The industry is evolving, and it’s time to pull ahead. As mobile technology develops, small business decision makers become increasingly optimized—delivering high-quality solutions in smooth, effective ways. Getting more optimized needn’t require tech-genius-level skill, and becoming up-to-date is simple when you’ve got the hardware.
Author: Justin Ledvina
CEO & Co-Founder of RocketResponder. Serial entrepreneur with an extreme passion for small business growth.
Controlling Your Small Business Marketing Budget: 5 Ways to Reduce Costs
Managing a small business marketing budget can be one of the biggest challenges for today’s up and coming companies. Even if you’ve been in the business 20 years, finding the balance of spending money to bring customers in and managing the bottom line is tough to do. With a few effective tips and strategies, though, you can reduce your marketing costs and potentially increase your marketing success.
Customer Contact: Striking the Right Balance
Have you ever been chased across a car lot by an over anxious salesman, or hounded by a real estate agent that got your contact information and just wouldn’t let go? We’ve all dealt with an overzealous salesperson at some point — and most of us go out of our way to avoid another encounter. Treating your social media followers to a constant barrage of promotional posts is basically taking that old “used car salesman” approach and can turn followers off for good.
While you must post content to keep your followers engaged, a steady diet of “Look at me” and “buy this” posts will backfire quickly and turn away the very people you’ve worked so hard to reach. Striking the right balance of informational, engaging and promotional posts is a must if you want your social media and email campaigns to succeed. Striving for balance ensures that you entertain and interact with your followers in addition to selling to them and makes it a lot more likely that they’ll hang around and read what you have to say.
Engagement Posts
Engagement posts should evoke a response from your customer, but shouldn’t be a call to action or marketing ploy. Seeking out information that is relevant to your brand’s industry and then actually having a conversation with your followers should be your goal when you create engagement posts. Engagement posts should generally be topical, of interest to your followers and industry and ask a question or seek an opinion.
Typical engagement style posts for a vitamin/health shake seller:
- “What’s your favorite hot weather workout?”
- “Do you have a favorite fitness hack?”
- “Slice it, dice it or scoop it into balls – how do you like your melon?”
- “64 ounces of water a day – how do you make sure you stay hydrated?”
- “We’d love to know what you think about… (Insert latest trend or industry news or interesting health fact here)”
Engagement posts should be outgoing, friendly and non-promotional in nature and should make up about 30% of your initial posts.
Informational Posts
Provide great content and interesting information to your followers and you give them a reason to read your posts and open your emails. Think about the magazines and news sources your target customers follow and create or link to similar posts. Own a locksmith service? Link to pieces on home safety, what to do if you lock your pet (or baby) in the car or how to install a safe. Have a pet grooming business? Link to pieces on puppy care, wearable technology for pets and summer pet safety. You can create your own pieces for your blog as well, but a few minutes of research will yield plenty of non-competing and informative pieces you can share with your customers.
Information pieces position you as someone who provides relevant and useful content and as an authority in your field, even if you did not write the initial piece. Provide information without strings to your followers at least 30% of the time and they’ll actually be interested in what you have to say. There’s an entire Internet worth of information available to choose from, sticking to authority sites and avoiding competitors are the only rules to follow when you post informational style updates.
The balance of your posts can highlight a specific product, sale or service. Use the remaining 40% of your posts to pitch your product of the month, present an offer or promote your latest sale. By offering relevant, useful and engaging posts most of the time, you strike the right balance with your followers and avoid looking like a constant pitchman or overeager salesperson. As an added bonus, you position yourself as an expert in your field – and someone to turn to when it is time to buy.
Increase Open Rates With Better Email Subject Lines
Email marketing is a must for any brick and mortar business operating today. It’s still uncomfortable, though, for many business owners. While writing those riveting, attention grabbing subject lines might read more like “Mission Impossible” for you today, once you’ve finished reading this, you’ll be ready to make ground breaking subject lines of your own for your next email marketing campaign.
Anatomy of a Killer Subject Line
In order to create subject lines that grab reader’s attention, you have to first think like a reader. Go through your email inbox and think about the headlines filtering through it on any given day. What does it take to make you click?
Chances are the subject lines did one of these things in order to make you want to click.
- Promised a solution to a problem.
- Conveyed a sense of urgency.
- Created a little controversy.
- Asked a question that piqued your interests.
- Was witty.
All of these things make great subject line ideas and can help you get your emails opened and read faster and by more members of your target audience. But why do they work?
- Obviously, people who have specific problems on your email lists are likely to open up if you’re promising a solution to their problems. That’s why it’s important to keep the email subject lines relevant to your audience.
- A sense of urgency often works because no one wants to feel as though they are missing out on the next big thing. This means they’ll open and click and just to make sure they’re not going to miss out on something that matters to them.
- Controversy sells! It’s as simple as that. While you don’t want to go so controversial that your turn your audience off, it never hurts to start a good conversation or debate as long as you are, once again, keeping it relevant. The goal of email marketing, after all, is to get people to buy what you have to sell.
- Piquing interests gets a little more difficult unless you know your audience very well. Chances are what one person finds interesting may not appeal to others on the same level. However, if you present it as a bit of a mystery, you might have them hooked.
- Witty is great. It gets attention and garners interest on its own. It also offers readers the hope this this will not be some dry boring sales pitch on your behalf.
At the end of the day, you’re left with a handful of possibilities and your own talents to attract readers and clicks. These ideas will help get your brain going, but the perfect subject line needs a little more to make it work. Try these tips for size.
- Be unique. Don’t follow the same trends others in your inbox have tried.
- Be specific. Don’t be so vague that your readers aren’t sure what you’re actually talking about.
- Be useful. Reward your audience with useful information that matters to them.
Finally, creating those riveting subject lines is only half the battle. You must follow through with the subject line promises or you risk breaking faith with your audience and losing subscribers.
5 Content Marketing Trends for SMB’s
2015 is shaping up to to be one of the best years yet for content marketing. According to the Content Marketing Institute’s annual state-of-the-industry survey, 2015 Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends, 69% of SMB’s are producing more content than they were a year ago, and 59% of those surveyed are planning to increase their content marketing budget in the next year.