Here’s our regular round-up of marketing and business promotion issues plus other interesting things over the past week.
Before you get delve into the gems in this article, please find the time to view the latest product from the One Smart Team at Bizezia: Your Daily News. Think about how you can use it as part of your firm’s objective to keep in touch with clients and prospects. It’s a great marketing tool and all for less than the cost of a Big Mac each morning! Click the Icon to discover more…
But first, think about trying something new today:
“If you do things well, do them better. Be daring, be first, be different, be just.”
– Dame Anita Roddick, founder of The Body Shop
This week’s stories:
Learn from Guy Kawasaki who brings his social media expertise to Hubspot
Guy Kawasaki is a legend. He is the chief evangelist of Canva, an online graphic design tool. Formerly, he was an advisor to the Motorola business unit of Google and chief evangelist of Apple. He is also the author of APE, What the Plus!, Enchantment, and nine other books. Kawasaki has a BA from Stanford University and an MBA from UCLA as well as an honorary doctorate from Babson College. He definitely knows what he is talking about…
In Social Mediopolis, we learn that HubSpot has partnered with Guy Kawasaki to bring his social media expertise to the HubSpot audience, and they wanted to share it with you as well! Check out three free awesome resources to help you grow your social media following, and create awesome social media posts to increase engagement and reach.
- Guy Kawasaki’s 10 Tips for Building a Social Media Following [On-demand recording]: Guy has over 7.5 million followers! He must be doing something right. Access his top tips for free in this on-demand recording of Guy Kawasaki on how he grew his social media following.
Access it here. - How to Get 1,000 Followers on Twitter [Free Guide]: Inspired by Guy’s first webinar on growing your social media following, we compiled his tips into a short guide to getting 1,000 followers on Twitter, the right way. Start growing your following on social media today!
Access the guide here. - The Art of the Perfect Social Media Post [On-demand webinar]: Creating social images to expand the reach of your content can be tough. Guy Kawasaki and Peg Fitzpatrick walk us through how to create the perfect social media post and how they have used these tactics to build a following of over 8 million!
Access the recording here.
Marketing ideas from Marketing Profs
More marketing ideas and tips have been published by Marketing Profs:
- 5 Branding Tips to Connect With Women (Without Losing the Men)
- The New Rules of Sales and Service: David Meerman Scott
- Picture This: The Marketer’s Guide to Visual Content
- How Much Do Retail Marketers Personalize Websites, Emails?
- Four Ideas for Successfully Globalizing Your Website
- Do Your New Products Have Real Competitive Advantages?
- The Most Effective Paid Digital Media Channel in 2Q14
- How Social, Content, and PR Combine for Marketing Success
- 11 Facts About Moms’ Back-to-School Shopping
- How Companies Fail With Social Media Metrics
- Five Ways to Maintain Credibility in Your Content Marketing
- Facebook Search, Brands & Hyperlapse, Twitter Trends, More…
- Email Campaign Planner
- Does Amazon Usually Have the Lowest Price Online?
- Harsh Truths About Inbound Marketing That You Need to Know
- Apply a Startup Mentality to Significantly Improve Your Online Marketing
- Day One With Marketing Automation, What to Do?
- Empty-Nester Women: Independent, Tech-Savvy, and Skeptical
- What Facebook’s Evolving Social Graph Means for Content Marketers
- How to Budget for Tradeshows and Events
- Pitching Content to Publications: Mistakes and Best-Practices
- What Every Marketer Needs to Know About Growth Hacking
- How Product Packaging Affects Buying Decisions
- Five Visual Design Trends to Inspire You
From: marketingprofs.com
Learn How to Handle Your Firm’s Expanded Services Workload
Kevin Stockton on the Grey, Ryan, Wayne & Company Blog writes: You want your [CPA – Accounting or Law firm] to grow, but you are not exactly sure how to make that happen. There are a lot of strategies out there, the most obvious being expanding your offered services to bring on new clients and expand your current business with the clients you already have.
But how will your firm handle the extra workload as you take steps to grow your practice’s footprint with both new and old clients? The article expands on two ideas to achieve your objective:
- Increase Your Staff
- Work With a Partner Organisation
Summary
Taking the step of uniting with an outside partner is a big one, but it’s a strategic move that can pay big dividends in the long run. By enlisting the help of a third-party partner, you will be able to assist your high net worth clients and affluent business owners with complicated, non-CPA-centric problems, without having the inherent danger of sending pieces of their business to outside sources, or adding too much to your overhead. The trust and integrity you build with these clients will in turn help you attract others.
Read the full article at: info.grwco.com/blog/how-to-handle-your-cpa-firms-expanded-services-workload
New Technology: Samsung launches Galaxy Note 4, Edge
Ravi Sharma wrote on Times of India that Samsung has announced its next-generation phablet, Galaxy Note 4, along with two new devices — Galaxy Note Edge and Gear VR — ahead of the IFA 2014 tech expo in Berlin. With these new announcements, Samsung is entering new segments, as well as updating an existing product line. The company also showcased its new smartwatch Gear S, which was announced last week.
Galaxy Note 4, which is now the top-end phablet in Samsung’s portfolio, has a 5.7-inch display. Samsung has upped the display resolution in Galaxy Note series, from Full HD (1080x1920p) in Note 3 to QHD (1440x2560p) in Note 4. Despite a higher-resolution display, Samsung says that Galaxy Note 4 will deliver 7.5% more battery life than its predecessor due to an optimized interface. The phablet has a 3,220mAh battery (just 20mAh more than that of Galaxy Note 3), and features fast-charging technology, so the battery can go from 0% to 50% in 30 minutes.
Using the right keywords
Marketing Wordstream says that High commercial intent keywords are like invitations from prospective customers. They beg you to tempt them with your wares. They tell you, loud and clear, that they have money in their hands and they want what you’re selling right now. But what kinds of keywords can be considered to have high commercial intent for Paid Search campaigns?
In this free guide, the promoters look at:
- What high commercial intent keywords are
- Why they’re so important
- How to identify them for your business
- How to put them to work in your content and marketing campaigns
Find out more, here.
9 Books Billionaire Warren Buffett Thinks Everyone Should Read
Drake Baer wrote in Business Insider that when Warren Buffett started his investing career, he would read between 600, 750, or 1,000 pages a day.
Even now, he still spends about 80% of his day reading. “Look, my job is essentially just corralling more and more and more facts and information, and occasionally seeing whether that leads to some action,” he once said in an interview.
“We don’t read other people’s opinions,” he says. “We want to get the facts, and then think.”
To help you get into the mind of the billionaire investor, Business Insider has rounded up Warren Buffett’s book recommendations over 20 years of interviews and shareholder letters: click here.
Learn from this: Increasing Customer Engagement and Lifetime Value
From Adobe you can learn about best practices for loyalty marketing programmes and discover how brands like Sephora and Starwood Preferred Guests ensure ease of use, mobile access and personalisation for their customers.·
- Relevant and personalised with appropriate offers·
- Real-time and contextual messages·
- Seamless across channels and devices
To download the FREE guide, simply complete the form at this link.
Segmentation Tactics
Magento Commerce explain that online merchants are under more pressure than ever to deliver targeted and optimized experiences to their customers. As a leader in eCommerce, The Magento Team know that segmentation is essential to improving conversion. This FREE eBook was developed to help merchants improve conversion through segmentation best practices.
Presenting relevant content and promotions to individual buyers can translate into more sales and larger orders on your site. Download the complimentary eBook now and start increasing your conversions today!
In this eBook, you will gain key insights on how to:
- Create more targeted messaging to increase conversions
- Encourage visitors to self-segment on your site for a better experience
- Help drive sales through a more targeted segmentation strategy
3 ways Accounts Prep clients can be profitable again
The promotion from OCRex on AccountingWEB talks about putting automation into practice. For years, accountants and bookkeepers have been offering a service, which takes a massive burden off the hands of their clients. Billons are spent annually on manual data entry tasks.
Now you can discover 3 ways to automate these tasks and equip your practice with the tools to optimise operations efficiently.
New Technology: Samsung launches world’s first bendable TV, largest curved TV
Ravi Sharma reported that Samsung today launched the world’s first bendable TV as well as the world’s biggest curved television, ahead of the IFA 2014 tech expo. Both these televisions have 105-inch screens and pack 11 million pixels (5120X2160p resolution) on the display panel.
The new Samsung curved TV a custom lock screen and has a quad-core processor under the hood to power the smart functions. The display panel of this 105-inch TV has 21:9 aspect ratio and 4.2-metre radius.
Microsoft Unveils Lumia 830 and 730 Phones
Microsoft will seek to draw more people to its internet-based services with two new mid-range smartphones it unveiled, including one designed to help people take better selfies. Both devices are under the Lumia brand Microsoft bought from Nokia. They run the latest version of Windows Phone 8 and feature Cortana, a Siri-like voice assistant available to help with directions, calendar appointments and messages. Many of those interactions will steer users to Microsoft services such as Bing search and OneDrive storage.
This video could change your mind about the robotics revolution
Harrison Polites, in Business Spectator, says that just like horses were made redundant as a mode of transport when Henry Ford started mass producing cars early last century, there’s a growing fear that humans will also soon face being put out to pasture. That’s the controversial message at the heart of this viral video on robotics currently doing the rounds on the web. It offers a rather compelling and grim argument on the scale and impact of the automation trend.
Good Advice: Don’t waste time reading terms and conditions
If a bank or insurer uses small print to reject your claim, fight back – you’ll probably win, says James Daley in the Daily Telegraph. He says that, a few months ago, his company Fairer Finance launched a campaign to get rid of unwieldy and indigestible terms and conditions documents in the world of personal finance.
When The Telegraph kicked off the Spare us the Small Print campaign, a snap survey was carried out to find out how many people actually read the Ts&Cs – and from the poll of 2,000 individuals, as many as 73pc claimed they don’t bother. Now, the Money Advice Service – the government-backed financial help centre – went one better, launching a similar survey in which as many as 84pc of people said they don’t read the small print.
New Technology: Bank customers to sign in with ‘finger vein’ technology
A new way of accessing bank accounts is being launched which identifies individuals through the unique pattern of veins in their fingers, says Simon Gompertz on BBC News. Instead of having to use a series of passwords and numbers, users will be able to log on to their accounts by placing one of their fingers into a scanner. The technology is quite distinct from fingerprint recognition.
Logistics firms are positive about future use of drones
If you ever thought that the future is going to be much the same as the present or recent past, you’ll be quite wrong: Will Green wrote in Supply Management that some 42 per cent of logistics operators believe they will use unmanned drones to ship cargo in the future and most believe it will be within 15 years, according to a survey. The research was carried out by the National Aeronautical Centre (NAC), which said rising fuel prices and predicted growth in international freight volumes made unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) more attractive, as they are expected to have lower fuel requirements than conventional aircraft. The survey also found more than a third of freight forwarders believed they would be using UAVs. However, the survey of 60 logistics carriers and freight forwarders found that there were concerns around the ability of UAVs to transport sufficient tonnage to replace marine and air shipping.
It’s your fault you don’t get paid on time: This could be why you are still waiting for your money
The Law Society Gazette say that law firms wait an average of three months for their bills to be settled – more than twice as long as businesses in other sectors, a survey of LLP accounts has revealed. The analysis of 321 firms, by finance company LDF, found an average delay of 94 days. The average payment duration across business as a whole is 41 days. Delays on this scale ‘could well tip firms which are otherwise very successful into dangerous territory’, said Peter Alderson, LDF’s managing director.
But from my experience, firms leave costs on the time ledger until someone says “we should bill that”. That’s often several months down the line – well after the work was done. And on top of that, any additional, unplanned work hasn’t been communicated to the client. Hardly surprising then that the client takes ages to pay whilst arguing over the matter.
Look up Contract Engine, now available for small accountants and lawyers up to large multi-office, multi-partnered firms. There’s nothing quite like it anywhere else: details at: www.bizezia.com/products/contract-engine
The Anti-PowerPoint political party
You might think you don’t like PowerPoint presentations, but you’ve got nothing on Matthias Poehm. In 2011, Poehm, a software engineer, founded the Anti-PowerPoint Party (APPP)—a Swiss political party with, as you may have guessed, a distinctly anti-PowerPoint bent. The party was formed with the sole purpose of raising awareness about the inefficiencies of PowerPoint (and other slide-show-style presentation software), how they lower engagement and motivation, and ultimately cost Switzerland (and other countries) large sums of money due to lost productivity.
Read more: www.howtogeek.com/trivia/switzerland-has-a-political-party-dedicated-to-the-elimination-of-what
Amazon’s Fire Smartphone launches in the UK
Oliver Smith in CITY A.M. reports that Amazon’s Fire smartphone, the online retailer’s first foray into the crowded smartphone market, will go on sale in the UK on 30 September following its US launch in June. Amazon has announced it has partnered exclusively with O2 to launch the phone which will be FREE on a £33 a month contract.
The Fire features Firefly, a service designed to identify products within a second and link through to purchase on Amazon’s website, and comes with a year’s free subscription to Amazon’s Prime membership service which includes free access to video and music streaming and unlimited cloud storage.
He has written over 700 business publications (see Glossaries at http://onesmartplace.com/resources/glossaries/) and is editor of Better Business Focus (see http://onesmartplace.com/resources/better-business-focus-magazine). His Blog, on a wide range of subjects can be found at: http://onesmartplace.com/blog/
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