There are many online tools you can use to help run, promote, and grow your business. Social media is one tool that can be very beneficial to you. As you build your online presence through social media, it’s important to understand the best ways to run your social media feed.

Use Analytics Tools

One of the many benefits of using online tools is the ability to track them. With social media, you can use analytics to see exactly what is working and how well it is working. You can look at overall engagement and what social media marketing strategies are doing the best. Most analytics tools will help you see the number of clicks, likes, shares, etc. that you receive. By utilizing analytics tools, you can better understand how effective your social media feed is. You can make changes to strategies that aren’t working and continue to strengthen and use the ones that are. There are many social media analytics tools you can explore.

Create a Content Calendar

As with anything else, planning is an essential part of running your social media feed. The best way to plan is with a content calendar. You can use a content calendar to help you stay on top of deadlines and to have a clear idea of what’s coming up. Your content calendar can also be used for brainstorming. If you plan out your content in advance, it can actually help you come up with more creative content than if you made it immediately before posting. Your calendar will also help you to be mindful of your consumers and the context of when you post. Relevant content provides consumers with value and makes it more likely that they will turn to you later for products or services.

Listen to Your Audience

No social media feed can thrive if you ignore what your audience is saying. People look out for businesses that engage with their audience. You should be reading the comments, DMs, and other communications. This can give you an idea of what people think about your feed. If people are making criticisms, make adjustments. If people praise what you’ve done, acknowledge them. Social media is intended to be interactive and fluid. Your audience’s thoughts and opinions should be clear to you and you need to show them you’re listening.

Social media can be a valuable tool for your business. It’s an excellent way to market your business and engage with your audience. You simply need to learn how to best manage your social media feed.

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Just because you get one sale doesn’t mean you’ve gained a loyal customer. How does a business make itself noticed, and even more importantly favored, in a world full of competition? Whether you’re still developing your brand or looking to do a makeover, the following tips can help solidify your brand as the one every customer recommends to a friend!

Become a One-Stop Shop

Oftentimes businesses seek to become specialized in one area in order to ensure quality. While this remains an important tactic, it shouldn’t diminish the other side of things, meaning that you provide a wide range of services or products relating to each other. If you’re trying to start up a donut shop, for instance, it would be remiss to not also sell milk! The truth is that customers care a lot about convenience—so making your business a one-stop shop for anything they might require further cements your brand as one they can trust to take care of their needs.

Loyalty Programs

A tried and true method of gaining customer loyalty is a loyalty program—essentially, giving them opportunities to rack up rewards points and receive discounts and free items because of their loyalty. This system encourages what could be a one-time customer to come back to you instead of a competitor, and to come back more often in order to get their rewards sooner. If you decide to look into this tactic, POS systems can track rewards points across stores and online marketplaces, so it’s pretty easy to implement.

Learn from Competitors

Every industry has competition, but that doesn’t have to be a bad thing. The last big way to increase customer favoritism towards your brand is by studying the other brands related to it, and then doing what they do, but better. When a competitor has a sales rewards system in place already, for example, you can go above and beyond by creating a referral rewards system! Also, by looking into what people like and dislike about other brands’ qualities, you can better finetune your products, services, and values to provide everything the competition does and more!

If you want your brand to stand out, there are lots of quick marketing tactics to increase visibility. But making your brand something customers favor over any other, however, requires more in-depth planning and skill. Don’t just stop at being a good place to go for a product or service—make your brand something customers talk to their friends about!

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Figuring out how to network can feel incredibly challenging. Maybe you feel like the networking efforts you’ve made thus far have only resulted in surface-level connections rather than meaningful relationships. Applying some of these ideas will help you make your networking efforts more productive.

Talk About Your Passions

According to The Therapists’ Network, talking about your passions is one way to make the conversations you have with colleagues more meaningful. Instead of asking small-talk-related questions, learn to dive into the things you care about, and more importantly, the things the other individual cares about.

Try to ask good questions and listen carefully to the information the other person is saying. As you do that, you’ll find points of connection and commonality where you can start to build a relationship with the individual.

Attend Events

Learning to hone your conversational and listening skills is essential so that you make the most out of your business interactions. But finding opportunities to meet new people and actually forge those connections is also essential. According to the Utah Valley Chamber of Commerce, if you are looking for a new job, job fairs can connect you with businesses that are looking for employees. Don’t be afraid to put yourself out there.

Even though attending these events can sometimes be overwhelming, try to think about them more as opportunities for you to meet new cool people who are passionate about the services they are providing in the world instead of as cutthroat competition for the best jobs.

Remember People

When it comes to being a good networker, it’s easy to think that being personable and memorable are the most important things you can do to ensure that you expand your pool of connections. But in all reality, building your network requires that you actually connect with, care about, and remember the people you meet.

Making a few solid connections at an event where you actually get in contact with them afterward will be much more effective than talking to twenty-plus people without having any meaningful conversations. According to Mind Maven, you should try to remember people and to remember their names.

As you work to find the best strategies to improve your networking abilities, remember to stay true to yourself. While it’s true that networking requires everyone to get out of their shell somewhat, remember to stick to your strengths. If you’re a great listener, leverage that. If you’re a great conversationalist, learn to use that. Working to maximize your strengths will help you feel more confident as you try to build more connections.

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Are you an entrepreneur or small business owner looking to upgrade and facilitate your production processes? If so, you should probably consider how your business could benefit by using more software automation. Here are a couple of the reasons that many small businesses are investing in software automation and the benefits that they receive as a result.

Reduce Costs

According to IntelliChief, one of the great benefits of having software automation is that it can actually reduce some of your costs around the workplace. Software automation such as business processing systems can help speed up your product turnaround time and can decrease costs. For example, each invoice that is processed automatically saves $10 on average compared to an invoice that is processed manually. There are many other processes that have reduced costs when they are automated. Essentially, if you automate more, you save more.

Simplify Tasks

One of the difficulties that many small businesses face is having a small number of employees with countless tasks to accomplish within normal business hours. There are some of these tasks that can be tedious and time-consuming that don’t really require a lot of specialized skill. These tasks can be frustrating for your employees to perform since their skills could be better used elsewhere. This is the kind of situation where software automation could step in and fulfill these tedious tasks in a simpler and more time-efficient manner, allowing your employees to use their skills elsewhere. For example, according to Gideon Taylor, PeopleSoft tools can assist with all major HR tasks like onboarding and time-off requests rather than requiring an employee to fulfill those needs manually.

Save Time

According to Business Money, perhaps the greatest benefit of using software automation is that it can save you time, sometimes even hours upon hours of time. As a small business with limited employees, specialized products, and a large audience, your time is more valuable than anything else. Just as people say, time is money, and money is time. If you invest in software automation, the steps in your production process will speed up, and you’ll be able to sell more products and make more money.

As you’re considering the different needs of your small business, remember to include the benefits of software automation in your considerations. Once you include automation in your business, you’ll never want to go back. By automating more steps of your business processes, you’ll see that your company will be more successful and be able to achieve more of your vision goals.

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Without good leads, your business will never prosper. Lead generation can be a tricky thing, however, especially if you haven’t done much research on what your target market wants. To get the most out of visitors on your webpage, increase their conversion by following these three tactics!

Use Customer Reviews

Hearing it from a friend is simply the best referral, but hearing it from a fellow online user is still pretty trustworthy to most people. Using customer reviews to generate leads is something businesses often forget the value of, simply because they feel it is outside their control. This, however, is simply not true. One of the key reasons customers leave reviews is because they are asked to do so. When a customer has a good experience, inviting them to review or even give a testimonial can be the tipping point for other users to simply browse your website, and actually make a desired action.

Source: https://leadgenera.com/knowledge-hub/marketing/do-customer-reviews-help-lead-generation/ 

Improve Web Design

What do people see when they first open the main page of your website? Just increasing your website functionality and improving its design can make a huge difference in how users perceive your products while considering a purchase. Ideally, 30 to 50 percent of your leads should become customers, so if that is not the case improving your website’s graphic designs and accessibility via mobile phone can significantly improve your numbers. Look at what other successful business websites have done, and try it yourself. Or, better, hire a graphic designer who knows what they’re doing!

Source: https://www.podium.com/article/website-conversion/ 

Make Quality Blog Posts

Often when people try to unleash the power of SEO with keywords and link building, they do so with little thought for the actual content on the page. Your blog posts and their quality, however, can make a big difference to users who are seeking a business that actually knows what they’re talking about. Also, implementing brand voice can help such users get a feel for who you are and what they can expect from your brand, instead of simple generic writing that they’ll easily forget.

Source: https://www.brafton.com/blog/creation/4-brand-tone-of-voice-examples-to-use-when-building-your-own/ 

What you can’t control is people’s decisions—but you can make the most of the tools the digital world has given and optimize your website to receive customers that want what you’re selling. If you have doubts, just give one of these tips a try and watch for results. You’ll be surprised how simple it often is to generate quality leads.

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