Posts from — July 2009

When you’re looking to create a website in the heavily populated online world, you need to think about what you need to do to stand out from the competition. Most likely, there’s already a few websites out there that are offering your products and services. What makes you different from them?

Once you know what you’re offering that’s different, evaluate and define your target market(s). Look at demographic information and find the prominent characteristics. You also want to look at personality data: are they hip and urban, conservative and family-focused, or single and ambitions?

A great way to define your target market is to create personas for each segment. For example, Cindy can be a 35-year old stay at home mom who has 2 kids and has a family income of $75,000 a year. Cindy visits your site for help with her personal taxes once a year. Your second persona is Ruth who is a 55-year old divorcee who owns her own business and comes to you for help with her business taxes every month. Knowing your target market(s) and defining your segments will help you find the people that make you the most money and that are the most loyal.

After you defined your target market, you can then look for other sites that have similar demographics and user characteristics. If you’re looking to get more visitors like Cindy, you can look for websites that cater to stay-at-home in their 30s and develop a partnership with them. Depending on your target audience, these niche website can bring in high quality, loyal, customers.

Do you need help correlating and analyzing your data to define your target markets? The Envision Agency, Small Business Marketing specializes in helping small businesses develop and implement marketing strategies. We can help you define your target market and develop specific marketing strategies for your business. Contact us today to find out how we can help grow your business.

At this point in your business, you’ve created a company blog, Facebook and Twitter accounts, a MySpace page and you’re on LinkedIn. Maybe you’ve even put together a few videos or participated in Wikis and forums. But are you sure you’re getting the most out of your social media branding? Do you know what result you’re having?

There are a lot of companies that will jump on the social media bandwagon. It’s fun, new, and hip – and it’s a great way to reach your current and target customers and start online conversations with them. But you’re a business… and there comes a time with every marketing channel when you need to evaluate the effectiveness. So, let’s start the evaluation with a few simple questions.

Do you know what is being said about your business online?

If you already have an online presence, do you know what people are saying about you? Are you responding in a timely and effective manner to capitalize on those conversations?

If you aren’t sure what people are saying, or take a few days to respond to comments, you need to reevaluate your current social media strategy. Social media marketing is an inexpensive to drive traffic and convert customers, however, it is time intensive. To get the best return, you need to give it the appropriate time and effort.

Do you know which channels are providing the most chatter, traffic, and customers?

On what channel do you get the most discussions, comments, and replies? What channel provides the most website or in-store traffic? And are you able to relate customer retention or new customers to a specific channel?

If you aren’t able to answer these questions, make sure you’re tracking your social media efforts. You want to focus on what is helping your business the most… and you can take time away from the ones that aren’t working as well.

Do you know what to do to take your social media branding to the next level?

You have already started your social media campaign, and if you’ve answered the two questions above, you should know where your campaign stands. Do you know what you need to do to take it to the next level? If you’re not getting what you want out of your social media branding, you have a few options.

• You can give it more time.
• You can put more effort towards it and try different approaches and channels.
• You can contact an expert who can help you create your social media branding and capitalize on what you have already done.

The Envision Agency, Small Business Marketing specializes in developing and revising social media branding strategies. We can help you create a local brand that really draws you into your community. If you need help with your social media branding campaigns, contact The Envision Agency, Small Business Marketing and we will create a personalized marketing plan that fits your company’s marketing needs.

Tips for Service and Product Based Businesses

Welcome to Part 2 of the Successful Selling Online series. If you haven’t yet read Part 1, you can read it here. We have already discussed the first basis of selling successfully online, here are some additional things to keep in mind.

Keep in Touch

Implement a plan to keep in touch with current customers and website visitors. Collect email addresses and develop specific contact points for your sales process. Start sending email newsletters about your company, products, and services offered – tailored to specific customer interests. You can also add a marketing message to invoices and receipts. If it works with your product/service use thank you cards and coupons to let customers know you appreciate them.

Evaluate Your Metrics

Implement website analytics (Google Analytics is a free service) and review your reports and see what’s working and what isn’t. Make sure you’re also looking at sales reports and cost evaluations for each product/service. If a product or service is doing great, see what you can do to replicate that success among similar products/services or how you can get more out of those sales. See if you can optimize what isn’t working to improve that, or decide to turn it off.

Diversify

How is your traffic coming to your website? Is it all from one source? Just like you wouldn’t have all of one stock (think Enron), you want to make sure you don’t depend too heavily on one marketing channel. If you’re using Google Adwords, consider some of the other search engines, or impression based marketing, affiliate marketing, or social media marketing. There are so many potential channels for online marketing, make sure you don’t limit your success by only choosing one. At the same time, make sure you don’t stretch yourself too thin.

Ask for Help

Look at what you are doing and what you want to accomplish. If you have the experience and expertise to develop and implement your online strategies, go for it! If you don’t have the budget to hire someone full-time or don’t want to take on that overhead, consider hiring a consulting agency.

Are you ready to develop or revise your marketing strategy? Contact The Envision Agency, Small Business Marketing for help developing and implementing small business specific marketing strategies.

Tips for Service and Product Based Businesses

Today, a website is more than an online resume, a calling card, or a place where people can go to get your hours and locations. Your website can be a very effective salesperson, and really, with the proper tools, you can turn it into your most effective salesman. And that’s just one portion of online marketing. Here are some tips to help you start selling online more effectively.

Be Different

What makes you stand out from the competition? There are things, big and small that make you stand out from the competition. There is a reason people are buying (or should buy) from you rather than anyone else. Find out what makes you different and make that a huge part of your visitor’s online marketing experience. For example, if you pride yourself on great customer service, make sure they can easily find out how to contact customer service by phone, email, and even online chat. Once they do contact you, make sure you respond quickly.

Provide Great Service

You want to respond to all requests, comments, and communications professionally and quickly. If you provide a contact form or email address, make sure you respond to your visitors in a timely manner… don’t let a week or two go by before you “get to it.” Make sure you are responsive and that you stand by your product and/or service.

Flaunt what you’ve got

If you’re selling products, have high quality images and give an overall and detailed view. Want to be different? Look at what your competition is doing and step it up a notch. What do your descriptions look like? Make sure you accurately describe your product and give enough detail so the customer doesn’t have questions.

Selling services? You may not have product images to put up, but you can give great detailed descriptions what each service entails. If you’re in a competitive market and don’t want to give extremely detailed descriptions, give enough to drive the visitor to call you instead of your competition.

Stay tuned for the second half of the Successful Selling Online series (read it here). If you have questions or would like help developing your online marketing strategy, contact The Envision Agency, Small Business Marketing. We specialize in developing and implementing online marketing strategies for small business.

Optimize your website error pages to capitalize on the unexpected.

The unexpected happens. A visitor can attempt to go to a page that you’ve moved, deleted, or renamed and get that dreaded error page. Usually, they’ll get there through an outdated link from a search engine, blog, or bookmark. It may even be a hard to find link on your website that wasn’t updated with the rest of the site.

This is a great opportunity to take the “bad” and change it to a “good.” This is a page that you can be creative with. First, you need to make sure it is consistent with your current website design. Reassure your visitor that they are still on the right site, the page they were trying to see no longer exists. Now, you can get creative with what you do with it.

• Make it entertaining. Many sites are using humor to help bridge the annoyance of an error page. Engage your visitor with your site and let them see some of your personality.
• Let them have access to a site-search tool to help them better find what they’re looking for fast.
• Give links to helpful resources. Highlight pages that can help point them in the right direction or pages that are most visited. If you know what most people are looking for on your site, make sure you highlight it on your error page.
• Recommend products and services that they may be looking for.
• Add a sign-up to your email newsletter. If you already have them engaged with your site, take advantage of it!

Because you don’t know exactly what they were looking for, you want to make sure that all of these come across as recommendations. You want to avoid a high-pressure sales situation.

If you’re looking for help developing and implementing marketing strategies for your website, contact The Envision Agency, Small Business Marketing. We can discuss your business, your goals, and develop solutions that take your business to the next level.

Using social networks to listen to your customers and brand your business online is becoming more and more important in today’s market. People are moving away from using search results to help them determine their purchases and are moving more to what others recommend. You need to make sure that you are connected to your customers and are monitoring what people say about your company.

Once you have set yourself up on some social sites and built a network of people, you’ll notice that it is difficult to run your business and manage your networks’ comments and updates. There are tools that can help you manage your social networks by offering you a combined view – and this can take away some of the hassle of maintaining and updating them.

• Minggl: Currently helps you manage Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, LinkedIn, and Digg. It’s an easy download that shows everything in a sidebar of your internet browser. Minggl shows your networks’ updates on all supported social platforms and it consolidates your friend lists. It also allows you to update your status on each site separately or send your status to all networks.
• Flock: Flock is a browser that is built using Firefox’s technology. It allows you to manage many of the most popular social media sites easily through a sidebar. It currently supports Bebo, AOL mail, Digg, Gmail, Yahoo mail, Picasa, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Photobucket, YouTube, Blooger, Blogsome, LiveJournal, Wordpress, Xanga, Del.icio.us, TypePad, Truveo, Revver, MySpace, and TinyPic.
• Digsby: Download onto your desktop and manage all of your email, instant messages, and social media. Digsby gives you the ability to combine all of your instant messaging buddy lists, email, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and LinkedIn accounts, and allows you to choose how you’re notified about status updates.
• HelloTXT: Gives you access and allows you to save time by aggregating all of your social networks – you can put these into groups and post only to specific groups rather than one at a time. It also allows you to aggregate and organize your friends’ posts and comments. Works with over 40 social networks.

There are more than just these four out there. You can also consider iGoogle, PageFlakes, Ping.fm, Tweetdeck, and Twhirl. You may find that these help you… but they may also overwhelm you. If you find yourself needing help managing your social media, give The Envision Agency, Small Business Marketing a call. We specialize in working with companies to build their online social presence.

Evaluate your effectiveness and then make it better

In our unofficial three part series about making social media work for small businesses, we have already discussed developing a social media plan to help focus your attention and minimize the risk to your business if social media doesn’t work. We then discussed how you should listen to your target market and utilize your current customer base to have better conversations online. Now, let’s talk about what happens after you start working with social media: evaluating and optimizing.

Evaluate your effectiveness. After you’ve participated in conversations and have implemented your social media plan, you need to look at what it has done for your business. It’s good to wait two to three months before you really consider whether it’s working for your business or not. Ask yourself:

• Are there certain sites or a specific type of site that works better than others? If so, research similar sites to see if you can mimic the success.
• Do these conversations you’re having help your business directly or indirectly? Is it worth the time you’re putting into these conversations?
• Are you effectively pulling these online conversations into offline interactions? If not, what do you need to do in order to pull these into offline interactions? If you don’t know, ask your sales team.

Make it better. Once you have identified where your successes are and what you need to work on, implement the changes and watch what happens. As with all marketing channels, you should always be evaluating and optimizing your social media efforts to ensure you’re getting the most out of the channel as possible.

Remember, social media is all about having online conversations. It should be fun and interactive… and can be a great way to create loyalty among your customers. If you need help, contact us at The Envision Agency, Small Business Marketing. We have experience creating social media campaigns for small businesses that work.

The Envision Agency currently has a list of over 150 social media sites of various types, some that are well known, some that are specialized, and quite a few that are just emerging. There are a lot of “social media” sites out there… are you sure you chose the right ones to appear on?

If your social media campaign isn’t working (most aren’t), are you sure you chose the best type of site… or the best site, to reach your target audience? Even if you’re are using the well known sites: Facebook, Twitter, etc., you can end up missing out on great conversations with your target audience by a poorly implemented social media campaign.

For example, Twitter has had a lot of press since Hollywood embraced it. It can be a very effective tool to communicate with customers if you have timely updates that need to be given immediately. For example, auction houses are using Twitter to let followers know about specialized products that they get and when they’re going to auction. This is a great way to use the tool – you have a very targeted client base that wants to know about a specific type of product and can participate once it goes on sale.

But, you want to make sure you don’t end up putting out useless pieces of information that annoy people and lose followers. If you don’t have timely updates that are given on a regular basis, consider another social media site other than Twitter.

If you need help seeing how social media can help your business, or want to see if there is something else you can do to make your social media campaign work better for your business, contact The Envision Agency, Small Business Marketing. We specialize in helping small businesses develop and implement successful marketing strategies.

You have a great site, it’s well designed and well programmed. Your bounces and exit rates are low, your site is navigated easily by visitors, your pages are sticky… but your conversion rates have stopped increasing. And now you’re stuck trying to figure out how else to optimize your website in order to improve your conversion rates further.

Working with companies that had conversion rates from 1% to companies that had conversion rates in the 50% range, I have seen people try dramatic things to improve their conversion rates. The number always depends on what conversion rate you are looking at. Is it for a product, a campaign, or a website? A company’s conversion rate will differ greatly throughout. As a business owner, you don’t necessarily want the specifics, but you want to know if it can be improved further.

Once you have covered the basics of website optimization, a great thing to look at is your website segmentation. Create personas for your website visitors based on their stage in the buying process and their stage in your selling process. Put yourself in that persona’s frame of mind and then try navigating your website. Can you find the product/service you are looking for? Are you getting distracted by another aspect of the website? Does the content on the website do what it’s supposed to do or is it off-target?

This is definitely a more in-depth and time consuming website optimization technique, however, it can produce amazing results if done correctly. By appealing to your website visitor and giving them everything they need to find and purchase your product or service, you are ensuring there is nothing standing in the way of your conversion rates. If you are looking for a drastic improvement, this is the point in website optimization that you may want to consider hiring an expert who can help you focus your efforts.

If you’re looking for professional help to develop your user personas, call The Envision Agency, Small Business Marketing. We’ll review your business goals and develop a work plan that fits into your needs and budget.