Grow Your Business with this FREE Webinar Series

Smart Marketing for Smart Business is an 8 week webinar series designed to help small business owners and professional service providers take their businesses to the next level by targeting specific areas of your marketing that may be

smart marketing for smart business webinar series

hindering the growth of your business.

  • Each webinar is one hour long
  • The series will run from July 5, 2011 to August 23, 2011
  • Register below to access ALL 8 webinars each week

As small business owners we want you to understand the shift from outbound to inbound marketing and how it affects you and your business. The 8-week series will give you tools and background information in:

  • Inbound marketing: how it levels the playing field
  • Small business marketing strategy
  • Social media marketing
  • Local marketing for small businesses
  • Website design for lead generation
  • How to measure you marketing efforts to ensure success

The topics above are just a sampling of what will be covered during our 8-week series. Register now for access to this free event that is sure to help you grow your business!

We have a line-up of industry experts who practice what we preach and we are eager to share our knowledge with you to help you grow your business. To reserve your spot for this exciting and free webinar series, sign-up below. Space is limited (and we’re not just saying that). Your login information will be sent to you two weeks before the first broadcast. We look forward to seeing you there!

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Measuring Off-site SEO

Part III – Measuring Off-site SEO

Basic off-site metrics to measure social media marketing efforts. Off-site metrics is activity that happens on other sites (or locations) where you and your target market and/or customers interact.

How to measure Twitter for small business effectiveness

measure your twitter with retweetsThe 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.

A good way to see what kind of influence your social media presence actually has is by measuring your Klout. Using this free tool to see what your social media influence really is, helps you see areas of weakness and helps you capitalize on your areas of strength. Klout will show you what your measurement of your overall online influence is and let you see who influences you online as well as the type of social media engager you are.

How to measure your small business effectiveness on Facebook and LinkedIn

Facebook and LinkedIn both allow you to create pages for your business, and again the easiest way to measure your effectiveness is to see how many people “like” your page on Facebook or “followers” your company has on LinkedIn.

Both Facebook and Linked In provide analytics for your to track how many new people are liking and/or following your business.

In order for you to get the most out of your social media marketing for your small business, your Facebook and LinkedIn business profiles need to drive followers to landing pages on your website so that your analytics and tracking on Facebook and LinkedIn can be used to see what your “likers” and “followers” value about your company.

Before you begin any social media marketing effort, make sure you set achievable goals  and know how you’re going to measure what success looks like. Also, be sure to choose an easy-to-understand and easy-to-use web analytics package.

Here are some web analytics software that are easy to use:

Google Analytics (http://www.google.com/analytics/)

HubSpot (http://www.HubSpot.com/)

Going up (http://www.goingup.com/)

Hootsuite (http://www.hootsuite.com/) Provides analytics specifically for your social media sites.

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Inbound Marketing Tips for Your Small Business

Three Alternative Presentation Applications for Inbound Marketing Professionals
Are you tired of watching boring power point presentations and even more burnt out creating them?  As a small business owner engaging in inbound marketing techniques, presenting is a part of your everyday life. You present while conversing with prospects and clients while you work to grow your business, within your own organization, and when you promote your business online.  Listed below are some great alternatives to the mundane presentations that your inbound marketing small business can use to spice it up a bit:

sliderocket for amazing presentations for inbound marketingSlide Rocket is a web based presentation application that is available to download for free right into your favorite browser.  This program is also slide based just like Microsoft Power Point, but it opens up endless possibilities to design and transform your presentations from mind-numbing to memorable.  Presentation software is not confined to your desktop anymore.  Slide Rockets excels at allowing the user to integrate substantial graphics with mild wording.  (Perhaps insert a link here to preview one of the presentations done on this software.)

prezi for inbound marketing is the zooming presentation editorPrezi is also an online based presentation application, but it has gone in the complete opposite direction of slide based presentations.  Instead, you can create nonlinear presentations with the ability to zoom in and out on a diagram of all of your information.  It sounds very technical and difficult to use, but this program is very user friendly and the site offers plenty of starter videos and sample presentations that you can actually edit during a demonstration.  The best way to learn about this unique software is to watch a presentation and then play around with the software to get a feel of how user friendly it really is.

using google docs as an alternative for powerpoint with inbound marketingGoogle Docs offers their own presentation software that is really geared toward collaborative presentations between two or more people.  If you already have an existing Power Point presentation, you can upload it right to this online application and edit it from there.  This allows all allowed editors of the presentation to see when each and every person edits the presentation.  This is ideal for working on presentations together in your small business, but perhaps when you cannot physically be in the same workspace together.

These are all viable options as Microsoft Power Point alternatives, but the ultimate decision is up to you: Do you want to continue to produce dull, flat presentations that no one even cares about, or would you rather stand out among your competition and bring life to your presentations that will engage your target audience and add value to your customers.

All of these presentation options will allow you to link to your presentation from your website. Use your presentation slides as part of your next blog post.

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Measure Your Small Business Social Media Marketing

Social Media Marketing Part II -Measuring Engagement

Click here if you missed Part I – Measuring ROI

measure social media engagement for smart marketingEngagement. 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.

Two easy engagement metrics for your small business social media marketing are page views per visit and time spent on your website. Your analytics software should allow you to measure both of these metrics.

The reason you want to track these two metrics is because the longer a website visitor stays, or the more pages she reads, the more value she is getting from your content and the likelihood she will be back for more is much greater. So keep an eye on sources that are  generating  traffic even if they haven’t yet produced any sales, they are still delivering highly engaged visitors and as your traffic increases, your highly engaged visitors will begin to convert into sales.

Your website analytics software should also allow you to see your bounce rate. A bounce rate is when a website visitors lands on a page on your website and immediately leaves or bounces off your website. If you see a page that has a high bounce rate, it’s a good indication that where they are landing is not meeting their needs. This gives you the opportunity to fix it.

Is the page relevant to the reason they came to your website? If it’s not, they feel tricked and they leave without wasting any more of their time. However, if they are being referred to your site and landing on a page that is relevant and useful and your bounce rate is still high, consider rethinking the referral source they came from. Maybe it’s not really used by your target market.

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Two Quick Tips for Small Business Marketing

Use Meta Description Tags

using meta description to drive traffic to your websiteMeta 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.

Also, you should make sure that each page on your website has its own meta description because each page is about something different.  A good way to increase the probability that someone will click on your site is to promote a free offer in your meta description.  This could be an e-book, a consultation, a seminar or a white paper. Think about it, you love getting free stuff, especially free stuff that will help you grow your business.

Use Links in Every Footer

One way to utilize links in every footer on your page is to link to other pages within your website that are related to the current page.  Make sure that you aren’t doing this:

Like what you just read? Click here to read more about how to grow your small business!

Instead, you should link the entire keyword phrase like this:

Like what you just read? Click here to read more about how to grow your small business!

Google has a ball with links so make sure that the links you are providing to your readers include descriptive keywords that focus on the content of the page you will redirect them to.

Another way to utilize links in your footers is to link to content that you own outside of your website.  This includes your blog, Facebook page, Twitter page, podcasts, and YouTube account.  The specific link, or links, you provide at the bottom of each page should be related to the content on the page.  Since the information you provide for readers on your page should intrigue them to read more, supplying them with related links to what they just read will eliminate any extra work they have to do to read more about a particular subject.  Simplicity is key.

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How-to Measure Your Small Business Social Media Marketing ROI

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Part I – Measuring ROI
As a service professional, it is important to understand how you are going to measure your social media marketing campaigns. Seeing the business value and return on investment (ROI) from your social media marketing is the difference between effectively integrating social media into your marketing mix and playing on Facebook and Twitter all day.

measure social media ROI

For social media marketing ROI success, your first step should be to conduct demographic research to identify which social sites your target market is using. Your next step should be to set goals with clearly defined levels of success.

While managing your small business marketing on your own, you have come across the word metric a number of times. All a metric is, is a standard unit of measurement or the way we measure something. Your small business social media marketing metrics should be thought of in two categories. On-site – activity that takes place directly on your website- and off-site, activity that happens on other sites (or locations) where you and your target market/customers interact.

Basic on-site metrics to measure small business social media marketing efforts

ROI: How much money are your social media marketing efforts contributing to your business? Is the cost of your investment smaller than the value you are receiving? Remember cost is not always financial; think of your time as a cost as well.

To effectively measure your social media marketing, you need a decent analytics package that allows you to track certain actions taken on your website like, completes a lead form, makes a purchase or downloads an e-book. In order to keep track of visitors who have taken certain actions, you need to label them so that you can trace that visitor back to the website that sent them to you. That website is called the referrer. Tracing your website visitors back to where they came from lets you evaluate the effectiveness of each source.

 

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How to use Twitter Icons for Small Business

As a small business owner, your small business should own a Twitter account and it should be used on a regular basis to maintain contact with your customers or prospective customers.  But do you know how to present yourself on Twitter as far as your icon and profile goes?

break out of your twitter shell with a new icon for smart marketingYour social media marketing profile is representing your small business, and your Twitter icon should embody the feel of your small business.  The worst thing that your Twitter followers want to see is that horrible Twitter egg icon.  This shows your customers that you haven’t put much thought or care into the way you present yourself online.  Break out of your Twitter shell!

If you have a logo already, you should use that accordingly.  This allows customers to recognize your brand and your company easier.  But what if you don’t have a set logo yet?  Simple, just create your own icon that features the name of your business.  This is your chance to think outside of the box you are currently in.  There are many free online photo editing websites, such as www.picmonkey.com, that will allow you to design your icon to the exact size Twitter requests.  Amazing!

Regardless of what your icon is, it needs to look professional.  If it is a picture of the front of your business’ building, make sure it is in focus and that it is not pixilated at all.  This also shows carelessness.  Also, you want Twitter followers to be able to tell what is portrayed in your image.  If, like above, you have a picture of your building, don’t take the picture from across the street leaving a lot of empty space on the sides of the icon.  Make your icon relevant to your business so that people don’t have to guess what your icon represents.

Twitter icons are small real estate spaces where you can either make or break that connection with a future Twitter follower who you hope to turn into a customer.  Don’t let a substandard icon take over your Twitter any more.  Vamp up your icon and get more followers today, who will turn into leads tomorrow.

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Get More Clients for Your Small Business with Social Media Marketing

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Thanks to the internet-focused age we live in, small business owners have been slowly making the switch from time consuming, costly outbound marketing to effective, efficient inbound marketing.  The new focus on inbound marketing has allowed small businesses to get found by the customers who need them and ultimately get more clients, without trying to outspend the competition.

As a small business owner, you can market your small business using social media marketing by making effective use of free online tools. These tools allow you to interact with your prospects on your social media networks and check to see how many of them share or retweet the information you provide to them. A few of the free tools also offer reports that let you know if your social media efforts have had an impact on your clients.

To effectively market your business, you need to be active online and in social media.  But just having a Facebook page or a Twitter account is not enough anymore.  To reach more people and get more clients you need to make sure you are getting a return out of the time and work you are putting into your social media networking. Is it truly growing your online footprint?

tweetdeck vs. hootsuite for content managementFor better management of your social media accounts, here are two social media marketing tools that help you manage all of your accounts in one place and provide some free reporting tools:

Hootsuite is a social media client (still known as Twitter clients, but do so much more) that allows you to build custom social analytics reports, update multiple networks in one step including, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook (profiles and pages) and Foursquare, compose and converse on the go with mobile apps for iPhone, Android and Blackberry; track results review success with click-through analytics in real-time; manage multiple contributors with team collaboration, share data and access without sharing your passwords; optimize delivery by choosing the best time and date to deliver your message to your audience. Hootsuite allows you to schedule messages in bulk and have your posts made when it makes the most sense for your business.

TweetDeck is another client that is has a very similar function as Hootsuite. It boils down to your preference and which one provides the simplest user experience for you. Just now that once you begin to market you small business using social media marketing, having a tool that monitors, tracks and allows you to see what is working best for your business, is a must.

To read more about what each social media client has to offer check out TweetDeck VS HootSuite: The “Twitter Client” Showdown.

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How to use Social Media Marketing to Grow Your Business

Use social media if you want to grow your business, pay attention.  As a small business owner, you know it should be a part of your marketing mix, but what you may not know is how to get the most out of it or even how to use it at all.  There are several different forms of social media including Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

It’s important that we view social media as a tool and not an end unto itself.  It must be maintained on a constant basis.  It is also ever changing and new user interfaces are added every few months.

The key takeaways from today’s social media audio blog are:

  • If you choose to use social media as part of your marketing, define it in your marketing plan.
  • Social Media is not an end unto itself and should fit into your overall marketing plan.
  • Know your business goals and what strategies and tactics you want to use to achieve them and whether or not social media is a good tactic to use.
  • Know how you’re going to measure the success of each tactic before you begin.
  • This is a great tactic to grow your business, but how does it fit into your overall marketing plan?
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Are You LinkedIn? Social Media for Service Professionals

Article first published as Are You LinkedIn? on Technorati.

LinkedIn means businessAfter eight years of being the social media hot spot for business professionals, LinkedIn reached its 100 million user mark. However, there are many service professionals who still don’t get LinkedIn’s full value.

Pay to Play

Unlike Facebook and Twitter, LinkedIn offers a more corporate, professional feel. There is a subscriber option that gives users more access and more networking capabilities. Overall users are able to build a professional network of current and past professional relationships. Before sending a “connect” request, LinkedIn asks how you know this person. This is unique in that it’s not a herding contest of who can get the most “connections” but a legitimate source to grow quality relationships with people who you can help, or who can help you.

LinkedIn comprises five major features which are similar to that of Facebook:

  1. Events
  2. Applications
  3. Search
  4. Groups
  5. Answers

Answers are a unique feature that you can use to demonstrate your expertise in your industry by providing good and useful advice.

It’s Not Just Who You Know, It’s Who They Know

LinkedIn shows you your network and degrees of connection, as well as how many people you are potentially connected to and how you are connected to them. This is useful because you can ask to be introduced to key players in your industry by someone you know that also knows your desired contact.

Another unique feature of LinkedIn is the ability to give and receive recommendations. Send a link that says “will you write me a recommendation on LinkedIn?” to former clients, employers and co-workers. This recommendation is listed on your profile page and works as a great credibility booster.

Using LinkedIn for business may make more sense for most professionals than having a Facebook page. However, as with any marketing tactic, there needs to be clearly defined objectives. LinkedIn can serve as a powerful self-promotion and business promotion tool, and with 100 million users shouldn’t be dismissed as a more viable social media option for your business.

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