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Business Profit Leaks – #3: Not Staying On Top of What People Say About You Online

2012-01-16T04:51:17Z

Not Staying On Top of What People Say About You Online

We’ve already established the importance of getting online reviews from your satisfied customers. Now, let’s talk about those “unhappy” customers a little bit.

If someone is unhappy with your product or service, they won’t hesitate to go online to let the world know.

In fact, customers are more likely to review something they have had a bad experience with than give positive feedback. It is human nature to complain and vent when things are negative, and the internet provides the perfect setting for people to voice these complaints.

If you’re not staying on top of what’s being said about your business online, how can you fix it?

Imagine a potential customer coming across a really nasty post about your business from one of your unhappy customers. Do you think they’ll be quick to call you up or come by? Probably not.

It all boils down to the fact that people put a lot of value in what other people think about businesses. The way consumers think goes something like this:

If other people like you, they they’ll like you too. If other people think your service is awful, they probably will too.
What you don’t know can hurt you. It is extremely important to be aware of negative customer feedback, because it can really negatively impact your business.

Lightspeed Research’s April 2011 survey found that 21% of those surveyed have decided against making purchases after reading just two negative reviews. After reading 3 negative reviews, 37% of people said they would change their mind about their purchase.

This is proof that negative feedback can really affect your profits – in a negative way.

Considering the high emphasis people put on other people’s opinions when choosing products and services, it is very wise to invest in monitoring the reputation of your company.

Encouraging positive feedback and responding to negative feedback can help protect your profits. Additionally, you can use the negative feedback to constantly improve your products and customer service, which is a tool any successful company should take advantage of.

Our “Voice Of The Customer” package includes automated email alerts to let you know when someone mentions your business anywhere on the Internet.

Business Profit Leaks – #3: Not Staying On Top of What People Say About You Online is a post from: IdealMedia.co.za

Business Profit Leaks – #2: Not Building and Managing Online Reviews

2012-01-13T07:41:47Z

Not Building and Managing Online Reviews

What are your customers saying about your business online?

A recent online study found that 62% of respondents read reviews online before buying a product or using a service.

The numbers speak for themselves. Up-to-date information and positive reviews are extremely important for the success of your business.

Review sites take up a huge portion of the total websites on the Internet. Everything from the latest phones and gadgets, to medicines, restaurants, and socks are reviewed on the Internet.

Not taking advantage of such free publicity can be a huge profit leak for your business. The days have changed where people solely rely on reviews from friends, peers, and neighbors when buying a product or service.

Now, they go right to the Internet to do their research. If your competitors are plastered on all of the review sites and have tons of positive reviews and your business does not have any, who do you think consumers will choose?

The best part of this whole process is that receiving online reviews does not cost you one cent. These sites are free, so why not build your reviews?

Offer incentives to your current customers to go online to give your company a review. Most of them won’t even need an incentive as happy customers love to spread the word online.

On the flip side, unhappy customers also like to spread the word online. So if your business has some negative reviews, you should work to build up your reviews from “satisfied” customers to offset those negative reviews.

There are many ways to manage your business’s reputation. For instance, your website, literature, and any other marketing methods should also highlight what your satisfied customers have to say about you.

Letting people know what you have done for others is one of the oldest and most powerful marketing tools we have available. If customers do not hear about the positive things others are saying about you, you may never get them to come through your doors.

If you're having a problem getting good reviews, you might want to check out our "Voice Of The Customer" review building package.

Business Profit Leaks – #2: Not Building and Managing Online Reviews is a post from: IdealMedia.co.za

Business Profit Leaks – #1: Not Making the Most of Your Contact List

2012-01-10T12:58:41Z

Not Making the Most of Your Contact List

In today’s market, many business owners are scrambling for sales to keep their doors open. Building a list of people who buy from you, who access your website, or who call you for information is a good way to do that.

Building a list allows you to easily reach an audience that is already aware of your establishment. Just having the list, however, is not enough. Properly following up with the list is where the money comes in.

Offer free newsletters, contests, tips, or any other incentives to get your customers to give you their contact information – especially their email addresses.

Once you have their email addresses, you can follow up with them on auto-pilot. You can do customer surveys, offer coupons and discounts, and also run promotional offers to increase repeat sales.

Doing email marketing is ecologically sound and cost effective. It eliminates the need to create mountains of paper mail that ultimately ends up in your customers’ trash rather than generating more sales.

Email also reaches your potential customers on their desktop and will be waiting there for them when they log in. They opted in to receive your promotions, so this is a “permission-based” form of marketing that will help take your profits to the next level if done right.

Building a “mobile” contact list is another extremely profitable form of marketing, which we will discuss in a later article.

In any business, it has been proven that “The Money Is In The List!”

So don’t ignore this amazing profit-boosting, cost-effective method of advertising that could turn your entire business around.

If you'd like to find out about an easy, inexpensive way to start building your mailing list, check out our Birthday Club Management System.

Business Profit Leaks – #1: Not Making the Most of Your Contact List is a post from: IdealMedia.co.za

Business Profit Leaks – 8 Potential Profit Leaks You Should Know About

2012-01-10T12:58:55Z

In today’s economy, business owners need to be smarter than ever when it comes to generating new customers, holding onto existing customers, maintaining cash flow and more importantly, generating profits.

Many local businesses are struggling to keep their doors open today, even if their business is booming. So why is the average local business struggling so hard to find profits? It’s simply because they have too many profit leaks in their business.

Just to clarify, a “Profit Leak” exists when a business does not use effective tools and resources that are available to them that will help them bring in more sales and profits.

Most business owners are always looking for ways to bring in more customers and boost their bottom line. However, the methods most of them are using simply don’t work the way they used to. Word of mouth, Yellow Pages, Newspaper ads, and TV ads just aren’t as effective as they used to be for many different reasons.

One reason is that most people today go online to search for products and services. Everyone is online. Your potential customers are online. Your existing customers are online. You probably spend a lot of time online yourself.

This is why online marketing has become the most popular form of advertising today. However, even with online marketing, your methods must be cost-effective and must provide results. If not, it is a complete waste of your time and money.

With your target audience spending a bulk of their day on the Internet, does it really make sense for your business NOT to have a solid, strong presence there?

If you don’t have a strong online presence and are not utilizing the many tools available to help you boost profits, you have some major profit leaks on your hands.

In order to really connect with your local consumers and crush your competitors, you have to fix any potential profit leaks as soon as possible.

When it comes to online marketing, there are so many resources that you can use to generate more profits for your business. There’s Social Media. There’s Email Marketing. There’s Mobile Marketing. There’s Online Reputation Management. There’s Blogging. There’s Classified Ad Posting and much more…

How many profit-draining leaks does YOUR business have?

Although this whole process may seem overwhelming, your business can slowly start to plug these holes one by one instead of tackling all of them at the same time.

Once you have plugged most of these leaks, you should notice a steady stream of new customers and a nice spike in profits on your future profit and loss statements.

In this series, we'll take a look at 8 of the marketing opportunities many local business owners miss.

Business Profit Leaks – 8 Potential Profit Leaks You Should Know About is a post from: IdealMedia.co.za

Small Business Online Marketing Strategy – Part 4: Facebook and Google+ Pages

2012-01-10T11:31:49Z

Facebook Pages

Facebook Pages (also called Fan Pages or Business Pages) came out a few years ago and they are still a hot opportunity for businesses.

Here’s why Facebook Pages are so important:

Facebook has over 800,000,000 users, and it's still growing strong! In other words there are plenty of opportunities for you to market your business. It doesn’t matter which country you live in because Facebook is everywhere.
Facebook gets more Internet traffic than Google.
Facebook's patented Newsfeed functionality shows every user what their contacts (including Fan Pages) are doing when they log in. This can be harnessed to get massive viral exposure to explode your business
People understand and trust Facebook far more than a random website that they find in Google search.
Facebook Pages can be indexed by the search engines, and can be seen by people who are not Facebook members, or who are not logged in.
Facebook has released the ‘like button’ which users can use to vote on various content around the Internet. This ‘like button’ has been responsible for creating insane levels of buzz for people, businesses, and events. You can use this feature to ramp up your business too.

Other Things You Can Do with Facebook Pages

There are so many benefits, features, and functions that are possible with Facebook Pages that I don’t know where to begin. In short, you MUST start developing a presence with a Facebook Page.

Google Plus Pages

Google introduced their Google Plus (or Google+) social network in June last year. By the end of 2012, there were 62 million users, with 625,000 new users joining every day. It's been speculated that Google Plus will have more than 400 million users by the end of 2012.

Google Plus has a clean interface,and it's easy to use. As with Twitter, you can follow people without asking their permission. Your contacts are added to "Circles", and it's easy to share content with one circle and not another.

Google Plus Business Pages were added in November 2011, and they have many of the features and advantages of Facebook Pages.

Most South African businesses haven't claimed their Google Plus pages yet, so now is the time to get in.

In the next part of this series, we'll take a look at converting visitors into customers.

Small Business Online Marketing Strategy – Part 4: Facebook and Google+ Pages is a post from: IdealMedia.co.za

Using the Power Of Online Reviews To Market Your Business

2012-01-09T11:46:13Z

The Internet is a bit of a jungle, really. Anyone can write stuff about your business and post it on Facebook or Twitter, or on any of thousands of other free websites. They can leave reviews – good or bad – on sites like HelloPeter.com or Yowzit.com, or on your Google Place page.

Nearly 70% of consumers check online reviews before they decide to buy a product or use a supplier. These days, it's getting even easier – just search for a business with your smartphone, and you have access to dozens of real people's experiences. Sites like the ones I mentioned above get thousands of visitors every month.

Good reviews on these sites can do amazing things for your business. People trust them – at least the ones that seem authentic. If you're getting great reviews, you can relax. But if you're not on the ball, one scathing review can put potential customers off for years to come.

The key is to be aware of what people are posting about you, and where. If you know what they're saying, you can respond, and try tofix the damage. At the very least, you can build trust by showing potential customers that you are a real person, that you care about your customers and that you want to sort out problems. The alternative is to hide your head in the sand and lose customers without even knowing about it.

Let's face it, people are talking about you, whether you know about it or not. If you know about it, you can respond.

The review below was posted on a restaurant's Google Place page in 2010 – who knows how many customers have been put off since then.

One bad review may be excusable, but when there are two…

And the interesting thing is that the restaurant owner is probably unaware of these reviews, or if they are aware, they haven't taken the most basic steps towards counteracting their effects.

You can see that they haven't claimed their Google Place page. Claiming your Place page gives you the option of responding to reviews, both good and bad.

And here's where they appear in a Google.co.za search for "restaurant sandton"…

What can you do to limit the effects of a poor review? There are a number of steps you can take.

First prize is to reach an agreement with the person who left the review, to get them to take it down or change it. This is not always possible – some sites don't allow reviews to be edited once they're posted. But most sites, including Google, will allow a response by the business owner. In order to do this on Google Places, you'll need to claim your listing.

It's important to maintain a professional attitude when responding to negative criticism. You should not writing to relieve your frustration with the reviewer. You should be writing with the future in mind – the dozens, maybe hundreds of potential customers who may see the discussion over the next years. You need to make an earnest attempt to sort out the reviewer's problem, so that potential future customers can see that you are responsive, that you care, and that you are prepared to make an effort to protect the reputation of your business.

Another effective way to counteract poor reviews is to smother them with love. Make a concerted effort to get happy customers to leave positive reviews, so that the negative ones are pushed down. Google Place pages only show the first 5 reviews, so you many only need 5 to push a negative review onto the second page, where hardly anyone will see it.

Whatever you do, DO NOT post fake reviews. Google is smart enough to know when a bunch of positive reviews are all coming from one computer, and fake reviews tend to sound fake. If you post 15 "5-star" reviews on the same day, it looks a bit obvious. (Having said that, Google hasn't done anything about the ones below – but if I were a competitor, I might point it out and spoil their nice 5 star rating!)

Rather, concentrate on giving your customers an awesome experience, and make it as easy as possible for them to post their reviews.

These days, most of your customers have smartphones. The easy solution to getting reviews posted is to get them to use their phones, and give them an incentive to post a review while they're still in your restaurant. Offer a small incentive, like a free coffee or desert, in exchange for an honest review.

Check out our Voice Of The Customer package, which gives you a head start towards collecting those vital positive customer reviews.

Using the Power Of Online Reviews To Market Your Business is a post from: IdealMedia.co.za

Small Business Online Marketing Strategy – Part 3: YouTube Traffic

2012-01-09T08:59:33Z

YouTube is owned by Google, and it's the second-biggest search engine on the Internet, after Google itself. Some of the statistics quoted by YouTube are staggering:

More than 13 million hours of video were uploaded during 2010 and 35 hours of video are uploaded every minute.
More video is uploaded to YouTube in 60 days than the 3 major US networks created in 60 years
70% of YouTube traffic comes from outside the US
YouTube reached over 700 billion playbacks in 2010

The reasons for the growth of online video are easy to understand:

It's easier than ever for ordinary people to create videos – most cell phones can record acceptable quality videos.
Internet bandwidth is dramatically cheaper than it was, say, five years ago – although South Africa has a long way to go in this department.
Social media sites like Facebook make it easy and quick to share videos with your friends. YouTube is itself a social media site, where you can subscribe to other people's channels, comment on their videos and connect with friends.

How do you use YouTube to market your business?

You create short, informative videos about your business, products and services, and upload them to your YouTube Channel.

You encourage your friends, employees, customers and Facebook fans to watch them – the more views a video gets, the better it ranks in YouTube's search results.

For some keywords, Google displays YouTube video links in the search results, which increases your views and ultimately increases the traffic to your website.

Here's a great example from Naked Pizza:

Your videos don't have to have Hollywood production values to be successful. This short video has over 47,000 views on YouTube:

In case you think it's just about restaurants, here's a customer testimonial:

What can you do with the videos you create?

You can publish them on your website or blog; you can share them on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and other social networks.

There are other video sharing networks besides YouTube, some of which also get a lot of traffic. You can submit your video to all of these sites, which can help drive traffic to your website.

Download the entire Small Business Online Marketing Strategy series

Get the entire Small Business Online Marketing Strategy series in my short report – “How To Beat Your Competition & Get More Customers Using The Internet” – just enter your contact details:

Small Business Online Marketing Strategy – Part 3: YouTube Traffic is a post from: IdealMedia.co.za

Small Business Online Marketing Strategy – Part 2: Getting Qualified Visitors

2012-01-09T09:30:07Z

Getting Qualified Visitors

Once you’ve properly researched your market and have a deep understanding of your ideal customers, the next step is to get visitors to your website. Getting targeted visitors to your website is paramount to making money with the Internet. If you don’t have any visitors then you won’t make any sales through your website. Think of it this way: traditional businesses rely on steady foot traffic in order to make sales, the same is true of the Internet.

In other words: No visitors = no sales

Let me just say that there are a multitude of ways to get high quality Internet visitors to your website. What do I mean by high quality? My definition of “high quality” is people who have a specific problem and are looking for a solution that you provide in your business.

Three of the main sources of Internet traffic for local businesses are Google, YouTube and Facebook. There are a lot of other traffic sources, but they are insignificant compared to these two sources. So for the time being we will focus on them.

Google Traffic

Google has more sources of traffic for your business than you might aware of. Go to http://google.com and search for “day spa johannesburg”. You should see a screen that looks similar to the following screen shot (Google may give you different results depending on your location, past searches etc.) I’ve marked up the image to show you what each traffic source means, and then given a description as well.

Here’s what each traffic source means:

Sponsored Paid Ads (You pay for visitors to your site)

You can buy visitors from Google on an auction basis. This is called Google Adwords. For each keyword that you are targeting you can set an individual bid. However, I must warn you that this is a costly exercise unless you really know what you are doing. The big advantage of Adwords is that you can start getting targeted visitors to your website immediately.

Local Business or Google Places Listing (with the map)

When you see a map displayed in the normal Google search results, this is known as the Google local business listings. These are great because they give a map location for your business, and a page (a “Google Place page”) with reviews, photos, and videos and other additional information.

As you may have noticed in the above image, it takes up a big chunk of the screen, meaning that if you rank in this space then you will get a lot of the available visitors to your website. Getting ranked in local business listings takes approximately 2 – 8 weeks.

Search Engine Optimization

The organic search results or search engine optimized listings require a completely different approach to get your web pages ranked. In cases where it is too competitive to rank for local business listings, I will instead look at Search Engine Optimization.

Search engine optimization involves 2 key strategies:

First you need to develop a list of relevant keywords with strong ‘buying intent’ i.e. “Nokia 234x phone battery.” This keyword has a high probability of getting a sale from a visitor. However, “phone battery” has a very low buying intent and is unlikely to make you much money.
For each keyword create a page of content with information that is highly related to the keyword. There many details to tweak on the page – too many to mention here.
Once each page is properly optimized you need to generate a significant number of links from other external websites back to your own pages, and this needs to be done continually. The more competitive the market, the more new links you will need to have coming into your site in order to dominate your competitors.
Having a well-optimized website is a factor in getting your Local Business listing ranked highly.

So those are the 3 main methods that you can use to drive high quality traffic with Google. But Google is not the only game in town. In the next post, I'll talk about another traffic giant that you should be using – YouTube.

Download the entire Small Business Online Marketing Strategy series

Get the entire Small Business Online Marketing Strategy series in my short report – "How To Beat Your Competition & Get More Customers Using The Internet" – just enter your contact details:

Small Business Online Marketing Strategy – Part 2: Getting Qualified Visitors is a post from: IdealMedia.co.za

Small Business Online Marketing Strategy – Part 1: Market Research

2012-01-09T08:57:56Z

Introduction

This series of posts is a brief overview of how to grow your business and increase profits by using the Internet effectively. By the time you finish reading these posts, you should have a clearer understanding of how to begin marketing your business on the Internet.

I’m not trying to turn you into an Internet marketing expert. But I will do my best not to overwhelm you with techno-babble.

Before we jump headlong into ‘Internet stuff’, just remember that the Internet is just ONE channel available for you to market your business. Other channels include TV, radio, newspapers, magazines, and press releases.

The Internet presents many exciting opportunities for you to expose and grow your business. The return on investment from a properly executed Internet marketing campaign will out-perform any other marketing channel.

Market Research

Performing ‘due diligence’ is critical in order to obtain a clear understanding of who your ideal customer(s) are and what exactly they are looking for. Get a notepad and write down answers to the following questions:

Defining Your Ideal Customer -

What problems do they have?
What gives them the most hassle, frustration, pain, fear, or anxiety?
What solutions can you offer that will help them?
What kind of phrases might they use if they were looking to solve their problem on the Internet? i.e. “how to stop my marriage break up” or “list of plumbers in Timbuctu” (this will help you to develop a highly relevant keyword list). Take a look at this free Google keyword tool to give you some ideas (note: the data is only an approximation).
What websites do your ideal customers visit? Go to http://answers.yahoo.com/ and type in some broad keywords to do with your market. Then dig deeper to find out what people are predominantly asking questions about. The idea here is to really feel your customer’s pain.

Understanding your ideal customer is so important and leads to the following outcomes:

Enables you to develop a good list of relevant keywords
Enables you to find other great places on the Internet to find customers (besides Google)
Helps you to identify their pain and as a result, write good ads, headlines, and website content .

Market research is the foundation of creating a successful marketing campaign for your business. By the way, I am sure that you already know your business in depth, but there is always benefits to be had by going through this process.

Next – once your foundation is in place, it’s time to think about getting some qualified visitors to your website.

Download the entire Small Business Online Marketing Strategy series

Small Business Online Marketing Strategy – Part 1: Market Research is a post from: IdealMedia.co.za

Sales Leads – Where To Get Them and How To Treat Them

2011-09-27T09:06:15Z

Qualified sales leads are the life blood of many businesses. It's the marketing department's job to keep the sales funnel topped up with qualified prospects, nurturing them until they're ready to buy. At this point they are handed over to the sales team.

Looking for qualified sales leads

Where does one find qualified sales leads? All the traditional outbound marketing methods come into play – radio, TV and press advertising; press releases, flyers, billboards and so on. Instead of using these techniques for 'branding,' though, you drive the traffic to a web page with a sexy offer in exchange for the visitor's contact details.

The great thing about doing this online is that you can track the number of visitors and the number of conversions – ie. the number of visitors who took up the offer. What's more, you can send visitors to a different landing page depending on where they saw your web address. That means you can see exactly how many visitors you are getting from each channel, and exactly how many of those visitors are converting.

These days, though, outbound marketing is becoming less cost-effective. The shift towards Internet and mobile advertising is pushing the cost of print media up, and the higher prices are reducing the number of advertisers.

Inbound Marketing Delivers Sales Leads

Inbound marketing is based on getting customers to seek you out, rather than you hunting them down, interrupting what they're doing and making them watch your ad or listen to your spiel. A few years ago, it meant writing articles to be published in newspapers and magazines, writing books, participating in radio and TV interviews. Nowadays, it's mostly about the Internet.

People use search engines to find things they're interested in; if you can get useful information in front of them when they're specifically looking for it, you've started a process which may very well end up with a sale. Google calls this the "Zero Moment of Truth" – the point at which your prospect is actively searching for your product or service. And in these days of smart phones, that moment could happen just about anywhere – when they're sitting at a coffee shop, when they're looking at your product in a store, when they're on their lunch break.

You need to make sure that you understand what your customer is looking for when they find you. The words they type into the search engine can help you to determine where they are in the buying cycle. Are they looking for ways to describe the problem they're having? Are they looking for forums or blogs which explain ways others have solved the problem? Are they looking for businesses which supply the solution? Are they looking for prices?

What you need to do is position yourself so that you and your business are seen as trusted advisors, the people who really understand what their problem is, who help them understand their options and ultimately supply the solution. You should strive to be present all the way through the sales cycle, so that your future customer is constantly reminded of your existence and your involvement. From the moment they start researching their problem, through the evaluation of possible solutions, to the reviews, testimonials and comments from other satisfied customers, your business should be engaging them.

Turning a buyer from an anonymous prospect into a qualified sales lead can be a slow process, but it's important to get it right.

Sales Leads – Where To Get Them and How To Treat Them is a post from: IdealMedia.co.za