The Hottest and Most Brilliant Business Tips for YOU – Start Social Storytelling  and More

Our research ninjas at Credit Suite smuggled out ten amazing business tips for you! Be fierce and score in business with the best tips around the web. You can use them today and see fast results. You can take that to the bank – these are foolproof! Wow your customers and prospects with social storytelling, and more.

Stop making stupid decisions and start powering up your business. Demolish your business nightmares and start celebrating as your business fulfills its promise.

And these brilliant business tips are all here for free! So settle in and scoop up these tantalizing goodies before your competition does!

#10. Don’t Forget the Videos!

Our first jaw-dropping tip is all about adding videos to your marketing strategy. The Self-Employed says video is compelling and persuasive and boy do we ever agree!

One of our favorite points in this article is all about retention of information. It seems we remember about 95% of what we view. And about 10% of what we read. Sorry, books.

This means it makes a ton of sense to add video to your bag of tricks. Video is a particularly persuasive marketing tool on mobile.

This article also has a ton of excellent tips for how to best optimize your video. After all, YouTube is the second-largest search engine, second only to Google. It makes sense to do everything in your power to make your video content discoverable.

We recommend reading the entire article. Yes, it’s that good.

#9. Set Up Your Field Sales Team for Success

The next awesome tip is about aligning the planets for your field sales team so they’ll be more successful. Open View Partners notes face to face requests are some 34 times more effective than emails.  So send your sales team into the field. But don’t send them without preparation.

Their two great tips were to arm your sales people with data. And give them good mobile tools. Don’t make them squint at too-tiny screens.

Pro tip – this works in a lot of other areas. The asking in person bit, that is. So if you ever have to argue a mistake on a bill, go to the place where the bill came from, if you can. Be nice, of course. Don’t look like some loon who they’re only too eager to call the cops on.

Be there, and be reasonable. You will be hard to say no to.

If you are as passionate about succeeding in business as we are, please help us spread the word about how to take the plunge and save time and money – and your sanity! Learn the art and science of social storytelling.

#8. Get More Social Media Sales

Our following life-changing tip concerns selling on social media.  LinkedIn points out it’s a great source for B2B social media leads – to the tune of 80%!

As we have seen elsewhere, one terrific strategy is to showcase your expertise. In all seriousness, who wants to read about someone who’s fumbling along? Of course, they can have compelling stories. But anyone without expertise needs a ‘happy ending’ of gaining expertise. Without that, they don’t belong in the B2B marketing space, now, do they?

But we also liked the idea to help the overwhelmed decision makers among us. When there are 111 choices out there, so many of us are tempted to close our eyes and point. Guiding such people is another form of value. In truth, it’s a lot like the strategy to showcase expertise.

Helping people. Whooda thunk?

#7. Give Your Email Marketing a Boost

For our next sensational tip, we looked at best practices for email marketing. Sumo lays it all out for us. Our fave tip was to clean house! For so many email marketers, their lists have black hole-style addresses. These are people who never respond. But the email may or may not bounce. If you have an email address you only use for one thing, then you know what we mean.

Let’s say you have 1,000 bad email addresses, and you send two messages per week. Then in month, you’re sending 8,000 emails to the void. Pay a penny per email? Then you’re wasting a good $1,000 per year on the dead weight.

And there’s another thing, which the article didn’t get into. There are any number of email service providers which will ding your company if you get too many bounces. After all, bounces clog up their servers and make everything go slower.

So clean house and send re-engagement emails to stale subscribers on a regular basis. Maybe  once a quarter? No response? Then sayonara; it’s been nice knowing you.

#6. Improve Your Emails

This tip is so cool, and it works! Science of People has us covered. Speaking of emailing, this article hit home in all sorts of unexpected ways.

Two tips which stood out to us were to not bury the lede (yes, that’s the spelling: you could look it up), and to not ramble on and on. Oh boy, do we love those!

But the one tip which we suspect will save both working relationships and social ones was #6. Add the address last.

This is vital. Trust us.

And check out their bonus. Someone should sew it on a sampler and hang it on a wall!

#5. Specialize in Social Storytelling

Grab this mind-blowing tip while it’s hot!

It’s time to wow your customers and prospects with social storytelling. Sales Hacker says it’s a way to buck the automation trend. That is, we still don’t have AI which can write a story and keep it compelling.

So, that reminds your intrepid blog post writer of a tale. See, social storytelling is everywhere! In fact it’s here most Fridays.

Social Storytelling and the Author

Now, I can’t honestly recall if I have mentioned this before. But I am an author. You know, published and everything. But of course life wasn’t always this way.

Good writing comes with training. And some of my best education came in, of all places, high school.

My 12^th grade English teacher was big on creative writing. So she gave us the formula, which I will now pass onto you.

Characters. Conflict. Crisis. Change.

That is, your story must have all four. The setting, by the way, is a form of character. And conflict can also be seen as purpose or the desired end result.

Think of your favorite stories. In The Wizard of Oz, the characters are obvious, including the title character. The conflict (desired end result) is to get Dorothy back home to Kansas. The crisis is when the team has to battle the Wicked Witch of the West. And the change is Dorothy gets to go home. While at the same time, her companions realize they had the power within them all along.

Bringing it All Back to Social Storytelling

So there’s a point to this little side junket. It’s like the tips in the article. We are talking about super-short social storytelling. As in, 20 to 30 seconds. How do you make a compelling character? Give him or her a struggle. What’s an interesting conflict or desired outcome or purpose? Something like what your customers and prospects want. What about the crisis? Where are things coming to head. When does it become do or die? And what’s the change? Where’s the happy ending?

For example – in your social storytelling, you might have a customer who’s tried everything but not been able to succeed. They want to, of course. And then things turn dire. They may realize they’re not getting any younger. Or a new baby or a house or the like means financial needs are more pressing. They need to succeed yesterday. The change, as you may have guessed, is how your product or service gets them there.

Human beings are storytellers. Social storytelling probably goes back to when we lived in caves and were first developing language. Homer told the stories of the Iliad and the Odyssey to his fellow Greeks, many of whom could neither read nor write.

Social storytelling is in our DNA. And it is powerful.

If you are as passionate about succeeding in business as we are, please help us spread the word about how to take the plunge and save time and money – and your sanity! Learn the art and science of social storytelling.

#4. Social Storytelling and Social Proof in Email Marketing

Check out this spectacular tip. It’s all about using social proof in your email marketing campaigns. Sleek Note says there are lots of compelling ways to use social proof in email marketing.

We loved their examples of showing authority. You can earn it, with great reviews from your customers. Or you can borrow it, through an association with another company or organization. You can polish it up with celebrity endorsements. And you can make it newsworthy with media endorsements.

But what if you have none of these? Then it’s time to build your brand and encourage reviews, to start. Why not show a short (yes, short, as in no more than three questions) survey upon checkout? Give away a small token of your appreciation for filling it out. Maybe a 10% discount on their next shopping trip?

Then you’ll start to get some social proof.

#3. Get Down on One Knee

It’s not your imagination: this winning tip can increase engagement on Facebook. BuzzSumo gives us the lowdown. They have four daily tasks to help you increase engagement.

We were so happy that these are all data-type tasks! One was to figure out when’s the best time to post on FB. Companies and their customers differ; this is not ‘one size fits all’. Your prospects might check FB at lunch. Or the morning or the evening could be their time to socialize online.

The weekend might be the right time. You’ll never know unless you keep tabs.

And you’ll also never know which content does best unless you measure. That’s their second task. What content works? What falls flat?

Do more of the former, and less of the latter.

We also loved the third task, to schedule your FB posts for the week. This is with a tool like Hootsuite or Buffer. After all, if your customers are on Facebook at 3 AM on a Tuesday, you have every right to want to sleep then!

Their fourth task was more measuring. Check your content and see if it works. For the second task, you’re looking at individual content. Here, you’re looking at the bigger picture. If quizzes do better than slideshows, then guess what you should post more often?

#2. Grow Network, Grow!

Our second to last unbeatable tip can give you a new perspective on how to grow your network. Entrepreneur notes we don’t start networking by sending strangers random calls. We don’t press our business cards into the hands of everyone on the bus.

At least, your intrepid blog writer hasn’t done that. In a while.

(Note: that was a joke)

So start with the people you know. Classmates. Friends. Neighbors. Colleagues, both current and past. Family. They know you! And they know you’re dependable, smart, etc.

And then the second tip makes even more sense – help others before you get them to help you. Yes, you’re creating an expectation of a quid pro quo. You’re also, you know, doing the right thing.

For the third tip, we encourage you to read this article in its entirety!

#1. Stand Out in an Overcrowded Voice-Assisted World

We saved the best for last. For our favorite remarkable tip, we focused on standing out as a brand while your customers and prospects shop with voice assistants. You know, Siri and Alexa and the like. The Harvard Business Review says there are a few strategies which should work.

Consider that this hasn’t quite happened yet. So the HBR could change their minds later. But there was one tip which made a lot of sense to us. And it can work, in some ways, even for other types of marketing and sales.

It’s to bundle the stuff you sell. Or, at least, to suggest the similar stuff. So if you sell, say, dog treats, there’s a good chance your customers will also take an interest in dog toys. They called this affinities. Then they took this from beyond the realm of Amazon’s recommendation engine.

That is, they suggest putting together different types of customers. And cater to their particular affinities. Your young mom groceries customers might be more interested in convenience. But your hipsters who want to cook something new.

Yet again, there’s a suggestion to treat customers like individuals. You know, like people.

What a concept.

So which one of our brilliant business tips was your favorite? And which one will you be implementing now?

If you are as passionate about succeeding in business as we are, please help us spread the word about how to take the plunge and save time and money – and your sanity! Learn the art and science of social storytelling.