How to Deal With Debt By Doing Business Marketing Smartly?

Published on: 04 June 2018 Last Updated on: 03 September 2024

Small businesses and startups often find it much easier to borrow the lion’s share of their capital. Finding an investor is never completely off the table, but it is not an easy task to do. It is much easier to find lending organizations, who are ready to test out the abilities of the new entrepreneurs to multiply their monies.

Very soon, a time arises when the creditors expect at least a part of their invested money back. Now, this is a time most entrepreneurs know will come, but none are ready to face. It is almost always “too early” or “too sudden.”

Online marking, when you are already in massive debt?

Gaining momentum for a new business not only takes time and effort, but it also takes some serious marketing skills. By marketing, we do not mean TVCs, hoardings, and pamphlets. Those are ancient forms of advertising that no one even notices anymore. If you are in such a situation, what you need is a stable dose of online marketing that will make you visible to your target audience.

Here comes the biggest conundrum in the world. When a business is already nose-deep in debt, can it afford to plunge further in by going in for online marketing? That entirely depends on your perspective of online marketing. Your contenders and contemporaries may think online marketing to be an added expense, but you know what almost 71% of the US population is already online and looking for businesses like you. So, would you deem online marketing as an added expense or a smart investment?

You need a website first :

website

The first step of online marketing is getting your own presence established online. It means an excellent site. By nice, we mean something that’s functional, professional, SEO optimized, and capable of attracting and converting traffic. It should represent your selling theme, services, and products perfectly.

Building a website is no easy feat. You may have the enthusiasm to build a website from scratch, but not all entrepreneurs can have the coding skills and analytical skills needed to construct a working business website. Building a website from scratch can take up a lot of time, and it takes a lot of algorithms to perfect the buying and payment process. Either you can opt for DIY website builders like WordPress or Joomla, or you can surely approach a professional website builder.

A professional website builder will again cost you a few bucks. If you are thinking of building a PHP based website from scratch, it will also take considerable amounts of time. Now, this is not going to be cheap for your business. Therefore, it is not uncommon for entrepreneurs to wonder if going for online marketing is the best way to a debt solution.

The inspiration you need :

So, let us tell you a real-life success story. Initially a nobody, Rank Fishkin started out with his own tech startup and went plummeting into a $500,000 personal debt. From there he is now the owner of the world’s largest SEO, social media, and content marketing website Moz that is netting about $40 million in revenue for the last seven years. That is a success story better than any fairy tale you will ever hear. Was it easy? Did it involve magic spells? No! It required endless hours of smart digital marketing strategies and intelligent investment moves.

The moral of the story is: just because you are nose deep in debt, does not mean you can invest in something new. Digital marketing and social media marketing are the new ways to reintroduce your brand to a new world of potential buyers. People are waiting out there right now to hear from you about your products and services.

How to find them?

Finding the right people at the right time is the only “magic” you need to perform. You will need a few social media listening tools like HootSuite, Buffer, and Social Sprout. These offer a few free services. Their premium services cost less than a Grande. Of course, you will need to work on your social media account before you start listening to what people are saying about your brand online! So get started. Create a professional Facebook page, Twitter account, and at least an Instagram page. You need to post daily. Sometimes twice a day. Engage in regular conversations with your customers. Stay visible and exciting.

If you ever run out of original content, do not shy away from asking your followers for some. Do it tactfully. Introduce new photo contests, quizzes, and polls with attractive rewards. That is the way to create user-generated content. It is the most efficient way to keep your page and wall filled with meaningful content every minute of staying online.

Investing is not the problem, not spending in the right places is :

Online marketing is an investment in every way possible. It is like putting a bait to catch the bigger fish. Using the right keywords in your product descriptions, doctoring your URL to suit the liking of the bots, and including image tags to become visible during Google image searches are all parts of that investment. Still, you may want to consult your personal financial advisor before you take the plunge. You need to be in touch with your financial reality before you can make new investments. Your financial advisor or your debt counselor should help you in understanding the debt program’s details. Your current debt program may have reservations about making new investments or certain kinds of investments unless you pay off a certain fraction of the amount you have borrowed.

Most businesses end up in a fiscal dead-end due to ignorance and bad decision-making, rather than investing in new marketing. We have seen companies drown because they were not adventurous enough and they have always played safe. In 2017, online marketing is not a luxury or an option. It is a compulsion you need to embrace before your competitors take away all your potential clients. Making yourself more visible on the internet will get you more sales and profit. It will help you make more money and pay off your debts faster than usual.

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Best Way To Earn Passive Income In 2020: Email Marketing

If you’ve done it well enough and offered something of value for free, then a bunch of people will opt-in. Now you have their email address and contact info and you can follow up with them for the end of time or until they unsubscribe. So, its important to give out some sort of free gift that you give to people in order to get their email. Okay. Emails- All You Need to Know: So what is your free gift, what are some things that work, really? Free ebooks. I'm sure you've seen those: “download our free report on __” For example, the eBook that I was circulating as a free gift was – “The 11 questions to change your life”. And then if people liked it (in a lot of cases they did), they want more and I give them an offer from my best Journal course, so there you know after they got it all they can get my best Journal course. So this is a very simple, opt-in I put 11 questions down and I give it away for emails (Shopify product research). Now, this right here has brought in probably ten thousand email addresses and, people have moved or they've unsubscribed or I’ve deleted them. Like I talked about earlier, but just from this little book right here I was able to generate a lot of income. Now I have their contact. So whenever I have a new video out, I know that they're interested in self-growth. So maybe if it's a self-growth video, I'll shoot it out to them. Or maybe if it's like a new offer I have, I'll shoot it out to them. Checklist: So anything like this, which is sort of like a free book and I say its more of a checklist, which is the second thing that works really well - you can do a checklist. I know some big entrepreneurs who were like to get the free YouTube checklist. Okay, like the five things to grow your YouTube channel get for free. Checklist and you take their email through email marketing and then you send it to them and it's all automated. Another thing that I'm a big fan of its free membership sites and. For instance, I’ve had one in my Facebook Community for YouTube entrepreneurs. It's pinned in the description there. And so it's like a gear list, a list of stuff you use or a quick start guide and the goal with your free report or your free opt-in or your baits is to get people immediate results. A good question to ask yourself is, what's like something that your audience could take action on open and get immediate results on in like 10 minutes. So you don't want your free report to be like an entire book, right? Authors will say get my first chapter for free, you don't want your free report to be like just mega long, although it is a strategy, I'm not a fan of it. If I get a free gift, I want it to be immediate action. So here is like gear favorites for it and conveniently these are all affiliate links, which is also cool, because even if they don't buy anything from me, down the road and they still get some good info if they want to buy something for themselves. Well, I make a commission on this. So that's a cool way you can cross-pollinate your income streams. I’ve built a multitude of free gifts and distributed them to my subscribers through click funnels something that they can do in 10 minutes or look at in 10 minutes, something that you can put together super quick even in like a Pages document or a Word document or a Google Document and just export it to a PDF. But don't spend too much time on this, the goal is to just get something up that you can start giving away to people to collect their emails through the email marketing. Best Way To Earn Passive Income: Email Marketing Lastly, when it comes to email marketing is for you to have multiple lists. This is because people have different interests. The people who are interested in YouTube, they're not guaranteed to be interested in personal development, for example. They're not, into maybe saving and investing and so if you talk about multiple things on your Channel, blog or your brand you want to segment your list as much as possible. Okay, so just try to narrow it down to people who like tennis or people who like golf or people who like swimming if you have a sports club or something like that, because of the tennis people are getting swimming tips. They're going to unsubscribe. They're going to get pissed off and that makes sense because you signed up for tennis not swimming. So as much as possible whatever that is in your business, try and segment your list as much as possible. And so that's why I have 20 lists of them have 300 people and some of them have 6000 people. Read Also: Pittsburgh Sportsbook Is Now Available At Parx Casino In Bensalem, PA 3 Top Tips to Keep Your Eyes Healthy

Influencer Marketing Tool to Move from Local to Global Market

Influencer marketing is having a high card nowadays as people are indulging more into the Virtual World. As per a survey, there are more than 2.3 Billion active users online and on average active internet users have at least 5 Social Media accounts. So just imagine how much time people actually spend Online. And if the statistics are to be believed an average US citizen spends 1 hour and 18 minutes watching a video online on the Social Media Daily! And other statistics are like this, the Snapchat users watch over 6 Billion videos in a day and the figure on Facebook is around 8 Billion. It is enough stats for any marketer to understand that no matter what niche their Product falls in, their potential buyers are waiting for them online. So the question that remains is How and When to make the approach for the purchase? The best answer for a local brand who wishes to expand their business globally is Influencer Marketing. It is the fastest and most effective way to promote business amongst the Brand’s Global leads. But there are certain things and options that are to be kept in mind for a successful promotion of a brand via Influencer Marketing. Influencer marketing is an important activity of Digital marketing, and here are some statistics of who the most famous Influencers of Social Media were and how much they earned. Selena Gomez ($550,000 per post) Kendall Jenner ($300,000 per post) Kylie Jenner Rihanna Beyoncé Knowles Taylor Swift Selena Gomez tops the chart where each social media post can be worth around $5,50,000. Isn’t that huge? But think of the business people who are paying her would be making from the marketing she does. That’s out of my mind at least. These were enough proof for how effective influencer marketing is, let’s see how a local brand can expand their business via Influencer marketing: There are three options for Influencer Marketing Approach a local brand can make to take the leap from Local to Global: 1. Work as per the Target area and make a progressive approach: This option is for those who don’t want to take a big risk and are a little less willing to spend much in Digital Marketing in the Initial level and then increase once they start getting returns on their investment. It is completely normal for any brand to think like that and for them, the approach towards Influencer can be like this, first make a target area where you want to expand your business. After that find a local Influencer of that area and approach with a mutual win-win situation for both. You make a proposal that they will develop a special scheme and Discounts only for their followers and in return, they do the marketing with a fair compensation paid of course. Once that is done and a brand starts getting a response, move out to other areas with the same strategy and spread the market. This is a long term approach but it has minimal risk and you ought to spend less. The best benefit is the brand won’t be dependent only on one Influencer and if they think the influencer of one specific region is not worth the investment, they can stop doing marketing for that area. So the only loss of business you suffer is from one area and others are still productive. 2. Difficult and Creative Approach to hit a nation or globe: This approach is unique and is totally based on how well you execute the strategy of marketing the approach. The thing is all a brand needs to do is come up with a cause that is sweeping the nation or the globe and start to think creatively in that area. Develop a challenge and form a campaign for the same, now hire a single influencer and ask them to pitch the challenge to other influencers and all you got to do is somehow link your brand with the challenge. This way the influencer will promote your challenge and then all you got to do is sit and enjoy the word spreading across the nation or across the world. The cherry on the cake could be if you are able to profit from the campaign. That can be done by making an announcement that if people who support the cause buy their product, the company will donate some part of the profit to the Government for the eradication or betterment of the cause. The best example is the Ice Bucket challenge, think of one viral challenge and you are done. 3. Third is traditional approach: This is the option where a brand does the traditional approach and contacts an influencer to do the marketing, but there are certain things that need to be taken care of in the campaign. Make sure the campaign is backed with a unique and relative hashtag and the influencer specifically pitches the brand, not just a few tags and messages. Nowadays in platforms, like Instagram people are not concerned about who the Influencer tags but, the effect will be prominent if the Influencer is seen with the product or the person associated with the brand and pitches the brand for sales purpose. Another thing that needs to be kept in mind is the approach to an Influencer is much different than that of a normal sales and promotion approach. Many influencers don't care about the money much but about fame and image more. Make sure to present with something that is beneficial for both the parties. And it is not the sole responsibility of the Influencer to do the marketing of the product. Brand marketers also must put in some efforts and share information on their own social media accounts both personal and professional. Make sure Influencer knows these efforts as it will give a positive boost to the campaign and Influencer’s moral. Thus, above were some statistics and options that are available for a brand to take a leap from Local to Global market with the help of Influencer Marketing. Read More: Improve Your Local SEO Via Content Marketing The New Wave: Conquer Gen Z With Effective Marketing 5 Marketing Tips To Help Grow Your Business On Instagram

Cold Calling Script for Successful Sales Persons

Cold calls are still of great importance even in the modern virtual world. If you are looking for business, one of the most effective sales tactics is cold calling. It is part of the outbound marketing strategy for your business and can deliver great results. A recent survey by DiscoverOrg on 1000 sampled senior executives in the IT industry reveals that 60% of them attended an event or took an appointment after receiving an unsolicited email or cold call. If you fear cold calls, then these tips will not help you to eradicate your fear. However, they will give you a more successful experience in making cold calls. Focus on the Goal Most beginners think that cold calling only deals with making the sale. However, this is not the case. It deals with getting an opportunity to make a sell. The primary reason behind making a cold call is setting an appointment for making the pitch. You can use a cold calling script to help you focus on the goal. Research Your Prospects and Market Before Making the Cold Call Your cold call has to target the right audience. Market research can help you to focus on the right audience. Gather a lot of information about the company or individual you will be calling in advance. This step will give you a significant advantage of being in a position to talk about their business and needs when you make the call. Gartner Group states that an enterprise that has an average of 100 to 500 employees will have approximately seven people making the purchase decisions. Therefore. It is critical to connecting with the right individuals if you need success in your cold calls. Leverage Contacts on Social Media to Enhance Your Chances of Connecting Statistics from Vorsight reveal that if you share a LinkedIn group with the person you are calling, you have a probability of 70% of making a successful cold call. What applies to LinkedIn can also stand to the other social media platforms. You can increase your prospects of receptiveness when you are connected with your audience in social media. Therefore, make sure that you work towards establishing of extending your presence on social media. Prepare Opening Statements for Your Call It is good to organize your thoughts before making a call as this will assist you to avoid the common mistakes while opening the conversation. Making such errors can make the individual you are calling to terminate your call. At this point, the cold calling script comes in handy. This document should act as a guide, and you don’t have to read it out. What Should Be in The Opening Statement of the Cold Call It is essential to organize your conversation on the cold call in a logical manner. You need a greeting, an introduction, reference point that talks about the prospects, advantages of your products and services, and lastly a transition to the dialogue or question. Prepare a Script for the Remaining Section of the Call Put down the benefits of your products or services and reasons that will make your prospects to buy them. Put down some of the possible objections and how you will answer them. It is easy to meander or leave something out if you don’t have a cold calling script. Once more, you will not be reading out the script when you call. The most important thing is to prepare a framework for your cold call in advance. Be ready to answer tough questions about the products and services you are selling. Forbes Insights report that 58% of potential buyers assert that sales representatives cannot adequately respond to their questions. You can get yourself out of this script by preparing an excellent cold calling script. Request for an Appointment During the Cold Call Set the appointment that you request during the conversation at a specific time. For instance, you could ask the prospect whether 11:00 a.m. would be good for him/her. You could also ask your audience whether you can meet them the following week. It is good to get your prospects committing to a meeting in your initial conversation. Don’t leave it vague because this will necessitate a second call for setting up the meeting. The phone call may never take place if you are unable to get to the prospect. Note That Gatekeepers Are Allies and Not Foes Remain polite to anyone who picks up the call or whoever guards the inner sanctum when making the cold call. Have strategies that will make the gatekeeper to come on your side. You could even ask something like ‘I am not sure whether you will be able to assist me?’ and he/she will give you the info that you require like the name of the person you need to talk to or the best time of contacting the prospects. You also need to learn the names of the gatekeeper and remain friendly during the call. Send Your Prospects Unique and Small Promotional Items to Smooth Your Way for the Cold Call This step will break the ice and make the brand to stand out from the crow. Sending out such promotional items will prepare the way for a successful cold call. A question like ‘are you the one who sends me this’ from the prospect may seem to be unnecessary or cheesy but it works well. If Possible, Do the Cold Call Late in the Afternoon or Early Morning The best time to reach the decision-maker directly is late evening or early morning. Research also reveals that Thursday is the best day for cold calls and Wednesday comes in as the second. The same research reveals that Tuesday is the worst but this can vary from one person to another. Remain Persistent 80% of new sales will come after you make the fifth contact yet most salespersons give up after making the second call. Don’t be the kind of person who gives up so easily. It is good to learn to try again if you really want to make a sale. Above all, practice, practice, and keep on practicing and you will become an expert in cold calling. You will always get better even if you find no fun in making cold calls. With constant practice, you will develop effective selling techniques. Therefore, get your script ready and the call list and begin to reach out to your phone. There are several people out there who would like to do business with you but you need to let them know about your brand first. Read Also: FinTech Is Making It Easier To Shop The World’s Biggest Sales This Is Why Social Media Is Essential In The B2B Sales Process 5 Actionable Mobile Marketing Tips That Drive Sales

How to Deal With Debt By Doing Business Marketing Smartly?