There’s no doubt that growing your business is an uphill battle.  It’s a challenging economy and the rules have changed for marketing and sales.  Gone are the days when you could just run an ad somewhere and expect your phone to ring. 

Effective marketing (and sales) today is a much different game than it was even 5 to 10 years ago.  Interruption tactics (like cold calling, direct mail or blasting advertisements) can still work but they are less effective every day.  Instead you have to find ways to attract your prospective clients – get them to hold up their hand and show they are interested in learning more.  Bottom line?  You have to think through your marketing and approach it strategically if you want to generate leads.  There’s no room for mistakes if you want successful marketing.

That said – here are 5 things that small business owners are doing to sabotage their marketing success in today’s environment.  Do any of these apply to you?

5 Marketing Killers

Not following up or following through

This one is a cardinal sin and it’s so stupid…but you see it happen over and over again.  A potential client expresses interest or a need in your products or services…and they don’t get any follow up or response.  It may not be a guaranteed sale, but interest is interest!

Personal example:  I recently needed to hire a caterer for an event.  A friend of mine recommended a local caterer and introduced her to me.  I expressed interest in learning more and received a quick (but friendly) response a few days later suggesting a call for more details. 

I gave her several times I was available for a call.  I received no response. 

A week later, I tried one more time to engage (running out of time for my event) and the only response I got was a phone call on a Saturday several days later during a soccer game.  Not being able to hear while at the game, I recommended a call on the following Monday…and received no response after that! 

Obviously I went with another provider – maybe my business didn’t matter, but Kansas City can seem like a small town and this particular caterer now has a bad reputation for professionalism with me (and others who I might talk to).  If you’re too busy to follow up, then you need to rework your business approach and try something different.

Recommendation – Are you following up (in a timely manner) on all of your potential leads and introductions?  If not – make that your top priority.  Not only are you potentially missing out on business, but you’re burning a referral source as well.

No consistency on marketing activities

Arguably the most important thing you can do for your marketing is to be consistent.  A great marketing message will fail if it’s not in front of people in a consistent way.  An excellent marketing tactic that’s not executed consistently is a waste of time.

How many business owners do you know who have a blog or a newsletter but rarely if ever actually update it or send it out?  Life and your business is crazy with lots of ups and downs, but if you don’t figure out how to consistently apply your marketing, you will never get out of that roller coaster world.

Recommendation – Identify at least a few tactics that you can reasonably achieve and make a black and white commitment to do those activities every week or every month.  Build on that once you’ve got the basics down.

Marketing to Everyone!

“So who do you work best with?”  If your answer is some variation on anyone who breathes, then you have already failed at your marketing and your wasting a lot of time and money.  By marketing to everyone…you are marketing to no one!

We are all getting inundated with literally thousands of marketing messages every single day.  A generic message that could apply to anyone is never going to break through that noise…and is never going to be heard.

Recommendation – Who are your BEST clients?  Carve out a subset of them and get really specific about who they are and what they’re looking for?  Try crafting a message just for that niche and see if you don’t get a much better response.

Not using Content /Educational approach for your marketing

Buyers are looking for solutions to their problems and most of the time they have several choices when it comes to providers.  Who are they more likely to choose – Company A who clearly understands the problem and provides lots of educational materials and helpful ideas or Company B who only has feature descriptions on how cool they are?  Who would you buy from?

Content and educational marketing makes you relevant to the large majority of potential clients who aren’t ready to buy yet.  If you can educate, inform and maybe even entertain someone who isn’t ready to buy yet, you stay in the running and likely top of mind for when they are ready to buy.

Recommendation – Start thinking like a consultant.  What’s the last thing you did to help educate your target market?  What could you create that would add value and establish you as an expert?

Not being found online

Quick – do a Google search on your company’s name.  Is your website on the first page of results?  If not…or if you don’t show up at all, then you don’t have any marketing.  The vast majority of buyers use online search as a key step in their decision process.  If they see your company in an advertisement but can’t easily find you online then you don’t exist and you wasted that ad!

Also do a search on the problem you solve. Does your company come up on the first page in that case? It’s more likely people are searching on problems or outcomes (keywords) than for your business name.  This is a bit harder to solve, but carries a lot more weight.

Recommendation – Quick fix…make sure you and your business have a presence on LinkedIn and Facebook – both are good sources for Google.  Longer term fix – leverage content and education based marketing (blog or articles, whitepapers other content) to address your keywords and the problems your prospects are searching for.

It’s Not Rocket Surgery!

None of the above ideas are rocket surgery…or even brain science!    However most small business owners are failing at least one of the above five ideas and many are missing on 2 or more of them.

How about you?  Are you onboard and in good shape with all 5 of the ideas above?  Anything else I’m missing that’s a critical marketing step?  I’d love to hear your thoughts – leave me a comment and let me know what you think.

Shawn Kinkade   Kansas City Business Coach

Photo by Alex E. Proimos

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Can your customers find your business when it comes to searching locally?

Back in April when Google released / updated Google Places they also shared that 20% of all searches done on Google included location…translating to nearly 3 Billion searches using Google data from March!!!

Beyond that, a recent study done by comScore and 15miles that asked ‘What’s the first thing you use when searching for local business information?’ had some interesting results on Local Search…

As you might expect, the large majority of consumers look online first, but the statistics vary quite a bit by age range.  The blended number for everyone was  that 70% look online first,

• 55 and older going online – 56% first
• 35 to 54 going online – 69% first and
• 18 to 34 going online – 81% first

Combine those two ideas and it’s pretty clear that if you have a business with a local presence…if you sell locally at all, you need to be found through local search results.

Easy Tool to Use

One local search company is helping you figure out where you stand with an easy to use, helpful tool.  AdCuda has created a local search visibility tool that is not only a really helpful tool, it’s a brilliant example of how to market effectively.

Click over to the tool using the link above and you’ll see the opportunity to enter the name of your business along with your primary zip code.  Hit enter and you’ll get back results on whether you are listed in 10 popular local search listings or not, a letter grade on how you did and an easy to read table of the offerings you could select from AdCuda if you wanted to improve your results.

Great Marketing

What makes it great marketing?  First of all it’s easy to use and easy to grasp – the business benefit / outcome they deliver is getting you listed and helping you get found with local search.  The tool quickly gives you a clear picture on whether you need help or not.

The tool and the other information on their site also demonstrates their expertise and credibility.  You don’t need to guess if they know what they’re doing, they’ll show they understand how things work.

Finally – it’s totally a no-pressure approach.  They don’t save your information, you can try the tool out as often as you like and the resulting offers / information give you a wide range of affordable choices that clearly outline what you’ll get.  There’s enough information that you could probably do the work yourself…but it would be much easier to have them do it.

What’s your grade on local search visibility?  If you haven’t been aware of it and you sell locally at all, it’s a low cost way to get a great boost to your visibility.  Share your thoughts on the Local Search Visibility tool or local search in general, I’d love to hear them.

Shawn Kinkade  Kansas City Business Coach

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Search Engine Optimization has become a mystical term, invoking the idea of wizards laboring in their lofty towers to get websites onto the first page of Google.

The reality is that SEO for really competitive online sites is an arcane art and if your business is going up against the big boys then you need to seek out professional help. 

However if you are a typical small business and you are in a well defined, narrow niche or you’re in a contained geographic area then there are a couple of basic SEO principles that will make a world of difference to you and won’t cost an arm and a leg to implement.

The challenge I’ve had is how to explain these basics to business owners that don’t know HTML, don’t want to know HTML and really don’t want to get bogged down in the details.  Here’s my attempt – let me know what you think.

Think of Google as a Giant Library…in fact it’s the largest library in the world!

Instead of physical books, this library is made up of virtual ‘pages’, each of them like a book on the shelf of the library.

Google wants to make it’s users happy!

Google makes money (lots of money) because 64% of all searches happen on Google – giving them the leverage to charge a lot of money for ads and other stuff.

However those users only continue to use Google if they get what they want when they’re searching.  So Google wants to make the users happy and the best way to do that is delivering search results that best answer what the user is searching for.

Therefore Google has to understand what all of the books (web pages) are about so they can find the best responses depending on what was searched for.  (With me so far?)

Back to Google being a library

Just like at a library – if you wanted to know what a book was about, the first thing you would do is look at the title of the book (the title of the web page).  If the title is “Great Burgers in Kansas City” then Google would assume the book is about Great Burgers…in Kansas City.

The next step to identify what the book is about is to crack it open and look at the Table of Contents section.  What are the chapters in the book about?  For a web page, the equivalent to a Chapter or Section title is a Header Tag – specifically a Header 1 (H1) or Header 2 (H2) tag. 

Using our example, it would be likely to assume there would be a chapter titled “Best cheeseburgers in the Kansas City Metro area” or maybe “Unusual burgers found in KC”.

Finally – the last thing that Google will do is thumb through the book and glance through the content.  Does it look like it’s a book about burgers in Kansas City?  For Google to really be comfortable, there should be a lot of content that would support the chapter titles and the book title.

Where Google isn’t as much of a library

The other thing that makes Google comfortable that a web page is important (and helps determine what it’s about) is based on the number of other web pages that point to a web site with a link…and how they  point to it.  Ideally other sites would setup a link that says Learn about Great Burgers in Kansas City.

The more sites that point to a page, especially if they’re related to the content overall, the more important that page or site becomes to Google and the higher up it will rank for searches on topics related to the title.

What most sites look like to Google – the reality!

Most small business books (web sites) that are out there either don’t have a title or the title is the name of the business…or sometimes even just the word ‘Title’.  So if your business is BFD and Associates and that’s all you’ve got in your title tag, all Google can do is assume that your book is about BFD and Associates (whatever that is).

Then Google opens your book and there’s nothing in the Table of Contents – there are no Header tags anywhere!  Now Google really isn’t sure what your site is about.

Finally – Google flips through your book – maybe there are a lot of words, but nothing really stands out…as far as Google is concerned, your book is about…NOTHING!

I don’t have actual numbers, but I would bet that 90% or more of small business websites don’t have Titles that reflect what the site is about (Keywords), Header Tags that support the Title and reinforce the keywords and content that additionally reinforces those same keywords.

The really great news about basic SEO!

Because almost no one does it right and most of your competitors don’t understand that Google is a library – if you can make a few small changes to your site, you will quickly start moving up the search results, without expensive black magic!  Here are some Quick Tips to get started:

1. Come up with at least 3 keywords for your home page that you think your best customers would use to search for your services.  That could be something like Peer Group Advisory Board or Kansas City Small Business Accounting.
2. Add those keywords to your Title Tag for your home page (it may be difficult to get 3 of them in there, especially if they’re longer, but do what you can).
3. Create headers on your home page content using H1 and H2 tags as natural descriptions for sections of your page.  Use the identified keywords in those sections.
4. Add those same keywords into the overall content on that page.  They should show up at least 3 or 4 times on the page – but make sure the page doesn’t sound stupid when you read it.  This is not more important than readability!
5. Don’t use flash or scripts as your home page (or only use it in 1 section) – it may look interesting but to Google, that’s like have a book without any pages.  You will get NO credit for search if there’s no readable content.

Start looking at your websites or your competitors websites and see how your book reads to Google.  (Try right clicking on your browser page and ‘View Source’ to see the code for your page – you don’t have to understand all of it, just look for Title and H1 or H2).

Does this description make sense?  Send me an email (skinkade at aspirekc.com) to request an article that gets into more detail on this idea – I’d love to hear from you (or post to the comments below)!

Shawn Kinkade   Kansas City Business Coach (letting Google know who I am)!

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Photo by Adam Pniak

These days more than ever it’s critical that your business stands out from the crowd (for the right reasons).

Recent studies show that an ever growing majority of people are turning to the internet first to solve their problems and buy solutions, services and products.  Specifically they’re using search engines like Google.

They’re looking for you, but if they can’t find you…if you’re not standing out, then they’ll go with who ever they can find and you’ll be out a customer opportunity (and an easy one at that since they were ready to buy when they started looking).

The good news is that most small businesses aren’t doing a very good job at building an online presence.  For most businesses owners the bar is pretty low – if you do just a couple of things on purpose you could find yourself on the first page of Search Engine results when those customers come a searching.  A little creativity and some focus could be all it takes to really ramp up your lead generation.

Below are 8 examples of different ways to stand out online – real businesses, real examples that you can steal borrow from.  What could you start doing with your business to stand out?

1.  Develop a viral video!

Blendtec makes high end blenders.  A few years ago, the CEO of Blendtec noticed some of his R&D engineers cleaning up a huge mess.  It turns out they had decided to try blending some wood (2×4’s) just to see what would happen.  The end result was a mess of sawdust and very blended wood!  Sensing some cool possibilities, the CEO asked them to do it again – this time with a camera running and the WillItBlend campaign was born. 

Over the years they’ve blended everything from an iPhone to a bunch of glow sticks with 90 videos posted to date (each at about 3 minutes or less and many of them will millions of views).  This is the only marketing that Blendtec has done for several years and despite a tough economy and an expensive product, their sales have gone up steadily every single year!

2. Move up in the search rankings with a blog!

Search engines love blogs – a blog will supply your website with fresh content that’s (ideally) built around keywords and ideas that your customers are looking for.  In fact one study discovered websites with blogs are getting 55% more traffic than their blogless counterparts.

One great example is the Signal Integrity blog written by Colin Warwick, a product manager with Agilent.  Signal Integrity is the premium keyword for the product that Colin is responsible for, but unfortunately his company website was showing up on page 5 of the Google search results – prompting him to jump into his own blog to start improving the search results.  And improve they did, moving from spot 44 up to the top 5 spots.  You can read more details on all the benefits on an interview he did at WebInkNow.

3.  Educate the old fashioned way

Social Media marketing doesn’t have to be about high tech – Lehman’s is a catalog company that’s been around for 54 years and started out targeting the Amish community in Ohio.  Here’s how Multichannel Merchant describes Lehman’s product lines:

The Kidron, OH-based marketer sells old-fashioned, non-electric merchandise from oil lamps and Amish-made wood toys to soap-making supplies and butter churns.

The starting point is the Lehman’s Country Life blog, the single largest driver of traffic to the website, augmented by educational videos on Youtube and a Facebook group that’s used as a focus group for the business.

4.  Promote your product via Twitter

Kogi BBQ in Los Angeles is one of my favorite Social Media success stories.  It’s self described as Korean BBQ but with a twist of Mexican and just an overall unusual menu.  To make things even more fun – the primary way to get Kogi BBQ is from one of their two trucks that cover metropolitan LA.  And the best way to know where the trucks are going to be?  You have to follow them on Twitter. 

They have over 45,000 followers, and more importantly their trucks typically have a 1 to 2 hour long line waiting for them when ever they show up!

Here’s a great write-up from the LA Times with more details.

5.  Get more traffic than you can handle…literally!

Threadless.com is a cool story – it’s an online t-shirt store where the designs are submitted by artists / wanna be artists around the world and voted on by customers and members of the community for contests and to decide which shirts actually get made.  However this isn’t some small time thing – Threadless has over 1.2 Million followers on their twitter feed and they recently ran into the nice to have problem (but still a problem) of crashing their servers when they ended up with too much traffic! 

It takes a lot of traffic to bring down a server like the one that they’ve been using.  All of that traffic was driven by an online campaign!

6.  Break the rules!

Ask anyone in Financial Services and they’ll tell you that marketing is a huge challenge because of all of the regulatory issues they have to deal with.  In fact they’ll generally tell you it can’t be done.  Anything they share with the public has to be reviewed by seemingly dozens of people before it can see the light of day – making Social Media an impractical marketing opportunity…or so everyone thought!

Putnam Investments is rocking the boat when it comes to participating on social media.  Their CEO is on Twitter.  They’ve built a blog focused on the Retirement Savings Challenge.  It’s not about their products (which would get them in trouble with the SEC and likely wouldn’t be very effective anyway).  Instead they focus on educating and discussing the challenge that all of us face as we try to figure out how retirement planning works in the first place.  By educating and not selling, they set themse
lves up as progressive, helpful and experts to turn to.  As David Meerman Scott points out Putnam is a great example – it’s fear that’s holding other companies back.

7.  Give away great educational content!

Infusionsoft is a software company that sells an automated marketing solution aimed at small to medium sized businesses.  They do several things well when it comes to marketing themselves, but the thing that stands out is their focused effort to create really strong free educational materials (reports and ebooks).  What’s great about the eb00ks is that they specifically don’t focus on the Infusionsoft products, instead they focus on the problems that their target market have and offer solutions.  Then they encourage sharing those materials out to a wide audience through contests and email campaigns.

I’m not a client of theirs, but I continue to be impressed with their educational approach and how they position themselves in a challenging marketplace.

8.  Increase your leads by 850%!

Few things suggest cutting edge online marketing and social media practices less than a 116 year old company that manufactures Fencing materials in Massachusetts.  However looks  can be deceiving – Louis Page is in a niche, blue collar market that most would think of as old school – in fact, they only put up a website about 5 years ago.   However when they launched their blog (The Fence Post), last December they started seeing a dramatic increase in traffic and leads for their products.

In fact as the owner Duncan Page describes to a local news station – his leads have increased by over 850% in just a few months.  People have been drawn to his educational approach and a focus on writing about topics that their customers are struggling with or interested in.

It doesn’t have to be that hard to stand out!

Although these are all impressive stories, looking at them collectively, none of these companies is doing anything that most small business owners couldn’t do. 

They’re doing the basic technical things around search engine optimization that anyone can do (I’m a perfect example – I’m not an SEO specialist, but if you do a search on Kansas City Business Coach on Google, I’m at the top of the list – because I’m doing a few basic things consistently).

They’re in touch with what they’re customers want and they’re willing to take the extra steps to make themselves available and to share valuable content to make it worthwhile to search them out.

What could you do today to start standing out online?  I’d love to hear your thoughts or questions – or let me know if you have some other great examples.  Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Shawn Kinkade – Kansas City Business Coach

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