Happy Labor Day!

Blue Dog Marketing wishes you a safe and happy Labor Day weekend! Enjoy!!!














And a little humor to enjoy along the way....

3 Tips for Making Great Marketing Videos

Unless you’ve been living on a deserted island for the past few years, you’ve seen the increase in videos to market products. Videos are a must-have for small businesses. It will give you an edge over your competition and raise your website in searches, too.

How do you make videos that “speak” to your prospective customers? Your prospective customers are looking for information that speaks to their individual needs, wants or problems. Don’t start you video out talking about your business, your products and yourself. Remember, it’s all about your customer!

Here are three tips that will help you make great marketing videos:

Focus on your prospect’s #1 problem

You have to show prospects that you “get it.” If you have a customer that experienced the problem, have them share their story. People love personal experience stories about their problem. 

Your video needs to make prospects relive their pain. If you don’t, they will simply put off resolving it, and you want their business now.

Use the Power of “What If”…

You’ve seen it used in successful infomercials…”What if you could lose weight in a short time with little effort?” Yes, these two small words generate billions of dollars to those companies smart enough to use them. Make a list of your product or service benefits and choose the top three you feel will resonate with your prospects. Add the “what ifs” to your offerings.

Introduce Your Product or Service

Demonstrate how your product or service works. The more dramatic the demonstration, the more impact it has on your viewer.

If your product or service doesn’t lend itself to demonstration, use testimonials from your satisfied customers. Have the customers that told their painful story talk about how your product or service solved their problem.

 

The Power of Video in Marketing Your Business

YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world. Don’t you think video really should be a part of your marketing plan?

Show me.

Because video is eye-catching, it can help you stand out from the crowd and draw in potential customers. Videos can clearly define your business more succinctly and in a much more interesting way then text. Video can bring a personality to your small business, while also demonstrating your authenticity. So if a picture speaks a thousand words, a video speaks a million!

Spread the word, umm... video!

Videos can be shared easily to help spread the word about your products and services. Create a YouTube channel and link your YouTube videos to your website, blog and all your social media. Links between your YouTube channel and website can boost your rank in search engine results. Use the video to encourage viewers to visit your website for more information.

What should my videos be about?

Different types of content work for different types of businesses. Here are some ideas:

1.   Customer success stories

2.   A brief company intro

3.   Product demonstrations

4.   Interviews clients and industry experts

5.   Record conference or seminar presentations you give

6.   Product reviews and testimonials

7.   "How-to" videos or short tutorials

8.   Introduce viewers to staff that have consumer contact, such as customer service. It's nice to put a face to a voice.

 

Writer’s Block? 6 Great Ways to Create Your Blog Content

Are you experiencing writer’s block when it’s time to blog? It’s not uncommon to feel this way. Here are some tips to help you get the content flowing.

Get inspired from blogs you read

Don’t plagiarize, but get inspired. Do you have blogs that you enjoy reading? If you find an idea that you think is relevant, put your own spin on it and expand on the idea for your readers.

Use strong images or video

You can keep your text short by inserting a bold image or a fun video.  Take pictures of your products or the end results of your services and use those rather than stock photos, when possible.

Create a How-To guide

Often, others struggle to do what comes easy for us, such as the services our small businesses offer. You might be surprised at how many people will appreciate a simple and clear how-to guide on tasks you never considered tricky. Share your knowledge.

Use Customer Testimonials

If you have happy customers, ask them to give you a testimonial in writing. Let them know you’ll be using it on your website and your blog. Testimonials strengthen your brand and your business reputation.

Make a ‘round’

Whatever your small business’ niche is, collect all the latest news items or products and put them into a little list. Give descriptions for each item and review them. Before you know it, you’ve created killer content in the form of a round. Rounds have become extremely popular and you may find yourself including them in your monthly blog rotation.

Determining Your Best Keywords

The keywords you use for your website are important for your search engine optimization (SEO).  Your keywords are what search engine looks at when determining the relevance of your site to a person’s search query.

Your keywords can be behind your website (in the META tag area) and used in your webpage content. All these locations help raise your SEO.

How do you determine your best keywords?  

A keyword can be a single word or a phrase, but you want to choose a term that users are actually searching for. Keywords should be short. Fewer than 200 characters is best.

Create a list of every possible keyword you can think of (at least 50-100) for your industry. Try singular and plural words, change the order, include commonly used synonyms and even include common misspelling of words. I recommend keeping your list in an Excel spreadsheet for ease of use and so you can add to it as your products evolve.

The more your competitors are optimizing for the same keyword, the harder it will be for you to rank highly using it. You can determine how many of your competitors are trying to optimize a keyword by looking at how many of them are using the keyword in the title tag of their website. This can be done using Google's "all in title" command.

Simply type "allintitle" followed by a colon and the keyword you are evaluating to determine the number of sites optimizing for the keyword. For example, entering "allintitle:speech coaching" (note there is no space after the colon) returns much fewer results than just speech coaching because it only provides the websites that contain those words in their title tag.

If someone goes to the trouble of including specific words in their title tag, you know they are trying to optimize for them.

Sprinkle your keyword throughout your website content and be sure to include them in your blog posts too.

Glitter Caps & Jewelry

Barbara Giancursio is a very fashionable lady. She’s always wearing beautiful sterling silver jewelry, which she has sold for many years. And, recently, she began wearing adorable glitter caps. Everywhere she went, Barbara was asked “where did you get that cap?”

Because of the huge interest in her glitter caps, Barbara launched Glitter Caps & Jewelry in early 2014. Barbara has been working hard to get the word out about her products.  In May, she held a ribbon cutting at the Brook Lea Country Club in conjunction with the Gates Chili Chamber of Commerce and the Greece Chamber of Commerce. Barbara has also held a summer patio party promoting her products to friends and neighbors.

With her winning personality and terrific product line, Glitter Caps & Jewelry will certainly be a success! If you’d like to host a Glitter Caps & Jewelry home party, contact Barbara at silverstar@frontiernet.net.  

Focusing on Your Ideal Client

Are you trying to sell your products or services to everyone? Or have you found your target market yet? As a small business owner, you want to sell your products or services to the people who want and need it most.  

Marketing is all about finding out who your target market is and learning how to connect with them in a meaningful way.

Once you get a sharp picture of who your target market is, you can easily turn prospects into paying customers. There are three steps to get to determining who these people are: target market, niche, and ideal client.

Target Market

Your target market is the broadest section of the population you're targeting. A target market is not everyone. It is the group of people who will use your services or products the most.

Niche 

Your niche is what you do for your audience

Target market deals with your customer. Niche is all about you. You need to differentiate yourself from all the other businesses that offer the same products or services as your business. What makes you different?

Ideal Client 

The ideal client is the detailed description of your perfect client or customer.

That's where an ideal client profile comes into play. An ideal client profile is a made-up person who represents your perfect customer. They have the exact problems your best customers have, they need your help, and they're ready to buy right now.

By creating a detailed bio of your ideal client, including biographical information and emotional needs, you'll be able to create email newsletters, blog posts, website copy and products that resonate with your audience on a deep and personal level.

Why? Because using an ideal client profile is like writing a letter to one person instead of thousands - the result is that each person who reads the letter feels like it's written just for them.

Remember, choosing a target market, niche and ideal client is for the purposes of your marketing efforts. You will probably attract clients that don't fit the ideal client image and that's OK! You’re not going to turn anyone away. Figuring out your target market, niche and ideal client help you focus your limited marketing budget, time and energy on the potential clients that will yield the best results for your business.

The more specific you get, the more effective your marketing will be and the more qualified your leads will become.

 

Use Facebook as Part of Your Marketing

Today, the internet is one of the most popular places for businesses to advertise. If you've got a business and you wish to effectively market your product or services, you are able to virtually advertise anything online and the web is open for 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

One great place for small businesses to advertise is Facebook. Facebook is one of the biggest social networking websites around today with over sixty two million members and it is still growing.

Facebook is a free and simple way to market your products and services. You can post information about new products or services you are offering, specials you are running, introduce new employees to your current customers and much more.

Need help setting up your business Facebook page and with other social media? Contact Blue Dog Marketing! We specialize in helping small businesses with their marketing efforts.