Savvy Low-Cost Marketing Moves for Young Entrepreneurs

Two realities of today for young entrepreneurs:

ONE: You MUST keep marketing your business all of the time

TWO: Cash available for marketing is getting less and less

So what are the savvy marketing moves all young entrepreneurs should be making in their business, on little to no budget, for maximum results?

BLOG IT UP

If you don’t have a blog for you and your business, then start one. If you do, crank it up! Think about what your customers want to know about that you can help them with? What are the key words your customers search for? Combine those two and start creating content. And don’t forget to add an RSS feed for your blog so people can subscribe and be kept updated.

You can check ours at www.frankteam.com.au/blog

Get YOUR Content OUT-THERE

Take your blogging to the next level and create some great articles from your content, then get that content out there to the world to build reputation & focus on you and your business. How-to’s, tips, strategies, interviews, positive stories and lesson’s learnt just to name a few. Your articles can go onto your website, into your newsletters, and then submit them to various media & content websites (eg: PRweb.com, SmartCompany.com.au, FlyingSolo.com.au, WotNews.com.au, ezinearticles.com). Even send them to The Frank Team for upcoming IGNITE editions!

DATABASE Contact

If you don’t have your past customers & prospects already in a database, spend time doing that & then make it a habit to update it as new contacts are made. If you do already have databases, when was the last time you got in contact with those people? You need to talk to and “touch” your people at least every 6 weeks for them to remember you. Email them, call them, text them, just do something to be sure you are talking to them regularly. But make sure what you have got to say is interesting & helpful, otherwise you are just noise.

Reward REFERRALS

For those wonderful customers who tell others about your great business, make sure you reward them. Anything from a phone call, to movie tickets, to discounts on accounts go a long way to make them feel appreciated. All you have to do is weigh up the cost of acquiring a new customer from scratch vs the cost of the reward to ensure you stay ahead and create goodwill!

Speak UP

Search for the 2009 conferences that are happening in your industry, especially where your customers will be. Create a kick-arse speakers profile all about YOU and your expertise. Then submit your profile with some great ideas for speaking topics you can cover for each of the conferences and secure some face time for yourself in front of your peeps. You can also get help with this through PR consultants, if writing kick-arse speakers profiles is not really your thing!

WEB Wonders

Get clear on the key words that your customers use when searching for you (or possible you’s) and ensure you have those key words wherever possible on your website (or otherwise known as Search Engine Optimisation)

Create a Facebook group account for your business (if your customer audience is young) & then send it out through your networks for members to join. Make sure you keep it updated. Put “The Frank Team” into your search on Facebook, find us & ask to join!

Post videos on YouTube, GoogleVideo and other video sites to bring your content and business alive.

Get your site listed on StumbleUpon, del.icio.us.com, digg.com, Squidoo.com & Yelp.com and any other directories that your customers may use.

Create separate landing pages on your website for different segments of your customer base

Create a professional LinkedIn.com profile for yourself and connect with people you know through the network. Update your profile with recent projects.

Keep the world updated with your latest “what’s on” through updating your Facebook profile regularly OR by creating a Twitter account

Team Up

What other businesses can you team up with that will add value for your customers with complimentary services/products? Personal trainers & healthy catering company, Car wash & xmas present wrapping, GPS & travel companies. Think about who targets the same customers as you do & see how you can team up together.

Old Fashioned Snail...................................................Mail

Yep – consider going back to some personalised letters. All it costs is the paper, printing, envelopes & stamps (which are now 55c each – watch out for that one!) plus of course some creative juices to put together an interesting and engaging letter. Either send it out cold to a new list, or to your past customers to say “hi”. The Frank Team is giving this one a go this week, so we will let you know how it goes (right here - on our blog!). Or chuck it onto the fax & use a fax stream service. The key is to get the message right in the letter; a compelling message that urges action.

Don’t believe us when we say these marketing moves work?

What marketing are young entrepreneurs ACTUALLY doing in their business right now? And is it working?

We asked a bunch of young entrepreneurs for their recent successful & unsuccessful marketing moves!

Michael Lieu – DriveSmart GPS Hire Australia (www.gps-hire.com.au)

SUCCESS- People love a bargain. Posting coupons/vouchers on ozbargain.com.au and eBay created more leads and successful conversions.
SUCCESS - Networking! I treat them as an opportunity to pitch your product/service rather than just gaining new contacts & business cards.
SUCCESS: Blogs - Google loves it when you update your site often, so use a blog which is regularly updated using keywords used by your target market. Here is mine http://www.gps-hire.com.au/blog/
UNSUCCESSFUL: Not so low cost, but Google AdWords - poor conversion rates, very expensive mistake. Focus on SEO work instead.

Emma Isaacs - Business Chicks, Last Thursday Club, Studio Bodyfit (www.businesschicks.com.au)

SUCCESS: Leverage/referrals – leveraging off of our existing customers has always worked well. There’s a lot more power and influence in having someone else talk about you rather than talking about yourself. We run events and activities all around the country so we’ll often ask a company who has multiple offices to refer us to their state counterparts. Given their experience with Business Chicks, they’re always happy to and it works beautifully.

SUCCESS: PR – publicity builds credibility and interest in your brand and if the article is angled correctly, can position you as an expert in your field.

UNSUCCESSFUL: Direct mail – we’ve found that the Business Chicks brand is difficult to understand until you’ve experienced it firsthand. Going in cold with marketing activities such as direct mail pieces have never returned strong results for us.

Mike Jarocki - Credit Card Finder (http://www.creditcardfinder.com.au)

SUCCESS - Article Marketing

Article marketing consists of submitting an article in your business expertise for publication in an internet article directory. It is mutually beneficial - the page where your article will be featured has advertisements where the article directory can gain revenue, and in return, you gain a 'free' link back to your websites, which can bring traffic and a quality link back to your site.

The largest and most successful article marketing campaign to date revolved around building the search engine rankings for the terms 'best credit card' and 'best credit cards'. First, an overseas freelance writer was contacted to write 20 articles on credit cards. Next, these articles were published among various article directories (namely ezinearticles.com and buzzle.com). Each article was specifically modified to promote the phrase 'best credit card(s)', which in turn raised our search engine rankings for the term in Google.

The total cost for this particular campaign was $200.As a result we are currently first for both of those search terms!

SUCCESS - Split-Testing

When visitors come to websites, the slightest phrase or graphic can have the largest influence whether they will click through to your product, or leave the site. Split-testing involves creating two copies of the same page, with slight variations (for example color, positioning and sentence restructuring). After about 200 visitors have visited your page, you will begin to get an idea of which layout is most successful for sale conversion.

For Credit Card Finder, it was found that the color red for application buttons yielded the highest click through rate, by about 13% over green. The total cost for split-testing is $0. It simply involves a free split testing program (we used Google Website Optimizer) and the time dedicated to creating different copy on your webpage.

UNSUCCESSFUL - Press Releases

While press releases in online marketing history have been known to result in a wave of free and quality coverage, it wasn't the case for Credit Card Finder. A press release was written about our new 'credit card calculator' - but press release coverage was non-existent once sent out. The total cost was about $150.

Faye Maramara – Paro Paru Jewellery - www.paroparu-shells.com.au

Two successful low-cost marketing strategies are:

SUCCESS: Direct marketing- this involves cold calling and making appointments with buyers to view my ranges of jewellery. No cost involved, 80% successful.

SUCCESS: Editorial- This involves meeting stylists and making appointments with glossy magazines when my new ranges of jewellery come out. No cost involved, 90% successful.

UNSUCCESSFUL: Not doing anything. Seriously. 0% successful

Lara Soloman, LaRoo P/L & MOCKS www.MyMocks.com

SUCCESS: We made a Mocks page (Mocki) on facebook then invited everyone from our online newsletter to be friends with us. This doubled the number of friends we had in a week, which has given us more opportunity to reach our target audience with more news and offers and strengthen the brand, and brand awareness.

SUCCESS: Added a link to my email signature to take people straight to the web page to buy my book! One sale so far that I know of.

UNSUCCESSFUL: Putting out flyers on cars promoting my product. We got busted by the local council and threatened with a fine and had to collect them all in again!

Jessica Kiely – The Frank Team (www.frankteam.com.au)

SUCCESS: November IGNITE edition with promo about new Frank Team Break it Down cards resulted in an instant sale!

SUCCESS: Personalised email out to specific database about upcoming program they would be interested in resulted in 3 sign-ups straight away.

SUCCESS: Event that featured past participants of a program & invited new possible participants to learn about that program. This resulted in 2 sign-ups within a week.

UNSUCCESSFUL: Fax stream to cold list with a letter that offered a free Planner for response. We got 8 responses out of about 200 faxes sent, but none of those responses have converted yet. (We are working on it!)

So what savvy marketing moves are you going to make today to move your business forward?

By - Jessica Kiely

The Frank Team – www.frankteam.com.au

Inspiring Young Entrepreneurs

Marketing Tip - Focus on the Problems...

Your customer's problems that is! By constantly monitoring the difficulties that your customers have, that your product/service overcomes, you will be better placed to:

1. Understand their needs
2. Meet their needs

Anchor the key problems of your current and prospective clients to your product/service, communiate it in your marketing campaigns, get your sales staff aware and focused on it, and your sales should benefit!

10 Secrets to Marketing Your Business Online

10 secrets to marketing small business online

Being online levels the playing field, as, big or small,everyone has the same chance to attract customers.

By following some basic principles, you can receive the same coverage as major players and see your business take off using savvy, affordable marketing.

1. Create a Website of course! - Without a web presence you don't exist online. So the first and most obvious step is to create one! The key to keeping customers happy in the online environment is to design a website that is both aesthetically and functionally pleasing. When you’re designing your website, create a situation where every page drives a consumer action and generates a sales lead for your business.
2. Convert Visitors to Leads - To turn your website from a passive, "brochure-ware" site that delivers a lot of information but doesn't deliver results, you need to refocus your strategy from delivering free information and content, to providing relevant content that drives consumer action. Supplying information is both necessary and helpful to readers and handy in raising your search engine rankings. Always ask yourself, "what is my call to action" - these can take the form of links to downloads, requesting consumer information, advertising, offers or promotions. At the very least, encourage users to make contact with you, either by phone or email.
3. Build Trust & Credibility - Being open and transparent is crucial to success in online marketing. Prove you are a concrete, reliable business by including as many of the following as possible: clear contact details including a physical address and landline phone number, photos and images of employees, location and equipment, third party endorsements and verification of your authenticity including ‘approved’ stamps and/or testimonials. Also, be sure to reply to all contact enquiries promptly with an acknowledgement of emails sent by users and/or response to phone messages.
4. Search Engine Leads - the first step to finding what you need on the internet is running a search on a company name, product name, service or activity. Research shows that high search engine rankings are a major predictor of online business success. After 30 results, users stop looking, so it’s vital you sit within this top percentile. So to optimise your business’ search engine ranking, use search engine optimisation (ie: having key words associated with the content on your
site so people find you when searching) and search engine marketing (you can pay to have your site link featured on the right hand side of search results pages).
5. Email Market/eDM - The power of online can be summed up by email marketing. It’s a cost-effective, efficient, traceable, relationship-building tool for regularly communicating with your existing and potential consumers. We have all heard of the 80:20 rule in marketing: 80% of your business comes from 20% of your customers. Email marketing is the easiest way to continue an ongoing, targeted dialogue with them. 5 top secrets for Email Marketing Success are: regularity, short punchy content, calls to action, personalisation, and maintaining a clean list (database).
6. Affiliate Market - As well as buying listings in search engine results, you can buy or trade listings on relevant directories and/or cross-promotional websites. Reciprocal link-backs improve both websites' natural search engine listings.
7. Partnerships & Links - As with affiliate marketing, the success of this tactic lies in increasing your exposure through both cross-promotion on related websites, and also through upping your search engine listing thanks to increased link-backs. There are many avenues to increasing your presence, for free or at a low cost on related websites. Submit articles to other websites and free PR websites, submit sites to directories, buy links, buy partnerships e.g.
Emailcash, List on Shopferret and price comparision websites.
8. Blogging - Running a business, you are clearly an expert in your field. Invite potential and current customers to share your expertise and get a taste of how your knowledge will positively impact them, by creating a blog. Blogs create a community around those with common interests and become a tool for sharing and developing ideas. Their major advantage is creating an open, accessible channel to boost consumer involvement. They can be used to encourage trials,
conduct on-the-ground research, and develop ongoing customer relationships. Plus there’s stacks of software online to set up your blog - all for free! We use www.blogger.com but there’s a huge range out there to choose from.
9. Email Signature - Think about how many emails you send out each day, each week, each month. Now multiply that by the emails sent by your employees and/or subcontractors. Every one of those emails is an opportunity to market your business. As well as including your standard contact details, and always, always your website URL; the smart online marketer also uses this opportunity to promote their latest offer, promotion, or release. Alternately it can be used to build your brand identity or value-add to consumers, and grow your relationships.
10. Track & Respond - Every web host keeps detailed statistics of activities occurring on your website; from the number of visitors, to downloads, where people landed and left the site,how long they stayed, to where they spent most of their time. Analyse this information and use it to continually improve your site's performance based on this silent customer feedback. The beauty of the Internet is that you can change your marketing and track its effects immediately. If something is working, stick with it. If not, change it again.

Going Forward
While you may not have the financial resources of the big guns, you do share access to the same technology: online. Use it to your advantage, and watch your small business grow!

This article was provided by Fred Schebesta, Director of Freestyle Media.

Awesome Marketing Quotes

Three of our favourite marketing quotes are:

“Marketing is not an event, but a process . . . It has a beginning, a middle, but never an end, for it is a process. You improve it, perfect it, change it, even pause it. But you never stop it completely.” ~Jay Conrad Levinson

"Sell to their needs, not yours." ~ Earl G. Graves

“The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.” ~Peter F. Drucker

What's your favourite marketing quote?