Whether you’re a startup or a small to medium-sized business, there are two things you presumably have in common: not enough time and even fewer resources. How can you grow your business and engage with your current customers all while dealing with Payroll, Customer Service, and the Day-to-day tasks of your business? We’ve put together our list of Marketing Must Haves for the upcoming year.
Updated Business Information
Is your basic information updated on all platforms? On your website? Google? Facebook? Yelp!? Twitter? Etc. Take 10 minutes to make a list of all the places you show up online and then another 10 to check them all. Check the links, hours, phone numbers, address, etc. This one is extremely basic, but it’s one area where we see almost every client slacking. You need to make it as easy as possible for your customers to find you and learn about you. This is step one.
BUSINESS INFORMATION CHECKLIST
✅ Website Information
✅ Google Information (My Business)
✅ Facebook Information
✅ Yelp! Information
Leveraging Customer Reviews
Are you leveraging your positive reviews online? Are you encouraging customers to leave reviews with incentives? Positive and Up-to-date reviews are extremely important for your business in 2019. We’re in the age of Customer Reviews, from Amazon to Facebook to Yelp!, customer reviews are one of the top driving forces of business in today’s digital world. Two things that can hurt you here: Poor Reviews and maybe just as important, a lack of reviews.
CUSTOMER REVIEW CHECKLIST
✅ Monitoring & Responding to reviews on other platforms (Facebook, Google, Yelp!, etc.)
✅ Embed Reviews on your website or use a plugin to create your own.
✅ If customers are unhappy, use reviews to fuel change. Take their advice.
✅ Don’t be shy. Boast about these reviews, use them for advertising.
Defining Your Marketing Budget
How Much Do You Spend?
One number that always seems to be up for debate is how much to spend on marketing. Spurred by the Industrial Revolution, Advertising and Branding came to life in the mid to late 1800s in America. Companies have been in some shape or form, spending a percentage of their budgets on advertising for close to 200 years. This number ranges anywhere from 0% up to 15% of gross revenue depending on your desired outcomes. Where do you fit? An old school rule of thumb is to spend 5% a year to maintain your current position in the market and 10% if you are looking to grow. In the startup age though, sometimes there’s an even larger value to the growth aspect, and in here we can find companies spending upwards of 15% to acquire customers as fast as possible.
Where Should You Be Spending Your Budget?
This one depends. Who is your target customer? Chances are, you’ll want to spend some with Google (which also owns Youtube) and some with Facebook (which also owns Instagram). Those are the two behemoths in the digital advertising space at the moment, and for good reasons, they have the best data (for better or worse) and the largest users bases.
Now, if you’re targeting 50+ year old males in rural farm areas, then these platforms might not be the most efficient use of your budget. These might require a more traditional approach with Print, TV, Newspaper. One thing we know is that you rarely can predict which channel will be the most efficient, this is why we try to test them all with small budgets. Avoid risk by not spending large up front chunks of capital on one channel. Most radio stations and TV Networks will not reimburse you if your ads don’t have positive ROI. This is why we tend to gravitate towards digital. There’s a low cost of entry and you can adjust the amount you’re spending at a minutes notice.
The bottom line: Test small budgets early and often—then adjust spend as you learn.
How do you know if it’s working?
This one isn’t always easy, but there’s a few common sense tricks to get you started. Attach a specific discount code to each channel or ad you test. Now, it has to be worthwhile, so a 5% off coupon probably isn’t going to drive traffic or encourage your customers to mention the code. Try 10%, 15%, 25% discounts or BOGO offers. If you’re in-store, ASK! Ask your customers how they heard about you or the discount and make note of it.
THE MARKETING BUDGET CHECKLIST
✅ Define your budget.
✅ Test & identify your best acquisition channels.
✅ Track your key KPIs
a Website Built for 2019
In 2019, there’s no excuse to not have a website that’s mobile device friendly. Responsive websites have been around for some time now, and today, it’s easier than ever to create one. There’s also no excuse not to be selling your product or service online. While there are a handful of options out there, we believe there are two platforms for website building and e-commerce that are above them all: Squarespace & Shopify.
The only Two platforms you need to consider this year
The easiest platform that can have you up in running in minutes (not hours) with a beautiful template is Squarespace. Need to show off your service? Sell your product? Squarespace can handle it all for around $20/mo [Squarepace Pricing]. Have a large product catalog and a focus on e-commerce over brick-and-mortar? Try Shopify, which is an e-commerce specific CMS with a robust feature set and reporting abilities that growing e-commerce retailers might need, of course, you’ll pay [Shopify Pricing] a bit more for the additional flexibility. Both platforms have ready-to-go templates already designed and ready to work with any extra plugins you might desire. Shopify in particular has easy to use templates, thousands of integrations/plugins, and can handle the majority, if not all of your reporting. Avoid custom built website for as long as possible. They can be costly, even when outsourced. You’ll need to either pay for an in-house developer or pay the builder a monthly retainer fee.
Collecting Your Website Data
Collect your visitor information! This is another area where we see most businesses missing out. When we work with clients, one of the first types of campaigns we’ll want to set up is a retargeting campaign. This campaign is focused on advertising to customers who have already expressed interest in your business by visiting your site. Recent industry reports that close to half of all Display Advertising (Banner Ads, etc.) is spent on retargeting alone! Problem is, most of our clients aren’t collecting the data, so we have to set it up and won't be able to use years worth of past data to our advantage. The bottom line? It’s extremely valuable data that you’re letting go for no cost. Even if you don’t have an immediate plan to use it, make sure you’re set up with tracking code from Google Analytics and Facebook!
THE WEBSITE CHECKLIST
✅ Mobile friendly, responsive design.
✅ Sell your products online.
✅ Track your visitors with tracking code and pixels.
Email is still king
Yes, email. It’s still one of the most effective channels to market your product and engage your customers. With organic reach on social platforms declining, this IS the best free way to get a message to your customers. Want to guess another area our typical clients are falling short on? That’s right, collecting customer data! Specifically, First and last name along with email. In an ideal world, you’d grab this information from every customer (and in the e-commerce world, it happens automatically). If you’re not collecting it yet, start! Offer an in-store discount for customers who leave their email.
Once you have the emails, you’ll need somewhere to store, organize, and send them from? Constant Contact and MailChimp are great, relatively inexpensive, and easy to use. Both integrate with Squarespace (as well as many other platforms!) if you want to add sign-ups forms or landing pages on your website.
How do you execute an Email strategy? Start simple. Send a monthly business update, share interesting blog posts & articles, or share a coupon code. Another great idea is to ask your customer what they want to hear from you about, you might be surprised.
THE EMAIL CHECKLIST
✅ Collect as many customer emails as possible.
✅ Use an email platform to send and schedule emails and organize your customer contact lists.
✅ Take action! Send emails to your customers about business updates, learning, and product discounts.
Do we need an APP or chatbot in 2019?
It’s a resounding no in both cases. Unless your product is the app, there’s a good chance you won’t need one. Need proof? Ask some of your customers if they’d prefer you had an app. Apps are time and capital intensive, they also need to be taken care of, updated, and filled with content.
Instead of a chatbot (and beware, there are sly marketers selling chatbot setups everywhere it seems), try a simple support chat add-on to your website. See how many visitors are actually engaging with you there. If you find you cannot possibly keep up with the requests, and it makes financial sense to do so, then you can start thinking about a chatbot. For now, check out Drift. Drift offers a free site support chat bubble that will pop up to every customer that visits the site. We even use one on this site! They have a bunch of features (chatbots, scheduling, email integrations), but to start, you’ll just want to get up and running and set active and away times depending on your business hours. Drift can work with your desktop computer or app. We love the app.
