Small Business Marketing Strategies

Should I cut back my marketing to save money?

By Christian

There’s been a lot of talk lately in the small business community about “cutting costs”. This always happens toward the end of the year. It’s especially understandable these days, when a lot of business owners are struggling with changes in their market.

Cut waste. Cut unnecessary expenses. Cut systems you’re not using.

DON’T cut investment in your business.

Not all expenses are the same! But many of you think they are. To you, an expense is an expense is an expense. And when it comes to expenses, fewer is better. It’s not overly complicated, but there’s more to it than that.

Unfortunately a lot of biz owners look at money poorly. As in…they look at money like poor pe0ple do. That’s a shame, because you’re creative, motivated, gutsy and talented. You have everything it takes to be successful, so take the next step and learn a bit about the differences between investing and spending.

Spending = expenses that do not yield a return on investment

Investing = expenses that DO yield a return on investment.

I’ve seen you guys (real world stuff…this ain’t made up, hypothetical stuff) flippantly shut down websites you’ve owned for years, that have tons of exposure and incoming links, so you can save $100 a month.

I’ve seen you guys cut marketing campaigns that bring in leads, so you can save some money. Think about that for a second. I talked with a guy last week in a LinkedIn forum about this. He was BRAGGING about how much money he was saving. Unbelievable. How are you going to grow if you don’t invest in your business? Find new ways and creative ways to invest in your business, but don’t stop investing. I know this is a tough market for a lot of you. Sales were down in 2010, maybe they were down in 2009 also.

SOOOO, it’s the time to invest MORE. Not less. If you need to cut expenses, move that in-house server into the cloud. My real estate team just did this, and it gives us the EXACT same performance for several hundred less per month. Cut your mocha lattes if you need to. I wouldn’t recommend it unless it’s truly necessary, but sometimes we need to take extreme measures.

If given the choice between cutting the cleaning service or cutting marketing, a LOT of you choose marketing. For God’s sake, please don’t do that. Take out your own trash. Look at your payroll; are you paying an employee $30k a year to do stuff that doesn’t bring in a return on investment? I’m not going to tell you to drop the empl0yee. I’m going to tell you that it’s YOUR job to get them doing stuff that DOES bring in a return.

Don’t cut marketing when business is slow. Do MORE marketing. If it’s slow for you, it’s slow for others. It’s not time to run in fear. It’s time to grow.

What is your REAL goal?

By Christian

People in business (such as you and I) are often busy trying to get people’s attention.

Getting new clients
Tweaking an ad to get a bigger response
Building your email list
Changing the layout of your website for higher conversions

These are all examples of trying to “grab” people. I am a fan. It’s essential, really. But I was talking earlier this week with a friend on Facebook, and she said something that disturbed me. I was making fun of this ad. Thank you Gunes for bringing this ad to my attention!

I pointed it out as an example of perhaps the worst marketing in the world at this particular moment. Most people agreed. Many were appalled. A few were disgusted. But this girl said “Well, at least they got our attention. Mission accomplished.”

Getting people’s attention is NOT the goal

Is this where your primary focus lies? Is your main marketing objective to get people’s attention…at any cost? If so, I have a simple question for you. The question is, “And then what?”

And then what?

After you have someone’s attention, what then? Have you put so much force into getting their attention that they are now offended? If so, how are you going to convert that attention into a sale? I don’t see it happening.

There is a saying that “any publicity is good publicity”. People cite public figures like Howard Stern and say all the negative press actually grows his listener base. OK. But consider Howard’s objectives. His entire goal is to get people’s attention. It is his only objective. Very, very few of us are in that boat. I’m not criticizing the dude; I’m simply pointing out that you need to compare apples to apples.

If you’re a shock jock or the frontman of a rock band, go on right ahead and continue making an ass out of yourself. But remember that Howard Stern is not you, and you are not him.

Can you imagine what the world would be like if EVERYONE was a shock jock? Oh my goodness.

But that’s what many companies try to do. Their sole goal is to get your attention. Consider the EFFECT your marketing is going to have on others. Remember your REAL goal is not to get attention; your REAL goal is to make sales. The two really can be mutually exclusive! And don’t forget your BIGGEST asset…the biggest asset that most business owners completely neglect…

I’ll hit you up with that in the next post…

My 7 Biggest Marketing Mistakes

By Christian

I’ve made tons of mistakes in marketing. These are the biggest:

Trying to help instead of focusing on the negative – I used to think that nice guys finish last. I was right. As it turns out, negativity pays when it comes to marketing! Make your headlines negative. Don’t focus on solutions. Focus on problems.
Trying to work with everyone who wants to work with me – It took me a long time to accept the fact that my target market is not everyone. Your target market also…is NOT everyone! As small business owners, learning to focus on a specific type of client or customer requires making some emotionally difficult decisions, but once you do things get so much easier, so much more profitable and so much more fun!
Too many calls to action – when it comes to marketing, we often try to sell too much. We want to tell everyone everything we do. In reality, our customers’ attention is a valuable commodity, so let’s treat it as such. Don’t expect your customer to care about everything you do. You’ve got their attention for a few seconds. Tell them one specific thing. Connect with them on one specific point, and build from there. Making fewer calls to action gets you a more meaningful result.
Not charging enough – I’ve raised my consulting fee several times, and business has not slowed. As it turns out, charging more (when you do it right) doesn’t cause you to lose business. It causes you to get better customers.
Holding back valuable information – I used to feel that I should share some ideas only with people who pay me. You know, leave the crappy ideas on my site for free, but give the GOOD stuff to paying clients. As soon as I started giving everything away, something funny happened…I started getting more orders.
Thinking quality content speaks for itself – as a blogger, I used to think great content was the key. All I needed to do was create great content for my blog and people would eventually catch on. Wrong. You need to spread the word. You need to market your blog. Great content is important. Marketing and networking are just as important.
Not selling products – the idea of putting a product together and selling it was always really intimidating to me, so I stuck with selling consulting. That’s fine, but consulting is always a trade of dollars for hours. Products are leveraged. Put the time in once, and then you can simply sell it over and over again. After I created my first product, I learned it’s really not that hard, and the benefits are huge.

These 7 mistakes have cost me a LOT of time and money. They are easily avoidable, so I’ve put a report together that addresses each one specifically. It’s free. If you’re a subscriber of Dangerous Tactics, you should already have received a copy. If not, please let me know, and I’ll make sure you get one. If you’re not a subscriber of Dangerous Tactics, head on over and grab a copy of My 7 Horrible Marketing Mistakes. I think you’ll dig it.

What if all I have is a small email list?

By Christian

A lot of you are new to marketing online, and there is a common belief that I want to crush today. It’s probably holding you back from getting the results you deserve. Many of you believe you need a big email list in order to make a big profit. This ain’t true.

Yaro wrote a post about how having a small email list is all you really need. I dig it. It’s the first straight forward post I’m aware of…from an A-lister…speaking directly to the fact that small, targeted lists can be highly profitable.

Everyday, we see well-known marketers with tons of traffic and tons of subscribers. It’s natural to compare ourselves to them. We read their sites…just like everyone does. You know, guys like Brian Clark and John Chow and Darren Rowse and Yaro Starak and all these people. I also have several more linked up on my resources page. They follow a familiar business model, and it’s a model that works. You SHOULD read this content, and you SHOULD learn from them. They have a lot to offer, but don’t forget that not everything they do may translate to your business.

This is one of the reasons I feel compelled to write this blog. There’s just not a ton of bloggers out there talking DIRECTLY to the challenges and needs of a small business owner with a small list. Small as in…less than 5000 people. There are a few very important things you may not realize:

Small is NOT a problem. It’s just a different business model.
Many, many marketers are out there as you read this, pulling in a very decent living from a very small list. It’s doable, and importantly…it’s doable by YOU.
Bigger ain’t always better. Should you grow your business? Always. But growth doesn’t always mean bigger. Sometimes it’s way more profitable to focus on quality over quantity.
When you have an email list with 100,000 people on it, you can get away with a lot. I don’t mean this rudely or dismissively. It’s takes a serious amount of awesomeness to build a huge list like that, but let’s be honest…if you have a list that size, you can send out just about anything, and you’re gonna get some orders. When you have a small list, you have to be awesome. There’s a much smaller margin for error, because you need to make every email count.
I was making a full time income on this business when my list crossed 500. Proof that a small list is all you need.

You don’t need a huge list. You need a great one. This isn’t a shortcut, but it’s an important point. Just one subscriber who is totally down with what you’re doing is worth more than 1000 who aren’t. Quality, not quantity, is the key.

Are you running a small business in a small market, like most readers of this blog? If so, then building a huge list isn’t in the cards. Don’t sweat it. It doesn’t matter. Instead, build an awesome, small list. Consider the benefits:

A small list allows you to be much more engaged with your readers one-on-one.
A small list allows you to listen more attentively.
A small list allows you to produce offers that are much more targeted and valuable to your readers.
A small list, when managed properly can be just as profitable as a big list.

I’ll talk more about the mechanics of marketing to a small email list in future posts. For today, I just wanted to encourage you; size doesn’t matter 🙂

If you want to attack this issue directly in your business, hit me up for some small business consulting. In a very short time, we can knock weeks or months off the learning curve for you. Also, if you have any direct questions about email marketing, fire me an email or hit me up on Twitter. Let’s talk.

How can I improve conversion on my website?

By Christian

We spend so much time and money getting traffic to our websites, building our subscriber lists, etc. It’s understandable that one of the biggest questions I get is “how can I improve conversion on my website?”

Think for a minute about the difference between “making contact” and “making an impact”. The difference is huge. For example, you could send a spam email to half a million people this afternoon, if you wanted to do that. It wouldn’t cost very much, and you would be “making contact” with a large number of people, right? But what would it get you? Probably…not much. Consider the fact that “making contact” is probably not really what you’re going for. What you REALLY want to achieve is “making an impact“.

IMPACT: The secret to a 70% opt-in rate

When you “make an impact”…that’s when your conversions go through the roof. That’s the difference between getting a 3% and a 70% opt-in rate. I know, because I’ve been on both sides of that fence. So many people ask me how to get more traffic out to their site, and I respond that my most profitable site only gets a few thousand visitors per month.

If you want to build a site that gets hundreds of thousands of page views monthly, I’m not your guy. I’ve never done that. But if you want to be highly effective with your niche marketing campaigns, that’s precisely what I do. Do you really want to just get more and more traffic? Or do you want to make a much greater impact on the people that matter most to your business?

The direction marketing is headed

We hear about all the A-listers out there who have tens- or even hundreds of thousands of subscribers, but did you know there is an entire world of marketers that make a fantastic living on a list of just a few hundred people? Today there are more businesses marketing online than ever. And do you think that number is going up or down? More new businesses flood the interwebz daily. It’s a beautiful thing. But with as noisy as things are these days, they’re only going to get noisier. This means we need to have a greater IMPACT on our visitors. We NEED to get better conversions, because most of us are not in a niche where getting a hundred thousand visitors a month is even viable. It’s not part of our business model. We need to get great visitors, and we need to keep them.

Focus on engagement. While it’s great to have a big list and a lot of traffic, there is ALWAYS a small segment of your list that is comprised of the people that really “get” you. Focus on them. Focus on making a big impact on a small number of people. I know, it potentially means doing away with the ego stroke of being able to say “I have an Alexa rating of X” or “I have a million-bazillion RSS subscribers”. For some business models, these type of metrics matter. They have their place. But for us small business owners running a website to a niche audience, we need to focus on what’s actually going to grow our business.

How to make an IMPACT

At the end of the day, this isn’t rocket science. Thank God, right? It’s why I love this business. It’s OK to just let it be simple. How do I get awesome conversions with my websites? I have opt-in forms that convert at over 70%, because I build the opt-in form especially for a small, highly targeted group of people. So when they visit my web page, it’s almost impossible for them to not take advantage of my offer. It was built, after all, with them in mind. It speaks straight to their most pressing need, and they know it. They know they’re not looking at a mass-marketed offer, because they’re NOT looking at a mass-marketed offer! They’re looking at an offer that was put together especially for them. They’re looking straight down the barrel of a highly targeted “impact marketing” campaign.

You can do this too. It’s the difference between sending a black and white direct mailing piece, or visiting them in person and shaking their hand. It’s the difference between having your customer on an autoresponder, or taking note of their mailing address when they place an order, and sending them a handwritten thank you note. It’s the difference between having an opt-in box in the sidebar of your blog, or having 7 different opt-in pages…each one targeted to a specific segment of your readership.

Of course, in order to have high conversions like this, you have to do two things:

You have to pay close attention to your clients and customers. You have to know them.
You have to take the time to engage people personally.

People KNOW the difference between automated mass communication and authentic engagement. Personalizing an email is fine, but people still know it’s a broadcast message. They’re not impressed. Mass communication is important, so I’m not saying otherwise, but if you want high conversions you need to go the extra mile.

Authentic engagement is what causes high conversion rates, and it’s just something that cannot be faked. It also cannot be automated. It’s a business decision we all have to make, but if you want to make every visitor count, and if you want stellar conversion rates, that’s how you do it. Make an impact.

Does your blog disappoint you?

By Christian

I just got a great message from a reader indicating he’s fed up with blogging and doesn’t know what to do moving forward. He doesn’t want to quit, but he’s not getting the results he’s looking for, so he’s just kind of stuck.

His main question is “Can you take a look at my blog and tell me what to do?” I get asked this a lot.

Unfortunately it’s just not helpful for me to give you blanket, generic advice. I hate telling people that, but taking a look at your site and giving you some watered down advice is just not good business for either of us. The truth is your ideal plan of attack is completely, 100% dependent upon your goals. It’s also dependent upon where you are now and how long you want it to be before you start making serious things happen. These things HAVE to be addressed!

Since I do consulting with you guys here, I wanted to get that out and be very clear. I can’t give you goals. I also cannot provide you with drive or aspiration. That’s on you, baby 🙂 Basically it works like this: if you don’t have goals, I can’t really help you achieve them. That makes sense, right?

How to make a great goal for your blog

BUT…if you’re willing to sit down and talk it out a bit, we can most definitely fine tune your approach to web marketing and make things happen for you. One of the biggest things small business owners struggle with is knowing what to pursue with their blogs. It’s kind of hard to set a goal for your blog when you’re not really sure how blogging works to begin with, right? So I want to give you a three step process. This is my advice for any new bloggers, without a doubt.

Get very clear on your target market – your audience is NOT everyone. Focus!
Once you know your audience, get clear on your goals – is your main goal engagement with your readers? Affiliate income? Email list building? Client lead generation? Obviously, without a targeted goal you cannot have a targeted approach to achieving it! When you know what you want, step 3 becomes much simpler.
Put together a simple, easy to sustain plan for making it happen – this can involve tweaks to your site, changes to your approach for creating content, changes to your marketing or all of these.

Does it make sense that steps 1 and 2 are absolutely crucial? Does it make sense that without steps 1 and 2 in place, it’s pretty much impossible to do step 3? I can help you with any or all of these three steps, but these represent the path for getting exactly what you want out of your blog.