There are countless ways to grow your business! And it probably takes more than two of them to succeed, so what could we be talking about here?

Growing a B2B business starts with a net new client premise. If you own the business, you’re probably thinking a lot about how to grow it and maintain steady growth. I bet you have a few key prospects in mind and are thinking about when you might call them. When one of them calls you, you’re giddy!

Don’t worry, this isn’t about cold calling vs inbound marketing.

During a recent meeting, my colleague Matt Barden from Industrial Marketing distilled business development down to its essence and I may be paraphrasing. “New business comes in two ways; making calls or getting calls. You call or you get the call.” In both cases, the sale is up to you. Simple maybe, and simple is what works! I can’t count how many cold calls I’ve received from marketing automation companies in the last year but it was at least 5 or 6 and they all tell me they do it because it works. Ironically, their services promise more warm leads with fewer cold calls.

As a potential reseller, I’m a good target for their calls so I expect and welcome them.

This is not about cold calling nor is it about getting back to basics.  Rather, you need to start thinking about having the data/intelligence to make really effective outbound calls and get well-qualified inbound calls as well. Then your firing on all marketing cylinders!

Create and Use Intelligence!

You can have realtime market intelligence coming from individuals at known companies that tell you when to call the prospect and what they’re interested in. At the same time, you’ll be receiving inbound calls and leads based on your strategic online campaign that’s bringing intelligent content to your target audience.

Hopefully, you’ll close more deals when that happens.

The Digital-Human Nexus

Here’s the crux of it all. Boatloads of people are online right now either searching for products and services related to your business or they’re passively educating themselves on personal and work-related topics. They really want to find that ideal solution online and when they find it, they want you, a human being to help them get exactly what they want.

Small companies that decide to step it up with integrated search and content marketing campaigns tend to up-level their businesses faster than they expect.

When you discover the abundance of the realtime, electronically-connected marketplace, you can’t wait to get your message circulating in it. You want to personally connect with all those business prospects who are online. You can actually witness the digital-human nexus and experience it with a voice conversation once your communications jump from the screen to the phone or a meeting place.

Moving Out of the Desert

If you want to move your brand from nowhere land to the bustling bazaar of daily commerce, you’ll need to make a modest to perhaps moderate investment in a couple of digital platforms that will support your organic website – the hub of your brand. Costs for these services have settled at reasonable rates and the tools work better than ever! The best thing? Everything is fully transparent, measurable and accountable. You’ll be in the know!

You can see your investment working (or not) without any smoke and mirrors.  In other words, your marketing team won’t be using dubious analytics and vague forecasts. They’ll be giving you qualified sales leads and you’ll be measuring new business results from your campaigns. You’ll know the real bottom line.

Double your Sales Pleasure!

Do you want to grow? Call or be called. Better yet, make great calls and get great calls too. When your campaign is set up and integrated, all you really need to do is have the conversations that close new business.

If you have questions about how this program can help you grow your business, feel free to call us at 603-345-7223.

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Choose a website hosting plan that actually works hard for your business!

Your website has parts that will break or expire and cause communication problems, just like your car’s parts will eventually break or malfunction and cause transportation problems. If you have a website for any length of time, you’ve surely experienced a utility malfunction, broken page link or even a complete outage. Panic can set in when that happens, especially in a marketing or sales-driven company. You can begin to imagine people visiting your site and leaving with the impression that your company’s act isn’t really together.

Listen up! The technology overlords of the Internet don’t particularly like websites that aren’t cared for, which clutter up the data universe with a bunch of old, static and irrelevant content. And, they have ways of punishing those sites!

FACT:  You do not know the identity of your website visitors unless they give it to you by opting-in to an offer; filling out a form. That means potential customers, perhaps big ones, are examining your online offerings and possibly getting frustrated with their experience when your site lacks an adequate maintenance program… and you won’t even know about the lost opportunities.

FACT:  Without a professionally managed program of itemized, ongoing technical maintenance and content updates, your website will suffer lower search results and diminished user experience. Some browsers such as Google Chrome might even flash a warning screen cautioning visitors before entering what they deem could be a malware prone or unsafe website.

Does your website have an SSL Security Certificate yet? If not, visitors are already being warned about entering it.

BEST PRACTICE: Put your website on a managed hosting and maintenance plan instead of a basic hosting plan. A fully managed website maintenance plan costs more than basic hosting and it’s more than worth the difference! You avoid disruptions in sales and workflows caused by malfunctioning web pages. Search bots “see” a secure and well-built, mobile-friendly site to crawl and properly index content for searchers of your products & services.

So, what do want your website to do?

Here are the two main service options available:

1. With a low cost basic hosting plan, you can at least have an online presence where people can find you by your own domain name or URL. However, without having and complying with the terms of an SSL Security Certificate, visitors may be warned before entering. Hopefully, your site would be mobile responsive by now, had someone paid attention to evolving standards several years ago and kept your site up to acceptable standards.

2. With a managed hosting and maintenance plan, your website would be searchable for your prospects’ & customers’ keyword queries about your product or service, not just your domain name. Your web service provider would have already alerted you to and installed SSL security certification on your site, especially if you have any contact forms or user portals. Years ago, they would have had your site complying with mobile-friendly (responsive design) standards giving mobile device users a seamless and high-quality mobile web experience before some of your competitors were even aware of the responsive design best practice. Every link would work as redirects are taken care of upon the first warning signal. Real human beings constantly work on the back and front ends of your website to make sure it’s optimized for speed, search and user experience.  Design and functionality plugins are always updated to the latest versions. Malware is constantly scanned for, isolated and removed. And get this: You can call them and talk with them on the phone whenever you need to! Sounds like best practices for online marketing doesn’t it?

My colleagues and I cannot stress enough the importance of maintaining SEO and website competitiveness today, and it’s only getting more intense out there! If you have any questions about website maintenance plans and how they can help improve your business, feel free to contact us online or call 603-345-7223.

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Forget your friends’ advice. Just Google it!

Do you need a certain product or service about which you know little? If so, Google wants you to ignore your friends and pay attention to their search engine instead.

When it comes to seeking referrals, do your friends have the best resources to help you find what you need? In many cases, yes, in other cases, maybe and in still others, no! When your friends and family come up dry, there’s one place to go; the Internet.

Let the numbers work for you!

Chances are, most of your friends and associates don’t have the right experience or enough knowledge about your industry to make fully informed referrals. It’s even more likely that your current customers and friends don’t associate with enough prospective clients to feed you enough referrals to sustain and grow your business.

Person to person word of mouth still has a lot of business influence but in a hyper-competitive, digitally enabled marketplace like we have today, you need a strong internet search presence to validate verbal claims by individuals. Even if you get a good personal referral, your prospect will go online to check you out before calling. You can be sure they’ll Google you first. What shows up when they do? This is the simplest and one of the best SEO tests you can do.

Google yourself now!

Go ahead, Google yourself! What’s in the first few positions on the first page? Is it your content or someone else’s who shares a name? Is your own website or LinkedIn Profile in one of the top positions? If you do show up on the first page, is the information favorable and complimentary or could it raise questions about how well positioned you are in your industry?

Creating a favorable and growth-oriented presence that is searchable on the Internet is a sustainability imperative today, even if you’re still chugging along on word of mouth. At some point soon, if not already, the default action of most people will be “I’ll just Google it…” instead of “I’ll just ask Larry…”

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Famous 20^th Century industrialist John Wanamaker made legendary his quote, “I know that at least half of my advertising dollars are wasted, I just don’t know which half.”

Image by Moma, Sao Paulo, Brazil

This was true of most advertising all the way up until digital technology and the Internet started to dominate how we broadcast marketing messages. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is still a relatively new way to advertise although it’s been around since Google and other search engines have commercially operated (no pun intended).

Buying space in print and time on broadcast networks is largely a “spray and pray” method whereby you can begin to narrow down channels that your target audience may be more likely to see/hear your ad. But if you’re like most businesses, only a small fraction of the audience you pay for will have any interest in your offer. Even if your message is in front of an interested prospect, you rely on his or her whims at that moment. An unknown distraction can divert the attention of someone intending to respond to your ad and, poof! The prospect forgets all about you.

Now there’s a way to assure that every dollar you spend buying advertising will be the direct result of physically engaging a person with your message online based on keywords, phrases and questions they are typing into search fields. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) has given you control over the type of online shoppers you would attract and exactly how much you will spend to reach and engage each single prospect or customer. Analytics programs such as Google Analytics will track and measure the direct results (clicks and website interaction) of your advertising campaign in real time. John Wanamaker would be impressed! He might say, “Now I know exactly what my advertising dollars are doing. I just wish online shoppers weren’t so fickle!”

Google is the dominant search marketing giant and wants its customers to get results. To that end they’ve put together a nice best practices guide which this article will encapsulate.

We’re curating the basics of SEM success directly from Google:

1. Keywords – Effective keyword management helps you reach the right customers and grow your business. Your keywords should reflect all of the different types of user queries that could help someone find you when they’re looking for something you offer. Keyword research and analysis is a fundamental step you must take initially to make sure you reach your target audience searching online for your products & services.

• Negative Keywords – Words or phrases that allow you to filter out who your ads will be served to in the search results page. Upon deciding that a term is irrelevant to your campaign, you can add that term as a negative keyword. Whenever someone searches on Google with that term included, depending on match types, Google will refrain from showing your ad and you won’t waste money paying for an irrelevant click. To help you determine negative keywords for your campaign, here’s a free negative keyword tool.

2. Your Ads – One of the most important things to get right in your search ad is “the Creative” – the key message you put into it. Creative relevance drives more qualified clicks. Make your ad relevant and resonant to pull qualified click through engagement.

3. Your Advertising Budget – Google AdWords lets you set daily budgets for your campaigns with the flexibility to change them at any time. A key benefit of developing and fine tuning an SEM campaign is your ability to measure, adjust and actually begin to control your response rates within a spending limit. This helps you manage your growth and marketing administration costs.

4. Reporting & Analytics – AdWords and Google Analytics together offer insights into the performance of your campaigns and those insights help you become a better marketer. By carefully measuring, analyzing and making adjustments to your keywords and messaging, you will continually improve the ROI performance of your SEM campaign.

There is more science to the practice of Search Engine Marketing than this overview reveals. Within each of the four major components of SEM listed above, there are entire sets of best practices with various tactical options that will help you customize your campaign to generate the best results. For more in depth education, go to PPC University.

If you would like a free evaluation and consultation regarding an SEM program for your business, feel free to contact us at 603-345-7223.

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