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Growing Your Business With CRAP Campaigns
May 19th, 2013 by Mardy Sitzer
Imagine your emails being blocked as spam, unsubscribes from your blog, you get unfollowed on Twitter or Facebook and disconnected on LinkedIn. And they aren’t taking your phone calls.
Having spent several years in the field as a sales person before becoming a marketer, I learned a very basic lesson – ask for the order too soon and you’ll lose a prospect for life.
Marketing isn’t any different. Ask for the order too soon and you’ll lose prospects and audiences. Having your marketing channels shut down is as hard to recover from as trying to rebuild a relationship when you’ve lost their trust.
To avoid racking up more losses than wins, create C.R.A.P. campaigns (Connect, Relate, Appeal, Promote).
Relax, I’m not bashing my work or company anymore than I am bashing the industry as a whole. What I am suggesting is that there is a natural flow to help prospects buy. When you are creating copy for your website, newsletters, blogs, social posts, and other content, you should be creating campaigns that address each buying stage. Read more…
Social Media May Not Be For You
May 15th, 2013 by Mardy Sitzer
It is hard to believe that in the year 2013 some companies are not yet using any social media and their website is a basic brochure style template. Some of these companies are struggling, and believe it or not, some are thriving below the radar.
I know that given my line of work, my speaking and workshops all promoting social media as the go-to solution for marketing that the opening statement might appear blasphemous. But the truth is the truth.
Why then, you may ask, are some companies not doing any social media and why it might not be necessary. I’m happy to share my thoughts, experience and views. Read more…
Define Your Best Customer
May 6th, 2013 by Mardy Sitzer
My guess is that there isn’t a company on the planet that doesn’t want more customers. But what kind of customers?
Small companies, above all others, with limited time and resources, need to maximize their efforts to be sure that they are bringing in the right customers, not just any customer. The ‘not right’ customer can eat into a company’s resources diverting them from more profitable relationships. The same goes for sales people.
Struggling or evolving businesses might feel that any customer is a good customer, and while that might be fine in the short term, sustainability demands a focus on the best customers that you should be attracting.
Having a clear idea of who your ideal customer really is – or should be, will help you to formulate your sales and marketing efforts and help you grow. You might even save yourself a lot of time by not chasing prospects that won’t deliver long-term value.
One way to look at customer acquisition is like any investment – such as a piece of equipment you might be considering purchasing. Read more…
Today’s SEO Practices
April 16th, 2013 by Mardy Sitzer
This is a guest post by Amanda Baird, a Marketing Strategist, Analyst and Researcher with a domestic and global financial services background. To learn more about Amanda, you can connect with her through her LinkedIn profile.
Having attended a SES Sponsor’s session this past February, it became clear that the nature of SEO has dramatically changed.
Google has been rolling out between 5-600 changes to its search algorithms every year, making it more difficult to game the system. A few of the more notorious changes were Panda and Penguin. Panda’s primary target is content, while Penguin’s focus is links.
Panda was originally introduced in February of 2011 and regularly goes through updates. By March of this year Google rolled out its 25th iteration of Panda. Once Panda was introduced, many websites experienced a fall in rankings, penalties, or both.
This session, titled Link Building, Authors, Panda, Penguin, Tools & More, was presented by Jim Boykin, owner of Internet Marketing Ninjas.
Boykin recommended that you look at who is linking to you, who you are linking to – and ask ‘does it make sense’? Google is now looking for more natural interactions between websites. For example, a dentist’s blog linking to a flower shop triggers a robotic disconnect. Read more…
11 Things To Do For Spring Marketing To Grow Your Business
April 10th, 2013 by Mardy Sitzer
It’s Springtime –finally. Springtime triggers thoughts of cleaning – freshening up the house, yard and even digging into closets to rid yourself of heavy winter wear and cobwebs.
Your business needs a springtime clean as well. Purge old files and records now that your taxes are filed; put things into storage, donate them or toss them out to make room to grow your business – maybe even create space to bring on some summer Interns.
If your business experiences a slow down during the summer, then spring would be a good time to ramp up sales and marketing efforts to keep your leads and project pipelines filled and cash registers humming during these upcoming months.
And if you’ve been reading my latest posts, then you are tuned into how things are changing quickly on the Internet. The following are 11 things to get on your ‘must get marketing done’ list for this spring: Read more…
