Through my 20+ years of marketing experience, especially in the digital marketing space, I have realized that most small businesses have the same challenges with their marketing programs. Smarter Business Solutions offers you the opportunity to determine where the marketing weaknesses are in your business and then utilize my expertise to plan, execute and analyse exactly how to achieve your business’ goals.
Most businesses employ specialists on a part time basis. For example a lot of small businesses hire out their bookkeeping, accounting, HR/payroll, etc., simply because they don’t have the in-house knowledge or the budget to have a full timer for these roles. Smarter Business Solutions and my marketing suite of offered services, works the exact same way.
You determine what your needs are. In some cases, you may not even know what you don’t know, so you don’t even realize where you need to start. That can be part of my role as well.
Which of the following marketing hurdles do you potentially want to improve upon?
SEO/Local SEO
There are a number of ways prospective customers end up on your website. Most likely, 50% or better arrive via a search engine such as Google. The thing is, if you don’t rank well enough for the terms that are important to your business, you aren’t going to be seen and your competition will be in a better position to steal your traffic.
SEO is a key element of Smarter Business Solutions’ approach to making sure you are seen throughout the customer journey. Dive a little deeper into how I can help by checking out more information on SEO & Local SEO (which 90+% of all SEO providers fail to speak to).
Social Media
Ah… the necessary evil of today’s internet and reach of your business. I joke because I am probably the least social, social media guy around!! But the thing is, it is definitely something you need to be involved in. The trick is to do it properly and with the right strategy. Simply being there isn’t good enough… and certainly isn’t effective enough.
Learn more about how SBS will help your social media presence actually put your business in a position to grow.
Video Marketing
This is possibly the largest, coolest component of digital marketing today. Video is being consumed at an alarming rate and you should definitely be in the game. The thing is though, the game doesn’t always just focus on closing the deal. Proper video marketing should be utilized throughout the entire customer journey to not only improve awareness of your business and services, but to help convince, convert and retain long after the sale has been made.
Smarter Business Solutions can provide you with more information on how video marketing will improve your business if you simply follow this video marketing link.
Website Management/Audits
Boring… but incredibly important. Most businesses simply ignore their website and those that send inventory to a marketplace such as Kijiji or autoTRADER, simply have no idea if their inventory is actually being seen or being seen in the right places. They also don’t know when their website has an issue, until it is far too late and requires a lot of work to correct.
This type of task can be off loaded to Smarter Business Solutions to make life easier on you. Check out more info here.
Email Marketing
Email Marketing is probably one of the most important elements of a full marketing strategy, yet done the worst. Email can be leveraged at almost all points of the customer journey but definitely post-sale. Along with SEO, it is generally considered to have the best ROI. It is trackable and can provide so much valuable information that can be leveraged throughout your marketing plan, it is silly to not have a proper plan of attack for it to maximize the impact on your business.
Read more here on how Smarter Business Solutions will help drive more successes for your business through effective Email Marketing.
Advocacy
This is as basic as it gets and is based in the fact that you aren’t sure what you need. SBS can be your representative to deal with the marketing vendors/service providers you already deal with to provide an unbiased review of their success/failures. I can also vet prospective service providers by asking the questions you may not even know to ask.
Read further on how I can assist you and to what degree.
PPC/SEM
Google is trying to force everyone into a corner and leveraging paid advertising. Yes it certainly can drive customers to you, but doesn’t need to be the primary driver of traffic to your site. If it works for you, it can probably be more effectively done. If you aren’t doing it, it might be something to look at to supplement your other digital marketing efforts.
Do a bit of investigation on PPC/SEM here and see if it makes sense to include Smarter Business Solutions in driving better results.
Data Collection/Analysis
Too many small businesses don’t have enough information in order to make informed decisions. Because of this, they tend to either do the same thing they’ve done historically (even if there are diminishing returns), or they throw caution to the wind and try something new and see what sort of ‘feeling’ they get from it.
We all know what ASSuming means right? Proper Data Collection AND Analysis will allow you to make better, smarter decisions… Hmmm I wonder where Smarter Business Solutions got its tag line?? Find out more about Data Collection & Analysis by clicking here.
Marketing Strategy
This is the fun stuff! Building a plan to fit a business’ goals. Utilizing a variety of marketing techniques to achieve both short-term and long-term goals. Unfortunately, most businesses fail in even having a plan.
“A goal without a plan is just a wish.” Find out more on my approach to making your wish a goal with a plan.
Conversion Analysis (CRO)
Getting traffic to your website is a great goal; and a very important one at that, but, you need to be able to convert as many visitors as possible into a preferred action on your website. Analysing where and how to optimize your conversion rate (CRO) is a key component of an maturing marketing plan.
SBS can help you with improving your CTR (click through rate) and making you more effective. Read more on how SBS could do this for you.
LTV/Retention
As far as my personal philosophy goes, the sale is just the start of the relationship between you and your customer. We all know that customer acquisition is incredibly expensive and selling to a ‘warm’ prospect is much easier to do. If you have the right processes in place, you will be able to sell more, more often, within a deeper customer relationship, if you have a plan to maximize client retention and Lifetime Value (LTV).
Sell more products to those you’ve already sold to. Find out more about improving your share of wallet & LTV by reading about it here.