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How to Grow Your Small Business with Data: 4 Practical Tips

It doesn’t matter if you’re a new company looking for a strong start or a town staple looking to break bad habits, you can always improve and grow your small business. For some, that might mean entering new markets. For others, it may mean creating deeper engagements with existing customers.

Throughout this guide, we’ll look at four effective ways to use data to improve your small business practices to increase new and existing customer engagement and satisfaction. You’ll take both practical behind-the-scenes and public-facing steps to:

  1. Get organized.
  2. Pinpoint your ideal customers.
  3. Work across channels.
  4. Offer incentives.

Before you initiate any changes, however, we suggest that you define your exact needs and goals—both short and long term—and how you will measure your success in addressing them. Make sure to put this down on paper! Your answers will determine the extent to which you’ll want to focus on each suggestion.

Ultimately, making these changes to your small business practices will help improve your bottom line. Let’s dive in!

1. Get organized.

For your business to make any progress, you must be organized across multiple levels of your operations. While you will likely always face setbacks and hiccups, systemic organization will make the difference between success and failure. Focus your organization efforts around two primary places: your customer database and your inventory management system.

Customer Database

Data hygiene has nothing to do with scrubbing your data’s ears. Rather, it is the ongoing process involved in maintaining clean data that is complete and error-free. all of the ongoing processes involved in guaranteeing data is clean … and error-free.”

You rely on your customer database to make important decisions, personalize customer communications, and generate leads. Databases that contain many errors (whether inaccurate, duplicated, incomplete, or outdated data) can induce huge losses for your business. Take the following steps to clean your business’ data:

  • Audit your customer database’s health. What areas of your database contain the most inaccuracies or inconsistencies? What data is missing that could help you make better decisions?
  • Remove dirty data. Once you’ve identified the areas of your database in need of remediation, remove inaccurate entries, non-verifiable entries, outdated entries, and duplicate entries. This allows you to move forward with only correct customer information, such as names and addresses. Addressing your customers with the right title and name will make them more likely to purchase from and trust your brand
  • Standardize your data fields. Ensure that all of your addresses, numbers, titles, and dates are written in a standard form. For example, a simple inconsistency in how birthdays are entered (DD/MM/YYYY vs. MM/DD/YYYY) could result in major misinterpretations of your customer base demographics.
  • Create data-management processes. Looking forward, develop procedures for how staff should collect and store new data. If you have customer-facing forms, such as an account registration form, avoid introducing new errors by providing clear instructions and using conditional logic to trigger different questions depending on individual responses.

If you want to organize your business’s consumer data, but feel uncomfortable diving into the deep waters of data hygiene, consider hiring experts to lead the way. Professional consultants have the necessary training and experience in creating data hygiene procedures, cleaning, organizing, and analyzing data into valuable reports, as well as developing and implementing a data marketing strategy.

Inventory Management System

For small businesses that sell a wide range of products, inventory management can be a time-consuming headache. Luckily, there are modern, tech-driven solutions. Inventory management software, for example, can help save you time and avoid the errors of a manual, pen and paper inventory system.

But you’ll need to be careful in which software you choose. An awkward, one-size-fits-all system will lead to inaccurate item counts and stocking errors that can bring down your business.  When deciding on the best inventory management software for your business, consider testimonials from similar businesses, industry-specific benefits, and the provider’s industry expertise.

For example, a grocery store would want to use inventory management tools (including multi-store management, barcode scanner/printer integration, and automatic reordering) that were made with supermarkets in mind.

Ultimately, the tools you choose should make your life easier and more organized—not more difficult and chaotic.

2. Pinpoint your ideal customers.

Since customer retention can boost a business’ profitability, customer retention makes a huge difference for a business’s success. However, if you’re targeting the wrong customers, you’re likely to have high customer churn and a correspondingly low retention rate. You’re not necessarily treating them poorly—you’re probably offering great service—but they’re simply not the right fit for your business.

Instead of trying to guess who your customers are, use a combination of your in-house and third-party data to develop informed customer personas for your business’s ideal customer profiles—the ones that are most likely to become long-term patrons. Follow these three steps to build your personas:

  1. Segment. Using various data combinations, filter your customers into smaller categories. Pay particular attention to customer age, political affiliation, household income, education, religion, online activity, and purchase history.
  2. Analyze. Identify patterns, correlations, and trends among the resulting segments. For example, you might want to know where your highest paying customers live, the products they buy, and the best way to reach them.
  3. Create. Use the information you’ve gathered to draft your personas as if describing an actual customer. Bring each persona to life by giving them a name and fleshing out their motivations, interests, and how your business can help them.

Using the resulting personas will yield more targeted sales, reduced marketing costs, thoughtful product decisions, and improved alignment across your organization.

3. Work across channels.

You can use your customer profiles in your outreach and marketing efforts. Because you likely have several different high-priority customer personas, you’ll want to address the individual needs and priorities of each specific group. Moreover, different customers will be receptive to different modes and marketing tactics. Appending data can help you identify how to best approach your audience. To convert most customers, you should plan to facilitate multiple interactions with your business across a variety of channels, such as:

  • Direct mail
  • Email
  • Phone
  • Digital ads
  • Social media

As your business and target markets grow and change, you’ll need to adjust your marketing and sales plans accordingly. Especially in today’s rapidly changing digital environment, trends quickly come and go and social platforms appear and disappear. Rather than seeing these changes as setbacks, view them as opportunities to try new approaches and grow in different, unexpected directions.

4. Offer incentives.

Customers want to feel valued by your business. Offering loyalty programs rewards regular, high-value customer spending. Your incentives will depend on your target audience. But they will likely include a combination of the following:

  • Loyalty promotion programs.
  • Free samples.
  • Seasonal sales and discounts.
  • Free events, classes, and workshops.

Take a page from Tip #3 and make these customer incentives available across channels—both in-person and online.

And remember, incentives aren’t just for customers. To acquire and retain the best staff, Double the Donation recommends using incentives to better engage your employees. You can:

  • Create opportunities (such as donation matching, volunteer grants, and company volunteer days) for employees to support the community.
  • Set up an employee recognition or loyalty program that highlights and celebrates employee achievements.
  • Facilitate social events (such as holiday parties or team outings) to create an environment where employees feel like they can bring their whole selves to work.

While it’s tempting to jump into the incentive game, the best incentives are developed in conjunction with recipients. Survey your employees and your customers to understand exactly how they’d like to be appreciated.

Stopping here, however, is doing a disservice to your business’ success, and putting its future existence in peril. In order to avoid an untimely end and make the best-informed decisions for your business, you’ll need to continue to track, update, and analyze your data.

In fact, the most successful businesses are those that prioritize data across their entire operations: from inventory to sales to customer and employee retention. For example, according to AccuData’s guide to data marketing, businesses with data-driven campaigns see an average of five times return on investment. Instead of relying on one source of information, use a variety of tools, including a POS system and data enhancement services, to collect and leverage the perfect combination of in-house and third-party data in your business’ growth.

Author: Gabrielle Perham, MBA, Director of Marketing

Gabrielle is the Director of Marketing & Sales Operations for Deep Sync and its family of brands: Compact Information Systems, HomeData, AccuData Integrated Marketing, AlumniFinder, ASL Marketing, CollegeBound Selection Service, and DeepSync Labs. She joined the organization in 2017 and possesses more than 15 years of experience in strategic marketing, branding, communications, and digital marketing. She earned a B.S. in Marketing and an M.B.A in Marketing Management from the University of Tampa.

The post How to Grow Your Small Business with Data: 4 Practical Tips appeared first on Marketing Insider Group.

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Get Your Content Engine Running Before Hiring A Fractional CMO

arketing insider group shares why marketers should consider content marketing before hiring a fractional CMO

Have you considered hiring a fractional CMO because your small business can’t afford a full-time marketing executive? Fractional CMOs have become increasingly popular in recent years, and can provide many of the same benefits as a full-time CMO without a long-term commitment.

But before you pull the trigger, consider starting up your content engine. Hiring a content marketing agency will not only reserve some of your marketing budget, but also deliver a marketing strategy that’s backed by data and guaranteed to succeed.

Quick Takeaways

  • The fractional model emerged over 20 years ago once companies realized they could hire on-demand executives on a contracted basis
  • A lack of trust between CEOs and CMOs, and a rise in popularity of the gig economy has caused a dramatic rise in popularity for hiring fractional CMOs
  • About 60% of marketers create at least one piece of shareable content per day
  • Hiring a content marketing agency ensures consistent content, use SEO-backed data, regular delivery of performance reports and a maximized budget

Not every SMB needs a fractional CMO. Here’s what you need to know about trending fractional CMOs and why a content marketing agency may be a better fit for your business.

What Is A Fractional CMO?

A fractional CMO is an on-demand, part-time chief marketing officer. Their expertise is outsourced to play the role of a full-time CMO, without any in-house commitment. They are responsible for mentoring the marketing team through specific tasks, such as:

  • Defining a marketing strategy
  • Driving traffic and sales growth
  • Improving digital presence
  • Managing content
  • Reporting on marketing results

Many small to midsize businesses, or SMBs, can’t afford to hire a full-time CMO. Instead, they opt for a fractional hire to free up their marketing budget. In-house CMOs make approximately $211K/year, whereas fractional CMOs only make about $130K/year.

What’s Next?

Fractional leadership isn’t a new concept. In fact, the fractional model was born over 20 years ago once companies realized they could utilize on-demand finance executives on a contracted basis.

In more recent years, research has shown a lack of trust between CEOs and CMOs, in addition to the rise in popularity of the gig economy. This explains the dramatic rise of traffic growth for fractional CMOs.

rise in traffic growth for fractional CMOs

Source: Google Trends

A growing number of companies now list open positions for part-time, virtual or fractional executives. Additionally, premium talent marketplaces, like Toptal and Catalant, are supporting this trend by high-end remote talent easily accessible to companies.

Clearly, the trending fractional CMO market is seeing rapid growth. If you’re thinking about jumping on the bandwagon, it’s essential to first understand whether or not your business is the right fit.

Who Needs A Fractional CMO?

An in-house chief marketing officer holds more responsibility, whereas fractional CMOs only work with your business enough to offer honest feedback, guidance, and training.

Fractional CMOs are mostly beneficial when a company:

  • Needs a CMO, but can’t afford full-time leadership
  • Needs help running campaigns identified by an in-house CMO
  • Doesn’t need full-time leadership due to a simple marketing strategy

To learn more about whether your business can benefit from hiring a fractional CMO, enjoy the short video below.

Video Source: CMOwashere

Although hiring a fractional CMO sounds like a financially responsible option, you may not need one at all. Other options, such as hiring a content marketing agency, can be more affordable and beneficial to your company.

Why Prioritize Content Creation Before Hiring A Fractional CMO?

Content creation is the epitome of marketing best practices. In fact, 60% of marketers create at least one piece of shareable content per day.

By prioritizing the creation of high quality content, you can drive traffic to your website, maximize engagement and increase customer retention– without adding another employee to the payroll.

Before hiring a fractional CMO, consider turning your budget into working dollars and spending it on content marketing. Doing so provides a number of benefits, such as brand awareness, educated audiences and increased credibility in your community.

bar graph shows how marketers are using content marketing to provide benefits to their businesses

Image Source: Visme

One of the most effective ways to master content marketing is by hiring an agency to help your business succeed. Not only do content marketing agencies create an effective strategy, but they also:

  • Provide Consistent Content. Two of the most important factors in driving traffic to your website are frequency and consistency. Hiring a content marketing agency guarantees you can share high quality content consistently.
  • Use SEO Data. Google’s algorithm is looking for content that both uses keywords and provides genuine value to human readers. Content marketing agencies have a team of SEO experts that help deliver content that meets the high standards of SERPs.
  • Share Performance Reports. Measuring the effectiveness of your marketing efforts is key to growing your business. Content marketing agencies demonstrate their value by sharing performance reports that prove success.
  • Help You Save Money. When you’re choosing between filling an in-house leadership position and hiring a content marketing agency, the latter is guaranteed to maximize your budget. Paying salaries and benefits required by in-house employees is much more costly than working with an agency’s team of content marketing experts.

By focusing your budget on content creation, you can answer the questions of your audience with high quality content. Doing so creates a valuable customer experience, ultimately encouraging both engagement and conversions.

Get Your Content Engine Running Today!

Before you hire a fraction CMO to define your marketing strategy, consider Marketing Insider Group. Our team is full of content strategists, professional writers and SEO experts who will build and execute a marketing strategy that delivers success.

Learn more about how Marketing Insider Group can help grow your business today by checking out our SEO Blog Writing service now, or schedule a quick consultation today!

The post Get Your Content Engine Running Before Hiring A Fractional CMO appeared first on Marketing Insider Group.

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5 Tips to Establish a Niche Small Business in the Community

Here are five expert tips to help establish your niche business in the community.

Starting a niche small business, whether it’s a hip-hop/ballet fusion dance studio, gluten-free bakery, or vintage thrift store, is no small feat.

You have to jump through hoops to set up your business entity, find a location, and hire employees. On top of that, you have to raise awareness of your business and generate traffic within your local community.

Establishing a niche business comes with unique challenges, especially if many of your potential customers aren’t familiar with the types of products and services you offer. However, there are plenty of ways to get the word out and turn your business into a community staple. We’ll cover five top tips in this post.

Quick Takeaways: 

  1. Host free events.
  2. Create an SEO strategy.
  3. Adopt a targeted ad strategy. 
  4. Get involved in philanthropy.
  5. Be personable on social media. 

Your niche small business provides a distinctive service or product to your local community, enriching the local business landscape. These strategies will allow you to hit the ground running and build a loyal customer base.

1. Host free events.

Making your business an inviting, welcoming place will help you earn new customers and make a name for yourself in the community. One way to invite community members to check out what you have to offer is by hosting free events.

Free events offer a casual, no-pressure opportunity for community members to learn more about your business and get to know your staff. Consider hosting events like:

  • Workshops/classes. Show the value your business brings to the community by offering free educational workshops or classes. Host a dance class, cooking tutorial, paint night, dog obedience class, or wine tasting.
  • Open houses. Open your business to the public to host a tour of your facilities, complete with free snacks, drinks, and coupons or discount books.
  • Online events. Allow potential new customers to tune in to an event from their homes, such as a virtual yoga class, cooking class, or a Q&A with a local author.

During these events, let attendees know about the niche products and services you have and the benefits of these offerings. When you create a positive experience for attendees, they’ll be much more likely to visit your business again in the future.

2. Create an SEO strategy.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of designing your website to appeal to both visitors and search engines alike. When your business’s website is user-friendly, informative, and engaging, it will improve your performance in search rankings, meaning your website will appear higher on search results pages.

Keep these tips in mind when creating your SEO approach:

  • Create high-quality content targeted to your main audience. Your content is the driving force behind your SEO strategy. Search engines prioritize content that is authoritative and meets users’ search intent. Write informative blog posts related to your business’s services, events, or any research you’ve conducted.
  • Leverage local SEO. Google’s algorithm takes proximity into account for certain types of searches. For example, if you were to search “local Mexican restaurants” or “pet boutiques near me,” you’ll likely see a variety of local businesses that offer what you’re looking for. Local SEO involves optimizing your content to increase your visibility in local search results, including the Google Local Pack/Map Pack. To improve your local SEO performance, your content should be relevant to local issues and audiences.
  • Optimize your metadata. Don’t forget about the technical aspects of SEO as well. This means incorporating keywords into posts, creating concise, informative meta descriptions and meta titles, and including alternative text for images.

Adopting an SEO strategy, especially a local SEO approach, can help establish your small business in the digital sphere. You can draw in potential new customers with educational content that helps them easily find the information or services they’re looking for.

3. Adopt a targeted ad strategy.

Targeted advertising allows you to boost your marketing ROI by reaching your target audience members directly.

One of the most effective forms of targeted advertising is geofencing. Geofencing marketing involves digitally connecting with target audience members who are within a specific geographic boundary. After drawing the boundary, you can serve audience members digital ads on their laptops, tablets, and mobile devices.

Here’s how the process works:

  • Create your address list. Depending on the audience you want to reach, your list might include addresses for homes, other businesses, conferences, concerts, sporting events, trade shows, or universities.
  • Design effective ads. Create engaging, visually appealing ads to use during your targeted ad campaign. The ads should lead audience members to a useful landing page, like your business’s homepage or online store.
  • Track your progress. Track metrics such as your ad impressions, click-through rate, and conversion rate. Note any successes or failures in your strategy and adjust your plan accordingly.

Geofencing marketing allows you to focus your marketing efforts rather than taking a “throw things at the wall and see what sticks” approach. You’ll know that you’re directly reaching people who live and work within close proximity of your business.

4. Get involved in philanthropy.

Giving back to the community helps establish your business as trustworthy and responsible. Studies have shown that half of Americans would switch to support a company that supports a cause they believe in over one that doesn’t.

Also, consumers and employees want to have a say in your business’s charitable efforts. 84% of consumers and 85% of employees say that the more a business engages its customers and employees in charitable giving decisions, the more trust consumers have in the business.

Here are some examples of the benefits of getting your niche small business involved in philanthropic activities. 

Your business can offer a variety of philanthropic opportunities for customers and employees, including:

  • Employee volunteer opportunities and volunteer grants
  • Percentage nights or fundraisers for local nonprofits
  • In-kind donations to local charities
  • Pro-bono services

As you promote these opportunities, you can connect with a local audience that’s specifically interested in philanthropy. Community members will feel good about supporting your business when you support charities in your area.

5. Be personable on social media.

Social media is an effective channel for introducing potential new customers to your brand’s personality. On social media, you can interact with community members while promoting your business’s products and services.

Social media users seek authenticity from the accounts they follow. They don’t want to feel like they’re talking to a business—they want to interact with a real person.

For instance, let’s say you’re promoting your new dance business on your Instagram account. To give followers an inside look at your studio, you can let one of your dance teachers do an “Instagram takeover” where they use your account to post video updates throughout their day. This gives a face to your business and makes your social media presence feel much more friendly and approachable.

It’s also important to keep your audience in mind when creating social media content. Every social media platform has its own unique audience and appeals to different demographics. This infographic explores top social media platforms and the core audiences on each platform:

Here are popular <a href=social media platforms and the audiences they appeal to. ” width=”710″ height=”215″ srcset=”https://marketinginsidergroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Dance-Studio-Marketing_Social-Media-Preferences-1.png 710w, https://marketinginsidergroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Dance-Studio-Marketing_Social-Media-Preferences-1-300×91.png 300w, https://marketinginsidergroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Dance-Studio-Marketing_Social-Media-Preferences-1-150×45.png 150w” sizes=”(max-width: 710px) 100vw, 710px” />

Creating content that resonates with each specific audience will boost engagement. For example, you might reach a younger audience on TikTok by participating in video trends, while posting photos and written content on Facebook can help you reach older generations.

In addition to your organic social media efforts, consider launching a paid social media campaign. Similar to geofencing, paid social media ads allow you to advertise to a specific target audience, even if they aren’t following your page. Using both strategies together can greatly boost your online brand visibility and awareness.

Establishing your niche small business in your local community won’t happen overnight. However, with these marketing and outreach strategies, you can foster brand awareness faster, turning your business into a go-to spot for local customers.

Tiffany Bellah has been involved in the dance world at many levels – as a dancer, a dance mom, a studio manager, a virtual assistant to studio owners and now as the Customer Service Manager for Dance Studio Pro. She is the mother of 4 and lives in Southern California where she enjoys working remotely to support the users of the World’s Best Dance Studio Software.

A decade ago, when her girls wanted to dance competitively she went to the studio owner to offer her skills in administration and knack for setting up and managing apps that would make that Studio Owner’s life easier.

After researching all the options, she discovered DSP and became an expert user – fast forward to the present, she has been with the company for a year and a half, and she is thrilled to be a part of the constant improvements in technology that help us all connect around the art of dance.

The post 5 Tips to Establish a Niche Small Business in the Community appeared first on Marketing Insider Group.

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Helping Entrepreneurs Get To Where They Want To Go Faster

Helping Entrepreneurs Get To Where They Want To Go Faster written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with Carolyn Rodz

Carolyn Rodz, guest on the Duct Tape Marketing PodcastIn this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interview Carolyn Rodz. Carolyn serves as the co-founder and CEO of Hello Alice. Hello Alice is a free, data-driven, and multichannel platform helping small business owners on their entrepreneurial journey by providing access to relevant funding networks and technical assistance tools while increasing owner success rates. Elizabeth Gore and Carolyn launched Hello Alice with the goal of helping entrepreneurs thrive with access to funding, resources, mentorship, and more.

Key Takeaway:

As a business owner, how do you find the right resources at the right time? Carolyn Rodz co-founded a free digital platform that connects business owners with the resources they need to launch and grow. In this episode, we talk about how HelloAlice helps small business owners on their entrepreneurial journey by providing access to relevant funding networks and technical assistance tools along the way.

Questions I ask Carolyn Rodz:

  • [1:30] Could you give us the background of how this Hello Alice came to be?
  • [2:20] Why the Lewis Carroll reference?
  • [2:59] What’s your history like and what brought you to decide that you were going to do this?
  • [4:30] Did you have an aha moment where you knew where you needed to start or how was the business born?
  • [5:13] What’s been the biggest challenge?
  • [6:09] Do you refer to yourself as a marketplace almost or more of a membership organization?
  • [7:03] What’s been the most rewarding thing to date?
  • [8:31] Can you describe what the typical member looks like?
  • [9:19] Is there an equity emphasis?
  • [11:06] How do networking and peer-to-peer connection play out in what is kind of a technology platform?
  • [12:50] So how does the process work for businesses who want to join Hello Alice?
  • [13:37] How does Hello Alice make money if joining is free?
  • [14:39] Is there an art to getting a grant?
  • [16:24] What type of networking have you found the community responds to?
  • [18:16] Why do members stick around if they choose to stick around?
  • [19:40] Have you seen a maturity of a business through this?
  • [20:44] Where can people learn more about Hello Alice and connect with you?

More About Carolyn Rodz:

  • HelloAlice.com
  • Follow HelloAlice on Twitter
  • Follow Carolyn on Twitter

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John Jantsch (00:00): This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Marketing Against the Grain, hosted by Kip Bodner. And Keion Flanigan is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Look, if you wanna know what’s happening now in marketing, what’s ahead and how you can stay ahead of the game, this is the podcast for you, host and HubSpot’s, CMO and SVP of Marketing. Kip and Keion share their marketing expertise unfiltered in the details, the truth, and like nobody tells it. In fact, a recent episode, they titled Half Baked Marketing Ideas They Got Down In the Weeds, talked about some outside of the box campaigns with real businesses. Listen to marketing, its grain wherever you get your podcasts.

(00:55): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guest today is Carolyn Rods. She serves as the co-founder and CEO of Hello Alice. Hello, Alice is a free data driven and multi-channel platform helping small business owners on their entrepreneurial journey by providing access to relevant funding networks and technical assistance tools while creating owner success rate, increasing owner success rates would be a better way to say that. So Caroline, welcome to the show.

Carolyn Rodz (01:26): Thank you. Thanks John for having me. One of my favorite topics to talk about.

John Jantsch (01:31): All right, well, so I guess let’s just start with the history of Hello Alice, and I know you hit a pretty important milestone that you might want to share as well in terms of membership. So give us just the background of how this, uh, Hello Alice came to be.

Carolyn Rodz (01:45): Yeah, hello. Alice started back in 2017. I always say is the answer to what I wish I would’ve had when I started my very first company as a small business owners many years ago. But the plan was really how do we help connect business owners to the right resources at the right time based on where they are in their journey, all based on who they are as a person and the type of company that they’re trying to grow. And we’ve continued to do that ever since, helping to bridge them through the capital that they need along that journey, and then surfacing all of the right opportunities and resources and learning experiences to help them deploy that capital in meaningful

John Jantsch (02:20): Ways. And why the Lewis Carroll reference?

Carolyn Rodz (02:22): Yeah, when Elizabeth and I were starting this company, we started it with young kids in our homes. We were actually living together. I moved my family in with hers. We were out in, in the North Bay as we built the first iteration. And we happened to be reading the story of Alice in Wonderland to our kids. And we realized there were so many similarities between this entrepreneurial journey of all these unknowns. And sometimes you feel big and sometimes you feel small. And it’s this crazy journey for everybody. And thus the Hello Alice.

John Jantsch (02:51): It’s funny, the, you know, my company is called Duct Tape Marketing. And it’s similar sort of metaphor, you know, like what it’s like to be, you know, to start a business. What’s your history like? What brought you to deciding I’m gonna do this thing?

Carolyn Rodz (03:04): So I started out actually my career as an investment banker and jumped into entrepreneurship quite blindly. I had been exposed to it a lot as a child. My grandparents ran a very large cookie and bread factory in Bolivia. My dad was an entrepreneur and I started my first company but really struggled with cash flow management. I struggled with inventory management. There were so many pieces of the actual business side that I just didn’t understand. And I ultimately ended up closing that company. It was in the retail space. After a couple of years, I then started a second business in the digital media space. And I grew that with everything that I had learned from that failed experience in really leveraging my network the second time around and asking for a ton of help along the way where I knew, I knew, at least at that point, I knew what I didn’t know.

(03:54): And I grew that company slowly and steadily over about seven years and then sold it. And it was really at that point I started mentoring and supporting others. I then met Elizabeth along that journey and she was coming from this background with the working for the United Nations, leading their global entrepreneur council. She had this big macro view of what entrepreneurship really could do for a global economy. I saw a very micro view as an individual business owner, what the impact would be. And when we brought that together, we just saw this huge opportunity to help both individuals and to help the world at large.

John Jantsch (04:30): Yeah, I mean, did you have that like idea, uh, aha, you know, it’s like this is what we need to start, Or was it really more the mentoring turned into somebody asking for help and you figured out how to get them that help and the business was born or

Carolyn Rodz (04:43): Definitely the latter. And I think often the greatest businesses start when you just keep seeing this need like glaring in front of you. I had just had my first child, I was ready to take a break. I’d sold my business like I was burnt out on entrepreneurship to be honest. I was ready to take it slow and slowly instead it just, it kept coming up and it kept coming up and I kept seeing this need. Um, and then, you know, I, once I met Elizabeth that was like, All right, this is, let’s do this. Like we can’t not because nobody else is doing it,

John Jantsch (05:13): So. So what’s been the biggest challenge so far?

Carolyn Rodz (05:17): It’s changed a little bit along the way, but I would say early days it was certainly access to capital, like many of the business owners that we support. And probably not surprising to you since you talked to a lot of entrepreneurs raising money was really difficult. We are not a cookie cutter tech company. We never have. We’ve been this blend of community and a technology platform and we’d often get bucketed very much into one or the other. And so it was really hard for us to get traction. We had some people that just bet on us early on. Now I would say it’s really, you know, as our team has grown, it’s just making sure that we’re focusing on the right thing. We have, this is a rare business and that there’s a lot of opportunity thrown at us and a lot of things that we can be doing. But always really challenging ourselves to stay as focused as possible so we can keep a growing team all moving in sync in the right direction.

John Jantsch (06:09): I mean, do you think of yourself or refer to yourself as a marketplace almost or more of a membership organization?

Carolyn Rodz (06:16): You know, I would say at our core, we’re community, A community above all else. We always say if we can’t, you know, keep that real sort of human to human component, we’ve sort of, we’ll, we’ll lose our way at the end of the day. We have to have trust. I think what’s made our company so strong is this fierce loyalty. However, it is all tech driven, right? And so it’s how do we kind of layer technology to support the community in meaningful ways? And in that sense, it is a marketplace, right? We have, we’re a place where you can come to find the right loan for your business, you can get the best credit card for your company. So there IT solutions and discounts and grant opportunities. So there certainly is that marketplace component. Yeah. But all of it is really driven by having a solid understanding of who are we actually serving as an individual, not as a conglomerate.

John Jantsch (07:04): So I asked you the challenging part, what’s been, now, you know, I mentioned a milestone of over a million. Do you call ’em members or

Carolyn Rodz (07:11): We do, yes. Okay. We were refer of ’em as owners, but we never say users on our purpose. So we remember like the big journey everybody’s on.

John Jantsch (07:18): All right, so million owners. So what’s been the most rewarding to date?

Carolyn Rodz (07:21): Oh my gosh. You know, I think this is the coolest job in the world because the second I feel like I’m starting to get worn down or anybody on our team and we’ve been going like, we’ve been working so hard, it’s like at that moment we hear these incredibly inspiring stories. But you know, one comes to mind of Jessica’s balding, the owner of Harlem Chocolate Factory, who has gotten over $120,000 of grants from our platform. She’s gone through, you know, learning and educational experiences really. Like there’s these businesses that we just helped get through Covid that would’ve never otherwise, you know, made it necessarily, and not because of like, you know, we were some like magic band-aid for them. But just surfacing the opportunity, opening the door for them to put the work in to go get the solutions that they needed. That to me is the most rewarding part. Cause I’ve been there, I’ve closed my doors on a company and I know how incredibly exhausting it is when you’re in, you know, right at that precipice of are you gonna make it or not? And to know that we were, the small part of helping somebody make it is, it’s like a very emotional connection for me with our community.

John Jantsch (08:31): I imagine there’s a little celebrating that goes on when people hit some sort of milestone in part of the community. What’s a typical member owner, typical member owner? I mean, is it a startup or is it somebody trying to scale or is it just everything And

Carolyn Rodz (08:45): We’re very traditional main street small businesses. Yeah. So everything from a retail operation to, you know, a dry cleaner on the corner to a consultant, it’s really typically most of our business owners are less than 10 employees. Mm. They’re, we always say small and growing businesses. They’re, they’re businesses with very big goals and ambition. And there are business owners that work incredibly hard every day, but they’re in the early stages of growth and really need that guidance to unblock those big initial hurdles.

John Jantsch (09:19): Is there, uh, an equity emphasis, I mean, obviously give people access to capital that maybe traditionally are just not getting access to capital?

Carolyn Rodz (09:29): Yes. We have a lot of really cool initiatives in place. We are working on a, an equitable access to credit fund where we’re starting to unlock capital, really utilizing grant funds. We’ve deployed over 20 million in grants over the years where we’re starting to utilize those grant funds now to actually de-risk some credit for these owners so we can start to get them into sort of mainstream opportunity. Our goal is always how do we bridge that gap from their first credit card, their first loan that they need to walk into a bank and have the power of choice that many entrepreneurs have the luxury of starting with. But the reality is the majority don’t. That’s the piece that we focus on and we’ve gotten to partner with banks and corporations and incredible companies and foundations that are doing great work out there to be that bridge between the resources they have and the business owner needs.

John Jantsch (10:18): And a word from a sponsor, Hey look, if you’re still using Dropbox or Google Drive to store your images and videos, listen up. Well those are fine for storing docs and sheets. They’re not so great for marketers needing to store organized share and collaborate on visual assets Air’s Intuitive UI is purpose-built for visual assets, find files faster with visual search and AI auto tagging, share files, securely fast track projects and feedback teams at Google Sweet Green, the infatuation in more are saving 10 plus hours a week using Air. Air is the leading platform for marketing teams to manage and automate their creative operations. Learn more at Air.inc/ducttape. That’s air.inc/ducttape.

(11:06): So we’ve talked a little bit about the funding aspect of the loans, the grants, but there’s also a networking like peer-to-peer connecting, you know, teaching knowledge. I mean, how does that aspect play out in, in what is kind of a technology platform?

Carolyn Rodz (11:20): Yes. So we have a bunch of learning opportunities for us it’s always, capital is wonderful and it’s a piece of the solution, right? But the reality is most business owners aren’t even ready for that. You know, they’re not ready for venture capital, they’re not necessarily ready for that first loan. They’re looking for that initial traction to open the door. So we have a lot of programs. We have our Boost Camp experience that’s coming up in January as an example, which is a mini accelerator. It’s a three day accelerator that brings owners through how do you grow revenues. And it takes them through a series of automated guides that are very dynamic. We bring in incredible speakers that, that come and share their expertise and then they’re carried through this online experience that continues into perpetuity. So it helps ’em to build their plan and build that foundation, but then they go through tracks inside the hello s platform that are carrying through the details each of our how-to guides.

(12:09): It’s very dynamic. So we’re asking questions along the way as that business owner answers that we’re learning more about them and putting them on a path that’s really tailored to their needs. So the solution that you’ll get recommended for you in your business is very different than the solution that I’m gonna see for my business at the end of the day. And everything that we’re pushing to those owners is really tailored to their own, their own unique needs. Cuz as you know, all of our journeys are so different and to put a cookie cutter approach just doesn’t work. But we’re also learning what’s working for entrepreneurs and for certain segments of entrepreneurs and how do we help guide people on those paths that are actually opening doors and actually showing increased revenues and actually showing improved opportunities for funding.

John Jantsch (12:50): So how does the process work? I mean, how does a business come to you and say, Oh, I listen, I listen to John’s podcast and I wanna join Hello s how’s that happen?

Carolyn Rodz (12:58): Yeah, it’s totally free. So you just go to hello s.com, you can sign up for free, you’ll go through just a really quick onboarding experience where we’ll ask some basic questions about your business and from there you’ll get recommended opportunities that’ll help your company grow. So it’s everything from a grant that you should be aware of and we really take into account who you are as a business owner. If you’re a black female business owner working in manufacturing, here’s the right recommendations for you. If you are, you know, a veteran, you know, working in tech in Arizona, you’re gonna get different recommendations based on where you live, based on the industry that you’re working on.

John Jantsch (13:38): So you said the mo the the adjoining aspect is free. So the sort of the logical entrepreneurial question for me is what is the hell, How do we make money? Business model

Carolyn Rodz (13:48): , people ask us it all the time. We make money in a variety of ways. One is through affiliate partnerships. So as business owners are making purchases along the way, we are receiving commissions off of those. We also have premium experiences. So there are certain paid experiences. Uh, we work to get the best pricing on all of those if we can. We certainly also for credit card holders an example, there’s benefits. If they have a hell elses credit card, there’s opportunity for us as well. But at the end of the day, it really is, we’re always looking for ways of how do we help business owners and make money off of the things that they’re doing anyway. We don’t wanna put additional spend into their pocket. Everybody’s so bootstrapped and so tight on dollars. All of our monetization comes from our, the business partners, a corporate and enterprise partners that we work with. So we’re never taking money out of the hands of business owners.

John Jantsch (14:40): Grants are obvi, as you’ve mentioned, a big part of what you help people acquire. I, is there an art to to getting a grant or is it really just right place, right time, right need? Or is it a more competitive , you know, type of thing that, that you really have to get good at?

Carolyn Rodz (14:56): It is competitive and there’s certainly, I would say both art and science to it. One is just actually filling out your application fully. You’d be surprised how many people submit a grant and don’t answer all the questions and actually taking time and thoughtfulness. I think that’s a very simple thing that will really set your grant application apart. We actually have guides on Hello Alices, on how to go through the grants process, how to optimize your grant application. And then we also run workshops really helping people figure it out. And I’ll say for our own company, I built both Hello Alice in previous companies with grant funding and we’ve applied for, I mean, hundreds of grants over the years and it’s, it is a numbers game, so it’s not, it’s unlikely the first or second or even probably 10th grant application will result in money. But we try to keep the applications as streamlined as possible, as simple as possible for people so that they’re not spending a a ton of time on it. Most can be filled out in 20 minutes or less. And then also you can reutilize a lot of the data fields. So if you filled it out once for the next grant, we’re not gonna ask you the same questions again. So to save people time, we know time and money are various scarce resources for entrepreneurs.

John Jantsch (16:03): So I’m seeing like the bot, you know, to help the application is like the Cheshire cat or something.

Carolyn Rodz (16:09): We have our rabbits, so you’ll see our white rabbit a lot throughout the platform, but the white rabbit is really the guide for the entrepreneur. So where you see that rabbit pop up, it’s sort of pulling those entrepreneurs along the right path and the recommended path for them.

John Jantsch (16:24): So, So what type of network, our backend

Carolyn Rodz (16:27): Platform we

John Jantsch (16:27): Do, you know, in my experience that’s one it’s not necessarily the most valuable is Definitly the thing that people enjoy the most that are kind of in, in this, you know, struggling together. So what type of networking do you have you found the community response to?

Carolyn Rodz (16:42): Well we do lots of different affinity groups that we’re pulling together, right? So one of the biggest roles for us at Hello Alice, how do we convene business owners together in ways that are meaningful to them? And sometimes that is who are you as a person? So we, for Hispanic Heritage Month brought together a group of Hispanic entrepreneurs. We also will bring people together by geography. And so we just had an event in Atlanta, for example, with in partnership with MasterCard that brought owners together. But we do a ton online and it really is, I think those smaller groups are so critical. We also leverage ecosystem partners. So we work with, you know, the National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce. We work with the US Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. We work with a ton of organizations to, to push owners out and say, look, this is a network on the ground that’s very helpful for you. And those have become great partners for us. They are constantly referring people over to Hello Alice. We’re always referring people out to them. And we’ve built a really incredible ecosystem of organizations like DI Inc. And I mean there’s so many, there’s thousands of them. Yeah, they’re so critical to the ecosystem. I think we are a technology and we can certainly help expose the right resources for people, but there is so much that we cannot do as a technology that will never replace that human human touch.

John Jantsch (17:57): So, and, and this would only come sort of anecdotally from you talking to members I suppose, but do first off people probably join for a very specific reasons. I mean typically probably drawn for the capital is that

Carolyn Rodz (18:11): Yes, capital is the number one draw in for sure. Yes.

John Jantsch (18:16): Why do they stick around if they choose to stick around?

Carolyn Rodz (18:19): They stick around often I would say a combination of guidance. It’s just where do I go next? What do I need to be focusing on? And then a specific solution. So we work again with all of our corporate partners, say, Okay, we’re gonna bring you, you know, we, you know, we need a payroll service for your business. We’re gonna, we’re gonna filter down what are actually the really viable and good ones for your company. But also how do we take the volume of 1.2 million business owners on our platform and go leverage the very best discount for your business to help you make that purchase for us. We make recommendations, many recommendations, Aren a platform that we don’t get any affiliate. Yeah. Fee from. Our big belief is that if you’re with us over the journey, that there’s gonna be some that are beneficial to us, mutually beneficial, there are gonna be some that are not, but at the end of the day, we have to have the trust of the business owners or none of us win.

(19:12): Like we are all very aligned around how do we help these business owners grow and succeed. It’s what we need as a business. It’s what the business owner needs for their own company. It’s what the corporate ecosystem needs. They need those businesses to grow. The foundations we work with need those businesses to grow. So there’s such alignment that we get to be, you know, we have the luxury, I will say, of being a very mission driven company. At the end of the day, every decision we would make, we say, is this best for the business owner or not? And if it’s not, we won’t do it.

John Jantsch (19:41): You’ve only got five short years under your belt. But have you worked with somebody that came to you maybe in total startup mode, needed some money to get going and now you know, you’ve connected with them and they have 50 employees or something. I mean that, have you seen a maturity of a business?

Carolyn Rodz (19:58): Yes, we had, one of my favorite stories is Sia Scotch a company. It was one of the first female owned scotch company owned by a Cuban American. And what was so cool is that she was on Hello Alice, used Hello Alices to support the growth of her company. Ultimately ended up selling her business and then came back and funded grant funds for other business owners. It was like this really cool full circle story of so neat to be a small part of her journey and then to get to see her actually getting back and fueling the ecosystem. I think it’s just an example of one, how much entrepreneurs are rooting for each other. Like, sure, we all know this is tough and everybody’s cheering each other on. And I think that’s sort of the essence of the community that we’ve built.

John Jantsch (20:40): Awesome. Well Carolyn, thanks so much for stopping by the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. You wanna tell people, obviously we’ve mentioned the name Hello Alice, but uh, you want to tell people where they can, uh, connect with you and find out more about Hello Alice?

Carolyn Rodz (20:53): Yes, please check us out@helloalice.com. You can follow us at hello Alice or hello alice com depending on the platform. I mean myself at Carolyn Rods.

John Jantsch (21:02): Awesome. Well thanks again and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days when we’re both out there on the road somewhere

Carolyn Rodz (21:08): For sure. Thank you so much, John, I appreciate the time.

John Jantsch (21:11): Hey, and one final thing before you go. You know how I talk about marketing strategy strategy before tactics? Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that, what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we created a free tool for you. It’s called the Marketing Strategy Assessment. You can find it @ marketingassessment.co. Check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That’s just marketingassessment.co. I’d love to chat with you about the results that you get.


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7 Smart Marketing Strategies for Small Businesses

marketing strategies for small businesses

Whether you’re launching a new small business or already have an existing one, you need to develop a marketing strategy that prioritizes a strong online presence. With 97% of people researching local businesses online, it’s essential to meet potential customers where they spend the most time.

However, growing your small business in the digital landscape isn’t easy. Between defining your target audience, promoting your services, and getting the word out, it’s simple to understand why you’d be overwhelmed.

Throw developing a marketing strategy into the mix, and it might seem like you’re trying to learn a foreign language.

Don’t worry! With the right strategies and channels in place, you can get on the fast track to growing brand awareness and earning ROI. In this post, let’s discover what should be at the center of your small business marketing strategy.

Quick Takeaways:

  • A marketing strategy helps you optimize your online assets and promote your company.
  • You need to develop your audience, value proposition, and technology before diving into digital tactics.
  • The right strategy combination—search engine optimization, social media, etc.—will help you earn brand awareness and conversions quickly.

[Do you need to start your small business marketing program? Check out our weekly blog service that includes an annual plan and monthly reporting!]

Why is it Important to Build a Small Business Marketing Strategy?

Every business wants to get their name out there, but when you’re a small business with a modest budget, it’s hard to come up with traditional and online marketing ideas while balancing marketing expenses against the expenses of actually doing business. And with advertising costing as much as it does, it’s no wonder that so many small businesses struggle to get noticed.

Here’s the plot twist, though: advertising isn’t the best way to generate leads anymore. The average person today sees around 5,000 ads a day, a number that’s over twice as high as it was in the ‘80s. As a result, ad blockers are now used by more than 250 million people. So if ads aren’t the way to build a customer base, what is?

Well-researched and planned digital marketing, diligently and consistently executed will keep the branding and sales wheel churning for the smallest of businesses.

Did you know that 50% of small businesses don’t have a dedicated digital marketing strategy? Small businesses often deal with a limited marketing budget. As a result, it can be a challenge to earn visibility in a local community.

A marketing strategy helps you increase brand awareness and develop a pipeline of qualified leads that will turn into sales. With the right digital tactics in place, you can scale your small business marketing efforts to earn more customers in your local area.

Before diving into your channel strategies, you need to build a foundation. Consider the following elements when getting started:

  • Understand your target audience’s problems and priorities so you can present your business as the solution
  • Build a strong value proposition that differentiates you from your competitors
  • Set performance goals so you can focus your budget and resources on meeting objectives
  • Identify how you can leverage current customers to become your brand advocates
  • Use free promotional tools and automation where applicable

How to Build a Small Business Marketing Strategy?

There’s no secret sauce to developing a small business marketing strategy. However, the below strategies can help small businesses earn high ROI, and even get some valuable time back.

While the combination might be trial and error, dedicating time and budget to your marketing will pay off in sales and brand reputation.

1. Search Engine Optimization

Beyond developing an impressive website, search engine optimization (SEO) is perhaps the most impactful marketing strategy for small businesses. SEO is the process of optimizing your website and content for search engines or end users to find your company easily.

Often, the higher you rank on Google, the more likely you’ll be able to drive traffic and consumers to your website. With over 35% of all traffic coming from local sources, customers searching for your services will be more likely to find your business in search engine results.

You can implement SEO by:

  • Creating a Google My Business account
  • Requesting reviews from your customers
  • Optimizing your website with local keywords
  • Creating blog posts or videos that relate to the local community
  • Using location pages
  • Focusing on getting high-quality backlinks

At Marketing Insider Group, we’re constantly optimizing our strategy for ourselves and for the clients we serve.

The best advice we can give to any small business is to publish blog articles multiple times per week. Even if you don’t have the bandwidth to do it all right now, start small! Check out our guide to writing the perfect blog post and skip right on over the trial and error of blog posting.

Don’t expect to write a few words on an industry trend or two and expect your website to crash from too many visitors! Research SEO blog posting strategies and others that could help to build your credibility in search.

2. Pay-Per-Click Advertising

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising allows small businesses to display ads when consumers search for certain keywords in a search engine. While it can lead to an expensive bidding war, local markets are often less competitive and the PPC model helps you keep a regulated budget.

Sounds good, right? But, how does this work?

You bid on certain keywords—like “local printing company” or “office supplies near me”—and create ads around those phrases. Advertising platforms will then use an algorithm to display your ads in the search engine result pages (SERP) based on factors such as keyword relevance and landing page quality. You pay every time someone clicks on your ad.

For some, it works wonders. But this must be a thoughtful approach! Definitely don’t just “throw money at the problem.” Make sure your business roots are strong, like your strategy, website, and brand messaging. Then assess if PPC advertising could truly make a difference for you.

3. Email Marketing

With a projected 4.3 billion email users by the end of 2023, email marketing is an excellent way for you to reach your target audience. In fact, 81% of small businesses report that email is their primary lead generation and retention tool.

Email marketing is the only digital marketing tool that allows you to build a personalized relationship with customers and continue to nurture them well after their first purchase. You can send customers drip campaigns based on an action—like signing up for a consultation or completing a purchase—or send regular newsletters filled with company and product updates.

To use email marketing successfully, consider the following tactics:

  • Segment your customers based on demographics or activity
  • Use a CRM or EPS to automate sending emails at the right time
  • Develop compelling subject lines to make sure your email gets clicked

4. Social Media Marketing

If you’re looking to reach a larger audience and engage with customers regularly, social media is a small business must-have. While it may not be the biggest driver of sales growth, it can help you reach awareness and branding goals.

The average user spends 3 hours a day on social media. While it may seem intimidating at first, it’s essential not to spread yourself too thin and join every platform.

Instead, focus on your target audience. Where are they spending the most time? What type of content do they enjoy? How can you make the biggest impact?

Depending on your customer needs, consider the following platforms:

  • Facebook: Post entertaining pictures, status updates, and customer success stories
  • Twitter: Share news and answer customer inquiries in real-time
  • Pinterest: Spread visual content like blogs, infographics, e-books quickly
  • YouTube: Dominate with user-generated and branded video content
  • Instagram: Display high-resolution imagery that showcases your services

But remember this important detail: showing up on social media platforms when you feel like it is not enough!

Your small business’s social media accounts could use their own smart strategy. Once you’ve figured out where your audience is lurking, build a realistic content plan and publishing schedule. Stay consistent for a few weeks and don’t be afraid to make small adjustments along the way.

5. Content Marketing

What should be at the center of your small business marketing strategy? Content marketing.

Content marketing is the act of developing and publishing high-quality content that is valuable to your target audience. It should speak to their challenges and needs while positioning your business as the solution through creative storytelling.

It’s important to note that content marketing is a long-term strategy. It will take significant time to build rapport with your customers and search engines. However, when done correctly, content marketing can position your business as an industry leader and build long-lasting relationships with your audience.

Your content should include a wide range of formats to highlight your industry expertise and learn what your audience prefers to consume. When getting started, consider the following content types:

  • Blogs
  • Whitepapers or e-books
  • Infographics
  • Videos
  • Podcasts

The quality of content you create is invaluable. Each business has a field of expertise, and you can capitalize on your valuable expertise by sharing your knowledge online. Customers then find your content when searching for information on the topic.

So rather than trying to find your customers to shove an ad in their faces, your customers come looking for you. And the better the content, the more loyalty you’ll build with your audience. Just be sure you’re combining content efforts with search engine optimization (SEO), so that your content shows up in Google searches.

Further, content isn’t just text. Written content can be boosted with some snappy visuals. Whether you’re including a well-crafted infographic, some applicable photos or visual references, or even a video, giving your audience something to look at will increase engagement.

You can even go a step further, and get in on what all those trendsetters have been talking about: live streaming on social media. Hold a Q&A on Twitter Spaces, give visitors an on-site a tour of your facilities on Facebook, or show them how you get the job done with LinkedIn Stories. The more transparent you are with your audience, the more they will trust you.

6. Ratings and Reviews

Beyond the content you create, the product or service you provide has a big impact on your online presence. You need to be aware that people are leaving reviews of your company and your products on places like Google, Amazon, Yelp, and more. If you’re providing something remarkable and offering great customer service, then this is a good thing.

If not, then it can have some serious consequences. You need to be proactive about encouraging positive reviews and about remedying negative ones. This isn’t to say that you should manipulate reviews to suit the image of your company, but rather that you should make it convenient for your customer to leave an organic review and act quickly to resolve the problems in negative reviews. Here are some tips:

  • Encourage reviews—make reviews easy to post, and have a link where people can read reviews.
  • Respond to negative reviews—try to resolve issues and improve the customer’s disposition.
  • Consider using online review software—get the most from customer feedback and online reviews.
  • Make sure your reviews are organic—don’t sabotage your reputation with paid reviews.

7. Online Reputation Management

Remember how we mentioned SEO? Well, just like you need to watch out for negative reviews, you need to watch out for negative or defaming search results. Negative search results can crowd out positive ones, and make it hard for customers to find your business, let alone trust it.

Reputation management is a very large topic to cover. To simplify, you should definitely be checking regularly for what comes up when you search your company’s name.

Make sure you’re honest and customer-friendly in your dealings, you’re producing excellent content, and that you’re making the most of social media sites and business directory listings. The more positive stuff about you that you can put out there, the better chance you’ll have at crowding out the negative noise.

5 Questions Answered on Small Business Marketing Strategy

Figuring out a marketing strategy when you’re the owner of a small business can seen daunting. Once you have a foundation, we can start to dig a little deeper. Here are 5 important questions on marketing for small businesses, answered:

1. What marketing tricks can SMBs learn from Fortune 500 companies?

First, large companies believe that they can be known for something, but their egos get in the way when they only talk about themselves. Small companies are often better able to maintain the important focus on customers and become known as true thought leaders in their space. We help SMBs to craft customer-focused mission statements to guide their strategy.

Second, small companies have less technical infrastructure. We’ve seen them out maneuver their larger peers with better customer experiences on their website, more authentic and engaging content and more interaction on social media.

Third, smaller companies also tend to have more passionate employees who are willing to create engaging content, interact on social, and even drive referrals for customers and new recruits. SMBs should identify this strength early on and focus on employee and customer engagement as part of their marketing strategy.

Fourth, retention is the secret to a high ROI Marketing strategy. In larger companies, working closely with existing customers can become secondary to driving growth. SMBs face similar pressure for different reasons. But the math behind the growth engine is different for SMBs. They need growth with lower investment. Customer Retention programs are the best way to achieve high ROI with little investment.

2. Where should marketers be focusing today when designing marketing campaigns?

We hate the word ‘campaign.’ It’s everything that’s wrong with marketing today.

Today’s customers and buyers are always searching online for information, education and solutions to their problems. The smart marketers are creating always-on programs to answer this need. That includes educational and non-promotional thought leadership, activating employees in content creation and social engagement, and then creating and testing the right paths to conversions.

3. What is the key to wildly successful digital marketing programs?

Wildly successful marketing programs are always running. They are always testing the right content or message. They are always tweaking the audience filters and targeting parameters. They are always optimizing the visual elements of the program. And they are always testing conversion paths. Being always on is the key.

4. How should SMBs approach campaign development today, and where do they typically go wrong?

SMBs can sometimes be so desperate to deliver on the sales or lead goals, that we focus too much on the last stage of the buying process. Marketing programs should match the buying process as much as possible.

This means creating a lot of content at the early stages.

On average, for every 1 customer, there are 100 people in the early stages of the buying journey. These are people who know they have a problem but are not even sure what the solution is. Explain it to them and why it’s important (no product yet)!

For every buyer there are 10 people in the middle-stages. These folks are looking for deeper how-to education. Spend time helping them (not too much product yet).

Now you’ve earned a right to talk about who you are, what you sell and why you are better.

5. What are some great tips for designing customer journeys?

We live in a digital world where it’s relatively easy to see what your customers need at each stage of their journey. We can simply use Google auto-fill or related searches to tell us what content to create. If I’m selling content marketing strategy services, I know that people want content marketing strategy tools, templates and examples because Google auto-fill or related searches told me that’s what most people are searching for.

Once you’ve created a list of topics, you can group them into categories and use Google Trends to tell you which categories of content and topics are more important for your customer journey relative to each other.

We can use other tools to tell us what questions we should be answering with our content at each stage of the buyer journey, and which channels are most important to our customers. For B2B businesses, LinkedIn might be the place to be. But if you’re in fashion, for example, you have to be on Instagram. Don’t leave these decisions up to your gut. We can quantify the impact of each of these approaches.

Finally, we need to measure our efforts. Are you showing up on the first page for the search terms your customers are using at each stage of the buyer journey? Identify the top 15-20 search terms your customers use across their journey and track your visibility or position relative to your competition. And remember that online, your competition might be an online publication or a mommy blogger.

Develop Your Small Business Marketing Strategy

Limited resources and a small budget don’t mean you can’t leverage a marketing strategy to grow your business. Developing a small business marketing strategy allows you to learn about your ideal customers so you can better serve their needs and earn their loyalty.

To increase brand awareness and conversions in your local area, don’t forget about how these marketing strategies can help you grow:

  • SEO improves your online visibility when potential customers search for your services on Google
  • Paid search is a great way to supplement SEO efforts and drive more traffic to your website
  • Email marketing allows you to stay top-of-mind with relevant customers
  • Social media keeps you connected with your customers and relevant in real time
  • Content marketing helps you establish your thought leadership through credible materials

Unsure of how to get started with marketing as a small business? Schedule a free consultation to learn about our Weekly Blog Writing  Services that make quality content seamless.

The post 7 Smart Marketing Strategies for Small Businesses appeared first on Marketing Insider Group.

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How To Stop Losing Customers To Your Competition

How To Stop Losing Customers To Your Competition written by Shawna Salinger read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Generating leads can be challenging, especially if you are a small business owner. There is A LOT that goes into obtaining just one lead, let alone ten or 100 leads. But what’s worse? Creating a plan, paying for a successful advertising campaign, driving traffic to your website, generating leads…and then losing those sales because you don’t have the proper communication and lead nurturing systems in place.

Most businesses are moving away from the fragmented lead nurturing world and adopting an integrated digital lead nurturing and communication strategy. However, this can be harder for small businesses that maybe don’t have the resources or time to put some of these systems together.

Fortunately, technology has given us multiple possibilities, and now there is a lot we can do about it.

For small business owners, I’ll show you the program I created to help you communicate and nurture your leads and how to make it a success.

Find out more about how you can optimize your lead nurture system


Apply for a free 1:1 session

But first, let’s look at the three main trends making it hard for small businesses, imparticular, to create a unified lead nurture system.

Here’s a quick overview of the three problem trends and actions you can take to resolve them.

Top trends Robbing Small Businesses of Leads

  1. 1

    Speed to Lead

  2. 2

    SMS Overtaking Email

  3. 3

    Personalize Website Journey

Speed to Lead

The first trend is Speed to Lead, which is the time a business takes to reply to a prospect from the moment they become a lead.

People today expect instant contact, but research indicates they’re not getting it. And this is really hurting businesses that don’t address it.

According to Velocify, responding to leads within the first-minute increases conversions by 391%. Other related research from Harvard Business Review reveals that contacting a lead within the first hour makes you seven times more likely to qualify that prospect.

But who has time to do that? Especially when you must reply quickly during working hours, at night, and over the weekends.

Of course, it doesn’t mean you have to sit all day long responding immediately to everything, but people expect at least a reply.

Do they want to know if you received their message? If someone is going to get back to them? What’s going to happen next?

Is speed to lead making a difference in sales?

Companies that acknowledge the importance of speed to lead have a huge advantage. According to E-marketer, 51% of leads will work with the organization that contacts them first.

Think about yourself as a buyer. If I had a new project to repair my home, for example, I might contact three companies and, without much concern for the price, the first one that replies will probably get the work. We are at the point where speed has become more influential in certain circumstances than price.

You could even make the case that if you responded faster, you could charge more. The most profitable companies today have made speed to lead one of their highest priorities, and they are raising their prices because of it. What if your speed to lead was your differentiator?

Now think about all the different channels people can get ahold of you to request a quote or a consultation. Or how many places are you not paying attention to because you can’t or don’t have the time to monitor them?

chat funtionality of google business profile

Google Business chat, for example, is one of the functionalities that Google added recently. Instead of calling you, getting directions to your business, or going to your website, customers can just send you a message and ask you a question or get a quote.

But you have also phone, voicemail, emails, website forms, website chat, Facebook Messenger, Instagram DMs, SMS, and the list goes on. Do you monitor and respond to all of them?

Now companies have to reply almost immediately, despite the fact that nobody has the time to monitor a ton of different apps and places.

As a business owner you need to think strategically about how you are going to utlize all the tools available to generate leads for your business while also being realistic about what you can manege.


Apply for a free consulting session

SMS Overtaking Email

SMS has become a real choice for a lot of the people we do business with. In fact, 48% of the people said that SMS is their preferred channel for receiving updates from a brand. More than two-to-one SMS over email.

statistics of the best channels for brand updates

I assume there may be generational gaps in these statistics, and certainly, specific industries are more prevalent than others, but this trend is real.

Mobile is now overtaking desktop in terms of website visits. In the same survey, E-Marketer found that mobile devices today are driving 45% of web leads. And if people are using a mobile device, it is a whole lot easier to just send a text message to start the conversation.

Businesses need to not only be able to monitor and reply quickly but probably need to move a portion of those replies to text.

analytics showing the increase of leads coming from mobile devices

For example, the graph above is website traffic data from a home service business. 54% of their traffic comes from a mobile device, which really explains the convenience of moving part of the marketing strategy to text messages.

Of course, I am not talking about the spammy text messages that we all get. I am encouraging you to use SMS to create a better experience for people that are already on the customer journey and close to becoming a client. Or even build marketing campaigns to reengage past customers that have gone cold. People that already know you, but just haven’t heard from you for a while.

Personalized Website Journey

The bar has been raised. No longer can your website be a brochure that just describes what you do and how you do it. Today people expect to have personalized content experiences and real conversations within your site.

They want to engage in content that is highly relevant to them as fast as possible. Most of us serve multiple markets and multiple segments, which means you have to help people find what’s suitable for them. And that is where the customer journey starts, many people get a referral, Google your business, and then end up at your website.

Ask yourself: Is your site designed perfectly to engage everyone who visits or do you need help from them?

Technology is getting smarter every day. Our website chat is an example of a simple personalized website journey. And it begins with a straightforward message, “Welcome back, John Jantsch, How can we help you today?”

duct tape marketing website chat showing an example of a personalized website journey as a lead nurturing option

It knows who I am, and that type of personalization has become expected because technology makes it so easy. We can now lead our prospects directly to the most relevant content for them based on an answer they just typed.

A unified lead nurturing system

Let’s face it, if you have to reply immediately in a bunch of places, you need some automation. You need some technology that can help you do that.

Lead Spark, is a way to unify your messages, automate follow-ups (even on weekends), immediately get Google reviews to build social proof, reactivate one-time customers, turn website visits to chat conversations, run activation campaigns, capture more leads, and more.

screenshoot of a message showing how a unified lead nurturing system works for small businesses

For example, an automated follow-up that acknowledges a lead message and starts a conversation to explain what is going to happen next in the customer journey. Turning inquiries into text chats.

If you’re spending money on ads, if you’re spending money on SEO and then you’re wasting some of that money because you’re not responding quickly to some of the leads that are coming in, then to me that’s worse than not figuring out how to get leads in the first place.

Learn how to automate your lead nurturing


Click here to get started

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5 Reasons to Write a Blog For Small Business

These days, it seems like everyone has a blog site. In fact, WordPress blogs alone are read by over 400 million people every month, with users creating over 80 million new posts, 44 million comments and 23 billion page views each and every month.

But despite that, many old-school businessmen question whether they should bother with blogging in the first place. They think that it isn’t for them or that their potential customers have no interest in reading what they have to say.

This is particularly common in more traditional businesses, but the truth is that creating content can work for anyone, no matter what they do.

Still, it’s often difficult to get the boss to agree to it, which is why it helps if you explain the benefits of blogging before you seek permission. Here are just a few of the best reasons why small businesses should start blogging.
I write for six years, so I can share my own experience. I created main points to write about. You may check one of my last Edubirdie review.

  1. It helps you to think in new ways

One of the main reasons why blogging is a good idea is that it forces you to stop and think about your business and your industry. It’ll also encourage you to browse other sites to see what’s newsworthy, making sure that you stay ahead of the curve.

This is equally as important for sole traders as it is for big businesses. If you’re an accountant, for example, then your blog could well be the difference between someone choosing you and choosing a competitor.

On top of that, blogging also prompts you to focus on what you want to achieve with your business. There’s no point blogging for the sake of blogging, and you’ll want to make sure that whatever you’re writing about is a good fit with what you stand for as a whole. If you run a toy shop and you’re big on educational games, for example, then you might want to blog about the best games on the market for different ages and subject matters.

  1. It’s great for marketing

Blogging is one of the best things you can do to support SEO efforts. That’s because search engines love fresh, original content, and because it creates more pages that can be indexed in their results.

In fact, 72% of online marketers say that content creation is their most effective SEO tactic, and 60% of businesses who blog acquire more customers than those who don’t.

Better still, while your blog will form the basis of your content marketing strategy, helping you to increase website traffic and sales, there’s no need to be a professional writer or designer. One my good friend, a writer, goes so far as to say that “spelling and grammar mistakes can even make you seem more human,” although he adds that they should never be deliberately added for the sake of it.

  1. It gives you a voice

Companies who launch a blog are able to comment on the industry they’re in, effectively becoming active participants instead of casual observers. It also allows them to build up a buzz around their products and services, boosting sales by positioning them as knowledgeable, personal and approachable.

This is where smaller businesses have an advantage over big multinationals. One of the benefits of buying from a small business is that employees remember your name and tailor their services based on what they know you like.

When small businesses start blogging, it’s important for them to let their personality shine through in what they’re writing.

  1. It allows you to share your expertise

If you’re knowledgeable in your field then running a blog can be a great way of proving it to other people. Customers love to buy from people who know their stuff, and that’s true whether you’re selling goods or services.

Another option is to break into guest blogging by approaching relevant sites and offering to write for them. This has a number of benefits, but the main one is that it connects you with a ready audience and saves you the hassle of having to build one, simultaneously giving your business free PR from a credible source.

  1. It creates a two-way conversation

Blogs are like social networking sites in that they allow customers to have a conversation with the businesses that they’re buying from. When you start blogging, you have a golden opportunity to talk about the issues that your customers are interested in, and you can invite them to share a comment of their own.

This can even be harnessed and put to good use elsewhere in your company.

For example, if customers tell you that they want a certain kind of product then you can start to stock it. Your customers are also likely to suggest potential improvements, and you can dig into your blog site’s analytics to get a good idea of what topics they’re interested in.

What’s next?

It doesn’t have to be difficult to start blogging. In fact, it only takes a couple of minutes to create a WordPress blog, and many websites now come with blogging functionality built into their back end. This means that you can often just log into your site and get started.

That’s usually the best way for businesses to start blogging, and while a little strategy is always a good idea, it’s better to push ahead than to be paralysed by indecision. Try it sometime – you might be surprised at how much you enjoy it. And how much your customers enjoy it, too!

Need some help developing your strategy? Check out our SEO blog writing services or schedule a free consultation to see how we can help your blog!

The post 5 Reasons to Write a Blog For Small Business appeared first on Marketing Insider Group.

Did you miss our previous article…
https://www.sydneysocialmediaservices.com/?p=1409

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7 Smart Marketing Strategies for Small Businesses

marketing strategies for small businesses

Whether you’re launching a new small business or already have an existing one, you need to develop a marketing strategy that prioritizes a strong online presence. With 97% of people researching local businesses online, it’s essential to meet potential customers where they spend the most time.

However, growing your small business in the digital landscape isn’t easy. Between defining your target audience, promoting your services, and getting the word out, it’s simple to understand why you’d be overwhelmed.

Throw developing a marketing strategy into the mix, and it might seem like you’re trying to learn a foreign language.

Don’t worry! With the right strategies and channels in place, you can get on the fast track to growing brand awareness and earning ROI. In this post, let’s discover what should be at the center of your small business marketing strategy.

Quick Takeaways:

  • A marketing strategy helps you optimize your online assets and promote your company.
  • You need to develop your audience, value proposition, and technology before diving into digital tactics.
  • The right strategy combination—search engine optimization, social media, etc.—will help you earn brand awareness and conversions quickly.

Why is it Important to Build a Small Business Marketing Strategy?

Every business wants to get their name out there, but when you’re a small business with a modest budget, it’s hard to come up with traditional and online marketing ideas while balancing marketing expenses against the expenses of actually doing business. And with advertising costing as much as it does, it’s no wonder that so many small businesses struggle to get noticed.

Here’s the plot twist, though: advertising isn’t the best way to generate leads anymore. The average person today sees around 5,000 ads a day, a number that’s over twice as high as it was in the ‘80s. As a result, ad blockers are now used by more than 250 million people. So if ads aren’t the way to build a customer base, what is?

Well-researched and planned digital marketing, diligently and consistently executed will keep the branding and sales wheel churning for the smallest of businesses.

Did you know that 50% of small businesses don’t have a dedicated digital marketing strategy? Small businesses often deal with a limited marketing budget. As a result, it can be a challenge to earn visibility in a local community.

A marketing strategy helps you increase brand awareness and develop a pipeline of qualified leads that will turn into sales. With the right digital tactics in place, you can scale your small business marketing efforts to earn more customers in your local area.

Before diving into your channel strategies, you need to build a foundation. Consider the following elements when getting started:

  • Understand your target audience’s problems and priorities so you can present your business as the solution
  • Build a strong value proposition that differentiates you from your competitors
  • Set performance goals so you can focus your budget and resources on meeting objectives
  • Identify how you can leverage current customers to become your brand advocates
  • Use free promotional tools and automation where applicable

How to Build a Small Business Marketing Strategy?

There’s no secret sauce to developing a small business marketing strategy. However, the below strategies can help small businesses earn high ROI, and even get some valuable time back.

While the combination might be trial and error, dedicating time and budget to your marketing will pay off in sales and brand reputation.

1. Search Engine Optimization

Beyond developing an impressive website, search engine optimization (SEO) is perhaps the most impactful marketing strategy for small businesses. SEO is the process of optimizing your website and content for search engines or end users to find your company easily.

Often, the higher you rank on Google, the more likely you’ll be able to drive traffic and consumers to your website. With over 35% of all traffic coming from local sources, customers searching for your services will be more likely to find your business in search engine results.

You can implement SEO by:

  • Creating a Google My Business account
  • Requesting reviews from your customers
  • Optimizing your website with local keywords
  • Creating blog posts or videos that relate to the local community
  • Using location pages
  • Focusing on getting high-quality backlinks

At Marketing Insider Group, we’re constantly optimizing our strategy for ourselves and for the clients we serve.

The best advice we can give to any small business is to publish blog articles multiple times per week. Even if you don’t have the bandwidth to do it all right now, start small! Check out our guide to writing the perfect blog post and skip right on over the trial and error of blog posting.

Don’t expect to write a few words on an industry trend or two and expect your website to crash from too many visitors! Research SEO blog posting strategies and others that could help to build your credibility in search.

2. Pay-Per-Click Advertising

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising allows small businesses to display ads when consumers search for certain keywords in a search engine. While it can lead to an expensive bidding war, local markets are often less competitive and the PPC model helps you keep a regulated budget.

Sounds good, right? But, how does this work?

You bid on certain keywords—like “local printing company” or “office supplies near me”—and create ads around those phrases. Advertising platforms will then use an algorithm to display your ads in the search engine result pages (SERP) based on factors such as keyword relevance and landing page quality. You pay every time someone clicks on your ad.

For some, it works wonders. But this must be a thoughtful approach! Definitely don’t just “throw money at the problem.” Make sure your business roots are strong, like your strategy, website, and brand messaging. Then assess if PPC advertising could truly make a difference for you.

3. Email Marketing

With a projected 4.3 billion email users by the end of 2023, email marketing is an excellent way for you to reach your target audience. In fact, 81% of small businesses report that email is their primary lead generation and retention tool.

Email marketing is the only digital marketing tool that allows you to build a personalized relationship with customers and continue to nurture them well after their first purchase. You can send customers drip campaigns based on an action—like signing up for a consultation or completing a purchase—or send regular newsletters filled with company and product updates.

To use email marketing successfully, consider the following tactics:

  • Segment your customers based on demographics or activity
  • Use a CRM or EPS to automate sending emails at the right time
  • Develop compelling subject lines to make sure your email gets clicked

4. Social Media Marketing

If you’re looking to reach a larger audience and engage with customers regularly, social media is a small business must-have. While it may not be the biggest driver of sales growth, it can help you reach awareness and branding goals.

The average user spends 3 hours a day on social media. While it may seem intimidating at first, it’s essential not to spread yourself too thin and join every platform.

Instead, focus on your target audience. Where are they spending the most time? What type of content do they enjoy? How can you make the biggest impact?

Depending on your customer needs, consider the following platforms:

  • Facebook: Post entertaining pictures, status updates, and customer success stories
  • Twitter: Share news and answer customer inquiries in real-time
  • Pinterest: Spread visual content like blogs, infographics, e-books quickly
  • YouTube: Dominate with user-generated and branded video content
  • Instagram: Display high-resolution imagery that showcases your services

But remember this important detail: showing up on social media platforms when you feel like it is not enough!

Your small business’s social media accounts could use their own smart strategy. Once you’ve figured out where your audience is lurking, build a realistic content plan and publishing schedule. Stay consistent for a few weeks and don’t be afraid to make small adjustments along the way.

5. Content Marketing

What should be at the center of your small business marketing strategy? Content marketing.

Content marketing is the act of developing and publishing high-quality content that is valuable to your target audience. It should speak to their challenges and needs while positioning your business as the solution through creative storytelling.

It’s important to note that content marketing is a long-term strategy. It will take significant time to build rapport with your customers and search engines. However, when done correctly, content marketing can position your business as an industry leader and build long-lasting relationships with your audience.

Your content should include a wide range of formats to highlight your industry expertise and learn what your audience prefers to consume. When getting started, consider the following content types:

  • Blogs
  • Whitepapers or e-books
  • Infographics
  • Videos
  • Podcasts

The quality of content you create is invaluable. Each business has a field of expertise, and you can capitalize on your valuable expertise by sharing your knowledge online. Customers then find your content when searching for information on the topic.

So rather than trying to find your customers to shove an ad in their faces, your customers come looking for you. And the better the content, the more loyalty you’ll build with your audience. Just be sure you’re combining content efforts with search engine optimization (SEO), so that your content shows up in Google searches.

Further, content isn’t just text. Written content can be boosted with some snappy visuals. Whether you’re including a well-crafted infographic, some applicable photos or visual references, or even a video, giving your audience something to look at will increase engagement.

You can even go a step further, and get in on what all those trendsetters have been talking about: live streaming on social media. Hold a Q&A on Twitter Spaces, give visitors an on-site a tour of your facilities on Facebook, or show them how you get the job done with LinkedIn Stories. The more transparent you are with your audience, the more they will trust you.

6. Ratings and Reviews

Beyond the content you create, the product or service you provide has a big impact on your online presence. You need to be aware that people are leaving reviews of your company and your products on places like Google, Amazon, Yelp, and more. If you’re providing something remarkable and offering great customer service, then this is a good thing.

If not, then it can have some serious consequences. You need to be proactive about encouraging positive reviews and about remedying negative ones. This isn’t to say that you should manipulate reviews to suit the image of your company, but rather that you should make it convenient for your customer to leave an organic review and act quickly to resolve the problems in negative reviews. Here are some tips:

  • Encourage reviews—make reviews easy to post, and have a link where people can read reviews.
  • Respond to negative reviews—try to resolve issues and improve the customer’s disposition.
  • Consider using online review software—get the most from customer feedback and online reviews.
  • Make sure your reviews are organic—don’t sabotage your reputation with paid reviews.

7. Online Reputation Management

Remember how we mentioned SEO? Well, just like you need to watch out for negative reviews, you need to watch out for negative or defaming search results. Negative search results can crowd out positive ones, and make it hard for customers to find your business, let alone trust it.

Reputation management is a very large topic to cover. To simplify, you should definitely be checking regularly for what comes up when you search your company’s name.

Make sure you’re honest and customer-friendly in your dealings, you’re producing excellent content, and that you’re making the most of social media sites and business directory listings. The more positive stuff about you that you can put out there, the better chance you’ll have at crowding out the negative noise.

5 Questions Answered on Small Business Marketing Strategy

Figuring out a marketing strategy when you’re the owner of a small business can seen daunting. Once you have a foundation, we can start to dig a little deeper. Here are 5 important questions on marketing for small businesses, answered:

1. What marketing tricks can SMBs learn from Fortune 500 companies?

First, large companies believe that they can be known for something, but their egos get in the way when they only talk about themselves. Small companies are often better able to maintain the important focus on customers and become known as true thought leaders in their space. We help SMBs to craft customer-focused mission statements to guide their strategy.

Second, small companies have less technical infrastructure. We’ve seen them out maneuver their larger peers with better customer experiences on their website, more authentic and engaging content and more interaction on social media.

Third, smaller companies also tend to have more passionate employees who are willing to create engaging content, interact on social, and even drive referrals for customers and new recruits. SMBs should identify this strength early on and focus on employee and customer engagement as part of their marketing strategy.

Fourth, retention is the secret to a high ROI Marketing strategy. In larger companies, working closely with existing customers can become secondary to driving growth. SMBs face similar pressure for different reasons. But the math behind the growth engine is different for SMBs. They need growth with lower investment. Customer Retention programs are the best way to achieve high ROI with little investment.

2. Where should marketers be focusing today when designing marketing campaigns?

We hate the word ‘campaign.’ It’s everything that’s wrong with marketing today.

Today’s customers and buyers are always searching online for information, education and solutions to their problems. The smart marketers are creating always-on programs to answer this need. That includes educational and non-promotional thought leadership, activating employees in content creation and social engagement, and then creating and testing the right paths to conversions.

3. What is the key to wildly successful digital marketing programs?

Wildly successful marketing programs are always running. They are always testing the right content or message. They are always tweaking the audience filters and targeting parameters. They are always optimizing the visual elements of the program. And they are always testing conversion paths. Being always on is the key.

4. How should SMBs approach campaign development today, and where do they typically go wrong?

SMBs can sometimes be so desperate to deliver on the sales or lead goals, that we focus too much on the last stage of the buying process. Marketing programs should match the buying process as much as possible.

This means creating a lot of content at the early stages.

On average, for every 1 customer, there are 100 people in the early stages of the buying journey. These are people who know they have a problem but are not even sure what the solution is. Explain it to them and why it’s important (no product yet)!

For every buyer there are 10 people in the middle-stages. These folks are looking for deeper how-to education. Spend time helping them (not too much product yet).

Now you’ve earned a right to talk about who you are, what you sell and why you are better.

5. What are some great tips for designing customer journeys?

We live in a digital world where it’s relatively easy to see what your customers need at each stage of their journey. We can simply use Google auto-fill or related searches to tell us what content to create. If I’m selling content marketing strategy services, I know that people want content marketing strategy tools, templates and examples because Google auto-fill or related searches told me that’s what most people are searching for.

Once you’ve created a list of topics, you can group them into categories and use Google Trends to tell you which categories of content and topics are more important for your customer journey relative to each other.

We can use other tools to tell us what questions we should be answering with our content at each stage of the buyer journey, and which channels are most important to our customers. For B2B businesses, LinkedIn might be the place to be. But if you’re in fashion, for example, you have to be on Instagram. Don’t leave these decisions up to your gut. We can quantify the impact of each of these approaches.

Finally, we need to measure our efforts. Are you showing up on the first page for the search terms your customers are using at each stage of the buyer journey? Identify the top 15-20 search terms your customers use across their journey and track your visibility or position relative to your competition. And remember that online, your competition might be an online publication or a mommy blogger.

Develop Your Small Business Marketing Strategy

Limited resources and a small budget don’t mean you can’t leverage a marketing strategy to grow your business. Developing a small business marketing strategy allows you to learn about your ideal customers so you can better serve their needs and earn their loyalty.

To increase brand awareness and conversions in your local area, don’t forget about how these marketing strategies can help you grow:

  • SEO improves your online visibility when potential customers search for your services on Google
  • Paid search is a great way to supplement SEO efforts and drive more traffic to your website
  • Email marketing allows you to stay top-of-mind with relevant customers
  • Social media keeps you connected with your customers and relevant in real time
  • Content marketing helps you establish your thought leadership through credible materials

Unsure of how to get started with marketing as a small business? Schedule a free consultation to learn about our Weekly Blog Writing  Services that make quality content seamless.

The post 7 Smart Marketing Strategies for Small Businesses appeared first on Marketing Insider Group.

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7 Steps to Tame the Marketing Chaos

7 Steps to Tame the Marketing Chaos written by Sara Nay read more at Duct Tape Marketing

How to Tame the Marketing Chaos…

What’s wrong with small business marketing today?

I’ve spent years in the business world, and these are some of the most common statements I hear from struggling business owners and entrepreneurs trying to build successful marketing and operations system for their business;

I’ve spent most of my marketing budget on a new website, and it looks great, but it’s not generating any leads.

I’m paying an SEO company thousands of dollars each month. And I have no idea what kind of results I’m getting.

I’m sending out direct mail, and I think some people are calling me from it, but I am not sure. 

I’ve started to invest in paid advertising, and people are going to my website, but no one is calling me.

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What do these examples have in common? First, they focus on single tactics and not the entire customer journey. Second, they are focused on one thing and not the entire system.

The opportunity in small business marketing today is to focus on your customers. And you focus on your customers in two main ways other than the product. First, see where your customers are trying to go and how you can better understand them. Second, you need to map out all of the systems that contribute to that journey. This will allow you to repeat the process that works and give every customer the same awesome experience every time. 

This post will cover;

  • How to get started understanding your ideal customer
  • Your ideal customer journey and how both the marketing and operations arms of your business play a role – the marketing hourglass
  • The 7 steps to small business success through systems mapping

This is a long blog post packed with tons of great information for your business. So feel free to bookmark and come back to it later, but whatever you do, make sure to take the time to digest all of this information. I promise it will help in the long run. 

everyone is not your customer - seth godin

“Everyone is not your customer.” – Seth Godin

Know Your Customers

Before we talk about the marketing hourglass, it is essential to take a step back and understand who your ideal clients are on a deep level. I am not just talking about demographic information either. You need to understand what motivates your target audience, their behaviors, and what solutions they are looking for? After all, how can you guide them if you don’t know what they’re looking for?

Obtaining that level of knowledge is really important before you start developing anything else from a marketing standpoint. First, you have to fully understand where your clients are trying to go to help them get there.

Once you understand who you are targeting, the second part of marketing is to understand your differentiators and how to communicate them to your ideal clients. Next, you need to answer the questions; How are you going to stand out? What’s your competitive differentiator? How are you going to build brand awareness?

After you have clearly defined those steps you can then dive into your marketing and operations systems.

The Marketing Hourglass

The Marketing Hourglass is a proven system that I have installed in thousands of businesses around the world. The marketing hourglass reverberates around a new kind of customer journey for your business.

the marketing hourglass steps are know, like, trust, try, buy, repeat, refer

There are two different types of systems that you need to have in place in order to effectively move people through this journey. They are your marketing systems and your operations systems.

The top of the hourglass holds the first 4 phases – know, like, trust, and try – and they make up the ‘marketing system.’ This part is about getting in front of your target audience, and it flows until they are ready to become an actual client. 

The bottom of the hourglass holds the last 3 phases – buy, repeat, and refer –  also known as the ‘operations system.’ When someone becomes a client they’re in the buy phase, how can you absolutely blow them away and exceed their expectations so that they become repeat customers and refer you to everyone they know? That is your operations side. 

Every business needs both marketing systems and operations systems. You need marketing systems and sales systems in order to grow and generate demand. Then, once you create that demand, you have to be able to deliver the promised value to keep them coming back.  

The Marketing Systems: Know, Like, Trust, Try

They can also be thought of as the marketing and sales system. This system is defined by a clear path to help you convert your target audience based on the customer journey.  

Ask yourself, how can you get someone to know your business all the way to their ready-to-purchase moment? Some examples of this would be conducting a free webinar with a client consultation as the end goal or launching some paid ads in order to sell a product or service. 

First and foremost you need them to know about your business. You can do this in several ways. One recommendation would be to use the P.E.P system.

A lot of marketers put marketing media into 3 buckets; paid, earned, and owned. At Duct Tape  we took a new approach and relabeled those buckets Paid, Earned, and Person or P.E.P. 

Paid is stuff that you will always continue to pay towards. Examples are; advertising, direct mail, and sponsorships. 

Earned is the work you put in, it takes time and patience, but long term, it can pay off big. These are things like; search engine optimization (SEO), social media, and referrals.

The last category is Person and it means that an actual person has to do something. That is networking, speaking, and outbound outreach. 

For best results, your journey should focus on at least a couple of these mediums so you do not have all of your eggs in one basket, so to speak.

customer-journey-marketing-operations-systems
The Operations System: Buy, Repeat, Refer

Your marketing systems are how you generate demand which then leads into your operations systems. The operations half of the customer journey defines a clear path to deliver the value promised to your clients. Therefore, every marketing system should have an operations system to go with it.

Once someone purchases, how do you move them along as a customer and generate repeat revenue? And if you’re focusing on referrals, what does that process look like?

Onboarding a new client is an example of an operations system. The client went through your marketing system, they signed up, and now you need to onboard them. What are those steps?

Your operating systems do not necessarily relate to a sale, but they are processes that need to be documented in order to keep your business moving forward. 

Now that we have the basics covered let’s get into how to build a successful system

7 Steps to Build A Successful Business System

  • Map out core marketing and operations systems

  • Determine what you can automate

  • Document your critical stages and processes

  • Identify key metrics and systems

  • Assign key stages and metrics to team members

  • Schedule weekly review meetings

  • Hold quarterly strategic planning sessions

Map Your Core Marketing and Operations Systems

This first step is vital for many reasons. First, mapping out your systems allows you to be efficient and effective. It also allows you to consistently deliver the same level of experience to every single one of your new clients.

Step 1: 
Is to get started. Don’t let the unknown paralyze you. Identify your most important (or most profitable) product or service and start with that. You will not go wrong by focusing on the most profitable part of your business.
Step 2: 

You need to define the start and stop of your marketing system for that product or service. Ask yourself, “At what stage is the process beginning, and at what stage does it end?

Step 3:

Brainstorm tasks and activities between the start and the finish of each system.

Once you understand your system, you need to document the steps. Start by brainstorming all the steps that need to happen between the stop and the finish of each system. Note; It is important to identify which steps are the most critical to the process and be sure you nail those every time.

Someone attends a webinar, and then what happens? They get an email nurture campaign, and then what happens? You are mapping out the journey to land on your desired end result.

Step 4:

Make this process repeatable. The system needs to be identifiable and easy to follow. Write it out in plain English or better yet have a visible outline. Also, make sure everyone on your team has access to the steps and follows the process. Next, physically go through the plan you have mapped. This exercise will help you identify any holes or areas of opportunity. 

Get started mapping our your first system

Step 1

Identify your most profitable business system

Step 2

Define the start and stopping points in this system

Step 3

Brainstorm tasks and activities between the start and finish of the system

Step 4

Clearly label all stages and make the process easily repeatable

System Mapping Tool

We use a product called Whimsical. It’s a free tool to help you mind map and brainstorm in a clear and visual way. 

Below are a few tips for organizing your visual system map;

  • Use a terminus shaped symbol to define your start and endpoints
  • Use a rectangle to identify your tasks, activities, and processes 
  • Use a diamond shape to identify important decision points 
  • And use arrows to indicate the flow and direction of each event

Remember to start from the beginning and keep asking yourself, “What needs to happen next?”

Example Marketing System – made with Whimsical
example-webinar-process-map

The start of this marketing system is a webinar and this is made clear by the terminus shape. The arrows are pointing to the right so you can see which way the process flows and the next step. A rectangle indicates that the next step is a task where the client enters an email campaign. Then there is a pivotal call to action for a consultation booking.

Here you see a branch in the system. Do they book the consultation? If not, they are put into the down-sell campaign because we can see that they are not quite ready to get on the phone.   

However if they booked the consultation, they continue through the system to the next task or CTA. And so on and so forth until they are either onboarded as a new client or put into a future email automation bucket. 

This systems mapping process is the first step towards transitioning from tactic to strategy and from hacks to systems. It’s getting all of these pieces in place by answering the question and then what happens next?

Determine What You Can Automate

The next step is setting yourself up for success and avoiding burnout by asking yourself, “What can I automate in order to be more efficient?”

I recently went through this exercise with a client. She was spending hours making custom agreements for her clients. Mapping her systems allowed her to see this and we got her a proposal software. Now, she changes a few key terms and is done in seconds. She uses the time that used to be spent creating, editing, and sending the document to acquire clients. 

Now see what you can automate. If there is a task that ties you down, ask yourself, “How can I automate this?” Call reminders and email follow-ups are great examples of processes that you can easily automate.

Document Critical Stages and Processes

Next, take a look at the most important processes in your systems. The areas where things fall apart if they’re not handled correctly. 

Create these stages so that someone else could conduct a consultation call just by accessing your documents and jumping into a checklist. These steps should be very detailed, so that if you are not there someone else will know exactly what to do and how to do it, from start to finish.

Identify Key Metrics 

Identify the specific areas in your business where you want to track metrics. A good rule of thumb is to track metrics for all of the critical steps in your system. 

Using the example above, you would want to know how many people got on a consultation call or how many new clients were onboarded. This would help you to see the performance of each stage. By tracking key metrics, you can see if there are gaps and where you need to focus to improve your system moving forward.

spark-lab-scalable-factors


Take the Business Systems Quiz

Team Member Accountability

If you have a team, you need to assign key stages and metrics to them depending on their role. This way they have more accountability and you can see the results they are driving. 

If you have a marketing team, you might assign digital ads performance tracking and reporting to them. And if you have a sales team you would assign a different stage to them. Then you would look at all of your systems, and you and your team would divide and conquer. 

This is also an important stage for solopreneurs. For example, we started Duct Tape Marketing with just two team members. So we would say, “Okay, this stage I’m in the marketing role, this stage I’m in the sales role, this stage I’m in the customer service role.”

You need accountability and metrics for each of these stages, and you need a person behind those metrics. Completing this step will also make it easier when you do decide to expand or hire because you will have clearly identified roles and responsibilities.

Schedule Weekly Review Meetings

From there, schedule weekly review meetings with your teams based on your systems. In these meetings, you should go over their systems, metrics, and accountability chart. 

These meetings also allow you to lead, congratulate your team on their successes, and see where you need to step in. 

Hold Quarterly Strategic Planning Sessions

Next, you need to start holding quarterly, strategic planning sessions for your business. If you are not sure where to start, know that your systems should direct these meetings.

Once you install this process, you will be able to quickly identify what your growth opportunities are for both halves of the hourglass. For example, you could see what steps are holding you back from converting more clients in your marketing system. And on the operation side, you can start to understand why clients aren’t becoming repeat clients. 

When you build these systems, you are taking out the guesswork and creating essential strategies that can scale—resulting in a business that scales. 

Why go through all of this process mapping?

Predictable lead generation and growth are two main benefits that come from documenting new systems. In addition, you can make quicker and better business decisions based on metrics and evidence. 

Following a system allows you to develop processes to help you avoid errors and  significantly reduce the number of mistakes. In addition, you will build an accountability culture for yourself and your team. I know from experience that employees work better with a clear direction and a culture they support.

The clarity in these systems allows you to have hyper-focus and to get the most out of weekly meetings. Resulting in strategic planning that is not crowded with excess and focused on your most important goals.

Predictable lead generation and growth are two main benefits that come from documenting new systems. In addition, you can make quicker and better business decisions based on metrics and evidence. Following a system allows you to develop processes that help you avoid errors or significantly reduce the number of mistakes. In addition, you will build an accountability culture for yourself and your team. I know from experience that employees work better with a clear direction and a culture they support. The clarity in these systems allows you to have hyperfocus and to get the most out of weekly meetings. Resulting in strategic planning that is not crowded with excess and trimmed down to zero in on your most important goals.

The Value in Systems – Spark Lab Consulting

The goal of identifying and mapping your marketing and operations system is to increase demand for your business.

And along the way, it also helps you have more clarity and control in what you’re doing. This clarity and control will allow you to grow and scale in a smart and sustainable way. Not only leading to more profit but more peace of mind. 


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This post was written in partnership with Spark Lab Consulting – a new initiative from the founders and team that brought you Duct Tape Marketing – designed to help you operationalize your marketing AND fulfillment systems. 

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