Inside Small Business | Small Business & Home Business Marketing
Archive for June, 2009
Ask the Panel
Lasse Ljung, Forever Ljung Photography asked:
1. How do I get more people to visit my website?
Amy: There are many ways to do this…word of mouth from your customers (which means you have to deliver an exceptional experience to all of your customers), talking/blogging about your site, distributing business cards, mailers, banner ads, brochures, promotional products with your web address, etc.
Get your web address out there on social networks…Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, etc. Talk about your site on blogs and forums and get other websites/forums/blogs to link to your site.
Another key element is to make your site SEO friendly, which will allow search engines to find it. Getting other relevant websites and blogs to link to your site will help push your site closer to the top of the search engine listings. Register your site with Google and other search engines and use meta keywords & descriptions, title tags, headings, key words within the site and good content.
Then once a potential customer visits your site, make sure it is professional, easy to navigate and find the information they need and/or contact you. You want to make sure your site reflects the image you are trying to convey; that your site delivers the experience they are expecting. It should be clean and organized and designed in a way that reflects your company brand.
Nicole: If you are a local business I love geotargeting on Google’s paid search program. Select what region/city/custom location your services/products are available in and your ad will only appear to searchers in that area. You can also search for forums, blogs and message boards that have discussions that directly relate to your services/products and answer questions along with a plug for your business. (Make sure you’re actually providing relevant content to these sites and not just plugging your business!) Finally, always make sure all of your marketing collateral like business cards, stationery and fliers have your URL. This is often overlooked by businesses and a huge miss!
2. What is the most effective marketing tool? What tool has the most return? Mailers? Web? Door to door handout? Etc…?
Rob: There is no one correct answer to this question. It depends entirely on the business, the customers, and how you as a business owner communicate with them. A lawn service may find door hangers an effective way to reach potential customers and might find less success with web banners. Another thing to consider: it really isn’t the tool that is effective. It’s the message. One company might send out a mailer and do very poorly, while a competitor tries a different message and finds a huge success with the same list of customers. It all comes down to the right (relevant) message, communicated in a way that interests customers.
Nicole: Unfortunately there is no one ‘magic bullet’ for every business. The most effective marketing tool is the one that targets your customers. This could be anything from a targeted direct mail campaign to an ad in a hobby magazine. To find your ‘magic bullet’ you need to first put yourself in the mind of your potential customer. What are they doing when they need the service or product you provide? (Has a wall pipe just burst? Are they happily planning their wedding?) Where would a customer go during this time? (Would they run to the yellow pages for a plumber listing as water is gushing out of their wall? Are they online doing research for wedding photographers, or attending local wedding events?) To better get an idea of your target customers’ behavior, ask new clients where they heard about your business. This will help you understand where you need to be marketing to reach your customers, which will get you well on your way to an effective marketing plan!
3. Also, I am not sure how best to word it, but something along the lines of what are the new innovative ways to market? Facebook? Twitter? Blogs, etc… I just want to know where the new stuff is. I feel like Direct mail is kind of old school and Facebook ads are the new innovative stuff.
Amy: Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, blogs, forums…these are all very popular marketing tools. Make sure you continually update your content. If your updates are interesting, people will keep coming back. You can’t post something once and expect your customer base to grow…keep it relevant and dynamic and mix it up with multimedia; photos, videos, text, etc.
Nicole: Social marketing is like the wild, wild west of the marketing world. There’s gold out there, we all know it, but where do we look for it and how do we get it out of the ground? Facebook and MySpace are very popular social sites, but most people aren’t comfortable sharing their private photos and life updates with every entity they do business with. A Facebook/MySpace page works best for a brand that has a very loyal following, and there are not many success stories with ads on these sites. A blog is an excellent way to detail out what your business does in both words and photos, and show off your expertise/offering. It has the added benefit of being highly visible to search engines, so make sure your blog has relevant copy on your location, what area you service, detailed product/service offering, and so on. That brings us to Twitter, which can be a great tool in certain situations. Do you have new products or promotions regularly that you want to share? Twitter works well when your business needs to have regular updates with potential customers. You can also use it to see what your customers are saying about you in the Twitter world, and to respond to those comments. With all that said, let’s not overemphasize the importance of social marketing; it should only be one tool in your arsenal of marketing weapons.
Rob: Facebook, blogs, Twitter, and all the other social networking sites are just tools like direct mail, radio advertising, and point of purchase displays. In my opinion, they are way over hyped and are not yet delivering the value that many online “experts” have predicted. A smart business owner will carefully test the effectiveness of any marketing tool before investing a lot of money in the promises to make sure it will pay out in an increase in sales. Just because something is called the next big thing, doesn’t mean it will work for your business.
Keep Your Customers with Email
by Martin Lieberman, Constant Contact Managing Editor
A business cannot live by one outbound communication per year. Chances are good you have probably wondered about your own communications strategy. Are you communicating enough?
Think about how many times during the year/quarter/month a customer needs you, or your products or services, and let that be your guide to determining how often to reach out and touch your audience. Think of this number as a minimum, then build from there.
Your business could be a marketing consulting firm, a software company, a nonprofit, an educational institution, a car dealership, a florist, a restaurant, a vineyard, a rock and roll band–you name it! Success and profitability is all about creating loyal customers (e.g. clients, users, donors, buyers, diners, drinkers, and fans) and driving interest, repeat business, and referrals.
Since it is roughly six to 12 times less expensive to sell to an existing customer than it is to acquire a new one, the value of customer loyalty and repeat business is just too compelling to ignore.
According to Bain and Company:
- A 5 percent increase in retention yields profit increases of 25 to 100 percent.
- Repeat customers spend, on average, 67 percent more than new customers.
It’s All About Communication
Communication is a critical part of any relationship. Take a lesson from small businesses that long ago grasped the dynamics and importance of building customer relationships through communication. They nurture their customers over time by learning and remembering individual preferences and interests. They acquire this customer information directly from customers through personal interaction. And they keep in touch with customers on a regular basis ensuring their organization remains “top of mind.”
It takes six to seven contacts before you can turn a prospect into a customer. All that contact can be expensive and time consuming. That’s where email marketing becomes a critical part of any organization’s marketing efforts.
Email Turns Prospects and Visitors into Loyal Customers
Email marketing enables you to proactively communicate with your existing customers instead of passively waiting for them to return to your Web site, visit your store or office, call you on the phone, etc. With email marketing you can solidify existing relationships, initiate new ones, and convert your one-time visitors, buyers, and members into repeat business and long-term customers or contributors.
No matter how your visitors, prospects, and customers found you–perhaps you paid for search engine placement, sponsored a newsletter, placed a banner ad, distributed a flyer, or sent a postcard–email marketing adds to your bottom line because it allows you to maximize your investment in those expensive and time consuming marketing efforts and improve the return on investment (ROI) of every dollar you spend to obtain new business and develop profitable customer relationships.
According to DoubleClick, good email marketing wins over consumers:
- Well-executed permission-based email marketing campaigns can have a positive impact on consumers’ attitudes towards companies.
- 67 percent of U.S. consumers said they liked companies that, in their opinion, did a good job with permission-based email marketing.
- 58 percent of consumers said they opened those companies’ emails, while 53 percent said that such emails affected their personal buying decisions.
Why Is Email Marketing the Answer?
Email marketing is one of the most powerful marketing tools available today. It is easy, affordable, direct, actionable, and highly effective. When you add email to your marketing mix, you spend less time, money, and resources than with traditional marketing vehicles (e.g. direct mail or print advertising). And, with email marketing, you can communicate more quickly, which means your time-sensitive information is disseminated in minutes, not days or weeks–and you can see the results of your efforts instantly.
Email marketing is at its most effective when used in communications to your existing customer list, or “house list,” as a means of customer retention.
Communicate More Information More Often
Email marketing is an affordable way to stretch a tight marketing budget. It can cost as little as fractions of a penny per email! With a response rate five times greater than direct mail and 25 times the response rate of banner ads, email marketing is the most effective way to increase sales, drive traffic, and develop loyalty.
Unlike direct mail, there is virtually no production, materials, or postage expense. So, with email marketing, you can easily and affordably create more communications that are valued by your customer, and you can make those communications support and enhance your brand in a way that substantially differentiates your company from the competition.
Your communications can include newsletters, preferred customer promotions, sale notifications, new service announcements, event invitations, holiday greetings, and much, much more.
Educate Your Customers
Information and education make your customers and prospects much more valuable because they are more likely to buy when they can make an informed decision. Why force prospects to look elsewhere for the important information they need? Your email communications can gently lead a prospect through the sales process, provide important data, and drive the prospect to your website for more details or a purchase.
For example, an email newsletter is uniquely suited to accomplish the long term goals of customer retention and loyalty, while it can still contain calls-to-action that provide short-term benefits.
For most businesses, a well-educated customer uses products and services to their greatest advantage. And, guess who will be the first in line to buy when something new becomes available?
Studies show that both senders and recipients increasingly prefer email marketing. According to DoubleClick:
- Permission-based email is far and away the preferred method of online communication for consumers. 75 percent rated it as their preference, with only 25 percent preferring postal mail and no one choosing telemarketing.
Foster Long-lasting Relationships
Email is an easy and inexpensive way of establishing early and long lasting relationships with your prospects and customers. And the benefits of these relationships are far reaching. When you inform and educate prospects and customers, they begin to perceive you as capable of addressing their needs. Even better, they may look to you as an expert. This develops trust, opens the door to two-way communication, and allows them to share their pain points with you.
Using the information you gain from your prospects and customers, you will be able to better serve their ongoing needs, hone your unique selling proposition, and slowly close the door on your competitors. In the process, you may discover hidden sales opportunities that you may not be addressing.
Easily Measure and Improve Your Results
The benefits derived from most types of marketing and advertising are very difficult to measure. With email marketing, however, you can easily measure the number of emails sent, emails opened, bounce backs, and unsubscribes, as well as your click-through rates.
You can also tell who opened your email, which links in your email motivated the most clicks, and even more specifically, who clicked on each link. All of this useful information can help you send highly targeted campaigns to the individuals most likely to respond to your offer, thus improving your results going forward.
Having the right tool is 90% of the job
Skip Shuda, Team and a Dream
A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter-and getting smarter faster than most companies.
- the cluetrain manifesto (www.cluetrain.com)
In a recent Keynote address called “Andy Hunt on Pragmatic Thinking and Learning“, author Andy Hunt relays the story of a man who was trained to see using just his tongue attached to an electronic imaging device. The man became so adept he could navigate a car through a parking lot with only his tongue for vision.
This bizarre repurposing of the use of our tongue serves to illustrate something we humans have been doing for millions of years. We build stuff that enables us to dig deeper than with our bare hands, fight more lethally than kicking or punching, and travel farther and longer than running. Man, the tool-maker.
Person to person communication is one of the most vigorous areas of human tool-building. Starting with extenders like the written word, the trained courier-bird and smoke signals, our ambition to communicate faster farther with more people has driven innovation upon innovation. The printing press marked the advent of mass communication, extending our voice to thousands of ears. With electronic communications our voice-extending spree exploded across phone, radio, TV, satellite and so much more. From Gutenberg’s wonder to the Internet, mass communication has only been around for a handful of centuries.
And then it really got crazy…
Internet Marketing is the art of optimizing Internet-based conversations to promote a specific Point of View (POV) with a specific audience. After all, the internet (little i) is just the plumbing for a whole host of voice and conversation tools. Cyberspace is made up of a fleet of different modes of communication. “Markets are Conversations.” Is the first thesis of the 1999 manifesto that illuminates the future of a global, human conversation.
We are a Blogging, Tweeting, Surfing, LinkingIn, Facebooking, Digging, Stumbling kind of people. For guys and gals who had trouble walking and chewing gum most of their lives, that’s a lot of new steps to learn. I suspect that many small business and mid-sized business owners feel this way.
So how do you make sense of this cacophony? How does a small business step into this tumbling, frothy sea without drowning? Which of these powerful tools should you embrace, and which should you ignore no matter how seductive the siren’s call?
So, put on your anthropologist hat… if you have one… and let’s examine some of these newest tools of human communication.
Let’s start with Blogging which, for many, is easier to grasp than some newer Internet tools because of its ties to the newspaper and magazine journalism with which we grew up. Blogging has created an ocean of citizen-journalists. If you aren’t a Blogger today, you can surf to another site like Wordpress or Typepad or Blogspot and become a Citizen Journalist in just minutes. It is simple. You pick the format, the rhythm and the voice. You can choose to write a daily column or a monthly feature piece. You tell a story and people read it… or not. It can be funny, informative or inquisitive. Depending on the nature of the story, you attract different readers with different attitudes and behaviors. Blogs have an instant editorial page attached to each post through the use of reader comments. Because blogs can be presented with regularity and can be amplified with photos, figures and videos, they are excellent for communicating a perspective. Furthermore, the search engines love blogs because they provide fresh, meaty content for their hungry hordes of non-stop seekers. This means that your web presence and visibility will grow. But Blogs take time and commitment. If you don’t have both, you might consider another forum to join the conversation.
LinkedIn might just be the right forum for you. LinkedIn is targeted less on communicating a perspective and more on highlighting your expertise, your experience and your competence. Since LinkedIn was built for professional audiences, many business owners and entrepreneurs have joined LinkedIn. In fact, I recently read that there is a new LinkedIn user EVERY second! The LinkedIn structure is meant to allow you to create and easily communicate with trusted networks of people that you know. The great thing about LinkedIn is that you gain a lot of benefit just from completing your profile. Even if you do very little, other active users will drive relevant news, questions and topics to your email inbox. However, the real power of LinkedIn comes from joining and participating in group discussions. You can pose and answer questions about your business areas of interest, gain visibility with others in your industry and open doors to new business opportunities.
Finally, don’t forget about the importance of your Web site as a communication vehicle. If someone comes to your site with a problem – and you have the solution, can they find it in a natural and intuitive way? If you have a skilled team, your investment in Internet Marketing tools will direct visitors to your Web site. Is your site conversation-ready? Remember that with the advent of all of this information, it only takes a flick of the wrist and a finger tap to change channels.
Recognizing that people have very different styles of problem solving, your Web site needs to support as many as necessary for your marketplace. For example, an engineering parts company might provide specifications, diagrams and other supports for the “methodical buyer”. A company selling educational products to elementary school teachers might have a much more “relational” buyer. Strong attention to the “About Us” page and a well done “Why Choose Us?” page could be important supports for these problem solvers. A strong book for understanding this idea more fully is “Waiting for your Cat to Bark: Persuading Customers When They Ignore Marketing” by Bryan Eisenberg, et al.
A business oriented Web site must be an extension of your voice for which you are engaging in a conversation. However, the conversation is held in an uncommon format with indirect feedback. Visitors communicate by visiting, clicking and entering information. Having a strong understanding of your Web site’s statistics (Web analytics) becomes your “listening post”. Make your Web site a well-constructed treasure hunt where you want your visitors to find the treasure, using a set of problem-solving support messages. But remember, if you show them the treasure too soon, they won’t know that they arrived. If you bury the treasure too deep, they’ll flick-tap out of your world.
Having the right tool is 90% of the job. - Lester Shuda
This brings us to the end of the journey into the human extenders we call Internet Marketing. How do you use other tools like Paid Search or Email Marketing to continue your conversation? Does the rapid stream of 140-character-max consciousness of Twitter energize or upset you? Have you ever used a Wiki to share information with colleagues? If so, how did your language shift in formality, tone and length?
Every tool has its unique rhythm, strengths, weaknesses and audiences. Understand your POV. Understand your audience. Understand the tool. Remember that markets are conversations and Internet marketing is just an extension of that conversation.
Online Markets…
Networked markets are beginning to self-organize faster than the companies that have traditionally served them. Thanks to the web, markets are becoming better informed, smarter, and more demanding of qualities missing from most business organizations. – the cluetrain manifesto
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