JustSmallBiz Marketing: Recent Episodes
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Your business doesn't have to end with COVID-19. Do these three things to help your business survive.
Turning the “I always shop local” shopper talker into a local walker. Let’s face it, people will always say they will shop local when asked. The reality is, that MOST people don’t do that at all. They will shop local when it makes sense for them, but they won’t do it unless it is in their best interest.
Today, I want you to think about the question, "Who else wants to start getting more qualified leads from online marketing?" I know I do.
We're told that online marketing is the way to go but getting qualified buyers instead of tire kickers is not easy. The online world is great for tire kickers. They'll click on any ad out there. They don't even care if the ad is even relevant. They might just click on it because it's something to do when they have very short attention spans. What we want to do is find ways to get more qualified buyers online.
There are three ways. One is to develop better ads that turn off tire kickers. I'll explain that a little bit more. The second thing is target groups in segment as much as impossible. The third thing is to consistently track your efforts; A/B test to see what's working so you can continue to get better at it. By getting better at it, you'll spend less and you'll focus more of your attention on the people who are going to do it.
Let's look at the first one. Develop better ads that turn off tire kickers. Say upfront who you couldn't help. For example, I had a therapist who was cash‑only up in Baltimore and she did not want to take insurance.
A lot of people who are seeking mental health counseling will try to find counselors who accept that health insurance. What we've done with her is in the ad it says, "Only Accept Cash. No Insurance Accepted."
This drives the people who have insurance away from clicking on the ad. No, it's not going to get everybody, but it saved her a lot of money. When somebody clicks on that ad, these people already qualified themselves saying, "Wait. I'm going to pay cash out of my pocket to do this." You got to find ways to say, "Hey, I don't want to help you."
For example, with me, if you're a business with less than $20,000 or $25,000 or $100,000 in income, I'm probably not going to be able help you as much as you need to unless you have a marketing budget in place. I'm telling you upfront, "You don't have a marketing budget of $500 a month or more, I'm not going to be able to help you."
By doing that, you can get some of those people to not click on your ads, not contact you, not waste your time, because they are just not ready or able to do business with you. Find ways to eliminate those people who are not right for your product.
The second thing is, target groups in segment as much as possible. The more you can identify who your client, the better off you are at segmenting your audience and only advertising to those people who fit those profiles.
As online media is getting better with that, the direct marketing lists are getting better with that emails, so you go to list companies. I'm a bald person, I only want to market to bald people. Bald men who live in Florida, in this specific neighborhood, etc., who drive convertibles, or whatever.
You can segment your list very nice. If you do that, you're going to spend more wisely, invest more wisely in your marketing and have a better opportunity to reach your target market more frequently at the same budget level than you just did a throw the paint at the wall and whatever is going to happen.
The third thing is you got to consistently track your efforts in A/B test and test to see what's working, try different pictures, try different messages, try different offers, try, try, try, and don't give up too early. That's what happens. You expect everything to work upfront and it just doesn't happen that way.
Theoretically, you're going to nail it the first time, but the real world is going to tell you that you haven't thought of everything, you're going to spend money upfront and you're not going to get the results you expect immediately. It's just not going to happen. You must test. You must commit.
Say, "I commit six months." Commit. Make a commitment that this is going to make it happen and you're going to spend this money. You might not see results from Month One or Month Two but then you start figuring it out and then you start getting the leads to qualify leads and making those conversions. But you'll only do it if you stay there.
It's like going to college. You're not going to graduate if you don't do all the credits. You may be going for three years in college and go on, "Is this a waste? What am I going to do? I'm not getting anything out of this. I'm not going to finish."
It's after the fourth year when you get your bachelor's degree and if you continue on, you get your Master's, etc. Those are the kind of things that you really want to do. Take an approach that says, "I'm going to commit to this make this happen."
If you do these three things to get more qualified leads, and those three things are to develop better ads that get tire kickers out of the way, target the groups in segment as much as possible, track your efforts, test them, and be willing to commit for a period of time, you'll frequently see that you're going to get more qualified buyers into your funnel, into your pipeline.
You know that you offer great service, great customer service, great experiences, great products and that is going to pay for itself tenfold.
If you have any questions and need some help establish your marketing strategy, getting help implementing marketing, whether it be online, offline or through social media, give us a call at 321‑613‑8476, that's 321‑613‑8476 or you can email brad@justsmallbiz, that's brad@justsmallbiz.com. Thanks.
Today I want to talk to you about three early warning signs that your social media engagement is in danger of failing, and how to fix it.
The three things are your pages are not getting any more likes or follows, your pages aren’t getting the right types of likes or followers, and your ads aren’t converting into new business.
Let's look, a little bit more in detail.
The first one ‑‑ you aren't getting more likes, and by likes, I mean legitimate likes, when you're not trying to just basically get people to like your page. You see this so often, time and time again, "Help us get to 1,000 likes. Help us to get to 10,000 likes," etc.
That's not doing anything for you. It's just, "I'm trying to get people to like me, because that's what I want to do."
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Today, we're going to talk about whose fault is it when you lose a sale because you have to call somebody back.
Here's a situation that happened to me recently. I had a flat tire, about 100 miles away from our usual place. Inmon Auto Repair, which is also a client of mine.
I called a few local shops. For the most part, each one of them said, they would call me back. They took my tire information down, and they had to call me back, which I thought was a little odd because in this day and age, you should be able to look something up right on the spot.
I would've stayed on the phone, but regardless, for the most part, each one of them said they'd call me back.
How often do you hear yourself saying that you need to revamp or kickstart your marketing for your small business, but don't do it? Well, there are three reasons for that and we're also going to look at what you can do about it. Let's look at the three reasons. The first one, I don't want to call it laziness, but let's call it laziness. Usually it's such a pain in the neck the first time you did it or if you've done it before that it's overwhelming. It's kind of laziness because it does take a lot of work, especially if you haven’t done anything before.
The second thing is you just lack the time. You're dealing with the tyranny of the urgent, everything that's coming in. You don't have the time because you're running a business.
Hi, this is Brad Swezey, President, JustSmallBiz Marketing. Today, I want to talk to you about how you can easily lose customers in less than a minute. There are three ways, actually there are more, but I'm going to discuss three ways today.
First, you cannot answer the phone. One of the things about people looking for our services, they want to call someone. If they call, they want someone to answer the phone. Frequently, you'll find businesses that don't answer the phone, or if they do answer the phone it may be a voicemail message, or they'll put them on hold.
If you put them on hold for more than 15, 20 seconds, they're going to hang up and call somebody else, so that's the first way. The second way is forget that they're your customers. I'll talk about a little bit more about that further. The third way is forget about them, completely.
Today I want to talk to you about how easily you can get more perfect customers for your small business. We all know while getting customers can be expensive, there are some easier ways than others to do it. I just want to talk about three of them today.
The first is introduce yourself to surrounding businesses, and offer them a chance to try what you have and even be aware that you exist. I wrote an article once about this Italian ice place around an area that opened up. I went to the dentist, asked them if they had been approached by anybody at the business across the street.
They didn't know about it, though it was right across the street. When I went over to the ice place they said, "No. We hadn't done that." That place is no longer in business, but they probably could have done themselves a good favor by just going around and introducing themselves to their surrounding businesses.
Today, I want to talk to you about do you make these mistakes with your online presence.
We all know that online presence is important, but I'm not sure we all do all the things that we can to avoid making mistakes that hurt us.
The first one I want to talk about is not paying attention to your Google+ page or your Google My Business Page, whatever Google is calling it these days. The reason why this is important is because you can see anytime you search for something on the Internet. If there's a business, for example, it'll come up.
Today's topic is, "Warning ‑‑ If you don't do these three things, you are going to lose customers," or at the very least, you're not going to gain customers.
These three things are 1) you must have offers that are compelling; 2) you must have offers with time limits; and 3) you must deliver on expectations.
Let's look at the first thing; have offers that are compelling. I tend to look at direct mail that comes in because I'm in the business. I don't know if everybody else does, but there's a lot of direct mail that comes through that just has generalized stuff on it. There's no offer. It's just, "Hey, we're a business. We do landscaping, or we are a dentist." You probably get dentist stuff all the time.
Hi, this is Brad Swezey, President of JustSmallBiz Marketing. Today, I want to talk to you about who else wants to avoid throwing away money on advertising that doesn't work. Nobody likes to throw away money.
As small business owners, we often don't have a lot of money to throw away on stuff, because we're trying to grow our businesses on a shoestring budget. I want to talk to you a little bit about that, on how you can avoid throwing away money on advertising.
First, I want to talk about a client of ours who, before they became a client, they had spent a lot of money in advertising in a couple of free magazines that are sent out around the area. They look good. They were glossy. They're very nicely done.
The only challenge with that is you don't know how many people are actually reading them. Free magazines are often not read at the rate of people who will pay for some kind of subscription, because they want to read the content.
Today, I want to talk about the question: How often do you find yourself saying, "Why are my competitors seemingly more busy than I am when my company is better?"
There might be three things that they're doing that you're not doing, despite the fact that you're better. We're going to talk about these three things.
The first is they're probably not missing opportunities to build customer contact lists. By that I mean, most people don't respond and buy right away. Sometimes, they need to be nurtured and be contacted repeatedly because things get in the way. (Listen for the rest of the story or read online)
Many small business owners, myself included, understandingly, put our hearts and souls into our businesses which is why when we get a negative review, it can hurt us to the core. Sometimes, like every other human being out there, our tendency is to first blame the customer and say, "This is an exception," or something else like that. Now, is this right or wrong? It depends. Regardless, it ultimately is we, the small business owners, who are generally at fault.
Hi, good afternoon. Today's topic is "Who else wants to cut their advertising cost by 37 percent while increasing sales by 15.6 percent?"
I use those figures because that's what we've been able to do for one of our clients in an established industry that didn’t grow as much. We have documented results. I want to talk about , related to that, how you can approach your advertising and increase sales while spending less money on advertising.
Typically, what happens if I go into a business from a marketing consulting perspective, and they don't have a true marketing person ‑‑ by that I'm talking about somebody who's given the title of marketing director, marketing coordinator, etc. in a small business, which is typically what you see. Somebody is out there and their whole job is to go to networking events or something.
I'm talking about a marketing professional with decades or years of experience and education behind them that can take a coordinated approach to marketing. If you walk into most small businesses, they either don't have a person or they don't have the right type of person.
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Today I'm going to talk about what every small business should know about digital billboards.
Digital billboards, for those of you that don't know, are those screens on TVs, mainly, that you see in restaurants, hotels, etc. where there are advertisements and information. Today I'm going to talk about what every small business should know about these digital billboards.
The first is where they are located in a place matters as much as the place they are located.
In other words, let's say you're a business connected to something tourism‑related and you get pitched with the idea that these digital billboards are in a hotel. On the face of it, it looks like it might be pretty good. But where they're located in the hotel might be a problem.
They might be in the area where somebody's walking by and focused on getting to their room, or getting to the counter to check in, and the billboard's located on the left or the right, and the people don't even look at it. Typically, those of us who stay at hotels, we go into the hotel, we want to check in, and when we check in, we want to go to our room.
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I'm talking to you today about three early warning signs that your small business is in trouble.
They're out there. Whether or not you pay attention to them is up to you. But if you do pay attention to these early warning signs, you might be able to take care of some problems before they become big ones.
The first one I want to talk to you today about is your good employees. You start noticing that your good employees are quitting. When your good employees stop expressing themselves to you because you're not listening to them and you don't think their ideas are valid, etc., they'll often quit.
Why are they quitting? Because they're good at what they do, and why not go work for a business that may understand them and also offer them an opportunity to excel? No one wants to be part of a sinking ship.
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What I want to talk about today is the question, "What Every Small Business Owner Should Know About How Consumers See Their Businesses." Because we often are in our businesses all the time, we fail to realize sometimes how consumers or customers see our business. That's why I want to talk about three things you really should know, about how customers see your business.
The first one is you're a means to an end. They have a need or want that they need to get taken care of; That's their primary reason for coming to your business. There may be secondary and other reasons for them to come to your business, but fundamentally they want to come to your business for something.
If somebody wants coffee, they come to your business primarily to get coffee. If the coffee's bad, chances are they're probably not going to go back there no matter how good everything else is. You really want to make sure you know that the consumer's need or want that is primary to them, that needs to be taken care of. If you don't take care of that, all else will fail.
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Today, I want to talk about the three secrets of beating your competition. Like I've said before, there's obviously many ways to beat them, but I want to talk about these three today.
Those are basically one, don't fall prey to advertising promises made to all of them, including you. Two, know your target market's needs and wants better, and address them better; and the third one is showing appreciation for them, by doing something a little bit more than what most businesses do, which is often nothing. You want to do those things. Let's look at those in more detail.
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