Marketing New Year Resolutions
We’ve all said it, we’ve all done it …. New Year’s resolutions. But, the real question is, who is still looking at those resolutions we made months ago? Not many. A new calendar year symbolizes a new beginning. Many of you are probably thinking about personal resolutions, but how about establishing New Year’s resolutions for your business?
Small business owners are consistently pulled into many different directions. We spend so much of our time trying to make that next sale, keeping customers happy and product on the shelf, that many tasks fall by the wayside. What if you set just five or six manageable goals and looked at them on a weekly or even monthly basis? Consistency and keeping them top-of-mind is key. Write them down, don’t let them weigh you down.
We challenge you to think about these five marketing ideas in thinking about how to focus your 2019 business resolutions.
- What do your online and real-world footprints look like?
- Do you know who your customers are?
- What is your brand saying to your customers?
- Have you actually listened to your customers?
- Are you putting too many of your marketing eggs in one basket?
You might be asking yourself how to turn these into resolutions.
- Pick one real-world or digital channel each month, whether it’s Facebook, Google Search, Yelp, etc on the digital side or your collateral, trade show booth, business signage etc on the real-world side and dive deep and learn how your customers are reacting to your messaging across all the channels? Are you being consistent in your messaging? Are you leading with your competitive advantages?
- Make this the year, you will know who your customers are. Even if you cannot afford a fancy customer relation software, a simple excel spreadsheet will work to start.
- Details matter. Take one piece of marketing collateral – a sign, a brochure, one page on your website – and take a critical look, or better yet, ask someone in your professional network to take a look. Tell them what your goal of that piece is and ask them does it achieve it. Each month, pick a different piece of material.
- Words are powerful. Customers want to be heard. Picking up the phone, talking to a customer face-to-face in a store means you are connecting. In the days of heavy automation, that personal contact is lost. Set a goal. How many customers are you going to connect to this month? Make sure it’s realistic.
- Many companies try one marketing tactic; sometimes it goes well, but many times, it fails. There are many reasons for the failure, however the biggest is that just one print ad or one Facebook ad or one direct mail piece isn’t going to move the needle. Customers consume their information in a variety of different ways and you need a suite of integrated activities to help you move the marketing needle. What product or segment are you going to focus on?
Go ahead, write down those resolutions today and throughout this month, refine them until you have 2 or 3 achievable ones and 2 or 3 stretch ones and then make a plan. 2019 is the year of technology mixed with getting back to basics. Your customers are your success. If you have a solid actionable and results-oriented marketing plan, making that next sale will be easier and keeping your customer happy will take less time. Let us help you make your 2019 resolutions a reality!
The Most Common Small Business Marketing Problem: Missing the Forest for the Trees
Many small business owners know that successful marketing can play a huge role in their growth. It is very common for us to hear these owners have great ideas for what they want to do, but they all have the same issue: due to lack of people and resources, they fall into the trap of focusing on single marketing ideas or tactics, instead of an integrated marketing strategy that incorporates multiple tactics for reduced cost and increased performance.
There are a lot of marketing agencies out there who focus on specific marketing tactics such as direct mail, new websites, advertising, etc. Yet, for a business to have integrated marketing, they would need to hire multiple companies and have the time to manage and coordinate all of them to ensure they are helping the business grow.
We have worked with a client who has the yearly tradition of going to an important trade show that they once deemed perfect for their market. They make it a priority to go each year, with the same booth they’ve used for years, to get their business noticed, make good connections, and hopefully come back with buckets of leads.
Unfortunately, the buckets have been getting smaller each year and they’re not sure if it’s the show (Is it still the best show for them? Are there newer, better ones now?) or them (is the booth the best it can be? Should we do any marketing before the show to drive up booth attendance?)..
Worse, the effort this trade show requires held them back from doing other marketing. Trade shows, take up a lot of time, dollars and stress, so often doing just this will feel like enough to a small business owner. Who could blame them when they don’t have the time or resources for more?
Fortunately, since working with Sales Renewal, we have been able to work with them to increase the return of their Trade Show investment while at the same time combining Trade Shows with a diverse set of other marketing tactics that complement each other nicely.
Want to learn what we may be able to do for your firm? Get in touch now.
Proud to Work Alongside Our Non-Profit Clients
While Sales Renewal is best known for our one-stop marketing solutions, JointSourcing and Marketing Essentials, we are equally happy to work on smaller-scale projects. One of our strengths at Sales Renewal is that we work across a variety of different industries, offering unique perspectives that can shed new light on traditional strategies and “the way things have always been done”. Some of the work we are most proud of has been for non-profits, spanning educational, government, cultural, healthcare, and religious institutions, for which we have developed a number of innovative solutions on an a la carte basis. Our a la carte clients pick and choose what’s most important to them at that point in time, a perfect fit for clients who are budget-sensitive or may need help with one or two discreet marketing tactics such as a new website, an online membership directory, an events calendar, or online donation capabilities, without the ongoing commitment of a longer term program. Here we highlight a few examples of our project work for non-profit clients.
The Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation at Harvard Law School (CHLPI), which advocates for legal, regulatory, and policy reforms to improve the health of underserved populations, turned to Sales Renewal to to help solve the problem of accessing the large number of documents housed in their Health Library, including published research, academic articles, and legal documents. Sales Renewal created a custom search system for CHLPI’s Health Library Publications that integrated multiple off-the-shelf plugins to meet their requirements at an affordable price. In addition to the classic series of filters, we created a visual map-based filter for a more user-friendly, interactive interface for selecting state specific publications.
We find that an important consideration for many non-profits is being able to manage and maintain their website in-house. When the Concord MA Chamber of Commerce struggled with how to manage their ever-growing paper membership directory, Sales Renewal proposed moving this document online and incorporating it into a new, easy to maintain website, also created by Sales Renewal. A unique challenge on this project was the fact that, due to the generous terms of the contract with their third party mailing house, the physical mailing actually produces an important stream of revenue for the Chamber. We were able to implement a solution that brings the directory into the modern world without losing this revenue by creating two versions: an interactive, online directory as well as the traditional hard copy, also available as an easy-to-read online flip book. Once everything was in place and with some initial training, we were able to turn the reins over to the Chamber to manage and maintain the directory and the website themselves.
Similarly, The Armenian Church turned to Sales Renewal to create a new website including an online events calendar and online donation system to keep their congregation and friends engaged and informed. After we created an easy-to-read, and importantly, easy-to-update events calendar within an updated website, the church is now able to maintain their own online presence to more effectively connect with their community.
The Boston Musician Association is a labor union (local 9-535) representing over 1,600 professional musicians in the Boston metro area and beyond. When creating its new website, the association had two main goals: 1) to provide a central place for its members to stay informed publicize their own upcoming events, and compare notes on venues and employers, and 2) to make it easy for the public to find musicians they could hire to perform, or who could provide instruction in a variety of instruments. Sales Renewal’s challenge was to automate this process to avoid the need for manual data entry as much as possible and we continue to work with this client to fully integrate and automate these important functions. The Music Buyers Guide, created by Sales Renewal, provides a central repository of musicians, sorted by the instruments they play and includes a full biography of their experience. The musicians themselves are able to send changes to their profiles directly from the site making for fast and easy updates.
As these very different clients show, Sales Renewal has the breadth and depth of experience to handle any size project and we are happy to work with our non-profit clients to make the most of their limited budgets. Often, seemingly daunting challenges can be handled can quickly and efficiently if the right expertise is brought to bear. Learn more about our a la carte services and how Sales Renewal can help your non-profit benefit from a new approach to marketing.
Brand Watch: Can You Buy Loyalty for a Quarter?
People who shop ALDI tend to more than loyal – they’re really Raving Fans. We love brands with personality, and ones that inspire that kind of following really get our attention. What gives a brand personality? It must have a unique appeal.
What’s ALDI’s appeal? In a nutshell, the German-based grocer sells quality foods in a decidedly no-frills store atmosphere. ALDI doesn’t appear to be worried about the Amazon vs. Wal*Mart retail fight that’s raging again (and at a more heated pace) this year.
In fact, ALDI shoppers seem to enjoy participating in the “in real life” shopping experience a little more than other shoppers – a lesson we’re pretty sure isn’t lost on ALDI corporate.
Make ‘Em Pay For a Cart
Plenty of people have written about the ALDI “Shopping Cart Effect,” but we’ll add to the mix something we haven’t seen written about it: It makes shoppers smile, at each other. And we think that’s got to be good. Was this a planned element of the company’s marketing mix? We can’t answer that question, but we can say it’s an intangible, but important, part of the brand.
In case you’ve never shopped ALDI, here’s the gist: shoppers stick a quarter into built-in locks that secure the shopping carts together. When shoppers return their carts, they get their quarter back.
Sticking a quarter in a slot to get a shopping cart doesn’t sound like something you should make your customers do – especially when they’re in a hurry. Sure, they get the quarter back when they return the cart, but there’s a cost: they have to take it back to the lock up line, by the store entrance, which can be inconvenient. Say, for example, if your car is full of groceries (especially cookies) and toddlers. Or hungry teenagers. Either way, it could be turn out badly, right?
But a funny thing happens in ALDI parking lots. People unload their carts and look around to see if another shopper is nearby, They’re likely to call, “Want my cart?” as they approach the new arrival. Just as often a shopper jumps out of his or her car, waving a quarter in the air, shouting, “Here; I’ll take that!” They’re in this quarter-for-a-cart thing together.
In a world where online behemoths and big-box-bruisers are battling over the grocery delivery market, this is a whole different ball game. And it’s created an interesting – possibly unintended – marketing advantage for ALDI.
It’s as if that silly quarter makes us want to work in cahoots with other human beings.
Consumer behavior is interesting. As brandwatchers, shoppers, marketing geeks and operational afficianados, we love stuff like this.
What consumer behavior does your company encourage? Your company’s unique appeal may lie in some of the ways you interact with your customers. Even if the results are unintentional, they may be positive aspects of your brand. Think about it…some of those touchpoints could hold a secret marketing advantage.
We’d love to hear about your brand, or one you’re watching. Share your secret with us!
Should You Stop Asking Your Customers for Reviews?
Because businesses have actively solicited customer reviews (and other feedback) for years, many online review sites look like over-caffeinated click-a-thons. It’s hard to sort out the helpful from the hype. But it’s clear that consumers want to consider other customers’ opinions and experiences before they buy – in other words, businesses need reviews. Savvy online shoppers, however, are becoming jaded, as they know they must read between the lines, sorting the real reviews from those that were planted or paid-for.
Business owners are sort of stuck between a rock and a hard place, too.
Yelp and Yext are both trying to help, in different ways.
Yext, the New Kid on the Block
Most people probably have heard of or have used Yelp’s reviews. These reviews live only on the Yelp site and help educate Yelp visitors on the businesses listed on Yelp.
Yext reviews are different. Yext reviews appear on only your site so are visible to all your visitors, and importantly, no competitors’ reviews appear (unlike on Yelp, where competitor reviews are 1-click away).
Also, and very notably, the average number of stars your business receives will appear in-line with Google’s search rankings.
How important is that?
According to Yext, internet users click 50% more often on starred listings than those without: because the stars make them stand out and because reviews truly influence buying behavior.
Remember, Search Engine Optimization (getting more traffic from search engines) is a 2-step process. First, your page has to rank well in Google’s search results (ideally on the first or second page) and second, visitors have to click on your listing rather than all the others on the search result page.
Most people forget that second step and that those noticeable stars will lead to more organic visitors to your site. (Read more about how the stars can can boost local rankings.)
Yelp Reviews
Since 2004, Yelp users have written about 150 million reviews, and the company works hard to help consumers sort out what’s real and what’s helpful. So while it may sound counter-intuitive for a review platform, Yelp strongly, clearly, and repeatedly has told businesses using its site to STOP asking their customers for reviews.
In 2018, that’s probably just a little too idealistic. “Everyone’s doing it” isn’t the best defense, but let’s be real: everyone’s doing it.
Wherever sales are made – online or off – shoppers are implored (and incented) to provide reviews. Receipts from Taco Bell, CVS, Kohls, Famous Footwear (among others) beg shoppers to rate their services, sauce packets, shoes, and to describe their service experience. Most of those requests come with incentives, and customers who complete reviews earn rewards ranging from points, coupons and free sandwiches to sweepstakes entries.
For its part, Yelp doesn’t seem to mind going against the grain. The company’s clearly-stated policy prohibits listed businesses from soliciting reviews directly from customers. Yelp regularly identifies organizations it believes is “gaming the system, ” and penalizes them.
But Everyone’s Doing It – And You Should Too
We like that Yelp is doing what it can to actively weed out reviews that don’t meet its standards.
The ground rules it has established for businesses are designed to serve customers as well as listed businesses (and Yelp of course).
In our opinion, Yelp should be concerned about the businesses that are trying to game the system (contests, discounts, fake reviews) but not target those which are acting in good faith when requesting that customers rate and review their products and services.
It should be noted that Yelp does recognize that most businesses are playing fair: the company points out that it recommends nearly three-quarters of the reviews on its site.
So Ask Your Customers for Reviews – And Don’t Stop There
Your prospects read reviews and weight them heavily in purchasing decisions. According to Forbes, “88% of consumers trust online reviews as much as a personal recommendation.“
We recommend that our clients structure their businesses and train their staffs to stack the odds in their favor of getting good reviews by providing great products and services. We also recommend they manage those reviews by requesting that happy customers post reviews using Yext. The reviews can be automatically fed to a website – usually the Home or Testimonials Page, * and their stars will also appear in Google results when prospects are searching for your business.
Takeaway: Yext reviews and ratings being displayed on your website is good – and at the same time, your website gets more natural search traffic. A no brainer given Yext’s modest cost.
In other words, as long as you’re treating your customers (and review site partners) honestly, asking for reviews is good – and Yext reviews can make a good thing even better. Yelp reviews appear only on Yelp, but, that’s not necessarily bad. If you’re a local, B2C business in fact, it could be critically important so Yelp has its place in the review universe too. (Yelp may be all a local restaurant needs!)
Questions about managing customer reviews, Yext, local search, or understanding how reviews sites affect buying behavior? Contact us.
* you do have a Testimonials page on your site, don’t you?
Sales Renewal’s insight:
According to Forbes, “88% of consumers trust online reviews as much as a personal recommendation.” Are you putting the right reviews in the right place?
Tips for Getting Better Business Images on a DIY Budget
Let’s call this the “fake-it-til-you-make-it” photo tip sheet.
To be clear: We are proponents of professional photography for your website, and all of your marketing material. High-quality images attract attention, communicate clearly, and sell.
Simply put, professional photography makes you look better. The better you look, the more people will look. The more people look, the more leads you’ll see.
But professional photographers aren’t always available when photo ops present themselves. And, a professional photographer doesn’t fit in every small-business budget. Still, every business needs quality images.
Here, we offer general guidelines and specific tips to help you get better quality photos of your business, your people, and your products – on a “DIY” budget.
See more tips for photographing employees on the job.
What You Need to Know about Small Business Photography
Equipment Matters. Photographers like to say the best camera you have is the one at hand – and that’s true, so plan ahead and use a real camera – or the best one you can get your hands on. If you must use your cell phone, follow this advice from TechRepublic. And no matter what kind of camera you use, use a tripod. (More on that later.)
Photography is the art of capturing light. So learn to use the aperture and white balance settings on the (best) camera you have. Also pay attention to color cast, and learn what temperature settings work best for your site. (Industrial lighting can be tricky, often turning images yellow or blue.) When framing your shots, notice shadows – and try to eliminate them. Generally speaking, shadows detract from your product images.
Closer is always better. The subject of the image should be obvious. You want to direct prospects’ attention so they look at and consider specific features of specific products. Nothing in the photo should distract from what you’re trying to sell.
Background Noise Detracts from your photos. Some tips to tune it out:
- First, look critically at the background when you frame a shot. If you can tell that a picture was taken in your break room, so can everyone else.
- Second, learn to use aperture settings to minimize depth of field. (Learn from the Fstoppers or see Nikon’s more artistic explanation.
- Challenging background? Some professionals recommend using a fog machine to blur the background, for example, when you need an image of a large machine in a shop setting and cannot isolate the machine or eliminate a distracting background. If that sounds too complicated, try creative lighting or professional post-processing. The point is to make it easy and pleasing for your viewers (prospects) to focus on what you’re trying to show (sell) them.
Remember, post-production is your friend. Many a photo has been saved by a little TLC on the back end. While very robust post-production software can run into the thousands of dollars, quite a few free, easy-to-use packages offer enough functionality to make your images look really good. (LunaPic and iPiccy are two nice, free options.) Standard post-production features to improve the quality of almost every image:
- Straighten the image. Unless your restaurant is the Leaning Tower of Pizza, your image should probably portray the subject straight, not at an angle.
- Remove or reduce shadows.
- Frame and format. Having each image the correct size (both file size and height/width ratio) makes a world of difference in the way your images, website, and handouts look.
- Crop. Crop. Crop. Less is more, and close-ups are generally better. Aim for less in the frame. Are you getting the picture? We hope so.?
5 Fast, Practical Tips For Improving Your Business Images
Place a white sheet of paper under a product to get an instantly clean and bright background. Or use a piece of Plexiglas to create a nice reflection. Shopify offers more ideas to improve your business photography here.- To improve lighting and reduce shadows, position two or three light sources on different sides of the product you’re shooting.
- Use compressed air to blow away dust particles, stray hairs, and anything that takes the focus (pun intended) off your product.
- Take pictures straight on – and if the resulting images are crooked anyway, use a photo editor to straighten it. The exception: when you’re taking pictures of people. In that case, some angles are good. Passports and mug shots are taken straight on – why draw comparisons?
- Use a Tripod. Sure, you’re steady Eddy. Use a tripod anyway.
Follow these tips and picture yourself increasing sales!
We’re marketing professionals, not professional photographers. If you need a business or corporate photographer, we are happy to recommend the business and corporate those that we work with. How can we help you improve your marketing programs and grow your sales? Let’s find out!
Sales Renewal’s insight:
Budget won’t support professional product or corporate photography? When you need to take your own business images, follow these tips to get better pictures for your website and for all of your marketing material.
Best of Growth Spurts – Focus on Customer Feedback and Reviews
In this month’s content roundup, we’ve focused on the many different ways businesses use customer feedback and reviews in their day-to-day marketing and business development. Reviews can be used to boost your online, local presence via SEO. Through reviews, your fans can help do your marketing for you. Survey feedback can be used as a source of ideas for your content marketing plan. Feedback can be used for product development and changes, and also to retain customers by making them feel valued, respected, listened to.
Here are 5 timely and relevant posts that look at getting the most from customer feedback and reviews.
Three Customer Feedback Myths That Deserve Busting, marketingprofs.com – Surveys are invaluable tools for making sure you’re meeting customer expectations. Learn why simplicity is probably the best route to go. Read the full article here.
Maximize Your Local Listings Presence with Online Reviews, yext.com – In today’s mobile-first world, reviews drive awareness and consumer decisions. Businesses need a comprehensive review strategy to beat the competition. Read the full article here.
How User Reviews Can Drive Your Business – A The New York Times article looking at how online reviews and social connections are causing a shift in the balance of power from marketers to consumers concludes that no longer do marketers have the ability to fully control their sales messages, as consumers are using online reviews and ratings to inform their purchase decisions. Read more about the study here.
Creating Magnetic Marketing Content with Surveys, surveygizmo.com – One of the many uses of surveys is to generate content for your blog. You can ask for feedback, report on findings, create a “top questions asked” series, and much more. Read more here.
How Successful Companies Engage Customers During the New-Product Development Process, marketingprofs.com – From large-scale intelligence gathering, like crowdsourcing or social listening, to a narrower, targeted approach, like focus groups and advisory councils, successful B2B businesses use customer feedback to ensure they are on track with product development. Read more here.
Sales Renewal’s insight:
In this month’s content roundup, we’ve focused on the many different ways businesses use customer feedback and reviews in their day-to-day marketing and business development. Reviews can be used to boost your online, local presence via SEO. Through reviews, your fans can help do your marketing for you. Survey feedback can be used as a source of ideas for your content marketing plan. Feedback can be used for product development and changes, and also to retain customers by making them feel valued, respected, listened to.
Here are 5 timely and relevant posts that look at getting the most from customer feedback and reviews.
Best of Growth Spurts – Focus on Maximizing Your Content Marketing Efforts
In this month’s content roundup, we’ve focused on different ways you can get the most out of your content marketing and blogging efforts. After all, content marketing is often one of the biggest components – in both time and dollars – of many small business marketing budgets, so it makes sense to maximize that investment.
To be successful, it’s important to see content marketing not as a silo tactic, but rather something that is just one component of your overall integrated marketing strategy. So, a single blog post can be used to support your SEO, email, social media, PR, and retention efforts, to name just a few. The goal is to get the most out of every piece of writing, whether you share it on social media, link to it in your email signature, syndicate it, create a companion download, or even pay to promote it.
Here are 5 timely and relevant posts that look at maximizing your content marketing efforts.
How to Reuse Old Content to Boost Your SEO and Keep Your Audience Engaged, marketingprofs.com – Does your content plan include “evergreen content”? While it’s critical to have a steady flow of fresh, quality content, you can often maximize your impact by including at least some content that doesn’t “expire” (in other words, it will still be relevant a year from now). This content can then be re-used and repurposed for SEO and social media. Read the full article here.
How to Create Content That Keeps Earning Links (Even After You Stop Promoting It), moz.com – Content + linkbuilding = powerful SEO strategy. And the key? Creating something that people will find and link to when they’re in need of sources to cite. This puts you in a good position to earn a lot of passive links.
This article describes the content types most likely to satisfy people in need of sources and tips on how to execute these content types. Read the full article here.
7 Ways to Ensure You Maximize Your ROI from Content, quicksprout.com – From “picking 1-2 channels and designing around them” to “never stop promoting, ” this post offers solid advice for getting the most out of your content marketing efforts. See all 7 ways here.
How We Grew Our Organic Traffic by 43% Without Publishing a Single New Blog Post, hubspot.com – An interesting approach one company took to maximizing its content marketing efforts by putting into place a strategic plan that included the whole staff. Read the case study here.
28 Ideas for Content Upgrades to Grow Your Email List, sumo.com – Get more out of your content creation efforts – whether you’re doing the writing or have hired a writer – by creating a companion “upgrade” or bonus (tip sheet, checklist, video, slideshow) that you can promote and give away for the “cost” of an email address. See all 28 ideas here.
The variety of ways a business can get the most out of its content marketing efforts can be overwhelming. Sales Renewal has programs that can help, from our comprehensive JointSourcing Solution™ to our guided Marketing Essentials Solution™ to our on-demand Flex Marketing™. Get in touch today.
Sales Renewal’s insight:
In this month’s content roundup, we’ve focused on different ways you can get the most out of your content marketing and blogging efforts. After all, content marketing is often one of the biggest components – in both time and dollars – of many small business marketing budgets, so it makes sense to maximize that investment…
Best of Growth Spurts – Our Favorite Posts from March
We regularly update our Growth Spurts blog with actionable marketing & technology advice, news and information. These articles are often hand-picked to address issues and projects we’re working on with our clients, but they are relevant to most business owners involved with any aspect of marketing their business. Here are our 4 favorite posts this month:
On Analytics
What Google Analytics Can’t Tell You, and How to Get the Info You Need
We’re firm believers in using Google Analytics, but years ago we identified the problem with relying only on Google Analytics to inform our marketing decisions. (Read about our Call Tracking case study here.) Continue reading…
On Web Marketing
Online Reviews: 20 Ways to Handle Bad Reviews, Boost Your Reputation & Win New Customers
Online reviews – love ’em, and hate ’em.
According to BrightLocal’s 2016 Local Consumer Review Survey, most people (91%) regularly or occasionally read online reviews. What’s even more striking is that 84% of people said they trust online reviews as much as a personal recommendation. Online reviews have become the new word-of-mouth marketing.
An established Reviews program is critical for any business. From requesting reviews to addressing negative comments, having a clear strategy will help you get the most out of this powerful marketing tool. Read this article for some good advice, then contact Sales Renewal to help.
On Website Design
The 7 Elements of Graphic Design, and How to Apply Them
Sure, you can “design” a Facebook cover or social media image using one of the many tools available (Canva, PicMonkey, inDesign, Adobe…). And these tools all make “good design” seem easy.
But don’t be deceived. Be sure you consider “professional” design services where it really counts. Website, branding materials, and other places where you need to make a long-lasting impression. Read the article here.
On Email Marketing
B2B Marketers Say Email Delivers the Highest ROI Leads
Study after study confirm that email marketing continues to be a top lead generation channel. This holds especially true if you are a B2B company. See the results of recent research showing that email is the top lead- and revenue-producing vehicle for B2B marketers.
Sales Renewal’s insight:
We regularly update our Growth Spurts blog with actionable marketing & technology advice, news and information. These articles are often hand-picked to address issues and projects we’re working on with our clients, but they are relevant to most business owners involved with any aspect of marketing their business. Here are our 4 favorite posts this month.
Best of Growth Spurts – Our Favorite Posts from February
We regularly update our Growth Spurts blog with actionable marketing & technology advice, news and information. These articles are often hand-picked to address issues and projects we’re working on with our clients, but they are relevant to most business owners involved with any aspect of marketing their business. Here are our 5 favorite posts this month:
On Product Marketing
Psychological Pricing Is Your Golden Ticket to Selling More – You want to make money. That’s why you run a business. Whether you’re selling a product or a service-you’ll have to put a price on what you’re selling at some point. This article introduces the concept of creating an effective pricing strategy by using psychological pricing tactics. Simply put, it’s a strategic way to price your products or services to influence people when making a buying decision. Continue reading…
On Exit Planning
Are You on Track to Hit Your Exit Revenue Goal? How to know if you’re likely to hit your number and how Agile, Integrated Marketing can help – Most business owners have a sales price in mind when they contemplate selling their business. Because businesses are typically valued at a multiple of revenue (or revenue derivatives such as EBITDA) this sales price is directly dependent on the company’s annual revenue at the time of the exit.
If you are considering selling your business in 2 to 7 years and would like to increase the odds that you will achieve your exit revenue goals, read on to learn how better and more cost-effective marketing will propel you to success. Read the article.
On SEO
Google: SEOs Need 4 Months to a Year for SEO Changes & Ranking Improvement – We’ve said it time and again, but it’s worth repeating. SEO is a long-term strategy. Anyone who promises something different is not the right SEO firm for your business. In fact, in the recently released “How to Hire an SEO” video, Google explicitly mentions how long it takes for a site to see improvements due to SEO changes. Read more and watch the video here.
On PPC Advertising
Google AdWords Benchmarks for YOUR Industry – Whether you’re getting in to PPC advertising for the first time or it’s time for an account review, it can be daunting to know whether or not you’re doing a good job. Sure, we all want to create ads that have highest CTRs and the best conversion rates, but what’s a good metric for one industry isn’t necessarily good for another. So what numbers should you be looking to beat in your industry? This post was updated on 3 Jan 2017 and is chock full of useful online advertising benchmarks:
- Average Click-Through Rate (CTR) by industry
- Average Cost per Click (CPC) by industry
- Average Conversion Rate (CVR) by industry
- Average Cost per Action (CPA) by industry
On Website Security
The Benefits of Installing SSL on Your Website – For several years now Google search results have shown more preference to websites that use HTTPS. (HTTPS is the secure version of HTTP, the protocol over which data is sent between your browser and the website that you are connected to.) While Google claims that this is currently a “mild” ranking signal, there are indications that this is becoming increasingly important. So important that Sales Renewal is in the process of rolling this out to all our clients by purchasing and installing an SSL certificate on their websites and forcing HTTPS. Questions? Please contact us here.
Sales Renewal’s insight:
From exit planning to product marketing, SEO to PPC advertising to website security, here’s a digest of our favorite posts from February.