SMEs with limited time and budget should follow these simple strategies to get results in 2017
Your website is the face of your company’s digital marketing strategy, yet one of the most common critiques today is that websites are too complicated. Sometimes it’s a case of gamification taken too far or overuse of the popular, but visually intense parallax format – a busy website, overdesigned or poorly formatted is simply difficult to use. What’s more, creating such a site, and maintaining an equally deep marketing presence on social media or via email, is time-consuming and may not pay off.
A critique that we encounter far less often in the digital marketing world, is that a website is overly simple, but that doesn’t mean such sites don’t exist. Rather, the overly simple website tends to be described differently: they choose unattractive fonts, lack visual interest, or don’t implement their content effectively.
Look at these…
Unusual Tactics To Help Small Business Win The Holidays
I’m writing this article on the morning of Black Friday, just after I cleaned out my inbox of all the promotional emails I had received from retailers about their special offers.
There were about 10 promo emails in my list. I opened two and clicked through from only one. The others were unceremoniously archived.
This sums up the challenge that small businesses face during the holidays.
Markets have gotten more saturated and enterprise-level marketing technology is readily available to everyone. Instead of competing on a level playing field, it’s harder to reach your customers and bring them back to your store.
This is especially true during the holidays when there are so many retailers (some with massive marketing budgets) vying for the same attention and dollars.
I’ve always liked…
In your mission to compete with the big guns, are you underutilizing these small business branding hacks?
When you’re trying to boost your online visibility, it’s hard to know what tools to use, what methods you should be targeting and how to effectively measure results, especially when you’re already consumed with the day-to-day operations of your small business. You’re also unlikely to have an infinite budget to allocate toward this. That, combined with the confusing nature of SEO, with loads of companies promising to get you to rank but few actually being able to deliver, can leave many small business professionals wondering what direction they should take with their small business SEO. Here are some common mistakes:
Not Being Specific About Your Market
It may sound counterintuitive when it comes to SEO, but it pays to tap into a niche.
Logically, you might think that ranking for as many different keywords as possible would…
Out with the old and in with the new
The idea of scheduling all your appointments on large excel sheets or overfilled diaries is a thing of the past. Small businesses are now gradually switching to digital calendars and online appointment scheduling and in turn improving their business output as customers have the ability to make appointments online, anywhere, anytime.
To get to this stage, it is recommended to follow the next 7 steps for success as a small business.
7 methods for a small business to boost adoption of online booking
1. Promotion, Promotion, Promotion
When committing your business to a CRM / Online booking system you need to “go big or go home”. Meaning, you need to promote the fact that you are now accepting new appointments through online booking.
This should be advertised anywhere your customer has most interaction within your business. For example, good places to advertise would be next to your cashier,…
To succeed your start-up must be lean. These are key principles to apply to marketing
Around the world, thousands of new businesses with exciting new ideas for original products start up every day. To say most of them fail is an understatement. The reality is the vast majority fail. Yet some go on to transform the way we live, eat, shop, work and pay for things. Start-ups are remaking the modern business landscape by disrupting established players. It's an exciting time to work for a start-up, or even better to be a founder. However, that doesn't change the incredibly slim odds of success.
Why do Start-ups fail?
Start-ups fail for all sorts of different reasons. But they all suffer from a set of problems which more often than not are the primary reason for their failure. Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, David Collis, outlines these problems as suffering from a…
SMEs/SMBs with offline businesses models can still utilise digital marketing
You would be forgiven for thinking that the days of bricks and mortar stores are numbered due to the rise of Internet shopping and dramatically increased usage of Smartphones to make purchases when on the move. Certainly, online shopping is fast becoming the norm as UK shoppers are expected to spend over £52 billion online by the end of 2015; an increase of over £7 billion on the 2014 figure.
Yet this only represents 15.2% of retail sales in the UK which is a clear indication that in-store shopping is still the consumer’s #1 choice. Even better news is that you can use digital marketing to boost your level of in-store customers! According to a Deloitte report, digital technology influenced approximately 33% of in-store retail sales in the United Kingdom during 2014; this equated to over £100 billion.
No matter how advanced…
An integrated small business campaign example
I awoke on the last Friday of November to the usual Black Friday hangover. On checking my emails I was inundated an avalanche of offers in relation to that American import which, like Halloween, is now huge over here in the UK too: Black Friday. With the Argos, Currys, Tesco and Boots' websites all experiencing outages due to weight of demand, the British public appears to have got over its aversion to this American celebratory holiday of all things consumer.
I run a niche ecommerce business that has a big US subscriber base, and based on previous Thanksgiving weekends it was clear that we needed to have a planned approach to the "holiday" season. As the day drew nearer we had customers emailing asking what we had planned as offers - it was going to be a big sales day.
Now we are a small business, our turnover…
Separating ROI from data noise
Learn what metrics can help you truly understand the value of your spend, and what technologies really deliver on this most important metric.
Small-to-medium businesses are investing in their marketing at jaw-dropping new levels. BIA/Kelsey predicts that 2015 will be a banner year for local media expenditure on the part of these organizations, with investment exceeding $50 billion. Digital investments are at the forefront, with 28% of marketers reducing their traditional advertising budget to fund more digital marketing and search marketing capturing the largest share of online spend at 47%, according to Business2Community. But with so many dollars on the line, how can a business know what investments are really paying off?
Return on Investment is the gold standard that today’s marketers are seeking. But with each new media channel, there is new complexity in the metrics…
Review your approach to marketing with limited budget
How to build - Start-up Marketing 101
Recently, we attended Denver Startup week, which inspired us to create a short 'How To' Guide that digs into issues related to getting a start-up off the ground – building on the 'How to build requirements for an MVP' and our white paper on 'Tips every first-time entrepreneur should know.'
This article mamepecifically focuses on how to develop a marketing strategy as a start-up, with lessons learned from experts, as well as advice on tools of the trade and how to measure and analyze your progress.
15 Marketing tips for start-ups
Tip #1
The key advice that you always have to keep at the top of everything you do is:
Get your product out the door – with emphasis on speed over perfection. Your product doesn’t…
Plus three ingredients that you can combine to create a powerful name and strap line
The name you select for a brand, product or service will clearly have a major impact on how prospects and customers perceive your service, but what are the options for choosing the best name? There are lots of ways to name a business, a service, or a product. The addition of a strap line can take the name a little further. From nonsensical words, like Google, to highly descriptive names, like Compare the Market – there are just so many ways to think about naming! Whilst it's true that naming is a bit of an art and today we are often constrained by domain name availability, there are certainly a few issues to consider to guide you to choose a name that can work much harder for you.
1. Nonsense names – e.g. Google
The benefit of a name like this is that once you’ve lodged…
