All posts with the tag 'Small Business Marketing'

Top 5 Tips When Creating A Virtual Business

Here's to "Your Virtual Success"!

Perhaps you’re considering creating a business or expanding a current business. As with many businesses, investing in inventory, product development or warehouse space might seem requisite. And perhaps this appears to be a reasonable or even logical approach, borrowing the famous quote from Field of Dreams, “if you build it, they will come.” After all, your simple business plan projects profits after only a modest startup period. My advice is to think about this again. When creating a new business, it’s highly advantageous to operate in a way that is both conducive to a flexible lifestyle while mitigating downside risk, including ramp up time or significant upfront investment.

Then again, you might be thinking that you can alleviate the risk by securing a bank loan, tapping into your home equity or even attracting venture capital. My advice, once again, is to think about another path, preferably one revolving around the golden rules above. Yes, there are a select few who can beat the traditional small business odds which are often estimated at 5 to 1, where only 20% of new businesses succeeded in the first 3 years. Venture capital odds are surely the worst, where many experts maintain the odds that you will succeed (find VC funding, maintain control of your company and enjoy a positive liquidation event) are about 5,000 to 1. How difficult are these odds? At roughly 5,000 to 1, you would odds comparable to getting struck by lightning.

Bootstrapping your virtual business should be much easier than funding a traditional brick and mortar business. Before opening a traditional storefront, or investing in a physical office, ask yourself if you can work from a home office, or if you can adjust your operations to accommodate a virtual business model. Instead of getting on a plane or train, are you sure a “face to face” Skype conference call wouldn’t suffice? At a cost of about $5 per month, you can simultaneously video conference with multiple people, regardless of their location. Instead of investing up front in capital equipment, can your new business secure orders in advance, or even deposits in advance of delivery?

  1. A short path to the money (limited ramp-up or development time)
  2. No upfront capital
  3. Customer deposits in advance of delivery
  4. Contractor based assistance for delivery
  5. Niche marketing opportunity (it’s much easier to target a vertical than a horizontal)

When thinking about your next venture, think about the Top 5 virtual business startup tips and if possible, find a virtual business model that leverages these for your new or existing business. Try to follow some or all of these.

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ePublishing As A Marketing Vehicle For Startups, Entrepreneurs And Emerging Companies

ePublishing offers startup companies an opportunity for high level marketing impact, yet requires no cash outlay. This should be an attractive formula for most if not all startups, entrepreneurs, home office based businesses, emerging companies or essentially any company tight on cash. Though there is no capital investment needed, it does require the ability to write reasonably well and to invest time and energy in an educational and non-promotional topic. However, for many startups and entrepreneurs, there is often an abundance of knowledge to share, and many actually yearn for a platform from which they may share their new ideas and concepts.

Leading ePublishers don’t allow promotional articles, embedded links or personal rants. Articles must conform to a multitude of specifications to be accepted. The content must be educationally oriented, it must be properly formatted, grammar must be correct and word density in some cases cannot exceed four or five percent for a particular keyword phrase. This emanates from the ePublisher’s desire to eliminate “keyword stuffing”, in a similar manner to Google’s perspective on the same issue when it comes to SEO.

Of course, you may be asking how it will help your start-up to write these articles if they cannot be promotional in nature. The answer lies in the information you can provide, not the actual product, service or solution your company offers. For example, if you sell a better, more durable, longer lasting sweatshirt, you can write an article about the innovative material now available for sweatshirts as opposed to writing an article about why your sweatshirts are better than other sweatshirts. Another example might be a web development company. Instead of writing about why your new company is the best web development company in the world, you can write about technology used in your marketplace, perhaps an article about the advantages of using PHP in website development over an HTML based website design.

The benefits to start-ups can be significant. Startups are often idea rich and cash poor, lacking the capital and marketing budget for a traditional marketing campaign. ePublishing offers the following marketing advantages:

1. Drive web traffic to your new website

2. Improve SEO resulting in better search engine results

3. Provide credible, published content for prospects

4. Provide dynamic content for your website

5. Provide back links to your website

6. Re-purpose blog content (blogs are often a compelling basis for an article)

7. Appear high in search engine rankings when interested parties search for specific content (electronically published articles can often appear on Google page one results for example, eclipsing much more established web site if the content is current and on topic)

ePublishing offers a level playing field for start-up companies seeking to compete with more established firms. You don’t need to be a technical guru to submit an article, you don’t need capital, the user interfaces tend to be easy to use and quality ePublishers offer plenty of guidance and suggestions on writing quality articles. What does your start-up need to get articles published? You need an interesting idea, 250 or more, well written words (though this can vary by publisher) and some patience when starting out with your first few articles. It can take a week or so to find out if your article is accepted, and in my opinion, for start-ups, entrepreneurs and other emerging companies, it is well worth the wait.

For more information, read Your Virtual Success (Career Press) http://www.amazon.com/Your-Virtual-Success-Finding-Profitability/dp/1601631014.  StartUpSelling provides outsourced B2B marketing, sales and lead generation services focusing in the areas of eMarketing, telemarketing, SEO, insurance agency social media marketing and website development. StartUpSelling specializes in innovative entrepreneurial marketing and sales concepts.

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Patience Is A Virtue – And A Good Rule For Web Seminar Marketing

One of my clients has a web seminar scheduled for October 6th.  An emailing was sent to their prospect list yesterday, and as of this morning 80 people have registered for their webinar. Based on prior monthly webinars, I’d estimate that they will have in excess of 150 executive level registrants by their web seminar date next week. Why is this small business client successful with their webinar marketing program when others may fail?

  1. The web seminars are educational – they do not try to sell their services
  2. The topics are current business topics, related to their vertical industry expertise
  3. The guest speakers are subject matter experts, expounding on a variety of challenging issues germane to the target prospect executives

Of course their first few web seminars didn’t attract nearly as many registrants. Over time, however, they have established a strong following. Today, when they reach out to their prospective clients, their name is known, they are respected as a thought leader in their industry and they are able to readily book web meetings and on-site appointments with these prospective clients.

Beyond the messaging, selecting great topics, finding knowledgeable speakers, and respecting email best practices, this small business has exercised patience, taking a long term approach to winning over their prospects. For products, services or solutions that result in revenues of $10,000, $50,000 or $100,000 or more, this is a great approach. Patience is a virtue and seemingly an important aspect of web seminar marketing too.

For more information on web marketing topics, read Your Virtual Success: http://www.amazon.com/Your-Virtual-Success-Finding-Profitability/dp/1601631014

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Posted in business, emerging business, Insurance Agency Leads, Insurance Agency Marketing, Insurance Agency Webinars, Virtual Business | Leave a Comment »

It’s All About Your Close Ratio

Do you track the ratios of your prospects to presentations to proposals to closes? These simple ratios can offer tremendous insights into the health of your sales and marketing engine. Further, they can elucidate specific challenges in your business. For example, let’s say that you offer monthly web seminars which result in 100 registrants per month. Of these 100 registrants, 10 move further down your sales funnel (see blog entry called The Prospect Scorecard) and result in individual presentations (10%). Of these 10 presentations, five request proposals (50% of presentations or 5% of webinar registrants), and are deemed “proposal worthy” through your well defined Prospect Scorecard or other measuring system which your company has in place. Lastly, of these five proposals, two close, or 40% of proposals or 2% of the original 100 webinar registrants.

Now that you’ve established your ratios, are you happy with them? If you are, then you may want to increase webinar registrants, allowing more prospects to cascade down through your funnel. Or, perhaps you think that a 10% conversion rate from webinar registrants to individualized presentations is too low. You would then need to determine what should be done to influence that metric. For example, perhaps your webinars need a more compelling call to action, a special offer to move to an individualized presentation, or you could make it easier for the prospect to meet with you by offering an abbreviated one to one web meeting or conference call. There are actually many things you could try to refine your ratios, of course you have to have these in place to do so.

Your company now has simple and easily measurable metrics for your sales process. Extending these measurements to your marketing engine, in this particular case, can be as simple as measuring where webinar registrants arrived from (LinkedIn or other Social Network, ePublishing, eMail Marketing, Referral, etc.) and then tracking the resulting prospects through the sales funnel mentioned above. Many small businesses fail to measure these key metrics, which is really very simple to accomplish. We track all of these for our own sales and marketing efforts at StartUpSelling, Inc. You can read more about this on our website, or in my recently released book, Your Virtual Success: www.yourvirtualsuccess.net.

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A Small Business Marketing Plan for the Web Centric Marketing Era

Small Business Marketing Plan, Insurance Agency Marketing Plan

Small Business Marketing Plan, Insurance Agency Marketing Plan

What type of marketing plan does your small business create each year? Is it a comprehensive and detailed plan that is 10 or 20 pages long or a more concise one to five pages? Is it part of an annual business plan or a five year strategic plan? Companies approach business planning, budgeting and marketing from a wide variety of perspectives.  For the purposes of this article, we’re going to drill down to a marketing specific plan, then further to a web centric B2B lead generation plan.

There are many marketing related activities which fall under a small business marketing plan umbrella. Some of these (listed alphabetically) include:

  • Association Memberships (Chamber of Commerce, etc.)
  • Blogging
  • Brochures
  • Client Testimonials
  • Club Memberships (Golf, Tennis, Other)
  • Direct Mail
  • eBrochures
  • eMarketing
  • ePublishing
  • Events (for both clients and prospects)
  • Networking Organizations
  • Newsletter
  • On-site Seminars
  • Pay Per Click (Google PPC Campaigns)
  • PR and Client Testimonial Creation
  • Promotional Items
  • Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
  • Social Media Marketing (Facebook, LinkedIn)
  • Telemarketing
  • Trade Shows
  • Traditional Advertising (Magazines, Yellow Pages, Radio, TV)
  • Web Seminars
  • Website
  • White Papers

That’s already a long list, and we’re just getting started. Small businesses can’t tackle all of the activities above, in fact, they should only focus on a few of these each year, and many would agree that they should focus on lead generation oriented activities which will help keep their pipelines full and active. Let’s review some of the better lead generation activities from the list above:

  • Direct Mail
  • eMarketing
  • Pay Per Click (Google PPC Campaigns)
  • Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
  • Social Media Marketing (Facebook, LinkedIn)
  • Telemarketing
  • Traditional Advertising (Magazines, Yellow Pages, Radio, TV)
  • Web Seminars
  • Website

Granted, networking oriented activities can generate leads, though these should be pursued in the normal course of business in a manner most comfortable to the individual salesperson. Thus we are focusing on quantitatively oriented (easily repeatable and highly measurable) lead generation activities. This list is more manageable, but still needs to be culled to ensure proper focus on the respective lead generation activity.  A decade ago, traditional advertising, telemarketing and direct mail might have been the preferred path for most businesses. Today, only one of those activities should remain on our list, and as you will see below, the remaining items are all web marketing centric.

  • eMarketing/Web Seminars
  • Pay Per Click (Google PPC Campaigns)
  • Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Blogging, ePublising
  • Social Media Marketing (Facebook, LinkedIn)
  • Telemarketing (for smaller profile prospects)
  • Website

Our small business marketing list has now been culled to a manageable level. You may have noticed that eMarketing has been paired with web seminars. This is because many small business marketing experts find a higher B2B response rate to eMarketing initiatives when leveraging educationally oriented webinars as the primary call to action. SEO, search engine optimization for Small businesses, results in the organic display of your business website at the top of the search engine rankings (Google, Bing or Yahoo search engine results). You probably noticed that this is now bundled with blogging and ePublishing, since those elements are often necessary to achieve page one search engine results. Organic SEO is a gift that keeps on giving; it does not require fees every time a prospect clicks on your name. PPC, or Pay Per Click ads, appear at the top and side of the Google results, and require that your business pays anywhere from $1 to $5 per click, depending upon the competitiveness of the search term. My recommendations for a B2B lead generation, web centric plan often focuses on the following:

  • eMarketing/Web Seminars
  • Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Blogging, ePublising
  • Social Media Marketing (Facebook, LinkedIn)
  • Website

This is a manageable list for almost any business, and a cost effective outsource if the business lacks the internal expertise to accomplish these tasks.  A professional up to date website is essential for any small business. The website should be optimized for your specific keywords (benefits, workers comp, truck insurance, etc.). Your small business SEO initiative may need to be regionalized or localized (workers compensation Massachusetts).  Social media marketing, a presence on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc. is fast and easy for most businesses, a full blown social media initiative would require a greater investment of time (creating and managing a group, offering content, responding to discussion groups, etc.). Blogging and ePublishing are essential and extremely helpful for most businesses. Fortunately businesses can often leverage their blog content and publish it in well known, online article directories. Lastly, a successful eMarketing and Web Seminar campaign can often yield the best results for small businesses. An ideal series might have 5,000 0r 10,000 targeted prospect emails combined with a monthly webinar. Be wary of email list brokers advertising inexpensive email lists. We’ve seen business lists where the first and last names are merged into one field and many of the emails are info@ or sales@ type emails, a definite problem when it comes to professional eMarketing. EMarketing is both an art and a science, businesses must ensure it is done properly, professionally and obey the CAN-SPAM act.

Web centric small business marketing is now a critical foundation for any small business wishing to grow, your business should be well on the way to implementing these initiatives. That said, don’t attempt to do too many activities at one time, you’re better off doing a few marketing activities really well than accomplishing a dozen in a haphazard manner.

For more information on small business marketing read Your Virtual Success: http://www.amazon.com/Your-Virtual-Success-Finding-Profitability/dp/1601631014

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When is the Last Time You Read the US Constitution – Take the July 4th Quick Quiz

When was the last time you read this?

When is the last time you (or your children) read the US Constitution, or for that matter, the Declaration of Independence? With our national birthday just around the corner, thinking about the Constitution seems particularly relevant. It’s great to go watch a parade, but you might find it truly worthwhile to take a little time and read our Constitution. If memory serves me correctly, I read it back in my college days for a class I took on constitutional law. Recently, however, I read a great book on my Kindle, called The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court by Jeffrey Toobin. The Nine frequently referenced the articles and amendments of the US Constitution. So, after finishing The Nine, I decided to reread the Declaration of Independence and The US Constitution.  I came away with two surprises:  1. The Constitution is a surprisingly short document considering all that it represents – those framers were clearly a brilliant group.  2. Even with the formality of the language of the times, you can really sense the pent up anger in the Declaration of Independence.

The real question is, how much do you know about the Constitution? If you’re curious, take this quick quiz (answers are below):

  1. How many Articles are there?
  2. How many Amendments are there (last one was in 1992)?
  3. What is Article 1 about?
  4. What is Article 2 about?
  5. What is Article 3 about?
  6. How many Amendments are there in the Bill of Rights?
  7. When was the Bill of Rights ratified?
  8. Which Amendment abolished slavery?
  9. Where would you find the famous quote, “WE hold these Truths to be self evident?
  10. How many states were required to ratify the Constitution?
  11. Bonus question: What is the Fifth Amendment about?

Some of the language in the Constitution seems crystal clear to me, other language seems cryptic. After reading through it (twice), it seems abundantly clear why the judiciary has so many perspectives of Constitutional right and wrong and the myriad of interpretational perspectives on the document. This document represents one of the most important, guiding principles of our everyday lives. When is the last time you or your children read the Declaration of Independence and The US Constitution? Answers to the quiz are below, if I made a layman’s error on these, I guess I’ll have to “plead the Fifth”. Feel free to send me comments, clarifications or corrections.

Answers: 1. (7) 2. (27) 3. (Legislative Branch) 4. (Executive Branch) 5. (Judicial Branch) 6. (10)  7.  (1791) 8. (13th) 9. (Declaration of Independence) 10. (9) 11. (Shall not be compelled to be a witness against himself)

If you’re interested in reading something on a leading edge business topic, try Your Virtual Success (Career Press), my new book on web centric sales, marketing and business management. Available at all bookstores, Amazon and on the Kindle: http://www.amazon.com/Your-Virtual-Success-Finding-Profitability/dp/1601631014

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Posted in business, Business Book Review, emerging business, Entrepeneurship, Home Office Business, Insurance Agency Marketing, Virtual Business | Leave a Comment »

Selling Vertically

Solution selling is most effective when targeting a specific vertical marketing. This is particularly important if you’re a small business or solopreneur. Our general web seminars which offer topics pertaining to eMarketing or webinar marketing might yield 50 registrants from a list of 3,000 executives. But, when we offer a highly targeted web seminar, for example eMarketing Campaign Results for Transportation Insurance Agencies, we often yield 50 registrants from a list of only 350 executives. This dramatic improvement is the result of changes to the outgoing invitation. You’re much more likely to interest executives with a vertically oriented message than a general message. For example, Webinar for Trucking Agencies will have much greater efficacy than Webinar for Insurance Agencies. As we verticalize messaging for our clients and provide educational topics, they have seen huge gains in webinar attendance. Recently, one of our clients had 291 registrants for their webinar. Prior to moving to this format, their typical registration was about 20. If you are embarking on an eMarketing and Webinar Marketing campaign, think vertical, and as always, go virtual.

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Good for GoToMeeting

I can host unlimited conference calls, unlimited web meetings and unlimited web seminars for less than $3 per day. Let’s look at what this means to any business:

• Unlimited conference call #s are generated at the touch of a button (phone or PC based access)
• Unlimited Web Seminars (show anything on your PC to as many as 1,000 other people – anywhere in the world)
• Custom landing pages for your web seminar registration and virtual waiting room
• Automatic registration for your web seminar, selecting required or optional registration fields (name, email, phone might be required, but city, state and zip code are optional)
• Detailed registration and attendance reports
• Record the presentation and audio for training, future presentation use or load onto your web site for viewing
• Real time collaboration (sharing) of information – work on the same document at the same time – from anywhere in the world
• Ability to view other people’s PCs (they can show you anything they like on their PC)

That’s a lot of computing power for three dollars a day – perhaps too much? GoToMeeting recently sent an email that they were going to increase prices for companies requiring larger 500 and 1,000 attendees meetings – BUT – they were not going to increase prices for existing customers. That’s a good, customer oriented attitude that shows their loyalty to customer and earns the same in return. Cloud computing solutions like this are relatively new, but great customer service has been around for a long time, virtual or not, for those who understand the importance of customer loyalty. Good for GoToMeeting/GoToWebinar/Citrix – seems like they get it.

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Micro Market Yes – Micro Manage No

In a Virtual Business Model, highly targeted, extremely specific, micro marketing is a great way to differentiate your company and message from the competitive throngs. For example, why market to high tech organizations, when you can market to software companies? Why market to software companies when you can target your marketing to smaller software companies between $5 Million and $25 Million in revenues. Why market to those companies when you can micro market to SaaS software companies (Software as a Service) for example? Now we have a very specific, highly targeted group and we can tailor a message specifically to them. We can even go the extra distance and create a buyer persona for the specific titles we are targeting: CEO, VP Business Development, VP Marketing, etc.
Conversely, in a virtual model we should focus on virtual employee or contractor goals, not their working schedule or process. A graphic artist for example should be paid on a completion date for a final deliverable. Set the goal and the date; don’t manage their time or methodology. Telesales people can be paid upon call production or appointment setting efficacy. Don’t tie them down to specific calling hours (other than it must be general business hours). Let them operate at their peak times and periods of peak efficiency. If you’re using web designers, create a simple process for your personal imprint, initial mockup, full scale mockup and approval. Create a series of milestones (and dates), and manage the results, not their time.
Leveraging the Virtual Model and simplifying your own management process should help optimize your time. After all, you should be virtually managing the results, not the personnel. The Virtual Model minimizes office politics, water cooler time, non productive marathon meetings, and the peripheral gripe sessions. Be more efficient – go virtual.  www.startupselling.com

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