Introduction

Hello! My name is Tom DuHamel and I run a small company in Hackettstown, NJ called I Heart Blank, LLC. I specialize in WordPress websites, but my mission statement includes integrating your website with your marketing plan. So…I’ve been doing websites since about 2002, in some shape or form. After graduating college with a Marketing degree, I started working at a local radio station here in Hackettstown (actually one of the last independently owned radio stations in New Jersey) and doing websites on the side. In 2011, I founded I Heart Blank, LLC and started doing websites full time!  I’ve done hundreds of websites for all types of local businesses throughout New Jersey, and the country.

That leads us to what we’re talking talking about today. Your marketing and your online presence. Whether it’s your website, directories or social media, reviews, etc; your online presence is important.

With most things in life, everything comes down to either time or money. You can spend either your time bringing your marketing plan to life or pay someone to do it. Dedicating the time and energy to spend on your marketing plan is one of the hardest things you can do as a business owner. Most people, including me, want to spend their time making money for their business and there’s not a whole lot of ‘immediate gratification’ for plugging away on your overall marketing plan. It’s important to make time for it and here’s why; your representation online is who you are and your identity to a lot of people.

Your Position

You, as a business owner, should have a passion for what you’re doing. There’s something that drives you to do what you do. Coupled with your passion, you are also a unique human being. There’s literally no one else like you! There’s something about those two things that will help you come up with your USP, or Unique Selling Proposition. It’s basically what sets you apart from the pack. The emergence of your USP is where your overall marketing campaign comes in.  Even if you’re part of a larger brand identity, your individual chapter or ‘section’ can help separate themselves.

A lot of times, determining your USP can do half of the work of a marketing plan or online presence.  If you decide that you’re ‘geared’ towards one thing…you want all your actions, ads, behavior and online demeanor to reflect that.

So, for me, I have a passion for helping people, I know a decent amount of marketing and I’m pretty damn good at making websites. That’s my marketing mission statement right there. Every presence I have online incorporates that…”To integrate your marketing plan with your online presence.”

It’s also important to realistically ‘define success‘ for yourself.  While money is important to pay my mortgage and making sure there’s food on my plate, success for me is working hard and helping people.  I don’t always look for the easy money…I’d rather work hard and make a living wage then find a ‘get rich quick’ scheme.  Often times, people ask me if I’m ready to hire people or out source work.  While I do get overwhelmed sometimes, I like that I make a (mostly) comfortable living and I still love what I do.  It’s not for everyone, but it took me many years to come to that conclusion.  I often use the phrase, “I got be able to sleep at night” and it’s what I think about when I make business decisions.  As business people…and people who are even in this seminar, we have a passion for what we do…it’s why we do it!  You can be successful and be able to sleep at night.  Whether you’re selling a service or have a retail store.  Ian McKaye, who’s an accomplished musician and businessman, put it this way,

“Success is not a goal to me. It’s the ‘do.’ Every day. I wanna love what I’m doing. What is success? I wanna know what that means. When people say “…but you sold so many records.” What does that have to do with anything?! If you put that into ‘food’…What’s the number 1 selling food in the world? Of restaurants?! It’s obvious: McDonalds. But does that make it the best food?! I don’t think so. It makes it pretty clear that it’s actually the opposite.

In terms of records, TV shows, or movies a lot of times the things that sell the most are actually, kinda, the most homogenous…and uninteresting.”

Looking From The Right Perspective

It’s also important to look at your business from the outside and not the inside. When you’re visualizing things from the ‘inside’ of a business, you often overlook the point of view of the customer. When I first started working at the radio station, I was in a position where I was a salesman but also a marketing person which, as I said earlier, is what I went to school for.  My former boss gave me a book called “The Wizard of Ads” by Roy Williams (you can get a free PDF download of the book on Roy’s website). It’s an amazing book because each chapter is about a page or two long and it’s filled with business and advertising ‘tid-bits’ that are real easy to read. It’s actually his ‘greatest hits’ from his weekly newsletter.  I feel like the three books in the series taught me more about how to think outside of the box and just a whole lot more than a college course taught me about marketing and advertising. Here’s a quote from his book about it:

“The business owner is uniquely unqualified to see his company or product objectively. Too much product knowledge leads him to answer questions no one is asking. He’s on the inside looking out, trying to describe himself to a person on the outside looking in. It’s hard to read the label when you’re inside the bottle.”

I deal with small businesses all the time.  Often times, I have a fresh perspective when I’m working with businesses…and a lot of the times I have to help a business get adjusted to thinking like their customers.

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Work Backwards

Always look out and do what’s best for the for the “janitor”.  While there’s a bit more I have to write on the subject, I think it’s important to make things easier for the ‘janitor’.  The ‘janitor’ can be your customer or your employee’s.  While, sometimes, we think of the janitor as a ‘low man on the totem pole’, his job is one of the most important.  The janitor of a school is the one that makes it shine!  If the janitor has to come in every morning and move tables and chairs out of the hallway before he can sweep or mop it, he’s gonna start resenting that part of the job.

Likewise, if your employee starts to resent a part of their job that could be made easier than, at least part of that, is on you as the business owner.  Same goes for your customer.  If they call your business and get caught in ‘voice jail’ for 5 minutes before they get a hold of someone, then they’re going to start resenting even doing business with you.

(here’s where I talked about the “E-Myth Debunked”, McDonalds and setting up the business like a franchise)

Your Website

If you’re serious about your marketing strategy, then you want to create a website with the same mindset as opening a new ‘brick and mortar’ location. Think of it this way; your website is an online store front that’s available 24 hours a day. Whether someone wants to look up your hours or your phone number, your website should be the best representation of your business.  You can let them know valuable information about your business that they want to know and hopefully show them some things they didn’t know about.

Often times your website doesn’t need to be the fanciest thing in the world either.  Remember what we just talked about.  You need to be answering the questions people are asking.  If that happens to be be a one-page website…so be it.

Taking a lesson from the big-dogs can also help.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Think about how you search for things. More importantly, think about how your potential customers will search. I’ve had clients that call me and say, “My site’s not coming up in Google“, to which I ask “What are you typing into the search engine?” They give me to term and usually, without a doubt, I reply with “Those words don’t appear anywhere on your website.” If you want to come up within those search terms the content has to appear on your website. More importantly, it has to come up with relevant information. Search engine’s like Google want you to be on top. We, as people who use Google, are Google’s product not customers. Google’s customers are people who are paying for AdWords. We are their product because we click on those AdWords. So, in essence, Google wants us to keep visiting Google for our search engine needs, and it’s their primary objective to have the most relevant information come up. If we looked up ‘kettle pot’ and porn showed up, then Bing would be a more popular search engine.  So, if someone’s looking for ‘kettle pot Hackettstown nj’ they actually want your page to come up so that you keep going to Google. It’s your job to put the most relevant information on your website to come up when someone searches for either your business or something your business offers. You just gotta learn how to play the game.

Just like in the old days…”Content is king.”  If you have relevant content that solves someone’s problem or answers a question, then you’re going to ‘win.’ Present descriptions of your products, write about where you are…there is no business type that I can think of that you can’t ‘write more’ about.

The more advanced level of that is how much you spend (time or money) on these things and, of course, some industries are harder to crack.  If you’re a new law firm in NJ, home renovator, roofing company, these are all a little tricker.  A roofing company can have an individual page for each town in New Jersey, so when you look up “roofing hackettstown, nj” they’re going to come up with their specialized page.  Some law firms in New Jersey can spend thousands of dollars a month just to tweak positions of things on a site.

A couple of years ago I was set with the task of a website ‘overhaul’ for Aquatech USA.  One of the biggest things I do, when I start on a new website, is get organized.  Part of it is seeing the business through the eyes of the consumer (which I talked about above.)  The first question is ‘what do you want on the website?’ Chris described how he sells to professionals, homeowners, sells and rents equipment, etc.  So we sat down and came up with a ‘sitemap’.  Basically a bullet numbered list of all the things he wanted on the website.  As we went through his list we moved things, created sub-pages, etc.   Once we got the list together, I also suggested we highlight some of the more popular industries that Aquatech serves.  So we came up with another list including; construction companies, gold courses, DPW’s, marinas, etc.)  See what we did there?  We took popular terms people might type in Google and made specialty pages highlighting equipment (and specialized equipment) for that industry.  Pressure washers was another ‘thing’ that we had to take some time with.  On the homeowners page, we called it “Pressure Washers” while on the professionals page added the term “Power Washer.”  This helps us to spread the SEO love on multiple search terms throughout the site.

These days an SSL is also important for ranking in search engines.  Since 2004, Google has ranked website’s ‘more significantly with SSL’s in search results.  In 2017, Google started penalizing websites that do not have an SSL.  If you use Google Chrome, the browser makes it more obvious (than it used to) that a site is not secure.  The in the past, websites would only have an SSL if you were collecting sensitive information, like a credit card.  An SSL encrypts the data leaving your website so no one can steal it.  SSL’s are important.  These days, SSL’s are a little cheaper too.  With about a $60 annual fee, it’s very worth having on your site.  If you’re lucky enough, some hosting company’s have started incorporating something called Let’s Encrypt.  It’s a free SSL service.  The big difference is that, typically, when you pay for an SSL you also get some kind of insurance or warranty in case someone decrypts the data.  Let’s Encrypt is free (and just as secure) but doesn’t offer any type of warranty.  If you have a website with e-commerce on it, I still recommend paying for the SSL, so that you get the warranty.

ADA Compliance

ADA Compliance has become (justifiably) more important.  ADA compliance, at it’s core, just makes your website easier to ‘read’ for someone with a disability.  Some super simple examples are:

  • Color contrast
  • Font size
  • ‘Alt’ tags on images
  • Headings hierarchy
  • Image selection
  • Learn more about it here:  https://webaim.org/

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Have AI Help

People have many thoughts about the upcoming Skynet takeover and Artificial Intelligence.  Personally, I like it as a tool.  Some people, me included most of the time, aren’t the greatest at copywriting.  The last time I did this seminar, someone said they typed in some keywords and AI created content for their website…and it was pretty easy and straight forward.

If you can figure it out pretty easily, then it might be less expensive than hiring a copywriter to write your content.  The only suggestion I would give is to ‘make it your own’. We talked about it earlier, you’re passionate about your business and you know what sets you apart from the pack.  AI isn’t going to express that.  I recommend using AI as a starting point and then making it your own.  Who knows, maybe when the machine spits out the content, it will inspire you to write more about it (or just give it a different point of view).

Even the ‘premium version’ of the SEO plugin I use has AI in it!

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Pictures (Aesthetic)

Sometimes I’ll show a client a ‘demo’ of what their site will look like. I can follow that template/demo site to a ’T’ and then at the end, the client says, “It doesn’t look like the demo.” I usually reply with, “You gave me pictures off your iPhone.” High quality pictures can enhance website like no other (as well as social media). I urge people to spend the $800 – 1200 bucks to get a photographer for the day. It will not only make sure you website shines, but you also have a TON of ammunition for your other social media. Your header images, profile pictures, instagrams and everything else will be enhanced.

While, these days, you can definitely get away with taking images on your iPhone/Android…depending on your business, you might just want a photographer.

Wanna Start A Blog?

A blog can be something magical but, and I can’t stress this enough, it’s not for everyone. When someone tells me they want a blog, I tell them I’ll give them a blog if they get me 5 blog posts ahead of time. 99% of the time the blog never gets on the site. When you have a blog that the last post was from a year ago…that actually hurts you.  The fact is that 1 in 4 Google searches are for local businesses.  You can generate a lot of traffic for your site if you have a blog.

If you are writing blogs posts, a lot of people have trouble coming up with content.  It is time consuming and sometimes you just don’t know what to write about.  I find myself forcing myself to write content sometimes…just to keep my blog relevant.  Here’s a list of some ideas you can use to fuel your inspiration for your next blog post:

  • What’s Common To You Isn’t Common To Everyone
  • Your Opinions Matter
  • Customer Service On Your Blog
  • History Matters
  • The Resources You Respect
  • Be Selfish
  • Picture Perfect!
  • New! New! New!

The great thing is that you can just sit on your couch, open a Word document or Google Doc, and get your ideas out while you’re watching TV at night.

A lot of times I’ll just get a WordPress plugin that will make their Facebook look a blog posts. This is because a typical blog post should be between 400 -600 characters.  A lot of people writing skills for that, even once a month.  New and updated information is important to any business, so if you’re writing ‘shorter’ updates, then it might be a good idea to just post your Facebook posts to your website.  To do this, all you have to do is copy and paste from Facebook Page Embedder.

Also, don’t be selfish with your blog posts.  I don’t always mind it, but some people don’t want to ‘give away’ valuable information about their product or service.  I’ve heard, “Why would I tell them that.  I want them to call so I can talk to them and sell them.”  While I understand that mentality, sometimes it can hurt you when it comes to your website.

I write my blog posts to be informative and to serve anyone who wants to learn about something web, marketing or online related.  I recommend adding a passive, soft sell call to action at the bottom of your blog post.  Take this SSL article I wrote (that is mentioned above.)  You’ll find a passive call to action on the bottom that basically says, “If this seems like this is overwhelming, let I Heart Blank, LLC help!”

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Domains

Domain names are a great way to help your next promotion or advertisement!  .com domain names cost anywhere between $10 – $15 a year (mostly) and can be a great way to help promote your business.  Here are a few examples of why you might want to purchase more than one domain name:

  • For a single product, service or package
  • To make your marketing (& advertising) more memorable
  • Wit (aka – for the hell of it)
  • If you own a franchise
  • If you have a potentially confusing website or business name
  • SEO optimization
  • Fans for domains

What kind of things should you think about when getting ready to buy a domain name?  Actually, quite a few!  First is picking your TLD or Top Level Domain.  This is the .com, .net, .local, .lawyer or whatever you might be thinking of.  The super short answer is you should always try to purchase a .com.  It’s what everyone remembers.  Most people are trying to remember what to type in and aren’t really thinking about the TLD.  If your perfect .com is taken, there are somethings you can attempt (if you really want a .com).  Here are some ‘tips’ are also great for if you’re picking a secondary domain:

  • Three word rule
  • Visualize the domain
  • ‘Hear’ the domain
  • Be careful of numbers
  • Be careful of variable words
  • Try adding an SEO word
  • Be weary of the “-“
  • The old standards
  • Suggestion tools

Google Map Packs

Here is the Google Business Profile Manager.

At this point, we know how important being on Google Maps is.  Local search results bring up Google Maps on the top on mobile…and that’s for good reason.  Again, remember what I said before, Google wants to bring relevant information to the top.

Another solution, to help with your general SEO and overall visibility for your business are services that ‘manage’ your social media and online presence.  For a couple years, and you might have heard them on the radio I offered the ‘Going Social‘ media package where I’d set up 5 social media sites for $250.  I got a call one day to be a ‘Yext Reseller’ and heard the guy out.  Basically, Powerlistings submits and manages around 70 of your social media and directory submissions from one dashboard.  I’ll admit, this isn’t optimal for every small business…but it can be very beneficial for certain business types, mostly service-type businesses.  The fact that you can update all your information across 70 social media and directory sites is pretty cool and happens almost immediately.  We just did it with Aquatech who moved to Valentine Street.  I logged into Chris’ Yext account, changed the address and…BOOM…updates happened immediately on all the sites he appeared on.

Campaigns / Promotions

Your advertising, marketing campaign and/or promotion is really the sales force of your business. Rather than hiring someone to go sell your business to people, you use a campaign to get the word out and attract people to your business.

Take Your Time

When coming up with a campaign for your business…remember that it’s for a set amount of time. Sometimes they can be reoccurring. Once you’ve done one you can always go back to it a year later, 5 years later…whenever.

So let’s say you’ve come up with a campaign. Let’s say you’re planning a hashtag promotion that gives away a product a week. Let’s say you plan on running this promotion for 13 weeks. That’s an important one. You can’t just run a promotion for a week and say, “Well that didn’t work and I don’t want do this again.” Let your campaign marinate. Often times, it takes one person…or it take one post on social media to help get it really going. If it doesn’t work right away you can look at why it didn’t and use that for the next one…to make sure the campaign gets off to a good start right away. Everything is valuable.

Too Many Cooks In The Kitchen

Another tip I would give is to ask for feedback when brainstorming your campaign, but don’t actually bring too many cooks in the kitchen. Feedback is great! Someone can offer a better hashtag than you thought of, or someone could suggest a better time of the year to do the promotion. There was a quote from Forbes that says:

Nothing destroys a good idea faster than a mandatory consensus. The lowest common denominator is never a high standard.

Think outside of the box. I know this one can be a little tricky but it can be pretty easy to get inspired. A quick example is to start reading books related to the subject. The Roy William’s book I spoke of earlier can really help to inspire you. Take his successful ideas and relate them to your business.

Take Inspiration

Another idea is to look at other businesses. This works on two levels…1st is to take a look at the ‘big dogs’ in your industry. If you run a jewelry shop, look at what Jared’s is doing. They’re companies that hire advertising agencies, who run demographics and do marketing research to find the best way to sell. Their final ad is a result of all that. So look at their promotions and look at who they might be targeting for yourself. They’ve all ready done the leg work…you can benefit off that. The second is to look at the ‘small to mid sized’ businesses in your industry. Ethically, I would say to start looking up businesses in other states. It looks really bad if you rip off a promotion idea from a competing business in your own town. It’s tacky, you’ll probably get called out, and we’re all in this together. But, for example, if you find a jewelry shop in Wisconsin who thought of a really cool promotion for their business…why not take inspiration from that!

Mailing Lists

Mailing lists can be a great way to get your business into people’s eyes and ears on a regular basis.  The two ‘big dogs’ are Mailchimp and Constant Contact.  Constant Contact was a mess a while ago, especially when Mailchimp came on the scene.  Very outdated and it looked primitive compared to Mailchimp.  Over the past couple of years Constant Contact has really stepped up their game.  Both are equally as good.  It’s important to know that Mailchimp has a free level, while Constant Contact is a paid service.

When creating or starting a mailing list, first and foremost, you want it to be good.  When I first started my business, I would send out Newsletters once a quarter.  No one really cares about websites or the website world, so I didn’t want to ‘over due’ it.  My newsletters basically had three sections to it:

  • World Wide Web News – Where I would share links to articles I found around the web that might be interesting to people (eg – Top 10 used passwords in 2022).
  • I Heart Blank Articles – This was more business / marketing driven of articles I had written that quarter.  Again, trying to keep it interesting and keep me on the top of their minds while asserting that I’m the authority of my industry.
  • I Heart Blank News – This is where I would either feature a website I had just done, or talk about any new products, services, or just ‘things’ that I Heart Blank was doing.

So think of your frequency and your content if you decide to put together a Mailing List.  I can’t tell you how many things I buy, get automatically get put on a mailing list…just to get the first three emails and go, “This is so boring and I’m not interested in anything they have to say.”

When figuring out the ‘sections’ or areas that you’re going to have with your Newsletters, look to the blog section (above) that we talked about for interesting ways to set up your template.

Your Medium Is Not The Message

“If you build it, they will come” does not work in all scenario’s.  I once had a friend call me to ask me if the radio station I worked at actually worked?  I told her that it does, but she has to recognize that we’re a medium and not a message.  She was a little confused so I asked her what her marketing campaign was that she wanted to put on the radio.  She didn’t have one.  I told her that if she put an ad on the radio that just talked about what she does and (technically) that the business exists, it may or may not bring people to her door.  But if she offered a free e-book on her website with the pitfalls or loop of her line of business, then her chances would be a little bit better.  That would be her marketing campaign.  Then the radio message would talk about a free e-book on their website (which is trackable,) then state that if anyone see’s these pitfalls, then they would be welcome to call the business.  This will help people to remember her business and also establishes her as ‘The Source’ or professional in her line of work.

I Should Hope So

I was listening to a seminar once from Jeffrey Hedquist, and during one part he talked about the “I should hope so” statements he saw so often in advertisements.  What Hedquist meant was that if you’re writing advertising copy (for print or radio) and you write a sentence that could easily be answered by the question “I should hope so…” then it probably shouldn’t be in your ad!

It shouldn’t be in there because you’re wasting prime real estate in your ad.  We’ll take radio as an example.  Let’s say your buying a :60 radio advertisement for, let’s say, $60 (we’ll keep the numbers simple.)  A typical sentence of radio advertisement will take about 5 seconds, or about 8% of a commercial.  So, if you were to look at the cost of 8% of a commercial, it comes out to about $6.00.  So, in essence, you’ve wasted $6.00 on an obvious statement in your advertisement.  That’s a huge waste of money.  HUGE!!!

If your advertising medium is a print ad then you should (technically) look at the square inches (or centimeters or pixels) you’re using to with an obvious statement and divide that by the cost of the whole ad!  Chances are you’re still wasting a pretty penny.

Don’t Be Afraid To Start Small

When I first started I Heart Blank, I thought of (what I thought) was a pretty cool inexpensive way to do some DIY  advertising.  I purchased 1,000 postcards (maybe $79) and roll of stamps ($60) and I waited for the mail.  I would save all the valu-pack and whatever else there was coupons and look for new businesses.  I would even see if they had a website, especially check if they had a bad website.  I would send them a postcard with a hand written note on the back.  I would log the date, business and address and follow up with a second postcard in about two weeks.  I thought it was a great idea, took me about 15 minutes a week and was relatively cheap.

I followed this procedure for about a year, but didn’t get any results.  What I should have done was follow up with a phone call on the third week.  It didn’t bother me though.  It was a decent idea and I had to try it.  I figured, at the very least, I got my name out there a little bit.  That brings us to our next point…

Failure Is Growth

It’s okay to fail. A huge thing that a lot of smaller businesses are scared of is failing. Some of it has to do with money, and while everything is going to take either time or money, failure is still something that’s hard for people to deal with. It should and it shouldn’t. Failure is Inevitable…for one it’s a lesson in how not to do things. It’s a step in the right direction…failure’s effect on your life is all how you deal with it. John Wanamaker once said

“I know half of my advertising isn’t working. I just wish I knew which half.”

He’s knew he was making wrong decisions, but he didn’t know when. He saw the value in trying and failing, along with probably every self-help book that’s ever been published.  On a different scale, do you know how many companies that you might respect or cherish have, just, constantly failed.

An older example of failure actually turned into an amazing advertising campaign for Avis, the car rental company. The campaign started in 1962 and it was the ‘We Try Harder’ campaign. Avis would come in 2nd at Hertz car rentals every year…so they built a campaign around, them failing to come in #1. Get it…we try harder…cause we’re number 2. One ad I remember had a headline that just read, “If you find a cigarette butt in an Avis car, complain. It’s for our own good.” The ad goes on to talk about how they try harder and their customers should essentially help them get to number.

Do you know how many times Apple launched a huge product that have failed. Even when Steve Jobs was at the forefront? Examples include; the hockey puck mouse, the Newton, Eworld, iPod Hi-Fi, iPod Socks, and a whole…whole lot more. If that doesn’t get you here’s 12 McDonalds products that failed over the course of 15 years. That’s almost one per year…and there’s a lot McDonalds has to do in terms of product launch:

  • McLobster
  • McGratin Croquette
  • Hula Burger
  • Pizza & McPizza
  • McSpaghetti
  • McAfrika
  • Arch Deluxe
  • McHotDog
  • McDLT
  • McLean Deluxe
  • Big N’ Tasty

Social Media

Instagram:

Quick tip for hashtags. You can search hashtags to see which one’s are popular. So when you’re posting a picture or something, look up some and see which one’s have the highest tags.

You can also use hashtags as a promotion for your business, but it’s gotta be good. For example, you could start a hashtag like #eatinatmamas and then offer a weekly gift certificate or free meal to one person a week / month that uses the hashtag or tags your business. This is brilliant because it gets other people to promote YOU! Just be careful the offer is worth what you’re asking people to do, or people won’t do it.

Small promotions can have a huge impact for your marketing strategy.  Just posting images of new products, or a perfectly made cheesesteak could be enough to make someone’s mouth water.  But be smart about it.  If you’re a restaurant, and you’re serving lunch make sure you post a picture of that ‘perfect cheesesteak’ the next morning between 10 – 11.  If you’re a hair salon, take some images of the previous years up-do’s around prom time.  Please, please…just keep it interesting.  Before you post it, think to yourself, “Is this something I would like.”

Tips for Posting on Facebook To Get Results:

  • Get Your Facebook Fans onto an email list
  • Practice storytelling with each Facebook post
  • Understand what excites your audience
  • Make sure your content has context to the reader
  • Have a friendly and relaxed approach when posting
  • Use Facebook For Lead Generation But Convert On Your Own Site
  • Learn how to be more relevant to your customers’ lives.
  • Empower your employees to scale your content
  • Simply Stop Writing Promotional Posts
  • Focus on building relevant, high quality content
  • Focus on providing value
  • Analyze what’s working and produce more of that
  • Create more video content
  • Know more about your potential buyers
  • Know what works for your audience
  • Remove or Adapt Your Promotional Posts
  • Diversify your social media platforms
  • Become indispensable to your audience

When’s the best time to post on social media:

Facebook

Days: Tuesday – Sunday | Time: 9AM, 1PM & 3PM
Facebook is broadly used on mobile and desktop, at work and at home. It really depends on the audience as far as who and how it is used.

Twitter

Days: Wednesday (B2B performs 16% better during business hours, B2C performs 17% better on weekends.) | Time: 12PM, 3PM, 5PM & 6PM
Twitter is a hard nut to crack, and definitely audience dependent, like Facebook. It is often treated like an RSS feed, and something to read during down times like commutes, breaks, and so on.

Pinterest

Days: Topic Based | Times: 2PM, 9PM & 2AM
Pinterest users seem to make network activity an evening sport, much like sitting down to TV in the evening during their free time.

Instagram

Days: Monday & Thursday | Times 2AM, 8 – 9AM & 5PM
Instagram users are on a platform meant for mobile, and that means they tend to use the network all the time, any time.

LinkedIn

Days: Tuesday – Thursday | Time: 7 – 8AM, 12PM, 5 – 6PM
LinkedIn is for professionals, and they tend to use it around work hours.

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Stay Progressive

One easy pitfall is to get into is becoming comfortable with your business and your promotions.  The you should always be looking for the plateau.  Even if you’re ‘at capacity’ you should have an ace up your sleeve.  The second you get lazy, you’re opening the door for someone to take some of your market share.  Remember the AVIS ad’s I was talking about earlier?  They were #2 trying to be #1!  The same happens everywhere.

Being progressive, at its core, means that you have to keep your business on the top of people’s mind when they need your product or service.  Think of Pavlov’s dog.  When someone says, “Oh, I’m out of this!“, “I’m starting to get hungry…” or “What should I get Aunt Judy for her birthday?“…you need be on the top of their mind.

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Customer Service & Your Brand

86% – The number of U.S. adults who will pay more for a better customer experience.

89% – The number of U.S. adults who switched to a competitor because they had a bad customer experience.

73% – The number of U.S. adults who said a friendly customer service made them fall in love with a brand.

Sales 101 tells you that being a salesman is a transfer of confidence.  The same is such for the small business owner.  Every business is, essentially in terms of marketing, is a product itself.  You’re confident in your product (or you shouldn’t be in business) and you know it’s the best thing since sliced bread, so you’re going to let people know why.  As much as I hate being a salesman, there was the day…that I had to admit to myself that I was one.

Customer service and your customers are actually rooting for it.  Real weird to think about.  Be nicer to your current customers and show them you appreciate them.  They’ll thank you by spreading the word about your business.  That can be an online review, a social media post, or just telling their neighbors and friends.

A dissatisfied customers tell between 9-15 people about their bad experience and around 13% tell more than 20 people. (Source: White House Office of Consumer Affairs)

I think I heard a stat once that if someone has a good experience they only tell between 3 and 5 people.  And think about it…it makes sense!  When’s the last time you’ve heard someone tell a good story about going to the airport or flying on a plane.  I’m guessing you’ve heard them talk about the bad experiences plenty.

Give you customers a reason to tell more than 5 people about how good your business or service is.

Get local!

When I worked at the radio station I joined every club I could get my hands on.  I wanted to brand myself, be in front of as many people as possible and be on the ‘top of their mind’ whenever they were ready to use my services.  In sales, I believe they call it the ‘three foot rule’…mostly I just didn’t like making cold calls.  Here are some of the ‘local’ groups I learned about and was a part of:

Note:  Please don’t join a civic group for the wrong reasons. Make sure you passionate about the cause and then join it.

Keep Your Customers At The Core

This may be one of the most important things to remember when thinking about your business.  Your customers are the reason you’re in business, which is all the more reason to be sincere with your online presence and keep your customers at the center.  Acquiring a new customer can cost 5 times more than keeping a customer.   Make sure you pay attention to your current customers and even find interesting ways to keep them coming back.  Offer them a discount for being a loyal customer.  Thank them by posting a picture of them on your social media (and don’t forget to tag them.)  Get your customers to tag your business and/or hashtag.  Your fans will root for you, don’t be afraid to ask them.  Take Czig Meister!  I see so many people around town, and in other towns, wearing their shirts.  They’re supporting a local business that they want to support!  Find that angle and exploit it.  Most customers who love you, would love to help you be successful!

So how do you do it?  We’ll on Facebook, here’s some tips:

  • Get Personal
  • Use Pictures
  • Run a Contest
  • Have Fun
  • Showcase a Cause
  • Use Facebook’s Features
  • Consider Using Your Personal Profile
  • Crowdsource Your Content
  • Love Your Fans

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Set Goals For Yourself

I’ve got this little thing called the Remarkable 2 and I love it…lemme tell you why.  It helps me to set goals for myself, whether they’re large or small.

I, personally, tend to put things off unless I write them down.  If I have an extra half an hour at the end of the day where I’m looking for something to do, I can always go to my ‘to do’ list and find something that will fill that 30 minutes.

I often organize my tasks into: today, this week, this month, this quarter, “don’t forget”…and then Snake Tasks.

Be sure to find a solution that’ll work for you.  It’s one of those things where I used to have scrap pieces of paper all over my desk.  I tried to do it digitally with Reminders or a Evernote, but it turned out I like to physically write something down…and even more satisfying, cross it off my list.

Find a solution that works for you.  You don’t have to spend the money on a Remarkable, but keep yourself organized!

Note:  Don’t be afraid to fail with your goals and tasks.  We talked about it earlier…just cause you don’t make a deadline, doesn’t mean you’ve failed.

Getting Together a Marketing Plan

I’ve found a really cool Marketing Plan Template from HubSpot (or here).  If you’re interested in putting together a marketing plan, this is the best, free one I’ve found online.  Here are some of the sections we’ll go over in the Marketing Plan..

Business Summary

  • Our Company (mission statement)
  • Our Marketing Leaders (about the owners or marketing department)
  • SWOT Analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities & Threats)

Business Initiatives

  • Initiatives (these are basically the realistic goals you want to set up for your business, either in the next year or next 5 years.  Initiatives include; Description, Goals of initiative and Metrics to measure success)

Target Market

  • Industries (Based on your initiatives, what business industries do you need to ‘crack’ into.)
  • Buyer Personas (based on your industries, who do you need to ‘get in good’ with)
  • Competitive Analysis (Who are you up against?  What advantage (or USP) do you have over them.  This will be important to think about how you can win over clients with your USP, compared to your competitors)

Marketing Strategy

  • Product (what are you selling)
  • Price (what does your pricing structure look like?)
  • Promotion (how are you going to get the word out about what sets you apart from the pack)
  • People (who, in your company, is going to do what?)
  • Process (how you’re going to see the customers and get to them)

Budget

  • Set up a budget of time & money, you’re going to spend on your marketing plan

Marketing Channels

Figure out which mediums, you’re going to use to get your message out.

  • For each channel you should have a Purpose and Metrics to measure success

Examples include:

  • Webinars
  • Teach a class at CCM
  • Social Media
  • Print ads
  • Radio ads
  • Markets
  • Local business groups (BNI or LeTip)

Marketing Technology

Any technology you’ll be using to help you manage your marketing plan.  Could be something as simple as MailChimp or something as in-depth as a CRM.