Google Plus- Social Media Revamped

As of June 22, 1011, Google + had more than 20 million users. In order to get started with Google + you had to be invited and each new user was given 15 invitations. Currently you must find someone who has an invitation left over or request from Google that you be included once this initial test phase is complete. Google Plus.

What is Google+?

Google+ is Google’s attempt to compete in the social networking arena. There are many similarities to Facebook however some key differences give Google + the opportunity to dominate all social networking sites.

• Stream- The stream displays the activity of your friends. If you are familiar with Facebook’s news feed, navigating Google +’s Stream will be a breeze.
• +1- Google’s version of the Facebook Like button.
• Share Box- let your friends know what you are doing, identical to a Facebook status.
• Circles- Circles allow users a way to organize their friends into groups based on their similarities. Google + allows users to customize what each circle can view. For example you can share different information with work colleagues than your friends from college. The ability to limit content viewed and separate contacts is a large competitive advantage that Google+ has over Facebook.
• Sparks-A content recommendation engine that allows you to search for a subject and it will then display interesting articles and videos. Like a normal Google query, how this engine decides on what content to display is determined by a detailed algorithm.
• Hangouts- This is a video chat system that allows for a group of up to 10 people to communicate! It is a sophisticated system that recognizes who is talking and then displays that person on everyone’s computer screen. Additionally, this chat system allows for the group to watch YouTube videos together. Hangouts are different than traditional video chat systems because once you have established contacts in a Hangout it is an ongoing activity, people can stop in and chat whenever they see someone is available. It does not require an invitation and acceptance for each video chat session.

Google + for Businesses?

On July 6, 2011, Google announced that they are developing a platform for businesses to use however it will not be available for some time. Google does not want businesses creating accounts in Google+  right now and Google has been suspending business accounts when they are discovered.

It seems as if waiting for the Google+ business platform will be well worth while for business owners. There is buzz that the platform will incorporate tools such as Google AdWords and provide additional analytical data for business use. Google is now working with their marketing partners and determining how including brands will affect the Google + experience for users. Find out more here.

As a business owner, it’s hard to keep your focus on your customers and not your competitors when your competitors are nipping at your heels online and offline.  Any good business strategy online or offline, however, begins with understanding your customers’ needs and compelling them to take action (e.g. call you, buy your product, fill out a form etc).

A client of ours watches closely every competitor that enters her market. Rightly so, she’s nervous about losing clients to competitors at lower price points, or to competitors that offer different products and services.

During one of our regular client meetings, she suggested we change up our ppc ads in reaction to increased competition. The suggestion was to add, “…value of $xx” to the ad, which meant we had to remove a call to action to make room for this text. I knew what the results were going to be, but we implemented the change and split test the ads, one with the call to action, “Call today!”, and the other with, “Value of $xx”). She was reacting to her competitors that were offering lower price points and trying to differentiate her services.

We knew what the outcome was going to be, but ran the test as raw data often makes a point better than your word. We ran the split test long enough to have valid data and found a 22% lower click through rate and 40% fewer total visitors with the “value of” ad. That’s a big difference!

Key takeaways:

1. Focus on your customers, not your competitors.
2. Tell your customers what you want them to do. The call to action is one of the most important direct marketing elements to include in any advertising.

Have you run similar splits tests with different results?

If you’re a small business then you know that every dollar you put towards marketing and advertising needs to pay for itself. There is a saying in the advertising industry that 50% of your advertising spend goes to waste, but what 50% is it? Call tracking will tell you what advertising is wasteful. You can then use your call track data to stop using inefficient tactics, or go back to the advertising source and negotiate a better advertising rate once you’ve got data on call volume and lead generation!

Marketing accountability

Call tracking is easy to use and set up and there are a number of vendors that you can find online that can provide you with call tracking numbers, in addition to agencies that resell numbers, sometimes at a lower cost than you can get directly since they purchase in volume. Call tracking can be used for traditional marketing and advertising tactics, in addition to online call tracking.

Call tracking traditional advertising and marketing tactics

The set up is easy for traditional marketing and advertising. If you’re utilizing print advertising as part of your media mix (e.g. postcards, billboards, magazine ads etc.), a unique call track number is ordered in the same rate center as your normal business line and used in your ad in place of your normal phone number.  From within your call tracking dashboard, you forward all inbound calls to your normal business line. Once your ad goes live, call tracking data is collected and usually updated immediately so you get very accurate and timely data. In addition to knowing how many calls you’re getting, you get lot’s of other useful data such as what day of the week the call came in and what time of day.

Call tracking isn’t just for traditional advertising

You can also call track your online marketing efforts too. The set up for online call tracking is slightly more complicated, but typically involves putting a small amount of javascript on your site that recognizes the domain a searcher is coming from and changes the numbers on your entire website once the searcher lands on it. The one caveat of this is that you can’t have any phone numbers in images–all your phone numbers need to be in text/html. Nonetheless, the great benefit of tracking online efforts comes from understanding your organic and PPC lead generation efforts. You will get a much more transparent picture of your ROI for PPC spend; for example, if you spent $100 and got 10 calls you now know your cost per call.

Additional features and benefits of call tracking

1. You’ll also get insights on operational issues. Most call tracking systems will not only notify you when you have a missed call so you can follow up on it immediately, but also show you very clearly what days of the week and times of the day you’re missing most calls (i.e. callers that are hanging up or going to voice mail). Great data to improve staffing issues!
2. Geographic data on where callers are calling from.
3. Name of the caller if they don’t have caller id blocking.
4. And if you have call recording turned on, you can listen in on calls. This is another great training and management tool. Plus if you happen to be the recipient of an unruly customer, you can always listen to the call to unravel the issue and understand how your staff handled the call.

Drawbacks

Really the only negative to using call tracking is that customers may store the call track number in memory and only use that number whenever calling your business. This is a relatively small percentage of people and the benefits in knowing the ROI and effectiveness of your marketing and advertising spend far outweigh any drawbacks. In addition, once you stop using a call track number you can hold on to the number and monitor the number of calls that may continue to come in before deleting it from your account altogether — typically once you stop using a call track number the calls stop altogether, or just a few sporadic calls come in and taper down over a month or two.

Finally, a caution for using online call tracking — do not publish your call tracking numbers anywhere online. Google in particular uses your real phone number from many different sources to verify your local listing and having a call track number published on a website somewhere can hurt your optimization efforts.

Have you tried call tracking? What are the main benefits that you see in utilizing a call tracking service?

Directors, and board members, Rocky Mountain MSDC

As recent transplants to Denver, and new members of the Rocky Mountain MSDC, our goal as attendees was to get to know the Denver business community better, make contacts and get involved. The goal of the event is to build growth amongst minority owned businesses by fostering connections with corporate companies.

We were greeted by the bear at 8am:

Rocky Mountain MSDC, lineup of speakers:

Denver is a very entrepreneurial city.
Two of the more interesting businesses at the Rocky Mountain MSDC Business Opportunity Fair included:

Denver B Cycle - Bike Sharing Business - Rocky Mountain MSDC Business Opportunity Fair

• Denver B Cycle — a bike sharing business owned and operated by Denver Bike Sharing, a Colorado non-profit organization, that provides access to bicycles in downtown Denver for a minimal cost. A 24-hour pass costs only $6, and the annual is $49…can you believe that? Forty-nine dollars for an annual bike pass! The goal is to provide transportation from point A to point B with rides lasting under 30 minutes; once you arrive at your destination just check the bike back in to one of their many stations located throughout the city of Denver. You can check out bikes at any of the numerous locations the company has throughout the city of Denver. And amazingly, the company told me in the first year of business they have not had one bicycle stolen…amazing! Denver B Cycle currently has approximately 450 bikes throughout Denver.

The Abo Group - Rocky Mountain MSDC Business Opportunity Fair

• The Abo Group — Full service architectural firm out of Lakewood, CO specializing in sustainable design and “green” architecture. Although renewable energy has been a hot topic as of the last few years, the founder of the company, Ron Abo, said he has been involved in “green” design since the oil crisis of the 70′s…certainly not a company that’s jumping on the band wagon.

Did you attend the event? Let me know your thoughts?

I just want the hamburger!

If you’re a small to medium-sized business, lets say under $6 million in sales, ignore branding initiatives and tactics, and stick with direct response marketing tactics that make your phone ring. Ok maybe don’t ignore branding completely, but let’s keep branding simple and put the emphasis on direct response marketing tactics that grow cash flow. Positive cash flow is one of most important “keep your eyes on the ball” type cliches for any small to medium-sized business. Chet Meisner, author of The Complete Guide To Direct Marketing states, “…building [brand] image and making a sale are at strategic odds with each other.”

What do I mean by branding?

1. Developing your logo and brand image–while you need to do this, don’t overspend in this arena. Hire a graphic designer that you feel can translate your vision of the brand into a logo, graphics, and packaging, but I certainly wouldn’t hire a branding company. Some sites quote numbers for this task as high as $25,000 – $40,000 for a small business…ouch!
2. Writing nice prose for your marketing literature…this might make your English lit professor happy, but it won’t make the phone ring. Make it effective, not pretty. Develop ad content with the basic components of effective direct response marketing.
3. Spending advertising money on tactics that create lots of awareness, but don’t necessarily drive people through your doors or make the phone ring, which would include such things as radio and cable TV spots. Most small businesses can afford cable TV spots as they can cost as little as $10-$25 for a 30 second commercial. I ran cable tv commercials years ago for my own retail store and I found that it created quite a bit of awareness, stroked my ego, but didn’t make the cash register ring like a postcard or PPC advertising.

Consider these facts:

Fact 1: You don’t have the budget to drive an effective branding campaign, and until you’re a public company nobody is going to care about your brand, especially not your bankers. What you should care about, and what your bankers care about is your cash flow and making the phone ring. The brand will come later, and in the meantime your brand is defined by the personal relationship you develop with your customers.

Fact 2: Branding tactics do not make your phone ring. Pretty fonts, nice advertising prose, fancy graphics, radio spots, cable tv, all can be effective at creating awareness, but are not typically the most effective direct response marketing tactic.

Fact 3: A brand doesn’t mean anything if the cash flow of the business is not strong. How many multi-billion dollar branded companies went bankrupt during the Great Recession? Did General Motors’ multi-billion dollar brand save it? How about Lehman Brothers…and those guys were bankers. What about Business Week…a 92 year old magazine sold for a prayer. Do you think that would’ve happened had the cash register been ringing a little more frequently?

By all means I’m not saying to kick branding to the curb entirely, you need a well designed logo, consistent use of fonts and colors, just don’t spend much money on tactics that primarily create awareness and make things look pretty. Your emphasis should be on direct response marketing. This means the design and layout of your advertising is solely focused on generating leads–once you’ve closed the customer, then you can worry about branding. For print media this means writing effective headlines, features and benefits of  your products, an offer, sense of urgency (expiration dates), and calls to action.

Don’t let branding drive your marketing and advertising decisions until the equity on your balance sheet is clamoring for you to take your company public or your bankers are calling you to find out if you need any money.

So ignore branding, and spend your advertising dollars on tactics that are specifically focused on driving people to your door and making your phone ring.

For additional resources on writing effective headlines and copy, visit Brian Clark’s Copyblogger site. For a thorough study on direct marketing check out Chet Meisner’s book, The Complete Guide to Direct Marketing.

What’s your take on small business branding and direct response marketing?

No surprise, but everyone knows that word-of-mouth marketing is the best source for new customers that a small business can acquire. If you haven’t started acquiring online business reviews from your customers you’re missing a huge opportunity to help your small business grow.

Why you’ll regret not soliciting online business reviews for your small business:

• 92% of consumers said they read product reviews online (source: smallbiztrends.com)
• Of those that read reviews, 46% were influenced to buy (source: ibid)
• 71% said reviews from family or friends exerted influence in their decision (source: Harris Interactive June 2010 via Bazaarvoice.com)
• For a small business, asking for reviews cost almost nothing

The benefits:

It’s clear online business reviews can have a significant effect on your business’ leads and growth. Online business reviews affect two important marketing elements:

1. Human conversion: consumers are going to check you out online before they purchase, and the more expensive, the more risk there is in a purchase, the more research consumers will do before buying from you.
2. Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Google uses reviews as part of its ranking algorithm. (source: searchengineland.com). In addition, as the web has gotten larger and more difficult to index in real-time, the search engines have had to adapt to other trusted sources to deliver relevant, timely results and what better source than online reviews and Facebook likes–the power of the crowd.

How do I get online business reviews?

Start by asking  your customers for reviews online. Are you a retail store? A professional service? Print business cards that have shortened url’s to 3 review sites, for example, to your Google Places page, Yelp, and maybe Citysearch. Don’t forget to ask for a review on LinkedIn if you’re a professional service or a solo consultant. Hand your review business cards out to all your customers, ask them for the review. One caveat with Yelp, in spite of being one of the most popular local search sites on the web, the company has a heavy handed algorithm for reviews and if your customers are new to Yelp the review probably won’t show, so stick with Google and others. Finally, you might even consider an Ipad in the office that is used specifically for reviews. Bookmark your review sites in the Ipad and ask your best customers for a review before they leave.

Have you tried any other tactics for reviews? What has worked for you?

Ever wondered if the headline you developed for the newspaper or magazine ad was the best it could be? Or maybe you developed multiple offers and didn’t know which would work better in the ad?

For not much cost or time, you can run tests in Adwords and quickly receive feedback on a number of different advertising elements. Some of the elements you can test include:

1. Price: you probably have multiple price points for your products and services. Run one ad featuring your low price point, and another with a higher price point, but maybe with more services. I recently split test an ad for a client in retail at two different price points, one at their lowest price, and another ad with a 50% higher price but with more services. The lower price point received 50% fewer clicks–a dramatic decrease.
2. Discount vs. Price: Will your customers respond better to a price, or a percentage discount? Run identical ads and show one with a percentage discount, and the other with the markdown price.
3. Offers: will your customers respond better to “free shipping”, or “10% off if you buy today.”
4. Content/Message/Copy: overall you can split test different copy and messaging to understand better what resonates with your customers.

My recommendation is to run two ads simultaneously varying only one element, for example two different price points, or price versus discount offered. You can split test more than 2 ads at a time, but if you don’t have a lot of traffic it will take longer to collect statistically significant data, which brings up the final point in this conversation–statistical significance. Your tests need to run long enough to collect enough data to be considered conclusive. Here’s a site that you can use to enter the information about your test to help you determine which ad is the winner. As a final note, whichtestwon.com is a great site that shows different results for web pages tested in a similar manner as above.

Let me know how your tests went?

As a small or medium-sized business, you are approached often with people wanting to sell you traditional advertising, everything from the Yellow Pages, newspapers and magazines, to radio and cable TV. And most likely you’ve been approached by media buyers too that claim to plan, implement, and purchase advertising flawlessly and at no cost to you other than the expense of paying the advertiser for the space. Anything free usually has its pitfalls.

I suppose media buyers had their place several decades ago.  Today however media buyers for small and medium-sized businesses represent wasted expense, and most add almost no tangible value other than having the ability to hit the forward button on your ad.

Important considerations before hiring a media buyer:

1. Media buyers are not free: In spite of not charging you for their service, media buyers typically receive a percentage of your spend from the advertiser…my experience has shown around 10%. You could save this expense by asking the advertiser directly for the “agency price.”
2. Goals are not aligned: A media buyer will purchase media where they receive a percentage back on whatever you spend. If stand alone direct mail postcards are effective for your business, a media buyer probably won’t recommend this tactic since they typically don’t get a kick back. Do newspapers or magazines work for you as a small business advertising tactic? That probably won’t be recommended either as most do not offer agency rates.
3. Don’t turn over advertising to someone else: Marketing and advertising are two of the most important functions of your business, why would you turn this over to a media buyer? Maybe you’d solicit help from a copywriter, or a true advertising,or direct marketing specialist, but not a media buyer. You know your market, your products and services, and your customers better than anyone. How is a media buyer going to advertise better than you, when their job function typically focuses on finding advertising sources?
4. They don’t do much, if any, online marketing. I am heavily biased towards online marketing for small and medium-sized companies, and for obvious reasons. Online marketing is your single best tactic at acquiring qualified leads at the lowest cost possible. You won’t find media buyers offering Google PPC.
5. Advertising results are not measured. I don’t know if this is the case for all of them, but I’ve never met a media buyer that measured their success on a recommended advertising tactics…as long as you keep spending, they get paid. One tactic didn’t work, let’s just spend somewhere else.
6. They’re not skilled in copywriting: I’m sure there are exceptions, I haven’t run across any yet, but I’ve never met a media buyer for a small or medium-sized businesses that knew how to write effective ad copy.

At the end of the day, your best bet as a small to medium-sized business is to solicit advice from your peers in the business world. Find out what has worked for other people. Typically there are no more than 3 basic advertising tactics that will consistently produce quality leads for you — find out what these are and stick with them.  Don’t always go for the inexpensive route, and if anything, hire a copywriter or skilled direct response advertising professional to help you build your message. Of course don’t forget that online marketing is your single best bet for small business marketing and advertising.

Are you a small or medium sized business that struggles to figure out where to put your advertising spend? Does it go into traditional advertising or online marketing, such as Google PPC, or SEO. Oh where oh where do I spend?

I’ve been involved in marketing and business strategy for over 15 years, and most of those 15 years it has been with my own skin in the game so I’ve learned a thing or two about marketing and advertising. I’ve made plenty of mistakes, and had some great successes too. Never mind that I’ve worked with dozens of small and medium-sized businesses which has added to my convictions. Most importantly, I’ve measured results for almost everything I’ve done for my clients and myself.

Here are some of important takeaways:

1. Never stop spending on marketing! The old adage, “Out of site, out of mind,” still holds true. Years ago, circa mid to early 90′s, I read Guerrilla Marketing by Jay Conrad Levinson and if there was one thing that stood out from his book it was don’t stop. Especially if you’re a new business, you’ve got to spend effort and/or money marketing your business. Unless you’re a big brand, people are not going to beat a path to your door despite your delusions of grandeur.
2. Guerrilla marketing is your best bet. Wikipedia defines guerilla marketing as, “…an unconventional system of promotions that relies on time, energy and imagination rather than a big marketing budget.” If you’re like most small to medium-sized businesses, you probably don’t have an endless source of funds to market, advertise, and promote your business.Years ago my wife and I started a retail store.  I knew PR was an effective way to get exposure for the business and with a little luck could leead to the possibility of getting a larger story. From my personal networking, I had received a contact for a local pr person, pleaded my case that I had no budget, and she put together a basic press release for our business with a worthy “hook” for a story and released it to the local media. Several things came from that $150 investment:
   • Local media coverage: I received a story in a local business journal
   • National TV exposure: Not long after the story was published, a reality TV show producer in Los Angeles called us – she needed inspiring stories about people that had left corporate to launch their own entrepreneurial ventures.  So we ended up with a reality TV show segment featuring our business, past careers, and how we made the jump to entrepreneurship. The TV show ran nationally for more than a year on cable and I had countless people tell me they saw our story on TV, and of course the best part was that the exposure was all free! Priceless publicity. Was that worth $150 for the initial press release? You bet!
   • Intangible benefits: The online media coverage lead to many inbound links to our website, which just gave us better exposure and rankings with the 3 main search engines.
3. Online Marketing is your single best tactic
   As the web matured, our brick and mortar business generated almost 50% of its sales from online…sales we never would have had without an effective online marketing presence.
• You’re not an exception: I can’t think of too many small or medium businesses where online marketing is not your single most cost effective marketing and advertising tactic.
• Everyone is looking for you online: Consider 80% of people search for a local business online within 10-20 miles of their location [site source]. How much are you spending on in online marketing? Is most of your existing advertising budget spent with traditional media?  Do you have a good local presence online? When was the last time anyone used a Yellow Pages?

What percentage of your marketing and advertising spend is going to traditional media? Have you shifted funds recently to online marketing efforts?