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Jun 13 2013
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The 10-Step Road Map To Promoting Webinars

Thursday is guest post day here at Duct Tape Marketing and today’s guest is Samuel Faith – Enjoy!

7552515652_5fb8fa48ba_zWhen it comes to content marketing, nothing is better than a good webinar. You can educate, inform, engage and convert your target market – all at once. Independent reports from inbound marketing experts indicate that webinars can significantly boost your expert status, build meaningful and engaging relationships with your customers, and turn your audience into high converting prospects.

But creating webinars is just one part of the equation. Promoting them is equally important too to maximize so here is a comprehensive 10-step roadmap for you to effectively promote your webinars.

1. Define Proper and Measurable Objectives

Having specific objectives help you to measure your success and ROI. Most of us don’t plan properly, and having specific objectives happen to be an afterthought for most of them. Without any objectives to help you measure, you won’t know how well your webinar performs and thus you can’t improve anything.

Your objectives will vary depending on your business needs, but most of them will fall into the following categories:

  1. To educate and inform
  2. To generate qualified leads
  3. To gather market response and feedback

Clearly defining your objects will also help you when you promote your webinar, as well as planning the presentation delivery. What you do for each objective categories will be different.

2. Set Realistic Expectations

Expectations are not quite same as goals. Usually, we might have unrealistic expectations or too vague ones that we don’t even know what we should measure using the objectives. Knowing and having realistic expectations also help us in follow-up plans. Whatever your expectations are, keep in mind that webinars are not for massive immediate boost in sales, but rather to build relationships and generate new leads.

3. Estimate Audience Response

There is no easy way to estimate audience response, for there are many influencing factors. However, here are a few factors that you can consider to estimate your audience response.

  1. Your current blog and email subscribers. Look at the numbers such as usual response rates. Check out how many percentage of subscribers are active in engaging with you. These are the same people that are likely to have an interest in your webinar.
  2. Targeting metrics. If you have specific targeting metrics, then you will have a lot closer chance to estimate your response from that target group.
  3. Your content and offer. If your webinar content sucks, then nobody will come. You can’t lie to audience with just promotional materials. t will also depends on the offer you are going to give as an incentive.
  4. Your web traffic. This is seasonal as it depends on other marketing efforts too. The traffic can spike. So if your webinar is promoted on your site during the time of traffic spike, then your webinar will receive a lot of responses.

4. Determine and Set Your Cost Per Lead

Cost per lead is basically your cost for hosting and promoting a webinar for each participant. Sum up everything and divided by the number of participants you get. Knowing your cost per lead can help you out in determining your cost per acquisition for each customers. It is always good to keep this cost low, and if you have your own email list or partnering with someone with a good list, then this cost will go down too. If your promotional efforts pay off and you gain a lot of participants and interests, then your cost per lead will be low as well.

5. Maximize Your Attendance Rate

Statistics show that actual turn-out rate from all webinar registrants is between 40% to 60%. The rest will flake or just forget about your webinar, unless it is paid. Maximizing attendance rate is not really hard. You can use a good reminder sequence via email, and SMS reminder just a couple hours before webinar starts. Offering good incentives can compel them to attend your event too.

6. Conversion Matters

Conversion is all about maths and you can easily figure it out once you know the industry’s standard conversion rates, click-through rates and open rates, as well as your own data. If you already have an email list, then you definitely have all those data.

A well-articulated offer on a well-managed email list, with good email subject can get you around 10% to 15% click-through rate. Average will be 5% to 10%. If your webinar topic is highly relevant and timely, then you can expect even better.

Your landing page is important too. A well-optimized page with good copy, minimal form fields (ideal is just name and email) and good incentives for visitors to sign up can convert convert as low as 25% of visitors. Hopeful rate will be 40%. However, it is not unheard of to convert 70% to 80% with well-optimized landing pages.

7. Ask For An Expert To Be Guest Speaker

Even if you are an established expert, your webinar event will reap more benefits if you partner up with another expert. He will have his own list and blog readers. Besides, it will also deliver more value to your audience as well as his. In fact, it is known that you can get as many as 200% to 300% boost in webinar sign-up rate. This is especially helpful if you and your business are not well-known players yet. Your visibility will also shoot up when you have a high-profile guest speaker.

8. Build An Optimized Registration Page

Landing pages are important, but so are registration pages. They should not be an afterthought at all. For some, they may separate landing page from emails and registration page as two entities, or they may use only one page for both purpose. Here are a few critical things you should not have on a registration page.

  1. Too many form fields. Did you know that every extra form fields required to fill out will lose 5% of your prospects? If you have 3 fields, then that is already 15%. Name and email are enough. Follow up the rest later.
  2. Having links leading to other pages. If your registration page or landing page is hosted on your main website, make sure that the page is standalone and none of your navigation links are there. In fact, don’t put ANY links that will lead people away to any other pages.
  3. Not having social proof. People will trust you more if you show social proof. Things like testimonials from previous webinars, information about your high-profile guest speaker, and mainstream media coverage on you – all of them can give you massive boost in social proof.

9. Do Split Tests Again & Again, Then Improve

It is absolutely critical to test our message in the promotional contents to know which ones works the best. For emails, test different subjects. For landing pages, do A/B split tests. You might not get it right at the first time but after a few times, you will get enough data to know that what works, and what doesn’t. Then you can improve for future events. If you want to get good examples, subscribe to Obama’s email campaigns. He has some of the most talented copywriters and email marketers.

10. Don’t Forget To Remind And Follow-up

Not every registrants will remember that they have an awesome webinar to attend. What you should do is send out well-timed reminder emails and SMS. Always remind your registrants one week ahead, then 1 day ahead, and 1 hours before the event. Don’t keep sending SMS reminders all the time though, and it is best to send out an SMS reminder together with the final reminder email.

After your webinar event ends, send out a thank you email to all those attend. And make sure you keep your word and give them access to your giveaways, as well as follow-up your audience. You may want to send a survey, or a special offer. It all depends on what’s your end-goal is. You can also send recording of your webinar to everybody, including those who didn’t show up.

profile_picSamuel Faith is a content marketing specialist with a focus on technology, marketing and entrepreneurship. He is a big believer of the role of webinars in content marketing and currently running http://www.bestWebinar.com, a website where he reviews and talks about webinars.

Filed Under: Referral Marketing, Small Business Marketing, Webinars Tagged With: ,
May 16 2013
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Mobile Copywriting Tips and Four Apps to Assist

Thursday is guest post day here at Duct Tape Marketing and today’s guest is Teddy Hunt – Enjoy!

technology flickr image

photo credit Via Flickr by FaceMePLS

With 79 percent of Americans working remotely at least part of the time, it seems the days of copywriters chained to cubicles are far behind us. However, leaving the desk behind can take some getting used to. Read on to discover tips for copywriting in a mobile work environment, and 4 helpful apps to assist you in doing so.

Stay Connected with Technology

Many of us step out of the office to recharge our batteries, but you shouldn’t cut yourself off from your workplace altogether. A smart phone allows you to receive phone calls from your clients and respond to their emails while you’re away from your desk. You can also set up a landline-style number through Skype. The low subscription fee lets you make and receive local and international calls just as you would in the office. Calling landlines is cheap, but beware of dialing international mobiles. Global roaming charges can add up quickly!

Invest in a Convertible Tablet

Laptops are the traditional choice for mobile copywriters, but convertible tablets offer greater flexibility. They have the screen size you need and the keyboard you love, with the additional of benefit of being able to run mobile apps. These handy programs aren’t just for wasting time. Read on to learn about the apps that can help you write great copy on the go. Here are 4 of the best ones:

Wi-Fi Locator and Free Wi-Fi Help You Connect

Mobile copywriters need to research, send email, and log stories on the go. The Android-compatible Wi-Fi Locator and its iOS counterpart, Free Wi-Fi, track your location and tell you where to find the nearest t-mobile broadband hotspots. Handy maps make it easy to head to the places you can log on.

Evernote Turns Note-Taking High TechEvernote

Once upon a time, copywriters wouldn’t be seen without a well-worn notebook. These days, that notebook has gone digital with the launch of Evernote. To call it “the ultimate note-taking app” might sound like an overstatement, but its ability to capture text, images, and video is impressive. In fact, it’s created such a buzz that 89 percent of Evernote users downloaded it on a friend’s recommendation.

Use it to record your interviews or simply to jot down your own thoughts when inspiration hits. The ability to tag items helps you stay organized, no matter how many assignments you’re working on.

Omnifocus Keeps You on Track

OmniGroupWith a multitude of external distractions, staying focused can be one of the greatest challenges for copywriters on the go. The Omnifocus app makes the job easier by prioritizing your workload and breaking it down into smaller, more manageable tasks. The reminders function ensures no job slips through the cracks. Omnifocus is currently available for Mac, iPhone, and iPad, and details can be synched across these devices. An Android version is also in development.

(Image via OmniGroup)

Mozy backup

Mozy Backs Up Your Important Data

Almost three-quarters of businesses have lost data in the last two years. If you think it won’t happen to you, then consider these sobering statistics. A staggering 140, 000 American hard drives crash every week, and more than 2 million laptops are stolen annually.

Backing up your data using a cloud system like the Mozy app will help you keep business as usual should the worst happen. The app can automatically back-up the files on your laptop or tablet while you work.

Keeping Pace With An Accelerating World

Perhaps the most important takeaway that you could get from this article, though, is that copywriters need to do everything they can to keep pace with today’s rapidly changing marketplace. The more quickly you can generate great ideas and deliver stellar copy, the more competitive you will be in your endeavors as a professional copywriter.

And if you aren’t currently very mobile in your own copywriting practices, it can be to your advantage to do so. In fact, many remotely working employees have reported a 25 percent increase in productivity, so it makes sense to take your copywriting out of the office. What other tips do you have for copywriting on the go?

teddy_hunt_avatarTeddy Hunt is a freelance content writer with a focus on technology. When not behind a computer, Teddy spends the majority of his free time outdoors and resides in Tampa, Florida.
Filed Under: Content marketing, Marketing Materials, Referral Marketing, Small Business Marketing Tagged With: ,
May 3 2013
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8 Tips for Writing White Papers (Hint: Don’t Call It a White Paper)

Today is guest post day here at Duct Tape Marketing and today’s guest is Gordon Graham – Enjoy!

Ever seen a “white paper” on the web… and figured those are only for the big guys?

Think again. A white paper is a 6- to 8-page marketing document that helps a prospective customer understand an issue or solve a problem. Producing one can help your small business generate leads, build buzz, and level the playing field with much larger companies.

I know, I’ve done it. And I’ve helped dozens of other companies do it.

If you’d like to put this high-powered marketing device to work, here are eight tips on writing effective white papers.

Tip 1: Provide information your prospects can use.

Wondering what you could possible say in a white paper? You already know more than you realize.

To help find a likely topic, ask yourself:

  • What pains do your customers experience?
  • What problems do you help with?
  • What advice do you give them?

For example, consider Tom the plumber. The problems he finds include leaky pipes, clogged drains and plugged toilets. And what sometimes causes them? A DIY job gone wrong.

What if Tom publishes a little report called “5 Home Plumbing Jobs You Can Do Yourself—And 3 You Should Leave to a Pro”? What if he mentions that report on his business cards, on Facebook, even on the side of his truck? Wouldn’t that help Tom stand out from every other plumber in town? Wouldn’t that make him seem like the kind of guy they can trust?

Tip 2: Don’t make your white paper a sales pitch.

The #1 mistake people make is turning a white paper into a sales pitch. Don’t do it! An effective white paper provides answers to questions that many prospects ask. If you dish out a sales pitch, you’ll waste this opportunity to get known and trusted.

Tip 3: Write in a conversational tone.

Many business owners are scared of writing. You don’t need to be. Just write in a friendly, conversational tone, something like this article. You want to sound authentic, helpful, and trustworthy. No need for big words and fancy sentences. You may want to hire an editor to smooth out your final draft: You can quickly find one by Googling “find an editor”.

Tip 4: Present proof for your claims.

If you make a claim, be prepared to back it up. Dig up facts, figures, and quotes from experts and reliable sources. If Joe says homeowners can save half their plumbing bills by following his list, he should have an article in Time magazine or USA Today for proof.

Tip 5: Get it designed properly.

Your white paper should be attractive and easy to read, and that may call for a professional designer. Author/designer Roger C Parker has great tips available at his site Design To Sell. A cover photo helps too, and your designer can find one for about $20 on a site like www.istockphoto.com

Tip 6: Develop a snappy title.

The title is what people see when your paper comes up in a list of search results. So if your title doesn’t “pop” right out of the screen, prospects may skip right past it.

You can make a title interesting with a bold statement, a number, a question, a looming deadline, or a promise. Write lots of different titles, combine the best, then test your favorites on some actual customers.

Tip 7: But don’t call it a white paper.

In some sectors, the term “white paper” is valued, but in others it’s over-used or unknown. You may get more traction calling your document a “special report.” To make the intended audience clear, create a subtitle that names a specific job role or challenge, such as “A special report for home-owners wondering about DIY plumbing.”

Tip 8: Promote it like a madman.

It’s not enough to stick a white paper on your website. You’ve got to promote it. Mention it on your blog, newsletter, Facebook page, Twitter, and LinkedIn groups. Send it any relevant journalists, analysts or bloggers. Consider publishing a press release through a channel like PRWeb. Your goal is to get your white paper in front of everyone who could possibly benefit from it. Good luck!

photo credit: pamhule via photopin cc

Gordon-Graham-150x150Gordon Graham—also known as That White Paper Guy—is an award-winning writer who has created more than 175 white papers for clients from New York to Australia, for everyone from one-person start-ups to Google. His book “White Papers For Dummies” was just published in spring of 2013.

 

 

Filed Under: Referral Marketing, Small Business Marketing Tagged With: ,
Apr 25 2013
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Are You Ever “Finished” with Inbound Marketing?

Enjoy this guest post from Michael Reynolds is President/CEO of SpinWeb

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photo credit: Folk Media via photopin cc

Inbound marketing is both an art and a science. The technology, metrics, measurements, testing, and goals are the science part of it while the creative campaigns and intuitive ideas are a critical part of the art of inbound marketing.

While the numbers and metrics are very quantifiable, the multifaceted nature of inbound marketing can make it somewhat challenging to tackle from a productivity standpoint.

Let’s face it… there is always more you could do. There is always one more blog post you could write. There is always one more ebook idea to work on. Always one more video campaign. One more social media experiment. One more network to try.

Yikes! Where do you draw the line?

Whether you are an agency partner doing inbound marketing for your clients or you are a marketing pro who is in charge of marketing for your organization, how do you know when you’re “finished?” for the day, week, or month?

Reference Your Goals

Before you get all worked up over whether you are doing enough, take a look at your goals. You may feel like you’re not doing enough but if your metrics show that you are on track with your goals, relax! You’re on the right track.

Naturally, you’ll want to continuously improve your results and nudge your goals higher and higher but this can be done in a manageable way that is realistic and achievable.

Follow your Cookbook

While the results are the most important measure of your success, you also need to be working from a “cookbook” so that you have a framework for your activities. A sample cookbook might contain these activities for a given month:

  • Write and publish 4 blog posts
  • Schedule one Facebook post per day
  • Schedule 3 Twitter posts per day
  • Create one new offer, video, or webinar (could also be per quarter)
  • Review keywords and prune/add
  • Look for opportunities to improve conversions and adjust accordingly
  • Create one new A/B test variation for CTA
  • Newsjack as needed
  • Monthly review with client

This is a pretty simple list of activities that are proven to lead to positive results over time. However, if you get three months in and discover that you are not hitting your goals, then you can go back to your cookbook and make some adjustments.

Traffic not as high as you want? Try doubling your blog post output while slowing down offers. Traffic is high but you leads are down? Spend more time creating offers and optimizing conversion opportunities.

Keep the Customer Happy

If you’re with a partner agency, then your customer is, well, your customer. If you’re a marketing director then your internal customers might be the CEO, VP, owners, board of directors, etc. In either case, you have someone to keep happy.

You might be trucking right along and getting great results but the fact remains that customers like to see activity. Your customer’s happiness index (CHI) is important and you’ll want to include some touch points and look for ways to keep them in the loop outside of your regular monthly meeting.

This is where newsjacking can come in handy. Set up some Google Alerts to keep you notified of industry chatter and ask your customer for feedback on these items to see if they want to take advantage of them.

Additionally, you can look for other ways to move the needle like communicating with their sales teams to see if there are any ways you can help close the loop on leads. Little “extra” things like this are the spices that you add to the mix to round things out and keep your CHI up where it should be.

Work the System and Adjust as Needed

If you use your goals as an ultimate target, follow a cookbook, and keep your customer happy, you’ll have some clear boundaries the can help you define when you are “finished” with your inbound marketing activities.

No one wants to feel like they have to work 16 hours a day because there is always more to do. Use these guidelines to keep yourself in check while achieving the great results that you were hired for. If you see opportunities to tweak, go for it… but always measure and tune.

What are some ways you check the “finished” box for your inbound marketing campaigns?

Michael-200w-leftMichael Reynolds is President/CEO of SpinWeb – a digital agency located in Indianapolis, IN. As an Inbound Marketing Certified Professional with Honors Distinction, Michael regularly blogs, publishes educational industry content, and speaks at conferences around the country covering topics like social media strategies, inbound marketing, and technology.

In addition to his obsession with marketing and technology, Michael devotes part of his brain to ballroom dancing and classical music. Prior to earning degrees in both Cello Performance and Management Information Systems from Ball State University, Michael studied the cello with a real live Klingon and still plays regularly in church and the occasional chamber music gig.

Michael enjoys playing tennis, cycling short distances very slowly on the Monon Trail (usually on the way to Bazbeaux Pizza), traveling with his beautiful wife, and eating lots of sushi.

Filed Under: inbound marketing, Referral Marketing, Small Business Marketing Tagged With:
Apr 23 2013
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Why Marketing Is Your Most Important System

Today’s guest post comes from Duct Tape Marketing Consultant Nicole Crozier.

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photo credit: noodlepie via photopin cc

Without the same budget, resources and in-house expertise of larger companies, small businesses are at a disadvantage when it comes to marketing.  By default, responsibility for marketing often falls to the business owner, who usually isn’t a marketing expert and is already strapped for time. As a result, usually one of two things happens:

  • The owner tries various marketing tactics, but without a strategy in place, these tactics often fail, wasting valuable budget dollars.
  • The owner does the right thing and hires a consultant or marketing firm to create a marketing plan, but without the time or expertise on staff to execute the plan, it just sits on the shelf gathering dust.

Why don’t these options work for small businesses? Because what they really need is a marketing system. A marketing system goes beyond the marketing plan to give small businesses the foundational tools, strategies and tactics they need to activate their plan, along with processes to grow and sustain marketing momentum. Here are the core elements of a marketing system – you can see that the plan is just the first step:

  • Plan your marketing using a strategy-first approach to identify your ideal customer and define your core difference.
  • Build the right marketing foundation, such as a website, social media pages and marketing kit.
  • Activate the marketing plan with the right lead generation and awareness tactics.
  • Sustain marketing over the long term by putting the right marketing processes in place.

Here are the top five reasons why a marketing system can be the right choice for small businesses:

 1.     A marketing system is familiar, just like other business processes

Most business owners have no trouble thinking in terms of business systems when it comes to things like paying the bills, setting up services, or hiring employees. But for some reason marketing is more often viewed as a mysterious creative art. In reality, marketing is a business system, and by treating it as such, any mystery around it simply disappears.

 2.     A consistent and predictable stream of leads and referrals

Small businesses don’t need a flash-in-the-pan big-budget marketing campaign with short term results. They need an ongoing and steady stream of incoming leads to fill the sales funnel and create predictable revenue over the long term.

 3.     More qualified leads that take less sales time to convert

It takes a lot of sales time and effort to try and convert prospects who either know little about the company, or were never really qualified leads in the first place. With the right marketing system, small businesses can put processes in place to more effectively move prospects through the sales cycle without a salesperson ever having to pick up the phone. The result is that your prospects get to know, like, trust, and try your company’s services or products through your marketing content, and often end up contacting you when they’re ready to buy.

 4.     Automated marketing systems

One of the main reasons small business marketing efforts fail is because they simply take up too much time. With a marketing system, small businesses can put a series of tools and processes in place to automate many of their marketing functions.

 5.     No more guesswork, no more wasted marketing dollars

Many small businesses spend their time trying the latest marketing tactic of the week and hoping something will stick. The result is a lot of wasted marketing dollars, and no clear idea on why a tactic didn’t work. By focusing on strategy first, marketing tactics simply become the range of tools and vehicles small businesses can choose from to reach the right audience with the right message. And with the right processes in place, owners have a clear picture of what they need to do each month.

When it comes to your marketing system – don’t take a cookie cutter approach:

While a marketing system should adhere to some core principles and follow logical business-building logical steps, it should not be confused with a “cookie cutter” solution. Each step in a marketing system should be customized to the organization, from identifying the right target market and defining a core difference, to selecting the right tactics and strategies that will best reach the target audience.

Even the types of marketing processes should be customized to each company’s internal resources, capabilities and budget. In the end, an effective system should take the guesswork out of marketing, bring clarity to business owners, and become a manageable business process, just like every other small business system.

About Nicole Croizier

Nicole CrozerNicole Croizier is a Vancouver, BC-based marketing consultant and founder of small business marketing firm Corner Your Market. A graduate of Simon Fraser University’s Communication program, Nicole believes in staying on top of the new rules of marketing, and holds an eMarketing certificate and is currently completing programs in social media and web analytics at the University of British Columbia. Nicole left the corporate marketing world after 12 years to found her marketing firm in 2010, and then joined forces with the leading small business brand Duct Tape Marketing as an Authorized Consultant in 2012.

Filed Under: Referral Marketing, Small Business Marketing Tagged With:
Apr 18 2013
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Which Online Marketing Tools Lead to Substantial Growth?

Thursday is guest post day here at Duct Tape Marketing and today’s guest is Lee W. Frederiksen, Ph.D. – Enjoy!

There is a revolution going on in professional services marketing. More and more buyers are going online to learn about possible solutions to their business challenges and find and evaluate potential service providers.

This revolution is already having a major impact on the growth and profitability of professional services firms. My firm recently completed a study of 500 professional services firms and how they used online marketing tools. The results and their implications are described in our new book, Online Marketing for Professional Services.

A Competitive Advantage

The research revealed that the proportion of new business leads generated online had a direct impact on both firm growth and profitability.

Fig1Fig. 1. Online Lead Generation Drives Firm Growth and Profitability

Figure 1 shows that as the proportion of leads generated online increases so does firm growth and profitability. The highest growth rate comes from firms that generate 40-60% of their leads from online sources. Talk about a competitive advantage!

The bottom-line advantages of online marketing are clear and compelling. But where do you start? When you get down to it, what really works?

Evaluating Online Marketing Tools

There is no shortage of opinions about which tools are most effective. But we were interested in results, not rhetoric. So we investigated the effectiveness of 15 of the most common online marketing tools as experienced by three different groups:

  • High Growth Firms — These were the fastest growing and most profitable firms in the study. We were interested in what they were doing differently than their peers.
  • Average Growth Firms — These were the firms that experienced only average growth.
  • Experts — We recruited a panel of 20 top online marketing experts to provide their perspective on the relative effectiveness of the tools. We reasoned that if anyone understood the full potential of the individual tools it would be these folks.

Figure 2 shows the effectiveness ratings for the 15 tools.

Fig2
Fig. 2. Effectiveness Ratings for Experts vs. High Growth vs. Average Growth Firms

A couple of overall findings are clear.

High Growth Firms find almost all the online tools significantly more effective than do their Average Growth peers. And with the exceptions of Facebook and banner ads, the online marketing Experts judged the tools to be more effective than did the High Growth Firms. Perhaps the better you know the tools the better use you can make of them.

Relative Effectiveness of the Tools

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the single most effective online marketing tool in the eyes of both the Experts and the High Growth Firms. SEO is closely followed by web analytics and blogging.

In some ways these top three tools fit together nicely. They provide the content (blogging), the method of attracting visitors (SEO) and a mechanism for evaluating and optimizing the process (website analytics). Notice that the Average Growth Firms largely miss the importance of these core tools.

As we move down the list, we add more analytical tools (usability testing) and more content (white papers, ebooks). In the mid-level of effectiveness we find email marketing and some social media tools such as LinkedIn and Twitter.

Other social media platforms such as Facebook and YouTube rank relatively low in effectiveness for professional services firms. Banner ads were judged least effective by all groups.

What Does This Mean for You?

Understanding these online marketing tools can give you a real edge. Since most firms (the Average Growth group) do not realize the power of some of the techniques such as SEO, blogging and website analytics, you may want to focus your energy first on these tools, which can give you a true competitive advantage.

Just as important, you can avoid investing a lot of resources in tools that do not show as much promise, such as banner ads or Facebook. Does that mean you should never use these tools? Not necessarily, but it does suggest how you might prioritize your efforts.

While your competitors try to generate new clients using less effective techniques, you can focus on those techniques used by the fastest growing firms and favored by the Experts who know the tools best.

Online marketing is changing the face of professional services. Some firms will win more business and earn more profits. Others firms will fall behind and find it harder and harder to attract new clients. With a little knowledge, the choice is yours.

LeePhotoAbout Lee W. Frederiksen, Ph.D.

Lee is Managing Partner and Director of Research at Hinge, a premier professional services branding and marketing firm. He brings over 30 years of marketing experience to the firm’s clients. He is co-author of Online Marketing for Professional Services.

Filed Under: Lead Generation, Referral Marketing, Small Business Marketing Tagged With:
Apr 11 2013
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Why Every Small Business Needs Great Content

Thursday is guest post day here at Duct Tape Marketing and today’s gust is Natalie Chan – Enjoy!

What-is-content2It’s no longer enough for a small business to build a website, Facebook page or twitter profile and hope that people will flock to it, bringing new business.

To ensure a strong online presence, you need good content. Great content means interesting, high quality and highly shareable content that allows you to capture your audience with engaging information, advice, stories and more to provide value – not a hard sell.

However, while nine out of ten organizations market with content, (Source: Content Marketing Institute), continuously creating great content can be a challenge. Especially for small businesses who are already time-poor and resource-stretched.

Repurposing your content allows you to streamline your efforts and make your content work harder for you at no extra cost.

Here are a few tips to boost your content marketing:

1. Subtract the sales pitch

Content marketing may require different tools and a different mindset than direct marketing, but that doesn’t mean the two can’t play together. Use some direct marketing materials you’ve already created and subtract the sales pitch to isolate the relevant, engaging messages for the casual consumer.

You can turn a press release announcing a new product into a blog post addressing the problem your product attempts to solve and educating consumers on other solutions or points of consideration they should be aware of. Take a pitch deck, remove the hard-sell, and turn it into a webinar with useful information for consumers independent of your product. That’s the difference between providing value and extracting it from consumers.

2. Multimedia is Multipurpose

Multimedia assets can greatly increase the flexibility of your content execution. An Instagram photo can live in a blog post, which in turn can become an appealing thumbnail in your Facebook update. Video is one of the most flexible assets you can develop. You can embed videos on your YouTube channel into articles and blog posts, turn them into thumbnails on Facebook, link to them on Twitter, adapt them into podcasts on SoundCloud. Each of these channels present sharing opportunities as well, and by extension further repurposing.

3. Use Hyperlinks

One of the easiest – not to mention cheapest – methods of repurposing your content and extending its shelf life is creating hyperlinks back to it later. These links can be placed organically throughout the new content you produce as a way to get readers to engage with related or otherwise contextually relevant content. As a best practice, be sparing with the number of links you use so as to not to distract the reader or encourage too much bouncing.

4. Leverage Recommendations

There’s no better time to engage audiences than when they’re thinking about what to experience next. Whether on yours or other publisher sites, using discovery platforms to recommend more content you’ve produced for consumers to check out next is a great way to keep them engaged and extend the shelf life of your content.

N ChanNatalie Chan is a Marketing Manager at Outbrain. Outbrain helps people discover the most interesting, relevant and trusted content wherever they are. Outbrain provides personalized recommendations across a network of premium publishers, including CNN, Fox News, Hearst, Rolling Stone, US Weekly and Fast Company. Through Outbrain’s all-in-one content discovery solution, publishers, brands and marketers are able to amplify their audience engagement by driving traffic to their content – on their site and around the web. Outbrain is currently installed on more than 100,000 sites and generates more than 85 billion page views per month.

 

Filed Under: Content marketing, Referral Marketing, Small Business Marketing Tagged With:
Mar 8 2013
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How to Lift Your Website Conversions

It is guest post day here at Duct Tape Marketing and today’s guest is Chris Goward – Enjoy!

LIFT Model v2As a growing business, you need more than just a basic website to be successful on the Internet. You need a website that serves prospective clients and clearly communicates why they should buy from you. Your website needs to work hard.

In short: you need more than just traffic; you need conversions!

Unfortunately, it can feel daunting to compete against larger businesses that have large budgets to perform SEO, hire copywriters, and support dedicated design and development departments.

What can you, as a SMB, to use this your advantage? You can leverage your ability to test and evolve more quickly than the big guys.

We’ve found the best way to improve how websites communicate to their prospects is by testing to uncover business insights. The A/B/n split tests that we run on our clients’ sites make huge improvements in their business.

We will use the example of Iron Mountain, where our tests started with a 45% lift in the first test, then a 404% boost (!), then another 44%, then an additional 38%, followed by a 49% conversion rate increase.

The best result for me was when a sales manager walked down the hall to ask our marketing client what he’d done to increase the lead flow into the sales team. That’s a great feeling!

Iron Mountain isn’t a small company, of course, but every business that uses online can use the same methods they do.

You can get results like this too.

One of the tools we use is called the “LIFT model™” conversion optimization framework to construct task-based hypotheses.  I’ll walk you through how to evaluate your webpage with the LIFT Model and create your test hypotheses for improving your website.

The LIFT Model has six parts

1.     Establish Your Value Proposition – This is a classic problem. Even though every business owner can tell you why they are the best, we often find that they forget to say it explicitly on their website. Do you have the best customer service, lowest prices, highest quality? Do you know what’s really most important to your prospects? You can test to find out what makes you the best in their minds.

2.     Create Urgency – Ask for the business. Tell them why now is the right time to take action. This doesn’t have to be a hard sell, but urgency is a powerful fuel for driving your customers to take action. You should test the best way to create urgency. In a test of a site-wide call-to-action, we found that adding an urgency message lifted conversions. Can you test something similar?

3.     Improve Clarity – Even very effective pages probably aren’t perfect. Is the copywriting effectively communicating your value proposition? Do the images support the message? How obvious is the next step call-to-action?

4.     Improve Relevance – Your headline is your first impression. It should tell the visitor they are in the correct place AND what to do. Images are also valuable assets for establishing relevance; make sure your photos match the purpose of your page.

5.     Decrease Anxiety – Testimonials, certifications, warranties are all important to establish trust. If your visitor has to stop to consider their safety they may never start back up. But, too much emphasis on security can also hurt sales. We tested an example where placing a security symbol too close to a shopping cart actually reduced e-commerce sales by 2%. You should test that!

6.     Decrease Distractions – If an element isn’t important to your business, tone it down. How many things are you asking your customer to do on a single page? What is the most important element on the page? Stay focused on the page’s purpose.

Here’s an example of some of the LIFT points we identified for one of Iron Mountain’s landing pages, for example.

Iron Mountain LIFT

We can then take those problem areas and test to find the best ways to eliminate them.

Turn Weaknesses Into Strengths

The LIFT points are used to turn an online experience’s weaknesses in hypotheses to improve your conversion rate. Another word for the “strength” in this case is a hypothesis.

A valid hypothesis has three qualities:

1.     It is Testable – You should keep your tests simple. Change of copy, use of bullets, and change of images work well because they can be implemented without complicated efforts.

2.     It is Falsifiable – Testing requires the risk of being wrong. You derive insights by proving your hypothesis either true or false so you can take that knowledge to save you time or work in the future.

3.     It is Fruitful – There are many hypotheses that can be tested and assessed, but don’t make a difference. Make sure the goal of the test is something that improves your business (like form submission or add to cart) not something like time on page.

A good hypothesis also needs to follow a certain structure that says “Changing x into y will do z.” So, potential hypotheses in this example would look like this:

  • If we reduce emphasis on the privacy policy more people will complete the form.
  • If we add a review of our service more people will complete the form.
  • If we change the header graphic to an illustration of backing-up data more people will complete the form.

Each of these hypotheses has a clear means for testing, a recognizable goal, and is possibly false.

HypothesesHow do you apply this to your website?

When you look at the experience you are trying to improve, list out the six LIFT factors and find at least one change to improve each factor.

 

 

  • Establish Value Proposition
  • Create Urgency
  • Increase Clarity
  • Increase Relevance
  • Reduce Distraction
  • Reduce Anxiety

Look at your LIFT points and create a hypothesis like: If I change x into y my prospects will do z.

Now that you have a clear testable hypothesis you are ready to begin your test. You can use whatever tool you are comfortable with (e.g. Optimizely, Unbounce, Google Analytics Content Experiments, etc.) to run the test, and because you have created a valid hypothesis you will have an insight for your marketing, not just a completed test.

Want to learn more?

Want more details about Iron Mountain’s conversion optimization strategy?

I’m going to host a free webinar to show how Iron Mountain has dramatically lifted their conversion rates over the past three years. I’ll show strategies and tactics you can use on your websites too.

Join us for the free case study webinar.

 

Chris_Goward_smChris Goward founded WiderFunnel with the belief that digital agencies should prove the value they bring. They’ve developed conversion optimization programs for clients like Google, Electronic Arts, SAP, and Shutterfly. His new book, “You Should Test That,” published by Wiley in 2013 redefines conversion optimization and shows how to create dramatic business improvements and gain marketing insights. You can find out about his company, WiderFunnel, and follow him on Twitter at @chrisgoward.

Filed Under: Lead Conversion, Referral Marketing, Sales, Small Business Marketing Tagged With: