Tag: small business marketing strategy

Categories
Sales & Marketing

3 Steps to Crafting Your 2012 Marketing Plan

There’s no question you can start and grow a business without a marketing plan. However, I can tell you from personal experience, if you’re feeling stuck and can’t get to the next level, it’s probably because you never took the time to put a marketing plan together.

Having a marketing plan really is the key to growing and sustaining a successful, profitable business. Otherwise all you’re doing is winging it, and winging it only takes you so far.

So if you’re ready to craft your 2012 marketing plan but you’re not sure where to start, read on — I’m going to walk you through 3 steps to get you there.

1. Start with the end goal. If you don’t know where you’re going, then you really don’t need a plan. (And it’s impossible to plan without knowing where you want to end up anyway.)

It’s probably easiest to start with the money. How much do you want to make in 2012? Write that down. You probably also want to divide it up into monthly or quarterly goals so you know how much you need to make each month or quarter to reach that goal.

Now figure out how you’re going to make that monthly or quarterly figure. How many of your products/programs/books/service packages do you need to sell to hit that number? Write all that down too.

2. Put the big blocks in place. In order to meet your quotas are you going to need to do some launches? Put those in first. Or is there something else you need to do to get clients or customers? (Attend networking events, host teleclass, etc.) Make sure those are all accounted for before you do anything else.

Once you’ve put in the big blocks, take a moment and eyeball your calendar. Is it packed with launch after launch? Or do you have hardly anything in there? Check that it’s balanced — you want to have enough launches or big marketing events in there to generate some visibility and momentum for your business but you don’t want so many you feel exhausted and overwhelmed just looking at your calendar.

3. Fill in the details. Marketing is a dance — a dance between promoting and giving. Creating and building relationships then harvesting those relationships. You need to make sure you have all both things covered. (And if you’re wondering what I mean by marketing activities that create and build relationships, I’m talking about doing things like an ezine or answering people’s question on Facebook — content-rich activities that don’t obviously lead to a promotion.)

You may also want to take the time to actually fill in the actual launch steps. When are you doing the preview call? When do you want the emails to go out? When are you going to have all the copy written?

The more specific plan, the easier it’s going to be to execute. Not only will you know exactly what you’re supposed be doing at all times but your team will be able to help you a lot easier.

Categories
Business Ideas

3 Steps to Starting the New Year on The Right Foot for Your Business

There’s no better time to take stock of your business than the time between the end of one year and the beginning of the next. It’s “out with the old, in with the new” and that includes out with anything that isn’t serving you or your business at the highest level, and in with what you want your business to look like.

To help you get on track for the fresh New Year and all it’s possibilities, I thought I’d share 3 simple steps to get you and your business started on the right foot.

1. Start by cleaning out the old year. Are you surrounded by stacks of papers or old files? Now is the time to clean those up and make room for all the new business and opportunities that are bound to come your way (unless there’s no room for them).

What about old products or programs? Is everything you’re offering in your business still a good fit? Or maybe there’s something you’ve outgrown or doesn’t work with your brand anymore?

And don’t forget to look at your mindset or your habits. What are you still not doing you know you should be? What habits or blocks are you finally ready to ditch for good?

Get it all out there. Write everything down you want to throw out with the old year. Then you may want to destroy it — burn the paper or shred it. Remember, this is all about clearing away what you don’t want or don’t need anymore.

2. Be grateful for what you HAVE accomplished. Now that you’ve gotten rid of the old and worn out, don’t forget to take a moment and write down everything you’ve accomplished last year. What are you grateful for? What are you most proud of? It’s time to celebrate your accomplishments — take the time to do this. (If you’re anything like me, this is the first thing to go. It’s difficult for me to celebrate anything, I’m constantly looking at all the things I WANTED to do and didn’t.)

3. Now, get set up for the New Year. Some of the things I do include getting my new calendar in place and writing down my goals in it. Then I put together a marketing and promotional plan for the year so I can reach those goals.

You also may want to take some time to lay out a plan for getting rid of those blocks. Is there a program you need to buy? A coach you need to hire? Or maybe there’s something you need to implement. (Ditto for the changing those habits — what do you need to do to ditch those old habits that no longer serve you for good?)

Now, when you set up a plan, make sure you do what many people do when training their dogs — set yourself up for success. Create the plan with your success in mind. Don’t make it so overwhelming or paint yourself in a corner so there’s no way for you to succeed. Push yourself but be realistic too. There’s no shame in taking small steps toward your goal — the only shame is making yourself feel bad because you didn’t give yourself a realistic plan to meet your goals.

And, whatever you do, don’t forget to celebrate! You deserve it.

Categories
Sales & Marketing

3 Simple Steps to Marketing Even If You Hate Marketing

Of all the things entrepreneurs struggle with, this one is probably the most difficult and most dangerous. Why? Because it directly impacts the success of your business.

I know I’m not revealing any big eye-opening secret when I tell you that if you don’t regularly and consistently market your business, your business won’t grow. I know you know this. But none of that helps you when you hate marketing. (In fact, it probably makes you feel even worse, doesn’t it?)

So what did you do? Here are 3 steps to get you started (hint — these work even if you love marketing):

1. Find a marketing strategy or tactic you enjoy. There are LOTS of ways to market yourself, I guarantee at least one of them you will like doing. Your job is to find it and then build your main marketing strategy around it. Here’s a list of a few marketing activities to get you thinking:

a. Writing — blogs, articles, etc.

b. Speaking — live, on teleclasses/webinars/livestream, or even podcasts

c. Being interviewed on radio or television

d. Video

e. Chatting with people via social networking

At least one of those should resonate with you.

Once you figure out your favorite marketing activity, the next step is to build your marketing strategy around that activity. (More on that in step 3 but first…)

2. Outsource what you hate to do. The problem is no matter how much you may love one marketing activity, there are probably other essential activities you don’t love quite so much (hence why you probably hate marketing to begin with). So the trick is to build your marketing plan around what you enjoy doing then you outsource the other pieces you don’t enjoy.

Sounds pretty easy when I put it that way, eh?

Okay so what if you have no one to outsource to and you’re worried about cash flow. My advice is to take a deep breath and find someone. Look, outsourcing your marketing is the easiest way to see a return on your investment — if you start consistently marketing your business that money WILL come back to you.

Start by looking at your budget. See what you can put aside each month for marketing help. Then find someone who can do the tasks you need done in that budget. You might not be able to get everything done, but prioritize what’s most important (i.e. what you’re going to see a return on your investment the fastest) and focus on that.

3. Start small and build from there. Yes I know there are lots of marketing activities out there you could be doing, and the more marketing you do the better your results. However, that doesn’t mean I want you try getting everything done tomorrow.

Here’s the minimum of what you need to have a successful, growing business — one main lead source bringing leads into your business and one main way of converting those leads into customers and clients. That’s really it (at least for the marketing side). You get that nailed down and the rest will come.

And here’s some examples of how this can look:

1. Lead source (speaking, blogging, videos, interviews, social networking)

2. Lead cultivating (ezine, free calls)

See how simple this can be?

And to take this one step further, let’s say you love speaking and hate writing. You can focus on speaking and hire a virtual assistant to take care of putting an ezine out for you.

Voila! Marketing plan built around your strengths and outsourcing your weaknesses.

Then once you have that nailed down you can start adding more marketing activities to the mix. Before you know it, you’ll find you have built up an amazing marketing system that’s feeding your business (and better yet, you may discover you don’t mind marketing quite as much as you thought you did).

Categories
Planning & Management

What Do You Do When You Lose Your Mojo? 3 Tips

It happens. For many of us entrepreneurs, our business is built around us. So when we get tired, stressed, overwhelmed, burnt out or lose our mojo, our business suffers. And when that happens, it can impact us in all sorts of negative ways.

So when we do lose our mojo, what can we do to get it back? Here are 3 tips to help you out:

1. Take care of yourself so it doesn’t happen in the first place. Okay, I realize if you’re already suffering from burn  out and have lost your mojo this isn’t going to help you much, but for the rest of you (and once you’ve gotten your mojo back) this is where you need to start.

So, when I say take care of yourself, I mean more then eating well and getting enough sleep (although it can certainly mean that). What I mean is you have to do things that “fill the well.” That’s more of a creativity expression — if you don’t do things that feed your creativity and fill the well, the well of creativity will run dry and then you’ll be in a fix. But it’s the same concept for you as an entrepreneur.

Basically two things are going on as an entrepreneur — along with doing all those fun things that use up the well of creativity (or well of passion or whatever makes sense for you) you also end up doing things that aren’t your strengths. So, as an entrepreneur, you actually run the risk of burning out from two different sides — emptying the well and draining yourself from doing tasks you hate. (This is why so many entrepreneurs struggle with losing their mojo and burning out, because they don’t realize this is happening, they try and power through it and then it all blows up in their face.)

So what you need to do is take the time to do things that fill your well and feed your soul, plus try and eliminate the tasks you hate. (Honestly, there WILL come a time where you simply can’t do those tasks anymore and that’s a really bad place to be if you have no back up plan.) At the same time, you should do things that take care of your general health and well being — exercise, eat right, sleep more, go out with friends, read a good book, etc.

If you make a point of taking care of yourself and your needs, you should avoid this whole nasty business in the first place.

2. If you are stuck in burn out and have lost your mojo, be gentle with yourself. Look, you didn’t get here overnight and you’re not going to cure yourself overnight. So take a deep breath and know this is a process and you WILL recover, it just might take a little time. (Maybe more time than you want but it is what it is.) Beating yourself up and berating yourself is just going to make the healing process take that much longer.

3. Put together a plan. Start by taking some time off. Even if it’s a weekend. Or just one day. Try and get away from your office and your computer. If you can take a week off, better yet.

Now, if you only end up taking off a day or a weekend, you may still really not feel like being back when you open the door to your office, but remind yourself you’re being gentle and this is a process. I just want you to break the cycle you’re in and clear your head a bit. What you should do now is figure out what you need to be doing to feed your soul, fill the well AND take care of yourself. If you don’t know what those tasks would be, try a bunch of them out. (“The Artist Way” by Julia Cameron can really help fill the creative well if you want a place to start).

Also, take some time to start delegating those tasks you hate doing. Get them off your to-do list. The faster you can stop doing them, the faster you’re going to start feeling better.

And through it all, keep reminding yourself this is a process and it WILL get better, once you’re filled the well, feel better health-wise and get rid of the tasks that drain you.

Categories
Sales & Marketing

Spiders or Peeps? Why Writing for SEO Can Hurt Your Website Rankings

In my copywriting trainings, this topic invariably comes up. And usually it’s because I’m questioning my students’ choice of words on their websites or other online promotional copy.

“I chose that word because it’s a good SEO keyword,” they say.

Ah. It may be a good SEO keyword but it’s certainly not a good people word.

But before I get too far down this path, let me give you all a little background info. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. What that means is you make your website and other online copy “search-engine friendly” so the search engines will rank you high for your chosen keywords. (Like on the first page when someone does a search for that keyword.)

One of the main tactics used to optimize your site is to scatter your chosen keywords throughout your copy (the frequency and positioning seem to change depending on how close the Moon is to Jupiter so I’m not going to even go down this path today.)

Why do you want that? Presumably so you get more online visitors to your site.

On the surface, it makes sense. Your website ranks high on the first page when people do a search for your keywords, they see your website and click on the link.

Easy, right?

Well…

First off, SEO (like everything Internet-related) has changed. A few years ago, SEO made perfect sense. That WAS the main way people found things on the Internet.

However, with social networking taking the world by storm, and more people on Facebook and YouTube then Google, people using the search engines have dropped significantly.

Now, that’s not to say you don’t need to take the search engines into consideration. There’s no question people are still using the search engines. But their searching habits have changed. Now they’re more likely to search for you after hearing about you via offline methods (like newspapers, magazines, television, direct mail, speaking, meeting you at an event, etc.)

Of course, people will still do generic searches for keywords that relate to what you sell. But trying to get yourself on page 1 of those rankings can be really difficult. And with Google changing their algorithms every time the wind changes directions, you can be on Page 1 one day and knocked down to Page 20 the next. (Also known as the dreaded “Google Dance.”)

So what do you do?

Well, my thought is while optimizing is not a bad idea, I wouldn’t put too much energy into it. And I certainly wouldn’t put words that sounded weird or off to my ideal clients on my online materials even if they were strong keywords. (Look, if you’re going to do all this work to get your ideal clients to visit your site, do you really want to turn them off with bad writing and poor language choices?)

Google and all the other search engines are going to reward you if your website isn’t deceptive, offers great content, and the content changes regularly. If you do that, the search engines WILL like your site regardless of your SEO. (You might not end up on Page 1 but the search engines will regard you fondly and will probably not move you around too much during any dances.)

And the reality is, it makes far more sense to focus on other avenues for people to find you. Be active on social networking sites, post articles, upload video, blog more. All of these things will increase your visibility out in that wild world we call the Internet FAR more than simply focusing only on SEO.

And if you focus on those activities, then you can put your very best writing on your website — the kind of writing that will make your visitors eager to learn more about you and do business with you — instead of suffocating your copy with keywords that may make those very same visitors click away.