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Oct 12 2012
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The Impact of Better Design

I’ve been investing in better design lately and it’s making me money.

But, what is better design?

Better design

photo credit: jm3

For some that term might simply mean better visual appeal, more pleasing to the eye or stylish.

To me it means better communication.

The primary thing I have to offer is information and better design allows me to communicate that information more effectively and more profitably.

I’m not suggesting that aesthetics of better design aren’t important, but of equal importance to me is hierarchy of information, white space and information way finding that is delivered with the right fonts, spacing and appropriate use of size and color.

Good design costs money, but so does poor design, clutter and confusing information.

As you may have noted if you’re reading this on my site, ducttapemarketing.com has undergone a total redesign and now runs on a custom theme on the Genesis framework. The design was completed by Rafal Tomal and Josh Byers of Studio Press, part of the Copyblogger Media.

The redesign was badly needed as my site had sort of become like some of the Christmas trees I remember as child where my brothers and sisters would just keep putting more and more stuff on the tree because, well, we could.

The overarching goal of the redesign was to more effectively communicate and more effectively deliver information. Comments from readers suggest we made huge strides in that aim.

Statistics also reveal site traffic is up 22% over the previous six month trend, page views are up 104%, time on site and bounce rate have both made significant improvements and sales of our core product, with any change in promotion, are up 219% over a six month trend.

Invest in better communication through better design – it always pays when you get it right.

Filed Under: Blogging, Web Marketing Tagged With: ,
Oct 11 2012
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How to Stay Focused On Producing Your Highest Payoff Content

Today’s post is a direct answer to a question I receive frequently.

Writing optimized content

photo credit: madamepsychosis

First, the question – “I get that I need to produce lots of content but what should I write about?”

And now, the simple answer – “Write about things that your customers and prospects want to know more about.”

It really is that simple. Of course, the challenging part is understanding and staying focused on the most important, otherwise known as highest payoff, topics.

Today it’s not enough to simply write brilliant stuff. Yes, that’s certainly one aspect, but you’ve also got to write brilliant stuff that addresses what your prospects want to know in ways that search engines and searchers alike find relevant.

A little bit of research can go a long way when trying to develop a content strategy based on winning search results for phrases and topics related to what you do.

For this I’ll turn to a primary SEO routine.

Keyword research is a fundamental practice in the search engine optimization and marketing world. It’s how you determine what your pages need to say, it’s how you determine what your competition for important search terms is doing to stay at the top of the rankings and it’s how you determine what search terms and countless variations you want to bid on in your pay-per-click campaigns.

It’s also a great way to develop a body of primary topics for your editorial content calendar.

Below is a routine I’ve used over and over again to help sort out the precise body of topics that will produce the highest payoff in terms of search engine results. (If you want to read my thoughts on how I use these phrases once I discover them check out – The 7 Most Important SEO Factors for Bloggers)

List of 30 – 5 groups

The first thing I do is brainstorm a list of key search terms based on my own analytics, my sent email box and questions that clients routinely ask. I try to produce a list of suspects that reach thirty or so.

Then I try to group them into five or so major themes.

Google Keyword Tool

Next I take this list to a free tool like the Google Keyword Tool or a paid service such as WordTracker.

I run the words or phrases into these tools and quickly start working on revising my brainstorming list based on actual search volume, competition and a host of related phrases that these tools feed me.

Volume and competition prune

I revise my list, sometimes greatly, based on an initial analysis of the amount of search volume and how competitive a search term is and land on a group of phrases somewhere between perfect world and extremely long tail.

The more specific a search phrase is the more valuable it may be in terms of conversion. In other words, someone searching “small business marketing” could be looking for a lot of things, but someone searching “small business marketing growth strategy” might likely be looking for that killer course you’re selling – less volume, more relevance.

Conduct searches

Now I take my revised list that is probably no more than ten phrases, to the Google. I plug each phrase in and note the page one results. (These days it might make sense to do this logged in and out of your Google account as the results can vary greatly.)

I analyze the top results to make sure this is a place I want to land and create a list of what I now call my “competition” for these phrases. I then employ a few competitive research tools, such as the free Open Site Explorer or SEO Toolbar from SEOBook or the paid Raven Tools to learn a great deal about why these sites or pages are ranking well for these terms.

Website content feature

google keyword tools

Using the website feature you can easily learn what search terms Google thinks a page or site is optimized for.

One last step I like to use is to return to Google Keyword tool and use the website content feature that allows you to run a keyword analysis not on a search phrase but on an actual URL.

I do this with many of the competitive sites to learn why Google thinks what they do about this page and drum up more related search term candidates.

From all of this research I can generally come up with a meaty list of topics that I know I need to blog about in a very optimized way. My only task now to is find ways to say some of the same things over and over again in highly interesting ways. I also employ a tool like Scribe in my writing to help keep me laser focused on the content strategy.

This isn’t the only way to do keyword research and I’m sure many of the SEO folks have great strategies and routines for accomplishing what I’ve described here, but this is a way that works for me and helps me naturally balance the need for content with the need for optimization.

Filed Under: Duct Tape Marketing, Marketing Strategy, Social Media, Web Marketing Tagged With: ,
Oct 9 2012
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The 7 Most Important SEO Factors for Bloggers

Blogging software, such as WordPress, automatically gives your content an advantage when it comes to the “on page” factors that search engines consider important in determining what content to show in search results.

Ranking higher in Google

photo credit: Stuck in Customs via photopin cc

That’s one of the reasons I promote the use of blogging software for every small business site on the planet. Right out of the proverbial box your site stands a better chance of ranking for key terms.

Of course that assumes that are consistently feeding your blog high quality, keyword rich, educational content. (But that’s a story for another day.)

Today I want to focus on the most important SEO factors for bloggers and talk a little about how you can do a few things to modify your blog’s default settings and get even more optimization.

Title

The title is an HTML attribute that does not actually show up on your pages, but is displayed at the top of the browser window. By default, most blogging software makes the title the same as the post title or headline.

This may be one of the most important elements to consider altering. Many times your headline for a post benefits from being catchy or even intriguing to attract readers from Twitter, but that may not make the best title for people searching.

You can change default settings in the code or you can use one of the many SEO plugins designed to give you the flexibility to alter the important the elements I address in this post. I use a plugin from Yoast called WordPress SEO.

With the plugin installed you will see a screen below your post that allows you to change elements such at the title and description.

In most cases I create a much more search engine friendly title, with important search terms, no matter the headline of the post.

SEO factors in blogging

Preview of how this post, with modified settings, might show in search results.

URL

The URL or permalink for each blog post is also something you can alter. The first step is to make sure you are using search friendly URLs. By default WordPress creates database URLs with numbers and such that aren’t search friendly at all. You can create customer URLs by going to settings – permalinks and choosing a custom structure that includes the post name.

Once you do this WordPress will by default create URLs from the headline of your post. You can edit these URLs and in some cases this makes sense. Some blog posts headlines, as I’ve mentioned, don’t make the best URLs, so this is the place to shorten and edit in some keywords for more SEO impact from the blog post URLs – another very important factor.

How to edit URL of blog posts

You can edit the URL in post screen for keywords and length

H1 tag

H tags are used in HTML to show hierarchy for things like heading and subheadings. (They are often used incorrectly by designers for styling as well.) Search engines use these tags as yet another way to make a determination about what’s important on a page so wise use of H tags can help emphasize keywords in the content.

By default your blog post headline is shown in the HTML as an H1 tag. You may also want to style subheadings with H2 or H3 tags (Something that you can easily do with the Visual editor.) Careful use of keywords in these headings and subheading can give your post a boost.

Description

The description is another HTML attribute that does not show up on the page but does show up quite often when your post in featured in search results – it’s the text that describes what the post is about.

If you don’t complete this for your posts the description text will likely be the first few words in the post. This may or may not be a good way to draw someone in to reading your post.

Using the SEO plugin mentioned above I write descriptions that read more like an ad for the post so that someone reading it really wants to dive in and read the entire post.

Adding Alt image tag

You can add a title and alt image description in the Add Media screen

Images

If you use images in your posts, and I believe you should, take the time to complete the title and alternate description fields when you upload an image as search engines can’t see the image so your descriptions in these fields offer another opportunity for keywords related to the post topic.

Also, choose the featured image setting for the image that you want to show when someone retweets or shares your post to Facebook.

Sitemap

Sitemaps are files or pages that as the term suggests map out all the pages on a site. There was a time when these were popular navigation tools but for the most part site maps have become a tool to let search engines easily access content and changes on your site.

The WordPress SEO plugin comes with a sitemap function and there are many others available as well.

Make sure that you also submit your sitemap to the Google and Bing Webmaster Tool Portals.

Speed

This last item isn’t an SEO or on page factor directly, but search engines, not to mention humans, hate sites that load slowly. Google has repeatedly implied that slow loading sites are being penalized in their latest updates.

There are many factors that impact site load speed, including theme issues, caching and plugins. Using a caching plugin such a W3Total Cache has become a pretty standard recommendation.

Another factor is hosting. Larger WordPress sites have big databases and when that’s coupled with lots of traffic a host configured for WordPress is a must. Over the years my site started to drag so I switched to Synthesis hosting recently and coupled with the Genesis Theme framework my site is once again lightning fast.

You can use Google’s PageSpeed Insights test to see where you might have issues.

Filed Under: Duct Tape Marketing, Social Media, Web Marketing Tagged With: ,
Oct 4 2012
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5 Ways to Generate More Email Sign Ups

Getting more email subscribers is job #1. Email is and has long been the number one producer of return on marketing investment for businesses large and small.

Acquiring the contact information of someone who has expressed at least a mild interest in what you do and has given you permission to tell them a great deal more about what you do is the first, and perhaps most important, task.

There are few businesses today that can get by on traffic and eyeballs alone. Today’s marketer must get access, permission and time on the screen. Today’s marketer must have multiple opportunities to build enough relationship capital to convert trust into a sale.

Email marketing, combined of course with advertising, referrals, public relations and a total online presence is the complete package.

List building is an essential element of email marketing today and takes a strategic approach in line with its importance.

It’s no longer enough to slap an email sign-up form on every page of your website and call it done. You must focus attention to detail and expand your thinking on list building to get your “value exchange” or “reason I would give up my email address” in front of more of the right people at just the right time.

Below are five tactics for list building today:

1) Feature with content

There is an assumption in this post that you are producing high quality, educational content – the kind that draws links and readers. Now you’ll want to explore ways to promote your list sign up as people engage with this content.

Many WordPress theme frameworks today (Genesis and Thesis) allow for what are being called “feature boxes.” These feature boxes make it easy to place a sign up box at, say, the end of each blog post or top of your blog home page. Placing your email offer where people are reading and enjoy your content improves uptake.

2) Content partner share

One of the most important ways to entice email subscribers today is by offering long format content in the shape of an eBook. Generally, this is content that deeply tackles one subject in a way that’s appealing to your target client.

Once you’ve gone to the effort to produce this content reach out to other businesses, the ones that know they should be offering content to their customers, and allow them to promote your eBook by way of a special co-branded sign-up landing page.

3) Thank you suggest

Once someone signs up to receive your offer it’s good form to redirect them to a “thank you” page that gives them assurance that all is well, what to expect next or other details.

Consider partnering with three or four other “high quality” content producers that you would recommend to your readers and suggest subscriptions to these partners on your thank you page.

If each of the partners involved performs this action you’ll see more subscribers by way of referral.

4) Advertise

If your content, such as an eBook, is attractive enough you may find that advertising is an effective way to create list sign-ups. Of course this assumes that your conversion and measurement activities are such that you at least have some idea of what an email subscriber is worth long-term to your business.

You can effectively promote an eBook through Facebook Promoted Posts or by purchasing solo ads in newsletters related to your market.

5) Endorsement swaps

One of the most powerful ways to quickly add subscribers is for another list owner, one that has built trust with their subscribers, to send a mailing endorsing your eBook or newsletter content.

Now, while this is obviously a great tactic, it’s one that requires many things. No list owner will risk their reputation endorsing low quality content and neither should you. This is a tactic that takes time as it’s best done with partners that you have established a very trusting relationship with either by way of reputation in your industry or by directly working on other projects.

Build these relationships, create some killer content and approach your partners with the idea of sending an email offering their great content to your list while they do the same.

Filed Under: Referral Marketing, Social Media, Total Online Presence, Web Marketing Tagged With: , ,
Sep 27 2012
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A Crash Course in Landing Page Conversion

Yesterday you learned what makes a good landing page and the 9 concepts below can be used as a checklist to keep you on track the next time you run a marketing campaign.

1. Where landing pages sit in the funnel

To understand the role of a landing page it helps to show visually how they fit into your marketing flow, from the traffic source, through your different test variants, and finally, the confirmation page.

(Click the image for to explore in more detail)

2. Message match: Ad to Headline

This should be your first concern. Read your ad phrasing and then read the headline on your landing page to see how closely they correlate. One of the biggest reasons for a high bounce rate (and a poor PPC quality score for PPC) is that people lose the information scent when they arrive at your page, thinking they are in the wrong place.

Next stop? The back button. Then your competition.

3. A single CTA

Having a single call to action gives people only one thing to do and stops them wandering down the wrong path. Drill this into your head: only give them one thing to do and they will be more likely to do it.

4. Social sharing

There are 2 ways to add social sharing to your page. You can add them to your main page to show social proof or add them to your confirmation page (covered in part 9).

Don’t forget that a low count shows “negative social proof” so if you want to use them, try using paywithatweet.com to get your ebook instead of a form. This boosts tweet counts in the background. Then show the widgets when the count is high enough and switch back to a form.

5. Use video to increase conversions

Studies have shown that using videos improve conversions. But why?

  • Higher engagement: Videos increase the time on page, giving your brand message longer to sink in
  • Feature yourself or company employees: Raise the trust factor by showing you’re real
  • People are lazy: Many prefer to watch rather than read

6. Trust factors

Some things that can help instill a sense of trust in your visitors are:

  • Number of participants: My personal favorite is for webinars or events. If you show a running count of how many people are attending it can really sell people on the value of the event.
  • Testimonials: They can be video, but written ones also work well, especially when associated with a brand that your visitors know
  • Client logos/endorsements: If you have recognizable clients include their logo.
  • Media mentions: Show the logos of big sites where you’ve been featured. Often achieved via a PR push around a product launch.

7. Visual design

Professional page design is also important for establishing trust – but bad designs convert too (usually for cheesy pages selling miracle weight loss pills). So what can you do to improve your conversions using design?

There are a variety of techniques including directional cues like arrows, or people looking at your CTA, contrast, whitespace and color etc.. Read Designing for Conversion – 8 Visual Design Techniques to Focus Attention on Your Landing Pages for a detailed exploration of this.

8. A/B Testing & Optimization

Your page is awesome, right? How do you know? You just made an assumption because you spent a boatload of time designing it and you are feeling proud of your masterpiece. The thing is, EVERY page can be better, and this is where testing and optimization come in.

How do you optimize your pages? Most people just throw out some ideas (often untrained people) and try a quick test based on a headline or button color change… but most tests fail.

A good process goes something like this:

  1. Gather user feedback on your page using tools like Olark (live chat) and Qualaroo (simple surveys). You’ll be surprised to learn where people are hitting barriers in your conversion funnel.
  1. Brainstorm ideas with a diverse collection of team members: Include customer support, designers, copywriters and information architects.
  1. Develop a hypothesis: Now that you have feedback and some ideas for a test page you need to create a hypothesis for why you think it will succeed and build your page with this in mind. Try writing it like this:

“Our Test Hypothesis: Will allowing visitors to download our PDF by providing their email address perform better than receiving it in exchange for a tweet? Considering that not everyone has a Twitter account, or is willing to share such information with their followers.”

It’ll you build a test page with a strong sense of purpose.

  1. Run the test: Finally, you need to set up a test with your new page against the original (control) page. Make sure you leave it running for at least a week to cover daily variations in behaviour and don’t stop the test until it’s had enough traffic to achieve statistical significance.
  1. Choose a winner: This is easy. Whichever performs best should be promoted to be your new champion page and the loser discarded.
  1. Try, try again: Remember that test will often not give you the results you were hoping for, but don’t give up if your first few attempts don’t pan out. Learn from them and keep trying.

To see how good you are at spotting what converts the best, try ConversionSkills.com. The value in trying to pick the winner is to remember that your decisions should be driven by data, not assumptions.

9. Post-conversion strategies

We’re at the end of the funnel, and the most under utilized conversion opportunity space you have at your disposal. Your confirmation pages are prime real estate to engage with your new lead/customer, after all they have just signalled positive intent by converting.

Things you can add to your confirmation page:

  • Webinar follow up: Remind people that they will receive full videos and slides of the webinar even if they weren’t able to attend.
  • Social sharing: Ask people to share your page with their colleagues.
  • Follow you: on the social networks they hang out on the most
  • Freebies: If you were doing lead gen to give away an ebook or whitepaper, give them an extra one free as a thank you.
  • Ask them to subscribe to your newsletter: This is a great way to keep people in your sphere of influence for further re-marketing in the future.
  • The Amazon model: Use “People who liked this also liked… ” to drive extra sales.

For an even deeper dive, read post-conversion strategies for lead gen landing pages.

Now you’re a real landing page pro, so visit the landing page we put together just for Duct Tape readers and take the next step.

– Oli Gardner

Oli Gardner is Co-Founder & Creative Director at Unbounce – The DIY Landing Page Platform. He is an opinionated writer, primarily on the subjects of landing pages and conversion rate optimization. You should follow him on Twitter @OliGardner.

 

 

Filed Under: Small Business Marketing, Social Media, Web Marketing Tagged With: ,
Sep 24 2012
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How and Why to Make Your Website
Tablet and Mobile Friendly Now

Talk about mobile and tablet usage dominates computer hardware conversations and the implications are one of the hottest topics in marketing right now as well.

photo credit: waferbaby via photopin cc

Website visitors are now consuming content from our sites in a dizzying array of devices, formats and orientations. There was a time when browser compatibility was a designer’s primary concern. Today, designers and site owners need to be increasingly concerned with media compatibility or more to the point, the size and shape of the viewer’s screen.

The use of mobile and tablet devices for browsing has crept past 10% in my stats and my guess is this is undereported as some device detection goes unreported. The number one device is the iPad, with the iPhone a close number two.

Tablets, including Samsung Galaxy, Kindle, Nook and Google’s Nexus 7, as well as the still dominate iPad, are poised to make huge strides in adoption and usage in 2013 and may take usage on some sites into the 25% range.

So, yes, now is the time to get serious about making sure mobile and tablet visitors to your site have a great experience.

The first step might be to get a picture of where your site is currently. Test your site’s mobile readiness here, view your site as it might look on dozens of devices here and check out this great education resource.

Whether you decide to hire someone to do it for you, do it yourself or find a solution in the middle, one term that’s important to understand is media queries. Media queries allow web developers to change the layout of a page based on the media that’s displaying it — whether that means adapting it to fit a smaller screen or just stripping it down to the essentials before it heads to a printer.

The term and concept has been around for years – remember visiting a site that had a print friendly option – that site was using what we call today a theme switcher to change the design based on a media query.

This concept is what drives a great deal of what goes on behind the scenes in device specific design.

Below are some of the options you might explore as you determine the best strategy for adopting mobile and tablet design experiences for your website.

Build it for you

You can simply hire a designer to create a mobile friendly design and then integrate it into your current design. In many ways this is how you might get the most useful, yet most costly design. A good mobile designer should understand that good mobile design is more than simply making everything smaller. The best mobile design starts with understanding intent and delivering the must have content beautifully.

The IAB has a nice directory of mobile site builders and long time player moFuse has a hybrid

Add a Plugin

One very simply fix for WordPress blog sites is to explore a number of plugins that do the heavy lifting of detection and switching and come with mobile themes built in. Plugins such as WPTouch Pro and WPMobile Detector are good options. You might also consider simply adding a mobile theme, such as Mobile Pro as your theme.

Automatic mobilization

There are a growing number of what might be called automatic solution – services that take your current site and automatically create a mobile version. These tools attempt to make sense of the navigation and core content, but also allow for some amount of customization and addition of widgets for things like social sharing, contact forms and eCommerce functions.

Dudamobile works very well and has several large integrations including Google Mobile Ads. bMobilized is another player that includes some great customizations, including a large library of widgets.-

Adopt Responsive Design

Another growing option that is preferred by some is something called Responsive Design. The idea behind this concept is that instead of using mobile sites or themes, the design uses media queries to determine the best way to show the content based on the user’s device. The practice makes use of CSS, fluid grids and flexible images to create one experience responsive to many environments.

WordPress theme makers are quickly creating responsive design themes that can replace the need for mobile and tablet specific tactics. Studio Press has many responsive design themes and the Responsive theme also draws high praise.

For those that want to dive in and learn more about this topic check out Responsive Web Design by Ethan Marcotte, The book explores CSS techniques and design principles, including fluid grids, flexible images, and media queries

If you want to explore fluid grid design in a truly geeky way have a look at Gridpack.

Build Your Own App

Of course one final option that you might explore is the app route. There are a number of tools that make it fairly simple to build your own apps. This assumes that you have content that people will want to visit using your their device’s native operating system rather than the web.

It’s a fun option, but might not be the most useful for many businesses.

However, if you want to explore jQueryMobile is a good place to start and check out drag and drop options such as MyAppBuilder and AppMakr.

Filed Under: Social Media, Web Marketing Tagged With: , , , ,
Jul 19 2012
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Hey Brother Can You Spare a Tweet

There are a handful of proven referral partnership approaches that I’ve advised most every small business to consider.

One is to establish a formal partnership with a not for profit whose mission you can get passionate about supporting.

Approach the development director or a board member and tell them up front that you want to explore all of the ways to partner. Many non-profits will take and need your financial donation, but I find that they are always looking for much deeper relationships with businesses.

Build supporting this organization’s mission through financial support, event support, in kind support, volunteer support and even committee or staff support into the partnering idea. Supporting a community cause can be very good for your business and good for your business culture when done for the right reasons and allowed to grow.

To maximize the relationship I further suggest that you use your marketing muscle to provide your chosen not for profit with a win that also allows you to showcase your relationship.

This, I’ll admit, is a tricky point and let me put forth this disclaimer: I’m not suggesting by any stretch that you flaunt your good deeds publicly for gain, but people want to support companies that they see are doing good things in the community, people are proud to work for a company that they feel cares about the community and your marketing support can provide significant opportunities for exposure and fundraising for your chosen partner.

A large regional bank in my community (UMB Bank) has started a pretty innovative support campaign in this vein that involves Twitter and Foursquare. Banks are highly regulated so they often have to great pretty creative if they are to use social media in any meaningful way.

One of the ways that UMB raises funds for its chosen charities is to donate when people use the #umbgives hashtag or check in at a branch on Foursquare. Throughout the year they rotate in a new charity and all tweets of any kind that include the hashtag and checkins accumulate money for the organization.

This to me is a great way to create a win for the organizations while demonstrating community involvement. The not for profits have a very easy way to get their staff, volunteers, donors, and other constituents involved and the bank receives some glow from all that sharing and tweeting. In addition, bank employees now have a very simple way to participate and support the charity while supporting their own organization through social media. I like the month to month approach as well because it creates some urgency for the organization.

Another great approach is to simply hold a special event, sale or new product launch and designate a portion of the proceeds for that campaign to your organization. This allows and motivates your charitable partner to help spread the work and it’s another win for all involved.

Done creatively and in support of a mission your entire organization can get behind, this approach offers some wonderful opportunities for both brands and not for profits.

Filed Under: Referral Marketing, Social Media, Web Marketing Tagged With: , , ,
Jul 16 2012
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Follow the Logical Path to Marketing Success

As I’ve stated countless times marketing is a process of getting people with a need to know, like and trust you. It’s a bit like the traditional Russian Matryoshka nested dolls – you open up one and that leads you the next step and the next step and the next.

The key is creating a series of logical steps so that people take small steps along the path rather than asking them to make giant leaps.

I’ve used a metaphor I call The Marketing Hourglass to lay out the step in the path – know, like, trust, try, buy, repeat and refer. These seven steps when outlined for small business owners, seem to bring the entire concept of a marketing system into much greater focus.

Today I would like to outline what these steps might actually look like from a tactical standpoint for a typical B2B service business.

Know

This is the act of creating awareness so while it sometimes starts with a referral received, it’s often the act of putting something out there that gets the attention of your prospect.

Know tactics – AdWords ad promoting free eBook that is related to your service offering but doesn’t sell anything directly, blog posts answering common client challenges amplified in social media, Facebook promoted posts for free eBook, LinkedIn Answers geared towards blog posts and free eBook content.

Like

In this step you must move towards gaining permission to continue a conversation. The key here is your email capture activities.

Like tactics – Create landing pages for specific networks, create eBook landing page with autoresponder that delivers even more information related to eBook or other eBooks, offer weekly newsletter to all who download eBook.

Trust

Trust is perhaps the most important step and yet it’s not one you can simply manufacture through one or two tactics – it’s comes together through a collection of things.

Trust tactics – consistently deliver your newsletter, educate – don’t promote, get backlinks from reputable websites, participate on Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ and Twitter by sharing great information and helping others find what they want, consistently write educational blog content, stimulate reviews on sites like Google+, LinkedIn and Yelp, submit press releases to online distribution sites such as PRWeb and find industry or local publications that accept contributed content.

Try

The try step is omitted by many in the desire to leap rather than lead.

Try tactics – create and deliver an online or in person seminar related to your eBook, create a free or low cost experience of your knowledge or expertise through an audit or evaluation, create an unheard of guarantee, create a try before your buy option, create a low cost version, write a book.

Buy

Obviously, this is the step we all want, but for me it’s just another stepping stone to the ultimate goal – a thoroughly thrilled customer.

Buy tactics – give more than promised, add a bonus, create a new customer kit, look for ways to get increase education for more than the buyer, make it easy to for buyer to sell the solution internally.

Repeat

For most businesses, long-term momentum only occurs when the customers acquired in year one buy more as new customers are acquired in year two. This step must be intentional and designed in the beginning as opposed to left to accidental whim.

Repeat tactics – create a results review process with every client, start an autorespoder series that provides education on additional solutions, write hand written notes for no reason, check in on LinkedIn with clients occasionally just to say hi, systematically send press clippings, create custom RSS feeds, create a client only newsletter, create mastermind and peer-2-peer client only groups.

Refer

100% referral from your client base is the goal of this system and while it won’t ever happen, if you begin with this result in mind, it’s more likely that a higher percentage of clients will refer.

Refer tactics – create a partner team and introduce them to your clients, sponsor a not for profit event and include your clients, create eBooks or gift certificates that your clients and cobrand and distribute, feature your client stories in your marketing materials, hold client appreciation events, create a hot 100 prospect list and share it with clients for introductions.

Obviously there are many things that come before the tactical implementation of your path, such as defining your ideal client you want to walk the path and communicating why your path is the perfect one to walk, but having an integrated set of tactics each with the goal of moving prospects and clients to the next stop along the way just makes marketing much easier.

Filed Under: Duct Tape Marketing, Referral Marketing, Vision, Web Marketing Tagged With: