Danielle MacInnis – Marketing Blog for Small Businesses

I have been consulting for some time now and it seems to me that small business are in the driver seat in being able to cherry pick from some of the best systems and tools about there (many free) to drive their marketing.

Here are a list of my top tools and resources that would be useful to invest in today.

1. Build your blog – this is a way to connect with your target audience in an interactive way. It is also a great way to optimise your web by linking your blog in it. The best tool I have found is wordpress because it has the best widgets (applications to enhance your communications). Blogger and typepad are also good but I have a preference for wordpress. It has more functionality.

2. Build your webpage – I think the key thing for small business is to have a web page with a content management system built into it. I use citymax but there are many software programs now that are web based that can give you a basic template and tools to build your website. A word of caution, make sure that the content management system is easy to use, provides all the services you might need, hosting, web optimisation – key words, meta tags and layout formats and will support you as your business grows i.e. shopping carts, pay per click options, search submission, adding extra domains and pages. You can purchase great templates for wordpress and use it as a website which is a low cost way of getting started but unless you host it on your own domain and use your own CSS tools it is hard to get all the functionality of surveys, forms and product sales online.

3. CRM – a basic database that collects your customers information. I use officeautopilot (sendpepper for SMB) for the base for my customer segmentation and I can use it to send campaigns from, and create landing pages. There are many tools out there that will give you this capability for little investment. 4. Autoresponder – I use aweber. Really great tool for setting up a series of emails to subscribed customers. Not a spamming tool. People need to opt in. It gives great tracking capabilities and allows me to launch many campaigns to different segments with ease.

4. Form creation – I am using Wufoo and finding it excellent. I was using surveymonkey but I think Wufoo has surpassed this tool because of its great intergration with paypal and merchant services. Not only can you create a form or survey (great templates) but you can sell using a template.

5. Sell on-line – I have found Paypal to be great and easy to set up but there are many more including shoppingcart. I think you just have to see what works for you best in your country. 6. Tracking tools – Google analytics is the best for me as it tracks information in more detail than some of the other tools but compete is a great one for looking at your competitors. Website grader is also another good one to see how to optimise your website.

Next steps: So if you are not sure how you stack up or the right questions to ask, take my online survey to help you audit your online marketing strategy.

Tracey Voyce is all about educating business owners about getting real results online. In my podcast with Tracey she covers the following areas about being successful online.

First I asked Tracey what Bloomtools mission is?

“ Bloomtools is about working with the small business and what they want to achieve online. Your website should be accessible, and you should have a strategy behind your web presence so you get some results.” Tracey said.

Tracey shared with us some of her tips for building a successful online presence. She called it the P’s of a web presence/ online presence.

1. Purpose: What is the purpose? It is no longer just about lead generation. How can I get my existing clients buying more etc.

2.Promotion:How are you going to get people to visit? What tools are you going to use.

3. Persuasion: What do you want your ideal customer to do when they visit? You want your visitors to take action. They need to know who you are what you do and what is the next step? Call, fill out form, download etc

4. Presence online: Build the relationship.

Website building – Tracey shares her advice

1. Find someone that will work on the strategy so you know that the site is going to work and get results.

2. Look for tools that will work with the site as your business grows. You need a system that has the flexibility to grow with you.

3. Understand how much work is involved in choosing updating and maintaining your site, ie WordPress(needs some IT background to maintain) vs  Bloomtools (more manageable for small businesses and less hands on).

4. Small businesses now can leverage CRM, Database marketing, SEO and content management system.

How to Build a website for engagement with Bloomtools?

Tracey explained the process of building and online presence with Bloomtools.

1. Initial consultation – understand where you are and where you need to go. What do you need and what is your budget.

2. Creative brief – then the designers can come up with three unique designs

3. Final Design – is produced

4. Populate site with your content. Optimise pages in your site for SEO

This whole process can be as quick of 4-6 weeks from start to finish.

Bloomtools have a free trial version.

Alternatively listen to this article as a podcast.

No one seems to be talking about it, but surely it is the next step. The intersection between social media and CRM tools. How do we leverage the conversation we are now having with the customer and the use of our customer relationship management engine?

CRM + [SOMETHING THAT INTERACTS WITH/MANAGES SOCIAL INTERACTION] = CRM 2.0. Paul Green’s Blog does have a great article on CRM and how it has evolved from CRM 1.0 basically a tactical software platform to manage customer data or transactions to the era of CRM2.0 – a customer engagement strategy. Vendors like SAP CRM 7 and Oracle Social CRM have been proclaiming CRM 2.0 for a while now, but according to Paul they still have a while to mature.

Jeremiah Owyang an analyst from Forrester Research is a web strategist and in his latest blog talks about  in his article When Social Media Marries CRM Systems

“brands will be able to track, manage, and monitor who enters the community, determine if they are a prospect, customer, partner, or even inactive. Secondly, brands will be able to develop intelligence on how effective communities are for bringing customers closer such as integrating existing social networks like LinkedIn to the corporate intranet. In a theoretical sense, brands could determine which customers have the best reputation, and how to keep and reward them. But perhaps, most importantly, customer experience will improve as companies now have a better understanding of them throughout their life cycle –and beyond.”

I think there are some definite leverage points that today small business and others can take advantage of.

1. As  Jeremiah suggests using the interaction that our customers have now with us through social media and building a better understanding of them and their life cycle as a customer will allow us to further customising our offerings to our customers needs. How you integrate all the channels of communication to do this, I don’t know, but I am sure there is some agitator tool out there. The future CRM without new Internet technologies such as Web 2.0 does not work anymore. There are lots of new opportunities to collect information on customers in this new social interactive environment. Recruitment firms are already leveraging this by using Linkedin.

2. As customers start to collaborate, the use of CRM tools can be more influential further up the lifecycle as we test the ideas for new products and services and build them together. Using CRM platforms as a feedback mechanism would be an ideal scenario particularly if we have the customer details like email, twitter id, or facebook name. As Jeremiah explains SalesForce is a CRM example where collaboration is starting to happen as Salesforce offers community insight tools. It offers IdeaExchange, which powers Dell Ideastorm and My StarbucksIdeas. As Paul Green explains “it extends the company’s value chain to the customer and incorporates the customer into the pores of that value chain in addition to allowing them to tap the unstructured information that is out there for the picking on the web.” There is a great opportunity to actually engage with the customer in the interactions and not many companies are using their CRM to do this yet.

3. Information on competitors, feedback on companies, customer reviews are all fair game now with the customer controlling the conversation. This information can provide a great deal of insight and an opportunity if collected and trends identified to intersect the conversation with key pieces of valuable information either to protect a brand that might be the victim of some unfair blogging or to capitalise on the groundswell of a viral campaign. As the CRM tools become more sophiscated at digesting this information companies will be able to leverage this to proactively meet the needs of their customers and protect their brand reputation.

4. Customer escalation. Hilary from Lithium makes a great comment on a blog about how CRM and community forums can assist call centre agents. Customers can search once and get combined results from forum posts and the company’s knowledge base. And customers are more likely to get their questions answered if questions posted on forums are escalated to customer support when not answered in a set time frame. For customer support agents, they get a (closer to) 360-degree view of the customer if forum activity is integrated into their CRM desktop. Hilary explains Lithium is doing this today. Helpstream is another example.

5. Adam Needle makes some interesting comments on his blog that current CRM vendors that largely cater for “ demand generation (Eloqua, Market2Lead, Marketo, Silverpop, etc.), marketing automation/EMM (Aprimo, Neolane, Unica, etc.) and advanced CRM (today prob Oracle, Salesforce, etc.) — collectively, what I refer to as integrated marketing management — are building on (and integrating with) existing CRM and are positioning both to be able to broker and to measure/nurture and find ROI in customer dialogue.” Adam states that these vendors aren’t in the best position to understand the customer dialogue because they operate in a data rich database environment but they are coming around. He believes that they are coming around and will begin to integrate social media and other such ‘unstructured’ data/communication capabilities into their platforms. So as marketers and small business the landscape will change with regards to the tools we have and how they intersect to have conversations with our customers and manage that data as part of a marketing intelligence.

SMALL BUSINESS TAKE AWAY:

So as a small business you might be just starting to collect names in a database and that is a great start but perhaps start to monitor the conversations your customers are having with you on your blog or about you on social forums or product reviews to see if you can join the conversation or identify trends where you can improve your service and your competitive advantage. A good way of starting to do this is follow google alerts and maybe some competitors just for fun or have a look at Marketingvox for some good tips.

Relevant Books:

The art of strategic Listening by Robert Berkman

The Age of Engage: Reinventing Marketing for Today’s Connected, Collaborative, and Hyperinteractive Culture by Denise Shiffman

Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies by Charlene Li (Author), Josh Bernoff (Author)

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I have been investigating a number of CRM tools that will do what I call close loop marketing for my clients. These tools enable you to put in a database and then create campaigns to nurture a lead. The two I am favoring at the moment are OfficeAutoPilot(OAP) http://www.officeautopilot.com/ and FirstWave (FW) http://www.firstwave.net.au/.

Both have their benefits but I think Officeautopilot has a slight advantage in functionality at the moment. Firstwave is more practical and easier to navigate so I guess it depends on your need and who will be driving the marketing effort.

Firstwave is around $500 upfront and $395 per month US with up to 1000 emails a month free and Officeautopilot is no set up fee and $597 for basic tool and $195 for the marketing tracker with 1000 at .01cent.

Summary of the tools:

1. Marketing tracker tools – track traffic via url coding to web pages, google ads and online campaigns. – Both

2. Lead scoring; both – and routing with OAP

3. Outlook integration – OAP

4. PURLS – personalised urls coming soon for both

5. Tags for segmentation – OAP

6. Phone tracking and integration for call centres – both

7. Templates for direct mail campaigns – FW

8. Reporting on campaigns, customised reporting – both

9. Customisable database – both

In the age of 1:1 marketing companies will be developing their own CRM tools or buying into a software vendors vision. I guess the benefit of outsourcing is you aren’t putting all your resources into the R&D and you can focus your energies and time on the business you do best. One thing is for sure, the intimacy that you have with your customers is related to the loyalty and value that they provide you, so it is worth investigating in a system that will give you that sort of relationship.