Erik Qualman's Blog, page 572

The Call to Action: Still a Key Component of Contemporary Business Ownership

Even in a perpetually changing business world, there are some elements and key factors that remain constant. These can be found across individual disciplines and business sectors, from sales and manufacturing the marketing techniques used to promote brands. The latter market is particularly fascinating, as while it has experienced a greater level of evolution that almost any other aspect of business the basic rules of marketing remain largely unchanged. As a result of this, the ‘call-to-action’ remains a crucial marketing technique that can help to drive traffic and sales conversions over time.

For those who are unfamiliar with the term, a CTA can be any technique, icon or promotional package that is utilized to convert unique visitors into sales conversions and customers’ with a fixed financial value. This is a long-standing marketing technique, and one that can take numerous forms in the modern age. So although the basic premise of CTA’s remains unchanged, the technology used to implement them and bring them to live has changed almost beyond all reasonable recognition. In addition to this, the development of analytical CRM technology has also made the impact of CTA’s easy to measure.

More specifically, companies tend to invest in CTA techniques that are located almost exclusively online. This is especially true in an age of mobile websites, where large and prominent icons can easily be transformed into responsive CTA’s. By clicking on these visitors can be directed to an alternative page that implores them to subscribe with the brand or make a purchase, or alternatively enables them to learn more about a specific product. Either way, these visual icons help to build relationships between brands and consumers within a relatively short period of time.

There are also more diverse CTA techniques that will become increasingly popular in 2015. The first is the use of high quality blog posts, which can be published either on your own website or through on a relevant alternative online resource. This can include an organic CTA either within the post or at the bottom, so long as it is natural and links seamlessly to your brand.

Alternatively, there is a trend for promotional CTA’s currently driving the online gambling market. More specifically, branded sites such as casinotropez.com are offering increasingly generous welcome packages and bonus offers to new customers, which are designed to engage potential participants and solicit them to interact with the gameplay. Often including free gameplay options and deposit matches of up to 400%, these CTA’s are extremely aggressive and particularly effective in a crowded marketplace.

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Seven Tips for Making Webinars More Social

If you’re a B2B marketer, chances are you’ve either attended or hosted a webinar. Although webinars are a great marketing tool – think leads for your sales team – the average webinar isn’t cutting edge or even personal. In a time when everything from print ads to TV shows have hashtags, webinars without a little side conversation leave something to be desired.

But it’s not just about attendee experience – encouraging webinar attendees to talk in a public forum provides additional publicity for your event and valuable insight about what your attendees think about the webinar, the industry and sometimes even your brand. These insights can help you better plan future marketing initiatives.

If you’re looking to make your webinars more social, Twitter is a great place to start. Here are seven tips to consider before your next event:

Select a unique hashtag to use for your webinar. This hashtag not only creates a forum in which attendees can interact with one another, but it also makes it easy for you to find and monitor those conversations and better gauge success by tracking impressions generated by your event.
Send a Tweet 15-30 minutes before the webinar as a reminder. Include the link to register and the unique hashtag you’ll be using during the webinar. Doing so reminds attendees to tune in and is an easy way to get in one final promotional push for your webinar before it starts.
Send a welcome Tweet at the start of the webinar. Includes a note about when the webinar will start, and don’t forget the hashtag! Think of it as a cocktail party – you’re the host, and you should be there to greet your guests at the start of the party.
Don’t just share the hashtag at the start of the webinar. Keep the hashtag in the footer of slides during the webinar for those who are late to join or who might not have been looking at the screen at the start of the webinar.
Tweet the Twitter handles of the presenters using the hashtag at the beginning of the webinar so people can find (and use) their handles during the event. You may also want to include the presenters’ Twitter handles on one of your introduction slides. For added promotion, encourage your speakers to Tweet about the webinar leading up to the event using the designated hashtag.
Stats make great Tweets during webinars. If you want to see your Tweets Retweeted anything with a “%” should be considered. You can Tweet these as they happen, or can pull them ahead of time and issue them as they’re mentioned.
Remember this is a conversation! Make sure you’re monitoring what people are Tweeting during the webinar, and respond as necessary. Consider responding to people who say they’re joining the webinar or appreciated the webinar using an @mention.

As marketers, we’re no strangers to the second screen. Why would webinars be any different? Adding a unique hashtag and Tweeting about your webinar is one of the easiest ways to make your event more social for attendees, and to gain valuable insights from your audience.

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Job Boards Becoming More Social

If you need a job, you most likely will turn to a job board such as Careerbuilder.com, Monster.com or Indeed.com.

Job boards allow you to search by job title, keyword, company name, location, whether you want full-time or part-time and more. The search can be as specific or as general as you like.

Social media, though, is the new up-and-coming way to find a job. It’s all in whom you know, not necessarily what you know, right? By being active on social media (especially on professional sites like LinkedIn), you can get ahead in the job field by connecting with similar people all across the nation.

Big Numbers Using Social Media

Still, most people go to job boards (not social media) when they are serious about finding a job.

Social media can be a distraction and is more viewed as a way to keep in touch with family and friends, not a way to find a job (though it can be a great tool to find a job or change careers).

One thing social media has going for it is that almost everyone uses it and engages in it. There are definitely some lessons job boards can learn from the worldwide social media platforms.

Job Boards Can Learn from Social Media

The article “3 Lessons job boards can learn from social media sites” states that social media has mastered the art of creating high-levels of interest, share-ability and visibility.

Social media allows products, services and articles to go viral and reach millions of people day after day.

The article recommends job boards:

Become more specific – Instead of focusing on all careers in all different industries in every different city, narrow down your niche. The site freelancewritinggigs.com, for example, only focuses on freelance writing and editing jobs. Freelancers can visit the site daily to see new jobs they may be interested in applying for. By being more specific, like how Instagram only focuses on images, you’ll be able to focus on a select group of people and become the leading job board in that industry.
Find similar jobs – If you follow tech companies on Twitter, Twitter recommends other followers you may be interested in. Job boards should always recommend other jobs that the job seeker may want to apply for. This gives the job seeker more options and it keeps them on your site for a longer period of time. In addition to sharing similar jobs, job boards can also show articles to the candidate that they may be interested in.
Utilize sharing features – On social media, you can easily share an article with friends, ‘like’ someone’s post, retweet a blog post, ‘favorite’ an Instagram image and so on and so forth. The article recommends job boards do the same thing. The advantage to this is prospective employees can save a job they’re interested in and apply later when they have more time or they can easily send a job to a friend they think may be good for the position. People don’t want to spend forever trying to figure out how to save and share job listings, so job boards should make it as easy as possible for their users.

If you run a job board, make sure to use these three lessons from social media.

Think specific, think simple and most of all – think social.

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Make Life Insurance a Social Task

Social media is used for most anything these days. Whatever someone is searching for, they can find it on social media, from friends to businesses to insurance quotes and rates. As the following article shows, Auto, Health, Home & Life Compare & Save is a major topic of interest for consumers trying to save money on their coverage needs. Whether it is the required health or auto insurance or looking for the right life insurance coverage, social media can be a great tool for finding deals.

 

Social Task at Hand

Narrowing down the fields of insurance, let’s zero in on life insurance. You can make this a social task and use social media sites for finding information. Take a look at most life insurance companies and start with their websites. You’ll then find widgets for a number of social media sites and go from there. Not only will you find current news releases and information, you’ll also probably see customer feedback. Here’s where you can get a real taste of the company’s customer service, philosophies and interactions.

Engagement Matters

Because social media is where you can engage, it’s a great place to witness the good, the bad and the ugly from a business. Compare different companies through their social media pages. You can get a sense of the company before you go further. Are they receptive to consumer inquiries? Do they respond in a quick manner? Lastly, do they solve any problems or in fact create more on social media? Once that’s taken care of, you may have some companies narrowed down and you’re ready to contact them.

Contact via Social Media

Don’t close up your social media yet. You don’t need to pick up the phone and wade through various gyrations to get to speak to someone. Use social media. Many sites, like State Farm, offer free quotes for consumers on their websites. You’ll be asked for your zip code and to fill out a questionnaire. You also will have an agent assigned to you as a contact person. This is all through the website. It’s a great way to compare different companies and their life insurance quotes. You can also find valuable information on their social media sites, and as mentioned, most companies have these links right on their home page. Things have gotten easier with social media. The nice thing about using social media for finding life insurance quotes is that you can take a look at a company’s Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn pages without having your own.

 

You can do a lot of research before giving any of your information away. So before you start making those phone calls and being put on hold a number of times or waiting in an endless queue, browse social media. You’ll get a lot of good information along the way, and hopefully find the best life insurance deal around.

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Social Media & Technology Trends for 2015

This New Year, technology and social media will make us feel more important and taken care of than ever before. Synced data and cloud computing paired with social media usage and execution will have a big role in helping move along our lives in a smooth efficient manner where we’ll barely even notice. Key themes trending in 2015 revolve around overall connectivity between business-to-consumer, people-to-people, machine-to-machine and people-to-machine.

 

Trend #1: Anyone in the business of doing business will do it via social media.

It’s no secret that the rapid emergence of mobile technology has given way to the significant amount of time we consumers spend on social media. In some ways, people have become so mobile they have detached themselves from their tangible surroundings – however, the desire to connect with something or someone has actually transitioned itself into a virtual, social media form. We use Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and Instagram to maintain our relationships whether it’s with people or subconsciously with our favorite brands. For 2015, businesses will pour more money into paid social media advertising to reach their target demographics and build loyal consumers out of each and every one of us. Marketers will leverage the behavioral metrics, analytics and data that technology has made possible to track in order to strategically engage potential customers. Social media outlets have already begun structuring their advertising programs to push paid ads to the top of the feeds and limit the amount of organic promotional posts so even companies who don’t want to participate in the changing advertising atmophere will find it necessary for their business to stay afloat.

In addition to the upward trend in social advertising, social commerce will start to be implemented as well. Social commerce refers to shopping directly from a social media network as opposed to going to a retailer’s separate website. The purchasing process in ‘15 will become streamlined, consisting of online users clicking the “Buy” button for a featured shirt in a promoted social media post. Social media is really the ideal environment for retail and the future of the business – people on it are already engaged and it’s a breeding ground for impulse buys by consumers who are highly in tune with what’s trending.

 

Trend #2: Increased integration of visuals becomes a standard for engagement.

As humans we innately crave visual stimulation – thank goodness technology is the enabler that feeds our need. With high-definition retina displays featuring the crispest images, social media-hosted video and mobile virtual reality included in the 2015 itinerary, how could we expect any less? According to Forrester in 2014, the visual-based social media platform, Instagram, saw four times more engagement than Facebook and Twitter. The statistic proves social media users, regular consumers and advertisers alike, have figured out just how effective it is to tell stories through video and pictures. Social media outlets are currently the best way to inform others of what is relevant and happening in your realm because they let you capture and share a moment or thought, visually. Affordable devices that house these social media platforms are extremely prevalent in the 2015 market, which will allow a mass amount of people to participate and feel connected to each other.

 

Trend #3: The Internet of Things is coming into fruition.

It’s all about connections this year meaning we’ll rely on our everyday appliances to have some sort of network connectivity. This concept of all devices being linked to the internet and to each other, known as the “Internet of Things (IoT),” is becoming a reality due to the advancements of WiFi-enabled devices, synced data technology, as well as improved accessibility to the internet in terms of both costs and locational range of available networks. With all the tools in place, “smart life” can ultimately take place. Samsung has been a pioneer in leading this revolution with its introduction of a smart home last year that comprised of high-efficiency smart appliances like washing machines, refrigerators and entertainment systems, all of which could be managed and controlled with one device through an integrated platform and server. Tech trends of 2015 will keep up this momentum with a flood of smart wearables and everything WiFi and social-media equipped, taking further steps towards being completely connected in every aspect.

This 2015 is set for obligatory social media consumption, visual implementation for engagement and synchronization through the Internet of Things. As a result, our world will finally be uninterrupted by the interruption of advanced technologies and strategic social media integration to achieve true connectivity whenever and wherever we go.

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Is Your Social Media Usage a Security Risk?

When you stop and think about it, just how secure is your home at the end of the day?

While you may have a good security system, practice common sense habits like not letting newspapers and mail pile up and don’t leave garage doors and other entries to your home unlocked, you could still be advertising that you’re a potential break-in victim?

According to FBI data from as recently as two years ago, one in every three-dozen homes nationwide was expected to be burglarized during the year. Such criminal events lead to an average loss of $2,230 with each break-in. When you total those figures up, it comes out to more than $4.5 billion in property losses.

So, still feel safe at home?

Practice Common Sense at All Times

While individuals and families can’t be in their residences 24 hours a day, there are a number of common sense tactics they can deploy to reduce the chance of becoming crime victims in their own home.

Among them:

Secure the Residence – More and more Americans are looking into and purchasing local home security systems. For those fearing that a security system will cost too much money, there are plenty of companies and deals out there if you take the time to research them. Social media is a great tool to use in this process. Along with referrals from friends and family members, Google terms such as “security systems” and “home security” when researching. Review the companies that are of interest to you, along with checking out their social media profiles on Facebook, Twitter etc. You can learn details about a company by seeing how quick they respond to consumer questions on social media, if their responses are helpful, and how often they post relevant links to information on home crime stats etc.

Don’t Fall Into a Pattern – Many crimes in the home occur due to residents falling into a familiar pattern. They may leave for and arrive home from work at similar times during the day, leave mail and newspapers pile up while out of town, let grass and bushes grow while on vacation etc. All of these patterns of behavior can lead to trouble, especially in circumstances where one or more thieves are casing a residence. In order to lessen the chances of your home being broken into, alternate to a degree when you leave for and arrive home from work if at all possible, put your mail/newspapers on hold when out of town, and if you can’t do it yourself before you leave, have someone mow the lawn, water the plants etc. while you’re away.

Avoid Advertising Your Schedule – Finally, it probably should not come as a big surprise that more and more home break-in perpetrators are turning to social media in order to learn when homeowners and renters will be away. If you’re planning that long-awaited vacation or have to go out of town for work or family business, don’t advertise it to the world. In the event you just have to post pictures and comments of where you’re visiting, make sure you have a private profile on sites like Facebook and Twitter, meaning only those you approve of can see your posts.

With the economy still struggling and many individuals facing financial hurdles and/or living on the streets, tough times mean a greater risk of criminal activity.

Lessen the chances that you and your loved ones will have your residence visited by an unwanted guest.

Photo credit: Image courtesy of Salvatore Vuono at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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Put Social Media, Text and Email to Work for Your Company

Integrating technology into your company is the key to business success because it helps unlock your customer outreach and marketing potential.

Focusing on social media, text, and email will help your business grow by increasing your online and mobile presence.

As the following article shows, here are just a few reasons why integrating social media, text and email into your company is a must….

Creating a Social Presence

Social media’s influence on society is impressive.

Sites like Facebook and Twitter dominate the online activities of millions of Americans as well as people across the globe. With that said, it’s pretty apparent why your company should adopt a social media mindset.

Not only does having a Facebook business page, Twitter account, and Linkedin profile help your company climb the social ranks, it also helps you create a social presence.

With a strong social presence, your company can increase its customer outreach and marketing in a number of ways:

• Social Q and A – With social media, you can encourage your customers to post any questions they may have about the products and services you provide. It’s important to respond to your customers’ inquiries quickly or you could end up losing followers as well as customers.

• Social Marketing – Once your online presence grows, your company can begin to use its social profiles as a marketing device. By posting photos your goods and describing the services you provide via social media, you can showcase your business and attract new customers.

• Social Opt-Ins – Sites like Facebook offer an opt-in feature that allows your followers to sign-up for your email list through your business page. This helps drive traffic to your company’s website.

Texting Your Way to Success

Just like social media, just about everyone across the planet uses a smartphone or wireless device. Based on the growing trend in all-things mobile, adopting a mobile mindset will put your company in the palm of your customers’ hands.

Here’s how:

• Mobile Marketing – Marketing to your customers through their mobile devices is the best form of customer outreach. Why? Because it helps your company connect to its audience in the moment and on the go.

• Direct Outreach – Going the mobile route with your company’s outreach efforts provides a direct line of communication to your audience. Sending a text will grab your customers’ attention faster than traditional marketing techniques.

• Easy and Cost Effective – Because marketing is in the form of a text message, creating text marketing campaigns is cheaper and easier for your company to create and deliver.

Email for All

If social media and text marketing help your company grab the attention of a massive online audience, then email gives your outreach efforts a personal touch.

By encouraging your customers to sign up for your website’s email list, you can send promotions and marketing campaigns that are tailored specifically to the recipients.

Just like the social and text routes, you need to keep in mind marketing etiquette when using email outreach.

Receiving your customers’ email addresses is a privilege, so don’t ruin it by flooding their inboxes with numerous daily promotions. Reaching out through email once or twice a week is all your subscribers need.

When it comes to customer outreach, social media, text and email will help your company reach millions.

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6 Tips for “Civilizing” Your Comments Section

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.com

One of the reasons blogs have become so popular is because of their social nature. The ability for people to leave comments and get replies from the author is precisely why blogs won out over static websites. It’s also why everyone from mainstream newspapers to the small corner store uses some form of website that allows comments.  T

While the social angle of a comments section can be great to draw a crowd, there’s the slight problem of the anonymity the internet provides. In other words, people are more than willing to make statements that they never would in real life, but it’s as if the anonymity they have online allows them to spew hatred and vitriolic comments with little regard to how those comments might affect others.

The problem is that when your comments section turns into the staging ground for World War 3, it will have a negative impact on your website, not least of which is people hitting the back button just to get away from the negativity. So, what can we do? Are we stuck dealing with people’s darker sides or can we find a way to all just get along?

1 ) Write a Comment Policy

Having a comment policy is critical because then no one can complain they didn’t know what they could or couldn’t post. Remember, it’s your website and you can decide the rules people have to follow. But make sure to spell everything out in clear, easy-to-understand language.

Now, this will not necessarily be a deterrent, but it can help you when it comes to removing comments.

2 ) Allow Users to Report Posts

This ties in with having a comment policy. If you have a loyal audience, they can be quite adept at policing themselves. And this becomes a lot easier when you have a comment policy in place.

You’ll find that people will be quick to report comments that are nasty for the sake of it. Funnily enough, most people are good human beings. Unfortunately, it’s the trolls that holler the loudest. But you’d be surprised at the power of a loyal community.

3) Reply to People’s Comments

If you want to build a loyal audience, then you need to show them you respect them. And the best way to do that is to respond to people’s comments. Yes, you’ll have to reply to each and every one. And you need to do it quickly – at least within one business day, if not faster.

Engaging in conversations with your readers will help you build powerful relationships with them. Think of it this way. What site would you rather visit? One where your comments are ignored or one where the writer of the article you were reading takes the time to respond to your comment, even if it was just a simple “great article”? You’d visit the latter, wouldn’t you?

By taking this approach, you are building that all important loyalty that will help you keep your comments section civilized. Your loyal audience will make sure it stays that way. After all, they don’t want some troll ruining a site where they feel safe and comfortable in sharing their opinions and where they feel valued.

4) Require Facebook or Google+ Sign-In to Post Comments

The idea is to get people to use their real name to leave comments. Though this doesn’t guarantee they won’t be argumentative for the sake of it, people are less likely to throw out racist, sexist or any other –ist comments if their real names are attached to them.

This approach doesn’t mean you won’t receive negative comments at all – some people don’t mind posting vitriolic remarks even under their own names – but it will certainly reduce their volume.

5) Use Their Pride against Them

Instituting an up- and down- vote system will certainly help. You’d be surprised by how many of these trolls really care about their comments being down-voted. It’s a massive case of pride. Their goal is to provoke a reaction, which they often do, causing flame wars that are beyond ridiculous. However, when they’re comments are down-voted, their pride is seriously injured and they often slink away into the night.

This system also reduces the likelihood of people posting unpleasant comments in general. Remember, the goal isn’t to deter differing opinions. It’s just to make sure people express them in a respectful way.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.com

6) Human Moderation of Comments

Human moderation is the end-all and be-all of whipping your comments section into shape. Word filters and giving people the ability to report other users’ comments are nowhere near as effective as having someone read each and every comment before posting it. It might take quite a bit of effort and time, but it’s well-worth it, if you want a comments section where your audience feels safe and comfortable discussing their opinions.

However, you need to be careful when moderating comments, especially if you are doing it yourself, as the writer. You don’t want to remove every comment that offers a different opinion than yours or that criticizes your work – if it’s done tastefully, of course. This is why it’s often a good idea to get someone who can be impartial to do the moderating.

If you simply don’t have time or the funds to moderate each and every comment, another option is to allow comments from trusted readers to go through without moderation. If someone has been posting regularly on your site under a certain account and their comments have been respectful, there’s no reason not to allow them to go through without moderation. It’s not as if that person will suddenly turn into a hate-filled bigot.

Careful, though, because moderating the first comment from a new account isn’t as effective, especially if it’s something you publicize. Someone can very well write a respectful comment to get their account through the moderation process, only to turn into a very unpleasant person afterwards.

Unfortunately, the only really effective way to make sure your comments section stays clean and civilized is with human moderation. Of course, there’s always the option of turning comments off completely. Though it will harm your site to a certain degree, the benefits might be greater, especially if your content tends to spark unpleasant debates.

However, as previously stated, the goal isn’t to deter differing opinions or even to stop heated debates, it’s to make sure people do it in a civilized fashion.

Whatever you do, though, don’t feed the fire. If some of these less than pleasant comments make it through, just ignore them or, preferably, delete them. Don’t rise to the bait, because that’s what most of these people want. It’s what makes them feel important.   So, just ignore them and your life will be so much simpler.

In the digital age, a well-done blog can be a launching platform for a lucrative career.  The reality is, engagement is a step along the way, so don’t let a band of internet trolls divert your path with their pseudo-intellectual garbage.  Implement these 6 tips, and hopefully your blog will remain civil, sane, and scalable to boot!

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Infographic: 11 Essential Ingredients Every Blog Post Needs

It does not matter whether a business is a small or a multinational enterprise. Blogging is without a doubt integral to online content marketing techniques and strategies for a myriad of reasons. In detail, here are the four major accounts why online marketers need to blog as far as promoting a business is concern:

1. To drive traffic to one’s website. A blog provides online marketers the opportunity to create relevant content for the consumers. They can use the virtual world as a means to drive traffic back to the company’s website. In saying this, it is important for online marketers to turn the blog into a foundation for all the company’s social media platforms. Post links of blog articles in different social websites, and in this manner, social followers are given a reason to click through the company’s website.

2. To escalate SEO or SERP. Blogs increase the website’s SEO. New content is the key to whipping out competitors in the search engine’s result page. To do this, it is important for bloggers to make use of keywords. In addition to that, listing topics, keywords, and categories would help consumers and shoppers find products and services more easily.

3. To position one’s brand as a leading industry. Properly-written articles illustrate how the company positions as an industry leader. Posting topics that rings a bell pertaining to the industry may bring out that the blogger is knowledgeable of the company and the products and services it offers. In this manner, it is not only the products and services that are being marketed, but the online marketer’s writing skills as well.

4. To cultivate better consumer relationships. Blogs serve as an alternative source of connection between the company and the consumers. By accessing the website directly, clients are able to get to know the business from the comfort of one’s home.

Knowing the benefits and importance of blogs in promoting a business, it is important for company to put a lot of effort in writing effective blog posts and generating powerful content. This is for the prime reason that online marketers want to see their posts in top search engine results. In doing so, there are several ingredients that must be considered when writing a blog post, and how online marketers take care of these ingredients determines the success of blogging service.

There are two important parts of a blog that must be ironed out. There components are:

• Title. A blog must have a striking title that wakes up the curiosity of anyone who reads it. It could be a brief overview of the article or a complete mystery. What matters is that it catches the attention of the reader, catchy and is able to convince the target audience to hit the link and read the entire article.

• Content. Truth be told, the content of a blog is equivocally important as the title itself. A blogger will not succeed if he or she has a good title yet has poor content (or vice versa). Both the title and the content must be written well, as excellent content constantly ranks high in the search queries. When writing the content, bloggers should call to mind:

o The method or style used in writing matters. This includes how the ideas, concepts, and problems are introduced, how they are discussed, and how the article proceeds.

o It is also important to make the article or blog post visually appealing. The human brain reacts more actively to visual images than text. To make an article visually appealing, make use of high quality videos and images (and not just plain text).

Because writing a blog post is vital, Copy Blogger came up with a very interesting and informative infographic informing online marketers of the 11 most important ingredients every blog post must possess. This infographic will guide a blogger in writing blog posts that will surely meet all the reasons why blogs are created.

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Trimming the Sails of Your Business to the Wind

All kinds of startups should strictly follow the “carpe diem” (“seize the day”) rule. By that I mean: business cannot be static, it should change and develop accordingly to the time and conditions. For example, keeping track of popular holidays and adding a pinch of their spirit to the image of startup when it is appropriate. Christmas, Halloween, St. Valentine’s day, Thanksgiving day are more than just holidays –they are perfect tools for making your customers love and appreciate you more, as well as your products. So don’t lose these opportunities, act accordingly!

Website

There is no need for complete change of design, but don’t hesitate to use some details that will show your customers that the site is alive and exists in the same universe with them. Treat it the same way you treat seasonal decorations of your home: mistletoe and snowflakes around Christmas, hearts as St. Valentine’s day, jack-o-lanterns at Halloween, and so on. Just don’t overdo it – a slight, non-intrusive change of design on the main page will be more than enough.

Services

Coordinate your specials to holidays and other important events. “A special one-time offer, only here and only now!” Turn this sentence into a guide to successful implementation of the possibilities provided by this holiday. It doesn’t matter what business you are in – you may create a temporary service or just give a discount for an old one, it doesn’t really matter as long as it brings profit to your customers. However, don’t get carried away – there is no need for actions that will cost you lots of money.

Social networks

Social networks are always an excellent tool for engaging customers; the key is to use them in a way that would emphasize the human touch. Show your company as an organization that is interested in holidays, that congratulates its clients, gives them presents. Depending on the holiday in question you may create special games and contests, offer prizes in order to engage your customers into communication. You could even give them a possibility to choose what they would prefer – a particular service, discounts or, perhaps, a small present from your company. This or that holiday is a great opportunity to attract the target audience to your social network public pages: entertain your customers, offer them something for free – a little sacrifice right now may turn them into your faithful clients for years to come.

Attitude

If you have been an entrepreneur for a while, you cannot overestimate the importance of a proper attitude. And I don’t mean traditional smiles and congratulations. Everybody does that. Try something new. Create the feeling of comfort, make your customers feel cozy. Turn your startup into a place where clients would come to take a respite from their hectic lives, where they know they are welcome.

Co-workers

As an entrepreneur, you should worry about the comfort of your clients in the first place, that is obvious. However, the functioning of your startup fully depends on the working capability of your colleagues. Motivate them. Not only by your own example (though it is also important) and not only with the promises of future profit. Let them have their moments of relaxation, build up the spirit with something like small parties or movie nights on Fridays. They will appreciate it.

Following the spirit of the times isn’t easy and requires you to constantly be in touch with the situation in general. You and your co-workers will need lots of dedication and patience in order to cope with all the necessary work, but bear this in mind – eventually your efforts will pay off.

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