Guide to Marketing Your Business

What Defines Your Brand?

Every business has a brand, but the most successful businesses have brands that have been carefully and thoughtfully designed.

Branding is the process of crafting your business’ brand, and even though branding and marketing are closely related, they are different processes.

Think of it this way: branding is the process of deciding on the story you want to tell about your company, and that story is your brand. Meanwhile, marketing is the process of going out and telling that story to consumers in a compelling way.

Many people think of visual elements when they think of a brand: logos, color schemes, particular ads they’ve seen, and so on. Other people may think of an advertising tagline or a news article they read about the brand. For local businesses, customers may associate a brand with a particular person or group of people.

Keep in mind that since your brand is the story of your business, even very deliberate and effective marketing and branding can’t completely define your brand. For example, if a potential customer hears from a friend about a negative experience with your business, no amount of advertising is likely to make the potential customer forget it. Whether you like it or not, that negative experience is now part of your brand in that potential customer’s mind.

If you don’t have a strong sense of your brand, it will be difficult to market your business. After all, if you don’t understand what’s special about your business and your products or services and what’s unique about your story, then how can you communicate it to anyone else?

Questions to help you better define your brand

• Why does your business exist?
• What is your business’ story? How does it relate to your own story?
• What problems can your products or services help customers solve?
• Why would customers choose your business over the competition?
• What other brands do you look up to?
• What do you want people to think of when they hear your business’ name?

While all your marketing efforts (and many other factors) will play a role in defining your brand, there’s no denying that strong visual elements like logos, color schemes, and headlines play an enormous role in influencing how consumers perceive brands. At the very least, your business should have a logo, and you should strive for consistency in the look and voice of your marketing communications.

“I do not regard advertising as entertainment or an art form, but as a medium of information. When I write an advertisement, I don’t want you to tell me that you find it ‘creative.’ I want you to find it so interesting that you buy the product.” -David Ogilvy, on Advertising

Setting a Marketing Budget

Setting money aside for marketing may seem difficult, but remember that your business can’t succeed without marketing.

As a general rule, many experts agree that small businesses with revenues less than $5 million should devote about 7 to 8 percent of their annual revenue to marketing. Some businesses, like retail stores, may require a lot more; many retail stores spend up to 20 percent of their annual revenue on marketing during their early years.

Your marketing budget will also determine whether you’re able to hire a professional marketer or a marketing agency to help you build your brand and grow your business. A good marketing partner can not only help you create a thorough marketing plan but should be able to help you execute every aspect of the plan. Make sure the marketing partner communicates with you readily and provides clear billing and reporting that you can understand. You should always know what you’re paying for and what results you’re getting from the
money you devote to marketing.

If you don’t have the budget to hire an agency or a marketing professional, that’s okay too. It may take time and effort, but there are always options to effectively market your business, even if you’re working on your own and don’t have experience in marketing. This approach may extend the timeline of building up your business, but it can be done. Focus on how you can help your customers and find ways to share those details with customers. Deliver outstanding customer service. And in this age of social media, creating “shareable” experiences that customers can share on their platforms can offer a big boost to word-of-mouth marketing efforts.

Judging the Success of Your Marketing Strategies

No matter what marketing tactics you use, it’s important to track results and make sure your marketing efforts are delivering a clear return on investment (ROI)

To decide whether your marketing efforts are succeeding, you’ll need to establish key performance indicators (KPIs), which we’ll discuss more later in this chapter as we guide you through the process of creating a marketing plan.

Remember that just because a marketing tactic doesn’t succeed instantly doesn’t mean it’s time to throw it away. It takes time to develop strong marketing messages and identify the most effective ways to reach your desired customers. However, you may need to discard marketing tactics that consistently fail to deliver returns, even after many adjustments.

On the other hand, don’t assume because a marketing tactic has worked in the past that it will continue to work in the future. Markets are always changing, and so are your customers. Even the most tried-and-true strategies need to be continuously evaluated based on KPIs and then adjusted or discarded if they’re no longer delivering results.

Creating a Marketing Plan

Your business can’t succeed without an effective marketing and communications strategy, which is why you should begin developing this strategy from the moment you start planning your business and continue to refine it for as long as your business exists.

Creating a marketing plan involves four essential steps:

• Assess your company’s current situation
• Identify your target audience
• Define your marketing goals
• Research and select your tactics

In the following sections, we’ll discuss these steps in greater detail

Assess Your Company’s Current Situation

The first section of your marketing plan should define your business and its products or services, then explain how your business is different from competitors

Marketers use a time-tested method to analyze a company’s current situation, and this method is called a SWOT analysis. To perform a SWOT analysis, you need to identify your company’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.

STRENGTHS

How are your company’s products and services different from and better than your competitors’ offerings? Why is your business in a better position to succeed than theirs?
 
WEAKNESSES

What do your competitors do better than you? What advantages do they have over you?
 
OPPORTUNITIES

What are the opportunities you created your business to capitalize on? Is the market for your products or services expanding, or is there a current need in the market that’s going unmet?
 
THREATS

What factors could realistically cause your business to fail? These could be factors within your control (like organizational issues) or outside your control (like an economic downturn or competitors lowering their prices).

Be brutally honest when identifying your company’s weaknesses and the threats you face—knowing them is the only way to overcome them.

You’re Indiana SBDC advisor can provide market research to help develop your SWOT analysis.

Tips for identifying competitors and your value proposition

TIPS FOR IDENTIFYING COMPETITORS

Remember that your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats are only important as they relate to your competitors. After all, if your company had no competition, you wouldn’t need marketing at all. But every business has competitors, no matter how innovative or unusual their products or services are.

To help you perform your SWOT analysis, you should gather plenty of information about your competitors. Make sure to identify your indirect competitors as well as direct competitors. For example, if your company provides guard services to warehouses, other companies that offer guard services within your service area are your direct competitors. However, electronic alarm systems for warehouses might provide an alternative to human guards, so businesses selling alarm systems may be indirect competitors.

To help you objectively evaluate your company against your competitors, try to fill out the attached table. Rate your company and your top two competitors in each of the areas listed using a 1-5 scale, with 5 as very strong and 1 as very weak. Remember to be as impartial and honest as you can.

TIPS FOR IDENTIFYING YOUR COMPANY’S UNIQUE VALUE PROPOSITION

Also known as a “unique selling proposition,” your unique value proposition describes what your company offers, how you help solve customers’ needs, and how your company differs from the competition. Identifying your unique value proposition is an essential part of assessing your company’s strengths. Communicating these strengths is the most important purpose of your marketing messages and your overall marketing strategy.

Once you’ve created a SWOT analysis and taken a snapshot of your company’s current situation, your marketing plan has a strong foundation. You now know your company’s most important advantages and opportunities as well as the potential challenges your marketing strategy needs to overcome.

Identify Your Target Audience

Next, you’ll want to identify your ideal customer—the type of person or company who is most likely to buy your company’s products or services. Make sure to stay grounded in the real world when thinking about your ideal customer—a billionaire tech entrepreneur who wants to buy out your inventory might be the “ideal customer,” but you can’t count on them coming along. Marketers call your ideal customers your “target audience.”

Also keep in mind that the target audience for your product may be different from the end user. For example, if you create toys for very young children, the children won’t be the ones buying your toys. In this case, the children’s parents are your primary target audience.

The characteristics you’ll want to identify to define your target audience will differ depending on whether your business is primarily based around business-to-consumer (B2C) sales or business-to-business (B2B) sales.

Characteristics to focus on for B2B and B2C founders

For B2C businesses, the characteristics of your target audience may include:


• Geographic location
• Age
• Gender
• Marital status
• Family size
• Education
• Income
• Occupation
• Hobbies
• Buying frequency
• Attitudes toward your product and competitor products

If you operate a B2B company, the characteristics of your target audience may include:

• Geographic location
• Industry (NAICS or SIC code)
• Size (number of employees or annual sales)
• Length of time in business
• Type of products or services they provide
• Whether they import or export products
• Buying process
• Decision-makers
• Level of need for your product
• Degree of loyalty to vendors
• Buying frequency

Your Indiana SBDC advisor can provide no-cost market research reports to help define your target audience.

Building on Market Research

IDENTIFY YOUR TARGET AUDIENCE

You can assemble much of the information about your target audience from the data you gathered during market research, although identifying all the important characteristics of your target audience may require additional research as well. If you have current customers or clients, asking them questions is one of the best ways to gather more information about your target audience. Ask them how they found out about your business, what they like about your brand, where they tend to shop and purchase products, what they read and watch and which websites and social media platforms they use.

Targeting Your Market with Audience Segments

Many businesses will have more than one type of person or company who is likely to be interested in their products or services. To represent these different types of potential customers, you can break down your target audience into smaller audience segments. To do this, group types of prospective customers into categories based on similar characteristics so you can reach and serve them more relevant marketing messages.

As an example, let’s return to the idea that your company makes toys and games for children, only now you make them for children who are a bit older — say ages 10-12. These children probably don’t have their own income yet, but they may have an allowance, and they almost certainly tell their parents when they want a toy or game. The parents may go out and buy your toys and games on their own as a gift for their child, but they may also buy your products because their child saw an ad online and keep asking them for it.

In this case, both the children and their parents are part of your target audience. Children spend their time differently and respond to different types of ads compared to their parents, so you’ll need to come up with different strategies to market to them. The children and their parents are two different segments of your target audience.

Documenting Segments

One of the best ways to document the segments of your target audience is to develop for each audience segment a simple, one-paragraph profile of a fictional person who embodies the qualities of that audience segment. Marketers call these profiles “personas,” and they can help you keep track of your audience segments, relate to them as real people, and refer to them clearly and memorably.

Remember that your ideal potential customers already have busy lives and established buying patterns that don’t include your business. If you want to convert them into a real customer, you’ll need to give them a good enough reason to break those established patterns and form a relationship with your business.

Don’t forget that your target audience may include existing customers and clients, especially if your business model encourages repeat transactions. There are always competitors looking to lure away your loyal customers, so don’t take them for granted! Tailoring specific marketing efforts to your existing customers, including loyalty programs, rewards and discount offers, can help you reinforce the strength of your existing customer base while you attract new customers and prospects to grow your business.

Define Your Marketing Goals

A good marketing plan needs to define specific, measurable goals tied to sales and profitability.

What do you hope to accomplish with your marketing efforts? Are you trying to bring in five new customers a day, ten clients a month, or $100,000 a year?

One of the best ways to make sure you’re setting the right goals is to make sure your goals are SMART, which is an acronym that stands for specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. Here are some examples to help you develop SMART goals:

SPECIFIC

Example of a non-specific goal: Raise money.
Example of a specific goal: Raise $10,000 by September 1.

MEASUREABLE

Example of a non-measurable goal: Improve customer satisfaction.
Example of a measurable goal: Improve the number of highly satisfied responses on customer surveys by 25%.

ATTAINABLE

Example of an unattainable goal: Make $100,000 in a month when you’ve never made that much in a year.
Example of an attainable goal: Increase monthly revenue by 10%.

RELEVANT

Example of an irrelevant goal: Improve our company image.
Example of a relevant goal: Increase sales among one audience segment by 30%.

TIME-BOUND

Example of a non-time-bound goal: Increase revenue to $150,000.
Example of a time-bound goal: Increase average quarterly revenue to $37,500 over the four quarters of next year.

SMART Goals

SMART GOAL

Example of bringing it all together: Increase sales among parent audience segment by 10% in six months.

Your goals will be unique to your business, but as you set them, you should tie them to key performance indicators (KPIs). KPIs are measurements that communicate important information about the health and future of your business.

Examples of possible KPIs for your marketing efforts include:

• Revenue
• Sales growth rate
• Number of leads
• Cost per lead
• Number of customers
• Cost of acquiring a customer
• Conversion rate
• Bounce rate

If goals are the destination you want to get to, KPIs are the signs telling you you’re headed in the right (or wrong) direction.

Research and Select Your Tactics

Now that you know what you want to accomplish, it’s time to figure out the specific marketing methods you’ll use to reach your target audience and convert them into customers or clients. You need to develop strategies that incorporate your goals, build on your strengths and embrace your unique competitive advantages.

Marketers call the blend of strategies that a business uses a “marketing mix.” The exact mix of marketing tactics that makes the most sense varies widely from business to business, and funding that mix often takes a lot of experimentation. The most effective tactics for your business will depend on the nature of your business as well as on your target audience and how they behave.

For example, do your ideal customers typically make a buying decision because they saw a billboard or a TV ad? Or do you offer the type of product or service that people often purchase because they read an online review or saw a post about it on social media? Understanding how your target audience consumes information and makes purchasing choices will help you make informed decisions about how to spend your marketing and advertising dollars to get the most effective results. Your Indiana SBDC advisor can provide no-cost market research to help understand your target audience behavior.

Examples of Popular and Proven Tactics

Examples of some popular and proven marketing tactics are:

• Billboard and poster ads
• Television and radio advertisements
• Print media ads (newspapers, magazines)
• Newsletters and direct mail
• Brochures, letterheads, and business cards
• Promotional events
• Direct sales (telephone, door-to-door, etc.)
• Online advertising, including:
  • Website
  • Social media
  • Email advertisements
  • Video ads
  • Display advertisements on other websites
  • Ads in search engines like Google

Every marketing tactic has its benefits and downsides compared to other tactics. For example, billboards and television ads can reach lots of people, but they cost a lot of money up front. These ads also don’t specifically target your potential customers, so you’re paying to show your ad to a lot of people who have no chance of becoming customers.

Also, you can plan and execute some tactics, like direct sales, direct mail, and building a website, by yourself. Other tactics, like running television, radio, and print media advertisements, will require you to work with a media buyer or other agent who may require a commission or fee.

There is no universal right or wrong answer when it comes to a mix of marketing tactics—only what makes sense for your business based on your target audience and your budget.

Developing Your Message

Once you have a documented marketing plan in place, you will need to start creating your marketing assets. Many people who are inexperienced in marketing believe that the most important quality of a good advertisement or ad campaign is that it gets the attention of potential customers. However, that’s not true. The most important criteria to judge your marketing efforts is whether they lead to more clients or customers and help your business grow. If an advertisement or marketing strategy gets people’s attention but doesn’t lead them to trust your business and purchase your products and services over those of your competition, then that advertisement or strategy does nothing for your business.

Regardless of the medium or strategy, most effective marketing messages contain four fundamental elements:

• A clear, concise, and memorable headline
• A value proposition that briefly explains why your product can help meet potential customers’ needs (and do so better than alternatives)
• A reason for the potential customer to act now, like a timebased promotional offer such as a coupon code or an explanation of how your product or service will improve your customers’ lives immediately
• A clear call-to-action (CTA) statement that tells the customer what you want them to do (call now, sign up, subscribe, try a free sample, etc.)

Most ads should also contain an eye-catching image that conveys and reinforces the mood or tone you want your ad to capture. Make sure your images fit the scale of your advertisement and look clear and visually pleasing.

Developing Your Message

Once you have a documented marketing plan in place, you will need to start creating your marketing assets. Many people who are inexperienced in marketing believe that the most important quality of a good advertisement or ad campaign is that it gets the attention of potential customers. However, that’s not true. The most important criteria to judge your marketing efforts is whether they lead to more clients or customers and help your business grow. If an advertisement or marketing strategy gets people’s attention but doesn’t lead them to trust your business and purchase your products and services over those of your competition, then that advertisement or strategy does nothing for your business.

Regardless of the medium or strategy, most effective marketing messages contain four fundamental elements:

• A clear, concise, and memorable headline
• A value proposition that briefly explains why your product can help meet potential customers’ needs (and do so better than alternatives)
• A reason for the potential customer to act now, like a timebased promotional offer such as a coupon code or an explanation of how your product or service will improve your customers’ lives immediately
• A clear call-to-action (CTA) statement that tells the customer what you want them to do (call now, sign up, subscribe, try a free sample, etc.)

Most ads should also contain an eye-catching image that conveys and reinforces the mood or tone you want your ad to capture. Make sure your images fit the scale of your advertisement and look clear and visually pleasing.

Choosing Your Marketing Mix

If you understand your target audience, then you’ve already got much of the information you need to choose a successful marketing mix.

Your goal is to find your potential customers and deliver marketing messages that will engage and energize them to become customers. Where that process happens and how it happens depend on the behavior of your target audience.

To evaluate your options for your marketing mix, review market research and ask yourself the following questions about your target audience:
 

• What types of advertising messages do they notice and respond to?
• What types of media do they watch, read, and interact with?
• Where do they look for information about products and services?
• Where do they make purchasing decisions?
• How long does it take them to make a purchasing decision?

Observe What Your Competitors Are Doing

Ask Yourself:

• What are my competitors doing well? What are they doing poorly?

• Are there things about my competitors’ marketing tactics that I like but feel I could improve on?

If you’re able to identify what marketing strategies your competitors are using successfully while discarding the tactics that don’t deliver results for them or wouldn’t work for your business, you’ll most likely have the beginnings of a very effective marketing mix.

Regardless of which tactics you decide are best, it’s usually not wise to spend your entire budget on one marketing tactic. No matter how much research you perform or planning you undertake, there’s no surefire way to know which marketing tactics will deliver the best results without trying them, observing the results and adjusting them over time.

The Four P’s of Marketing

One system that many marketers use to evaluate marketing strategies and decide on a marketing mix is called the four Ps. The four Ps are:

           PRODUCT – What are we selling?
           PLACE – Where and how will we sell it?
           PRICE – How much are we selling it for?
           PROMOTION – How will we let people know we are selling it?

If you understand the four Ps as they relate to your business, you can use them to make decisions about which marketing strategies are likely to deliver the best results for you. To understand the four Ps, ask questions like those in the following subsections.

Product

• What does my product or service do for the buyer? What need does it meet?

• What feature does my product have? How do those features compare to those of my competitors’ products?

• How will the customer use my product?

• What does my product look and feel like? Does it create an experience for the customer?

• How do I differentiate my product from competing products?

Place

• Where do my potential customers look for products and services? Where do they make purchasing decisions?

• Where do my potential customers work? Where do they spend their free time?

Price

• What is the value of my product or service for the buyer?

• How do my prices compare to those of my competitors?

• Are my customers price-sensitive? If I raise or lower prices, will they respond quickly?

• If I offer discounts to specific customers or audience segments, will it increase sales and/or revenue significantly?

• How do I differentiate my product from competing products?

Promotion

• Where can I get my marketing messages in front of my target audience? When are they most likely to respond to those messages?

• How many times do I need to interact with my potential customers before they will make a purchasing decision? (Remember that one interaction is rarely enough to convince someone to buy a product or service.)

• What is the best time to promote? Is my business seasonal or cyclical?

• How do my competitors promote their products and services? How will my marketing messages stand out from theirs and capture the attention of potential customers?

Creating a Marketing Calendar

Going over the necessity and importance of marketing calendars.

Once you decide on the blend of marketing tactics that will make up your marketing mix, you’ll want to create a marketing calendar that will establish timelines, implementation schedules, budgets, and assigned responsibilities for all your marketing campaigns. Ideally, your marketing calendar should detail these aspects of all your marketing activities for the entire year.

Online tools exist that can help you create a calendar that’s clean and easy to look at, but you can also use a spreadsheet program to create a basic calendar that meets your needs. Whatever tool you use to create your calendar, make sure you update entries, keep track of important milestones, and note your results.

Although creating a detailed marketing calendar takes time and patience, it’s worth the investment. Consistency is key when marketing your business, and if you only make time for marketing when you feel like you have time to spare, your marketing efforts will be spotty and occasional—if they happen at all.

Publicity and Public Relations

Public relations (PR) is different from marketing, but the two are closely related and sometimes overlap. Public relations is the process of creating and cultivating a positive reputation with the public. Like marketing, public relations activities can occur on many different channels, including traditional media, social media, and face-to-face communications.

When many people hear the term public relations, they think of a big company responding to a disaster with a carefully planned news conference or press release. But public relations isn’t just for emergencies, and it’s not just for large corporations, either. For example, many small businesses engage in public relations every day by maintaining their social media pages and interacting with members of the public online. Others are active in the community on a regular basis. These activities can be seen and shared in the public arena, and whether they directly relate to your business or not, they will be associated with your business in the public eye.

Aspects of Your Business You May Want To Publicize

• Success stories from your clients or customers
• New products or offerings
• Community involvement and charitable events
• Your expertise within your field or market

Hosting events, workshops, and seminars—including online “webinars”—are also forms of marketing that double as public relations.

Many businesses work with PR professionals who handle their public relations campaigns. Even if you don’t have much budget to devote to PR, you may be able to hire a consultant who works with you for a few hours a week on your PR efforts. And even if you have no money to spend on PR at all, you can still cultivate relationships with reporters, bloggers, and other media contacts by contacting them with news about your business. Just remember to keep your messages relevant. Sending even one or two personalized PR communications to local media professionals who may be interested in your business’ story is much better than sending thousands of messages to a mailing list full of random people who don’t care.

The Power of Online Marketing

Very few businesses today can succeed without an online presence, and even fewer should want to

For many small businesses, online marketing should be the first avenue they explore to help them engage with potential new customers and establish their brand.

Today, 82 percent of consumers conduct research online before buying a product or service, and the average consumer now spends more time online than with all other types of media combined. As more customers use the internet to research products and make purchases, online marketing can deliver more of the benefits of traditional marketing tactics like TV and radio ads without high up-front costs and risks.

Creating a Website
 
The first and most important step to establishing an online presence is to create a website. Many online services allow you to register a domain name (the URL or online address of your website; for example, www.isbdc.org). Then, you can create your website using a customizable template. Using these tools, most people can create a functional, professional-looking website for their business in a matter of days or even hours.

Most Important Qualities of a Website

• It’s visually appealing
• Its appearance, feel, and content line up with the look, personality, and voice you’ve established for your brand
• It’s intuitive and easy to navigate for potential customers
• It contains valuable offers and strong calls-to-action that encourage website visitors to become leads and leads to become customers or clients

If your business requires a more complex website or you want something that looks more professional and polished, you may wish to hire an outside partner to build your website. In many cases, the up-front investment to have a professional build your website is worth it. However, make sure to compare your options and shop around aggressively for the best price, which is not always the cheapest price. A simple website containing a handful of pages should not cost your company tens of thousands of dollars. However, make sure to ask for examples of work before choosing a partner for your website build, and ask to see mockups and working drafts throughout the process. If you’re not happy with any aspect of the website, speak up right away.

If you hire someone to build a website for your company, also make sure you own your website’s domain name and have full access to the website at all times. If you don’t, you may run into serious problems if you want to hire a different person to manage the website or decide to manage it on your own.

I’ve Created My Plan – What’s Next?

Now that you’ve got a marketing plan, you know how to concentrate your limited resources on the greatest opportunities to increase sales so you can achieve a sustainable competitive advantage. You may want to draw from your marketing plan, especially your unique value proposition, to create a brand positioning statement. Your brand positioning statement should be a short (just a paragraph or two) internal document that communicates your brand’s unique strengths in relation to your competitors.

A brand positioning statement should clearly answer:
 

• Why should potential customers buy from you, and why should current customers keep coming back?
• When current and potential customers hear your company name, what should they think of?

The value of an effective brand positioning statement is that anyone in the company should be able to refer to it and quickly evaluate whether a marketing strategy or other business decision aligns with your brand positioning. If it doesn’t, then you may want to re-evaluate that strategy or decision.

Finally, remember that a marketing plan is always a work in progress. Every aspect of the plan, whether it’s your SWOT analysis, your target audience segments and personas, or your mix of tactics and strategies, should be reexamined on a regular basis to respond to changes in the market and the ongoing evolution of your business.

Judging the Success of Your Marketing Strategies

No matter what marketing tactics you use, it’s important to track results and make sure your marketing efforts are delivering a clear return on investment (ROI). Remember the key performance indicators (KPIs) you established in your marketing plan and try to track them for every marketing tactic you implement.

Just because a tactic doesn’t succeed instantly doesn’t mean it’s time to throw it away. It takes time to develop strong messaging and identify the best channels to reach your target audience. However, you may need to discard tactics that consistently fail to deliver returns, even after many adjustments.

On the other hand, don’t assume because a tactic has worked in the past that it will continue to work in the future. Markets are always changing, and so are your customers. Even the most tried-and-true strategies need to be continuously evaluated based on KPIs and then adjusted or discarded if they’re no longer delivering results.

Using Your Website to Grow Your Business

Your website forms the foundation of your online presence and all your online marketing tactics.
 
Once you’ve got a website, your next goals should be:

• Use website contact forms and other tools to gather information from website visitors so you can convert them into leads
• Follow up with leads and strengthen your relationship with them so you can convert them into customers or clients
• Attract new visitors to your website by creating valuable content
• Use the data you gather from your website and related tools to measure your results and keep improving your strategy

Next, we’ll discuss strategies you can use to realize these goals.

Attract Visitors Through Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

One of the best and most sustainable ways to attract more visitors to your website is by engaging in search engine optimization. SEO is the process of improving your website so it ranks better in search engines like Google. That way, when people search online for products or services like yours or for related topics, they will be more likely to come across your website and visit it.

CREATING CONTENT FOR SEO
The single most important factor to SEO, according to statements published by Google, is to provide high-quality, original content (words, images, videos, etc.) on the pages of your website, especially the homepage.

Some of the most important types of content for SEO include:
 

• Your homepage
• Pages that describe your individual products or services
• An “about” page that tells your company’s story in brief
• Blog articles
• Lists of answers to frequently asked questions (FAQs)
• Images and videos

One of the best and most sustainable ways to attract more visitors to your website is by engaging in search engine optimization. SEO is the process of improving your website so it ranks better in search engines like Google. That way, when people search online for products or services like yours or for related topics, they will be more likely to come across your website and visit it.

Best Practices for Keyword Targeting

So, website content should target a wide range of keywords. One of the easiest ways to balance the two is to base your core website pages (your homepage and pages about your products and services) around head terms and then write blogs based around long-tail keywords.

Keep in mind that search engines today are much smarter than in years past, and they can figure out the overall context of a webpage. If you want to write a page based around the keyword “lawn care services,” you don’t have to say “lawn care services” over and over when you write the page.

In fact, doing that can make search engines ignore your website. Just write helpful information about lawn care and your products and services, using the term “lawn care services” once or twice (especially in the page title and main heading), and search engines will notice and understand what your page is about.

Also, search engines can recognize when keywords are similar and treat them as interchangeable. For an example, go to an online search engine and search for “lawn care services,” then try another search for “lawn maintenance services.” You’ll most likely see a lot of the same results, with maybe a few small variations. So, your website probably doesn’t need two separate pages for “lawn care services” and “lawn maintenance services.” The main lawn care page can target both terms.

The Two Keyword Categories

Keywords break down into two broad categories, head terms and long-tail keywords:
 
HEAD TERMS

These broad, one- or two-word topics usually get a lot of traffic but people are searching for very specific topics

Examples: Lawn care, lawn maintence, grow a lawn, seed service near me, free estimates, fertilize a lawn, etc.
 
LONG-TAIL KEYWORDS

These longer phrases tend to get less traffic, but that traffic can be very mixed.

Examples: How to plant Kentucky Bluegrass, how much fertilizer does my yard need, best lawn service in Indiana, cheapest lawn care for lawn maintenance, etc.
 
Many business owners want to rank at the top of Google for head terms. If you’re operating a lawn care service, wouldn’t it be great to be number one for “lawn care”? The truth is, not really. First, you’d be competing with every other lawn care service that exists online, which means bringing a very big budget. Second, most searches on the internet (over 70%) are actually for those long-tail keywords. If someone searches for “lawn care,” they could be looking for a service, but they could also be looking for jobs, tutorials to do it themselves, statistics and facts, or any number of other things unrelated to your business.

But if someone searches for the long-tail keyword “free estimate for lawn mowing near me,” you know they are shopping around for services. If you can rank well for that search (and other searches like it), then you are going to attract more qualified potential customers—and you’ll be able to provide them with more targeted messaging.

And not all of the best keywords to rank for are going to be focused on sales. A person searching for “how to plant Kentucky Bluegrass in Indiana” might be interested in lawn care services too — but they might not even know it yet. If you provide a helpful article for them and they find it in search engine results, they might visit that page on your website, browse around your site and realize your lawn care services could make their life easier. By targeting a long-tail keyword with your content, you just created a potential customer.

Other SEO Tactics

In addition to creating quality content, you can also improve your website’s SEO by:

• Improving the website’s structure—reducing the depth of your site’s navigation, getting rid of old content, fixing or removing links that don’t work, etc.
• Reducing your site’s load times
• Making your site mobile-friendly
• Attracting links naturally from other websites by publishing useful content like blog articles

 
SEO TACTICS THAT DON’T WORK INCLUDE

• Repeating the same keywords over and over on a page or cramming as many different keywords as possible into a page
• Creating lots of different pages and posts that mostly contain the same information
• Paying other websites to link to your website

Optimizing your site for search engines can take a while to deliver results, but the results you do receive from SEO will tend to be very sustainable, meaning they will build over time without additional spending and will remain stable even if you have to cut back on spending for a while.

Attract New Business Through Social Media

Marketing your business on social media is a low-cost, low-risk form of marketing that only becomes more important as younger audiences get older and become the prime consumers of most products and services. Most young people today were raised with social media platforms and take them for granted as a part of their everyday lives. And people from a wide variety of demographics regularly use popular platforms like Facebook and Twitter.

Some benefits of social media for small businesses include:

• The ability to promote awareness of your brand and content among new and different audiences, some of whom you might not be able to reach any other way

• Building a dedicated following and keeping your existing customers engaged with your brand

• Improving performance in local search results (the location specific results that appear at the top or side of many search engine results pages)

Note that many social media platforms offer “sponsored posts” and other types of premium posts that businesses can purchase for greater visibility, but you don’t need to spend any money to create the social media profiles that can help your business reach more potential customers.

Some of the most popular and well-established social media sites include:
 

• Facebook
• Google My Business
• YouTube
• Twitter
• Instagram
• Yelp
• LinkedIN
• TikTok

At a minimum, almost every business should have a Facebook page. Almost 70 percent of people in America use Facebook regularly, and businesses that don’t have a Facebook page will miss out on lots of potential opportunities to get their brand and messaging in front of potential customers.

You should also create a listing for your company on Google My Business. Google My Business is Google’s free listing service for businesses, and it also provides some social media capabilities. Creating your company’s Google My Business listing won’t cost you anything, and it will help your business appear in local search listings and maps results when potential customers in your area search for products and services similar to what you offer.

To create your Google My Business listing or to claim and update an existing listing for your business, visit Google.com/Business.

To find other Google resources available to help grow your business, you can also visit SmallBusiness.withgoogle.com.

Consider Pay-Per-Click and Other Paid Online Advertising

If you’ve used a search engine before, you may notice that when you perform your search, you receive results labeled “AD” that appear first. Pay-per-click advertising lets your business bid money to appear in these ad results. With PPC ads, you pay a fee each time someone clicks on your ad. When the user clicks your ad, they’ll arrive at a page of your choosing on your website.

Every search engine has its own system for buying PPC ads. If you want your business to appear in the ad results at the top of Google searches, for example, then you’ll need to create an account with Google Ads.

Note that with PPC advertising, you pay each time someone clicks your ad, not each time someone becomes a customer or client. You can spend lots of money getting clicks and still receive no customers or clients at all, especially if the webpage where your ads lead doesn’t grab users’ attention or offer a clear value proposition and a quick call to action.

PPC ads at the top of search results aren’t the only type of paid online advertisements, though. You can pay for your advertisements to appear as display ads, which are banners and images on other websites. You can also create video ads and pay for them to run before videos on sites like YouTube. You can develop retargeting ads that follow your website visitors to other sites after they leave. You can pay for your company to sponsor content like blog articles on other websites. You can pay to run a variety of social media ads. There are lots and lots of options.

With so many options, creating and managing online ads can become complex, and it’s easy to spend lots of money on these types of ads without getting significant returns, especially if you’re new to online marketing. If you think online ads could be particularly helpful to your business, you may want to consider working with a marketing agency who can manage your online ad campaigns for you. Paid online ads also won’t deliver useful results if you haven’t already established a strong online presence, so it’s best to think of paid online advertisements as a “next step” you can consider after you’ve built a website, worked to optimize your website for search engines, and created social media profiles for your business.

You Have New Website Visitors – Now What?

Once visitors get to your website, the quality and helpfulness of your content (including blogs, videos, images, and website copywriting) as well as the user-friendliness and visual appeal of your website will decide whether visitors stay to learn more about your products or services.

Common reasons that website visitors quickly leave a website (or “bounce,” in online marketing terms include:

• Long load times
• Unappealing design
• Confusing structure or lack of clear navigation options
• Annoying popups or other intrusive ads

For users who stay on your website, you want to provide not only educational content like blog articles they can browse if they just want information, but also content that can make potential customers feel more familiar with your brand and begin to trust you.

Examples of content that can develop trust in potential customers include:

• Testimonials from happy customers or clients
• Case studies that explain how you met a client’s or customer’s unique needs
• Information about you as a person and other key people from your business’ team
• Stories of your business engaging with the community in a positive manner
• Pictures of your company, your products, and satisfied customers

However, even after viewing this information, many potential customers won’t feel ready to trust you with their hard-earned money just yet. For those customers, your goal is to gather their contact information by getting them to fill out a contact form on your website. Remember that your customers’ contact information is valuable to you, so you’ll have to offer them something of value in return for it.

Examples of items you can offer in exchange for contact information include:

• Discounts, coupon codes, and other promotional offers
• Chances to win prizes like apparel and other promotional items (“swag”)
• In-depth pieces of content, like infographics and eBooks, that provide lots of information about a topic that interests your potential customers
• A subscription to your company newsletter (which may itself provide additional promotional offers)

The most effective website contact forms are simple and only require a name and an email address. If your business absolutely needs a phone number or mailing address to follow up with a lead, then you can ask for that information, but the number of website visitors who fill out your contact forms will drop dramatically with every additional piece of information you ask for.

Always Follow Up With Online Leads!

Once a website visitor gives you their contact information, they become a lead. That’s an important step, but the process of turning them into a customer is far from complete, and many businesses struggle to follow up with online leads effectively.

Many business owners think it’s acceptable to follow up with leads within a day or so, but studies show otherwise. In fact, experts have determined that you’re 100 times more likely to reach a lead and 21 times more likely to qualify that lead (meaning find out if they’re a realistic prospect or not) if you follow up within the first 5 minutes of them contacting you compared to following up within 30 minutes. And after 20 hours have passed from the initial contact, studies show there’s nothing you can do to improve your chances of contacting a lead and qualifying them—every call you make after that point only hurts your chances.

Certain businesses may be able to manage this problem by being extra-vigilant and dropping everything to contact a lead whenever one comes in. However, with online marketing, leads can come in at all hours of the day, even at night.

Various digital tools exist that can help you make sure no lead slips through the cracks and that every lead receives almost immediate follow-up, especially once you start getting more leads from your website than you can handle on your own. Options include:

CALL CENTERS

You contract with a call center company that hires and trains employees to speak with leads and do some of the initial qualification work for you before passing the lead to you

MANAGED LIVE CHAT

You contract with a company that installs a chat popup on your website where visitors can chat with a trained representative. (Sometimes the initial chat will even be conducted by a software program that will ask for basic information and then refer the lead to a representative after that.)

EMAIL MARKETING

You create pre-built email messages that leads automatically receive 

after they fill out a contact form on your website. These emails can offer information that’s more tailored to the lead compared to what’s on your website. Many online tools allow you to deliver emails that are personalized to include the lead’s name and customized around the lead’s interests.

For some businesses, none of these options can replace the personal touch of a direct phone call or face-to-face interaction with a lead. However, these digital tools can help keep a lead engaged and keep your brand at the top of their mind long enough for you or a sales representative to contact them while they’re still excited about talking to you.

Never Stop Improving Your Online Marketing

Google provides data to most website owners for free. Data helps you answer questions like:

• Where are my website’s visitors coming from?
• How many of them are becoming leads?
• Which marketing strategies are giving me the best return on my investment?

To start receiving this data, you’ll need to sign up for a Google Analytics account and add a tracking code to your website. (Google has resources related to Google Analytics that can walk you through this process.) Once you add the code to your website, Google will start collecting data. Before long, you can start viewing that data.

If you browse through the data for your website, you’ll see data like:

•  Users
  •  This is the number of people who visited your website or a specific page over a given time period.

• Page Views
  • This number tells how many views a particular page or set of pages received.

• Average Time on Page
  • This is the average amount of time users spend looking at a particular page or set of pages.

• Bounce Rate
  • This is the percent of visitors who leave a particular page without doing anything else on your site.

It can be hard to know what to make of these numbers at first, and even when they show improvement, it won’t necessarily translate to more customers and revenue for your business right away. However, if you see your users, page views, and average time on page going up over time, then you’ll know you’re at least on the right track in terms of developing and promoting your website. Bounce rate should trend downward over time. If you don’t see improvement in these numbers or they start moving in the wrong direction over the long term, then it’s probably time to re-evaluate what you’re doing.

Managing Online Reviews

Most consumers today read online reviews when looking for a business or while shopping for specific products and services, so receiving good reviews can play an extremely important role in attracting new customers. Since reviews are so critical, sitting and waiting for them to come in isn’t enough. Instead, you should personally talk to your happy customers about leaving a review. Automated email messages are also one of the most reliable and least annoying ways to follow up with your customers so you can ask them to write a review. You should not offer monetary incentives for reviews, and you should not ask customers to leave a review while they are at your business.

If your company receives a negative review, don’t panic. Instead, respond quickly but keep a level head. Don’t argue with the customer. Instead, respond politely and sympathetically. First, acknowledge their issue and then offer to make things right. If possible, offer to contact the customer offline and follow up with them further.

Unfortunately, scammers know about the power of online reviews, and sometimes they’ll make up a negative review to try and get something from a business, even if they’ve never had any previous interaction with that business. If this happens to you and you’re sure it’s not a legitimate complaint from a real customer, try to contact the company operating the review platform — whether it’s Google, Facebook, Yelp, or another site—to explain the situation and ask them to remo