Month: October 2017

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Digital Marketing Featured News Online Marketing PPC Social Media Social Media Marketing Tips and Tricks Web Design

Nashville-America’s Next Creative Boomtown

Nashville: America’s Next Creative Boomtown

When you work remotely, you can work anywhere that suits you… and one city that suits us fine is Nashville, Tennessee, where Social Link Marketing keeps watch on our teams, strategy, and accounts. You know it as the home of hot chicken, hot records, and hot summers. But it’s also one of the nation’s hottest opportunities for creative capital and tech investment. It’s not just that we like the music (okay, we love the music). We happen to think that Nashville’s seriously happening. Here’s a few reasons to come visit us and see why.

100 People a Day Can’t Be Wrong

Nashville metro saw a 36,667 population increase in 2016. We’re talking net gain. That puts the Music City’s 2% annual growth in the same league as Charlotte (2%), Denver (1.6%), and Atlanta (1.6%).

Investors Love Us

According to CityLab, Nashville ranked No. 22 in the nation for venture capital deals in 2017 and made No. 7 on the Milken Institute’s list for growth in employment opportunities, wages, and technology. Three startup accelerators make their home here. Considering that the rent in San Francisco is 150% higher, we think Nashville’s a better bet for businesses looking to expand.

Smart and Diverse

Forbes ranked Nashville No. 3 in its review of “The Next Biggest Boom Towns in The U.S.” on a number of factors: low housing prices, pro-business environment, rapid growth in educated migrants, and an increasingly diverse population. All of this is great news for tech industries.

Creative Communities

Tech is coming to Nashville, but the creatives were always here. Put them together and we’ll make some magic. Nashville is home to art, theatre, high-fashion design, artisanal food, handcrafted musical instruments, and a thriving community outreach. We know this for a fact—we’ve helped a lot of these businesses build sales close to home and far away.

It’s Sacred Ground

We’re not just talking about the Parthenon replica in Centennial Park, although that’s pretty awesome. The Ryman Auditorium (the “Mother Church” of country music), RCA’s historic Studio B, The Bluebird Cafe, and international songwriting festivals make Nashville a music lover’s Holy Land.

We’ll Feed You

Our food events are more fun (Hot Chicken Festival, anyone?), east side restaurants are taking off, we’re home to multiple craft breweries, and we’ll stake our food trucks against Austin’s any day. And speaking of those guys…

The Next What?

We love Austin, too—but can they claim the best bathroom in America or a forty-foot statue of Athena? Not to mention that WalletHub named us No. 1 for women-owned businesses (Austin’s hating life at No. 72). Maybe that does make Nashville the next Austin… we prefer to think of Austin as the previous us.

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Nashville is just one of many great cities where we’re helping clients build business. Wherever you are, we’ll put your virtual marketing department to work for you. Get in touch and let’s get started!

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Blog Online Marketing PPC SEO Social Media Social Media Marketing Tips and Tricks Web Design Web Development

Tips on Helping Your Website Visitors To Convert

Building Sites That Convert | Social Link

Is Your Site Converting Sales?

The first generation of business sites was all about building awareness. The second generation was about handling transactions. Tomorrow’s digital marketplace will be dominated by sites that bridge the all-important middle ground between these two ends of the sales funnel: customer conversion. This is where your site truly becomes a working tool for your sales force. Here’s six critical steps to building a site that sells.

#1. Know Who You’re Talking To

Your site doesn’t have to speak to everyone in the same voice. Coordinate your paid search and ad strategy to target customers by profile—geography, age, gender, profession, interests—then build landing pages geared toward their specific needs and interests.

#2. Make It Mobile (But Don’t Diss Desktops)

In spite of the massive growth in mobile usage, only 15% of all sales are made on smartphones. One reason is that many e-commerce sites are simply not optimized for mobile. Is your site truly mobile-adaptive? Are phone numbers set up for tap-to-call? Are payment methods, forms, and product displays simplified for mobile? Does it have location-based and notification features? If not, it’s time to redesign, because there’s one thing an app can do that a desktop can’t: it follows your customer everywhere… even when they’re in your competitors’ stores.

#3. Upgrade Your Content

Your sales force relies on good content just as much as your customers. Videos, blogs, infographics, and social posts are a great way to show your product’s benefits… they’re a great conversation-starters for sales calls… and they’re much more SEO-friendly. Small wonder that content marketing generates more than three times as many leads as outbound marketing (with a conversion rate that’s six times as high).

#4. Go For Relevant

With inbound marketing, the path is as important as the destination. Is your keyword strategy geared to your customer’s immediate needs and interests? Are you clearly showing the difference that your product makes in your customer’s lives? Is your promoted content appropriate to the space it’s filling in your customer’s day? Your site is only effective if your advertising is relevant enough to motivate action.

#5. Make Offers, Not Monologues

Outbound marketing announces; inbound marketing invites. To be effective, every piece of content on your site needs to offer something of value to the customer, and invite an interaction in return. This can take the form of shareable content, an email sign-up, product upsells, or loyalty premiums. Don’t settle for explanations. Start conversations.

#6. Keep Them Talking

One of the oldest rules of selling is still valid: the longer you keep the conversation going, the more likely you are to make a sale. With sophisticated email marketing, cart abandonment doesn’t have to be the end of the road. You can pinpoint the timing and content of emails to your customer’s buying patterns, make special offers, and guide them back to more relevant content.

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We build sites (and campaigns) that build sales! One call is all it takes to put your virtual marketing department to work for you. Get in touch and let’s get started!

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Sales Navigator and Why it’s One of the Best Selling Tools

 

Getting the Most Out of LinkedIn Sales Navigator

The better your network, the better your sales. This is what social selling is all about—and, thanks to lead generation platforms like DiscoverOrg and ZoomInfo, it’s gone beyond combing through profiles to see which of your friends went to college with that SVP you’ve been courting.

Then there’s LinkedIn Sales Navigator, which not only promises high-quality data from its 500-million member database, but also the relationship-building of a true social network. We’ve been trying it out for ourselves… here’s what we’ve found:

The Best News: Everybody’s Already There

All lead gen platforms promise qualified contact information. How qualified the leads are depends entirely on the developer’s diligence. In the case of Sales Navigator, every contact is essentially pre-qualified: the vast majority of professionals are already on LinkedIn, and most of them are good at keeping their profiles up to date. There’s little chance of hitting a dead end.

Social News: Shared Experiences

Shared interests are the backbone of social networking. This filter makes it easier to break the ice by identifying what you’ve got in common: places you’ve lived, companies you’ve worked for, influencers you both follow.

Also Good News: Keeping Track

It’s not really a social network… but you don’t turn to LinkedIn to share videos of surfing cats. What LinkedIn can do is keep you aware of what’s going on with your contacts—promotions, job shifts, and new connections (valuable if you’re trying to link up through a mutual contact). If you’ve signed up at the Team level, you can see which of your colleagues is already in touch with your prospects. You can also package sales collaterals in PointDrive Presentations—clients won’t have to download them, and you can keep track of who’s viewed what.

Incredibly Filtered News: Narrow Your Prospects

Features like the “Interested In” filter make it easier to target companies that need what you provide. Advanced filters (years in position, years in company, posted content keywords) allow you to target prospects who are most likely to be the movers and shakers within their organization.

Still Good News: CRM Integration

Integration with SalesForce, Microsoft Dynamics, and HubSpot has been a feature for some time now, and it’s gotten smoother with the new user interface.

Maybe-Not-Terrific News: You’ll Be Using InMail

Some people aren’t crazy about having to use LinkedIn’s internal email system instead of getting direct contact info (for the record, LinkedIn swears it gets better response than email). Depending on which level you buy, you’ll get anywhere from 20 to 50 messages a month.

Words of Wisdom: Don’t Rush The Setup

One of the strengths of Sales Navigator is predictive matching—so the more information you provide about yourself, the better your hits will be. Expect to spend about an hour importing your contacts and setting up your profile.

Want to boost the impact of your sales? One call is all it takes to put your virtual marketing department to work for you. Get in touch and let’s get started!

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Marketing Lessons From the Music Industry

What Brand Marketers Can Learn From Jack White

As a virtual marketing agency, the Social Link team lives and works all around this great country (and beyond)… but our home office is right here in Nashville, and as digital marketers we’re always inspired by the music business. Nobody connects with an audience like Nashville artists! Here’s some insights we’ve gained while following the rise of Jack White’s Third Man Records—a Nashville-based music label that lives up to its brand promise in astonishing ways.

#1: Grow From Your Roots

Long before he became a Grammy-winning musician, Jack White was a professional upholsterer. The brand identity for Third Man Upholstery combined a black-and-yellow color scheme with a punchy slogan (“Your Furniture’s Not Dead”). To build buzz, he and a colleague formed a band called “The Upholsterers” and placed vinyl records inside their furniture. To date, two copies (worth up to $900 on eBay) have been found.

Though White has long since traded in leather sofas for vinyl LPs, the roots of his original brand are still at the core of Third Man Records. His company makes everything it sells. The brand colors remain yellow and black. And the slogan has become a rallying cry for music fans: “Your Turntable Is Not Dead.”

The takeaway: Though companies must evolve to survive—even reinvent their business models—the best ones continue to express the values and attitudes that made them great.

#2: Whatever You Are, Own It

True to its motto, Third Man Records is dedicated to pushing the limits of what only vinyl can do: the world’s first liquid-filled album, scented records, discs cut with x-rays, and the first vinyl record ever played in space. And it doesn’t stop there. Third Man’s Nashville store has a recording booth where you can cut your own record. In 2017, the label even opened its own vinyl pressing plant.

The takeaway: Whatever you make, make it matter. Everything your brand does is better when it’s something only you could have done.

#3: Say It Loud and Mean It

Despite its dedication to physical media, the label’s talent roster is available on all streaming platforms—Spotify, Pandora, Apple Music, and Tidal (in which White is an investor). Is this a brand disconnect? Absolutely not. Third Man promotes vinyl for the same reason that Apple promotes iPhones: it’s a way of reminding fans that what they create is more than a commodity. And that music, like technology, still has the power to inspire.

The takeaway: Wherever you go—and you should go everywhere—always remember what you mean to your biggest fans. Speaking of going anywhere…

#4: Be Occasionally Random

The music isn’t always distributed through normal channels. On April 1, 2012—not an April Fool’s prank, swear—Third Man Records launched 1,000 helium balloons carrying flexi-discs of Jack White’s single “Freedom at 21.” Only a handful have ever been recovered, and one of them fetched $4238.88 at eBay auction.

The takeaway: If you’re gonna aim, aim high.

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Whether you’re in Nashville or on the other side of the world, Social Link has the in-house expertise and resources to translate your brand story into tangible results. Get in touch and let’s get started!

 

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Blog Online Marketing Tips and Tricks

Convert Transactions Into Relationships With Sales and Marketing Alignment

Decision Comfort: Turning Transactions Into Relationships

Here is a customer experience nightmare we all live with. You’re in a long line of passengers waiting for coffee, minutes before a flight. You don’t want coffee, you need it the way a gator needs a slow, fat bird. Yet as the line refuses to budge, one word is flashing through your caffeine-starved brain: leave. The airport coffee bar has abandoned you. Your flight is maybe seconds away from abandoning you. So you abandon the line. Just like millions of online consumers abandon their shopping carts every day.

Your decision to quit the line has nothing to do with your loyalty to the brand. You love Brand X Coffee. Just seeing the logo reminds you of rich, bold flavors and everything that is good about life. Too bad for you that everyone else in line had the same thought. And so you run for the gate and settle for a cup on the plane. It will be bland and watery. It will not be the coffee you wanted. But it will not make you miss your flight.

Brand loyalty did not fail. The transaction failed. And bad transactions kill relationships. But there’s a simple fix—one that has nothing to do with efficiency and everything to do with human psychology.

Closers Are For Coffee

Let’s go through that coffee line again… only this time, a barista is working the line with an iPad. The moment he or she asks, “What can I get started for you?” you feel an immediate surge of relief. You’re still miles from the counter—but you’re getting something started! This coffee is going to happen. Then again, you expect nothing less from good old Brand X coffee.

Isn’t this just a mind trick? Of course it is. It even has a name: Decision Comfort. It doesn’t bring your coffee any faster, but it allows you to imagine a happy ending to your coffee ordeal, so your expectations relax. Studies show that consumers are more comfortable with a decision once they’re able to visualize its outcome. By establishing that comfort, the barista with the iPad has changed nothing… except how you perceive your relationship to the brand.

Let’s Get Uber There

You’re marketing a new ride-hailing service like Uber and the boss wants to focus on “faster pickup and delivery” as a key benefit. Is this the right approach? In theory, yes: time = convenience, and shorter wait = lower abandonment. But in reality our sense of time is actually quite fluid. Fifteen minutes in line can feel like fifteen hours if you’re worried about missing your flight. On the other hand, if your order’s already been taken—or if you see a sign that reads, “Expected Wait From This Point: 20 Minutes” and it only takes fifteen—then it will start to feel like time is back on your side.

Uber has mastered the decision comfort game. It doesn’t get you a driver that much quicker than phoning for a cab used to, but it can show you a little icon of your driver coming your way. How long did it take? Exactly as long as Uber said it would.

The Short and Winding Road

There is nothing to be lost by speeding up a transaction… unless it costs you the chance to advance a relationship. Suppose that your retail site wants an add-on to help you reconnect with first-time customers. Which of these will do the job at the lowest risk of cart abandonment?

  1. Offer the option to save credit card information to simplify future purchases.
  2. Include an opt-in for your newsletter (which you’ve helpfully pre-checked).
  3. Offer a discounted bundle with other related items
  4. Offer a chance to save 15% on the order by filling out a three-question survey.

The first three options will not slow the transaction by more than a second, but they share a problem: they all force the customer to think into the unforeseeable future. Do I really want these people having my credit card number? Do I need another newsletter? How much am I going to want these other items that I didn’t plan to buy? It’s the equivalent of asking, “Would you like to pre-order coffee for your next flight?” or, “For a discounted fee, would you like to add two other destinations you didn’t plan on visiting?”

The fourth option (the survey discount) might seem like the least desirable. It adds time to the transaction and it costs you money. And yet it has a big advantage over the others. The customer knows exactly what they’re being asked for and what they’ll get in return. They don’t have to plan ahead or rethink an earlier decision. And what you’re getting in return—valuable information about your consumer and a reason to reconnect—is surely worth some discount. As with Geico’s “Fifteen minutes could save you fifteen per cent or more,” a clear choice is a strong motivator to action.

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What can we get started for you? One call is all it takes to put your virtual marketing department to work for you. Get in touch and let’s get started!

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Remote Tips and Tricks

Your Virtual Marketing Team and How to Manage It

6 Tips For Building Virtual Team Culture

At Social Link we live, work, and go virtual. Working as “your virtual marketing department” is better for our clients (faster access to top talent), better for our teams (liberation from cubicle hell)—and we’ve proud to say, it’s a lot better for everyone’s bottom line. Even so, it’s not without challenges, particularly if your company’s used to a highly formalized or communal environment. Here’s some best practices we use to keep our own virtual team in harmony.

#1: Know Your People

Going virtual means you spend far less time in meetings. That’s great, but it also means you have to make an extra effort to get the team acquainted with each other. Do they prefer working independently? Are they night owls or morning people? What’s their sense of humor?

Take time to get beyond the profile picture on your group chat. If you hear a dog barking in the background of your next conference call, don’t immediately ask them to mute—it’s a chance to learn more about an important member of their family.

Tactics: Create a Facebook group and encourage photos; post a question of the day and compare answers; devote the first few minutes of team calls to non-work matters.

#2: Keep All The Lines Open

Frequent check-ins are critical on a virtual team. Isolation is a motivation killer: it’s important to maintain one-on-one contact with individual team members, by phone as well as chat. This is particularly important in a creative culture, where freewheeling discussion often leads to unexpected breakthroughs.

Tactics: Take the call wherever possible; encourage informal conversations so you know what’s going on in everyone’s daily lives; take advantage of opportunities for face-to-face meetings.

#3: Make Them Talk to Each Other

For one-on-one conversations to be effective, they need to be happening in all directions. Encourage your team to look to each other for answers, take on task leadership, and collaborate on solutions.

Tactics: Maintain a dedicated conference line that’s available at all times; create a team chat room; designate subject matter experts so that your team knows who to call on various topics.

#4: Make Sure Everyone’s Seeing the Same Thing

To see is to know: this is how you’ll know if you picked the right collaborative tools. Meetings go much better if everyone on the call is able to share the screen.

Tactics: Join.me, TeamViewer, and Google Hangouts are all budget-minded options that facilitate screen sharing.

#5: Make Sure Everyone Speaks the Same Language

Just because you all use the same words doesn’t mean you speak the same language. To a developer, a “platform” is a set of software tools; to an advertising creative, a “platform” is a brand positioning. Your team members may be coming to you from vastly different work cultures, or even from different countries. It’s worth the time it takes to understand the fine nuances of each other’s terminology.

Tactics: Encourage overexplaining; ask people to explain their terms; choose a common term for everything and make sure everyone sticks with it.

#6: Always Be Consistent

Team members may be on different time zones. Some of them work in remote offices while others are used to working alone. People will inevitably develop independent working styles and you should encourage them to do so: that’s how you get great results. At the same time, remote teams function more effectively if they know what to expect, whether it’s the start time for a group chat or the folder where you find all the briefing materials.

Tactics: Don’t cancel a meeting if there’s nothing to discuss, just keep it short; make sure everyone knows before meetings what part they’re expected to play, and how to prepare.

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Need a virtual marketing department of your own? At Social Link, we’ve got access to a deep base of talented people who love to work virtually and would love to work with you. Get in touch and let’s get started!

 

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