The Very Many Virtues Of Brevity In Business

If you’re to run a successful business, or operate well within a firm, you’ll need a set of skills that are transferable to almost any role. What’s interesting is that for the most part, these skills aren’t particularly limited to actual business knowledge and acumen, which sounds crazy to someone trying their best to figure out how to navigate within the world of business. However, bear with us.

Have you ever heard the term ‘everything is marketing?’ This is often used as an example to discuss how most things we do as people is, in some capacity, marketing something promising to another person to benefit from the exchange.Just think about it. When you attend a date and come across well enough to secure their contact details to see them again, you have successfully marketed yourself.

When you have just been selected for that challenging job role, you have just marketed yourself. When you teach your child how to ride a bicycle without stabilisers, you have marketed the superior riding technique to your child, and they have accepted it and ultimately utilised it well based on your parental authority.

It’s no wonder that most social media strategies to get small businesses and startups off the ground rely heavily on eye-catching marketing to take them to the next step, allowing them to stand out in all areas of the exchange. No matter what platform you use, you can benefit from using a similar set of skills, and a similar set of marketing virtues. The most important of them all? Clarity, brevity and simplicity.

You should use it in every aspect of your email-writing, promotional material, and general method of communication in business. Business is more often than not a science rather than an art, and the sharper the tools you have to operate the more accurately you can reach your result. Consider taking writing classes through classroom tuition through Training Connection, to get real, responsiveness critique of your writing.

What Is Brevity?

Brevity is sharply defined as ‘concise and exact use of words in writing or speech.’ When it comes to marketing your business across to a prospective client, you need to be able to get across who you are, what you do, and why you should be chosen within around 2 or 3 sentences. The benefit of social media pages is that they often force you to adapt to this clear-cut description because the ‘bio’ boxes, statuses or tweets your firm is allowed to use is restricted to a number of characters.

What Are The Benefits?

The benefits of brevity are numerous They include:

Efficiency and saving time in the workday that should be dedicated to business operations and planning as opposed to long drawn out communication.

Politeness – brevity comes across as respectful of the other person’s time, and this extends to the client reading your business promotional material.

Understandable – Brevity works on the basis of Richard Dawkin’s ‘meme,’ which is defined as the smallest unit of an idea able to transfer between people the most easily. You can see how positive thoughts about your business, quickly and easily spread, could be beneficial to you.

It’s never too late to adopt brevity in your business toolkit.

5 Steps To The Perfect Sales Process

When it comes to sales, you may feel as if you’re tackling the Tardis. It can be completely mind blowing. But, that doesn’t mean you have to suck at sales for the rest of your life. In fact, it means quite the opposite. It may just be that you need to be pointed in the right direction and helped along your way a bit. If that’s the case, you’re going to going to need to work on getting your sales process right. If you don’t, you may find that your business struggles to progress and that you’re not going to grow at the rate that you hoped. So, to nail it the first time around, here are the five steps that you need to take.

Step One: Research

First of all, before you can take any active steps, you’re going to want to do your research. Right now, you know that your sales process just isn’t working. But you may not know why. So, research can help with that. You’re going to want to create a user-friendly website that has a conversion focused sales funnel. So, you need to find examples of other sites that do it well. You may even want to look out for any results that other businesses have published online about their successful sales processes.

Step Two: Create

With some research behind you, you can now think about creating the perfect sales funnel on your website. To do this, you’re going to need to design and code the pages that your customers will visit as a part of the sales process. This can be as simple as a landing page with an opt-in point, or something more complex. Using your research, you should have a rough idea what will work best for you.

Step Three: Split Test

To find out if your ideal design is working for you, you may want to think about doing a split test. This will involve using two different designs to see which works the best. So, if you were stuck between a few different ideas, it’s always worth trying two. Then, you can compare the results that you get for each to see which is the best to go with.

Step Four: Refine

Next, you’re then going to want to refine your designs, and the sales funnel itself. Based on the results that you got from split testing, you should be able to create one clear design that combines the best and most successful pieces of both – both in terms of the overall design, and the technical sales process too.

Step Five: React

And finally, you’re also going to want to make sure that you’re reacting on a regular basis. It’s important to use data if you want to improve your sales because it will get you the results you want. You should regularly review your analytics to discover where your customers are dropping off during the sales funnel. Then, you can work on improving it so that they convert from prospects into customers.

4 Foolproof Ways To Track Marketing Success

Marketing is an excellent way to increase sales and build a reputable brand. There is only one problem: it’s hard to quantify the results. After all, it isn’t easy to say whether a sales increase were a result of your strategy or another, simpler reason. As a result, some businesses are in the market of guessing and hoping for the best. If this doesn’t sound like a good plan, there are solutions. These solutions involve tracking your marketing strategy to understand its effectiveness, and here is how to do it.

Customer Feedback

Customers are lots of things, but they aren’t liars. In fact, they are brutally honest even if they are talking face to face with a supplier. Although this is scary, it is also a fantastic resource to help codify success. By simply asking them for their opinion, you can figure out whether the strategy was a hit or a dud. And, quantitative research couldn’t be easier. All you need to do is stop passers-by and ask them a question, or get them to fill in a short questionnaire. It’s basic, yet it is very effective.

New Vs Returning Users

Overall, you need both the new and returning website user numbers to be high. The reason is that it indicates two things. The first is that your plan is effective enough to make new customers aware of your brand. As far as marketing is concerned, that is the main goal. Secondly, it shows that your website is appealing and functional enough to keep them coming back for more. And, that is vital if you want to build a solid customer base. After all, you don’t want to spend lots of time creating an amazing marketing strategy to lose it when people visit the site.

Big Data Analysis

Big data is incredibly popular in 2017 and for a good reason. Simply put, using QA metrics and other formats is the best way to gauge success. As long as you know how to read the numbers, the answers are there in the data for everyone to see. Once you translate it, you can then transform or tweak your marketing depending on which one is the most necessary. Google Analytics started the trend, and it shows no signs of stopping anytime soon. If you don’t get on board, you may miss the train.

Growth Rate

Although different factors affect growth rate, a business can’t expand without great marketing. There is just too much competition nowadays for a company to survive and stand out from the crowd. As such, it is quite okay to generalize about the success of your strategy even if you don’t have the numbers. It is by no means the only way to go about it, especially when you have analytic metrics and quantitative research. Still, the firm’s rate of growth is a good sign that everything is going in the right direction.

Now that you have the tools, there is no reason not to track your marketing success.