Business Link's Leaner Meaner Marketing

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Business Link's leaner meaner marketing workshop presented by Dev Chakraborty.

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Leaner, Meaner Marketing

High Fidelity... ‘Top 5 records...’

Today, we will be covering:

Networking

Business cards

Time management

Facebook

LinkedIn

Twitter

How to improve traffic to your website

E-newsletters

PR

Useful marketing websites

Creative marketing ideas

CIM Definition Of Marketing

The management process responsible for identifying, anticipating and satisfying customer requirements profitably

An (Old) Definition Of Marketing

If you can get the Mayor to laugh about it – that’s PR

And if you planned the whole thing – that’s Marketing!!

The circus is coming to town! If you paint a sign saying: “Circus coming to the fairgrounds this

Sunday” – that’s Advertising

If you paint the sign on the back of an elephant and walk it through town – that’s a Promotion

If the elephant walks through the Mayor’s flower bed – that’s Publicity

Marketing Today

In the modern world, we could add:

If you spread the word via your website or blog, or using Facebook and Twitter, perhaps on your iPhone – that’s Social and Digital Media!

Market Research

What do you think your customers think about you and your business??

Find out what they really think

Focus groups

Mystery shopper

Surveymonkey.co.uk

SWOT analysis

The Future Of Web Design

Build your own website, zero experience required

www.moonfruit.com

Add pictures, audio, video

Track website traffic

Built-in SEO

Free of charge! (as long as you update it once every 6 months)

How To Improve Traffic To Your Website

Get your site listed on directories

Get listed in search engines – submit your site (individually) to all the major search engines

Search Engine Optimisation – decide your ‘keywords’

Search engines look for certain things – titles, headings, meta tags – so it is crucial to make sure your site is ‘search engine friendly’

Add no more than 15 to 20 keywords to keep the search engines from flagging your site for keyword spamming

Use keywords at the beginning of sentences and higher up on the page

Get people with complementary sites to link to yours

Use offline marketing – promote your website in all your marketing

Provide useful resources on your website, resources that make people feel thankful that you put in the time and effort… and they’ll spread the word for you

Provide a subscription box to your E-newsletter on your most-viewed business website pages

E-Newsletters

It costs six times more to make a sale to a new customer than to an existing one!

Frequency? Weekly, monthly, quarterly?

Objective? Customer retention, sales generation, PR?

Offer tips and advice

Case studies/client testimonials

Mailchimp.com less spam, reports

Keep it short... link to your website whenever possible

Data Protection - unsubscribe facility

Call to action

Include a ‘forward to a colleague’ call to action

Test, test, test! Email to Hotmail, Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo email accounts

Public Relations

Know your target market – what do they read? FT or The Sun?

Make sure your product or service is ready

Don’t forget local radio

Be clear and concise... so what?!

A picture speaks a thousand words

Deadline is king

Piggyback national/international stories

Always send to a named individual

Follow up… polite persistence

Explore possibility of a regular feature

10 Useful Marketing Websites

Free Listings

www.yell.com

www.thomsonlocal.com

www.freeindex.co.uk

www.gumtree.com

www.hotfroguk.co.uk

Diary date to revisit sites every 6 months

File Conversion

Ever wanted to convert files without the need to download software?

You can change almost any file to almost any other:

Word doc to a PDF? Excel file to a jpeg?

www.zamzar.com

It works with most document, video and music files:

.rtf; .docx; .doc; .ods; .odt; .ppt; .pptx; .odp; .wpd; .ps; .pub; .xls; .xlsx;

.cvs; .wps …

FREE OF CHARGE!

Get Feedback On Your Website

Bounce rates are one of the biggest problems for web designers. Visitors to your site need to be able to see what it’s all about in the first 5 seconds – if they can’t, the chances are that they will leave.

Test whether your design is clear and easy to understand: www.fivesecondtest.com

Your website is revealed to volunteers for 5 seconds

The community of web designers will give you feedback

FREE OF CHARGE!

How Others View Your Website

Type your website address into the main box, choose the size that you want to investigate, and click ‘go’

It launches a new browser that shows your website in the exact size you specified

FREE OF CHARGE!

Did you know each user sees a slightly different amount of each website? Computers have lots of different screen sizes, and users set up their browsers with a range of toolbars.

See how users actually view your website with

www.screen-resolution.com

Photos For Your Website

Take images from your camera, and tried to use them on your website? Digital cameras produce massive, high-resolution images which will use up all your webspace allowance.

They will make your website slow to load, and drain the user’s bandwidth.

Resize your images with www.imagemerger.net

Just specify by what percentage you want your images reduced and the site will do the rest.

FREE OF CHARGE!

Website Chat

Offer live help to make more sales on your website.

Use simple live chat on your website

www.olark.com

Google Analytics

Search Engine Optimisation

What?

How?

Reports, reports and more reports

99designs.com 99designs is the #1 marketplace for ‘crowdsourced’ graphic

design

Connecting 93,335 passionate designers from around the globe with small businesses who need design projects completed

Gold, Silver, Bronze or Custom prices

Create a design brief, i.e. what you need designed

Designers then submit concepts to compete for your prize. Be sure to provide continual feedback to help the designers deliver a concept you love

At the completion of your contest, you'll need to pick your favourite design and award a winner. You'll then receive the final design along with copyright to the original art work

www.bigstockphoto.com

BigStockPhoto is your fast, easy-to-use marketplace for quality stock images

It offers over 4 million royalty-free photographs and illustrations from talented photographers and artists around the globe

Business Link.gov

Fantastic small business resource:

Online articles

Workshops

Advice

10 Creative Marketing Ideas Not To Forget…

Contra Deals

Barter, barter, barter!

Double or triple your marketing budget without getting your cheque book out

Advertising – radio, newspapers, magazines, corporate hospitality, etc.

Photography, web design, graphic design, restaurant, training, etc.

… virtually any service!

Client Referrals

Word of mouth is the best form of advertising!

Let your happy customers spread the word

Simple postcard design – referral details on the back

£25 M&S voucher, bottle of champagne, petrol voucher, etc.

Memory jogger, e.g. Sky TV

Keep An Eye On The Competition

Essential for success – their campaigns, news, changes in pricing or policies can affect your customers’ perceptions.

Stay ahead of the competition – pre-empt/react to their news:

Where do they advertise?

How do they advertise?

‘Borrow’ good ideas!

Video Footage

Adding video to your website boosts your Google ranking.

60”/90” introduction to your company

Virtual tour......meet the team......client testimonials

Promote in your email signature, Facebook, E-newsletter...

Upload to YouTube

Timing

E-newsletters

Mailshots

January 1st : new calendar year = new financial budgets

April 1st : new financial year

Public Sector – use it or lose it!

Set Goals

How do you eat an elephant?!

Set manageable goals

If the idea of selling 10,000 widgets a year overwhelms you, think of it as selling 27 widgets a day

Sales – cold calling

Just 5 calls a day = 100 per month = 1,200 per year

Who Are You? What Are You?

If your business was a car, what exactly would it be?!

Mercedes? Vauxhall? Aston Martin? Kia?

A 30-year-old, rusty Trabant?

Do your staff/customers share your opinion?

Joint Promotions

Reach a whole new pool of potential customers for a very low cost – set up joint promotions with other small businesses:

Contact some non-competing small businesses serving customers in your market

Offer to publicise their products or services to your customers in exchange for their publicising your services to their customers

Measure Your Success

Whatever activity you choose, set targets to measure the impact of your actions:

Monitor enquiries from a direct mail campaign

Increased hits to a website

Increased sign-up for your customer newsletter

Ebay Shop

eBay founded in 1995

Pay a monthly subscription fee (from £14.99 per month)

Each item you list in your eBay Shop incurs an Insertion Fee (from 20p)

If it sells, a Final Value Fee applies (average 8.5%)

Facebook

Launched 2004, currently 550 million+ users Not the leading social network in Russia, China or

Japan Current value $68 billion?!

Average number of friends is 130

Advertising opportunities, eg Leigh Court wedding venue – ‘Single’ to ‘Engaged’

Keep your personal profile separate from your business profile

Be personal and authentic

Make it interesting, don’t always be commercial, add industry specific news

Add video footage

Add your Facebook URL to your email signature, business cards, etc.

Carefully phrase your status updates

Post your E-newsletter subscription information

Integrate Twitter feeds... NB can be overwhelming!

Set Google analytics on your Facebook page

Incentives for fans

LinkedIn

Over 90 million professionals use LinkedIn to exchange information, ideas and opportunities:

Stay informed about your contacts and industry

Find the people and knowledge you need to achieve your goals

Control your professional identity online

Add a photo: people buy people

Join industry-specific groups

Join geographical groups: FSB, local Chambers, GWE Business West

Reply to threads, position yourself as the expert

Ask questions

Testimonials

Investigate your connections’ connections

Remember your manners! If you wouldn’t do it, say it or share it in person, don’t do it, say it or share it on LinkedIn

Create unique content yourself, e.g. a blog... share this on LinkedIn

Company profiles: keep your friends close... and your competitors closer still!

Twitter

Doctor: “I’m sorry, I don’t follow you”

Patient: “Doctor Doctor, I think I’m addicted to Twitter”

Be authentic – don’t be afraid to show your personality

Avoid self-promotion – you’re building relationships

Generate business from Twitter by directing customers to your website through clickable links within your tweets

Engage with your followers, get to know them

Be positive!

Be multi-dimensional: don’t just tweet about your business... tweet about hobbies, funny stories, etc.

Co-workers can share ideas, close-of-business figures, while working on projects over different sites

Great for market research: send out a question to thousands of potential customers who can each respond instantly with a short answer

Numbers mean nothing. You are better off having 25 true friends than 2,500 strangers who care nothing for you

Never tweet anything you wouldn’t want your mother or your boss to see

Networking

Should I be here?!

Fail to prepare, prepare to fail … prepare a memorable 60” presentation

Two of you from the same company at the same event?

Post event follow-up

Evaluate

Business Cards

Never leave home without them!

Continuity

Quality vs price

Add one line on the back of your card: ‘What I can do for your business’

QR barcode – video testimonial

iPhone application – bump

Time Management

Plan your day

Take breaks

E-newsletters… unsubscribe

Stop procrastinating

Emails/social media... don’t reply straight away

Running your own business can be lonely... mix with inspirational people

What are your time bandits?! Internet surfing, social media, eBay?!

Learn to delegate... outsource ...

Organise your desk and office – “a place for everything, everything in its place”

Avoid Vampires!!

Marketing Plan

How to prepare a practical, useful but – most importantly – a realistic 12 month marketing plan

Over To You!

Sharing best practice ...

What has been the most effective marketing tool for your business?

“The next 50 years will see new forms of marketing, tailored in greater ways to our lifestyles.

“Traditional advertising will remain on bus stops, through the iPhone, on television, via the internet and posted through our letterboxes.

“But word-of-mouth marketing will forever be the most powerful way of persuading customers to join us.

“It’s the product that really forms the future of marketing – as it has done in decades past.”

“The next 50 years will see new forms of marketing, tailored in greater ways to our lifestyles.

“Traditional advertising will remain on bus stops, through the iPhone, on television, via the internet and posted through our letterboxes.

“But word-of-mouth marketing will forever be the most powerful way of persuading customers to join us.

“It’s the product that really forms the future of marketing – as it has done in decades past.”

Sir Richard Branson

Thank You!

Dev Chakraborty

Business Link

E: dev.chakraborty@businesslinksw.co.uk

Slides available from:

www.businesslink.gov.uk/southwest/eventspresentations

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