4 Free Ways to Promote Your New Content

Placing greater efforts on crafting a killer header and writing great content would be worthless, if you do not promote the content that you create.

It's similar to planning for a Friday night party, but not inviting anyone to the party. If you take the time to promote and build excitement, you might attract people who are interested in attending.

This is the same with your content and gives you the best chance of success.

Here's a big tip. Don't promote your content to everyone. It's like inviting your mom to a guy's night out. You should target each of your content that you create to a specific buyer persona.

Hubspot has a great guide on how you can easily and step-by-step identify your buyer persona. Start this first before you begin to promote your content.

Below you will find the 4 free ways we use to promote our content. 

1. Promote Consistently on Social

At every possible time, we promote our content through our social channels to keep each post fresh. Make sure you include an image, link and a hashtag.

2. Notify Current Audiences through Email

Email is often overlooked as a source for inbound leads. We've covered interesting points on Email Signatures and what to avoid here.

Another great read is some neat tricks for email you can implement here.

One other use for your content through email is to approach new prospects by providing them with valuable information, and establish authority to assist with your sales efforts.

3. Recycle Content

Old content can be repurposed, with a new header, improved more in-depth content to make it more helpful for new readers.

It can cover more resources and provide better value to the readers.

4. Repurpose Content Into New Formats

A great trick to increase your content's reach you can repurpose your content into other formats, such as a slideshare deck, Pinterest post, or podcast.

Are there any other free ways you currently use to promote your new content?

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Cheat Sheet on Which Website Changes to Prioritise

There are generally two ways websites change, either big or small.

There is the revolutionary change requiring a periodic 4 to 5 year redesign and there are the little evolutionary changes that happen in between the revolutionary change that are the enhancements, and support handling.

Some changes to websites are simple content changes, while others are serious maintenance normally requiring new features and integration.

There are millions of things you can do with a website and each of them has a cost and benefit:

1. The time/effort/costs needed to make changes varies in time. It can be finished quickly or can take months of planning, programming and testing.
2. The results of the websites changes also vary wildly while some have a huge impact on marketing outcomes while others have none at all.

Adding a new title tag or modifying it, adding a new section or dropping a video has a return (benefit) on investment (time and cost).

Together they can be plotted on a chart showing the relationship between benefits with time and costs.

Time and Money: The costs of website updates

Websites are magic, it allows anyone to interact with your business globally. However, it still does need time, and money or both.

If you have an in-house marketing team, with a solid content management system (CMS), then changes to texts and images don't incur additional expenses. These are basically free website enhancements to the company.

Big design and programming changes normally mean calling your web developer.

Here is a quick overview of possible website enhancements and whether marketing time or there is a required investment into design or development incurred:

Relationship between traffic, conversions and website changes: the benefits

Before making any changes to your current website you should ask this question.

What is the outcome you expect to achieve out of this change? Is it to enhance your brand, gain better conversions or you are responding to feedback you have received from your users?

Each and every investment into your website should align with a goal.

These business goals lead to website needs, where commerce sites are usually higher sales transactions or information sites are for lead generation through better traffic and a higher conversion rate.

That's how essentially websites make money.

Here are some main goals of websites that people use as a benchmark:

1. Increase conversion rates: Maximize the percentage of visitors who visit the site to take action through the website that align with the visitors' perspective and psychology.
2. Increase traffic: Grow brand awareness and top line traffic levels through better alignment between website, search, social, email and paid marketing activities.
3. Easier management: make the website more efficient marketing tool with more flexible templates and tools so no update takes longer than expected and the ability to integrate actively with other systems when practical.
4. Website uptime: Ensure that the website is up during critical times when customers meet most often. Find out more about great hosting here.
5. Internal politics: Keep people happy, especially highly-opinionated people, and people with power. Some website changes don't have any practical marketing purpose.

Beware of opinions! When an opinion is stated look for evidence to support or refute that opinion. You could probably find it in Analytics which is a great tool for making better decisions about website updates.

Below are some examples of website changes that align with goals mentioned above and we see how the benefits matchup according to our experience:

There are a few updates to your website that could potentially hurt the marketing results (yes this is true and can happen to you too!) and here are some common examples:

1. Adding a design element that pulls the visitors attention from the call-to-action.
2. Building an expensive feature that isn't rarely used.
3. Updating the title tag of a page that already ranks high for a valuable phrase.

Set priorities

Things by now should be clear.

Look at every possible change to your website in context of costs and benefits and you should be well on your way to determine objectively what business goals need to be solved and what changes potentially have a negative impact on the site or could potentially hurt marketing results.

Create a worksheet with some of the points above that is simple. The most important aspect of this exercise is to have a clear statement of purpose. The risks of action without outcomes without a clear direction can be bad.

Not sure? Test.

There is no certain answer to every method. You can still be clear about the goals and look carefully at the costs that might be incurred.

If costs are marginal then try quickly and measure the impact of the change over a fixed time to compare with other changes that occur on the site.

If costs are high, weigh the risk and proceed with the test or you can choose to prioritize the lower cost updates, only making the bigger changes after you've exhausted the smaller, simpler updates.

When Updates Reach Limits

Eventually you will hit the point where updates have reached their limit and it is possibly a time for a redesign.

An updated website has a lifespan of around 3 to 5 years depending on the business and the industry, and updates might not be keeping in line with market trends.

This should be a clear indication to stop making updates and proceed with plans for a new redesign.

What do you prioritise for website changes?

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4 Tips to Boost Your Marketing Campaign with SMS

There is an ongoing buzz on Social, PPC Ads, and Digital Marketing that often a tried and tested method get's drowned out.

Give a guess what is the most used data service in the world?

According to Nielsen, it's SMS. Marketing through SMS is not surprisingly different from any other campaign.

This is often confused with other data and metrics but SMS sends short transcripts of information in a straightforward, direct, and quick way.

Black Friday data shows, SMS is still relevant to marketing efforts and should not be overlooked. For example, it's a great way for customers to opt-in to receive latest information on deals and upcoming holiday products.

Below we will provide you with the tools you need to hit a home-run with your SMS Marketing.

Marketing (the Secret Bonus)

To understand the role of SMS in marketing, you must first understand what marketing is and how it contributes to your business.

Essentially marketing is how you plan to tell someone more about your product. Whether your product is great, or how it can improve their lives.

The added bonus if your marketing is done right: Selling becomes easy for you because your customers would have already been familiar with your products, the advantages and how it can help them.

For example, you have a product which helps households save 90% of their electricity. This is a fantastic product, however, because your marketing was not done right not many people know of your product.

It was a product that did not live up to its potential, not because of poor quality but because of poor reach.

1. Speak 'English'

As with everything marketing, more often than not, businesses get caught up in industry jargon.

For example, in the tech industry it could be RAM, HDD, and others. Instead it could have been the speed your computer responds to your instruction, and how many photos, files, and music you can store.

70% of targeted customers don't know in-depth information. This doesn't mean you should disregard technical information all together, rather consider catering your campaigns to specific customer groups.

Targeting your customers is known to deliver great results. Convey a message with the intent of speaking to your customer on a personal basis

2. Don't just write

Although writing may seem to be a daunting task, you do not need to be an expert writer to convey your message.

Your writing can be done just to convey the information that the reader is looking for. For example, it could be just factual data, or it can be a communicative piece where the reader and writer both have a relationship together. 

Keep in mind, that to have an engaging conversation is more valuable, as compared to giving a notice.

3. SMS Marketing Inspiration

4. Targeting Customers

As mentioned, in the 3rd tip, convey the right message to the right person. You need to put together a simplified process to understand the size and attractiveness of the target market.

Key areas to identify include: 

1. Your ability to service, and 
2. Compete within your chosen target market.

2 ways you can properly evaluate the market potential (sales opportunity) is through identifying your market size and what is your current market share.

Updated: The easiest way to forecasting sales (just 2 steps).

When you have identified this you can then plan marketing activities to carry out your promotion efforts.

How to launch a SMS Marketing Campaign?

How to start? Would you have someone sit down holding a phone and slowly sending messages out to your clients?

Send SMS like the pros and have an automated service at a reasonable price

Learn ways you can send SMS to your customers based on geographical area with EVERWORKS.

Conclusion

To successfully deliver a marketing campaign you have various tools at your disposal, and SMS is one tool to consider. It is cheap, always delivers, and direct.

Would you consider using SMS as an additional tool for your marketing campaign?

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Industry Secrets Revealed: Mobile Originated vs Mobile Terminated

MO and MT are frequent terms that you may come across when dealing with EVERWORKS SMS Delivery Gateway. These two jargon terms sound complicated when they really are not! MO standards for Mobile Originated are messages 'originating' from the user's mobile phone. Where as Mobile Terminated which means messages get terminated on the phone. 

MO and MT are frequent terms used by mobile marketing and sms service providers to identify the different requirements and function of each point of action. Think of it simply as a flow chart where there is a point of inquiry and there is a final response.

Firstly, MO simply means user-initiated response from his/her own mobile phone. They usually send in a text word(s) which form the keyword so that the system can identify and respond to the inquiry. This keyword is only just a command instruction partnered with a short-code to help the server respond with to display the information requested for. 

For example: "mobile" is the keyword sent to the short-code "33886" would query a response from the server to sent information relevant to both the "mobile" keyword and short-code "33886".

Secondly, MT simply means the point where after receiving instruction from the MO will display the relevant information for the inquirer.

The command received from the MO's earlier keyword and short-code would generate a response from the server, which would be terminated on the user's mobile phone (terminated messages does not imply messages that stop an action, but instead it means the final point of destination the message is intended to reach). 

For example: after a user has sent an MO containing both the keyword "mobile" and the short-code "333-888" the server would respond to send "sms delivery gateway services special offer 40% discount for bulk orders over RM xx", representing the MT displayed on the user's mobile phone.

With a 140% mobile phone penetration rate in Malaysia there is ever growing opportunity to reach new customers, existing customers, or respond interactively with field employees and more (Source: eCommerce Milo).

Multiple uses of mobile marketing can be employed to generate a user response and initiate pre-sales and post-sales customer service and provide a response to a potential customer demand. 

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You're Missing Out on This Trick Where Customers Are 82.4% More Likely to Shop

A recent survey done by Technology Advice show results to the power and results of consumer loyalty programs.

Respondents said that they would be 82.4% "more likely" to shop at stores that offered loyalty programs, compared to 17.6% of respondents who are "less likely" to do so.

Businesses that ignore this may in turn forfeit on this consumer demographic. 

Although card-based loyalty programs are the tried-and-true marketing tactic that have been around for years, there has been a sudden shift in industry indicating a transformation to meet the digital age and rise of smartphones.

Malaysia has seen a strong 140% mobile phone penetration rate and this gives opportunity to further distribute a cost-effective multi-channel marketing program through SMS Delivery. 

The survey further adds that based on the responses that were collected and analyzed consumers are not only open to, but welcoming of such efforts. While consumers remain uncertain of fully-digital reward programs (decidedly against social rewards), but there is a widespread desire for both smartphone apps and exclusive incentives.

How to take advantage of SMS Delivery to monetize on this opportunity?

Exclusive incentive as mentioned above is one of many innovative measures that your business could undertake to further provide incentives to consumers to participate actively with a responsive business that makes effort to provide to loyal customers rewards.

Take advantage of exclusive access to VIP Status instant notification feature

Consumers desire VIP status perks more so than social-based-rewards.

This can be very encouraging for businesses which have already installed loyalty programs based around rewards and perks. There is an incentive to save money overall, but they show strong preference for VIP-style incentives, and given the data according to Technology Advice businesses should consider a "tiered" or level-based system.

Are you looking to add an SMS Delivery option for your business? Feel free to visit EVERWORKS SMS Delivery for more options.

For more information about the survey referenced above please visit here.

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Don't Lose Customers With This Secret Method From Uber

Problem

Uber has generated a lot of media attention of late and it seems to be a growing trend to have almost everyone using the Uber mobile app to move around the city. In some cities like Seattle you can order lunch from within the Uber app.

This was all good until the company realized that there was a big problem for its ever popular feature UberEATS as there is a large group of people that ordered food from outside of the app and with every meal that isn't being on the app represents lost opportunity for the company. 

Solution to the problem

The solution... SMS Marketing! Uber sends text messages to users that have opted-in not only to remind them that the app is on their mobile device, but to also let them know what is on the menu for the day. The SMS Marketing campaign started when Uber prompted its users to subscribe via text message.

Character limitation isn't the end of the world

Although it is widely known that an SMS message, which is limited to 160 characters of text (including hyperlinks) gives the sender a limitation to what can be sent. This problem can be solved by sending messages through MMS marketing by including an image as part of the message sent.

Alternative to Uber: Peach Case Study

The likelihood of implementing an application that has steep initial cost requirements can be a major stumbling block for the majority of small and medium firms in Malaysia, but there is a way to overcome this. 

For example: Peach (a restaurant also in Seattle) uses MMS, but unlike UberEATS where you click through to open the app and place your order, Peach allows you to simply reply "YES" (a MO Keyword) via text message to place your oder. Included in the message is a link that shows more information about the dish prompting the user to proceed to the mobile web to find out more.

Conclusion 

It is increasingly common for mobile apps to use text message marketing to increase app downloads, especially when there is a 92% conversion rate, it is rare to see text message marketing used to keep users engaged outside of the app. This could be a "break the status quo" innovation in exploring different communication channels that would best serve your businesses consumer demographic needs. 

Start your Mobile Marketing campaign now with EVERWORKS SMS services.

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The Ultimate Explosive Guide for Small Business Marketing in Malaysia

This is big news for you as a small business owner in Malaysia. The Internet is the number 1 place customers turn to before making any purchase.

This is important to digest, regardless whether you're in the process of launching a new startup in Malaysia or have an existing business thinking of venturing online, having a strong online presence is important.

There is a collective understanding and awareness that brand development and digital marketing is important. However, measurability of ROI is always the major hurdle that most small business owners in Malaysia struggle to get past.

The most common and frequently asked question that's raised amongst the business owners in Malaysia we meet is; Is there a way for business owners to track ROI?

Just to get this done and dusted from the very beginning. As long as your small business does not appear on the 1st page of search, 90% of searchers won't find you. And to ensure that your efforts online do not go to waste, there's some groundwork that needs to be done (including the dreaded topic of SEO and keyword research).

Local businesses, need to constantly monitor that they have their information always up-to-date and readily available when potential clients were to search for them. For example, new phone numbers, store operating hours, new locations, etc.

Register your local business for free on Google Maps to appear on searches easily.

Below we'll help you cover the basics, and intricate details to guide you in getting started on Marketing on the Internet, to benefit from visitors searching for products and services online.

Questions this article will answer are:

1. How can I make a website, with no coding experience and with little budget?
2. Is there a reason why my website isn't appearing on Google?
3. What is blogging and why does it matter?
4. Why do I need social accounts?
5. How do I get more traffic to my website?

Let's start ...

The core of small business marketing in Malaysia

3, 2, 1 ... Your business has been established. You've filled up the necessary paperworks and understand that the most important things you'll need to begin leveraging your marketing online is by acquiring new customers from organic search.

Also, compiled below are some great suggestions of FREE apps for your startup / small business ~

1. How can I make a website (with no coding experience and with little budget)?

A website now is equivalent to your shopfront. And any good first impression your small business can make is valuable.

Your website shows who you are, what you offer, where you are, and how a potential customer can get in touch with you.

The Internet has matured where services now cater for the DIY business owner (helps when you have a small budget). 

Popular suggestions from us:

1. Website: Shopify.com. wix.com, squarespace.com
2. Website hosting: Everworks, Shinjuru, Exabytes
3. Payment gateways: iPay88, MOLPay

Most of these options come with pre-made website design templates for your website that you can either purchase or use for free.

For business owners with a small budget, opt for freelancers or agencies willing to bundle a package for you. Speak with a sales rep from Everworks to learn more about options available to you.

If time / computer technology do not work in your favor, consider using a freelancer or a small marketing agency which specializes in web design.

You can find freelancers here at Upwork / Freelancer. 

2. Is there a reason why my website isn't appearing on Google?

If you already have a business, try searching for yourself (product / services you offer).

One quick reason that can be commonly solved could be due to your hosting solution. Find out how choosing the best web host instantly improves your SEO here.

However, there are a lot of factors that affect your ranking on Google. Essentially, Google tries to find the best content to present to a person searching for a particular piece of information. 

For example, If I am looking for the best place to host a birthday party in KL, Google would want to present me with results of locations in KL that are available for me to host a birthday party.

And the most important factor is SEO. What is SEO? SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It's a technique to help your website rank better on Google making your website more visible to people who are looking to solve a particular question they have in mind. 

Simply, it is a method of structuring your website / blog posts to be in the best shape for appearing on the first page of search results.

The best way to take advantage of SEO is through your blog content. Content on your blog doesn't just help to inform and educate your buyers, but also it helps Google to match search words with relevant words in your blog post.

3. What is blogging and why does it matter?

As discussed above, blogging helps your website to appear on Google. Most importantly on the first page. Getting ranked No 1 is the ultimate goal.

Frequency and quality of content which appear to solve a searcher's queries is imperative. and a great way to do this through your blog.

To start a blog, you can use inexpensive options, and just to list a few suggestions: 

1. Wordpress.org, 
2. Wordpress.com, 
3. Blogger.com

Once you start writing blog posts for your small business, you can add a call-to-action on your posts to encourage visitors to interact with your business.

A great way to capture new leads is by encouraging them to subscribe to newsletter updates through email. Learn more about how email is everyone's number 1 tool here (44x ROI for every $1 spent, this is a hidden secret that all small business owners should take advantage of). 

Great suggestions to email tools include: 

1. Mailchimp, 
2. ActiveCampaign, 
3. AWeber

4. Why do I need social accounts?

Social is powerful. It helps you to increase traffic, improve your search rankings, and empowers your customers to engage / interact with you.

For your small business in Malaysia ensuring that you maintain current information online, only helps to encourage discoverability for your business.

Important social accounts your small business in Malaysia that can be claimed (for free): 

1. Facebook Business Page, 
2. Instagram Business, 
3. Twitter Business Account, 
4. LinkedIn for Business

5. How do I get more traffic to my website?

Using the tools above to introduce your business, the advantages your product / service provides and retaining interest in your business if the need isn't present to purchase at this moment.

Step 1: Build content which provide value above and beyond to your potential customers.

Step 2: Share that value through social

Step 3: Retain interest through your email, because 72% of adults prefer communicating through email. Email converts, and here's a great resource on how to get started on your email marketing strategy. 

Step 4: Convert on your website

Persist in your discovery online to be discovered.

The road sounds long, but any steps you make will surely have an impact on your small business. Don't expect instant results, but demand consistent achievements. Blogging will take a few months to start sending you traffic, but paid social accounts can have immediate effects.

Congratulations on starting / updating your small business in Malaysia! Let us know if our tools above have helped you.

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