Social Media for the Small Business

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Is social media worth the investment?  The answer is YES.  Social media has a strong impact on sales as well as brand perception.  Increase in sales has a positive correlation to the exposure of social media.  Not only does social media build loyalty among customers, but it also influences marketing operations.  Social media improves customer listening, engagement, and is a doorway to new market insights.  If done correctly it positively affects business value and customer relations.

Here are 4 advanced strategies for small businesses looking to make a big impact:

1. Use Multimedia – Consumers are becoming more and more visual.  They want to SEE what they are buying, and not just read about it.

2. Offline and Online Advertising Integration – Using offline advertising practices such as print or radio can increase your opportunities to extend sales pitches and invitations to be part of your business community.  Extend a warm welcome to your Facebook page or Website and they will be happy to join your community and buy your product or service in the near future.

3. Customize Messages – Businesses are starting to have multiple social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and so on. DON’T send the same message across on each platform, this duplicate copy is annoying.  A message on Facebook does not work the same on Twitter.  Be sure to use different styles for each to maximize potential.

4. Excite the Community – Once you have built a solid community, then be sure to utilize the community to drive more traffic and more buzz.  Contests and discounts are perfect for this.  Contests and offering exclusive discounts create competitions, this may cause an incredible increase in sharing causing the excitement to go viral.

~ Michael Whartnaby, Prospectr Marketing

“Upselling”: How To Treat Customers Like Prospects

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Studies have shown that it can cost up to 5 times more to win over a new customer than it does to serve existing ones.  With that being said, each customer should be treated like they are the best customer.  Not only is upselling practically effortless since the hard part of selling yourself, services, products, and solutions, along with establishing a rapport with the customer has already taken place, but it is also highly profitable.  Treating each customer like they are a top prospect naturally attracts the customer to want more of your product.  Therefore, DO NOT take a customer for granted.  Here are 4 upselling techniques that will make customers feel like the top prospect and want more of your product.

  • Understand Their Needs – LISTEN to your customer.  In order to understand and what a customer needs and wants, it is crucial to listen carefully so that you know how to satisfy THEIR needs.  Understanding your customers involves talking with them consistently and hearing their issues so that you can satisfy them.  Remember, a relationship goes two ways, and listening and accompanying the needs of the other will yield great results.
  • Offer Solutions, Don’t sell. – After carefully listening to your customers needs, do not think about using a sales pitch to satisfy them, but think about a solution that will make the customer feel like they are being treated with top care.  Offer a couple options and alternatives and how they can benefit the customer’s needs.  Educating your customers will help them see the true value of what they are being offered and they will know the advantages to each solution. Do this and it will make the customer feel well taken care of, and will result in them coming back for more solutions to their problems.
  • Privileges – Customers should be the first ones to hear about any new events, products, or services and so on.  They will feel very important knowing they are being thought of and treated like they are the top prospects.  Tools such as company  newsletters can be sent out to customers giving them privileged insight on the “cool and new stuff” (as customers would say) that is happening in the company.  Who doesn’t like privileges?
  • Don’t Overload – Be careful with how much information and communication you provide to your customers.  You do not want to push them away with too much information that they feel overwhelmed.  A relationship with a customer can be applied to a dating relationship.  You don’t want to be too forward and bothersome withthe one you are dating, especially too soon, because thiswould annoy them and cause them to them to not answer your calls.

Author: Michael Whartnaby, Prospectr Marketing

Content Marketing

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The golden key to developing new business is a myth. New business is developed by hard work and commitment to a marketing and sales process. This process is driven by the content. Great Content drives great campaigns: It provides value to your target audience and it engages them in an ongoing dialogue. What is content marketing: Content marketing is creating and distributing digital assets for the purpose of achieving business results. Successful content marketing is much more about “perspiration” than it is “inspiration.”  Most marketers can come up with an idea for a clever e-book, quirky video or trippy infographic, but few invest the energy in actually producing any of those things.  Creating content is marketing’s lunch pail discipline, and the best content marketers are those that work the hardest. After developing and creating great content that connects you to your target market, intrigues potential clients and leaves them asking for more then you need to start working on distribution channels.

Content Marketing Best Practices:

  • Context—Your work needs to be placed in the right venues for the right audiences. Organizations need to research their target customers and understand how and where they consume content. Often organizations will create personas based on their prospects’ demograpics. Each persona gets a name, age, role in organization, business needs, etc. You will need to ensure that all of the important constituencies in your organization buy into the personas, especially marketing and sales management. Once you have personas, you can start modeling their online behavior. Do they read blogs or trade journals? Do they trust analysts or their peers? Do they participate in social media? Which venues? By focusing on personas and modeling their online behaviors you can begin to narrow down the targeted venues and ensure that your content gets in front of the right eyes.
  • Timing—Potential customers want different kinds of content at different stages of their research and purchase process. Similarly, newly engaged clients need different content than those who are long familiar with your organization. Build a time-line for each of your personas and brainstorm what kinds of content they would need at each stage of their engagement with your company. What are the content items that will push them to the next level?
  • Cost—Content is expensive. It takes time and money to develop and manage. After you have modeled your personas and figured out what content they need at each stage of engagement with your organization, you need to set priorities based on your current business needs. If your organization is looking for brand new contacts to market to, maybe you should invest in “top of the funnel” venues like social media and a blog. If you need to focus on moving a small set of known prospects through the buying process, perhaps you will prioritize content that can be personalized to each prospect’s organization and business need. No matter what your current priorities, remember that you should have a some amount of budget to keep new and existing content up to date going forward.
  • Creative—Your original content has to bring something new to the table in some way. Try to make it engaging and useful. Work hard to make it so enjoyable that your audience will share it with friends and colleagues.

Having a defined content strategy ensures that your clients and prospects will get what they need to make informed buying decisions. Content marketing works hand-in-hand with lead generation because as your prospects engage with your content, you gain insight from your customer’s digital body language. With this knowledge you can communicate with them (via email on the web) in a way that is aligned with their interests and business needs.

Travis Piepho

www.prospectrmarketing.com

Reaching Your Target Audience

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What makes your voice louder than the thousands of others in your industry? What can you do to beat thousands of competitors and gain your prospects attention? How can you efficiently market to the right people who are ready to make decisions? It starts with creating great content, but quickly turns to a race as to who can generate the most interest from the right people. When you want to distribute content think like your targeted prospect and deliver information to them in their favorite social mediums. Get your content out there using all types of tools. My favorite are: Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Stumbleupon, and Google plus. These tools are invaluable for branding your business, but also in targeting, reaching and expanding your prospect base. For more information on Social Media check out the winners of the 2011 social media blog:

  1. Brian Solis: The grand master of social media, Brian is one of the web’s leading social media evangelists and his blog is required reading for businesses.
  2. TopRank: This popular blog, the brainchild of Lee Odden, provides exceptional social media advice and should be one of your daily destinations.
  3. Convince & Convert: Jay Baer’s Convince & Convert provides outstanding content for businesses seeking to embrace social media. This is the second year Jay has made our list.
  4. Six Pixels of Separation: Mitch Joel offers consistent and thought-provoking content delivered with personality.
  5. Social Media Explorer: This blog, from Jason Falls, provides excellent perspective on the current state of social media and should be a regular stop for serious social media marketers. This is the second year Jason has made our list.
  6. Brand Builder: For businesses looking to dive deep into social media discussion, check out Olivier Blanchard’s rich insights. This is the second year Olivier has made our list.
  7. Spin Sucks: Gini Dietrich’s blog takes a look at social media from a PR perspective. Check her site out!
  8. Danny Brown: Danny Brown’s blog examines the human side of social media with rich content and insights.
  9. The Anti-Social Media: For something completely unique, check out Jay Dolan’s satirical blog on the state of social media.

~Travis Piepho

The Complete Guide To Online Marketing

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The Fundamentals to Building a Strong Prospect Base

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Effectively identifying, reaching and qualifying your target market is extremely difficult. Efficiency is important in these steps: to identify your target market think about who needs and/or would receive value from your business offerings. Reaching your target market takes testing. Finding and applying a great analytic tool like Google Analytics will generate solid market research allowing you to track and understand what interests your prospect base. These analytics will give you the keys to generate more inquiries out of your campaigns. Research is invaluable in the continual growth of your business and will be valuable to you in years to come.

Research drives content and content drives the qualified leads through your pipelines.  Converting leads to customers requires a careful qualification process.. Did you know that you can qualify potential prospects and shorten your sales pipelines simply by creating different content? Creating content with actionable offerings that is valuable to your target customer will increase your conversion rates. This content drives everything from Search Engine Optimization (SEO FACT – When your website attracts more interest then you will receive and generate more traffic consistently into the future.)  to email campaigns. Without a clearly communicated, specific and valuable proposition to your customer then the sales pipeline will get plugged.

Delivering this content to the right people over and over again will generate sales. It is truly a numbers game. A sustainable business will generate a consistent flow of new sales leads: self qualified leads that have been pulled in and have asked for your information. We all know It is valuable to interact with prospects personally using direct mail, phone and email, but only when they have been sufficiently qualified, or it simply becomes a waste of time.

Appropriately managing your marketing pipeline – allows for efficiency in marketing best practices: response management, personal delivery and interactive messaging. An efficient system for prospect management is essential in effectively creating a more efficient and effective conversion rate, while also shortening your sales pipeline.

This is a fundamental post: I hope that you use it as a springboard in your marketing and sales endeavors. These points will help you to continually create qualified leads and deliver information to your market generating more traffic and interest in your business offerings. Now that is a sustainable ROI/Bottom Line Based marketing initiative!

~Travis Piepho

Personal Customer Service

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When we consider customer service we think of our companies lifeblood. How is customer service being reduced to such an impersonal experience? I respect insightful response programs that create knowledgeable and timely response to prospects, or customers that are most likely to buy. It is important that B2B companies remember that answering your customers requests with timely and relevant information drives continual business and creates a feeling of worth to them. Great response management services are helpful in staying on top of your customer’s requests. New upcoming service providers like Safe Harbor also can add significant value to B2B companies looking to automate some of their customer service with a professional response and a personal touch.

With the current automated internet service environment it is no wonder, “People are frustrated with automated systems. They’re also not fond of the new trend in voice response systems that are now becoming industry standard. Would you be surprised if I told you that they just want to talk to another human being?” (Brian Solis: “How To Make Customer Service Matter Again”).

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There is no denying the importance of Response Management, Customer Service, and/or Personal Automation

~Travis Piepho

Prospectrs’ Contact Information – If you desire personal automation please contact me. I will gladly send you more information.

Drive Growth Use Content Marketing

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The importance of content the is often put on the back burner when trying to drive business growth. This tool in your arsenal of marketing efforts should never be put behind other tools: Linkedin, new phone software, email providors, Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus etc.. You catch my drift. Every single one of these tools is driven by the content. Yes, we understand that the delivery and networking tools are important, but they don’t mean anything if you don’t have an actionable offering that will convert new business and cause increased growth on the bottom line.

We have suggest 7 tips to creating great content:

  1. Always start from scratch.
  2. Demand a ruthlessly simple definition of the business problem.
  3. Discover a proprietary emotion.
  4. Focus on the size of the idea, not on the size of the budget.
  5. Seek out strategic risk.
  6. Collaborate, or perish.
  7. Listen hard to your customers (then listen some more).

Content is defined by what you provide your target prospect, or client. It is all about the client. Realize that without proper research and knowledge of exactly what your target market needs then you will not be delivering something that drives conversions.

Put your ear to the ground and listen to the times. What can you solve? What can you do better than anyone else? Can you communicate a simple solution for your target markets business problems?

Essentials For Success as an Inside Sales Rep.

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I found these Tips to be helpful in managing my different accounts I hope you do as well:

Get rid of what you don’t need:  Prospecting lists can get messy. Sometimes a company will be imported with so many contacts it actually is a better use of your time to weed out the ones that are going to be of no use to you. Send a referral email (just in case that Director of Automotive Procurement happens to eat lunch with your target contact every day), mark them as “Not Appropriate Contact,” and move on.

Organize what you have:  Now that you’ve cleaned up your list, look and see what’s left. Clearing out the clutter can actually reveal potential opportunities you might’ve skipped over. Make sure to follow up with the prospects who told you to hold off until after the new year, and check in on contacts you haven’t spoken with in awhile to see if anything has changed in their company. And of course dive into any untouched contacts.

Replace what you need: If your ideal contacts work in IT, and you only have the Sales Director and a Marketing Executive on your list, go find some new contacts! See if there’s anyone you missed on sites like Jigsaw and NetProspex, check out LinkedIn to see if there’s anyone listed in the right department, and don’t forget about the company websites.

Focus on the result, not the product
Prospects need to understand how your product/service will solve their problems and be able to quantify the benefit. Companies are tightening up on buying authority. Before ever thinking about getting buy-in from senior management, your buyers need to believe that this is a priority and that the results will be significant.

Slow down & insert pauses
There’s nothing worse than trying to keep up with a motor-mouth – trying to digest what they said three sentences ago. Reps should provide an opportunity for the prospect to process information and ask questions. If prospects are given time to think, they will be more likely to open up and discuss issues.

Listen
Many reps are so eager to ‘close’ that they forget to listen to the prospect. We’ve all seen Reps framing the next question or comment while the prospect is still speaking. I love this line from Geoff Alexander, “As a rep, keeping to your own objectives is important, but in doing so, remember to stop when you hear a great clue, and address it right then.”

It’s easy to forget the fundamentals. These tips might be generic and many would consider them below their current level of expertise, but something new can always be learned by going back to the basics.

Business – What Really Matters.

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As an entrepreneur I appreciate statements like this: Start-ups what do we want? Answer: Trust.

Prospectr Marketing was founded by my dad and I. He is also my business partner. We founded this company for many of the same reasons that American’s dream of having their own business. We believed that we could do something better than the rest and that we have a unique offering. We have proven that unique offering and we are successful, have been for a few years now. Though, what really gave us this spark of inspiration was greater than just what we found in using our proprietary system, but because we believe that the freedom of starting a company really adds to community, to family and to our nation. We believe in greater principles and we are extremely ambitious because of our principles and ideals. These principles are largely founded in our core values of trust and integrity.

What small businesses want and need is trust. Without trust nothing runs, nothing succeeds and nobody is empowered. Trust drives growth. It  drives empowerment and it can change the landscape of our economy. I believe that steps can be taken to achieve trust from prospective clients and employees. I follow these steps:  frequency of message, sincere and thoughtful follow up etc… However, the real foundation for trust starts early on. It is the vision and mission the company uses as a foundation that drives follow through. This follow through is what really builds and can change industries.

So what do small businesses really want? They want to see others believe in them. How to do this? Find a reason greater than money that drives you. Use this reason to create a foundation of greatness that will always exceed your customers expectations. Follow through with your new business. If you cannot follow through then do not start it in the first place. Entrepreneurs want and need trust.