Small Business Tips

In addition to marketing ideas, these small business tips can help with everything from day-to-day operations to managing the burden of leadership.

For a wider variety of tips and ideas for your small business, be sure to visit the Gamma Notes Small Business and Startup Marketing Blog.

5 Tips for Local Search Results

July 19, 2016 By Matthew White Leave a Comment

If you have a business that relies on walk-in customers, you can’t ignore local search marketing. With more choices being made based on research done not only on the Internet but specifically on mobile devices, it is now a fact of life for you.

While traveling recently, I was reminded just how poorly many businesses manage this aspect of their marketing and advertising. It’s even more critical if you own or run a business that depends on seasonal vacation traffic. And if my vacation travel is any indicator, there’s a good chance that you can do more with your local search marketing efforts.

Local Search, Here and There

Taxi engaged in a local search — Taxi and Uber drivers may or may not be a part of your marketing, but your local search marketing likely requires some attention.

Gone are the days when vacations were planned exclusively around the kitchen table with a stack of maps and travel brochures. Now, so many vacation choices are made on the fly with web and mobile local searches. What’s the best brunch place nearby? What are the top attractions for a rainy afternoon? What’s a kid-friendly spot for dinner and entertainment?

In fact, more and more, most family decisions are made in this same manner – from doctors to birthday party venues. And while many businesses get that they need a web site or social media presence, they don’t understand some of the fundamentals of local search marketing – how to end up in local search results or even get some local search results in terms of store traffic.

Getting Some Local Search Results

While we can’t map out a one-size-fits-all local search marketing strategy here, we can provide some tips that will help ensure that you’re going in the right direction. Most of these tips apply to anyone – whether you’re a local attraction, boutique, doctor’s office, or a brunch spot:

Google My Business
Make sure you have a Google My Business (formerly Google Places) account that is accurate and up-to-date. This is the first and most basic step. You’d be surprised how information gets populated in these local entries that is inaccurate and affects your walk-in traffic.
Link It Up
Link to your Google My Business information from your web site. You can leverage the free resources that Google My Business provides – like mapping and navigation capability. This directly affects how easily your customers discover and (if they) show up at your location. Plus, you don’t have to seek out web design services to build this from scratch.
Reward
Offer rewards or incentives for positive reviews and check-ins on social media and Google.
Manage Your Reputation
Actively monitor reviews on social media and Google and respond to them in a timely manner. Customers are willing to give you the benefit of the doubt if you address criticism diplomatically and directly.
Use Those Good Reviews
Call attention to those good reviews by sharing, retweeting, quoting, and thanking on social media. This also relieves some of your burden in generating fresh content.

Now, off for a bite to eat. Know a good place?

Know Your Audience . . . Then, Act Accordingly

February 1, 2016 By Matthew White 1 Comment

Some of the insights in the recent Gamma Notes post on using customer profiles and knowing your audience might seem obvious. But, you’d be surprised how often things like internal protocol or our own personal preferences impact decisions.

In fact, a little (big) something called confirmation bias can impact something as simple as your decision to continue reading this post . . .

Confirmation Bias

Confirmation bias is neatly defined by Science Daily as “a tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms one’s preconceptions.”

According to authors Chip and Dan Heath in their book Decisive, confirmation bias is a major roadblock to good decision making because “it can look very scientific. After all, we’re collecting data.”

Right?

They go on:

When we want something to be true, we will spotlight the things that support it, and then, when we draw conclusions from those spotlighted scenes, we’ll congratulate ourselves on a reasoned decision.

Haven’t we all done that? And, if you say no, you’re probably guilty of confirmation bias.

Know Your Audience And Thyself

Know your audience and market accordingly. What's outside the spotlight? — What’s outside the spotlight that you’re not seeing? Know your audience, then act accordingly.

In order to determine which decisions are based on good information versus bias, we have to do some testing. (And of course, not let confirmation bias color how we read the results.)

Returning to an example in the previous post on customer profiles: My friend believed that incoming phone calls held no promise for lead generation.

There are in fact a number of possible variables that could be skewing this perspective, and these variables act as great tips for analyzing almost any similar situation:

Positioning – Perhaps the phone number isn’t presented in such a way that actually encourages use – how would a vanity number change the results? Does toll-free matter? Maybe a simple local number is more appealing to the audience.
Messaging – Is the overall message and brand something people feel they can engage by phone? Or, is the thought intimidating for some reason?
Call to Action – How is the number presented? What’s the expectation that callers have? A wait? A human being? An automated system? Lots of questions?
Bias – She may not like using the phone. (I know, it’s not my first pick either.) Or, perhaps a previous experience involving one of the above has biased her outlook on the phone as a lead generator altogether.

As you can see, there is a great deal to consider and all of the above can be narrowed down with even basic testing and analysis.

For example, a more specific call to action such as “call for a free (blank)” might be all that’s needed to get at least some result. A phone number with no call to action may generate exactly that . . . no action.

So before reinventing the wheel or worse, taking on that rebranding strategy, it can pay to take a step back and look at the situation objectively.

The Numbers Don’t Lie

A business professor and friend once told me, “The numbers don’t lie.” And rarely will your customer profile.

We, on the other hand, lie to ourselves all the time.

How might you be deceiving yourself in the way your business messages, markets, and sells? Please share your thoughts and questions below.

Marketing Has Changed And So Should Your Marketing Department

January 5, 2016 By Matthew White 5 Comments

Nowadays, just about any marketing or communications department looks something like the chart pictured here.

Marketing department structure example — An example of typical marketing department structure. Though marketing has changed, many organizations have not changed their approach to it.

Some of the titles may get swapped around or the term marketing gets swapped out for communications if you’re a nonprofit, but the marketing department structure itself is pretty much the same.

The boxes at the bottom can be a whole lot of things depending on your model and organization’s mission. Maybe they represent social media, blogging, and print advertising, for example.

Or, each box might even represent a single social media vehicle like Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook. More and more, managing a single one of these channels is a full-time job (or should be) for many organizations. The job requirement depends on your mission and outreach strategies.

But, get ready for the big takeaway from this blog post. Many already know this, but a surprisingly large number of organizations don’t:

Every one of those boxes can be contracted out. And, the farther you get way from the top box, you probably should contract out those roles. In fact, you can – and possibly should – contract out the whole department.

Think about that for a moment. There are a number of reasons that management will immediately claim to challenge this. I’ve heard them. I’ve lived them. Still don’t believe? Please, read on.

Marketing Was Once More Passive

Twenty years ago, marketing was – by the very nature of the mediums available – much more passive. You had advertising and print campaigns, which you could have an ad agency manage of course. But, results and metrics were fuzzy. They took a while to receive and digest.

Maybe you were putting together a direct mailer. Same thing. A phone campaign would be more engaging, but again, results and feedback are slow. You might put a trade show booth together, and while this too would be less one-way, it made sense to manage much of the preparation and staffing in-house.

Regardless, all of these are mostly static tactics that are managed well and executed upon within the kind of hierarchy we see in our chart here.

More importantly, “best practices” weren’t changing much in the foreseeable future.

Marketing Is Now Much More Dynamic

Marketing department structure pictured with question mark — Marketing has become far more dynamic than ever before. In fact, it’s difficult to keep up with the trends and tools without specializing.

The speed with which a message can be constructed, distributed, evaluated, tested, improved upon (and repeat) is much faster now: Hours in many cases and even minutes in some.

In short, for communications and marketing departments, the landscape, mediums, and tools have changed dramatically – even over the last five years. But, organizational structure and procedures have not.

And, if you’re a small business or nonprofit, all the added “convenience” of smartphones and social media have only resulted in more items on your to-do list . . . or even worse, your wish list.

For many, “in-house” is no longer getting results. And, the returns will in most cases diminish over time.

The Biggest Problem With “In-House” Is Stagnation

Organizations by their very nature aren’t often great at innovation and evolution. They are good at deliberation and staff retention. And, the bigger they are, the better they get at these things. This inevitably leads to stagnation. I have watched this happen firsthand. You can see this for yourself in many of the dinosaur companies that still walk among us.

Experience in widget making or widget maintenance is good. Broad, seasoned personal networks built over time are good. But, the search for new ways to capture new eyes, ears, hearts, and minds requires something different. It requires new insights and a view from the outside.

With such dynamic landscapes in mobile marketing, search marketing (that includes SEO), content marketing, and social media marketing, innovation and evolution are exactly what is required.

The agile and the flexible will not only keep up, they will grow and dominate.

Knowing Your Audience: Do You Have A Customer Profile?

December 10, 2015 By Matthew White 3 Comments

“No phone calls?” I asked, surprised.

“Maybe two a day,” my friend responded.

“But you’ve got trucks all over town, driving around with the phone number plastered on them.”

“People don’t want to talk with a human being – they want to type everything.” She added, jokingly, “Don’t you know that?”

Yes, that’s a phone. And, this phone could still be one of your best sales tools. Or not. How do you find out?

I agreed half-heartedly. I certainly would rather type than talk for most tasks and problem solving – ordering a book, researching a new car, arranging grocery delivery, solving a tech support issue . . .

But, what surprised me most is that her business is a more traditional residential and commercial services business. And, it’s a successful one still growing at a healthy rate.

There are some assumptions I’d like to see tested (more about that later), but I was surprised that either:

a) The phone plays such a small role in lead generation, or

b) The online component is responsible for so much more.

Different Strokes, Different Folks

There are of course statistics to support the idea that people are emailing more than they are talking on their smartphones. No surprise there perhaps. However, it stands to reason that certain markets and market sectors would be more phone-friendly than email-friendly (and vice versa).

Without a doubt, different businesses and niches have their unique requirements. The nature of the business, the market’s demographics, and other factors all play a role. These unique requirements – and nuances let’s call them – impact the messaging, marketing tactics, and strategies that end up being successfully employed. Very simply put, this is called knowing your audience.

Knowing Your Audience

Without building a customer profile, you’ve got an empty picture frame.

If you’ve fielded sales calls, responded to questions, or spent any time in customer service, you’ve developed a sketch of who your customer is. And, subconsciously you can make a lot of decisions based on your picture of who that person is: They do or do not like a follow up email, for example. Or, they tend to respond to certain phrases and avoid others. Their eyes light up when you ask certain questions.

This is a customer profile. And, we’ve all developed them – some with more research and analysis, some with more nitty-gritty hands-on experience.

Why The Customer Profile Is So Valuable

The problem is that many businesses do not make as many decisions as they should based on this profile. Individually, they may know the profile. As an entity, it’s often the policy, bureaucracy, and warring agendas that cloud the business’ decision making.

However, lots of answers to common problems can be discovered simply by bouncing it off of your customer profile. Here are just a few of the things a customer profile can help you determine:

What kind of blog articles, social media posts, and social media channels deliver information they actually care about.
How they want to pay, when they want to pay, and how much they want to pay.
Methods for follow up – such as email or phone – and the timing of that follow up.
Is a referral program a good idea? If so, how should it be structured?
How big an issue is reputation management and what channels should we be monitoring?

Building A Customer Profile

There are a number of ways to go about building a customer profile, and as you can gather from the above, you probably already have a start. An outside perspective is very helpful however because you can avoid some of the biases that confuse the process. In addition, there is a great deal of analysis and some metrics that should play a role.

We can help. Share your thoughts below or reach out for marketing and sales help for your business.

In our next article, we’ll continue the topic with more thoughts on knowing your audience and some related pitfalls.

Leadership and The Necessity of Inaction

September 22, 2015 By Matthew White Leave a Comment

Don’t play what’s there, play what’s not there.
– Miles Davis

While finishing and reflecting upon a recent post exploring leadership and the necessity of action, I was reminded how often the converse is true: There is also the necessity of inaction.

Plenty of thought leaders and big thinkers have written of the power of the subconscious including Tim Ferriss, Malcolm Gladwell, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, and others. The fact is we are working on solving problems constantly – we’re just not always aware of it.

For entrepreneurs and good business people, their passions are part of who they are. Sitting down to debate and discuss an issue or strategy is productive (as long as that time allowed for it is limited). However, most often, the real problem solving occurs outside the meeting and maybe even while you’re asleep.

Very early in Robert Grudin’s Time and The Art of Living, comes this passage:

Fast drivers can see no further than slow drivers, but they must look further down the road to time their reactions safely. Similarly, people with great projects afoot habitually look further and more clearly into the future than people who are mired in day-to-day concerns. These former control the future because by necessity they must project themselves into it; and the upshot is that, like ambitions settlers, they stake out larger plots and homesteads of time than the rest of us. They do not easily grow sad or old; they are seldom intimidated by the alarms and confusions of the present because they have something greater of their own, some sense of their large and coherent motion in time, to compare the present with.

More often than not, the fire drills of the day can wait. Or better yet, they have a way of taking care of themselves without you. We are becoming conditioned increasingly to act, rate, respond, and generally do, when that doing may or may not play a part in the something “greater.”

Knowing When to Act, Knowing When Not to Act

If you’ve started a new marketing initiative, for example, you have to wait until you get a good and reliable data set to know your next steps. If you’re tracking a prospect that looks promising, you have to know when you’ve done everything you can for that prospect, then wait – patiently and respectfully.

Acting for the sake of acting, doing for the sake of doing, and mistaking busyness for business lead to nothing productive. And, those paths are usually counterproductive.

After all, deciding upon inaction is a conscious decision to not take action – a form of action in and of itself.