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Small Business Marketing

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Know The Performance of Your Website With Google Analytics
Attracting Referrals
Branding By Design
Make An Offer They Can't Resist
Target Marketing For Dollars
Marketing On The Internet With Articles

Know The Performance of Your Website With Google Analytics
By Toni Grundstrom 

A new tool available at Google.com is Google Analytics®. This tool allows you to see and analyze detailed reporting of your website. Keep track of the items, you feel are the most important for you to know, for the success of your website. 

Site Usage – One of the numbers to look at is the Average Time on Site. The longer you can get visitors to view your website the more likely they are to contact you. Keep your content fresh, full of quality content, useful tools, etc. and you will see that number increase. Another number you will want to look at is the %New Visits. This shows how many visitors are new and how many are returning. 

Visits – a measurement of unique visitors who visit your website. After you send out your postcards or other marketing campaigns, check to see for spikes of your daily visitors to track how the marketing is working. 

Traffic Sources Overview – The chart shows you where your visitors are coming from. Great way of tracking marketing campaign success, search engine performance, and any type of marketing that drives visitors to your website. 

Content Overview – This report shows you what area of your site visitors are entering from. A common thought is that visitors enter using your main page and then surfs through the rest of your site. This is usually not the case, especially if you are using SEO* activities and linking to pages other than your main page. If you see that people are entering on a certain page, and then not surfing the rest of your website, you will want to make changes on that page to encourage people to visit the rest of your website. 

Keywords – This information is essential for you to understand. If you are using keywords to optimize your site and they are not the common keywords your site is being found on, you will want to do more research. Know what keywords visitors are using to find your site and use them more frequently throughout your website to attract more visitors. 

Goal Conversions – Goal conversions are the primary metric for measuring how well your site fulfills business objectives. A goal is a website page which a visitor reaches once they have made a purchase or completed another desired action, such as a registration, survey, or download. Once you have set your goals, you'll be able to see conversion rates from the traffic you receive. Direct mail postcards** can drive visitors to your website, give them more information about the housing market, and become your customer. 

Your understanding of the Google Analytics® reports helps you to determine if you need to make changes to your website. Track the data for 3 months before you make any changes.  Review the different sections of the reports to see how your visitors are interacting with your website. Go to ‘Conversion University’ to see tips on how to improve your website, get more visitors, and create greater conversions. 

Get Started – Go to Google.com and set up a Google account. Go to www.google.com/analytics and set up your Analytics account. Set up a ‘website profile’ for all of the websites you maintain. Fill out the URL of your website and you will be provided with HTML code and instruction of how to put it into your website HTML. This enables Google Analytics to begin collecting data for the reports. This code does not change your website and will not show for your visitors to see. When you see a green checkmark next to ‘receiving data’ you know Google Analytics® has started.

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Attracting Referrals
By Toni Grundstrom

Customers are your greatest marketing tool. When it comes to winning referral business you need to create an ongoing program to generate referrals from them.

Start with communicating with your customers to let them know you're open to receiving referrals. Ask at any 'point of contact' with your customers including in person, on the telephone, the back of business cards, or through your newsletter.

A great way to encourage referrals is to offer an incentive. Make sure the incentive is valuable to your customers. Remember they bought a certain item/service from you. Think of something that is complimentary to that item/service. The incentive will not only entice referrals but increase the value of being your customer.
It is a good idea to offer an incentive to your current customers to provide referrals such as a discount or rebate. When their friends or family members make a purchase or sign up for services they will receive a token of your appreciation.

When the customer finishes a purchase with you, the installation is finished, or your service is completed, ask the customer if anyone else they know needs the same product/service. A home improvement contractor, for example, could send a follow-up letter at the end of each project asking for feedback and include a section requesting referrals.

Customer service plays a heavy role in your referral business. If the customer has an issue but you resolve it quickly, and to the benefit of that customer, they will tell others about your assistance and refer you. When you have a good, solid working relationship and a happy client, they will tell others about you and your business. Your customers become your sales force and you get more business.

Add this statement to any request for referral marketing piece.

Do You Know How Many People You Know?
Your family, In-laws, Friends, Neighbors, Business Associates, local coffee shop acquaintances, Church members, Sports team and those on the other team (only if you're a good sport!), Card Game players, and now online acquaintances. If any of your people need our products send them our way.

Affiliate and Reciprocal Referrals

Know what types of businesses are in your 'business circle'. These affiliates have direct contact with your prospects and can send them your way. As an example: A home inspector is a major influencer on home improvement companies since people need to fix what the inspector has found defective. On the flip side a real estate agent is a major influencer for the home inspector since many homeowners ask the agent who they recommend to have the home inspected before they make an offer on it. Marketing to your influencers is necessary and is as important as the campaigns used to attract your own prospects. Identify your affiliates and call them to get acquainted. Build a relationship with them through sales and marketing tactics and see what you can do for them.

Identify businesses that can refer back and forth with your business. An example for reciprocal referrals is a heating company and replacement window business. A customer's windows have condensation on them and ruins the frame. The window replacement company fixes the windows and recommends that the customer get an air-to-air exchanger and recommends the heating company. On the flip side the heating company installs an air-to-air exchanger in a house where the windows have had condensation on them and ruined the frames. They recommend the window replacement company. Build a circle of affiliate and reciprocal businesses and referrals will consistently come in.

For all business referrals create marketing materials that the influencer can give to the customers. The window replacement company could supply the heating company with a brochure on how replacement windows save energy. The heating company supplies the window company with information on why condensation forms on windows and how to alleviate it.

Keep your referral program on track by scheduling ongoing activity just as you would with your prospects and customers. Once you build a relationship with your business circle you don't want any of them to fall by the way-side. The way you handle the referrals you receive from the influencer will help solidify the relationship with them. Send out a thank-you note or make calls to them with updates on how you appreciate the referrals sent your way.

The best way to keep referrals coming in and creating prospects for you is to ask for them. You already have the source, ask them for the referral.

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Branding - Business Identity By Design
By Toni Grundstrom

Small Businesses and Solo Entrepreneurs need to build their brand identity just like the large companies. People are more likely to do business with you if they feel comfortable with you and feel like they already know you.

When you sneeze do you ask for a 'Kleenex" or a tissue? Are you thirsty for a 'Coke' or a cola? Consumers buy these products just because they are familiar with them. When you're a small business owner or solo entrepreneur the product/service is you. It is imperative that you build brand identity that creates familiarity of you within your 'niche' market.

Building your brand identity is important because people support businesses and products that they are comfortably familiar with and avoid the unknowns.

Here are some successful strategic branding ideas.

Personal experience creates a strong bond between you and your customers. Your customer service needs to be extremely personal so it creates an viral cycle. The personal experience your customer receives will lead to 'word of mouth' publicity.

Create a consistent and repetitive association of you in your prospects mind. This can be achieved by using jingles in audio advertising mediums, and logos, photos, slogans and/or positioning statements in print advertising mediums, press releases, brochures and especially your business cards. Remember there is a back side to your business card and that is valuable space to be used for brand marketing. Be consistent in the look of your marketing/advertising so it brands you and your company. People will be acquainted with you based on that alone.

Get a professional web site with headers and footers that continues your business identity using the same logos, photos, slogans and/or positioning statements as you use in print.

Write articles with content that is educational and valuable for your customer. Put each article on your website and invite visits to your site through your resource box. Use your resource box to build brand identity.

Use article directories to publish your articles, with your resource box pointing back to your website, to build name recognition. This is absolutely FREE advertising and a must for branding your business and yourself. When you sign up as an author you have an opportunity to add your photo or logo in your profile. Make sure you take advantage of this opportunity for increased identity branding.

Here are a few article directories for your article submissions:
www.articlesubmissions.com, www.marketingsource.com, www.netterweb.com, www.womans-net.com

Brand your business by associating with and complimenting other successful products to develop a quality reciprocal link and partnership brand strategy on the Internet. This will increase your exposure and business identity. There are products you can use for this such as Arelis (http://axandra.com/index.htm) and Zeus (http://www.cyber-robotics.com)

Build brand identity and stay in constant contact with your customers and prospects by using an auto responder service. Communicate frequently with your customers and prospects giving useful and personal information. Always use your same logos, photos, slogans and/or positioning statements.

Frequency is another branding strategy. As an example, create a postcard marketing campaign where you send out pertinent information about your market or how you go above and beyond the 'typical' customer service. These direct mail postcards should be sent out at least once per month, if not more, and have your photo and/or logo prominently placed.

Your brand is your promise. Make sure you, and anyone associated with your business, can stand behind what you have promised in your branding efforts and be able to deliver on that promise. If you don't live up to your brand promises your customers and prospects will feel alienated from you and your company. This will damage your relationships and your overall brand.

A consistent look for everything you do will design your business identity. Successful small business owners and solo entrepreneurs know the importance of branding their identities into the consciousness of their niche. When they are ready to purchase they will already know you and are willing to buy your product or service. Never under estimate the power of branding.

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Make An Offer They Can't Resist
Toni Grundstrom

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Target Marketing For Dollars
Toni Grundstrom

When you identify the people who need your product/services and are willing to pay you for them you have overcome one of marketing's greatest challenges. Target marketing provides you the chance to send a specific message to your niche, personalizing your message to satisfy their unique needs.

Your target audience, or niche, are those individuals who would most likely benefit from your offer and buy your services or products. Taking the time to carefully "profile" your target audience will improve the likelihood of marketing success.

For your marketing to be cost effective you need to pick a target audience, or niche, to focus on. Every person is not going to be interested in your product/service so your marketing dollars are better spend on those with common needs and interests. By marketing to your target audience, who already have a need for your services, you immediately increase your marketing campaign's likelihood of success.

Narrowing Your Focus

Who are your existing customers and what common denominators do they share? Your goal should be to focus on locating more individuals that have those same common denominators. There are several ways to narrow down your target audience.

1) Demographics - Focus on a particular characteristic of people. These can include their career, a hobby or interest, their income level, age, marital status, etc. Collect information about the people themselves.

2) Geographical area - Focus in on a particular neighborhood, community, or geographic area. How far does your product/service cover. If you sell your product online demographics can include rural, urban, state, country, or even P.O. Box.

Benefits of Segmenting a Target Audience

Increased marketing results. You will be able to focus your message to address the unique needs of your niche. This means addressing their common issues and explain specifically how you can help them with that issue.

Decreased marketing cost. Targeting your audience means you have a good idea of where to advertise. You can use the smaller publications rather than expensive mass media. Your niche is focused and smaller so fewer direct mail pieces need to be sent. You can also afford to send out multiple mail pieces to create frequency to get your audience to remember you.

When one message is sent to any and everyone you can't tell them exactly what they need to hear. Your marketing piece will fall on 'deaf ears' because each person has different motivations for buying, personal needs, professional needs, wants, goals, and the like. What is an effective sales piece to one person may be a complete turn off to another.

The goal of your marketing is to get into the heads of your prospects and figure out their needs, issues and motivations. Why do they want or need to buy your product/service and are there any objections and concerns you need to overcome for them to purchase from you? The only way to do that is to focus on your niche. If your general message read, "I Am The Best Person To Buy Carpet Cleaner From" your message will not even be noticed. Compare that to "Your Stained Carpet Cleaned With Insti-Fresh In 5 Minutes" sent to homeowners with pets or toddlers and they will identify and read the rest of your message.

It may be necessary to create various sets of your niche to target different segments. However, to do so, you need different sets of marketing materials focusing on the needs/wants of each of your different segments.

Now that you have completed your target marketing and identified your niche you should look at its size. How big your target audience is depends on your marketing budget and how much income you want to generate. To do this, calculate:

-Your target revenue goal.
-Your average sales/customer.
-How many sales do you need to reach that goal (target income/ ave sales per client)?
-How many prospects there are in your target audience?
-How many current clients do you have in that segment?
-What is your market penetration? (# of current clients / # of prospects in area)

Once you have those numbers you can determine if your target audience will bring in your revenue goal. Refer to your marketing plan to ensure your market research has selected the correct niche/audience and your message will satisfy their unique needs. The more specific you are about your target audience the better your chances for a successful marketing campaign.

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Marketing On The Internet With Articles
Toni Grundstrom

Article marketing is not a new Internet marketing tool. This marketing tactic has proven itself to successfully bring increased traffic to your website and, subsequently, increased sales.

How does this work? The process is easy.

Write articles relating to your website and submit them to "free content" submission sites. The process is easy to do and it will take some upfront time but you know your business. You know your product. You know the value of what you sell for your customers. Put that knowledge in the form of an informative article and it can increase your website traffic, sales and subsequently, your income.

How can article writing boost traffic and income?

Every article you submit to a free content site contains a link to your own website. If your article was valuable to the reader they may choose to click on the link and pay you an unexpected visit. The best way for someone else to market your website is when a webmaster publishes your article on their site for content. Your link remains active and the visitors to that site can read your article and click on your link. The more webmasters using your article, the better for you.

Continue to write articles about your product, service, or industry. As the list of your published articles grow larger, and more and more of them are appearing on different websites, the total number of links back to your site increases. Ensure that all the links do not come back to the same page. 'Deep links' means that each article links back to a different page on your website. Choose the page that closely coordinates with your article. The readers of your article are already interested in that topic so linking them back to your site, containing more information on the same topic, keeps the reader as a visitor on your web site longer.

If your site is into promoting a product or service, the links that your articles have achieved will mean more potential customers for you. Even if visitors only browse through, you never know if they might be in need of what you are offering in the future.

The second value of this is that the major search engines are placing a lot of significance on incoming links to websites so they can determine the importance of a certain site. The more incoming links your website has from all your published articles, the more importance the search engines attaches to it. All the new link activity will increase your website's placement in the search results.

Search engines do not just index the websites, they also index published articles. All of the activity derived from your articles gives you a higher ranking which turns in to being closer to the first page when individuals search for your product/service. There are other techniques you need to know, including keywords and keyword phrases, to be as successful with this marketing technique as possible.

If you think about it, only a few minutes of your time is spent on writing one article and submitting to a free content site. In a short span of time that article is distributed to more sites than you can think of. Even before you know what is happening, you are getting more visitors than you previously had. Write more articles, get more traffic. Consider submitting to several article directory sites or use an article distribution service and really watch your web site visits and your sales increase.

Take the time to write a series of articles about your product, service and/or industry. Make them informative so the reader will want to get more information by clicking on your link back to your website. The time you spend will create increased website visitors and sales.

Editor's Note:
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Copyright 2007 Toni Grundstrom All Rights Reserved.
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