18th Apr

Local marketing has become the buzz word and crucial to your business success. You need to get your name out there for your audience to find you from many different online an offline angles. Here's a quick list of 8 practical quick tips to market your business locally.

Tip #1

Incorporate your reviews through online and offline channels. For example as soon as you receive a review you should post it on Facebook. Cross promote that review on your Twitter page and other social networks. Additionally post these reviews to your offline marketing such as leaflets and editorial adverts.

Tip #2

Create specific landing pages for your services and marketing campaigns. Once they're live continually test and improve them. If you wanted to find out more about this and what to include in a landing page, I discuss this in more depth in my book Fully Booked! The ultimate guide to marketing your services based business.

Tip #3

Create a Google+ page. if you haven't done so yet then STOP and do it right now! Without a Google+ page your missing out on a huge amount of local business.

Tip #4

Facebook Ads! Facebook ads are a great marketing tool that you should be using to market your service business locally.

Tip #5

List your business in various directories. Everywhere your ideal customer will look to find you.

Tip #6

Set up and maintain a local search optimisation strategy. Many people will feel safer by approaching local businesses oppose to national chains and so when they do make sure your business name appears.

Tip #7

Create a website that's ready for the new digital age. This means that your website should be fully responsive and work equally as well on desk tops, laptops, mobile phones or tablets.

Tip #8

Stand out from the crowd and identify what sets your business part. Use this to market your service business locally. So there you have it, 8 quick tips to help you market your service business locally.

18th Apr

Social media has grown to become an essential part of any business marketing toolkit. Even though the importance of social media has been widely documented, there are many businesses who market their services using social networks without having a social media marketing plan in place.

So, before going any further let's see what a social media marketing plan actually is. A social media marketing plan is a detailed written plan of everything you plan to do and accomplish for your business through social networks. The plan should comprehensively detail your starting point, what you hope to achieve and how you are going to get there.

Your social media marketing plan must work in complete alignment with your overall marketing strategy for your business, so that you can determine if you're achieving your goals.

Do you have a social media marketing plan? If you do, that's great! If you don't or the one you do have isn't working as well as you hoped, no worries!

Let's get started and starting creating your 5 step social media marketing plan.

STEP 1: Carry out a social audit and create social media marketing goals

The first step to your social media marketing plan is to review where you are now on social networks and how well you are doing. Having completed this social media audit you need to decide where improvements can be made

Once you've done this groundwork, you'll be ready to start setting goals. Although you would have created goals already as the improvements you've identified will become your goals.

Setting goals allows you to instantly determine if you are meeting your goals or not, as well as documenting your return on investment.

These goals are usually geared towards achieving your end goal for your business that becomes part of a larger marketing plan for your business. As you write goals you must remember to keep your ideal customers top of mind.

STEP 2: Create or improve your social media channels

The second step is to carefully select the social networks that would be most beneficial for your business marketing goals. You don't need to appear on all the social networks but you must be visible to your audience where they hang out. That's why a key point within any business marketing activity is to have identified your ideal customer so that you can market your services with pinpoint accuracy and achieve a higher rate of success.

I strongly recommend you tackle one social network at a time as trying to deal with all the social media networks simultaneously may become overwhelming. Once you've established which social network you wish to market your services, you can start optimising your social media accounts. A key tip is to make sure you have filled out all the relevant sections whether that be text or images.

STEP 3: Add engaging content

The next phase in creating a social media marketing plan is to create unique engaging content for your audience. To do this you need to know what's happening in your industry and how it can help your audience. So where do you find this? Well, you need to keep yourself in the loop through news that appears on the networks, engaging with other businesses and thought leaders.

STEP 4: The social media marketing plan

Finally! This is the stage you've been waiting for, creating your social media marketing plan. You need to bring together your engaging content, your ideal customer persona and your social media distribution calendar. In case you were wondering, a social media distribution calendar is a calendar that clearly defines when specific pieces of content will go live and on which network they will appear.

STEP 5: Evaluate and Improve your social media marketing plan

You've now distributed your content on your social media accounts and so the next stage is to evaluate how well it's doing by testing what day or time works best for your individual social media accounts. Document what type of content works best for each social media account such as text based content, images or video. Use the built-in analytics software within the social media networks as they will give you insights in to valuable data in regards to engagement. If it works then keep doing it, whilst looking in to how you can improve it and if it's not working try something else. One size does not fit all when it comes the social media networks. We are all individual and all learn and connect in many different ways from visual to auditory and reading and writing to kinesthetic, so make sure you cater for them all when creating your social media marketing plan.

18th Apr

I'm sure you've heard the phrase, "Content is king". Now more than ever it's become an integral part of every marketing strategy due to the return of investment it can yield. In the service industry your customers can't see or touch physical products, but instead employ you or your business for the services you offer. You must entice your audience and create sufficient interest for them to contact you.

So how do you do this? First and foremost your content should be unique, useful and engaging for your audience. If a picture paints a thousand words then words paints a thousand pictures. Let me explain... Your audience have a problem and they're looking for a solution. If you can clearly convey that you can solve their problem then they will more than likely contact you.

You must carefully select the words, images, audio or video footage to describe what you or your business does that will solve their problem. Whichever medium you choose to market your services, your goal is to make a positive impact and resonate with your audience, leaving them wanting to know more. Additionally you are trying to create a connection with your audience and so by being more social and creating visual content that shows what you do, will allow your audience to get to know you.

Here's some of the benefits you'll receive from creating exclusive engaging content:

  • The search engines reward you - SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)
  • Engages your audience and encourages loyalty over time
  • Develops expert status
  • Delivers new leads
  • Free marketing - Your customers will spread the word
Content marketing should be at the forefront of every marketing strategy you create for your business whether online or offline. I urge you to consider using a variety of marketing mediums to connect with your audience. Most of all, embrace content marketing if you want to grow your business.

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