Before we dive into the real meaning of wtm , let us look into what is Internet Slang. Internet Slang refers to a different kind of slang used on the internet by users to communicate effortlessly to save time. Internet slang use abbreviations in texting, social media networks, instant messaging and even face-to face communication. Leet, acronyms, ingroup memes, abbreviations, keyboard symbols are some of the internet slang prevalent.

Now to our abbreviation- wtm 

wtm stands for What’s The Matter? The abbreviation is used to ask people what is their state of mind if they are acting strange or quieter than usual. Some even use it to indicate that they are sad or annoyed. You may wonder what wtm mean on Instagram , snapchat and other social media platforms. wtm has the same meaning on all social media platforms like snapchat and Instagram. Adults and teenagers mainly use wtm.
 
Some other abbreviations that can substitute “wtm?” are:
? UK expands as “You Okay?”
? ITE expands as “You Alright?”.
? WIWWY expands as “What Is Wrong With You?”
? SUP expands as “What’s Up?”
? RUOK expands as “Are You Okay?”
Fun fact
WTM can also have other meanings too.
? WTM-What’s the Move.
? WTM-What the Mess.
? WTM-Whatever That Means.
? WTM-What’s the Matter?
As long as the internet exists now and then a new internet slang will emerge. So it is essential to keep yourself updated with the latest addition to the slang to keep up in the virtual communications you have over the internet.

Source: Codea Web

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With that in mind, here are some questions worth asking yourself while shaping the optimal customer experience.

Related Article: 4 Proven Sales Techniques for Business Owners Who are Introverts

What do customers want?

This billion-dollar question hasn’t gotten any easier to answer over the years, given how customer needs change along with technology, but we have more surveys and results than ever before, which helps. According to the 2018 Salesforce CX Report, 80 percent of customers say the experience a company provides is as important as its products and service, while 75 percent of customers agree it’s easier than ever to take their business elsewhere.

This is both an opportunity and a warning. Customers are more open than ever before to being wooed, which means they’re also more willing than they’ve ever been to switch brands. But what will they switch brands for? According to Salesforce’s second annual State of the Connected Customer, the answer is — you guessed it — a better experience. And that same survey concludes that not only do customers expect good-to-great experiences from the brands they love or want to try out, they’re also more willing than ever before to talk about those experiences.

Are customers becoming high maintenance? Not at all. Modern technology has simply given them the platform they need to communicate their true needs and wants. The overall increase in marketing and screen time-grabbing tactics has also created a more competitive online marketplace in which the customer always wins. 

According to a study by Forrester, the price of a portfolio of customer experience leaders grew 32 percent compared to a portfolio of customer experience laggards, which only grew by 3 percent. If brands want to stay competitive, they have to rethink their customer support- and experience-strategies.

How do brands provide better customer experiences?

Of course, knowing what customers want is only half the battle. The other half is exceeding expectations. In other words, brands are expected to offer a happy marriage of automation and personalization, from pre- to post-purchase. This is reassuring, if only because there is a common, intuitive thread through the whole journey: convenience. The brands that figure out how to provide the most convenient experiences for their customers, be it online, offline or in between, are the ones that will strike gold.

Are you bringing home the bacon?

How do we know that customers spend more time and money on experience-driven brands? The proof is in the pudding. According to Forrester and Adobe’s The Business Impact of Investing in Experience report, experience-driven businesses can expect 60-90 percent higher year-over-year growth compared to other companies in terms of customer retention, repeat purchase rates, average order value and the holy grail of marketing and sales: customer lifetime value.

As an enterprise marketing leader, I’m fascinated by consumer psychology, and by how brands react to what they think customers want. But in the 21st century, there’s little need for that kind of guesswork. It’s easier than ever to discover what your customer wants, when they want it and how you should best deliver it to them. Frankly, your customer expects nothing less than the best. What are you doing to meet their needs?

Entrepreneur

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Raise your hand if you’re not a natural salesperson. You’re introverted. You’re deferential. Chatting with strangers is definitely not your favorite cup of tea; the idea of your livelihood hanging in the balance turns tea to mud in your mouth.  

I was once in your shoes. I grew my first business by cold calling prospective clients from my kitchen and leaving messages on their answering machines. When they called back, I’d answer in a different voice, as if they’d reached the receptionist of a busy office.

As soon as I got my “real” self on the line, the fun began. By fun, I mean degrading terror and awkwardness. I sucked. It didn’t matter how great a deal I was offering; each word left my mouth with the elegance of a pulled tooth.  

Everything changed as I mastered a few tried-and-true techniques of sales. Anyone can master them, but the easiest way to understand them is to walk yourself through a simple scenario. Let’s pretend you’re selling an apple and apply the following four principles to the transaction: 

1. If you scratch their back, they’ll scratch yours.

You know the customer wants to buy the apple, and the customer knows you want to sell them the apple. Each of you is in a position to do the other a favor. There is a whole well of mutual good feeling to draw from, but you have to remain cool and collected to enjoy it.

The customer needs to see you as an impartial advocate. They need to know you’re willing to go to bat for them. Never jump the gun and offer a deal before they specifically ask for one; wait until they outright say it or at least offer enough hints that you can be certain of the direction they’re headed.

At this point, offer to take action on their behalf. You’ll ask your manager if they can get a discount on that Red Delicious. Don’t act certain that you can pull it off, but convey that you’ll do your damndest. If the customer feels special — that you wouldn’t do this for everyone, but are making an exception in their case — they’ll want to make you happy in return.

2. See them as they’d like to be seen.

Never underestimate the power of a good old-fashioned compliment. It has an interesting and predictable psychological effect, in that the person being complimented will on some level want to live up to your expectations.

“It’s so refreshing, with all the fast food around, to meet people who’d rather eat healthy fruits and vegetables. It’s like seeing someone on the subway reading a book instead of staring at their phone, and it’s one of the little perks of my job that I get to interact with folks like you every day.”

Bam. Who wouldn’t want to buy a delicious apple, when doing so will feed their hunger and self-esteem simultaneously? This is an especially powerful move if you can get the customer to agree with your assessment of their character as you’re describing it.

3. The golden rule of sales: Shut-up and listen.

An entrepreneur who can speak about a good or service with eloquence, passion and confidence is impressive. An entrepreneur who can do all that and be totally at ease in the silence that follows is a force to be reckoned with.

Learn to be comfortable with this silence. Let the customer think through what you’ve said about the apple, and then let them think some more. If they raise a concern, resist the temptation to reply at length. Keep your answer short and specific, and wait for an acknowledgment.

There are two benefits to this, and they work hand-in-hand. The first is that listening builds rapport. Rapport means connection, harmony, sympathy. The second is that silence builds pressure.

The longer you stay quiet, the greater your chances of hearing what you want to hear. It’s not an easy skill — it caused me to sweat literal rings through my shirts when I was a noob — but dogged, patient practice will pay off.

4. Know what you’re selling.

It’s not enough to be just an expert on apples; you have to be an authority. Authority signals a subconscious trigger to trust and obey. Achieving it involves walking a fine line between tough but uncondescending, firm but disinterested.

The most basic way to establish authority is to achieve total expertise about what you’re selling. You have to be able to present your customer with all their options — every detail of which you know like the back of your hand — and then painstakingly assist them in selecting the one that checks all their boxes.

What kind of apple are they looking for? There are so many varieties, and you’re familiar with them all. Some are sweet, some are sour, some are tangy. This one is perfect for a pie, that one is best in salads.

But expertise is just one half of the equation. The other half involves your attitude and bearing. It involves taking charge of the relationship. Passive, indirect challenges — “Are you sure about that Red Delicious? These Galas just arrived, and they’re amazing” — will showcase your knowledge and give you an air of assurance difficult to doubt.
Entrepreneur

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The question that arises, though, is what business to start. Interestingly, my criteria (listed below) for the right choice of business is pretty much the same as my checklist for creating a winning business plan. So, make sure you stack up well against these criteria. If you do, you should be able to both develop a business plan worthy of investment capital and to grow a successful business.

Related Article: Five Online Businesses Anyone Can Start

1. Make sure you have unique qualifications

When developing a business plan, I always say the most important question to answer is “why are you uniquely qualified to succeed?” If you have no unique qualifications, then it’s hard to succeed, and easy for others to copy you. Unique qualifications can include your experience, intellectual property, relationships, etc.

In choosing a good business to start, think about your unique qualifications. What can you do better than anyone else? What do you have great experience and expertise doing? Interestingly, this is why so many restaurants fail. Oftentimes, new restaurant owners have no experience and expertise managing a restaurant. As a result, failure is likely. Conversely, when a restaurant owner launches a second, third, etc., restaurant, because of their experience, they are much more likely to succeed.

2. Make sure there is a “pain”

Always look for a market pain or need. Because that’s why people tend to spend their money on. For example, if people in your town have to travel 20 minutes to the nearest dry cleaner, then there might be a significant need for a dry cleaner there.

In general, the greater the pain, the greater the chances your business will succeed. Importantly, not all new ventures solve massive pains. For example, many internet and mobile app ventures solve an entertainment need rather than a pain. However, while some of these ventures become multi-billion dollar enterprises, the vast majority of them fail.

3. Make sure the business is fundable

No matter how good your business idea is, if it requires funding and you can’t raise it, it doesn’t matter.

The ideal business is one that you can at least start with finance you provide yourself, or with a reasonable amount of financing. Conversely, if you have a great idea, but it requires $100 million in initial funding, you’re not going to raise it. Large investors will not bet on an unproven startup, unless the founder of that startup has a long track record of taking companies public and/or returning sizable returns for investors.

Likewise, if you require outside funding, make sure the business fundamentals are such that investors will receive a sizable return on investment (ROI). Because, no matter how solid the opportunity, if investors don’t feel they will earn a fair return, they won’t invest.

Keep these three factors in mind when choosing a new business to start and when developing your business plan. When all three are in your favor, the sky is the limit to your success.

Forbes

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Answer by Noah Kagan, Chief Sumo at AppSumo, on Quora:

To give you a clearer picture, here are the five main categories of online business you can start.

• Gig-based business. This is the easiest one to start because you don’t need to develop any product upfront. All you need to do is to find out what you can do and get people to pay for that service.
• Affiliation. Affiliation is about promoting others’ products you believe in. Again, you don’t need to spend any time and effort developing a product here. However, you need to build an audience that will listen to your recommendation.
• E-commerce. Simply put, e-commerce is about moving the retail business model online. The biggest challenge of running an e-commerce business is to keep control of all the moving parts at the same time from branding to marketing, suppliers to customers, and inventory to delivery.
• Courses and programs. Selling information is a lucrative business model for many. But first, you need to position yourself as an expert in your field and your course/program as the solution to your audience’s struggles.
• SaaS. Software as a Service basically means an online tool—usually program—that helps solve a problem or leverage specific resources. For example, Sumo helps solve the problem of generating leads for businesses. The hardest part of running a SaaS business is to stay competitive because frankly, anyone can just copy your software idea nowadays.

Related Article: The Comprehensive eCommerce Website Audit Guide

Each of these business models required different types of resources, skillsets, and experiences. If you’re someone who starts from zero and needs to make money quickly, I suggest you start with the easiest one which is selling a service or services.

However, the fundamental step-by-step process of starting any of the online business is largely the same.

1. Validate your idea. You always want to test your business ideas before you start spending anything on it yet. Make sure there is a real market need before you invest more money and time in it, this helps you to mitigate many unnecessary risks and stresses.
2. Develop your positioning and offering. 90% of the elements that make or break your business come down to your positioning and offering. To make sure you get them right, spend a great deal of time studying your audience and focusing on solving a problem for them. This means you want to have the great product that solves the right problem at the right time.
3. Create a marketing system. A marketing system is simply a process to put yourself in front of more of the right people when you get your positioning and offering right. The thing gets clear when you start adopting this perspective.
4. Test and optimize. A strategy, a funnel, or a system won’t work forever. Get creative and keep testing things out. Look for areas that generate the greatest impact on your goals while requiring the least investment of resources; these are the best places for you to start optimizing.

There is no clear path to how you should start an online business. The strategies that work for me will most probably not work for you. And most of the tactics will become irrelevant very soon when being abused by marketers.

So, instead of giving the specific steps to start a business, these are the principles you can use to start and grow your business for decades to come.

Forbes

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1. Slow down your storytelling.

Through a tale of two zoos, Ann Hanley, author of bestseller Everybody Writes, illustrates the power of drawing out a narrative over time.  The Bronx Zoo, one of the largest and best-known U.S. zoos, has achieved viral success with a clever social campaign every Valentine’s Day since 2011. The zoo asks followers to name one of its Madagascar hissing cockroaches after a loved one. 

Riffing off this idea, the El Paso Zoo prompted visitors to name a cockroach after an ex, which would then become a meal for the zoo’s meerkats. But before the El Paso Zoo aired the main event live on Facebook to an audience of 6,000 viewers, it spent weeks teasing out the spectacle with a multitude of social posts. With only limited resources, the smaller zoo was also able to leave an international footprint.         

2. Deliver solutions, not products. 

“No one wakes up in the morning and says, ‘I wish someone would sell me a financial product,’” said Allison Baird, Boston Private’s SVP of Products & Solutions. We do however lose sleep over our families or whether we can save enough money to take a trip to Africa in a year, she said. These are the kinds of conversations marketers should strive to have through their content. 

Baird says marketing professionals have the unique challenge of anticipating customers’ needs and goals in order to drive innovation. Years ago we never knew to ask for a phone that takes pictures, but today “we all walk around taking pictures all over the place,” she said.  

3. Find influencers who inspire FOMO.  

Seventy percent of advertisers hire influencers as part of their social media strategy, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau. But as anyone who understands social media can tell you, it pays to find the right ones. “We could not do this without influencers,” said Beverly Jackson, VP of Social Portfolio Strategy at MGM Resorts International, whose team fields 1,700 requests from content creators angling for a free trip to Las Vegas daily. Those who make the cut create original content that makes millennial travelers feel a sense of urgency. MGM then takes the influencer-created content and targets it, putting more spend behind the posts with the highest conversions. 

Related Article: Is Slack The Future Of Business Communication?

4. Use social media to adapt quickly.

Under Jackson’s leadership, MGM has leveraged several strategies to excel in the fast-paced social media landscape:

• Instagram Stories and timeline as separate channels: “Bifurcating that strategy has made all the difference and has ensured that we get funding for our initiatives,” Jackson said.  
• Social-first focus: Put people in place that not only know the categories but know how to navigate their assigned platforms and channels. Define responsibilities, so everyone accounts for their own lane and knows how to measure success. 
• Go Live: “There is no better way to create FOMO than covering a live event,” Jackson said. Having a social media manager embedded within the team allows quick action when new event coverage opportunities arise.

5. Stop sounding like a marketer.

Just like a Vegas act, “All great writing has a tell,” Handley explained in her closing keynote at Forward. “What is your tell as a writer? I think the more specific our writing is, the stronger the tell, the stronger the voice.”

Source: Forbes

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Slack, whose name is an acronym of Searchable Log of All Communication and Knowledge, is used by more than half a million companies for internal communication, of which around 18% pay to do so. Among its users are up to 65 Fortune 100 companies. An extremely successful freemium model, with revenues up from $105.2 million in 2017 to $400.6 million in 2019, Slack is up front about the challenges of working in a field with well-funded and ambitious competitors such as Microsoft that are potentially willing to sacrifice income in exchange for market share.

Related Article: How Social Media On Tomorrow’s Mobile Network Will Be Game-Changing For Business

I have written about Slack a number of times. To understand the company, it is important to understand its founder, Stewart Butterfield, who set up Flickr, an application I once adored, and who is possessed of an ability to materialize complex ideas in an amazingly simple way: after using both Flickr Like Slack, you wonder how you managed until now. Yahoo!’s acquisition in February 2005 and the subsequent zombification of the service made Stewart determined that he would never sell Slack only to watch it die. He has turned down offers from Microsoft and Amazon, growing Slack, converting it into unicorn, then going public and making many investors rich while boosting its value in its question to become the benchmark in business communication. The tool is also open minded: it’s usually possible to find connectors for other types of service, along with any number of possibilities for task automation, as well as many other features to improve communication in organizations.

Slack has been described as an email killer, which is not an easy assignment: email would be very difficult to killand would require a lot of help, since the decision to use it or not doesn’t depend entirely on us. Nevertheless, the companies that use Slack make healthier use of email, without the need to cc half of humanity. Quite simply it’s a better way to communicate at work, to the point that workers use it not just for work-related matters. Organizations with capable and alert system administrators can enjoy sophisticated features that can significantly improve the quality of life in the workplace.

I’ve been advising my students at IE University to use Slack to coordinate their communication and work groups. Many of these students then start companies and continue using Slack or go to work for companies that use it. There are already those arguing that despite the competition, the company long ago won the battle of business communication, because there is no better tool. I’m not sure that’s necessarily the case, but I do know from talking to a great many companies that most people like using Slack. I don’t know if it’s the future of business communication, but I hope it will be, not because I have any stake in Slack, but because I have been using it for a long time and I like it a lot. If you haven’t tried it yet, I recommend you give it a go.

Source: Forbes

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While today’s mobile networks are fast, imagine what users will share with blistering speeds and lower latency. And for businesses aiming to capitalize on the dramatic changes triggered by next-gen networks, the opportunities in social media are vast.

Related Article: TIPS TO CREATE A USER JOURNEY MAP (AND WHY IT’S IMPORTANT)

Tyler Gates, managing principal of immersive and interactive content studioBrightline Interactive, has been creating immersive experiences and simulations for 16 years. After working with some of the country’s top brands, Gates has fresh ideas about how next-gen networks and improved bandwidth will level the playing field in technology and drive what’s ahead.

“The onset of 5G really is an enabling technology,” Gates said. “It will enable both mobile devices as well as head-mounted displays for things like VR, AR and MR [virtual, augmented and mixed reality]. It’s going to allow us to experience social media content or information represented in a completely different way.”

In assessing social media today, Gates maintains that the content is mostly static—and experienced primarily via our mobile devices.

“Right now social media largely happens on a two-dimensional screen,” Gates said. “Sometimes with Instagram or Facebook stories, there’s the inclusion or incorporation of video content, but for the most part, social media is driven by the written word.”

No Hands

The game-changer, according to Gates, will be how the interface is controlled. Throughout the history of computing, the way we’ve managed almost all interfaces was with some form of controller: a video game controller, a keyboard, a mouse or a smartphone keyboard, for instance.

“There’s always been a translation mechanism for you to control something you can experience visually,” explained Gates. “The difference between then and now, with something like [Microsoft’s] HoloLens 2, is you are just using your hands normally. So we’ve removed the abstractions between you and the content you experience.”

5G’s high speed and low latency make these experiences possible, as we’re less limited by bandwidth. Instead of experiencing social media content through a device from which you’re just viewing information, images or videos, you’ll be fully immersed in the content that you’re sharing.

“With an expanded data pipeline, we can experience more data in a more realistic forum and a more real-time, immediate capacity,” said Gates. “Social media will get a massive upgrade.”

Putting The Active In Interactive

The ability for a business to create collaborative environments leads to tremendous potential for engagement. But to really win at the social media game, Gates advises companies to stay in sync with cultural trends. “Right now, people want to experience content in a personalized capacity that’s relevant to them. They want it when they want it, and they want to drive,” he said.

Take HBO’s Game of Thrones, for example. According to Gates, a company like HBO wants you to watch the show as soon as possible because fans who haven’t watched yet are usually reluctant to discuss the show in the time frame where it matters most. “As the week goes on, that episode is going to lose relevancy,” Gates said.

That said, he argues, just because the show has ended, some experiences for the viewer can extend its life. And this is the big takeaway for businesses’ evolving their social media strategies: With interactive social content, a company’s product, service or intellectual property can live on in a variety of ways.

There’s already a bandwidth-heavy AR experience for the hit series, but in the future, fans may be able to follow their own storyline in real time, record the experience, share it with a friend or partake in someone else’s storyline.

A Level Playing Field

Imagine the possibilities for social media engagement if companies could incorporate emerging interactive technologies into their messaging. Better yet, for organizations of all sizes, expensive equipment won’t be required.

“At Brightline, we have high-end, sensor-driven computer vision camera systems and even custom build some of the equipment ourselves,” Gates said. “But you can capture volumetric film content [interactive experiences using 3D-captured imagery in augmented, virtual and mixed realities] on an iOS device. That means that the small to medium-sized business owner has just as much ability to create content as someone with 16 years of experience in interactive design and development.”

The only barrier to entry for generating compelling social media content made possible by 5G technology, according to Gates, is having an employee with the time to learn and use off-the-shelf consumer products.

“The more you can experience content in an immersive capacity where you’re not just viewing content but you’re experiencing it with your whole body, the more memorable and more exciting it will be,” said Gates.

Source: Forbes

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A buyer persona is a comprehensive representation of a user group’s demographics, psychographics, needs and irritants. Personas are used in marketing to answer questions about your customers. They guide your marketing efforts in the right direction by providing clear and consistent frames of reference for everyone on your marketing team.

Why Use Personas?

It is easier to think of a person, rather than a laundry list of demographics, psychographics, irritants, etc. Buyer personas encapsulate user types into more practical representations. To give you an analogy, authors who write for specific target audiences must know their market before they begin writing. For instance, they wouldn’t write a mushy love story for an 8-year-old just as they wouldn’t write a book about teddy bears for middle-aged men. You need to know the target market you are catering to before beginning the process of writing a book or redesigning a website.

Related Article: How to Use Influencer Marketing to Grow Your Social Media Audience

How Well Do You Really Know Your Customers?

Maybe you think you don’t need buyer personas because you already know everything there is to know about your customers. Well…you really don’t. You are not your customer and this assumption can cost you. According to the research below, marketers who rely on their intuition underperform compared to their colleagues who create and use buyer personas.

Why Are Buyer Personas Important to Your Website?

Creating buyer personas requires you to interview your customers and study their needs, behavior and expectations. Once you gain insight into your customers, you can better engage them with a more effective website experience. All components of the website including design, messages, content, offers and calls to action will be optimized specifically for the customers you target.

1. Make Objective Decisions on Website Redesign

It can be difficult to separate opinions from facts when working on a website redesign. But opinions can lead to websites designed to please yourself and other stakeholders instead of your target market. Do not run the risk of confusing the needs of your users with your or your company’s preferences. Be especially careful with the content incorporated into your new website. Utilizing buyer personas is pivotal at this point in the process. The targeted messages throughout the website will be different if the buyer persona being targeted is a teenager versus an older businessman.

2. Attain More Targeted Marketing

Creating buyer personas allows you to get to know your customers better. You’ll learn things you didn’t know about your customers, gain insight into your customers’ perception of your company and so much more. Knowing your customers is important because you’ll need to produce marketing assets using language that resonates with your readers in order to convert them into customers. You can deliver more effective marketing that visitors understand and relate to. Tell your readers what they want to hear!

3. Empathize with Your Customers

When you give your ideal customer a human face and characteristics, employees will be able to better empathize, visualize and understand what it is they should be looking for and thinking about with real customers. In order to sell to anyone, you must be able to connect with them. You must understand what the buyer is going through, their pain points, their needs, etc. With empathy, you can connect with the buyer which, in turn, gets the buyer to connect with you. That’s how you close the sale. Most of the time, buyers don’t know exactly what they want, so you have to ask the right questions. Without clearly defined buyer personas, it is difficult to make that connection.

4. Guide Customers through the Customer Journey

Buyer personas ultimately help you develop a customer journey map. HubSpot describes a customer journey as “the active research process a buyer goes through leading up to a purchase.” By using buyer personas, you are able to better understand user behaviors throughout the journey, which ultimately helps you to create a strategy to guide them. A documented customer journey provides a strategy to guide customers throughout all stages of their journey – from the awareness stage through the consideration stage and, ultimately, selecting your company in the decision stage.

5. Gain a Competitive Advantage

By using marketing targeted at your buyer personas, you are primed to outperform your competitors. Websites created with your personas in mind will always outperform generic ones.  By knowing your customers, your website will be more appealing than competitors’ sites that use the same generic messaging for everyone. Evaluate both your and your competitors’ websites through the eyes of your buyer personas to develop an objective understanding of your competitive positioning.

6. Realize a Return on Investment

Investing relatively little time, money and effort into the buyer persona development process results in an all-around enhanced user experience, increasing relevance and connection with your users. ROI (Results on Internet) are achieved when an organization stops thinking they already know their users, and actually gets to know them with user personas! Consumers are more demanding these days, and having defined personas helps you understand what they are looking for and why. Give users what they want and they are more likely to purchase your product or service, resulting in more revenue.

7. Attain Company-Wide Consistency

A business, small or large, has many moving parts. Just because there are numerous departments and stakeholders, doesn’t mean there should be disagreement about who your highest value customers are. Having set buyer personas ensures consistency; all departments should think of the same characteristics when a persona is mentioned. The buyer persona is a universal tool; it serves as a frame of reference not only for marketing and sales, but for all departments of your organization. Each user that comes in contact with your company should get a consistent experience across all departments based on the persona type they fit. Company-wide consistency, therefore, ensures your company is speaking to users as they need to be spoken to.

8. Attract Better Quality Leads

Leads are great. Quality leads are better. You don’t want just any lead. Not all leads are the same. You need the right type of leads to sell your product or service. Buyer personas can help improve your website’s marketing efforts to target High Value Customers (HVC). When you build a more strategic and personalized nurturing plan for each persona, your HVCs will flow in.

In summary, effective buyer personas for your website create the Results on Internet that you have been searching for.  Now that you know all of the benefits of buyer personas, you can develop personas for your own website.

Source: Intechnic

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Find, follow, connect with, and learn from influencers in your industry.

Connecting with and engaging influencers should be an important part of your networking strategy. Of course, connecting with Oprah Winfrey may be a long shot, but many others may be within your reach. Here is one tactic that may be useful:

Related Article: Mobile E-Commerce Web Design: Why It’s Important!!

1. Find and follow influencers in your industry.

Focus on influencers who are active social network where you have a presence and whose views are aligned with those of your company. Interact with their content by commenting, sharing and liking, but be authentic and don’t overdo it.

2. Use an “ego bait” strategy to engage them.

Quote them on social media and in your blog and mention their name in a positive context. You would be surprised by the results this may produce. Influencers might share your mention with their audience, and they may link to your content or follow you.

3. Reach out to them directly.

Compliment them on their content and ask if you could commission an article for your blog. Yes, this may cost you some serious money, but it will be more likely to get their attention. Having even one article from an influencer will be a huge credibility boost and will help attract others.

When all fails, don’t be discouraged and focus your efforts on other influencers who may not be as hard to attract.

Build relationships with influencers on social media by commenting on, sharing and liking their posts

While attracting influencers is a good starting point, the ultimate goal of your social media strategy should be to become an influencer yourself. Influencer status will do miracles for your social media marketing as well as your own career.

Working toward earning an influencer status is a long journey that starts with producing amazing content, continuously improving it, networking tirelessly and working your way up to earn the respect and trust of the industry.

By networking and interacting with other influencers (see the previous tactic) you can learn a great deal about becoming one yourself. Here are some suggestions:

• As an aspiring influencer, you have to be ready to contribute by producing and curating a lot of quality content.
• Discover where other influencers contribute their content and pitch some of your best material.
• Be prepared to be rejected at first. Use the criticism to improve on your content, and don’t give up. Practice makes perfect.
• Participate in discussions and conversations. Respond to all comments; engage others by discussing their content across multiple platforms.
• Be ubiquitous by applying your name and face to every piece of content that you produce. It’s all about building recognition.
• Post frequently across multiple social networks. Use automation tools to help schedule your posts.
• Utilize your personal social media accounts and channels to distribute your content as well as to receive feedback.
• Be helpful to others by offering advice and assistance. Helping others grow will grow your network as well.
• Be active offline. Attend networking events, seminars, conferences; try to land some speaking engagements or interviews. Get your name out there!

Source: Intechnic

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