Since the 21st Century began we have seen an enormous acceleration in the use of the web by consumers and the tools available to business owners to promote their businesses online. If I was to write an article covering all the things that website owners need to do to have the “perfect” website, it would quickly turn into hundreds of pages. So rather than focusing on the micro detail, I want to give a more macro overview of what I believe are the 5 key things that you need to work on to maximise your web presence.

1. Put Your Website At The Centre Of Your Business
   More prospects and customers will view your website than any other promotional material you create and in many cases it will be the first and only element they see. Give it the respect it deserves and dedicate some time to managing it and promoting it at least monthly.
   
   
2. Update Your Website – Preferably Weekly
   Visitors like seeing plentiful and useful content, but more importantly Google loves it! This in turn improves the visibility of your site online and therefore brings more visitors and ultimately more business. Create special offers, write an article, update the news, add some testimonials, add a case study, update your portfolio and add content to your Facebook/Twitter/Blog – the choice is yours.
   
   
3. Focus On Creating High Quality Content
   Poor content is unacceptable to many people and if your spelling mistake is in a keyword, then Google will not reference it properly and you’ll also lose visits. Be sure to check spelling, punctuation and grammar and ALWAYS use original content.
   
   
4. Get A Mobile Website
   Good marketing is about making your customers’ experience as pleasurable as possible and without a mobile website visitors will have to overcome numerous issues when trying to browse your website and that’s just plain frustrating. So with the phenomenal growth in Smartphone and tablet usage it just makes plain sense to provide them with a mobile website to view.
   
   
5. Do What You Can – Outsource What You Can’t
   Most business owners suffer from a lack of time and funds. However, before you sacrifice your precious time to save some money think carefully about whether you would be better off outsourcing. You could create that Adwords campaign yourself, but do you truly understand what you are doing? If not you could waste more than you’ll ever save. Instead you could use your precious time to create more content.

Click the link to read the full On-line Marketing Article

In the old days you had to spend money on marketing your business in order to have people find you. Therefore, by definition, your success was almost directly tied to brand recognition. Think about the Yellow Pages (Golden Pages in Ireland). In its heyday you open it up to find a specific company and you would be hit by full-page ads. You would flick through page after page of full page ads and then the half-page ads would appear, followed by the quarter-page and then the line listings. The bigger ads would typically get the most calls, but they would also be the most expensive. It wasn’t unheard of for companies to hand over €20,000 or more for one ad!

Then Google came along and something interesting began to happen. Slowly at first and then with increasing frequency Google’s search rank began to replace the need for us to buy from recognised companies. In other words, Google’s search rank became a de facto brand identity for unknown brands.

You might disagree with me and in some instances you’d be right to. However, the fact remains that these days most start-up businesses will spend more on SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) than they do on brand marketing. Obviously the ideal is to have a well recognised brand backed by a first place, or at least first page, rank in search results. When you look at the Google search results, the listings are all the same. You might be on the same page as a major brand and visually you are both on a par. The Yellow pages approach of “bigger is better” is meaningless in Google’s listings. So, the question is ‘can having a good search ranking can be more valuable in this “search-engine” age than brand?’

Click on the link to read the complete marketing article.  

I was just listening to the radio and came across a business discussion in which a branding expert was talking about marketing. I know the guy and he is a very knowledgeable and eloquent speaker. He was talking about how important perfection is in marketing. The importance of focusing on fonts and not using lots of them or choosing and sticking to a specific colour or colours for your branding, etc. Everything he said was correct but as he spoke, something struck me like never before.

Marketing is like a million-piece jigsaw and most people think that to be successful in business you need to finish the whole jigsaw.

The fact is that “finishing the jigsaw” is only possible for large corporate companies with hundreds of staff and huge budgets and even then they rarely get beyond the 900 thousandth piece! The reality for the rest of us is that we have to make do with completing a fraction of the jigsaw. So how can SMEs be successful without completing the jigsaw? Quite easily actually - stop worrying about the whole picture!

Just like a jigsaw, marketing is about the pieces. But each form of marketing is not a single piece, but a cluster of pieces that make up a small part of the picture. Therefore, don’t worry about the million pieces and simply focus on the 50 pieces that make up one recognisable part of the whole picture…

This is just a small portion of the Marketing Article on our main website.

Innovation is amazing! Just when you thought allowing people to find your business and contact you couldn’t get any easier, along comes a new innovation that makes it easier again.

Take QR Codes for example. They were invented in 1994 by a Japanese company(Denso-Wave) and like so many technologies now used for marketing businesses, QR Codes were originally used for tracking car parts through the manufacturing process. There’s a good reason for their initial use and it’s in the name – “Quick Response Codes”. They were designed to allow equipment to read them faster than traditional bar codes; a very important requirement in a manufacturing environment where time is money.

Fast forward about 15 years and some bright spark realised that these clever little codes could be used for marketing purposes because now literally everyone can have a QR code reader in their hands. No, I don’t mean that we would all walk around with those supermarket checkout readers in our pockets. QR Codes don’t need lasers to read them, just a simple camera – just like the cameras now built into virtually every mobile phone.

So the hardware problem was solved but you still needed QR code reading software and that problem was solved with the introduction of the IPhone and other smart phones. If you have one of these devices you can now download a free QR code reader app and once installed, you are free to scan every QR code you see!

Are you still with me? Because this entire preamble was important in setting the scene…

Read The Full QR Code Article Here

I think every business owner would agree that it is far more pleasurable picking up the phone to someone who wants to do business with you than it is to make a phone call to try and convince someone to do business with you. It sounds like Nirvana to have customers ring you and say the magic words “can you help me with…” or “can you provide me with…”, etc. But actually it’s not impossible, it just takes thought, time, effort and in some cases a little money (but not as much as traditional marketing).

We all know what Pursuit Marketing is even if we’ve never heard of it before. You sell widgets, so you decide to run an ad to promote them. Being a smart business owner, you create a great design and include a compelling message plus an attractive offer. But here’s the problem; The vast majority of people who see the ad are not interested in buying widgets that day and the reader of the ad who is interested doesn’t know you and so doesn’t trust you. So even if he/she calls about the ad, you still have to “sell” to them! In short, pursuit marketing is every form of marketing and selling that pushes your services/products without giving knowledge or trying to build rapport and trust.

So in simple terms, attraction marketing is the exact opposite. Forget about directly promoting your products/services, forget about selling and simply focus on building trust and getting your customers to know and like you. The web is the easiest platform for attraction marketing, with the likes of Facebook, Twitter, Blogging and E-Zines, you have plenty of opportunities to “connect” with your customer-base. But attraction marketing can easily apply to our everyday, offline world too.

Read the rest of the article and find out why you should implement Attraction Marketing and how.

If you have recently started your own business or you are thinking of doing so, then this is for you. There are 5 things that a new-business owner needs to think carefully about before opening their doors to customers:

1. Learn The Ropes
   You know about your business, but do you know about the fundamentals of running a business? In particular, do you know the basics of marketing a business? Make it your job to find out and you’ll make the right decisions.
   
    
2. Think About The Intangibles
   You might have heard the saying “people buy from people” and it really is true. YOU are your best marketing conversion tool, yet so many people ignore that and go straight for the logos, websites and leaflets without ever building the foundations of their business. That is, they concentrate on the tangibles because the intangibles are difficult to work out.
    
   How you are going to do business? How you will interact with clients? Are you a jovial down-to-earth person or are you very formal and “business-like”? The intangibles are what convert enquiries into sales, so figure it out.
   
    
3. Marketing Budget
   New businesses forget to think about a marketing budget. Sounds like a crazy oversight seeing as they budget for everything else, like furniture and equipment, etc. But when it comes to their marketing they don’t budget and so they under-spend or over-spend, both of which is bad for business.
   
    
4. Marketing Plan
   Everyone will tell you to write a business plan and doing so has a great deal of merit, but what is absolutely vital (and will form a part of your business plan) is a marketing plan. This doesn’t have to be a 200 page epic, but could be a one-page plan, but it should contain a number of key elements. There is a separate article on how to create a marketing plan on my website.
   
    
5. Consistency
   When things don’t go to plan the simplest thing to do is to stop everything and run for cover. DON’T do this. Stick to your plan. Adjust what needs adjusting, but make sure you keep moving forwards.

Click the link to read the full New Business Marketing article.

There are literally hundreds of ways to market and promote a business these days. Print marketing, online marketing, viral marketing, guerrilla marketing, blog marketing…and the list goes on. For every marketing discipline there are about a million ways you can get it wrong. So in reducing this long list down to seven I looked at the things that cut across as many marketing disciplines and cause the biggest issues when you get the wrong.

So here goes (and feel free to comment or add your own major marketing sins to the list)

1) Treating Marketing Spend As A Cost
Marketing is an investment like any other investment. Treat it like a cost and you won’t plan properly or be consistent and you’ll always be looking for ways to ‘save’ money. You’ll let the newspaper ‘design’ your ads, you’ll choose your website designer based on price alone rather than what your business needs, etc.

2) No Marketing Budget
Not having a marketing budget is a sure-fire way to waste money. You’ll spend money on unplanned activities that may or may not provide a return and you may even spend more than you ever thought you would. A budget creates a framework to work in and gives you a yard stick to track your success or otherwise.

3) No Specific Target Audience
We all want to do business with everyone and it’s a great goal, but that can’t be achieved unless you have truly enormous budgets. For anyone whose business name doesn’t start with “A” and end in “PPLE” you need to pick a target customer and go after them. This allows you to properly target your message and the type of media etc.

4) No Understanding Of Your Customer Needs
Every customer has a need - you just need to find out what that is. Not knowing and assuming is a sure-fire way to waste money. If you’re a corporate then you’ll run research programs and focus groups. If you’re a small business owner, talk to your customers and identify why they chose you.

5) No Marketing Plan
If you don’t have a plan you’ll just meander through your year and be swayed by this or that. Ultimately you’ll waste whatever budget you did put together. It doesn’t have to be an epic novel, even a one-pager will do. Think about the activities you can afford then spread your budget across each quarter and remember seasonality. Now drill-down to each month and then finally match the activities to each month.

6) No Tracking Mechanism
If you don’t track the results of your activities you may be doomed to waste your spend. Even the best campaigns get stale, how will you know when that happens without tracking?

7) Be Consistent
When things don’t go to plan it’s so easy to put the brakes on and in some cases get into reverse gear. But do this at your peril; you could harm your bottom line and your brand awareness efforts. It also delivers inconsistent results that lead to uncertainty and that leads to more bad decisions. You don’t have to carry on regardless, but rather than jst stopping, take time to review and adjust accordingly.

OK, that’s it - my 7 deadly sins of marketing. Want to see the presentation about all this? Visit www.thedggroup.ie/marketing-articles.asp.

I am sticking to my New Year marketing budget creation theme (as per my last blog).

When working with clients on their marketing budgets I always work backwards into it. You start at a macro level (look at the big picture) and work backwards until you are looking at a micro view (looking at the many small details). The steps are as follows:

1. Decide on your target revenue - the most critical macro element.
2. Identify your customer.
3. Write down all the relevant potential marketing activities you may want to run.
4. Plan out your spend per quarter - take into account any seasonal impact on your business.
5. Now match up your activities to your spend per quarter

Think “consistency”; don’t run a single expensive ad if you can’t afford to run a series of them, at best it will deliver a small uplift in business with no long-term benefit.

Click the link to read the whole Marketing Budget Planning article.

As each new year starts (whether calendar or financial), business owners start to think about how they are going to generate business over the next twelve months. This leads onto how much it is all going to cost and I am often asked, “how much should I budget for marketing spend in the coming year?”

The starting point is how much you should plan to spend. The answer begins, rather frustratingly, with another question… how much revenue do you want to generate in the coming year? I always say that marketing is an investment in your business and not a cost. You spend X to generate Y, so you can’t decide what you are going to spend without knowing what you want to achieve.

So, once you know how much revenue you want to make, you should also factor in your net profit margin, then simply take between 5% and 10% of your revenue figure and you have your marketing budget. The reason for the variance in percentage is to cater for businesses with different levels of margin. A company that generates 40% net margin can afford to spend a larger percentage of their revenue on marketing than one that generates 10% net margin.

Without a budget you WILL spend more than you would want to. I once met a business owner who had spent €60,000 without even realising it until he checked his expenses at the end of the year! A budget also allows you to plan where you are going to spend your money, so not only will you control your overall spend, but you’ll also spend it where it gives the best return, which you can actively track because you planned the spend in the first place. Finally, having a budget helps you to avoid silly decisions. You know, when the advertising sales person rings you up with the “deal of the century”, you simply say, sorry that’s not in my budget plan, which has already been allocated for this quarter/year.

Click on the link to read more about how to create a marketing budget.

Everybody knows that you market your company, product or service to attract new customers. So how come so many people end up creating websites, brochures and ads that just don’t work?

It is actually a common error that a lot of people make and it comes from not having an objective and end-goal in mind. Instead, people focus on what’s easy, i.e. what they like and dislike. Of course a business owner should be an expert in their customer base and many are, but even if you know everything about your customers and potential customers, it is very easy to have tunnel vision and lose yourself in the design, tagline and colour choices.

But why does this happen? Well, for the same reason why fashions come and go and music that we all ‘rocked’ to 20 years ago is now about as popular as a stockbroker at a dinner party. (If you’re reading this and it’s not 2009 then you may not get it and it proves my point - stockbrokers during the recession weren’t particularly popular people).

You see, people belong to an age group and gender (demographic) and everyone has their own personality (psychographic) and specific requirements (needs). So creating any successful marketing element is all about matching your marketing to as wide a range of age groups and personalities across one or both genders to meet their needs. As a male in his late 30s, I can tell you that I have no idea exactly what a 21 year-old girl wants when looking to buy a car. I have a general idea, but not enough to be sure of creating a compelling ad…

Click to find out how to successfully market your business without your preconceptions getting in the way.