Happy Halloween

We at Affinity Express wish all our clients a very happy Halloween in a new look!

Enjoy and stay safe.

How Social Media Influences Your Sales Cycle

“People buy from people they trust and they trust people they like.” (Garrison Wynn), which means that sales are driven through personal connections. Therefore, a company’s social media efforts support sales by driving authentic interactions with your audience that lead to an increase in the intent to buy and, ultimately, more sales in shorter periods of time.

Today’s consumers research products online, check reviews and decide based on blog posts and opinions from their peers and others who have used the products. While social consumers often use their network for validation, they sometimes discover new options with specific features to meet their needs. This leads to interaction with the business and the start of sales process.

10 Lessons from 100 Blog Posts

I recently celebrated the publishing of my 100^th blog post for Affinity Express. To seasoned bloggers, this number is not all that impressive. But for our small team covering multiple areas of marketing, this was a major milestone for one of us to achieve that took much blood, sweat and tears (I cried because my other team members seem to write amazing posts without the same level of angst as me!).

As I know many small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) struggle to maintain a blog or wonder how they can ever get started, I thought I’d reflect on what I have learned and try to save you some of the pain I have had.

1. Focus on one audience. You may have several different segments of customers, prospects, or other readers. But it is very hard to be everything to everyone. We initially wanted to speak to prospects in publishing and marketing services companies (which serve SMBs) and retailers (which have different requirements). We also wanted to provide employee topics–we have quite a diverse team–and share the expertise of various executives at our company. An added challenge for Marketing was to find enough authors and “urge” them to publish something of interest on deadline—no easy task. And meeting the objective to get people to contribute regularly like guest columnists was virtually impossible. As a result, the wide array of topics and the continually changing perspectives meant that it was hard to see the mission of the blog.

We solved the problem by streamlining. We decided our audience was the SMB marketers, the same audience that our publishing and marketing services clients target. This enables us to demonstrate that we understand the challenges our clients face and have the expertise to help them support their end customers. It builds credibility for our services and the related support we provide. It also makes it easier for us to determine whether a topic makes sense for us to cover or not.

Marketing During Holidays

It’s not something that is being questioned anymore. Today’s entrepreneurs know that online media is equally important to marketing around the holidays as traditional print media. The challenge is that, with so many businesses issuing online campaigns and going all out to capture the attention of customers, it has become critical to know the right tools to reach your target audience and build visibility  during holidays. This time of year gives you an opportunity to show another side of your business and maintain contact to build the relationship. Here are some tips on how retailers and other SMBs can stay in touch with customers online.

Send holiday greetings

When your customers (like everyone else) are being barraged with holiday messages, it is wise to send short, relevant communications that will be perceived as valuable and respectful of their time. A photo of your team or one showing your community initiative could catch their interest. It could also be an animation, a puzzle or a simple greeting that connects with your customers. You could it post it on YouTube with a link it to your website. If you include an element of humor or quirkiness, it is more likely people will share it and give you more mileage. Check out jibjab.com, a free website that helps in creating funny holiday e-cards. Don’t forget to use subtle brand reminders like using colors of your logo or your brand tagline in your message!

Optimize your website for mobile searches

Google predicts 65% of consumers will use their mobile device to look for a business to make in-store purchases.

Your Marketing and Design Reading for The Weekend

This week, I came across several posts talking about trends of interest to SMB marketers, ranging from content marketing to mobile to social. I try to keep everyone at Affinity Express up-to-date on what “the experts” are saying about our various target segments and the services we provide. We use the knowledge to help us make choices in our future direction and even to validate past decisions. There is always a lot of information to digest but you can’t take your eye off the ball because things can change quickly. I hope you get some value out of this compilation from just the past few days.

Content Marketing the #1 Driver of Leads for B2B Marketers

B2B Magazine conducted a survey of 440 B2B marketing professionals that revealed content marketing is the most important tool for generating leads (51%), coming out ahead of brand awareness (38%), thought leadership (34%) and sales (29%). Two-thirds of the respondents said they will be either “very” or “fully” engaged in content marketing by next year. This is a 100% increase over 2012 to 2013. As we work so hard to generate relevant content each week for our audience, it’s nice to know so many other B2B marketers agree with our choices.

Restaurant Website: How to Serve It Nice and Hot?

Despite the fact that 89% of US consumers research a restaurant online before dining there to check out menus and other information (AIS Media), I found some astonishing figures about restaurants:

• 95% of independent restaurants do not have a mobile website
• 40% do not have menus that can be read online
• 50% do not even have a standard website

(Research conducted by RIMS)

According to the National Restaurant Association, 50% of all full-service restaurants that have a web site use it primarily to offer consumers information about the restaurants and provide location details. This, I believe, is insufficient for customers who want to do everything online, from looking up restaurant locations on maps, checking out menus, reading customer reviews to booking tables online. With that in mind, here are some tips for restaurateurs planning to develop their websites to attract a lot more foodies online.

1. Make the website simple and logical

Keep the design simple, without any clutter. The information should be easily available to customers to help them make a quick decision.

Your Marketing and Design Reading for The Weekend

Are you being asked to justify your use of social media for business or wondering if it’s time to finally jump in to increase visibility for your company? This week’s post covers several articles on social media in general, LinkedIn new features, Google+ and blogs. Because it is difficult to specifically tie revenue to social media activities (especially when you are a B2B company), the overall theme for marketers here is: “It isn’t easy being social.”

But My Business is Different

Three things about this post hooked me: the title, the image of the cat and the first line: “Ever felt overwhelmed by social media advice?” I use my weekly blog post to give some order to the chaotic amount of suggestions I read. Yet I often find myself on the outside looking in because Affinity Express is not in an long-established business category like a printer or ad agency. Oh, and I love cats.

It’s especially challenging to know where to start when your industry doesn’t use social media at all or the predominant opinion among your peers is that it is too casual or too personal. The author suggests this is actually the perfect time to start in social media because you will be ahead of the pack. I could not agree more. Not everyone at Affinity Express understands why we engage in social media but we offer Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter designs for our clients to sell to their end customers. How can we not use these sites for our own business?

The post goes onto say that, when you are the first in a category, you can take inspiration from all kinds of other businesses and define what social media means and how it fits into your industry. As a result, what you thought was a problem—social media strategies not applying to your business—is really not a problem at all. It is an opportunity to learn to think differently about how social media can work for you.

Celebrating National Newspaper Week

 

8 Tips to Get Started on Email Marketing

There are many questions and concerns that SMB marketers face while planning their email marketing strategy. They range from choosing an email services provider, designing templates, writing interesting content, implementing analytics, tracking metrics, getting people to opt in, keeping track of new channels of communication like tablets, mobile phones and more. As a result, email marketing quickly turns from an interesting idea to a tricky and seemingly overwhelming project. How can you make sure that your email marketing produces results rather than wastes your time? Here are a few tips that have worked for me in executing e-marketing for Affinity Express.

1. Research best practices

Reading up on general metrics of email marketing such as average open and click-through rates will help you set targets for your campaigns. Insights from other marketers will save you time by helping you to avoid problems and employ tactics that work. For instance, 54% of people who unsubscribe from permission emails said the reason was that emails were coming too frequently. Furthermore, 77% of online consumers say they’ve become more cautious about giving companies their email addresses over the past year according to Subscribers, Fans and Followers research series by Exact Target.

The chart here shows reasons for unsubscribing from business mails as determined by Exact Target.

2.   Make subscribing easy

The most likely place to get someone to subscribe to your emails

National Newspaper Week

Affinity Express is Cheering for Our Publishing Clients

Newspapers have been the vehicle used by marketers for centuries to promote their businesses and drive new revenue. Acting as the voice of local communities, they are the ideal media choice for small- to medium-sized businesses. Today, the addition of online news sites and a range of digital services illustrates that publishers are very much in sync with the information and news consumption preferences of their audience, as well as the marketing needs of their customers.

In honor of National Newspaper Week, Affinity Express celebrates our publishing clients and appreciates their support. We are proud to be a resource for multimedia publishers striving to innovate and serve as digital agencies for advertisers.

Your Marketing and Design Reading for The Weekend

Maybe the only thing increasing faster than the use of mobile devices to research and purchase merchandise is the number of articles about this topic. We are definitely follow the trends at Affinity Express because we not only support major retail clients, we also provide mobile ad and mobile website design for smaller retailers through our publishing and marketing service clients. Here is some of the coverage from this week that I found interesting from both the retail marketing perspective and the consumer standpoint.

Your Company Needs a Mobile Strategy Yesterday–And These Numbers Prove It

Since I’m writing this post as a representative of Affinity Express, I’m not going to quote the first line of this article but it basically notes what one third of us would rather give up than our mobile phones. That pretty much reinforced what I already knew–it’s time to marketers get serious about mobile if they haven’t already!

Yet few big brands are doing it (mobile marketing, not the other thing). Mobile advertising accounted for less than 1% of worldwide ad spending in 2011 (eMarketer). This is despite the evidence that it works well. For example, a mobile-based loyalty program for Maurices (a chain of women’s clothing stores) was directly responsible for $1 million in sales in four months.

The article lays out several reasons why mobile should be part of any company’s marketing plans:

• Mobile interaction is the internet 3.0–mobile platforms and apps are driving more and more online traffic and customized user experiences and there will be huge increases of mobile-only internet users in the next few years.

8 Traits of Effective SMB Marketers

All of us come across some great, mediocre and (I’m sorry to say) terrible marketers as colleagues, associates or competitors. I am always on the look-out for marketers who have overcome challenges and set their brands apart to see what I can learn from them. Based on my observations, these are the eight qualities needed to be an effective marketing manager for an SMB company.

1.       Time management

Working in marketing for an SMB means being constantly pulled in different directions. Salespeople want prospect presentations; whereas HR wants video shoots for recruiting purposes. Social media require monitoring and contributions daily because they are direct channels of communication with customers. Activities have to be measured, analyzed and reported on. And the list goes on. Successful marketers need to be masters of time management to keep the entire range of internal and external customers happy, while demonstrating ROI for their work. Make the most of every minute!