Month: March 2012

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Marketing with Face Time Not Facebook

As the online marketing gurus implore us to put more time, effort, and money into marketing via websites, blogs, ad words, and social media, we sometimes lose sight of the value of face-to-face networking for building our businesses.

There are even more opportunities to meet other business people now than before online networking existed, but you have to take the leap from online to offline marketing. Social media can be a valuable tool for establishing initial contacts with people whose talents and interests match your needs or your clients’ needs, but its relationship building value is easily overestimated.

How efficient is social media in establishing real relationships? The core of any marketing effort is a plan to build trust, and the most effective way to build rapport is through a handshake and eye contact. Social media is, ironically, inherently not social. It puts us behind a computer screen, and away from human contact.

Let us get together, away from the screen. It could be breakfast or lunch, an after-hours mixer, an open house, a business leads meeting, or any number of venues. You can learn more about a person in a five-minute conversation than they would ever post on a social media profile. If you have not already made in-person networking a core part of your marketing plan, you will be amazed at how productive and fun these meetings are.

Groups on social media sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Meetup, are facilitating an increasing number of face-to-face meetings in groups as diverse as you could imagine. While there are literally hundreds of them, the good news is that they are searchable, so you can find the right groups for you.

What kinds of groups and meetings do you find most valuable? How do you make time for face time? Where do you find the groups that you attend and people you meet? Please post your comments and share what works for you.

If you would like more information about groups that might be of interest to you, please let me know.  I will point you in the right direction.

Thanks for reading, and thanks in advance for your comments.

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Calculating the Value of Your Internet Connection…

If you would like to know the value of your Internet connection, it is a fairly easy calculation.  First, you need to find out what speed you are getting.  There are several web sites with free speed test applications, among them www.speedtest.org, www.speakeasy.net/speedtest and www.speedtest.org.  Any of these sites will run a test for you and show you what download and upload speeds you are actually getting.  And some will show you the averages for you location. Then divide your monthly cost by your speed.  You’ll get a “dollars per Kbps” or “dollars per Mbps” result. Typically the higher your connection speed is, the higher the value of your Internet connection given the same cost.  If, that is, you use all of that speed on a regular basis.

If you are just doing emails and visiting social web sites, the speed of your connection is probably not very relevant to you.  If, on the other hand, you download movies, music files and videos on a regular basis, a higher speed connection is definitely one of your concerns.  As is your absolute budget amount.  You may want a higher connection speed but simply not want to pay a significant extra monthly fee for it.  If you have alternative connection methods available to you, such as high speed digital subscriber line (DSL) service over your business phone line, you might want to use the value formula as one of the methods of comparison when choosing your supplier.

It’s kind of fun to run the speed tests.  Some of the web sites mentioned above also list optional things – some free, some for a fee – to do things for you like defragmenting your disk, cleaning up your registry, etc. – but when you are simply comparing speeds between one vendor and another it’s not necessary to do anything but run the free speed test and do the value calculation. 

If  you found this blog entry particularly useful, please send me a comment or an email.  I’d love to hear from you.

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Marketing Help: Analyzing Your Website Statistics

Marketing Help: Analyzing Your Website Statistics

google_analytics_v2_new_returning_visitors

Do you know how many people visit your website in a given week or month? How long they stay? How many pages they’ve visited? These are important numbers to know. Analytical tools such as Webtrends and Google Analytics can let you see how your website performs.

The largest number is usually related to the gross number of page views that your site experiences. But it’s also important to look at the figure that shows the number of “unique” views, the actual number of people who’ve visited your site in a given time period, usually a week or a month. This can give you some real insight into the effectiveness of your website content in keeping people interested. As can the average “time on page” figure. For example, if you had 158 page views in a month, with 74 unique views, that means that about 53% of your website visitors found enough there of interest to them to get them to return. If, on the other hand, your landing page prompts visitors to take action by placing an order or subscribing to something then the relationship between the two numbers may mean something entirely different. It really depends on what your website is designed to do.

You can also look at the exit rate — the percentage of people who left your site after viewing only a particular page — and the bounce rate, which is the percentage of people who left after viewing a second or subsequent pages. If your exit rate for a page is, say, 34%, then about one-third of the people visiting left after viewing that page. Again, this may be just fine if they answered a “call to action” on that first page How are you measuring web site performance? What tools do you find helpful and which measurements give you the best insights into your customers’ needs and interests?

If you found this blog entry particularly useful, please send me a comment or an email. I’d love to hear from you.

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Help With Marketing Your Small Business

If your business is like many other small businesses today, particularly in today’s economic climate, money for marketing may be a tight commodity. But marketing is a must if you want your business to grow. Thankfully, there are several things you can do, at little or no cost, to get your message out to prospective and existing customers.

The most basic requirement today, of course, is a website. It should effectively describe the benefits of your product and service and include a “call to action” to motivate browsers and prospects to become customers. And it needs to be easy to find, which means (1) broadcasting  its existence so that search engines like Google (www.google.com), Bing (www.bing.com), Yahoo (www.yahoo.com ) and Ask (www.ask.com), just to name a few, can find it and (2) optimizing it so that those search engines place it at or near the top of the results when prospects search for your products or services.

Website hosting and building has become much less expensive and much simpler to implement with tools available from a wide variety of Internet service providers (ISPs). Registering your own domain name for your website is also a straightforward process. And having your own domain, instead of being a subset of something like “sites/provider.com/site/your-domain-name” for example, is critically important if you want to be able to measure the effectiveness of your website’s performance since many analytic tools don’t work for sub-directory sites. Plus you’ll want your own domain-specific email addresses.  While free email accounts are great for personal use, they don’t make a very good impression when used for your business.

You’ll also want to take advantage of social media sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and the like, each of which has its own advantages and disadvantages depending on the type of business you are in. Are you using all of the tools available to you in marketing your small business? Which ones are working best for you? Can you share any tips that other small businesses can use? I’d love to hear from you.

If you found this blog entry particularly useful, please send me a comment or an email.

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The Importance of Your Online Business Image

OnLine Business Image Graphic

Do you know what your online image says about your business?  Take this little two-part test:

You meet two people at a networking event and both tell you that they sell and install fine replacement windows for your home.  You gather their business cards for later reference and a week later decide to inquire about replacing your windows.  You’ve forgotten who handed you which business card, but they both have email addresses.  One says quotes@finewindows.com and the other says billybobsfinewindows@yahoo.com.  To which company will you feel best about trusting your window replacement needs?

Suppose you don’t want to get an actual quote just yet but want to do some research first.  Are you more likely to go to www.finewindows.com first or to http://sites.google.com/site/billybobsfinewindows?  And if you didn’t have the website address for www.finewindows.com, how likely do you think it is that a search on Google or Bing or Ask would find http://sites.google.com/site/billybobsfinewindows near the top of the list versus www.finewindows.com?

With so many small businesses running on shoestring budgets these days, it is indeed tempting to use free email accounts and set up websites using free templates available from Google, MSN and others.  Or to just set up a Facebook page and hope for the best. But what does that say about your business to someone who doesn’t know you?  If you chose www.finewindows.com above instead of http://sites.google.com/site/billybobsfinewindows you already know the answer to that question.

Getting your own domain name for your website, and so-called “vanity” email accounts using that same domain name, doesn’t have to be expensive.  And setting up the website doesn’t have to require a degree in web design (or rocket science!). Many ISPs can provide you with bundles that include domain name registration, email addresses, website templates and even more sophisticated capabilities such as newsletter broadcasting, blogging and e-commerce.  It might really pay to look into these options before making a decision. Unless you really don’t think your image is that important.

Do you have questions on anything mentioned above?  Give me a call or an email, or post a comment, and I’ll be happy to discuss them with you.  Do you any have experience using one or the other or, even better, both kinds of approaches mentioned above?  I’m betting that lots of people would love to have you share your experience.  Let us know what results you’ve experienced. Thanks for reading!

Posted In: Marketing Online

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Marketing Help: The Importance of Your Offline Business Image

Marketing Help: The Importance of Your Offline Business Image

For a current update on this post, click the image.

Business Card Rant on YouTube Image

I collect a lot of business cards as I build my network and help small business owners with their marketing and technology issues.  And I’ve noticed that people are either (1) not paying much attention to the venerable old business card, or (2) getting so enamored with its design as to render it unreadable or (3) going so high-tech that it could be useless to its intended audience.  Let’s take these one at a time.

A business card needs to have certain basic elements.  These would normally include the name of the business, the tag line if applicable, the name and title of the person whose business card it is, the information on where that person’s business is located — either physically or on the web — and complete information on how to contact that person by all means available.  It might benefit from an image or a background, or it might not.  It really depends on the business and the intended audience.

If the business card is going to include an image, which is a great idea in many cases, since pictures can be much more powerful in conveying concepts than words alone, that image should not render the rest of the information on the card undecipherable.  This might call for a design that uses, against most conventional design advice, reverse (and maybe bold and maybe shadowed) type for the pertinent information.  The type face has to be big enough and bold enough to be readable coming out of the image.  If the image is only part of the card design, it’s important not to let the image color dictate the color of the type. Even on a white background, a very light blue or yellow color can be virtually unreadable.  Especially if the font size is tiny as well.

And then there are the “techie” cards.  I have some with no names, addresses, telephone numbers, web sites or email addresses.  Just a funny graphic symbol like the one accompanying this blog entry.  That funny symbol is called a QR (for Quick Response) code and it contains my business card information.  All of it. And it could also contain a link to that card if there was too much information in the QR code for a particular smart phone to read. It could contain a link to a map showing the location of my business.  Or other information.  QR codes can be very helpful in mobile marketing applications.  But if your audience doesn’t use smart phones, how useful is it, no matter how high tech or trendy?  The answer is:  Not very!  But you could print it on the back of your traditional card in order to serve both markets.  Make sense?

So the idea is to fit the medium to the message and to the audience.  As we all tend to concentrate on our online marketing image and activities, let’s not forget that what we do offline is important as well.

I’d love to have your comments and ideas on this topic.  Examples of best and worst cards you’ve encountered could be lots of fun as well.  Let me know and thanks for reading.