Dacotah Media LLC

3 Ways a Marketing Consultant Can Help Your Business Grow

Josh — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 15:36:39 +0000

As a small business owner, you need the right tools to succeed and the best way to get them is to hire a small business marketing consulting company. Sure, you may have some great ideas that got your business off the ground but you need the tools to float and eventually soar. As an owner, you have multiple responsibilities. You can remove one of them by hiring a consultant to keep your company’s momentum going.

Here are three ways a small business marketing consultant can help your business grow:

A Marketing Plan

Do you have a marketing plan actually written down with actionable steps and a time line for completion? Many small business owners do not. Luckily, a marketing consultant can help with that. You have no hope of truly succeeding if you are flying by the seat of your pants when it comes to marketing your business. Eventually, something is going to fail because you did not have a real plan.

A marketing plan creates the foundation for actionable tasks. With a plan laid out in black and white, you will know the “whys” behind each action. Plus, if you bullet point or number the actions, the plan will not seem so daunting. You can take baby steps – one action at a time – or speed things up and accomplish several things at a time. And when business slows down, you will have a plan to revisit so that you can study which steps may be the problem so you can fix it.

Business Identification

So you hung out your shingle… does anyone know you are in business? Does the public even know what product or service you are offering? A small business marketing consultant can help you create a tag line and logo, part of the branding process, which will serve as your business identification to the public. By using your business’s branding elements consistently, you can be easily identified within your industry’s marketplace.

Targeting your Customers

Do you know how to get your business website to pop up at the top of the list when consumers go searching for a product like yours on an internet search engine? What about relaying key messages about your product or service? Can you do that effectively? Do you know how to create a sense of urgency or present calls to action in your advertising? How do you track your advertising and promotional efforts to determine whether they are even effective? As you can see, marketing is more than just putting up a website, handing our fliers or printing up business cards.

A consultant can help you design your marketing plan and put it into action. They also will create a time line and put an implementation plan into place so you can follow it. Hiring an outside small business marketing consultant with the knowledge and experience in your chosen industry is the key to a long and fruitful enterprise.

5 Proven Small Business Advertising Strategies

Josh — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 20:02:19 +0000

If you are looking for a low cost way of spreading the word about your small business, use the internet. The majority of potential customers use the web to find products and services in your city or area.

Yellow Page and newspaper advertisements are becoming less and less relevant by the day. Here are some proven advertising strategies to get your product or service out to an audience hungry for it. These are simply starting points. Be sure to utilize search engines and your imagination to come up with more strategies.

1. Start a blog. There are some excellent free sites like Blogger.com to market your small business. Use the same relevant keywords in the URL, title, and scattered through the text so that the search engines can determine what your blog is about.

2. Communicate with your local Chamber of Commerce. You can visit their website, call them, and email pertinent information about the products or services you sell. Give very specific information about what it is that you offer.

3. Use search engines to find organizations that are relevant to your business in your city or area. Get in contact with these people and offer something free or a discount for a first time customer. Remember to test out the things that are working. Ask new customers where they heard about your small business. You could also offer different promotions to different organizations and observe what is returned to you.

4. Search out other community organizations. Nearly every group has a website these days. Use your imagination to expand your advertising. As a start, you could look for: Little League sponsorship, veteran organizations, churches, and lodges. Use the above tactic of give and get. Offer something extra to them in exchange for marketing your small business.

5. Set up an email campaign. Collect emails from willing customers. You could suggest that they email 10 of their friends who may benefit from your small business. Send out a newsletter containing useful tips, strategies, or advice pertaining to your company. This will show that you are a subject matter expert in your field and customers may send this information to more people.

The key to all of these strategies is networking. The most successful small business advertising idea is to offer useful information and not make a sales pitch. Consumers are looking for helpful information and products. They must get the feeling that anything you claim is truthful. If you offer this, your reputation and sales will begin to grow rapidly.

Small Business Marketing on a Shoestring Budget

Josh — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 01:17:58 +0000

Many small businesses don’t set aside much money for their marketing budget. But even a little bit of money can go a long way, especially when marketing online. The “World Wide Web” offers a world of great marketing opportunity. Even a one-man shop has the ability to use the web to reach a wide audience… with minimal spend. The right business marketing strategy can help you take a minimal marketing budget and grow your business enormously.

Search Engine Optimization

One tip to grow your small business with the internet is to optimize your website so that it is search engine friendly. Learn as much as you can about SEO (search engine optimization) so you can get free traffic. It does take effort to optimize your site so that search engines take notice but this costs considerably less than many other marketing methods and it is the most effective form of online marketing there is. If your website is the first result when people search for the product or service you sell, you have a good chance of making a sale. There are small business SEO specialists, such as Dacotah Media, that can help you do this.

Search engine marketing techniques, such as pay per click campaigns, can be effective but they cost money per click and not every paid click will result in a sale. When you have an optimized site that attracts people naturally, you are going to get more results. The fact that it can cost you less than, say a cup of coffee per sale, a Google AdWords campaign means that you can do more with less in terms of marketing budgets. Many small businesses divide some of their budget between pay per click campaigns and organic SEO. This can be a good approach. Try to dominate both the left and the right side of the search engine results pages. Doing so with SEO and PPC campaigns increases your marketing reach without breaking the bank.

Social Media Optimization

Small businesses often build their business on relationships. Social media tools allow you to do that. You can use social marketing tools to help you reach your customers so that you can get new customers and so that you can sell repeatedly to existing customers. Social tools can also help you optimize your website for search engines as well as create follower lists so that your updates are read. These tools don’t cost money; they cost time and effort. You may want to have a social marketing guru help you figure out which of the many tools out there could provide you with the maximum return on your investment and some marketing companies will take on the outsourcing of your social marketing campaign for you.

Just because you’re a small business doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t be marketing. Small business marketing consultants can help you… even if you cannot spend tens of thousands on marketing each month.

Thirteen Easy Ways to Increase Revenue From Your Existing Customers

Josh — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 12:53:07 +0000

Are you overlooking one of the biggest sources of increased revenues for your business by not focusing a targeted marketing effort on your existing customers? Experience has proven that your existing customers are the most effective and efficient source of more revenue since you already have an existing relationship with them. Increased sales can come through them via an increase in the total number of purchases, higher frequency of purchases and higher dollar value of each purchase.

So, what are some ways to achieve those increased dollars from your existing customer base? Here are 13 ways to gain more revenue from your existing customers.

1. Offer a discount to them if they are buying more than one.

2. Give a discount to customers when they reach a certain number of any purchased products.

3. Develop package deals for groups of your products.

4. Offer an upgrade to your product as a deluxe or premium edition for a slightly higher price.

5. Offer a free sample of your product and inform them that they will get a discount if they order now.

6. Offer “add-on” products or services to the purchased product (e.g. special packaging or wrapping, imprinting or other personalization, etc.).

7. Offer an extended guarantee or warranty of the product for an additional cost.

8. Develop and offer a customer loyalty program that rewards frequent buyers of your products.

9. Send customers a “thank-you” email with some special offer attached.

10. Develop and use a customer contact management system to follow-up with customers to see if they are satisfied with their purchases and for an opportunity to offer them another product.

11. Insert a brochure for another product in the first product package bought from you.

12. Send your customer a free surprise gift with a special product offer.

13. Send your customers greeting cards at holidays and include special product offers.

5 Crucial Local Business Directories

Josh — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 21:08:31 +0000

Very few business owners (even fewer so-called “marketing experts”) know that getting a business listed in Google Local Search is a matter of using a variety of methods, rather than finding the magic bullet (which just doesn’t exist). However, many people realize that getting listed in local business directories is a big part of the process, which is true.

The only problem is there are a couple of misconceptions that often prevent business owners from getting local visibility:

First misconception: the “experts” convince business owners that there is one end-all, be-all local business directory they need to get listed in. Since there is no such place, the business owner gets listed there and at most enjoys a tiny bump in visibility, but remains disappointed.

Second misconception: the “experts” give business owners a huge list of supposedly important directories and say “find a way to get found in these 85 places and you’re golden.” That’s a ton of work for the business owner, who doesn’t have time to spare and has a business to run, and who decides to take care of the directories another day.

That’s the bad news. The good news is there is a middle ground, which does not require you to spend your life submitting your business to dozens of directories, but which will not disappoint you by promising a silver-bullet solution.

There are a few important bases to cover. Directories are NOT all the same: some are key unpaid places you want to make sure you’re listed on, and a couple are paid (but inexpensive) services that in my experience are worth the small annual fee. (Again, we are talking about the right combination of solutions.)

Here are the 5 crucial local business directories you will want to make sure you are listed in:

1. CitySearch–if you’re not listed on here, get listed ASAP. Many customers also write reviews here, and getting listed will allow them to give you reviews.

2. Yelp–also a key directory. As with CitySearch, you simply must ensure you’re listed here, if you’re not already. If you are not, submitting your business is easy.

3. InsiderPages–a little more tourist-oriented than the above two, but especially crucial to be listed on if any of your customers are from out-of-town.

4. Universal Business Listing–a paid directory, for approx. $30/year. The big benefit is that once you submit your business info, UBL makes sure other directories have you listed with your correct business info, which is actually extremely important if you want to get visible in Google Local Search results.

5. LocalEze–similar to UBL, a paid service that is more than worth its keep. LocalEze and UBL provide you similar benefits, but it’s good to have a couple bases covered.

If you are a restaurant owner, you’ll want to make sure you’re on the Zagat Survey. If you are in the services (painting, landscaping, plumbing, and others), ServiceMagic is an excellent place to get listed on. If you’re a doctor and you want to be more visible to your patients, DoctorOogle might just help.

Are there more directories? Sure. Lots of them. But you want to get visible at a minimum cost of time and money. The beauty is that both Google Local Search and other directories pick up on your info once you’re listed at the places I suggested. At the VERY least make sure you’re listed correctly at the first three resources I listed, and if possible, pick one or both of the paid services to help get the word out about your local business. You can very quickly–even just during lunch–make sure you’re listed at these few key places, which will likely get you a solid boost in the local search results in short time.

Small Business Marketing on a Shoestring Budget

6 Reasons You Need To Know Your Ideal Customer

Josh — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 20:20:38 +0000

It’s amazing how many small businesses do not have a satisfactory answer to the question, who is your ideal customer? It is a simple question and in business, a critical question that needs to be answered in order to create any semblance of a marketing plan. It is also the first question I ask any new client.

The definition of an ideal customer is the profile of an individual or organization that your product is most suited for. In more simple terms they are a customer that is easy to find, they buy lots from you and they also refer additional business. But several questions remain. What do they look like? Where do they live? And why are they ideally suited to the product or service you have to offer?

When identifying them as an individual consumer you should be able to answer most if not all of the following questions:

What is their demographic profile?
Where do they shop?
What media do they consume? i.e. websites, TV, magazine and social media.
Where do they live?
How often do they buy your product?
What is their average income?
What is their preferred means of communicating?
What solution does your product provide for them?
What are their shopping priorities?
What’s their age and education level?

This is not an exhaustive list but a good start.

If you are a B2B business then you need to look at answering these questions amongst others:

What is the job description of the individual that authorizes purchase of your product?
What is their demographic profile
What is the nature of their business?
Where are they located?
What is their annual spend on the products and services you market?
How frequently do they purchase the products and services you market?
Where do they advertise?
What industry groups are they involved in?

The importance of the ideal customer is simple. It allows you to define your target market which is the cornerstone of any marketing plan. The marketing plan in essence will describe how you as a business will find THAT customer to get YOUR product or service into their hands.

The six key reasons you need to know your ideal customer are:

1. You will know their definition of value.

Value in this case are the benefits of a product or service that the ideal customer value over others. When a consumer makes a purchase decision, they assess the range of benefits against their needs and match the product or service being offered against those needs. Your business is more likely to make a sale if your offer matches the benefits they value. How do you know what they are? By knowing your ideal customer intimately and then marketing your product to them focusing on the key benefits they value. Knowing their definition of value is also critical in developing successful promotional activity for any product or service.

2. You can develop better marketing messages.

Your marketing messages are the key to communicating the benefits of your product or service. By knowing your ideal customer, you can develop better key messages that appeal to that audience. This includes the type of language used and the key benefits you will focus on in your messaging. In addition, by being able to profile your ideal customer, you are able to provide more detailed briefs to creative agencies which will produce better results for you.

3.You will know what marketing tools to use.

By marketing tools we mean advertising, PR, direct mail, social media etc etc. Understanding your ideal customer allows you to make better decisions in terms of your communications plan. You need to know what media they consume, when and how they consume it. By doing this you will increase the effectiveness and improve the targeting of any marketing spend.

4. You can identify clusters.

Clusters are groups of individuals that exhibit common natural characteristics. Cluster analysis is a very useful marketing research tool that uses characteristics of a group called variables to identify sub-segments within that group. The key to the tool is being able to identify the ideal customer in the first place. Once you identify the ideal customer you can do some research on this group to identify clusters that you can target with specific messages. Knowing these clusters will make your marketing activity more effective.

5. You will be able to identify purchasing trends.

Purchasing trends change frequently in many markets, in particular markets where demand affected by the state of the economy (e.g. Real Estate and Motor Vehicle markets). A business that knows what effect changes in the economy will have on demand from their ideal customer, are better prepared to tackle any challenges head on. A business without this knowledge will fly blind and be unable to anticipate any changes in demand.

6. It will be easier to measure your results.

With any marketing plan you need to measure your results. I’ve heard many marketers say if you can’t measure it then don’t do it. I agree. It’s the only way to justify a marketing spend. By finding your ideal customer, you are in a better position to track and measure the results of your marketing plan.

My takeaway from this article is pretty clear, if you don’t know your ideal customer then you can’t develop a marketing plan. It’s that simple. Spend some time to look at your current customer base and find out more about your best customers to develop an ideal customer profile for your business.

Do that and you’re on the path to finding more of them and growing your business.