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Welcome to Masterful Marketing. This blog is for small business owners looking for marketing help and ideas. If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. You can also subscribe via email by filling in the form to your left. Thanks for visiting!

Want to increase visitor response on your website? Then give them a reason to do something and connect with you!
If your website is simply a brochure for your company products and services, you are missing an opportunity to encourage your visitors to take some action that benefits them and you. Maybe it’s time for a website marketing makeover that includes an effective call-to-action strategy.

A “call-to-action” refers to active copy that compels a user to do something such as watch a video demo, download a useful tool or sign up for your mailing list. Visitors that find your website by searching may find what they are looking for, but don’t let that opportunity to capture their attention slip away by not providing them with an offer.

On the other hand, if you drive a visitor to your website through a marketing campaign and don’t provide a clear call-to-action, you run the risk of them getting confused, frustrated and leaving without connecting with you. Offer your visitors compelling content and something that benefits them and they will do what you want them to do.

But like other marketing activities, you need a strategy to focus you on what you are trying to accomplish.

Define the purpose of your Website

Do you want to:

• Develop your expert reputation? Encourage visitors to subscribe to your blog, connect with you on Twitter and LinkedIn or “like” your Facebook page.
• Build your email list? Offer a valuable free tool in exchange for their email address and name.
• Generate leads? Provide a free 30 minute consultation or a whitepaper that discusses one of their challenges and how to overcome them.
• Sell a product or service? Offer a free trial (software), a free chapter of your information product or provide valuable free “stuff” if you register for an event.

Once you have your goals and their priority, you can now design the call-to-action copy and buttons into your website so that they can be easily found.

Tips to make your call-to-action attractive to your visitors

Once you have your goals and understand which ones are the most important, create your offer and use creative website design techniques to make it visible.

• Put them on every page.
• Use colorful buttons to draw attention to your offers.
• Place them above the fold and at the top of your sidebar.
• Keep them simple and limit the number on any one page (it can paralyze people into making no decision)
• Use action oriented verbs and avoid “click here” whenever possible.
• Create short forms and ask only for the information you need.
• Use multiple offers that help those who aren’t ready to commit still take an action (watch a video vs. download)

An often overlooked opportunity

Put the same call-to-action as you have on the page into your meta description tag that is used to describe your page in search engine listings. When searchers see your description, a good call-to-action will encourage them to click through to your website from the major search engines.

What’s your strategy?

Think through how you want to weave an effective call-to-action strategy into your website structure. Don’t leave it to chance that the visitor will figure out what they are suppose to do and actually do it. Understand the goal of your website, create compelling offers for your visitors and convert new visitors into followers, repeat visitors and potentially new customers.

What ideas have you used to get your visitors to take action? Share your successes!

Article source: http://masterful-marketing.com/website-call-to-action-strategy/

Welcome to Masterful Marketing. This blog is for small business owners looking for marketing help and ideas. If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. You can also subscribe via email by filling in the form to your left. Thanks for visiting!

Any small business that is not developing an expansive Web presence as part of your online marketing activities is missing an opportunity to gain visibility and develop an expert reputation. Think of your online presence as one entity with many customer touch points. Each of those touch points must effectively convey your brand and your message in order to help your target audience continue their effort to get to know you.

A Web presence analysis is an exercise that helps you determine how your business is perceived when someone searches for your area of expertise. Important to your online marketing strategy, this analysis answers questions such as:

• How well can your business be found when someone searches?
• Is your brand consistent across all of your online properties?
• How is your business seen with respect to your competition?

Evaluating how you are perceived online will help you pinpoint areas that need attention, enabling you to develop a better online marketing plan that focuses on these specific areas and puts activities in place that will improve the effectiveness of your online marketing.

Web Presence Analysis Overview

A Web presence analysis should include:

• Keyword analysis and research – For your top keyword phrases, where do you rank if at all?
• Search engine visibility – How well can I find you and what is missing?
• Website structure analysis – Does your website lack the proper items that lead to being found?
• Social media analysis – Is your social presence consistent and well integrated with other social properties and your website?
• Competitive understanding – How do you compare to your competitors?

To get started and to make this task easier, I suggest you download and install the SEO Toolbar for Firefox from SEOBook, a set of SEO tools in one convenient toolbar that enables you to gather a wealth of information about your website and those of your competitors that will help in the analysis.

Step 1 – Keyword Analysis and Research

For those of you who follow this blog regularly, you know that I am pretty anal when it comes to researching and then using your top keyword phrases in your web content, your social media profiles and all of your marketing activity. If you search this blog, you’ll find a post or two that talk about the reason for doing this research and the tools that make it easier. Speaking of tools, a nice feature of the SEO Toolbar is the keyword suggest tool. Type in a keyword, select the tools you want to use and get suggestions for other keywords.

Step 2 – Search Engine Visibility

There are two areas of search engine visibility:

• Where your website ranks for your top keywords
• How visible your business is in general (i.e. via social sites, directories and links to your properties).

To find out how well you rank for your top keywords, you can use the Rank Checker. Enter your domain name, your top keywords and hit start and it runs a report that says where your site ranks for those keywords in Google, Yahoo and Bing. You can save the report and run it regularly to track how well you are rising in the ranks.

To see how well your business is listed in various online directories, check out GetListed.org. They check Google, Yahoo, Bing, Best of the Web and now Yelp and HotFrog for your listing. If your business is not listed in any of these directories, you have work to do. Creating your local business listings has two benefits:

• It makes your business more visible throughout the social web;
• It creates more links back to your website.

Step 3 – Website Structure Analysis

How your website is structured has a lot to do with how well you will be indexed in the search engines and how readily you will be found. This may be something you will need help with, but if your site is created in WordPress, which naturally embraces search engines, you will be in good shape. If not, make sure your site isn’t loaded with JavaScript, Flash and other items search engines can’t index and that you follow the usual on page SEO techniques to help search engines better index your site.

Step 4 – Social Media Analysis

Analyzing your presence on the social media sites for this exercise is about brand consistency, message communication and participation across all the sites. Take a hard look at your profiles and make sure you are sending the same message to the same audience for all of them and that you are linking all your profiles and website for maximum visibility.

Step 5 – Competitive understanding

Now that you know how you are seen online, compare your results with that of your competition. Understanding where you are stronger or weaker in relation to their presence will help you determine where you should be channeling your marketing efforts. The SEO toolbar can be used quite effectively to gather that information.

• Visit the site and look at the information the SEO toolbar provides;
• Run Rank Checker for the same keywords to see where they rank;
• Use the “compare sites” feature on the SEO toolbar to get more statistics.

In addition, review their website and social media profiles for their messages, brand consistency and keyword usage.

How visible are you?

If you have never monitored your presence on the Internet to see how well your marketing activities are working, you should do one now to set a baseline for measuring your improvement over the next few months. As you increase your visibility, great things can happen for your business.

What have I missed? Is there something else we should include in this analysis? Add your ideas to the comments. And let us know how well you are doing.

Article source: http://masterful-marketing.com/5-steps-to-analyzing-your-web-presence/

Welcome to Masterful Marketing. This blog is for small business owners looking for marketing help and ideas. If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. You can also subscribe via email by filling in the form to your left. Thanks for visiting!

The answer, of course, is yes. And even if you don’t have a logo, your business still has a brand.

However, few small businesses really understand what a brand is and why it is important to their overall marketing strategy.

Brand is the perception the world has of you and communicates your personality and influences your prospects’ opinion of who you are and whether they want to do business with you. A brand:

• Is everything you are, the value you deliver and the total client experience. Every image you project needs to consistently reflect the personality of your business.
• Reflects your business’s promise, message and values. Your identity should be consistent with, and reinforce, your purpose and your core message to your customers.
• Conveys the expectations and promises that you extend to your clients in terms of quality, service, reliability and trustworthiness, shaping their perception of you and your business.
• Helps the audience differentiate you from your competitors, positively influencing their decision to hire you.

A good brand communicates clearly, artistically and creates credibility. It enables you to provide customers with an image that can evoke feelings about your business, having a powerful impact on whether someone wants to do business with you.

• When someone looks at your business card, website or marketing piece, what does your image project?
• Does this image reflect your business’s personality and values?
• Is your brand consistent in every aspect of your company – from your materials, to your attitudes, to the way you answer the phone, to the way you conduct yourself in public?

How do you determine your brand?

If you have never thought about your brand and just let it happen, it would be beneficial to take some time to determine what your brand projects and whether it is consistent with your values. Ask customers the first words or images that come to their mind when your business is mentioned. If they consistently respond with adjectives that fit your business such as reliable, committed to excellence, or delivers quality on time and within budget, then your brand has been developed and you can now take it to the next level. When responses are inconsistent, ambiguous, or refer to attributes such as cost, it is an indicator of a weak brand image.

If you have a weak brand, determine what it should be and focus on marketing efforts that help build awareness around your brand. Remember that your brand is developed through an entire customer experience and needs to be reinforced consistently through your Web site, sales tools, promotional items, customer service, messages and other aspects of doing business with you.

Evolving your brand

If you have developed a good brand, it should continue to evolve with your business. As your business matures, so should your brand. Evolving your brand does not mean changing your brand but rather refreshing, updating, or clarifying the image you use and the emotion it projects. If you have had the same logo for several years, talk with a designer to see if you can update its look without changing the overall image it projects. If you don’t have a logo, consider having one developed. But if your brand is weak, a little evolution is needed before you embark on a new marketing campaign.

One last tip: Brands take time to develop so avoid totally re-branding your business unless you truly believe you need to (for example, if your brand has been associated with a negative feeling or event).

How well does your brand project your business?

Article source: http://masterful-marketing.com/do-small-businesses-need-a-brand/

Welcome to Masterful Marketing. This blog is for small business owners looking for marketing help and ideas. If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. You can also subscribe via email by filling in the form to your left. Thanks for visiting!

The Guardian Life Small Business Research Institute published a report in June 2010 called Six Dimensions That Characterize Success-Oriented Small Business Owners. The survey is based on analysis of a survey of 1,100 small businesses with between 2 and 99 employees. These 6 dimensions include collaborative, self-fulfilled, future focused, curious, tech savvy and action oriented.

Although I agree that these are important, I have identified 5 more dimensions, or personality traits, that contribute to their success.

Creativity

Successful small business owners are always thinking about what  marketing activities will keep them visible to their target market. Savvy business owners evaluate many opportunities to see if they can help their marketing efforts.

Patience

Marketing takes time for it to deliver results and those who are successful realize that marketing is about building relationships with prospects over time in order to turn them into long term customers. They accomplish their goals by investing in a marketing plan that guides and sets the parameters for success.

Consistency

Once they put the marketing plan into action, they stay true to their plan. They are consistent with their messages, their activities and their actions, ensuring that they project a consistent image to the market.

Commitment

Even in difficult times, successful small business owners continue to market their businesses and don’t stop marketing just because the economy is negative. They know that staying visible is crucial when times are tough and that when the economy turns around, they will be that much further ahead of their competition.

Thirst for Knowledge

Not only are these business owners experts in their discipline, they are life-long learners who develop their marketing skills throughout their entire career. Those who shy away from learning how to market their businesses find themselves at a disadvantage when they experience a downturn in the economy. Once that happens, it is very difficult to pull yourself out of it.

What other traits are important to be a successful small business owner?

Article source: http://masterful-marketing.com/5-traits-of-successful-small-business-owners/

Welcome to Masterful Marketing. This blog is for small business owners looking for marketing help and ideas. If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. You can also subscribe via email by filling in the form to your left. Thanks for visiting!

Marketing people love to write about marketing blunders and mistakes and we all have our opinion on what should be included in the top mistakes every small business must avoid. However, even though we continue to make these blunders visible, I still see these mistakes made, costing small businesses dearly in terms of dollars and results. Solid marketing efforts take a combination of planning, creativity and patience. As you review your plan and adjust for the upcoming year, make sure you are not unknowingly committing the following.

Not Developing a Marketing Plan

Jumping right into activities without assessing your target market needs and desires and understanding how best to reach them sets you up for inefficient marketing with little to no results. By not establishing a solid plan before you being your communication results in ineffective programs that waste your budget.

Not Clearly Defining Your Target Market

Trying to be everything to everybody means you dilute your message and attract no one. People want to do business with someone who understands them and can help them achieve their goals. By specifically focusing on a niche market that you work with, you can clearly identify why they should do business with you and make selection of your services much easier for them to make.

Not Focusing Your Activities

The value of developing a plan is to set the direction of your marketing activities so you can focus your efforts. Once you decide on your strategy, you need to stay focused on executing that strategy. Constant change to compete with the latest fad does not breed success. Figure out what will work for your business and stick with it.

Sticking With An Ineffective Strategy

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Don’t get complacent and think that “things will get better” if you are not getting the results you want with your current activities. Review what is happening at least quarterly and adjust as needed.

Changing a Strategy That Works

On the other hand, if you have a winning marketing strategy that consistently gives results, then why change it? Enhance, extend and improve your plan to keep it fresh and effective, but don’t make radical changes to something that is working.

Delivering an Inconsistent Marketing Message

If each activity delivers your message differently, your prospects will get confused and your results will be poor. Being consistent with your message and brand across all of your marketing activities will increase your chances of being seen by your prospects.

Believing a Second Rate Web Site Works

With online and social media marketing being so critically important today for small businesses, it is important to make sure you don’t make too many common mistakes with your web presence. With your website being the hub of your online presence, having a poorly developed, non-optimized website is the kiss of death for your online efforts. As recently as the writing of this post, I spoke with someone who paid dearly for a horrible website and promises of first page search engine results. Perception is reality on the web and people are not going to do business with a company that does not have a quality Web site – period.

Stopping an Activity Too Soon

Easily the most costly mistake is changing your marketing messages or brand midstream. Just about the time you are sick of your marketing, your prospects are just beginning to recognize who you are. Marketing requires patience so give your marketing time to work.

Focusing Too Much On You Or Your Company

Your customers don’t care who you are or how great your company is. They only want to know how working with you is going to fulfill a need or desire. They need to see the value you offer and realize the potential benefits of working with you quickly. Keep the details about you and your company as background information and keep the focus of your messages on how you plan to help your customers.

Cutting Marketing when the Economy is Bad

Marketing keeps you visible when the market is slow and helps to generate leads, build credibility and ensure that your prospects know that you are alive and well. Cutting marketing is the biggest mistake small businesses make in tough economic times. Reducing spending and ensuring your marketing dollar is spent wisely is important – there are many things you can do at a low cost or free – but stopping marketing completely can be deadly.

Be aware of your marketing at all times so you can avoid falling into these traps. Your business will be more successful if you do.

What marketing mistakes do you see small businesses make regularly that I left off the list? Let us know.

Article source: http://masterful-marketing.com/10-marketing-blunders-many-small-businesses-still-make/