Founder of KyLeads and SEO Expert
Content strategist, serial entrepreneur, and Founder of KyLeads. Love hate relationship with the internet and can rank (almost) anything in the search engines.
Social Media Management
Founder of KyLeads and SEO Expert
There is no best - only ideal for your situation. You've not given much detail. Do you want to automatically repost and curate or do you want to make every post you publish? For our company https://doxflowy.com - we use Hootsuite and we don't publish all the time. For others, Buffer may be a better option. Just go with a cheap tool that has a UI you like. They're all more or less the same these days.
Startups
Founder of KyLeads and SEO Expert
Please please please, use what's already available. I'll give you an example, we use https://spark.laravel.com for billing, https://signaturegenerator.co to generate signatures, https://solidframework.net to convert documents, and probably a dozen other software solutions to create ours. There's no where that says you need to use 100% proprietary code. Usually, this is done when you can't find anything opensource to tweak or if what's available is too expensive for your budget. If there's an option, 9/10 startups stand on the shoulders of giants by using what's available. This is especially true if the market hasn't been validated in any meaningful way.
Start-ups
Founder of KyLeads and SEO Expert
That should be done right at the beginning right after you’ve successfully completed your beta testing and have ironed out the major bugs. I see many founders worried about customers leaving if they start charging. Newsflash, if they’re not paying then they aren’t your customer. The only time this may not be applicable is if you have a hybrid model. Squareup.com doesn’t charge immediately but they get paid by facilitating transactions. https://usefulpdf.com doesn’t charge immediately either but it’s partially ad supported. You should charge immediately and ask for more money than you think the product is worth right now. Most founders underprice by a huge margin.
Social Media Marketing
Founder of KyLeads and SEO Expert
There are countless methods you can use to grow your brand on both the platforms. There's been a spate of bots and growth services (see more here: https://www.growthboost.co/blog/buzzoid-review/) getting shut down by Instagram and, at times, they can also affect your account. Here are a few of the best strategies for organic growth on Instagram. Partnering with other accounts to do cross-promotion. This was referred to as S4S in the past but with Instagram limiting views, it may not be as effective today. You can run a followers campaign depending on your budget but just know that it takes quite a few followers to make a meaningful impact and you may be better off focusing on organic growth channels. Upload consistently. Of course, everyone knows this but try and aim for every other day at the least. Once a day if you can. It's social media so things move fast. Focus on an intermediate action. Instead of buying now, it may be better to run a direct response lead gen campaign. Videos are still getting great reach on the platform. Stories are even better. If you can get in your IG stories every day then you'll be in a really good position to engage with your audience and drive meaningful revenue. If it can't be you then get a dedicated person to do it for you. Try to mix it up. Engagement posts like polls and the lifestyle your business champions should be more prominent than advertising focused content.
Webinars
Founder of KyLeads and SEO Expert
A cold email campaign - no? Too much work, too little return. The timeframe is too long. The longer the period between when people sign up and when the webinar is held - the fewer people will attend. At the point of sign up, people are excited. Over time, that excitement wanes and you're left with folks who're busy and may have (what they consider) better things to do with their time so your webinar and the reminders get pushed to the backburner. The single most impactful thing you can do is shorten the time between registration and the actually webinar. Keep it at one week and see how it goes. A tool like WebinarJam (see more here: https://www.growthboost.co/blog/webinarjam-review/) gives a lot of flexibility. If you don't mind an automated webinar then a tool like EverWebinar will allow you to do just in time webinars. That is, within 15 minutes of signing up, the presentation starts. That can boost your attendance rate to over 50%.
Podcasting
Founder of KyLeads and SEO Expert
I'd agree with the other answers here that in the beginning, your best bet will be to leverage the audience of your guests. There's a trick to doing it properly. Instead of just sending them a link to tweet or letting them know when the episode is live, it's important to make it dead simple for them to share. You can create sound bites and upload it to Soundcloud and it'll play directly in the twitter feed. You can create custom graphics for them to share on social media. Get creative here. Another thing you can do is launch a giveaway to promote the podcast. Entry couldbe something like subscribing and leaving a comment on a specific episode. Some podcast platforms (see more here: https://www.kyleads.com/blog/podcast-hosting/) also have built in directories that help distribute your podcast further. You may even consider using cheap social ads to build up that engagement and social proof. Social ads paired with a landing page (see more here: https://www.kyleads.com/learn/landing-pages/builder-software/) that focuses on either capturing email subscribers or podcast subscriptions would be a good investment. You want to try to get over that initial hump of about 1,000 regular listeners. From there you may start to see compounding effects. Hope this helps.
Survey Design
Founder of KyLeads and SEO Expert
There are many ways to go about this but the best method is to simply sit down and interview customers who've bought from you in the past. It may be necessary to give them an incentive but don't lead with that. Initially, just ask to have a conversation because you want to improve the service you're providing. If you don't get enough takers there then you can add an incentive. When interviewing your customers isn't an options, then turn to surveys. Specifically, likert scale surveys (more here: https://www.kyleads.com/blog/likert-scale/). Likert scale surveys allow you to gauge sentiment. For example, you could ask how often do you go to the gym: - very often - often - Neither often nor seldom - seldom - very seldom Using that information, you can quantify the habits of your audience as a whole. Also use open-ended questions in conjunction with your Likert scale questions so respoondents can go deeper into their feelings about specific topics. Taken together, you'll get a good idea of their habits, likes, and dislikes. If your current customer base doesn't provide enough responses (at least 100), then you may want to use ads or personal outreach on a platform like LinkedIn to get those insights.
Stats
Answers
Calls