If the goal of your website is to turn your visitors into new business leads, it has to be strategically designed for that purpose. It needs to do a great job of engaging the visitor, enticing them to give you their email and encouraging them to connect with you. 1. Give customers the information they seek. A clearly articulated value proposition [...]
You know you need to keep in touch with your contacts year round and may be wondering if an newsletter marketing is worth the time and effort or if people even read them anymore. The answer is YES!…but…they need to provide value. An e-newsletter can be a great tool for building trust and expertise with your current and prospective clients — [...]
In general, people don’t make snap decisions — they need to do research, gather information, compare options and get validation before they make a purchasing decision. Going through this process is often described in sales and marketing as going through “the funnel”. Most have three basic stages (some use four) referred to as Top of the Funnel, Middle of Funnel and [...]
I generally avoid writing about SEO since there are so many articles, ebooks, blogs, etc. already out there, but I am more frequently hearing from my small business clients that that they want to “rank #1 for this or that keyword” without really understanding how the new world of SEO works. Yes, keywords were important years ago for ranking—and they still [...]
Party! Well, maybe. High fives. Definitely. It may seem like the work is done, but there still is plenty to do after you launch your site. For any business (and especially a small business) having a good website is generally the number one priority for marketing. Creating a truly great site takes time, planning, and often a good chunk of the [...]
In December we all start to looking ahead to the new year and thinking about resolutions and goals for the coming year. If you are like me you avoid personal resolutions because chances are they probably will not be kept as we all get busy and lose the motivation — then we just feel bad. However, when it comes to your business, having goals and a [...]
Small businesses have many challenges in sales and marketing and often times struggle to build adequate pipelines for new business. Many spend hours out “networking” only to be disappointed that the leads they get are not qualified, and let's face it, are just bad or not a fit. With all the things a small business owner or manager has to do, [...]
Living and working in Silicon Valley, we get quite a bit of exposure to “start-ups”. Of course there seems to be many definitions for start-ups since I have talked to some that have been in business for more than 7 years and still consider themselves a start-up. I think some of it has to do with the “sexiness” of saying I [...]
In a past issue of Target Marketing, Bob Bly wrote an article titled “Sometimes Old-School is Better”. The main point of the article was that as journalist and writer, he promoted the importance of checking facts – and that doesn’t mean just doing a Google search, compiling numerous resources and just reinventing the same content assuming someone did the fact checking previously. Content [...]