Welcome to another beautiful fall Friday, Hatchbuckers. This week we have gathered some great articles useful to any Small Business! With the holiday’s right around the corner –  you may be thinking that now is the time to run your first social media contest, or begin a revamp on your existing website or marketing strategy. We hope our Friday favorites serve you well!

• How To Maximize Email Lead Capture – http://www.ducttapemarketing.com/blog/2013/11/04/email-lead-capture/: Did you know that email marketing still produces the highest return on investment of any marketing practice? Within this article, Joan Jantsch outlines the tools and form placements needed to provide the yield the highest capture!

• How To Run a Successful Social Media Sweepstakes – http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/social-media-sweepstakes/#: Within this detailed overview, Social Media Examiner walks you through the 5 steps of running a social media sweepstakes. With the holidays approaching, your Small Business may consider running a contest or promotion, and this article provides all of the information you need to get going.

•  The Beginners Guide to Online Marketing – http://www.quicksprout.com/2013/11/07/the-beginners-guide-to-online-marketing/: Saving the best for last, a GREAT resource for Small Businesses and Entrepreneurs. In this guide, you will walk through 14 well-written, easy to understand chapters packed with great information about online marketing

Often times your Small Business will get a suggestion to create an eBook.  Don’t feel alone if you’ve wandered what an eBook consists of – or how to start creating your own.

What Are The Characteristics of an eBook?

eBook

• Electronic Book
• Typically Not Used For Lead Capture (Do Not Require Information to Acquire)
• Short
• Interactive
• Visually Appealing (Graphics)
• Casual
• Designed for Skimming
• Bulleted Points
• Can Be Easily Distributed
• Often Landscape Design

eBooks can be a great avenue for a Small Business to create and distribute valuable information to their audience.

Getting started with email marketing campaigns can feel like a big task. Many people who get started with new email marketing software get stuck on creating all of content up front. When you realize how effective nurturing campaigns can be, many people want to set up  a year long campaign with all of the content right away. This is great if the content is no problem for you, but for many, this task seems daunting and they give up before even starting.

Here are the main 3 types of campaigns we see created and how to save yourself some time when creating them!

Campaign type #1: Nurturing Campaign

What it is:

A nurturing campaign should be a series of emails that give your contacts educational information. This campaign should not sound self- promotion-y or sales-y at all. The purpose of this campaign is to introduce and educate your industry and products to your email list without being a pushy salesperson.  By educating your contacts on the benefits of your product or services, you are helping them come to a decision.

Make it easy:

Use content you already have or use other people’s content. If you write a blog or have any good educational material, repurpose that for your emails in this campaign. If you find other articles by a third party (non competitor, of course) then link to that article. Always make sure to give credit to the author and keep your email short. Write 1 or 2 sentences about why you thought the contact would like the article and put the link in.

Hack:

Just stay 2-3 steps ahead. If you don’t have hours to spend creating this campaign upfront, then don’t. Create 3 or 4 steps to start and keep adding emails to the tail end of your campaign, but make sure you stay a few steps ahead.

Campaign Type #2: Customer Check-in Campaign

What it is:

A campaign to stay in touch with your customers on an occasional basis to stay top of mind and receive feedback.

Make it easy:

You don’t need a lot of emails for this one. Staying in touch quarterly is probably more than enough. Intersperse a generic “checking in” email just to say hi, with emails asking for feedback.

Hack:

Reuse some of the same emails. I can probably just create 4 emails here, since they would be dispersed over a year. Most likely, a year later, the contact is not going to remember the 1st email. If you would like some difference, just create copies of the 4 emails and change some wording– now you have a 2 year campaign.

Campaign Type #3: Sales Campaign

What it is:

A shorter term campaign. This is what brand-new leads receive. Usually this will be a introduction email and a follow up email (both with a clear call to action).

Make it easy:

If the contact is not ready to buy now, they should be on a nurturing campaign. Just create 2 simple emails to introduce your business and follow up on the first email. Include a clear call to action link. If the contact does not click, make sure they are started on a nurturing campaign.

Hack:

Create your first sales campaign and then copy it and change the subject lines on both emails. Start half of your new contacts on one and half on the other. Now you can compare opens and clicks between all 4 emails. Always testing things, like subject lines helps you to learn what your audience is more receptive to.

As Halloween approaches, I started thinking of some of the email “horrors” I see Small Businesses make every day.

Top 3 Email Horrors To Avoid This Halloween!

• Horror #1: Spamming Your Contacts: Spam accounts for nearly half of all emails received (yikes!) The key is to build a reputable list, sent targeted communications, and know your contacts. Check out our blog, “Spam I Am (Not): Top 5 Questions To Ask Yourself Before Sending An Email” to make sure you are not contributing to a huge problem.

• Horror #2:  Infrequent Communication: Often times I see small businesses with little direction in their approach. They will send emails randomly, with little thought behind their email content and its timeliness. This leads to infrequent and irrelevant email communication that appears unorganized to your contacts. I encourage each of my clients to map out a sequence before starting any email campaigns to avoid this horrifying approach.

• Horror #3: Writing A Sales Pitch: If you look at the emails you tend to read and respond to, you will most likely find that they are personalized to you. Write your emails in the same tone as your emails to your friends and family. If you write your emails with wordy sales garbage, people will quickly disregard you (and probably unsubscribe/mark you as SPAM). I can’t stress enough, aside from sending relevant content – how important tone and personalization is. Write as though you are having a conversation with one person vs. the masses.

In lieu of fall and after visiting my first pumpkin patch of the season, I wanted to talk about one of my favorite concepts from entrepreneur, author, and speaker Mike Michalowicz. In 2012 Mike spoke at an Entrepreneurs Organization of Saint Louis about entrepreneurial approaches he learned from pumpkin farmers. I immediately became interested in the correlation between a budding entrepreneur and a farmer.

The concept behind The Pumpkin Plan is simple and straight forward – you can grow your business by pertaining to everyone (growing both good pumpkins and bad pumpkins), or by focusing in on perfecting one niche (growing good, colossal pumpkins). When you become ridiculously good at your niche and stop serving everyone, you in fact – grow something colossal.

The Pumpkin Plan states the following:

1. Plant the right seeds (what is the one thing you do better than anyone else? Do that.)
2. Spend time nurturing those seeds (nurturing  = spending all of your time, money, and energy with your “right seeds”)
3.  Weed out the bad, rotten pumpkins (Those that drain internal resources = under pay, over demand)
4. Over nurture the good, healthy pumpkins (Over serve and satisfy your ideal customers)
5. Sit back and watch your pumpkin patch grow with winning pumpkins (Filling your business with winning customers who help your business grow)

Never thought such a simple business concept would make such a huge impact on me. Check out Mike Michalowicz or The Pumpkin Plan if you are looking to learn some great, out of the box business advice.

Social selling or social media selling is a hot topic now. Most businesses know that they can reach a larger pool of potential customers by creating and maintaining social media profiles.

Creating and maintaining the profiles are a start, but then how do you find prospects for your business? And how do you pull them into your sales funnel?

In May, we posted this blog, “4 Must- Dos For Selling on Social Media“, which had some great tips on how to find prospects and develop relationships: http://benchmarkcrm.com/blog/4-must-dos-for-selling-on-social-media/.

So what do you do now? The answer is: you must capture their information.

To do this, you need a contact capture form and you need to offer something of value. If your audience already likes your content, they will sign up for something like a whitepaper or ebook. If you are online retail, coupons or specials always work great as lead bait.

You can leverage this form differently across social platforms. Here’s a brief list of the main social media platforms and how to utilize contact capture forms across them.

Facebook:

Facebook lets you embed a form onto a thumbnail image on your company page here:

Make sure that after you embed your form, you also post status updates so that your pages fans know that the form is there. Facebook also now allows you to use hashtags. Using a strategic hashtag in this post can expand the views for your status update and increase your form submissions. Here is a full blog on how to embed your form to Facebook:  http://benchmarkcrm.com/blog/facebook-to-capture-leads-really/

Twitter:

You would want to post a link to a signup form. Make your status update to signup enticing in 140 characters or less and include a relevant hashtag to increase the posts reach.

LinkedIn:

The great thing about LinkedIn is when you post a link or update, you are allowed to share it into groups, which is a great way to increase the views with those who don’t follow your company or aren’t connected to you. Post the link to the sign up form with a brief description on your company page and then hit “share” and share to groups you think would have interest in signing up.

Pinterest:

Pinterest allows you to add a link to your image. So you can “Pin” an image of the actual form or of a sign up button. In the description area, describe what they get for signing up. Then make sure you link the image back to the original sign up form. Here’s a blog with a full description on how to do this, as well as other tips on lead generation using Pinterest: http://benchmarkcrm.com/blog/how-small-business-can-use-pinterest-for-lead-generation/

Once you have a prospects name and email you can start sending them more information about you and your company. Ideally, when they fill out a signup form, the prospect should be able to tell you what products and services they are interested in so that you can target them with relevant, interesting educational information on those specific items.