Adam Wiggins says, “Effective sales professionals display a quality more valuable than an infinite book of leads. Trustworthiness. Trustworthiness comes from the heart and navigates your journey to customer service excellence. How do you know whether your customers trust you? Your sales results likely tell the story. But even if your clients consider you an integral part of their inner circle, there’s always room for improvement. If you’d like to welcome increased sales results — and enhanced customer success — we have four tips to help you”. 4 Steps to Building... [...]

Hannah Tighe says, “It seems every day there is more evidence to show that LinkedIn is an incredible tool for creating strategic relationships, boosting your reputation, and generating more leads. But just because the tool is valuable doesn’t mean that everyone is using it properly. If you aren’t getting the results out of LinkedIn that you were hoping, consider asking yourself if you are making any of the following mistakes. These common trip-ups could be limiting your success before you even start. Keep on reading to discover the top LinkedIn blunders people make —... [...]

Andrew Dymski says, “The marketing services arena is a crowded space these days. Every firm is competing for a prospect’s attention and time, so it is getting harder and harder for agencies to separate themselves. This is exacerbated by the fact that nearly every marketing agency website and blog you visit describes itself in the same way and publishes content on the same topics. With all this noise and chatter out there, how do agencies clearly differentiate themselves from their competition? One approach is to change up your marketing by combining marketing automation and... [...]

Alisa Meredith says, “There are plenty of ways to use your Twitter cover image to promote your business. You can implement different tactics at different times, depending on what’s going on in your business at the moment. It’s easy to mix your cover image up and keep things fresh, while always being consistent with your branding. To inspire your next Twitter cover photo change, check out some great examples below. 1) Build Instant Trust Rebekah has an impressive social media pedigree. Using an “As Seen On” box and a half-circle badge, she doesn’t shy away from sharing some... [...]

Will Blunt says, “Conducting research is an essential part of writing quality blog content. To be a credible industry expert, you need facts, stats, figures, and examples at your disposal — all external validation that shows you know your stuff. But doing research can be very time consuming if you’re not sure what you should be looking for and how to look for it. In this post I will take you through a four-step process for researching your blog posts. This process will help you validate your blog ideas, fill your posts with interesting and relevant content, and increase the... [...]

Jami Oetting says, “Website visitors are banner blind. And if they do pay attention to the display ads cluttering their online experience, they can put a stop to irrelevant messaging by installing an ad blocker. Hey, it’s tough for any brand to compete with plug-ins that can replace banner ads with pictures of puppies and kittens. But this isn’t to say banner ads are all bad. In fact, there have been some pretty creative uses of the display format. But overall, people are tired of being bombarded with ads that don’t apply to them or are ill-timed. They lost trust,... [...]

Lindsay Kolowich says, “You know by now that posting on social media is one of the best ways to amplify the awesome content you’re creating. But it isn’t enough to simply post content to social whenever you feel like it. Think about it: Is your audience spreading their time spent on social media equally throughout the day? Of course not. Every social network has higher and lower traffic times throughout an average day and an average week. Posting strategically at higher traffic times will help drive traffic to the content you’re sharing on social. So, when are the... [...]

Lindsay Kolowich says, “Every brand on Facebook is on Facebook for one reason — to (eventually) get more business. But getting more business from Facebook means different things to different types of businesses. Different brands will have different objectives, such as driving in-store sales, increasing online sales, launching a new product, building awareness, or promoting a mobile app. Regardless of the objective, there are a few steps that happen before Facebook fans can turn into real business. You have to first build an audience on Facebook, then drive inbound traffic to your... [...]

Michael Brown says, “Your keywords are included. Your title tags and meta descriptions are set. Your links have been added. Your content is now optimized, right? Wrong! These are all necessary steps in the content creation process, but none of them qualify as content optimization — at least not in my opinion. Content optimization is a popular term these days, and one that’s on the minds of most marketing agencies. But it’s a term that is widely misunderstood and misapplied, with negative consequences for both agencies and their clients. So what is content optimization? Here are... [...]

You probably know that people leave your website without taking action ( filling out your survey, consuming and sharing your content, subscribing to your newsletter or buying your product). In fact, most of your visitors fail to take action. Inertia keeps them moving, without stopping to think deeply about what you are offering. Three experienced marketers (Sean Donahoe, Bobby Walker and Sam Finlay) got tired of seeing most of their prospective followers and customers leave so they decided to do something about it. They created Stakk. This tool, being released today, may change the way you go about... [...]