3 ways to make your Website the Life of the Christmas Party!
Thursday, December 24, 2009
One of the greatest assets of having a website as a facet of your marketing strategy is that you can keep your content fresh with relative ease. Whereas a TV ad or a radio spot takes a process to change, your website can be updated at the click of a button.
In the spirit of the holiday season, let’s say that your website is akin to a Christmas party. Just like there are hundreds of home improvement and re bath business, there are similarly a plethora of Christmas parties that everyone gets invited to every year. You will typically avoid the parties that offered boring, lame, typical holiday festivities and attend the ones that offer more than stale Chex Mix and watered down egg nog.
This is exactly how customers pick and choose the businesses that they frequent. They act on past experiences, and if you’ve had the same content on your website from the day you started it, then you have little chance for making a lasting impact on a customer. Here are a few tips on how to keep your website fresh and in the Christmas spirit.
1) Give the website design a holiday tinge!
You know those houses on the block that shine like the house in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation? Well, it doesn’t have to go that far…but you have to admit, it certainly is attention grabbing. This doesn’t mean you have to throw good design principles out the door in favor of all green and red fonts, but a little change can make a big difference. For home improvement and re bath businesses, you might think of taking a page from Google’s playbook and altering your logo with a bit of snow, or some Christmas lights. Anything dynamic will perk the customer’s interest long enough to get your message across, which brings us to tip number 2.
2) Good eats = Good time
Party A – Chex mix, dollar store sodas, and a bowl of popcorn
Party B – 4 types of pizza, a 10 foot sandwich, holiday drinks, and and all the sausage and cheeze you can eat.
Which party are you going to? (You can’t say both!) Party B wins out because of pure substance. The good stuff is there, so the people will follow. Are you giving your customers the good stuff? No, not fluffed up persuasive copy, we’re talking about the GOOD stuff. Discounts, tips, videos, blog posts…in other words, fresh content. This is the perfect time to put up your helpful How To articles in your home improvement or rebath blog, post a video tutorial to YouTube, or give your customers a limited Christmastime coupon. Choose whatever juicy marketing tidbit is best for your business model, but choose something, because a website with stale content will generate absolutely no home improvement leads.
3) Good music, the greatest call to action.
It’s a party, not a wake! You want people moving around and laughing and dancing, but if you’ve got the best of Bing Crosby and Lawrence Welk on the background, you’re more likely to induce a food coma. Good music that you can dance to is the ultimate call to action, which is exactly what your website needs(see Beyonce’s “Single Ladies”).
What is your call to action? Every marketing endeavor has a desired result, and the call to action should invoke your customer to perform this action. Do you want them to buy something straight from your website, or do you simply want to collect their information for later use? Whatever the desired outcome, make sure it is front and center on your webpage, and that their is ample reason to perform the call to action. I.E, “call us now and receive X discount on this service. Sign up for our newsletter and get a FREE X”.
Unlike a frivolous Christmas party, the success of your business can actually rely on your website. Dynamic aesthetics, fresh content, and tempting calls to action are surefire marketing practices that can ensure your home improvement and re bath business will be the hit of the party, both this year and the next.
Merry Marketing: How giving can end up getting you a lot!
Tuesday, December 8, 2009
Yes, t’is the season to be jolly. It’s almost Christmas time, and everybody is scrambling around in their coats and scarves to catch the flying items falling off of store racks everywhere. Even in this weak economy, people are still willing to spend a little cash in the spirit of holiday giving.
As a marketeer, you should already be asking yourself, “how can I leverage this as an advantage for my home improvement or rebath business?” But that’s when the guilt kicks in. Like a sharp kick to the side, the pang of guilt forces you to say, “I should be thinking about giving, not receiving!”.
Consumers experience something similar to this called Shopper’s Guilt. It’s when people who can afford to spend money forgo doing so in response to feeling guilty that others cannot afford it. This effect is amplified in a weak economy where there is high unemployment.
The good news is there is a way to quell both your need to indulge in holiday charity and to get customers feeling right about spending money again. All you need to do is pick a charity and team up with it as a holiday promotion.
Something similar to this might work: “For every home improvement project or rebath product purchased in the month of December, 5% will be donated to ___________”.
Of course, you’ll have to crunch the numbers and figure out what your company can afford to donate, but once you have, you will be able to both quell shopper’s guilt and help a charity at the same time. You don’t want put your business at risk by contributing too much of your sale to where it becomes detrimental, but you also want to keep in mind that these might be customers who otherwise would not have purchased anything, so any profit is a good profit.
Once you’ve figured out the numbers and the program semantics, make sure to tailor a specific marketing campaign (social media is great for quick response campaigns!) for your holiday promotion. People need to know that you’re teaming up with a charity for the holiday, and once they do, they wont have to feel guilty about getting a little something this Christmas, because they’ll be giving a little something at the same time.
How to Market your Home Improvement Business: 4 Simple Recession Proof Marketing Principles
Monday, November 30, 2009
Let’s face it, the recent downturn of the economy has adversely affected many small businesses. Only adding to the problem is the lack of marketing direction and strategy for many small businesses. They think that marketing is a mysterious voodoo power reserved for the bigger businesses with fancy hi-rise offices and gargantuan marketing budgets. This is simply NOT true. A marketing strategy is essential for the success of any business, no matter the size.
So what’s the difference between a business with a marketing strategy and one without? Well, take a black jack table in Las Vegas as an example. Let’s say there are two people present:
Player A) a wandering tourist fresh out of a fancy buffet, fingers greasily fiddling with his multi-colored chips as he looks on to the dealer, signaling for him to hit.
Player B) a card counter. A modern day rain man, who also signals for the dealer to deal him another card.
To the untrained eye, it might look like both of these men are gambling, but are they really? Player A is definitely gambling. He is blindly throwing his money into a game of chance, fingers crossed in hopes of lady luck casting a happy glance down upon him. Player B, however, is putting in an investment based on past successes, and knows that every play he makes has a greater chance of offering him a return.
Now let’s take a real life marketing example. In Austin, TX, the recession hit the real estate market pretty hard, so people that were on the cusp of buying new properties instead decided to invest their money on home improvement and rebath to increase the value of their existing properties. You would think that home improvement marketing and rebath marketing would have jumped on the opportunity for lead generation in a heartbeat, generating home improvement leads hand over fist.
For some it worked, and for some it didn’t. Many of the small home improvement businesses simply didn’t know the best way to react to the situation because they had no marketing strategy. Any promotion or lead generation endeavor was merely a gamble, whereas the businesses that had a cohesive marketing strategy used it to their advantage and stole the market share for their own.
The Moral of The Story: Don’t Gamble with your business. To ensure constant and positive returns on marketing investment, you need a cohesive marketing strategy. Here are four simple steps to forming a successful marketing strategy for your home improvement or rebath business:
Step 1) Find your audience.
- Who are you trying to reach? New home owners? Huge commercial properties? Are you catered to an older audience or a younger audience? If your audience is too general you will exhaust both your human and monetary capital and wear yourself thin. Pick a target audience that you feel confident you can build market share with.
Step 2) Find your message.
- Simply put, what makes your home improvement business different? What is your expertise. Yes you are a home improvement or rebath company, but are you the “budget” company? Are you specifically for high budget clientele? Are you a “green” home improvement company focused on environmentally sound methods? Pick what makes your company stand out and include this in your marketing messages. Make it part of your identity.
Step 3) Find your medium.
- Which medium will you use to deliver your message? This will largely depend on your budget and situational appropriateness. What are you trying to accomplish? Billboards, television, radio, print, social media, networking groups… it all depends on what you need to be done and how much time and money you can afford. Choose the medium that’s most appropriate for both your message and your budget. Brand recognition and awareness can use bigger scale, more static mediums such as billboards and television ads. The more reactive marketing methods such as sales, promotions, and coupons can leverage more dynamic and quicker-responding mediums such as radio, print, and social media.
Step 4) Analyze and adjust.
- This is the most important part of your home improvement or rebath marketing strategy. This is where you analyze your promotions, how people are finding out about you, and what marketing methods are working for your business.
Keep track of the amount of time and money you put into each marketing endeavor and how much business each endeavor generates
If your return on marketing investment is not sufficient, make necessary changes or don’t use that specific method again. If it works, then keep on using it (and note in which situations it is successful for future reference).
If you follow these steps, and keep track of your successes and failures, you will soon have a cohesive marketing strategy for your home improvement business that will not generate significant home improvement and rebath leads right now, but enable you to leverage the market conditions in your favor for all future situations.
Thanksgiving Themed Marketing: What do you bring to the table?
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
America is a huge melting pot of different cultures, so it’s no surprise that Thanksgiving tables across the nation look a little different from one another. I’m sure you’ll find the traditional Thanksgiving spread, but perhaps with a side of sweet and sour sauce, chile con queso… a jar of kosher pickles, maybe?
If someone were to visit these households for Thanksgiving, they would bring back the memory of that one special dish. So in the Thanksgiving spread that is your industry…what do your customers remember about your dinner? What is your “special dish” ? What makes your business stand out from the competition?
There are many facets to the home improvement and rebath business, just like there are many different types of home improvement and rebath customers! Each and every one of these people needs to know what makes your company better or different (hopefully both) then any other business in the same field.
The next time a customer is looking for home improvement or rebath services, how will they choose the business to which they return? It depends on the marketing of each business. Here are some niches that your home improvement business may cater to:
Quick turnaround, expedited jobs
Intricate, custom jobs
Low Budget jobs
High Budget jobs
Try some of these home improvement and rebath labels on your business and see how they fit! “Fast and easy home improvement”, “Custom Rebath”, “High Quality home improvement”. You aren’t limited to these labels, but the idea is there. Find out what part of the market your home improvement business best speaks to.
The point of this is to refine your marketing strategy. If you can hone in on a specific niche of your market, it will make refining your marketing endeavors that much easier, so you can get the best return on your marketing investments, because if you know which niche is providing you the best returns, you can pursue the most efficient marketing with as little overhead for your business as possible.
If you can figure out what your “special dish” is for your business, then every Thanksgiving your customers will be sure to come back for more, and that means plenty of leftovers for your home improvement or rebath business for years to come.
Look, Ma, No Hands!: How to build SEO backlinks without lifting a finger
Thursday, October 29, 2009
Today, a poll written by TotalBeauty.com spread across the internet. It contained a list of which cities had “the ugliest men in America”. We’re not condoning this sort of report, but it does come in useful as a case study for how to get attention to your website. CNN ended up picking up the story and sharing it with the nation. Now THAT is definitely some attention. Let’s see how this applies to building SEO backlinks.
Your business marketing campaign has a limited amount of capital, both monetary and time-wise. This means that you need to maximize the efficiency of the effort that you put into your marketing campaigns. Your lead generation is dependent on how adaptive your marketing strategy is to customer demand and market trends, but your business plan depends on long-term, concrete marketing goals. How do you find a happy medium? The trick is to finding what sort of lead generation activities provide the best return on the amount of time or money spent on these endeavors.
In regards to SEO, this means maximizing the efficiency of your time spent on link building. You can go the manual route and painstakingly call, email, and contact other high ranking website for keywords and keyphrases for which you are looking to build relevancy. Depending on what your online marketing campaigns look like, sometimes that really is the only way to go.
For small businesses like home improvement and Rebath, there just isn’t enough time in the day to foster lead generation via manual link building SEO strategies. That’s okay, because you don’t have to! Just stick to what you’re good at, and whip up a quick article about what you know.
If you just got through a Rebath or home improvement project where you successfully battled a common mold problem, why not take a couple of hours to share your success story? In doing so, you can build just as many quality SEO backlinks without having to trudge through directories and beg people to link back to your site. If you share interesting and notable content, soon enough people will build your backlinks for you.
Keep in mind that all these SEO strategies are centered around what you’re already doing, and the only difference is throwing in some documentation and marketing panache.
Don’t waste your time and money by doing things the hard way. Stick to what your doing and share your successes with the world. You can build a good foundation for a successfully online marketing campaign with just that, and that will start you along the path for great lead generation.
One Size does NOT fit all Marketing Solutions
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Just as every person in this world is a special and unique snowflake of creation, marketing campaigns also come in different shapes and sizes.
Not only are they unique to business such as home improvement companies and Rebath businesses, but they are unique within themselves! You can’t have one be all, end all solution for your marketing needs. The trick is to leverage solutions which have strengths for certain aspects of your marketing campaigns.
Let’s say you have a long-term marketing campaign, and have invested marketing capital and budget into billboard advertising and television ads. Television ads take time and money to produce, and are difficult and expensive to utilize for on the spot marketing needs. The same can be said for billboards, as they have long-term campaigns for the most part.
These marketing solutions are great for things like brand and name recognition, but are very difficult to use in a pinch when you want to tailor your latest brilliant marketing ideas. Fortunately for you, there are a plethora of other tools at your disposal.
What is the quickest and easiest way to get a message from your company to the adoring public? Social Media! Let the billboard and television advertising take care of your long-term marketing endeavors while you apply social media in a more surgical manner.
Example:
A storm hits your area and thousands of people are left with destroyed roofing. There are thousands of people looking for roofing help, and they don’t know where to turn! Sure, they might possibly remember your business name from that ad campaign you ran last month, or perhaps from those couple of billboards they saw coming home from the interstate…but why leave it to chance?
This would be the perfect opportunity to increase your lead generation through social media! You can update your Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or whatever social media that you use with your specials, services, and product announcements. You can include links to your home page and get some nice traffic rolling in! Not only is this free, but it is instant. Can you say that about many other mediums of communication?
You wouldn’t use a hammer to screw something in, would you? Of course not, so why use the same marketing solutions for every need? A marketing campaign is not a static, one-trick pony (well, at least not the successful ones). A good marketing campaign is diversified with both long-term goals like brand and name recognition, and also short-term goals like product advertising and lead generation. So what’s the difference between good marketing and bad marketing?
The difference is knowing which solution to apply to achieve each goal accordingly.
SEO Snake Oil: Scams and Services to Avoid
Monday, October 19, 2009
Finish this phrase:
“If it sounds too good to be true, ________________ .”
That’s right! It probably is.
Now let’s take a look at some commonly used phrasing in regards to online marketing, SEO, SEM, and other such internet related business practices.
“FIRST PAGE GOOGLE SEARCH RESULTS GUARANTEED”
When it comes to search engines, the entire practice of Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing is all based off of educated guesses. There is no inside insight into the search algorithm that Google, Bing, Yahoo!, or any other search engine used. So while online marketing companies can research and find out the best way to increase search engine visibility (some to great success!), it is all based on really good educated guesses. Google could change their algorithm the next day and your site could plummet to the bottom of the search engine ranks. There are no “guaranteed search engine rankings”. If someone is claiming to guarantee a spot in the SERPs, then they are either outright lying or being disingenuous. They don’t mention for what terms or phrases for which they will garner this magical Google ranking. I’m sure anyone could get first page “wombat psychology summer program registration” results if they really wanted to.
“TOP SEARCH ENGINE RANKING IN 24 HOURS”
There are many things you can do in a 24 hour time span. You can learn the game “Go”, take a trip to a day spa, watch all 6 Star Wars movies, but you can’t really get top search engine ranking for valid keywords and phrases in a 24 hour period. This phrase appeals to the people who are impatient, and because not many people have innate in-depth knowledge of SEO, they waste their time and money on these snake oil services.
There are more scams, but they all amount to the same thing. These shady SEO and SEM services offer a cheap and fast product, and the people that use them get nowhere, but they get nowhere quickly and for little cost.
The moral of the story:
Search Engines were created to put relevant information in the hands of the user. This means that if your website isn’t showing up in the search rankings, then it isn’t relevant information for those search terms. You have two options at this point:
1) Find out the quickest way to exploit Google’s algorithm to boost your search rankings, or find a company to do it for you.
2) Find a seasoned online marketing company that knows how to actually make your page relevant for your desired terms organically and legitimately.
Remember, if your a home improvement company (or any company for that matter) your lead generation is tied to your marketing. If you base your marketing on SEO and SEM provided by unstable business practices, then you’re setting your business up for failure.
Leads and CRM, a Tale of Two Companies
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
Lead generation is essential for any sales oriented business or service provider. After all, you can have the greatest product in the world, but if nobody knows you exist, you’re not selling a thing. Rebath and home improvement leads are no different. All the marketing and advertising in the world won’t do you a bit of good if you don’t treat those leads with care!
Allow me to rephrase that. If you’re a home improvement or rebath business, you are already busy with the practical side of running your business. You have limited time and capital to put into marketing strategies and lead generation for your business, so when you get a lead, you need to use it to its full potential. This is accomplished through Customer Relationship Management.
Let’s take two companies for an example, an Austin ad agency, and a Texas home improvement and rebath company. Both the Austin ad agency and the home improvement business get 5 incoming leads and only 1 lead turns into a sale, but only the ad agency utilizes a Customer Relationship Management solution. This includes practices such as keeping a database of customer interaction, requesting client feedback, and analyzing this data in order to figure out if the lead was successful, cost effective, etc.
So the home improvement company gained 5 leads, and 1 sale. The Austin ad agency gained 5 leads, 1 sale, and a wealth of information. The benefit of using Customer Relationship Management is that it has the potential to multiply the value of your leads. By analyzing the data provided by your customers, you can see what they like, what they don’t like, what sort of interaction is effective with them, and many other things. You can then take the data that you’ve analyzed and apply the concepts of what you’ve learned to future lead generation strategies.
While the two example companies might have the same success on the surface, the ad agency will be able to fine tune their marketing strategies and advertising in the future to produce more efficient and effective leads for their company.
Use your Customer Relationship Management strategies to find out what types of leads work best for your company. If you don’t know how, there are always those of us that can help you.
The Big Picture: A Quick Marketing Retrospective
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
It’s time for a quiz! (Stop sweating, it’s multiple choice).
Q) Which of these is most important for marketing?
A) Really cool looking marketing material
B) Lead generation. 5000 leads a day, regardless of industry
C) Lunches on the corporate card
D) Knowing your target audience
Pencils down!
For those who chose A: You just might be a Photoshop whiz kid, or a graphic design extraordinaire! Marketing strategies, however, may not subside on cool graphics alone, but on science and math too.
For those who chose B: Yes, lead generation is important, especially in the home improvement industry where there are many, many professionals available to offer their services at any given time. Lead generation, though, means nothing in and of itself. Your lead generation may be exceptional within the home improvement industry, but if they were all looking for a real estate agent in the first place, then the leads are of little to no value.
For those who chose C: Go to the corner store and pick yourself up a snack. Get your head in the game!
For those who chose D: You are absolutely correct. Knowing your target audience is essential for any business marketing campaign, regardless of industry.
Granted, this is easier said than done (and even somewhat obvious), but the point remains the same. Marketing strategies are not one-trick ponies. They are multi-faceted plans that use your marketing capital in order to achieve the greatest return on investment. That’s the marketing game, in a nutshell.
A good litmus test? Ask yourself right now, without cheating or using Google, “What is my target audience.” If you can answer that off the top of your head, then you still have a grasp of who you’re trying to reach.
If you find yourself either unsure, or hesitant to answer, then one of two things might have happened. One, you really might not know who your target audience is. If this is the case, you need to re-evaluate, or even just begin outlining your marketing strategy. What is your message? Who are you trying to reach? Even a small local business here in Austin, Tx needs a marketing strategy. If you don’t even know who you’re trying to reach, how will you ever know once you’ve reached them?!
If you once had a definitive answer to that question, but are now uncertain, then your target audience might have changed without you even knowing it. This is okay, because sometimes business plans and marketing strategies have to adjust and compensate for a variety of factors, and they will be fine as long as you are aware and consciously adjusting your marketing.
A little big picture retrospective is healthy in any planning process:
1) What are you trying to say?
2) To whom are you trying to say this?
3) How (via what mediums) will I get my message across?
4) Is this working?
With a carefully planned marketing strategy, 1 and 2 should be easy to answer, and 3 should be flexible until question 4 yields a “yes”.
Simple enough? (yeah, right).
The Many Faces of Google: How To Leverage Universal Search In Your Online Search Engine Marketing Campaigns
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Some years ago, Google revamped its search engine to include more than just webpages. Google Universal Search now includes results from things like Google owned YouTube, Google images, Google maps, etc.
Although it makes search engine marketing slightly more involved, this also means there are more areas that will allow you to don your SEO thinking cap in order to boost your Google rankings.
Images: Google images, to be exact. The images on your website can affect your Google rank. While you don’t have to name every picture the same thing, instead of something arbitrary, try to use some keywords in title tags and alt text.
In addition to the existing images on your website, you can create images with the purpose of spreading them around the internet. Of course, this depends on your industry, and whether or not it is appropriate for your company, but if it is, why not create some entertaining pictures that people will want to link to others? It doesn’t have to be the next great LOLcat, but if your customers link it to others, and it is linking to certain pages on your website, then it will help your ranking and possibly create some backlinks for you.
Video SEO: This isn’t the first time this blog has mentioned YouTube in regards to SEO, and with good reason. Haven’t you heard? YouTube is the SECOND MOST USED SEARCH ENGINE. If you’re not exposing your business on YouTube, you’re doing a disservice to your online marketing campaign.
YouTube tends to carry a certain stigma with it because its content is usually catered towards entertainment, but you don’t need to participate in this. A couple of easy ways to get exposure on YouTube are by creating instructional videos that are relevant to your industry, or even just a video portfolio or some of your products and services. You can link your website from individual videos and your YouTube profile, which will increase the number of inbound links to your website. (Plus, if people like your videos, they can easily embed them in their blog posts, Tweets, or web pages).
Google Maps: That’s right! If you make an entry into Google Maps for your business, your customers will have another way to find your business. You can fill your profile with relevant keywords and phrases, which helps all sorts of SEO campaigns, but most particularly local campaigns. It also ensures that if someone searches for your business name specifically, they will be provided with quick, relevant results. You’d be surprised at how many businesses don’t show up as the top result when someone searches for their website specifically.
The inclusion of other services into Google’s Universal search shows that search engines are moving beyond just web page indexes. Search engines want to provide users with all sorts of helpful information regarding their searches, and if your business isn’t making itself visible in as many relevant aspects of search engines as possible, then you’re already behind the search engine marketing curve.