Author: Kelly Bolton

Everyone loves social media, no matter the platform. We love being able to easily keep in touch with friends and family and make new friends at the touch of a button. Businesses love it for the ease of marketing and reaching customers and new customers they get with social media. Yet it’s also easy to lose focus of what’s really important in the realm of social media marketing. It’s very easy to get caught up in focusing on the number of followers you have and the number of likes and shares a post gets. After all, we’re only human, and non-business people are always talking about how many likes and shares a photo or video has gotten, that it seems like that’s the main goal of social media. If you get caught up that, you can easily forget about what the really important goals of social media marketing are, what you should really be focusing on. Goals such as conversions. That’s what your posts are really all about, right? Getting customers to your website and converting them into customers.

Social media likes and follows are nice, but you need to focus on other things to really get your marketing to work for you. You need to focus on the things that really matter, like conversions and engaging with your followers, your customers, which can drive sales. Just because someone follows you or likes a post doesn’t mean they’ll buy from you.  Engaging with customers and building relationships with them, however, will help them feel more in touch with you and feel like you care about them, and that can lead to conversions.

Instead of tracking the number of likes you get, instead you should track things like your engagement metrics, such as repeat pageviews, content shares, visitor count, conversion rate, and number of comments on blogs or articles. These things are more important to your business as they can lead to customer acquisition, sales, and revenue. The number of likes and similar vanity metrics are just more of a “feel-good” thing and, while they can be a mark of your engagement activity, they don’t have much to do with your bottom line.

It can be really hard to change your focus, however. We all feel good when we see a post get a like or we see our number of followers go up. But you need to change your focus, and to do that you’ll need to change your mindset. It can be hard to do, but you can do it.

Learn more about focusing on the right social media goals by going here, here, here, here, here, and .

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Gaining new clients and customers is always a must for businesses in order to for them to succeed and grow, and so a lot of effort gets put into advertising and marketing. But you don’t want to forget about current clients and customers. You want to keep them loyal and keep them coming back, too. To do that, you should do what you can to keep them happy. Loyalty programs, great customer experiences, special perks, and the like can go a long way in retaining clients and customers. Another thing you can do to increase you retention rate is to upsell and cross-sell your products or services to your clients and customers. How so? Your current customers are already know and trust you, and so you can more easily go to them with new products and services and have an opportunity for an upsell or cross-sell. When you upsell, you try to sell a better version of something or add extra features or add-ons. Cross-sell is to sell something a little different or related to what the customer already has or is buying. Along with increasing retention rate, upselling and cross-selling to current customers can give you a higher profitability than new sales, can provide stronger customer loyalty, increase referrals, and created shorter sales cycles.

How do you go about upselling or cross-selling? Here are a few ways you can do it.

• Make upselling seem like the customer is “winning” by getting something better. Everyone likes to win, after all. If the customer feels like they win, they’ll be happy, and a happy customer is a returning customer

 

• Use the “shopping cart” to upsell, but do it right. Offer simple upsells related to what they’re purchasing. They’re ready to check out at this point, anyway, so it’s a great time to make the offers.

 

• Try to upsell during customer support interactions. You’ve probably come across this tactic when contacting your cable company or phone company about something, and they try to sell you on some sort of new deal they’re offering. But don’t let your up-sells replace your customer support. If you can fix a problem without an upsell, do it.

 

• When you release a new product or service, reach out to your current customers first. They’ll appreciate being first to know and having first shot at getting something new from you. One possibility is, if you have some new service that is related to a current service, you can offer them the current service, plus the new service for a small additional fee.

 

• If you have a supplemental product or service that will enhance the customer’s experience, you can try to cross-sell it. For example, if they’re buying a TV, you can try to sell a game system or video player along with it.

 

• Place cheap, impulse items near the checkout lanes. You see this all the time at grocery stores and the like, and it usually works to get the customer to buy a little something extra. Try using the cheapest items that will complement your most-purchased products.

 

• You see the “Customers who bought this product also purchased” or the “Frequently purchased” on websites like Amazon, and it works rather well by pairing up people with similar taste and recommending items to them.

 

• Incentives like free shipping on a certain amount or offering bundle deals are a great way to get people to buy more when they feel like they’re getting a deal.

 

You can learn more about upselling and cross-selling by visiting this article, this article, this article, this article, this article, and this article.

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The X-Men have been a popular comic book franchise for many years that has spawned video games, cartoons, and a popular movie series. Many of us are familiar with some of the characters, like Professor X, Wolverine, Storm, and Magneto. The series is not only popular for its great action and stories, but also for the many things it can teach us, such as the importance of tolerance and acceptance of people who are different (be it race, physical characteristics, etc.). The X-men can also teach lessons that can be useful in the business world, too, believe it or not. For example, since Professor X runs a school that houses and teaches mutants, and the X-men are often caught up in battles to save the world, we can use the X-men to help in developing a business strategy.

In reading the X-men comics and watching the movies, we see the importance of strategy in many of the things the band of mutants are involved in, from the running of the school to, especially, the many battles they fight. Professor X, as the founder and leader, has had to constantly plan and develop strategies in order to prepare for whatever situation may arise and keep his beloved students safe. The same can be said for X-men team leaders like Storm and Cyclops, who have had to come up with battle plans and strategies to both keep their teams alive and win their battles. Leaders like them also know that they need to have plans that are flexible enough to be changed when the need arises. Business strategies need to be the same, since things don’t always go to plan and something can come up suddenly that can throw your plans out of sync if they’re not flexible so you can change them without trouble.

There are many strategic planning tips we can learn from them that we can apply to developing business strategies, such as:

*Approach your planning sessions with your company policy in mind
*Play devil’s advocate with every decision, so you see things from each side
*Learn from the past, so you know what’s been done and what worked and what mistakes were made
*Map out a “plan of attack”, so you know what you’re going to do and when
*Invite input and consensus by planning with a team and getting everyone’s thoughts, ideas, and feedback on things
*Be innovative by stepping back from tradition and trying new things
*Use a system, such as SWOT, for your planning
*Experiment and proof as much as you can to find what works best for you
*Make sure you have a back-up plan, or two.
*Be positive and give it your all

Incorporating these tips into a business strategy along with elements such as talent development, strong communication, leadership training, and a well-defined mission can lead to business success.

Stand out from the crowd and aggressively grow your business with Aggressive Growth Marketing. The Growth Marketing Agency that provides Growth Hacking Marketing, Social Media, Guest Blogging, Email Marketing and growth focused Digital Marketing Agency services. Call to discuss your needs today.