Danielle MacInnis – Marketing Blog for Small Businesses

It is Christmas time and so in the spirit of giving here are some we just love and so we want to share this with you. Here also is our download of some great marketing apps  to help you market your small business. Here is the stuff that we use cost it is great, it works and it very affordable.

Freshbooks – really love this software for managing timesheets, accounting and their sense of humor.

MailChimp is our email client of choice. Not only is it easy to use but fun. Also it integrates well with wufoo (form builder) social media, google analytics just to mention a few platforms we need to make your marketing work well!

Aweber – is a great autoresponder and we use this mostly because of its awesome pop up feature but also it is a great “set and forget” auto email campaign manager.

Wufoo – our survey form of choice. Again brilliant integration with other software and really excellent reporting.

Brain Jam is a group of students that Dan likes to mentor so they get the practical skills to get great graduate jobs. Need a student? Ask us how.

Bubbl.us – love this tool for mind mapping

Hubspot Website Grader is a awesome way to work out how your site is going. Take the grade for some excellent insight and tips.

Snagit - awesome for screen grabs

Jing – awesome for recording How toos from your screen

Bloomtools a great platform that we recommend to many of our clients as it is a toolbox of marketing software in one interface. Website Content Management, CRM, forms, SEO, email marketing all in one toolbox.

Seth Godin website is packed with great marketing advice. We love his free stuff. Check out Knock, Knock – how great websites work!

Jotform is a great form creation tool. This is what we have used down the side or at the bottom of this website. Great for quick tools and integrates nicely with most web or email platforms like wordpress. Has a free version.

Gomockingbird is brilliant if you want to do a “mock” of your website as a wireframe so you can plan out how it will work. It can save a lot of time to do this drawing as a starting frame and then work with your web designer.Has a free version too!

Unbounce is a great software for creating landing pages. We used this to create a offsite with a difference for a client based around a James bond theme. Here is one of our pages. It is really easy to use. Sometimes all you need is a landing page.

Animoto allows you to create your own video creations with just a few clicks. We love it! Here is our video. You can make a 30 second video for free.

2desk is a great software that allows you to chat via skype with people on your website or blog. Great for giving or getting instant feedback. You guess it they have a free version.

Visit our website for Stuff we are into and find more apps as we discover them. Love to know what you find useful?

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.

There are some really great tools out there to help you monitor how you are going with your presence on the web. Here are some that I have found useful.

1. Google analytics – once you set up the piece of code on each page of your site, it can be a great source of information. Go to google and set up an account. Then go into the google analytics tab and set up your website/domain information. From there once you have put the piece of code on your web you are good to go. Key information from google that is useful is key word search, where your visitors are coming from, how long they stay and on which pages they visit. Use google alerts to track your company name and your competitors to see how often they are mentioned online

2. Webgrader – from hubspot.com is another great free tool that gives you some idea of how your web is performing. The great thing about this free report is that it gives you some actions that you can take to improve your chances of being found by your key customers.

3. Page rank – this gives you an idea of how well your site is ranking next to other sites out there. It is a relative measure and I found it interesting but not really that useful in terms of “so what is next?”

4. Compete is a site that will give you competitive information about your site, compared to your competitors. Webgrader and google do this as well.

1.Brand eye report

5.Brandseye – helps you monitor your brand. It is a paid service but relative inexpensive for a small business.

6. Trackur is another service that tracks your brand online. They have a download pdf to help you decide if you need tracking that is worth looking at. They also have an awesome key word tracking tool.

7. Experts like mashable have some great lists and resources available on this area. Check out their top ten reputation tracking tools. Tim Martin‘s site is a great source of information as a digital expert. Worth a look.

Many of my clients pay for google ad words. I find google ad words can be a waste of money (left hand side of page below). It can be effective but it needs to be so targeted to ensure that the customers clicking on your ad are really likely to buy your services.  I think it is much more effective to improve your chances of getting found on the organic search (right hand side) on google.

So how do you do it? Many would say you need to get the services of an SEO expert. I say no. No one can guarantee you a page 1 listing in the organic search, at least not for long. This is a constantly changing landscape. However there are a few things you can do to increase your chances of being found. Here are my top 5  tips for getting a top google ranking.

If I can do it so can you.

5 TOP TIPS FOR GOOGLE LISTING

1. Think like your customer when constructing your website. Look up key words that are descriptive of the service you deliver and words that your customers would use in their search. Use key words once in the title and a few times on each page, in bold if possible. Use a tool like Google key words or compete. This will allow you to filter those words that are heavily competed for and those that aren’t. Then choose the words that you think give you the best chance of exposure and pepper them through your home page and site. I used marketing and marketing plans.In the visible page text, include words users might choose as search query terms to find the information on your site. Don’t forget to use your geography to narrow your customers to the right location. Don’t be all things to everyone if you want to attract the right customers.

2. Creating  valuable content and updating it gives the search engines a reason to crawl your site and the more links you have to your content then the more likely Google is going to rank you higher. Having headings that describe the content is important. Answer customer questions. Link your blog on your website so the information is constantly updating. Be careful.Web pages that use Flash, frames, Java applets, plug-in content, audio files & video have content that search engines cannot access. Once you have that valuable content post it on other sites so you can link back to your own site. Pick sites that have a high authority if you can (valuable to our target audience).

3. Submit your site to search engines that are relevant to your customers. This also increases the chances of your site being found. As SEOMOz explains “Search engines have four functions – crawling, building an index, calculating relevancy & rankings and serving results.” SEOMoz is another great site to visit to learn the basics of SEO and they have a pdf download which is useful.

4. Look at your overall website SEO. The key words, subject heading, picture tags. The more information you can give Google when it crawls over your site the better you will be ranked. You can use Hubspots website grader to give you an indication of how to improve your site.

5. Do your own analytics.Don’t believe any SEO company that says they can guarantee you a 1 page google listing. It is impossible. Sites are updating all the time and so it is a constant moving landscape. Instead keep on top of key words and have an google analytics account so you can adjust your approach by monitoring your client visits and more importantly your conversions. It doesn’t matter how many people visit your site, the real measure is how many end up being a real prospect that you build a relationship with. Have a way of capturing these potential customers.

Tools:

Google Analytics Keyword Tool
Google Insights for Search
Google Keywords Traffic Estimator
Google Trends
WordTracker Free Keyword Suggestion Tool
Keyword Density Tool

Compete – to check your website against your competitors

SEOMoz – learn more about SEO

Website grader – grade your site and make changes to improve SEO