Danielle MacInnis – Marketing Blog for Small Businesses

“Fun is at the core of the way I like to do business and it has been the key to everything I’ve done from the outset. More than any other element, fun is the secret of Virgin’s success.” —Richard Branson, CEO of Virgin

What is your culture like? More than any other element I believe it shapes your success as a business. The way your employees interact with one another and the values and vision they share is key.

Here are some other organisations that inspire me with their culture.

Red Balloon culture is a fun culture.

Microsoft innovation

Virgin Blue fun, opportunity, culture

Google fun, creative, exploring

Starbucks , fun, passionate for the customer

What is your culture like? Take the survey.

Here is MacInnis Marketing’s results

You are a Tribal Leader on the verge of becoming a Tribal Elder—the highest, most respected role in our society.

Your tribe hardly ever refer to the competition, except to note how remarkable their culture is by comparison, and how far their results outstrip industry norms. The theme of communication is limitless potential, bounded only by imagination and group commitment. People in this culture can find a way to work with any almost anyone, provided their commitment to values is in the same intensity as their own. (Unlike Stage Four, the focus isn’t on “our values,” but on resonant values.) There is almost no fear, stress, or workplace conflict. People talk as though the world is watching them, which may well be the case, as their results are making history. Your job is to make sure the infrastructure to maintain these leaps to Stage Five are in place.

Special mention to Peter Mason CEO of Ducon – who taught me a lot about having fun every day and has built an awesome culture that people just want to be part of and his customers love. Thanks Pete!

Want to do two things at once? Listen to this article as a podcast. Here are my tips for a small business.

1. GET A WEBSITE

Your Business is Open to Your Marketplace 24/7,  and can be changed at anytime and it presents a professional image. Don’t you search on the web first when you are interested in a product or service?

You can do this by going to a web designer or use one of the content management tools that I use like citymax. Just google web content management systems and you fill find lots of options.  The alternative to this is to use a blogsite like wordpress, blogger or typepad and direct it over to your website address. Register your domain. Find if you can get your company name. You can check out who is or godaddy to check if it is available.

2. MAKE SURE YOU CAN BE FOUND It should be optimised for keyword searches. You want people to find your site, so make sure it shows up in Google searches. Easy way to do this is to create pages. Home page needs to be attention grabbing and should solve the prospect’s problem. It’s not about you. It’s about them. However to optimise the home page make sure you have 400-500 words with key phases and words in the title, intro and end section of your website page. Do this on every page. You can use a  wordtracker or  keyworddiscovery tools in my list of resources on this blog. Ask for links with associations you work or are involved with. You get points from google and increase your visibility. Then add your website url on everything from your email, signage, advertisements, invitations, everything in your offline presence.

3. Create a relationship with your  customers.

Most people don’t buy when they visit your website. They need to be convinced that what you provide will solve their problems.  Create a unique reason to come back to your website. It might be to download a resource like a checklist on my site or a newsletter or a calculator.  We then ask for a small piece of information, their email address and name. You can use several powerful strategies to build a list of customers and keep communicating with them automatically. How many times have you made an enquiry, or done some research online Gone to a blog or tweeted? You need to provide value. Information. Useful stuff they can use right away.  Remember to connect with your customers, create great content and engage and be of value. To do this regular communication with your customers once you have their names is a email follow on or auto-responder campaign and example is aweber software. The average customer will not respond until they have seen the message for at least 7 times. If you are going to do an email, follow-on, make sure it is still adding value, and that they have opted in.

4. Promote Your Area of Expertise

Create an article about your area of expertise on your website and then send it out on a PRwire service to get it picked up by press on line. This will give you more links back to your site (but only if you put the article on your site first). Your website is the perfect place to feature stories and testimonials but be creative, maybe record a testimonial and stream it live or get some footage. Create a project sheet for download. All of this add to promoting you in your area as an expert. Add a question forum or discussion board to your web (much easier if it is set up as a blog) or link your blog to your home page of your web and start a discussion about things your customers want to know. You should create a blog  separate to your website and link them together( if they are not one and the same). This is where you can link to other interesting relevant sources. You then can build some credibility as a expert. Why not start a podcast, which is another way to do the same thing. This should also live on your web and blog.

5. Understand your customers. Online surveys are a fantastic way to find out what your customers want. Use one of the survey free tools listed on my blog . By finding out what your clients want first, you can tailor your service or event to suit them. When you do launch, you’ll have a far better chance of success. You can also do an adwords campaign with google to create a lead generation program. This is easy to do and you can use the keyword tools above to help you as well as googles tools. You want to ensure that you use google analytics tools as this will help when you come to measure your website .

6. Purpose of your website

Is your website just a digital brochure? Well, it could be so much more. Your site should be a lead generator at the very least and ideally it should be a way to close sales either online or after an enquiry. The value of your business is in your list.  You need to measure conversion on your website. If you had a newsletter for download, measure that. Put the code form google into your website page and measure the downloads with google analytics.  Try  this app for google at youcal How many people are downloading, bouncing, how long are they staying and what are they looking at.

7. Listen, watch and inspire If you are going to invest in a website or blog then you have to invest the time to track it and improve it.  It might be a good idea to get a number of people to contribute content and have one owner. Expect to spend 2 hours per week updating your web or blog if you want it to have some traction. Look at the google analytics of your competitors, invent, create and inspire. There has never been a better time to get an online presence. People are searching on line more and more before they buy a product or service. They are having conversations with their friends online. They are making a short-list and then looking for some interaction before they make a decision. Give them a reason to have a conversation with you or you might be overlooked in this growing marketplace.

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