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.

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

See all the benchmarks here.

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.

Are You on Track to Hit Your Exit Revenue Goal?

How to know if you’re likely to hit your number and learn 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 2-7 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 not only help you hit your exit revenue goal but can also increase your company’s sales price.

Will your current marketing effort deliver the revenue you are counting upon?

The first question to answer is: how much should you spend on marketing your business? There’s no fixed formula, but generally, according to the U.S. Small Business Administration, “small businesses with revenues under $5 million should allocate 7 – 8% of their revenues to marketing.” This will need to be adjusted depending on:

• Your current investment in marketing – if you’re underspending, for example, you may need to invest more to catch up;
• Your exit revenue goals – an aggressive goal will most likely require a bigger marketing investment; and
• Your competitive position – how you are positioned compared to your competitors and how competitive your industry is will impact the level of marketing investment you need to make.

To help businesses understand how to make these marketing investment decisions, Sales Renewal has a proprietary process – the Marketing Investment Analysis: Exit Planning Edition – that considers:

• Who you market to (B2B vs. B2C)
• What you sell (services vs. products)
• Industry Competitiveness (not competitive to super competitive)
• Firm Competitiveness (weak to strong competitive advantage)
• Top Competitor (much stronger to much weaker)

For example, a business in a highly competitive industry that wants to double its revenue prior to a sale will require a very different marketing investment than one with an average competitive position in typically competitive industry and a modest growth goal.

Marketing Investment Analysis, Exit Planning Edition

The Sales Renewal Marketing Investment Analysis: Exit Planning Edition is composed of 18 high-level questions which typically take 10-15 minutes to answer online. Based on those answers, Sales Renewal will formulate and deliver a set of sales & marketing recommendations specific to your business. Contact us to learn more.

Agile, Integrated Marketing – The Key to Hitting Your Numbers

Sales Renewal has taken two well-known concepts – Agile Development (from the software industry) and Continuous Improvement (from manufacturing) – to develop an approach to marketing that allows small businesses to use their often-limited time and financial resources to maximize their marketing return on investment.

The two key principles of agile, integrated marketing are:

Rapid Iteration – Produce marketing concepts quickly, get them out into the real world and iteratively improve them based upon feedback. A popular agile mechanism is the “sprint” during which the team breaks big, complicated activities into small, bite-sized actions that are quickly implemented and promptly evaluated so that the next set of activities can be prioritized and undertaken.

Plan-Do-Check-Act Cycle in Marketing – Agile marketing isn’t just about producing a lot of things quickly. It’s about responding to direct and indirect sources of feedback using rapid iterations to adjust and improve accordingly.

Integrated Marketing Breaks Down Strategic & Tactical Silos

Most marketing problems are multidisciplinary and so require the integration of multiple marketing tactics. For example, getting more leads from your website could be solved by: getting more traffic from SEO or getting more traffic from ads or having a better converting (written, designed) website.

But none of these tactics is right if implemented in a silo. Marketing today is multi-disciplinary, multi-channel and complex, and therefore requires an integrated approach.

The key to making this work? A coordinated, integrated marketing plan.

The Integrated Marketing Plan + Continuous Improvement

The traditional Continuous Improvement cycle is an iterative process that breaks down into four steps: Plan, Do, Check Act. When applied to integrated marketing, it means:

Plan

The first step is to create a coordinated, integrated marketing plan that considers:

1. High level, investment view to determine the financial ballpark;
2. Assessment of your business goals and strategies; customers; sales, marketing, brand & technology assets and needs;
3. Competitive review;
4. Specific strategies and tactics; and
5. An actionable plan detailing the required expertise, technology, budget and timeframes.

Do

Following your Integrated Marketing Plan, the second step is to put in place the foundational changes (brand, company positioning, etc.); one-time set up and configuration (website, redo social media sites, design direct mail piece, etc.); and on-going marketing (SEO on website, post on social media, mail targeted direct mail, etc.)

Check

Use analytics and benchmarking to measure the effectiveness of your marketing plan to grow your sales & leads. This will two critical questions:

1. Where did our visitors and leads come from?
2. Which of our activities generated the visit or lead?

These answers will allow you to do more of what’s working and less of what’s not and become more efficient over time.

Act

Integrated marketing is not a “set and forget” process. As you “do” and “check”, you will most likely need to adjust your plan. Acting in sprints allows for fine-tuning without having to recreate your plan.

The Key Benefits of Agile, Integrated Marketing for the Exiting Owner

Implementing an integrated marketing plan allows the exiting owner to increase revenue and decrease the cost per lead and cost per sale in the years before the exit. Using a Continuous Improvement cycle provides marketing metrics that allow you to systematize your marketing processes and workflows to make them repeatable and the Company less dependent on key individuals. Combining these concepts in an agile, integrated marketing program will allow you to make growth and return more predictable, thus reducing the buyer’s risk and resulting in a greater sale price.

This post is a summary of information presented in a recent Sales Renewal webinar, co-sponsored with BTA. Watch the full presentation here:

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Sales Renewal is committed to helping all small businesses grow their sales while sharing the risk and reward. If you’re considering selling your business in 2-7 years, however, our powerful agile, integrated marketing will be particularly attractive as it can help you maximize your sale price. To learn more, please contact us today.

Sales Renewal Develops Multi-Dimensional, Visual Search System for Non-Profit Client

The Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation of Harvard Law School (CHLPI) advocates for legal, regulatory, and policy reforms to improve the health of underserved populations.

Two years ago, Sales Renewal worked with CHLPI to build a new WordPress website that was modern-looking, responsive and easy for the CHLPI team to maintain. A key component of the new website was the creation of a Health Library, which houses all of its published research, articles from academic journals, and legal documents like amici briefs and administrative complaints.

As the number of publications in this Library grew over the last two years, CHLPI realized it was getting more and more difficult for readers to find the content most relevant to them. and they identified the need to be able to search by:

1. Keywords
2. Geography
3. Type of document
4. Topic
5. Publication year
6. Combinations of the above

In addition, for the geographic search, they also wanted it to not only be textual (the name of a state) but also visual (clicking the state on a map).

When they approached Sales Renewal for advice, we understood that as a non-profit, they were budget-sensitive, so we looked at available WordPress plugins that would meet these criteria. Unfortunately, while their search requirements could be addressed by separate plugins, there weren’t any that would handle all at once.

Affordable, Custom Search System

Consequently, 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:

• A multi-faceted, term-based filtering system, allowing users to narrow their search by Geographic Focus, Document Type, Publication Topic, or Publication year
• A keyword-based search system
• A visual, map-based filter in which will automatically update to indicate which geographic regions have applicable publications

Other notable features include:

• The system requires no additional work on the web editor’s part when adding a publication to the library – all they do is include a specific tag to categorize it correctly
• The entire system runs on asynchronous JavaScript*, so the page doesn’t have to reload when filters or search terms are changed
• Filters are represented as query strings in the website’s URL (for example, http://www.chlpi.org/health_library/?fwp_geographic_focus=south-carolina), which means that specific searches can be bookmarked by users for future reference, or linked to from outside sources, such as other websites, blog posts, or e-mails.
• The system is responsive, and works on desktop computers, tablets, and smartphones.

Feedback on the new Library has been overwhelmingly positive and has been called a “fantastic addition.” We encourage you to visit the CHLPI Health Library and test out the features for yourself. And please contact us for your next custom development project – we’re happy to provide a no-charge consultation.

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* Synchronous code is executed in sequence – each statement in the code waits for the previous statement to finish before executing. Asynchronous code doesn’t wait – your program can continue to run. This helps keep your site or app responsive, and reduces waiting time, making for a better user experience.

Sales Renewal’s Marketing Investment Analysis: Exit Planning Edition Is In Beta

Sales Renewal is beta testing a new tool – the Marketing Investment Analysis: Exit Planning Edition – that business owners who are considering selling their business can use to assess how much to invest in marketing to meet their revenue goals at the time of sale. We’d love feedback on the tool and the resulting report.

Marketing Investment Analysis: Exit Planning Edition

As with the original Marketing Investment Analysis (see below), the Marketing Investment Analysis: Exit Planning Edition asks you to answer a series of high-level questions (24 in all) and typically takes 15-20 minutes to complete online. Sales Renewal will then review your answers and, within 3 business days, deliver a custom-to-your-business report with insights into how confident you can be that your projected marketing budget can deliver your projected annual revenue at the time of sale.

Once officially launched on October 15, the Marketing Investment Analysis: Exit Planning Edition will be available for $250, but during this beta period, the tool is available for free. If you’re considering selling your business and are interested in testing it, please provide your email below and you’ll be taken to the survey automatically.

Building on the Marketing Investment Analysis

In 2013, Sales Renewal launched the original Marketing Investment Analysis, which is designed for businesses in any stage of development. This affordable questionnaire and resulting 4-page, custom-to-your-business report provides specific programmatic and budgetary recommendations for marketing your business and will help you answer the three most common questions asked by business owners:

1. Am I investing the right amount in sales & marketing?
2. Which marketing programs or tactics will be the most effective for me?
3. How much should I invest in each?

The Marketing Investment Analysis costs $250 and is available here.

Keith Loris on Exit This Way

Sales Renewal President and CEO, Keith Loris, joined host Kerri Salls on Exit This Way to discuss The Challenges of Small Business Marketing and Why It’s Important Before You Sell Your Business. In this interview, Loris speaks of the importance of growing revenue the year or two before selling your small business, and what percentage of revenue should be applied to marketing efforts. He also discusses the risk/value tradeoffs in marketing, and how to build a system of policies and procedures to evaluate and appraise marketing tactics.

Click here to listen to the full interview.

Love in Your Ring Wizard, the First-of-Its-Kind Online Ring Designer, Has Launched

Sales Renewal is pleased to announce the launch of Minter + Richter Designs’ new ecommerce site, http://www.MinterAndRichterDesigns.com, and the custom-built Love in Your Ring Wizard that seamlessly lives within it.

The site and unique App are great examples of Sales Renewal’s JointSourcing Solution at work: key business challenges were identified in the client’s JointSourcing Blueprint (e.g., streamlining customizations for millennial customers, increasing average sales price (ASP), lowering cost of sales). The sales-enabling technology was designed and developed as part of JointSourcing’s Build Services and is now being publicized and marketed as a key differentiator during the JointSourcing Sell Services step.

Our Client and Its Customers

Minter + Richter designs and handcrafts custom titanium wedding rings with a variety of inlay materials, from the well-known to the exotic. The typical Minter + Richter customer makes a single purchase, buying rings for that special, one-time occasion: their wedding.

The Sales Process

Each wedding or engagement band is hand-crafted and individually made based on the purchaser’s preferences. This means that clients have to provide information about ring sizes and choose the type of edges, finishes and interior colors for each ring, as well as care options (polishing and cleaning), and shipping and manufacturing times (standard, rush, shotgun rush) before the ring is made. This customization process was originally very involved and required hours of offline phone consultations and email exchanges, as well as missed opportunities for point-of-sale add-on purchases and upgrades.

The Sales and Marketing Challenges

Minter + Richter originally approached Sales Renewal because they wanted their site to rank better when their millennial buyers searched for wedding bands in Google. As we worked through our SEO planning process (Sales Renewal’s Blueprint phase), however, we both realized that while improving SEO was a worthwhile thing to do, there were more even important things to tackle first. For example: enhancing the selling capabilities of the website; creating an integrated marketing strategy (read more about the benefits of comprehensive, integrated marketing here) and overcoming some key business challenges (streamlining the customization process for their customers while simultaneously increasing the ASP and lowering the cost of sales). We knew that once these challenges were met, the other marketing tactics, like SEO, would be easier to put into place.

The eCommerce Solution

Our efforts focused on the redesign and optimization of the company’s Shopify-based website to increase per-transaction revenue and to streamline the sales process. A key piece of this was designing and building the Love in Your Ring Wizard. The Wizard is able to handle all the most popular customizations online in four streamlined, user-friendly steps. Ring sizing, finish options and even rush manufacturing are all clearly laid out, making it easy for customers who want to customize their ring to do so without jeopardizing the sales of customers who aren’t interested.

Early Results Point to Financial Success

Minter + Richter’s new website launched in mid-July, and from the first Wizard sale, the company has seen increased per-sale revenue as well as incredible time savings. The business – and Wizard – was recently publicized by Boston’s WCVB Channel 5 in their Made in Mass series. As reporter Doug Meehan says, Minter + Richter is “taking design in a brand new direction. [Minter + Richter] are the first in the country where you can completely design your wedding ring online.”

Best of Growth Spurts – Our Favorite Posts from June

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. We believe they are relevant to most business owners involved with any aspect of marketing their business, and we offer a regular summary roundup of the most popular/interesting posts.

On Exit Planning: Miscalculation: The Little Big Horn Of Exit Planning – Any business owner disagree with: “It’s far better to start planning two years earlier than you think necessary than five minutes too late”? The article’s author recently surveyed business owners and found that owners frequently underestimate what needs to be done to transfer their businesses to the person they choose, when they want, and for the amount of money they need. Find out more here.

On Content Marketing: 10 Techniques to Successfully Amplify Your Content Marketing – Write it and they will come? Only if you follow through by letting people know your content exists. These tips will help with one of the most important steps in content marketing: “amplify”, or get the word out. Some of our go-to techniques: Keep sharing your most popular posts; Update and republish relevant, evergreen posts; and Curate similar content (and include a link to your original post). Read all the tips here.

On Email Marketing: Using Email Addresses for Retargeting – Take your email list to the next level by combining it with re-targeted advertising. Even if you have a very small ad budget, you can take advantage of the re-targeting options available on Facebook, Twitter, and Google. Read more.

On Local Marketing: 10 Things People Still Get Wrong about Local SEO – Do you still believe targeting keywords for Local Search is irrelevant? Claiming a Google listing will automatically increase search visibility? A huge radius will make you rank better for local cities? Find out how Google really ranks your business on SEO.

On Analytics: Four Key Metric Groups for B2B Marketers – This article reviews four of types of metrics key to succeeding in the B2B marketing space:

• Lead generation metrics (ROI of ads & campaigns; raw leads; quality of leads);
• Top of funnel metrics (Visitors to most popular landing pages; Organic / non-paid traffic; PR and non-paid media impact)
• Community & nurturing metrics (Email metrics; Time to respond for user questions)
• Customer satisfaction / loyalty metrics (NPS score; Survey data )

Read the article for details about each of these metrics groups. How many of them are you using?

Writing a Blog to Grow Your Business

“What do I write about?”

It’s inevitably the first question any business starting up a company blog will ask. And it’s inevitably the question that will continue to be asked as long as the company blog exists.

If you’ve done any research into business blogging, you have probably encountered endless articles about why you should have a business blog. These articles are often supported by survey results and data analysis. They typically explain that it can be a successful, cost-effective way to bring traffic to your website. An active blog means the search engines see your fresh content, which, if set up properly, can help improve your SEO performance. An active blog means you have plenty of fodder for sharing on your social media networks. You can also email articles to prospects and clients, and encourage people to contact you in the post itself (calls to action). All this, in turn, can grow your leads, increase sales, build your authority, and expand your market reach.

Write to Delight

Dive in a little deeper, and you are guaranteed to find even more articles about how to put together a blogging program. And they all make it sound so quick and easy.

Chances are you’ve come across some version of this advice: “To bring readers to your blog, all you have to do is write to delight and inform.” This is usually accompanied with plenty of tactical (?) advice:

• Plan your content in advance
• Use an editorial calendar
• Headlines/images/bullet points sell
• Understand your personas
• Blog daily/weekly/monthly/regularly
• Write to delight (there it is again!)

Sounds nice at a first read, but if you stop to think about it, what does it really mean? Can a business owner really turn this advice into an effective company blog? We don’t think so. At least not without investing way more time into understanding what it all means than anyone actually has. Because first and foremost, you still need to answer the question, “what do I write about?”

A Thoughtful Way to Structure Your Blog Content

There’s some old-school advice about writing that can be more constructive: “Write what you know.” You know your business. You know your customers. So in theory, you know what your customers need to know about your business.

We’re getting closer, but we need to take it to the next level by adding some manageable way to plan your content that takes into account all the benefits we discussed above: SEO, social media sharing, individual distribution.

So let’s start with what you know: your products and services. Ideally, your website is structured so each category of products or services has a dedicated page (on the SEO side, think broad key concept, or a category of keywords). These Category Pages link to individual Product or Service Pages (for SEO, this equates to “longer-tail keywords”). There may be one or two additional, highly-targeted pages for each of those services, focusing more in-depth on various aspects of that service or product.

Enter your blog. Each of your product or service pages offers near endless fodder for blog posts. Product updates, news, customer reviews, customer examples, how-to articles, all make good blog content.

Put the pages and blog posts together, and you have a content hierarchy that can be used to strategically answer the question, “what do I write about?” Not only will you have something to write about, but you will have content that will help your SEO efforts, move your prospects along the sales funnel, and allow you to reach out via social media networks.

An Example: Sit, Stay, Home – an Electric Fence Company

Let’s use Sales Renewal’s fictitious company, Sit, Stay, Home, to demonstrate the power of this model.

• Our top-level Category Page “Electric Fence Models” gives a summary of all our electric fence products.
• Each summary is linked to a Product Page, for example, “Model 1 – Electric Fence with GPS Collar”.
• This, in turn, links to a Special Features page, explaining “How the GPS Collar Works.”
• We can then generate Blog Post content for these Product or Special Feature Pages to enhance the reader’s understanding of your product: how the idea was developed (company insights); true-life example of how a dog was saved by wearing the collar (testimonial); why it works even in snow (geographic reference); what types of dogs it is best for (customer example); how to prolong the battery life (tips).

You’ll want to go through this process for each category of product or service you offer. At the end, you will find you have plenty to write about. And you will be able to systematically plan and schedule your content so you develop a well-rounded website, with pages and posts that support and explain your business.

With this birds-eye view of your content, you can balance they types of posts you write, as well. For example, one week you might write about why the GPS model works in the snow, the next week a customer testimonial about how Model 2 worked better than anything she had tried. Week 3 announces a software update for Model 4, and week 4’s post offers tips and tricks for better training.

Of course, once you know what to write about, you can rely on readily available advice for how to write it, being sure to take into account readability, WIFM (what’s in it for the customer), delight (!), SEO, and social sharability.