how to market small business online – Page 5

December 6, 2011December 6, 2011

What Do You Know About Your Customers?

Effective small business marketing relies on a sound knowledge of your customers (current and potential). Survey tools, such as SurveyMonkey, can help you gain the necessary knowledge about your customers.

To be effective, small business marketing must be targeted and this requires a deep knowledge of your customers. For example, with LinkedIn Ads you can target job title, organization or professional group. With Facebook Ads, you can target your advertising based on gender, age and interests of your customers.

How well do you know your customers?

What do you know about your customers’ typical characteristics? Have you any idea of the demographics of your customers, their preferences or their typical behaviour in different situations?

The following topics might give you some idea of what information you could gain about your customers (current and potential):

gender
age grouping (e.g. Generation X orY, Baby Boomers?)
interests (hobbies, sports. films)
where they find their entertainment
whether they work from home or in an office
how they use their mobile phone
where they live (city, country, local or global)
what they are willing to spend their money on
how they behave in different economic conditions (e.g. in a recession)
what kinds of presents they buy
close relationships – married/ de-facto, family size, same sex couples
how they spend their holiday time
where they converse on the web via social media.

If you lack information about your customers, your small business marketing activity will be untargeted and costly. However, one way to overcome this lack of information is to survey your customers (current and potential).

Survey your customers with SurveyMonkey

SurveyMonkey is a dedicated online survey service that is free for stated levels of service. At present, the SurveyMonkey service is free where you are using no more than 10 questions per survey and receiving no more than 100 responses per survey. When you work on a likely response rate in the vicinity of 10-30%, then this is a generous offer.

Even at this basic free level, SurveyMonkey enables you to design a web-based survey with an introduction explaining the survey purpose and different types of questions, e.g. fixed response or open-ended questions. It is super easy to use and you can very quickly design a survey that will increase your knowledge of your customers.

The basic level service of SurveyMonkey enables information collection via a weblink, email or Twitter; through a website pop-up; through embedding the survey on your website; or by placing the survey on your Facebook page.

SurveyMonkey will collate your results and give you access to the responses online. At the free level of service, you will receive some basic analysis of results but you need to upgrade to get more sophisticated summaries and analysis (e.g. charts such as bar chart or pie chart). However, for small business marketing you can often get by with the basic analysis of results.

Here’s an example of the analysis of results for a simple ‘work type’ question that I used to survey a group of readers of my e-Learning Blog:

Other questions in my survey on SurveyMonkey covered the frequency of access to the blog, how the information on the blog was used and suggestions for changes. This was a blog that I was contracted to write for the Queensland Department of Education over an 18 month period, so I needed to know the relative make-up of my audience, how the blog was being used and what improvements I could make in the information provided.

Your potential survey activity is limited only by your imagination and your willingness to find out more about your customers. Earlier this year, when my joint venture partners and I were developing Wizzley.com, a community for online writers, I used SurveyMonkey to find out the ‘article categories’ that members of my mailing list would like to see included. This helped us to round out the more than 3,000 categories for articles for our site. So through the survey, we basically established what topics my current email subscribers would like to write about on our new site for social networking and article writing.

Effective small business marketing requires a deep understanding of your customers and tools like SurveyMonkey help you to gain the requisite knowledge to achieve target marketing in a cost effective way.

December 5, 2011December 5, 2011

How to Create LinkedIn Ads: The Basic Steps

Linkedin Ads is a great medium for targeted advertising for business-to-business (B2B) marketing or where the market for your small business can be segmented by profession, job title or company. Now with over 130 million members, the LinkedIn professional network allows small businesses to get their message across to a highly targeted audience.

Good conversion rates and leads can be generated from LinkedIn Ads – as long as you have the right tools and the right people to tailor your message correctly. There are plenty of blogs and articles that can teach you how to create a great online ad campaign to achieve a high return on investment (ROI), but this blog post gets down to the very basics of creating Linkedin Ads.

What do you need to do first? How do you set up a Linked Ad? What are your options? This blog post will address these questions and more by spelling out the basic steps to get your LinkedIn Ads up and running.

Step 1 – Getting started with LinkedIn Ads

You must have a Linkedin profile to start. From there, you can go to Linkedin Ads by clicking the link located at the top left hand corner of the page:

You can also create a Business Account if you have created a company page. By doing so, you can add additional people to control and monitor your campaigns. This runs separately from your individual LinkedIn Ads account, so you can choose to run a campaign for yourself and then run a company campaign. These are also billed separately.

There is an additional registration required to create your LinkedIn ‘Business Account’ as indicated in the following image:

Step 2 – Create a LinkedIn Ad campaign

To create a LinkedIn Ad campaign you need to understand the basic terms used by LinkedIn:

Ad campaign: Covers up to 15 Ad variations and a single target audience.

Ad Campaign Name: If you intend to segment your audience, name your campaign accordingly for easy tracking and easy metrics beyond the campaign, e.g. as seen in the image below – ‘Performance Conversations for Networks/Groups’ ([Training Workshop Name] for [Targeted Group]):

Ad Destination: You can link the Ad straight to a page on your website or to a page created from your LinkedIn account. If you are going to send visitors to your website, ensure the link in your Ad takes them directly to the related page – do not send them to your homepage and expect them to look around for the right information. That is an easy way to instantly lose a possible sale.

If you have created a page from your Linkedin Company Page, you can also send people who view your Ad to the address of that Company Page. For e.g. a job advertisement you’ve posted, or a service that your company offers.

In addition to the above terms, you need to understand the LinkedIn Ad structure. This covers items such as image for your Ad, headline and description:

Image for your Ad must be 50×50 pixels.
The headline must be no more than 25 characters. Unlike Google Adwords, the headline for your LinkedIn Ad does not have to be “keyword specific”, so you can use a title that will catch your audience’s eye.
The description must be no more than 75 characters (but you have two lines to be creative with these limited characters). With character restrictions, you must get to the point but grab attention at the same time. Some common tips are:

– Tell them what you’re selling – get to the point

– Appeal to an emotion (fear, stress, relief, excitement)

– Use a Call to Action (e.g. Register today).

To round off your LinkedIn Ad you need to complete the ‘From” field with either your own name or your company name.

Step 3 – Targeting your LinkedIn Ad

This step is what gives you the most value so be sure you know exactly who you are trying to target. Your options for targeting with LinkedIn Ads include location, company, job title, group, gender and age. You can make your targeting as broad as you want (all members from one location – Australia) or as defined as you want (only members from Brisbane, Australia AND who work for the Queensland Government AND who are in a Senior Position AND who are a member of the AHRI Network group).

On the top right hand corner of your screen you will see your Estimated Target Audience. The more defined you get, the more this number shrinks, but don’t see this as negative. If your goal is to gain awareness of your brand, keep your target broad. If you are looking to generate conversions and believe you’ll have a high click-through-rate (CTR), then save yourself from advertising to unnecessary audiences costing you unnecessary clicks (and money). The more defined your targeting, the more likely you’ll be able to convert your LinkedIn Ads to sales because your Ad will actually mean something to your audinece. To everyone else – your Ad is just another ad with no relevance or significance for them.

Step 4 – Setting the budget for your LinkedIn Ads

LinkedIn Ads is a paid advertising platform. You have two basic options in terms of what you pay for:

Pay per click (CPC): You only get charged when someone clicks on your Ad.
Pay per impressions (CPM): You pay for the number of times your Ad displays for a visitor to LinkedIn (on the basis of ‘per thousand impressions’).

This choice is dependent on your goal. Linkedin will always suggest a click bid range for you. The minimum is $2.00 per click. The Bid Range is based on competition. The higher you bid, the more likely your ad will be shown over competitors who may not be willing to pay as much. Don’t worry about over-spending. That’s where the Daily Budget comes in, allowing control over your clicks so that you can stay within your online advertising budget. You need to choose whether you want to run your campaign continuously or until a specific date.

(Side note: there is a one time activation fee of $5.00 – this is then credited to your LinkedIn Ads account and used as the initial credit towards Clicks/Impressions)

Step 5 – Let your LinkedIn Ad run for a period…and evaluate

Keep an eye on your campaigns every day. It is important to monitor how your Ads are going so you can make adjustments if necessary. If your Ads aren’t getting any clicks – edit or delete them. If you’ve identified which variations of your ads are working the best – disable the others. If you’re reaching your daily budget every day and not getting any conversions to sales – lower your bid per click and/or alter your daily budget. Watch your campaign to ensure it is working for you and what you are trying to achieve.

LinkedIn Ads can be a profitable medium for small business marketing if you target your Ads appropriately and evaluate your results continuously.

December 3, 2011

Why Use LinkedIn Ads for Small Business Marketing?

LinkedIn Ads have a number of distinct advantages for small business marketing, particularly for businesses in the professional sector. We decided to use LinkedIn Ads to raise awareness of, and participation in, one of our new training workshops. This approach was designed to complement our normal email marketing campaign for our human resource consulting business.

Linkedin Ads is much the same as most click-based advertising programs, and just like Facebook Ads, you can segment your target audience. What makes this targeting more valuable and relevant is that you can target your audience based on their current professional status or career interests. In contrast, Facebook Ads tend to focus more on lifestyle interests, while Google Adwords enables targeting geographically by search terms/keywords.

LinkedIn Ads: The Advantages

The advantages of LinkedIn Ads revolve around targeting/segmenting features and cost structure. The key advantages for us were:

1. Ability to target professionals and business people

We could select a target audience based on Location (capital city, state, country), Gender and Age and then segment them further by selecting Companies they work for, Job Titles or even a Group they had joined.

2, Option to run your campaign for different target audiences

We focused on three different target audiences in this campaign – (1) people in Senior positions (as our workshop focuses mostly on managers and team leaders), (2) those that worked at specific Companies and (3) those who belonged to certain Linkedin Groups (usually professionally based).

3. Ability to create up to 15 variations of an ad

Initially we had two variations – each had the same copy but with different images. Eventually we added more variations to include Call to Actions. We ended up with 12 variations in total.

4. Relatively cheap for a highly targeted service

As with most click-based advertising, you have the power to set your daily budget and how much you are willing to pay for each click. While Linkedin Ads do have minimum amounts that you could set ($2.00 per click and $10.00 daily budget), these were relatively inexpensive considering how targeted you could make your audience, ensuring that only the most relevant people are viewing your ads.

Related to this last advantage is the capacity to view in advance the numbers that make up any specific targeted audience – so you can very quickly see whether the target audience is too large or too small. The following illustration shows that one of our earlier choices of audience resulted in an estimated target audience of 281,994.

Linkedin Ads: The Disadvantages

Two distinct disadvantages from our first experience of LinkedIn Ads were:

1.Actual reach

With the option to target your audience as broad or as narrow as you wish – we found that the more we wanted to tailor our campaign, the less people we could reach. While this sounds like common sense, it still felt restricting – we were not able to fine tune our targeting as much as we would have preferred to because the estimated target audience was in the low hundreds. This disadvantage could be a function of the location and population mix. The same audience choices in aUSenvironment would have resulted in much larger numbers.

2. Relatively low click through rate (CTR)

There were tens of thousands of impressions of our ads in the 2 weeks that we ran this campaign but we only received a .022 CTR (22 clicks per 1,000 impressions). This could be influenced by the nature of LinkedIn and the regular behaviour of the audience (high resistance to online ads?). Another influencing factor would be the quality of our ads – title, description and the image.

What we learned from this experience of LinkedIn Ads

Our key learning related to the nature of the image, the click behaviour of specific audience types and the impact of ad changes mid-stream in a campaign. Here are the key findings:

1. The image used makes a difference

In choosing an image, the audience clicked on the company logo image more often than a content-related image. This stat could be influenced by the fact that our logo is recognised in the marketplace after 15 years in operation.

2. The more senior group (higher organizational ranking) generated the most clicks.

By contrast, the campaign that targeted “Groups” was the least successful. What would influence this latter result is the nature of group membership (focused on discussion, not ads) and the perceived relevance of the ad to the focus of the group discussion.

3. Creating different variations in the middle of the campaign did not help at all and may have possibly harmed our campaign. Clicks almost immediately halted after releasing variations and very few clicks in total were gained from the new ads then from the original ads.

Why use LinkedIn Ads?

LinkedIn Ads provide a particular form of targeting because of the professional/vocational focus of the membership. We were able to learn a few things in our first campaign on LinkedIn. There’s a lot of trial and error with any form of click-based advertising. Patience is required along with a good analysis of your campaigns. Constant review and matching of all elements – heading, description, image and audience – are essential for success with LinkedIn Ads.

December 3, 2011December 3, 2011

Expand Your Business Through Your LinkedIn Connections

LinkedIn is the world’s largest online professional network with 130 Million members and thus provides a great opportunity for small business marketing. It represents a powerful network of educated, affluent and influential people.

Unlike Facebook and YouTube, which were established primarily for entertainment purposes, LinkedIn was created to develop business/professional connections. Once again, this background and purpose shape the etiquette and usefulness of this social networking site.

LinkedIn is used for multiple purposes by different groups of people. Employers seek out potential employees, job applicants display their work/professional knowledge and experience and business people seek to expand their professional and industry networks and locate business partners. Increasingly, employers are looking at the “Internet Footprint” of potential employees and LinkedIn has a pre-eminent status in this evaluation. Some organizations actually acknowledge that LinkedIn is their sole or primary source of job candidates.

For small businesses and Internet marketers, LinkedIn is a superb way to build a brand/profile that is professional and grounded. At the personal level, LinkedIn enables you to enrich your Internet profile by bringing both your offline and online knowledge and experience to the fore. It provides, like Facebook, the opportunity to integrate the personal and professional.

Here are some indicative facts about LinkedIn:

LinkedIn is ranked the 13^th most visited site on the Internet (12^th in the USA) – it ranks in the top ten sites in countries like Netherlands, India and Ireland
LinkedIn has a Page Rank of 9/10.

These stats highlight the power of LinkedIn as a medium for marketing and establishing a real professional presence on the Internet for yourself and/or your business.

If you have a LinkedIn profile, it will typically appear on the first page of Google results for a search on your own name or a search on a small business that you are part of. For example, if you search on the name of my small business, Merit Solutions Australia, you will see a number of individual LinkedIn profiles and the company’s LinkedIn profile on the first page of results.

From a search engine perspective, LinkedIn provides an excellent forum to capture attention and generate traffic for your website, company or products/services.

LinkedIn membership: the audience for small business marketing

LinkedIn is a superb site for building your online social network and creating new business connections. Here’s some interesting information about people on LinkedIn that is relevant to small business marketing:

LinkedIn is 59% male and 41% female
78% of LinkedIn members have a college or postgraduate qualification
69% of the people on LinkedIn live in theUS
Average household annual income for LinkedIn users is over $100,000
LinkedIn visitors spend about eight minutes on the site per visit and tend to browse the site from work rather than home
3 out of 4 LinkedIn members use the site for things related to their business – developing relationships, new business and business news
Compared with the overall internet population,

LinkedIn profiles show that:

– LinkedIn users are disproportionately well educated and affluent

– LinkedIn has a very strong representation of key business decision makers

– 18 to 24 year olds and people over 65 years are under-represented

– representation of other age groups is similar to the general Internet population.

[Sources (used with some statistical license): http://advertising.linkedin.com/audience/ & http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/linkedin.com ]

Small business marketing on LinkedIn

As an overall observation, it is important to remember that heavy selling and overt, continuous promotion on LinkedIn breaches the etiquette of this professional network and will result in complaints and being ostracized. Besides if you are using this site to promote yourself and/or your business, it is essential that you present a professional demeanor and respect the rights of other people on the site. In a previous post, I listed ten top tips for small business marketing on LinkedIn.

LinkedIn is a powerful social network for small business marketing as it provides a superb opportunity to develop your professional profile, create connections and build your customer base within a highly ranked, expanding business network.

November 30, 2011

Diagnosing Your Website Using Google’s Webmaster Tools

Google’s Webmaster Tools provides a set of diagnostics that enable you to make necessary repairs to your website. The information covers issues like the presence of Malware, duplicate pages, missing links (404 errors) and suggestions re improvement in HTML. So it seems the Google Bots are not so lazy after all!

Some of the information provided by Webmaster Tools gets very technical, so you may want to get your Webmaster to have a look at the diagnosis (or get a knowledgeable friend or family member to do so). However, you should be able to act on some of the information yourself and I will confine myself to a couple of these aspects.

Identifying and removing Malware

Webmaster Tools, as indicated in the above image, provides information about Malware that is affecting your website. According to Malwarebytes, Malware represents 97% of all online threats. Malware enables the perpetrator to steal your personal information (passwords, logins, etc) and disrupt your computer. Malware includes computer invasions such as ‘viruses, worms, trojans, rootkits, dialers and spyware’. Your Webmaster Tools will identify the threats and give you links for advice on how to remove these threats. A better way to go is to be proactive and use a program that will detect, prevent and destroy malware. The Anti-Malware program that I use and that is recommended by many technical experts (100 million downloads worldwide) is Malwarebytes.

If you take the opportunity to protect your website with an anti-malware program, then you will see the following message from Google’s Webmaster Tools (reported about my Small Business Odyssey site):

Google has not detected any malware on this site.

Clearing out duplicate webpages

The Webmaster Tools also advise other problems with your website that can be readily rectified. One of these is where you have duplicate pages on your website. Sometimes, you may have created a new version of an old page and accidentally left the old version on the website, resulting in duplication of the page. This happened recently with the website for my own human resources business. Google’s Webmaster Tools will advise you of this duplication under the ‘HTML suggestions’ menu item (see image above). The duplicate pages I identified were listed under the sub-menu item, ‘Pages with duplicate meta descriptions’ (in other words, with substantially the same title).

Dealing with 404 errors – page not found

These ‘page not found’ errors (404) are reported under ‘Crawl errors’ (see image above – it means you’ve upset the Google Bots because they can’t find the webpage that was supposed to be present). 404 errors can occur because you have removed a page which is still showing in Google’s version of your sitemap or because the page you linked to no longer exists for some reason. The Google Bots try to follow the links on your site and when they see a deadend, they report it as a 404 error.

I recently found a series of 404 errors on the website for my human resource consultancy business as reported in Webmaster Tools. These errors resulted from the fact that we had changed the default ‘permalink’ for the titles of our blog posts (changed from an auto-generated number to the title of our blog posts). The result was the following type of errors reported in Webmaster Tools under ‘Crawl errors”:

Where possible, you should clean up broken links and, where appropriate, resubmit your sitemap so that Google has a more up-to-date version to follow.

Through its Webmaster Tools, Google gives you a lot of information to help you to keep your website functioning properly and to make it easy for the Google Bots to index your website effectively.