Email Marketing—What It Is and Why You Need It

2Jan

You’ve probably already heard a lot of the buzz around email marketing. A lot of people are in your ear saying that it’s going to set your business up for success, but what even is email marketing? And how can everyone be so sure it’s right for your business?

Well, I believe in backing up all of my advice with facts. Email marketing should absolutely be on your “must-have” list for 2019, but don’t just take my word for it. I’m going to explain to you exactly what email marketing is and why it’s worth investing some time and resources into.

What Is It?
In your everyday life, you might know email marketing as those “LAST-MINUTE SALE BUY NOW” emails that you get every so often. As a marketer, you can think of email marketing as a way to reach out to leads and develop your relationship with them. When you consider investing in email marketing, ignore those spam emails you get. They’re wasted opportunities, and a good strategy can help you avoid that pitfall.

Instead, think of how you’ll reach out to interested individuals and encourage them to have a conversation with your brand. You’ll keep your business on your potential customers’ minds, and you’ll generate conversions from your thoughtful, strategic emails!

That all sounds nice, but I wouldn’t blame you for having some skepticism. How do you know this is going to work for your business? I’ve got some numbers that I suspect you’ll find very assuring.

Does Email Marketing Really Work?
For B2C
I want to show you some of the most compelling email marketing statistics that illustrate why it’s worth your time. First and (in my opinion) most impressively, 80% of retailers say that email marketing is their biggest asset in customer retention. Not only is email marketing keeping customers around, but it’s making them spend more with each individual purchase. Customers who bought products via email links spent 138% more than customers who never got email offers. Email marketing keeps customers around and keeps them spending money on your business!

Don’t get me wrong; not all email marketing campaigns are equal, and the quality of your strategy is going to matter a lot. For example, a lot of marketers miss out on sending “Welcome” emails when someone subscribes to your mailing list. That’s a huge mistake, since research shows that welcome emails generate 320% more sales than promotional ones! Missing opportunities like this will make your email marketing much less effective.

For B2B
One comment I’ve heard in the past is that email marketing is great for B2C business, but it just doesn’t offer much for B2B marketers. Well, nothing could be further from the truth! Email is the third most influential source of information for B2B decision-makers, falling only behind recommendations from colleagues and industry leaders. That means that email marketing is literally the best thing B2B marketers can spend money on!

This isn’t just theoretical, either—it’s already making waves throughout B2B marketing. 59% of B2B marketers reported that email marketing was their biggest revenue generator. If you’re running a B2B business and not reaching out to potential customers, you’re missing out on your best way to make sales!

Press Send
You know what it is and why it’s worth your time, so get started! Skipping email marketing means you’re missing potential revenue. If you want to take your marketing to the next level this year, then now is the time to start working toward that goal!

Do you want some individualized help with your social media marketing? Just set up a free consultation with The Go! Agency!

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How “New Year, New Me” Can Help Product Businesses

By Christopher Tompkins

19Dec

Business

You’ve probably heard “New Year, New Me” a lot over the past few years, but it isn’t just for Instagram captions from New Year’s Eve parties anymore. It’s also a viable marketing strategy for late December/early January! Well, if you do it right, anyway.

Every business could use a boost in the new year, so let’s talk about how this strategy can give you that extra attention!

Who Should Use It?
For a product-based business, you need to (as always) demonstrate how your product will improve your customers’ lives. But “New Year, New Me” brings in a potential for a fresh angle, if you’ve got the right business for it.

Let’s say that your business sells haircare products to older women. While your marketing strategy throughout most of the year might be geared toward turning back the clock, the new year is a great time to switch it up. Instead, you might say that you can give women a chance to create a new, youthful appearance to tie in the “New Year, New Me” angle.

Note, however, that this angle may not be for you if it’s going to majorly disrupt your brand’s voice. A seasonal change is nice, but a complete 180 is disorienting and will weaken your brand’s identity.

On the whole, though, this approach can work for any product-based business with enough creativity. How will your product change your buyer’s life? Will it give them more time, more money, better looks? If you can answer any of those questions, then odds are that this is going to be an effective strategy for you.

Why Should I Use It?
As a product-based business, it’s especially important that you appear to be constantly improving. If you hire a lawn mowing service, you’re not going to expect them to be constantly innovating or finding new, better ways to cut your grass. But if you were looking at buying a new lawnmower, you would certainly expect the manufacturer to have new models every year that are better or solve some new problem.

That same standard will be applied to your business, and you need to be ready for it.

It’s not always reasonable to roll out new and improved products every couple of months, though. In that situation, you only need to give the appearance of newness, and this is exactly how you can do that. You don’t say that you’ve got a new product—you highlight that it can make a new version of your customers. This gives buyers the impression that something new is going on while giving you some breathing room between the holidays and your next product launch!

“New Year, New Me” doesn’t just save you time and effort, though. It’s also a way to draw in customers for the rest of the year. If you can make a sale now, then you’ve got that buyer’s email address for marketing during all of 2019.

You’ll be able to target them with email marketing and get in touch when you have new products rolling out—just because you made a sale early in the year! How you start your 2019 social media marketing is going to impact your business for the rest of the year, so make sure you’re starting off on the right foot!

Make a Fresh Start
As you wrap up the year, start planning for how you’re going to make 2019 work for your business. The “New Year, New Me” strategy will keep you on the pulse of current events and offer an effective way to communicate with your audience at the start of the new year. Use my advice to make sure 2019 is filled with success and growth for your business!

Do you want some individualized help with your social media marketing? Just set up a free consultation with The Go! Agency!

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How “New Year, New Me” Can Help Service Businesses

By Christopher Tompkins

18Dec

Business

Are you looking to get a fresh start during the new year? “New Year, New Me” has been a popular New Year’s saying for years, and it might actually be a good angle for your New Year’s marketing.

I’m going to show you which service-based businesses can benefit most from the “New Year, New Me” mantra, and why it’s worth your time and resources. Let’s dive in!

Who Should Use It?
I’m not going to tell you that, “People in these five industries should definitely use this strategy!” There are too many variables to say that only certain types of businesses can use it. Instead, I’m going to ask you a few questions to help you figure out how effective this new angle will be for your business.

If your customer could make themselves better, how would they do it? Then ask yourself: Can your business provide them with that change?

It sounds broad, but let me show you a specific example. Let’s say you own an auto repair shop, and you decide that your ideal customer is a young adult who just started a family and wants to make sure their car is safe. For that individual, they might want to be more responsible in 2019.

How can you give them that? You encourage them to be proactive in the new year by taking their car in for that oil change they’ve been putting off or some other routine maintenance.

Take a minute to think on it. If you think you have a way that your customer can improve themselves in the new year, then you should absolutely be telling them about it! But what makes this strategy so effective?

Why Should I Use It?
People in general (but especially on social media) are primarily interested in the “new.” While it helps to be constantly reinventing and improving your business, it’s hard to have a fresh, new idea every day of the week. Sometimes, giving the impression that you’re “new and improved” can be just as good, and tying your promotions into the new year is a great way to do that!

If your business has a presence on Twitter or Instagram, you’re also going to benefit from popular hashtags like #NewYearNewMe. When advertising how your service can help people improve themselves in 2019, use the hashtag to get some extra reach! Just be sure to add in another hashtag or two that are more relevant to your industry, since #NewYearNewMe is going to be filled with a variety of people who may or may not be in your target audience.

The new year is also a time when people tend to be busy. They’re worn out from the holidays and typically starting new projects at work, so you stand to gain even more by pointing out ways that your services will save people time. For example, maybe your landscaping business can free up your customers’ evenings, or your fitness classes offer effective, quick workouts to busy professionals. Find where your business fits in the angle and tell your customers all about it!

Keep Things Fresh
Stagnation doesn’t sell even in the calmest of times, but it’s especially useless during the start of a new year. Use “New Year, New Me” to give your business a great start in 2019. Otherwise, you run the risk of missing out on this once-a-year marketing strategy!

Do you want some individualized help with your social media marketing? Just set up a free consultation with The Go! Agency!

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Giving Back as a National Business

By Christopher Tompkins

5Dec

Business

‘Tis the season for giving back! As a national business, you’ve got the advantages of a larger budget for the season, but you’ll need to work harder to make your contributions feel unique and personalized. That’s why giving back in meaningful ways is so important for your business!

I’m going to walk you through how you can give to your employees, clients, and charities. If you don’t want to be seen as cold and heartless, you need to join in the holiday spirit and show people that you care about them!

Giving Back to Clients
No matter what industry you’re in, it’s safe to say that your clients could have easily gone with one of your competitors. Show that you appreciate them choosing you!

A great way to do this is to post holiday coupon codes on social media. Not only are you giving people what they want most during the holidays—deals—but you’re rewarding your most loyal customers. The people who follow you on social media are the ones who regularly buy from your business. Reward them for that!

As an added bonus, people will buy more from you when you have a sale. This is what truly effective giving back looks like—a sincere effort to help the people around you that just so happens to benefit your business!

Giving Back to Employees
Your employees aren’t just employees. They’re real people with unique passions and interests. Prove that you understand and appreciate that about them! One great strategy is to make a competition of it. Set trackable metrics for employee success and let each employee choose a charity. Those with the best performance will have donations made in their name proportional to how well they did!

You get a few advantages from this idea. First, your employees are working harder because they want to help a cause that’s important to them. It will give them an extra push to increase productivity, which can be especially useful around the holidays when many industries get busy.

Beyond that, you’re creating the opportunity to show your brand in a positive light. Use social media! You can give the winners an employee spotlight to show off how well they did, what charity they chose, and how large a contribution you made. Your employees will feel even better about their accomplishments, and your followers get to see how well you treat your workers!

Giving to Charity
Large companies donate to charities all the time. The bad news is that the majority of them are doing it wrong. It’s easy to just write a check to a random non-profit and call it a day, but that isn’t best for your business or the charity. You’ll be better served by finding a way to donate that makes sense for your business.

For example, a national restaurant chain donating to the Make-A-Wish Foundation doesn’t make a lot of sense. Sure you’d probably get some credit for helping out people in need, but ultimately, it would be too confusing for people trying to understand your brand.

But what if you ran a promotion where you matched donations to Feeding America? You could use one-liners like, “We Feed You, Now Help Us Feed Them!” The move makes sense for your brand, you’d help raise money for charity, and encouraging people to donate would simultaneously tell them how generous and thoughtful your business is.

That’s a great plan in and of itself, but you can do better. Keeping the restaurant chain scenario, why not offer your employees paid time to work in their local soup kitchens and food pantries? Share pictures of them across social media and watch the positive buzz come rolling in. This way, you get to show how considerate you are, and the charities get publicity from a national brand along with some real chefs in the kitchen!

Get Giving
As you wrap up the year, you shouldn’t be asking yourself whether you should be generous or have a successful business. When you do it right, you don’t have to choose! Use my advice to make sure your national business is humanizing itself by giving back in December!

Do you want some individualized help with your social media marketing? Just set up a free consultation with The Go! Agency!

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Go!TV Episode 13

By Christopher Tompkins

30Nov

GoTV, Social Media

Thanks for stopping by for another Go!TV episode recap! We’ve got some major social media news for you this week!

How to Effectively Spy on Competitors

Nobody likes to admit that their competitors can teach them something, but it isn’t a bad thing. Spying on competition lets you learn from their successes as much as their failures, so think of it as doing your due diligence. To see how you can be keeping tabs on your competitors, check out this blog post!

The Go! Agency

The Comprehensive Social Media Checklist

As a social media manager, you’ll quickly find that there’s a lot on your plate. Between posting content, engaging followers, growing your brand, and a thousand other tasks, it’s simply too much to keep in your head. That’s why we created a checklist that you can use every week to make sure that your essential tasks were completed. Check out our blog for the free PDF!

The Go! Agency

There’s the end of this week’s Go!TV episode recap! Whatever you do, it’s important to be methodical. Doing something once won’t make you successful, but creating a routine just might! If you would like more guidance on how to optimize your social media marketing results, you can enjoy our blog or podcast!

Do you want regular updates on the biggest news across social media? Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter!

The Essential Guide to Spying on Your Competitors

By Christopher Tompkins

26Nov

Business, Social Media

Competition is a great way to make yourself a better marketer. You might be satisfied with your own results, but looking at a competitor can inspire you to keep trying. And why not let your competition help you become even better?

Today I’m going to share my best tips for spying on your competitors and using their successes and failures to improve your marketing strategy!

Find Your Competition
You’ll have to locate your competitors before you can draw any comparisons. But how do you do it?

Go to your preferred search engine and put in any keywords that someone could use to find your business. The brands that come up in that search (especially the ones that are outranking you) are your competitors.

For example, if you’re marketing for a home aide service, you would look up your city and some keywords from your industry. if you’re selling a product, include words that describe that product to help you find your competition!

Start Spying
You’ve got a lot of options when it comes to checking on your competitors. Use Google Alerts to set up a regular notification when anything new is published by or about your competitor. Just to be safe, you may even want to put an alert on their CEO.

If you’re receiving a lot of notifications about them, they’re probably sending out regular press releases or email newsletters. I recommend signing up for their email marketing pieces – it’ll help you see what they’re sending and how often! This can be a great way to see what they’re telling their audience. Even better, you may find gaps in their content that you can fill!

And of course, there’s the simple method of just following their social media accounts. Take stock of what they’re posting and how their audience is responding, and you’ll be ready for the next part of your social media recon plan!

Run a Competitive Analysis
To see how you stack up to your competition, you’ll need to compare. That means looking at a few key metrics!

How many followers are they getting, and how long has it taken them to amass their following? For example, you might be intimidated by their 50,000 page likes, but if you only notice that number growing by one or two per week, then you know they aren’t doing much to expand their audience.

It’s also smart to remember that followers don’t always translate to customers. What’s their engagement like? See which of their posts are getting attention and which are being ignored. This will help you determine what should and shouldn’t go in your content mix!

Keep Tabs
This isn’t something you want to do once and ignore for the rest of the year. Compile all your information so you can check back in and update your numbers. This will let you track how effectively you’re using their own strategy against them!

Start by creating a spreadsheet. Put in the name of each competitor and links to anywhere they have an online presence. Record monthly intervals of things like their follower count. Engagement is harder to assign a hard number, but maybe set up a numerical system for yourself: a zero if they’ve had next to no engagement that month and a ten if their audience just can’t get enough in another month.

This whole process will save you time as you check your competitors’ social media channels and see how they’re stacking up to your own!

Stay Informed
One of the worst things you can do is shove your head in the sand and pretend that your competitors’ actions won’t affect you. Keep on the ball, see what your competitors are doing, and you’ll be one step closer to leaving your competition in the dust!

Could your visual content use some help? Schedule your free consultation with The Go! Agency!

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Go!TV Episode 12

By Christopher Tompkins

23Nov

GoTV, Social Media, The Go! Agency

Welcome to this week’s Go!TV episode recap! Who’s ready for the biggest breaking news from all across social media?

How to Make Gripping Content
Everyone wants to make content that pulls in readers, but not everyone knows how. Technical aspects like marketing strategy and adhering to buyer personas are important, but they can’t replace authenticity. Do you believe what you’re writing? Do you think it’s valuable for your audience? If you don’t, your readers will see right through it and the content won’t be able to help your business!

Express Writers

How to Create a Buyer Persona
At its core, there are six steps to making a realistic, useful buyer persona: Undergo user research, collect your findings, brainstorm ideas, refine them, make them applicable to a real human, and apply your persona to your customer relationship management (CRM) platform. With an effective buyer persona, you can relate to your audience in an authentic way. Use the resource below for a more detailed step-by-step guide!

Social Media Today

That’s the end of our recap! The takeaway: If you want to reach your customers, you need to speak to them like real people. Keep this in mind as you create content and buyer personas, and you should have a good leg to stand on! For more social media marketing advice, check out our blog and podcast!

Want to keep up with your favorite social media experts? Find us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter!

The Essential Guide to Engaging With Your Audience

By Christopher Tompkins

21Nov

Social Media

You’ve got great ideas for new content and ads, but how do you know who to target? It’s safe to say that your new boat engine isn’t going to be a hit among lower-income twenty-somethings, which is why you’ll need to speak to the right audience.

But first, you’ll have to find them!

Identifying Your Audience
A tried and true method of finding the right audience is to craft a buyer persona. A buyer persona is an imaginary representation of who you’re selling to, and it makes sure your content is appealing to the right person. Here are some questions to help you create yours:

Where do they shop?
What social media platforms do they use?
What do they wear?
Where do they work?
Are they married?
Do they have kids? How many?
What’s their family situation?
Where do they live? (Think city, but also house, apartment, etc.)
What’s their financial situation?
What do they spend money on?
What’s their name? (This can help you remember that your audience has real people!)

Get as specific as you can! Once you’ve identified exactly who’s buying, you can figure out how to engage with them!

It’s important to remember that engagement best practices will vary from platform to platform, so it’s best to optimize your strategy for each social network.

Facebook
Fair warning: Facebook is one of the most difficult sites for engaging your audience. You want to have genuine, organic conversations, but Facebook’s algorithms tend to prioritize paid content. However, there are some workarounds!

Creating a Facebook group for your business is a great way to foster natural engagement. It will provide a space for your audience to interact directly with your brand, and it isn’t subject to the same algorithms that are at play in the news feed.

When people like your posts, invite them to like your page! They’ve shown that they’re interested in what you have to say, so encourage them to take that final step!

To draw in your audience, you’ll need to create Facebook ads. When writing, keep a clear idea of your buyer persona and what they expect from your brand!

Twitter
When looking for new people to engage with, search by hashtags that your buyer persona would use. It’s all about meeting your audience where they are, not trying to change them!

Another great tactic is to look at who’s following your competitors. If they like what a similar business is selling, they’ll probably like you, too!

Once you’ve found your target audience, what do you do? Like their posts, reply to them, just show them that you’re sincerely interested in what they have to say! Retweeting and quote tweeting are also some great platform-specific tools you should use!

Instagram
The strategies for finding people on Instagram are almost identical to Twitter’s plan: search hashtags and find who’s following your competitors. However, Instagram has one key advantage: location. If you have a brick and mortar store, go after people in your area!

You’ll want to like and comment on posts as always, but don’t stop there. Ask for permission to share a potential customer’s post! Decide whether it would fit best as a post or a story, then show that user you value them by sharing their visual!

LinkedIn
Join groups to find people! These are especially great because you’ll have a common interest to start a conversation. Additionally, you can search for people based on their job title and location. If someone has a job title that usually sends you referrals, then you should connect with them ASAP!

For B2B brands, consider what businesses you want to work with and search for their employees. If you were able to connect with someone, why not go ahead and send invitations to the people they work with?

Of course, there are two very different paths on LinkedIn. A company account can be a great boost for SEO, but it’s irrelevant when you’re trying to engage your audience. If you’re looking to form connections, decide who in your company will be the human face that’s attracting attention on LinkedIn.

Some Guiding Rules
There are certain principles that will serve you well on any platform. These include:

Don’t make a sale on someone else’s post.
Make comments meaningful! Don’t just reply with a thumbs up.
Respond to positive and negative interactions, whether that be via comments or messages!

And there you have it! You have everything you need to find and engage with your audience in a way that’s effective and works toward your marketing goals!

Could your visual content use some help? Schedule your free consultation with The Go! Agency!

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The Essential Guide to Visuals

By Christopher Tompkins

19Nov

Graphic Design

The best piece of content in the world will never get clicked on without a good visual. Of course, this begs the question: What makes for a good social media visual?

Well, there are a lot of things that factor into image quality: white space, kerning, and several others. But if you’re not an experienced graphic designer, just describing these issues isn’t going to tell you very much.

I’m going to show you real examples that my team made of good graphic design practices vs shoddy graphic design practices. Take a look!

1. White Space

White space is the empty part of a visual that gives it room to breathe. An image that’s crammed full of saturated colors and complicated patterns is going to exhaust anyone looking at it. On the flip side of that, too much white space makes your visual boring!

In this first example, the bad image has way too much white space. It’s boring, empty, and you’re only getting a glimpse of the one object in the image.

But white space is used much more effectively in the second image! It isn’t just a straight shot of the laptop, which would be dull to look at, but it balances the activity on the keyboard with the emptiness of the background and the rest of the laptop.

2. Text Layout

In our first visual, there’s a nice picture presented in an interesting way, but none of that matters once you notice that the text is cutoff. It makes the poster look amateurish, which is never a word you want associated with your brand!

In the second image, the text is in its proper place and you can fully appreciate the image and layout that the graphic designer chose. This visual is much more likely to earn some clicks!

3. Kerning

Kerning is the spacing between letters/characters in your visual, and it plays a huge role in how your work is received.

Look at the first design. There’s so much space between the letters that the text is right against the border and the edge of the image is cutoff. As a result, the whole thing looks like a crowded mess.

The second image tightens up the kerning, leaving plenty of room for both the visual and the text. Instead of cramped, this visual feels well-crafted and perfectly spaced!

4. Overcrowding

Sometimes, visuals just have too much going on!

The first visual’s funky background makes the entire thing feel too crowded. Your eye isn’t sure where to go, and your social media following would quickly tell you that your visual gave them headaches!

The revised visual is much more pleasant. There’s plenty of empty space, and your eye can much more easily focus on the central image.

5. Legibility

As a graphic designer, you have to carefully pair the color of your font with the image!

The text in the first image is clear—until we lose it in the trees and the woman’s hair. Because the graphic designer didn’t consider how a dark green font would look against leaves, you lose the tail end of the message.

The green text looked great, so our graphic designer fixed this by changing up the spacing. You get a clear, legible visual without sacrificing text that fits the image’s background!

6. Justification

In design, justification is how text/graphic elements are structured. For example, if text is “right justified,” it will all start from the right side of the visual.

This is where we enter the uncanny valley—something looks off, but the reason may not be obvious at first. In our first image, the text is all slightly mis-aligned, with the “No” slightly off from the preceding line of text.

Our second image changes everything to be left justified, and the entire visual is better for it. It looks crisp, orderly, and doesn’t make you scratch your head and wonder, “What’s wrong here?”

Invest In Your Visuals
There are a lot of elements that go into great graphic design, but it’s important that you keep them in mind! You wouldn’t skimp on your written content, and visuals are at least as important!

Could your visual content use some help? Schedule your free consultation with The Go! Agency!

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Go!TV Episode 11

By Christopher Tompkins

16Nov

GoTV, Social Media

Thanks for stopping by for this week’s Go!TV episode recap! We’ve got your source for social media news and trends that you need to know!

The Essential Guide to Content Curation
If you’re not reading content relevant to your industry, you run the risk of missing out on important conversations. You don’t want your customers to get their information from your competitors! This Go! blog covers:

Finding shareable content
Creating a content mix
Recycling successful content

And a lot more! If you’ve got a few minutes and want to have a successful social media marketing strategy, the blog is definitely worth a read.

The Go! Agency

The Essential Guide to Social Media Metrics
You might think that metrics are reserved for experienced, high-level marketers, but they’re important for social media marketing at every level! If you’re not tracking the relevant metrics for your campaign, there’s no way to know whether or not you succeeded. By extension, there’s no way to figure out what to change. This blog is a useful tool to make sure you’re making real progress on social media and not just spinning your wheels!

The Go! Agency

So ends another Go!TV episode recap. It’s tempting to set up a social media campaign and forget about it, but you need to reinvest in your strategy if you want it to succeed. How can you do that? By keeping up with reliable social media news sources, like our blog and our podcast!

Want to see what other marketing advice we dish out? Check us out across social media: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter!

Tag : social media marketing