What is Marketing – Finding & Advertising to your Target Market

Posted on December 4, 2011 by BigTree

One of the most common questions business owners struggle with in regards to their marketing is defining their target market.

Target market is your target audience. Said another way, it’s the customer who is most likely to buy from you and continue to use your products or services.

The question I typically ask business owners to get the real answer to who their target market is, is:

If you were to bet on the person who walked in the door as most likely to buy, who would they be? Male, female, age, income, with children, no children, education, live locally, own home, rent, employed, retired, etc. What else do you know about them? Are they do-it-yourself types? Do they want things done for them and they’re willing to pay for it?

Once you know who the target (or core) audience is, you can better target your messages to get them to buy. You will still get others, but going after the core audience will get you more “bang for your buck” in marketing dollars spent, and they will be the best people to share your message with their friends and families – hopefully who will also be similar enough to also be great customers for your business.

Many people will target messages using direct mail, or niche publications. They will also use targeted advertising on Google, Facebook or through other opportunities. If your business is more broad, but still mostly attracts people from a certain geographic area, you could use local publications in print or online, or radio or television opportunities to reach your target audience.

The more targeted the reach, the more you’ll likely pay per thousand readers / viewers. Keep this in mind when you look to purchase advertising / spend marketing dollars.

Keep in mind what your audience likes to see or hear when you communicate with them. Audiences without children may not be as enamored with photos of children as those with children. Focus groups to review advertisements are always a great idea – even if you just show them to a few honest people. (Don’t show them to the people who say everything is great just to be done with the work; get real honest feedback so you can make changes before rolling out the initiative and spending all those marketing dollars!)

Hope this helps – enjoy!

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5 Reasons Why You Should Blog about your Business

Posted on November 27, 2011 by BigTree

Why oh why do I have to blog? Well, you don’t. But it will help your business and web site traffic grow if you do it right. But let’s get one thing clear up front. Blogging is a commitment.

Unlike your web site overall, where you could set it up and then allow it to remain relatively untouched, a blog is the portion of your web site you are making a commitment to interact with on a regular basis.

Blogging helps you with your search engine optimization, as you are showing search engines your site is regularly updated with content that’s (hopefully!) relevant to searches related to your business.

Here are five tips to help you be more successful in your blogging efforts:

1. Communicate with your audience. Sounds simple enough, but you want to know who is most likely to buy your products or services. This is your “target audience” in marketing terms. It’s important to know who is most likely to buy so you can think about what these people are likely to be searching for – what news or information would they find compelling? Think about what’s in it for them – what are common questions you encounter in your business? Pose those questions in the manner people usually ask you and then answer them in a blog post. You can even set up multiple blogs by answering one question per blog – that’s a great way to spread out the blog posts!

2. Focus your Communication. This time we’re not talking about who your communicating to, but rather what you’re communicating. Before you start blogging, think about what you want to accomplish with your blogs, the content that will help achieve this goal, and again about what questions people ask you in your business. Help consumers answer commonly asked questions so they can find you as the local source for relevant information for your business. Remember quality information is important, as this is your reputation we’re building! Watch for typos and proofread all blogs!

3. Commit to the Frequency. It’s important to do a blog more than once in a blue moon. Search engines want to see regularly updated content, and users want to be able to find what they are looking for easily. A daily blog would be a significant commitment, and likely more than necessary. Doing a blog weekly or even monthly might be more appropriate in your business. We recommend doing three to four blogs in advance so you’re always ahead. We recommend scheduling them out to run once a week or once every two weeks, instead of publishing them all at once. Commit to a regular pattern or schedule to help keep up your blogging commitment. Once you stop blogging, it may be harder to start back up again!

4. Keywords! You’re blogging to help your target audience find you for a specific goal – make sure you’re using the words people search for when they’re asking questions or seeking out your business products or services. Use Google’s Keyword Tool to search for the words you think people look for in regards to your product or service. Google’s tool will show you what words people really search for, and what they search for locally versus globally. Google will also tell you the level of competition for advertising for the keywords. If you can find words people search for often that do not have a high level of competition, those are words that are most idea for including in your blog posts. For example, if you entered in the words “how to write a blog” or “blogs,” you will see that Google also suggests “Why blog,” “the blog,” “how do I blog,” “how do you blog, “what is blog,” what are blogs,” etc. You can also see that the competition for these phrases are low. If you look at the name of this post, we used this insight to name the post to make it more relevant for search engines matching up results to searches for “blogs” or “why blog” etc. It wouldn’t make sense for a search engine if we said Blogging is Tops or something similar – search engines don’t get puns. Be simple and straight forward.

5. Engage! Once you’ve gone through all this work, it’s important to engage with your readers. Post the blog on your Facebook page, Twitter feed, and be sure to watch for comments and feedback. Offer ideas and insights to readers, and use their ideas for future blogs!

Have fun, and enjoy the process. If you don’t feel like blogging, it will come across in your posts – so wait until you’re ready … jot down ideas as they come to you so when you do have time you have a list or two of ideas.

Happy blogging!

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Choosing a Marketing Agency for Your Small Business

Posted on October 23, 2011 by BigTree

There are a number of factors to review before determining the company you should work with on your marketing efforts. One of the biggest mistakes we repeatedly see small business owners make in choosing a marketing consulting company or agency is by choosing one that is much better at promoting themselves than the companies they represent.

At Big Tree Marketing, our priority is our clients, which is why you’ll note that the customers we represent have more fans, more likes, and more followers than we ever will. Because it’s not about us; it’s about them.

An agency or marketing consultant should ask you about your business, what’s worked, what hasn’t worked, what you like, what your customers like, who your customers are, how they interact with you, and what your goals are. An agency should understand how your business works, what has made you successful, what you’ve tried and worked well, and what you’ve tried and felt was not successful. An agency should care more about your business and how they can help you than how to fill their own pockets or portfolios.

Be wary of agencies immediately suggesting radio or television advertising, as they often receive kickbacks and commissions on selling radio and television advertising. Although those may be the right medium for you in the end, they are not for everyone, so be sure they’ve done a thorough analysis of your business prior their recommendation.

Be wary of “social media” representatives who have never worked for a company directly managing social media – they often know a lot less than necessary to assist you with your marketing efforts in a beneficial manner.

Beware the “experts” who talk about how great they are, because it’s not about them. Your marketing should be about you, your business, and connecting you with your current and potential customers.

An agency or marketing company’s success is reflected in their customers’ successes and their willingness to recommend them to their colleagues, friends and fellow business owners. So ask around!

 

 

 

 

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iOS 5 Upgrade – Big Benefits in a Nutshell

Posted on October 16, 2011 by BigTree

Wondering what the fuss is about the iOS 5 Upgrade?

Here are some of the highlights:

Software updates can now seamlessly occur without a computer connection. Similarly, you can now backup your iPhone without connecting to a computer.

You can also edit photos on the fly right on the iPhone. And you can get to the photo feature faster to take those photos more quickly and easily.

There’s also a highly visible notification center to better enable users to view incoming messages / alerts.

There’s a Newsstand where you can easily organize your newspaper subscriptions as well.

And there’s a snazzy LED light that flashes when a call is coming in.

More details here: Apple iOS 5 Features

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Discover the best ways to run a survey with subject line tips

Posted on October 1, 2011 by BigTree

If you’re looking to run a customer satisfaction survey, or a general survey for your customers to provide feedback or insight, here are some tips to obtain better results.

First, set up the survey using simple software (surveymonkey.com is an easy sample site). Make sure you’re asking questions that you don’t already know the answers to. For example, don’t ask them if they’ve ever purchased X if you can look up in your records and see that yes, they did buy X! Browse the web for sample surveys and ask the questions you’d be comfortable answering (keeping in mind that many people are not comfortable answering demographic data questions – so make those optional).

After you’ve created the survey, put a link to it on your own site as well as on your social media pages (Facebook and Twitter, etc). Then, email the survey link to your current and potential customers.

Email subject line tips:

-          Subject lines should be kept short (35 characters or less). Avoid using all caps, exclamation points, or dollar signs and avoid words that spam filters might not like, including “important message” and “free.”

-          When you use “minute” in the subject line on surveys, they tend to perform more poorly

-          Suggested subject lines are: “satisfaction survey”  “Short Survey” “customer survey” with your company name in it. For example: Big Tree Marketing Satisfaction Survey.

-          Once the user opens the email, give them incentive to finish the survey. Cash is always a popular prize. For example: Win $100! Just for letting us know how we’re doing and how we can improve, etc.

Actual email text idea:

 

Dear (enter customer’s name if possible),

In an effort to better serve our customers (or name your goal), (your company name) is conducting a customer survey. Your input can help us better serve you (or actual benefit to recipient). We estimate that it will take you approximately 5 (or however many) minutes to complete the survey.

Simply click on the link below to access the survey:

Survey link

If possible, please complete survey by (deadline). All answers are confidential and appreciated.

If you have any questions please contact me at (email  and phone)

Sincerely,

Name

Title

Company

Address


To be removed from this or any future mailings, please click here or reply to this message and enter “REMOVE” in the subject line

 

 

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How to avoid spam triggers in email subject lines

Posted on September 28, 2011 by BigTree

Spam filters do a world of good keeping the thousands of junk emails out of our inboxes each day. But when you’re ready to send out an email and don’t want to have your message trapped in a spam filter, here are some things to keep in mind.

There are certain words that are most likely to push your emails into a spam file.

Subject line words to AVOID:

Prices, $$, Cash, Guarantee, Bonus, Earn, Opportunity, Increase Sales, Home based, f r e e, order now, traffic, info, cheap, credit, billion, mortgage rates and any combination of dollar sign(s) and / or the word free.

For a more comprehensive list of trigger words, including the worst ones and the not so great words, check out this Mequoda Daily post.

 

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Free Online Marketing Tips for Success

Posted on September 25, 2011 by BigTree

Online marketing really can be managed relatively efficiently, as long as you’re willing to do a little work, or pay someone else to do it for you.

After you’ve done the first few basic steps, you can do fun interactive online contests, and increase your online fans, and follow these great social media best practices for Twitter (and other social media sites).

Once you have your own site set up, you can use Google Analytics to track who is coming to your site, how long they are staying on your site and where they came from (both geographically and the web site they were on before coming to your site). You can also use Google Webmaster tools to determine what people search for and find your site, the relevant words for your site, as well as any errors users experienced.

If you know your business, but want to make sure you use the best keywords on your site to better help people find you, use Google’s Keyword tool – type in the phrases you think people will most likely search for, and Google will tell you what people actually search for to help you set up your on-site SEO for success.

Hope these tips help! Check out our other blog posts for more help!

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Discover the Best Way to Host a Contest on Facebook

Posted on September 24, 2011 by BigTree

Most people love contests, especially if they think they have a good chance of winning, or if there’s a great prize. They’re a great way to engage your current fans, and help you gain more fans.

On Facebook, our experience has shown it’s better to do simple contests with relatively simple prizes to increase your fans. Here are some Facebook contest tips:

1. Choose a few simple prizes. For example, we had three $20 gift cards to a local popular restaurant to help us promote a local business page.

2. Make the contest itself very simple. Don’t promote all three gift cards at once. People respond better if you say: “Like this status & you’re entered to win a $20 gift card at (restaurant name)!! First winner will be drawn this Friday!” Using this tactic, you’re making it clear that there will be more than one contest, someone will win a gift card this week, and that it’s very easy to enter. You should be the first to comment on your post, stating, “if you prefer, email your entry to (your email address),” that way you’re offering other ways to enter the contest to be better in line with Facebook’s contest rules.

3. Continuing the idea of keeping it simple – as noted above, instead of forcing users to “like” your page, you’ll get more interaction if you just ask them to “like” the status you’ve posted. You really will get more likes on the page using this strategy – it’s worked for us numerous times! For example, we posted the above contest for the $20 gift card and got more than 70 likes on the status and only had 166 fans on the page when we started. We had 220 fans on the page by that first Friday. It’s a great way to move the needle (that was a 30%+ increase in fans in a week).

4. Immediately after posting the contest status, share it on your personal page, and post on other pages you administer to help promote it (assuming they’re similar in nature or will be beneficial in reaching a good audience for you). You can also run a Facebook ad to help in this initiative. Be simple and to the point in all promotional efforts.

4. When the contest end date comes, be sure to post the winner at the bottom of the status with all the likes as well as with a new post on your page. Then immediately do a new posting saying if they didn’t win, they can enter again right now for another chance, give them the new deadline, etc. Ask the winner to email you as you cannot message them or post on their profile to let them know they’re a winner according to Facebook’s rules.

Repeat & enjoy!

 

Please note that Facebook continually updates their promotional rules, so please check their site to be in compliance prior to running any contest.

 

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How to increase your Facebook fans

Posted on September 24, 2011 by BigTree

After you’ve created a Facebook page for your business, the next challenge is to obtain fans. If you already have a personal Facebook page, share the page you’ve created and ask your friends and family to like your page. You can personally message them if needed, and post it to your own wall.

Once you’ve created your page, you can claim your Facebook username. It’s important to do this so you can claim your own name before someone else does. For example, we’ve claimed www.Facebook.com/BigTreeMarketing so people can more easily find our username on Facebook, and no one else can have it. Just like we claimed www.BigTreeMarketing.com, we wanted to claim it on Facebook and Twitter. Our Twitter username (handle) is @BigTreeMktg (or www.twitter.com/bigtreemktg). Sometimes you have to shorten your name as we did due to length restrictions.

We chose Facebook and Twitter as our biggest social media pushes as they are two of largest social media networks. Google+ (or Google Plus) is growing, but does not yet have business profile opportunities, requires real names, and is still gaining traction.

To increase your Facebook fans, you need to post regular, helpful information to your fans. You should do simple contests, and engage people as much as you can. Think about your target market, and cater marketing messages, contests, and advertising to them. Having 1,000 fans is great, having 1,000 fans who read your posts, share them, and tell others about your business to help bring you more business is fantastic!

It’s hardest to get the first 100 fans. Once you get about 100 fans, it’ll be easier to continue to grow the numbers – so be persistent and patient, and don’t forget to keep posting! And remember, people love photos, testimonials, and to be “in the know.”

Again, we recommend creating your Facebook page, claiming your facebook username, and then doing the same on twitter as first steps. For more ideas, read the Top 5 ways to Market Yourself Online Now.

**We highly recommend not using your personal page instead of a business page. It’s important to have a business page set up on Facebook, otherwise Facebook can delete your account and you will be left with no fans or friends and will have to start from scratch – so all the work is down the drain! (You can still have your personal page, but definitely start a business page so you can claim your Facebook name – ie. www.Facebook.com/BigTree before someone else does!)

Want even more information? Read: How to use Facebook for my Business

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Top 5 Ways to Market Your Business Online Right Now

Posted on September 10, 2011 by BigTree

Everyone wants a quick answer when it comes to how to market your business online. Here are the top 5 ways to quickly increase your free online marketing presence – I’ve included links to help you get directly to the pages you need fast.

  1. Claim your Facebook Page (read our other article for details on how)
  2. Claim your Google Place
  3. Claim your Twitter Handle (read our other article for details on how)
  4. Claim your Yelp (and all directory) listings, especially .gov sites
  5. Claim your Foursquare Location

PS … you did already claim your web site name, right? Grab it before someone else does! Here’s how.

 

 

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