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?

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.”

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

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

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.”

Tonight I’ll be leading a workshop at the Charleston Center For Women with Shauna Heathman of Mackenzie Image Consultants. We’ll be speaking about how to discover your personal brand.

So, my antennae are out and I’m hyper aware of articles regarding branding and this one crossed my bow.  Like a hurricane! Graham Button is smack on.

However, I do take a bit of an issue with his inference that we Boomers are out the door with our “limited shelf life.” Unlike spoiled milk, we aren’t done yet. We still hold the reins of a great amount of wealth and influence. The question I’d rather see asked is, “How many of us are following the tide of the social media revolution?” Women of my generation are the fastest growing group on Facebook and carry the purse for our generation.

His take on women of the Millennial generation is absolutely precise. I work with many of these women and there is no doubt that they will put forward the first woman president.

He references the Net Promoter Score which one of my colleagues has been using for many years.

So go read the article and share your thoughts with me.

A revolution deconstructed

If you’re still struggling to understand the changes in marketing, advertising and public relations, this article pulls it all together in 10 succinct points and ends with a poetic appeal.

Powerful words

If you don’t have time to read the article, watch this video. It will give you something to think about today.

Typography from Ronnie Bruce on Vimeo.

Typography Animation project for class

Poem by Taylor Mali (www.TaylorMali.com)

Today I had to call a provider of service that I’d hired for some work to inquire about a date for service. The sales rep, said, “Oh, I asked the operations office to call you. They haven’t?” I couldn’t believe that for a very expensive customer transaction he’d not called me himself. Sure he must have been busy, but as someone about to spend several thousand dollars with him, he certainly could pick up the phone.

Marketing begins with communication

Marketing begins with our customer service communications. It’s very easy to lose a customer due to poor communication. I’ve never heard of someone who lost a customer due to over communication.

We all know that e-mail is the most frequently used business communications tool these days. Fast on its heels is texting. But neither of these communications methods carries my tone, inflection or feeling. Some people resort to using smilies, but I’m still not fond of them in professional communication, even though I’ve used them from time to time.

E-mail can get lost

E-mail does have the advantage of providing a written record of communication, but I can’t assume that my e-mail always arrives at it’s intended destination. E-mail can vanish into the ether. I can request “Read Receipts” from recipients of my e-mail, but not all browsers or mail clients support them. I’ve quit using Read Receipts and now call to be sure someone has received my e-mail. Is this double the work? Perhaps it is. But it does allow another touch point for communications.

Face to face meetings may take time, but are when client relationships are established.

We must remind ourselves that the phone is better than e-mail, but face to face is still better. As we all get siloed, we need to remember that our facial expressions and our body language give our clients the entire message.

Face to face meetings

While a face to face meeting takes time, it is often the precise thing to reinforce or build a good client relationship. It’s very easy for me to be lazy and think of the time involved traveling to another location, but when the client is investing significantly in my and my services, they deserve a face to face meeting. But I can also request that they meet me or offer to host a meeting, especially if we need technology that is only in my office.

If I don’t have time to drive across town, or my client is in another state, I can use Skype or other web cam video to have a face to face. If my client isn’t geographically close and they aren’t tech savvy or prefer not to use a web cam, at least I can use the phone.

Communication preferences

Each customer has a communications preference too. It’s good to learn early on which style my client prefers. Then I can be sure I’m getting their attention when I communicate with them in that channel.

We each want to feel important and respected. Communication done right provides those intangibles to my clients.

E-mail marketing is so common these days, that many business owners forget the point of it:   To engage and provide information that causes the customer to transact business with your company.

Your e-mail newsletter should:

• Be CAN-SPAM compliant. You say, “What’s that? I don’t spam.” Well, if you add people to your mailing list and then send them your latest news updates without their permission, you are in violation of the most important part of the law. From the FTC:

…the CAN-SPAM Act doesn’t apply just to bulk email. It covers all commercial messages, which the law defines as “any electronic mail message the primary purpose of which is the commercial advertisement or promotion of a commercial product or service,” including email that promotes content on commercial websites. The law makes no exception for business-to-business email. That means all email – for example, a message to former customers announcing a new product line – must comply with the law.

Assuming that you are compliant with the law, what is next on the list of important information about your e-mail marketing?

• Be visually appealing. There is a reason good design works. The brain assimilates information in a particular order. A professionally  designed template (most commercial e-mail marketing services offer them and you can customize them to suit your needs) is important to use. Don’t use 5 fonts in every version (bold, italic, all caps—in fact avoid all caps like the plague.) Don’t make your newsletter look like a bad church newsletter.
• Offer information that in keeping with your brand’s message and which is of interest to the reader. It is better to avoid sending a newsletter than send one with information that is not of interest to the reader. If you don’t know what to write about, ask your customers what is important to them and then write about that.
• Make sure it is well written. Check your use of pronouns as well as subject and verb agreement.
• Use photos. Remember a picture tells a story and is worth a thousand words is not just all hyperbole.
• Have a call to action. Request your customer’s interaction.
• Monitor and test subject lines. Not all subject lines are of interest. Most e-mail programs allow you to test your subjects to see which produce quicker opens and higher open rates.
• Monitor open rates. So you know who is reading your newsletter and when. With fine tuning you can get your open rates higher by monitoring how soon after receiving readers open or what time of the day gets the most opens.

photo credit; gainsp2003 on flickr creative commons

CharlestonCurrents.com featured an article from me in their issue on Thursday, 29 April, 2010. I’ve re-printed it here or you can go to the issue to read it.

In the world of nature everything is about opportunity.

This truth was apparent the other day when we heard a thump on the roof of our office. As I looked out of the window a red tailed hawk rolled off the roof with a mourning dove in his talons. They rolled around in the underbrush and then the hawk took flight to the cover of a low growing live oak. There he perched to feast on his meal of opportunity; the mourning dove.

Many reading this will think the hawk cruel for devouring the dove and some might wish for the demise of the hawk. From where I sit, I think this is a lesson in seizing opportunity.

As a small business owner, how hungry are you?

If you are hungry, how do you find your next project? Do you do as the hawk and fly across your territory watching for the slightest twitch or negligence? The truth is that the dove only became hawk food because he was not placing his attention where it needed to be: on being aware of what was happening around him. It’s the same in business. If someone “eats our lunch” in business, it’s because we may have been negligent one too many times.

Be aware

Whether we are in an economic recession, depression or boom, being too satiated keeps us from being aware. Throughout nature, critters have a way to know when opportunity arrives. Spiders sense the filaments of their web twitching; fish feel the vibrations of the water moving as flies land on its surface. Animals have a territory that they diligently monitor, making it their business to know what happens in their territory. We many not need to act on all the intelligence we gain, but it is our responsibility to know. And we must be prepared to respond to our intuition and the cues we gather from our intelligence.

Here are a few tips to keep the business hawks out of our dovecote:

1. Be vigilant to all opportunities.
2. Follow up on all leads.
3. Respond in a timely manner to inquiries.
4. Even when you don’t think you need to, circulate.
5. Remain powerful; not only physically, but mentally. Knowing you are capable is half the way to gaining the opportunity.
6. Don’t judge until you have all the information needed to make a decision.