Category: MarketingSales

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Social Media Secrets

The secret to social media success is actually to use it as the start of your sales funnel. However, Social Media isn’t a place for hard selling. Social channels were designed for casual conversation and spontaneous interaction. That’s the main reason why you should pay a lot of attention to your website’s content and focus on your brand storytelling while engaging with your customers.

Network on social media like you’re at a social event

Here’s another piece of advice for a small business entrepreneurs. If you start a conversation on social media by telling people, ‘Hey, go to my website,’ you’re probably not the best networker.
You would never walk up to someone at a networking event and hand them your business card without first striking up a conversation. Social media works the same way.

Social media allows you to connect with people one-on-one without paying for advertising. So connect! Once a follower is confident that there’s a real person on the other side of the keyboard, they’ll respond to your special offers, event invitations, or inquiries about their specific needs. Remember, it takes time to develop these relationships.

Create a landing page to capture contact information

Once you’ve developed a relationship on social media, it’s time to direct your potential customer to a landing page. Think of the most important action a customer can make once they arrive at your website. Is it signing up for your email newsletter? Downloading a free ebook? Registering for an event?

Ask for that one important action on a landing page. It might be the very first page a visitor sees when they arrive at your website, or it could be a prompt that pops up once a visitor has clicked around your site. A prominent landing page keeps your visitor on task and moves them into the sales phase of your funnel.

You don’t need advanced software to create a landing page. Google Forms are free, and services like Wufoo and Jotform offer free starter levels of service. These tools can help you set up a system to capture the most critical information about your leads, like their email addresses or phone numbers.

Remember to keep your landing page simple. Add your landing page URL to your social media profiles to make it easy for people to get more information about your business.

Engage first, sell later

Once you’ve forged connections on social media and captured lead contact information, you can start to think about selling to that potential customer. Thank your customer for their interest and provide value, whether it be in the form of an educational email newsletter, free product download, or consultation offer. Continue to build relationships with consistent communication that will get your customers excited about doing business with you.

Your initial social media interactions can impact how smoothly your entire sales process goes. Don’t ignore these powerful, free tools — use them to your small business advantage!

Social Media and SEO

Social media is one of the main players in the game of search engine optimization (SEO). It’s the seven of the top 10 SEO ranking factors. People are talking about what you do on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and other social networks. And, if they are linking to an amazing content on your small business website, it works wonders at getting your business listed on search results. That’s why the best small business websites integrate social elements.

How to add social media to your website to help grow your business?

Create shareable content

Keep this question in mind when you create content for your website: Will my visitors want to share this information? Every successful website has a great content – unique, relevant, trustworthy content. Text, video and images of your website and your website pages should exceed the expectations of your visitors. Infographics. White papers. Stuff they can’t find anywhere else and, that they feel compelled to share.

Make social sharing simple

Every small business website can benefit from at least adding a Facebook widget to the home page. But why stop there? You’ve probably seen product “shares” in your feed. That’s because people love to share images of things they think are cool on their favorite social platforms. Make sharing your cool stuff simple by placing social buttons on your product pages.

Showcase social feeds

If you use social networks like Twitter or Facebook to build your business, showcase your social activity on your website by incorporating social feeds. They can give viewers a glimpse of your business’s personality and entice them to connect with you. Embed Twitter timelines and Facebook activity feeds. It will boost your, more integrated, online business presence.

Offer social sign-in and commenting

Make it easy for visitors to sign in and comment on your website. They can simply select to log in via their Facebook account. They might need to enter an email address or similar – but they’ll likely find the more simplified sign-in process appealing. You can also enable visitors to leave comments on your site through social-based comment tools like Disqus and Facebook Comments (it allows users to comment on your content using their Facebook profile and show their comments to their friends in their news feed). If you’d like to learn more – Social Media Examiner provides a helpful overview of how social login works.

Install social media widgets on your website

It’s important to place your contact information in a prominent location on your website. However, you can make it even easier for people to find and follow your social media accounts. Social media widgets and embedded feeds pull your most recent Instagram, Facebook or other social media posts and present them in an area you choose on your website. Visitors can then preview your recent social activity and also like or follow your account right from their browser. These widgets allow you to connect with a potential customer on a second platform (your website plus a social media channel) without directing them away from your business website.

If you use a website host like Squarespace, Wix, or some WordPress setups, adding a social media widget may only require a few clicks. Otherwise, you may need to do some research to determine what HTML code you’ll need and where to place it.

If you’ve got a WordPress website, they have a great social media plugins available. Easy Social Icons plugin are a good option. Here’s a strong Top 20 list to start checking out.

Keep engaging

By adding these social media elements to your small business website, you’ll be well on your way to leveraging the power of social networking to share your awesomeness with the people who matter most – your customers and prospects. Schedule a manageable amount of time each day for meaningful social engagement, be authentic, be creative, and watch your business grow.

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Selling Luxury Properties in Egypt for High Net Worth Clientele

I was living and working in Egypt – Cairo, from 2006 to 2009. At that time, real estate field in Egypt was booming. I used to work in Cairo for the American number one real estate agency – Coldwell Banker, and, one of the biggest luxury development companies – Damac Properties, from Dubai. In 2007 Damac Properties just entered Egyptian market and they’ve been recruiting senior sales professionals from the real estate or similar fields of work, which had the same clientele. Those were the seven or five stars hotels and other leading real estate agencies. Our clientele at Damac Properties was only 2-3% of the total market share in Egypt (high net worth clientele).  In this post I’ll share with you this challenging method of sale…

How we sold luxurious Damac Properties?

Selling for Results

I’d like to share with you a challenging method of sale that we used while selling luxurious Damac Properties. We were selling an idea in a project, a unit that is to be built in the next 3-4 years, nothing tangible. Basically, we were selling a “fog”. Start of the project construction was planned in the first year and project completion was expected within the next 4 years.
The minimum price for a Damac property, whether it was a small retail unit, office space, or a villa, was around or not less that a million Egyptian Pounds (cca $250.000). Now, most of the sale was done within a pre-launch period. This was a period with the lowest prices and an excellent opportunity for a real estate investors to earn up to 25 % only by putting their trust in Damac and buying a property 3 to 4 years before it’s been constructed. What Damac’s sales experts had in their hands was Damac’s superior training called “Selling For Results”, conducted by a sales couch sent from Damac’s headquarters in Dubai, property info, sketched floor plans and an expensive project catalog. As a part of Damac’s marketing efforts, a pre-launching event in a seven star hotel was also organized, where we invited all of our qualified prospects. “Selling For Results” training lasted for a couple of days and it helped us strengthen our sales, communication, persuasion, negotiation and closing skills and techniques. After thorough preparation and a pre-launch event, our clients started visiting us in Damac’s offices spread out through luxurious Cairo suburbs. Now comes the peak of the selling challenge – clients were supposed to pay 25% of the property price on the spot. Namely, the procedure was to visit us at Damac’s office, bring a check and sign a reservation form. I can tell you, this kind of challenging sale I never had again in my whole life. That’s why I appreciate all of my ex Damac’s colleagues. They were really the best of the best sales professionals in the market. Not to mention, how challenging Egyptians are as clients. In the world of business, they are known as the best negotiators and they are also tricky and foxy in business. When they are buying something, it’s a common thing with them to give promises, schedule meetings, give their “words”, show interests etc., but, until they actually sign a contract, you cannot count on them actually buying.

If I put aside all the stress related to this challenging process of sale, I can still conclude that I’m grateful for this valuable international experience. It has definitely increased my capabilities, my selling, negotiation and persuasion skills. Also, my driving skills have improved. Even though I’m a very good driver, it’s widely known that Cairo traffic is crazy and it’s very rare to see a foreigner driving there. I’m proud of being able to adapt to a new culture of this Northern African country and to get known with the Cairo real estate market within the first three months. At that time Cairo’s population was 18 million and I met a lot of Egyptians who would get lost if they moved from one part of Cairo to another. Being able to get known with the geographical area without a GPS was really something at that time. In order to achieve that I started driving in Cairo almost immediately after my arrival and I spent a lot of time by driving around and figuring out the region, city parts and its streets. This process was made even harder by the mentality of Egyptians. Namely, if I asked somebody on the street for a direction, they would mainly direct me in a wrong way. Later on, after I’ve been living there for more than a year, I’ve found out that it’s because they are ashamed to admit that they don’t know. Well, I don’t classify people by their income, education or similar, however, mainly a bit less educated people would act like that. On the other side, I’ve had a lot of positive experiences with Egyptians as well. They are, in general, very welcoming and they like to help others even if they don’t know them, especially foreigners. I remember once, something happened with my car. My tire was a bit flat, so I stopped aside in a street with a very busy traffic. A couple was walking by. As soon as I stopped, went out of the car and looking at the tire, this couple approached me and a man asked me if I had a spare tire. He then took it and replaced it in less than five minutes. They just went their way afterwards. It was like, they didn’t wait for me to ask for their help, nor they expected me to say “thank you” after they helped me. They just did it and went their own way. Amazing…

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