The Hottest and Most Brilliant Business Tips for YOU – Slay with Memes and More

Slay with memes, because Halloween is coming faster than you think! 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!

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. Lights, Camera… Stunning Video Marketing

#10. Our first jaw-dropping tip is all about video marketing. The genius folks at HubSpot put together an ultimate guide – for free! Along with the download, they outline a dozen different kinds of ways pretty much any company can use video marketing.

Their #5 use for video marketing is something we do here at Credit Suite every single week: educational/how-to videos. Tune in to learn how to build business credit, what angel investors are all about and why using CPNs is not just a massive blunder – it can land you in jail.

Another kick-ass use for video marketing is personal messaging. So why not send a personal message to a prospect – using video? Think of how memorable that could be.

#9. Say What? Social Listening Honors Your Customers and Prospects

#9. The next awesome tip is about not just flinging content out into the void that is cyberspace, but also actively listening to what people are saying. You know, people like your prospects or your existing customers.

Cloo Hawk put together a smart list of 10 ways to use social listening effectively.

Check out #3, where you can get real-time updates to keep up with and improve customer service. Picture this: you roll out a new service. But the landing page throws a 404 error, or the coupon you were depending on to draw people to your site has so many misspellings that it looks unprofessional.

For rushed projects in particular, nagging, stupid mistakes can multiply like rabbits. So the moment someone complains, how about leaping into the fray? Not to make excuses or deny the problems, but to – Tada! – apologize. And then you listen to the complaints and actually fix them as soon as possible.

By the way, this means someone has to cover social listening 24/7/365. Because, yes, people use banking software on Christmas Day and buy clothes online on July 4^th and book spa days on New Year’s Day.

#8. Be Unbeatable; Use Unique E-Commerce Marketing Methods

#8. Our following life-changing tip concerns some out of the box means of engaging in e-commerce marketing. Push Engage put together a list of 18 separate ways to stand out from all of the other e-commerce marketers out there (hint: there are a lot of them).

One fascinating tip was to create a FAQ (frequently asked questions) for every product. Now, getting a new product onto a website might be a quick, rushed thing, particularly if you are trying to beat competition. For trendy sites and industries, tomorrow may be too late.

These are industries such as fashion and music. So creating a unique FAQ every single time might not always be plausible.

Or is it?

What about a more generalized FAQ, put together earlier? If your company sells the hottest and latest makeup, the truth is (don’t tell the fashion industry this!) the application of lipstick does not change from color to color.

Hence a FAQ for plum shades will work just as well as the same FAQ – probably just with the product name replaced – for the coral shades.

#7. Avoid Disasters with the Perfect E-Commerce Business Model

#7. For our next sensational tip, we looked at Sumo’s easy to read breakdown of various types of businesses. These include B2B (business to business), C2B (customer to business), and more.

The article outlines the pros and cons of each type of business model, such as startup costs and the length of sales cycles. Sumo also looks at how selling goods or selling services online can have special quirks.

For example, for goods, consider whether you’ll be using drop shipping or some other means of getting your stuff into your eager customers’ hands.

The most important takeaway is not just the myriad of kinds of businesses you can run from online these days. It’s also proof of the old adage, that one size does not fit all.

#6. Pining for Adventure? Then Pack Your Bags, ’Cause We’re Going on a Customer Journey

#6. This tip is so tricky, but it works! The fine folks over at Crazy Egg (gotta love that name) put together a comprehensive look at what a customer journey is, and just why it matters. Remember #9, where we talked about social listening? This is a similar concept.

Essentially, rather than listening to what your customers and prospects are saying, you are instead paying attention to what they are doing.

Here’s a fer-instance. Consider two separate customers: Erica the Early Adopter, and Cautious Carl. Erica might only need to visit your website once or twice before she is really to plunk her hard-earned cash down for your product or service.

But Carl holds back, and he hesitates. His money is just as green as Erica’s – and he may even have more of it to spend. But something is keeping him from pulling the trigger on a purchase.

As the article notes, one way which a customer journey can turn into a customer conversion can be through a great user experience. Beautiful, easy to navigate pages make people happy. Slow-loading, confusing ones do not.

Erica might not care because she’s got to have your product, although it will certainly bug her if it takes too long to get what she’s craving. And as for Carl, a negative user experience is just another way for him to confirm that inertia is his best move. Er, non-move.

Ouch.

So check out the article, particularly one of the greatest explanations of customer touchpoints we have ever seen.

#5. Slay With Memes

#5. Grab this mind-blowing tip while it’s hot! Social Media Marketing dropping some major knowledge bombs with their article about winning online marketing with memes. Two of their pieces of advice might seem conflicting, but they could both work.

One is memejacking – that is, to grab a current meme and spin it to your own purposes. If you have a product or service where you want to sell two rather than one, the “Why Not Both?” girl can help you slay with memes.

Another is to simply create your own meme. But that’s admittedly kind of tricky. After all, what you might find hysterical, others might find to be strange or unfunny or even offensive.

Their third tip was to work within the confines of a current challenge. Remember the ice bucket challenge? It was coopted in all sorts of ways – it’s no coincidence that some videos would have branding on buckets or tee shirts or the like.

So you can slay with memes that way – but please don’t coopt the eating of Tide pods.

#4. Measure Twice, Cut Once with Splendid Digital Marketing Tools

#4. Check out this spectacular tip, all about 10 fantastic digital marketing tools you’ll need for a successful campaign. Pixel Productions put together a list with some of our favorites!

In fact, they recommend HubSpot, the author of our #10 tip, above (Go, look! We’ll wait). Albacross was a great recommendation, too. With Albacross, you can track your website’s visitors and then reach out to them, even after they have left the page. So essentially, Albacross is a lead generation tool.

Hence if a business visits your site, Albacross has their information – even if they don’t leave it for you. But keep in mind: this is only for B2B sites. But considering online privacy issues, including GDPR, it’s highly unlikely such a tool will be made available for B2C.

#3. The Answer is: Machine Learning. The Question is: What is it Called when an AI Teaches Itself?

#3. It’s not your imagination: this winning tip can help you segment your customers more intelligently.

Uh, what?

Don’t worry. Process.st explains it all.

Sorry about that metaphor.

Consider how much better your marketing could be if you knew all sorts of esoteric bits of information about your typical customers. If your typical customer is a big fan of thrash metal, then you probably don’t want to put polka music in your explainer videos or your online advertising. What if they prefer the Impressionists to more contemporary art? Then your visuals should evoke Claude Monet, and not Jenny Holzer.

With machine learning, you get a far better picture and can make the subtle tweaks and decisions which just might get a prospect off the fence.

#2. Hello, My Name is Awesome Networker

#2. Our second to last unbeatable tip can give you a new perspective on what happens when you step away from the keyboard and meet your fellow human beings. We turned to Startup Nation to understand more about how to better network.

For all of the business card trading that so many of us do, it can sometimes feel like a meaningless exercise. After all, if you’re throwing out cards as soon as you get them, then aren’t the other people deep-sixing your own?

So we welcomed the chance to learn more about this sometimes mystifying aspect of getting social. We had two particular favorite tips.

Our first favorite was to be your best self. Essentially, this isn’t just about being pleasant and properly groomed; it’s also about becoming more helpful, more principled, and maybe even more graceful in your interactions. Be the person you would like to meet, and you’ll meet people just like the new you.

Our other favorite (the tips were all excellent; it’s just that these two stood out the most to us) was to meet strangers. And that can be terrifying to so many people! Yet it makes the most sense, ever.

After all, meeting utter strangers gives you more opportunities for new connections.

We Promise It’s Not a Lot of Math. Scouts’ Honor!

What do we mean? Let’s do some math. We promise it’ll be easy and you can use your calculator, fingers and toes, or abacus to follow along.

What if you have 100 contacts of any sort? Your mom, your hairdresser, your boss, and your elementary school teacher are all within this group of 100. And yes, you should meet their contacts, as much as you can.

But Mom’s contacts probably overlap with your own quite a bit. So she might only have 50 contacts you don’t know, and maybe even fewer.

Even if your hairdresser is rather different from everyone else you know, there is one overlap when they introduce you to someone – it’s your hairdresser, of course. He or she is the person who you and your new acquaintance have in common.

So to get the most bang for your networking/meeting new people buck (as it were), meeting utter strangers gives you a 100% set of new contacts. Naturally, and particularly in a smaller town or city, there could be overlap and you just don’t know it yet. And that’s all right.

Still, there’s another benefit – getting you out of your comfort zone. It’s easy to talk to the people we already know. But to strangers? Man oh man that’s hard! So network, and get better at it.

#1. You Can Lead a Customer to Your Website, But Can You Make Her Buy?

#1. We saved the best for last. For our favorite remarkable tip, we focused on SEO for lead generation. Red Website Design brought home the idea that search engine optimization does a lot more than you might think.

For example, consider the concept of targeting long-tail keywords. These are phrases which go far beyond a simple word or two and get to the heart of what a customer is really looking for.

Between bikes and Harley-Davidson Sportster motorcycles in Tallahassee, which do you think tells a better tale of what the customer really wants? So optimize your pages for more specificity. Because when you know what your customer wants, and you can deliver it to them with minimal fuss, guess what happens? You make a sale. Do that enough times and guess what happens? You get a customer. For life.

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!