In most cases, the answer is no. This is why leading companies follow the phrase out of sight, out of mind religiously.

Looking at Coca-Cola’s annual revenue ($37 Billion in 2019), a layman would say they don’t need to advertise anymore. But, this is where most people are wrong. Coca-Cola sells because its marketing is omnipresent, and consumers see it everywhere every day.

This is what all big companies do, and this is what you as an aspiring marketer or a brand owner should try to replicate.

If you are about to devise a marketing strategy with a touch of omnipresence, here are some helpful tips.

Go to your audience.

Omnipresence is about being everywhere, and this is exactly what you should do. Go wherever your customers are.

If they read the newspaper, make sure your brand has fixed newspaper space. If they read a blog, build one. Do they watch TV ads? Get your brand some airtime! Leverage anything that your customer might use.

Needless to say, you have to be present on every social media platform because as a budding business, you can’t risk losing even a single potential lead. If you are not confident with your social media or digital marketing skills, take a marketing course with Monarch.

Build an interactive website.

With the advent of social media, consumer behavior has changed a lot. The way people interact, consume news and entertainment, and shop has drastically changed.

Besides word of mouth, people now trust whatever information is available online. This makes it obligatory for every business to have an official website that is aesthetically pleasing, easy to navigate, and has reliable information with detailed FAQs.

Oh, and it should also have links to all your social profiles so consumers can know which ones are real.

Ensure consistent communication through all mediums.

Adopting an omnipresent marketing approach means that your brand will interact with the customer through various channels. While it’s useful to be present on all mediums, ensuring that the customer gets a consistent experience everywhere is even more important.

If you are a retail brand, it’s obvious that your customers would get top-notch service at the outlet. However, what’s more important is that no matter where the communication occurs, the customer should get the same level of service they would receive in a retail environment.

Whether it’s an email, an online support chat, or a simple phone call, your brand’s communication should be consistent, and the message should be coherent.

Uniformity in customer interaction is super-important for omnipresence.

Collaborate with non-competing brands.

Making your brand omnipresent is about communicating with your customers, but intelligent companies do it with their contemporaries too.

We are not telling you to forget about the competition and let your competitors get a share of your audience. Instead, we suggest wise collaborations with other brands that complement yours, yield beneficial results, and help you improve your marketing strategy.

A lot of big names have done such collaborations in the past and reaped excellent results.

Turn social media trends into traffic.

A great strategy to get your brand widespread attention is catching social media trends and curating content by incorporating your brand’s name.

Social media trends drive new visitors to your website and potential leads to your business. We all saw what happened last month when Cristiano Ronaldo removed a Coca-Cola bottle in his press conference.

While Coca-Cola’s stock value suffered, several brands made the right move and cashed on the marketing opportunity. Here are a few examples.

So make sure your marketing team keeps their eyes on all social trends and jumps in on the right one.

Work with Influencers.

Influencer marketing is a great strategy to get your brand some extra eyeballs.

Kids and adults, boys and girls, all follow celebrities and social media personalities they take influence from.

These Influencers and celebrities have built strong, trust-centered relationships with their audience. You can easily leverage an influencer’s audience to make your brand’s voice reach more people through someone they’re familiar with.

Depending on your budget and niche, find a macro or micro-influencer and collaborate with them for some posts or shout-outs. This is a great way to connect with a wider market.

Get involved and engage with your audience.

To be omnipresent as a brand, you have to be easily accessible and available all over the internet.

Be active on social media and engage with your audience. Reply to their comments and messages, do Instagram/Facebook Lives with an industry expert in your niche, and be vocal about your brand, its story, and any offers you might have for the customers.

You can also try commenting on industry-related threads or offer to write guest blog posts on a popular site. This will help you diversify the audience that sees and hears about your brand, ultimately getting it the awareness it needs.

While thinking about these ideas, remember that omnipresence is not a goal or destination. It’s a journey, and you need to be consistent with your efforts.

Take each day as an opportunity to do more about it!

Hernaldo Turrillo

Hernaldo Turrillo is a writer and author specialised in innovation, AI, DLT, SMEs, trading, investing and new trends in technology and business. He has been working for ztudium group since 2017. He is the editor of openbusinesscouncil.org, tradersdna.com, hedgethink.com, and writes regularly for intelligenthq.com, socialmediacouncil.eu. Hernaldo was born in Spain and finally settled in London, United Kingdom, after a few years of personal growth. Hernaldo finished his Journalism bachelor degree in the University of Seville, Spain, and began working as reporter in the newspaper, Europa Sur, writing about Politics and Society. He also worked as community manager and marketing advisor in Los Barrios, Spain. Innovation, technology, politics and economy are his main interests, with special focus on new trends and ethical projects. He enjoys finding himself getting lost in words, explaining what he understands from the world and helping others. Besides a journalist, he is also a thinker and proactive in digital transformation strategies. Knowledge and ideas have no limits.

The post 7 Tips for Creating an Omnipresent Marketing Strategy appeared first on OpenBusinessCouncil Directory.

Boosting B2B sales is all about focusing on solving a specific problem to a very concrete and measured audience. In our digital economic days, this implies a strong digital research and a bold profile for your company, organisation or team. This is both on web, mobile, social media and concrete niche B2B networks. Even the way you appear on zoom or other video calls.

Once you have a tailored capacity and a clear understanding about what you want to sell is only when the sales process can start. This implies a bull persistence of focus. Focus on clear business segmentation. Focus on understanding your target audience and be obsessive about them. Do all the research and know everything about their product(s), companies, their long tail segmentation. Intelligence about your audience and your clients is the number one golden B2B sales rule.

After this critical intelligence and research work, you have to find a clear critical solution and problem solving ways. Only when prepared for this very specific subject and their ecosystem will you be ready to start your process and boost your B2B sales like a bull.

B2B Sales Is All About People First

B2B is about people first. Their businesses come after. Once you take on that journey of understanding your B2B segment you can concentrate all your narrative and your digital outreach -whether on web, mobile, app or social media- to reach their ecosystem, their influencers and especially the thought leaders and decision makers. This implies precision, persistence and a scientific approach down to earth data driven preparation.

Once ready, work on serious messaging and content, explaining how your solution solves their B2B problem. Your solution needs to be simple and efficient and focused on solving concrete problems. Don’t try to solve all their problems. Solve one at a time.

How do you do this?

Make sure you have a credible and solid digital presence and an outreach tailored to their segmentation. Your digital presence will be the first key to open any closed door to your audience. Your digital presence, content, narrative and team are critical.

Build the messaging, competence and outreach to the ecosystem creating engagement with them. And repeat. After your first sale, continue with a simple to buy and clear call to action similar to a subscribe solution.

7 Sales Strategies To Become A B2B Sales Superstar

Last but not least, I propose here the 7 best sales strategies to become a B2B sales superstar that will increase conversions and, therefore, revenue:

1. Smart research-driven outreach. Before you start the sales process and to dial, or send an email, do your research and obsess about knowing your audience, clients and make sure to use solutions-driven narrative and buying intent through sales knowledge and data to reach out to the right people – titles, decision makers and intel about the company and their team.

2. Cold calls work, but you need to use all the channels. You have to cold call and persist in multiple channels – can’t just be emailing. You need to cold call and can’t just dial. You have to be proactive, do it all together and repeat with the right target messaging.

3. Include as many strong calls as possible to action titles, images or video. When you send an email, a tweet or a linkedin message, make sure that the message is strong by featuring an appealing headline and is related to the person you are targeting. Using a strong title, image or video in an email, LinkedIn message or through any other digital channel creates engagement. The focus on the person being targeted and the personalisation will pay off. Doing this your B2B target person will feel like you want to talk to them specifically instead of sending a mass message.

4. Reach out with serious knowledge and intent – don’t waste time with your target audience. Get your homework done on sales-based research intelligence from the company you are targeting. Check the profile of the person you are targeting, make it count. Build a relationship.

5. Create value – connect seriously. Go to your target audience and prospect’s LinkedIn profile, website and find concrete things about their problem and something to reference in your email or connection request. This shows that you want to create value, want to talk to that person, and people find it irresistible to receive a message that is personalized to them if this communication tries to solve a specific problem in their industry. Even if they don’t reply the first time, you’ll find a connection there and from a practical standpoint, it will show up in their feed if they accept the request. Over time, they’ll feel like they know you (as long as you post often). That makes it easier for you to start the B2B sales cycle and will make it likely for them to accept the call when you make a necessary follow-up cold call.

6. Social media intelligence and engagement. Check that person’s B2B business or team multiple accounts and engage. Make sure you know them, that you really care and want to get into their network. Don’t just send a connection request to every single person at that company on LinkedIn, engage and know about them and their multiple social profiles (of course in a wise and respectful way). This will give you a faster -and smarter- shot at finding your way in by creating engagement value.

7. Find the right path and rhythm. Understand where your B2B prospect is in the sales cycle and make sure you know if the targeted person and business is possibly interested in what you are selling or not. The worst thing for a salesperson is to sell a product that does not make sense for a prospect.

Being a sales superstar means being prepared and doing your homework. Boosting sales is about having the passion, dedication, intelligence and persistence to build relationships. It is about being obsessive about solving problems and CREATE VALUE for them and for you. And we need to say this in capital letters.

Dinis Guarda

Dinis Guarda is the founder of intelligenthq.com and an author, serial entrepreneur and CEO of ztudium that manages openbusinesscouncil.org, fashionabc.org, blocksdna.com, lifesdna.com.

He creates and helps build ventures focused on global growth, 360 digital strategies, sustainable innovation, Blockchain, Fintech, AI and new emerging business models such as ICOs / tokenomics.

Dinis is the founder/CEO of ztudium that manages blocksdna / lifesdna. These products and platforms offer multiple AI P2P, fintech, blockchain, search engine and PaaS solutions in consumer wellness healthcare and life style with a global team of experts and universities.

He is the founder of coinsdna a new swiss regulated, Swiss based, institutional grade token and cryptocurrencies blockchain exchange. He is founder of DragonBloc a blockchain, AI, Fintech fund and co-founder of Freedomee project.

Dinis has created various companies namely Ztudium, a tech, digital and AI blockchain startup that builds cutting edge software, big data insights, publishes intelligenthq.com, hedgethink.com, fashionabc.org, openbusinesscouncil.org and tradersdna.com, citiesabc.com among others.

Dinis is the author of various books. His upcoming books “4IR AI Blockchain Fintech IoT Reinventing a Nation“, “How Businesses and Governments can Prosper with Fintech, Blockchain and AI?”, also the bigger case study and book (400 pages) “Blockchain, AI and Crypto Economics – The Next Tsunami?” last the “Tokenomics and ICOs – How to be good at the new digital world of finance / Crypto” will be launched in 2018.

Some of the companies Dinis created or has been involved have reached over 1 USD billions in valuation. Dinis has advised and was responsible for some top financial organisations, 100 cryptocurrencies worldwide and Fortune 500 companies.

Dinis is involved as a strategist, board member and advisor with the payments, lifestyle, blockchain reward community app Glance technologies, for whom he built the blockchain messaging / payment / loyalty software Blockimpact, the seminal Hyperloop Transportations project, Kora, and blockchain cybersecurity Privus.

He is listed in various global fintech, blockchain, AI, social media industry top lists as an influencer in position top 10/20 within 100 rankings: such as Top People In Blockchain | Cointelegraph https://top.cointelegraph.com/ and https://cryptoweekly.co/100/ .

He has been a lecturer at Copenhagen Business School, Groupe INSEEC/Monaco University and other leading world universities.

He is a shareholder of the fintech social money transfer app Moneymailme and math edutech gamification children’s app Gozoa.

Between 2014 and 2015 he was involved in creating a fabbanking.com a digital bank between Asia and Africa as Chief Commercial Officer and Marketing Officer responsible for all legal, tech and business development. Between 2009 and 2010 he was the founder of one of the world first fintech, social trading platforms tradingfloor.com for Saxo Bank. In 2011 he created the B2B platforms socialmediacouncil.org and openbusinesscouncil.org with Jamie Burke.

The post In 7 Steps: How To Boost Your B2B Sales Like A Superstar appeared first on OpenBusinessCouncil Directory.

From the days of flyers and telephone calls to the evolving world of social media content and tailored online advertising, brands and businesses are constantly thinking of new ways to gain exposure and sell their products to customers.

Thanks to the power of social media, almost every company includes platforms like Facebook and YouTube. From TikTok to Instagram, it’s all part of a strategy to reach new audiences and increase sales.

You’ll already know that “influencer marketing” has been the way forward for many marketing professionals. Tapping into the success of everyday people who’ve taken the internet by storm has been seen as the logical way to go about it.

But, with high follower counts comes the high price you’ll have to pay to get social media users—who are bombarded by brand deals—to pay attention. Even if you opt for an influencer with fewer followers, you can never guarantee a return on investment.

Today, we look at how new tactics are being used to corner the social media market, including User-Generated Content and the phenomenon of “unboxing”.

Unique touches over fake presence

The traditional use of influencer marketing, where you pay a social celebrity to post your product on their platform, is a dying art. The facts and figures certainly back this up, especially around the use of fake followers.

According to a report in 2019, fake followers cost advertisers $1.9 billion, with companies “ripped off” for the price they paid for sponsored posts. It’s no small cost for a market said to be worth $8.5 million in the same year—based on advertising spend.

But it’s not just fake followers that point to influencer marketing being less effective than it once was. In the same year, American internet sensation Ariana Renee had to cancel her own clothing range after failing to sell the minimum 36 T-shirts required to start her first shipment, despite having a following of 2.6 million on Instagram.

Examples like this has got brands thinking. How can they promote their products in a way that people on social media will share it, without having to be paid a small fortune for the pleasure?

The answer in a nutshell—User-Generated Content (UGC). In simple terms, UGC is any content, whether it be videos, text, or audio, that’s shared by social media users. For brands, it’s a means to get creative and add personal touches to their products and packaging. This will have people reaching for their phones to post about it without hesitation.

Personalisation has boomed in recent times, with everything from personalised wrapping paper to personalised candle holders available online. It’s a trend that even celebrities are on board with. David Beckham’s 45th birthday celebrations saw Victoria give him his presents wrapped in paper printed with his own face!

It’s more than plausible to say that people want more unique, personal items these days, with the world of social media playing a key role in the desire for personalisation. If you think about it for a second, what is more likely to be shared on social media, a shopping bag with a brand name on it, or one that’s been designed to feel like it’s special to a specific individual and nobody else?

To quantify this from a financial point of view, it’s estimated that the global market for personalised gifts will rise to $38 billion by 2021. This provides a closer look at what direction things are heading in.

Unboxing–the never-ending phenomenon

With a continuous conveyor belt of products to choose from, there comes the opportunity for trends to emerge on social media. One of the most popular ones right now is known as unboxing.

Recognised in the Oxford Dictionary, ‘unboxing’ is defined as:

‘An act or instance of removing a newly purchased product from its packaging and examining its features, typically when filmed and shared on a social media site.’

Search for ‘unboxing’ on YouTube and you instantly get a sense of how popular it’s become. A channel known as ‘Unbox Therapy’ has amassed 17.1 million subscribers since its creation in 2010, with over 3.7 billion views in that time, with viewers tuning in for the excitement of unboxing the latest products.

Not only do unboxing videos fuel anticipation of what’s inside, but it always gives key information on the product itself. This is a big deal for consumers, and a recipe for success when brands think of new ways to present their latest craze.

Unboxing is not some sort of look into the future, it’s an established way to present and digest content right now. As of 2019, YouTube channel Ryan’s Toy Reviews, where youngster Ryan unboxes the latest toys and reviews them with his parents, was worth a whopping $26 million.

Personal reviews, not just views

It’s clear to see that the days of brands relying on social media megastars to post about how much they love the product they’ve just been paid handsomely to share are over. It just doesn’t yield the same results that it used to.

Now people want to see more personalised branding and opinions from the people in the position to blog, vlog and talk about. Not only that, but the everyday person also wants to share what they buy on social media. Making simple changes to packaging, adding unique touches, and even handwriting a note to fit inside the box are all ways for companies to up their UGC game. You can use a get Instagram followers app to propel your following on Instagram.

Hernaldo Turrillo

Hernaldo Turrillo is a writer and author specialised in innovation, AI, DLT, SMEs, trading, investing and new trends in technology and business. He has been working for ztudium group since 2017. He is the editor of openbusinesscouncil.org, tradersdna.com, hedgethink.com, and writes regularly for intelligenthq.com, socialmediacouncil.eu. Hernaldo was born in Spain and finally settled in London, United Kingdom, after a few years of personal growth. Hernaldo finished his Journalism bachelor degree in the University of Seville, Spain, and began working as reporter in the newspaper, Europa Sur, writing about Politics and Society. He also worked as community manager and marketing advisor in Los Barrios, Spain. Innovation, technology, politics and economy are his main interests, with special focus on new trends and ethical projects. He enjoys finding himself getting lost in words, explaining what he understands from the world and helping others. Besides a journalist, he is also a thinker and proactive in digital transformation strategies. Knowledge and ideas have no limits.

The post Best for Business: Up Your User-Generated Content Game to Corner the Social Media Market appeared first on OpenBusinessCouncil Directory.