How to pick your shots when advertising a small business
Almost every small business and startup faces a single problem and it’s one that gets very little attention in articles like these: How can you compete against bigger or more established businesses? If you only pay attention to the conventional wisdom that is most often articulated in advice articles, it will make marketing or advertising a small business very frustrating and expensive. Let’s look at some strategies that will make advertising a small business more successful. Study the competition The first thing you need to do is to discover where advertising a small business won’t work. You need to know where your competition is focusing its marketing efforts and judge their success. With a little research you should be able to identify the areas where your competitors are spending most of their time and money. Look for consistency and effort. Just because your competitor has a Twitter account, for instance, doesn’t mean that it’s being used successfully. A great place to begin this research is on SimilarWeb. SimilarWeb offers a free and paid service. You might get by with just the free service, especially if your competition depends on the Internet for a lot of advertising and marketing. I just looked up a site similar to mine and discovered that nearly 50 percent of the traffic to this site comes from organic searches and this site doesn’t do any paid search advertising. This might present an opportunity to explore. If your competitors do a lot of traditional advertising – print, radio, television, etc. – you’ll probably have a fairly good feel for this. Do the basics Look for the low-hanging fruit first: If your competitor is not getting organic search volume, then make search engine optimization (SEO) and content marketing a priority. If your competitor is not getting a lot of traffic from the social media, concentrate some of your effort there. If your competitor is not buying any online advertising, pull together a small budget and start advertising your small business on this avenue. These are very standard ways of marketing and advertising a small business today and it’s fine to invest time and money in one if you sense your competitor is not very active in it. But avoid the areas where your competitor has a significant presence; you don’t want to wage a scorched earth battle for the advertising and marketing turf where your competitor is strongest. Advertising a small business in other places If your competitors seem strong in these areas, start looking to non-traditional avenues for advertising and marketing: Trade shows. While these aren’t really non-traditional, you might find they are ignored by some of your competitors. They can be excellent venues for advertising a small business. Public relations. Become an expert at promoting yourself to the local media. Get free publicity and whip up interest in who you are and what you’re doing. When it comes to advertising a small business, nothing beat “free.” Compete for awards. If your industry or community gives awards, get into the contests. You’ll meet people, make a positive impression and you might actually win sometimes. Business development. Where are new places that your business can “plug in”? Brainstorm strategic alliances with related businesses. Direct mail. For some local businesses, targeted direct mail campaigns are the most powerful...
read more7 great web resources to build your knowledge and grow your business
“Risk comes from not knowing what you’re doing.” – Warren Buffett. Almost every person who starts a small business begins from a position of not knowing a whole lot about what needs to be done. Learning while doing is fine, but some people don’t learn quickly enough to be successful. Further, many others get to a certain level in developing their small business and then their knowledge stops increasing. They reach a sort of equilibrium between the amount of money they’re making and their desire to gain more knowledge to see what the next level looks like and discover how to get there. Many in this situation have merely adjusted to a certain pain level. Things may not be great, but they’re making ends meet so they learn to live with it. This is sad because honestly, taking a small business to more profitable levels, isn’t as difficult as one might believe. The most important things you need are desire and the willingness to take a risk. If you have those attributes, then you must find some places to increase your knowledge. You’re on my website, so it looks to me like you’re a good candidate for supersizing your small business brains, so let me steer you to some excellent online-resources. SCORE. The Service Corps of Retired Executives has been around since 1964. It offers all kinds of free counseling and mentoring for small business owners and entrepreneurs. The website has a lot of solid resources. However, developing a relationship with someone who has “been there, done that” can be invaluable. Find your nearest chapter and connect. The best business books. The link I’ve provided here will take you to the best-selling business books on Amazon.com. Be sure you’ve read the classics – don’t just focus on what’s hot today. After the classics, find the titles that will build you up in areas where you’re weaker. SBA. I want to point you toward the training section of the SBA website and its listing of Small Business Development Centers. You’re going to find a wide range of topics covered here and if there’s an SBDC near you, make yourself familiar with what they offer. Wall Street Journal blogs. The Wall Street Journal itself is behind a pay wall now, but you’ll find a lot of important current information covered in its free blogs. Small business owners are always short on time, this is a good page to scan each day to stay on top of what’s going on. Crowd-sourced knowledge. The Internet allows you to ask questions in forums where anyone can answer. Sometimes the answers are absolutely brilliant and from people who have an incredible depth of knowledge and experience. Two of these are Quora and the Small Business Forum. Quora takes questions on any topic under the sun; you’ll find many small business and money-making questions explored there. The Small Business Forum is an old-school website with topics and threads. I encourage you to explore some of these resources and dig up new knowledge and information. Build relationships with experienced business owners who have successfully grown their companies. If you find inspiration, the desire to grow and willingness to take risks will...
read moreIs the secret of your small business success linked to the secret of Facebook’s success?
Facebook recently announced financial results that blew expectations out of the water and its stock shot up on the news. But if you’ll dip into your medium-term memory for a moment, you’ll recall that a few years ago Facebook stock was hitting new lows not long after its IPO. This turnaround is, of course, based on exploding ad revenue and tied up with that fact is good news and (maybe) bad news for small business owners along with some very important lessons. Let’s start with the lessons that Facebook’s success is teaching us, especially in light of the question of whether or not to advertise on Facebook. Facebook ad revenue is up 45 percent over last year and – Get ready for it! – 78 percent of that growth comes from mobile ads. I don’t think there’s any other single statistic I’ve seen recently that does a better job underscoring the importance of mobile marketing in your small business. Advertise on Facebook? If you’ve been wondering whether you want to advertise on Facebook, you need to consider the question from the mobile marketing perspective. Let me point out another lesson that the financial success of Facebook advertising teaches us and it’s one that isn’t immediately obvious. I’m talking about the death of the Internet as most of us have known it. Consider this: Facebook is booming in both advertising revenue and users, and this growth is coming in the mobile sector. With that understanding, let me ask you a question: Are users accessing Facebook via mobile browsers, or the Facebook mobile app? I think far more users check Facebook via the mobile app than do via their mobile browser. This reflects a growing trend, especially among the younger demographic. Mobile users prefer using apps over navigating to websites using a browser. Is the Internet on its way to becoming just a pipeline to fuel mobile apps? Probably not entirely, but it’s certainly easy to picture a day when mobile users have a handful of mobile apps they rely on and scorn having to deal with the clumsy navigation delivered through the browser experience. Need a mobile app? This is pushing small business in a couple of directions. You should carefully assess your need for a mobile app and you should also consider advertising with Facebook, or another social media platform that gets a lot of mobile users. This leads us to why Facebook’s good news should also be good news for your small business. If you look at Facebook’s ad revenue growth curve, it goes up dramatically. It couldn’t grow this strongly if advertisers weren’t getting a decent level of success from the ads. I don’t think advertising through Facebook is a “slam dunk,” but I believe that if you are smart, or work with someone who has proven success on the platform, you can achieve your goals. In the shorter term, this might help you avoid developing your own app; reach your customers through targeted and tightly budgeted Facebook ads. (By the way, most of the easiest and fastest app development services charge monthly fees, so the cost model isn’t too different from the way you budget for ads. I looked at some DIY app services earlier.) The bad news, or at least the no-so-good news, is...
read moreThis Week in Small Business: Rob Gronkowski’s Winning Marketing Plays, and more
Rob Gronkowski has scored his share of touchdowns for the Patriots. He is also a winner on the modern marketing playing field. Tearing a page out of his marketing playbook is the subject of just one of the excellent articles in this week’s small business curated content. Leadership, management and productivity Google analytics is key to managing your small business website, and you must have it installed. But once you do, do you know how to understand and deal with your bounce rate? A major part of small business success today correlates to becoming a thought leader. This podcast will put you on the path to becoming a thought leader. Marketing and sales Are you good at marketing? Are you Rob-Gronkowski-good at marketing? Find out. Despite everything, Facebook is still critical for small business success. You need to understand how to leverage targeted advertising. But if you don’t want to pay for ads, you really need to know how to maximize your organic reach. And since we’re discussing organic reach, here are eight SEO techniques to boost your website traffic. Your blog is useless for content marketing if your titles don’t grab readers. Here are some good attention-grabbing strategies. If you think you’re having trouble ramping up your mobile marketing, you’ll feel better after you read about the headaches some legacy retailers are suffering. Discover how you and your employees can sell more by using mobile technology on the way to meetings and during meetings. If you’re planning a social media marketing campaign, here are six principles to carefully consider. See how 25 social media pros went viral and then swipe their ideas to go viral with your content. Entrepreneurship, startups and innovation This article details four resources available for veterans who want to start a small business. If that’s not you, forward the info to an interested vet! Opening up the crowdfunding platforms for non-accredited investors may change the face of small business funding. Here are the details you need to know. We’ve seen the sharing economy come to lodging and transportation. Is the legal profession ready for it? Politics, government and the economy Good news or bad? U.S. small business optimism unchanged in October. Believe it or not the economy in Washington D.C. – despite all the money that funnels through there – isn’t in all that great of shape, and it could be cause to worry… Maybe the best way to take advantage of the current economy is to be in the business of selling luxury...
read moreTune Up These Four Areas For Online Holiday Sales Success
This post is sponsored by Samsung. All thoughts and opinions are my own. Although none of the big greeting card companies have yet to market a card for Cyber Monday, it’s one of those special “named days” that virtually everyone knows about today. In fact, online shopping for holiday gifts has grown so much over the last several years, that retailers don’t limit their strategies to just Cyber Monday any more. Today, the entire five-day stretch from Thanksgiving Thursday to the following Cyber Monday has been dubbed “The Cyber Five.” With that importance in mind, let’s look at ways to make the most out of this intense shopping period for your business, as well as over the weeks that follow. 1. Social media You have probably fallen into certain patterns with your social media posts throughout the year. Now is the time to do some rethinking and targeting. If you don’t have an editorial calendar to finish off the year, start one. (And, by the way, continue the practice after the holidays are over.) Examine your merchandise and inventory along with your packing and shipping schedules. For example, if you have some items that have special shipping requirements that delay delivery times, you want to feature these products early in your marketing to prevent customers from getting excited by them only to be told that they can’t be delivered on time. Or, be prepared if you have items that are only offered during the season. Those “limited” items will be of high demand, so keep in mind how you are planning. If you have excess inventory, you might want to promote those items heavily throughout social media and offer instore promotions, discounting them dramatically to draw in customers. You can also use the social media, and customer reviews on sites like Amazonto discover the concerns and priorities prospects have regarding the items you sell. Review buyer comments on Amazon with an eye toward features they like and problems they’ve had with items like yours. Use this information in social media posts and blogs to persuade prospects. You can also search Twitter for posts containing keywords that relate to your merchandise. If you have a brick-and-mortar store, you can narrow your search down by location using Twitter’s advanced search. You could tweet directly to people who express interest in items you sell and even offer discounts codes or coupons. 2. Online advertising Take time to adjust your online advertising tactics. If you use Adwords, for example, thoroughly review your keywords and their corresponding bids. You probably want to rework some phrases to include holiday-related words. Being more aggressive with your bids is also warranted. In the same way, balance your bids with your shipping schedule. You don’t want to be paying a premium for keywords and sending people to your website when you know you can’t fulfill their orders in time for the holidays. Rewrite your ad copy to give it a holiday flavor, and don’t forget to change it after the holidays are over! Also, offer gift wrapping to support your customers. 3. Newsletters The holiday shopping season is a time when you can get away with sending additional newsletters to your email list. Plan your sequence with the calendar in mind. Encourage early shopping with discounts. Boost later...
read moreA small business pricing perspective: Higher is better
To get a perspective on small business pricing, let’s first take imaginary strolls through the aisles of two retailers: Walmart and Saks Fifth Avenue. Both are leaders in their markets, so this isn’t a criticism of either one. We’re taking this stroll to observe human behavior and psychology. If we walk through Walmart at almost any time of day, we’ll see a lot of people shopping, but if we hang out long enough and are observant enough, we’re going to notice a few abandoned shopping carts as well as some clothing that has been picked up as if to buy, but set aside randomly throughout the store. The folks at Walmart do a pretty good job picking up these discards, but they happen. If we do a similar stroll through Saks, we’ll find that they don’t have shopping carts, but that’s not really the point. What we’re looking for is clothing that has been picked up with the intention of buying it, but the customer changed her mind. Did you find any abandoned purchases in Saks? Me neither. The point I want to make is that psychologically, it’s much more difficult for people to abandon a high-value item after they have taken the initial steps to buy it. Smaller purchases are more inconsequential; we really don’t have a problem of saying “never mind” and moving on. Inexpensive items don’t have the same connection to our hearts and minds as do the more pricey items. This is important to understand when you set your small business pricing. Bigger items deliver bigger value and it’s difficult to turn our backs on adding sigificant value to our lives, both personally and professionally. I bring this up because I think some small business owners undervalue their products and services. I see this all the time in small business pricing. In a recent article on how to reduce stress in your small business, I suggested decreasing your workload by increasing your prices or order size. However, I understand if some small business owners are reluctant to ask for more money. There are a various ways to increase pricing in your small business. First, you can just start increasing prices across the board. Don’t be afraid to do it. I know a couple who once owned a small inn. The husband was always reluctant to boost prices. The wife wasn’t…and she usually won the arguments. The husband soon became a believer, however, because they never lost business with a price increase. Another way to hike your small business pricing is by providing more value. If you’re in a service industry, bundle together services and create higher priced options for your clients. Once you have significantly increased your average order size, I think you’ll find that it becomes easier for you to close sales. Fewer customers or clients will string you along and then balk at the last moment. So not only will your revenue increase, you’ll spend less time pestering your prospects. What do you think? Let me know how you have adjusted your pricing to get the best overall...
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