Category: Target Market

Five Marketing Pitfalls to Avoid When Planning Your Digital Marketing for 2023

Posted on by Amanda Bedell

Do you feel like marketing is a mystical creature that some people have seen, but every time you try to find it, it doesn’t show up for you?

Many small business owners feel this way because no matter how hard they try, or how much money they spend, marketing doesn’t work for them.

Unfortunately, this is compounded by the availability of not-so-good marketing advice, especially when you’re a newbie or not familiar with how SEO works.

 

Digital Marketing Basics to Know

There are basics of digital marketing you’ll want to understand before you jump into planning your marketing for the year. First, you’ll want to list your digital marketing assets, such as your website, blog, email list, and social media platforms. Next, you’ll want to create a digital marketing planner to map out what you will do for the month and year. Then you need to create content pillars or themes you’re going to talk about for the month ahead.

 

Avoid the Marketing Pitfalls

Especially if you’re new to entrepreneurship or digital marketing, you’ll want to avoid marketing pitfalls to skip wasting time and effort on marketing tactics that won’t work. Here are the five biggest marketing mistakes you’ll want to avoid in 2023.

 

Marketing Pitfall #1: Forgetting Set Goals for Your Business

You’ll want to establish a goal first before you start marketing. Depending on your niche and lane, your goal could be client or product oriented. You may also have a sales goal. Whatever your profession, think of a relatively easy goal to achieve and write it down. Make sure your goal has a due date. If your goal is big, break your bigger goal down into micro-goals, so you have smaller checkpoints along the way to see if you’re on track to reaching your goal. If you’re not, you can scale back or decide to take a different marketing route to achieve your goal.

 

Marketing Pitfall #2: Marketing without a Plan

Many people will randomly post on Instagram, create a blog, or send out email marketing without any type of plan. Without a plan, you’re basically throwing mud against a wall, hoping it will stick. You want to create a plan with a theme for your monthly marketing, even if it’s simple. Make all your digital marketing content around that theme so you can track your data and see what’s working.

 

Marketing Pitfall #3: Assuming the Needs of Your Ideal Client or Customer

You may assume you know what your customer wants, but is it true? The only way to find out for sure is to create a survey asking your potential clients and leads what their biggest pain points are for them in their business. Then you can formulate a plan to help solve what they need.

 

Marketing Pitfall #4: Using Social Media to Sell

While social media platforms are a great way to showcase your products, your team, you, and your company culture, you’ll rarely sell your products on social media unless you’re specifically running an ad. Instead, use social media to familiarize your clients with your products, how they can solve their pain points, and show your brand personality so they make an emotional connection to you and your business.

 

Marketing Pitfall #5: Failing to Use Email Marketing

Email marketing, although it’s been around for a long time, is still the best way to market to your fans and leads. While email marketing is very popular, it’s also one of the few ways you can get your client’s undivided attention. First, showcase your products or services, educate your avatar, and include a freebie to download to show your appreciation. Then, make sure you choose a platform, such as Convertkit, to upload your clients’ emails and start sending them emails regularly.

 

When planning your marketing, and you want to be successful, make sure to avoid these marketing pitfalls. Then, think through your marketing for 2023 and devise a plan that makes your marketing a big success!

 

How to Keep Your Clients Satisfied and Generate More Leads

Posted on by Amanda Bedell

If your customers aren’t satisfied, you’ve wasted all your marketing resources and the chance of a positive word-of-mouth advertising, Google review, or client referral. Instead, you can satisfy your clients by ensuring you provide them with the basics. Find out what you can do to keep your clients returning for more of your products and services!

 

Provide Quality Products and Services

In today’s world, having the ability to hire cheap labor from overseas can seem like a daunting challenge for anyone in the services industry. However, providing high-quality customer service and services gives you an edge over others who cannot compete with a higher-quality product. Your clients will come back for more when you provide a superior product or service. Even though your service or product may be pricier, you can provide your clients with time-saving services that they value and appreciate.

 

Give an Informative Sales Experience

Don’t just sell when you’re trying to sell – educate! Giving your potential and current clients the ability to learn from you, the expert, is a great way to build trust and competence with your lead or client. Educate and give them value, so they can see the expert thinking you can provide their business.

 

Offer a Guarantee

While some services may not be able to offer guarantees, if you can, this is a great way to ensure that your client will have a good experience. You can offer another or repeat your service and make what’s wrong right for your client. Keeping your clients satisfied with your work is important to uphold a good standing in your community and among your clients.

 

Generate More Leads

To generate more business, there are a couple of simple techniques which you can employ in your business.

  • Build your database with a contest
  • Email your clients with educational articles, discounts, or other incentives
  • Offer a free online course, e-book, or another incentive for people to join your email list

 

As long as the reward is directly related to your product or service, you can get more people interested in your business by generating excitement around you, your product, and your services. So why not get started today?

Marketing Tips for Entrepreneurs Part III

Posted on by Amanda Bedell

Here we are! The last in my series of marketing tips for entrepreneurs! 

If you haven’t read through the last two blogs, grab those takeaways here Marketing Tips for Entrepreneurs Part I and here Marketing Tips for Entrepreneurs Part II.

Now, the most important piece is this: of all these tips, what is ONE thing you can use to grow your client base this week? Send me a note of what you decide on so I can keep you accountable.

 

Create a Great Marketing Plan

A great marketing plan doesn’t need to be complicated. I understand marketing can be elusive and a little intimidating. But, I promise that you don’t need fancy technology or an all-in-one solutions…. You can start simple and you can start manual.

Pick up a regular paper calendar. Decide how many days per week you want content to be posted. Remember, you can start small! There’s no need to create content every day of the week or send out multiple emails. Maybe it’s simply dedicating 1 hour a week to social media, posting twice a week, and an email one time a month. 

Once you know what content you want to begin with, simply take that calendar and color code days of the week. Each color represents a pillar from your content pillars document. (If you haven’t received my content pillars template, email me and I’ll send it to you, for free!). 

Remember starting small is OK; you can always build on your marketing plan when you get into the habit of consistently creating content for your business. Fine-tune and refine your marketing plan based on your data and feedback.

 

Make Sure Your Marketing Fits Your Branding

There’s nothing worse than hiring a marketing company for your mountain-town vacation rental for them to post a picture of a couple walking along a beach! Ensure your social media, newsletter, lead magnets, and blog content have the same look and feel. The voice and style should make your brand recognizable among all your platforms. And, you’ll want to ensure your marketing and advertising fit your company image, products, services, and quality.

 

Review Your Current Marketing Plan

Remember the 80/20 rule? For business, the principle states that 20% of what you do is generating 80% of your income (revenue). With this lens, review your current marketing plan. What is bringing in clients? What isn’t? Make a plan to improve on the things that are working and drop the ares that aren’t. You don’t want to be spending money on marketing that isn’t giving you a good ROI (return on investment).

 

Educate Your Clients and Leads with Value-Driven Content

People don’t buy because of your fancy logo or cute tag line. If your materials aren’t addressing the problem your prospect has that they don’t want and doesn’t provide a result that alleviates the pain they are in, the marketing simply won’t work. Rather than pushing your company name and bio out to prospects, consider develop all your ads, campaigns, and sales materials with attention to compelling and factual information that solves pain points for your readers. Don’t worry about giving away too much information – when you’re in service of your audience, the right customers will be attracted to you.

How to Create a Marketing Plan for Your New Business

Posted on by Amanda Bedell

When you think of marketing, your mind may slingshot to social media. While this is one aspect of marketing, there are many other elements to digital marketing that you need to know before you jump right into social media. It’s important to design your digital marketing around a plan so that you’re spending less time, in the long run, working and posting your digital marketing than you are in the other aspects of your business.

 

Marketing Plan Step #1: Build a Website

Make sure to have your own website with your domain name. No one else can pull your information off the internet when you have your own website and domain name. You also have control over all your content. Make sure not to mistake having a social media page as your “website.” Your content or entire page can be pulled down at any moment, with no recourse, leaving you to start all over with a new site.

 

Marketing Plan Step #2: Choose an Email Service

While there are many email services out there today, Convertkit is one of our favorites for creators. Start with an email service that gives you a free account, then add the emails you have from prospects. Start with three to five tags, which are categories that you can set up to identify your email subscribers. A few categories that are good to start with are: clients, prospects or leads, and workshops (if you offer a free workshop). Whatever works for your business, categorize your email subscribers so that when you have an email campaign in the future, it’s easy to develop a targeted campaign right to the avatar you want to send them to.

 

Marketing Plan Step #3: Design a Lead Magnet

What is a lead magnet? A lead magnet is a freebie that you offer that is typically easy for you to generate and doesn’t use more of your time when your potential client takes you up on the offer. A lead magnet is a way to collect the email addresses of potential clients interested in what you offer.

Examples of freebie lead magnets are: ebooks, a mini-online course, a video series dropped via email, or a newsletter. Take one of the most common questions you get in your business and give them that information in your lead magnet. If you’re not sure what’s popular in your niche right now, take some time to do a Google search to find out what’s hot and trending online. 

 

Marketing Plan Step #4: Create Content Pillars

Content pillars are themes that you want to build your content around. For example, if you’re a florist, weddings, proms, and holidays are three content pillars you can build your content around. Create a theme for one to three months of content and build all of your marketing content, both print and digital, around the same theme. In doing this, you are continually reminding your followers about the service you offer. 

Why do you want to build your content around pillars? 

Because nowadays, in marketing, it takes up to 15 impressions for people to buy from you with all of the content they see on social media, email, and video. With that many impressions needed before someone considers buying, you need to think long-term for your digital (and traditional) marketing efforts.

When you’re building your marketing plan and content, remember that your plan doesn’t have to be perfect! Start small and see what works. Your first plan may be an email once a month, social media three days a week, and adding one blog to your website each month. Once you have a groove and are comfortable, start adding more content to your marketing!

Business Pitfalls to Avoid When You’re an Entrepreneur

Posted on by Amanda Bedell

When you’re starting a business, especially as a first-time entrepreneur, it’s easy to get caught up in the excitement of building your business, such as making your new website, your new company branding, and creating business cards. However, many new entrepreneurs fail to plan, which is why 80% of start-ups fail in their first year. To avoid failing in your new business, you’ll want to make a plan after you come up with your new business idea and before you start to make your new logo. This way, you can avoid many of the pitfalls that new businesses make when they start out.

 

Start Your Business with a Business Plan

The first mistake many business owners make is to start a business without a plan. 

Ignore market testing and push on with an inaccurate plan. When you lay out a plan for your business, you have steps to take that will make your business grow more rapidly and run smoothly. 

You can purchase many business planning books if you’re unsure where to start when building a business plan. Start by reading through one to three books. Find takeaways that appeal to you and use those for your personalized business plan. 

 

Make Sure to Recognize the Problem and the Solution for Your New Business

Your new business is exciting, and you’re ready to go! However, do you know the problem you’re solving for your new potential clients? If not, then you need to step back and figure out what the problem is that you’re solving and if this is a problem that people are looking for a solution to. You can find out by surveying people online to see if your services or products offer a solution that people are looking for. If so, does your product or service offer many of the features that consumers or other businesses are looking for? These questions need to be answered before you start investing in a logo or a website.

 

Build Your Own Website with a Domain Name that You Own for Your Business

Many people feel the need to be on social media, even more so than having their own website. This is a huge mistake to make when you’re a business owner! Why? Because a social marketing platform can take down your social media page without warning, leaving you without a site or a place for your clients to contact you. Even if you’re a brick-and-mortar store, this can hurt your business. Think of the many hours of time you’ve spent on your social media page (as your only source of an online website) that’s lost because someone on the social media platform didn’t like your content. That’s not a chance any business owner should take!

Make sure you have your own website with a domain name that you’ve purchased. Gandi is a great site to purchase your domain name from, which you can migrate to any platform on which you’re building your website. Whether you’re using a drop-and-drag website or an online marketplace, you want to own your domain so that you can control your content 24/7.

 

Build Your Email List After You Have Your Website Built

Many people mistake building their social media channels and completely ignoring their email list. Did you know that your email list is the BEST marketing tool out there? Even though it’s one of the oldest forms of digital marketing, sending messages out to your email list regularly is the best way to get in front of your ideal audience.

Make sure to know the basics, who your audience is, and do the legwork of data collecting to find out if your business idea is a needed asset to consumers or businesses. Once you’ve achieved that goal, then start your logo, branding, website, and email list.

Four Essential Keys to Marketing Success Part II

Posted on by Amanda Bedell

When it comes to marketing, you need to have some essential components in place to make your efforts result in an effective strategy that turns into business profits. So, if you haven’t read our last blog, go back and read about our first two essentials to marketing strategy, then read this week’s post to find out more about how to effectively market your business.

 

Marketing Essential #3: Avoid Marketing Pitfalls

As a business owner who wears many hats, you may not have the time to comb through all the information about digital marketing to familiarize yourself with what to do. In short, there are several significant mistakes you can make when marketing. Here is a summary of the major marketing pitfalls many businesses fall into. You should avoid them when running your business. To learn more, visit our blog to read more about these pitfalls.

The first mistake many business owners make is to start a business without a plan. 

For most, a passion they adore will become a business. That’s not to say that passion is bad, but you have to do the marketing to find out if you have a market for your product or service. 

Secondly, business owners don’t completely answer why people should use them over their competition. Don’t try to be full-service or solve everyone’s problems; that’s not realistic. Instead, you need to find your why and how it’s different from your competition.

Third, some business owners overlook the needs of their prospective customers and clients. They believe they know why they buy; however, there may be an underlying reason that the business owner doesn’t know about. Surveying your potential client base is key to finding out what they want or need that you’re offering. 

Next, many business owners fail to diversify their marketing options and fail to get market opinions on their offers. You’re missing out if you only use social media and don’t have a website! In addition, your business needs a Google My Business listing so you can collect reviews so others can understand what services you offer and the quality of your services.

 

Marketing Essential #4: Use a World-Class Marketing Perspective

A world-class marketing perspective is essential, especially if you want to attract customers and clients worldwide. Attracting global clients can be accomplished with several techniques and activities, such as using a marketing journal, a digital marketing plan, and creating content pillars for your marketing. 

Using these techniques, you can put your name out there in the digital world. With consistent content marketing, your business can become one of the top brands in your industry!

Three Steps to Create a Successful Product Launch

Posted on by Amanda Bedell

Have you ever launched a new product or service and wondered why no one bought it? You’re looking at competitors and thinking, wow, I did all that. How can they be successful when I’m not?

Well, there are two things to consider: either they are lying or the answer is in their messaging. Getting a message heard is harder now than ever before but it still can be done, let me show you how.

Below, we’ve got three essential steps that you can take to make a big splash when launching your new product or service. Let’s take a walk on a marketing journey, so you can see exactly how to use them and how they can affect the overall outcome of your marketing campaign.

Step #1 Define your Unique Selling Proposition for Your Product Launch

Define your Unique Selling Proposition (USP) by taking time to ask yourself questions from your clients’ perspective. What would it take to get your attention? What needs do you need to be met? What objections could come up? What are the promises you want to be fulfilled?

Viewing your product/service launch with a customer-first approach means you’re really looking at the full competitive landscape and how your company falls into everything that is available to our ideal customer.

If you already have a following, you could ask direct questions to your existing base by creating a poll on social media, asking survey questions in your email newsletter, or by calling directly and asking your clients what they would like to see or use that can help them solve pain points in their personal or business life. 

Once you know the answers to these questions, you can start putting together a plan to meet your clients’ needs. 

So many people had questions about creating their unique USPs, we built a series of videos dedicated to the process. Watch videos 1-7 in my Chaos to Calm Business Academy to learn how >>

Step #2 Develop an Effective Sales Plan Before Launch

To develop an effective sales plan, you’ll want to take the following steps. 

  1. Put together a headline that gets immediate attention.
  2. Share the benefits of your products and services by speaking from the customers’ perspective.
  3. Identify the specific needs met by your offer.
  4. Share your sales proposition by telling customers what you don’t do or how you’re different than anyone else selling what you sell.
  5. Motivate buyers with a call to action by making it easy to do business with you. This offer should be backed by a guarantee or no-risk entry point.

When you put together what makes your products and services unique, you can compel customers to buy. You need to answer a question, solve a problem, or feed an obsession. Provide them with all the information they need to make an informed and confident decision. If they don’t feel a strong want for your product, they won’t buy it. 

Step #3 Use a World-class Marketing Perspective for Your Product Launch

Research Phase:
To develop a world-class marketing perspective, you must take the time to study what does work. Keep a marketing journal and write down your innovative ideas. Take screenshots of quality ads as you find them so you have a folder of proven concepts when you go to create your own.

Development Phase:
Now, as you develop your materials, you’ll want to make sure your marketing fits the company image, service, and quality. Do you need to hire a designer or will the piece turn out well using a self-design tool like Canva? Search for quality images that represent your company and the people it serves. Who is or isn’t represented in those images? Offer more information in your marketing than anyone else. The more information you offer, the more products/services you’ll sell. Develop all your ads, campaigns, and sales materials with attention to compelling and factual information.

Testing Phase:
When out in public, watch how consumers behave in different situations and how they consider their purchases. Watch for when you say something that catches a person’s attention and, maybe more importantly, when did you “fire hose” them and lose their attention? Improve on your best marketing areas and drop what isn’t working.

A great marketing plan can only get better. So continue fine-tuning and refining your marketing based on testing results and feedback. Continuously test markets, ads, and marketing techniques.

By using these techniques, you can put your name out there to the world and become one of the top brands in your industry. You can’t lose when the reward is directly related to your product or service; so why not get started today with a low-cost monthly membership to my Chaos to Calm e-Learning Marketing system?

 

How to Get Free PR for Your Business

Posted on by Amanda Bedell

One of the most powerful techniques every business should use is free publicity. As the name implies, you are spending your time and effort to attract attention to your business. Unfortunately, PR, or public relations, is highly untapped for many business owners. However, you can educate the public and gather leads and prospects through free public relations advertising locally, regionally, and nationally.

There are different media avenues in public relations you can use to boost your advertising results and your paid advertising. With a solid plan that encompasses all these areas, you’ll have a great approach to using public relations in the best way possible. Find out how you can leverage free public relations to bring more business to your company!

 

Public Relations in the Media

Public relations include many different forms of media. The attention of newspapers, television, radio, magazines, bloggers, ezines and podcasts are all powerful tools that you can utilize to get more awareness of your business. You can use the following steps to get noticed by the media.

  1. Put together a press release for your company. The press release should be relevant to your target market and address consumer interest, not just announce your business.
  2. Compact your press release to include one hook and one angle. Choose the most attention-getting to make sure the media person you are sending it to is interested in reading your story.
  3. Put your press release in professional formatting. With press releases, you need a dateline, the most essential information at the top, facts, figures, and wrap it up with contact details, including who and how. Print the press release on your letterhead.
  4. Send your press release to all television and radio stations, local and metro newspapers, national newspapers, industry magazines, and any other form of media that reaches your target market. Don’t forget to include relevant blogs, ezines, press release submission sites, and industry professionals.

Make sure that the needs of your target market are addressed and made clear in your press release. When you provide consumers with a solution to a problem, a way to avoid a problem, and an opportunity to enhance their life, the media and public will be interested in your story.

Suppose you have a connection, or the ability to get a connection with a celebrity or an influencer. In that case, that can also garnish attention to your brand. Make sure you offer newsworthy information and then follow up with media outlets to make sure they are publicizing your information.

BCC Business Consulting can show you how to put together press releases that work!

Three Key Elements to Turn Prospects into Long Term Customers

Posted on by Amanda Bedell

Your prospects may come from many different sources, such as your website, Google My Business reviews, or email newsletter. You’ll want to have several ways to gather prospects and leads; however, if your leads don’t turn into clients, your money on acquiring that prospect can burn up quickly.

Once you have a customer, you’ll want to retain them in your business. The best ROI on the money you’ve invested in your prospect is to continue to sell your product or services with them over a period of time. If you want to turn prospects into long-term customers and retain them for future marketing, you’ll need to know the three key elements to draw them in and seal the deal. 

 

To Obtain Prospects, You Want to Be Inviting

People like friendly faces, so be sure to smile and address your prospect’s pain points. Make sure to listen to their concerns, and don’t sell them on a service or product that doesn’t fix their issues or problems. 

You’ll want to be perceptive, look at their body language, pick up on visual cues, and talk through their challenges. Ease them in your conversation, so they feel welcomed and comfortable talking to you. 

 

Educate Your Prospects and Be Informative

The biggest fear of most new customers is the dreaded buyer’s remorse. Often, buyers have remorse because they weren’t sure exactly what they purchased or what services they were buying in a package. 

If you educate your prospects and give them time to ask you questions, you can avoid buyer’s remorse from your clients. Make sure that you offer a quality product or service that delivers on the marketing claims.

In addition to educating prospective clients on the details of what they will be getting when they work with you, you can also offer them guarantees to sweeten the deal! First, you can offer a refund in a specific period if they don’t see results and have completed all the work necessary for them to have results. Second, you can offer them a bonus they can keep even if they return the product they purchased from your company. These money-back offers to a prospect can build trust in your client relationship, just for offering these options on your services.

 

Show Your Prospects You’re Enjoyable to Work With 

The third and most crucial element is to be enjoyable! Have a positive attitude, and when your client comes upon a challenge that they can’t overcome on their own, make sure to offer support. When your client sees that you care about them, they will be your client forever! 

You can use these elements and other ideas to find what works the best for your business and target market. Then, by making your product or service inviting, easy, informative, inspiring, and their experience enjoyable, you’ll loft your company above your competition.

 

Need help with figuring out the best strategy for converting prospects into customers? 

McMinnville Business Mastery Lunch & Learn

Posted on by Amanda Bedell

EVER FELT LIKE MARKETING, STAFFING, AND GROWING YOUR BUSINESS WAS LIKE NAVIGATING A DIFFICULT MAZE?

What if you could follow a proven and time-tested roadmap that provides you the EXACT steps to more cash flow and freedom?

At my Business Mastery Lunch & Learn events, join area business owners as we tackle the business challenges of the day. In each session, walk away with no-cost strategies that can be implemented immediately.

Lunch and beverages are provided but registration is required.

To register for an upcoming event, click on the date you want to attend:

January 25 – Topic: Finding & Keeping Employees

(POSTPONED) February 8 – Topic: Position Your Business for a Bank Loan

February 22 – Topic: Exit Your Way – Grow with the Exit In Mind

March 8 – Topic: Pricing Workshop (details coming soon)

March 22 – Topic: No Cost Conversions & Sales Strategies (details coming soon)

Past events included Non-traditional Ways to Find & Keep Superstar Employees, No-cost Lead Generation Strategies, Increase Conversions and Sales With Small Tweaks, and more!

What these events aren’t:

NOT a disguised sales pitch

NOT a boring presentation about buying ads that don’t result in new customers anyways

NOT a place for me to listen to my own voice for a whole 90-minutes 🙂

 

What you will get is:

REAL strategies that you can implement yourself

INSPIRATION that can only come from being in a room with like-minded business owners doing the same work at the same time

The PEACE OF MIND knowing that you’re focusing on the business activities that really make a difference so you can work smarter rather than harder.