How Mobile is Dominating the Customer Journey (and Why You Should Care)
Think your B2B customers aren’t using mobile? Think again! The Boston Consulting Group found that for more than 60% of B2B buyers, mobile played a considerable role in a recent purchase. B2B buyers are using mobile devices to conduct research on their needs and find other sources of information, potential vendors, and service providers. Look at your own analytics to determine the importance of mobile for your business and make sure your mobile presence is optimized.
Exactly What You Can Do to Define What Makes Your Brand as Unique as … M&Ms
“Melts in Your Mouth, Not in Your Hands!” For any business to succeed, it needs to uncover its USP or unique selling proposition; without placing a distinct and memorable stake in the ground, it is in danger of falling into the black hole of “everyone else”. Research your competitors to see what sets you apart and create buyer personas (detailed descriptions of your ideal customer) to help you make a list of everything that makes you different. Use your unique selling proposition in everything you do to help make better connections with your customers.
Effective Strategies and Tactics for Incorporating Photos Into Your Small Business Marketing Plan
Many important marketing tactics rely on eye-catching, arresting visuals and never has it been more important to make sure professional-quality images and videos. In this day and age when glamorous selfies, mouth-watering food photography, and breathtaking action shots (not to mention cute puppies) dominate our social media feeds, businesses need to step up their game with their own images. A good picture has the power to grab a user’s attention and help your small business gain visibility, both on your website and social channels. Professional pictures of employees, products or even your building can resonate with prospects and make them feel more connected to you as a business.
Why Marketing Automation Matters for Your Business
Ever wish you had more time in the day to devote to actual strategic initiatives rather than attending to more mundane tasks, like customer emails? We all know how important it is to engage in a regular and timely manner with both new and existing customers, but it’s so time consuming! Enter: marketing automation. Marketing automation can you help you execute and organize email outreach more efficiently while saving you something that you desperately need: time. A good automation system can help you gain new leads while keeping your current customers happy.
How to Understand and Solve Your Customers’ Problems
Connecting our customers’ problems to the solutions we offer is perhaps the most important task of marketing: If we can show that we understand their problems, they will listen to our solutions. There are a number of very effective – but underused – ways of understanding your customers’ pain points, including keyword research, customer surveys, and review management.
Miscalculation: The Little Big Horn Of Exit Planning
If you’re like 75% of all business owners, you may have a vague plan to transfer ownership at some point in the future, but feel little urgency to do anything about it now: Business is good, revenue is increasing – what’s the hurry? The author likens this mindset to the false sense of security General Custer felt on that fateful day in 1876! Owners often underestimate what needs to be done in the years leading up to an exit and the author cautions that it’s better to start planning two years too soon, than five minutes too late.
Maximize Customer Engagement With the Right Data Insights from the Right Data
Sales Renewal’s insight:
Many of us understand that analytics are key to gaining a competitive advantage but fewer of us really understand which data is important and how to put that data to use. Whether it’s Big Data or little data, technology can help all businesses gain valuable intelligence about their customers. This article outlines 3 steps to gaining actionable insights from your data. Important aspects of making the most of your data includes providing context, looking at trends instead of individual data points, and gaining insights that are aligned with your overall strategy.
Managing When the Future Is Unclear
The term "strategic ambiguity" might be enough to send your heart rate racing and your stress level into the stratosphere. However, this article acknowledges an under-appreciated reality: we often find ourselves managing in situations when it isn’t clear where we’re going or how we’ll get there. Discover some practical approaches you can take to emerge from periods of change a stronger manager and an exceptional leader.
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.