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Why Your Competitors are Thriving and You’re Not!

Content Marketing, Email Marketing, Local Marketing

What are your competitors doing that you don’t know about?

That might sound like a paranoid question, but it’s not. It’s a marketing must. If you don’t know what your top competitors are up to, you can’t beat them. It’s that simple.

Of course, you can’t expect the competition to turn over secrets to you – but you don’t need them to do that to be informed. All you need to do is observe, think, and ask a few key questions about what they’re doing.

Where Are They Marketing Themselves?

The first thing you need to know is where and how they’re finding customers. You don’t need a copy of their marketing blueprint to figure it out. Here are some suggestions.

Check out their website and make note of their most important keywords. You probably have some keywords in common, but you should still look at their content to figure out which words they’re targeting.
Search the keywords you’ve identified on Google and Bing to see if they’re advertising with either search engine.
Search social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn to look at their profiles and see the kind of content they’re sharing. Your Google search may also turn up a few retargeting ads for you to check out.
Track their social media mentions.

You may want to create a spreadsheet to track who’s marketing where – and how they’re doing it. Don’t forget to check sites like Tumblr, Snapchat, and Reddit. They don’t get mentioned as often as Facebook and Instagram, but they still offer marketing opportunities.

What Makes Them Unique?

You’ve spent some time figuring out how to distinguish yourself from your competitors – but how do they distinguish themselves from you?

A brand’s Unique Value Proposition tells you a lot about how they see themselves. Are they branding themselves as innovators? Solid and reliable? Affordable? Luxury?

You can pick up a lot of clues about your competitors’ unique qualities by looking at their websites and ads. What you learn can help you figure out how to be more competitive.

What Marketing Techniques Are They Using?

It’s not enough to know where your competitors are putting their marketing dollars. You also need to know what they’re doing with it. It can take some time to get a handle on their strategy, but it will be time well spent.

You may notice that they’re running both search engine ads and retargeting ads. That may indicate that their target audience requires a lot of nurturing before they buy. Or, you may notice that they’re relying heavily on customer-created content on social
media, and that could inspire you to create some brand ambassadors of your own.

You should also make note of the kinds of content that performs best for them in terms of engagement. Are they posting lots of videos or sticking mostly to photos? Are they using infographics or instructographics? Every technique they use could point in the direction of more effective marketing for you.

What Are Their Strengths and Weaknesses?

As you observe your competitors’ marketing and check out their websites, you’ll probably notice that there are some things they do exceptionally well. Maybe they’ve got killer blog posts that fans love and that get tons of shares on social media. Or, maybe they’ve got a YouTube channel with hundreds of useful videos.

At the same time, you should look for things they’re not doing so well. Maybe their website’s out of date or their social media posting is irregular. Maybe they haven’t done a good job of differentiating themselves in the market.

Make note of anything that might be helpful. Your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses can help you fine-tune your own marketing strategy.

What What Are Their Values?

It’s become increasingly important to consumers to know that the brands they buy have a moral center. You know that because you’ve seen the way brands can suffer when they misbehave. Customers can turn on brands in a flash if they feel they don’t share their core values.

If your competitors are affiliated with causes or charities, it’s important to know about it. You should look especially hard at any marketing efforts that tout their involvement and values. It’s quite common for brands to dedicate pages on their websites to their charitable efforts and values.

Millennials put a very high premium on corporate values both when they seek employment and when they shop. If you’re not clearly articulating your values and your competitors are, you might be at a disadvantage.

Keep in mind that when you express your values, you should look for causes that align with them. For example, a lot of food manufacturers and restaurants get involved with local food pantries and soup kitchen or sponsor food drives for hungry families.

How Do They Engage Fans?

Perhaps the most important question to ask is what your competitors are doing to engage their followers and fans. Engagement can mean a lot of different things from reading a Facebook post to creating unique, brand-based content – but it matters at every level.

One of my favorite ways to track engagement is to look at my competitors’ CTAs on social media. What are they asking fans to do? They might:

Ask fans to vote by asking them to like a post for one option and share it for the other.
Ask a question and encourage fans to answer in the comments.
Sponsor a contest and give entries to fans who like, comment, and share their posts.
Ask fans to create content and use a special hashtag they’ve created for that purpose.

You can also make note of the kind of content that gets the most engagement. Do they get five times as many likes on the videos they share as on photographs? Are they sponsoring contests to incentivize engagement? These are all good questions to ask.

7 Ways You Can Market Your Business Better

Content Marketing, Email Marketing, Local Marketing

Is your marketing strategy helping you accomplish your goals?

I’m willing to bet it isn’t – at least not all of them. And, if it’s not, that means there are things you could be doing better.

The tricky thing, of course, is figuring out what those things are. It’s not like they’re going to walk up and announce themselves to you, right? (But wouldn’t it be great if they did?)

Since you can’t count on marketing suggestions knocking on your door, let me help. Here are 7 things you can start doing right now to market your business better.

#1: Identify Your Unmet Goals Where You Expected to Do Better

The first step is to review your marketing plan and business plan and figure out what you still haven’t accomplished. You might have specific goals that remain out of reach, like attracting a certain number of new customers this year or passing a profit milestone.

Even if you haven’t articulated a goal, you might still feel disappointed about some of your marketing. Maybe readers aren’t finding your blog or you’re not getting as many people to sign up for your newsletter as you’d hoped.

Whatever it is that isn’t meeting your expectations, write it down.

#2: Update Your Market Research

The answers to marketing difficulties are nearly always found in the data. If it’s been a while since you conducted any serious market research, it’s time to retest those waters and see what’s new.

You should be gathering two sets of information about the people in your target audience. They are:

Demographic information, including age, gender, marital status, education, income, and geographical location; and
Psychographic information, including likes, dislikes, problems, concerns, and preferences.

The information you collect is what you’ll use to revamp your marketing to connect with the people most likely to buy from you.

#3: Sneak a Peek at Your Competitors’ Marketing

Competitor research doesn’t get enough attention, and if you’ve never checked out your competitors’ marketing for ideas, you’re missing out.

You should be looking to see:

How they differentiate themselves from their competitors
Which keywords they’re targeting
Which social media sites they’re using
How many followers they have
Where they’re spending money on advertising
How they get customers to engage with them

This is such an important topic that I wrote a whole article about it this month. Make sure you don’t take your competitors for granted.

#4: Find Out Where Your Target Audience Is

Once you’ve evaluated your competitors, it’s time to start thinking about where to focus your marketing efforts to reach your target audience. For example, if your customers are mostly women and you have an aspirational product, then your marketing budget will be well spent on Pinterest. If you’re a B2B company, you should focus on LinkedIn.

You’ll also want to think beyond social media and ask how your target audience will find you. Remember that voice search is on the rise and think about where people are going to look for your products – and how they’ll do it.

#5: Revamp Your Marketing Plan

This is step is a big one – but it’s necessary if you want to achieve your marketing and growth goals. Take all the information you’ve gathered and sit down and rethink your marketing plan. You should be planning:

Which short-term and long-term goals are most important to you
How much money you’re prepared to spend to achieve them
What methods you will use to reach your goals (content marketing, email marketing, retargeting, etc.)
Which platforms you want to use (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google, Bing, etc.)
What kind of content you will create
How you will track your results and measure your goals

In other words, this should be a complete, soup-to-nuts plan of how you will achieve your goals.

#6: Automate as Much as Possible

Marketing automation can save you a ton of time and money as you work to achieve your goals. If you try to do everything yourself, you may wind up missing deadlines or failing to keep up with your intentions.

I’m a big believer in email automation for marketing. There are tons of good marketing email providers, including companies like AWeber and Constant Contact. You can use them to create email sequences to send out to your subscribers – or hire someone to create them for you.

I also suggest using automation to monitor your social media mentions and post on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites. You’ll need to set up the posts and schedule them, but the beauty of this approach is that it means you don’t need to worry about remembering when to post something. The automation will do it for you.
You may also want to consider setting up automatic replies on your Facebook page. Lots of companies use bots to handle customer questions and increase engagement – and you should think about it, too.

#7: Test Everything (and I Do Mean Everything)

The final step is not to assume that your new marketing plan is perfect. Even seasoned marketers make mistakes. They guess wrong and need to correct course.
Tracking your results will help you figure out what’s working and what isn’t. You should know:

How many people open the emails you send
What your click-through and conversion rates are
Which social media posts get the most engagement

Once you know which efforts aren’t delivering, you can test new versions of them. For emails, it might mean testing new headlines, content, and calls to action. Or, if you notice that video content gets three times as much engagement on Facebook as everything else you do, you may need to revisit your marketing budget and allot more resources to video.

And there they are…

Marketing isn’t an exact science but doing these 7 things can help you realign your marketing strategy with your most important business goals – and at the same time, increase your profits and help you attract new customers.

Here’s Why Your Business Isn’t Growing!

Content Marketing, Email Marketing, Local Marketing, Small Business

Your business is in a rut.

And guess what? Even if it isn’t right now, it will be some day. It happens to every business. The marketing techniques that worked last year, or last month, are no longer as effective as they used to be. You try everything you can think of, but it doesn’t work.

You’re stuck.

But, the good news is that it doesn’t need to be that way. When your business gets stuck and stops growing, there are things that you probably aren’t doing that you can do to kick things back into high gear.

Ready to get things going again? Here are some of the most common things that cause business to stagnate.

You Don’t Have an Email List

This one’s a biggie for me – so much so that one of the first questions I ask new clients is:

Do you have an email list?

I’m always amazed when people don’t. It’s so easy to do and email marketing earns great returns. There’s really no excuse for skipping email marketing as a method of growing your business.

And, here’s the thing. It is very easy to build a list. All you need to do is come up with a lead magnet that’s designed to appeal to your target audience. It could be a short report or eBook, a cheat sheet, a tip sheet, a value-packed video, or even a template.

Then, you create a landing page around your cheat sheet, advertise it, and boom! You’ve got an email list.

You’re Dialing in Your Marketing Strategy

Let’s face it – most small business owners don’t have a ton of time for marketing. They might set aside an hour or two to deal with it each week, but it’s often the first thing to get pushed aside when time is tight.

I get why that is, but it’s a mistake. A big one. Why? Because marketing is one of the best ways to engage with your existing customers and attract new ones.

If it’s been a while since you revamped your marketing strategy, here are some tips to help you get back on track.

Analyze your current marketing campaigns to see which ones have stopped working. If you’re not getting a great conversion rate, then keeping a campaign running is a waste of your money.
Come up with some killer content that’ll appeal to your target audience. It could be a video, a blog post, or an infographic. Just make sure that it’s irresistible and actionable.
Build a marketing campaign around your new content. Use whatever platforms will allow you to reach your target audience. They could include Facebook ads, Google AdWords, or even native advertising.
Test each element of your campaign and track the results. Testing can be time-consuming, but it’s truly the best way to fine-tune your campaigns until they’ve delivering the results you need.

Most importantly, make tracking your campaigns an ongoing concern. When a campaign stops delivering stellar results, make a change immediately.

You Don’t Have a Referral Program

If you’re not asking your existing customers for referrals, you’re making a big mistake. Referrals are a great way to attract new customers. They’re free (or pretty close to it) and they allow you to turn your valued customers into ambassadors for your brand.

It doesn’t take much to create a successful referral program. You’ll want to start by deciding how to incentivize referrals. Your customers are more likely to help you out if there’s something in it for them. It could be a free product, a discount on your services, or even a cash incentive. Figure out what’s most likely to appeal to them.

Then, you’ll need to tell your customers about the referral program. If you have employees, get them involved. Make sure every one of your existing customers knows about the program. Then, when you get new referrals, make sure to deliver your incentives immediately.

Your Brand Messaging isn’t Consistent

What do people think of first when they hear your brand name? If you’re not sure what the answer to that question is, it’s a sign that your brand messaging is falling short of the mark.

Consistent brand messaging is one of the cornerstones of great marketing and business growth. If your brand message is diluted, then it’s time to tighten it up.

Let’s start with some of the most common ways that a brand message gets diluted:

Your brand message has evolved but you haven’t had the time, money, or inclination to update your website to reflect the changes.
You’ve updated your website but haven’t bothered to update your social media pages and other online content to match.
You’ve added new products that have expanded your brand beyond what your website says.

The key is to identify how your brand has changed, refine your message, and then standardize your branding across all platforms.

You Aren’t Using Social Media to Your Advantage

How are you using social media? If you’re not regularly getting leads from social media, then you’re probably not using it to your best advantage.

Your social media posts should be engaging and shareable. That means that you can’t simply post a sales pitch and call it a day. Your social media content must be:

Tailored to your target audience
Valuable and actionable
Designed to be shared

Every post you put out should include a specific call to action. Not every CTA should be sales-oriented. Some can encourage readers to comment or share your content. The key is to use every social media post as a way of expanding your reach and attracting new customers.

10 Marketing Tools You Aren’t Using – But Should Be!

Content Marketing, Email Marketing, Social Media Marketing

A marketer is only as good as the tools they use.

That’s easy to say, but it glosses over one of the real challenges that small business owners must face. With so many marketing tools to choose from, how do you know which ones are worthwhile?

It’s a good question – and I’m here to help with the answer. Here are 10 marketing tools that you aren’t using yet, but should be.

#1: Meltwater

Meltwater is a tool that lets you accomplish several marketing goals at once. With it, you can:

Monitor your brand in real time, including tracking brand mentions
Identify your best-performance keywords
Find the latest trends that apply to your business
Analyze your marketing campaigns
Create drafts of your publications days, weeks, or months in advance

Best of all, it collects all your results in one place so you can easily compare and evaluate your data and adjust your marketing campaigns accordingly. Pricing is based on your needs, and you can fill out their form to get more information.

#2: Google Alerts

Google Alerts is a tool that Google created to help businesses keep track of the latest information that’s relevant to your brand. You can log in to Google Alerts using your Google ID or Gmail address. Then, you can set up alerts as you choose.

Here are some of the things you can do with Google Alerts:

Track mentions of your brand
Track activity related to your top keywords
Track what your competitors are doing online

This is a free tool, and a good marketing option for beginners who want to wrap their heads around the web activity that’s most relevant to their companies.

#3: Simply Measured

Simply Measured is a social analytics tool that’s owned by Sprout Social. You can use it to dig into the activity on your social media accounts. For example, you can:

Here are some of the things you can do with Google Alerts:

Discover what interests your audience
Learn which content is driving engagement and interest
Identify emerging trends with advanced social listening
Collect detailed analytics to help you fine-tune your marketing campaigns

Simply Measured is one of the most powerful social analytics tools available. You can learn more and sign up for a free trial here.

#4: Facebook Insights

Facebook Insights is a tool that Facebook provides to its business customers. It offers marketers an impressive collection of analytics and statistics that can help you fine-tune your Facebook ads. Some of the information you’ll get includes:

Gender, age, and geographical breakdowns of your audience
Information about how people are finding your page
Data about the people who click through to your website
Breakdowns of your ad spending, including each ad’s reach and engagement
Information about which posts perform the best

It’s a deep well of information you can use to refine your Facebook ads – and you can apply the insights to your advertising on other platforms, too. Facebook Insights is a free tool. You can access it by clicking the Insights tab on your business page.

#5: Promorepublic

Promorepublic is a social media scheduling tool that allows you to schedule your posts easily across multiple platforms. They also provide some cool content creation tools, including:

More than 6,000 handcrafted templates
More than 100,000 images

Their services are broken down into self-service and full-service, and from there you can add options that include social monitoring and intelligent ads. There’s a free trial available for the self-service model. You can get more information here.

#6: AdEspresso

As its name suggests, AdEspresso is like a shot of caffeine for your advertising strategy. They have a huge gallery of advertising examples you can browse online. (As of this writing, the gallery was being updated, but they also offer free eBooks with sample ads. You can find them here.)

They have tools to help you create, manage, and analyze your ads. They also have a great blog and other educational material to help you perfect your ads and grow your business. You can get a 14-day free trial. After that, they have multiple tiers available, which you can learn about here.

#7: Promo

Promo is a video creation tool that even people with no video production experience can use to create professional-looking videos to post on their websites or social media. Users get access to:

A library of tested video templates to use
Access to thousands of images
Tools to help you create videos perfect for Facebook, Instagram, and more
Top-notch customer service

You can get a free trial, and after that they have three plan tiers to choose from. Find more information here.

#8: Canva

Canva is one of my favorite content creation tools. They offer an impressive collection of things to help you create memorable social media posts, including:

A library of professional templates for everything from Facebook posts to newsletters
Easy drag-and-drop design features
A huge collection of images and graphics
Photo editing tools

Canva is simple to use even for people with no design experience. Best of all, it’s completely free. You can create an account by signing up with Facebook or Twitter. Learn more here.

#9: SpyFu

SpyFu is an espionage tool for marketing. Using it, you can track your competitors marketing activity, including:

Every keyword they buy on AdWords
Every ad variation they’ve tried
Every rank change

Using it, you’ll get a huge amount of information that you can use to piggyback on your competitors’ ideas and – just as importantly – find holes in their marketing strategies. They offer three plans and all of them come with a 30-day, money-back guarantee. Learn more here.

#10: Hemingway App

Hemingway App is an editing tool that can help you improve the quality of your written social media posts and ads. When you plug text into the app, it will highlight it to show ways of improving it. For example, it targets:

Overly long or complex sentences
Long words
Adverbs and weak phrases
Passive voice

You can format your text right from the toolbar. It’s a free desktop app and you can see examples of how it works and download it here.

Your tools are waiting…

The tools I’ve mentioned here are my very favorite marketing assistants. You may not use all of them, but I encourage you to check them out and add a few to your toolbox.

Top 7 Marketing Trends You Cant Afford to Ignore

Content Marketing, Email Marketing, Local Marketing, Social Media Marketing

Who cares about marketing trends, right?

If that’s your attitude, I get it. Some trends are here and gone before you even have time to figure out how to take advantage of them. It’s easy to dismiss trends as fleeting.

But the truth is… some aren’t fleeting. Some are here to stay. As the year ends and 2019 approaches, it’s a good time to take stock of your current marketing strategy. And, if you’ve been ignoring all trends in favor of the tried and true, then guess what? 2019 is the year to shake things up.

Now, I’m not saying that you need to jump on every trend as soon as you become aware of it. I am saying that I’ve noticed that a lot of small businesses aren’t taking advantage of the big trends – the ones that, for better or worse, aren’t going anywhere. And with that in mind, here are 7 trends that you can no longer afford to ignore in 2019.

1: Artificial Intelligence

I wrote about artificial intelligence last month, so you already know I think it’s important for small businesses to embrace this technology.

In marketing, the use of AI in the form of chatbots has taken root and many small businesses are adopting it. The bottom line is that a well-programmed chatbot can improve your customer service and increase sales.

AI is also becoming increasingly important in the field of marketing analytics. You can use it to make market predictions and get ahead of the curve as your audience’s preferences change and develop. And, let’s not forget that programmatic advertising – which uses AI to automate ad buying – is on the rise.

2: Personalization

One-size-fits-all marketing is rapidly becoming a thing of the past. While there’s still some benefit to targeting ads to a large audience, the trend increasingly is toward the kind of one-to-one marketing that Amazon has done brilliantly for years.

If every visitor to your website is seeing the same content, it’s time to think about how to personalize it. You can do that using cookies that make recommendations based on a user’s previous activity on your site. Or, you can allow users to choose the type of content that they want to see. Either way, the goal is to make every customer feel that you’re speaking directly to them.

Incidentally, the same trend should be applied to email marketing. Sending emails that are triggered by a customer’s behavior is three times more effective than sending batch emails – something to keep in mind in the new year.

3: Influencer Marketing

Ad blocking has been a challenge for marketers for years now, but the recent stats show that it’s now impacting mobile advertising as well as desktop. What can you do to get around it?

I’ve written about influencer marketing before, but it really has proven to be one of the best ways to engage with potential customers without needing to worry about ad blockers. It uses influential social media accounts that appeal to your audience.

It can take a bit of trial and error to find the right influencers but once you do, influencer marketing can be a cost-effective way of attracting new customers to your business.

4: Video Marketing

If you’re not making marketing videos to share with your audience, it’s time to stop pretending that video is too expensive (or too technical) to be worth your while. Research shows that businesses who use video marketing grow 49% faster than businesses that don’t. How can you ignore that?

The good news is that video doesn’t need to be expensive and you don’t need to be Spike Lee to make a terrific marketing video that will attract new customers. Even a simple Facebook Live session where you take questions from your followers can help you grow your business.

5: Social Messaging Apps

Did you know that every month, businesses exchange 2 billion (that’s with a B!) Facebook Messenger apps with their customers? That’s not just a trend – it’s a tsunami.

Using social messaging tools like Messenger or WhatsApp can help you connect with customers on a personal level. And – hearkening back to the first trend I mentioned – artificial intelligence can help you do it.

Creating a chatbot for Messenger or any other app is a relatively easy (and affordable) thing to do. A lot of companies use chatbots to suggest products or answer simple questions. That means that using messenger apps is an extremely effective way to connect with your existing audience and attract new potential buyers for your products and services.

6: Voice Search – smart speaker

If you’ve said “Okay Google” or asked Siri, Alexa, or Cortana to find something for you online, then you know that voice search is here to stay. In fact, researchers estimate that 50% of all searches will be voice searches by 2020 – and that means that it’s time to optimize your web content for voice search now.

You can start by using the language of voice search – optimizing for the terminology that your audience is most likely to use. You may also want to start thinking about audio-only ads. It’s probable that you’ll start hearing sponsored content on Alexa before long. This is an opportunity for you to beat out your competitors who may be lagging in this area.

7: Social Media Stories

If you’ve logged onto any social media account lately, you’ve probably noticed something: stories. Facebook may prompt you to add to your story, and other platforms – including YouTube – have jumped on the trend.

A social media story is temporary content that can be used to trigger your customers’ FOMO (that’s fear of missing out.) It’s ideal for seasonal promotions and deals, and it can be a great way to engage your audience. If you’re not already using social media stories to connect with your customers, 2019 is the year to start.

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