Small business? Big impact internet marketing with your limited budget
If you’re looking for interactive marketing tips for your business you’ve probably found a lot of great advice that just didn’t apply to you. Ten years ago getting a serious position online just wasn’t possible on a small budget (unless you were a digital marketer or coder turned business owner) but today all that’s changed. Self service analytics, email, sales tracking are flourishing – designs can go from concept to launch for four or five figures and with some good planning it’s possible to compete with the big guys, maybe even out do them.
It’s not just your tools or access that will open the doors for you either. The big advantage a small business has over larger ones online is in knowledge and understanding. As a business owner or operator you know what your customers are coming for, who they are and what motivates them. As a marketing consultant I’m tasked with trying to deliver messages for companies every day and while I pride myself on learning a lot about the market all like all marketers it’s just not my job to know the product as well as you will. This is where you shine and this is how you set yourself apart in your email messages, your site content and your social media campaigns. Every interaction point is a chance to show your expertise and knowledge in a way larger companies struggle with so while you want to look at the big guys for ideas don’t be afraid to use your own understanding either.
Building a site
Let’s start at the beginning since well, that’s the start. Having a professional looking website is absolutely essential to have a business in any category these days whether you fix sinks or sell wedding cakes. Getting a design done on the cheap will take you down one of two courses – hire a small business contractor/ firm or contest the project out. While there’s a lot of upside with hiring a dedicated resource like the ability to go back and forth the more you want to change and work through things the more it will cost you. Hiring a single team also limits your design range so be absolutely sure to have your designer include multiple design comps so you aren’t stuck with just one layout option to pick through. If you’re aware of what you want or really need some help understanding it all hire someone dedicated.
You can find designers at SitePoint.com, Elance and many other sites.
Aside from hiring one designer these days there’s lots of sites letting you bid projects out to a whole range of designers. This option limits your ability to interact one to one and build a long term relationship up front but it opens up the door to many design styles and approaches too. Auction style approaches also let you get the project done quick as many people are working to win your business. For someone who really doesn’t have an exact idea of what their site should look like but knows what their site needs to accomplish consider bidding things out. This option won’t work well if you need someone to add strategy or hand hold.
You can find design based options at 99designs.net
Remarketing – Email & Social
Pretty much every time I talk to a business owner the subject of email comes up and for good reason. It work well, very, very well.
As a small business owner these are two areas where you can kick the competition square in the pants by taking the “enterprise” approach (on the small biz budget).
First you’ll need a tool or rather a provider that lets you send emails out. I’ve covered email service providers at length in a few other posts but to simplify you need something that lets you create emails, manage lists and ideally schedule emails based on profile criteria (also called segmentation). The most popular vendors for smaller businesses are Constant Contact, Awber and Vertical Response although there are many other great tools with a bit more cost and a ton more features (Exact Target, Email Labs, Blue Hornet, etc…).
Once you have your email provider it’s time to build. Again I’ve blogged pretty extensively about how to use email marketing and suggest you look at some other articles about the topic but to cover the basics you need a simple design and content. Keeping content relevant and frequent is really the most important part of email marketing… everything else just makes it better off. Once you have your emails queued up push your provider to the max and try working with different messages to customer types, prospects, etc… Segmentation is a powerful program and even if you can only take the time to send a few message types out each month you’ll find it’s well worth it.
Relationships – Social
Social is similar to email as it can be used to communicate and should be considered a retention/ relationship tool initially. Forget getting 20,000 new customers to follow you and instead focus on getting some of the ones already using your business involved. Look for mentions of your name, problems with your offering and even competitive insights and engage. As your followers grow you can of course push messages like with email but to fit the medium you need to think more about useful content and less about messages. Educate first and the rest will build.
Social isn’t a space with a ton of tools or features but there are definitely some winners. For twitter look at TweetDeck or similar management tools. For Facebook and Myspace be sure to set email alerts, triggers and even consider using a tool like FriendFeed to syndicate content out. Looking at blogs and the larger web community there’s many tools that can monitor for buzz although Google Alerts will capture much of it and at no cost. You can also find a number of social media focused agencies who can help you develop promotion ideas, monitor for buzz, even run and manage contests… just be sure to review credentials as social is the buzz and like with all buzz, there’s a lot of people trying to cash in without the real knowledge.
Surveys & Customer Feedback
Surveying is one of the few web marketing tactics where tools really do overlap or equal out for both big and small businesses. While some enterprises do use formal research vendors or really sophisticated modeled tools like Foresee results most just want to get answers to questions in a friendly environment that gets people through the funnel and for this Survey Gizmo or Survey Monkey will get the job done regardless of your size. The main constraint for surveys and small businesses is in actually crafting the questions. It’s extremely easy to lead and influence or just not ask the right questions. While a discussion of how to write a survey is something I’ll save for a full post follow the basic rules and you’ll be ok.
- Write questions that ask a broad question and end with a ranking. Not a ranking question that ends with an affirmation.
- Limit survey length. For simple web surveys 10-12 questions one 2-3 pages is really ideal. The longer it is the less completes you get and the worse the data is.
- Qualify your visitors. Having lots of great rankings is nice but if the people responding are out of your demographic it isn’t going to tell you about people who are buying.
- Get enough results. 50 survey responses is interesting but not necessarily true of a broader group. Aim for 400-500 responses to any survey and at least twice that if you plan to segment on any demographic field.
- Ask open ended questions. Even if you could master multiple choices they’d never tell the whole story. Let people share comments and read them. That’s actionable.
Of course you can also get data from sources beyond surveys and often for free. Log your customer support (phone and email) questions, add live chat to your site and see what happens. You can even ask friends and family provided that they are disconnected from the business… if a friend can’t place an order on your ecommerce site neither can a customer. It’s not formal but it’s insight.
Measuring it all
Once you’ve identified what you’re going to do you’ll need to understand how it impacts the bottom line. Like with many of these tools small business analytics have vastly improved in the past few years mostly because of Google Analytics. Google Analytics (or GA as it’s often called) is a free solution with an assortment of must see reports… it doesn’t do everything in the world but it does a lot and it’s simple – two facts which really count for the small business without dedicated analysts or time.
While GA will report on your site traffic “out of the gate” it takes a little more effort to make it really work. When enabled GA can track conversion events ranging from online orders to clicks to a store locator or anything else you define. Depending on your business these conversion actions may have a clear value or be a little harder to read but either way you need to identify them and build them into your implementation. This way as you build content and drive people to your site you’ll have an idea of what they’re actually doing and what its worth.
Other tools like your email vendor will also have their own analytics but again I strongly suggest blending as much as you can into GA as this will give you a single point of view. Unfortunately GA doesn’t take a ton of data but you can track clicks from any ad medium be it email or a search listing so do it. And keep doing it as you add more campaigns. Even if the metrics aren’t perfect (metrics really never are) you can compare campaigns against each other and quickly identify winners,
Finding time
If you read this entire post you’re probably thinking cool… I can do this but when. As a marketer I try to be honest with the business owners I work with and my message is always that this stuff takes time, more than you want it to. That said you don’t have to do everything at once. You can start with a new site or site upgrade and build a small list to email later. You can get on twitter and watch now, engage after you see the flow. It’s almost always better to start small and grow out or you run the risk of spreading too thin or getting behind in your duties and having it show (like missing a monthly newsletter). One thing to be sure of is that you always find time to review and improve. The beauty of interactive is that almost everything can be tracked to some degree of accuracy and that data matters. So be honest with your schedule but also be honest with your business needs – building it isn’t enough, you have to market and you have to put the time in to get the results out.
