Is Blab Best For Your Small Biz Branding?
One of the biggest changes of the last year that small business marketers need to understand and learn how to leverage, is the rise of “instant video.” I’m talking about all the live-steam apps that have invaded mobile devices, like Periscope, Meerkat and Blab, which is the focus of this article. The big difference with Blab is that its reach stretches beyond mobile devices (it has a good desktop-laptop presence via Blab.im) and it is better for allowing others to participate. This makes it a natural evolution for anyone who has been using Google hangouts. Essentially you can host your own talk show! You signup with Blab via your Twitter account and in many ways, conducting a Blab chat is a lot like conducting a Tweet Chat, especially if you’ve decided to use this live video streaming platform to promote your small business or your brand. I’ve discussed some of the fundamentals of planning and scheduling a Tweet Chat, and the same basic guidelines apply to a Blab chat or video session. Promote your Blab video Probably even more important than with a Tweet Chat, is promoting your Blab video in the social media well in advance of the broadcast. Also, be sure to use your email list to let your customers know about it. You can’t over-promote your live Blab video sessions. Once you’re involved in a live Blab video session, you have sharing tools immediately available that allow you to alert your Twitter and Facebook followers. If you’re conducting the Blab, occasionally encourage other participants to alert their social media followers in this way. I suggest you create a Blab account by signing on with your Twitter handle and spend a little time exploring topics that you find interesting. This way you’ll learn how Blabs are promoted and shared, and get a feel for how they flow in real time. Once you’re a bit of a Blab veteran you can decide how this video streaming service can be best used to promote your small business. The Blab video strategies you can use to promote your brand are virtually unlimited. Service providers can answer questions and offer insider tips. Some small businesses may want to broadcast Blab reviews of new products and services – and allow their customers and clients to offer their opinions at the same time. How-to videos are always useful. Establishing a regular schedule may work for some small businesses and at that point you will be establishing your own Blab TV show. This will help you create a lot of content fast and if you approach your topics thoughtfully, you can make good use of this content going forward. The Blab app and website give you the option of recording your Blab video so it can be viewed after its live airing and you also get a file that you can feature the Blab video on your website. Note that there is a good search feature built into Blab, so you need to choose the right keyword tags to identify your topics and your Blab videos. In the long run, this will help prospects discover your small business that you might not have otherwise been able to connect with. Here’s a great tip to help you build your Blab audience: Put a link to...
read moreSEO for Small Business Websites: What You Need to Know
It happens to small business website owners everyday. They do a Google search using terms they think their customers would use in searches and their website is nowhere to be found on the search results page. “What do I have to do to get in Google?” they ask themselves. The answer to that question lies in search engine optimization (SEO) for small business and it’s a topic that has to be understood from several angles: The human aspect, The “robot” aspect, On-page SEO, and Off-page SEO. The first two items on that list are related. When you create a website, you’re creating it for two potential visitors: the prospect you want to convert into a customer and the search engine “robot” that is “crawling” your content in order to index and rank it for search purposes. The things that make a page desirable for humans and robots are getting more closely related every year. A few years ago, web designers could “game” the search engine robots and algorithms by what we now call “black hat SEO.” However, that “game” is over now. Today you need to cover some small business website SEO basics, but even more importantly, you need to be sure your web pages meet the needs of your human visitors. Let’s first look at these aspects. On-page SEO for small business websites When we talk about on-page SEO for small business websites, we are talking about the webpages that make up your site, and it includes the words and graphics that your visitors see as well as the HTML code that they don’t see. Let’s start at the top of a typical web page and if you look at the screen shot below, you’ll see that my home page has the title: THE Small Business Expert | Susan Solovic. The keywords “small business expert” are important to me, so I want to communicate them in all the right places; obviously, my homepage is one of those places. You would be shocked how many small businesses have a homepage that is merely titled “Home Page.” There are millions of them, and they all have missed one of the most important lessons in small business SEO: Use your keywords in your page-naming scheme. The keywords you use in your page title, should also be used throughout the page in its content, headline, subheads, names of graphics, URL, and graphic “Alt tags.” The important thing here is not to “pack” your content with your keywords. If your most important keyword and its variations make up about 3 percent of your content, you’re probably at around the maximum level of density. (Of course, you need to be sure you’re using the right keywords, so always do your research.) Further – and this may be the most important advice in this entire article – you must publish high-quality, useful, original content. Google’s over arching quest is to find the best, most relevant, information for searchers, and it’s getting better at this all the time. So be sure that your webpages meet this increasingly high standard of excellence. There are two important HTML (the code that powers your webpage) attributes that you need to consider in your SEO strategy: Meta description Meta keywords These are “tags” that are buried in the code of...
read moreThis Week in Small Business: Important trends in Content Marketing, SEO and the Economy
Wow! Just finished this compilation and realized that none of the articles linked to here focus on the presidential race! (You can thank me later.) However, there are some very interesting insights into how things are changing, especially in the world economy, SEO and content marketing. And, in the big scheme of things, these will probably prove more important to small business owners than all the current political scene “sturm und drang.” Agreed? Politics, government and the economy Get a little help with your crystal ball and check out this Wall Street Journal article on five trends that will shape the future of the U.S. economy. And to see how Millennials are changing the global economy, check out this Business Insider article. Not our favorite subject, but an important one: Essential tax deductions for entrepreneurs and freelancers. Congress is giving small businesses and entrepreneurs some welcomed clarity on tax regulations. (Even more welcomed by one convenience store owner was when the IRS returned the cash they seized from him.) Leadership, management and productivity Do you know about Hyperwallet? If you have a virtual workforce, it may come in handy. If you want to grow fast, you’re going to have to train fast. You might need to break a few rules. Know what “geofencing” is and how it can boost your business? Find out in this article I wrote for MasterCard. Smart use of social media in your customer service system will do a lot to keep your customers satisfied and smiling. Is your leadership style one of the six mentioned here that create excellence? Marketing and sales Keep up with all the important SEO trends for small business websites. Content marketing has been evolving very quickly since 2010. Sujan Patel clues you in on all the changes you need to be aware of. Content marketers need to not only manage their content, but also their time. This article focuses on time management. It’s always smart to learn from others and this article draws 12 lessons from five content marketing case studies. Darren DeMatas discusses five creative ways to drive sales via customer service. Looking for hacks to draw traffic to your website? Here are 10 – although they seem more like “best practices” than “hacks” to me. Entrepreneurship, startups and innovation Need to tap your family and friends for startup funds? Check out this article I posted on Medium. This post by the Young Entrepreneurs Council details 15 of the most difficult things when you transition from employee to...
read moreTake control of your small business: Balance your CAC and LTV
Small business owners focused on merchandising for the next major shopping holiday and worried about making next week’s payroll often have a difficult time taking a step back and looking at longer-range goals. Failing to understand, form and implement a strategy for long-term success, however, will put you on a slow road to failure. There are two numbers that you have to “balance” properly if you want to assure long-term success: The cost of acquiring a customer (CAC), and The customer’s lifetime value (LTV). Let’s start with the obvious lesson: If the cost of acquiring a customer is greater than that customer’s lifetime value, you’re in big trouble. Yes, that’s obvious, but the story’s not quite that simple. If you’re a startup or for some other reason don’t have adequate financial data (sales and marketing) – maybe your record keeping isn’t good enough – you’re operating in the dark. Estimating these numbers as a startup is a necessity, but once you start marketing, buying merchandise, and making sales, you must have a solid system in place that captures and properly categorizes your income and your expenses. If you do that, it puts you in a position to correctly calculate CAC and LTV of a customer, and with those numbers you can make smart decisions going forward. Let’s see how those two vital indicators are calculated. Formula for CAC CAC is simply all the costs – sales and marketing basically – that go into acquiring a new customer over a given period of time. If you spend $100 in one month to acquire 100 new customers in one month, your CAC is $1. This is pretty straightforward once your business gets rolling. However, there can be times when it gets bumped out of whack. For example, if you’re starting a new business, you may pump extra money into marketing in the beginning and be in a position to throttle back a little later when you’re better established. Formula for LTV The simplest formula for how to work out LTV is to multiply three numbers: the value (net profit) of each sale to a customer, the number of sales made to a customer in a year, and the number of years a customer remains a customer (if a customer drops out sooner than one year, this would be a fraction). The formula then is: LTV = (Value of a sale) x (Number of sales) x (Life of customer in years) If your CAC roughly equals your LTV, your marketing efforts are not paying off. Having information like this tells you that you need to: Increase LTV – up sell, raise prices, offer bigger ticket items, lengthen the life of a customer, Cut or optimize your marketing budget – automate, segment better, find the right channels, etc. or Do both of the above. LTV modeling for decision making Once you have good historic numbers for your CAC and LTV models you can look for opportunities. Running at an LTV ratio of 3:1 (LTV:CAC) is generally considered good. (You’ll need to ultimately determine the LTV best for your small business.) If you find yourself in a position where you’re doing even better than that, you might consider taking some of that extra money you’re making and plowing it back into your business to...
read moreSmall Business Strategy: 21 Ways to be a competitor, not an imitator
The academics who roam the halls of the Harvard Business School will tell you that there are really only two basic ways to compete in business: Price Product/service differentiation That’s probably true, but within each of those categories – and especially within the differentiation category – there are many variations or strategies you can use as a small business owner. You need to fully understand these to be successful when you sit down to do your long and medium-range small business planning. The reason many small businesses fail is because customers see them as imitators, not as competitors, so that is the first question you need to honestly ask yourself: Am I really competing in this industry or are most of my efforts going toward imitating what others are doing, or have done? To help you answer this, and point you in the right direction for your small business strategic planning, here is a list of 21 ways you can set yourself apart from the others in your industry and establish your small business as a competitor to be reckoned with. Many are strategies to help you differentiate your product or service. Others will help you get a price/value advantage. Some do both and those can be the best ideas for small business growth and long-term success. Go boutique. Take your product out of the commodity market. If what you provide is a commodity, the only arenas where you can compete are price and service – and adding a higher level of service usually comes with a higher price tag, so it is difficult to achieve. Know your customer better. If you work hard to understand your customers, you’ll be able to better anticipate their needs than your competitors. Your customers will sense this. Nurture relationships with your customers. This is similar to the previous point, but I want you to look at it from the customer’s point of view for a moment. As you’re learning more and more about your customers, are they seeing it as your attempts to make sales or as your desire to serve and help them? Build relationships with your customers that go much deeper than selling them the next item you put on sale. Target your marketing better. The above items lead to this thought. If you can take your product out of the commodity market and you know your customers, you can better target your market. Do A/B testing. Always be refining your marketing. Don’t get lazy. Have a better loyalty program. Strong loyalty programs keep customers coming back for more. Is yours superior to what your competitors offer? Give something unexpected – extras. There may be nothing more memorable or loyalty-creating than to get something unexpected in a business transaction. For example, if you sell bicycles, offer a six-month tune up. Tweak your product or service to open a new market. A new market may be consumers or businesses in your local area who would use your product or service with just a few small changes, or it could be overseas and you just need to translate some materials. Have superior employees. I’m willing to bet that you patronize some local businesses just because the people who work there are so nice or helpful. Hiring, training and rewarding your team to make...
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