Marketing

What Your Business Can Learn from the Royal Wedding

by blogmistress on April 29, 2011

The royal wedding this morning was a spectacular occasion. I was struck by the throngs of people who camped out ahead of time and waited and waited and then stood outside the church and waved flags during the ceremony. All of those people wanted to be a part of something special. They didn’t have to get an invitation to sit on the front row. They just wanted to be near the event so they could enjoy it and say they had been there. People go out of their way to be associated with something special that makes them feel good.

What small businesses can learn is that going the extra mile to make people feel good can set them apart from their competition. This means that you make your customers feel like, well, royalty. In a world of superstores with little service and long checkout lines, you can offer the people you come in contact with something that everyone wants – you can make them feel special.

You may be thinking, “Don’t you do inbound marketing on the internet? How can you make anyone feel special online?” That’s a good question. This is a where social media comes in! Social media allows you to get to know people that you could never have met otherwise. You can like what they say, ask questions about what is going on with them. Making people feel special all comes down to showing them that you care – that you authentically, truly, honestly care. This isn’t something you can fake just because you are not communicating in person.

My daddy used to say, “people don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.” I know that quote didn’t originate with him, but it is one of the things that he said that is very important for business people to keep in mind. By the way, caring about people who are not your potential customers is just as important. Showing you care only about people who are your potential customers is not very authentic and really just kind of tacky.

Treat people like royalty and make them feel good, and you have given them something very special, indeed. People naturally want to be associated with things that make them feel good and special. What can you do today to make someone feel special?

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Facebook Marketing: Engage

by blogmistress on April 20, 2011

More businesses than ever are realizing the power of Facebook Marketing. A recent Small Business Technology Poll revealed that 41 percent of small businesses surveyed have a Facebook Page for their business. Last year, 27 percent said they’re using the social network, which represents a 52 percent jump from the previous year. That is great news for small businesses that need a cost effective, as well as customer effective, way to market. Facebook marketing is clearly not a fad.

The problem is that many businesses use their Facebook Page to broadcast rather than to engage and miss the best opportunity given to them by Facebook: engaging with their customers. So let’s look at some ways that businesses can use Facebook to engage with their customers and potential customers.

Ask Questions – This sounds like the same advice you get for having a conversation in person, right? People don’t want to hear your broadcast, they tend to prefer to talk about themselves. It is only human nature. By engaging your fans in conversation by asking questions, you can learn how your business can better serve it’s customers. Facebook has also given us the nifty “Facebook Questions” feature that helps us do even a better job with our questions. Have you used Facebook Questions yet?
Post Frequently – To be visible in your fans’ newsfeeds, you need to be there when they are. You need to be posting at least once a day to give your fans something to engage with. You want to post frequently enough to show up, but not so frequently that you appear to be spammy. Mix up the your types of posts. Questions, information, links, photos. The more possibilities people have to engage, the more likely they are to engage.
Keep Your Posts Short - Studies show that there is a 27% increase in engagement by posts that are 80 characters or less. There is a lot of information posted on Facebook, and people don’t always have a lot of time to spend reading long posts. Keep it short and simple for better engagement.
Time Your Posts For Better Engagement - The same study that showed short posts get more engagement also showed that posts on off-business hours get more engagement. Even though many businesses embrace Facebook marketing, there are also many businesses that block Facebook at the workplace. If you are posting during the hours that your target market is blocked from seeing Facebook, they won’t see your posts and won’t be able to engage. Do you work at a place where Facebook is blocked?

Broadcasting on Facebook is applying old marketing to a new platform. What ideas do you have for engaging your fans on Facebook?

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Internet Marketing – Not Your Grandpa’s Marketing

by blogmistress on April 15, 2011

Internet marketing is very different than the kind of marketing my Grandpa and family did when I was growing up.

I grew up in a family of small business owners. I remember many family gatherings where there was much discussion about marketing and advertising. There was discussion of competition and strategy. As kids, we were told this was “dead man’s talk”, which meant whatever we heard was not meant to be discussed outside of the family. As I write that last sentence, I’m thinking it kind of sounds like mafia, but it wasn’t anything like that- just business talk among family.

Marketing has changed a lot since those days (don’t I sound old?). In those days, marketing was interruption based. Commercials would interrupt your favorite TV shows, commercials would interrupt you while you were listening to your favorite tunes on the radio. Telemarketers would call you while the family was having dinner. You get the idea. Businesses who were advertising had to interrupt you and get your attention to market to you. TV and print ads focus a lot on “getting your attention.” Print advertisers think a lot about colors and fonts and placement. Everything is designed to get your attention away from reading an article and on to their advertisement. Those techniques are still used in those media.

The internet is a different kind of medium. Internet Marketing is permission based. The majority of people now start the purchase process online. When people search for a product or service online they are looking for the site that gives them the best information. Yes, they like sites that are aesthetically pleasing, and an attractive site is important. They want to be able to easily move through your site, so good navigation is important. However, when someone is searching for your product or service and they land on your site, what they are really looking for is information.

Unlike old interruption marketing, once people find you online, you don’t want to interrupt them from finding the information they are looking for by having things that are flashing or jumping up and down or popping up on the screen. You want to give them information that will give them confidence to take the next step in doing business with you. So give them visual cues as to what to do next. The next step depends on your sales cycle. If you have a short sales cycle, the next step may be to click on a “buy now” button or call you and make an appointment. This would be the case for retailers or services like plumbers or electricians. For others, the sales cycle is longer, so you may have to give your visitors a call to action that just gets them in your sales funnel so you can start nurturing them through the sales process. This would be the case for real estate agents or for businesses selling big ticket items.

Marketers of the past would have been astounded at the possibilities offered by today’s internet marketing. Unfortunately, there are still some marketers who want to cling to the past and are still trying to tell us that new marketing is a fad. We have heard it for years, haven’t we? The internet is a fad. Well, they don’t really even try to say that anymore. How about the old style marketers that say Facebook is a fad and that you will never get customers from Facebook? How many of you have gotten customers from Facebook. I know we have.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that all old marketing is bad. I certainly don’t think that TV, radio and newspaper ads are going to go away any time soon (well maybe newspapers, but we won’t go there). The truth of the matter is that internet marketing is here to stay until something better comes along. I’m sure the newspaper people didn’t like it when radio came along and started taking advertising dollars from them to use on radio ads. In the same vein, I’m sure radio people were not to excited when TV came along and started offering TV advertising. In the same way, today, all of these media are not really excited about internet marketing, but this is the way of the future, whether it is a website, social media or mobile marketing, internet marketing is here to stay.

My Grandpa died at the age of 94 last August. He was a very smart man, and I think he would have loved new marketing!

Key Take Away

Marketing has changed and continues to change. Smart businesses use effective marketing that will grown their business and get them customers.

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Achieving Your Internet Marketing Goals

by blogmistress on March 23, 2011

For every type of internet marketing we write about and do, we always stress setting goals. If you don’t have an internet marketing goal, how will you know you are making a difference.

Internet Marketing Goals

Begin with the end in mind.
Dr. Stephen Covey from 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

When you are setting goals keep these things in mind:

Make the commitment to reach your goal – Zig Ziglar lists this as the first step to achieving goals and it is an important point to act upon. “One person with a commitment is worth a hundred who only have an interest” – Mary Crowley

Analyze your current position – if you don’t know where you are starting, it will be hard to draw a map to where you want to go.

Set realistic but ambitions goals – If your goals aren’t really achievable, you will not really engage in trying to reach them. However, if your goals are too easy, you won’t have any reason to really work to reach them. Find your sweet spot where you are engaged and excited about reaching your goals.

Create strategies to reach your goals – for each goal you set, the strategies you use to reach them is the road map from where you are to your goal. When you are setting goals for internet marketing, you might use strategies like targeted blogging, growing and engaging with your social media following, creating effective calls to action. Make a plan for how your are going to achieve your goal and create the processes that will help you do it.

Identify obstacles – When you are thinking about your goals, keep in mind the resources that may be required to achieve them and plan accordingly. How much time, money and other resources may be needed? What about knowledge? Do you have the knowledge you need to accomplish your goal. Maybe you don’t have the right mindset for achieving your goals.

By identifying the obstacles you may encounter while striving to reach your goals, you can build into your plan ways to overcome the obstacles. No plan is perfect and no goal is reached without any challenges. Plan for the challenges in advance.

See yourself achieving your goal - Visualize how it will be to reach your goal. What will it look like and feel like. This is a way to train your brain to achieve the successful finish for your goal. Athletes use this type of visualization before they race or begin a game. Visualizing their success helps them achieve success.

Set a deadline – Most people don’t love deadlines, me included. However having a deadline holds you accountable. If you have to have something done by a certain time, you are more likely to achieve the task in a timely manner. If you have no deadline, you don’t have to be accountable.

Be prepared to change – Sometimes in life there are just things that happen that you can’t predict. An extreme example of this is the earthquake and tsunami in Japan. One day you are working towards achieving your business goals and the next day your goal is simply survival. Be willing to change when necessary after careful consideration of the circumstances. Even the best plan doesn’t survive reality.

Measure your success – Analyzing your progress on a regular basis will help you know how to tweak your strategies. See what is working and not working. If you aren’t measuring, you have no way to know when you reach your goal. Our friend Herb Lawrence at the ASU Small Business Development Center said in is small business blog yesterday that “if you can’t measure it . . . it isn’t worth doing.” Measurement is another way to hold yourself accountable.

Each time you reach a goal your confidence will grow so that you
can do bigger and better things. Remember what you get by reaching
your destination isn’t nearly as important as
what you become by reaching your goals
–what you will become is the winner you were born to be!
~ Zig Ziglar

Key Take-Aways:

Set Goals, set goals, goals.
Plan your work and work your plan (My daddy, Eddie Dicus, said this all the time).
Measure, measure, measure.

Next Steps:

Go to Wharton Marketing to download the Facebook 101 for Business eBook and the SEO 101 eBook to help you gain some of the knowledge you need to reach your internet marketing goals.

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SEO – It’s About Inbound Marketing!

by blogmistress on March 21, 2011

Unlike the early days of the internet, today’s SEO is about inbound marketing.

In the early days of the internet, SEO was about keyword stuffing and sex. Let me explain. In those early days, search engines used the “keyword” meta-tag to determine what a web page was about. Most marketers at that time were “old school” marketers (i.e. they used interruption or outbound marketing techniques).

Interruption marketing is more commonly known as advertising. It is where an advertiser finds an activity in which a large group of potential customers are participating (such as watching a TV show or listening to a radio station) and decides to interrupt (they call it sponsorship) that activity with their advertisement. They do this in the hope that someone who is participating in said activity will see or hear their advertisement and be enticed to buy their product or service.

When those marketers (or advertisers) moved to the internet, they used the same interruption marketing techniques. And since “sex” was the most searched word on the internet (i.e. an activity with a lot of potential customers, maybe), and since search engines used the “keyword” meta-tag to determine what a web page was about, these marketers put it in the “keyword” meta-tags of all sorts of sites. It didn’t matter if the website was about insurance or automobiles. They put did this in the hope that someone searching for “sex” on the internet would land on their website. And, after landing on their website would be so enticed by it that they would forget what they were searching for and decide to buy an insurance policy or whatever the site was selling.

Google understood that it needed to return relevant results to searchers, not irrelevant advertising. Over the years Google has evolved its algorithms to rely less and less on the “keyword” meta-tag and more on page content and connectedness. In fact, today Google no longer uses the “keyword” meta-tag to determine search results. It uses page content, links to the page, page connectedness to social media such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, etc., and other variables Google keeps secret.

So today, SEO involves a lot more than just filling in the “keyword” meta-tag for your web pages. In fact, it doesn’t involve the “keyword” meta-tag at all. Today’s SEO is about “inbound” or permission marketing. You must provide relevant content on your website and social media sites. This content will serve as a magnet to potential customers who are searching for what you have to offer. Don’t bait and switch. Present yourself as an expert in your field. Start a blog.

You can compare getting found on the internet with the lottery or trotline fishing. Using the lottery comparison, your web pages are like lottery tickets – the more you have, the better your chance of winning. Using the trotline fishing analogy, your web pages are like baited hooks on a trotline – the more hooks you have with the right bait, the better your chance of catching fish. So increase your number of web pages and bait them with good content!

Key takeaways:

Search Engine Optimization continues to evolve.
Content and social connectedness are more important than ever.

Next Steps:

Download our free SEO 101 eBook to learn more.

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The Line Between SEO and Social Media

by Admin on March 13, 2011

The line between SEO and Social Media is becoming more blurred all the time, especially with the socialization of Google (discussed in our previous post Google Gets More Social) and the partnership between Facebook and Bing. In case you didn’t know it, there is a war going on between Google and Facebook over your “word search” business. This means that your future internet marketing plans will need to include both Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Social Media Optimization (SMO).

What should you do? My Title Guy says:

Easy. Get a Blog. Create dynamic, engaging content (video, pictures, audio, text) and distribute it through all of your social channels-Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Linkedin, Flickr, Vimeo, etc. Because writing content for search engines can be different that content for actual people-consumers, forward thinking professionals will create highly engaging, keyword rich, VALUABLE content that is worthy of being shared across social networks. Next time you create content on your YouTube Channel, Twitter, Active Rain, Linkedin, Facebook Fan Page (personal FB pages are not indexed in social search) ask yourself “Who am I talking to? Who is my ideal client? What is my message? Is my message valuable? Do I have a call to action? Have I asked the consumer to engage with me- to share my content, etc”. The goal of getting found online stays the same, the method continues to change.

A blog is the best way to keep your web presence up-to-date with relevant, engaging content. It can be the foundation of you Social Media Optimization Strategy. Small businesses, especially, need to stop focussing so much on their websites and start spreading their content around socially.

Key Take-Aways:

Both SEO and SMO are necessary for a good web presence.
A blog is a great way to integrate everything together.

Next Steps:

Start thinking strategically about blogging and get your own blog set up!

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Is Perfection Getting In Your Way?

by Admin on May 12, 2010

Question 1: How would you describe the quality of a McDonald’s hamburger?

Question 2: Who sells the most hamburgers in the world?

The answers to those questions makes an important point. McDonald’s is not letting perfection get in the way of selling a lot of hamburgers.

Are you making this mistake? In your pursuit of making the perfect hamburger (or product or website or idea) maybe, nothing ever actually gets launched.

Is perfection getting in your way? Don’t let perfection get in the way of the possible! Yes, strive for excellence and do a good job, just realize that creating something great and launching it is better than striving to create something perfect that never sees the light of day.

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What Would You Say?

by Admin on October 2, 2009

We went to the Chamber of Commerce 1st Friday breakfast this morning. Every business gets 1 minute to say something about their business. This is a fun exercise. When you sit down at your table there are always lots of flyers and brochures on the table. Many of the business representatives refer to the flyers on the tables which give more information about their current sale or event or services, etc.

How many people, when it was their time to speak, pointed to their website for more information? None! I didn’t actually look at every flyer, but most did not have web addresses on them. How helpful would it be to say,” Hey, we are having a great sale this week, see our flyer on your table and go to our website at . . . ”

On your flyer (if you want to clutter up the table with yet another flyer), you list your website, and you tell your website address when you speak. When people go to your website for more information about your sale or event, they find what they are looking for! While they are on your site, they notice you have a blog with some interesting articles, you have a Facebook page where they can become a fan and receive updates and get to know you better.

What would you say?

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Making Sense

by blogmistress on April 10, 2009

Today, I would like to point you to a new valuable resource. The Gobbledygook Grader by the folks at Hubspot. Put in your content and see what kind of grade it gets. It’s all about making sense to people who might buy your product or service. Also, check out David Meerman Scott’s blog Web Ink Now today to see the top 25 gobbledygook phrases used in press releases sent in North America 2008.

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Why People Unsubscribe

by blogmistress on March 19, 2009

Another interesting chart from Marketing Sherpa. This one tells us why people unsubscribe from receiving email.

This chart tells us that when people subscribe to receive information from us: 1. We need to deliver relevant information and 2. We need to not flood customer’s inboxes.

My own experience tells me that however relevant the information, if there is too much of, eventually, I and possibly your customers will just tune it out.

So, once again, we are back to something we have talked about several times, being relevant. Good point.

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