Holiday inbound marketing ideas to boost your end of year revenue

Tis’ the season to drive in revenue!  That year end sprint is a driving force for every business. If you own a business that sells products or services to consumers, here’s how to drive holiday traffic to your store with discounts, free gifts and contests using:

Check In Deals

Offer customers that “check in” to your store/restaurant via foursquare, Facebook or other location based social networks to enhance your special promotion.  Not only will this drive traffic into your business; this will also increase your reach beyond your followers, as friends of your fans will see status updates at your location.
Bonus: Point out on your Facebook page and/or twitter account who took advantage of your offer, make sure to use the @ symbol, so your follower gets highlighted and the post will go on their page as well.

Facebook Landing Pages

That’s right, use Facebook as a Landing Page! Not only will you gain more “Likes”; you can offer a holiday gift and at the same time collect information from your customers, which will enable you to segment market better.  The page will be a tab found on the right side, make it your main page when someone comes to your page and let the holiday cheer come in!
Bonus: By gathering information on your customers, you can find out who your buyer persona is and keep them engaged via email deals and newsletters that are more suited to their needs.

QR Codes

A fun way to fun ways to keep your customers interested in your products or services is using a QR Code. The possibilities for what you can place a QR Code on and what you can do offer with them are endless - Place them on your holiday signage as a “secret discount”, send your customers an email blast holiday card that has a QR code with your holiday promotion, create a business card size holiday tag with a code and place the card in your customers shopping bags with discounts on their next purchase.
Bonus: For more great QR code ideas check out Create and Tracks, “Top 5 things to do with QR Codes this Holiday Season”.

Send a Holiday Greeting

Use your email list to send out a Holiday Greeting to everyone on your email list.  Make sure to send emails to you vendors as well as your customers.  Since not every customer or vendor is the same, experiment with different offers based on information you have collected in your CRM software.  Experiment with different subject lines as well based on to maximize the amount of customer who open your email.
Bonus: Give a discount for your customers Friends and Family.

Update your Google Place

Did you know you can update you Google place advertisement to offer special deals? Simply go to your Google places account and and click the offers tab an place your holiday deals!
Bonus: You can set an expiration date on your offer.

Hope these tips help you have a successful end of year!

Happy Holidays!

6 Companies every entrepreneur can be thankful for

With the stress of Thanksgiving planning and cooking finally being over; I took the time to think about businesses that have made my life as a freelancer easier, with either their products or blogs and I hope sharing them can make yours as well!

Hubspot 
Hubspot is a marketing software company based out of Cambridge, MA.  With 3 different levels of their software, they can work seamlessly with any size company. What makes them so awesome is their commitment to their customers. They don’t just build an awesome product; they provide training and support via their passionate inbound marketers. Outside of their normal trainings, they offer hubspot.tv, webinars, an awesome blog full of top tips, quarterly meetups and their inbound marketing university. Hubspot offers a free 30 day trial of their software – why not test it out today and see why they are worth bragging over!


Grasshopper 

Another Massachusetts company, Grasshopper is a company that offers virtual phone systems geared towards entrepreneurs.  Some of Grasshopper’s features include: 800 numbers, call forwarding, call screening, unlimited extensions, email to voicemail, onhold music.  What you can be thankful for is their low monthly price and their commitment to entrepreneurs. Point in case, Co-fouder Siamak Taghaddos is a Founding supporter of National Entrepreneurs' Day.  Also worth checking out is Grasshopper's blog, which is a great resource for entrepreneurs.


BizLaunch 

Canada’s, BizLaunch provides training and education to entrepreneurs. BizLaunch is excellent resource proving plenty of webinars, excellent advice and tools such as business plans, break even analysis reports, balance sheets and plenty more. The best part about BizLaunch is that all of their resources are free! Whether you’re a seasoned entrepreneur or you’re just starting out and don’t know where to begin, BizLaunch has the resources for you.


Eventbrite 

As an entrepreneur, you want to get name out there as much as possible, and that means networking and throwing your own events. Eventbrite is a website that you can place your own events in their database and search for events going.  What’s great about Eventbright is the search feature, you can search in your local area, date of event, price (from free to expensive), category and you can further narrow down the events to which town they are in. Most of the networking events I go to, I have found on Eventbright.  If you’re thiking about hosting an event, you can take secure payments through Eventbright via their own processing system, pay-pal, authorize.net or Google checkout. 



Salesforce 

The ultimate CRM Cloud software, Salesforce offers a variety of SaaS and PaaS solutions to help you reach out to your customers and analyze your customer’s behavoirs. Salesforce not only offers sales and marketing data software, it also offers great products and apps such as chatter, radian6, force.com, database.com and Heroku.  Like Hubspot, Salesforce pricing ranges per how big your business is and salesforce also offers free trials.


Bonnie Gibson

Ok ok, I know this part is a bit of a stretch/shameless plug! However, I enjoy offering marketing advice and sharing knowledge of print/web design, content writing and SEO via my blog and twitter. Feel free to find me on linkedin, twitter or google+ and follow me. If you need some marketing advice, I offer a free marketing consultation, just drop me an email.

Enjoy the rest of your Holiday Season and 6 cheers to the companies mentioned above!

Why content is online marketing's best friend

When it comes to driving traffic and creating leads, a nice design might be eye catching, but it’s your content and how your content engages your visitors that’s going to make your site a success. Consider your content to be your marketing budget’s best friend.

What makes content so important?  I seriously cannot stress enough the importance of great content.  Content is how your visitors will find out about your brand and what solutions you can offer to their lives easier. Content is what gives your company credibility and will set you apart from your competition. In this economy you need to transparency in your brand and gain trust in order to make it, and your content is just the thing that will help you do so.

What makes great content you ask?  Great content is finding ways to reach out and engage your customers by offering ways to make their lives easier.  Content isn’t only limited to images and text on a website, content can be blogs, podcasts, webinairs, white papers, ebook, etc. The point is to be as useful as you can to your visitor.  Once you are useful to your visitor, you can start turning your visitor into a prospect.

How can you create content that engages your audience? 
Compelling content is created when you take the time to understand your buyer’s persona.  Who exactly are you trying to reach? Write for them first and then the search engines.  Start by specifically thinking about who would buy your product or service. For me I am talking to you, the business owner who needs help with their online marketing.  That’s why my blogs are filled with tips to help you become more marketing savvy.  My website, my blog and my twitter account have you in mind.  If you are having trouble thinking of what to write? Read this ebook by hubspot to give you some great content ideas.

But what about ranking in the search engines? Now that you’ve got your reader engaged, time to make sure you content is optimized for the search engines. The key to optimization is in long tail keywords. Creating a keyphrase will help you gather your leads attention in search engines and weed out the traffic you don’t want.  The more specific your keyphrases are, the better chance you will have of driving the type of traffic you would want to your website. For example, when I moved back to New Hampshire from Rhode Island I was looking for a salon.  Since my favorite hair color brand is Goldwell, I searched “Goldwell Color Salons in Southern New Hampshire”.  Do you see how specific I got?  I knew I needed a salon but I only wanted one that offered the Goldwell hair color line.  The more specific you get in your keyphrases the more quality traffic you will drive to your site. Remember to use analytic tools such as Concentrate to track and measure your success.

While an esthetically pleasing website is great to look at as a visitor, what will make or break your business is your content.  What will help you rank in the search engines is your content. What will create sales is your content.  Consider your content your businesses best friend.

Life’s a beach – don’t let the sunset on your marketing

Summer is always fleeting, so I tired to make the most of it.  I went on an awesome family vacation at Lake Winnesquam in New Hampshire, picked up some new clients and got Inbound Marketing Certified.  However there is something big and gaping that I left out as I basked in the summer sun - I stopped blogging. I can even remember the moment I stopped.  I was sitting on the porch of my families vacation home, looking out onto the lake with my third blog post drafted on my laptop and instead of proofing and publishing I got caught up in the moments that made this summer so great. You might be thinking – this girl needs to relax; she took two months off not a big deal. Well, taking time off from any marketing efforts shouldn’t be treated lightly. Here are some reasons why:

Too much time off requires much more effort to come back.  Seriously.  I have thought about this writing this blog for at least a month.  I kept saying to myself, “OK, here is the idea, now tomorrow I will execute it and then proof my other blog.” If you hear that voice ignore it, in fact tell it where to go! Instead, do what you can in that moment, even if you create a skeleton of what you want to do it’s better than nothing and might just get you doing more.

Loss of web traffic.  Creating fresh and relevant content should be a key strategy in turning web traffic into leads.  If your not creating targeted content for your buyer persona, how would you expect to found?  The more keyword rich content you produce, will help you gain better results with the search engines and your audience. In my instance, I kept tweeting (less frequently of course) and made subtle updates to my site but my blog is where I really am creating my rich content so that should have been my main focus.

You disengage your audience. When I see the last time someone wrote a blog was months ago (shame on me!), hasn’t tweeted in weeks, or has a copywrite on their website from 2009 I start to think – this person either doesn’t know what they are doing, gave up or doesn’t care about their personal branding.  Once you start to lose your audience it’s difficult to get them back and I hope for the most part my audience is ready to bear with me and pick up where we last left off.

This blog is as much as a lesson learned, as it is an apology and a begging for forgiveness! The summer was great, but when it comes to branding you need to keep up and keep ahead of the competition. If moments come up when you feel overwhelmed, too busy or having too much fun to keep up with your marketing efforts consider the above.

If your stuck on what to write try thinking of what is going on around you and how you can turn it into a story worth sharing with your audience, this should keep you blogging without an extended absence. Now that I have gotten through this blog I must say it’s good to be back!

How to choose your the right social media for your business

In the wonderful world of social media marketing it is easy to get lost. You will hear from people, “You need to be on every social media platform.” Every social media platform? Good luck keeping up with that!It's better to use social media platforms you understand and that help you create conversations with your audience.  I use Twitter, LinkedIn, Coroflot and this blog you are reading now to reach my professional network. I prefer to stay away from Facebook, as I have used the application since it was only available to college students and I view it as my personal networking that I like to keep to just friends. Marketing strategist and Public Speaker, David Meerman Scott gives an excellent reasoning himself as to why he doesn’t use LinkedIn.

What social media is right for your brand? Here are some considerations:

Know your audience and what social media they use. Is your audience on Facebook? Are they tweeting or checking in via foursquare? Do they like to read blogs full of industry tips? Do they watch how to videos or enjoy a good viral video in general? Find out where they are and speak to them. You’re using social media to engage your audience, so make sure you are choosing relevant places to make a connection.

Figure out how much time and effort you want to spend on social media. Are you prepared to commit to a blog if you start one? Will you keep up Facebook posting or answer to people writing on your wall? Social media is not a set it and forget it type of marketing solution. Creating a social media presence and not keeping up with it is just as disengaging as not having a presence at all. Scope out the time you will need to put into your social media, if it is too much consider hiring someone to work on and build your social media brand.

Don’t use social media as a channel to just talk about your products and services. Social Media Marketing is about reaching out to your audience and having conversations with your customers. By having constantly inundating your network with a one-way conversation about your products and services you will lose your audience. Smart marketers and business people know that no one cares about your products and services but you. Sounds harsh, but it is true. What consumers do care about is how your product or service is going to better them. Creating blogs that offer solutions to your customers’ problems, creating polls and/or contests via Facebook and offering specials via twitter to your loyal followers are some great ways to connect and create clientele.

Use social media to create networks. Engaging with customers and moving them along your sales process should be your number one priority, but networking via social media marketing should be another goal taken into consideration. Networking via LinkedIn, Corflot and Twitter has helped me connect with some great designers, marketers and companies that I probably wouldn’t have found on my own.

According to comScore, an average person spends 14% of their time online on social media sites and those number are rising. With that being said it's time to come up with a social media strategy. Where will your brand be found?

6 things every small business should consider before doing a daily deal

Recently Groupon filed for IPO, this has opened up a whole slew of press while they are in their “quiet phase” especially on the hot topic of how Groupon does not benefit merchants. While taking much heat from bloggers, business owners and press, daily deals can benefit a merchant when used strategically.  Here are some things to consider when deciding if a daily deal is right for your business:

Know what you can afford to lose. With any deal or coupon your objective is to take a short term hit to make a long-term profit and gain new clientele.  Try to figure out how much you are willing to use as “FREE” advertising.  Keep in mind that this “FREE” advertising comes with a commission fee. For example, Social Living requires a minimum of 50% off any deal you are about to offer.  If they require 50% off and then split the profit with you in half it’s pretty much like you are offering a discount at 75% off – is your budget prepared for this?  

The deal is on! Be prepared. If you’re offering a rock bottom deal on a service, make sure your prepared to handle the amount of business your about to get.  Are you staffed properly and is your deal manageable without sacrificing customer service?  Do you have enough product to service everyone who has bought a voucher?  Consider a cap if you think you can’t handle the high spike in volume. Remember the focus should be on gaining new and loyal customers, but if you don’t prepare properly you will do the exact opposite.  

Have a plan of action. Understanding what strategy you want to go for increases the success of your daily deal experience.  Are you looking for new clientele or to spread your business name? Take for example a dentist offering tooth whitening, I would hope he or she is looking to spread his name as the chances for someone coming back after the service are rare. Chances are if you through a deal too cheap you will get an influx of one-time customers. 

Be analytical. The great thing about social deals is you know the ROI better than you would with print advertising.  In a recent TechCrunch article, Carey Friedman breaks down how he tracked the success of his Groupon campaign.  Friedman used analytics to determine that 70% of his Groupons were new customers and over half of them turned into repeat customers.  He reviewed the checks of each Groupon user to determine how they spent and how his staff was treated.  Using analytics enables you to track the success or failure of your campaign.

Go the next level with your customers. Make sure to somehow sneak a call to action in your deal.  You want your customers to continue to be interested in you. I suspect by doing a social deal, you participate in social media marketing.  You can offer a satisfaction survey with customers, not only will you find out the success of your campaign but you can also implore your customers to sign up for a newsletter and follow you on a social platform such as facebook and twitter.

Know your local laws. Did you know in the state of Massachusetts gift certificates have a 7-year expiration date? Neither does Groupon merchants, who usually give a 6 month expiration date on Groupons.  Most people don’t know this either, but a savvy consumer or business owner from another state will.  Not being aware of consumer protection laws can hurt your business in the long run and make social deal sites offer refunds on deals.

There are many social deal successes and many social deal failures; like many forms in marketing it’s all in how you use it.

6 Ways Marketing is like Dating and how not to miss the mark!

Flipping through a magazine on my Florida bound flight; I came across an advertisement for It’s Just Lunch, a dating service for busy singles. The headline immediately caught my eye: “Great guys and women don’t circle around your block waiting for you to come out of your house. You’ve got to market yourself.” The dating scene is much like marketing. Take a look at 6 ways marketing mirrors dating and how you can learn from it.

No one is looking for you if you don’t put yourself out there.  Let’s face it – if you don’t promote yourself or your company, how will anyone know you’re out there?  In dating you might try meeting someone through a friend, going to a party and/or using an online dating service.  With marketing, you would use referrals, networking events and social media to help build up your brand.

Stand out in a crowd.  The singles scene is tough.  You have to go the extra mile to prove you’re worth a second date.  Now picture your brand, you’re looking for that certain someone, whether they be a buyer, a job prospect or a new client; you’ve got to do something that sets you apart from your competition. Risk free trials, webinars, eBooks and relevant content are ways to set you apart from your competition.

First appearances mean everything. We’ve all heard the phrase, “don’t judge a book by its cover.” Can you honestly say you follow that advice? I’ve had friends try to set me up on a date with their friends. They give me the name and I go instantly to facebook, if I don’t like what I see I’m all set.  The same thing goes for when I am looking for a new product or service. I start by going to Google, entering a key phrase and looking at websites.  If a website doesn’t look appealing content or design wise; I click back to Google and continue my search.

Clear communication is essential.  Would you go on a second date with a person who gives you basic answers to your questions?  Now think about your marketing materials. Is your marketing content generic or engaging? Do you clearly convey to your audience how your product or service can help them? If your marketing isn’t clear, your brand might tend to be staying in the singles scene.

Don’t lose yourself trying to please someone.   You never want to come off being someone you’re not on a date, the truth will eventually find its way to the forefront. Same goes for your business, don’t lose site of your brand trying to appeal to a demographic; it will just come off as false and disingenuous.

Face your fears.   Everyone fears rejection, whether it’s a first date or your first meeting.  You must conquer your fears to be successful. Take your fears and use them as challenges to only make you and your business smarter.

Marketing is tough, but if you’ve lived the singles scene I’m sure you’ll be just fine!