Author: jazzbooeditor

Become a Social Selling Ninja

Becoming a social selling ninja is all about making yourself more relevant with clients and prospects. It’s giving them what they need, when and where they want it.

To start down the path towards full ninja status, you need a strong sales blog filled with valuable content. Your blog should act as a repository of meaningful content so customers can evaluate your product, keep up-to-date on events and new releases, and find answers to questions on demand.

Once you have some good content up on your blog, it’s time to start talking it up. Add it to your email signature. Share it on our social networks. Mention it at the end of meetings as a supplemental resource prospects can visit. These are important steps to increase readership and engagement, but if you want to extend your reach and derive the full potential from your sales blog, you will also want to amplify your content through your preferred social channels, like LinkedIn or Twitter.

What is Amplification?

Short and sweet, amplification is the process of taking a positive interaction with your content and promoting it farther than its original reach. It can be as simple as retweeting a tweet, liking a post, or sharing a positive review. Or you can take it further with enhanced amplification techniques like promoting content on Facebook, starting a hashtag campaign, integrating trending content, embedding tweets on your site, or using an amplification service. Most successful amplification campaigns use a mix of the above actions to create a strong narrative across multiple platforms.

Why Use an Amplification Service?

To get the most out of your valuable content, working with a respected amplification service can help you measurably extend the reach of your tweet, post, or other good news. Hootsuite and Gaggle Amp are two established services with the capabilities to successfully amplify your Jazzboo content according to your objectives.

Hootsuite

Hootsuite gives you the ability to promote your blog and its content, helping to increase readership and lead generation. With Hootsuite, you can share your content on the social networks of your choosing. All you have to do is preload your profiles into the Hootsuite dashboard and you’re ready to go. You can also obtain analytics on the reach of any individual post and the performance of overall campaigns.

GaggleAMP

GaggleAMP has similar capabilities to Hootsuite, though it is more targeted towards large enterprises. GaggleAMP offers a robust dashboard and strong analytics options. But what is most unique about this service is their “gaggle” structure, a method of pooling your employees, customers, partners, and supporters so they can easily share your messaging through their respective social channels.

Whether you choose to amplify on your own or bring in the experts, getting your message out to the broadest audience in the forums they prefer is a key part of achieving the revered status of social selling ninja.

To Tag or Not to Tag

Strategic, thoughtful content organization plays a significant role in the success of your blog. A well-organized blog makes it easier for readers to find the topics that most interest them and allows for seamless sharing to other social channels.

There are two primary ways you can organize your blog content for maximum impact: categories and tags. Known as taxonomies, categories and tags are different methods for sorting your content. Created to enhance the usability of your blog, these taxonomies give readers the ability to browse your content by topic in addition to the traditional chronological method.

Categories are similar to a table of contents, providing an outline of the broad topics that are covered in your blog. They are critical to the organization of your site, but should be used judiciously. Think general, overarching groupings, not tiny, hyper-detailed classifications.

Tags are similar to an index, providing specific entry points into your post content. Tags are not required for good blog organization, but they do provide readers with another easy way to find the information they want as quickly as possible.

As an example, if you have a blog discussing technology solutions you sell, you might create categories like Hardware, Software, Events, and Training. Then, if you write a post about an upcoming event, you will assign it to the Events category and add tags like the location, the topic, the event host, etc.

Or if you have a travel blog, you might create categories like Europe, North America, South America, etc., with subcategories for each country you visit. When you write a post about the Galapagos Islands, you will assign it to the South America>Ecuador category and add tags like islands, tortoises, wildlife, pacific ocean, etc.

So Should I Tag or Not?

The short answer is “yes.” But the short answer doesn’t tell the full story. You should only use tags if you are going to use them well. While categorizing your content is necessary, tags are supplemental. They support your categories by allowing you to keep the categories simple and broad, pushing the more detailed descriptors into tags. They also help your users find what they are looking for whether they are searching for general information or a specific topic.

However, tagging is not something that should be done haphazardly. Before you start tagging posts, it is a good idea to decide how you want to structure your tags so you can reuse them effectively. Ask yourself questions like:

  • When I tag events with their locations, will I use just the city, city and state, or city and country?
  • If I include state or country names, will I abbreviate or spell them out?
  • Will I use capitalization or make all tags lowercase?
  • Will I use lowercase even when I’m creating a tag for an acronym?

By making these decisions now, you can save a lot of time moving forward and establish the consistency that is necessary for tagging to truly work. Note these guidelines somewhere prominent and share them with any content contributors so all posts are tagged to comply with the standards.

As an extra tagging bonus, Jazzboo comes with an SEO plugin integrated into the blog framework, so all your tags are automatically translated into meta keywords, giving you an added boost in optimization with no extra effort on your part. Wins all around.

The Final Verdict

Absolutely use thoughtful and meaningful categories. Add tags to your posts for maximum benefit to search engines and your users, but only if you are willing to take a little time planning your tagging strategy and implementing it consistently. Good tagging is better than no tagging, but no tagging trumps bad tagging. And that’s the final verdict on whether to tag or not to tag.

Guest Post: Is the Cold Call Dead?

Guest Post by Anthony Lobosco, Cisco Systems

The cold call and follow-up email, a long-time weapon in the arsenal of a salesperson, is very inefficient at recruiting leads when compared to the more modern method of social selling. Instead of slamming my customers with emails about local events, product webinars, and Cisco resources, I have found it much more efficient to direct my leads to a one-stop, online spot for my customers to get company-related updates and information in the form of a high-powered sales blog.

This blog simplifies communication, giving me the ability to create more targeted email campaigns by including links to relevant content. It’s a great way to be proactive with clients and circumvent the “take me off your list” response. With a Jazzboo Sales Blog, I have a concrete reason to reach out via phone, rather than calling out of nowhere, giving me an in to discuss the email I just sent.

Now let me tell you why social selling works. While I may not be connected with every client on LinkedIn and Twitter, there are three clear benefits to reaching out via social.

  1. I can invite clients to connect through social channels. It’s less aggressive and I’m more likely to get a platform to communicate with them then through a cold all.
  2. It increases my thought leadership and relevance to the folks with whom I am connected (partners, clients, former clients, etc.)
  3. The best part – these connections create a ripple effect where my messaging reaches people I didn’t directly intend to contact.

So is the cold call dead? No, but with so many better options through social selling, it might be needing life support pretty soon.

The Importance of Good Design

Compelling content that hits its target is the most important component of a high-performing blog. But without good supporting design, that amazing review or new product can be diminished, or worse, never even seen. A clean, attractive design for your blog is an important contributor to establishing legitimacy and increasing readership, bringing the following benefits to the overall impact of your blog.

Positive Reading Experiences

Good design serves a specific function. In the case of a blog design, it should give the reader a more pleasurable and satisfying experience by providing high levels of readability and straightforward navigation, as well as demonstrating commitment to user satisfaction on your part as the blog creator.

Enhanced Content Presentation

Design enhances things. The idea of a quality blog design is to make good content even better by enhancing the presentation of your content while still remaining completely functional. It can make text easier to read, highlight areas to grab attention, and give you control over how your readers will digest your content.

Brand Reinforcement

Blog design isn’t just about “making things pretty.” It’s also about reinforcing your brand so that readers are left with a positive image of you and your company.

Device Agnosticism

A well-designed blog features responsive design, meaning it displays in an attractive, readable format no matter which device the user chooses.