Category: marketing

Business growth ideas: Grow your business

Business growth is always a priority

You land a few clients or customers (or more) and realize your service or product has value and potential. What’s the next step? No matter where you are in the process, business growth is always a challenge.

In 2009 I finished grad school. It was the Great Recession and there were zero jobs available. So I started an S-Corp for professional services. My first clients came from networking. My strategy was to connect with government organizations that didn’t have enough resources for a marketing team, and some small businesses that were still operating. I didn’t involve a clever social presence or website. In fact, I still do a terrible job of marketing myself, but that’s another story. I reached out to people and established myself while holding back fears and doubts about my networking skills. (Who doesn’t?)

Furthermore, I quickly learned I couldn’t rely on just one or two clients. As a result, I upped my outreach by launching a website, asking for referrals and spreading the word where I could; at networking events, online and face to face.

Most of all, no matter which tactics you employ, growing the business will most likely always be top of mind. It helps to begin with a goal in mind, a few objectives and a strategy. You will always be asking, “How can I get more clients or customers?

Let’s grow your business

First of all, this blog from a few years back has some great tips. Called 27 Low-Cost Ways To Grow Your Business, it has practical suggestions and a lot of them are the same I recommend to students and clients. If you need some more ideas, visit Marketing Resources and 5 strategies to start and grow a successful business with only $200.

In addition, the SBA is a great resource and here’s an article to get you started: 10 Tips to Help You Build and Grow a Stand-Out Small Business Brand thinking about whether your brand is ready for growth.

Finally, Reddit is another excellent resource – visit some of the subreddits: /r/entrepreneur, /r/growmybusiness and /r/startups

Buena suerte.

December 1, 2017
Marketing analytics: You need Neil Patel on your team

Marketing Analytics… and marketing in general

Here’s another recommendation for marketing analytics advice, and digital marketing in general.

Keep in mind that Neil Patel is an aggressive and effective marketer. He knows his way around analytics and digital marketing. You’ll notice a very different marketing approach from Avinash Kaushik when you visit his site. Whereas Mr. Kaushik takes a softer approach, Mr. Patel doesn’t hesitate to start marketing to you immediately. This is not a horrible thing, but you will get marketed to when you visit his site.

Get acquainted with Mr. Patel with a couple of helpful and informative blog posts:

How to Navigate Google Analytics Like a Pro (Way Beyond the Basics)

How to Get Actionable Data from Google Analytics in 10 Minutes

Don’t Lose Money: 5 Analytics Tools to Help You Fix Your Leaky Sales Funnel

Enjoy, and here’s to marketing with better metrics!

December 1, 2017
Digital marketing analytics: Avinash Kaushik

Digital marketing analytics on the web:

See how digital marketing analytics can better inform your work. Read Avinash Kaushik. His website/blog Occam’s Razor on analytics is excellent. Be sure to sign up for his newsletter in the lower right hand of his website.

Quotes:

“The interesting thing about averages is that they hide the truth very effectively.”

“Testing is the biggest no-brainer, and the killer of most stupid ideas… Testing is great because you can get the most important person’s opinion: the customer’s.”

“Web is perhaps the cheapest and most effective channel on the planet right now. No matter what you do you can do it cheaper, faster and more efficiently on the web.”

“Remember, a website is not a monolith that’s used by one type of people. Your job is to figure out what are all of the reasons that it exists for and find the best source to measure it.”

“The web is inherently complex, every bit of it… And it changes every day. The tool is not the answer, it’s the people. Buy the tool you want, but remember the 10/90 rule [$10k in software and invest $90k in great staff] and invest accordingly if you want to win.”

“On the web we all do a very poor job of understanding the customer needs and wants and thus their experience on our sites. …I am a fan of measuring Customer Satisfaction (were you satisfied with your experience on our site today), Primary Purpose (why are you here today) and Task Completion Rate (were you able to complete the task today).”

“If you want to have life-altering web site gains, those won’t happen because you have improved one page on your site or a set of single pages in a silo.”

“When you cross-breed a bunch of metrics to produce a hybrid ‘simple number’, the process, by design, hides insights, hinders the ability to understand performance, and almost never allows the management team to identify root-causes.”

“If you are not spending 30% of your time in 2013 with data, you’ll fail to achieve professional success.”

“Spend 95% of your time defining the problem and 5% of the time solving it.”

“We have so much data on the web, we dive into the the data ocean hoping that magically awesome things will follow. They never do.”

If you prefer the book:

Read Web Analytics 2.0: The Art of Online Accountability and Science of Customer Centricity

“I believe that most websites suck because HiPPOs create them. HiPPO is an acronym for the “Highest Paid Person’s Opinion.”
― Avinash Kaushik, Web Analytics 2.0: The Art of Online Accountability and Science of Customer Centricity

Finally, for more on Avinash Kaushik and digital marketing analytics on this site:

Analytics? Let’s defer to Avinash Kaushik

Yep, it’s another Kaushik post

November 23, 2017
Digital marketing needs to clean up its act

(Does) digital marketing need to clean up its act(?)

P&G’s Chief Brand Officer Marc Pritchard said what many digital marketers have been thinking for some time now. “The days of giving digital marketing a pass are over…It’s time to grow up. It’s time for action.” [We don’t] “want to waste time and money on a crappy media supply chain.”

Almost immediately after reading that, I came across an article, 10 Things I Hate About Digital Marketing by Jerry Daykin. Skeptically, he points out many of the potential pitfalls of digital.

What do you think?

“Digital is all around us and there’s never been a more exciting time in marketing. There’s also never been an easier time to completely waste your advertising budgets. Digital transformation is creating huge new opportunities to reach consumers and drive business objectives. But if you blindly believe everything you read in a marketing headline, or see presented on an event stage, you can easily be led astray.

[You might also like, “What are the Greatest Concerns for Marketers Now?”]

“The digital industry is sadly still full of misinformation, misguided gurus, false perceptions and perhaps even a few deliberate crooks. With so much constant change it’s hard for anyone to keep up. But in general, the traditional rules of marketing all still apply…”

In the same post: “The answer to how much content you need to make is nearly always dependent on how much you can afford to promote to a big enough audience. That’s why content isn’t really king, it’s a democratically elected president which can win hearts & minds only if it has enough of a campaign to get started.”

Read the rest of the post HERE.

February 8, 2017
Marketing Challenges: What are the greatest concerns for marketers?

I guessed number one of the marketing challenges correctly. See if you agree with this Hubspot post – updated to reflect recent business marketing research.
7 of the Top Marketing Challenges Marketers Face Today

Every marketer faces different challenges. Although we typically share similar goals, some teams are stuck on hiring top talent, while others are having trouble finding the right technology for their needs.

[Also, read, “Want to Create a Fantastic Social Media Proposal?”]

Whatever the case may be, there’s always at least one area that you can stand to improve. In other words, there’s always room to optimize the various components of your strategy and turn your marketing into an even more effective revenue generator.

Curious about what kinds of obstacles other marketers are up against?

To learn more about the challenges marketers face today, download the free 2016 State of Inbound report here.

We polled thousands of marketers on the challenges they face, as well as the tactics they’ve used to meet those challenges head-on. Here are some of the most common challenges marketers reported struggling with … and their solutions.

The Most Common Marketing Problems We Face, According to the 2016 State of Inbound Report

According to our report, generating traffic and leads and proving ROI are the leading challenges marketers face. Here’s a look at this year’s data:

Image Credit: The 2016 State of Inbound Report

Let’s go through each of these top challenges and how marketers can address them.

Read the rest HERE

Written by Lindsay Kolowich | @lkolow

December 10, 2016