There are no shortcuts. Keeping it plain and simple in 6 easy steps you can grow an audience on and offline for your budding startup. Note that you do not have to do all six at the same time, rather they can be done simultaneously or concurrently.

• Guest feature

At the moment you may not have 1 million or 5 million followers across social, but some upcoming tech blog has 10k or 20k followers with huge engagement. How about writing a blog post or making a guest feature on their website for free. This way you are adding value to a even large audience and your existing audience at the same time. It’s a win-win.

• Build a big social media tribe

This is not hard to do when it is done with focus and intention. Facebook and Twitter were the early targets for bloggers and start-ups as they provide free traffic. Today Facebook is harder to get that free traffic for bootstrapping growth but Twitter is still allowing free organic traffic. Many online video bloggers discovered that YouTube was a great source of traffic that turned up from search and also building a tribe of followers on YouTube.

• Relentless content marketing

Creating content around your topic and market is not new but it does work well. It also has a few benefits. It creates credibility and trust in your industry, it also improves your search engine rankings and it brings in referral traffic as people discover your awesome content and then talk about it on their blogs and then link to you. Now you may say you aren’t a writer. But practice will quite often overcome this obstacle.

• Write a book

This may seem daunting but it doesn’t have to be “War and Peace” at 1,000+ pages. Something from 50-100 pages can be enough. This can also be done before your day job, on weekends or late at night. In this digital world,  it is also easy to self publish a book on Amazon. You can also make hard copies of the books for as low as NGN 500.00. Bloggers and digital entrepreneurs that have done this well include Mark Schaefer, Guy Kawasaki and Mike Stelzner.

• Work with influential bloggers

Bloggers today often have larger audiences and bigger distribution than many popular magazines and newspapers. They also are global and have millions of passionate followers. Using bloggers has become more widely  adopted in the past couple of years but it has been done for the last 9-10 years by the early adopters such as Buffer, Mint and AppSumo as far back as 2007. Most digital entrepreneurs develop a product, launch it and then try working out the marketing later. Business success is in planning and executing the marketing and the product in parallel.

These are few of many steps that can be used to build your audience online. Should you need help with the above steps and implementing it in your business, do not hesitate to contact us. Visit www.colorteam.co today and drop us a message.

Hi, meet Eve, Earths’ first product marketing manager. You ask why? She successfully convinced Adam to eat the apple despite the ridiculous “high price”’ tag on it and now look at where we are today, but that’s a story for another day. Brands can create great market differentiation, quickly convert prospective customers to buyers and enhance their marketing tactics by simply creating effective and captivating CTAs (Call-to-action), one that the customer simply cannot resist, but how?

Marketing is the art and science of finding prospective buyers, that is people who are willing to purchase what you are offering. This is highly important as no business can survive without people being aware of its existence and what it offers, but what is awareness without actually purchases right? This is where Call-to-Action comes in!

WHAT IS A CALL TO ACTION?

A call to action (CTA)  is a simple, clear and concise directional statement that drive prospective customers to perform specific actions that guide the achievement of a particular goal(s) when interacting with your product, usually actions that lead to sales; the favourite phrase for any business owner, How exciting is it to use this simple tactic to spur profit maximisation?

A simple example of a Call to Action is this Buy button below, the customer upon seeing this immediately knows to click on it to make purchases, should your customer be looking for this button on your product page? We guess not

Other examples of CTA’s that can be used to communicate

“The more you engage with customers the clearer things become and the easier it is to determine what you should be doing” – John Russell

IMPORTANT POINTS TO NOTE WHEN CREATING CTAs

1. Aligning the customers’ satisfaction with the business goals enhances the creation of effective call to actions.

2. You don’t want to make your customers think or create an unclear message that makes the customer disappear, Customers are less likely to revisit a product that is confusing, requires deep thinking and difficult to interact with, Good customer experience drives sales.

3. An understanding of your prospects and their needs guides the creation of Call-to-Actions as it aims to seamlessly direct and make prospective customers do what you want that satisfies them as well.

4. Life itself is not a walk in the park, so how about making it easy for your visitors to navigate your website and social platforms. You can achieve this through directional messages, customer testimonials and clear messaging that will make your prospects more comfortable with your product and willing to make a purchase.

More businesses are shifting to digital platforms and it has become increasingly important to get customers to perform specific actions, clicks, input messages until their desired action is fulfilled and sales are made which inevitably increases the effective marketing activities.

Remember “The best marketing doesn’t feel like marketing.”  – Tom Fishburne

The efficacy of Call to Action (CTA) can be measured with A/B testing which determines the most utilized clicks. The Ultimate goal of businesses is profit maximization and this can only occur when the customer makes purchases which your call to action enhances.

At Merlotek Media we understand the importance of incorporating this into creating digital solutions for our clients.
Visit colorteam.co today for more