Author: Jon Turino

I am a marketing consultant specializing in helping my clients grow thier businesses through more effective marketing strategies. I help them with target marketing identification/segmentation, message development/refinement and media selection/creation. I am also and award-winning speaker and the author of five books. I have past experience in marketing of all types, insurance and financial services and high technology hardware and software.
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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