Email marketing produces results

As a small to medium business (SMB) you may be missing out on one of the most robust ways to stay in touch with your past and future clients.

If you’re not integrating email sign-up in your website and social media such as including an invitation to “Join Our List” or “Subscribe to Our Newsletter,” you are missing a significant opportunity to nurture your business.

“Although roughly 3 in 4 SMBs use email marketing tactics such as organic list growth and web-based sign-up forms to generate leads, just 41% include a sign-up form on their Facebook fan pages, according to a survey released in February 2012 by GetResponse. And while a majority optimize their newsletters with clear, recognizable, branded from field names and addresses, less than half include social sharing icons in their newsletters.”

According to “data from GetResponse’s “The State of Email Marketing in SMBs” indicates that only 42% of the SMBs surveyed segment their lists based on either subscriber personal data or subscriber actions, such as opens and clicks.” As our clients have learned, segmenting lists into groups and using variable content and personalization results in higher response and conversions.”

We’ve assisted a number of businesses by developing both their lists, segmenting their lists and embedding list sign-up in their websites as well as their Facebook pages. We’d be delighted to assist or consult with your business for the development of your integrated email marketing program.

For more compelling data from the GetResponse study, please read this article at Marketing Charts. SMBs Missing Opportunity to Integrate Email With Social.

Small business survival is not luck

On February 8th, our business achieved four years of age! While we established our full-time strategic marketing and public relations consulting practice in 2001, from 2002 until 2008 we consulted on an occasional basis. In 2008 we resumed consulting full time.

To say that the last few years have been interesting is an understatement! There are many of us who established businesses in the “Great Recession.” However, the fact is fewer new jobs were established by “start-ups” during the recession and the decline has continued. So, during a time of declining start-ups, great financial distress for many, we’ve managed to grow our business, and see our fourth birthday.

In fact according to “On Numbers”

“Ninety-three percent of the nation’s urban markets suffered declines in business activity after the onset of the recession.

A new analysis by On Numbers indicates that 870 metropolitan and micropolitan areas had fewer private-sector businesses in 2009 than in 2008.”

So please hear our hearty, sustained huzzahs for all of you wonderful people who’ve allowed us to provide marketing, public relations, and web design and development to you for the last four years.

It is not luck that has nurtured our firm for the past four years, but your trust, your referrals, and your continued support our our business.

Thank you!

Photo credit: Four leaf clover, Romtomtom

Social media etiquette – introductions are requested

How often have you invited someone to Link, Follow or Friend without reminding the person how you are connected? There are some “rules” for social media etiquette that somehow don’t cover this topic and some that do.

Social media etiquette makes the Web a nicer place

LinkedIn, Facebook, Google+ and Twitter all have suggestion mechanisms to help you find and connect with those that may be your friends, former co-workers, colleagues, or even former flames. In the drive to “get the numbers up” many people click, click, click to add new peeps.

Twitter and Google+ both allow you to follow or circle people without their permission. So, understanding new connections’ motivations is not as much of a concern as it is with Facebook and LinkedIn. With these two social media platforms, the emphasis is on a personal connection. I like what Cision’s Yvette Pistorio wrote in her blog post:

Introduce yourself. When you follow/friend/engage with people who may not know you, introduce yourself. It helps break the ice and open the door to conversation. Let them know who you are, what you do (if connecting for business) and how you came across them…it might just make a great impression. Be transparent about what you are connecting with them for.

Now I don’t want to sound like a curmudgeon, but if you want to be my Facebook Friend isn’t it just polite to introduce yourself? And if you want to be Linked, shouldn’t I know that you’re not a ball and chain?

Tell me who you are

I’m delighted to get to know new people, after all, I do brand myself “The Connection Maven,” but if I don’t know you, I don’t always understand your motivation.  Do you want to sell me something? Do you want to become a client or do you just want to ask me out for a cup of coffee? Or maybe you want to find a new job? I’m not a mind reader and so I have no idea why you may want to become connected. So, just tell me and we’re cool.

I’ll be your Friend. LinkedIn posse member and I’ll re-tweet your Follow Friday tweets. Just give me some context for our pending friendship.

Thanks, and rant over.

Photo credit: flickr user Joelk75

WordPress is the most popular blogging software in the world. The green line indicates how many WordPress blogs there currently are. Click the image for more details from Google Trends.

Optimizing Blog Posts–How Tos

Ever think about optimizing your blog posts? Oh, you’re not writing any posts? By not writing posts, you’re missing the most awesome way to use the techniques of inbound marketing and boost your SEO. This article illustrates optimization by showing you all the relevant ways to use your keywords.

Blogging, despite multiple announcements of it’s death, is still the best way to develop inbound marketing content that can bring your prospective customers to you and get your company some serious cred–if you do it right. And it can also help you demonstrate your professional knowledge, experience and distinguish your company’s brand all at the same time. Blogging is a BOGO. And who don’t love BOGOs? Right?

The first requirement is that your website have a blog. Popular blog platforms include Blogger, WordPress.com, and Tumblr. These work well for you if you don’t have a website, however, to gain SEO goodness, your blog is best a component of your website. In our opinion, it is the only way to fly. We recommend WordPress in a self hosted install. WordPress is the framework that currently powers 70,952,490 websites and blogs.

Steps to optimize on page

1. Choose to write, or post a photo or video that is a topic or idea related to your brand.
2. Have a purpose for the content. For example if you are a pie shop and bakery, you’ll probably want to write and post photos, recipes and testimonials about your pies, always staying focused on your primary brand message as well as your secondary messages and your buyer personas.
3. Know your company or brand’s keywords, (click the link on keywords to use the Google Keyword Tool.)
4. Use your keywords in your blog post copy. The earlier in the content the better. Don’t overuse them. Overuse will not earn you SEO goodness.
5. Use your H1, H2, H3, H4 tags appropriately. These are HTML tags that are defined in your website or blog’s CSS and which tell search engine spiders what is important.
6. Use images.
7. Use Alt tags on images.
8. Make sure image file names are titled with keyword rich titles as well.
9. Use interstitial links. Also called on page links, these are links within your text that provide on-page direction to your readers and to spiders to related and important anchor content on your website.
10. Use “slugs” for optimization.
11. Use page title for optimization.
12. Emphasize important words with either bold or italics, but don’t go overboard!

This annotated screen capture below illustrates a few of the optimizations.

Below is an example of how the page title and the slug must both contain your keywords for the post.

Be sure you use your keywords in your Alt Tags and Image Titles as displayed below.

By developing good blogging optimization habits your content will help you earn your company website some high quality rankings and provide content that is helpful or persuasive to your potential customer.

Food & Beverage channel publishes Smithem’s original content about marketing specialty food products

Cheryl Smithem, CEO of Charleston PR & Design, LLC, has been tapped to author posts for the About.com Food and Beverage category channel. The category channel provides advice and direction on the development, production, operation and marketing for specialty food companies and products. The channel is managed by Domenick Celentano, a former specialty food industry executive and professor of marketing. Smithem’s posts on marketing and social media for specialty food companies and entrepreneurs appear every few months. Smithem’s first post, “The Benefits of Twitter for Food Entrepreneurs, A Better Way to Get Your Product on the Consumers Plate,” was published in the final quarter of 2011.

Celentano selected Smithem to guest blog when he interviewed  Slather Brand Foods’ founder Robin Rhea. Smithem “pitched” Rhea to Celantano. Smithem is the public relations contact for Slather Brand Foods.

To be published in late February 2012, Smithem’s next article “Content marketing for Specialty Food Companies and Entrepreneurs” teaches specialty food companies how to use content marketing as a component of their public relations and marketing communications plan.

Charleston PR & Design, LLC is a provider of marketing communications consultation for diverse clients. The firm provides guidance to entrepreneurs and businesses just getting established or rebranding themselves. Charleston PR & Design, LLC formulates brand strategy and positioning; researches and develops marketing plans, content and collateral; plans and implements social media strategy; develops content-managed websites; and plans a company’s public relations.