Author Archives: Kari VanNoy

Smartphone App For Your Small Business

Posted on by April 30, 2013

4-13-smartphone-apps-for-your-small-bizHow do you decide whether or not to develop a mobile app for your business?

Mobile site or mobile app? Thats the real question. Do you require one or the other, or both? Understanding your businesses’ needs goes a long way toward helping you decide if you should invest the time and money necessary to develop and put into play a mobile app for your business. Does a mobile app make sense for your company? What are the costs, both in developing one and in maintaining one? Have you got someone capable of updating it? You need the answers to these and several other questions in order to really come up with a wise decision. Let’s take a peek at a few of the pros and cons.

The Pros and Cons of developing a mobile app for your business

Pros:

  • More than 50 percent of adult Americans are using smartphone technology
  • Keeps your brand prominent in the marketplace
  • Increases customer retention and loyalty, as the app is always in front  of them
  • App users typically spend much more time on apps than on mobile sites
  • Usually load faster than mobile sites
  • Mobile apps are available offline, though users will need to login to perform any actions, such as purchases

Cons:

  • A mobile app needs to be developed for each platform, iPhone, Android, Windows, or any other platform
  • Mobile apps require ongoing care, both as regard fresh content along with technology updates
  • Mobile apps are not as easy to optimize as a mobile website
  • Mobile ads could very well serve the purpose
  • Apps can be quite expensive! If you go the Do It Yourself route, be ready for a lot of headaches, as they frequently break, and need to be updated.

We all know there are as many uses for an app than you’ll be able to imagine, however some are superior to others. Here is an example of how apps were created in the health care market. Making sure your app is useful and not a mere novelty goes a long way toward helping you make your choice. While it’s a given that you require a mobile version of your website, the question of whether or not you should shell out what might be big bucks for an app is one you ought to look at thoroughly. Take your time to weigh the pros and cons for your business before you leap into developing a mobile app!

Green Marketing

Posted on by April 25, 2013

4-13-green-marketing-ideasPaint your business green!

Earth day is upon us again, and it’s a great time to think about how Green Marketing can be a useful way to appeal to environmentally conscious consumers. This is not just a smart way to conserve our precious natural resources, but it has developed into a hot political and social topic in our communities. The most obvious reason to embrace Green marketing would be to manage our available resources with an eye toward good stewardship. Nonetheless, you would be smart to keep your business’s public image in mind simultaneously, because the image it projects is often a deciding factor for many people nowadays. Many will opt for an eco-friendly choice over another company that doesn’t exercise Green marketing on principle alone.

How to attract and appeal to socially conscious consumers

Don’t be shy about promoting that your company is adopting a green marketing initiative. Utilizing the media is an important way for many companies to emphasize their green practices, while boosting their public images and generating positive reputation. As per a report by D S Simon Productions, “media initiatives with a corporate social responsibility focus generates 35-50% more positive media coverage on television, radio, web and social media than comparable programs without the CSR hook”. See about developing “green teams” in your company that can get employees fired up to do their part as well. This can help brand your business as one that really cares about conservation and green marketing. Seek out organizations like EarthShare to help with this.

How Arya Cleaners went green and it paid off!

A dry cleaning service in Chula Vista Ca, Arya Cleaners took steps like swapping their natural gas burning water heaters with technology that transfers heat from the boiler to the laundry machines, swapping their company vehicle with a fuel efficient clean burning delivery van, and by using wet-cleaning technology that reduced their usage of PERC (perchloroethylene), a harmful chemical solvent used by dry cleaners, by 90%.

This lead to Arya Cleaners being named a CoolCalifornia.org Small Business Excellence Award Winner, being a Certified Chula Vista Clean Business, and gaining the Mayor’s award for excellence in 2009 for green friendly business practices. Arya has got it. Branding themselves as an eco-friendly business in a business where there are few who are doing so made a huge difference. Take steps to embrace green marketing today, and see if it doesn’t have a positive impact on your bottom line!

Vanilla Blueberry Scones

Posted on by April 24, 2013

typic-blueberry-vanilla-scones-sm

I love these scones. I learned to love to bake and cook from my grandma, and this post is especially for her. But wouldn’t these Vanilla Blueberry Scones also make a lovely mother’s day gift? {Mother’s Day is coming fast: it’s May 12, 2013}

Learn how to make these scones, and get the full recipe here.

Enjoy!

SMBs – Smitten with Content Marketing (for good reason..)

Posted on by April 23, 2013

4-13-content-marketing-to-boost-salesContent Marketing: What It Is and Why You Need It!

Content marketing might be a term you’ve heard tossed about lately, but still may not know exactly what it means for your small business. To put it simply, content marketing is the practice of creating, collecting, and making available fresh content for one’s readers. This may come in various forms, including blog posts, articles, whitepapers, short reports, videos, podcasts, ebooks, social media and more. We live in an age that treasures information, and the more you can present your readers with the greater authority you will hold in their eyes, which can often bring about better rankings, increased traffic, links, and sales.

Content marketing is getting ever more popular!

According to BusinessBolts.com, this year some 74 percent of businesses plan to do an increased level of content marketing. Only 4 percent are not. Many reasons exist for this, among them cost-effectiveness, near-instant results and control over the medium. With content marketing you can shape your message, control the flow, and utilize many different mediums to get your content to your market. For instance, an article or blog post could be written, posted on your site, excerpted in social media, made into a video or audio and social bookmarked across the web. Repurposing your content for various platforms is the order of the day. In addition, this can happen quite often, and an entire content marketing campaign can be realized quite swiftly.

Want an example of how content marketing made a difference?

The New York Times recently profiled a Northern Virginia company, River Pools and Spas, that was watching as their sales tanked because of the housing recession of 2008. Orders shrank from six per month ($50,000 a pop) to less than two. What had been a $250,000 yearly spend on radio, TV and pay per click advertising, was now out of the question. Instead, owner Marcus Sheridan went on an ambitious content marketing campaign consisting of blog posts and videos, and in just a short time had not only recovered but surpassed pre-recession levels. In fact, Sheridan attributes nearly $2 million in sales to a SINGLE article he wrote on how much a fiberglass pool should cost!

Content marketing can and should be a major part of your online marketing strategy for 2013. The good news is that it’s all within your control!

5 Tips for Good-Looking Mobile Emails

Posted on by April 18, 2013

4-13-five-tips-for-good-looking-mobile-emailsDoes Your Email Look Grim on Mobile Devices?

It’s tough enough to make sure your email marketing messages get through without making the task more onerous. Making certain you are optimizing your marketing emails could be the difference in success or failure in your campaigns, particularly as mobile email open rates are increasing rapidly.

Mobile email opens are exploding!

Mobile email is now the most opened email, surpassing desktop with a robust 36 percent, according to Knotice.com. Combine that with the reality that email is the preferred online communication mode of 74 percent of all adults, and you will see why it’s so important. It’s not just phones either. Tablets are starting to take a major share also, as ReturnPath reports that iPhones account for 59 percent, iPads 26 percent, Androids 14 percent and Windows phones bringing up the rear at less than 1 percent.

Some tips for optimizing your marketing emails

So just how do you go about optimizing your marketing emails? Not to fear, we won’t leave you in the lurch! Here are a few must-do tips that help make sure your messaging shows up the way you’ve intended it to!

  • If you want your emails read, especially on a mobile device, keep them short and sweet. Make engaging and enticing headlines and content that keep the reader hooked, as it’s extremely easy to delete an email from a mobile device!
  • Keep your image files small, as large files take far longer to load, which can be a disaster as many won’t wait, and just move on, before they’ve even viewed what you’ve got for them.
  • Keep your font sizes in your main content at least 14, and headlines around 30. Anything below 13 will get automatically changed by the iPhone, and can wreck your formatting.
  • Make sure any calls to action are big enough for easy tapping. The typical adult fingertip measures around 45 pixels, so bear that in mind.
  • Make sure you test your marketing emails on the different mobile platforms before clicking the send button! This really is well worth the couple of minutes it will take!

Optimizing your emails for mobile isn’t a thing you should get to when you can – it’s a big deal you should do today! You can be sure your competition is!

Homepage Sins: 15 Ways to Improve Your Homepage

Posted on by April 16, 2013

4-13-fifteen-ways-to-improve-website15 homepage sins that are costing you sales

Sometimes it’s about what you don’t do as much as it is what you do. This can ring extremely true on the subject of your website. There are lots of things that can send visitors screaming into cyberspace to escape these grievous issues. Let‘s find out if some of these sound familiar to you.

  1. No clear objective – According to DinkumInteractive.com you have about 4 seconds to convey what your website is about before they leave.
  2. Your content isn’t scannable – Web viewers read in chunks, and if they can’t scan your page and get it in a few seconds, you’ve probably lost them!
  3. Not being mobile ready – Mobile is no longer an extravagance, as according to Google half of all website traffic is mobile.
  4. Not making use of video on your site – Videos rule, but whatever you decide to do, avoid autoplaying music at all costs!
  5. No updated, quality content – If your content is from Bush’s first term, it’s no surprise they’re fleeing! Also no fancy fonts or extremely long pages.
  6. No contact information – You want to ensure your customers can contact you when they want to!
  7. Not collecting email addresses – Also a necessity. Developing a list is one of the keys to long-term success online.
  8. Not utilizing Meta tags on your website – Especially the title and description tags. These can help you to get indexed and ranked in the search engines.
  9. Lack of social sharing buttons – Like it or not, making your site be shareable on social sites is where the party is, so get over it!
  10. No or poor Calls-to-Action – You want an action from your visitors; ask for it!
  11. No clear site navigation – Don’t use drop down menus, and make sure every page on your website contains a link back to the home page.
  12. Not optimizing your images – Make sure to use the ALT and TITLE tags for any images or videos you are using.
  13. Overuse of Flash – Besides being a pain for the GoogleBot to read, it may be very irritating to your visitors.
  14. No metrics to determine your progress – Do you actually not want to learn the quantity of people are coming around and from where? What do they like, or not like?
  15. “Intro” pages – These are merely an obstacle to your content. You really want to go there? (I’m looking at you, fancy restaurants.)

Get More Client Referrals

Posted on by April 9, 2013

3-13-seven-techniques-for-getting-referrals

 

7 top techniques for getting more client referrals

Most small businesses are always looking for ways to obtain more client referrals. However as outlined by GrowThink.com some 58.6% of us don’t even bother to ask for them! This isn’t something that takes place automagically, but rather is the offspring of a clear, focused strategy applied persistently. So that you can catch the idea allow me to share seven easy ways to get more client referrals, faster and easier than you may have thought possible!

  1. Ask your best clients – These can be your best business evangelists. People who are already in love with what you do won’t need much coaxing to sing your praises.
  2. Offer sensible incentives – Offering product savings, select offers, or other rewards which make sense for your business can be a fantastic way of getting people to send you new customers.
  3. Over-deliver on first-time customers – When you get a new customer, a terrific way to get them talking to their circle of contacts is to over-deliver to them. This can come in a number of ways, but make certain they view your company as a cut above the rest.
  4. Engage your customers – Find innovative approaches to engage your clients and perhaps find a way you can benefit each other. The key is to get them talking, and being open to ideas. Create an online neighborhood for your customers, such as a blog or Facebook group.
  5. Be courteous and a giver – Make saying “Thank You” part of your daily lexicon, and be generous when it comes to offering perks. Laying a surprise gift card or thank you note on a customer can be very beneficial.
  6. Enlist your staff – Getting your staff in the game can multiply your efforts. You will usually have to develop a way to reward results, but it can be very much worth the cost!
  7. Create a loyalty program – A customer loyalty program, preferably online, can help you generate enthusiasm and engagement. Reward interaction as well as purchases, because this could lead to more and more people becoming involved.

Consistently working a client referral plan takes some perseverance, but at the end of the day can create great results with a minimal outlay.

Surveying your Clients

Posted on by April 4, 2013

3-13-client-survey-tips

 

If You’re Not Surveying Customers, You’re Cruisin’ for a Bruisin’

Do you truly know how well you’re doing with your clients and customers? Are there problem areas or holes in your customer service you’re unaware of? Would you like to find out what they really think? There’s only one way to get this information—ask them! A well-crafted customer survey can be a useful tool that will help you discover the answers to these and many other items you may not even have known were issues for your customers.

So why ask questions at all?

The primary incentive for a customer survey is to eliminate problems before they become part of your reputation, and find ways to improve your service or products. Most of the time, we never learn about a disappointed customer: they’ll simply look somewhere else. CustomerThink.com has discovered that more than half of consumers have experienced issues and complaints with the products and services they’ve purchased. Creating a survey helps you find and correct mistakes that can be the difference between holding onto a client or not.

What kind of questions work best?

Make sure you have a clear goal to your surveys, and you ask questions that require  more than ticking a box, or assigning a numerical value to your query. Avoid “Yes” or “No” questions. Allow them to expand on their experience and feelings. (This can also be a great way to collect testimonials!)

How exactly should you hold the survey?

There are many ways to conduct a survey. However, if possible, the most effective way appears to be via an online survey, thus giving the respondent a good chance to think about and form well thought-out answers, something which may not occur via a phone call or personal contact. Look at offering a bonus for filling out your survey, and try to be timely as to when you send it. If you’re a new comer to this, consider using a company that specializes in this type of data collection, such as SurveyMonkey. However you achieve it, getting a read on how your customers view your business is invaluable data to have.

Online Reputation Management Strategies

Posted on by April 2, 2013

3-13-online-reputation-strategies

 

Use these 5 Online Reputation Strategies to Manage your Company’s Brand

You might think that online reputation management isn’t something you ought concern yourself with. I would implore you to reconsider that thought!

According to eMarketer 83% of consumers declare that online reviews sway their opinions about a particular company, and 8 of 10 of these people added that a negative entry online is the cause of them changing their mind regarding that company. Even one negative review, justified or not, can negate all of your finest efforts if you haven’t planned an online reputation strategy to manage it. So to help out with that I’d like to present five strategies your business, and your brand, can implement to monitor and manage your online reputation.

  1. Monitoring your brand names – Listening what’s being said about you and your business is critical. There are lots of wonderful free tools to help in this regard. Check out Google Alerts, Hootsuite, and Social Mention and others.
  2. Claim all of your social properties – Unclaimed social media sites can be used by your competition for nefarious exploits. Be sure you claim all social sites that could pertain to your brand.
  3. Own as much of page one of Google as you can – One assertive way to make sure what individuals learn about you when they Google you is to own most if not all of Google page one for your brand names. This makes it much more difficult for flyby attacks to have much if any impact.
  4. Ask for customer reviews – Customer reviews aren’t just gonna magically appear: you must actively court them. Make a point of prompting your clients to write reviews, and do everything possible so that it’s easy for them: links to review sites, examples from other customers, etc. And if you offer incentives, let them know that you’re not attempting to bribe them or influence their review!
  5. Engage with your people – Interacting with those writing comments, Facebook posts and tweets is an excellent way to head off any damage from the get-go. Don’t participate in mud-slinging however, no matter how justified you’re feeling! Thank them for their contribution to the discussion, and politely disagree, standing up for yourself. (If they’re not right, of course!)

Online reputation management is incredibly important these days, when customers can tweet, post or video form wherever they happen to be. Don’t forget this one!

How to Connect With Buyers Using Google+ Local

Posted on by March 28, 2013

3-13-google-local-logoHow to Use Google+ Local to Connect with Buyers

Even though it’s been a few months since Google merged with Google Places to become Google Local, there was some confusion as to just what this new entity would grow to be. No longer. One shining illustration of what is possible for small business is the Google business page for BakeSpace.com. They have employed all of the features such as hangouts, video and more to garner more than 330,000 users inside their circles. Businesses are waking up to the enormous opportunity that lies within Google Local and are finding excellent ways to use it for finding buyers and prospects.

So let’s examine some of the best ways your small business can leverage this platform.

  • Be sure your Google Local page excels – The first and probably most important task is to make sure that your page is entirely filled out. Fill in all text areas that are called for, as this makes a difference in how Google ranks your page. Also, use a ton of images, because this also affects the ranking of your page. There’s also the benefit of being allowed to present a vivid look at your site and merchandise.
  • Use the search function to prospect – Using Google to look for prospects and hook up with potential customers is ridiculously easy! The search bar at the top of your Google page will help you find people who are talking about your niche or company. Add them to your Circles and start the connection process!
  • Engage with potential buyers by creating offers – An excellent way to leverage your Google Local page is to create enticing offers and coupons which can be accessed directly from that page. This can be a terrific method to convert Google visits to onsite purchases.
  • Use Google Hangouts as a media channel – There are a variety of methods to use this versatile tool to pump up your business. You can conduct webinars, training sessions, online press conferences, offer free consults (related to your business) and even host your very own show. Google records these sessions, sends you the file, which you can then upload to YouTube. Beginning to see the possibilities?

I hope you’re realizing the possibility of what Google along with Google Local, YouTube and the rest of the Google suite could do for your business. Get your business started on Google Local today!