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5 Most Common Digital Marketing Mistakes | Vera Firman
Unlock the secrets to cost-effective client acquisition with our special guest, Vera, as she reveals the game-changing strategies behind successful reactivation campaigns. Many businesses miss out on golden opportunities by neglecting their existing client databases. Vera shares her expertise on leveraging email and SMS marketing to reconnect with past clients, transforming scattered and unorganized databases into powerful tools for business growth. Discover how simple steps like maintaining a clean client database, utilizing automation, and crafting strategic offers can lead to repeat business and reduced acquisition costs.
Ever wondered how automation can revolutionize your sales process? We dissect the benefits of using the Pulse Growth platform to streamline client reactivation campaigns. From managing emails and payment proposals to social media engagement, Vera explains how automation ensures consistency and efficiency. Learn about the effectiveness of SMS and WhatsApp campaigns in various regions and the critical role data and analytics play in preventing sudden downturns. This chapter emphasizes the need for a proactive approach to marketing and the importance of monitoring key metrics for sustained business growth.
Feeling overwhelmed by the multitude of tools required for online activities? Vera introduces Pulse Growth as the ultimate all-in-one solution to consolidate your marketing efforts. We discuss the platform's advantages, such as improved efficiency and transparency in managing social media, online proposals, and reputation management. With a single dashboard to monitor analytics across channels like Facebook and Google, business operations become more streamlined. Vera also highlights the significance of employee training and oversight, demonstrating how Pulse Growth’s comprehensive features can optimize your operations. Don’t miss out on her practical advice and an invitation to try the platform through a free trial and upcoming webinars.
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acquisition of client. When you spend money on advertising to get a new client is really expensive. So what's the cheapest way? The cheapest way is to reactivate. We call it reactivation campaign actually. For example, business owners that are ignoring the fact and power of social media because they think, oh, it doesn't work, so they don't post any content on social media, or they post like once a month and that's it.
Speaker 2:So we're going to move on to a section where we talk about the top marketing mistakes with Vera and she already kind of mentioned the reactivation campaigns and to have to reach out to your existing clients and I want to add here as well'm I'm going to cut her portion here, yes, so uh, one of the mistakes we're seeing business owners doing uh, they don't gather all the database together.
Speaker 1:It's like all over the place, um, lots of them, and just having some excel files not organized, some on their whats WhatsApp, some all over the places, not doing any email marketing, not doing any SMS campaigns and, more importantly, not trying to reactivate. The best customers are the ones who already bought from you and many business owners. They're ignoring this fact or maybe they just don't know, because most of the times we just say, oh, you know what you could actually use your database, you can advertise to them, you can send emails to them, you can send text messages to them. And they're kind of puzzled because I think they just maybe they're too busy or they didn't think this way.
Speaker 2:That's where the agency is trying to to help um, I'm gonna just add here is that a lot of the people are in business looking for new clients and that's kind of like a mindset that I need to find more clients and more clients and more clients and they completely forget that they have an email list of even if it's a hundred people and you're selling you sold them already Like you have a hundred people who will be buying you from again because you sold them already. Like you have a hundred people who will be buying you from again because repeat buyers are much more likely to buy again than complete strangers. So Vera was just explaining that point to us. If you don't mind sharing that again.
Speaker 1:Yes, so actually a client who already bought from you before and already trust and know your brand. It's much easier. And also, let's talk about cost of acquisition of clients. When you spend money on advertising, to get a new client is really expensive. So what's the cheapest way? The cheapest way is to reactivate we call it reactivation campaign. Actually. Way is to reactivate we call it reactivation campaign actually. So that's a way to reactivate your existing. If you have existing list of clients or people who've been with you in the past, you can have an offer, you can have something maybe like upsell or downsell and offer them and it's one of the easiest way to have sales and don't spend a lot on the new acquisitioning a new client.
Speaker 2:What are the ways that maybe your agency can help or entrepreneurs can use to do these reactivations in your businesses?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so we're using, obviously, the tools, automation tools which helps us to make it all happen. Obviously, we need to think about the strategy and know what can we offer to our list of clients. We do it for ourselves as well. For example, if you're offering services, you can always send some sort of case studies to your database and that encourages them to buy from you again. And it's happened to us as well.
Speaker 1:Like, uh, we've been sending case studies to our database and then one of the customers I've been talking, a year ago they got back to us and it's a lady who actually no longer working for that company. Now she's working for a very big hotel chain I can't say when, the name, unfortunately, because we are under nda, but because of those emails we were sending that lady, she remembered me and we talked to her a year ago when she working. She was working for a different even company at the time and here they got back to us and we closed the deal for another company much more bigger. So you know, you never know the clients from the past could be again. I will repeat myself a good way of acquiring clients for the cheaper rates. And they already know you, they trust your brand and that's the easiest sale you can make yeah, I love that.
Speaker 2:And uh, what specifically are you using to reactivate? If you don't mind sharing with the listeners?
Speaker 1:uh, for example. Uh, we have some businesses who work with us and, for example, we have yacht rentals or we have uh e-commerce, and by sending some bonuses, promotions or vouchers try to bring them back. Or friend recommendation hey, refer a friend and get something in return. People like rewards. Still, if you offer a reward or you can offer some bonus or you have some special, that's the way you can bring them back.
Speaker 1:So we're using pools growth platform and it's all in one automation tool and it helps us to make all the magic happen. It helps us to automate all the emails. It helps us to automate payment proposals, online signing proposals. It helps us to engage with all the social media platforms. It helps us. It has so many things which you know. Takes me probably another podcast to talk about futures, but since we started about reactivation campaign, let's just focus on that. So we are using Pulse Growth platform and it's a platform where you can upload all your database, all your existing clients, and you can start sending a reactivation campaign. Not only emails. You could also do SMS, which is more effective, or you could do WhatsApp. Depends where you are. For example, in the Middle East, sms is not allowed, but they use WhatsApp campaigns, which is very effective because everybody is on WhatsApp or emails, plus SMS, and WhatsApp is the really cool tools to remind about you to your existing clients or clients who's been with you in the past.
Speaker 2:I love it and so, basically, when clients work with you, are you going to equip them with your platform or how can they implement the reactivation?
Speaker 1:This for them. We just help them to set everything up like domain, make it all. We help them to make the email nice, for example, design nice template, and we teach them how to do it so they could do it themselves. It's not a rocket science, it's very easy. And of course, they have our support. If something doesn't work, we have a team who can jump on a zoom and help them to make it happen I love it.
Speaker 2:So you said it's called post growth. What's?
Speaker 1:the um postcode.
Speaker 2:Okay, I'll share it in the description, if anyone is interested in this platform. I love it and um can we go over the the? The biggest marketing mistake, which is something we didn't even talk about, which is no marketing?
Speaker 1:Yes. So one of the mistakes I would mention is being inconsistent. It's something I've struggled with myself in the past. For example, business owners. They are ignoring the fact and power of social media because they think, oh, it doesn't work, so they don't post any content on social media or they post like once a month and that's it. So again, when we started this podcast, I was talking about disciplining myself byining yourself. That's the way you achieve all your goals in your business. So, being consistent with your social media, being consistent with your email campaigns, and now, with all the available tools in the market, it's easier, way easier to fix it. You can just dedicate, let's say, two, three hours a month just for your social media. You can do it auto-post, auto-schedule. You don't have to spend every day on that. So consistency is one big mistake. Every business owner is Not every, but most of them do.
Speaker 1:And then another one I would like to highlight is looking at data and analytics. And you would be really surprised. Even big corporations and big companies we work with maybe 70% don't have even Google Analytics in place, or they have, but they never look at that, they never look at their traffic, they never look, especially the bigger companies having bigger mass, so they have. We have one client just now. We're on board.
Speaker 1:They have around 50 salespeople outdoors and a business owner have no idea what's going on. They don't know, um, they don't know anything. They don't know yeah, they know. They're now ranking on google with because we do that. But they can't control sales people. They don't have dashboard to look at, they don't see all the numbers. All they know that this year their profit is going down by 20 percent. But all of this again going back to systems process and looking at the dashboard and analytics your traffic, how many visitors you having, how many leads you have, how many calls were made, how many follow-ups you know. All that stuff is really, really important and unfortunately, uh, small and medium-sized and even bigger businesses they ignoring this factor until something you know. They ignoring this factor because they still have uh income and they've been lucky enough to get business, but when something stopped working, that's where they have to look at and fix I love that you say that because and that maybe that's what goes back to when something is not working, when the business is going down.
Speaker 2:it's then when they're like, oh, I maybe need to do something about this, Like maybe I need to do my SEO, Maybe I need to look at my numbers, Maybe I need to. So that's why it's very reactive approach instead of being proactive, which is just doing the things you know. Anyway, it doesn't matter. You know, think about long term and maybe there will be no time in the business slowdowns and you are suddenly like waking up, like, oh my God, I'm not doing anything.
Speaker 1:Unfortunately, you just mentioned really important factor. That's what exactly happening. So they were not looking at anything. Many don't look because business is going's good, everything is good. They're lucky they have I mean, they've been. It's happening also with businesses who's been in the market for like 20, 30 years and everything was good because the business been so long in the market that they don't even bother with that, but then something suddenly start going down. That's when they realize, oh my god, I need to start doing something. But the it's really important to do that. You know, do it not when you like in crisis. You have to be doing it early so you avoiding having crisis in your company exactly so.
Speaker 2:Proactive instead of reactive, that's what we're trying to say here. Yeah, yeah, that's right. So the second mistake that you kind of mentioned in the first part was that you know, when we generate leads for clients, they have no systems or sales processes to follow up and close the sales. Yeah, can we elaborate on that as well? What was your experience? Yeah, can we elaborate?
Speaker 1:on that as well. What was your experience? Yeah, so usually, before starting working with any client, one of my questions is always what is your sales process? Please tell me and I'm listening to what is the sales process? How do they handle the leads? How fast they handle the leads? How often they follow up with the leads?
Speaker 1:And many of them, unfortunately, unfortunately they either don't know, because their employees handling that and they don't know how it's being handled, and or some of them they know when they say, yeah, we do it, they do everything, we follow up, blah, blah, blah. But then, when reality hits and then we start looking and we realize that oh my god, guys, but you're not following up, you don't call these leads quick enough, or somebody forget to even pick up, pick up their phone and call. So, again, sales process is probably one of the most important factors and I would even say start selling first before you jump into advertising, because you need to have sales process in place, and this is one of the biggest mistakes. Everyone does Not. Again, not everyone. There are so many successful businesses, but what we're seeing to small to medium-sized businesses, that's a problem they're facing.
Speaker 2:So what do you think is the optimal Like let's talk about paid ads Like what is the optimal followup time when it comes to like a new lead?
Speaker 1:Uh, when new leads comes in, uh, I would always recommend to have some sort of the funnel. That's where, uh, there is SMS email campaign, is, you know, send to do the lead? Also, uh, calls and I always say you should call until they actually say to you don't call me anymore. Again one of the mistakes I would like to highlight business owners or their employees. They think, oh, I call this person twice, I don't want to annoy them anymore, it's okay to call. I would say up to seven touch points, meaning call them as many times as you can.
Speaker 1:Just because we live in such a crowded world, we are all busy, we keep forgetting things. You know, there's lots of distractions around, lots of. Even me myself always get distracted with social media, looking at instagram or somebody call me and I say, hey, I I'll call you later and I forget. So it's really important, it's not a bad thing and people really forget. So, calling and being persistent is one of the keys to success and many business owners or their employees they need to be trained because they feel like, oh, I don't want to bother people anymore.
Speaker 1:Same things would apply to emails and SMS. They say, yeah, I don't want to send too many emails because I don't want to bother people, but it's not bothering people. And same with advertising. I don't know if you remember when we didn't have Facebook and we used to watch TVs, there was lots of same advertising on the TV, over and over again. And the way it's done so, the more people see your brand, the more they remember your brand. So don't be afraid of you know, show your brand, advertise as many times as possible, call leads as many times as you can, send emails. Text be persistent. Don't worry. If somebody doesn't want you to call them, they will say so and you just remove them from the list.
Speaker 2:I love that. I love that. And you know what, just thinking back to TV commercials, like we all have the songs on the TV, like we're like I don't know there was like this milk advertisement with a cow and I was like I still remember the song because it's like always, always playing, and I love that. Also, you said, like call them until they say don't call me Because there is this fear, like I don't want to upset people, I don't want them to think I'm too, you know, needy or my brand is annoying, you know. But if you have their phone numbers and let's talk about like warmer leads, that not completely cold, like you're not calling from a phone book, you know you, if you have leads, they opted in for something you know. So let's assume they get an ebook or some kind of guide or something from you or a coupon, right. So let's assume they come for something before you call them, you know, and it doesn't have to be like some kind of cold, you know then if you're cold calling people, you might get more people upset.
Speaker 1:Yeah, cold calling is different approach and this is something we also tried in the past, but I really don't like this approach and it's already banned in some countries. You can't do this and I also believe that people, most of the customers they wouldn't probably buy until they know you and that's why, again, ignoring social media, ignoring building your online presence, it's one of the mistakes and it's better to start doing it early and don't wait until your business stop generating enough revenue and you have to jump on it and start doing this in stress, exactly.
Speaker 2:So let's talk about using many tools as a mistake, because my camera is dying, so maybe we have about 10 minutes to wrap this session up, so let's talk about reputation management first, and then let's go to the tools.
Speaker 1:Yeah, reputation management is another is something business owners actually don't do, and we're trying to educate and teach our clients that this is really important. Let's explain what it is. First, reputation management is when you ask your clients to give you reviews, and it's really important that you have this Google my Business profile. It's one of the important factors in the marketing game. There's others, like Trustpilot and and other tools, but let's talk about google my business. So if you have, uh, if you didn't set up your google my business profile yet, you have to do it. It's really, it's really a cool tool and it's free. And uh, asking your clients to give you a review again, don't be afraid, don't be shy. It's really a cool thing, cool way of getting new clients, because once somebody's searching for you on google, see positive review, the chances that buy from you are very high.
Speaker 1:And what we call the reputation management is that we help to automate it so our customers can send reviews to their customers. And in in case you know, sometimes we have not really happy customers, so there is a way to avoid that. If there is not happy customer, he can just say why he's not happy and the answer will not be published online. That way you are avoiding bad reputation and also system automatically send reminders to those you know, send review requests, but customer busy and didn't have time to do it, so automation will be reminding. And also there is another cool approach we're using. We're offering like a voucher for those who give us a review, and that's also help with retention, because customer who have your voucher they definitely should get back to use that voucher. So there's a way of not only building a reputation but also make your customers return back to you.
Speaker 2:I love that and, of course, they can use your platform as well Pulse Growth to implement that right.
Speaker 1:Yes, and when our customers join our platform, it's one of our bonuses. We build that reputation management for free. Wow, that's amazing. I will link later.
Speaker 2:Yeah, okay, well, I'll share it with the listeners for sure. So let's go on to using so many tools in our businesses as a mistake.
Speaker 1:Yes, I don't even know if businesses as a mistake. Yes, I don't even know if it's a mistake. It's just that there's so many available tools in the market. There's so many, and you get overwhelmed and confused. And then you need accounting system, you need proposals to sign online, you need email automation to run, and even us, when we started our agency, we paid for so many tools, and it's not only costly, it's also, you know, if something cracks, then the whole system is cracking because it's all related, they all zap together and sometimes there's technical problems can happen.
Speaker 1:Also, let's say, if you have employees, you need to give access to different tools to your employees. You have to deal with logins and passwords, which is really annoying. Or some of our clients they don't want to give access to their social media accounts because they're too worried that they're going to get banned. Instead, what they do, they give access to the platform where their staff can manage social media managing meaning not only posting social media, but also responding to comments, reviews all of this possible from one platform. So we ourselves used to spend lots of money I don't even want to mention the numbers on a yearly basis, how many tools we were using, and right now, we're using only one platform, it's Pulse Growth, and we're using it for online proposals. We're using it for SMS campaigns. We use it to build websites. We use it for reputation management.
Speaker 1:There's so many things it can be used for. We use it even for as a calling system that our people can call to clients from our CRM. All the calls could be recorded. You can know what's going on in your company. You can know how your staff is speaking to your potential customers. You can see everything at one dashboard. Looking at the analytics, for example, or if you're running advertising, such as Facebook or Google Ads, or you're doing SEO, you can see everything at one dashboard. So you don't have to log in separately to Facebook analytics. You don't have to log in separately to facebook analytics, you don't have to log in separately to google analytics and, in general, you can look, you know an overall monthly results and you could see what's going on in your business without having all these multiple tools and you know, I love that because we talked about transparency and with this platform, you can actually see what's happening on your Google accounts, on your Facebook accounts, right?
Speaker 2:So there isn't the fact that it's a hidden information, you know, it's really all connected together so you're able to see what your team is doing, the ads persons are doing for you. The Google ads persons, seos, like all of that is just basically, you can they cannot hide it from you anymore if you are using this it's also it's transparency.
Speaker 1:It's also lots of business owners they they cannot control their employees and uh, or like I don't say anything bad against employees, but some of them they just don't say anything bad against employees, but some of them they just don't train well enough to handle the leads. So once you identify the problem, at least you know how to solve it. If your staff cannot sell, maybe you can see how they're doing it and maybe you need to provide training, and not to mention how much money all these tools cost. And not also not to mention how much money all these tools cost, yes, so when you pay for one tool, it's really a very cost-effective solution.
Speaker 2:It is much cost-effective and, like I said, like logins for different platforms. It is a nightmare if your business is built on like you have the emailing software and you have the funnel building software and you have all of that. That's what you know.
Speaker 1:We're doing uh and uh. We already did, like this year, we did all the uh software we are using. We only kept few uh for operations and one for accounting because accounting was really hard to move, but everything else is operated from one platform.
Speaker 2:Wow, that's amazing. You froze, okay. You're back, okay. So, vera, just to wrap up this session, I want to ask you one piece of advice that you have for business owners that are still scattered a little bit, you know, and they're looking for ways to optimize their businesses and grow their online presence.
Speaker 1:One advice.
Speaker 2:Come to my consultation. Great, that's a great one. No, but for real, uh, how can people find you and what kind of services that you're providing at the moment?
Speaker 1:uh, at this point, um, we are running a digital marketing agency where we helping with uh search engine optimization and we helping with social media advertising and website website built again, websites built in our CRM and then, if you would like to try our platform, you can try for free. There is a free trial and we help with all types of installations at the start and we are also offering um webinars where we trying to show and educate business owners the ways, how, how, how to automate all this sales and marketing, uh, how to make it all work and uh, unfortunately, we well, I don't have a link yet for the next webinar. It's going to be on 20th of June. Maybe once I have the link, I can pass it to you and you can look at my social media on Instagram or Facebook and we have websites. Our team is ready to jump and have a call and support you for all your digital marketing needs.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much, so much for being here. I will make sure to put all your links in our episode note and share that with all the listeners. I mean, we covered so much in this conversation. I had so much fun. Yeah, thanks so much for coming.
Speaker 1:Thank you for inviting. I was really. I think it was very productive, lots of information, and sometimes I feel like it can be a little bit overwhelming for businesses, especially if someone just started. It could be really overwhelming. But again, don't get scared, it's all doable. You just need to start somewhere.
Speaker 2:Exactly, I love that. Thank you, vera.