Twelve Seconds: The Lift Your Business Needs
The only downside is that it doesn't give you a view of the Globe itself; the clean, white structure dotted with porthole windows is one of Stockholm's most striking landmarks.
There are only two gondolas for the popular ride, so reserve your spot online in advance to ensure a seat. The Lloyd's of London building on Lime Street was designed inside out, thrilling passersby with massive piping curving around the exterior. The twelve glass elevators are outside as well, gliding smoothly up the side of the building.
They might not be the fastest or the tallest, but for these lifts, it's all about the view. The Thames River is only a quarter mile away and some of London's other eminent sights -- including the spire at St. Paul's from one side of the building, and the celebrated Gherkin from another -- are even closer, making a second trip up those crystal pods is one of the best ways to savor the city. This one will be the hardest to check off the list: Lloyd's lifts are only open to employees and official visitors and security is tight. But don't give up hope.
The building is usually included in London's annual Open House, when the public gets free access and tours to places normally off-limits. Tearing along at almost forty miles per hour, the tower's lifts reach the 89th-floor observatory in just 37 seconds, leaving riders well over a thousand feet above the city. From this viewpoint, every corner of the sprawling metropolis is tiny by sheer distance.
Parks, temples, and even other skyscrapers and distant mountains are practically Lilliputian. And the journey is only half over -- the stomach-dropping return trip is just as thrilling. The ticket office is found on the tower's fifth floor.
Giving Small Businesses a Lift
Tickets are only sold on-site, so be prepared to wait in line. Don't call it an elevator. The Luxor's "inclinators" transport guests up the side of the hotel's iconic pyramid at a sharp degree angle. Unlike others on this list, the cars lack observation windows, and they can't compete with other famed elevators in height they only span 30 floors.
But like so much of Las Vegas, the inclinators are all about standing apart from the crowd. There are also great views from the top floors of the faux Egyptian universe below, especially at night, when the decadent lights of the lobby flash to life.
Access to the Luxor's higher floors via the inclinators is restricted to guests, so the best way to take a ride is to spend the night at the 4,room hotel. For most of the lifts on this list, the thrill comes from the view outside the walls. But for this elevator, it's all about the view inside. A psychedelic scene awaits behind the deceptively unadorned doors of the elevator near a small entrance on 31st Street.
By this stage of validating your idea, you've had a number of meaningful conversations with your target audience and you've built a small list of people who are interested in getting updates on your upcoming solution. Now it's time to expand on your original elevator pitch and pull some more insights out of the feedback you've been gathering from your conversations with the people in your community. All with the purpose of developing a competitive advantage that'll make your upcoming solution uniquely valuable to your audience.
In short, it's what makes your business, your business. The strength of your competitive advantage will greatly affect your early results in validating your idea. To land on the competitive advantage s for your idea, start by carefully combing through all of the feedback emails, conversation notes and ideas you've recorded from your target audience conversations so far.
Look for commonalities, trends, surprising insights and particularly interesting ideas that catch your eye. Highlight them as potential value propositions to come back to for developing your competitive advantage.
Despite what many profess, growing your email list further is actually an optional step in the process of validating a business idea. If you've already manually built an email list of or so subscribers, you likely already have enough people to validate your idea with. I've written about a lot of list building tactics that have worked well for me over the years, but here are a few of my favorites for quickly growing your email list beyond the limitations of manual outreach.
While guest posting is significantly more effective in the long run once you have a live website or blog of your own already, it's not necessary in the context of validating your idea quickly. All you need is a very basic "landing page" that gives you the opportunity to capture the name and email address of any readers who are interested in learning more about what you're planning on building--based on a brief description written on your landing page. This landing page will be a foundation for the proof of concept you'll be building in the next step anyway.
Within your guest post that's topically relevant to what you're planning on creating, you'll tastefully link back to your landing page so that readers can click through to learn more and sign up for updates. With that budget range, you can generally drive a couple hundred extremely targeted visitors to your landing page and see how they react to your proof of concept.
In my experience, giveaways are a mixed bag. Sometimes they work very well and give you a ton of qualified leads, but other times you're left with a list of people who signed up solely to win something cool.
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My advice is to keep your giveaway item as closely related to your upcoming solution as possible and keep your costs as low as possible. Spending meaningful amounts of money before you have a clear path to making it back is dangerous. However, giveaway are a potentially viral marketing tactic that's worked well for me in the past. I used one during my challenge generated email subscribers in just 6 days thanks to the built-in viral sharing that the KingSumo Giveaways plugin has.
Now you have a small but growing audience. You know the specific offering you want to validate your idea with. However, instead of pausing here to invest weeks or months into building your course, writing your book, developing an app or creating a complex website to highlight your freelance skills, we still want to make sure there's a paying demand for what you plan on building--before you actually go out and build it. That's where building a simple proof of concept comes into play.
A proof of concept is a realization of your method or idea that demonstrates its feasibility. Once you have a more clear picture of what your specific product or service offering is going to be, it's time to set a goal for what you want your proof of concept to achieve. There's no definitive, across the board success metric for all proof of concepts, but I always recommend setting a proof of concept goal of generating a specific amount of revenue from a predefined number of paying customers.
With my challenge I set my proof of concept goal at 10 pre-orders of the book I wanted to create. If I could get 10 people to pay me for a book that doesn't yet exist, that'd give me enough confidence to go out and actually create it. Now that I had the goal I wanted to achieve book pre-sales, it was time to create a simple preview of what that would be, so I could start pitching it and asking my subscribers to buy.
Going back to leveraging my core skills , I took a couple of hours and wrote out a simple Google Doc that was just a few pages long, to serve as my proof of concept for my book idea. You can check it out and grab the template for it in my original post. I kept the proof of concept ridiculously simple words while focusing on how it would benefit readers. Now it was time to see how it performed with my subscribers. You'll need a secure way to accept payments from your subscribers before asking them to buy.
That could be as simple as asking them to PayPal you the dollar amount, using a free card reader from Square to accept CC payment or setting up a simple product page on a platform like Gumroad. Next, you'll need to choose a realistic price point for your offering--a price point that helps you achieve your proof of concept goal.
Don't worry about the dollar amount you earn from pre-sales of your solution at this stage, since your goal at this stage is to validate your idea--not make thousands from it this week. This is something that so many aspiring entrepreneurs neglect to see the importance of, which often leads to failure, loss of motivation and disinterest in an otherwise great idea that you asked too much for before actually building it. To price the pre-sale of my book, I took a look around to see what others were charging for similar books so I could price myself in the same ballpark.
Next, it was time to start pre-selling. Your first sales need to come from manual, individual conversations with your subscribers. Download a free guide that teaches you how to turn Facebook traffic into sales in four simple steps using Hootsuite. The major social networks offer advertising options—but not all will be a great fit for every marketer.
When thinking about which social networks to use for advertising, look at which ones are performing well organically. Networks where your content naturally strikes a chord with fans are an obvious choice for your first social ad campaigns.
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For example, Pinterest has far more female than male users, and Snapchat has massive penetration in the younger audience segments. Facebook ads are designed to help you achieve one of three broad types of campaign objectives: In addition to a photo, Facebook photo ads include characters of text plus a headline and link description. They can also include a call-to-action button like Shop Now or Send Message. You can create your photo ad in Facebook Business Manager , or simply promote a post with an image from your Facebook Page. Facebook photo ads work really well for showcasing new products or services.
Show people using your product, rather than a simple photo of the product itself. Facebook video ad options range from short mobile video ads up to minute promoted videos designed to be watched on desktop. Facebook video ads can work well in conjunction with a TV ad campaign. Even if TV is not part of your marketing mix, video ads can be a great way of drawing people in with compelling visuals that highlight the best parts of your brand.
They made the video vertical to maximize screen space on mobile, and added text to optimize the video to play without sound. The campaign had a 20 percent incremental reach beyond the TV campaign, reaching one million women. Short videos have higher completion rates. A carousel ad lets you include up to 10 images or videos, each with their own link, all in one ad.
Carousel ads work well to showcase different features of a product, or to explain a step-by-step process. Use the different elements in your carousel ad together to present a compelling, effective story or message. Here are a couple of creative examples. When looking for glasses that fit you perfectly, it helps to know your face shape to find that pair that is right for…. A slideshow is an ad that creates a video from several static images—your own or stock images that Facebook provides.
Types of social media ads (and what they’re best for)
Slideshows offer the compelling motion of video, but require no video-specific resources to create. Posted by Icelandair on Friday, April 27, Slideshow ads load fast even on slow connection speeds, so they can be a particularly great alternative to video if your target market is likely to access Facebook from a slow connection. A collection ad highlights your products right in the Facebook feed. The ad includes a cover photo or video plus product images with pricing and other details, and allows people to learn more about your product without leaving Facebook.
Collection ads work especially well for retail and travel brands. For example, tour operator TUI Belgium achieved a three times greater click-through rate with collection ads compared to link ads on Facebook. Messenger ads are simply Facebook ads placed on the home screen of the Messenger app.
You can use them to encourage people to connect with your business on Messenger, but they can also link to your site. Using a custom audience of people who have previously messaged your business, you can use Messenger ads to restart conversations that have trailed off. Facebook lead ads are mobile-only that include pre-populated contact forms. This makes it easy for people to sign up for your newsletter, request a free trial, or ask for a quote.
Ask for the minimum amount of information you need to process leads effectively, to maximize completion. Get all the step-by-step instructions you need to set up your Facebook ads in our Facebook advertising guide. Instagram is most popular with millennials, but plenty of Generation Xers also use the platform.
Social Media Advertising How to Get the Most out of Your Budget
The specific Instagram ad types also mirror three of the Facebook ads types: You can create each type of ad for either the main Instagram feed, or for Instagram Stories. Your Instagram photo or video will look like a regular Instagram post—except that it will say Sponsored in the top right. Depending on your campaign objective, you may also be able to add a call-to-action button.
Make sure your photo and video ads are consistent in style with the organic posts you share on Instagram so that viewers recognize the ad is from your brand. Videos autoplay with sound off, so optimize your videos to work without audio. Perrier used this video in an Instagram campaign. A study after the campaign showed the ads contributed to increasing offline sales.
Make sure the images you use in your carousel ad are visually similar and tied together by a common theme. Instagram Stories ads can use photos or videos up to 15 seconds long. Instagram Stories only last for 24 hours, so this is a great format for in-the-moment marketing like limited time offers. Ads that show the product in use perform best.