Marketing Your Business: The Neighborhood Approach

A Fresh Outlook to Alleviate the Confusion of Search Engine Marketing & Search Engine Optimization

Introduction

We have several websites that we maintain for ourselves and clients, so we are barraged with emergency notices from vendors that this website or that one is in need of SEO. And from their perspective, yes, they could use some; however, we think about more than the search result ranking when it comes to our sites. Result Ranking is highly weighted as one of the more important desired outcomes, which is why SEM & SEO are the current trends in strategic marketing. We prize their value as well, but we use these techniques as tactical tools, not strategically.

Strategic & Tactical Marketing Considerations

When you design and implement your marketing plan, the first thing you must decide is what you are selling. Most of us are selling goods, services, or both. This is critical to ascertain, especially with regards to the idea of Search Engine Results Rankings and clicks on your website. Just a mere “click” on a website can become a  product if you can cause an enormous number of clicks to happen in a short period of time, monetizing it through basing your Revenue Stream on traditional Advertising Models, certain number of impressions (=clicks) equals a particular cost to the advertiser. In this Advertising Model, as with a magazine’s circulation, what economically matters is the number-of-eyeballs on an ad. Here your objectives are to get any click on your page from anyone, stay for a certain amount of time, and that is it. This subordinates your content to bait-on-a-hook status where you do not care what your content is or what it says, just as long as it relevant enough to get a click.

Relevant enough? For what? Enough for the search engines to determine whether or not to put it at the top of the Organic Results for any reason and for anyone. Huffington Post is a good example of this. They create little of their own source content, but they are master curators of others’ content. To them, it does not matter that someone with or without cancer clicks on an abstract of a currently circulating article/subject on, say, some new research and product that helps. They delivered their value proposition to their customer segment when the page was clicked-on or a sponsored ad was clicked-through. This is SEM & SEO on steroids, and a business model in and of itself.

Wrap-up

The following posts will not be about the strategic seo gaming, although some of it is necessary and helpful. We will explore the business owners’ opportunities to seize control of their own business marketing and have the marketing investment dollar return ten-fold in new access to the targeted customer segments.

In simple terms, if you are a Locksmith with a shop in Long Beach and take great pride in your 24-7 Emergency Services within a 25-mile radius. Unless you have invented a new bullet-proof locking mechanism that you want to sell to anyone, your primary revenue streams lie within your 25-miles service area. You only deliver your value proposition when you make that service call or counter sale at the shop. So do not pay for advertising, marketing and promotions dollar for anything outside your territory. If you are good and authoritative, you will earn that fame just by being dynamite in your own market.

So next time, we will talk about drilling down to what it is that you do or what your product does and your strategic marketing plan. We will start by clearly identifying what you do that directly benefits your customer segment(s).

Be sure to bookmark us or add us to your RSS feed for more installments of this post and other good stuff.  

Social Media Marketing for Special Events

One of the topics near and dear to our hearts here at Tenth Muse Creative is Social Media Marketing for Special Events.  Our next series on this blog is on why social media marketing is important and how it can help you stretch your event marketing dollars.

Events are a shared spectacle, a form of social entertainment - a group of people comes together to experience a unique social opportunity. Using social media within this social setting is almost a no-brainer!  Because understanding how powerful social media can be is so important, we really want to focus on sharing and what makes social media social.

The actual origins of the Internet was as a space for users to exchange information, and that is still true today. The Internet is more than just a place to prop up your online brochure (website), it is where your event attendees socialize and exchange information.  The point of using social media for event marketing is for event producers to participate in the exchange – before the event – during the event - and after the event.

Social media for event marketing is NOT about blasting out a link to your website and reminding people about your event date. Social media marketing is about engaging your audience and making them a part of your marketing efforts through User Generated Content and information sharing.  When you use social media correctly, your event fans become a part of your marketing strategy, not just a digital audience who is already awash in marketing messages, most of which they are ignoring in favor of user generated social marketing.

People who engage in social media are going to drive the “conversation” about your event, they are going to blog it, tweet it, post it, and share their impressions with other social media users. Social media users are the PR department you didn’t know that you had! If you work with your social users and engage them, they will deliver your messaging far more effectively and to more people than traditional advertising. When you engage social users, you are joining in the dialog, you are providing them with content that can be shared with other users and you are building relationships with people who like to share – and there are no better relationships to build than those.

 Our next series of posts is going to look at social media platforms and how to engage your event attendees to create dynamic pre-event social interaction and during-event social opportunities that will vastly increase your event attendee enthusiasm and create a long tail marketing buzz.

Don’t forget to bookmark us as we dive into the pool of social media marketing for your special event!

Small Business Branding 101 – Lesson 2 What do you do?

When we look deeper into Small Business Branding and Marketing, we find more and more questions to be answered that helps us craft our Small Business Marketing Plan.  The next question we consider is What Do You Do?  

We know What Business You Are In now, so what exactly do you do in that business? Today we will take a page from well-known sales guru BrianTracy and take an in-depth look at what you do. 

When a new contact asks “what do you do?” your answer needs to be framed around the benefit to the customer, because the reality of people is that they are mostly interested in what the benefit is to them. If you can provide them with a benefit they desire, suddenly ears perk up and you have an interested prospect. 

The wrong way to answer the question:

New Contact: “What do you do?”

You: “I’m a Chiropractor.”

Yawn. There’s no engagement here. There is no way for you to tell automatically whether this person you are talking to is really interested in your product/service. 

The right way to answer the question:

New Contact: “What do you do?”

You: “I help people achieve better health and increased physical mobility.”

Here is where you determine whether you have a new contact who is a potential customer. The potential customer will notice a benefit to him/her in the form of better health and physical mobility. If they are interested in those benefits, you are most likely going to get a positive response asking for more information.

New Contact: “Really? How do you do that?” 

Now you get to detail your service/product offerings to an engaged prospect who has demonstrated an interest in the benefits you can provide. 

As we keep reminding you, people don’t buy products, they buy solutions to problems.

Sell the solutions. 

Small Business Branding 101 – Lesson 1

After struggling a great deal with direction for where we want to go and what we want to accomplish with this blog, I think where I really want to dig in is two areas: conversations and branding. Logic suggests that it would be best to start with branding, since it’s hard to have a conversation about your business if you don’t really know what business you’re in – right?

So, today we will kick off with branding for small business and we are going to start from the beginning, because if your small business has been around for a while, it probably needs a brand refresh for the digital age. There are enormous advantages out there to small businesses that re-align their brand to who they really are and how customers/clients can expect to be treated, and those advantages shine their brightest when it comes to marketing your brand through social media.

Before we can market, we need to know what product/service we are selling. So, where do we start?

What Business are You in?

What do you do? What benefit do your customers receive from your company?

I read an article recently that quoted Theodore Levitt (Marketing Myopia) which discussed that in the 20th century, railroads lost out to air travel because they thought they were in the railroad business when instead they were actually in the transportation business of moving people and goods from point A to point B.  Frankly, you see this all time. You can see it happening right now in the movie industry, which is myopically focusing on the idea that they are in the DVD distribution industry when they are actually in the entertainment industry. When your company focuses on the wrong parts of what you do, customers notice because attention to the real business slacks.

Knowing what business you are in is the #1 element to branding. What do you really do for your customers?

• Get their car running again? 
• Prepare meals for them? 
• Provide them with tools?

What you ultimately do is solve a problem for them. Your customer needs lunch; your food service business provides it for them. A guy needs a new tire and you solve his transportation problem and get him back on the road. When you realize what business you are really in, it opens up all kinds of opportunities for solving your customers’ problems.

What problem does your business solve?

What benefits does your business provide to the customer?

One of our clients in the beauty industry recently realized that he isn’t in the Beauty Industry, he’s in the business of making people feel better about themselves. When you change up your direction like that, now you’ve got something to market. Market the benefit to the customer – because that’s really what the customer is interested in.

The benefit you provide is the business you are in.

Using Social Media to Engage your Customers

A lot of small businesses are entering the world of social media to help build their businesses and increase revenue as our economy begins a slow recovery. This is a very exciting time to be joining the online conversation as this is one area where a small business has just as much advantage as a larger one. Our mission here at Tenth Muse Creative is to help small businesses navigate the waters and enter this wonderfully level playing field.

First, let’s be clear: social media is not a one-way conversation where your business attempts to sell via posting links to your website. What your customers (both existing and potential) want is a dialog with your company. What customers want to know is how can you help them solve their problems? You need to start this process by listening to what their problems are! It is long-standing wisdom in business that people don’t buy products or services, they buy solutions to problems. You need to know the problems so you can solve them for your customers. 

So, over the next few blog posts we are going to take a closer look at conversations and how to engage with social media. 

Our formula for engaging customers:

1. Find the right channel. Where is the right place to have a conversation with your customers?
2.  Listen. People will tell you almost anything you want to know, if you would only listen.
3. Look for places to contribute. Can you answer a question? Solve a problem (without selling!)? Take the opportunity to build your reputation as the Answer Person.     
4. Don’t sell. Nothing is a bigger turn off for most people than being sold to. What you want to be is a problem solver, not another advertiser yelling “click me, click me!”

We will cover each of these steps in the formula over the next couple of days; today we want to focus mostly on what it means to engage. When you engage you are having a back and forth dialog, something we used to call relationship building. Find common cause with your customers, find their problems, help them find solutions; celebrate their victories for they are yours as well.

When you engage with your customers in a conversation, you become part of their community and build goodwill. Being a part of the community is what good citizens and businesses do; it engenders not only respect but loyalty as well. 

Engage in Conversations With Your Customers

What business doesn’t want the benefits of respect and loyalty from their customers?  We know yours does!