Over the last year I’ve come to admire and respect the work of Positus Consulting. They have provided spot-0n advice that works for our business. Because we respect her advice so much, we’ve asked her to share a bit of wisdom with us.

A guest post from Andra Watkins of Positus Consulting.

You DO want to grow your business

You want to grow your business. It’s what everyone wants, regardless of the season, ebb and flow of the economy or challenges presented by pesky competitors.

One of the keys to growing any business is knowing how and when to ask the right questions of key people. Sometimes, a focus group is the only way to get the biggest group of participants, but at POSITUS, we like to conduct individual interviews whenever possible.

By hiring a third party to individually ask a customer, vendor or employee key questions about your business, you are communicating several things to them that matter. Let’s take a look at each one of them.

Ask!

Your input is important to me. It is so important to you as a business owner that you hired someone to contact people individually to get that feedback. You’re conveying that the interviewee matters to your business by underscoring the crucial nature of their opinions and insights.

Your time is valuable. Individual interviews can often be conducted by telephone, and they can be timed for the convenience of the interviewee. By taking this approach, you’re communicating that time is precious; that you want to make giving feedback as simple as possible for the participant.

Your confidentiality matters. Lots of folks won’t participate in focus groups because they’re intimidated or they feel they cannot reasonably convey what they have to offer in front of a group. As a research tool, individual interviews with a third party allow each participant to speak freely and candidly in a completely confidential setting.

All of your comments are welcome – even the critical ones. By giving a participant a one-on-one forum with an impartial third party, you are underscoring that you want all relevant feedback – the good; the bad; and the ugly. The beauty of a third party is that the information can then be distilled and worded into relevant, meaningful input for dynamic business change.

I want to keep your business. Customers always like to feel special, and seeking out their opinions one-on-one is an ideal way to underscore that you want to keep their business for the long-term. With key customers, individual interviewing can be the key to keeping them in the “key” position for the life of your business.

You have been an instrument of change in my business. Getting one-on-one feedback is worthless without follow up. Once the information has been reviewed and crafted into specific strategies for growth and change, show people AND tell people how their input made a difference. Announce the changes you’ve made. Thank people personally. Be transparent about what you’re doing, helping everyone to see the value of their individual contributions.

Research is like concentrated dynamite

In every case where POSITUS has helped a client achieve double or triple digit growth, individual interviews have been a non-negotiable component of the strategic process. They are more affordable than a focus group, and the input gleaned is like concentrated dynamite. On more than one occasion, we’ve taken an entirely different strategic growth stance based solely on individual feedback, and that information is what helped the business explode with new growth.

And, isn’t that where you really want your business to be?

Ever wonder if you need a new logo? This funny infographic shares a few of the questions you need to ask yourself to determine if you do.

Ashley T. Caldwell of The Modern Connection and I were invited to lead a Twitter workshop for The Center for Women. Live5 News in Charleston came over to talk to us about Twittercide and how to stay out of trouble.

Twitter is a great tool to help you connect to current and potential customers, just be careful what you say.

When playing chess, strategy is the key to winning. It's no different when it comes to planning public relations for your business.

Just as Shira Levine writes in American Express Open‘s blog post on why you need strategic public relations, we’ve long championed knowing what you want to happen when planning your public relations campaign. Know your brand. Stay current. All your public relations must be aligned with a carefully planned business goal.

Levine’s six points to guide you in the development of a strategic pr campaign bear repeating:  (I’ve added my thoughts in blue beneath her thoughts.)

1. Be message-driven. Have goals and stick to communicating the most important message of your brand. Focus on driving mind share.

To which I add, know your message! Take time to comprehend your brand and don’t begin promoting your company just because you are “open.”

2. Consider geographic components. If the product is locally focused and distributed in specific places, don’t waste coverage in places where the product or service can’t be bought. Win the markets you have!

While it’s nice to get kudos from a national magazine, if you aren’t selling a product that is available across the country or on your website, you will not be growing your business. And isn’t that the goal?

3. Have a call to action. Your editorial should have a call to action for the consumer; for example, to visit your website or store. Focus on communicating the message of what exactly you want your consumer to do.

When developing a strategic campaign, it’s great to tie your publicity to an event, contest or limited time frame.

4. Understand what type of media you want and need for your message.Ten years ago the media landscape was much different. How you target print vs. electronic media is different. Weekly and daily publications operate differently.

“Recognize unconventional target audiences,” says Olguin. “That’s how we deal with our client: New Castle Brown Ale. For that client, a blogger or blog site like Thrillist works better strategically than USA Today.”

Recognize that media aren’t targets! You want to cultivate relationships, not just shoot news to them. Don’t let your press release become like a message in a bottle, cast out there just to see where it washes up.

5. Be time-driven. Have something in your PR campaign to tie the news back to. It could be a news peg, a hook, something newsworthy, etc. The launch of a product is always good. A new message for the marketplace can work. Just make sure it coincides with your business objective.

Just remember, public relations is like spring! It’s about news.

6. Recognize the power of the blogosphere. “Peer-to-peer communication is more valuable than category experts,” says Olguin “Tripadvisor and Yelp, for example, are incredibly important, but so is a blogger in Syracuse who says a restaurant is cool. So is Jason Chen from Gizmodo. Vertically-oriented blog writers live and breathe their category. Even if they aren’t trained on their topics they are super influential with the leverage they have over their followers. They can bring multiple placements, are easy to find, and you don’t have to spend much money to have a measurable impact.”

Blogs are a powerful and reach those who make purchasing decisions.

Know your brand. Know your message. Know your audience. Then strategically plan your public relations campaign.

Public speaking is proven, time-tested way to position your company as a knowledgeable, credible authority in your business segment or industry. It is one of the public relations tactics that continues to provide great return on your time-investment.

Develop a presentation

It is important to develop your talk or presentation on topics of interest to the audience. Your talk must not be an advertisement for your company. It must always be a way to share knowledge and leave the attendees more knowledgeable than when they arrived.

Get over your fear

Public speaking is a fearful thing for many, but there are many ways to lessen your fear. Start small and offer to contribute to meetings you attend. Practice speaking out when you are comfortable or join Toastmasters.

10 Tips to Gain Public Speaking Opportunities

1. Develop one or two talks of no more than 20 minutes length on current topics that are important to the types of buyers your firm serves.
2. Practice your presentation with colleagues, employees or friends. Ask them what they learned from your presentation and adjust your presentation so that your audience takes away what you intend that they take away.
3. Write a summary of your talk outlining your topic, what the attendees will learn or what benefits they will gain, the desired audience size and type, resources you provide (such as books, or take-away-notes), and facility / audio visual needs.
4. Make a list of the organizations, clubs and associations that have members who may benefit from the information you have to share.
5. Learn who books or plans programs and speakers for each of the groups.
6. Establish a relationship with these planners either by contacting them directly or asking a colleague or member of the group to introduce you.
7. Attend a meeting of the group, if meetings are open, or ask a colleague to invite you as a guest.
8. After gaining familiarity with the group and their normal procedures, adjust your summary to fit the group and send it to the program chair person with your request to be considered as a speaker, suggesting how you feel your presentation may be of benefit to the attendees.
9. Continually be aware of new groups and organizations and add them to your list.
10. Continue to attend association, organization and group meetings as possible, being aware of trends that effect members of the group so that you may be aware of new opportunities to speak.

There are a number of well known tactics in public relations and marketing that allow you to gain attention and set your business apart.

You’re the winner!

One of the most beloved of all time is the contest. Some contests are sweepstakes where a winner is selected at random after you “enter” a pool of qualified customers. The most famous of these is Publisher’s Clearing House Sweepstakes. Others are simple fishbowl lotteries of all entrants, such as the drawing of a business card at your local business networking group meeting. Still others are contests where entrants must comply with a set of rules. The most famous one of these that comes to mind is the Pillsbury Bake Off.

Marketing contests for small businesses

While these examples are associated with large corporations, there are many ways small businesses can implement these same concepts.

Charleston Magazine's Get Cooking Charleston contest requires entrants to use ingredients from Charleston

In Charleston for example, our local magazine just announced their Get Cooking Charleston! competition, a recipe contest and cook-off. The qualifications require all entrants to use ingredients that are either historically or geographically tied to Charleston. One of the sponsors is Piggly Wiggly Carolina whose marketing always makes the connection to Charleston’s culture and way of life. It’s smart of them to sponsor this competition. It supports their brand and positioning in the market. Same for Charleston Magazine.

Contest must be aligned with products & positioning

Your small business can do this too. If you are the maker of a product such as hand painted note cards hold an old fashioned letter writing contest. Perhaps you are a bar, you could hold a competition for the next new menu item or specialty cocktail.

Partnerships extend your reach

When you set up your contest, seek partners who may extend your reach into a new demographic, but perhaps have not yet reached. The classic example is a restaurant who wishes to reach wine aficionados and partners with a local or regional winery. You can share expenses, accomplish a common goal and cross market to each others lists.

Your company’s vendors can be your contest co-sponsors and larger vendors often have partnership marketing dollars that they can share with your small business. Homebuilders do this with their vendors quite frequently.

Enter rather than sponsor

However, you don’t have to hold the competition, you can enter a competition! The Get Cooking Charleston competition is a wonderful opportunity for businesses in the food and beverage industry segment.  Want to enter? Begin to look for local, regional and national competitions. You can enter them as an individual or as a representative of your business as Charleston entrepreneur Margaret Bjork of Private Eyes Undies did when she entered the “I am Free Enterprise” contest or just as Charleston singer Amanda L. did when she entered the Folger’s jingle contest.

Enter to win

If you enter a contest, enter to win; advice offered by internationally renowned opera singer Shirley Verrett during an opera master class. She said, “Don’t just try, bring your very best! Believe you’ll win and do everything you can to be the winner.” Do your business and your self proud.

And remember the advice of Thomas Jefferson:  “I’m a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.”

Who needs to be more efficient?

Most all of us have tips and tricks that we use to manage our business. No doubt you also have apps that you use and which allow you to manage your business more efficiently.  I have found a few great apps that I cannot live without and which help me manage my business.

These five applications have allowed me to boost my productivity.

KeePass

We all have a kadjillion usernames and passwords. Who can keep track of them all? Don’t put them in a spreadsheet or Word doc. Keep them in an encrypted database. KeePass, an OpenSource password management application,  is great for keeping me organized. It allows my business partner and me to sort, enter, retrieve and manage passwords from a simple interface. And when combined with DropBox, we can have our encrypted password files available whenever/wherever we log on with one of our computers.

Jott

I don’t know about you, but when I’m driving, I find that I think of all kinds of things I have to do. Instead of trying to hold all that in my mind, I Jott myself. Jott is a web based application that transcribes voice messages to text and then e-mails them and text messages them to the recipient.  I subscribe to Jott and when I call, the app takes all my notes to myself or others, and e-mails them to me and to the intended recipient. Jott interfaces with Microsoft Outlook and allows me to make appointments, tasks and draft e-mails. It interfaces with lots of other apps too. Jott is great for helping me track my mileage for business. I just Jott the beginning and ending odometer reading, and then add to my spreadsheet.

Skype

If you don’t Skype you should. We did away with our landlines and got Skype numbers for our business. We can call all over the continent for a very low flat-price. In addition, Skype makes conference calls a breeze. Just create a conference call group, add all the member’s numbers and click to call! Everyone on the line at one time in one place. Not only are conference calls easier, but virtual face to face meetings are too. And I can share my desktop as well, oh, and there’s chat function too.

Google Voice

I love my Google Voice! If I listed all the attributes of this wonderful app, you’d never read about anything else. So, I’ll list what is best to me. I can’t live without call forwarding and voice to text transcription that forwards the text message to my phone. Then there’s the Chrome Google Voice extension that allows me to call any number displayed on a website with the app which rings my designated number then connects me to my called number. It’s just like having a virtual assistant. Then there’s the Google Voice widget for my website which allows anyone to call me just by clicking!  And the other great perk of Google Voice is the ability to call back a number from the Google Voice mailbox and return to the mail box to manage/listen to more messages. It’s all very simple and complex–and all incredible!

Google Docs

Cloud apps are the best. I can create text documents, spreadsheets, presentations and share them right from the same screen with co-creators or editors. I can publish them to the web as pages with unique URLs too which makes the sharing of press releases easy. I can also easily add images, change the HTML or CSS attributes of any item.

What are your 5?

There are so many other apps that I’ve used to enhance the day-to-day management of my business. But, I’d love to know which ones you find indispensable!

Image properties and search engine results

While working with a client to create a blogging plan and editorial calendar, we reviewed the firm’s website.

I realized that the company didn’t have proper Alt Tags for their images and that their images were named with the “out of the camera” names common to digital cameras, like image5678.jpg.

Search Engines Like Alt Tags

When they support your SEO goals with proper Alt Tags and image names

By not having keyword relevant Alt Tags and image names as well as captions, this client and you may be missing an opportunity to increase your website’s inclusion in search engine results pages (SERPs.)

Google Likes Keyword Alt Tags

Google and other search engines search the Alt Tags and image titles and include images in their organic search results. In addition, web searchers are now getting more sophisticated in their searches and are searching images just as we search “normal” web content.

Image Properties

If you have a content managed website with a framework such as a Joomla, Drupal or WordPress you have the ability to make these changes. Image Properties for each image allow you to set the Alt Tag for each image. In WordPress, for example which is our preferred CMS, you can set these properties for each image in the Media Library or in an image gallery, such as a gallery created with NextGEN. Use your targeted keywords when adding Alt Tags and you’ll help your SERPs.

WordPress Media Library and Image Names

In the past when naming images, webmasters often used underscores between words in an image name. Underscores are not comprehensible to search engines so you should instead use hyphens between words. If you are using WordPress, you can set the name of the image in the Media Library when you import the image. WordPress does not require you to add the hyphens. Just remember to use keyword rich names for images that are relevant to the image content and post content.

Image Selection

When you select images for your blog posts, select images that are relevant to the post’s content and give them captions that are also relevant to the content. When you place the image in the page, place it near the most relevant content.

Images Can Support SEO Goals

Following these few guidelines will support your search engine optimization goals and will help your website’s rankings. If you’ve not followed these procedures in the past, you can update your site or have your webmaster do this for you. By doing this you will also be freshening up your content as well.

**picture frame image courtesy of designshard on flickr creative commons

Lessons learned

I’ve recently “moved houses” as our British friends say. In doing so, I’ve touched every piece of stuff that I own and have come to the conclusion that there is too much of it. The other realization that crystallized during this process is that some of the stuff should have been ditched long ago. Some items that I’d been keeping for sentimental reasons no longer have value, or function as they should, so they have been purged or donated to others who can use them.

It occurs to me that it’s the same with a company’s marketing, public relations and advertising. Every so often, we need to evaluate  to determine if the things we’ve kept have any use, purpose or even if they are functioning for our firm.

5 Steps to Stay Current

So here are my recommendations:

1. Annually review your advertising placements and determine which ones have actually served your firm. For example, are you still using the printed Yellow Pages? If so, determine how many new customers you received from this expense.
2. Annually review your website for functionality. Digital technology changes so fast and so often that a website designed and coded 3 years ago may now be out of date functionally.
3. Monthly (or weekly) review your website for updated content. Search engines regularly scan websites and index fresh content. As a matter of fact, they have a preference for fresh content. Blogging, project photos, recent honors and awards, client testimonials and reviews are all ways to add freshness to your site.
4. Every 5 years review your branding. Your branding should be something that will be relevant for many years so while you may not need rebranding it may need freshening up. In the last few years, brands such as Wal-Mart and ATT have revised their identities and messaging to be more contemporary. Your firm should do the same.
5. Annually review your financial allocations for marketing, public relations and promotions. If the competitive space in which your company performs is crowded, you may need to step up your game in order to stand out. You might do this by adding new activities, placements, or marketing personnel. You may not need to add anything to your budget; you may just need to shift your priorities. But, you won’t know until you evaluate.

Be proactive for better results

If you undertake these five items, you can be sure you won’t be in the position that I was when I moved and can be assured that your marketing communications will be more current.

photo credit: Flickr Creative Commons image from ARTS

I’m a member of a group blog, Dress4Dinner, a blog whose goal is to “bring back dinner” as a way to entertain in the home and “make it sexy” again. We each host a dinner party in our homes and write about our planning, execution and wrap up of the event. One of my blogging partners asked for advice on how to dress up her posts so they are more visually appealing and easier to read.

She took note of my use of subheads and the way images were being displayed in the posts and said she’d like to “dress up her posts a bit.” Here are the things that I suggested to her.

Use subheads like this

First, using subheads related to the following paragraph is a tidy way to eliminate long blocks of unbroken copy. Second, for the reader with little time, subheads allow for quick scanning of pages as well. Third, you can make them keyword rich and support your SEO goals.

Use images to add impact

There are many sources of images. A few that I’ve used are royalty free stock sites such as iStock and Stock.XCHNG. Another good source of images for blogs is flickr creative commons attribution license area. A note:  There are restrictions on the usage of all these sites’ images. You must adhere to the terms of use for each site and each work.

I like to use image management extensions that provide more flexibility in your blog posts. In our WordPress based blogs and websites created for our clients, we use the NextGEN gallery tools. You can display a group of images as thumbnails, as a slide show or as an image gallery. While the gallery options in WordPress have improved, they are still not optimal. NextGEN is very easy to manage and use and really dresses up your blog posts.

Other tips on writing better blog posts

Several posts of recent have offered tips and thoughts on how to create compelling and punchy content. HubSpot’s blog post addresses ways to create posts that are designed to support your SEO and Internet Marketing goals. Robert Holland on Ragan offers his tips to make blog posts sticky.

To paraphrase what my high schools friends would say to me in 1973, “write on.”