by Amber Miller | Aug 5, 2019 | Blog, Business Development
You’ve probably heard it all by now when it comes to developing a hire strategy. Some things you’ve tried have panned out great. Others? Well, quite the opposite. Every single business out there goes through similar challenges.
For obvious reasons, it’s wise to continually hone your hiring solutions. Few aspects of your business can increase revenue and deliver outstanding results as building the right staff can. The negative flip side of that is equally true.
Knowing how to hire will also have a huge impact on whether your staff are happy at your organization. If they feel valued by the team you build, they’ll stick around. If not, they’ll walk. In light of that, here are some things to look for when hiring.
Make Sure Your New Hire Will Be Compatible
Your prospective employee may be an uncontested all-star when it comes to their job performance and abilities. That doesn’t make them an automatic shoo-in for the position, however. You’ll also need to judge their compatibility with your existing employees.
Think about how much it cost to develop the staff you already have. Now imagine if this newcomer frustrated your valued workers so much that they stopped giving their best, or showing up or to the point they called it quits. This is all the more crucial for supervisory positions. As the saying goes, “People don’t quit bad jobs. They quit bad bosses.”
If you hire the right person, you’ll add another reason for your employees to show up for work every day. If not, you’ll have created a dark cloud when it comes to morale. It’s best to work together as a team to decide if compatibility exists in a job candidate to get a balanced perspective when hiring.
Check Their Social Footprint
Digging into someone’s online social activity when hiring isn’t considered “creepy” like it once was. Heck, people even check someone’s social footprint before going on a date. And these days, who can blame them?
Take a close look at your potential employee’s social activity. It’s entirely possible that a minute’s glance will tell you to move on to the next candidate. However, it’s equally possible you won’t want to move on to the next candidate after doing some searches.
“Asking personal questions won’t get you anywhere, and could be awkward and uncomfortable for both parties. Rather, you or your human resources team should be analyzing the candidates’ presence on social media,” says Steve Olenski in his Forbes article entitled, “6 Tips for Hiring the Right Employee.”
Assess Their Ability to Persevere
Sure, you need someone with the right skills who’s a fast learner but you need more than that. You’re looking for a candidate who can handle setbacks and adversity. Because sometimes one’s workload can knock the wind out of them on the bad days.
You need a staff member who’ll keep going when things get tough. Challenges are inevitable but can be overcome by a worker with persistence. What are you specifically looking for? More than anything after you have the correct skillset, you’re searching for a positive attitude.
This skill isn’t taught in any school yet is, nonetheless, essential. Perseverance only comes about through disappointment and setbacks. Failures are inevitable for everyone. The choice to continue the trudge to success despite failure is what separates the truly successful from the rest of the pack.
Find someone who’s determined and who won’t give up while maintaining their optimism and you’ll have a winner. Hire them quickly before someone else does!
Could You Use Some Extra Help with Your Hire Strategy?
A good hire doesn’t just happen. Recruitment and the hiring process are a painstaking process well worth the effort. Knowing how to hire is only half the battle, however.
Sometimes your current staffing demands make it hard to devote the time needed to add to your team. If this struggle sounds all too familiar, Smart to Finish can help you with this process. Our team has experience making sure your next hire is the smart hire.
We know firsthand that the right staff makes all the difference in a successful business. That’s why we’ve learned how to recruit and pass that good hire on to you. After all, when you’re successful, so are we.
Do you have additional questions about how we could help to make your hiring a big win? We’d love to interact more with you through a free consultation.
by Amber Miller | May 21, 2019 | Blog, Marketing
Wondering what the best email marketing service for your business is? You have email marketing that needs to get done. The time demands, however, can sap the strength you and your staff require to meet daily customer needs. Still, it has to happen.
Yes, growing your customer base is critical. No, you don’t want to lose existing customers because you can’t keep up with their needs while sinking time into email marketing.
What can be done if you’re facing a similar challenge? A virtual assistant, or better yet, a virtual assistant team may be the answer to your web marketing struggles. Here are a few of many reasons why the best email marketing service for your business may be provided by a virtual assistant.
Help Creating Your Email List
Deciding who is and isn’t a good lead for your email marketing strategy can be time consuming. From qualifying leads to compiling them in a coherent manner, there’s plenty of work to be done.
You also may need to upload info from potential clients or customers who signed up manually during a marketing event or exposition. These contacts can then be added to a spreadsheet and eventually to your platform. A skilled marketing assistant can help you get your email list in working order. That way, your campaign will run smoother and reach the correct demographic.
Email Templates Created by a Virtual Assistant
Your business’s email marketing campaign can get stuck in the mud before it ever gets going without the creation of quality email templates. Worse yet, those templates won’t convert like you’d hoped if they’re “thrown together”.
A virtual assistant or virtual assistant team can help you to create winning templates that score big leads. Text, font and graphics all need serious attention but it takes more than that. You need email templates that speak to your customers’ pain points and encourage them to take action.
Scheduling and Sending Emails
Once you’ve established your email list and created effective templates, it’ll be time for scheduling and sending emails. Your virtual assistant can work with you to decide on the best timing and frequency of your emails to maximize results.
Having help with email scheduling will eliminate your worry that you may forget to manually send those emails. Instead, they’ll just go out to your email list at the prescribed times.
Tracking Your Email Marketing Results Through Remote Assistance
Once you’ve put all that time into your email marketing strategy, you’ll definitely be interested in your results. Many platforms have inbuilt analytics systems for easy access to this information.
A virtual assistant can provide this research and compile relevant marketing summaries for your business. Things like measuring your click-through rates and comparing them with industry averages will be a cinch.
Analyzing and tweaking what days and times you received the best response rates will be easy as well. This research will enable your company to grow even more efficient at your email marketing efforts.
Do You Need Some Help with Your Email Marketing Campaign?
Smart to Finish strives to be the very best email marketing service available but that’s not all we do. We have an entire team of virtual assistants who can help you with a variety of services. You and your staff likely have enough on your plate already. Our virtual assistants can help you every step of the way.
Do you have more specific questions related to your industry type and our email services? If so, you can schedule a free 30-minute consultation to get a better idea of what we can do for you.
by Amber Miller | Apr 23, 2019 | SEO, Virtual Assisting
Interested in how to make SEO marketing more intentional in your blog posts? If so, you’re probably already sold on the fact that words by themselves aren’t enough (although they’re certainly important).
You have a valuable service or product that’ll help oodles of people. Now, what you need to make sure of is that they’ll actually find you. One of the best ways to get noticed is through organic search results. It’s not salesy yet screams credibility to potential clients and customers.
If you want your website to show up better in the search results, here are some key ways to do that by tweaking your blog posts.
Focus on Great Writing for Search Engine Marketing
SEO marketing has to start with high-quality writing. The “wild west” days of the internet are long gone—the days you could simply slap some primitive keywords into a semi-legible article and rise to the top.
Google continues to grow more sophisticated and has gotten way better at telling great content from junk. Grammar, semantics and articles without excessive use of keywords all matter.
What this means is that, like all good things, you’ll need to invest consistent time and resources into your strategy to see results. Shoddy sentences and poor grammar just won’t cut it anymore.
Use Ingoing and Outgoing Links
An often-overlooked way to boost your credibility in the eyes of Google is to provide hyperlinks in your articles. There are two hyperlink types: internal and external ones.
Internal links connect to valuable resources on your website such as your “contact” or “about” pages. They also link to relevant blog posts or other content.
When it comes to outgoing links, some business owners worry that adding them will make people go elsewhere and not come back. In reality, it’s riskier not to have them.
Google wants to see that you’re directing visitors to both useful content on your website and the internet at large. This provides credibility and higher rankings.
Consider Going Long Form in Your Posts
What’s long-form content? Posts that typically run in the range of 1,000 to 3,000 words. To give you an idea of the word volume, that comes out to between four and 12 pages in a print book.
Why is long-form content such a powerful SEO tool? Because most articles aren’t that length for starters. Provided these articles are well written, they look more authoritative to Google which means they tend to rank higher.
Primary keyword density should generally run one to three percent of the entire article text. Much more than that and Google could penalize you for being too spammy with your keyword usage.
The beauty of long-form articles is they allow your keywords to appear more frequently, since there’s more text, without them looking questionable to Google. The added keywords long form provides can give you a “bump up”. People tend to prefer longform content these days as well.
Use Longtail Keywords to Improve SEO Marketing
Longtail keywords are keyword phrases as opposed to single-word keywords. For instance, if you want to market sandals to your customers, using the word “sandals” as a keyword won’t help you much since it’s too broad of a topic.
You’ll need something more specific that’s being searched for but that your analytics tell you isn’t too difficult to rank for. That may mean something like “springtime sandals for teens” or any number of other possibilities.
You’ll also want to pay special attention to question longtail keywords phrases. In other words, these are the exact questions people have been searching for online and can be a useful aspect of ranking well.
Like any good thing in life, achieving organic search results that bring in clients and customers takes a lot of time and effort. Thankfully, the end results are well worth it—plenty of credibility and business.
More than ever, web content that works needs to be of high quality with attention to SEO details mentioned here and many more.
Are you sold on the fact that you need consistent quality blog posts for your business? Good!
What is a Virtual Assistant and Can They Help with My Blog Posts?
In short, a virtual assistant can help you with a variety of office tasks regardless of where your business is located. And, yes, we can help with content writing services such as blog posts!
At Smart to Finish, we understand just how busy businesses can be. The tasks that need done can be dizzying and, if not completed, crippling. We specialize in taking that heavy weight off of you and your staff so you can focus on the big picture with minimal stress.
If you’d like help, you can find out more about our blog writing services, marketing management and other virtual assistance options by scheduling a free consultation.
by Amber Miller | Oct 11, 2018 | Marketing
A solid sales funnel is arguably the most important part of any internet marketing effort.
You can do everything else right in your internet marketing efforts and if you don’t create a really great sales funnel that actually works, your entire endeavor could collapse.
In this post, we will be covering the entire buying cycle, so that you see what happens to the customer as they go through your funnel, and we will also discuss some of the most common sales funnels out there and how to use them on your own website.
What is a Sales Funnel?
So, you might be wondering just what exactly a sales funnel is. Sales funnels aren’t complicated, but they can be a little confusing to anyone who is new to the internet marketing business.
Basically, a sales funnel is simply the process that someone goes through to buy a product or service from you. The reason that it is called a “funnel” is that everything within the process is geared towards them making a purchase at the end.
The Sales Process
In order to understand the sales funnel, the first thing that you need to understand is the sales process, which is essentially the framework of the funnel. We will go over each step of the process below and explain it in detail.
Awareness
The first step in the process is the awareness phase. Remember, every sale that you make is not only a value proposition – it is also a solution to a problem. The customer is looking for a solution and you need to be there to provide it. So, the first step in the process is them becoming aware of the solution. You don’t have to worry about the problem; they are already bringing that part with them.
So, suppose someone gets online and opens up their favorite search engine, then types in “sleeping bag for 20 below weather.” They are looking for a sleeping bag that is going to keep them warm.
If you know that they are looking for that sleeping bag, then you can get them to come and check out your site. All you need to do is get their eyeballs to land on your listing in Google and have an HTML title that speaks to them.
In this case it might be something like: Sleeping Bags for Extremely Cold Weather.
Interest
So, now you move onto the next stage in the process. Now, you have their interest. They want to know what you have to say, and find out whether or not you really have the best solution to their problem. But you only have their interest temporarily.
They are not yet invested in your sleeping bag website. They are just a casual visitor. It’s your job to groom that interest and make it grow.
So, for example, if they get to your landing page, and you have a number of sleeping bags with the temperate rating listed on each one, they’re probably going to take a closer look.
But they might also take a closer look if you had an eBook titled: “How to Choose the Perfect Cold Weather Sleeping Bag,” or an article titled: “10 Tricks to Make Cold-Weather Sleeping Bags out of Average Ones.”
Evaluation
Next, they’ll move onto the evaluation phase of the proposition. The evaluation stage is where they compare your product against what they were looking for in the first place, as well as other products.
For example, suppose that you had the aforementioned cold weather sleeping bags listed on your site. A visitor might see them and buy, but they could just as easily think: “What if I can get a lower price somewhere else?”
Now, imagine that you had some way of convincing them that they won’t be able to get a lower price anywhere else. Do you see how drastically that turns the odds to your favor?
Of course, the trick is to actually convince them. Just putting the phrase: “You won’t find a lower price anywhere!” is probably not going to do it. People are savvy when it comes to advertising, so you’ll have to get creative.
Decision
So, the next thing that will happen is your buyer will make a decision. They will decide one simple thing: whether to buy your product or not. If you have done a good job and convinced them that your product will solve their problem, then they are likely going to buy. If not, they will go elsewhere.
Making that decision depends upon what you have presented them with in the evaluation stage. If you have made a good pitch then they will make the buying decision.
But when it comes to a sales funnel, them saying “no” doesn’t have to be final. For example, you could have a pop-up when they close the browser window that offers them a discount.
Purchase
The next step in the buying process is the purchase stage. You need to make it easy for them to buy at this point. They are committed but that doesn’t mean that they can’t back out. For example, think about purchases that you have backed out on.
Just one example: if you purchase something that seems like a really good deal and then find out that the buyer is charging four times what the shipping should be, you’re probably going to back out.
In addition to making it as easy as possible for the buyer to complete the transaction, this would be an excellent time for you to get their email address and permission to send them valuable emails on future products and services.
They are already excited about buying from you, so it’s the best time to ask.
If you are looking for a virtual assistant to help set up a sales funnel, we support several clients in this using many applications, including Infusionsoft, Simplero, Ontraport and more! Schedule a call with us here.
by Amber Miller | Feb 6, 2018 | Infusionsoft
Infusionsoft is one of the top marketing automation software programs, and we love it! We’ve been working with Infusionsoft for years to help our clients leverage it to make a big difference in their businesses. So, we know all of Infusionsoft’s hidden features, inside and out.
But…we’ve also discovered that many of the new clients are not using even half of the features that Infusionsoft offers. That makes us sad. ☹
It would be like going to Thanksgiving dinner and only eating turkey. How could you miss out on the stuffing and mashed potatoes?!
Today we thought we’d share just a few of Infusionsoft’s hidden features to save you time.
Feature #1: Expiring Credit Card Automation
If you have any type of payment plans or recurring subscriptions, this feature will save you a lot of time chasing failed payments.
Simply head over to the Ecommerce, Settings, and then select Billing Automation. From there you can select the trigger: “When a credit card is going to expire.” Then you can set up an email that will automatically be sent to someone BEFORE their credit card expires. You can set up several reminders too. A lot of our clients like to send reminders out 30 days, 14 days, and 7 days in advance. If you like a more personal touch, set up a task for you (or a team member) to call your client to collect their new credit card.
.For step-by-step directions, go here, or delegate it to the Smart to Finish Team.
Feature #2: Lead Sources
This may just be the most underutilized feature in Infusionsoft, but it’s also one of the most valuable. Don’t you want to know where your new leads and clients come from? If so, then you need to start using Lead Sources. You can use Lead Sources on your opt-in forms and then use different forms based on where you are promoting the opt-in. For example, you can have a Facebook opt-in, an email opt-in, etc. Then, you can review your lead source results to see exactly what source is providing you with the best results. Now you’ll know what channels are working best for you and your business.
Read more and learn how to set up lead sources here, or contact us and we’ll do it for you.
Feature #3: Note Templates & Internal Forms
If you are serious about automation, these are two features that can really free up your time. You can use Note Templates to take care of repetitive tasks. For example, set up a Note Template after a strategy call with a prospective client you want to remember to call back in a week or send them a particular email. Then when you’re ready, select the template, and all the actions will be done for you. You can do this for questions your customer service team gets asked over and over again, and that can save you time and money.
Internal forms work in a similar way, but they also can update contact details for you. They update contacts with new information or even decisions your contacts need to make, like attending an event or scheduling a phone call with you. This is also a great tool for adding new contacts and making sure they get the right tags and follow-up emails. Just a few clicks, and your records are all updated quickly and easily.
Learn more about Note Templates here and internal forms here, but since we’re talking about automation, the best way is to get the Smart to Finish Team to implement these time-savers for you.
If you’re ready to use Infusionsoft’s hidden features to make a big difference in your business and your life (by saving you time), contact us, and we’ll help you get started.
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