Grow Your Business With Facebook Marketing

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Facebook Marketing

Facebook For Business

I admit that I have been skeptical about the true value of Facebook to marketers. While the free ride for businesses may be over, Facebook has improved their system to make advertising on the platform a marketer’s dream.

Facebook Marketing for Business
Facebook offers one of the greatest opportunities for your business to reach a lot of people. More importantly, it provides the capability to specifically target certain types of people (demographically) segmented by their interests (Personas).

Wow! We actually get to apply what we learned about target marketing. Yet, it’s a understatement to say Facebook is a difficult platform to master. This is because business marketing on Facebook is a moving target.  However, if you adapt, are willing to commit advertising dollars and put in the content creation effort, Facebook can provide big rewards. Continue reading →

Do Men Count?

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I really enjoy reading marketing trade journals. I learn something from each issue. The articles provide amazing insight and the authors really get me thinking.  Yet, I have a question;  Do men count?

In most contemporary marketing articles the authors refer to any customer interaction as when “she” views or “her” preferences. They use the female pretense to indicate any kind of human interaction. I guess from their view, men must not spend money or only spend on beer and sporting events.  Men just work and hand over their paycheck to the wife who goes online and spends?  The problem with this view is that America has changed.  According to the latest U.S. Census, the percentage of married-couple households with children under 18 has declined to 23.5% of all households.  Sounds like quite a few independent guys and single dads out there to me.

Ok, enough jokes. Let’s find the truth;
A show of hands…How many men in the audience spend money?
Continue reading →

What is Content Marketing for Small Business?

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Early last year Google gave a gift to the small business community. The search engine now places more importance on fresh, unique content than mysterious SEO coding techniques to your rank website for search results.

How does this impact your business? It means “Content Marketing” has arrived as the method of choice to grow your customer base. Content Marketing can be loosely defined as a consistent and methodical posting of articles, images or video on your business website, blog, social media platforms and as a guest author on other related blogs or websites.

For the first time in recent history, small businesses who sell a service or skill have the advantage over large corporations with the ability to communicate genuine knowledge and experience. Large corporations generally have someone significantly removed from the front lines (if not entirely outsourced) creating their content. How can someone from the outside know your business as intimately as you? They can’t—you have the advantage. Continue reading →

Examining Internet Marketing for Small Business

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Before the Internet, growing a small business was generally limited by the number of people in your area code. The phone book, local newspaper and radio were your main advertising venues. WOW! Have things ever changed. When was the last time you went to the phone book to find a business or called a company from an ad in the local newspaper? Unless you’re a plumber, the way to grow a small business is to build your Internet presence to get the word out.

The good news is that the Internet provides the opportunity to reach many more people than your local media! The even GREATER news is that Continue reading →

If you could only choose one form of small business marketing which would it be?

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If you only choose one form of small business marketing which would it be?
SEO?   Blogging?   Facebook?   Google Pay-per-Click?

Of course that’s a trick question! – Gone are the days when small business marketing consisted of taking an expensive ad in the phone book (that you were stuck with for an entire year) and pulling weekly ads in the local newspaper. It was a simpler time indeed!

Relevant small business marketing campaigns of today are always “multi-channel” involving fresh content on your website, business blog, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and sending a regular email newsletter. Continue reading →

Content Creation for Targeted Marketing Outcomes

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Potential customers landing on your website from natural search is the lifeblood of most small businesses. For many years, adding a few choice keyword phrases on your web pages in strategic areas (a.k.a. SEO) was the key to fame and riches. Now Google says SEO tactics have been depreciated in favor of posting new content on a regular basis. In essence, what they are saying is that you need to post new content to your website on a regular basis to have any chance of placing well in their search returns.

You can either complain this is just one more thing you have to do, or you can view this as an opportunity to focus on the marketing outcomes you want to achieve. Continue reading →

Smart Content Marketing for a Small Business

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I had a nice chat with a home improvement guy about small business marketing. He needs more business and was disappointed he wasn’t getting more leads from his small business website. I spoke about content marketing and how creating articles on a regular basis filled with his insight, knowledge and experience and posting it on his website or business blog and promoting it on a few chosen social media will help the website place better in search and own more online real estate and have a larger audience. He sighed, “so I have to become a publisher too?” Unfortunately, the answer is yes. Continue reading →

Client Personas — Who are you marketing to?

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Who are you marketing to?

Using the concept of “Personas” can help you determine Who, What, Where and When you should market to your most likely customer prospects. Here are key questions that must be answered to develop a Client Persona.

• Who is your average client?
• Men, women or both?
• Are they young, middle‐age or seniors? Continue reading →

Predictive Data Marketing Analysis

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It seems every couple months or so someone coins a new phrase to describe some vague interpretation of a marketing trend and we all jump on-board. Take the term Big Data. There is no shortage of experts extolling the value of big data. I get it. Really I do. I too want to know exactly who is searching on my website so I can hound them on their social networks, stand out in front of their Elks Club hall for a chance to speak to them or I will re-marketing to them on each website they view until they buy my stuff. If that fails, I will have their phone records, so I can just assign them to a telemarketing outfit to robo-call them 10 or 20 times. My marketing campaign will be: If you buy…I’ll stop! Continue reading →