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With a few small tweaks to your Twitter strategy, you can be well on your way to gaining loyal followers who will actively engage with your content.  Twitter has been an influential social networking for a long time now, but there are still marketers who don’t quite understand its power or how to use it.  This is especially true when it comes to growing a big list of followers.

Here are 5 Twitter management tips that can help you build a long list of followers organically.

1. Make replying and retweeting a habit:  Twitter is all about having casual conversations with your followers, and being as personable as you can be. Some brands that don’t get the hang of how Twitter works often make the mistake of only talking about themselves, and posting. 

2.  Deliver good content constantly:    Brands that publish informative content regularly have a higher chance of increasing their number of loyal followers. People love reading new information, and the more information you share, the more engagement you will get on your Twitter page.

3. Monitor hashtags and trending topics:     Hashtags are used to categorize the endless stream of content on Twitter, and can also make your tweets easy to discover. Using the right hashtags in your post can be very beneficial as they help put your tweet on other users’ radars.  Also, look at trending topics and try to publish posts that acknowledge specific events that are happening in your vicinity. This way, your followers will know that you are also involved in what goes on around you.

4. Engage with influencers on Twitter:   Find influencers in your industry and reach out to them via Twitter posts. Mention them in your posts, and engage them in conversations that relate to your brand. These thought leaders will in turn share your content, giving you more exposure to a larger network of users in the Twitter-verse. If you are not quite sure about how to find influencers, the ‘Who To Follow’ lists on Twitter are an amazing resource for all to use.  If you can get an influencer to endorse your products/services, or mention them in a Twitter post,

5. Promote your Twitter handle:     One of the simplest ways to gain more followers is through the publicity of your Twitter handle. Create an eye-catching Twitter profile with an attractive header image, and a relevant profile picture. Put up your Twitter details wherever it is possible. The best places are of course your own company website. You can also include your Twitter handle at the end of your blog posts and also embed a live Twitter feed on your blog page.

Keep these 5 Twitter management tips in mind as you embark on your mission to gain more followers. Post engaging content, be courteous, and give back to the Twitter community, get involved in conversations and discussions with your followers and influencers, and watch your number of followers grow.

One of the first steps to figuring out your marketing budget is to establish your total revenue. Talk to your CFO, financial department, or accountant and figure out your gross revenue or estimated revenue. What is Gross Revenue, it is revenue received before any deductions or allowances, as for rent, cost of goods sold, taxes, etc.

A good rule to follow for small businesses with revenues of less than $5 million is to spend 7 to 8% of revenues on marketing, with the budget split between. However, the 7 to 8% rule assumes that your business will have revenue margins of 10 to 12% after expenses, which will include your marketing budget.

For companies that have been in business for one to five years, it is suggested to use 12 to 20 percent of your gross revenue or projected revenue on marketing.  Companies less than a year old, tend to need to ramp up before spending marketing dollars.

Marketing Budgets prepares businesses to grow, but you also must prepare your marketing budget. It is best practice to have a process in place for handling unexpected costs. Whether you contribute a certain amount or percentage each month to grow an emergency fund or set aside one lump sum right off the jump start.

How to Plan a Marketing Budget

4 Important Keys to a Marketing Budget

1.         Start with a marketing strategy.  What is important and what are you wanting focus most on your company.

2.         Set your marketing budget.  How much do you want to spend on what you want to accomplish?

3.         Allocate your marketing budget dollars.  Set aside the amount of money that you want to spend on marketing each month.

4.         Implement a marketing budget plan.  Maximize Marketing through a strong strategic plan and spend competency.

How Important is a Marketing Budget

Many small-business owners think a marketing budget is a luxury — an unnecessary expense they can’t afford. But failure to appropriately market and advertise your business can have a significant impact on its ability to prosper. A carefully planned and budgeted marketing approach can help you effectively promote your business to its target demographic while staying within established financial parameters.

Marketing Strategy: A marketing strategy is much like a business plan. It helps your business identify its audience and build a plan around that audience.

Marketing Basics:  A marketing budget allows you to invest in the most basic small-business marketing necessities.  This helps that business grow.

Tracking Marketing: To ensure your marketing funds are being wisely invested and producing positive results.

Email marketing is the use of email to promote a company’s products and services or to connect with the customers.  When it’s done well, email marketing is an effective sales driver.   When it’s done wrong, email marketing can come across as spam that annoys customers.  The best marketing emails are optimized for mobile devices; respect the customers, and followers.

Email marketing is the use of email to promote products or services while developing relationships with potential customers or clients. It is essentially direct mail done electronically instead of through the postal service.

Anytime a company sends out an email, aside from order confirmations and direct responses to customer questions, it could be considered a form of email marketing. Email marketing is one segment of internet marketing which encompasses online marketing via websites, social media, blogs, and more.

Email marketing can include newsletters with updates on the company, or promotions of sales and exclusive deals for subscribers. Marketing emails may also seek to share a general message on the company’s behalf, such as in the wake of a natural disaster or company scandal.

At its best, email marketing allows businesses to keep their customers informed and tailor their marketing messages to their audience. At its worst, this kind of marketing can drive customers away with persistently annoying spam emails.

How Email Marketing Works

It’s easy to set up and track an email marketing campaign, which makes it accessible for small businesses. You can add a newsletter sign-up option to your website, for instance. As people sign up, you can send newsletters to a growing audience. You can also direct customers to the newsletter from your social media profiles.

Why Email Marketing is a No-Brainer for Small Businesses

You may be wondering why consumers prefer receiving updates from brands through email. Here are just a few reasons why we think email marketing works so well with the modern consumer:

It’s convenient: With access to email right on their smartphone, most consumers find this type of communication very convenient. Not only can consumers stay connected with their favorite brands wherever they are, but they can easily redeem any coupon codes or other special offers right from their phone.

It’s personal: With this, today’s consumer is bombarded with marketing messages, and they tend to respond best to marketing strategy, you can personalize your messages and content based on the subscribers preferences and buying patterns. Email segmentation makes it easy to deliver the most relevant offers and content to the consumer.

It’s instant: Consumers like the ability to get information about exclusive offers and last minute deals. Sending email campaigns allows your small business to instantly and directly get the word out about these sales and promotions so that your consumers can take advantage of the opportunity to save.  

SEO (Search Engine Optimization), is the process of optimizing your website to get more organic traffic. SEO marketing directs changes that make it more attractive to a search engine.  SEO helps to optimize the website to gain unpaid or organic traffic on the Search Engine Result Page (SERP).

Why does SEO marketing matter?

Search engines want to provide the best results for users.

That means high-quality, informative listings that fit the user’s search query. By using SEO marketing, you can help your website’s pages appear in relevant and valuable search results. For example, when I type “best burgers in Dallas/Ft Worth, TX” into Google, the results contain the most relevant pages for that search.

If you want to earn one of these top spots, it’s crucial that you have a top-notch SEO campaign.

Including results for top burger in dallas\ft worth texas.

Do you want results only for best burgers in Dallas\FtWorth TX?

As a bonus, SEO helps you earn quality traffic too.

When people visit your site, you want them to be people interested in your products or services. SEO allows you to optimize your website to reach the people looking for your business.

There isn’t any point in driving traffic to your site if it isn’t quality traffic.

If you appeared in searches for Apple products when you sell fresh apples, for example, you wouldn’t drive relevant traffic to your site. By investing in SEO marketing, you’ll guide the right traffic to your website.

SEO marketing also helps you with traffic quantity.

If more people are visiting your site and learning about your business, it sends a positive signal to Google that your website is relevant to search results related to different pages on your site.

It will help rank your site higher, which means more people can find and visit your page.

3 parts of SEO marketing that influence your rankings

SEO marketing is an in-depth method that has numerous moving parts. This strategy can be complicated to understand because SEO involves many components.

The three parts of SEO marketing:

On-page SEO

On-page SEO involves any optimizations on your website.

This portion of SEO includes strategies to optimize individual pages on your website.  You implement changes on a page to help it rank better in search results.

Technical SEO

Aside from on-page SEO, there is also technical SEO.

Technical SEO involves the backend of your site and optimizing those components to help your site rank better.

Off-site SEO

Off-site SEO involves any off-page SEO strategies outside of your company’s direct control. This practice helps strengthen your relationship with other sites and builds your online reputation in your industry.

The most common off-site SEO practice is back links.

Back links are links to your site from other sites. These links can improve a search engine’s perception of your website, especially if the back links come from reputable, high-authority websites.

You can attract back links to your site by creating high-quality content.

If other industry authorities see your quality content, they’re more likely to link to it from their website. In most cases, your business will have to conduct outreach to make these sites aware of your content and its value.

While outside your direct control, off-site SEO is a must for improving your site’s ranking.

SEO marketing is a great way to grow your business online. You’ll help your company drive more organic traffic to your site and earn more valuable leads.

It’s the most wonderful time of the year! I know that’s generally a Christmas-time sentiment, but the November holiday season is just as fun and magical and inspiring. It’s still early in November, but Thanksgiving will be here before we know it, and Christmas won’t be too far behind it. The holiday season just goes by so fast every year.

As we head towards the end of a tumultuous year, business owners are met with a new challenge: planning for 2021. As we round out 2020 and look towards the New Year, it’s time to consider ways to grow your business, not just keep it above water. Growing your business during these challenging times is tough, but it is possible—and Beyond is here to help you every step of the way. Let’s get ready to dig in and grow your small business in 2021? Read on for three ways to get started.

Get Serious About Your Customers

Your customers are your key to success, that’s a no brainer. But in a time when connecting face to face is harder than ever, how can you keep your customers engaged and loyal? We’ve said it once and we’ll say it again and find new ones, online. Whether that be through your website, social media, email marketing, or another platform, staying top of mind and meeting your customers where they least expect is a simple and often free way to keep your clients engaged. In 2021, small business owners need to think about where they can skip costs, and how they can maximize profits.

Take Your Business Online with an Online Storefront

With the colder months ahead and the potential for more in-person closures, your business simply has to be online. But just because you’ve got your social media and website up, doesn’t mean you’re ready to really grow in 2021. If you don’t have an online storefront, you need one. We know that creating a website and accepting payments online can be costly and complicated, which is why we developed our own online storefront to help get you there faster, at an affordable price.

Prepare for Whatever Might Come

If 2020 has taught small business owners anything, it’s that no matter how well you budget, plan, and prepare, you can never really be sure what will come. As we look to 2021, small business owners should be prepared for business interruptions. 2021 might not be the year for costly renovations or opening new locations, but your business still might need a little help with cash flow. Just because you aren’t opening that second location, doesn’t mean your oven won’t break or other unforeseen difficulties won’t arise. 

How to Use Your IG Stories

The way you use your stories is highly dependent upon your industry. E-commerce stores will use their stories in a completely different way than a plumber or general contractor would.

1. E-Commerce/Retail: Some great ways to use your IG stories in this industry would be behind the scenes videos of your shipping process or scanning in new inventory in prep for a live sale (a quick peep of the new products to generate excitement for the upcoming live). You can also use your stories to share your outfit of the day (#OOTD) where you can link the story directly to the products in your store so followers can simply swipe up and shop directly from IG.
2. General Contractors: If you fall in this industry, use your stories to show your followers behind the scenes at a job! For some reason people love to see major disastrous jobs…if you’re a plumber and you respond to a huge leak, share a short video clip of it in your story. You can share a swipe up link for people needing your services. It keeps you in the forefront of your followers’ minds when they do need a plumber/general contractor.
3. Bakery/Chef/Restaurant: Use your story to share a food story! Right around mealtimes or snack times, tempt your followers with delicious looking fresh-made plates/dishes on the scene. Describe the smell, taste, etc. Consider it a short commercial just for that dish! Works like a charm!

Benefits of Using Stories

So whether you have been using stories for a while or you are just learning about them, it’s important to understand there are many benefits employing stories. What do you have to lose?

There are approximately 1 billion users on IG each month and over 500 million of them use stories. Think of the potential you have to reach people with stories. 200 million IG users visit at least one business profile a day and 1/3 of the most viewed stories are business stories. These numbers should be enough to push you over the edge if you’re sitting on the fence! This is a free platform and the viewers are literally there for the taking!

Your stories are also unique to your business. You get to create them. You aren’t restricted to the newsfeed guidelines. The best benefit of all; however, is that you can repurpose your high-performing content. If you used something on your home page that performed really well, you can utilize it in your stories periodically because it only lasts 24 hours. New viewers won’t know its old content! This saves you a lot of time and effort.  

Let’s Wrap Things Up!

In summary, you really can’t go wrong with Instagram stories. You can also, share them to your Facebook stories at the same time assuming you have your Instagram business page connected to your Facebook business page! Who doesn’t love a 2 for 1?

If this still seems a bit overwhelming, or social media just isn’t your forte, reach out to our experts here at Mind Yo Business, Inc. and we can get you squared away with a professional social media manager and content creator. Contact Us Today!

I got a call from a potential client last week talking about these YouTuber’s that are encouraging people to build 1-product ecommerce businesses and they promise overnight success. All they need to do is set up a proven drop-shipped business and run a bunch of PPC ads on social media and Google. This client had lost thousands in ad spend before calling me! THOUSANDS! People, STOP! Don’t fall for this! PPC should never be your first approach to marketing and I’m going to explain why in this blog post.

What is PPC and How Does it Work?

PPC stands for pay-per-click advertisement which just means you pay a set amount of money for every time a lead clicks on your ad. That set price is determined based on the popularity of the keywords you are planning to utilize for your ad in the search engines. The more popular the keyword the more money you will pay per click.

Many marketing agencies offer PPC advertising services and I want to make sure you understand what you’re buying into when you get these services. PPC services typically bring zero profit to marketing agencies. This is because your ad spend goes to the ad platforms like Google, Bing, Facebook, etc. Most agencies will charge you a set amount above that ad spend amount in order to pay for putting together and managing the campaigns which takes a good amount of time and effort.

So I’m sure you’re thinking, it isn’t recommended to start with PPC because marketing agencies don’t really profit off of it right? That couldn’t be further from the truth! Here are the reasons why you shouldn’t start with PPC first:

1. COST:

The average cost of a strong PPC campaign is from $2000-$10000/month which is quite a large range dependent upon your industry. Most start-up companies don’t have that type of marketing budget to blow in hopes of a successful ROI.  This money could be better spent on branding yourself on social media, ramping up your SEO, or even print advertising. Spend the money on building organically before going straight for the commercial market which is far more competitive.

2. NO DATA:

When you are just starting your marketing strategy, you likely have zero data to go off of. We suggest marketing organically on social media, email marketing, SEO, print advertising, and other more cost effective methods to assist in a means to gather data. These will all allow you to identify what things land and what falls flat. Organic marketing and analysis will help you narrow down your target market better so that you can plan your PPC advertisements in a more narrow way to prevent wasting money on unnecessary clicks.

3. INEXPERIENCE:

There are a lot of DIY videos out there or blog posts that will give you a crash course on how to run PPC ads, many of which charge you for the full run down. Unfortunately, you don’t get the full gist of the skills necessary to do so and they leave you will false promises of high ROI’s, thus resulting in you feeling defeated and ultimately giving up after wasting your hard earned money. If you take one of these courses be sure it is accredited by one of the major platforms like Google, Bing, Facebook, etc. Do your research. Some companies try hard to deceive you with seals and pictures of proof for different types of accreditations. Trust your gut!

Let’s Wrap Things Up

In summary, PPC is a great tool for advertising after you have exhausted all other forms of organic marketing. Don’t get suckered into wasting thousands of dollars that are you going to go back into the pockets of the already monstrous platforms you’re buying into. They stay wealthy whether or not your ad campaigns succeed. If you don’t feel confident in what you have learned in your DIY, pay the money to hire an expert. It’s well worth it to ensure you don’t waste your hard-earned money on dead ads that don’t bring you any new clients or any new money. Our professionals are standing by to assist you with your marketing needs now. Reach out to one of us today.