Category Archives: Small Business

5 Ways To Grow Your Business Automatically and Inexpensively

With the upcoming election it’s nearly impossible to turn on the TV, read the paper, listen to the radio…or even drive down the street without being reminded of the upcoming presidential campaign. It seems the presidential candidates work tirelessly around the clock along with their staff and supporters to try and win votes from the American people.

Speaking to different groups and organizations, they use different strategies and tactics depending on who they are speaking to.

No matter whose side lines up with your values, you can’t deny that each side does an excellent job persuading people to see things from their point of view. Running a business is a lot like running a presidential campaign. You are tirelessly looking to win over prospects and get them to “vote” for you by buying your product or service. The problem is that as a small business owner, you only have so much time and a limited number of resources. There are no volunteers lining up offering to help you get more customers. Nor are there unlimited resources and people donating money to you so you can send out more advertising.

So what do you do?

Today I’ll give you five tips (and a bonus tip) on how to market your products and services and grow your revenue without having to hire a small army or sink tons of cash into a campaign:

 

Stay in front of your customers. A costly mistake many businesses make is giving up on prospects too soon. Remember no matter where you are in the buying cycle, your customers have to be sold to over and over again. Realize that no matter whatever it is you sell…chiropractor services, dentistry, insurance, financial services – everything has an incubation period. That means in order to win the business and truly convert a prospect to a buyer to a loyal customer, it’s your job to get in front of and stay in front of your prospect. Remember 80% of sales are made after the 5th contact, so never give up too soon.

One size does NOT fit all. Prospects and clients are not in the same place in the buying sequence. Some are just finding out about you whereas others may have bought from you multiple times. For better results and a bigger response, develop different sequences to address prospects and customers.

For example, let’s say someone is new to your product or service and is ready to try you out to make sure you are right for them, but are not ready to buy. Because this is a critical time, the role of your messaging here is to get your prospect to opt in to receive more messages from you. In contrast, someone who already purchased should receive a message that reinforces how valuable your product or service is and make them feel good about their purchase.

Create automated systems. Putting automated systems in place ensures you are regularly attracting and leading prospects to your product or service and engaging with them no matter where they are in the buying cycle. Create systems for every stage your prospect, client, customer or patient will go through. For example, you might send a sequence of three emails followed by a letter and a phone call when following up on a prospect.

You can create systems to:

  • Attract new clients
  • Follow-up on prospects
  • Manage current customers
  • Educate prospects and customers
  • Assist customers in using your product or service

While this takes effort to set up in the beginning, in the end you save time by only having to create the system once (and occasionally updating it or refreshing it) and setting it on autopilot. Plus, having automated systems in place means you won’t have to continually have to chase after clients, customers or patients–nor will you lose sales because you didn’t have time or forgot to follow up with them.

Set up a multi-channel environment. The more different types of touch points in place, the higher your response will be. When setting up your email marketing, ensure your database can support multi-channel signals such as phone, email, mail and fax. For instance, if a prospect calls into customer service, it would be useful to have that automatically trigger an email to the customer asking if their problem was resolved. (Note, this becomes simple and a time-saving task when you do it up-front before a customer ever calls in.)

Don’t worry about having a perfect system. You don’t need the perfect system to get started. Put something in place, then tweak as you go. Don’t let perfect get in the way of done–because even an imperfect system will capture and convert more sales than one that doesn’t exist in the first place.

Use these five tips and you’ll not only grow your business more quickly, but you’ll never lose business because of being too busy to follow up. Put systems in place and you will find you spend less time trying to find customers and following up and more time cashing checks. Plus, by ensuring consistent contact with your prospects and customers, you’ll always have a steady flow of new business.

Here’s to your online success!

John Pfeiffer

 

P.S. And now for my bonus tip… If you are looking for a simple way to grow your business that makes it easy to put different multi-channel sequences in place so that a prospect or customer will never fall through the cracks I highly recommend Infusionsoft. This is the perfect system for marketers who want the power of a comprehensive turnkey system, but don’t want to deal with multiple vendors or spend hours making everything work together. I’ve recently changed over to Infusionsoft and am extremely pleased with how this is helping me automatically convert my leads into customers and growing my existing business without having to hire extra staff to do it.

If you’d like more info you can check them out here.

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I have a confession to make.

As a busy, small business owner and internet marketer, I don’t always do the things I tell other people to do for their business.I know I should be doing them for my own business too, but sometimes I act like the cobbler with holes in his shoes that spends so much time repairing others shoes that he doesn’t have time to repair his own.

This past spring I knew there was one thing I really needed to be doing…

Because in a tough economy, every penny counts and the truth is I was leaving tens of thousands of those precious pennies on the table…

…this happened because I wasn’t giving my prospects and clients a second (and third and fourth…) chance to do business with me. That’s a costly mistake, especially in today’s economy.You see according to market researchers, 98-99% of the traffic that visits your website, won’t make a purchase on the first visit.

Converting even just 1-2% of those lost visitors could make a significant difference to your bottom line. For example, if 3000 people visit your website each month, a 2% bump in your conversion rate translates into 60 additional customers.

So how do you go about converting that additional 2%? Email marketing.

In fact, according to Ogilvy, who are cited as pioneers in the interactive marketing industry and ranked #1 in the world by leading analysts, “People who are registered to receive email marketing messages from your company will purchase an average of 167 percent more than those people in your marketing database who are not receiving email.”

Email marketing allows you to keep in touch with prospects as well as current and past customers.It helps you drive traffic back to your website and promotions.It gives you the opportunity to educate your customers so they can be more successful in their business.You can position yourself as a go-to resource within your emails.You can cross-sell and up-sell your products and services to existing clients.And win customers back.Of course, I knew all this, but I still wasn’t doing it.Like you, I’m busy. But the reason I wasn’t doing it went beyond that.

No, the real reason I wasn’t doing it was the same problem most businesses face when thinking about creating or actually doing email marketing …Creating content. Writing relevant content that was useful and helpful to my audience while not sucking up all my time was a real concern.

I knew I could easily create pure promotional emails—you know the ones I’m talking about. These are the emails you see which look like a sales flyer or a coupon in your inbox.

They are usually a short email which describes the product or service and is accompanied by a pitch to buy the product or service.

The problem with this type of email is they can alienate your customers, especially if that’s all you do. And that was NOT something I wanted to do.Which meant I needed to spend time creating content that creates trust and builds up a solid relationship bond with my readers — not the easy, somewhat tiresome sales emails that often damage the reputation of the sender.

The task seemed a bit overwhelming to me. And because of that (I’m embarrassed to say) I did nothing.

Finally, I decided to outsource it. It was one of the better business decisions I’ve made. My results have been amazing.

Email marketing has:

• Re-engaged prospects and past customers making them re-interested in my services

• Brought inquiries about other services I offer

• Driven people back to my website increasing my web traffic

• Educated people on how I can help them drive more traffic to their site and increase their profit

My only regret is that I didn’t do this sooner!

If you want to stay at the top of mind awareness with new “eager to buy” prospects and convert them to paying customers, consider adding email marketing to your business platform.

Done right, you’ll build relationships with your clients and prospects increasing the number of people who do business with you. And if you’re a bit overwhelmed as I was, outsource it. It’s totally worth it.

To your online success,

John

 

P.S. If you want to learn more about how you can stop losing 98-99% of the prospects visiting your site or want to improve the results you are getting from your current email marketing, contact me. I did lots of research when I was looking to outsource. I’ll share with you what I learned and who I am using. There is no charge for this information.

PPC vs. SEO, which is right for your business?

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Vanilla or chocolate? Spring or Summer? Mountains or the beach? Some debates never seem to die.
One of the classic debates in the Internet world is search engine optimization (SEO) vs. pay-per-click (PPC).
Which is superior?
I believe a better question to ask is…
“Which is right for your business?”
Billions of people begin their search for products and services by typing a keyword or phrase  into search engines  like Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo. In fact, research firm Comscore recorded 19.3 billion searches in the U.S. alone during the month of May of this year (up 7 percent from the month before).
Upon users hitting the search button, they are presented with thousands of results. Some are organic SEO results and some are PPC results.
Organic SEO refers to how your website appears naturally on the results page based on your design, use of keywords, content and inbound links.
If done right, a site will appear high on the first search engine results page. The dilemma is that if it doesn’t appear high in the results, no one will see your listing as most people don’t search much beyond the first page of listings.
To help you determine which is right for you, I’ve put together a comparison of both marketing strategies:
Costs: There  are costs associated with setting up and continuing to keep your site search engine optimized, but there are no media costs associated with individual clicks to your website when you use SEO.  
An SEO campaign ideally has an SEO specialist who analyzes your site, maps out a strategy, implements a strategy, tracks results and is accountable for your campaign.
With a PPC campaign, the initial cost will be lower to set up your campaign, but there are on-going media costs for each individual click . 
Ideally you will have a PPC specialist who helps you select the best keywords, keeps you within budget and helps you get your desired results.
Volume of clicks: Organic search results are typically viewed more positively because they are seen as non-biased since you aren’t paying for your results. Therefore, more people click on organic search results than on paid results.  
Conversion rates: PPC drives immediate action which results in higher conversion rates than SEO. In a study by Internet Retailer, visitors who arrive on a site from pay-per-click advertising are 50% more likely to buy than traffic generated by search engine optimization.  This is due to the fact that PPC drives traffic to targeted landing pages which can be refined, something SEO can’t really do. 
Control:  With SEO, there is no control over ranking and results. Therefore there is no guarantee that your efforts will result in a higher search engine ranking or that you will maintain your ranking once it’s achieved.  
With PPC, there is a high degree of control because you can determine where on the page you are positioned depending on your investment.  PPC is also flexible and scalable. This means you have better control over how much you spend and the timing of when to increase and decrease the flow of traffic to your website. 
Changes to your PPC campaign are immediate. Changes to your SEO campaign can take  months to take effect.
With SEO you cannot do split tests or track click-through rates.  
PPC campaigns can track click-through and easily test new ideas. Pricing and offers, new products and services, and time sensitive offers and promotions are examples of things you can test with PPC.
The small amount of copy in a PPC ad which requires no design work, coupled with the fact that PPC campaigns can instantly be turned on and off means you can also run tests quickly.
Value:  SEO builds long-term value by continuing to pay off for you years after you put it into place. PPC only draws value when it is running because the instant you turn it off, it stops drawing traffic. 
Speed: SEO is a long-term strategy which can take a long time, usually three months or longer, before you see results.  PPC produces results fast, in minutes or days rather than months or years.
Maintenance: For your website to remain high in the rankings with SEO, you’ll need to do two things: 
You’ll need to add fresh, relevant content to your site on an ongoing basis.  
And you’ll need to continually adapt to algorithm changes from search engines. For example, Google’s Matt Cutts says they make between 350-400 algorithm changes per year. For most of these changes, you shouldn’t need to make adjustments because you won’t necessarily see a major difference in your results.
However, you do need to know what’s happening to make sure what you are doing is legitimate and doesn’t need adjusting. (In 2011, Google is focusing on placing original content at the top of search results which means unoriginal content or content copied from somewhere else will be bumped.)  
PPC campaigns require monitoring performance and making adjustments on a regular basis.
Campaign Results: With SEO, wildly sought-after keywords can take time to get rankings. However, you will benefit from niche-specific long-tail keywords that show up more quickly because these often attract qualified leads who are further along in the sales funnel.   As for overall strategy results, SEO results in continuous traffic over a longer period of time. 
PPC gives an immediate boost in traffic. It is useful for getting keywords which aren’t ranking naturally in the organic listings or to test keywords and promotions. However, when the campaign is complete, the traffic stops immediately.
So what’s right for your business?
SEO makes sense when you want:
  • A long-term marketing strategy with a high ROI
  • A free strategy (meaning no media spend)
  • A high volume of people clicking-through to your website 
PPC, on the other hand makes sense when you want:
  • Immediate traffic 
  • More control over things like where keywords appear, the message searchers see, ranking and the ability to test to optimize performance
  • Higher conversion and the ability to use higher diversity to send many more keywords to a landing page
Ideally, an integrated approach which uses both PPC and SEO to reach top rankings will give you the best results.  You’ll appeal to all audiences across all points of the spectrum when you get a good mix of SEO and PPC.
This is because paid and organic listings serve different purposes reaching different audiences at different points in the buying cycle.
You’ll also increase the credibility of your company and awareness of brand. In fact, Brand Lift of Search (a study by Google) found that the most clicked on areas of their results pages are those where companies have good organic listings combined with paid listings.
When a searcher sees your business high in organic results and high in PPC, it gives the impression that you are a solid business that will be around for the long haul. This increases consumers trust in your company.  
Lastly, from an accounting viewpoint, combining SEO and PPC helps keep both the unpredictability of SEO and the costs of PPC in check.
To more traffic and higher profits,
John