4 Branding Strategies for your Small Business Posted on December 30, 2015August 29, 2016 by Jessica Lunk Is your branding message truly getting across or are you simply blowing hot air? If you don’t have definitive guidelines for your brand and if you are not following them across all platforms, you could be missing out. Here are several ways to boost your branding and ensure that you are actually creating a cohesive and recognizable brand for your small business. Define Your Brand Guidelines Make sure that every promotional piece, press release, and Tweet that leaves your office conforms to your branding guidelines. Clearly outlining your brand expectations and how your logo, mascot, and merchandise are to be referred to can prevent mismatches and mixed messaging for your brand. Disney is one of the masters of branding and everything they put out is designed to clearly represent the brand. From the annual blockbuster movie to the whimsical, talking trash cans at the theme parks, every single item is carefully created and screened with the big picture in mind. A simple list that depicts phrases or things we “always” do when speaking with customers or promoting the brand can help create a consistent and positive message across all of your platforms. Putting together a Brand Guideline for your company can help you make sure everyone is on the same page – even if your business is small. Here are a few areas to address: Logo: Using your logo consistently across all channels adds cohesiveness to your brand. For example, is it ok to display your logo without your tagline, or not? Do you have a version of your logo to use on light colored backgrounds and a version you use for dark colored backgrounds? Is there an emblem in your logo that can stand alone, or do you always want to include the wordmark with the emblem? Staying within specific brand guidelines for your logo will help boost recall and recognition of your brand. Color: Even a color as simple as “red” has variation to it, and everyone has their own interpretation. Setting guidelines on what your brand colors are and how to use them will help everyone stay within the lines of your brand when working on print, web, or promotional materials. Identifying a Pantone (print) and corresponding hex color (web) will help keep your brand looking sharp and consistent everywhere your prospects and customers see you. Voice & Tone: Branding is visual, but there is also a copy element that comes to play. For instance, carrying a serious tone on your website while you’re funny and irreverent on social media would give your brand a bit of an identity crisis. Decide if the voice and tone should be professional, playful, comedic, introspective – whatever best reflects your brand and culture. Naming Conventions: What you call things can increase brand equity – and even help build a sense of community around your business. Think Mickey Mouse Club Mouseketeers, Rackspace Rackers, and, of course, Hatchbuckers. From your tagline to your product and service lines, naming consistently gives and instant lift to your branding. Message Consistency Once you’ve established some brand guidelines, you need to share them with everyone on the team, from the employees who create the packaging and images to the ones who answer the phones. One of the most often overlooked branding slipups is via your social media channels; make sure every site you use has a fully branded profile and that the person posting your tweets, updates, Instagram shots, and pins is correctly representing your brand. Enhance your Brand with Inbound Marketing Inbound marketing allows you to position your brand as a go-to for education, innovation and expertise. When you put informative branded content out there for prospects to find, use, and share you’re building focus on your brand in a positive way. It doesn’t matter what you sell as long as you’re getting information into the hands of people who can use it in a good light. This will automatically enhances your brand. Leverage Social Media If you have social media accounts just because you “should”, you’re not using them with branding in mind. Your social media accounts can be valuable brand builders, provided you cultivate followers and actually engage with users. Simply throwing up a (branded) profile page isn’t enough, you need to join the conversation. A quick look at your social media accounts can tell you how you are doing in this area. If you are not consistently posting and interacting with followers and connections, you’re missing out on a powerful way to build your brand. Branding may seem like a task left for the bigger guys, but defining your brand and staying consistent across all channels can be extremely valuable to your small business. Invest some time in developing your brand to develop instant recognition and recall of your business when it’s time for your audience to buy. Original source of the infographic: Better Business Brand
The Most Important Online Marketing Lessons of 2015 for Small Businesses Posted on December 29, 2015July 8, 2016 by Jonathan Herrick Can you believe that 2016 is just a few more days away? If you’re like us at Hatchbuck, you’re ready to jump into the new year and continue the momentum you’ve built in 2015. While we’re setting the deck for 2016, we thought it was a good time to look back on the year and reflect on what worked best on the marketing front. To help, we’ve tapped into small business influencers to ask them the most important marketing lesson they learned in 2015. Here’s what they had to say: The Cloud Is a Given, The Focus is on Tools Marketing technology is evolving fast, and the beauty of SaaS (software as a service) is that it gives small businesses the ability to quickly implement cloud-based technology without being tied down to long-term contracts or manual maintenance and upgrades. This is a unique advantage to small businesses, as their counter-parts in the enterprise space can find it challenging to switch out legacy systems and adapt. Today, SaaS is the obvious choice for small business, changing the conversation from, is it in the cloud? to does it work for my business? “Cloud is out, usefulness is in,” says Anita Campbell, Founder and CEO of Small Business Trends: The focus going forward is on what that software can do for your small business — whether it’s marketing software or any other kind of software. And since cloud software is now the default choice of small businesses, the emphasis is on the ability to quickly get up and running, and do tasks seamlessly, without a lot of custom programming. That’s what business owners and marketing managers looking for marketing tools will be focusing on in 2016. And that’s where the focus should be — on the usefulness of the tool, not on enterprise buzzwords like “the cloud” that we consider a given. Your Customers Hold the Key to Your Success You can spend lots of time and money to attract new customers to your business, but if your customers don’t stick, you’re left with a leaky boat that is tough to paddle where you really want to be as a business. In 2015, putting the customer first was the ticket to success, according to Nellie Akalp, CEO of CorpNet.com: The biggest marketing lesson I learned in 2015 is to think like the customer in all efforts! Where are my customers online? What conversations are they having? What outlets are they reading? Those are just some of the questions I was able to answer to target key clients and market them services resulting in fantastic ROI. I used this tactic from everything to my social media to content marketing and plan on doing so in 2016! Deborah Sweeney, CEO of My Corporation also credits re-engaging customers to her business’s success in 2015: Our best online marketing lesson this year is the value of re-targeting to current customers. We do a lot of work to bring new customers into our net of offerings. Once we have their attention, we have truly recognized the value of offering value-add services and ancillary services to grow our interaction with our customers. When we market to small business owners and entrepreneurs initially, they may not need certain services we offer, but re-marketing with other offers (For example, the entrepreneurs initially need a corporate filing or DBA assistance. Over time, though, they may need business licenses and trademarks.) Marketing to your own customers and providing top-notch customer service in the process will keep your customers coming back and your revenue growing! For us, that was the best success story in online marketing from 2015. Whether you’re launching a new service or introducing a mobile app, tapping into your customer base can give your initiative instant momentum. Rebecca Xiong, CEO of GrowEpic, leveraged GrowEpic’s engaged audience of customers to drive downloads of their new mobile app: We have an active software-as-service social tool site with hundred of users a day. We used that to market our mobile app, telling people the app makes it easy for them to do what they do on the site already. Most apps rely on app store promotion or a branding site to promote. With our strong user-base and regular new users, our mobile app grew quickly and reached 100,000 downloads in a few months. It Pays to Invest in In-Depth Content The key to getting found online in 2016? Creating in-depth, quality content that goes beyond the standard 500-word blog post will bring big returns in getting your business found online, according to Martin Harrison, Co-Founder at Copify: The biggest lesson I learned in 2015 is that Google is increasingly favouring long form content in its search results. We have seen our rankings for several competitive terms switch from specific landing pages created specifically for that query, to long form, guide-style content such as this: http://us.copify.com/guides/how-to-start-a-blog. My advice for brands would be to invest time and budget creating new, or expanding upon existing site content to deliver genuine value to your audience. Entrepreneur Brent Hale echos Harrison’s advice to invest in in-depth content this year: The biggest online marketing lesson I’ve learned over the past year is that content marketing is still the most effective and economical way to expand your audience (for businesses where content marketing makes sense). Not only that, but the longer and more thorough your content, the more effective it is. Ultimately, if you can produce high-quality content that educates and inspires your audience on a consistent basis, you will see a significant increase in your business. Guest Podcasting is Effective, Inexpensive and Scalable Building your small business brand? Shawn Chhabra, Host & Creator of the podcast, “Winning the Game of Life,” explains how small businesses can build an audience in a very effective, inexpensive and scalable manner: Podcasts are effective because you are being featured as a show guest on the shows where your prospects and ideal customers are listening to the Podcast; whole hearted, fully involved while listening. You are really speaking directly to your dream customers as a Podcast guest. They want to hear what you have to say, so you can see how your listeners can turn into your loyal customers. It is inexpensive and almost free, because the host of the Podcast show is the one who is doing almost everything. All you have to do is just show up for the interview. Scalable because you can continue to look for other related Podcasts where you can be featured as a guest. Social Media Isn’t Just About Engagement – It Should Convert Small business owners know that they should be using social media, but are often perplexed at how social media can actually impact their business. Casey Cornett, Director of Social Media at VI Marketing and Branding, advises to think about your entire marketing funnel when putting together your social media strategy: If I had to give one marketing lesson from 2015 for small business owners, it would be to stop looking at social media as just one section of your marketing funnel (Engage), and begin using it at all areas: Attract, Educate, Engage and Convert. Social Media has grown tremendously over the past few years, but one thing 2015 brought to the industry is incredible targeting (offering very cost-effective Attract), auto-play videos (use to Educate) and finally reliable Conversion tracking through website pixels. Stop posting your latest 10% off sale, and begin growing your customer database. Your Marketing Strategy is Bigger than Each Individual Channel Social media, SEO, email marketing, content marketing – each digital channel you touch will give lift to your other campaigns. So, if you have a well thought-out content strategy, it will naturally boost your SEO, impact what you share on social media, and influence what you send in your email newsletter. Likewise, building an enormous social media following can impact SEO as your content is shared, and drive more traffic to your website. When you orchestrate a marketing strategy in which each channel works together to augment the others, you’ve got a recipe for blockbuster success. Mandy McEwen, Inbound Marketing Specialist and Leader at Mod Girl Marketing, explains: If we learned anything in 2015, it is the importance of cohesive digital strategies. Online marketing has a lot of moving parts that businesses cannot ignore. The days of one-channel digital marketing are gone. It’s not enough to just have a great SEO strategy. It’s not enough to just have great content. It’s not enough to just have an email newsletter. Effective online marketing must be holistic and must be user-centric. In order for businesses to really succeed online, they must have a holistic and mobile-friendly marketing strategy that includes several digital channels and segmented campaigns. Having a strong brand voice and active social media presence is no longer an option – it’s a necessity. Let’s not forget about analytics and user experience, which are both extremely important when devising marketing strategies that actually produce a healthy ROI. Investing in the right software solution, turning existing customers into repeat buyers, expanding on existing content, leveraging guest podcasting, converting social media connections into customers, and leveraging each digital channel to boost the others – successful small business marketing is all about making the most of every resource you have at your disposal. What marketing lessons did you learn in 2015, and what marketing strategies are you ready to try in 2016?
Struggling with Content Marketing Strategy? Nail it with these 5 Tips. Posted on November 5, 2015November 11, 2022 by Jessica Lunk You want to be seen. So, do something. Something big. If you want to catch people’s eye in your content marketing endeavors, you have to do three things: Be bold, be relevant, and be impressive. If you want to make an impact and get your business noticed you have to go the extra mile. To reach and engage your audience use these 5 tips to nail your content strategy: 1. Know Who You Are Knowing who you are takes a deep understanding of the product or services you offer, why you offer them, and a bit of the roadmap that lies ahead of you. Once you understand your business, you have to create a brand around it – and this is the tough part. You know who you are, but does your audience? Branding is how you communicate; it’s your face to the world and while it may change over the years, it should remain a version of itself. Think of Q-Tips, Kleenex, Xerox. These companies are so inextricably linked to their product that most time people don’t know whether you are talking about the company of the item. That’s what you want for your business. 2. Know Your Audience Knowing who you are also means knowing your audience. Successful businesses don’t try to be everything to everyone. Instead, they are super intentional about putting their stake in the ground and defining their audience. Herb Kelleher, co-founder and former CEO of Southwest Airlines, took this exact approach. He decided that his audience wasn’t everyone. It wasn’t even the business-class flyer. Instead, he set his sights on the family flyer. He appealed to them by offer low fares, painting his planes like whales, and implementing a hiring strategy that focused on hiring attitude before skills. And this targeted approach paid off. Today, Southwest Airlines is the nation’s largest carrier in terms of originating domestic passengers boarded. When your demographic is defined, you can get to know your audience intimately. What are they interested in? How are they finding information? What are their pain points? Knowing your audience allows you to tailor your message, taking a personal approach to your marketing to stay super relevant to your audience, and create raving fans of your business. 3. Be Where They Are After you’ve defined your niche, go find them. Does your ideal buyer hang out in specific geo locations? Do they participate in certain communities online? Are they urban or suburbanites? Are they looking for a specific resource that you can provide for free? Take a multi-level approach to meeting your ideal buyers where they are by: Driving top-of-mind awareness with ads. Delivering value through helpful resources. Nurturing with personal email marketing. Especially for smaller businesses that have to do more with less, being targeted with your audience means that you can allocate resources efficiently and effectively. 4. Use Technology Marketing technology used to be reserved for big businesses with big budgets and lots of technical know-how. But today, there are a ton of free or budget-friendly resources that are easy for small businesses to implement and use. Try these examples on for size: Create a blog on your company site. Share your expertise, show off your company culture and feature guest posts from others in your niche. Blogging displays your authority, builds up a reserve of content you can share, and helps your ideal buyer find your business online through search. Leverage Youtube to connect with your audience. Produce your own video, or better yet, leverage your customers’ video testimonials to share with your audience. In fact, Offerpop revealed in a recent report that brand engagement rises by 28% when consumers are exposed to professional content along with user-generated product videos. Create buzz on social media sites. With social media, you can take word-of-mouth marketing one step further and get your audience talking about your brand. Focus your efforts on the channels that your ideal buyer engages with the most. 5. Make Sure They Can Find You with SEO Creating useful, relevant content for your audience is the first step to getting found online. Then, reach out to your partners, influencers in your space, and your customers to share and exchange content, helping boost your reach. As you build content on your site, you may also want to hire a SEO consultant to help make sure your website is structured properly for ultimate optimization. For a few more ideas on how to get found online, check out our Small Business Guide to Online Marketing. You want to make a big splash, right? Try these ideas and watch as you reach grows exponentially.
Sell Them with a Story: How to Use Storytelling to Grow your Small Business Posted on October 28, 2015June 27, 2016 by Jonathan Herrick One of the most effective marketing strategies for your small business has been around since the beginning of time. Storytelling. Even before the modern digital era storytelling was used by ancient leaders to move crowds to action, preserve history and change nations. Storytelling is a powerful tool that you can use to market your brand and connect in a more real and personal way with your audience. The Power of Storytelling “We are, as a species, addicted to story. Even when the body goes to sleep, the mind stays up all night, telling itself stories.” – Jonathan Gottschall (@jonathangottsch), The Storytelling As a small business, cutting through the noise and getting more of your audience talking about you can leave you feeling like David in a match against Goliath. Lots of companies create content, and it’s getting crowded out there. Getting attention is tough, unless you can connect with people on a human level and tap into their emotions. Crafting a compelling, memorable story that shows why your business is unique is a powerful way to stamp your brand on the hearts and minds of your audience. Create a story worth sharing, and your audience will reward you by passing it on to their family, friends and colleagues. But does storytelling really work? The answer: It sure does. The reason storytelling is so effective is because the buying process is not just a rational decision backed by data points for your customers; it’s also an emotional one. In Chip and Dan Heath’s Book, “Made to Stick” they describe why some ideas stick and others don’t. Overwhelmingly the stats show that people remember a powerful story over cited statistics. Stats like the often regurgitated: “We grew revenue by 200 percent.” In fact, in one example, students at Stanford were asked to share facts with their classmates: 63% remembered the stories and only 5% remembered the actual statistics that were cited. I know what you’re thinking…if you’re anything like those Stanford students, you probably won’t remember that stat. So to illustrate, here is a great example of a business using storytelling. Subaru, as you know, is in the car business and like everyone else they could have talked about safety, gas mileage, etc. Instead they connected with their potential buyers and customers with a powerful story, Making Memories: Now I have to tell you I don’t own a Subaru, but as a dad (their ideal buyer) this pulled on my heartstrings in a way that no other car company has. I have shared this video and nearly 340K people have as well. But you are probably asking, so what? Is it driving results? Subaru is outpacing their competitors in growth and recent sales have been up as much as 28% as a result of their focus on leveraging storytelling to connect in a more human way. That’s huge. The Art of Storytelling You’re probably thinking, I don’t have a Subaru-sized budget. So how do you craft your own compelling story that captivates the attention of your small business audience? Start with the 6 Elements of a great story: Understand Your Purpose: Whether you sell a product or a service, don’t make the story about what you do, make it about “WHY” you do it. It is often said if you are in the shovel business you don’t sell shovels, you “Give them a better hole”. People gravitate towards the “why” not the “how” or “what.” Create the Conflict: If everything is running smoothly for your ideal buyer, what do they need you for? It’s human nature to be slow to embrace change, but a pain-point or point of conflict for your ideal buyer can be the catalyst they need to make a buying decision. Show your readers what problem your product/solution solves and what tension it relieves. Create the Character: Develop a character that your reader or audience can relate to and cheer for. Someone that experiences the same challenges and struggles your ideal customer goes through every day. Focus on WIFT: Your prospects and customers want to know what’s in it for them. The fact is, no one cares about your business’s sales and marketing goals. Believe it or not, your audience doesn’t wake up every day waiting to be a lead in your sales pipeline. They do, however love hearing and sharing a remarkable story about themselves! Keep it simple: We all suffer from overstimulation produced by too much content. Attention spans are short, and everyone reads in 140 character, bit-sized chunks. So, keep your story short, easy to digest and impactful. A great example of simplicity is Apple. Deliver a great ending-With a great story, you’ve got readers in the palm of your hand. While you have them engaged, don’t forget to include a clear call to action to help them take the next steps to happily ever after. Describe how doing business with you will improve their lives and emphasize why it’s worth the tradeoff of changing their behavior. Bonus-6.1 Share your story: Now, more than ever, you have a platform to spread your story. Social tools like Facebook, Twitter, Slideshare, and Instagram make it easy to connect with your prospects in customers in real-time and share an engaging story. Social media is also a great place to find elements to craft a great story for case studies, your blog and your website. We are moving into an era where “Personal” Brands will separate themselves from the pack by delivering on authentic and real messages. By using storytelling in your marketing, you give your prospects and customers a reason to care about your business. And to quote the great Mark Cuban: “When you’ve got 10,000 people trying to do the same thing, why would you want to be number 10,001?”
Tackling The Whole “Automation” Thing Posted on October 21, 2015July 27, 2016 by Lindsay Randazzo Everyone’s talking about marketing automation software and how life changing it can be for a business. I agree completely. Automation can make your workplace life a lot easier. For some though, marketing automation is a bit daunting. Trying to come up with your process and set up the steps correctly can take some time at the beginning, but automation will ultimately become your favorite coworker. Start small Jumping right into an elaborate automation strategy is 1) time-consuming and 2) overwhelming. Instead, add automation here and there as you learn more about the system and your strategy. For example, webpage tracking will help you gauge customer interest. Once someone has visited your pricing page, create an automated task for a sales rep to follow up with them. Small step, HUGE result. Instead of someone manually remembering to check and see who visited a webpage for calls (or not knowing at all), automation systems know to tag website visits and link automated actions based on that visit. Automation helps reduce clients slipping through the cracks. Now your sales team will have a list of tasks to call prospects and offer more information faster than your competition. Add pieces along the way Once you have small one-step automation in place, you can start to link multiple actions to accomplish what you want. Let’s say you have a tried and true sales process that works for your business; why not create a campaign with your sales steps? My own sales process looks something like this: Day 1: Send email Day 3: Call client Day 8: Send testimonial. I can automatically start prospects on this sales campaign when they fill out an online form or click a link in my email. This exemplifies marketing automation managing your workflow. Now you don’t have to rely on post-its and reminders cluttering your desk! Find the hidden gems Ask your consultant or the support desk, “What is your favorite feature? What will save me time but be relatively simple to get going?” Hatchbuckers all have their favorite feature, but mine is tag rules. It’s simple in theory, but oh so powerful. For example, if someone gets a tag two times, Hatchbuck triggers an automated action. This can be anything: creating a deal, starting a campaign, sending an automated email. When your prospect hits that magic number that you deem to show significant interest, it triggers the appropriate content. Instead of going through my thousands of contacts and figuring out who should get my drip campaign, or who my top prospects are to call, tag rules do everything for me. My prospects that have the tag rule triggered will get that campaign, or I’ll come into the office with tasks to call anyone with that interest. Super simple, super life-changing. Stop thinking about you It’s not about you… Really. Automation is about customer experience. Take a step back and think about the content they will be receiving and what actions should trigger campaigns or follow up tasks. When a customer visits your services page and have read testimonials twice in one week but have yet to fill out a form, continue to educate them slowly until they are ready to buy. Maybe they have questions but are afraid to ask. Maybe they need a more personal touch. Start building a relationship with these prospects using the knowledge you have about their interests and their behavior. Think about how your clients journey from the start to finish of a campaign and what comes next. When you are providing excellent customer service along the entire sales funnel, loyalty and trust will build as your relationship blossoms. Happy customers turn into your advocates and repeat sales. Get automating! Take it in steps, it’s always easier to add steps to your automation process. Think about your client and imagine if the steps you have make sense for your ideal buyer. Utilize the tools and resources that your marketing automation software provides for you. Those help videos and articles can really help set the stage and give you great ideas for your own process based off system-specific best practices. If you prefer a real person to see what you are missing, reach out! If you feel that you’ve mastered automation and want to really step it up, ask for advanced level suggestions. Let your system do the work for you!
The 140 Character Email Approach to Sparking Conversations Posted on October 1, 2015June 1, 2016 by Lindsey Stroud There are 3 things we can assume about the people we send emails to: 1) they receive a lot of email, 2) they don’t have a lot of time to devote to sorting/reading/responding, and 3) they receive a lot of the same requests. The minute Outlook opens, most people are swarmed with a pile of 25-50 emails, with the goal of QUICKLY eliminating the majority. The first consideration is going to be – “Which subject lines looks like mass produced junk?” Ok delete those. Once the bad subject lines are sent to trash, the next thought is going to be “Which emails have the highest priority?” If at first glance an email appears to be flirting with the lines of a best-selling novel – most won’t think twice about tossing it to the trash alongside the bad subject line victims. So with the assumptions that people don’t have time or energy to devote to long emails and elaborate requests – Which emails do get read? What makes up good email? How do you get a greater response? I think we can take a lesson from our friends over at Twitter with the 140-Character Approach (roughly 20-30 words). This method allows you to quickly get information to your contacts in a digestible amount. It can be a challenge in itself to downsize your emails, but is a practice that will help spark more conversations as the world changes the way it prefers to receive content. Let’s look how to apply the 140 Character Approach to your email marketing best practices: Segment Your Audience – There is no one-size-fits-all approach to email. The minute something does not relate to your audience, you will lose them. Breaking your contacts down into segments will help you to drill down and tailor the messaging directly to their needs, wants, and likes. Consider segmenting by the following to help stay relevant: Status (Former Customer, Prospect, and Customer), Potential Product/Service Interests, Title, Company Size, and Location. Make Every Word Count – When you are squeezing your message into a short blurb, each word is important. The easiest way to grab your reader’s attention and create impact is by using power words, which often create a feeling or awakens an emotion within the reader. Check out this list of 317 Power Words. Have a Conversation – If you are taking time to segment and learn about your contacts through a system like Hatchbuck, you should have all of the tools you need to drill down into a great conversation. Great conversations consist of back and forth communication, so an open-ended question is a good idea to begin the line of communication. Here are 21 Open-Ended Sales Questions to Ask. Redirect – If you have a lot of information you need to get out, don’t throw it all into an email to be disregarded. Consider it a great opportunity for you to use a call-to-action to drive your contacts to your website or landing page. Landing pages are great because you have the ability to place additional descriptions and images that may cloud your email conversation. If you are looking for a cheap landing page builder, try out Wix. Marketing automation helps to put a human touch back to your sales process by giving you key information to spark meaningful conversations. Keep your process simple, clean, and targeted and turn more handshakes into raving customers!
Social Gone Small Part 2: Social Media Content Hacks Posted on September 22, 2015August 26, 2016 by Jessica Lunk In Part 1 of Social Gone Small, we explored the different social media platforms and the popular demographics found on each. Now, we’re going to dive into they type of content that will get your audience engaged with your brand. In Part 3, we’ll look at how you can grow a following of avid fans. Social media is different than other types of marketing in that you are promoting to a social channel. The keyword there is social, and you need to keep in mind that people are on each site to interact with their friends and acquaintances. The best way to get your audience to engage is to be genuinely social with them. Here are 8 social media content hacks to show your personality and get to know your followers: 1. The Rule of Thumb This rule of thumb hack is true of most social media sites. People will follow you if they are interested, and stop following if you are not sending them what entertains or educates them in some way. Therefore, you have to mix up your content. For every marketing-focused piece, you should post a few personal pieces. They can be about your employees. They can be about the current news. They can be funny videos that you find online. You can’t bombard followers with advertising. If you do, you will lose them. 2. Visual Content Is King Images are extremely important on all social media sites with added importance on sites such as Pinterest, Snapchat, and Instagram. Creating original images is an easy way to stand out from your competitors. Make sure you are posting the recommended sized image for each site. There are many great online photo editing tools out there such as Canva and PicMonkey that are affordable and easy to use. 3. Call-to-Action For most social media sites, you have the ability to add a call-to-action in the text area for each post. You can ask your followers to bookmark a post, save it for later or read the rest on your blog. 4. Post With Goals In Mind Make sure you have a strategy for each post. Most social media posts have one of three goals: Click to go to your site Share this item with your friends Respond with a like or comment You can survey followers, have them take a quiz or show them a video. Make it short and simple and know why you are posting. 5. Stand Out With Videos Videos are extremely popular and they don’t have to be long or professionally produced. A minute or less will get you the most views. You can post videos almost everywhere including Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest. The best videos are recorded with a smartphone and posted online. Instead of worrying about production, get your video out there fast. The more you do it, the easier it will get as you develop your voice. 6. Share with Friends Ask your followers to share. Social media channels are all about sharing with other people. That is how they grow. If you are engaging the right audience for your products or services, you can ask your followers to share with their friends. If they like what you are posting, then their friends will too. 7. Shorten Those Links If you are not already using a link shortener, you should be. When you shorten links, you annoy people less AND you can track them. While you shouldn’t want to annoy your followers, tracking their behavior is something that can help you learn what is successful so you can repeat it. While some social media sites do provide analytics, most do not give you comprehensive information. 8. Be Picky Do not try to jump on every social media site that comes out. Do your research and work with two or three to start that have the right audience for your company. You need to be consistent or there is no point to being on a site at all. Want more insight into how to grow your social media strategy? Check back to learn how to grow an engaged following.
The Small Business Playmakers You Need on Your Team Posted on March 10, 2015June 1, 2016 by Jessica Lunk Like a college basketball recruiter courting the best players to get their team to the NCAA championship, small business owners can use personas to attract their best customers – winning more deals with less effort. With personas, you can uncover the motivations and challenges of the very best customers within your customer base. Then, you can develop targeted messaging to recruit more customers who are just like them. Identify and create personas for these small business playmakers to attract the right type of customer (and repel the wrong type of customer) for your business: The MVP There is no “I” in team, but there’s always that one key player – Most Valuable Player – that coaches wish they could clone. The same goes for your customers. You have customers of all kinds, but you can probably name your “Most Valuable Customers.” Your MVCs are the customers you wish you had more of. This ideal buyer spends more money with your company, sticks with you longer, and has less gripes. The Playmaker There’s no great team without a great point guard. A great floor general in basketball knows when to the pass the ball. The same is true for your playmaking ideal buyers. Not only is your solution a great fit for them, but they are raving fans of your business. They know when to pass the word to others who could benefit from your solution set. A big part of boosting your bottom line without adding a lot of manpower is through word-of-mouth referrals. Attracting the right type of customer means that they’ll be more satisfied with your business. They’ll talk about you in all of the right places – from online forums and review sites to networking events with their peers. The Sharpshooter Like the playmaker, your sharpshooter customer knows how to use your business product like a champ. Unlike the playmaker, you don’t hear from this player all that much. However, when you call on this customer to help you score, they don’t disappoint. The sharpshooter steps up when you make the call, whether it’s to take a customer feedback survey, be a customer reference or to provide a testimonial. Low maintenance with high return, the sharpshooter is one of your most efficient customer personas. The Shot Blocker On your team, the shot blocker is great. They reject your competition and swat away challengers, setting up fast break business conversions. On the flip side, trying to recruit a die-hard shot blocker from another team is your most difficult business play. Full of objections and rejections, their loyalty to a competitor can’t be penetrated. You can spend a lot of time trying to score a shot blocker, when often times, there’s better players to work with. The Ball Hog When you’re playing to win, a rotten player can sour the whole team. Most coaches would rather have a team of less talented, but scrappy, players who work together to win, than a gifted ball hog who, in his quest to attain glory, puts the whole team in peril. Think about those customers who suck time away from your other customers – and suck the life out of you. These are the types of customers that you can never seem to make happy. They are quickly dissatisfied and quick to leave your business in their dust. Just as important as attracting all-star customers to your business, persona marketing helps you throw down the gauntlet and make it clear who you are NOT for. A great example of persona marketing is Planet Fitness. Their “No Lunks Allowed” campaign clearly hammers their stake in the ground. Through their marketing, they create a welcoming environment for the average, everyman gym-goer, while at the same time creating a hostile environment for what “they” consider grunting gym rats. Persona marketing is working for the gym. In 2014, they landed on the Forbes best franchise list with a growth rate of 26%. They also received an “A” for franchisor support. Focusing on the right customer – and excluding the wrong customer – is a play for growth. Persona-based marketing can help you attract the right type of customer, turning your customers into playmakers for your small business. For the busy small business owner, recruiting the right customers can feel like marketing madness. That’s why we’ve put together a simple guide for the small business owner that wants to up their marketing game. From building personas to creating the right content, we’ll help you attract and convert more of the right prospects into ideal customers. Download the Content Marketing Playbook to start drawing up better plays for your business.
Marketing Campaign Lessons from the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge Posted on August 27, 2014June 1, 2016 by Jessica Lunk The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge is the type of campaign marketers dream of – a viral, revenue-producing campaign that has everyone talking about your brand. While you may not come up with the next Ice Bucket Challenge, you can run with a few key takeaways to make sure your next marketing campaign is a success. Simplicity is Key. There is no secret formula for making something go viral – often it’s a perfect storm of creativity, influence and current events that boil down to the perfect recipe for an infectious campaign. But you have to start somewhere on your quest to reach more people with your message, so start with simplicity. The ALS challenge is super simple to understand and act upon, so that anyone, and everyone, can participate. Audit your next marketing or social media campaign for ease of use and eliminate any unnecessary steps that may hinder involvement. Influence is Everything. Former Boston College baseball captain, Pete Frates, is credited with helping the Ice Bucket Challenge go viral. Frates, who is battling ALS, participated in the challenge, and his connections in the sports world took it from there. Since then, global celebrities like Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Steven Spielberg and Oprah Winfrey have participated in the challenge, using their star power as a platform to reach millions of people with the campaign. Before you launch your marketing campaign, think about how you can rally the influencers in your network to participate so you can get the most leverage out of your campaign efforts. Innovation Beats Budget. ALS could have poured a lot more cash into a much less effective channel. Instead, with an innovative social campaign, they reached millions of people and received a ten-fold increase in donations. While you can’t always bet on a viral marketing campaign, you can refuse to meet the status quo. Track where you are spending your budget and the impact of that spend to highlight programs that are working and ones that aren’t. Think outside of the box to achieve the same results at a lower cost. For instance, could allocating spend away from a niche conference to a direct mail piece be more effective for reaching more prospects? Can capturing leads from a freebie-offer on your website be more effective than purchasing a cold list of contacts? You won’t know until you test, and taking a creative approach can pay off. Marketing Makes an Impact. Sometimes, especially when it’s difficult to track your marketing efforts, marketing can feel like fluff. But, between July 29 and Aug. 21, the ALS Association had received $41.8 million in donations, compared to just $2.1 million during the same time period last year. Brand awareness and relationship building have everything to do with the success of your company. You can have a great product, the best service or the most noble cause, but if no one knows or trusts your brand, they aren’t going to invest in you. Whether you’re a digital marketer, social media maven, or in the creative department, tracking your marketing efforts back to ROI can show just how valuable you are to the big picture. Maybe you won’t come up with the next “Harlem Shake” or “Ice Bucket Challenge,” but who knows, maybe you will. In the meantime, focus on simplifying your message, building relationships with influencers, out-innovating (instead of outspending) your competitors, and measuring marketing impact to grow your business.