Your company has been doing some digital marketing for a while, perhaps you even hired someone from the outside to handle it for you, and you feel like things are going in the right direction. You start thinking that it might be time to do even more and invest a bit more money to intensify your digital marketing efforts.
Then, you start to doubt your decision and figure that you are doing alright as it is. All of a sudden, this becomes a whole thing and you just cannot pull the trigger either way.
How do you do it? How do you know when it is time to intensify your digital marketing efforts? How do you make the first step?
Have Your Results Plateaued?
One of the clearest indications that you may want to intensify your digital marketing is the notorious "plateau". Namely, when you look at the results your past digital marketing efforts brought you, you will be seeing an upwards trend with better results being achieved as time goes by. However, if you notice that this improvement gets less noticeable with time and especially if it starts stagnating, you have plateaued.
In such a situation, investing more in digital marketing can be the best thing you can do for your company. You have obviously identified what works and you simply need more reach, which can be achieved by larger investments.
Have You Identified Your Best Performers?
For the majority of companies, digital marketing will not involve just a single tactic. Instead, they will be using a mix of various tactics and techniques – from SEO to paid search and from paid social media to content marketing.
Before you can decide whether you want to ramp up your digital marketing, you need to identify what has produced results for you in the past.
For example, you may have realized that you have been getting great ROI from your Google ads while your Facebook ads have not been performing that well. Or, perhaps you may discover that your aggressive SEO campaign has been yielding amazing results and bringing fantastic organic traffic to your site.
The reason why this is important to figure out is that intensifying certain tactics will cost less than others and that the process can be extremely complicated with certain tactics as opposed to other.
Can You Afford It?
One very big consideration to keep in mind when considering upping your digital marketing is the money you have at your disposal. Simply put, becoming more aggressive and active with your digital marketing will cost more money and, oftentimes, you will find that taking things up to the next level means proportionally larger investments than in the beginning.
It should also be pointed out that ROIs will change dramatically as you start investing more in your digital marketing and certain practices that made sense before may not in the future, and vice versa. You have to be extremely careful about your budget and work every single aspect of it from as many angles as you can.
If you are have come up with a fantastic digital marketing boosting plan and you cannot free up any money at the moment, you can think about bridging loans and other similar financial injections that might bridge you until you free up some money in the future. If you should choose to do this, you need to be very, very careful.
Additional Considerations
Of course, there are other things that you should factor in when making a decision to intensify your digital marketing. For example, you may feel that you are on the verge of success with a particular tactic and you need just one more push to get over the hump. This often happens with marketing tactics that require more time such as content marketing, for example.
Or, perhaps a new competitor has entered the market and you want to prevent them from getting a foothold and threatening your own company. In such a situation, you may want to invest more in marketing and nip things in the bud, so to say.
Closing Word
Turning up your digital marketing efforts is often the right move to make, especially if you have noticed that the circumstances have changed recently. That being said, it can often be a rushed decision, which is never a good idea.
Take a good, long look at the data, try to make some projections for the future and if the numbers tell a clear story, go for it.
James D. Burbank has been involved in the world of marketing for almost 15 years. He is currently splitting his time between Australia and Europe and working only when he has to. You can check him out on Twitter - @JBurbank2019.
Fivenson Studios is based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, our graphic design team specializes in logo and web page design, as well as marketing campaigns for social and print media. From flyers and brochures to targeted landing pages, we aim to bring your company into the spotlight and reach a greater range of potential customers.
Tried and true marketing strategies for small business owners who want to build a Facebook following, generate new leads, and turn social followers into paying customers.
If there’s one social media platform that all small business owners should be on, it’s Facebook. The social network has come to dominate the online space with more than a billion users worldwide.
Finding success with Facebook marketing isn’t hard, but it does take a little time and know-how to truly engage your customers and drive more leads and sales. We asked social media experts and business owners to share their insight in this comprehensive guide to Facebook marketing for small business.
1. Why is Facebook Important for Small Business?
The statistics speak for themselves: Facebook has an estimated 1.8 billion monthly users worldwide, and according to the Pew Research Center, 68% of all U.S. adults use Facebook. For many, logging onto the social media platform is a daily habit—used for entertainment, news and connecting with friends and family.
Simply put, small businesses can’t afford not to be on Facebook. It’s an ideal platform for engaging with customers where they already spend time online.
2. How Do I Use Facebook for Small Business Marketing?
On the surface, Facebook marketing is relatively simple: Start a business page and start posting updates and photos about your company. However, your social media marketing strategy matters, since your business has to compete with lots of other friends and businesses for your customers’ attention. The goal is to post valuable information and built relationships with your followers.
“Generally, users on Facebook want to see content they care about from sources they care about,” said Simon A. Thalmann, digital marketer and writer for Kellogg Community College in Battle Creek, Michigan. “Usually this centers on friends and family, but many people are also passionate about brands that offer goods and services they like or identify with, or that they in some way find value from following or seeing content from.”
Your goal as a small business owner is to figure out what your customers respond to, and deliver that value through your Facebook posts.
3. What’s the Difference Between My Facebook Business Page vs. My Personal Page?
The profile you create to represent your business on Facebook is different from your own personal profile. Business profiles are called “pages.” How can you tell the difference?
“If you can click ‘like’ on it, then it’s a page,” said Dennis Yu, chief technology officer for BlitzMetrics. “If you can log in and be friends, then it’s a user profile. A lot of people talk about their pages, when they are talking about their user profiles. If you want to grow your business, then you need a Facebook page for it. Only with a Facebook page can you boost content, get analytics to see how it’s working, collect email addresses, drive people into a call, and so forth.”
4. How to Create Facebook Account for Small Business
It’s free to create a Facebook page for your business. Start by selecting the type of business you own. You’ll then be prompted to fill out your business name, a business description, a cover and profile photo, and a call to action. Once you’re happy with everything, be sure to hit “publish” to make it public. After you publish your page, you’ll have access to Facebook’s business features, including messaging and analytics.
5. How Can I See My Followers on Facebook?
To see how many followers your business page has, simply click “Settings” at the top of your page, and then click “People and Other Pages” in the left column. You should be able to see a list of everyone who has liked your page. (Some may not show up, however, depending on the individual user’s privacy settings.)
6. What Should I Post on My Small Business Facebook Page?
What you post depends on your business and your customers. Before you start posting, it’s worth thinking about the most common questions and issue you hear about from customers, and use that as a guide for posting content that’s relevant to them.
But no matter what, try to keep things fresh. “Regardless of the industry you are in, or the audience you are trying to reach, nothing bores people more than the same old content shared time and time again,” said Gerald Vinci, owner of Vinci Digital Marketing.
Vinci recommends diversifying your strategy by sharing both written and visual content, including:
Tips and advice
Your own blog posts
Blog posts from other relevant websites
Posts from other Facebook pages
Create a survey or ask a question to get a conversation going
Share interesting photos or videos that your audience would benefit from
Show people more about your personality by sharing things you and your team get involved with like community events, office parties or celebrations
7. When Should I Post on My Small Business Facebook Page?
Like the content you choose, timing also depends on your audience. However, a good rule of thumb is to space out your posts, rather than put them up all at once.
“The default approach that seems to work best for our particular audiences is a schedule focused around the average workday. Students and staff often seem to check their pages first thing in the morning at work or school, just before or after lunch, and just before leaving work or just after arriving home after work,” Thalmann said.
He added that a three-post schedule during the workday typically includes a post around 7:45 a.m., another around 11:45 a.m. and another around 4:45 p.m. Posts later in the evening, around 7 p.m. or so, often do well also.
8. How Often Should I Post on My Small Business Facebook Page?
The goal here is to get your posts in front of customers, without going overboard.
“I’d recommend posting between one to three times daily,” said Allison Baker, social media and marketing coordinator for H2O Media Inc. “You don’t want to bombard your followers, but you don’t want them to forget about you either. Having a consistent, daily presence is extremely important on social media. Even if you’re only posting something like an inspirational quote, your followers will still see your business name and logo, and this will keep you top of mind.”
9. What if I Don’t Have Much Time to Post on Facebook?
Does posting on Facebook one to three times a day sound overwhelming? If you don’t have much time throughout the day, you can streamline your process by setting aside time to create content in batches, said Facebook marketing expert Mari Smith.
“For example, write out the top 10 frequently asked questions from your customers. Make that into a blog post. Then, create ten short videos with each point or tip, as well as 10 image quotes,” she said.
If you can afford part-time help, it might be worth it. “Hiring a good social media assistant for even a few hours a week can make all the difference,” Smith said. “For example, you can provide your assistant with photos and video clips that you have on your phone anyway and they could use them to create many wonderful videos using a tool such as Animoto.”
Smith added that small business owners should take advantage of a social media scheduling tool such as Hootsuite, Buffer, PostPlanner or Edgar. That way, you can schedule your posts in advance, instead of stopping in the middle of the day to update Facebook.
10. How Do I Get Facebook Likes for Small Business Page?
When people “like” your business page, they’re also automatically opted-in to follow your posts. That means your content will show up their newsfeed, so it’s important to build the number of page likes your business has on Facebook.
“We’ve been working incredibly hard to get our Facebook followers up, as a majority of our referrals and sales come from social media,” said Amandine Liepmann, cofounder of Mitz Accessories.
Liepmann said building followers starts with good content. “Before posting anything I always ask myself, ‘Would I want to read this? Is this content engaging our followers in active discussions?’ The more activity you can show on your page, the better.”
Coverage of your business on other sites can help increase your Facebook following as well. “We were recently featured by UpWorthy and found that we had a lot of new fans on Facebook after the story was posted,” Liepmann added.
Looking for even more strategies to grow your Facebook following? Jennifer Cherry Foster, president of Catalyst Media Factory, shared these tips:
Make sure to tag customers (with their permission), other businesses and vendors to get in front of new audiences
Engage with other businesses that offer complementary services
Create graphics that carry your logo when shared
11. How Do I Find Good Photos for Facebook?
Images are arguably more important than anything you write on Facebook. Good images can mean the difference between a customer clicking your post or just scrolling by.
“Anytime I post anything on my Facebook business page, I make sure to include an eye-catching image. By having a bright, relative image to the topic of a blog post, announcement, or news article, a potential client is more likely to engage with my page,” psychotherapist Liz Morrison in New York City.
You can take high-quality photos with your smartphone, but make sure your subject is well lit and in the frame. You can also experiment with free stock photos from sites like New Old Stock, SplitShire, 1 Million Free Pictures and the Creative Commons. Take your photos to the next level with free design tools like Canva, which allow you to play with text and other graphics to create flyers, announcements and more.
12. How Do I Design My Small Business Facebook Page?
In addition to choosing photos to accompany your posts, you’ll also need to consider the profile and cover photo of your Facebook page. “Vibrant visuals will always win the day,” Smith said. “Work with a professional graphic designer to create your images. Or, use a tool such as Adobe Spark to create a compelling cover image.”
Your profile and cover photos should be related to your business, and represent your brand. For example, if you own a children’s clothing boutique, a playful, colorful cover photo would be appropriate. If you’re a legal firm, something muted and traditional might be better. Find inspiration by looking at other business’ Facebook pages.
13. How Do I Use Facebook for Small Business Promotions?
Some businesses run contests and other promotions to drive engagement of Facebook. (Be sure to check out Facebook’s terms before you run your first promotion.) The best promotions combine great content with an offer that’s relevant to your customers, said digital strategist Jason Falls.
“For example, instead of just giving away a spa treatment, do a video interview with someone who has had the spa treatment about how it made her feel reborn, refreshed, important again … connect those emotions,” he said. “Then target that post to women within the demographic you’re trying to reach. The content should grab them, then conveniently introduce them to the promotion.”
However, you should be careful with promotions—they can be useful, but they can also backfire. “While they can certainly drive activity, if it’s for a giveaway or prize, you end up driving a bunch of people to your page who don’t really want to buy from you, they just want the free thing,” Falls said. “Still, if you can create a contest but explain it using compelling content that grabs people’s emotions, you’ll likely find it to be far more successful than just saying, ‘Click here to win!’”
14. Ideas for Facebook Contests
Facebook contests may not be the best tool to reach new customers, but they can make your current social media followers feel special and help you reach other goals.
“We connect with our current customer base by offering our social media fans and email newsletter subscribers exclusive JUST4ME discounts,” said Claudia Montez, founder of Isabelle Grace Jewelry. “Every week, we put one of our pieces on a special JUST4ME discount and advertise it in our newsletter and to our social media followers. Not only has this resulted in new purchases from existing customers, but it has also helped us really grow our email list!”
You can also offer customers a chance to win free or discounted product if they:
Like your post
Comment on your post
Share a photo
Guess the answer to a trivia question
Caption a photo
15. What Does Facebook for Small Business Cost?
Theoretically, nothing. You can start your Facebook business page and post for free, and if you focus on organic efforts, you’ll never spend a dime. However, experts and small business owners all agree that, thanks to Facebook’s algorithm, it’s tough to build your audience without paying to boost your posts.
“The mistake most small businesses make on Facebook is that they think it’s purely an organic play,” said Jamie Turner, author, CNN contributor and CEO of 60SecondMarketer.com. “The truth is that if you use the paid advertising feature on Facebook, you’ll get better results. Best of all, Facebook is inexpensive and easy to use, so don’t miss out on using it for as little as $5 per day.”
16. What are Facebook Ads?
“Facebook offers paid placement on their website and mobile apps,” said John Surdakowski, founder of Avex Designs. “Your content, special offers, website or posts can get in front of customers with a few simple clicks. What’s more, your ads will be targeted to a very specific demographic. Facebooks ads are very popular, since they can be quickly deployed.”
This video explains more about Facebook’s targeting capabilities:
The answer to that question depends on your budget and your goals. Cost of entry is low. According to Surdakowski, you can allocate as little as $5 per day or as much as $500 (or more) per day.
“Before putting your entire marketing budget behind Facebook ads, it would be best to test with a small budget and scale up from there,” he warned.
This video explains how Facebook Ads costs are determined:
18. What is the Facebook Insights Feature?
Facebook Insights shows you all kinds of statistics about your business page. It’s only visible to you, the page administrator, and it can help you judge how well your page is performing.
The amount of info can be overwhelming. Here are the metrics business owners should pay the closest attention to, according to Dennis Yu of BlitzMetrics:
Your top posts (i.e. posts with the most impressions and engagement)
Who your best fans are (where they live, what they like, how old they are, what they engage with, etc.)
How you fare against your competitors
In order to get insight on your competitors’ performance, you should find five other pages to benchmark against in “Pages to Watch.” Then you can look at how fast they’re growing in fans and engagement.
19. What are Facebook Tracking URLs?
It may sound technical, but tracking URLs aren’t that hard to use or understand. Basically, tracking URLs have a special combo of letters and numbers to identify the source of each click. They help you determine how many people actually visit your website because they clicked on the ad.
“Tracking URLs are used by Google Analytics to determine the correct referring source of a website visitor,” said Eve Mayer, CEO and owner of Social Media Delivered. “Facebook provides an easy-to-use tool, which allows creators of Facebook ads to create a URL that will provide Google Analytics with even more detail about how a visitor ended up at the website.”
20. How Do I Use Facebook Live?
Facebook Live is the social media platform’s live video streaming feature, and it can give your followers a more personal view of your business.
“Live video is perfect for really showcasing the human side of your business through storytelling,” Smith said. “With live video streaming, small businesses can take their audience behind the scenes, conduct product demos, introduce staff members, spotlight customer success stories, host Q&A sessions, invite feedback, do interviews and so much more.”
Smith recommends experimenting with your style at first—your videos can be rehearsed or impromptu. But she also stressed the importance of using a tripod and microphone so that your videos aren’t too sloppy.
Lisa Spector owns Through A Dog’s Ear, a company that produces music to calm the canine nervous system. “I recently did a live Canine Classical Concert and broadcast on Facebook Live so that people were invited into my living room,” Spector said. “While there were some tech problems, people still loved it and enjoyed sharing the calming time with their pups at home.”
21. What is Facebook Stories?
Facebook Stories is a new feature that allows users to share photos and videos that disappear after 24 hours. If that sounds just like Snapchat and Instagram Stories, it is. Facebook is trying to capitalize on the growing trend of using images and videos (rather than text) to communicate.
Right now, the feature is available only to personal users and can’t be used on business pages. However, it seems likely that if Facebook Stories becomes popular, it will be extended to businesses as well. Small business owners should keep an eye on this trend.
22. Can Facebook Generate More Leads and Traffic to My Business?
The short answer is yes. But your success with Facebook depends on your audience and how well you’re able to reach them. If you follow some of the best practices in this guide, you should be able to boost leads and traffic to your business.
“Children, teenagers and young adults will often be easier to reach on other social media platforms,” Mayer observed. (Snapchat, for example, caters to a much younger audience than Facebook.) “You will have to spend some money on Facebook ads and boosted posts to reach new people,” she added.
23. What Should I Never Say on Facebook?
“As tempting as it is to talk politics on Facebook, it’s best to avoid that subject altogether,” Turner said. “Also, if you ever get negative comments on Facebook, be sure to take the high road.”
Getting into arguments with customers on your Facebook page—whether about your business or something unrelated—is a bad idea because it’s a public forum. You could wind up alienating many more people than just that one customer. Instead, keep things professional and upbeat at all times.
Fivenson Studios is based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, our graphic design team specializes in logo and web page design, as well as marketing campaigns for social and print media. From flyers and brochures to targeted landing pages, we aim to bring your company into the spotlight and reach a greater range of potential customers.
Conceptually, the theories of persona-building, positioning, and messaging are easy to understand. However, sometimes it’s helpful for a marketing team to critique a real example and then discuss the parallels to their own business. An example that everyone can easily relate to, and that is separate from the business you represent, is also an effective way to diffuse any emotion that may hinder folks from seeing the lessons associated with trying to execute a poor go-to-market strategy.
The following is a true story: the case of a better mousetrap. In 1955, an eager entrepreneur introduced a revolutionary new product that was destined to change the world of “rodent control”. In addition to producing leaflets, promoting through friends and family, this ad (click on the link below) ran in a variety of publications at the time.
Ad for a better mousetrap, circa 1955
Issues and Opportunities
You can infer a lot regarding the marketing strategy by looking at an example of the execution. While the product design clearly is creative (and not for the squeamish), the entrepreneur fell into several traps that are common today, especially in hi-tech marketing:
1) Failure To Focus On A Clear Target Segment/persona
Who is the target audience/user/buyer? It looks like pretty much “everyone.” For fear of leaving a sales opportunity on the table, the entrepreneur attempted to be all-inclusive. In a single swoop, he went after farmers, restaurant owners, food processors, meat packers, ships, homes, and orchards. Although the confusion of trying to address multiple audiences at once may be obvious to us gentle bystanders, one wonders if anyone asked the entrepreneur the following questions:
Who is most likely to buy your product? Who is the person?
Do all these audiences look alike? behave the same way? have the same concerns?
What problem(s) are you trying to solve?
How well do you really understand the target buyer?
2) Failure To Properly Position The Product
Every product needs to have positioning statement.
What’s In A Name?
Clearly, not all “mousetraps” are alike. In 1955 (and even today!), the top-selling mousetrap is the Victor snap-trap. In 1955 the snap-trap sold for 5 cents. Our entrepreneur’s mousetrap sells for $29.95. Branding the product against a generic “mousetrap” nomenclature will not serve his marketing interests. (Although, a branding effort would introduce its own set of challenges.)
A New Category?
He’s attempted to establish a new category of mousetraps, namely, the “sanitary, self-setting, portable” mousetrap. This is good and goes a long way to justify such a massive price increase over the competitive alternative. However, what you can’t quite make out in the photos is the following:
The mousetrap’s dimensions are 3 ft long, 8 inches wide, and 18 inches high.
It holds 3 gallons of water and is quite heavy (especially if loaded with 102 mice!).
NOTE: Years ago, when I developed my first Positioning Workshop, I had the opportunity to view and touch this actual, very real mousetrap. Unfortunately, it is actually neither, sanitary, self-setting, nor portable. We have a category mismatch.
Benefit? Which Benefit?
There are many benefitsfloating around in the ad. Which one is most important? Some seem hard to believe. Again, it’s the “everything for everyone” approach.For a benefit to be meaningful, it must be relevant to the target audience. It must also be single-minded, clear, substantially (e.g. you can prove any claim with data), and differentiable.
Differentiation?
We come back to the 5 cents snap-trap alternative. If anything, this ad makes the competitor’s product look better.
3) Failure To Have A Crisp, Clear “elevator Pitch”
Because there was no positioning statement to guide the marketing strategy, the messaging is a confused mess. The entrepreneur would have greatly benefited from the Message Box template where he could underscore 4 key messages:
An “engagement message” designed to establish relevance with the target audience and their primary “rodent control” pain points they are trying to address.
A “solution message” that illustrates why not all mousetraps are the same and certain applications require something much more than the standard snap-trap.
A “reinforcement message” that shows how his invention is superior to alternatives.
A “value message” that describes how the target’s life will be better than before after using his new, revolutionary product.
Critique Your Own Work
How well does your ads/direct mail/website stack up? Use the mousetrap example as a teachable exercise. Never be afraid to critique your marketing strategies with regards to your persona, positioning statement, and messaging. It’s not about placing blame; it’s about reaching the “next level” of marketing effectiveness. Otherwise, your success may be limited to selling 4 units to your brother-in-law.
Good luck!
Fivenson Studios is based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, our graphic design team specializes in logo and web page design, as well as marketing campaigns for social and print media. From flyers and brochures to targeted landing pages, we aim to bring your company into the spotlight and reach a greater range of potential customers.
If you think e-mail is just for keeping in touch with friends, or forwarding pictures and funny stories, think again. Email is probably the biggest advancement in marketing since Johann Gutenberg invented movable type for the printing press. Every business can use the power of e-mail to significantly increase its marketing results.
Here are just a few of the benefits of e-mail marketing.
1) EXTREMELY LOW COST
Before we moved our business to the Internet we relied heavily on direct mail to help market our business. Direct mail is a powerful means of attracting prospects and converting them into customers, but it does cost money. The cost to mail out a simple, one-page prospecting letter, is about $.40 - $ .45 cents (that includes copying the letter, the envelope, and the postage). Then there is the time to label the envelopes, fold and stuff them and affix postage to them. Again, direct mail can be a very profitable marketing vehicle, but it does require time and money. With e-mail, you eliminate almost all of the costs, as well as most of the time. With a reliable list-serv, like Topica.com -- you can send a message to 100, 10,000, or even 100,000 people on your list with the push of a button. And the service is free!
2) TIME SAVINGS
Once you create your e-mail message, it's just a matter of sending it to the people on your list. You do that with the press of a button, and within minutes most of the people on your list will have received your message. You don't send one e-mail at a time -- you send to everyone on your list at once. That's powerful. We have literally begun receiving hundreds of dollars in orders for our products within 10 minutes of sending out our e-mail newsletters. No other marketing vehicle can provide you with such instantaneous results.
3) YOU CAN TEST YOUR MARKETING INEXPENSIVELY
Rather than investing money in a newspaper ad, flyers, radio, cable TV or direct mail, for a test, you can simply test the idea on your email list of prospects and customers. For little or no cost, you can learn the results in just a few days.
HOW CAN YOU USE E-MAIL TO HELP YOU MARKET YOUR BUSINESS?
4) SEND A NEWSLETTER
If you sell cosmetics or Tupperware, you could create a short monthly newsletter of tips related to your product or service. Of course, you would include a promotion for one or two of your products in each issue. Don't think such an idea applies to your business?? One of our clients is a frozen custard stand -- nearly 4,000 of their customers have signed up to receive their monthly newsletter. Every time the newsletter comes out, their sales increase. You can do it too.
5) ANNOUNCE A SALE OR A SPECIAL PROMOTION
If you are going to have a sale or a special promotion, make sure your prospects and customers know about it. Send them all a simple email announcement telling them the details.
6) SEND AN INVITATION
Having an open house, or a special presentation? Let your list know about it via . . . e-mail.
7) DIRECT PEOPLE TO YOUR WEB SITE OR PLACE OF BUSINESS
If you have a Web site, you can use e-mail to alert your list about new features or new content available on your site, or a reason to visit your business.
8) PROVIDE PRODUCT OR SERVICE INFORMATION OR ANSWER QUESTIONS
Direct your prospects or customers to send their questions to you via e-mail, then send them the answers through e-mail. You can even have standardized information that can be sent to them to save you time.
9) REMIND YOUR LIST OF UPCOMING HOLIDAYS AND EVENTS
Holidays, celebrations and events have always provided perfect tie-ins for product and service promotions. Remind your e-mail list of the upcoming holiday or event and tie it into a special promotion.We hope these e-mail marketing tips will get you thinking about how you can utilize the power of e-mail marketing to grow your business.
Fivenson Studios is based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, our graphic design team specializes in logo and web page design, as well as marketing campaigns for social and print media. From flyers and brochures to targeted landing pages, we aim to bring your company into the spotlight and reach a greater range of potential customers.
With more than a decade of experience in marketing, ranking from pay-per-click to direct mail, I’ve seen a lot of failures and far more successes when it comes to marketing.
Today, the art of marketing is far more complex than it once was. However, many of the same basic principles still apply. Too often, professional marketers and small business owners overlook the basic techniques that have separated successful campaigns from those that never turn a profit. Here is my all time list of effective marketing tips.
Know your audience. Successful campaigns get that way because marketers know their audience. They fully understand their needs, how to help meet those needs and how to create demand. Knowing and understanding your audience through proper market segmentation means a well-targeted campaign that generates a profitable return.
Focus on the offer. A marketing offer is the driving force of marketing promotions that drive results. In fact, market testing has proven that the offer is the most significant criterion for conversion. Focus on your offer if you want to be successful.
Split test. Never ever run a campaign without testing something. One of the most common is a split test which allows you to simultaneously test two versions of something. It can be a web page, post card, or email. Split testing is essential for improving performance.
Never work alone. The most creative ideas come from working with other creative people. Don’t feel like you need to have all the answers or great ideas. You may start with an idea, but an open dialog with creative individuals will make it better.
Don’t sell on price. I’ve seen so many marketers fail because they sell on price alone. This leads to a discounting war, lower profitability, and often bankruptcy. Rather, focus on creating so much value that the perception of price becomes insignificant.
Consistent messaging. Consider the entire user experience before you launch a campaign. From email to website to offer, is the prospect having a consistent user experience? If they are, your campaigns stand above 98% of others.
Create value after the sale. As marketers, it’s our job to understand our market segment and build relationships, not dump people off at the front door of our store and walk away. Focus as much of your energy on building relationships with customers as you do prospects.
Test. Test. Test. In addition to split testing, you should consider multiple forms of testing in each marketing discipline. For direct mail, test headlines, offers, copy, time of direct mail drop, etc. Consider testing a life long mission.
Integrated Marketing Works Best. You can’t rely on one form of marketing to carry you to success. It’s okay to generate most of your leads or sales through PPC marketing if you will but what happens when that dries out? Use multiple media sources to meet your goals.
Nothing can replace experience. You can run out and hire all of the best consultants in the world, but you still have to do the work. Nothing can replace actual experience. It will make you a stronger marketer and more successful in the long term.
Apply these helpful marketing tips if you want to be truly successful. These techniques and tips are applied by successful marketers on a daily basis. The result is an ever growing success rate of marketing success.
Fivenson Studios is based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, our graphic design team specializes in logo and web page design, as well as marketing campaigns for social and print media. From flyers and brochures to targeted landing pages, we aim to bring your company into the spotlight and reach a greater range of potential customers.
As A Small-business Owner, You Barely Have Time To Develop A Website, Let Alone Master The Latest Digital Marketing Tricks. This Strategy Can Help!
Many of your potential clients will begin their search for products and services using search engines like Google and Bing. Manta’s recent millennial marketing survey found that websites and blogs make up 16% of small-business owners’ marketing to that valuable customer market.
Search engine optimization (SEO)—the technique that will keep your company website and blog at the top of search results—can be a complex process to master and maintain.
Research shows that web users are most likely to visit sites that rank high on the first page of search results. Keeping your business at the top of Google and Bing searches can result in more visitors to your website. But earning your place on that front page can be a full-time job in itself.
If you’re feeling overwhelmed, take heart. Very few small-business owners have time to sit in front of their computers all day monitoring their search rankings. Mastering a few SEO basics can help boost visits to your company website.
The first step is to know the following two things about your business:
What unique products and services do you offer customers?
What are customers looking for when they do business with you?
Spelling out these two simple points will allow you to develop authentic descriptions of your products and services for your website.
For example, Steve Ozment, co-owner of Flowerama, has a clear sense of what he wants customers to know about his flower shops. “I want them to know that we are quality and that we are value. We’re going to deliver what we say we’re going to do,” he said.
When it comes to Flowerama’s website, Ozment added, “We need to make sure we’re giving [customers] content that is not only interesting, but valuable. … We do it because these are our best customers. These are the people who follow us.”
Try the same strategy with your own website. Don’t try to “trick” search engines by stuffing too many keywords into your business description. Instead, focus on information about your offerings that Internet users and potential customers can use, along with client testimonials that describe your business’ quality services.
Because Google and Bing rely on the value of the information on business websites—not just on the number of keywords stuffed onto a web page—a company blog can help you rise in the search rankings. Some small-business owners have the marketing budget to hire a copywriter to produce blog articles. Depending on your location and the number of blog posts you want, hiring a copywriter will cost anywhere from a couple hundred to few thousand dollars.
This expense can be built into your marketing budget. Reputable digital marketers and business-listing services are well aware of the SEO value that original content will bring to your website and blog.
If you are a do-it-yourself marketer, getting your company blogs up and running is quick and simple. You may even enjoy sharing your knowledge of your industry and blogging about the business you love.
If you haven’t set up a blog already, most website services allow you to add a blog function to your existing site. Take a few minutes to map out how often you’ll be able to post blogs and what you’d like to share with your customers.
Refer back to those two questions you answered earlier, then ask yourself:
Can I spare 15 minutes a week to post a blog?
Which details about my company am I comfortable sharing? What updates about my products and services are nonproprietary and will be of interest to my customers?
What is happening in my industry that will help customers see the value in my products and services?
Remember, you don’t have to spend too much time on blog posts. Just a few paragraphs, a photo or a video posted once a week will start you on your way to better search engine placement. It’s a good idea to be consistent with your posts; a steady stream of new content will help your search ranking and keep readers coming back to learn more about your industry and business. Be sure to share your posts in your marketing emails and on your company Facebook and Twitter accounts.
If your information is helpful, other websites will link to your page, boosting your Google and Bing rankings even more. Who knows: You may even enjoy blogging about your business every week.
There are no shortcuts to boosting your Internet visibility. But developing a website with these content techniques in mind will allow you to step away from your keyboard and get back to business.
Fivenson Studios is based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, our graphic design team specializes in logo and web page design, as well as marketing campaigns for social and print media. From flyers and brochures to targeted landing pages, we aim to bring your company into the spotlight and reach a greater range of potential customers.
Every time I release a free e-book to my subscribers, I get great feedback about how awesome I am and how they could NEVER create anything so cool.
((sigh))
I have a confession to make. You see ... it is really, really simple to make a short, viral e-book. It's not rocket science, I promise.
If you know how to use Word for Windows, you can create an e-book. Now, as far as doing market research to find out if anyone will "buy" your e-book - that's a whole 'nother ball game. But, if you want to make a nice little giveaway for some viral marketing, it's easy as pie!
Step 1: Write your ebook in Word for Windows.
As you write it, keep the following in mind:
This e-book should serve a purpose, either to generate traffic to your website or to make affiliate sales. However, it should also be informative and useful to the reader. This e-book will represent your company. Make it quality.
Double check that all links are active before you save your final copy in Word.
Keep your images and pictures small, because you don't want the final product to have a large file size. When you're saving your images, test the file types. I find that saving an image in .jpg is smaller than saving it in some other file sizes. Test yours, too.
Step 2: Go to my favorite tool, http://convert.neevia.com/
See where it says "Select the file"? Browse to your Word for Windows file and click Upload and Convert
That's all there is. Like I said, EASY EASY EASY.
Now, it's your job to get your Ebook into the hands of people.
Send it to your mailing list or newsletter.
Allow your friends to give it away.
Submit it to free e-book directories.
Use it as an enticement for people to sign up for your mailing list (You can say "Sign up and receive this cool e-book - free!")
You can even give it away as a free gift to people who win your auctions on eBay to make your auction stand out from others.
So, if you'd like to have viral marketing working for you, too, get started today on your giveaway!
Fivenson Studios is based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, our graphic design team specializes in logo and web page design, as well as marketing campaigns for social and print media. From flyers and brochures to targeted landing pages, we aim to bring your company into the spotlight and reach a greater range of potential customers.
Defining Return On Investment Is As Easy As Subtracting Dollars Spent From Net Profit. If Only It Was That Simple To Measure Social Media ROI.
Calculating social impact on current and potential customers is kind of like trying to figure out if you’re having any influence on the behavior of your teenagers. You’re pretty sure they know you exist because they’ve liked you at one time or another and you see them around occasionally, but they don’t seem to be hearing you, so you find yourself always looking for new ways to deliver important messages. And just when you’ve given up and don’t expect any change in their behavior, they show up and surprise you—sometimes months or even years later.
In these days of constantly changing platform algorithms and ever-shrinking organic reach, getting a grip on the value of your social media efforts—especially if you’re not paying to play—can be frustrating. A recent Manta survey found that small business owners are evenly split on their willingness to spend dollars to promote their business on social media. And among those who do invest, nearly 60 percent report no return.
Those numbers raise a couple of questions. What exactly does that ‘R’ in ROI mean? Is it a relationship? Revenue? Return? How do you define social media ROI? What are the goals you want to measure, and how do you measure them?
Defining The ‘R’
The challenge of defining social ROI. Many people mistake the ‘R’ in ROI for revenue, and return can come in a lot of different forms. I would look at it in terms of what matters to your business, what are you looking to accomplish? Not what do you want social media to do for you, but at the end of the day, what are you hoping to achieve, what does success look like?
Once you’ve pondered and answered those questions, you can begin to look at social media to achieve goals and measure something that actually matters to your organization. Is your focus on pushing a product or improving a current product? Is it customer service? Is it increased media placement? Is it lead generation? Is it building community and connecting with current customers? Or is it the Holy Grail, acquiring new customers?
Objectives-Based Returns
Manta’s survey asked small business owners to define their primary goal for using social media. Nearly 37 percent identified acquiring and engaging new customers as their top aim, followed by driving awareness and marketing (17 percent) and gaining lead generations/referrals (15 percent). Only eight percent said building community was paramount.
Those results aren’t surprising, says Dooley, but they are perhaps a bit out of order because the content isn’t a linear path to conversion. “I actually think social media is better for maintaining or increasing touch points with current customers or people who are already in your circle versus acquiring new customers. Truthfully, especially for small businesses, your next wave of customers is going to come from people who are already connected to your current customers. That’s word-of-mouth 101.”
Social media is the digital platform for word-of-mouth marketing. Set your objective, find out which platforms your current customers prefer (ask, research the social media habits of your desired demographic), what they’re talking about, who they’re talking to and why.
“A great posture to have is to treat it like a community,” noted Dooley. “The term target audience is used a lot, and that to me is the wrong term because I think it makes it seem like the band is on stage and entertaining and sending information out to influence the audience. And it’s more complicated than that with social media. I think the posture should be more like you’re sitting in the audience in the seat next to them, and talking with them and learning from them and creating rapport and inviting them to connect with you and do business with you.”
Successful social media engagement that eventually leads to conversion is active, planned and ongoing. Listen and respond rather than sit back and observe passive one-way conversations. Dooley tells a story about a client in growth mode seeking a younger restaurant clientele. His agency suggested adding a platform to their already successful Facebook efforts, and they suspected Twitter was the right choice but did a test to confirm. They ran a Facebook contest and as part of the entry form asked entrants what another platform they used most often. Twitter was the overwhelming answer, so the next step was a platform search for brand mentions that resulted in a fine of hundreds of tweets a week. “We basically said, this is like people picking up the phone and calling your customer service and you not picking up the phone.”
Measuring Return
So you’ve planned, connected and shared your stories—now what? Social ROI calculators are easy to find, but may not account for the metrics necessary to set the stage for your particular social objectives. Dooley suggests tracking a handful of performance metrics, specifically click-through rates (Facebook). And for content, track repins, retweets and shares. Use Web analytics to look at unique visitors from social and their time on your site. “The ultimate goal is to have someone else saying this piece of content is so good that I’m going to take the time, and put my social reputation on the line for putting this content in front of my audience.”
Those nonlinear conversions that happen because you’ve created a social customer relationship over time aren’t easy to track, but your objective planning will include campaigns—coupons, promo codes, contests that you can follow and measure in dollar-for-dollar return. And then you can account for all three ‘R’s—relationship, return, and revenue.
Fivenson Studios is based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, our graphic design team specializes in logo and web page design, as well as marketing campaigns for social and print media. From flyers and brochures to targeted landing pages, we aim to bring your company into the spotlight and reach a greater range of potential customers.
FAQ pages are quickly becoming a standard convention for service firm websites. But in this article, I’d like to broaden your appreciation of a FAQ page to what I believe it really is: a high-return, low-cost marketing tool that can address a broad range of marketing, sales and service tasks.
Reasons every service firm should have a FAQ page
A FAQ helps potential buyers educate and pre qualify themselves
As visitors land on your site, some of them naturally wish to learn how your capabilities can help them. Enter the FAQ. With an eye towards creating FAQs that anticipate and answer prospects most pressing questions, you can actually move the sales dialogue along—without committing any labor to the selling process. For example, if your FAQ page features questions like "What is the profile of a best-fit client for your firm?", “What kinds of projects does your firm specialize in?” and “What do you typically charge for a project?” you can both educate and pre qualify prospects with your FAQ.
A content-rich FAQ page reduces demands on your support staff
FAQ pages evolved from a product manufacturer’s need to free up their customer service staffs from routine customer questions. By surfing a FAQ page for questions and answers, a potentially confused (thus potentially dissatisfied) customer could find the answer to their question and not burden your service staff. The same principle applies to any service firm. The easier you make it for prospects and buyers to serve themselves, the more satisfied they become working with your firm.
A FAQ acts as a great internal training device
imagine the HR director for your firm who is training a roomful of new hires. Imagine that as part of her standard orientation, she calls up your firm’s FAQ page online and walks the new recruits through each FAQ. In a matter of 20 minutes, she can educate recruits on the most fundamental marketing and service issues of your firm such as “What makes our firm different from all others in the market?” and “Who do I go to if I have a service problem?”, and as a result train a new group of marketing ambassadors.
imagine the HR director for your firm who is training a roomful of new hires. Imagine that as part of her standard orientation, she calls up your firm’s FAQ page online and walks the new recruits through each FAQ. In a matter of 20 minutes, she can educate recruits on the most fundamental marketing and service issues of your firm such as “What makes our firm different from all others in the market?” and “Who do I go to if I have a service problem?”, and as a result train a new group of marketing ambassadors.
A FAQ page can help optimize your website’s internal links
If you look at Amazon’s Investor Relations page (http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=97664&p=irol-faq ), you’ll see that not only does it provide answers to the most relevant questions, but it also provides relevant internal links back to sections of the Amazon site—in other words, Google Juice.
FAQs that answer prospect questions
Prospective clients have very different questions about your firm versus clients. Most prospect questions revolve around why they should do business with your firm. Here are some standard FAQs in this area:
Why would my organization need to hire an architectural firm (or marketing agency, or engineering firm, or consulting firm)?
What does an architectural firm (or marketing agency, or engineering firm, or consulting firm) do
How is (Your firm) different from all other firms in your industry?
What's the profile of an ideal client for (Your firm)?
What reasonable outcomes can I expect from working with (Your firm)?
Why would I choose (Your firm) over one of the larger firms?
What do you charge? How do you bill? What are your terms?
Do you guarantee your work?
What steps are necessary before we can start working together?
FAQs that answer course-of-business questions
FAQs can also be used to manage relationships with clients well after the ink has dried on the contract. Another set of FAQs should deal with the common questions clients have during the course of working on a project with your firm.
These course-of-business FAQs include:
Who is assigned to our account?
How often do we meet? Where do we meet?
What are our responsibilities during the project?
What are your responsibilities during the project?
Where do I go to get my service issues addressed?
How often will our company meet with yours during the project?
What recourse do we have to terminate a relationship once our work begins?
What options do we have to continue working with you after the project is complete?
How to find the answers to FAQs that stump you
If you don’t have all the answers to FAQs at your fingertips, you might try these avenues to find more information:
Sales and customer service field reps
Sales reports
Customer service feedback forms
Customer service phone recordings
Company chat room responses
Company blog comments.
If you can’t find enough FAQ information using these, why not take this opportunity to reach out to your clients? You could email a smattering of your best clients with an email that goes something like this:
Hi,
We at (Your firm) are developing a FAQ page for our website and are wondering if we could get your input. Would you have time to answer two brief questions?:
What were the most common questions you had about our firm before becoming a client?
What kinds of questions do you routinely ask about our firm after becoming a client?
Sincerely,
Your Name
Your Firm, Inc.
You’d be surprised how many people will actually help you when you reach out to them for help like this.
Some tips on formatting your FAQ page
In my view, FAQ’s work best when each FAQ leads off with a question. It’s now a standard convention to write FAQs this way. However, Google Reader’s FAQ page (http://www.google.com/help/reader/publishers.html) doesn’t follow this format and I find the page a bit more difficult to navigate.
If your page has just a few FAQs on it, five or less, just list the questions with the responding answer in random order on the page and let visitors scroll to find the FAQ they’re looking for. But if your firm has more than five FAQ’s, start off with a “table of contents” that lists all the questions in a hyperlink format. Then, after the visitor clicks on the question they want answered, they dynamically jump to the answer further down on the page.
For those pages with multiple FAQs, consider sequencing your FAQs. Chronologically sequencing your FAQs means that the first FAQs would deal with prospect questions they want answered before doing business with you. The next section of FAQ’s would cover the stage of signing a contract with your firm. And the last section might deal with common post-sale FAQs.
When writing the FAQs themselves, I’ve found that formatting the questions differently from the answers (e.g. italicizing the question and using a standard font for the answer) is a handy way for the reader to distinguish between the two parts of every FAQ.
Categorizing a whole bunch of FAQs
When you arrive at the IRS’s FAQ page (http://www.irs.gov/faqs/index.html), you’re confronted with hundreds of frequently asked questions (I have about a hundred myself). How do they organize and categorize all these FAQs? Quite well, I think. They group their hundreds of FAQs by category, subcategory and even by keyword.
Another service organization, the U.S. Copyright Office, sorts all its FAQs by major subheading http://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/ . So, if you have a question about registering your work, you scroll down to the heading marked “Registering a Work”. Then under that heading you’ll find over 15 specific FAQs including “How do I register my copyright?”, “Where can I get application forms?” and “Can I file online?”
One thing I’d like to see more on FAQ pages is a question at the very end of the FAQ page that says “Didn’t find the FAQ you were looking for? Email us and we’ll consider adding it”. In this age of Web 2.0 why not reach out to your market and seeks its opinion?
Henry Kissinger once said, “Any fact that needs to be disclosed should be put out now because otherwise, the bleeding will not end.” I’d like to alter that slightly to read “Any FAQ should be put out now so the buying can begin”. If you’re like most service firms I work with, you struggle every day to generate marketing tools that are low cost, high ROI: ones that move a buyer to a sale, and keep current clients by strengthening the relationship. Consider adding a FAQ page to your marketing toolkit because it can do all this and more.
Fivenson Studios is based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, our graphic design team specializes in logo and web page design, as well as marketing campaigns for social and print media. From flyers and brochures to targeted landing pages, we aim to bring your company into the spotlight and reach a greater range of potential customers.
As I continue to work with companies seeking to improve the return of their online marketing dollars, I’ve gained a new appreciation for the marriage of search engine marketing and search engine optimization.
Just a like a company’s house list, the information they gather from their own PPC campaigns can provide a significant boost to the effectiveness of their search engine optimization efforts. The key is to know what information you’re looking for and how to use it to generate qualified visitors to your website.
Qualified visitors are those that have a higher degree of interest in your products or services and a greater likelihood of purchasing your products. I’ve often seen websites that have reduced their traffic while significantly improving conversion rates. The result is lower costs related to traffic acquisition and higher revenue. With more revenue and less expense, margins reach a new level of success.
The concept that I teach in SEO training is the most effective way to combine pay-per-click advertising with search engine optimization is to focus on conversions. What keywords have you promoted through pay per click advertising that led to conversions? If you’ve been running PPC for a while and you are still unsure, then consider expanding your analytics to include Google conversion tracking.
Once you have the answer and know which terms produce the greatest conversions, regardless of ad variation, then you SEO keywords have been determined. You want to generate organic traffic to the same keywords you’re promoting through PPC as long as they are generating your highest conversions.
An example of this might be someone promoting an e-book on how to fix a car. If the highest converting keyword is, “car repair”, then you should consider car repair as a keyword phrase you must optimize for. Organic traffic to this term will produce targeted website visitors and conversions for little or no money as you improve your rankings.
The last piece is to take your highest converting landing pages and build in some or all of the elements into your website. Once you’ve tracking and optimized landing pages via PPC, you can duplicate what you’ve learned from a conversion perspective organically. Consider applying the landing page elements that have generated the highest return for you on your pay-per-click advertising.
Whether you’re new to SEO or consider yourself a search engine optimization expert, leveraging your pay-per-click advertising is the best investment you can make. Determine which keywords generate the type of traffic that is most valuable to you and optimize around these terms. They will generate more traffic and revenue at a lower cost.
Fivenson Studios is based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, our graphic design team specializes in logo and web page design, as well as marketing campaigns for social and print media. From flyers and brochures to targeted landing pages, we aim to bring your company into the spotlight and reach a greater range of potential customers.
