The bright side of being multi-lingual
"I speak four languages, so my brain must be wired differently than everybody else’s, right?" Wrong. In fact, some research suggests that the more languages people know how to speak the better their general comprehension skills are. Also, learning a language and meeting different people from around the world will help you develop your problem-solving and critical thinking skills. And did we mention that it can also open up new professional opportunities for you? So would you like to learn how to start speaking Mandarin? Or is French more your speed?
Either way, these websites should help get you started on your way: http://www.spiketalk.com/Pages/HomePage . . . http://www.fluentin3months.com/blog/how-to-speak-any-language . . . http://languagesonline.org/about . . . http://www.fluentin3months.com/blog/how-to-learn-any-language
And there are plenty of online resources for the multi-lingual amongst us, such as this one: http://www.babbel.com/en/#s=1&a=37&c=WEB_SOCIAL&t=home
http://www.babbel.com/en/#s=1&a=37&c=WEB_SOCIAL&t=home
http://www.babbel.com/en/#s=1&a=37&c=WEB_SOCIAL&t=learn-languages-free . . . http://www.fluentin3months.com/blog/how-to-learn-any-language
http://www.fluentin3months.com/blog/how-to-learn-any-language
http://languagesonline.org/about . . . http://languagesonline.org/about . . .
http://languagesonline.org/about . . .
http://languagesonline.org/about . . .
http://languagesonline.org/about . . .
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The sign-up form is one of the more popular tools on any list and allows us to keep track of all the interested parties, as well as produce useful demographic data as they sign up; job level, education level, country of origin and more. Then, once we have gathered all the information we can, we can start to build up our 'target audience' as they are called in marketing.
What is the Target Audience?
The target audience is the people who will want our product. We do not necessarily want everyone who shares an interest in a topic to buy it; often we would rather design a marketing campaign with a specific target audience in mind, resulting in better sales. This specific group of people that you are trying to reach out to with your marketing campaign fits into two main categories: Those that have already seen your message or have already paid for it; and Those that haven't yet seen it or haven't yet paid for it.
So essentially, you want to develop your message before sending it out and targeting that message to your specific audience.
Example
Let's say we own a Brazilian Jiu Jitsu school in London, England and we want to come up with a marketing campaign on Facebook. So we first of all make sure that we have developed the message we are going to send out; this could be a buy one get one free coupon for our beginner classes, or a special offer for new students wanting to try out our sport. We then decide on the target audience which would be best for this particular campaign; let's say it is fellow BJJ martial artists living in London between the ages of 21-25.
We then print out the marketing message and hang it up in our school; we ask everyone to come in and read it and they'll see two things immediately:
1. It is written in english, not in Portuguese. Which means it should be easily understood by people that are not used to reading/writing Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. And as with any language, its harder to learn if you don't use it every day; you'll probably find that people will be more likely to learn from you if you speak the language they do too, which is why we recommend learning your customer's language before launching a campaign that involves sales or trading. 2. It is written in a world-known language. Most people won't be able to understand the message merely by speaking it, as their brain stores the information differently and has to process it a different way. Which is why we recommend writing in languages that are popular and easily understood such as English and Spanish etc.
Once we've created our message, we then send it out to those potential customers on their networks asking them to sign up for our events or classes:
1. We ask them via email to sign up through our online form, explaining who they are and why they should visit our website/event, or purchase from us. 2. If we choose to do an email campaign, we want to make it as targeted as possible. We want these people to sign up from the areas that they live in; not from random streets they are on because they're going to NYC. So we will do a quick online search and find out their postal code; which is just their internal postal code and address, not where they actually live. We then turn that into a geo-targeting for our emails, which will send them to only their area.
Originally we wanted to send out our email campaign via big city area codes and hoping that people from the streets nearby would still sign up and would therefore visit our website; however this didn't work out at all, as we ended up only getting a handful of people to actually follow through. So don't try this method of email marketing if you have any doubts!
3. Once they have signed up, we then send an email through their inbox (or spam) asking them to join our Facebook community where we can stay in contact with them. 4. After they have signed up, we simply like their page and then ask them to buy a BJJ membership; or we can decide on the type of payment that best suits the market we are trying to target.
Let's say they buy a BJV-FIT Passport, which is a multi-week international pass that allows you to train in any of our partner schools:
We now have 24 hours to follow through with this action, in order for it to count as an online sale.
Conclusion
The most important thing to remember is that you should always be researching and testing your marketing; what works and what doesn't work, remember that testing things is the key to success in any field.
Always keep an eye out for new markets; we set up our first Facebook page before we knew how to even use Google maps, which shows that you should just try new things and not stick to just one method of marketing. Give it a go and see what works best on your brand!
Here are some useful links that I have found useful for promoting my article:
http://www.fluentin3months.com/blog/how-to-market-a-product . . .
http://www.