Posts Tagged ‘small business marketing strategy’

What the Dallas Cowboys Teach You About Marketing and Your Business

Thursday, August 11th, 2011

Before we even get started, I will admit that I am a lifelong Dallas Cowboys fan. Making it worse for all of you Cowboys-haters out there is that I’m a lifelong Dallas Cowboys fan who grew up, and currently lives, in the suburbs of Philadelphia, PA — Eagles country. For anyone who’s reading this that has no idea what I’m talking about, the Dallas Cowboys are a NFL football team. In fact, the Cowboys play their first preseason game of the 2011-12 NFL season tonight, which is perhaps what sparked the idea for this article.

Dallas Cowboys Marketing TipsThe Dallas Cowboys are also known as “America’s Team”. They came to be known as America’s Team during their early history. Tex Schramm was the original president and general manager of the Dallas Cowboys. What he really was though was a supreme marketer. You see, Tex changed how NFL teams market themselves. Among many other marketing-related strategies, Tex is the genius behind the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders. :) Jerry Jones, the current Owner, President, and General Manager of the Dallas Cowboys continued Tex’s Marketing legacy and has since transformed the Dallas Cowboys into the second most valuable sports franchise in the world… Jerry just got done building a ridiculous stadium, he has sponsorship deals with Ford, Pepsi, Nike and many other national brands. Jerry brings in concerts, allows HBO to film TV shows with his team, and simply markets the hell out of the Cowboys. So, what does this teach you about Marketing and business? Well, nothing yet.

If you have followed the NFL in recent years (about the last 15) then you know that every year the Dallas Cowboys are usually over-hyped. They are all bark and no bite when it comes to actually playing football. You see, Jerry Jones is in the football business. His product is the Dallas Cowboys. He uses his marketing skills to sell his product and he does a great job at it. However, this scheme can only run for so long, as once people start to see through the pretty packaging and realize that the product is defective all of that hard work that was put in to build the second most valuable sports franchise in the world comes crumbling down.

What I’m trying to convey here is it doesn’t matter how amazing your marketing strategies are, if your product or service doesn’t meet or exceed the expectations of your customers, you won’t be in business for very long. Here at Catalyst Marketers it’s pretty obvious that we strongly believe that the right marketing approach can take your business to the next level. With that said, even with our marketing strategies behind your business, if your products and services aren’t worth their price tag, you’re not going to survive for very long. Like the Cowboys, you might become the leader of the pack for a while, but eventually customers are going to see through all of the fluff and perhaps start following another team.

So as the 2011-12 NFL season approaches, take something from America’s Team, make sure your products and services are good enough to win the game before you start marketing them to your customers.

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Posted in Small Business | 1 Comment »

Finding Sourcing Content for Your Small Business

Tuesday, March 29th, 2011

The backbone of an effective social media campaign is content marketing. Content Marketing is simply using content to educate your target audience about your products, services, industry, events, etc. as a way to spark conversations and build relationships. To elaborate, the content you create or promote should be viewed as relevant and of value to your audience, not just the classic “save 30% on your next purchase” advertisement.  Online content used to engage a customer and provoke conversation can be in the form of video, audio, written, imagery, etc.

All small businesses today can, and should, take advantage of content marketing.  Below are just a few reasons why your business should be utilizing content marketing.  These statistics, sourced from an Arik Hanson, give a glimpse at how fast the online audience is growing.

  • More than 250 million people use Facebook Connect every month. (Facebook)
  • Between April 2010 and January 2011, Twitter has gained 40 million users and a 62 percent increase in mobile use of the platform
  • The average American Internet user watches 30 minutes of video online per day [40 percent increase over 2009]
  • Social networking site usage grew 88 percent among Internet users aged 55-64 between April 2009 and May 2010

With stats like those above, most of you have probably decided that content marketing can do wonders for your small business.  But where do you get ideas for this content?  There are two main approaches for delivering content to your audience. As discussed in previous Catalyst articles “Content Marketing featuring Lil Wayne” and “Small Business Uses paper.li For Content Marketing”, the first method is for you to create online content for your small business.

Content Marketing for Small Business

The second method is finding great content from other respected individuals/businesses in your industry and sharing their content with your audience.  By doing this you’re accomplishing two things.  First, you’re building a relationship with the source whom you pulled the content from, as sharing their content should be seen as a valuable gesture by you (small business owner), thus they are likely to reach out to you to say ‘thank you’ and the relationship-building process starts. Secondly, you’re getting relevant (to your products/services/industry and to your target audience’s interests) and valuable content in front of your target audience. You can then use that content to engage your audience in discussions.  The benefit over time is that you can use other people’s content to build relationships with your customers & prospects, which should in turn generate new & continued sales for your small business.

Finding sources of content relevant to your audience can be both challenging and time consuming.  Fortunately, there are new tools being developed daily to assist you with this.  From Tweet filtering/aggregating programs, such as Mass Relevance’s TweetRiver, to blog search engines, finding good information on almost any topic is becoming easier.  A great, easy-to-use website we came across which can be used to find recent articles on any subject is Topix.com.  This site allows the user to search online news and blogs for any topic they choose.  The user is given the options to enter keywords and source details (blog vs. news article, specific website domains, etc.).  Another valuable feature is that one can restrict the search to a specific geographic location.  This is especially useful if you are looking for relative content specific to your town or city.  After the search criteria are defined, a list of all matching blogs/articles is listed in chronological order.

Employing an effective content marketing campaign for your business will engage your current and potential customers like never before.  However, how efficiently your content is obtained plays a big part in your business’s overall social media costs.  By using the tools and methods described in this article, your content marketing time and capital commitments can be greatly reduced, resulting in higher profit margins. How efficient and effective is your content marketing campaign?

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Posted in Small Business | 2 Comments »

3 Reasons for Creating a Strategic Marketing Plan

Monday, June 14th, 2010

Whenever we meet with a prospective client, one of the first things we explain is our belief in the importance of having a solid Strategic Marketing Plan. For all business owners, large or small, writing a yearly Marketing Plan that identifies what you’re hoping to accomplish, and how you will go about doing so, is the foundation for all that you do that year. With the Internet, it’s easier than ever to reach your customers & prospects, connect with them, build relationships, and drive sales, that many business owners jump right in without first creating a Strategic Marketing Plan. This post will provide you with the top 3 reasons why it’s imperative that you create a Strategic Marketing Plan for your small business.

Before we get into why it’s important to have a Marketing Plan for your business, let’s first define what we think a solid Strategic Marketing Plan looks like. Let’s start at the top…When we create a Strategic Marketing Plan for a customer, we start out by learning their business. We then go through exercises aimed at finding out what our customer’s organizational goals are, and who their target audience is. Once we have a strong understanding of our customers’ business, their goals, and their audience, we start building out the Strategic Marketing Plan.

Create an Online Marketing PlanIf you’re creating a plan yourself, be sure to list out your organizational goals for the current year, determine who your target audience is, and where those folks spend their time online. If your target audience uses foursquare, then you should have an online presence on foursquare. If your target audience doesn’t use Facebook, then don’t spend your time using Facebook as a marketing tool.

Creating your Strategic Imperatives is the next step in the process. Strategic Imperatives are simply how you will go about achieving your goals. A few examples might be, “Use online tools to reach more people, build relationships, and ultimately drive sales”, or “Create a blog to provide free articles about XYZ industry, my products, and our business philosophies”.

Once you know what your goals are, how you will achieve those goals, and who you’re looking to target, now it’s time to create your marketing tactics. Tactics are the actual campaigns that you will run to reach and engage your target audience. A few example tactics might be, “Create a YouTube Video Series to educate consumers on my services”, or “Use Twitter to promote my blog articles”. After the marketing tactics are created, your plan is complete.

Now that you know how to create a Strategic Marketing Plan, below are 3 reasons why it’s critical to your success. A Strategic Marketing Plan provides business owners with:

  1. A map for achieving yearly goals
  2. The ability to track success through individual tactic performance measures – Performance measures should be setup for every Marketing Tactic
  3. An understanding of the time, and budget, needed to execute on the Strategic Marketing Plan

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Have you taken the time to create a Strategic Marketing Plan for your business? Has it helped your business?

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Posted in Small Business | No Comments »

Use Google Analytics as a Measurement Tool for Your Small Business

Monday, January 25th, 2010

Google Analytics is an amazing online tool for small business owners. Best of all, it’s FREE. You simply add your small business website to the system and you can begin tracking things like: site traffic, entrance sources (how readers get to your site), exit pages (what pages readers are leaving your site from), keyword relevance, demographic information on your visitors, and much, much more. If you’re not setup on Google Analytics, definitely take some time this week to get setup your small business website.

With the above being said, to fully leverage the power of Google Analytics, you must first establish your goals for your online efforts, and then build a strategy around those goals. If you don’t setup your goals up front, then when you use Google Analytics as your measurement tool, you won’t know what to look for. Keep reading to find out how Catalyst Marketers uses Google Analytics and how we recommend our customers use it.

Catalyst Marketers e-Marketing Strategy is to practice what we preach. We use a combination of content marketing and online social tools to reach more small business owners, educate them through content marketing on the power of using online social tools to promote their business, and ultimately drive new customers for Catalyst Marketers. Here’s how we do it.

  1. Constantly publish new educational content, relevant to small business owners, to the Catalyst Marketers blog
  2. Use social tools like Twitter, LinkedIn, BizSugar, & the Catalyst Marketers Facebook fan page to promote our content AND the content from other experts – this builds relationships with those experts and shows your followers that you’re not there to just promote your “stuff”
  3. We then try to convert our followers to customers of Catalyst Marketers, by establishing ourselves as thought leaders in our industry and proving to our followers that we understand how to drive growth for them through content marketing and social tools

How do we know if our strategies are working and our goals are being achieved? Well, we turn to Google Analytics (among some other things). Our goal is to use social tools to drive traffic to our content (blog posts). So on a regular basis (you can determine how often you need to check your reports – at least every month), we log into Google Analytics and check out our traffic sources. We ask, are the social tools, which we are using to promote our posts, driving the most traffic to our site? Google Analytics lists the top traffic sources. If the tools we’re using, Twitter, Facebook, etc. are among the top 5-10 traffic sources for our small business website, then we know we are on our way to achieving our goal.

Google Analytics offers so much more than just traffic sources. If another goal is to drive traffic from our blog posts to other pages on our site, like the Catalyst Marketers Solutions page or the Contact Us page, Google Analytics shows us that as well. We can look at each individual page and determine how traffic is getting to that page. We can also tell what page they go to next from the current page. Basically, we can see if the majority of traffic to our Solutions page is coming from our blog posts. If it is, we know that our content marketing is working because we are effectively producing relevant and valuable content, which in turn, is leading readers to want to find out more about what we have to offer.

Turn Content Marketing into Sales

The next step in the process is to effectively drive sales from all of your efforts. The ultimate goal of all businesses is to increase sales. Once we know how we are driving traffic to our site and what pages our readers are going to once they get there, the next step is to entice them to take action: Call us or Email us to find out more about our solutions. If that’s the goal, then you need to make it easy for readers to find your contact information, as well as, state a compelling reason why they should reach out to you. It’s one thing to produce awesome content, but if your readers don’t know what you offer, then you’ll never get any sales. This is why our goal is to drive readers to our Solutions page and then to our Contact Us page. We can track this activity through Google Analytics and then we can tie in any new leads by asking those individuals how they found us.

It’s imperative that you establish goals for your online marketing efforts and then use tools like Google Analytics to see how you’re tracking against those goals. If you don’t, then all the time you spend online, can never really be calculated with return-on-investment. If you have any questions about how you can setup an e-marketing plan, like the one we use, then send us an email OR check out our solutions page. We look forward to hearing from you and answering any questions you may have.

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Posted in Online Marketing, Small Business | 2 Comments »

Cross Promote by Partnering with Local Businesses

Monday, January 18th, 2010

Are you constantly looking for new ways to build awareness around your business, your products, or your services? If so, congrats! Small businesses in today’s economy should always be pressing forward in trying to find creative ways to get their name out there.

Is your business located in a small town? How about a big city? Either way, I’d imagine that the majority of readers who own and operate a small business have it located in an area close to other businesses. With that said, have you ever considered approaching any other local business owners to see if they’d be interested in doing a cross promotion with you and your small business?

Cross promotion involves two or more parties who setup a program where each party helps promote the others’ products & services. I had the idea the other day when I was meeting Steve Keib, owner of Tranquility Life Spa & Salon, for lunch at Spatola’s Pizza in Lansdale, PA. He and I were discussing creative ways to market his business when the idea hit me. Steve should have a flier on each table at Spatola’s. In exchange for space at the tables, Steve could offer to put coupons & a menu for Spatola’s at his cash register – persuading each and every customer to take one with them as they pay for their Spa services.

How much do you think a promotion like this costs? If you said almost $0 then you’d be right. It takes a creative idea, a little time and networking, some printing costs and that’s it. You now get access to all of Spatola’s customers and vice versa. Each small business owner is happy and hopefully traffic increases. Definitely be sure that you setup some measurement tools, such as adding a unique code to each coupon you put in someone’s store OR by having your flier say “mention that you saw our flier at Spatola’s and receive 10% off”. For each customer who mentions it, be sure to track that sale in your computer/register so that you can go back to see just how well the promotion is working.

The best part about this idea is that you don’t have to limit your partnership to one other business. You can work with many different businesses in your local area. Just be sure the customers who come into your partner’s store are the same target customer who you want to attract.

Is anyone currently running a cross promotion strategy like this? If so, how’s it working for your small business?

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Posted in Small Business | 3 Comments »

The Same Old Marketing Campaign

Saturday, August 22nd, 2009

Is your small business running the same old marketing campaign that’s been running for years now? Have you seen your ROI continually dropping? Are you even measuring ROI?

These are some of the questions you should be asking yourself a few times a year if you’re hoping to grow your business. If the answers to these questions is “yes”, it’s OK. There is still time to turn things around. I know that being a small business owner is not easy. There are countless things that come up in the course of a day, a week, etc. If you find that you don’t have time to handle your company’s marketing plan, simply find a company you can trust to do it for you.

If you’re finding that your traffic is slowing and those ads in the local flier are becoming more expensive, you’re not alone. Traditional media companies are raising rates because there are less and less advertisers buying space in their publications. When the economy gets back on its feet and people begin investing again in marketing/advertising, many experts expect those ad dollars to go to new media companies versus traditional media companies.

Their are a few reasons why all businesses, large and small, are shifting their marketing budgets to new media:

  • Lower up front costs – many online tools are free
  • Greater reach – small businesses can have a global presence
  • Deeper impact with prospects, customers, & brand evangelists
  • Ability for viral growth
  • More tools available to measure return-on-investment

When it comes time for you to start spending again on marketing your product or service, definitely take some time to learn what’s changed since your last campaign. Find out where your prospects & customers are spending their time and then begin creating strategies around talking with them in those places. If you find that they are spending their time online, then new media marketing may be right for you. If you need any help getting started, feel free to reach out to Catalyst Marketers.

If you have found this post informative, please share it with others whom you think will benefit.

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