Small Businesses - Big Marketing

Online Reputation Management - Do it, or Lose Customers.

It’s a beautiful sunny morning. You’re in a great mood as you begin to prepare for a big meeting with a prospective client. Client notes? Check. Project outline? Check. Formal proposal, printed and collated? Check.

A few hours later you’re in the middle of the meeting and things are going great. You know you are so close to landing the deal. And then....boom. They stand to leave the meeting and let you know that, despite your great presentation they’re going to look at other vendors. Why??? They found some unfavorable reviews posted online about your firm and they aren’t 100% comfortable moving forward. They thank you for your time and leave.

What? You didn’t even know any customers had submitted reviews online. Your firm didn’t even have a website yet!

If this hasn’t happened to your firm yet - it will. Today 63% of customers research purchases online prior to sealing the deal (according to eMarketer). That number will continue to increase each year. if you are not actively monitoring our online reputation (both your company’s and your own) it’s going to start hurting.

Sadly, you most likely won’t even know when you lose a customer to a bad online review. Customers don’t have time to ‘hear your side of the story’.

So what can a small business owner do?

First - Google your company name (and your own name). What comes up? Do you like the results? While you can’t remove information from a search listing, you can publish new information to push the ‘bad’ information to page 2. Tips on how to do this below.

Second - Sign-up for Google Alerts for your business name (and again - your own). Anytime new information is posted that shows up for that search query, you will be sent an email notification.
So you don’t like the information you see? Here are a few things you can do to help push that bad press to page 2:

• Purchase your name. If  you don’t own www.yournamehere.com yet, you should. Go buy it right now - I mean it. Right now - I’ll wait. (note - if you’re a parent the nicest thing you can do for your child is purchase their name. Do you realize what the odds will be that it’s still available when they are old enough to do it themselves?)
• Set-up accounts at Facebook and LinkedIn using your full name. Google loves showing social networking sites for name searches.
• Start a blog. Google loves fresh content. An easy way to push bad results to page 2 is to start your own blog (on your own domain name) and publish fresh, useful information. 
• Participate in business forums, submit articles to niche websites, or submit press releases to online distribution sites. Again, these tactics won’t ‘remove’ bad press - but they will help to push positive pieces to page 1. 
• As a business - incentivize customers to write positive reviews. If you are a restaurant, give a discount to customers that submit a positive review to Yelp. The idea can be carried across to any industry.

Online reputation management isn’t easy, but it’s a necessary evil to small business owners. Get started today - or get left behind.

Need help managing your online reputation? SearchMarketMe offers personalized ‘Reputation Management’ packages to small businesses nationwide that includes a detailed monthly report of any press mentions (or forum reviews, Twitter, etc) that your company receives. Consider it a very, very grown up Google Alert. All at an affordable monthly fee. Contact us today at 425-677-7839 to learn more.

Whitehouse.gov – Hopefully not a sign of the future…

I was very impressed when I heard a new website was launched for www.whitehouse.gov the moment Obama became the new President of the United States. I’ve been following Obama on Twitter and Facebook since the start of the election and have always been impressed with the tech-savvy approach of his campaign.

Sadly, once I checked it out I was very disappointed. I hope this isn’t a sign of how the Obama presidency will be – shiny on the outside, rough on the inside.

Let’s go through the issues-

My first stop was to The Briefing Room to check out the new Whitehouse blog. Excited to see if anything had happened during his first day of presidency, I clicked on the Executive Orders/Proclamations links. Zero info – understandably. I doubted much would happen on day 1. However, once I checked out the blog I noticed the National Day of Renewal and Reconciliation Proclamation – obviously they aren’t filing information correctly and don't have a good organizational system created.

Next, I tried signing up for email updates from one of the blog posts – the linked to this page as the call to action. The only problem – it takes you to a contact form, not a sign-up form. Oh my.

Finally, I visited the Whitehouse 101 section and saw the ‘Pets of the Whitehouse’ – but…once you scroll through you start seeing font tags in the photo descriptions...

<font face="arial, helvetica, sans serif" size="2">President Gerald Ford (1974-77) gives his golden retriever, Liberty, some attention in the Oval Office. </font>

I’m not even going to go into the title and meta tags (or lack thereof) throughout the site. There may be other issues, but I had to stop looking. It was killing my optimism for the country.

Are any of these issues deal-breakers? Definitely not. The obvious attempt at transparency in government is very exciting. A presidential blog? Very, very cool. And yes, any new website launch is tough.

But this is the website for the new President of the United States. The President that the entire world is watching with a microscope – please, please do better than this Obama. If you need some help, give me a call.

Goal Setting - Getting what you Want and More!

I’m a huge believer in goal setting. Each year I set aside at least one day to step back from my day-to-day ‘life’ and plan for the future. Usually, I repeat this exercise quarterly to make sure I’m on track.

It’s impossible to set goals without time away from your business to reflect on what you really want. Anytime I have tried to skip this step and set goals in the midst of running my business I have found myself chasing goals that were other people’s idea of success – leaving me exhausted and unhappy.

I’ve spoken before about the power of attending industry conferences – if you don’t have the willpower to step outside of your life while at home, pick an industry conference and plan to stay one day after the conference ends. Use that day to set goals while you’re still riding the buzz from the conference.

So now that you have set your goals, how do you increase the odds of actually achieving them? After all, Albert Einstein did say:

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

First, understand what it will take to achieve them
and break it down into bite-sized pieces.

Let’s say Goal #1 is earning $100,000 per year. Pretty daunting task, until you break it down. Perhaps each client is worth $2,000 per month to your business – you then need between 4-5 clients each month to meet your goal.

How many client pitches do you need to get your 4-5 clients? Hopefully you have been keeping track of your close ratio – if not, review your track record during the last half of 2008. If you pitched your services to 10 prospective clients and resulted in 4 new customers – your close ratio is 40%.

So, to earn $100,000 next year you will need to pitch
to 10 prospective clients each month, or between 2-3 a week.

Makes it sound much more doable, right?

How much marketing is required to meet 10 prospective clients? Let’s say you market your business exclusively through email marketing (not realistic, but it helps simplify my example!) and you receive phone calls from 2 interested parties after each campaign….

Then, you must send 5 email marketing campaigns each month
to meet your 10 prospective clients to close 4-5 and earn $100,000.

Phew! Goal is set!

So how do you hold yourself accountable? Setting goals is the easy part, after all. Here are a few tricks I’ve found that work wonders:

• SHARE your goals! Tell your friends and families what you want to accomplish. You don’t have to share financial information, just let them know you’re trying to pitch to 10 new customers each month – peer pressure is a powerful motivator!

•Make your goals visible! This is my favorite trick – one that has worked wonders for me. Write it on your bathroom mirror with dry erase marker. But – not just your goal, also write what you need to do to accomplish it. That way, each and every morning it will be the first thing you see (and the last thing you see every night - it feels like crap seeing this on your mirror knowing you didn't do what you needed that day to reach your goal). For example:

      Goal: Earn $100,000
                    To Do: Send 5 email marketing campaigns each month to pitch
                    10 prospective clients each month and land 4-5!

This exact same process can be applied to build out your business’s 2009 Marketing Plan. Once you have a strong understanding of what each marketing tactic delivers – work backwards to the desired result. It’s all about the numbers – and numbers don’t lie!

Note: If you are stuck developing your own 2009 Marketing Plan, fill out our free Consultation Form to learn how SearchMarketMe can help you set and achieve your business goals in '09