How to write an effective social media post

StickyGeneral,

Social media has become an essential tool for businesses to expand their audience and increase sales. Using social media effectively can make a business in a big city like Baltimore gain an edge over its competitors. Writing an effective social media post can help you engage with your followers and attract new customers. In this blog post, we will discuss how to write an effective social media post that will expand your audience and help to bring in sales.

1. Know Your Target Audience

Before you start writing your social media post, it’s important to know who your target audience is. Who are you trying to reach with your post? What are their interests and pain points? Understanding your audience will help you craft a message that resonates with them and encourages engagement.

2. Keep it Short and Sweet

Social media users have short attention spans, so it’s important to keep your posts short and sweet. Aim for 80-100 characters for Twitter, 40-70 characters for Facebook, and 1-2 sentences for Instagram. Use bullet points or emojis to break up text and make your post more visually appealing.

3. Use Attention-Grabbing Headlines

Your headline is the first thing that users will see when scrolling through their feeds, so it’s essential to make it attention-grabbing. Use powerful words and phrases to create urgency or excitement. For example, “Don’t miss out on our limited-time offer!” or “Discover the secret to perfect skin with our new product!”

4. Add Visuals

Visuals are an important component of social media posts. Use high-quality images or videos that are relevant to your message. Research has shown that posts with visuals receive higher engagement than those without.

5. Include a Call-to-Action

A call-to-action (CTA) is a statement that encourages users to take a specific action, such as “Buy Now” or “Learn More”. Including a CTA in your social media post can help drive sales and engagement. Make sure your CTA is clear and specific.

6. Use Hashtags

Hashtags are a way to categorize your post and make it more discoverable by users searching for specific topics. Use relevant hashtags that are related to your post and your brand. Avoid using too many hashtags, as it can make your post look cluttered and spammy.

7. Be Authentic and Engaging

Social media is all about building relationships and engaging with your audience. Be authentic and show your personality in your posts. Ask questions or start a conversation to encourage engagement. Respond to comments and messages in a timely manner to show your followers that you value their input.

8. Test and Analyze

Not every social media post will be a hit. It’s important to test different types of posts and analyze their performance to see what resonates with your audience. Use analytics tools to track engagement, clicks, and conversions. Use this information to refine your social media strategy and improve your posts over time.

Conclusion

In conclusion, writing an effective social media post that expands your audience and brings in sales requires a combination of factors, including understanding your target audience, using attention-grabbing headlines, adding visuals, including a call-to-action, using relevant hashtags, being authentic and engaging, and testing and analyzing your posts. With these tips in mind, you can create social media posts that drive engagement and help you achieve your business goals.

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When is a Website Useless?

StickyStrategy

What Not to Do

We have been working with NZ Used Appliances. When you go to their website, it is available to be claimed. Obviously this doesn’t help much. When people try to go to the website they don’t know if they are out of business or if there is a technical glitch.

What the story is, is that they paid someone to create and run the website for them. They got no leads from it and stopped paying them. Just having a website is not enough. It is like putting out an Open sign on a store that no one ever drives past. No one will know it is there.

What They Did Right

They created a Google My Business page so that they could show up on the map in searches. Many people make a mistake here by doing the bare minimum. Google gives brownie points for filling out the information as completely as possible. The listing will rank higher that way. NZ did a pretty good job filling out their listing.

What to Do Better

For the map listing, getting more citations is better. A citation is where another website lists your name, address, and phone number. This could be a directory, a social media site and other possibilities.

The next thing is content. Pictures are great for customers to see what you are selling or doing but search engines like Google and Bing rely on words to figure out what a website is about. The reason so many Wikipedia articles rank so high is that they have a lot of content and are very authoritative. The more helpful information and pages you provide the better. Don’t just copy content. Duplicate content is not looked upon favorably and can get you listing pushed down in the listings.

The other key item is the number of websites linking to yours. Why is that important? It is kind of like a popularity contest. If someone doesn’t like your website, they are unlikely to put a link to your website from theirs. So the more websites that link to your website, the more likely that people find your website worthwhile. Search engines want to give people a good search experience so more links usually means higher rankings.

However, not all links are created equal. A brand new website with no history linking to you will not have much power to help you. However, Wikipedia, NBC, NY Times or a similar website linking to yours will have a huge effect. It can have the same effect as links from tens or hundreds of small websites without much power.

Social Media and Advertising

The above was about getting a website seen in organic rankings. However, there are also strategies for getting seen on the various social media networks like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. That is for another article.

It is also possible to advertise on Google, Bing, Facebook and others. There are a number of strategies to accomplish this and they vary depending on where you are advertising, what you are advertising and to whom. It is possible to sink a lot of money into online advertising very quickly but it is also possible to make a lot of money if you know what you are doing. Once again, that is a whole other article or more likely articles.

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Columbia, Maryland

StickyGeneral

Columbia, MD is a created city built by James Rouse and the Rouse Company. It was built on farm land in Howard County halfway between Baltimore, MD and Washington DC. Rouse is hailed as a visionary and a great person but not everything done always met the smell test.

My cousin and aunt (great aunt actually) had a farm in Ellicott City and what many people now would consider part of Columbia. I remember going there as a kid and having lemonade on the back brick patio sitting on nice cool spring metal chairs that were very comfortable. Then we would go and see the horses and visit the barn that was teeming with cats. They didn’t have much of a mice or rat problem.

One incident I will never forget. I was running through a field and stopped abruptly just in time. There was a large spider web inches from where I had managed to stop. I has almost run right through it. In the center was the biggest spider I had ever seen. It was over an inch long and the body had yellow and black markings and when you added in the legs it was several inches across. It was a common garden spider, an orb weaver. And no this isn’t a fish story. I looked it up and that is how big they are.

Well, when you build a city in the middle of farm land, the roads can’t handle the traffic so the roads in the area were being widened and new ones were being built. I am guessing the builders never had to pay their fair share of what it cost the county and the state to do all that road work and other infrastructure work. But that is a common problem not unique to Columbia.

Although my aunt and cousin fought it, they put a road through part of their farm. They were convinced that someone had been paid off to put the road through their property since they were fighting the Rouse company. I tend to doubt that one.

Once I was older I found out more about the situation. There were salesmen for the Rouse Company that came around and made offers to buy properties. They treated my aunt and cousin like two little old ladies who weren’t very bright and didn’t have two nickels to rub together. Wrong. They were incredibly bright and well read. The salesmen tried to tempt them by saying, think of what you could do once you sell your land, you could travel to Europe and other exotic locations. This was not an enticement. More of an insult. My aunt and cousin had plenty of money to travel when they wanted to and they had.

They also paid for lawyers to help out neighbors to fight the Rouse Company. There were several with apple orchards who finally gave up and sold. Condos and apartments had been built next to their properties and the kids would come in and steal the apples. Because of the theft their profit margins were down and they decided to sell.

When James Rouse died my cousin was so pleased with herself that she had outlived her nemesis. When my cousin died we found the check for the land that was claimed by eminent domain for when the road was put through their property. My aunt and cousin had never cashed it they had such strong feelings.

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Ranking in Search Engines

StickyMarketing

We have been working with a nearby company, Annapolis Clean Carpet to help them move up in the ranking in the different search engines. We have had some problems with it at first, but let me tell you the general idea.

Black Hole

No one truly knows what the algorithm is that the search engines use to figure out ranking. They don’t want you to know it because otherwise everyone would try to game it and that would defeat the purpose of their algorithm. People try and game it as it is of course, but the search engine algorithms get smarter all the time.

It used to be that keywords were important (they still are), but everyone started doing what is known as keyword stuffing. They would just have a page of keyword after keyword and there was no sense to it except for trying to rank. Now the search engines penalize you if you do that.

Content

Some of the things that help with ranking are common sense. One of those is content. Content can mean both pictures and text, but for search engine ranking, text is by far more important. The more text and the more pages the better. It is also important to include as many keywords and keyword phrases as possible. These are the things that people type into the search engine when they are looking for your service or product.

Citations and Social Media

Citations basically involves your name, address and phone number. It is important to have this consistent from one site to another. There are many sites like Yelp, Yellow Pages and dozens of others that are the modern equivalent of phone books. People go to those sites looking to see what reviews businesses have received or just looking to find companies in the area. If you aren’t in them, you won’t be found. Also, the search engines like it the more you are in. It is for the search engines that you need to be consistent in how consistently you are listed. Similarly, there are social sites like Bing and Yahoo where the same concepts apply.

Links

The more people link to your website, the more the search engines like it. It is like a popularity vote. If you don’t have any links, the search engines will not take your site seriously. They want a good experience for their users and want to send them to sites that other people think are worthwhile. So, the more links the better, but also what type of links is important. If the link to your website are from Wikipedia and NBC and places like that, even if there aren’t many, that will really boost your ranking. With Annapolis Clean Carpet, we think we had some issues with links, but we will never know for sure.

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How to Break the Sales Plateau Glass Ceiling

Leverage

Have you reached that point where your sales efforts bear no fruit? When you do everything by the book but still feel the results you get are not proportionate to the time and resources you put in?

Plateau Glass Ceiling

Well, being the results oriented person you are, you have thought of downsizing and having a small sales force that do more with little expenses.

However, even downsizing isn’t the answer because it will leave your sales team fatigued and disengaged. Also, downsizing comes with a permanent fear of “you don’t know who is next”. People working in permanent fear of job loss shift their attention to their career advancement plans— not profits for the company.

Sales is important, it is what keeps the diesel engines running, workers coming, and landlords away. If you have hit a sales plateau, a quick fix isn’t what you are looking for— you need a sustainable jumpstarting strategy to keep the juice flowing.

Here are 3 tips to break the sales plateau glass ceiling

1. Pay attention to the process

One major reason that get most sales teams stuck is because the leadership is focusing on the results rather than the process. In the end, the only things that you remain with is a high expectation and a sense of entitlement to results.

You might say, “But I pay them to do the job, I should get the results”, but do you pay attention to the efforts they put in?

In his book of strategy, The Art of War, Sun Tzu teaches that the war isn’t won in the battlefield, but every war is won before it is fought. It is healthy routines that fuel the pursuit.

Ask yourself these questions; How will I keep my sales people motivated to keep the chase alive? Is there an accepted reward and punishment strategy in place? What are our daily/weekly/monthly/yearly sales targets?

Investing in the process, helps you forecast and keep your expectations in proportion with periodic milestones. It is by focusing on the process that you will know loose bolts to tighten and broken conduits to fix.

2. Keep Learning

The shifting business grounds requires that you keep learning. The market dynamics do not stay the same for years, in fact, with social media, email marketing and all the ‘new generation’ lead strategies, what worked last year might not work today!

You must therefore keep learning to be in favourable position when the complacent business owners are getting a sales snag.

Grant Cardone, a best-selling author of many marketing books says; “Even a veteran sales person needs to continue to read, educate and train in order to keep skills sharp,”

To retain your clients you need what works to satisfy them, and to gain new ones, you must know what works in getting their attention and how to meet their demands.

3. Make Prospecting a priority

How serious are you prospecting? Without prospecting you remain with the only customers you have had for years, and while it is important to prioritize customer retention, it is even more important to add new customers.

Prospecting helps you land customers who will be more profitable as you have created credibility serving your old clients.

Most importantly, prospecting keep your sales force in the ‘hunting spirits’, it kills complacency and is a motivating factor to your sales team.

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10 Ways to Claim Tax Deductions

General
Tax Deduction

You can decrease your taxable income (and keep more money to yourself) without flouting IRS laws. According to Tax Foundation statistics, most Americans do not claim their tax deductions because they think that the procedure is too complicated or they are just unaware. Here is a list of 10 scenarios that are eligible for a tax write-off.

1. Charity

You do not have to own a charitable organization to qualify for tax deductions under the IRS’s Publication 78. If you are involved in any charitable work such as baking for a school’s fundraiser, you can write off those expenses.

2. Sales or state income taxes

If you have a choice, opt to deduct state income tax. See if your state has the sales tax or income tax and use the IRS table to make your calculations. Also, add any big purchase you make such as vehicles and building materials to the sales tax rate.

3. Casualty and theft

The federal government relieves you the pain of unexpected business losses through fire, floods, theft, or other unforeseen circumstances by allowing for deductions. Things that benefit your business such as body oil for a bodybuilder in a competition also fall into this category.

4. Health Insurance premium

Itemize your medical expenses that exceed 7.5% of your adjusted gross income for deductions. If you are responsible for your health insurance coverage, IRS might give you 100% of your premium cost.

5. Lifetime learning

Even after high school, you can claim tax deductions on education expenses. You can get up to $2,000 per year through the lifetime learning credit. However, at higher income levels, this benefit does not apply.

6. Home mortgage interest

Every year, you can deduct 100 percent of the amount of interest paid on your mortgage.

7. Real estate taxes and points

The fees charged by banks to get a home loan are converted into points and are tax deductible. If you are refinancing your mortgage, you deduct the points over the life of the loan.

8. Self-employed Social Security

It is enough hassle paying for social security and Medicare taxes when you are self-employed. Get some relief by claiming 7.65 percent deductions from your income taxes.

9. Looking for work

Hunting for your first job does not entitle you for any deductions. Once you get a placement and are moving, you can claim your deductions. If you lose your job, the costs of looking for new work in the same industry exceeding 2% of your adjusted gross income qualify for a write-off.

10. Student loan paid by parents/guardians

Money spent by your mom or dad to your student loan is eligible for a tax write-off if you are not claimed as a dependent. The amount goes up to $2,500 of the interest paid.

With these deductions you can have a little extra change in your pocket.

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Emotional Intelligence to Increase Sales

Marketing,

Emotional Intelligence, The book reveals how to have an impact on your performance

Are you in the sales after completing your schooling? Are you learning all the selling techniques from the books, attending seminars and taking guidelines of successful sales teams? Yet unable to reach your goals and turn productive. The problem is in the atmosphere and state of mind you create than the sales techniques knowledge. It is time you work on emotional intelligence.

Emotional Intelligence is a study that examines why and how our conscious, the process of logical decision making differs from our unconscious emotional triggers leading to a decision and mindset that can hinder the desired result accomplishment.  Emotional intelligence impacts your performance, have you heard about it, if not read this book mentioned below here.

‘Emotional Intelligence for Sales Success’ is a resource for the sales team leaders and sales professionals. This book offers points on things to look for and apply while hiring and training sales staff who can lead to more productivity, higher retention levels and job satisfaction.

Colleen Stanley is an author of ‘Growing Great Sales Teams’ , a monthly columnist for Business Journals and co-author of ‘Motivational Selling’. This book is a guide to the sales field and its application. Colleen Stanley, the author, President and founder of SalesLeadership, Inc, offers techniques identifying emotional triggers that have set off and can be recognized in your prospects. This book has concrete examples of how these triggers may be dealt and you are more productive in developing trust, business relationships and eventually increase the sales success. Colleen has illustrated with examples of how people miss excellent business opportunities due to lack of awareness about the principals of emotional intelligence.

Sales deals with handling stressful selling situations and there is a need for the emotions to run the sales meet using influence skills and effective selling techniques. Actually, the non-qualified and non-productive selling behaviors include product dumping, discounting, etc and these also product sales results.

Nevertheless, Colleen Stanley says that it is your ability to assess, identify and control emotions that reveals a direct impact on the sales. Elevating the emotional intelligence quotient with respect to sales helps in selling and making in less time full margin bigger deals.

Precisely, a straight forward explanation is to understand your hot buttons, when and why you react and what hinders you professionally and personally. Wisely handling your emotions helps in working better and having the desired approach to achieve the sales numbers.

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Leverage Yourself

Leverage,

Most small business people, especially when you are starting out are cash strapped and basically have to do everything or at least know how to do everything.

Time Limits to Growth

But, there are only 24 hours in a day and you can only do so much. How do you leverage yourself. Because if you don’t figure out how to multiply your efforts, your business is never going to grow very large. It is going to be limited by your abilities.

If it is all based on your work and it is a service business, then the amount you can charge per hour limits how much you can make. And if you can’t work, you can’t make anything.

Similarly, if you are selling a product, there is only so much you can sell, make and ship before you are maxed out. The only way to make more money is to sell more expensive products or hire someone to help.

Where is the Value Added?

So you need to figure out where you can make the most difference in the company, where you add the most value and then see who you can hire (part time, full time, contract basis) that can do some of the work so you can focus on the more important things and on the business.

As soon as possible, you want to hire someone to do the $10/hour jobs so you can focus on tasks that are $100 or$200 or $500/hour in return.

What are You Good At? What Do You Enjoy Doing?

Some things you aren’t good at, others you don’t like because you haven’t learned how or aren’t good at. Some things simply need to be done. Others, you might need to spend some time learning. Once you have practiced something you might find you are good at it.

One of my daughters growing up would try something once and say I am no good at it, I give up, I am not doing this. (Other things she would tackle till she persevered.) Part of the problem was that she wanted to do things perfectly the first time and didn’t like to fail. When this was pointed out, she would get on with things and do fine.

If you are better at technical aspects, then you might want to find someone for sales. If you are great at sales, you might want to find someone who is very organized and can run day to day operations.

Even though you are paying people to do different aspects of the business you will grow larger and faster than if you try to do everything yourself to save money.

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Educational Selling

Marketing

I have heard this elsewhere but it was brought home again in the book “The Ultimate Sales Machine” by Chet Holmes. The model that he touts in large parts of the book is also similar to how many people sell on the internet.

Essentially the Strategy that Many Use on the Internet

Google uses this model in many ways. For them it isn’t so much about providing education as information, which is not that different. By offering something of value for free, they attract a large audience that then becomes attractive to sellers and so Google makes its money on advertising. They are able to provide advertisers with more targeted advertising than almost any method of advertising in the past.

Many other people use education to sell on the internet. They offer a free ebook, free information on their website, a free webinar with information that is useful to people to attract them. Then they offer a subscription or more in depth offering for a fee and that is how they make their money.

Expand Your Audience

What Chet Holmes points out in the book is that usually only about 3% of people are looking for your product or service at any time. There are a lot more that might be helped by it and save money using it but they don’t realize it and therefore aren’t looking for it.

Educate and Direct

If you advertise or promote your product or service, you will attract the 3% but not the other group which is many times that size. It is just not on their radar screen. However, if you offer education that helps them, they will pay attention. Things like, 7 Things You Can Do to Double Your Sales, or 10 Things You Should Know About Indoor Pollutants in Your Home, etc. Then you can pick compelling information that also makes a case for your services or products.

By doing this you are not only appealing to the 3% but to the 30 or 40% of the population who probably have need of your product but don’t know it.

You can do this through advertising, meetings, trade shows and other means.

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Strategy Ideas #1

Strategy

Tuck Business School is usually ranked in the top 5 in the country. Its professors are well known in the area of business strategy and have come up with some important ideas and concepts.

Vijay

One of them is Vijay Govindarajan. He grew up in India in a lower middle class neighborhood in a one bedroom house with his parents and five brothers and sisters. Electricity couldn’t be counted on. He figured that India had few resources and lots of problems. If he wanted to get ahead he was going to have to be innovative. He feels that the only way to move up, either as a person or a corporation is to be creative and innovate.

Vijay went to Harvard Business School on a Ford Foundation scholarship. The scholarship required that he spend two full years in India after graduation. But then he got a job offer from Harvard Business School and they required him to start work one week before the full two years were up. Neither Harvard or the Ford Foundation would budge and Vijay had to pay the Ford Foundation back for his business school education.

He was struggling to get by when a more senior professor suggested that he try doing some consulting on the side. He did and loved it and found that it provided a great synergy to his teaching and research. He was able to get in and see what companies were doing and not just do things from an ivory tower more theoretical approach.

Reverse Innovation

One key idea this has led to is Reverse Innovation. Reverse innovation is the process of inventing or designing products for use in underdeveloped or emerging markets. Then you bring those products back to the wealthier countries.

Example / Inspiration

He came up with this idea of course while consulting. In this case, he was consulting with GE. He saw that they had developed an ultrasound for the Chinese market that only cost $5,000 and was portable. In the US an ultrasound machine with similar function costs $300,000. GE brought this machine to the wealthier countries and sold a ton of them. But they didn’t understand what they had done because it was such a small event in such a large company.  Vijay picked up on this and used it as a focus for his research. He also told GE’s CEO Jeffrey Imelt about his discovery and Imelt jumped on the idea. He made it a major focus for the following year.

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Sales & Leads

Marketing

My mentors, Dan & Brad spoke last night and stressed that the key to a successful business is leads and sales. You might add a third, which is conversion. Just because you have a lead doesn’t guarantee a sale, so conversion is important as well. Although if you have enough leads you can overcome poor conversion.

Play to Your Strengths

They pointed out that some people are able to excel at both, but many people have a knack for one or the other. So team up and let each person do what they are strongest at. One generating leads and the other closing business. Sometimes the whole is more than the sum of the parts. Each of you should make more money teaming up.

We were also reminded that business owners don’t care how many ads you run, whether they are in position 1 on a Google search or anything else like that. They care that they are getting leads, making sales and growing their business. If you can deliver leads, they aren’t going to care what position they are in.

Listen and Question vs. Pitch

Find out from them how many leads they are getting currently. How much is an average sale and what is the average margin or profit per sale. Then you can figure out where they are now. Then ask given their current resources, how much extra capacity do they have to do more work. If they are maxed out, that is a different discussion.

Most companies have more capacity to do work that they an utilize. Then take that number and multiply out and figure out if they could get the leads and the sales, how much extra in sales and profit that would be. Then ask them what they are doing to get there. If they are just going to do more of the same, they might not make it to that goal.  They need a new channel and strategy to bring in more sales. That would be you!

Listen, Diagnose, Prescribe

By finding where there pain is and where their dreams and vision are you are gaining information and leverage so you can better sell them but more importantly so you can better help them. If it doesn’t work for both parties you probably won’t make a sale. So don’t just pitch them and sound like everyone else touting why they are great. Listen, diagnose, and then prescribe.

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