Rosy's Six Tips 2015 (1)

Rosy’s 6 Tips to a
Blossoming Small Business
Written by Meg Rose Russell
www.rosymarketing.com - facebook.com/rosymarketing - meg@rosymarketing.com

Tip 1: Set Your Strategy
Tip 2: Create Your Core Offering
Tip 3: Create Meaningful Content
Tip 4: Develop Your Online Presence
Tip 5: Consistently Generate Leads
Tip 6: Maintain Your Marketing
Think big, believe big, act big and
the results will be big
At Rosy Marketing we believe growing a small business is
something like growing a rose garden. You start with an
idea, a seed. You need a perfectly prepared planting bed,
plenty of sunshine and just enough water and fertilizer to
grow a blossoming rose bush. If you don’t have the right
amount of any one of the essential elements your plant will
not thrive or could even die.
Similarly in a start-up or small business, it’s essential to set
the strategy and direction for the business before diving
head first into operations and trying to find new business.
You must check your soil is fertile and prepared for planting
your business seeds, before trying to generate new leads.
In this paper we will give you our top tips to establishing
the foundations for growing your business in a healthy, sus-
tainable and organic way.
Rosy Marketing has developed 6 basic tips to creating a
simple, effective and affordable marketing routine for your
business that will help you find more customers, get more
from your existing customers and save you precious time.
Marketing decisions should be driven by information, logic
and strategy. Businesses that gather, analyze and use data
to inform the development of long term marketing strate-
gies and consistently implement the tactics in that plan
will benefit from constant and dependable growth. This
requires discipline, and in some cases, professional as-
sistance. But we will get you started with our 6 tips and
approach described below.
In this e-book we will cover setting your strategy, creating
your core offers, the importance of meaningful content,
developing your online presence, lead generation strategies
and maintaining your marketing.
2

Set Your Strategy-Begin at the beginning by en-
suring you set your marketing strategy before you
start promoting
If you ensure your marketing strategy is ‘spot on’ from the
start, you can use any number of different marketing tac-
tics that are consistently implemented and monitored and
be successful. Choose your ideal clients wisely, and identify
your key points of difference between you and your com-
petitors.
Good strategy is not only essential it’s, effective.
Here are some questions to ask yourself as you work
out your business strategy.
What type of business would you like?
Defining your ideal client starts with taking a realistic look
at what you actually offer and who really values and ap-
preciates it. Many small businesses try to be all things to
all people making it very difficult to really focus on or serve
narrow market segments. It is through no fault of their own,
but without a clear strategy and focus from the outset, it
is difficult to know when to say ‘no’ and refer a potential
customer on to another business when someone asks for
help in an area that’s not your core business. People really
appreciate this honesty.
If you are an existing small business, the best way to define
your ideal customers is to review your existing customers.
Who are the highest value customers? Who appreciates
the value of what you are offering the most? Who do you
enjoy working with the most? Now list the characteristics
of these ideal clients into profiles and be as specific as
possible.
Once you have done this, build your entire marketing strat-
egy focused on attracting and retaining more of your ideal
client base and less on those who draw you away from
your core offering.
Tip 1: Set Your
Strategy
3

Why is your garden different and special?
Developing your solid marketing strategy relies heavily on
in-depth research and review of your offering, your target
customer and what is different about your offering com-
pared to potential substitutes. Many businesses, small and
big alike, fall into the trap of believing that their product or
service has no competition and therefore they do not need
to do the work required in ensuring their products stand
up.
Don’t fall into this trap!
While your product is probably fantastic, amazing and su-
per special, get clear on the following aspects. Write down
your answers!
• Why is your product/service different from the competi-
tion, and
• What makes it better?
• Why should the potential customer in the market pick
you over another company offering something similar?
You may know in your heart your product is better and/or
different, but if you can’t clearly articulate this in your mar-
keting strategy you could be losing business.
Do your research
The best way to ensure you differentiate your business is to
do your research. Take the time to research your top com-
petitors and your top customers. What are other business-
es saying, offering and promoting? When you interview
your existing customers, if you are not already in the habit
of creating a feedback loop, start with some questions like
this:
• Why did you choose us?
• What is one thing we are better at than our competi-
tors?
• If we could improve one thing, what would it be?
• Do you recommend us to others, or would you?
• If you would recommend us, what do/would you say?
Tip 1: Set Your
Strategy
4

Once you have set aside time to do the hard research, it’s
time to benchmark yourself against your competition. What
were the core differences between you and others that
surfaced? What stood out from your customers’ research?
Look for common service benefits and find a way to make
your business benefits stand out against those with whom
you compete.
Do this research and analysis as the first step in marketing
your business. This is not easy, but is the most important
step. Like the soil for the rose bush, your business strategy
is the foundation for all of your marketing and sales tactics.
Getting this stage right will help you capture new custom-
ers, create higher value customers and generate sustain-
able growth in your business.
Tip 1: Set Your
Strategy
5

Build your core offering to nurture your leads-This
is about ‘watering’ to generate leads, nurture con-
tacts, educate contacts, and grow new business
Know anything about marketing and sales? If so, you may
be familiar with the concept of a lead funnel, where you
aim to load heaps of leads into the top end of a funnel and
you end up with a few new customers at the bottom. So,
simply, you try to get as many leads dumped into the fun-
nel as possible and the more sales you end up with.
However, with the introduction of things like Twitter, Face-
book, Google, and a whole range of reviewing and ranking
sites, the game is changing. Creating a successful market-
ing base for your business now depends on creating an
authentic customer experience and providing meaningful
engagement throughout a longer and more involved cus-
tomer journey.
There are many different coined and trademarked con-
cepts littered throughout marketing literature, education
and leading industry expert materials.
But the core of these updated lead funnel practices focus
on:
• introducing depth and meaning from initial introduction
and awareness of your brand,
• providing added layers of interaction and value through-
out the interest stage of a lead
• encouraging the customer to try your offer by giving
something away and sharing success stories
• giving an incentive for the customer to take action and
purchase
• getting more from those who have purchased by nur-
turing existing customers to refer business, give posi-
tive testimonials and provide feedback for continual
improvement.
Try not to get too overwhelmed by this process. Basically,
it is just important to understand and be aware that the
Tip 2: Build Your
Core Offering
6

process from which a potential customer becomes aware
of your business is like planting a seed in your rose garden.
The rose bush doesn’t just grow and blossom overnight.
It requires fertilizer, watering, sunshine, care and attention.
Just like your marketing and sales tactics.
Here are some helpful questions to start developing the
added value you can provide at each stage of your own
customer journey, motivating your prospects towards pur-
chase.
• Do you have free or trial offering?
• Is there a starter offering?
• Have you thought of a ‘make it easy to switch’ offering?
• What is your core offering to take to the general public?
• Have you developed add-ons to provide additional
value?
• Membership based? Are there any members-only of-
fers?
• Have you created any strategic partner deals?
Many business owners mistakingly believe they can just
advertise and get sales. This may occasionally work, but
in order to create a blossoming business with organic and
sustainable growth you must execute a continuous plan
that engages and provides value to potential customers
along their entire journey with your business.
John Jantsch from Duct Tape Marketing, a leading market-
ing expert in the small business space, has trademarked
his own concept of ‘The Marketing Hourglass’™. He has
some extremely helpful suggestions to systematically de-
velop these crucial touch points, processes and product/
service offerings for each layer of customer engagement
leading towards sales. We recommend reviewing these
suggestions and creating your own personal lead nurturing
process that suits your business, customers and industry.
Here are some of Jantsch’s helpful suggestions to start
your thinking.
Tip 2: Build Your
Core Offering
7

“Know - ads, articles and referred leads
Like- website, reception and email newsletter
Trust- marketing kit, white papers, and sales presenta-
tions
Try- webinars, videos, evaluations and nurturing activities
Buy- fulfillment, new customers kit, delivery and financial
arrangements
Repeat- post customer survey, cross-sell presentations,
and quarterly events
Refer- results reviews, partner introductions, peer-2-peer
webinars and community building”
If you want to keep your customers, and get the most out
of every potential lead, be sure to spend the time to cre-
ate value at each stage and gently move prospects from
awareness to interest, to desire, and eventually action.
Tip 2: Build Your
Core Offering
8

Create meaningful content - Enrich the soil of your
rose garden
Over the last ten years the idea of generating content as
part of a marketing strategy has become not only best
practice, but required practice. There are countless blogs,
online article sharing, and social media promotions galore!
The new developments of the internet and free web based
applications have made it so easy that anyone can become
a self-published author. So much so that search engines
have now built this into their algorithms for search results.
If you do not produce regular and original content through
your website, you will be penalised as potential customers
desert you for your competitors.
Not only that, but producing regular, original content helps
to establish your expertise in your field, helps you engage
with potential customers, and creates material you are
able to then share through multiple mediums and pos-
sibly create other resources to bundle at a later point. The
main thing to focus on when creating content to share is to
provide as much value as possible from your own business
experiences.
Don’t over share, don’t flog other people’s material, or
bombard your followers. Focus on creating a sustainable,
consistent and scheduled content calendar that helps build
trust and helps educate prospects in your area of expertise
and industry. The latest industry polls suggest 20% of your
content be brand related, and 80% be industry related.
Be trusted
Creating content that builds trust can include customer
case studies or testimonials shared through a blog or
social media. Get your business listed through trusted
sources on the web and get your customers reviewing your
service and providing testimonials on a regular basis. Add
content across multiple forms, not only written, but audio
and video. Video is fast becoming the most trusted source
of information for a business.
Tip 3: Create
Meaningful Content
9

Be an educator
• Top Ten Lists - Create a series of lists showing custom-
ers the top places to go to find specific pieces of infor-
mation relating to your service, industry or profession.
• Videos- Creating videos has become a very effective
way of sharing content. Try creating a how-to, or shar-
ing an example of recent work.
• While White Papers are quickly becoming antiquated
in many industries such as IT and Finance, they are still
the industry norm. White Papers provide an opportunity
to take an industry related topic and show your point of
view and expertise in the arena.
• Workshops/Seminars/Webinars- workshop events
are a great way of packaging up sets of information
for potential clients. Benefits of these offerings are the
low cost and limited time commitment. A seminar is
a quick way for your customers to get a taste of what
your business has to offer and get to know you a little
better. Trying turning one of your blog series, white pa-
per, or how-to videos into a series of seminars to gen-
erate more interest and increase engagement.
• FAQ -Frequently asked questions are a great way to
create new content for people who are looking for very
specific things. Add even more value by giving answers
to questions people haven’t asked but probably should
have.
Be sure to build these into your marketing plan, and
schedule them into your content calendar to regularly share
content, adding value to your customers and increasing
engagement and ultimately sales.
Tip 3: Create
Meaningful Content
10

Develop your Online Presence -by preparing the
site to plant your online garden
Just like planting roses, creating an effective and powerful
online presence for your business takes a lot of preparation
and planning. Take the time and spend the money to have
a consistent and comprehensive online presence across
not only a modern, responsive website, but also multiple
social media platforms, website listings and networking
forums.
Your online garden, including your website and digital inter-
actions, now stands as the centre of the business market-
ing world. What does this mean?
Today’s business owner must build a marketing strategy
with online engagement at the centre, because most cus-
tomers look for and make decisions about which business
to choose by searching on-line – at least initially. Therefore,
the majority of your marketing decisions must start and
end with your web presence.
With an attractive, informative and easy to use website,
your small business can create the strong marketing foun-
dation it needs to carry your company’s marketing efforts
into the next decade.
Online Location. Physical store location has always
mattered, but now the online location for the local busi-
ness has become just as critical. This includes more than
your website. It’s your website, your business listings, your
social media pages, your blog, your interactions with other
blogs, your presence on online reviewing sites and building
your online reputation through ratings and reviews.
Tip: Your lead generation should focus on being
found in the right place at the right time by your right
customers
Tip 4: Develop Your
Online Presence
11

Digital Promotion. Any media buyer or advertising execu-
tive will tell you most businesses have shifted to paying
for digital advertising over traditional print, television and
radio. Why is this? Well, not only has a businesses’ online
shop become the central focus of developing new sales,
digital promotion and advertising is more cost effective and
results can actually be tracked.
However, you still need to be wary when investing in digital
advertising as it serves a specific purpose. The new face of
digital advertising should be used to generate awareness
about your informative and educational content.
Tip : Be sure to use your meaningful content as lead
conversion and it should augment your websites’
information to give customers more value
Tip 4: Develop Your
Online Presence
12

Consistently generate leads -by picking a sunny
spot for your seeds to grow
In the past small businesses followed a traditional formula
of lead generation using advertising and conferences par-
ticipation. However there is now a big shift away from this
method as it is the most expensive, and is becoming less
and less effective with the explosion of social media and re-
ferral based buying decisions. We now live in an age where
people prefer to find the businesses they choose to trade
with using search engines, rating sites, and the information
readily available online.
What does this mean for small businesses?
This means businesses need to think more about being
found, rather than finding new business. This means be-
ing strategic, ensuring you have the right product offering,
the right information, that you are visible in the right places,
and you have all the answers in as many formats as pos-
sible for your potential customer to engage with.
Have you given your customer a reason to engage with
you? What are you offering on what levels to lead them
towards a sale?
One can think about these activities as leaving rose petals
leading toward your rose garden. You want to create ed-
ucation-based materials and posts that can be promoted
through social media as a soft entry point to your business
and website.
This helps build trust in your brand, and enables you
to continue the conversation online that can lead
towards sales.
Tip: Take advantage of the power of information,
networking, trusts, connection, and community to
generate leads
Tip 5: Consistently
Generate Leads
13

Lead generation deep dive- Tactics in detail.
Customer Referrals. Turning every customer into a
referral is the most effective and powerful tool to continue
generating new business for your company. If you ap-
proach each new customer and project with the mindset of
generating a referral you will not only provide the best cus-
tomer service and experience for your customer but you
will encourage them to tell others, and be your extended
marketing team.
Public Relations. Public Relations has historically been
and remains one of the most trusted, cost effective ways to
generate new leads for your business. It is also one of the
trickiest methods as it requires creating newsworthy infor-
mation and establishing relationships with key journalists.
Digital advertising. Lastly digital advertising is the only
controllable lead-gen activity. Its benefits are that it is a
highly targeted and easily measurable way to promote
awareness of your wonderful content such as e-books,
papers, videos and workshops. It is also the most expen-
sive and least credible form of promotion, so be sure only
to use it as described and as part of the overall marketing
activity mix.
Tip 5: Consistently
Generate Leads
14

Maintain Your Marketing: Schedule, automate
and prune -Know when and how much to water
The lack of order, strategy and a systematic approach to
selling is the biggest weakness for most small businesses.
While we know and understand it’s hard to get around to
marketing, it’s essential that you either find a way to build
it into your routine or find someone to help you. Small
business can create a marketing machine by scheduling,
automating, and pruning.
Here are some secrets and tips to get your marketing
done.
Scheduling-Make it a habit
• Create a marketing plan that has clear timelines, sched-
uled activities and choose one marketing need at a time
to dedicate time to.
• Content calendar-create a monthly/weekly topic to
focus your content creation around and schedule out
across 6-12 months
• Weekly reviews - once you’re clear on your marketing
strategy, marketing itself becomes a set of projects.
You can then focus on a group of projects, and then
break those projects down into action steps or tasks.
Automating-Set up systems to help support your
marketing
• Auto-responders -set up automatic responders from
your website and your email so people will receive a
timely response from you no matter how busy you are
with other things.
• Email marketing systems - Instead of just sending
emails through Outlook set up your business with an
email marketing tool like MailChimp or Campaign Moni-
tor. You can create segmented email lists, beautiful
email campaigns and newsletters, and schedule cam-
paigns for the future without you having to manually ex-
ecute anything. Most of these tools also have the ability
to track who opened, who clicked, and what people
Tip 6: Maintain
Your Marketing
15

were interested in and are free or low cost.
• Customer Relationship Manager- If you have multiple
people managing customer relationships and you hope
to grow, these systems are core to your effectiveness.
There are many low cost options to centrally manage
your key customer information. One example is the
product ‘Insightly’.
• Project management - Part of automating your market-
ing activity is being good at managing your projects. As
mentioned above, once your marketing strategy and
plan are set, it becomes a matter of project managing
the calendared activities. Using free tools like ‘Smart-
sheet' and ‘Trello' is an excellent way for multiple mem-
bers of your business to track what needs to be done.
Practice and prune until it becomes second nature.
• Regularly interview customers - Build feedback into
your customer loop by setting up surveys through
‘Survey Monkey’ or ‘Google Forms’. This way you can
continue engagement with your customers and get
valuable feedback on what you are doing right, and
what you can improve on. This is also where you can
track how they found you.
• Review business stats - Regularly review your sales
stats against your number of leads. What is your con-
version rate? Is there anything during the process you
think you can improve?
• Review activities and results - Use the statistics from
your email marketing program, social media statis-
tics and Google Analytics in your website to compare
website traffic and behaviour to your scheduled market-
ing activities. What activities were most successful in
driving people to your website? How did these results
match up against your targets?
Do more of what works and less of what doesn’t. Always
tweak and try new things! Above all be sure you are clear
on your strategy, concise in your message and audience,
and consistent with your marketing activity and everything
will be ROSY.
Tip 6: Maintain
Your Marketing
16

About the Author
Meg Rose Russell is a marketing consultant, artist, sports
enthusiast and founder of Rosy Marketing.
Rosy Marketing provides marketing strategy and support
for super small businesses, start-ups and social enterpris-
es. We specialise in establishing your comprehensive online
presence and setting up your small business marketing
machine to help you find new customers and get the most
from your existing customers.
Rosy marketing is about looking on the bright side, find-
ing your key point of difference and helping your business
grow from the ground up. From regular marketing man-
agement of day to day marketing activities, to promotional
campaign management and in depth market research we
are marketing specialists that have the marketing skills and
experience to help your business and your brand grow.
As a small business owner or budding entrepreneur you
may lack the time or know how to build and nurture your
marketing presence. But don't let that stop you from
dreaming big, setting big goals and aiming for success.
We are here to help.
17

Rosy's Six Tips 2015 (1)

Recommandé

Recommandé

Contenu connexe

Tendances

Tendances (19)

En vedette

En vedette (15)

Similaire à Rosy's Six Tips 2015 (1)

Similaire à Rosy's Six Tips 2015 (1) (20)

Rosy's Six Tips 2015 (1)