A short conversation will quickly produce the answer:

"How can I be sure it will work?"

Followed, equally quickly, by:

"But I haven't got time to find out how to do all that stuff!"​

When your day is packed with all the things you wished you'd had time to do yesterday then worrying about whether some new scheme is actually going to work and deliver a result - is high on the agenda.

Especially as everything involves either our time or your money!​

So my first priority is to show business owners the impact that a local marketing strategy can have.  

Helping them to understand that even though they have a bricks and mortar, local business the online world can still be their friend and deliver more prospects and leads to their door to increase the profitability of their business.

To make this as easy as possible I've produced this short video ​about the impact this can have on your local business marketing - as well as a simple Local Marketing Checklist

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​The Local Marketing Checklist will tell you more about how each aspect of a local marketing strategy is important and how they work with each other to develop a cumulative effect.

Click on: Local Marketing Checklist to collect your copy and discover if you are still missing the foundation stone of local marketing for bricks and mortar businesses - and what you can do about it.

The post Local Business Owners Biggest Fear appeared first on Online Marketing For Business - Dewsbury.

The reality is that video is the nearest you will come to face to face interaction - and is by far the best way to help your prospects get to know, like and trust you.

The face carries the majority of communication between people, your voice and your appearance can all influence prospects even more than the words that come out of your mouth.

The old, text based internet was a sterile environment and used to be the worst possible way of trying to sell anything. These days things have turned on their head and the ability to use images, audio and videos has turned it into the best method other than having your prospects walk through your door.

Here's a few pointers for making videos that connect with prospects:

• Look appropriate to what you are selling. If you're a professional — wear a suit. If you're a plumber then wear your overalls.
• Pay attention to the background. Does it look professional? Workshops are good for tradesmen - just make sure they look organised.
• Branding, branding, branding! Make sure your brand image, logo and contact details are prominent somewhere!
• Prepare what you are going to say but don’t read from a script.
• Slice and dice. You don't have to pack everything into one video. In fact, short videos of no more than 2 minutes are best. So you want one on your home page with your essential selling offer of who you are and the benefit your provide. Then make lots more on small niche subjects to put wherever appropriate on your website.
• Post your videos on your website and create your own YouTube channel. Make sure you put a link back to your site into the description field on Youtube.

Not convinced? Check out this infographic from HighQ.

The post Video Marketing In 2017 appeared first on Online Marketing For Business - Dewsbury.

Closer examination shows that this is no cheap piece of wrapping but a robust cover overprinted with outlines of perfume bottles and the word 'Chanel'.  So this is really a Chanel marketing campaign.

So what is going on here? There's no marketing messages, no glossy imagery?  This seems to be a very downmarket approach to advertising a high end product.  Or is it?​

​Advertising in the print media is never a cheap option.  So Chanel must think they are getting their money's worth.  So what are they achieving?

Target Marketing To A Niche Market​

The Sunday Times is not cheap at £2.50 though you do, of course, get a good deal of reading for your money.  Mine usually lasts me through most of the week!  

So Chanel will know that their campaign is going to be seen by every buyer of the newspaper, all of whom probably have disposable income to spend on the high value/designer label product that Chanel is marketing.  No other newspaper carried this cover - they have targeted their niche market.

A Call To Action​

But there isn't one!  Nothing to tell their prospects what Chanel wants them to do next.

However, this campaign took place on Sunday, 11 December.  I would guess that Chanel's marketers have carefully selected the optimum date before Christmas to put 2 ideas into their prospects heads:

1. The brand they want prospects to buy - Chanel
2. The idea for a gift when their prospects are struggling for inspiration - perfume

It's easy to say: 'Of course, everyone knows about perfume as a present'.  But everyone also needs reminding.  Being 'top of mind' at this critical moment is Chanel's objective.

The overprint on that semi-transparent paper communicates everything that Chanel want to put into our heads.  

The repeated image of a perfume bottle and the word: Chanel.

No Call To Action necessary!

A perfume bottle and the brand name - who needs more of a reminder?

Social Proof

Why use the semi transparent paper?  It's sort of confusing because the Sunday Times newspaper clearly shows through and this must confuse the message?

In practice, this is of benefit both to Chanel and to the newspaper.  The Sunday Times maintains its visible presence on the news stands so that their buyers are not put off by having to check what they are buying.

Chanel benefit from an implicit endorsement by the Sunday Times.  It tells people that Chanel is the sort of product that people who buy the Sunday Times also buy.  They feel comfortable in the same way that when they see their friends sharing on social media that they have bought a product. 

Not So Daft​

So maybe the kitchen paper is not so daft after all.

Chanel are:

Excuse me, I've just remembered I've got some presents to buy...

The post Why Is My Sunday Times Wrapped In Kitchen Paper? appeared first on Online Marketing For Business - Dewsbury.

Our results in signups and sales will tell us what is going on with those who have entered our marketing process but what about all those who see our offering but stay well clear?

For that sort of information you have to go back to surveying and that’s exactly what Mancx did, a company offering trusted answers for business questions. Instead of posting a question on a site like Quora or Yahoo Answers, Mancx is a business question-and-answer website that allows individuals to securely buy and sell their knowledge with others.

So they are very interested to know what users think of information that they find on the web.

Is this how your prospects feel?

Out of the 1,900 Americans surveyed a rather distressing 98% said that they distrusted information they found on the Internet with 94% adding that “bad things can happen as a result of acting on inaccurate information online.”

The reasons they gave for this included

Reading those results again you get ‘too much irrelevant, out of date, self promotional stuff’ and they worry that their unfamiliarity with any particular site can lead to them making a costly mistake due to their own lack of knowledge.

So what do you need to do to chip away at that monstrous 98% of users who are so fearful that they won’t come near you with a barge pole?.

Well you can’t do anything about the rest of the internet but you can do something about what you publish. Your website, your blog and any other online real estate you may use.

Who's happy now?

Keep it familiar, keep it comfortable and keep it simple. Reassure your visitors at every stage that you are doing exactly what you said you would do and they can find their way both further in to your process – or out again whichever they choose to do.

From the very beginning you need to build a relationship of trust which probably means putting your own personality into it so that they can relate to you personally.

You need to publish regularly so that they can see how recent your content is and you need to keep your marketing to a relatively low percentage of your total content so that you are not seen as publishing solely for the purpose of selling.

To put it simply, just be a nice guy (or gal!), give useful stuff away so they are more likely to come back and make sure that there are no surprises on your websites.

A smaller group of prospects on your list who are more comfortable with you and therefore more likely to buy will generate more sales for you than scattering marketing grapeshot left, right and centre.

The post What Do Our Prospects Think Of Us? appeared first on Online Marketing For Business - Dewsbury.

The 10 minutes it takes to watch this video will probably be the most useful 10 minutes you have spent all year and will provide you with the foundation stones of the strategy you need to develop your business model.

Incorporate the principles identified here into your business offering and you WILL increase your sales and business profits.

The post Persuasive Principles To Increase Your Business Profits appeared first on Online Marketing For Business - Dewsbury.

A guarantee may have all sorts of legal and financial definitions depending on where and how it is used. But in the selling process it’s purpose is to affect the psychology of the prospect.

This is true of any marketing and selling process, wherever it is carried out – and online we work in a pretty hostile environment.

In online marketing we have no idea:

Basically, we don’t know anything about our prospect. Yet we have to deliver an offer to suit the prospects circumstances and that’s pretty hard to do.

Your prospect may be anywhere from a red-hot ‘I’m ready to buy now, take my money’candidate to a passing browser who is only mildly interested in your offer – but could be persuaded to buy in the right circumstances.

Listen to copywriters who write all those magic words that persuade people to buy and they will tell you that you need to grab their attention, identify their greatest need, magnify whatever their problem or pain may be and then offer them your solution. That’s assuming that you’ve caught your prospect’s attention at some moment when they are amenable to your offer.

If you are lucky, you will hit all the right buttons and your prospect will agree with your selling points as you lead them through the selling process up to the point of deciding to buy.

But then the ‘yes, but…’ questions start popping up in their mind. They start reminding themselves of all the reasons that they should not buy. Anything from what the wife or husband will say to the fact that they know they can’t afford it.

So you need to ensure that there as as few reasons for the prospect to persuade themselves NOT to buy as possible. You set out to make the barriers to entry as low as possible.

Make the price as low as possible as you lead them into your sales funnel. Give them as many buying options as possible; give them multiple bonuses; but ultimately the best way is to persuade your prospect that whatever decision they make, including a decision to buy your product, they are never going to lose their money.

A guarantee that if they don’t find that the product does what you promise then they can have their money back completely removes the financial risk to the customer. Indeed, some marketers even go as far as ‘risk-reversal’ and offer to pay the customer if they are unhappy for any reason.

So in marketing terms a guarantee has nothing to do with the technical or financial or legal obligations of either party. It is everything to do with influencing the psychology of the prospect – to remove what is probably the biggest ‘yes, but...’ objection to a sale by ensuring that the prospect understands that if they are unhappy with their purchase they can always get their money back.

The post G is for Guarantee appeared first on Online Marketing For Business - Dewsbury.

E-mail remains a powerful communicator and time-saver for business owners.

Yes, there always seems to be too much of it but consider that all online marketing is a numbers game and some email does get to your target market – and that email is free – and then ask yourself if you can think of any marketing strategy that delivers a better return on investment.

The real point about email is that it is generated by your Autoresponder which is also managing your list – which is the beating heart of your business. Lose everything else and if you still have your list you can begin again with a flying start. So anything that adds to your list is good.

Don’t forget that in terms of business risk, you do not own your Facebook page or Friends, or Twitter and your followers. Third party platforms such as Facebook, Twitter or Pinterest may be effective marketing tool today – but could be gone tomorrow. And if your business is dependent on them for your traffic and marketing messages then your business could go down the swanee with them.

In contrast, you own your own list and it makes sense to protect, nurture, grow and use it.

After ensuring that your website is focused on generating a direct response from your visitors, which may well be to opt-in to your email list in exchange for some useful information, the next priority for local business owners is to ensure that you have continuing communication with those prospects.

After all they have expressed an interest in your business by visiting your site. Are you seriously intending to ignore them?

Of course, you can Tweet and persuade them to Like your Facebook page but all that takes time – the one commodity of which you have least. Should you choose to use these strategies then do ensure that at some stage you provide a Call to Action to bring them to an email sign-up form where you can capture their information.

By comparison, with email, once you have pre-loaded your messages into your autoresponder your prospects will receive personalised messages from you for as long as you choose. And if they are already part of your Facebook or Twitter community then your presence in their life is simply reinforced to ensure that you remain ‘top of mind’ whenever they decide to buy whatever your are offering.

Email may well be diminishing in its impact and use but in terms of building a relationship with your prospects it achieves:

..and email remains a powerful tool in your local marketing armoury.

The post E is for Email appeared first on Online Marketing For Business - Dewsbury.

Although direct response marketing can be achieved using any form of marketing media by far the most effective is through internet marketing – specifically because of the speed and automation advantages of online marketing.

Online, responses can be measured immediately and the merchant system actions tailored to the responses of the website visitor.

It is for this reason that the first action of any business owner should be to review the effectiveness of any page of their website landing page where visitors arrive. Is that page delivering to the visitors what they are expecting to receive AND are you generating a response from those visitors which will enable you to continue the ‘conversation’ and build a relationship with them that will ultimately result in a sale?

If not, then this is a first priority before any thought is given to SEO, pay per click or social media campaigns. Having visitors arrive at a website that does not work is like putting petrol in a car with only 3 wheels. It doesn’t matter how much ‘oomph’ you give it if the machine doesn’t work the you are going nowhere.

Checking on the direct response effectiveness of your website should be a high priority for all business owners.

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It’s a fact that people respond better to being told what to do with a specific call to action than to vague requests or suggestions.

This is particularly appropriate when they have expressed some interest in your product and changed from being a visitor to your website to being a prospect.

Now you need to move them into and through your sales funnel and this requires instructions. Basically, you are providing road signs for the way you want them to go to complete the sale.

It can be simple text, an image or button or banner. As long as your call to action makes clear what the visitor is supposed to do in order to reach that point where your interests meet, when they have what they are looking for and you have just sold it to them.

No mistaking what is required here!

A call to action is what distinguishes the dividing line between marketing and selling and marks out effective, profitable websites from ineffectual, brochure sites

The success of your Call To Action (CTA) can be measured by split testing. Both one CTA against another and with and without a CTA.

The measurement of responses and the ability to split test your offers are some of the great advantages of online marketing for local businesses. They provide objective data about the Return On Investment achieved for a given investment in marketing compared to more traditional marketing methods which tend to sit in the Overheads column of your accounts providing no discernible benefits.

The post Call To Action appeared first on Online Marketing For Business - Dewsbury.

An 'out of office' message is the most basic example of an autoresponder.

However, for marketing purposes we are interested in more developed versions that will respond when your website visitors sign up to receive whatever freebie you are offering – and will then follow-up with them at preset time intervals as well as being able to confirm subscriptions, unsubscriptions, posts, and other list activities.

As a local business owner your immediate question will inevitably be: ‘What’s the benefit for me?’

And there are 2 answers:

Building Relationships with your prospects

If you offer visitors to your website something useful and relevant then they may decide to give you their name and email address in exchange. It is an ethical bribe, a fair exchange.

So don’t get wound up with personal opinions about whether you ‘like’ that sort of thing or not. What you ‘like’ as a business owner is the profit in your bottom line – or you wouldn’t be in business. Collecting the means to communicate with prospects who have willingly provided their contact information is simply a means to your own objective.

That’s why it has to be an ethical bribe. What you offer should have real value to the recipient.

Once you have your prospects contact information that they provide through some ethical bribe you offer on your website then you can continue to communicate with them whenever you choose. The advantage of an autoresponder is that you can pre-write your email messages and set up your message sequence to go out at whatever intervals you choose.

Repeated contact with your list of prospects keeps your product or service ‘top of mind’ in their head space. Even if they don’t actually open and read your messages simply the site of your name in their inbox will keep reminding them of what you provide so that when they decide to buy then you have a chance of being among the suppliers they consider at that moment.

So the marketing benefit is that an autoresponder will enable you to build a relationship with your website visitors after the first ‘touch’ of their first visit. It’s a numbers game, a fairly small percentage of visitors will sign up, you will be able to build a relationship with some of them and of those, some of them will eventually buy from you.

As well as your scheduled messages you can also send a ‘broadcast’ message to your list whenever you choose. So special events and offers can all be communicated at zero cost to large numbers of prospects at the expense of 10 minutes of your time to write an email. How good is that!

Some autoresponder services

Let’s be clear that none of this is spamming. The whole point of using a proper autoresponder service is that it is fully compliant with the law and includes an ‘unsubscribe’ link in every email you send.

Anyone receiving your emails can unsubscribe and remove themselves from your list at any time. Which is a good thing because you don’t want to be fooling yourself that you have a prospect when they are really not interested.

Saving Time

The second benefit is time. As a local business owner you don’t have any of that to spare. So to have an employee who works faultlessly, 24 hours per day, forever, costs nothing and never asks for a raise or time off is pretty exciting.

Once you set up your email sequence, which can be as long or as short as you choose to make it, then a good quality autoresponder service requires no more of your time.

So you get marketing benefits from an autoresponder without having to constantly work at it. What business would be without one?! Once you begin to accumulate a list on your autoresponder then it becomes the very core of your business.

More businesses fail after a catastrophic incident such as a fire not because they have lost equipment, stock or premises but because they have lost their business data. Progressively accumulating a list of prospects and customers on autopilot enables you to start communicating and marketing again within days.  If your list is safe - then so is your future business.

Basically, I’m only going to recommend outsourced, 3rd party service – these autoresponders operate on the provider’s infrastructure and you manage it through a web-based control panel and pay a monthly usage fee – usually only a few dollars.

It is possible to install and run autoresponder software on your own server – but as a local business owner getting involved in the technicalities of such a venture is the last thing you want to be doing.

Personally, I recommend Aweber and Mailchimp. I find Aweber easier to manage and has various additional features to help with marketing. Mailchimp has the advantage of offering your first 2,000 subscribers free for life but is oriented towards pretty html newsletters and html in email is, itself, a major obstacle.

Only ever do your marketing with text email. It is less likely to get caught up on spam filters, is smaller in file size and therefore quicker and does not have to worry about whether it will fit or be readable on the increasing number of mobile devices like smartphones and tablets.

If you don’t yet have an autoresponder set up on your website and would like some assistance then give us a call or use the Contact page.

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