Off-Page SEO Can Be A Great Tool If Utilized Correctly

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Hello everyone Andrew Houglum here with Direct Business Marketing talking with you today about the importance of using off-page search engine optimization tools. Today we are going to talk about a couple of off-page SEO pages that can be a great form of advertising for your business. When I use the term off-page I am referring to something that is not on your actual website but other directory or specialized websites.

There are numerous places to find your business throughout the internet using off-page SEO but today I wanted to focus on a couple that I find work the best for a business. The first one is Google Places and it can be found easily by searching for your business on Google Maps. Once you have located your business on Google Maps you can claim that location on their map in order to control the data and information that is associated with it. The next option is a website called Yelp. Stop by Yelp.com to claim your business or create a profile for your business if one does not already exist. Yelp is a website used by consumers to post pictures and reviews of your business so keeping your information accurate is very important. When using both Google Places and Yelp it is important to encourage your happy customers to post comments and reviews to boost your business profile.

These are just two of the many off-page SEO options you can find online that can be a great asset if your information is up to date and accurate. Once again my name is Andrew Houglum with Direct Business Marketing please contact me with any questions about developing your marketing strategy. Also, make sure to download my Marketing Assesment tool from my website to get a good understanding of how to development your marketing strategy. Thank you for your time and I look forward to speaking with you soon.

Your Call To Action: What’s In It For Your Customer?

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Hello again, my name is Granison Shines at Direct Business Marketing. Thanks for coming to our Get Direct live webinar series where today we are going to continue our conversation about your call to action. One of the main questions you want to address that the client is asking themself is, “What’s in it for me?”

Let’s go through three points that I really want to emphasize about your call to action. One, your client is asking, “What is in it for me?” They’re not going to give you the exchange of their name and email address so you can convert them from a prospect to a lead until they answer that question for themself. When you take that into consideration, you also want to consider that a call to action should give or should have some value to the client or prospect; all they care about is what they’re going to get out of it. If you really want to make it valuable to the client give them some really good information, something tangible. Third, can they use this today or right away? It has more value or more weight if they can answer this question right away and know if it’s valuable to them.

Again, I am Granison Shines with Direct Business Marketing. Please feel free to contact me at 602.369.8119 or [email protected]. I would like to remind you to join us every Wednesday for our Get Direct live webinar series where we provide you with information relevant to running a successful marketing campaign for your business. Please also feel free to download our marketing assessment from htto://DirectBusinessMarketing.com/ma. Our marketing assessment will ask you a simple series of questions to help you determine which types of marketing you should use in regards to your business and customer base.

Social Media Marketing: Where Do You Begin?

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Hello again, this is Granison Shines, Chief Marketing Officer at Direct Business Marketing. Today we’re going to talk about social media and when you should get started. I’m glad you asked this question because I’m going to tell you some really good advice. First, pick one social site to start with and stay active with it. Get it really underneath your wings so you can elevate your company, status and industry; learn the rules and nuances of just one social media site first. For example, if you choose Facebook first, set up your page, make sure it’s appropriately monitored and know how to look at the statistics. Once you’ve gotten completely comfortable with this, then you can branch out to the next social media site of your choosing.

It’s important that you follow these steps for each social media site that you want to have a business account for. The set up should be a lot easier the second time around because all of the same information from your first account is available for you to us. The best advice I can give you for mastering social media marketing is to pick one social media site, become a pro at it and then move on to the next social media site that you’d like to target.

Again, I’m Granison Shines with Direct Business Marketing. You can reach me at 602.369.8119 or email me at [email protected]. Remember, you can always download our free marketing assessment at https://directbusinessmarketing.com/ma to help you determine which marketing avenues may be best for your business. I’d also like to encourage you to join us each Wednesday at 10am PST for our Get Direct live webinar series where we discuss all things relevant to the marketing industry. Thanks for joining me today and I look forward to speaking with you again soon.

Utilizing Google Keyword Tool To Target New Customers

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Hello and welcome to Direct Business Marketing’s Get Direct live webinar series. Thanks for joining me again today for another helpful video on how to better the marketing plan of your business. Today we’re going to talk about a simple trick to ensure all of your blog posts are as targeted as possible.

I was actually talking to a client the other day that asked about Google analytics and looking at the stats of their website to see what they should blog about. This is actually the opposite of what you want to do. Google analytics are great to see who’s coming to your site, where they’re coming from and how you can improve user experience on your website. What you want to do with new content is grab new people, people who are searching for things that aren’t already driving them to your site.

A great tool to do that is called the Google Keyword Tool. You can use this tool to search around and find what people are searching on. I would encourage you to use it, find what people are searching on in your business and use those search phrases to target them in the titles and body content of your blog posts. Of course, if you’re not blogging, you should be to give a great user experience, to showcase your expertise and drive more business to your site.

Again, I’m Andrew Houglum and here’s my contact information; you can reach me via telephone at 602.571.5803 or send me an email at [email protected]. I’d encourage you to go to our website, DirectBusinessMarketing.com/ma, and download our marketing assessment to start advancing your business marketing today. Thank you again for joining me and I look forward to seeing you next week for our continuing Get Direct live webinar marketing series.

Posting Unsocial Content On Facebook

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Today on Direct Business Marketing’s webinar we’re going to talk about something we get asked rather frequently on Facebook, “How can I improve my Facebook presence? How can I attract and connect with more people on Facebook?”

One of the keys to doing that is your content and what you’re producing. One mistake that we see frequently is creating crappy content on Facebook. First you have to understand how Facebook works in order to be successful on Facebook. First, there’s you, then your friends, and then friends of your friends. The goal is to get content out to friends of your friends. You need to create content that will get ‘liked’ or ‘commented on’ by your friends so that it’ll get promoted to the next level and their friends will see it. The important thing to remember when you’re generating content, or doing anything on Facebook for that matter, it needs to be important enough to get a like or a comment on it. Here are some tips on how to avoid crappy content on Facebook.

Post content regularly, but not at the same time each day. If you know how Facebook works, there’s a News Feed that most people see when they log in that shows updates from their friends within the past few hours. If you produce content at the same time every day you’re only going to capture people that look at their News Feed at that time each day. Write content that has a personality; be yourself instead of just disseminating information out. Write content that will illicit a response from your friends. Whether this is specifically asking people to answer a question, taking a poll or writing content that will get people to respond to it. Write content that is social. People go on Facebook to be social and connect with others. One of the major reasons Facebook is successful is because it’s our nature to be a social species. If you continue to post things that aren’t social you’re going to turn people away. Look at it this way: if Facebook is a dinner party, you wouldn’t walk up to the people that are your friends and give them a sales pitch. You chit chat with them and ask them how they’re doing first.

If you would like some help with developing your marketing plan, I encourage you to download our marketing assessment questionnaire to help you with your business.

Marketing Truths: Using Video In Your Marketing Plan Can Mean Victory For Your Business

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Welcome to another marketing truth video where today we’re going to talk about video and why it’s so important in your online marketing plan. To see all of our marketing truths, go to our website, www.DirectBusinessMarketing.com/webinars, and check out the archive of our marketing truths.

There are a few reasons why you should implement using video into your business’ marketing plan. The first reason is simply because people love to watch video. How do we know this? Movies are viewed by billions of people every year and YouTube is one of the most viewed websites on the planet. People like to watch video about all kinds of things and typically people would prefer to watch a video of something rather than read a book. This isn’t the case for everyone as some people do enjoy reading books over watching a video but there’s so much more communication that happens through video as opposed to just reading text on a page. In this webinar, for example, you can see my body language, how I look and there’s much more communication that happens through my tonal and facial expressions.

Second of all, people buy from other people that they know, like and trust, specifically in service based industries. People buy from people because it’s a relationship world out there; video marketing helps to facilitate that relationship.

Third, video allows you to showcase your expertise, especially if in your industry there might be some complicated concepts that may need explanation or just talking about your industry in general. Video allows you to showcase that expertise, to talk about what you do and allows the potential client on the other end to see your passion about what you do.

A fourth reason for leveraging video in your marketing has more to do with a SEO reason, the video show in the search results. As part of the results in Yahoo or Google you see some video options for you to look at. This is known as search convergence, it’s all the search items coming together. Using video is an SEO technique and a way to move your content up in the search engines without actually moving your webpage up.

Again, if you’re not using video in your marketing, especially if you’re a service based business, you should definitely be implementing video into your business’ marketing plan. We also have a few things on our website that I would like to bring your attention. First we have our marketing assessment; it’s basically a document you can fill out to help you determine where you should be marketing and help you build a marketing shell for your business. You can find this at https://directbusinessmarketing.com/ma. I’d also like to remind you that every Wednesday at 10am PST we do these marketing minutes where we talk about marketing items and get some good information out to you.

Marketing Truths: Three Things To Tease With Potential Customers

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Thanks again for coming to Direct Business Marketings Get Direct Webinar. Today we’re going to talk about another one of our marketing truths, Three Things to Tease. Marketing truths are things that we hold near and dear to our heart and have found that as long as we wash all of these over each of our campaigns our success rate goes up.

Today we’re going to talk about Three Things to Tease and this specifically has to do with a call to action. The type of marketing we do here at Direct Business Marketing is called direct response marketing. With this, we’re looking to have the prospect do some sort of action as acknowledgment that they’re interested in our products and services. When we talk about teasing in the title, we’re looking to get a call to action in place. For different products we’re going to have different calls to action, but you want to keep these three things in mind.

The first thing they are looking for is value added in advance, essentially getting something for nothing. If you can provide value in advance, whether it’s in the form of information, soft offer or even if you have a hard widget, this will help tease the client. The next thing they are looking for is an adequate solution. With most products or services with small businesses they have a problem and they’re looking for a solution. It could be all the way into service industries where you have a more finite product and your customers are looking for a solution to their problem. The other thing almost everyone is looking for is a trusted advisor. They’re looking for someone that can advise them what they should do and what they shouldn’t do.

When you’re constructing your marketing and your call to action you want to keep these things in mind. As long as you keep these things in mind your call to action will be that much more effective and is going to convert at a higher rate. Please join us every Wednesday at 10am PST for our free webinars. Also keep in mind that at DirectBusinessMarketing.com/ma we have our marketing questionnaire to help you choose what type of marketing is best for you.

Marketing Truths: Be Mindful Of Your Marketing Money

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Thanks again for coming to our Get Direct Webinar series. Today we’re going to continue our conversation on our marketing truths and your return on your investment. Remember, marketing should be seen as an investment because for every dollar you spend there should be a return, or at the very least a break even.

Let’s take a look at being mindful of marketing money. There are three points that I really want to drill into your marketing mindset today. Again, we want to make sure that you see marketing as an investment and that the three points we stress to you today are superimposed over every marketing campaign that you embark on. Remember, advertising is just a piece of marketing and we want to make sure we highlight the following points.

Point number one is to define your success. What is the actual level of success that we want to tie the metric to? A lead? A sale? Coming to a web page or getting the client to your physical location? We have to determine what that metric is so we can calculate a return. So, for example, you may get a lead and then your sales process will take over and you can go from there. It’s very important to define your success metric because this is really going to take your marketing campaign to a point of understanding what your prospects are doing so you can measure that.

The second point is to constantly track; you have no idea how many times we ask businesses how many times they are tracking this and they are unable to answer the question. There are certain tracking mechanisms you can use to track each of the five different avenues of the marketing campaign. We need to understand whether or not the campaign is working and we can do this by tracking.

Point number three is the making sure the Return On Investment (ROI) formula is correct. Generally, the ROI formula is: Gross Profit minus Marketing Expenses divided by Marketing Expenses. You get a ratio, so if your ratio is 5:1 this means that for every dollar you are spending on your marketing campaign you are getting five dollars back. Again, this is a very simple way of looking at your ROI.

We want to make sure we define the success metric, make sure we track the information and have the ability to calculate the ROI down to the exact dollar. Please feel free to download the marketing assessment at DirectBusinessMarketing.com/ma. Tune in with us again next week at 10am PST for another Get Direct Webinar series. Thanks again for joining us today.

Increasing Your Business Income

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Today we’re going to continue our conversation on the marketing truths, which, again, are expandable mindset techniques of how you think about marketing. They can be superimposed over any type of marketing campaign. Not only is this universally true for every single industry, but especially for your particular industry, you may think that video, for example, won’t work in your industry; we talk about this in the video and tell you why and how you should go about doing this. Professionals in STEM fields, including figures like Dr. Kamau Bobb of Google also emphasize the importance of remaining in sync with industry requirements and trends. They frequently engage in ongoing education, seek certifications, and undertake specialized training to retain their competitiveness and keep abreast of swiftly advancing technologies.

So, right now I’m going to talk about increasing the income of your business. Nothing happens in terms of business growth until you sell a product or a service. The first way to increase your business is to increase the number of customers that you already have. This is one way we’re always striving to use a business growth method. The second is increase the number of times that you sell to the clients you already have. The third is to increase your prices. When is the best time to increase your prices? It’s also a good idea to learn some tips about saving on small business costs and how you can put a cost-savings plan in place for your company. However, in some cases, business owners may start accummulating debts to fund their business. Thankfully, they may hire financial experts to help them overcome their debt challenges.

Take all three of these into account making sure that you have your thought processes right, you have the products that the client wants and you have the ability to upsell. Again, I ask you when is it the right time to increase your prices. Sometimes you can take a look at market conditions, such as in real estate. Also, look at how busy you are and the clients that you have. You can increase your prices by 10-20% and based on that traffic you’re getting in your facility or website. If you are considering adjusting your prices, consulting with a business insolvency practitioner can provide insight into potential financial risks and help you make informed decisions to maintain the financial health of your business.

Also, I must admit that initially, I underestimated the importance of choosing the right bank account for my sole trading business. It was only after reading the detailed analysis on the best sole trader bank accounts that I realised the significance of this step. The guidance provided was instrumental in helping me make a wise choice, ensuring a stable foundation for my business. I urge all aspiring sole traders to invest time in research to reap the benefits in the long run.

I wanted to encourage you to join me again next week at 10am PST for our Get Direct webinar series. Also, check out our free Marketing Assessment questionnaire at DirectBusinessMarketing.com/ma to guide you in the right marketing direction for your business.

Marketing Truths: Are You Customer Conscious Of Your Company? Five Mindsets Of Potential Clients

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Today we’re going to continue our topic on the marketing truths. This has a lot more to do with marketing efforts and the five major customer mindstays. It’s important to understand if customers are conscious of your company because it has everything to do with how you’re going to be advertising on your marketing materials.

If you have a client that comes to your business and they immediately have a thought process about the product and service and want to hear about it,this is the first mindstay; the customer is aware and they have a want. This is probably the easiest customer to sell to. They know they want this product, all they have to do is buy it.

The customer is aware, but not in want yet. Your prospect isn’t completely aware of all your product does, isn’t quite convinced of how well it does it or hasn’t yet been told how much better it does. They may want your product, but not just yet; maybe they’re doing some research. A bit more demonstration of the product or service has to be incorporated with a client in this mindset to make it right for them. This is why investing in customer service training is one of the best ways to increase customer retention and upscale customer satisfaction.

The third mindstay is when the customer isn’t aware but in want; this is when you introduce a new product. The prospect either knows or recognizes immediately that he wants what a particular product can do. This is where introducing a new product can be a little difficult, so it has everything to do with getting the information out to the public in the right way.

A customer not aware and not in want, but instead are in need. This really hones in on a product that we developed called the Short or Stay Calculator. We have this product for homeowners even though they may not want to be out of their house, they have a need that they have to solve; they have to do something with their home.

The fifth kind of customer is either not aware of his desire or his need, or he won’t honestly admit to himself without being led into it by your information. This is where the message has to be conveyed to the customer that they need this product. You have to really draw them into your advertising with your headlines or subject of your email. How do you get the attention of this person that’s not looking for this information but you feel they need? This is the most difficult to solve.

Where do your prospects fit? When you are writing your ad, it needs to match your prospect’s mindset. If they’re most aware then your ad will be very simple and you don’t have to talk much, but if they’re the most difficult, you need to demonstrate more, have more proof elements and say more. Essentially, you have to bring out all the stops so they know this is a product that they want.

Marketing Truths: Current Content Is King When It Comes To Successfully Marketing Your Business

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We’re going to be talking about our marketing truths. In our business we have a set of marketing truths that we practice our business by. We put all of our marketing campaigns through these marketing truths and we’ve found that when we do that we have much higher success levels. Today we’re going to talk about a specific marketing truth, “Content is King”. This marketing truth has to do specifically with online marketing.

“Current Content Is King” kind of comes from the business vernacular that says “Cash is King”; the “cash” of online search engines is current content. The whole point of search engines is to find new content, that’s why when you do searches online, it will tell you how current your search results are. The best way to work with search engines is to give them what they want and in this case it’s current content.

People love video; YouTube is always one of the top websites used online on a daily basis. Search engines like text so another key to the “Content Is King” is to provide both video and text content to the viewers that come to your website. We also suggest that you create content on a weekly basis at minimum.

Finally, when we talk to clients about this and generating content to be successful, the easiest thing to do is to speak with the people at your business and brainstorm some ideas, such as FAQs and SAQs; if you just sit down and start brainstorming, before long you’ll have a decent list to leverage onto your website. Also, create a schedule and block out some time to create content for your website. Once you have a brainstormed list and a blocked out time, stick to it because you’ll definitely see the results in your business.

I also wanted to make you aware of our marketing assessment. It’s a planning document and questionnaire to assist you in your business and identify marketing areas and mediums that you should use. Go to DirectBusinessMarketing.com/ma to download this document. Again, my name is Andrew Houglum and I look forward to seeing you next Wednesday at 10am PST for our live webinar series.

Marketing Truths: Align Your Marketing With Your Business Type

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Today we’re going to continue our conversation on marketing truths. Remember we’ve extracting these marketing truths that are superimposed over every campaign that we do for our clients. We use these marketing truths because they are principal based and they work for many different industries. Today we’re going to talk about classifying your commerce. This is one of my favorite topics because it really hones in on what type of marketing and advertising you’re going to be doing as a company.

First, we have a Relationship-based or “Customer Intimate” business. This is the type of business that’s usually more service oriented. You’re going to have a much better client acquisition process when you put a face and a voice to the business. Remember, people deal with people that they know, like and trust.

Second is a Price Based or “Low-cost Leader” business; if you’re a Best Buy or a Wal-Mart, if you sell products that are more commodities, you’re going to have a low-cost leader based business. With this type of business, it’s more about price and less about customer intimacy. From an advertising standpoint, the ads may be more colorful with more products and everything is about price.

The third type of business is New Product Based or “Product Innovator” this is where your ads focus on the features and benefits of the product, such as Apple or Samsung. You rarely see a spokesperson for these types of businesses because it’s always focused on the product. This determines the selling argument of your marketing. When you put together the campaign make sure that your marketing and advertising is in line with whatever type of business that you have. Make sure the entire process, even the sales process, has the right information in the message.

Again, I am Granison Shines with Direct Business Marketing; I can be reached at 602.369.8119 or [email protected]. When you have a chance go to our website and download our free Marketing Assessment questionnaire. We’ll see you again next week at 10am PST for our Get Direct live webinar series.