Start Working on Your Annual Marketing Plan Now!

2014 will be here before you know it. As a small business owner, you’re probably working on your 2014 budget. Now is a good time to work on your marketing plan for next year too.  

Where do you start when building your marketing plan for next year? Start by reviewing your 2013 Marketing Plan. As you look over your marketing efforts from this past year, ask yourself these questions:

• Did your sales objectives meet your expectations as a result of your 2013 marketing strategies?

• Did you reach the correct customers and prospects?

• Did you drive targeted audiences to your website?

You want to determine which parts of your 2013 marketing plan worked and which ones did not work. Some of your marketing campaigns may have worked well and produced decent results, while others were not effective at all. This is when you can start to make adjustments to your marketing planning for 2014.

Quite often, we find many small businesses do not have a marketing strategy in place at all. They’re flying by the seat of their pants when it comes to implementing marketing campaigns and strategies.

As a small business, you need to focus on your marketing plan. The first thing you need to do when creating your marketing plan is to understand the needs of your customers.

By researching who your customer is, you will discover their “pain points”, what areas of concern they have, and how you can successfully fix their problems. Gathering this customer research can help you create a marketing plan for next year that will grow your business.

If the thought of writing a marketing plan scares you, know that Blue Dog Marketing is here to help you. Contact us!

Your Small Business Website vs. Social Media

Small business is finally embracing social media as a platform to enhance marketing efforts. However, many small businesses now believe that social media is all they need. Not true! Social media has its place in your marketing strategy, but your primary marketing focus should be your website. All your social media work should drive people to your website.

Your small business website should be designed to pull visitors in and showcase your products or services. Your call-to-action should be visible on your home page, allowing you to capture visitor information and market directly to them.

Your website must be mobile-compatible. Your prospective customers will be viewing your website not only from their computer, but from their smart phone and tablet. Your website needs to be adaptable to today’s technology.

While social media is a place your business must be, let social media drive the traffic to your website, where you can control the experience. After all, you have to meet your customer where they are, before you can take them where you want them to go. Just make sure where you take them is inviting.

The Benefits of Email Marketing

Blue Dog Marketing often creates and implements email marketing campaigns for our clients. Why is email marketing such a great marketing tool?

It is Cost Effective

An email campaign is one of the most low cost ways to market your small business. You don’t have printing and mailing costs. The only investment is your time, or the cost of a marketing firm, to create your email message, research your email address list and send it out.

You can target your audience

By researching your audience, you can craft your email message to that particular audience. You can segment your targeted audience by location, business type or age, whatever works for the promotion you want to send out and for your particular business. This allows you to create an offer just for that specific set of potential customers.

A Business Coach Can Help Grow Your Business

Have you ever thought about hiring a business coach? A business coach can help you work more intelligently, manage your business more efficiently and grow your small business. Your business coach is there to support you as you implement the changes necessary to improve and grow your small business.

Business coaches ask the right questions of you so you’re able to come up with answers yourself. They can look at your business objectively and help you set and achieve goals, improve your time management skills, help you focus on outcomes, increase your personal performance and drive profitability.

Business coaches are sounding boards for you to discuss your business ideas and marketing strategies with. They help you stay focused and remain positive during changes in your business.

The right business coach will be knowledgeable about your industry and your business needs. They help you work more intelligently so you can create more work-life balance.

Blue Dog Marketing has several clients that are business coaches. They each have specific industry niches where they are experts and can help businesses grow. These coaches have proven track records of achieving results for their clients.

If you decide to invest in a business coach, know that you’ll have some hard work ahead of you. Your coach will not do the work for you, but rather, will guide you forward. 

 

7 Tips to Increase the Effectiveness of Your Email Blast

Email blasts are a quick and relatively inexpensive way to reach current and potential customers. Before you hit send, make sure your email is written properly and is mistake free. Here are seven tips to consider before hitting send.

1) Does your subject line grab their attention? Without a powerful subject line, you won't grab people's attention and they won’t open your email. Be clear and enticing. Have your readers wanting to find out more about your business.

2) Is your content interesting?  Your content needs to address the problems your customers/prospects are having and how you can solve them.

3) Does your writing flow logically and clearly? Build your ideas one after the other to lead your reader to the logical conclusion. Don’t jump all over and certainly don’t try to use this one email to tell them everything you do or sell! You’ll lose them.

4) Are you using industry specific jargon? If you’ve included jargon in your email, get rid of it unless you know that everyone reading your email speaks fluent jargon.

5) Is your spelling and grammar correct? Spelling and grammar DOES matter. Always run a spell check over your email text before hitting send. And have someone else proof read your email. Some words are correct for spell check but aren’t the word you meant to use. Poor spelling and grammar can turn off potential customers. And, it can affect your search engine results.

6) Is the call-to-action clear? Are the next steps, or actions, you want your customers/prospects to take clear?

7) Does everything work? Do all links work when clicked and send your reader to the right place? Are all attachments actually attached? Are you sending it to the right people?

Follow these few simple steps when sending out an email blast to get the results you want.

Here's a link to an interesting article about how to increase your website traffic.

http://mashable.com/2013/09/09/increase-search-traffic/#!

4 Tips to Help You Discover What Your Customer Wants

What is it that your customers want? That's the million dollar question, isn't it? How do you find out? Ask them!

How does a small business do that? Here are some tips:

1. Talk to them

It's surprising how many companies don't talk to their customers. Direct contact, face to face, a phone call or through social media, is the perfect opportunity to ask your customers about your product or service. You can ask them what the purchasing experience was like, why they bought from you, what they thought could be improved, how they heard about you, etc.

2. Newsletter

If you have a regular newsletter, add a short survey. To increase participation, offer a discount or coupon available once your customers have completed the survey. It's also a great way to ask about which social media channels they use so you can make sure you're on the same ones.

3. Case studies

A case study is a great way to bring a customer’s story to life. A case study first addresses the problem your customer was having, why they hired you and how you helped them. Contact your customers to ask if they’d like to have you write a case study about them. Usually, customers are very happy to participate because it gives them free publicity. And you not only have a very in-depth conversation with your customer, but you get some great marketing material to use.

4. Ask for feedback

Take the time to survey your customers and prospects if you get the sale or not. What should you ask them?

·         Why did they buy from you?

·         Why did they decide to go elsewhere?

·         How did they hear about you?

·         What did they liked/didn't like about your service or product

Taking the time to gather this information shows that you care about your customers. You’ll gather important information that will help you in the future to market to your customers and to better close a sale.

Again, this survey can be a phone call from your customer service department or an email survey you send out. Just make sure you reach out to your customers and the ones that didn’t become your customers.

If you want to know what your customers want, try one, or all, of these tips!

3 Free Sites for Monitoring Your Keywords

 As a small business owner, you’ve embraced social media and you’re blogging or tweeting and want to monitor certain keywords. How do monitor these keywords? Here are three free sites where you can monitor your keywords:

1.   Google Alerts 

Google Alerts is probably the best known monitoring tool. It is really easy to use and it's free. You only need to put your keywords in the system. Then, Google Alerts will email you when your keywords are being mentioned.

With Google Alert, you are able to put in over a 1000 keywords. Remember, you’ll get a lot of email notifications.

2.   Mention 

Mention is a simple app you can download for monitoring your keywords. You can use it on your laptop and there is a free app for your smart phone. This way you can easily see what is said about you anytime and anywhere.

How it works: Enter a keyword that you would like to monitor and this creates alerts that you will see through your email. One of Mention’s great features is that it integrates with your Twitter account. This allows you to easily re-tweet a tweet you find interesting.

Mention is free, but if you want more features, you will need to purchase the advanced account.

3.   Social Mention 

Social Mention is a tool to see what people are saying about you, your company or all the things you would like to monitor. Social Mention monitors all the major social networks like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Google. Just like Mention and Google Alert, this tool is also very easy to use. You will find your results provided in a number of statistics not just the mentions. Social Mention provides you with sentimental ratings, top users of your brand name, top keywords used in conjunction with your brand, passion, strength, reach and more. You can also click on the mentions, this way you can give a really fast respond.

As you can see, monitoring your keywords can be easy and free. You just have to find the one which works the best for you and your company. They all have different features, so decide which features work best for your needs, and start monitoring your keywords.