Advertising

Advertising / Online Marketing / Promotion / Social Media — No Comments
16
May 13

SEO or Google AdWords? Plus 8 Tips to Promote your Website Effectively

"At" Key on Computer KeyboardLet me first start by explaining that SEO (search engine optimisation) is the process of improving the ranking of your website in search engines via the ‘organic’ (unpaid) listings. The principle of SEO is to ensure your website ranks highly for keywords that people are likely to type into search engines when looking for a business like yours.

Optimising your website content and design helps to drive qualified traffic (what they are searching for you offer) to your web pages and ensures that people interested in your products and services can find your business online.

With Google AdWords (paid) listings, you are simply buying traffic to to your website, either through pay-per-click or other forms of advertising. But it’s expensive, and getting more so every day for the competitive keywords. It’s also complex and whole books have been written about how to manage the intricacies of Google AdWords. The bottom line is, before you even think about paying for AdWords, you need to ensure that your website is inviting to the people who are interested in your product or service.

Tip 1. The first place to start if you are just creating a website is to make sure that you have a keyword in your Domain Name – either the name of your Business or as a description.

Tip 2. Find a way to get a dot com (.com) domain and if your business name is not available, be creative rather than grabbing the dot net (.net) and then competing for ranking against a dot com with the same name.

Not sure what your keywords are?

Tip 3. A good place to start your keyword research is with the Google Keyword tool. Designed for AdWords advertisers to find keywords, you can also use it for your own research. Keyword research is the foundation of your website’s on page SEO.

Steps for finding keywords:

  • Brainstorm a list of possible combinations of words people might use to look for your type of business, product or service, including brand names, generic names, geographic location, service descriptions or area of expertise.
  • Go to the Google Keyword Tool and enter these, choosing Australia as the country and both Broad and Exact as the search results.
  • The Keyword Tool will give you lots of suggestions based on your seed keywords.

Tip 4. Once you have your keywords, what do you do with them on your website?

  • Think about your site content – use authentic and original content, use key search words in the text and make sure you have H1 headings and preferably H2 sub headings as well, all containing keywords.
  • Pay attention to keyword density, and keep it low. It can be irresistible to stuff your keywords in wherever possible but with semantic search (Google now tries to figure out the meaning of your site when it spiders it), keyword stuffing will do you more harm than good.
  • Internal links – when you write a related post or article on your site, link your keyword back to another article on your site. Building internal links helps Google find other areas of your site and reinforces you as an authority on the topic.

Tip 5. Create a strategy for your site design which includes creating a sitemap – a page that includes links to every area of your site. This helps the search engines find every area of your site.

Tip 6. Think about the customer who will use your website and what will be easiest for them to buy your products or services. Make a ‘call to action’ and relevant conversion for every page – don’t force your potential customers to make extra clicks.

Tip 7. Leverage your strengths – if writing is one of your strengths, then make sure you have a blog on your website. Remember blogs don’t just have to be just written words, showing your pictures or artwork can still tell a story on your blog. If you are a photographer or artist, make sure you have a Pinterest account linked to your pictures and ensure that all your social media platforms are updated for the audiences they serve.

Tip 8. Always check the ranking of your site as you continue on your journey.  You should rank No 1 for your business name and possibly, your name (especially if it’s unique).  But the important goal is to rank on the first page for key search terms in your business category, because that is where you will be competing for potential customers attention. If you want to rank well on your own name (because your name is the business), then make sure there are multiple platform link opportunities for people to see your name; like Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Youtube, Twitter and multiple online directories entries – it all helps.

Finally, after following all these tips, sign up and use Webmaster Tools to verify ownership of your website. This tells Google about your website.  Sign up for Google Analytics and include the code in your website, even when there’s no traffic, there are many opportunities for education by using these tools.

Google is such a wonderful resource, if you are thinking of building a website or you want to know how to rank well on Google – you only have to seek their advice and the best part – it’s free.

Love to know whether this is helpful or if you have other tips that are working for you?

About the author:  Teresa Bassham is the boss lady of Zenworkz Authentic Marketing and educates businesses to think, create, engage and optimise their marketing effort.  She coaches customers in strategies for traditional and online marketing; and implementation.  If you would like free how-to-do-it-yourself marketing resources or to subscribe to free e-news about all things marketing, please visit the website:

http://www.zenworkz.com/

For daily marketing tips and references, connect to our fabulous community on Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/Zenworkz.Authentic.Marketing

 

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Advertising / Marketing 101 / Marketing Law / Social Media — No Comments
15
Dec 12

Update: Australian Marketing Law for Small Business

Here’s a quick summary of changes in marketing law and what it will mean for your small business.

Advertising and Consumer Protect Laws

The Australian Federal Court and Advertising Standards Bureau have determined that businesses are responsible for third-party comments posted on Facebook and Twitter. In a nutshell this means anything that could be deemed discriminatory, derogatory or degrading to women, homosexuals, or ethnic minorities; including strong or obscene language or inappropriate references to sexual activity.

The Australian Consumer Law covers many aspects of business activity, but advertising is perhaps the area where small businesses can most easily stray onto the wrong side of the law. The principle is the obvious one that businesses should not mislead or deceive through advertising. When you have a business page through social media, under consumer protection laws you could be held liable for misleading or deceptive conduct by a third party.

What this means for you is that you must regularly monitor posts from third parties and remove anything which may contravene any of these laws or standards within 24 hours of posting.

The Spam Act and Privacy Legislation

Recently two Australian businesses were formally warned about not providing an opt-out for their email marketing. The Spam Act 2003 requires that if you engage in email marketing you must have consent to the message being sent. You must have your contact information in the message. You must have an unsubscribe action to allow the recipient to opt-out.  Failure to do so, may prompt warnings by the Australian Communications and Media Authority.

As a very brief summary, Privacy Legislation revolves around asking people for permission to collect and use their information, and obligations to disclose what information is being kept and for what purpose, and obligations relating to the correction of inaccurate or disputed information. What this means for you is you need to provide a statement on your website that explains your privacy policy to users.

Intellectual Property and Copyright

Many small businesses use no forms of intellectual property protection and often breech other rights through copying pictures without permission to do so, especially via social media platforms.

What this means for you:

  • You need to consider what confidential information is used in your business and add security to protect it.
  • Ensure that you have the right to use any material (such as copyright material) in your marketing, both offline and online.
  • Always register trademarks used in your business.
  • Ensure there is adequate document recording the right and restriction of use for your own Intellectual Property.

The bottom line is advice should always be sought whenever material that may be the subject of copyright is proposed to be used in the course of your business marketing.

Its always a good option to consider these laws before unknowingly contravening them, creating heartache and potentially expense for your small business.

For more information there a comprehensive list of Legal Topics for Small business on this website:

http://www.innovation.gov.au/SmallBusiness/LegalHelp/LegalTopics/Pages/default.aspx

About the author: Teresa Bassham is the principle of Zenworkz Authentic Marketing, and is passionate about educating small and medium business professionals to create their differential advantage, attract more ideal customers and create a marketing plan to achieve success.  She coaches customers online and by phone – if you would like to request coaching – please contact me.
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Advertising / Authentic Values / Branding / Engaging customers / Keep Calm & Keep Marketing / Selling / Trust — No Comments
14
Aug 12

Telling Stories and Ruling the World (apologies to Plato)

Good marketing promotion has always been about building a strong relationship with your audience through telling your story. And building relationships with an audience of potential customers, is about being relatable and matching values.

Why are values important in your marketing promotion? Values represent what you stand for or believe in; and your values form the foundation of your personal and business branding message.

Your personal branding message is what sells you, your services, and helps you develop relationships with potential customers. Your business brand is what makes your business recognisable and sets it apart from others.

People will ultimately buy from those they know, like, and trust. That’s why telling your own story is so important. While your story is not a sales pitch, it is and should be seen unashamedly as self promotion. You just can’t create something fabulous, you have to communicate that fabulousness to your potential customers. It will be the story of your passion, your ideas, your values and the medium that people (who you ultimately want to buy from you), will get to know you, like you and trust you.

When people land on your web or social media page, meet you or walk into your office; they should understand within seconds what you are all about. Your blog posts should communicate that personal story directly or indirectly. Every piece of promotional material, including your story, that you put out should be put out with your potential customer in mind.

Telling your story can help you and your potential customers by:

  1. Displaying a clear values message or value proposition, your ideal customer will know very quickly if they trust you and want to do business with you.
  2. Explaining passionately why you do what you do, which also helps potential customers understand you and trust you
  3. Sharing something about yourself, revealing the real person; will enable customers (and suppliers) to see what you’re like to work with and for
  4. Clearly identifying a profile of your ideal customer, will encourage them to contact you

The bottom line is “be who you are” and make that your difference. Your values form the foundation of your personal brand. Your personal brand is what sells you and your branding is what makes your business recognisable and sets it apart from others. In sending out a clear message, your ideal customer will know very quickly if they trust you and want to do business with you.

Never forget that businesses are ‘people’ too, and in revealing the real you, you offer a sense of trust and assurance that the business is real, ethical and has integrity. Given the exponential growth of online video and social media, communicating your own story will have a big advantage over those that don’t reveal anything about themselves.

I would love to know how you feel about revealing the real “you” – so, please leave a comment?

About the author: Teresa Bassham is the principle of Zenworkz Authentic Marketing, and is passionate about educating small and medium business professionals to research their customer market; create their authentic marketing message; attract more ideal customers; and create a marketing plan to achieve success in 2012/2013.  She runs local workshops in Northern NSW and coaches customers online and by phone – if you would like to attend the next scheduled workshops or request distance coaching online –please contact me.

Visit my website and subscribe for monthly e-News updates on all topics related marketing.

For daily Authentic Marketing updates visit and “like” my facebook page:

http://www.facebook.com/Zenworkz.Authentic.Marketing

 

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Advertising / Attracting Customers / Authentic Message Creation / Authentic Values / Coaching / Engaging customers / Integrated Marketing Strategy / Keep Calm & Keep Marketing / Marketing 101 / Selling — No Comments
17
Jul 12

Keep Calm and Keep Marketing Part 2 – Focus on Marketing Tactics

Recently I responded to a request to help small businesses that were feeling despondent because of falling sales and general feelings of frustration with marketing a small business in difficult, trading times.  In this series of posts, Part 2 will focus on marketing tactics you can do to survive and thrive.

Firstly don’t be tempted to stop marketing! This is not the time to cut back on marketing activity.  The key to building customer awareness is to take consistent, regular action. Be sure to keep your marketing activities going at least six months so that you can track your rate of return.

Promoting your products or service, little and often is better than one large, expensive campaign. The more you crop up in potential customer’s awareness, the more they feel that something is drawing them to you. I can’t tell you how many times I have heard this from my customers – it was meant to be! Little did they know it is my marketing tactic.

Identify your best product or service by it’s revenue margin; then focus your promotional and selling efforts on this only. Add as many low cost promotional options as you have time for, like Twitter and Facebook Pages to broadcast valuable information about how to solve customers problems or bring them joy.  Update your LinkedIn profile regularly with updates about your business and any valuable content such as blog posts.

Work out how you are unique to your best customer and focus on doing this better. Define what your unique marketing difference is and promote that consistently. Being different and finding that difference is easier in a service based business because YOU are unique. Finding the difference in a product market, means adding or augmenting your products with value added services, like lay-by’s, special deliveries, or exceptional customer service – there are a thousand different options. The secret is understanding what you need to do to make your service or product a vital part of someone’s life to the extent that they just won’t be tempted by your direct competitor’s offers.

What makes your marketing message unique is your story, your purpose, and your values.  What makes your message compelling is that it is customer focused – it speaks to the customers hot button that your service or product fulfils as a necessary part of their life or business.  It must tap into the emotional metaphors: looking good, feeling good, being successful, rewarding themselves – refer to Maslow’s Hierarchy of highest needs.

Finally, recognise that you can’t always do this alone and if you are, not with peace or joy. To be able to hire support, you need to focus on sales and cash flow. You may need support from someone who can guide you? A coach or mentor can look at your business and your progress with an honest and objective eye; and guide you away from costly mistakes and focus on a direction that may well challenge you; but will also bring you the business success you desire.

 I’d love to hear your thoughts? Please leave a comment below:

About the Author: Teresa Bassham of Zenworkz Authentic Marketing inspires small businesses to develop and use an empowering Marketing and Communications Plan for Business Profitability … see my full services at www.zenworkz.com and while you are visiting my website – subscribe for weekly e-News updates on all topics related to authentic marketing.

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Advertising / Attracting Customers / Engaging customers / Integrated Marketing Strategy / Marketing Analysis Tools / Social Media / Uncategorized — No Comments
12
Jun 12

Shaping Social Media Strategy with Tradition Marketing Models – AIDA

The acronym AIDA stands for Awareness, Interest, Desire and Action. This is the most simple and rudimentary of marketing models and is still relevant today when it comes to social media and internet marketing strategies.

Each level of AIDA can help you set your marketing and sales objectives, decide what to measure, and create relationships between each level of the model. Understanding the flow of activities through each level will help you align your measurements and analytics with your marketing and sales objectives.

Here’s some tips on how to apply this model to your social media and internet strategy, and how the model and measurements are evolving in the social media age.

Awareness: Awareness is social media’s greatest benefit. Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, and other networks are built for generating awareness. These networks are not going to be your point of sale. Instead, they are your communications portal, and lead potential customers back to your sales landing page, blog, and website, where you will be making your sales conversions. The goal of generating awareness, is letting people know about your business products or services; and that you can solve a problem or satisfy a need they may have.  At the awareness level, comments, conversations, interaction and valuable content to share, are key measures.

Interest: Now that you have their attention, you need to get customers interested in your product or service. You can improve interest with special offers; compelling reasons why you can satisfy their needs better than the competition; or how you can solve customers’ problems. Benefits (and not features) weigh greater at this level, and social media can help you amplify customer interest. Following a strategy of linking social media posts to targeted landing pages will provide you with metrics, such as CTR (click through rate), retweets (of content, promotions and links), and comment about your specific products or services, that you will help you refine your promotions.

Desire: Social media can help improve desire through engagement, but to facilitate someone’s desire to buy, you need to have a website that makes purchase easy. Potential new customers will give up if your process has too many steps, despite a great offer. The user interface must be built with the customer in mind. Your website makes a huge impression, people will judge your business by it, so take the time to go through your site – improve the presentation and the shopping cart experience. Take the customer from interest to desire with a clean, easy to navigate, information rich, and functional site. Metrics that matter at this level are bounce rate, time on site, pages viewed and incoming links.

Action: Now that your customers are ready to buy your product or service, you need to complete the transaction.  While it is possible to purchase from Facebook, if you have several products or services, having a website will be your best option; and while social media can influence the action through the previous levels, it’s not going to have the same influence as your own website. You need to make it easy and obvious for your customer to complete your desired action (purchase, sign up, lead form, etc.).  The action is also where you can calculate some of your final metrics, like sales conversion rate and return on investment. This is where you can see how your strategies are performing and the final impacts of your social media promotions.

AIDA’s Flaws: AIDA is only a rudimentary representation of a marketing and sales process and it’s not a perfect model. Keep AIDA in mind as you shape your social marketing strategy. It will help you focus and prioritise your marketing and sales objectives for success.

I would love to know if AIDA works for you? Please leave a comment below.

About the Author: Teresa Bassham of Zenworkz Authentic Marketing inspires small businesses to develop and use an empowering Marketing and Communications Plan for Business Profitability … see my full services at www.zenworkz.com

While you are visiting my website – subscribe for weekly e-News updates on all topics related to authentic marketing.

For daily Authentic Marketing updates visit and “like” my facebook page:

http://www.facebook.com/Zenworkz.Authentic.Marketing

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Advertising / Attracting Customers / Authentic Values / Relationship Marketing / Social Media — No Comments
25
Mar 12

How to Promote through an Authentic Story

As a marketing services provider, I know the benefits of promoting myself and my business, but that doesn’t make it any easier to step out of my comfort zone and actually do it. Culturally in Australia, we do tend to be a teeny bit critical about those who enthusiastically share their awesomeness; but we can learn to authentically self promote through telling a story about what we do, and why we do it and gain the benefits of self promotion.

The most compelling reason to try is that customers are going to be more motivated to buy from people they know, like, and trust. Building trust can begin with sharing the story of your business and the people behind it. The imminent change to Facebook Timeline will provide businesses with an improved platform for authentic story telling.

Telling your authentic story can help both you and your prospective customers by:

  • Demonstrating your values, so you naturally attract customers who relate to you,
  • Explaining why you do what you do, which helps prospective customers understand you and trust you,
  • Sharing your unique persona, enabling customers to understand what you’ll be like to work or deal with,
  • Clearly identifying your ideal customer, encouraging those that don’t fit to look elsewhere and those that do, to make contact.

As business owners, we owe it to ourselves to become better at communicating our story. We are all passionate about our business. We express love for our new project or idea or product.  An authentic story simply links this passion with our unique persona to what we love doing, and a genuine joy becomes evident when we share our story.

Promoting yourself and sharing your story won’t always feel comfortable but to develop and grow, you won’t ever be comfortable. With a bit of practise, you’ll find your story telling skills starting to improve. Given the rapid changes happening with online video and social media, great story tellers will have a seriously big advantage over those that hide behind their computer screens.

If you are shy but have learned how to promote yourself with your story, please share your experiences below. Feel free to give yourself a bit of gratuitous self-promotion at the same time!

About the author:  Teresa Bassham is the owner of Zenworkz Authentic Marketing and educates businesses to think, create, engage and optimise their marketing effort.  She coaches customers in Social Media Strategy and implementation.  If you would like some assistance changing to Timeline for Facebook Pages, please contact her through her website: http://www.zenworkz.com/

Zenworkz Authentic Marketing publishes a weekly blog on small business marketing: http://www.zenworkz.com/blog/

For daily marketing tips and references, connect on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Zenworkz.Authentic.Marketing

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Advertising / Attracting Customers / Authentic Marketing / Branding / Marketing 101 — No Comments
5
Feb 12

What you get for $3.5 million – 30 seconds and a huge audience

This weekend over 130 million Americans will tune in to their football grand final – The Super Bowl.  The New York Giants play the New England Patriots in a grand final contest where advertisers use the large television audience opportunity to creatively engage and influence both existing and potential customers.

I’ve attached links to two of these clever and entertaining commercials below and I hope you enjoy them.

It costs $3.5 million to air a 30 second commercial plus production costs. Supporting each commercial are both the sponsor and advertising agency marketing teams to make sure there is a sales return on this investment. Although the scale of spending is incomprehensible to businesses like yours and mine, these sponsors have the same promotional objectives, to maintain and attract customers to their services and products.

The steps to maintaining and attracting customers are the same:

  • Having and working to an Authentic Marketing Plan
  • Authentic Marketing and Branding messages
  • Customer Insight – knowing who and where your ideal customers connect to media
  • Knowing what your customers appreciate about you, your services and products
  • Authentically and creatively engaging with your customers across all media
  • Well planned and executed customer attraction and retention actions
  • Measuring success and effort

Enjoy the commercials …

Volkswagen – 2012 Game Day commercial

Doritos – This commercial is also showing how integrated mobile phone technology has become in product promotion and purchase.

I’d love to hear your thoughts? Please feel free to leave a comment or question below.

About the author: Teresa Bassham is the principle of Zenworkz Authentic Marketing, and is passionate about educating small and medium business professionals to create their authentic marketing message, attract more ideal customers and create a marketing plan to achieve success in 2012.  She runs local workshops in Northern NSW and coach customers online and by phone – if you would like to attend the next scheduled workshops on 20th & 21st Feburary, 2012 or request distance coaching online –please contact me.  And while your visiting my website – for weekly updates on all topics related marketing – subscribe to my newsletter.

For daily Authentic Marketing updates visit and “like” my facebook page:http://www.facebook.com/Zenworkz.Authentic.Marketing

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