Tag: Customers
You can’t miss the doom and gloom of the current economic climate. All businesses, large and small, must carefully spend their marketing budget. Gone are the days of frivolous spending. So I wanted to outline five cost effective ways of spending your small business marketing budget. With online marketing become more and more vital as part of a small business marketing plan, there are many ways which small businesses can promote their business and help drive leads.
1. Blogging: Setting up a blog can be completely free! Yes, we love anything free. But like most freebies, in order for it to be effective you need to plan it well and invest your time into it. Using free blog providers like Wordpress and Google Blogger are great ways of getting involved in the blogging world, without costing you a penny. There are so many different benefits of blogging, one of the biggest benefits is to your websites ranking in the search engines (aka Search Engine Optimisation - SEO): Google loves new and unique content. Blogging is a great way to constantly add new content to your site. Plus your posts will be tagged and full of relevant keyword. Blog well and others in your industry may link to you, increasing the number of valuable inbound links. For more on the benefits of blogging, read this post: Blogging – just for teenagers, or good for your small business?
2. Twitter: Again, another freebie! Twitter is great for promoting what you do and learning about latest industry trends. By joining the conversation and providing useful information, you will soon generate a loyal base of followers. Use Twitter to answer questions relevant to your industry, learn about new goings on, promote your product, events and news (but don’t be pushy). For more information on using Twitter to promote your small business, read these blog posts: Twitter: Small Business Success Stories – Will yours be one of them? and Guide to Getting Your Small Business Started on Twitter
3. Email Marketing: Email marketing can cost as little as 1p per recipient and £5 per mailshot (well, those are the rates for using a self managed SMEketing Email Marketing solution, but we like to think these are pretty competitive!). If you don’t have time to maintain a close working relationship with your customer base, email marketing is a great, cost effective way of keeping them updated with your latest news, products and offers. Email marketing can also be used as a lead generation tool. Send out well targeted mailshots to relevant recipients and you will find visits to your web site go up, and conversion rates increase. For more information on the benefits of email marketing read this blog post: Email Marketing for Small Businesses
4. Google AdWords: These unfortunately are not free (we wish!), but you completely control your budget. If you only have £10 a day to spend, that’s fine! Make sure you get the most from your budget by using relevant keywords, focused adverts with a strong call to action, and a well thought-through landing page. Google AdWords can be a great way of driving relevant traffic to your site, and the results are completely measurable. If something isn’t working, you know straight away. This is why AdWords are one of the most cost effective advertising mediums out there. Add Conversion Tracking to your adverts and you’ll be able to see exactly what ad’s are providing the highest conversion rate once visitors are on your site. Once you know that, you can direct your budget to keywords and adverts that are giving you the highest Return on Investment (ROI).
5. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO): You know I said Google AdWords weren’t free, well there is a way that you can get Google to promote your site FOR FREE! How? Improve your website’s ranking for relevant keywords, and Google will display your site in their search results – free of charge! But again, this is something that will take an investment in your time. Make sure your website is well designed – good navigation, lots of keyword rich content, no broken links, good use of anchor text in your links, etc… Once that is done, you need to boost the number of high quality inbound links. Go to Yahoo and type “linkdomain:yourcompany.com -site:yourcompany.com” to see the number of your inbound links. Do the same for your competitors and see how you compare. Next create a plan to increase the number of incoming links – sign up to relevant directories, promote your blog, create great content on your site that people want to link to. Links should be from high quality sites – link farms are NOT GOOD! The page giving you a link should have few other outgoing links on the same page, and the anchor text should be optimised to promote what you do, not necessarily your business name. An example of a good link to SMEketing would be: “SMEketing is a fantastic source for small business marketing advice and services.” The anchor text here tells Google that the link (www.SMEketing.com) is relevant to “small business marketing”. If the anchor text fell on the business name, it would just tell Google that “SMEketing” is relevant to www.SMEketing.com – which to be fair, it probably had figured out anyway!
Read here for more SEO tips: Top 10 SEO Mistakes Your Small Business Should Avoid
If you want to learn more about any of the above marketing strategies, please get in touch. At SMEketing we’re experienced in all these marketing mediums and have seen first hand the benefits when small businesses employ such tactics.
July 1, 2009
This week’s blog topic is all about O2 and the new iPhone 3G S (current model is iPhone 3G, new model 3G S).
Apple unveiled the new iPhone 3G S at yesterday’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in San Francisco. Rumors of a new iPhone have been whirling around for months and months, so this came as no surprise. As detailed on the Apple website, the new features of the handset are:
- 2x Faster: The fastest iPhone ever. Load web pages, launch apps and more – faster
- Built in video camera: Shoot video, then edit it right on your phone
- Voice control: Use your voice to place a call or play music
- Compass: Let iPhone 3G S point you in the right direction
- Spotlight Search: Search across your iPhone from one place
- Messages: Send text, photos, videos and more
For those of us in the UK, the Carphone Warehouse and O2 will be supplying the phone to consumers from the 19th June 2009. However – anyone who already has an iPhone 3G (like myself) will face a huge charge if we want to upgrade.
There is limited information on the new iPhone 3G S on O2’s homepage; all current communication on the deployment of the new iPhone 3G S has come from their official O2 Twitter feed. From this, they announced that existing customers will have to buy themselves out of their existing contract, then purchase the new iPhone 3G S on a new contract. This is unlike the time of the previous iPhone 3G launch, where in order to make up for the disappointing performance of the first-generation iPhone, O2 allowed customers to break from their existing contract and upgrade for free.
For anyone who has a current iPhone 3G, the minimum their contract can have left is 6 months (for those who bought the iPhone 3G on the day of release, anyone else will have even longer). On a mid-sized contract of £35 a month, this equates to more than a £200 charge. Now many of you may think that this is pretty fair – why should people on an iPhone 3G contract get out of it, just because a new phone has been launched. And in a way you’re right – if I had a Nokia and Nokia released a new phone (which they do often), I would be laughed out of O2 if I demanded to be released from my contract just because I wanted the new version of my existing Nokia phone.
So why are O2 not repeating this offer of getting out of your contract for free – it’s because they know that they’ve got money coming in regardless. By forcing people with the current iPhone 3G to sit out their existing contract, they get a steady £35 (or whatever) a month from them. They can they can then provide new customers with the new iPhone 3G S, so their new stock of iPhone 3G S go on new customers, rather than existing ones. The iPhone is exclusive to O2 so we don’t have a choice. O2 know that even if they make current customers really, really angry – it’s tough. We can’t exactly take our business elsewhere.
But the problem here is that the majority of iPhone users are (or were) fiercely loyal to the iPhone – these are the people you saw on the news queuing up overnight to make sure they got their mitts on a new iPhone 3G on the day of release. And why did they do that?? Because O2 had allowed them to get out of their existing contract with the first-generation iPhone and just pay the money for the new phone alone. These people made the iPhone 3G (and in turn O2) a huge success. These are the people who blog about it, tweet about it and convince their friends that they can’t possibly live without one! But do you think these same people will be queuing round the block in the rain if they have to pay £200+ to get out of their contract, plus the £274.23 to buy the new phone?? We’re in a recession, and even the most avid of iPhone fans are unlikely to be willing to drop that amount of cash just for the prestige of having the latest iPhone (the new features really aren’t worth that much money, and anyone on with an iPhone 3G can get a software upgrade free anyway). And anyone who doesn’t already have an iPhone is unlikely to be mad enough about them to queue like that.
Another problem for O2 is that as well as the rumours of a new iPhone launch, there have also been rumours that other networks will soon be allowed to sell the iPhone. If this happens, O2 will soon find that all these unhappy iPhone 3G customer may well up sticks and leave to a provider that will be more competitive and who treat their customer with a bit more love and care. So by angering their existing iPhone 3G customers, O2 are taking a big risk.
So, watch the news on 19th June – will people be queuing outside (hopefully not in the rain – come on British summer!!) all night long to get their hands on the latest release? I doubt it – and if they are they’re probably actors/O2 employees etc, who’ve been paid to do it! I can just see the new launch being a flop – because O2 are alienating the people they need to make it a success.
The moral of this story? Just because you may have your customers held over a barrel, it doesn’t excuse you treating them badly. This is a lesson that can be applied to all businesses – large and small. If you’re a small business providing a service that no-one else does, or if you’ve got customers locked into a contract – it shouldn’t affect the way you treat them. Never assume that you can ignore them or give them a second rate service just because they have no choice. Customers are king as far as small businesses are concerned and you should treat every single one like gold-dust!
June 9, 2009
Heard of a little thing called Twitter? I hope so! At SMEketing in Hampshire, not a day goes past where we don’t read some kind of article on it. They’re not always positive articles – like most success stories, there are people who love it, and people who loathe it. But at the end of the day you can no longer ignore it. Twitter is here to stay, and it can help your small business.
How? Well, many of the articles I read surround success stories of Twitter – how it has directly helped businesses gain more customers. And you know what? They’re always small businesses – these are the people who are using Twitter to maximise their product/brand awareness and as a result are generating new businesses and boosting the spend of existing customers.
Here’s a couple of Twitter success stories:
Hubspot, a fantastic source for online marketing, recently wrote about the Kogi Korean BBQ taco truck in LA. They’ve been using social media, and in particular Twitter, with astonishing affect. They identified that their young, techno-savvy customers were using Twitter, so they got involved too. They now have a community of over 14,000 people. They used Twitter to broadcast the locations of their trucks, solicited new names for their trucks and are also designing new company t-shirts via their blog and Twitter. As a result, they now have constant queues of people, lining up to get their hands on one of their tacos. Considering the current state of the economy, that’s a pretty nice position to be in!
Another, well documented Twitter success story is that of CoffeeGroundz, a coffee shop that has credited Twitter with almost doubling their clientele! CoffeeGroundz owner, J.R.Cohen registered with Twitter and started following members of his local Twitterati (definition: the tweet elite, whose feeds attract thousands of followers and whose 140-character spews capture the attention of the rapt who doggedly monitor them) – he soon build up over 1000 followers. One day one of his followers called Sean, sent a direct tweet to Cohen, saying that “I want to pre order a bkfast wrap so I can zip thru drive thru to get back for gas man. C’est possible?”. Cohen replied straight away saying ‘Wi. What do you want on it?”. Ten minutes later Sean had been through the drive-thru and had picked up his breakfast wrap. This simple exchange generated a lot of buzz on Twitter, and was hailed as the first time a to-go order had ever been placed via the medium. Grasping the opportunity with both hands Cohen started taking to-go orders via direct messages from any of his Twitter followers.
CoffeeGroundz has also expanded on their Twitter success by hosting a Tweet-Up – an event where local Twitterers meet up to chat, network and generally get to know people better. Not only did this generate great PR for CoffeeGroundz, but they also kept the 100+ Twitterers well fed and watered – lining their pockets even further!
There are many examples of how small businesses are using Twitter for their advantage. It can be as simple as confirming an appointment, offering some advice, or just commenting on other people’s conversations. The point is that you can’t gain from the benefits if you’re not there. Twitter is perfect for small businesses – it doesn’t cost a penny, and it allows you to reinforce one of your key USPs – your individual character and personal touch to business.
What else can you use Twitter for?
- Understand your customers - by using Twitter polls, you can gain insight on your followers that can be fed back into business
- Form valuable business relationships - it’s not just your customers who are using Twitter. It’s likely that journalists and body representatives are using it too, so use if to build relationships with these key people
- Events and reporting - if you are hosting an event, create buzz about it by broadcasting details via Twitter
- Offer exclusive offers and promotions - offer discounts to Twitterers only
- Reputation management - use Twitter to make followers aware of your service levels, answer customer questions and engage i conversations about your offerings
If you’re still not sure if Twitter is right for your small business, come and talk to us at SMEketing. Based in Southampton, Hampshire, we can help you plan your Social Media Marketing campaigns to ensure you receive best possible results from your investment. Get in touch, even if it’s just for a quick bit of advice! Of course, you can always reach a SMEketer on Twitter – follow us at http://twitter.com/SMEketing
If you’re already using Twitter to great success then let us know. It’s always good to hear from small businesses that are doing well – especially in the current economic climate. Leave a comment at the bottom of the post…
For information and advice on setting up a Twitter account – stay tuned. This will be the subject of the next SMEketing blog post.
April 14, 2009
