Do This Not That Marketing

Marketing Advice, Grow Your Business

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Are You Leveraging the Right Resources to Grow Your Business

When you’re trying to grow your business, the right resources can make all the difference.

Is it time to get serious about growing your business online? Marketing your business with online content is the ultimate way to bring traffic to your website. You can use articles, newsletters, blog posts, social media updates, FAQs and more to help bring traffic. The trick is to use content in a systematic way to grow your business right. Having a lot of followers isn’t indicative of success. Earning money is. So, if you want to grow your business you have to know which resources to leverage.

Content Is Still King

Everything revolves around content. Content is needed for every aspect of your business. If you create information products you need even more content. However, even if you sell other types of product or service you still need a lot of content in order to educate, engage, and encourage your connections to buy from you.

Forms of Content

There are many different forms of content that you can use, such as blog posts on your website, guest posts and articles on other websites, inside print publications and online newsletters. Content can be text, audio or visual in nature. Having a combination of different forms of content will ensure that you reach more of your audience.

Have a Plan of Action

The other key to ensuring that you are leveraging the right resources is to have a plan of action. Don’t just create or have content created without a point of view, voice, and the goals for the content in mind.

Create a Publication Calendar

When you know what content you want to create, it’s important to spell it out in a calendar so that you will do first things first. For instance, if you are launching a new product in three months, you can start whetting the appetite of your list now.

The Email List Is the Most Important

They say the money is in the list, and that’s as true today as it was five years ago. Walt Hampton, the President of the Book Yourself Solid School of Coach Training says if you don’t have a list you don’t have a business. The first time I heard him say that I winced. The reality is that social media marketing hasn’t replaced email marketing; it has created another way to lead people to your email lists. Leverage your social media to build your list.

Develop Incentives to Collect More Email Addresses

The point of your blog posts, social media updates, and even webinars is to provide useful, valuable information to your audience and, in exchange, collect information from your target audience so that you can market to them within your email lists. Host webinars, ask for sign-ups on social media, and incentivize lists with free give-aways or low-cost entry products and services.

All Content Should Work Together

Starting with the product, service or event that you want to promote, work your way back to today to decide the different types of content that you will use to get more email subscribers to whom you can market and promote your wares. Decide what type of content they need to become educated and informed about your products and services so that they will purchase.

Consider Drawing a Workflow

Looking at how all your content works together to bring in buyers as well as encourage the purchase, may help you identify gaps in your content needs. Your content workflow might look like this: Email Subscription Bait > 7-Day ECourse > Webinar > Short Report > Long Report > EBook > Coaching > etc… Seeing it written out should help you decide what you need.

By knowing what your goals are for the content that you create, you’ll be able to use it more efficiently to grow your business far beyond what you thought possible.

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Building Long-Lasting Business Relationships

Building RelationshipsI’m scheduled to meet with one of my coaching clients this afternoon. She’s a delightful human being, an entrepreneur with a big heart, and working with her is one of my favorite things I do.

That got me thinking about the nature of business relationships. How the best ones seem to last in a mutually beneficial way. I always tell my colleagues, if it’s not mutually beneficial, it’s not a real relationship, at least not a healthy one. So how do you build a healthy business relationship? Here’s what I think:

* Give Freely – Freely give of yourself to people and they will remember you. Always be thinking, “how can I serve this person?” Zig Ziglar said “you can have everything you want in life if you will just help enough people get what they want.” I think that’s true. And, if you’ve done a good job letting them know what you offer, they’ll come to you when they’re ready. And how do you let them know what you have to offer? My favorite way is what Michael Port calls a “Simple Sales Conversation.” I’ll write more about that soon, but if you have questions, feel free to email me ron@rontester.com.

* Stay Professional – When you’re building relationships, it’s important that you communicate professionally. Whether in person or on social media, you need to keep the things you share business-like, avoiding personal oversharing or inappropriate sharing. And by “professional,” I don’t mean pinging people with sales messages. I mean being careful that you project the image you want your audience to have of you.

One time, I was joking with a friend about something on Facebook, and a mutual friend contacted me and thought that the joking was potentially giving people the wrong impression of me. I hadn’t even thought about it, but when I looked back I could see what she was saying, so I deleted the comments. It’s important that when you’re posting on social media, you’re thinking, “What would the people who are reading this think of me?” If the answer is questionable or less-than-flattering, you should not hit the “publish” button.

* Kill Your Elevator Speech – I don’t like the elevator speech for a whole host of reasons. The best way to share what you do is by having a conversation. That being said, you need to be prepared with a short way of introducing yourself, your business, and what you do for people. Be sure to frame it with the benefits for the client instead of making it all about you.

* Be Honest and Ethical – It can be a dog-eat-dog world out there, and you’ll have to compete with a lot of unethical people. But, keep your own morals and don’t cross those legal and ethical boundaries just to get business. In my area, everyone knows the people that are dishonest or unethical, and we avoid them like the plague. If you gain that reputation for yourself, you will suffer for it in the long run.

* Do What You Say You Will Do – Don’t volunteer to do things you don’t have time to do. If someone asks you to do something and you simply can’t do it due to a time crunch or something, say so. But, when you say you will do it, do it, and do it to the best of your ability.

I learned this the hard way. A couple years ago I volunteered to help someone with a fundraising project I really believed in, but the project turned out to be much bigger and take much more time than I had. Instead of going back to the person and telling them I couldn’t handle it, I just didn’t do the work, at least to the degree it needed to be done. Needless to say, I felt terrible, but I know the person who asked for my help resented that way I didn’t come through for her. That was a painful lesson and I don’t want you to make the same mistake I did.

* Don’t Monopolize Anyone’s Time – We’ve all met the person who talks too much, or the person who doesn’t talk at all, or the person who sticks by one person at an event. Don’t be that person. Instead, learn to converse intelligently and appropriately with a variety of people. Even if it means getting out of your comfort zone, you will build better relationships if you step up and out.

* Be Welcoming – When someone new wants to join a group you belong to, be welcoming and open to them. Sometimes groups can become cliquish, and it can cause serious problems with the group. Not allowing new people in and making them feel like they belong can make a group stagnant.

When I visited one service group for the first time, they looked at me like I was an alien. I didn’t feel welcome at all and it was incredibly awkward. If you want to build good relationships, take the initiative if you’re in a group situation and someone new joins you.

* Listen a Lot – You’ve heard the saying, “You have two ears and one mouth for a reason?” Well, it’s true. Use this as your guide to listen twice as much as you talk. Sometimes talking too much is a sign of nervousness; if you can focus more on what people are saying than what you want to say, you can also calm your nervousness.

Building long-lasting relationships takes time in business and in your personal life. Both have many of the same characteristics for success. Be yourself, be honest, listen, and be helpful. But, don’t overshare or act in an unprofessional manner. If you want business relationships to be fruitful, they have to trust you, so be trustworthy. Tim Sanders says people do business with people they know, like and trust. You can be that person, and the relationships will follow.

If I can be of service to you, please don’t hesitate to email me ron@rontester.com.

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Common Online Marketing Mistakes

Avoid these online marketing mistakesThis October, I’ll be presenting “Taking an Offline Business Online for Greater Impact” to a group of entrepreneurs. As I’m preparing for that presentation, I thought it might be helpful to share what I believe are some common online marketing mistakes. These are the mistakes I see every day. If you’d like to add others, feel free to comment below.

When it comes to online marketing, I generally see two types of people. Some think they know nothing about it and they’re almost afraid to learn. Others think they already know everything and don’t need to learn anything more. Both of these approaches can work against your success.

It is true that online marketing is not very different from other types of marketing. The tools are different, but the goals and processes aren’t that different. You still need to understand who your audience is, what your product or service is, and know how to explain to your audience why it will solve their problems and why you are the one to offer it.

Here are the most common online marketing mistakes I see:

* Not Sticking to One Brand – Don’t try to be someone different online than you are offline. Don’t try to recreate your brand for every social media network. Keep the same brand image, slightly changed as necessary for each network’s platform and features, but keeping the same colors, values, and ideals as you have on your website. You want your customers to know who you are, no matter where they connect with you.

* Not Watching Your Competitors – You don’t want to copy your competitors, but watching them will help you stay one step ahead of them. It might even alert you to some systemic change in the marketplace if you are paying attention. Be aware of what type of products and/or services your competition provides and be ready to do them one better. Learn from their successes and their failures.

* Not Having a Goal – It’s imperative that for each type of marketing you do, you have a specific goal in mind. I recommend using the SMART goal framework. Whether it’s content marketing, pay-per-click marketing, or social media marketing, having a goal to reach will help you know whether or not you’ve accomplished your mission. Plus it will help you know how to move forward.

* Not Having a Domain Name – Not only should you have a domain name, but you should also have an email @yourdomainname if you want to be taken seriously as a business owner. I have a gmail account I use for personal stuff, but for business it’s ron@rontester.com. You can easily set up your own email address with your webhost provider, sometimes at no additional charge.

* Not Having Diverse and Regular Content – It’s no longer enough to simply put up 500-word blog posts and expect to get a loyal following. Today you need longer blog posts, video, podcasts, infographics, memes and more to ensure that you are reaching all parts of your audience. Everyone learns differently, and it’s your job to educate them in the way they learn best. When it comes to diversity and regularity, I’m a work in progress. This year I’ve started doing more video and it’s paying off with more awareness and engagement.

* Not Having an Email List – It’s surprising how many business owners there are who don’t realize the importance of building an email list for successful online marketing. But it’s true; some people don’t build an email list, and they should. If you aren’t sure how to keep an email list, feel free to reach out to me and I can help with that. If you just need a resource, I recommend Aweber.

* Not Having Well-Written Content – You can’t just slap anything up and expect it to be successful when it comes to content marketing. You need original, unique content that speaks directly to your audience. In addition, you need curated content from other experts which you comment on. I am approached on a fairly regular basis to share content on my blog, and it’s stunning how often what they want me to share is poorly written and needs substantial editing. If you want to be taken seriously, you need to pay attention to the writing.

* Not Focusing on Benefits over Features – It’s tempting to discuss all the features of your product or service instead of the benefits. All marketing messages, even on your “about us” page, need to be focused on your client and how your products or services benefit them. That can be difficult to wrap your brain around sometimes, but it is imperative in order to get more conversions.

Here’s an exercise I recommend everyone go through: 1) write down a feature or your product or service, 2) write down the benefit to your client or customer, and 3) explicitly state “What that means to you.”

For example, one of the features of working with me is that I have been a successful small service business owner for almost 20 years. The benefit to my clients is I actually understand what they’re going through and can guide them to make better decisions. What that means to my client is when they are asked about whether to invest in a new advertising campaign, purchase new technology or hire another salesperson, they can reach out to me and I will walk them through the process so they have peace of mind and confidence that they are making the best decision they can. What I am really offering is peace of mind and confidence.

In summary, don’t be afraid of online marketing, but do take it seriously. I will help you grow your business in ways that can be gratifying and financially rewarding. If you really want to be successful at online marketing, learn from those who have gone before you, and do not try to reinvent the wheel.

If you have questions about how to get started or how to make progress marketing your offline business online, please email me ron@rontester.com. I will be happy to help.