Share What You Know and People Will Buy What You Sell

What do Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates all have in common? Each is an amazing salesperson. They’re able to get in front of others, clearly present their vision and persuade people to buy in. continue

Projecting a Great Customer Experience a Half Year Ahead

The hunt for new customers often starts with an attempt to make the phone ring or generate a click on a website.

Yet the best way to generate calls is to focus on making an existing customer thrilled. continue

Social Media and Customer acquisition

If you just started a small business, you’re probably wondering how you can use social media to connect and acquire customers. Social media is known for helping businesses improve brand awareness, but one of the ways to assure that your random Twitter followers or Facebook fans will eventually become customers is when you create and share meaningful content. continue

Successful salespeople educate and inform

Our ongoing communications revolution has profoundly affected how salespeople achieve success.

Buyers are now in charge!

Referencing blogs, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook and other Web-based tools, buyers often bypass the traditional selling model altogether – learning for themselves about your products and services, your competitors, and what customers say about you (whether true or not!). continue

Why You Should Be Using Twitter Ads Over Any Other Advertising Platform – SumAll

Early adopting marketers saw that their ads performed remarkably well, were cheap, and soon advertisers started flocking to the platform. These days, it seems everyone’s a Facebook Ads expert. continue

Why Companies Need to Embrace Location-Based Marketing

So who is already using them? Apple, of course, has been using them for its 254 retail stores across the U.S. since December 6th, 2013 to enhance customers’ shopping experience. continue

The 4 Things Every Customer Wants

The landscape of customer loyalty has new contours: Customers get terrific service in pockets of their life and use those experiences to judge every other sales exchange. Customers also have more choices than ever before and therefore rely on their service experience as a key gauge of product and service excellence. Today’s customers are much smarter buyers. Social media has made every person a Consumers Report adjunct.

Great Branding Takes More Than Advertising – Management Tip of the Day – April 29, 2014 – Harvard Business Review

As digital disrupts more marketplaces, brands become more important and valuable – not less. They provide meaning and satisfy emotional needs. As consumers experience information overload, the tendency to gravitate toward what’s familiar increases.

Marketers Need to Think More Like Publishers – Greg Satell – Harvard Business Review

In 2010, Pepsi pulled its Super Bowl ads and invested $20 million into its Refresh project, which employed crowdsourcing to support good causes. It was an astounding social media success, with more than 87 million votes cast.

User experience is the new differentiator. How will that affect the internet? — Tech News and Analysis

The world of business is changing, as are the locations of the people who are driving that business. How companies reach new users and how they treat them once they do will be the defining business issue of the future. Those who deliver the best user experience to a global audience will win this race will change the internet as we know it.

Breaking Up with Facebook: Where Are Brands and Young Users Going?

“We’d love to say ‘It’s not you, it’s us’ but it’s totally you. Not to be rude, but you aren’t the smart, funny social network we fell in love with several years back. You’ve changed. A lot,” wrote delivery service Eat24 in its breakup letter with Facebook.

Successful Brands Don’t Care About Sales on Twitter [CHART]

Social-savvy brands have been using Twitter to engage with fans and followers for years, but since we know most of them aren’t advertising, what are they using the service for?

A Presentation Isn’t Always the Right Way to Communicate

We rarely think about whether presentations are the best way to express our ideas; we just blindly create and deliver them. By some estimates, 350 presentations, on average, are delivered every second of every day.

Marketing Technology is All About Content | Social Media Today

I was doing research on Google Trends and noticed something interesting. The phrase “social media marketing” grew tremendously from 2009 to 2011 and has since leveled off, without future growth in sight. Meanwhile, the phrase “content marketing” has really picked up in the last year and is on a significant upwards trajectory. I realized that these simple graphs told a larger story about today’s marketing landscape.

Would You Rather be Social or Interesting?

The “Interest Graph” is not the “Social Graph”. But what does that mean and why should you care?
Despite the rapid ascent of Interest-based platforms, such as Pinterest, Sulia, WeHeartIt and Wanelo, we rarely see dialogue about the Interest Graph except in a Social context. However, The Interest Graph and Social Graph are two fundamentally different infrastructures with different underlying assumptions for marketers.

Woo Loyal Customers for Life With 4 Winning Ways | Entrepreneur.com

There’s a point in almost every romance when it’s time to either move forward or break up. The same is true for the brand-customer relationship. At some point, your best customers want recognition for their loyalty or they’ll quickly go from loving your brand to dumping it.

Shopify Examines Social ROI For Commerce Sites, Finds Facebook Dominates But Reddit Is Growing

Shopify has compiled data from its platform merchants to determine how much value commerce sites get from social media engagement, and put the results into a massive infographic.

3 Ways to Grow Your Business By Focusing on the Customer

Every business in this generation is being hit with a variety of challenges. It would be easy to just roll over and sink. Sadly many companies are even getting to the point where simply surviving has become their daily mode of operation.

Social Media is Great, But Don’t Forget Old School Marketing

If you’re only marketing your brand online, you’re missing out on a sizable chunk of potential customers.

The World of Social Media Monitoring And Analytics – infographic ~ Digital Information World

Are you analyzing social media insights to measure the Return-on-Investment of your marketing efforts?
If leveraged well, social insights can reveal consumer opinion and trends, and can be useful to make future predictions. For businesses and organizations properly utilizing this data, it can be key to success.