the colors you use, and the typography you present to your audience. Choosing the correct elements and matching them to the lifestyle, voice, and message of your brand brings your personality together with one unified look.

A serious brand may choose a darker colour palette, serif typefaces as these are more formal and mature, as well as hard edges and open spaces.

A casual brand may go for cooler colours as these are more relaxed and calming as well as choose sans serif typefaces as these are modern and agreeable. Landscape images are a popular choice for brands that leave certain messages open to interpretation, and round elements are more casual.

Show Off Your Lifestyle. When you share the culture around your business, customers will feel more attached to your brand. If your brand’s lifestyle is adventurous, creative, and fun – customers are going to love watching a behind-the-scenes of your employees living that type of lifestyle. When you showcase this with pure transparency, your customers know that you are being authentic and will thereby emotionally connect to you better.

Create Unique Lingo That Is Specific to Your Company. Once you are aware of what your brand personality is, you can craft your business’ voice and the lingo used, around it. For instance, your brand could be vibrant and energetic, traditional and stoic, affordable and friendly, luxurious and sophisticated, or casual and funny. Is your brand light, serious, old, young, and is it more feminine, masculine or non-binary? Identify where your brand falls into categories like these and then make a list of keywords that could be used strategically in communications that support the voice of your brand. These keywords should be used across social media profiles, throughout advertising, in your brand’s blog, and through external and internal communications.

Engage on Social Media & Take Time to Respond. When you take time to respond to your customers, it increases your credibility as it makes you more trustworthy and puts your customers at ease. It also shows that you care about them and that you are willing to take the time to respond and build a meaningful relationship. In addition to this, it can take people who are being negative towards your business and turn them into loyal customers by giving them the attention needed to solve the problem they are having. Finally, customers expect you to respond and engage with them through social media and if you don’t, it’ll feel like you are ignoring them which is definitely not what you want.

Grow Your Network on LinkedIn. Every single business wants to be seen and one great way of doing that is by using social media marketing. Although Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter all offer their own benefits when it comes to reaching your intended audience targets, it is LinkedIn that allows your brand to reach a higher amount of professional visibility. With over 500 million individuals signed up on the platform, business professionals can network with one another without traveling anywhere, the platform offers the ability to generate new leads, and you can network to specific businesses in your market. Beyond this, by optimizing LinkedIn profiles of your business’ employees, you can use your brand’s unique voice to invoke the emotional side of the brand across the professional sphere.

Make In-Person Appearances by Speaking at Conferences. When it comes to business and public speaking, not enough actually engage in conferences, which is a shame since there are plenty of benefits to be had. When businesses speak at conferences, they generate more sales, showcase that they are thought leaders, obtain free publicity, and get access to increased visibility, all of which will increase your visibility and network.