Inbound Marketing Strategist & Consultant
Over 14 years of experience fixing inbound marketing mess for service SMBs. Your marketing isn't working, but you continue to waste time/money on busy work! WHY? There are 3 core reasons why your marketing activities don't work (only 3):
1. You don't know your customers
2. You don't know your value proposition
3. You don't have a measurable & focused strategy
These three items will derail any marketing activities and turn them into busy work, empty calories. I've seen years worth of busy work without any results! Wasteful.
See my reviews first, then give me an hour. You'll walk away with practical and actionable advice guaranteed!
Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)
Inbound Marketing Strategist & Consultant
Basically, conversion rate is goals divided by total visitors and multiplied by 100 to make it into a percentage. So if you have 100 sales and 10,000 visitors, your conversion rate would be: 1%. You need to measure 2 things in your case: 1. Conversion rate for each plugin. 2. Overall conversion rate for all sales. 2% estimate is a very, VERY broad benchmark marketers like to throw out there when asked for average conversion rate. It will be wrong. Here's an article with average conversion rates segmented a bit, it is still not 100% accurate but it might just give you a bit more accuracy. http://www.smartinsights.com/ecommerce/ecommerce-analytics/ecommerce-conversion-rates/ Re-reading the question, I get a feeling that you might be trying to do some planning, for business/marketing plan. It doesn't matter how many members you have, because not everyone will buy and you will also have new visitors converting to members as they buy plugins. Now you might need to segment your conversion rate: 1. Members 2. Visitors 3. Plugins Keep in mind, each plugin will have it's own conversion rate so applying 2% rule for each will be wrong. Some will be popular, other's won't. So. If you want to use 2%, that should be your overall sales conversion rate. Then, you need to guesstimate sales for each plugin within those 2%. Let's say: You have 10,000 visitors, 2% conversion rate would give you 200 sales. Now: - Plugin A = 50 sales = 0.5% conversion rate - Plugin B = 100 sales = 1% conversion rate - Plugin C = 30 sales = 0.3% conversion rate - Plugin D = 20 sales = 0.2% conversion rate These are random numbers, you need to figure out which ones might be more popular than the rest to put some numbers on them. Keep in mind that's for all visitors, members and new visitors. You can segment that to members by looking at how many sales were made by members, rather than everyone. This is just basic overview to help you think it through. Hope that helps.
CMS
Inbound Marketing Strategist & Consultant
For ease of use, go with WordPress. You can tell if it's a WordPress website by looking at the source code. Look at the <head>, theme and plugin files will be there. 99% of WordPress websites will use /wp-content/. So you can simply search source code for that to see if it's WordPress. If it is WordPress, you can find out what theme it's using by finding main stylesheet. Usually, path looks like this: example.com/wp-content/themes/theme-name/style.css In WordPress, theme information is included inside style.css. So when you look at that CSS file, you will know the name of theme, theme author, and sometimes URLs. Hope that helps.
Content Marketing
Inbound Marketing Strategist & Consultant
Well, I'm not a huge fan of popups myself - BUT - being in business you have to try different things to see what works for your business and your target market. Popups DO work, unfortunately. Data proves it. Yes, they are annoying to some people - note many people who might get annoyed with popups have marketing knowledge to some extent - regular folks don't find it that annoying. Dan Zarrella tested popups and found that bounce rate remains the same pretty much, but subscription rate goes up a lot. Judge for yourself http://danzarrella.com/my-data-shows-email-popups-work-and-dont-hurt.html# Am I advocating for the use of popup? No, I'm advocating for understanding your business objectives and knowing your target market. If popup helps you achieve your business objectives without upsetting your target market, than go install a popup and get subscribers. Make sure your offer is superb, and don't spam them with sales emails once they sign up. Respect the subscriber and their inbox. Deliver value! As for services, these are some of the popular ones: - https://optinmonster.com/ - http://pippity.com/ - http://popupdomination.com/ - http://ninjapopups.net/ Just a few to name and check out. Optinmonster has great, easy on the eye optin popups. Remember, TEST, TEST, TEST. If it doesn't work, great. You know it doesn't work. Don't just take people's naysaying and roll with it. They mean it well, but testing is key!
WordPress Development
Inbound Marketing Strategist & Consultant
I don't know any plugins with that specific feature, but I did want to mention this after reading your description. You can target specific pages/posts with CSS, so you can limit text wrap to your about page. You just need to know the page ID. WordPress includes a page specific class in the body tag. It looks like this page-id-123. 123 would be your page ID. See screenshot - http://i.imgur.com/zFldy2T.png So you can simply do something like this: .page-id-123 .slideshow-class { ... } This will limit your CSS changes to the slideshow on this particular page.
Copyright Law
Inbound Marketing Strategist & Consultant
If your needs are not too complex, and relatively standard - what I would recommend is trying out Trust Guard's generators to walk you through creating both documents. Privacy Policy Generator https://www.freeprivacypolicy.com/ Terms of Service Generator http://www.termsofservicegenerator.com/ They are relatively in-depth and cover most situations, unless you're like Facebook. Then you would need an attorney.
Banking
Inbound Marketing Strategist & Consultant
There are a few things you can do to help build trust to get new deposits: 1. Inbound marketing, you need to create a strategy for the long haul to build value and set yourself up to be more than just a bank. This deserves it's own question and answer. 2. Make sure to promote your deposts are FDIC/NCUA insured. 3. Many people were leaving big banks for some of the business practices they engage in, trying to focus and highlight that you are different, that you don't do what other banks do and take care of your customers will help you attract those looking to switch. 4. In addition to having basic banking features, you need to deliver additional convenience features that most banks offer now - online banking, mobile deposits, fee-free ATMs, etc. 5. You really need to figure out your ideal target market, find something niche you can focus on and attract them. Without a huge marketing budget, trying to market yourself to general public will not yield results. If you focus on a niche target market, identify their pain points with banks, and then try to offer an alternative that fixes those pain points will get you those customers. Once you get more customers, word of mouth will spread and you will be able to compete to a wider audience. 6. I understand the reasoning behind getting deposit customers, to fund the loan business, but that's not going to help you get AND keep customers. You do need to be a good bank, with good customer service, with a good portfolio of features. If you get one thing out of what I wrote, that should be this: Figure out what your ideal target market is, identify their pain points with banking needs, and position your bank to fix those pain points. You might want to start with your local neighborhood, and work from there.
Marketplaces
Inbound Marketing Strategist & Consultant
Your support software should cater to your needs, depending on how your business operates. Fiver uses Vanilla forum and Zendesk. Thumbtack uses Zendesk. Not sure about AirBNB, their help center seems to be custom. Depending on how well funded your are, I would recommend starting with a free plan with one of the help desk SaaS products, or even using open source ticketing platform. Then, as your needs grow and you need integration with your marketplace, there's no reason you can't scale and migrate.
Customer Acquisition
Inbound Marketing Strategist & Consultant
What you need is a clear inbound marketing strategy, which includes content marketing (blogging, ebooks, infographics, videos, images, audio, etc.), social media marketing, email marketing and PPC. Heavy emphasis on content marketing. FYI, you should look into this: https://sponsorist.com/ http://www.sponsorhub.com/
Sales
Inbound Marketing Strategist & Consultant
I worked in the event planning space in the past, and now have one of the popular event planning blogs. You have to consider your target market first. Event organizers come in 2 different flavors - independent event organizer working for a client and an employee organizing the event for the company. Knowing which one is which during your sales pitch/conversation is critical because it helps you position your product aligned directly with event planner's goals and objectives to help them understand how your product benefits them, their client and event. They're always on a budget, and a new product requiring an upfront investment without a clear benefit is a risk they are not willing to take to stay within their budget. You need to see what your competitors are doing (if you think you don't have any, than you haven't done your homework well enough) and position your product in a way that 1. it clearly solves event organizers pain/problem, and 2. it sets your product apart from the competition. This really should be your value proposition, which is NOT the same as your vision/mission statement and/or your business description. It needs that ONE unique differentiator to set you apart from the competition and clearly communicate tangible solution to a pain/problem. Many businesses across industries miss this. All in all, you are not communicating tangible, real benefits that solve event organizer's pain/problem to reduce perceived risk of an upfront payment. Tip for the road: Don't use ambiguous language with event organizers, be as specific as possible. P.S. If I had more details as to what your product does and why it requires an upfront payment (and how big it is), I could be more helpful in attracting and selling to event organizers - and understand what pain/problem it solves.
Web development
Inbound Marketing Strategist & Consultant
If you simply aggregating information than I don't see any issues with copyright. But, I would seek permission from the brokers/website owners to make sure business is protected. It doesn't hurt asking for permission, and if it directly benefits them to get leads/sales than none of them will say no.
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