How to leverage ‘Fear of Missing Out’ Marketing To Get Millennials On Board
It goes by the acronym FOMO: Fear of missing out. We see the symptoms of this condition everywhere we go, and many of us are probably good examples of it. The constant checking of Facebook and text messages are notable signs of FOMO; people don’t want to miss out on experiencing something as it happens. While FOMO is found in individuals of every generation, Millennials seem to be FOMO sufferers in the greatest percentages. A 2014 Eventbrite survey found that 78 percent of Millennials (those between 18 and 34 years old) would spend their money on a “desirable experience or event over buying something desirable.” FOMO is a major driving force behind “sharing” and “engaging.” Sharing and engaging are experiential phenomena and Millennials seem to be living in fear that they will fail to experience worthwhile, memorable or noteworthy events in their lives. Two FOMO marketing requirements Although this is a somewhat abstract concept, it’s one that small business owners need to understand and consider as they plan advertising and marketing campaigns. There are two concepts to keep in mind as you try to leverage FOMO to make sales and bring prospects into your funnel: Find ways to make your product, service, or business into an “experience” (at least in part), and Find ways to let your prospects know that the experience or opportunity will end. The second point above is a standard component of every very successful call to action. You see it in copy like this: Enrollment must close at 5 p.m. tonight. Be one of the first 25 to sign up in order to receive… The price doubles to $200 at noon tomorrow. You might consider getting a countdown plugin that puts time limits on sign-ups or opt-in forms on your website. I recently noticed that Thrive Leads has just put such a plugin on the market for WordPress sites. I’m sure there are others as well. Give your customers an experience The other element here is the “experience.” Can you create an engaging experience that would be popular and “shareable” with your customers, clients, and prospects? For example, if you’re a retailer, an “unadvertised” sale would fall into this category. You would set up an email campaign that builds anticipation and ask recipients to share information about the sale with their social media contacts. The sale would have to be generous and exciting enough to drum up the kind of buzz that you need to get into FOMO territory. Further, by its very nature, Snapchat touches the FOMO nerve. Create in-store Snapchat coupons and you should be able to build the kind of anticipation that will lead to additional incremental sales. I talked about how one NYC yogurt shop used Snapchat coupons in this post. Will today’s Millennials continue to be influenced by FOMO to such a great extent as they mature? I suspect they’ll mellow a bit, but right now is the time you want to build brand loyalty with this huge group of consumers (the biggest our nation has ever seen). This makes it important to use all the marketing tools you have to establish your relationship with...
read moreHow You Can Start Marketing on reddit Today
Are you trying to sell to 18 to 29-year-old males? If so, you should at least consider marketing on reddit. But first, you need to understand what this mammoth website is all about…and it’s a little hard to capture its essence in just a few words. It bills itself as “The front page of the Internet,” but that doesn’t really go far enough. Remember bulletin boards? reddit is a mutant bulletin board that spun out of control (in a good way) over the last decade or so. Let’s go back to the site’s newspaper analogy, it’s the front page, the sports section, the personal ads, the lifestyle section and every other subject/interest area you might find represented in the mass media. It’s all sliced and diced into subreddits and you’ll find a subreddit on virtually any topic you can imagine. That’s good news and bad news. The bad news is that users are dispersed over countless subreddits. The good news is that this creates a lot of opportunities for marketing on reddit; there is certain to be one or more subreddits that are natural homes for the prospects you want to reach. For example, here are some subreddits related to entrepreneurism: Entrepreneur Startups Accounting Business Finance Inventions Motivation Smallbusiness Socialmedia Kickstarter Sideproject Telecommuting Growmybusiness Marketing 3 ways to market on reddit You can leverage reddit to market or brand your business three ways. You can post a link, write an article, or take out an ad. Take some time to get a feel for the site and understand all of its quirky rules and etiquette guidelines. Posts are up-voted and down-voted, so you don’t want to make a major faux pas right out of the starting gate and get your post down-voted into oblivion. With those warnings, a number of small businesses have been able to connect with their best prospects through reddit. Remember that question I asked at the very beginning of this? If you want to reach a young male demographic of individuals who are passionate about an interest that aligns with your small business, you can score a major win on reddit. The big hurdle you need to jump over is to be sure that they see your posts as informative, not salesy. Further, if your demographic is here, consider advertising on reddit. They claim you can get started for as little as $5, but of course, it depends on how many people you reach. You’re charged per 1,000 impressions. If you have a big budget –$30,000 and above – you get their “managed platform” and an account manager. Otherwise, it’s a self-service system. Examples of marketing on reddit Reddit ads are sort of a combination of an AdWords ad and a Facebook ad. Your ad appears at the top of the page, like AdWords, but you target specific subreddits, interest groups, and locations (Get that local business owner?), similar to what you would do on Facebook. Here are some ads that reddit is currently touting as among their favorites: Note that even ads get up-votes and down-votes. Understanding this is central to achieving any kind of success at marketing on reddit: Users have to like what you post. This gets to the heart of engagement…or perhaps I should say “positive engagement.” If you engage your audience...
read moreThis Week in Small Business: Cybersecurity, job growth, bottle caps, and a whole lot more
What do you see when you look at a bottle cap? A small business idea? That’s just one piece of inspiration you’ll find in this week’s roundup of curated content. Leadership, management, and productivity Goldman Sach has its ambitious 10,000 Small Businesses initiative. Discover what they are teaching these fortunate small business owners. Simplicity is good, so that makes this “One Stunningly Simple Habit for Success” very appealing. Here are three ways to use your company culture to strengthen your marketing. Paypal’s small biz lending platform is growing. You’ll want to know why. Sixty percent of hacked small to medium businesses are forced out of business within six months of being breached. Entrepreneurship, startups, and innovation Think there are no more good ideas for a business? The guy profiled here just needed bottle caps to get him thinking and acting. Marketing and sales Success depends on staying on top of or ahead of the trends. That’s why you’ll want to know and understand these five online marketing trends. Steal a few pages from the top brands’ playbooks. Neil Patel shares eight that focus on content marketing. Blog going stale? You need these tips to help you “double dip” into your content marketing resource pool. If you didn’t attend Digital Summit Denver, you’ll benefit from these three marketing takeaways. Don’t be Grumpy! Believe it or not, there are at least five marketing lessons that we can learn from Disney movies. These seven unique ways to use coupons to boost sales could really help many small businesses. We can’t lump all Millennials into one category when it comes to social media use. We need to understand and work with the differences. Politics, government, and the economy For job growth, Seattle took the top spot and Dallas came in second in the Paychex small business index. Check out the results in this Dallas Morning News...
read moreIt’s time to toss away your ‘could haves’ and ‘should haves’
The third Saturday of July – it’s July 16 in 2016 – is Toss Away the “Could Haves” and “Should Haves” Day, a special day created by Martha J. Ross-Rodgers. Since so many of you are small business owners, this may seem like a foreign concept. After all, you have struck out on your own and just by doing that, you’ve announced to the world that you take responsibility for your present and future condition or situation. However, when you’re struggling with the daily grind it’s easy even for “cup half full” people to get a little down and pessimistic. For this reason, it’s a good idea for all of us to toss away our “could haves” and “should haves.” They can come from our businesses or from our personal lives and, of course, most often they are a combination of the two. Recalling and reliving regrets can make great art. Who can forget Frank Sinatra’s version of My Way: “Regrets, I’ve had a few. But then again, too few to mention.” Or Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront: “I coulda been a contender.” But carrying the “coulda” and “shoulda” baggage around in real life has a crushing effect on our ability to move forward and achieve the promises of all our tomorrows. And for small business owners, this is not only personally devastating, it ruins our chance at commercial success and that, of course, also has a huge impact on our families. On Toss Away the “Could Haves” and “Should Haves” Day, you’re encouraged to write all of these kinds of regrets and blames on pieces of paper and then toss them away. Then make the following resolution to yourself: “From this day forward, I choose not to live in the past, the past is history that I cannot change. I can do something about the present, I choose to live in the present.” And as a small business owner, there is a lot you can do in the present to improve your position and spur your company on to greater success than you have ever before enjoyed. But you can’t move forward if you allow yourself to be weighed down by the...
read more9 Small Business Gmail Plugins to Boost Your Productivity, Bottom Line
I’ve heard the rumors that email is becoming obsolete, but I don’t see it happening soon, so we still need things like the 9 small business Gmail plugins listed here to help keep you organized and productive. And hey, although I’m billing these as great small business Gmail plugins, several of them will be very useful for your private email accounts! Most of these have various pricing tiers – sometimes with free levels – and generally require the use of Google’s Chrome browser. FollowUp.cc. This is billed as a “relationship manager.” It gives you the timing, tools, and intelligence you need to wisely follow up with prospects. You can set reminders, see who has read emails you sent, and be alerted when you haven’t received an expected response. It also integrates with various productivity apps and CRM systems. Boomerang for Gmail. This share several functions with FollowUp.cc, but doesn’t have the integrations built into it. You can schedule email sends for a later day, “archive” received emails and have them reappear in your inbox at a later day (when you need to act on them), and alert you if you don’t hear back from someone. Rapportive. This is now owned by LinkedIn. It gives you a great profile about your email contacts. Receive or send an email and you’ll see the person’s employment information, actual location, and social media contact details. This small business Gmail plugin improves your ability to engage and connect with prospects. (Free) Todolist. This app allows you to turn emails into items for your to-do list. A long list of extensions let you take this productivity to virtually any device you – or your team – uses. You can prioritize, set reminders and notification, visualize your increased productivity, and much more. CloudMagic. I mentioned integration with productivity apps above; that’s the whole idea of CloudMagic. You can update popular apps and services like Salesforce, Evernote, Zendesk, Mailchimp, and others right from your Gmail inbox. Streak. If you want to skip “integration” with a CRM, consider Streak, which bills itself as “CRM, inside Gmail.” Email “power tools” include: snoozing, send Later, mail merge, templates (useful for boilerplate), thread splitting. CRM specific tools in this small business Gmail plugin include sales, product development, deal flow, fundraising, support, hiring, and real estate. BatchedInBox. Email services think they’re doing us a favor by notifying us every time something hits our inboxes. It just isn’t so! With this app, you can schedule when you want emails to hit your inbox. Don’t be distracted until you know you’ll be ready to deal with your email. (Free) Bananatag. The main function of this app is to allow you to track where your email and email attachments go. You’ll know when emails and other materials have been opened and when they’ve been sent on to decision makers to review. It also gives you scheduling, templates and more. Unroll.me. Many small business owners subscribe to blogs and newsletters for specific reasons and when the reason is gone, they just let them continue to fill their inboxes. This app makes unsubscribing easy. Further, you can combine the subscriptions you want into one email that appears each day. If you want to join to the “zero inbox” crowd, this app is a must. Look over these small...
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