Problem 1 – Small Business Marketing is left until the need for customers arise
As professional service providers and small business owners, you are responsible for every aspect of your business. You oversee the daily tasks, the bookkeeping and the customer service that is provided to the customers you’ve worked so hard to get. Because you’re being stretched so thin, marketing your small business is usually left until you’re in need of more customers and then forgotten again once you’ve gotten some customers for the time being.
Marketing your small business needs to be an ongoing activity. You should have a list of daily, weekly and monthly marketing tasks that are ongoing and that are continuously generating leads.
Daily tasks can include following up with leads who have called, emailed or filled out a form on your website and participating in social media. Weekly tasks should include blogging and other participation in the blogosphere i.e. reading and commenting on relevant blogs. Monthly tasks should include developing information content, lead nurturing campaigns and checking on the progress of existing campaigns.
Problem 2 – Marketing is entrusted to under qualified individuals and no tracking methods are in place to determine what’s working and what’s not.
Small business owners and professional service providers try and cut corners hoping you’ll see a return on a zero investment. It’s easier and cheaper, you say, to just do it yourself, or have your web savvy intern or daughter hand out fliers at the grocery store, or update your Facebook page every now and then. Although you may save a few dollars on the front-end, what you’re losing in the long run should make you stop and rethink your methods.
Using under qualified individuals to handle your marketing most likely means there is no tracking method in place. If you’re not tracking your marketing, it’s practically worthless. You think you know what’s working, but you don’t really know and if you are right about what’s working you don’t have any idea how well it’s working or how much you’re actually spending on your marketing per customer. Being able to repeat your marketing successes is what helps you grow your businesses. Having a tracking method in place, is what lets you to know what your marketing successes are. If you don’t know how to get this started, hire someone who does, and let them show you how.
Problem 3 – No company blog and not participating in social media marketing
A major reason that small business owners and professional service providers suck at marketing is because you don’t know the value of blogging for business nor the power of social media marketing for your small business. If you don’t already have a blog for your business you are now in the minority of business owners and have limited your ability to position yourself as a thought leader in your industry.
The same goes for social media marketing. Alone, social media marketing is not the answer to your marketing needs, but implemented within the larger marketing plan, social media marketing allows you to engage, promote and grow your online footprint, which greatly effects your search engine rankings.
Let’s summarize:
Problem 1 – Marketing is left until the need for customers arise.
Solution: Market continuously on a daily, weekly and monthly basis to maintain steady lead generation.
Problem 2 – No tracking method in place to determine what’s working and what’s not.
Solution: Hire someone to show you how to track your marketing, or if you already know how to track, being disciplined to incorporate tracking into all your marketing campaigns.
Problem 3 – No company blog and not participating in social media marketing
Solution: Develop a blogging and social media marketing strategy and begin blogging for your business and participating in social media.
Small business internet marketing is no different. As marketing trends evolve, the tried and true methods of traditional, outbound marketing methods continue to be the way most small business owners market their business, even though studies have proven that traditional methods are more costly and less effective.
The simplest metric is how many followers do you have? This number hints at a measure of your overall reach. However, it’s a slippery number. You can have 50K followers who ignore your every tweet which means they are useless to you. A good measure of how influential you are is through the number of retweets you get. This means that what you have to say was considered so valuable, someone wanted to share it with their followers as well.
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Engagement. Everyone who comes to your website that was referred from a social media source, is not going to immediately become customers or leads, but knowing what they are doing on your website is still important. Measuring how engaged your website visitors are is another useful metric that can give you insight into what people are interested in what they’re not.
Meta data can be simply defined as “data about data”. In Google, when you do a search, the meta data is the little snippet of information below the website URL that tells the reader a little bit about what information is contained on the page you are about to click. This tiny description is really all you have to convince potential readers to click on your page. So, your page’s meta description should be interesting enough to make it stand out against the other millions of meta descriptions out there. This is key for excellent small business marketing.