What Is Influencer Marketing and How Can It Help My Business?
Influencer marketing is a very powerful strategy when done right! This article explains the do’s and don’ts of effective influencer marketing and describes its impressive potential; 92% on consumers have made a purchase after reading about a product on a blog they follow. Read on to see how you can incorporate influencer marketing into your marketing mix.
Is Your Business Built for 24/7 Customer Relationships?
A seismic shift is under way that many businesses cannot ignore: thanks to new technologies, instead of waiting for customers to come to you, you can address your customers’ needs the moment they arise—and sometimes even earlier. It’s a win-win: customers get a dramatically improved experience, and companies boost operational efficiencies and lower costs.
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.
Holiday Marketing For Law Firms
Holidays are a time for interacting with people, whether it be your family, friends, neighbors or coworkers. This also makes it a great time to socialize with your clients. The end of the year makes a perfect time for you to say “thank you” to your clients and wish them the best for the new year. Personal interactions around the holidays are things your clients will remember in the new year.
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.
Sales Renewal Introduces the JointSourcing Pro Solution For Professional Service Providers
Professional Services Firms and Advisors benefit from a unique approach to achieving measurable success from their marketing and business development activities
Concord, MA, September 20, 2018 – Sales Renewal is pleased to announce JointSourcing Pro, a unique marketing program designed to help professional service providers achieve measurable success from their marketing and business development activities.
Networking: Necessary Evil or Untapped Opportunity?
Ah, networking – the marketing activity everyone loves to hate.
We say if you hate it, you’re doing it wrong.
What we often hear from people who do a lot of networking – professional services providers, in particular – is that networking is a necessary evil. But they don’t like it for a variety of reasons.
It’s time consuming, for one thing. It’s uncomfortable to talk about yourself, many say. It’s very hard to differentiate yourself from competitors in the room. And, maybe most important, it’s hard to know if it’s working: it’s frustrating to put a lot of time and effort into it without seeing a clear return on the investment.
WIIFM
Most of the clients we advise know that networking isn’t about standing in a room and vacuuming up business cards. They realize that they need to position themselves and their services as uniquely suited to the needs of the person they’re talking to and do so in a memorable way so they don’t promptly forget about you.
And you should get to the point quickly. While the concept of “What’s In It For Me?” has always been important in marketing, it is even more so in today’s overloaded, micro-second-attention-span world. If your prospect doesn’t understand nearly immediately how your services can benefit them, you’re likely to lose them.
The Elevator Pitch
This reality means that an effective “elevator pitch” is critical to networking success. Keep in mind, that an elevator pitch is like a cover letter: they’re both brief, initial missives whose only purpose is to get you to the next step (the hiring manager reading your resume, the prospect wanting to talk more substantively with you).
Your pitch should hook your listener with a concise, compelling story. Not the whole story, not even a summary or highlights. Just a few compelling messages for that particular person/networking group. Your prospects or referrers should leave the conversation understanding the unique benefits you can provide and wanting to learn more.
Remember, you’re not trying to close anyone at the networking event: your goal is to secure follow up conversations that will ultimately turn prospects into clients.
Do’s
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Don’ts
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Networking as Part of a Well-Balanced, Diversified Marketing Mix
Networking seems so easy. Just go to a meeting and talk, right? Especially in fields where trust and personal relationships are so crucial to signing a new client (i.e., professional service providers such as lawyers, accountants, wealth managers and the like) networking seems like the perfect marketing tactic: face-to-face meetings where you can begin to develop a rapport and chemistry.
This false sense of security leads many to “overinvest” in face-to-face marketing strategies like networking, while “underinvesting” in other strategies that are equally, if not better suited to showcasing the individual’s expertise and garnering trust, yet require less time and are more easily benchmarked, such as seminars, speaking and writing opportunities, content marketing and more.
Most people understand the importance of having a well-planned, diversified, portfolio of investments; the same logic applies to the importance of having a well-planned, diversified, portfolio of marketing strategies and tactics. For both, planning, management and benchmarking makes the difference between profitable success and time-consuming failure.
To see the role networking can play in a well-balanced portfolio of marketing strategies & tactics please download “JointSourcing in Action: New Professional Services Firm, Obscurity to Awards”.
Sales Renewal Collaborates on New Marketing Strategy with Image 4, the Leader in 3-Dimensional Brand Experience
The JointSourcing Solution helped Image 4 orchestrate a strategic repositioning to achieve its dual goals of growing revenue and unifying its brand & messaging across four distinct verticals.
Boston, May 23, 2018 – Sales Renewal, a unique, full service marketing agency that is revolutionizing small business marketing, is pleased to announce the latest client to successfully employ the JointSourcing Solution™ to grow its brand and revenue.
JointSourcing helped Image 4, a marketing agency that has been creating award-winning 3D brand experiences for 30+ years, unify its brand & messaging across four verticals, refocus existing service offerings, identify strategic initiatives to address prospects’ disparate needs, design a new website that speaks to all customers, and integrate multiple marketing technologies to cost-effectively grow leads. Through the JointSourcing Solution, Sales Renewal continues to manage a robust, ongoing marketing program for Image 4, including implementation and management of day-to-day marketing activities.
JointSourcing (“joint venture + insourcing”) is a comprehensive, one-stop marketing solution delivering results for clients of all shapes and sizes. This innovative approach to managing the marketing function has proven equally effective for small businesses that simply don’t have the time or skill for marketing, medium-sized businesses without a fully staffed in-house marketing team, and larger companies that need “pop-up” marketing departments to address gaps in expertise or bandwidth or execution of special projects. JointSourcing has been successfully implemented by a wide range of companies, including retailers, manufacturers, professional services firms, and non-profit organizations.
Image 4’s initial goals for the JointSourcing Solution were to grow its revenue through consistent, integrated marketing. However, during the Image 4 Blueprint (the first phase of JointSourcing), both parties identified an additional challenge created by the company’s entrance over time into the four quite different verticals that have fueled their growth. As is often the case with the “cobbler’s children,” the principals at Image 4, expert brand marketers themselves, were so focused on executing successful client projects on time and on budget that they had little time left to consider whether their brand and positioning were in fact optimally being conveyed to prospects and clients in their very diverse markets.
Image 4’s thirty-year history of creating memorable experiential design for trade shows led to a growing business in 3 other verticals: bank branch design, specialty pop-up stores and corporate & institutional spaces. Unfortunately, the marketing language useful for trade show clients did not translate effectively to the highly specific language required, for example, by Image 4’s architect partners who were designing commercial buildings. The fundamental challenge then, was to position one brand across four distinct verticals that don’t speak the same language and have different experiences and expectations.
During the Blueprint phase, the client and Sales Renewal collaboratively define business & marketing strategies, branding, messaging & positioning, and the most cost-effective marketing tactics for each individual client. This process helped Image 4 see that the company could have a unified, overall message that all of its customers, across verticals, would find compelling and understandable (3D Branding) while still being able to speak to buyers within those four verticals in the sophisticated, industry-specific way they expect and require.
“Working with Sales Renewal was an eye-opening experience for Image 4,” said Jeff Baker, president and COO of Image 4. “When you’re in the trenches day in and day out, it’s difficult to take the time to step back and re-evaluate. The Blueprint exercise with Sales Renewal forced us to think about market presentation in a way we never had before. Their experience with a wide variety of businesses brings a broader perspective to the table, along with practical experience in implementing a wide variety of marketing strategies and tactics. Sales Renewal has the patience and understanding to put themselves in their client’s clients’ shoes to determine what they need to hear, rather than what we want them to tell us. Their thinking really helped inform our brand strategy.”
To share 30 years of thought-leadership, and showcase how Image 4 brings diverse brands to life, Sales Renewal launched the new website and educational blog (www.image4.com). In addition, Sales Renewal identified a range of marketing strategies and tactics designed to increase awareness and actively grow leads in each of their four markets.
JointSourcing’s custom-configured marketing team, based on Image 4’s unique needs, continues to deliver day-to-day management and implementation of the plan, whose strategies and tactics are re-evaluated on a quarterly basis to reflect real-world feedback and modified as necessary. Included in the company’s monthly marketing program is paid advertising, local marketing, SEO strategies, content marketing (including original and curated content), social media marketing, email marketing, website enhancements and comprehensive analytics to benchmark and continuously improve them all.
“Working with Image 4 has been especially exciting, and personally rewarding for me, since it involves marketing experts working collaboratively with other marketing experts to refine and implement a challenging marketing strategy,” said Keith Loris, president of Sales Renewal Corporation. “All JointSourcing projects are by nature very collaborative, but this one in particular felt especially energizing – it’s just not often we at Sales Renewal engage with clients who are also marketing professionals.”
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About Sales Renewal Corporation
Sales Renewal is a full service marketing agency that is reinventing small business marketing with unique, complete, one-stop marketing solutions, shared risk/reward business model and impressive client results. The JointSourcing Solution™ delivers all the marketing strategies & tactics, human expertise, technology and management needed to grow revenue while sharing risk and reward with clients. With JointSourcing, Sales Renewal literally invests in its clients’ success, becoming an expert partner that strives to get the maximum ROI for everyone’s investment. Learn more at www.salesrenewal.com.
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!