Targeted visibility on Google is everybody's dream, but to achieve that, you also need to focus on optimizing your Google My Business profile apart from ads and websites. People often refer to it as a business profile on Google, but it is much more than that.

It is a dynamic snapshot of your business that highlights your best features, current promotions, product descriptions, and so on. Since it is your top profile on Google that is easily accessible through SERPs, it provides you the best opportunity to allow people to find you, engage with you and learn about you.

So, in a nutshell, it fulfills most of your marketing objectives, such as awareness, branding, and advertising. Last but not least, it is entirely free, making it indispensable for marketers.

Despite an astronomical number of searches performed on Google, the number of views on a business profile is very low. According to a BrightLocal research report, a typical business profile attracts 1,260 views out of 167 billion searches performed on Google every month.

The problem is not that Google My Business is not a good platform, but very few people know how to effectively use it for the best results. This platform offers an excellent range of features that can transform your marketing.

Why Do you Need a Google My Business Account?

Here are the three primary reasons you need a GMB account:-

1. Be discoverable in digital search (How to show up on Google search)
2. Keep customers informed about your products and services
3. Build trust and boost consumer confidence

The Benefits of Optimizing Your Google My Business Profile

A significant benefit of optimizing your Google My Business profile is that it provides you an edge over your competitors in terms of visibility on Google. Google delivers you through your GMB profile without spending even a single penny, and it is an unfair advantage. The slightest benefit you get in terms of visibility on Google pays you back many times over as brand awareness, traffic, and revenue generation.

However, optimizing Google My Business profile benefits aren't limited to increased visibility; they go beyond it to increased engagement, higher local rankings, and improved lead generation. Here are a few benefits of optimizing your GMB profile:-

1. Improves Local Rankings

Do you know how to rank higher on Google in local or Near Me searches?

The more optimized our GMB profile is, the better local rankings you are likely to achieve. Apart from proximity and relevance, a better GMB profile corresponds to improved local rankings as Google's algorithm favors activity and quality of information. It increases engagement and visibility.

2. Improves Engagement

Google is constantly upgrading, and its new feature, "zero-click searches," is even more formidable. It is part of Google's initiative to provide most of the information related to a query on its SERP itself. "People Also Ask" and "Local Search Results (with Google Maps") are some of the features that help you to get your answers on the SERP itself.

So, suppose you have a well-optimized Google My Business profile with pictures and the latest posts. In that case, you will drive more engagement and conversions as more and more people try to interact with you through your dynamic profile details.

3. Drives Conversions

Regular GMB profile doesn't help drive conversions, but users can locate you through keyword searches, directly call you from your business profile, and view FAQs when you optimize it. They can also make a reservation, book an appointment, request a quote and perform many other activities directly from your GMB profile.

How to Optimize Your Google Business Profile?

This article is entirely dedicated to educating and guiding marketers to use this platform and optimize their business profiles to get the best results. It helps you in the following three ways:

1. To increase your prominence in local searches
2. To attain better online visibility than your competitors
3. To contact and acquire customers online through features such as booking a reservation, making an appointment, requesting a quote, etc.

Here are the ten marketing tactics that you can use to optimize your Google My Business profile.

1. First, Create a Google Business account

For making a GMB profile, creating a Google My Business account is a prerequisite. Later on, you can connect it with your GMB profile. You can straightaway visit the URL https://www.google.com/business/ to create a business account and sign in using the Google ID you use for business purposes. Don't use your personal Google ID to start a business account.

2. Fill Out Every Section

Google has added many elements and categories to the Google Business profile that appears on the first page of SERPs. They keep on doing it to help you create a profile that can attract your potential customers and answer their queries before they decide to buy from you.

So, beginning from the essential details such as name, address, phone, website, and opening hours, you can move on to the following sections that might be a bit time consuming, such:

• Category and attributes
• Products and services
• Questions and answers (Generated by the business owner)

After that, there is a dynamic section where you can keep on posting and adding:

• Posts (To engage users and announce promotions/discounts etc.)
• Reviews (For reputation management and branding)
• Questions and answers (User-generated)

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Local SEO ranking factors

Google considers the following three factors to determine local rankings.

• Relevance: How closely your business profile matches a search query
• Distance: What's the distance between the searcher and your business location
• Prominence: How popular and well-recognized is a business (Google uses many factors to determine it.)

3. Add Contact Information

Make sure that the business name in your profile is the same as you use it in your store, visiting card, or signage. Google considers adding location-based keywords a spam activity, so stay away from any such practice.

Keep your business name and address the same across the web, including listing sites. Google algorithms may perceive small things such as using "st" instead of "street" as an inconsistency, affecting your credibility.

Mention both regular and holiday hours in the "Hours" section. Otherwise, customers might visit you when your premises are closed and may post negative reviews.

4. Write Your Business Description

The important thing is that the brief business description that you see below your business name is not written by you but by Google. The good news is that Google does a pretty good job writing an editorial summary and keeping it consistent across the platform.

However, you can exercise a bit of control on the "From the Business" section in your Google My Business account dashboard. To find this section, scroll down your profile and see it under the reviews section.

Here is how you can optimize this section of your profile:

• Use all the 750 characters for a better description, with vital info in the first 200-300 characters.
• Don't forget to use popular keywords, especially those your target audience uses to find businesses similar to yours.
• Avoid repetition of information from other sections. Instead, describe your USP, what differentiates you from competitors and what customers appreciate about your business.
• Avoid including links or markup language.

5. Choose a Category

Most Google Business profile visitors come from discovery searches, which means they land on your website looking for something using the specific keywords. Only 16% come from direct searches, i.e., the search bar uses the business name, product name, or address. It, therefore, becomes inevitable to include the relevant keywords in your GMB profile that ordinary searchers use to search your business type.

If you choose a category, Google offers category-specific features for your Google Business profile. For example, Ocala Yoga Center, Florida, mentions its type as a Yoga studio.

However, try to be specific while choosing your business category. For example, using "Tibetan Meditation Center" instead of just "Meditation Center" will attract more eyeballs.

Here is a complete list of categories you can use to choose the most specific one for you.

Product categories shouldn't be confused with products or attributes. You can talk about them in a different section. Also, don't add unnecessary categories as it might confuse Google.

6. Select Appropriate Attributes

Once you choose the right category, Google will prompt you to select the appropriate attributes. These attributes don't exist exclusively on Google you can find them on Yelp as well. However, Google is known to use granular and exciting attributes.

Click this link to see an exhaustive list of attributes you can choose from.

7. Attract Eyeballs through Stunning Photographs

Adding pictures to your business profile shouldn't be a one-time activity. Be active and keep your GMB profile lively and up-to-date. Soon, Google might show these pictures in the local search, giving you added visibility.

Pictures are directly linked with engagement. According to a BrightLocal study, businesses with more than 100 photos get five times more calls than average businesses. However, don't try posting 100 images in one go.

• Post at least one new picture every week.
• The logo should be placed as a thumbnail photo.
• Your brand should inspire your cover photo. However, Google displays different pictures as your cover photo based on the search query.
• You can add photos of happy customers, views of business premises, and team photos as a general rule. Adhere to Google's photo guidelines for specifications.
• Avoid stock photos and special effects. Upload genuine pictures of your business.
• Use high-quality images with clear depictions.

Google selects a photo from a Business Profile and displays it directly in local results based on the keywords used.

• You can geo-tag your photos to showcase your expertise in your area
• Adding videos is also a great way to highlight your business profile
• You can also add a 360Āŗ view of your organization/products to your profile

8. Encourage Users to Post Google Reviews

Believe it or not, the bright yellow stars of Google reviews in search results influence a user's buying decision. At least these star ratings compel them to visit the seller's website or contact them through call buttons.

Note: You can also add "Call Now" buttons to posts created in Google My Business.

These gleaming star ratings make other entries look duller, giving you an edge over your competitors.

It is one of the most prominent reasons why Google considers star ratings as a ranking signal. Have a look above at the screenshot of search results on Google. The entries without star ratings appear below the ones with them.

Pro tip: Keywords used in the reviews also help you rank higher and appear in top search results.

You can easily see that the relevant keywords are encouraged by Google.

Tips:

1. Ask, incentivize and encourage your loyal and new customers to post their reviews using free tools like a review shortcut link.
2. Ask your customers through email, social media, text, and in-person conversations to post their reviews, and they will more likely do it.
3. Don't forget to respond to reviews; it encourages even more reviews.

9. Post to Your Google Business Profile

You can use your GMB profile as social media and regularly post on it. Google encourages you to share your announcements, events, offers, and products on your GMB profile. You can easily create posts in the GMB dashboard, and they will appear at the bottom in the "Updates" section.

Posts increase engagement and, therefore, the overall activities performed by the user on your GMB profile. Similarly, regular posts will soon catch Google's attention and will help you improve your rankings.

Note: People on search engines have a higher buying intent than social media platforms, so posting on your GMB profile will also boost your conversion.

If users follow your business profile, they will get notifications for your posts, and you will get loyal and regular visitors to your business profile free of cost.

Pro Tip: Regularly post on your Business Profile to increase your digital footprint. You shouldn't do it to send signals to Google, but for the users. You can use it to enhance customer experience, announce events and offers and add links and CTAs. Specific posts have a timeline and are deleted when they are expired, so post frequently and update the customers about what's happening.

10. Ask and Answer Questions

Similar to Amazon, Google also features a section that includes questions and answers in your business profile. These questions and answers address relevant queries of the customers to push them down in the sales funnel. These answers are meant to help customers to decide to choose your business. Anyone can ask these questions, and anyone can answer them.

However, when someone else answers a question, it can also lead to inaccurate answers. To avoid this, you can set up alerts, so whenever someone posts a solution or a question, you can quickly have a look.

Pro Tip: You can also seed your FAQ section and upvote your answers so that the customers can refer to them first. It doesn't violate Google guidelines. Since Google picks up the keywords included in the answers in the Q&A section, write answers with the focused keywords in mind. You can naturally follow your keyword strategy without stuffing keywords. While features like "add me to search" are not yet available, optimizing your Google My Business profile effectively can significantly boost your visibility and improve your chances of appearing in search results.

With proper monitoring and management of your Q&A section, you can address the doubts of the customers, highlight your USPs, and clear hurdles of their buying process.

11. Add Products and Services

When your offerings are not clear from your business name, it's time to add products to your business profile. It will give your products even more visibility and allow people to have a look at them without even visiting your website. Adding such content enriches your profile and helps it rank for relevant searches.

While mentioning your product or services, you may also add their description and price. When the user clicks on it, the full description will appear. Google may also link your products from the category section, giving them even more visibility.

12. Set Up Messaging

Google enables searchers to contact you directly from your Google Business Profile through its text messaging option. With more than 82% of smartphone users using local searches for shopping, Google provides one of the most valuable features. To enable this feature, go to Google My Business dashboard and choose the "Messaging" tab. You can install this from Google Play. You can easily set up message alerts from your GMB dashboard.

Conclusion

As a proven and dynamic marketing tool, setting up Google My Business isn't a one-time activity. Instead, it's an ongoing activity that periodically requires inputs from the business owner to grab users' attention and provide them updates about their products and brand.

It increases your online presence and helps you to be in the spotlight without spending anything on it. You should update even the minor changes in your business.

Publish posts, photos, and upload videos. Use different strategies to get reviews and keep on responding to them. Use as many GMB features as you can to increase your visibility on search engines. Apart from that, you can add quality content and information to your GMB profile and your website, social media, and review sites.

Google's ultimate objective is to connect its users with the best business solutions. Make a Google My Business strategy to thoroughly and accurately maintain your business information through your GMB dashboard and regularly post fresh content to reap its rewards.

For most digital marketing agencies, scaling remains a sweeping challenge. Most agency owners struggle with workforce-related issues such as lack of resources, idle resources, and workflow issues. Managers are busy firefighting as they find their employees rebuilding everything for every new client without a standardized workflow.

Apart from that, managing client relationships is the second biggest challenge faced by many digital agencies, as explained by Arsalan Sajid, startup community manager at Cloudways.

What is Startup Scaling?

Startup scaling is directly related to a startup's ability to survive and flourish in the wake of fluctuating demand. Since the fall of 2019, we have been experiencing these market fluctuations, when the deadly pandemic broke out that is still active across the globe.

A scalable business is flexible and can efficiently handle an increased workload without any disruption in its workflow. When an agency can scale successfully, it can increase its workload without compromising quality and performance.

The best way to deal with these challenges and scale your agency is to leverage proven agency tools and technology. Here are the three game-changing tools that will transform your processes and workflow:-

1. InstaSites Builder: For Instant Websites

DashClicks' InstaSites Builder helps you achieve customer delight by easing out the painstaking process of creating professional websites. On several occasions, agencies need to develop websites for their clients. This tool allows agencies to create hundreds of niche-specific websites within seconds. An added advantageāyou don't pay anything unless you make a sale.

You'll be surprised and thrilled to know that it doesn't require any coding or any technical knowledge on your part. Choose a niche-specific website template from hundreds of readily-available templates and enter your client's business information. Now you have to press the build button, and the software will automatically create a niche-specific professional website for your client within seconds. Sounds interesting, doesn't it?

What's more? You can share this newly built website with your prospects using an inbuilt send function. It will help you make an excellent first impression on your clients and speed up the entire process of prospecting and closing the sale.

As you know, website development takes a lot of time. Building a professional niche-based website is even more time-consuming and tedious. It includes spending time with the developers, arguing with them, and still not getting a website according to your specifications and expectations. DashClicks' InstaSites Builder comes as a breather for agency owners in such kinds of situations.

The Benefits of InstaSites Builder:-

• Has the capacity to build hundreds of niche-specific websites instantly and swiftly
• Creates SSL secured websites
• Offers numerous latest design templates
• Comes with advanced features
• Creates ready for use websites that turn sales in autopilot mode

2. InstaReports: For Instant Data-Driven Reports

Reports are an integral part of digital marketing. Both the agency and the client are curious to identify the digital blind spots and strategy mistakes to maximize their ROI on digital marketing.

However, creating reports is time-consuming and a tedious task that takes up a lot of productive time. Luckily, technology integration can save your life and time spent collecting data from different analytics tools and presenting it in an easy-to-understand format.

With DashClicks' InstaReports tool, you can create detailed data-driven reports for your clients in a matter of seconds. InstaReports tool is powered by Google Maps and can directly pull data from different channels such as the website, Facebook, and mobile. It can also fetch data from online listings and other places on the web for the local SEO and directory listings.

After collecting data from several resources, the tool creates a detailed report in an easy-to-understand format. It also highlights the problem areas where the project requires maximum attention, helping maintain transparency and keeping the client and the agency on the same page.

DashClicks InstaReports Highlights:

• Offers Complete Analysis
• Offers Listings Analysis
• Provides Social Analysis
• Provides Google Ads Analysis

Apart from that, the reporting tool offers several other analytics and reports.

How to Use InstaReports for Prospecting?

In these competitive times, prospecting can be a challenging game. To win a project, you need to exhibit your capabilities and prove that you are better and unique than the rest. A presentable report created by DashClicks’ InstaReports tool will not only throw a positive impression on your prospects but also will explain how it helps them identify the weaker areas of their marketing campaign. The eye-catchy stats-based reports are sure to win the hearts of your prospects.

The tool delivers a solution-oriented analysis and highlights the gaps in your digital marketing strategies.

How Can InstaReports Help You in Prospecting?

Here are some of the InstaReports features that will boost your conversion rates during prospecting:

A. Offers in-depth online business reports within seconds
B. Helps you make an excellent first impression on your prospects by creating multi-channel business reports on the fly
C. Highlights gaps within your marketing strategy and helps you tweak it for better results
D. Helps you manage all incoming leads, saving both you and your team valuable prospecting time.
E. Helps you close more deals by providing instant in-depth marketing reports

How Does InstaReports Help Increase Your Sales?

InstaReports helps you present a great sales pitch to your demanding prospects. It will help you win their trust and convince them about your capabilities as a professional and global digital marketing agency. Since the report mainly highlights the problem areas, it will help you convince the prospects that they will immensely benefit from your services and expertise.

It will help you gain more and more clients in the long run. Here are some of the features InstaReports offers to help increase your sales.

1. InstaReports is a tool powered by Google Maps that allows you to automatically pull in business data and create business reports
2. Helps you deliver beautifully crafted business reports in seconds
3. Provides your prospects with the most accurate insights
4. Helps you identify the biggest pain points of your client’s business
5. Provides relatable solutions to your campaign, conversion, and sales issues

3. Agency Website

We have already discussed how DashClicks' white label resellers services allow you to use fantastic agency tools to build bulk websites and generate professional reports. These tools can prove to be your most lethal weapons during prospecting and adding new clients to your portfolio. Apart from these, DashClicks also offers an Agency Website tool that helps you create your agency website in a few seconds. This website is professionally designed and optimized to attract more and more clients for you.

DashClicks' white label tools such as agency website software help you save time and scale your operations by instantly creating a professional niche-based website. If you are an agency owner, you must be familiar with the pain of creating a professional website that converts.

Choosing a template to tweak the design and add content is a time-consuming task, and developers can further add to your woes by delaying things and rendering a web design you don't like.

If you want to create a professional website that quickly loads, converts, and positively impacts your clients and visitors, use DashClicks' Agency Website tool

Conclusion

59% of businesses think that the primary reason why agencies hire white label services and tools is cost-cutting, but it would be akin to just scratching the surface. The actual benefit of hiring white label services is the access to a platform that empowers the agencies and clients and helps them manage and monitor their campaigns.

A white label agency platform helps them transform their workflow and drive their business. It also includes access to the above three tools that can be game-changers for a startup agency. These tools resolve some of the most significant issues you face in your day-to-day operations. Prospecting is a big challenge, but these tools give you an edge over your competitors during prospecting and help you swiftly seal the online marketing contracts without doing any additional legwork.

Tools like InstaReports, Agency Website, and InstaSites Builder will keep your clients happy and help you generate more business. Visit our website today to know more.

Technology has empowered marketers in many ways. One of the best examples of technology-driven marketing solutions is the retargeting tools that enable a marketer to target the site visitors who visited the website but didn’t complete the purchase. What makes this tactic even more exciting and popular is that it is inexpensive to retarget. Moreover, you can expect a higher return on investment since you’re only targeting the people who have shown interest in your products.

This article will discuss the major types of retargeting that works and how to implement them.

What are Some of the Most Effective Retargeting Strategies?

The best way to retarget your website visitors is to display Facebook ads on their mobile browser. The three most powerful retargeting strategies to reinstate the visitors to your site are as follows:

1. Retargeting specific URL visits
2. Retargeting existing customers
3. Retargeting leads based on page engagement

Let’s dive into these three strategies separately.

1. Retargeting Specific Page Visits

The most prevalent method of retargeting is based on website visits in the past 90 days. However, it takes time and doesn’t work if you don’t add any filter to it. So, do it intelligently and don’t aim to target everyone who visits your website. To increase your conversion rate, target only those who show keen interest and are willing to buy.

So, how to choose that small group of audience you should focus on for retargeting?

To find those visitors, you need to trace their specific actions taken on your website. For example, if someone lands on your website through a blog post backlinks, they will only read the blog post and bounce away. Targeting such visitors is useless if your immediate goal is conversion. However, if someone comes to your website, reads your blog post, signs up for a newsletter, and also checks your products and services page before he leaves the website, then it reflects a strong buying intent.

This doesn’t mean the first type of visitor may not be your potential customer. However, even if we take them as prospects, they are more likely to be top of the funnel (TOFU) customers, who still need a lot of education, interactions, and nurturing before they convert.

Now how will you retarget both types of visitors?

If you show a lead magnet in a retargeting ad to the second type of visitor, it won’t make sense as they have already shared their contact details on the lead magnet form while visiting the website. Similarly, you cannot offer a free trial to the visitor who just read your blog post and went away because he may still not be aware of your product or services.

Such unplanned retargeting never yields any results, and it’s like targeting the wrong prospect with the wrong offer. Their stages in the buyer’s journey are pretty different.

The Ruskin Bond Ad

Check out this retargeting ad I received on my Facebook account:

You may notice how hyper-focused this ad is. This ad seems to be inspired by the web pages I visited while visiting Ruskin Bond’s website. Ruskin Bond is an Indian author of British descent.

The advertisers might have tracked my activity on the website to serve me with an ad focused on becoming a better writer.

This ad also emphasizes how this product can add value to my life. You should follow the same approach while creating retargeting campaigns.

Here are the two reasons why people don’t want to buy from you.

A. They are not ready to spend money on your product
B. They are not aware of how your product can add value to them

The above ad is the best example of the second reason.

This ad is targeted at a group of high intent buyers.

These targeted ads are flashed as soon as someone visits a website, including the pages that only the strong intent buyers visit.

Tip: Retargeting based on a specific URL or a landing-page-visits always works, and it is the best retargeting practice these days.

Facebook ads are highly effective and popular for most niches and products compared to Google Ads.

Here’s the complete procedure of creating effective retargeting ads on Facebook.

Open Facebook Business Suite. Facebook is known for regularly updating its platform, so instead of giving you the steps, I’ll suggest the path.

First, create a new custom audience.

You need to go to the Ad Manager from the “More Tools” section and create a new campaign. Enter your information and then select “Create a New Custom Audience.”

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Facebook is best known for its custom audience feature, and hence it can be the best retargeting strategy for a business. To make ads even more effective, Facebook offers diverse customization options for their campaigns. You can easily create a new custom audience from the drop-down menu.

Your marketing goal here is to attract website traffic which you can choose from the custom audience menu.

When you choose this audience type, you will be able to create lists of people who visited specific web pages on your website for laser-focused targeting.

The devil lies in the details. So, after creating lists, you can dive into other elements.

You can design a campaign for different objectives, such as promoting a webinar or driving traffic to a specific landing page. Hundreds of thousands of people regularly read about your product and see details on social media channels but never convert. Through retargeting, you can get them back. Here in this section, you can add the URL pages that include a specific word such as a product name, etc.

Facebook allows you to refine your retargeting ads according to options such as “device used” and “frequency.” Frequency is a crucial metric because it shows that the visitor is a ripe lead and needs a slight push to convert.

All you need to do is create ads that explain to your audience how they can use your product, save time, and add value to their lives.

It is one of the most effective remarketing strategies because the user is quite familiar with the product, and they are most likely to make the purchase if they are fully convinced the product will help them.

2. Retargeting Existing Customers

The second type of retargeting is aimed at unresponsive email subscribers. Over time, many of your email subscribers stop responding to your emails and buying from you. To convert them into active buyers, you need to share your engaging marketing messages with them.

Anybody familiar with email marketing will agree that over time new visitors join you, and old subscribers become unresponsive. However, it is easy to sell to your old subscribers because they have already purchased from you, and you don’t need to put in additional efforts to educate them about your products or services.

Sometimes your emails don’t even reach some of the subscribers because of the filters and network issues. In all such cases, this retargeting method can resurrect those unresponsive customers. It is incredibly cost-effective because such retargeting ads have a high CTR and a high degree of relevance.

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You may try to upsell your unresponsive customers as many companies such as AT&T and American Express are already implementing this strategy and have been quite successful in boosting their sales.

This strategy is beneficial for retailers such as clothing and apparel sellers. It is a harmless way of marketing to existing customers with your current offers. Here is how to set up these ads.

Go to AdWords or Facebook and then go to Facebook Ads Manager>>Audience Section>>Click Create an Audience.

You can create another custom audience from here. Select “Customer List” and upload your audience list.

If you see a green checkmark, you have done it. If a yellow exclamation sign appears, you need to manually update some entries.

You can directly import contacts from MailChimp, apply filters for old and current customers, and upload them on Facebook.

You need to sort your email list to make separate lists for unresponsive customers and old customers.

There is no point in wasting your advertising dollars on customers who are regularly buying from you. Instead, you should target the customers who don’t respond to your marketing emails and don’t convert.

You can try to bring them back to your products by sending messages like “we are missing you!” etc.

3. Lead Generation Ads Based on Page Engagement

If website-based retargeting doesn’t work, you can try lead generation ads-based targeting. “Lead Ads” is Facebook’s powerful lead generation tool. This type of retargeting uses form-based ads as lead magnets. The goal is to collect customer information.

Before we dive into how we can create such ads, let’s look at a few examples.

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As soon as you click the ad, it will take you to the lead generation form that looks like the one shown in the next column in the above table. Such ads don’t force you to leave the Facebook platform. As you know, most people come to Facebook to interact with their friends and family and don’t like to move away from the platform.

Lead form in the lead gen ads appears within the platform and doesn’t take the user offsite, making such ads immensely effective and less annoying. So, it works as a lead magnet that doesn’t interrupt the flow or habit of a social media user.

Suppose you retarget people with page engagement as a metric. In that case, you will get better results because these social media users are hyperactive and hyper-aware and are always on the lookout for new brands and products on Facebook.

Let’s dive into how to set up lead generation ads.

Create a custom audience>> Choose “Facebook Page” from sources>>

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From here, you get a wide range of options to choose from. You can try to be as specific as possible here.

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So, you can target visitors who perform any activity on your website or Facebook pages, such as clicking on a CTA, saving a page or post, or showing engagement with your Facebook post or ad.

After selecting the right metric, save this audience and create a new ad on Ads Manager.

Your goal is lead generation, so select the “Lead Generation” option and select your ad format. You can choose a single image or video for the purpose. Don’t opt for carousels when you are creating a lead generation ad. Now, you can edit the content on the ad.

Don’t forget to give some incentive in exchange for your customers’ email addresses.

You can offer an informative ebook, coupon, or a study or white paper to them, and they will happily fill out your form and click on a CTA button if there is a sound reason for doing that.

Don’t forget to edit your fields to match your needs according to the audience.

Make sure that the form questions are specific and designed to capture only the most crucial customer data. The idea is to take up only a few seconds of the visitors without annoying them.

Most marketers feel that Facebook’s page-based retargeting is the best way to drive visitors back to your site. It’s observed that the most engaged users use social media platforms differently than the average users.

Many specific psychographic customer segments are always searching for businesses and products that add value to their lives. Savvy marketers should take advantage of this fantastic feature of Facebook to convert those who showed interest in your pages or posts but didn’t convert for any reason.

Conclusion

Marketing is no more a simple phenomenon, and it can be an act of sheer folly on behalf of a marketer to assume that they can convert prospects on their very first visit. Since the sales funnel has become highly complex and lengthy, and your first-time visitors might not know who you are or how your product could help them, they are unlikely to make any purchase decision. In other words, they are not ready to buy from you.

Retargeting ads help bring those visitors closer to conversion. The more targeted these ads are, the more likely are users to make a purchase.

The most accurate way of retargeting is retargeting specific page visits. It will help you a lot in converting your site visitors. The second most effective way is to target unresponsive existing customers. If they haven’t bought anything from you in the past few months, send them a few enticing ads to boost sales.

In the end, you should run lead generation ads to pull in already engaged users. As emphasized above, your retargeting ads should be highly focused to drive significant results.

Most companies have an immature and casual approach to social media. They know that social media marketing is a crucial part of inbound marketing, but they don't know how to leverage social platforms to achieve their business goals.

Sometimes they recruit Gen X to manage their social accounts, thinking that younger generations are far more social media savvy. However, without a proper social media strategy, this practice can be extremely harmful. We are already past the first stage of social media, wherein publishing a post was enough to generate awareness and achieve many business goals.

These days, social media platforms are crowded like never before, and everybody is striving to gain some visibility and attention from users. So, we can't sit back and hope for miracles to happen. Brands should learn to run their social media accounts in an effective, well-planned, and measured way.

Here are some of the stats that would immensely help the marketers. 71% of customers will happily recommend a brand if they get an excellent service experience on social media. Unfortunately, more than 95% of people who participated in brand conversations didn't follow the social accounts of those brands. For the sake of branding and maintaining a personal touch, you should manage some of the social media accounts yourself.

Given the challenges lying ahead, here is a 13-step social media marketing strategy for businesses to succeed and give your brand a voice in 2022:-

1. Perform Competitive Research
2. Decide on a Rational and Feasible Budget
3. Decide the Type of Content to Share
4. Follow a Social Content Calendar
5. Set Realistic Social Media Goals
6. Find the Most Relevant Social Metrics You Should Target
7. Understand Your Social Media Audience
8. Set Your Accounts in a Professional Manner
9. Promote Your Social Properties
10. Engage With Your Audiences
11. Ā Build a Community
12. Ā Rope in Influencers to Increase Your Reach
13. Ā Measure Your Results and Adapt

So, without further ado, let's dive in.

1. Perform Competitive Research

Do you know the secret recipe to beat your competition, hands down? You need to conduct competitor analysis to succeed on social media without wasting time in hit and trial. If you think that everybody should have a unique approach to digital marketing, you should keep in mind that your competitors have already done their research. They understand customer psychology better than you.

Competitive research helps you in many ways, including finding the key phrases your competitors are using and the strategy they are implementing to succeed. It will save you time and energy when making your strategy.

Competitor analysis involves the following steps:

1. Identify your competitors
2. Perform SWOT analysis of your competitors
3. Assess your competitors' website and customer experience
4. Determine the market positioning of your rivals
5. Check their pricing and current offers
6. Learn about the technology they are employing
7. Review feedback on social media

The primary purpose of competition analysis is to identify your brand's major competitors and determine the best strategies to beat them. It also helps you understand why customers choose them and what you can offer instead to persuade your target audience to buy from you.

Exploit the gaps you find with the help of competitive research and do your best to meet customer expectations.

You can also use tools such as BuzzSumo to discover the most effective content your competitors are creating and sharing on social media.

For example, here is the screenshot of the search results returned by BuzzSumo for the keyword brand engagement online. We have chosen the option of most shared content, and the first result that appears is an article published on Moz in 2015, whereas the second most shared article was published on Forbes in 2016.

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You can choose similar topics and can develop even better content that resonates with your audience.

2. Decide on a Rational and Feasible Budget

When it is a matter of serious business, lip service doesn't work. Allocating a feasible budget for your social media accounts is important. However, you shouldn't spend more than what you earn from social channels. Sometimes, you are unable to calculate your income directly from social media marketing, but you can easily estimate the average returns by contributing to achieving your business goals.

For example, you can assess the contribution of social media channels in increasing your brand awareness and brand recognition. So, the best way is to calculate the ROI of your social media expenditure. First, decide your budget for digital marketing and then decide how much should be allocated to social media.

According to WebStrategies, a company allocates around 5% to 15% of its annual income to marketing. Then, they spend 35-45% of this budget on digital marketing, and only 15-25% of this amount goes to social media marketing, including the paid campaigns.

3. Decide the Type of Content to Share

Social media is not a marketplace where you spoil everything and tarnish your brand image by selling. Social media users do not use the platform to buy anything. So, you must be thoughtful about what you post on social media and avoid promotional content at all costs. You can try a mix of informational and entertaining content to engage people who follow your account.

Occasionally, you can post promotional material and other people's content, but that should be a fraction of the entire content you publish on social platforms. To engage users, follow a social calendar and punctuate it with trending content. You can also follow the influencers in your industry to take inspiration on the type of content you should share on your social media platforms. These influencers know their audience, so they create perfect content to engage them. That's the reason influencers are so successful.

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Another important thing is to be realistic about what kind of content you can create. Many businesses want to launch their video channels and produce quality videos. However, creating professional videos require equipment, expertise, people, and time, which makes it an arduous and time-consuming task. In that case, you should altogether avoid this option as there is a lot of competition on YouTube, and just one or two poorly created videos will only tarnish your image.

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You should also make sure that you don't post personal stuff or something that interests you personally. So, the personal accounts and the company accounts should strictly be kept separate. We should assess every post from our target audience's viewpoint.

Tip 1: The probability of visual content to be shared online is 40 times higher than text-based content. So, try to create visual content which is getting popular day by day. It also has a very high engagement rate.

Tip 2: As per an official statement by YouTube, mobile video consumption increases by almost 100% annually. It is also linked with a high conversion rate as 64% of customers conceded that they are more likely to shop a product online after watching a video about it.

Tip 3: Bring diversity to the content you create, as only one type of content can reduce the user's interest. For example, you can try a mix of entertaining videos, fascinating imagery, and a compelling text copy. You can also try memes, slides, or carousel and introduce humor, drama, and fun elements.

Tip 4: Customize your content according to the social network you're using. For example, attract people through enticing visual content on Instagram, keep it brief on Twitter, add short videos and links on Facebook, and post educational content on professional networks such as Linkedin

4. Follow a Social Content Calendar

Following a social calendar and choosing the best time to post will result in increased audience engagement. If you spend time on social media, you will quickly identify the best time to post so that the majority of the people are able to view your post.

Most social networks use algorithms that control users' feeds. If you don't post when your target audience is most likely to be active, chances are your followers might never see your post. It's therefore recommended that you use social scheduling software to schedule multiple posts at different time intervals when your audience is likely active on that social platform. These tools are Buffer, CoSchedule, Hootsuite, Agorapulse, Sendible and Sprout Social, etc. You can also use ContentCal.

You should also decide the frequency of your posts for each of your clients on different social platforms and post a variety of content both for entertainment and information. Focus on high-quality content and visually appealing graphics. You can use a social scheduling tool such as Buffer or Hootsuite to make your life easier.

5. Set Realistic Social Media Goals

Goal setting is an area most people overlook, but you should remember that it is the first step to your social media marketing success. Many people do not know where to start because they have very little knowledge about social media and what they can achieve.

You should set the goals in the light of your business plan. Setting strategic goals will help you take your business to the next level. So, in a way, your social media goals should complement your overall business objectives.

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Learn to set SMART goals, i.e., Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound.

Setting SMART goals is crucial because it means that your goals are attainable and realistic. Setting unrealistic goals may sound glamorous in the beginning, but you may not be able to achieve them, leading to disappointment later on. That's why setting limits to your goals and choosing the right social platforms become so critical. You can't succeed on all the social channels, so don't spread yourself too thin. Choose the network your audience spends the most time on.

Here are a few examples of social media SMART goals:

• Creating brand awareness
• Improving ROI on marketing campaigns
• Achieving high sales targets
• Increasing footfall to boost in-store sales
• Expanding your fan base

Attach a realistic figure to each such goal and then try to accomplish it using analytics. Social media may help you achieve all such objectives.

6. Find the Most Relevant Social Metrics You Should Target

If you think you will achieve your business goals by creating a social presence and spending your precious resources and time on it, you are on the wrong track. Social analytics can be a bit confusing over here, so to ensure success from social media, you need to choose the most relevant metric and focus on it.

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It's a folly for marketers to focus on vanity metrics such as the number of followers, likes, etc. You should also avoid unethical practices like buying fake followers. So, to increase your brand awareness, the right metric to focus on is "Post Reach."

It will provide you with information about your content's reach across different social channels and demographics.

If you are using social media to achieve your sales targets that involve driving people to perform a specific action, the number of clicks would be the most desired metric to track.

Fake followers or audiences other than those you want to target won't help you achieve anything at all. That's why marketers call it vanity metrics.

7. Understand Your Social Media Audience

The right mantra for succeeding on social media platforms and driving meaningful results from influencer marketing is using the same social platform as your target audience. For example, if your audience loves to spend time on Instagram, you should also choose Instagram as your marketing channel and find Instagram influencers in your niche.

If your target audience is Gen Z, then the best platforms for you would be Instagram and Snapchat rather than Facebook. Even with its 2.27 billion active monthly users, Facebook may not be that effective for you as a channel if your target audience is Gen Z. Facebook is known for a bit of a mature audience, say 25 to 34 years old.

The better you learn about the psychographics and demographics of your audience, the easier it would be for you to choose the right marketing channel.

Tip 1: Instead of worrying about managing different social platforms, find the one that is majorly used by your target audience and focus on it.

Tip 2: If you don't know which social platforms your target audience uses, conduct a survey.

Tip 3:Ā  You can start with your audience's most preferred social platform and then expand it to the other networks they visit. You don't need more than three channels to tap them.

Tip 4: Apart from the top social networks such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, and Snapchat, you can also tap other popular platforms such as TikTok, WeChat, QQ and Telegram, etc.

Tip 5: You can use the research papers such as the one released by Pew Research to explore data about social networks usage by different demographic groups in the US.

Tip 6: Don't waste your time on the network your audience doesn't use.

Tip 7: You can create multiple accounts on a single platform or multiple YouTube channels to target different interest groups if you have the required resources.

8. Set Your Accounts in a Professional Manner

Your social media accounts represent your brand, so they should follow your branding consistently and professionally. It applies to the colors, logos, and graphics used on your social profile or page.

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You should appropriately fill your profiles and bios. Link your social profiles to the relevant properties such as the related landing pages on your website, etc. Upload high-resolution images that are correctly optimized for banners, background, and profile pictures. Make sure your target audience loves your social media page.

9. Promote Your Social Properties

You need to vigorously promote your social handles. Add buttons for your social media real estate all over your website, especially at the most visible places such as the home page, About Us page, and footer and blog page.

Similarly, you should also include buttons of your social accounts in your emails. You can easily do it in the email settings and add these buttons in the footer below your name and contact details.

Tip 1: Promote your accounts both online and offline. Add them everywhere ā€” store signage, pamphlets, brochures, visiting cards, banners, posters, etc.

Tip 2: Cross-promote it on different channels. For example, you can mention them on your YouTube channel's profile page. Promote your YouTube channel on Instagram and Twitter and vice versa.

10. Engage With Your Audiences

Most of the social networks are meant for engagement and not just for watching and scrolling content. All successful businesses try to engage people as much as possible rather than act as a broadcaster.

A social media strategy that aims to cover every social network can be a big disaster as we all have limited time, energy, and resources. Therefore, focus only on the platforms frequented by your target audience.

To further improve the engagement, you can also try custom hashtags that promote healthy discussions and sharing.

Tip 1: Don't ignore any mention and respond to them everywhere. There are multiple tools that you can use to find your brand mentions.

Tip 2: Ā Provide top-notch customer support and make customers feel valued.

Tip 3:Ā  Encourage customers to talk and participate in discussions. Resolve their queries and aim to achieve customer delight.

11. Build a Community

Another perk of using social platforms is your ability as a business to build a community. You can always put in efforts to make your social media property a go-to place for your audience, so you can engage and nurture leads and, above all, build long-term relationships.

Tip 1: Create interactive posts and include your followers and fans.

Tip 2: Use quizzes and questions to know the opinions of your audience

Tip 3: Don't repeat your ads on social media. Make it enjoyable, so people find value in your content and frequently return to your posts.

Tip 4: Hire people to run your social accounts that match your target audience's social demographics. For example, if your target audience is roofing contractors, the existing homeowners would be your best choice as your social media professionals.

Tip 5: Never underestimate the importance of paid promotion. It allows you to target audiences you can never reach otherwise.

Tip 6: You can use paid advertising to create brand awareness, achieve sales targets, generate leads, and promote posts and videos.

Tip 7: Create interest-based groups such as Facebook groups. It's a great way to build a community without being promotional.

12. Rope in Influencers to Increase Your Reach

Engaging with the right influencers has its advantages. Influencers know the craft of social media marketing, which makes them highly reliable for brand promotion. They have a distinct style their audience is primarily familiar with, so their posts are pretty effective and engaging. People follow their advice because of the reputation they enjoy in their respective fields.

Tip 1: Collaborate with influencers whose followers match your target audience.

Tip 2: Create exciting content for your influencers so they can convince their audience to consider buying from you.

13. Measure Your Results and Adapt

Even the best marketers on the planet can't predict the outcome of their campaigns. Something or the other might go wrong. That's the reason periodically measuring your results is important to tweak your strategy accordingly. You've already set your goals and determined the key metrics to focus on.

You can use an appropriate analytics tool to measure the performance of your campaigns, especially concerning the metrics you've chosen. If you're not getting the desired success, you can change your campaign strategy. Most of the social networks have inbuilt analytics tools, and they offer relevant data about the campaigns. On Facebook, it's known as "Insights." Twitter and YouTube also have their inbuilt tracking software.

If you find that some of the content pieces perform well on the platforms, create more such content. On the flip side, if your content is not performing, try to figure out the reason behind that and switch to a better content strategy. You can also conduct an online survey for that.

Conclusion

Regardless of the goal you set, you can fearlessly dive in and invest in social media marketing as it has a massive impact on brand awareness, followers count, and sales. Your social media strategy is directly related to brand awareness, lead generation, lead nurturing, and conversion. Apart from that, social channels have long been used to provide instant and quality customer support to build a loyal customer base. Constantly track your results and improve your campaigns. Implement the 13-step social media strategy discussed above and be ready to embrace success.

Knowing how to package and present your services is the key to selling them.

The truth is that humans operate on certain psychological principles. Even if your agency’s services are technically superior to the competitor, the winner is the agency that better captures the perception of prestige and value.

This means that even if you build the brand and acquire the right talent, you won’t turn a profit if you can’t figure out the best way to package your digital marketing service offerings.

The trick is to lean on tiered subscriptions, and we’re here to show you how to do it.

How to Offer Digital Marketing Services?

There are two primary strategies that agencies use to market their services.

The Volume Pricing Model

The first of these is known as volume pricing. With this model, you establish your pricing rates based upon the volume of items or services purchased. An example of this might look like this:

• 1-5 blog articles per month – $50 per article
• 6-10 blog articles per month – $42 per article
• 11-15 blog articles per month – $39 per article

The general strategy here is to motivate your customers to spend more by creating the perception of value. Though the cost per article decreases, you are ultimately selling more and achieving a greater profit. The customer feels that they are making a better investment by claiming the lower rate per article even though they end up spending more.

The primary benefit of using volume pricing is that it communicates your pricing formula to the user. The major downside is that it generally does not present as many opportunities for profit as tiered pricing.

The Tiered Pricing Model

The tiered pricing model is more common among digital marketing agencies.

With tiered pricing, you package your services and their corresponding monthly limits into packages that you will price according to their perceived value. These tier packages are not exclusive to marketing and are likely used in just about every subscription service you currently pay for monthly (i.e. Netflix, Spotify, Dollar Shave Club).

Let’s take a look at an example:

The tiered pricing model allows for convenient viewing of the offerings within each package. Users can quickly compare costs and make an informed decision before purchasing.

You’ll likely find pricing tables just like this on virtually every digital marketing agency you’ll find online. Let’s explore what makes the tiered pricing model so popular and effective.

Why You Should Use Tiered Pricing for Your Digital Marketing Service Offerings?

We recommend the tiered pricing model as it offers the following benefits:

1. You Keep Your Customers on Your Website

When making an informed purchasing decision, online consumers like to compare. It’s common for users to compare a product or service on several different websites before deciding where they want to spend their hard-earned dollars.

When you utilized a tier pricing comparison block like the one above, users are far more likely to compare your plans versus each other as opposed to comparing them to a competitor. This is a psychological strategy that preoccupies a person’s mind with the potential value of your plans only.

Additionally, these pricing tiers simplify the process of gathering data for a purchasing decision. Even if a well-written, long-form blog exists to specifically compare the services offered by two competing companies, most are going to respond best to these types of easy comparisons.

2. You Can Package in Under-Performing Services

It’s expected for an agency to have services that sell far better than others. In our experience, Facebook Ads and Google Ads campaigns perform well as they typically result in increased conversions and more immediate results. Conversely, standard content writing is not as popular.

If you find that one of your services does not sell as well, it’s not necessarily indicative of the quality. Rather, when faced with a choice, your customers are going to pick the sexier option.

If you package your services into set tiers, it’s much easier to incorporate your under-performing services in a way that increases the perceived value. While purchasing a blog from a freelancer typically won’t cost much on its own, adding several blogs per month to an existing tier can automatically increase its worth.

For example:

In these example tiers for SEO services, we distinguish the perceived value of each plan in two ways. The first is by increasing the number of hours offered with the existing service from the first tier. The second is to add a service that is not featured at all in the lower-tier plan.

While we know the standard cost for a quality blog is not much, what matters is what your customers perceive. You increase the value of Tier B by packaging in a product that the customer might not otherwise buy. However, when packaged in as an added benefit, the offer suddenly becomes much more appealing.

Essentially, segmenting your offerings into tiers can present opportunities for automatic upsells without needing to ask for them.

3. You Control the Perceived Value

As we touched on in the example above, it’s the direct comparison that dictates the perception of value in the mind of a customer. When you create service tiers and progressively increase your offerings, customers assume that the higher tier is more valuable regardless of what each added service is worth.

It’s for this reason that the tiered pricing model provides a greater opportunity to drive company profits. As long as you can adequately present the value of your tiers, you get to control the pricing.

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Let’s return to the Netflix example above. They price their Basic tier at $8.99 per month. This is their minimum viable product. It’s the bare minimum that they can offer that will attract customers while still generating a profit.

The next plan offers minor improvements at nearly double the monthly cost. Netflix is likely capable of selling this tier for less, but the perception of value is baked into the tiers. The middle tier is even titled “Standard” for added measure. For new buyers, this automatically calls attention to the higher-cost plan as paying for the “Standard” sounds more attractive than being a “Basic” member.

How to Build Your First 3 Marketing Service Offerings?

Now that we’ve analyzed the benefits of utilizing a tiered pricing model, let’s explore how to go about building your first three packages:-

Your Three Tiers – Basic, Premium, Elite

These are not necessarily meant to be the names of your three tiers but indicate the progression of value with each new tier.

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• The First Tier

The first tier serves as an entry point for anyone that wishes to get a taste of your digital marketing offerings.

This package should contain the bare minimum amount of services and features necessary to both attract customers and generate a profit. Aiding customers with the basic tier should realistically require a minimal time investment from your team.

Let’s take a look at the first platform paid tier that customers can purchase when using DashClicks:

• 5 Team Member Seats
• Unlimited Sub Accounts
• 1,000 Email Sends per Month
• 100 SMS Credits per Month
• 50 GB File Storage

This initial tier package offers an attractive selection of benefits that can realistically serve a small business. The cost is low according to our MVP, while still allowing us to offer great features.

The important thing to remember with your first basic package is that you don’t want your customers to feel basic. If the first tier feels cheap or not worthwhile, they’re not going to invest their money into your business. By comparison, your middle tier will feel like the real basic tier and will not make customers feel like they’re purchasing a valuable upgrade.

Your basic customers are important as they’re the ones who are essentially sampling your digital marketing offerings. If you capitalize on the opportunity to impress, you will have a much easier time convincing this customer to upgrade at a later date.

For this reason, you certainly won’t want to name this first tier “Basic.” Instead, try to name your tier something that indicates the tier status without diminishing its worth. For this reason, names such as “Starter” or “Lite” are very common. When they’re convinced that your services are worth it, they’ll be excited to change their status from being a starter to becoming a premium member.

• The Middle Tier

The middle tier should realistically be your most popular service package. It offers a clear middle ground that separates the customer from being “basic” or a “starter.” It also offers an attractive selection of services and benefits at a lower monthly rate than your expensive, elite tier.

For the middle tier, you might want to utilize a naming convention that enhances the sense of value and provides a sense of higher class. Many businesses might utilize the term “Premium” or “Advanced.” Our naming conventions see us calling our middle tier “Plus,” whereas we save our most premium value for later.

Let’s look at our Plus tier as an example:

• 10 Member Seats
• Unlimited Sub Accounts
• 5,000 Email Sends per Month
• 500 SMS Credits per Month
• 100 GB File Storage

To further enhance the value, users also gain access to additional features within the various platform software. There are several things to point out when we compare the first tier to the middle tier.

The first is that all of the listed benefits double in quantity or otherwise increase significantly. Gaining access to double the number of team member seats is more sensible for your everyday marketing agency. You also gain access to more messaging capabilities and file storage to accommodate the scope and scale of your agency.

If that’s not enough to convince someone that the middle plan is worth the extra monthly fee, the expanded capabilities of the platform software will do the job.

It’s also not just about comparing the plans directly. There’s also a unique psychological effect that happens when a person purchases a more expensive plan over the least expensive one. The customer typically associates the name of the plan with how they view their agency.

If you name your middle plan the “Premium” tier, a customer is likely to think “My agency is important and worthy of Premium.” This is as opposed to feeling as though their agency is small or basic. Suddenly, it’s not only about the services provided but about the feeling of worth associated with being a member of that plan.

Finally, it’s important to reiterate that you don’t want the gap between your plans to be so extreme as to alienate your basic-level customers. There should be an appropriate increase of offerings that directly relate to the increased monthly value.

Test out different pricing schemes and nail down your middle-tier. Getting the price right here is the key to motivating your basic customers to upgrade when the time is right.

• The Elite Tier

This tier is the best package that your agency can realistically offer. The Elite tier will only appeal to a certain class of a customer by design. You’ll reserve your higher tier for those who want access to the maximum level of service your agency can offer to a single client. This should also include additional bells and whistles that create a sense of undeniable value.

However, you can start building your elite package by simply taking the same features and services offered in lower tiers. You will need to increase the limits of these features by a notable margin so that the customer does not feel as though they are overpaying for marginal improvements.

Let’s take a look at our very own elite tier:

• 20 Team Member Seats
• Unlimited Sub Accounts
• Unlimited Email Sends
• 1,000 SMS Credits per Month
• 250 GB File Storage

The price per month is a notable increase from the middle-tier plan. However, we once again greatly increase the value of the same deliverables. By increasing our quantities by double or more, we’re already off to a great start. Setting one of those deliverables to “unlimited” also implies a special level of treatment reserved for high-paying customers.

However, the cost per month is still an issue. While there may be customers willing to pay this monthly rate, we would benefit from adding a few more features to truly seal the deal. This is where you will need to get a bit creative and think of ways to truly make those customers feel special.

A common tactic to increase the value of an elite plan is to offer an exclusive support line. A customer that’s paying top-dollar will likely feel entitled to priority service, and they’re right. Because the elite tier generally only applies to a small selection of customers, offering this priority service shouldn’t become a burden.

MindMeister Example

An additional idea is to throw in some smaller, add-on features that your agency might sell a la carte. If you cannot realistically provide free add-ons, you may be able to offer them at a lower rate that’s exclusive to elite customers. What you’re able to provide will largely depend on your offerings and the capabilities of your agency.

With your elite tier, it’s important to remember that you’re now marketing to a higher class. Because most will want to spend less, you shouldn’t expect to sell your elite plan as often as your middle-tier plan. Instead, you want to curate a package for the elite customer that’s truly worth the asking price. As long as the value and quality of service are present, you’ll have an easier time keeping your elite customers on board for the long term.

Build Attractive Packages for Your Digital Marketing Service Offerings!

Packaging your digital marketing services into attractive tiers is the best way to keep customers on your site while controlling your profits.

Allow your customers to dictate which deliverables are most valuable to them. Then, take those same deliverables and scale them up in a way that correlates to a progressive increase in value. Further enhance the value of subsequent tiers by packaging in additional services that are generally low-cost to implement, yet valuable to a customer’s success.

Additionally, be mindful of customers in one tier when creating benefits for the next tier. An increase in a tier’s price isn’t simply to generate more profit but to communicate to customers that the added benefits of an upgraded tier are worthy of the additional cost. You want your customers to aspire toward the upgrade rather than feel alienated or ripped off for purchasing a cheaper tier.

Finally, remember that any package is only as valuable as the quality behind the actual service. Make sure that your team is ready to provide excellent service to all customers regardless of the package they purchase. Instilling satisfaction is the best way to create loyalty and encourage customers to invest more in your digital marketing service offerings.

Outsourcing your work is a sensitive topic in the United States work culture.

However, it is an effective way of expanding the scope and capabilities of a business without breaking the budget. The tricky part is identifying when a task is worth your time and when you’re better off paying for additional help to take care of it.

With this handy outsourcing guide, we’ll clear up misconceptions about what outsourcing is, the pros and cons, and how utilizing this strategy can help you save money.

What is Outsourcing?

Outsourcing is the process of hiring an outside, third-party to perform services or complete tasks that are otherwise performed by your in-house team.

In the U.S. culture, we regularly associate with outsourcing exclusively with help hired outside of the country. However, according to this definition, outsourcing your work can apply to hiring an individual freelancer or a fulfillment company that specializes in assisting existing companies with specific objectives.

For example, IT outsourcing allows business to delegate technology-related tasks to an external software development company. It results in saving time and reducing costs to open a legal entity and hire tech experts.

When Should You Outsource Your Work?

Knowing when it’s right to outsource requires an evaluation of yourself, your team’s current capabilities, and your overall goals for the company.

Here are some important questions that can help you decide when it’s time to consider outsourcing:

1. Can Your Team Complete Daily Tasks without Compromising Quality?

A sign of a busy team can be positive or negative. On one hand, having plenty of work means that your business is acquiring new clients and making deals at a steady or hectic rate. On the other hand, it can be a sign that your current workflow is not ideal for getting quality work from your team members.

First, analyze what you can do to improve your project management. Familiarize yourself with each team member’s day-to-day activities and interview them regarding their current workload. This information will help you isolate the cause of the issue.

If the amount of work coming in exceeds the capabilities of what your team can realistically achieve, outsourcing can alleviate some of that excess pressure. This can help with redistributing tasks in a way that allows you to get the best work possible out of all parties.

2. You’re Looking to Grow or Expand Your Offerings

Growth is a necessary part of business survival. However, the time for growth may come before you have the resources or means to make significant changes to your team internally. Examining the average rates for outsourced or freelanced help may lead you to conclude that outsourced help is an ideal solution.

Hiring external help to expand your offerings is not uncommon. A study from 99Firms indicates that there are approximately 1.1 billion freelancers worldwide. 45% of those freelancers possess a post-graduate degree.

Not only does this indicate a genuine demand for outside help, but it also battles the stigma that third-party help must be cheap or low-quality. Because outsourced help typically works via temporary contracts, you also have the freedom to let go of a third party at any time if the work is not aligning with your business goals.

Some companies specialize in offering professional services to other companies only as opposed to personal clients. For example, an e-commerce company is likely to outsource its shipping services to companies such as ShipBob. DashClicks itself provides fulfillment services to other marketing agencies for the express purpose of helping them grow with reliable quality.

3. You Lack Talents for a Key, One-Time Projects

There’s a possible scenario in which a key client that loves your business commissions you to do something beyond your team’s current capabilities. For example, they may require a new, robust website that’s complete with content and SEO optimizations. While your marketing company specializes in the latter, you may need help with the initial development.

Rather than denying and potentially losing an important client over one aspect of the project, consider outsourcing. There are talented web designers around the world looking for work as a primary or supplemental form of income.

You will still manage and facilitate the project. Your team communicates what’s needed for the outsourced assignment and continues the work in-house until the task is complete. You’re able to serve and satisfy your client without spending unnecessary resources on scouting and hiring a permanent team member for a service you do not typically offer.

4. You Do Not Enjoy Completing Certain Tasks

Before you started your own business, you were always hands-on with the creative tasks that you enjoy. Now you find yourself spending a chunk of each day performing tedious clerical work. It’s vital for the company and someone needs to do it.

Or, you can consider outsourcing your dreaded tasks to a third party. Not only will you improve your work life, but you can also potentially save money when viewing rates for outside help as opposed to what you would pay yourself.

In addition to the potential monetary benefits, you also free up that time each day to focus your efforts on areas where they can better serve the company. Removing tasks that you do not enjoy from your plate is not only personally satisfying but can help your company grow and become more efficient in certain scenarios. Job seekers who are making use of a resume builder can streamline the process of finding suitable positions, just as outsourcing can streamline business operations.

The Advantages of Outsourcing

We can all relate to the above scenarios where outsourcing seems viable, but are the advantages worth it?

Let’s examine the advantages of outsourcing as well as some of the cons so that you can make an informed decision regarding your next hire.

1. Outsourcing Saves Money

How does outsourcing save money if you still need to hire someone for the task? Outsourcing helps your business cut costs in several ways.

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The first is that you only need to pay for work as needed. This is as opposed to devoting resources to scouting, interviewing, hiring, and paying the salary of an individual whose work might only be necessary on an irregular basis.

The second way is by reducing the amount of office space and equipment necessary for your team. When hiring third-party help such as from a BPO outsourcing company the hired individual or team is expected to have all of the abilities and resources necessary to complete the task without your assistance.

The third way is by having the freedom to determine which rates benefit you most. Freelancers may fluctuate their ongoing rates depending on the availability of work. Though it may take a bit of effort to scout the right talent for the right price, you have much more freedom when hiring temporary help when compared to offering a competitive salary and benefits to a full-time employee.

2. It Creates the Opportunity for Higher-Quality Work

When the workload becomes too demanding, the quality of your team’s work typically suffers. A high-stress, unrealistic work environment not only damages team morale but can harm your reputation with clients due to poor results.

By outsourcing help for specific tasks, you can give your team the freedom they need to focus on their specialties. After all, you hire your permanent team members because they excel at performing specific tasks. By offloading the routine, tedious work to an eager contractor, you make everyone’s lives easier, while also benefiting your company in myriad ways.

3. Gain Expert Help at a Lower Cost

As stated at the beginning of this article, outsourced work does not only need to feature tedious, monotonous tasks. In many cases, outsourcing a specific task to an expert can help your company grow and expand its number of offerings.

Even if the upfront rate seems higher initially, remember how this cost compares to hiring a full-time expert. You will benefit from working with experts that possess years of experience without the need to offer a competitive salary or compensation package to an equivalent hire.

4. Get Tasks Completed Faster

When you delegate a task to a full-time team member, you need to schedule this task around their existing responsibilities and work schedule.

When you outsource that task to a third party, you get to dictate the terms. If you need a fast turnaround, communicate this when you put out the call for help. Interested and capable parties that do not have the same obligations will be able to deliver results at a faster rate. If they do fail to deliver anything at all, you only lose out on time.

What Are the Downsides of Outsourcing?

As with all things in life, all positive things also come with potential downsides. It’s merely a matter of weighing the potential benefit of the advantages versus the potential negatives.

Here are some of the most common downsides associated with outsourcing:

1. You’ll Still Spend Time Performing QA

Quality assurance is a standard part of completing any project. However, this process is generally far more simple when performed in-house as your team is trained to complete assignments your way. All of your team members are familiar with this process, which makes it much easier to lean on them to see a project to completion.

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When hiring outsourced help, that built-in understanding is no longer present. Of course, you can help improve the odds of receiving quality work by providing a quality onboarding experience for any freelancer. The better you can communicate the requirements, the more likely they will deliver a product that’s close to your expectations.

This, of course, is not a guarantee. If the person completes a project that’s not up to your standards, you’ll still be spending time proofing, requesting revisions, or completing the edits yourself. This issue is compounded if the individual does not use your language natively.

2. Communication Can Be a Problem

While there’s no liability to a one-time hire, this works both ways. Because an outsourced hire is not a company employee, they are not obligated to be as communicative as you might hope.

Communication issues in-house can quickly be resolved as you share the same office. However, a third-party hire can exist anywhere in the world and has to work around their personal life and schedule.

Issues once again can be compounded if the person lives in a different time zone. It’s common to outsource help from overseas, which creates language and logistical barriers that you must prepare to work through.

3. You Deny Your In-House Team Opportunities

This is a sensitive issue to navigate and requires a deep understanding of those who make up your company. While a passionate team is willing to work hard for their company, they also should improve themselves and discover new opportunities.

When you immediately delegate certain tasks to outside help, you deny an in-house employee the opportunity to learn and develop. Your employees may see your attempts to outsource as a direct negative toward their personal career development. If you deny your employees the opportunity to expand their resumes and improve their level of income, you may risk losing them to a company that will.

4. There’s a Risk of Damaging Your Reputation

This one will also require you to understand an important party – your customers. As stated in the beginning, the United States in particular is known to take strong stances against outsourcing. Not only can it impact your internal team, but your customers may also have a moral stance against the act.

Additionally, your customers have the right to expect your in-house team to complete the requested work. If you outsource some or all of the project to a third party at home or abroad, it can automatically trigger two responses.

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The first is that the work is low-quality as it comes from an untrusted source. The customer chooses to give their money to your company and you repay that trust by utilizing an unknown party. Even if the work is quality, the customer may feel betrayed as they were not able to make an educated purchasing decision.

The second concern is the fear that they are overpaying. When you outsource help, the expectation is that the company is saving money. When the customer pays the same rate for outsourced help as they would for internal help, they’re going to assume that they’re being taken advantage of, so that your company can pocket the profits.

Know the Advantages and Risks Before Outsourcing

Outsourcing is a common practice. As the statistics above show, more people are working from home and as a freelancer than ever.

A business that leans on outsourced help can potentially save money, improve project turn-around, help mitigate workflow issues, and discover growth opportunities.

However, it’s important to be keenly aware of how outsourcing your work can impact your company’s reputation with in-house employees and customers. It’s essential that you gauge the response and feeling toward outsourced work before making your final decision. You want to use outsourcing to propel your company forward, not to alienate those that brought you to where you are.

As long as you have an understanding of where your company stands and appropriately weigh the risks, outsourcing may be a genuine solution for your business needs. Use this guide as necessary to aid in your decision-making process down the line.