Networking events are a double-edged sword. On the one hand, a popular event means there’s plenty of potential customers to meet. On the other hand, attending an event and coming away empty is a huge waste of a business owner’s most precious commodity – time.
Fortunately, there are ways to tilt the odds in your favor. Some advance preparation and a few tips to keep in mind while at the event will increase the chances that you walk off with at least one, or possibly several qualified leads.
Hot sales leads naturally get most or all of a salesperson’s attention. Salespeople are always hunting for more customers right now. Unfortunately, this “right now” mindset overlooks other sales leads well worth cultivating. By maintaining a long-term sales funnel and paying more attention to neglected leads, your business can nurture today’s cold leads and convert them into successful sales later on.
Here are tips on how to avoid overlooking a promising sales opportunity:
In a survey of small businesses last November by MerchantCircle, the 2,555 respondents overwhelmingly chose search engine marketing as the one channel they would use if they were to put all of their marketing dollars in to one basket. Search engine marketing was selected by 32.9% of the small business owners. Other choices were traditional (19.7%), social media (16%), paid search (9.8%), mobile (3.7%) and none of these (17.9%).[1] The results are surprising, because search engine marketing (SEM) is not something small business owners take to like ducks to water.
Well, the good news is that businesses have finally come around to the idea that social media is a ripe playing field for their B2B marketing goals. Don’t feel bad if you were late to the party; any place with such an over-abundance of cat videos and Justin Bieber fans would confuse anyone as to whether or not it was the proper arena to conduct business. But the diversity of content and audience is all part of the charm and potential of social media, and when navigated properly, the potential ROI for almost any industry is huge.
On June 13, 2012 CEO and Founder of Placed, David Shem announced that Placed Analytics would launch as a public beta version. Placed Analytics is a free service which works with any mobile application (as long as the end user allows for location based service permissions.) via the connection of both the physical and digital realm. According to Placed, this service, which was established in February 2011, anonymously measures, aggregates, and analyzes the paths and places people visit in the physical world.
At this point in the evolution of integrating technology and business, most companies know that weaving various social media outreach efforts into their plans is not exactly optional. In fact, regardless of what industry you work in, being social media friendly is an inescapable component of staying relevant and competitive. But even if they are aware of the need for effective social media strategy, the real question is this: are businesses doing enough in terms of social media? And furthermore, how diligently are they tracking the success and results of these efforts? According to a new study, in the B2B world, the answer is not diligently enough.
When your company pays thousands of dollars to exhibit at a trade show, you have to monitor whether the investment paid off. Your numbers don’t have to be prefect (and they probably won’t be at first). But you can build on the data you collect, and as you get better at measuring your return on investment, you’ll also get better at figuring out why you should be exhibiting at a particular show.
No small business can afford to do things half as well as the competition or to be right 50 percent of the time or to get halfway to its financial goals. But we see a lot of business owners whose website and e-commerce business are set up for selling but not set up for success. The difference is huge. We offer four must-do’s for your business in today’s world: You can implement them one at a time, if you prefer to work toward a goal rather than leap on it, but in our opinion you need to address all four of these areas to be successful at e-commerce.
The marketing potential in social media has become such a powerful force, that ignoring it is simply no longer an option. On Facebook alone, you have access to over 500,000,000 people with the click of a button, making it the most effective and low-cost solution to marketing your business. While your ultimate goal is essentially to increase your revenue, it is not considered good practice to use social media as a forum to aggressively advertise your products and services. This could actually drive away potential customers. It is about spreading the word and building a community. With increased awareness and exposure of your brand, your sales will subsequently grow. Below are some tips on how to increase your following, engage your audience and ultimately, increase your sales!
Targeted Promotions That Can Benefit Your Business
Promotions are meant to increase your sales by encouraging customers to choose you over your competitors. However, many businesses end up spending a lot of money on promotions that offer very little ROI (Return On Investment) because they fail to reach the customers who are interested in a particular product or service.
That’s why targeted promotions are often recommended, since they reach out to certain audiences that just need a little push, such as a money-saving deal, to visit your business. There are a few common types of targeted promotions that can appeal to your most promising customer bases.
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