Search Results for "business"

Classic Marketing Mistakes

Written by

Marketing isn’t easy. Granted. It is incredibly complicated and only increases in complexity each year. However, it has been my experience that there are many basic concepts which are commonly missed by those attempting to take a stab at marketing their business.

Warning: This post is intended to be constructive and helpful to anyone seeking to improve their overall marketing efforts however it has the potential to become a frustrated rant from someone frequently tasked with resolving issues that result from these kinds of errors.

It’s called ROI people

Marketing is my business. Its what I do. So you would expect me to always be recommending businesses increase their marketing budgets and invest in growth strategies. While I am often having this conversation, it is surprising to me how often I am telling business owners to hit the brakes.

The truth is that there are those who get that marketing is a critical element in any business plan and those who don’t. The problem that I often encounter is with those who DO embrace this reality. They develop a blind faith that any investment will work and business owners all too often find themselves throwing dollars into advertising campaigns and promotional efforts because they believe that is what they have to be doing. They recognize that any responsible business owner should be re-investing a certain percentage of their funds into growth and advertising. But what we frequently witness are marketing directors who have managed to secure an appropriate budget for their overall strategies but are completely unable to quantify their return.

This is where we usually enter the picture and inform decision makers that it is in their best interest to stop what they are doing for the time being and develop a new strategy that includes scientifically measurable goals and metrics. In this wonderful modern age of marketing, there is one type of campaign that I never have any interest in.  That is a campaign in which a return on investment cannot be conclusively measured.

Word-of-mouth marketing is not a real strategy

Nothing makes me throw up my hands like hearing that your promotional strategy incorporates “word-of-mouth advertising”. This is absolute nonsense and for the life of me I can’t understand why so many professionals actually take this seriously.

Let me be clear. Word-of-mouth (WOM)  exists. People talk . Word spreads. But there are some rules in business that must be considered before lending any credence to a WOM strategy. First, people will overwhelmingly talk more about negative experiences than positive. This means that you’d better be providing AMAZING, off-the-charts services or products, otherwise WOM will not typically be in your favor. Traditionally if a customer goes to five stores in a day and four of them provide INCREDIBLE service while one of them drops the ball, as soon as they get home the customer will be sure to post an outraged report on Facebook about the business who let them down, urging all of their acquaintances to boycott them for eternity. What do the first four businesses get? Nothing. Silence.

There’s another reason that WOM does not enter our business plans: It can’t be controlled. By definition word-of-mouth is outside the control of the marketer. It is truly more of a public relations concern than anything else. IMO the only times a serious business should be even talking about WOM would be when the PR and customer service departments are meeting. From that discussion some positive strategies may be devised with proactive measures that could incorporate the marketing department.

In most cases though, I have observed a good deal of misguided strategies where word-of-mouth is given far more credence than it warrants.

Everything changes and so must you

I’m a pretty young guy. Almost every day I’m working side by side with individuals who have been marketing businesses since before I could ride a bike. I’m not at all bothered by this and feel privileged to be able to associate with and learn from everyone in my professional network.

However, there seems to be one fact that I have come to terms with and many other’s that I have met have not. This fact is that change is a constant. What worked yesterday may not work today and what works today may not work tomorrow. We need to accept this.

When we are brought in to analyze the marketing budgets of businesses, I’m routinely surprised at how consistent the budgets tend to be year after year. This is where we always step in and ask questions like “why are you spending X dollars each year on X?” to which we often receive a reply along the lines of “because we always have”. We recognize that at some point these dollars were probably generating a reasonable return. But no matter what kind of return they were generating, this does not justify throwing exactly the same amount of money in this direction year after year. Whether we like it or not, these dollars need to be re-evaluated and re-distributed based on current data.

This is something we are talking about all the time. The mindset which we often confront consists of business owners seeking to grow their business by making a large, one time investment. Their common hope is that they can invest in say, a great website or a fresh branding initiative and they will be set for years. The newsflash for them tends to be that marketing is an ongoing investment. The smarter strategy usually is to budget recurring funds into marketing and constantly review and re-evaluate. Publish new articles. Blog. Update your site. Create new promotions. Explore new marketing channels. There are thousands of new things to do and successful businesses do them.

If it can’t be measured, it isn’t worth much

Carrying on a similar theme to the ROI notes above, the marketing that matters is the marketing you can measure. If you are ever approached with an advertising opportunity or a new promo idea one of your first questions should always be “How can I measure the results?” If it isn’t easy to quantify the return then you should look elsewhere.

We don’t always need to assume

Putting together an effective marketing strategy is complicated. When we are deciding on design elements, slogans, branding decisions, target market and so many other things, there is a lot to consider in order to make the right decision for your business. But the good news is that we don’t have to guess.

That’s right. When we want to determine what the most compelling promotion to run in a certain region would be, we can make our decisions based on more than just the pre-existing knowledge that exists in our own noggins. Loads of information and data exists that we can include in our decision making processes.

The research that is required to make truly informed decisions is something we are well accustomed to conducting. This can be a time consuming process but in the end is almost always well worth the effort. Gathering factual evidence to refute or substantiate our theories really does make a difference.

Some of the methods we may employ to gather factual evidence could be:

Ok that last one maybe not so much but the rest are just a few of the many, many resources at our disposal for educating ourselves prior to launching a campaign.

Conclusion

There are many more mistakes that could be added to this far-from-comprehensive list. Nonetheless, these are my top observations and I hope they serve as good reflection points for you as you contemplate your next move. Feel free to share any frustrations that you yourself have encountered in the comments below.

Penguin 2.0 is Coming Summer 2013: Google’s Matt Cutts Outlines 10 Points Forcing Black Hat & Link Spammers Out

Written by

Matt Cutts with Google put out a new video regarding Penguin 2.0. Technically this is Penguin 4, but Matt and his team are going with 2.0 as this is a major upgrade to the algorithm  The changes being made will mostly affect black hat SEO marketers, marketers that try to buy their way into search results, trick the system or cheat. He touched on 10 items that will be happening over the next few months and during the Summer of 2013 that these people will not like.

White Hat Marketers and small business wins with Penguin 2.0

This is a valuable update for small and medium size business owners who work hard to build a great compelling content and web sites. If that’s what you’re doing, Matt and his team are working hard to share your content with the world. While these Penguin 2.0 changes will help small – medium sized businesses, they will make it harder, or less likely, that web masters will find it difficult to rise up through the rankings when they try to buy their way into SEO, use Black Hat techniques or attempt Link Spamming. These are the main points of Penguin 2.0:

  1. We’re going deeper that Penguin 1.0. Penguin 2.0 is according to Matt, “…a web-spam change that’s…dedicated to try to find…Black Hat webspam and to try to target and address that. This change will have more of an impact than 1.0
  2. Advertorial that violate quality guidelines is going to have a very rough road ahead. Paid ads will no longer float pagerank  Matt explains that there’s nothing wrong with Advertorials in Google’s eyes, but they should not float page ranking in the SERPS and the ad should fully disclose that the content is paid and not editorial. I suspect that we will hear a great rumbling from those who sell advertising space online from this change alone
  3. Traditional queries will be see cleaner SERPs while traditionally spammy SERP areas will receive even tighter filtering. Matt specifically brings up pornograhpic queries and payday loan search results where Penguin 2.0 will have a much stronger impact
    Cute Samurai Penguin representing Google's Penguin 2.0 changes for Summer 2013
    Penguin 2.0 is just a little more aggressive.
  4. Denying value to link spammers by “going upstream”.   This will negatively affect black hat practices like link networks even more than what has been done historically
  5. Matt’s team is “munging” around on some ideas to enhance the sophistication of link analysis. The data they’re working with will potentially bear fruit for the team. It’s pretty early to discuss the details and we’re excited to see where this goes
  6. Improve the ability to detect hacked sites and enhance the way site owners communicate with Google when the site is reclaimed. Potentially the best part is that there will now be a single point of contact and a single source point of information for site owners to bring their website back up the SERP results
  7. Author Authority is going to have a huge boost this summer.  The Google team is working hard to use a few new signals to better determine if an author is an authority in their sphere of influence and if so, to give them more float
  8. The Google team has found and is adding some signals of quality to algorithm. This will positively affect the quality of  results and “soften the blow” for legitimate sites who were impacted too severely by the first version of Panda
  9. The team is reviewing a change that will limit clusters of results showing from the same domain.  So as you’ve reviewed results, once you’ve seen a set from a domain, and if there’s a cluster from that domain further down in the SERPS, those additional results will be ignored to allow other results to float up. The purpose is to increase the diversity of the results page
  10. Give more information to Webmasters. Beyond information about hacked sites as mentioned in point 6, Google is moving their resources around in order to give more concrete details and more useful URLs for diagnosing issues

My favorite line from the video is when Matt Cutts says, “If you’ve been hanging out on a lot of black hat forums and trading…different types of spamming package tips and that sort of stuff, then this may be a more eventful Summer for you!” Just goes to show that the anti-spam team is very serious about delivering quality results. Without it, Bing wouldn’t have to work as hard to gain market share.

As a team, Real Big Marketing is excited for these changes and the improvements it will provide to small and medium size businesses in Jackson, Lansing and the surrounding area. If you’re staying on top of your content, making sure it’s fresh and relevant, this shouldn’t be a problem for you and we hope that you have an “uneventful” Summer 2013.

If you’re interested in watching the video, we’ve embedded it here for you to view:

Marketing Strategy Firm

Written by

A marketing strategy is an expression of where you want to be and what you want to achieve.  Some companies have it down. They’ve developed a solid, results-oriented marketing plan. Others haven’t seen the difference between success and failure.  We help companies who are struggling between the two and we help people who are interested in improving their business but don’t see the results they need from their marketing spend.

We build marketing strategies for new, small- & medium-sized businesses

We help small and medium size businesses who have either grown by word of mouth or have had a little success with buying some advertising. Especially if they are in a situation where they’ve taken the advice from a bunch of different sources over time. It’s hard work to run a business. Finding the true voice of your company becomes difficult when a lot of people are pulling you in different directions. Each telling you what’s important. Situations where the agendas of others are outweighing yours. This is an ideal situation for us to help. We’ll work hard with you to figure out your voice. We’ll help you unify it across your brand and we’ll help you find the right marketing tools to promote your brand successfully, without agenda… Save yours.

We help new business owners as well. You know you have a great idea. You know people will buy it. But you’re not crazy enough to believe that, “If you build it,  they will come.”  That doesn’t happen.  So you’re in this place where you want to step out, but don’t know how to do it safely. How can I start this business and make sure that enough people will be there to support me. Support me by buying what I sell.  We help sift through what you need now and what can wait. We help figure out who’s going to help you and who’s going to steal from you.  We help you figure out what to say and where to say it so that when you open your doors, people are for your success, with their money.

What is your philosophy for creating a Marketing Strategy?Marketing strategy enhances the bottom line

We believe that people connect with brands emotionally, so we will help you connect at that level. We passionately share with our clients that one consistent message is more successful than many so we will enhance the integration and perception of your brand. Holistic strategies allow you to see a 360° view of your best customers and your best processed, so we take a comprehensive approach to solving your business challenges. We believe that goals bring accountability, so we set and act on them.
A solid, results-oriented marketing plan can be the difference between success and failure in business. Our team brings together a wide range of marketing services and tools to produce a clear marketing plan which your business can follow to success.

What type of strategic marketing services do you provide?

It depends on what you’re trying to achieve. Are there enough people who know about your brand? Is your competition taking more market share than they deserve? Are you trying to bring a product or service into a new market? Whether your goals are to generate brand awareness, reach new audiences, drive leads, convert customers, increase revenue, or retain and build customer relationships, we can help. Here are some common names assigned to the consulting work we do:
[threecol_one]

  • Brand Strategy
  • Brand Positioning
  • Business Startups
  • Lead Generation
  • Lead Nurturing
  • Lead Management
[/threecol_one] [threecol_one]
  • Campaign Development
  • Competitive Analysis
  • Industry Research & Insights
  • Market Research
  • Market Segmentation
  • Marketing Tactics
[/threecol_one] [threecol_one_last]
  • Media Planning
  • Product Launches
  • Product Development
  • Sales Tactics
  • Target Marketing
[/threecol_one_last]

Big ideas and real results to transform your vision into reality.

If you’re at a decision point and concerned about making successful decisions for your brand, give us a call.  We offer a no hassle, no obligation discussion about the situation. We’d love to shed some light for you and your brand. Drop us a note or call (517) 358-6794. We’d love to push you up to the next level.

Online Advertising – SEM & PPC

Written by

Online paid advertising is the one unique form of advertising that accurately identifies and targets customers who raise their hands to say, “I’m interested in what you have to offer.”  Much different than television, radio, magazines and direct mail where we have to wait for the end user to respond. These forms of online advertising effectively round out marketing strategies where online presence is common for the target audience and online advertising firms may help enhance the process.

Banner and skyscraper advertisements, on the whole, are in a sharp decline, but the techniques and tools are changing and improving with time. Paid search, keyword advertising, content marketing and online display advertising are extremely cost effective when used correctly. This is especially true as Search providers begin to offer “Enhanced Campaigns” which effectively bring mobile and retargeting into the mix.

Sounds great, how does it work?Online Advertising with Real Big marketing brings more traffic to your website.

Whether you’re used to Google, Bing or Yahoo, you’ve become familiar with the advertisements that show up around the real results from your search query. This is a common starting point for online advertising called paid search.  Sometimes called Search Engine Marketing, or SEM, it’s only a start.

You’ve seen the ads that follow you around the internet, the thumbnails that show up on the bottom right side of your Facebook and Linkedin pages. This is all paid online advertising. The tools used today extend far beyond results on search pages alone. As part of an online marketing strategy, brands or companies will pay for or bid on keywords and placements of display advertisements that relate to the products or services they provide. The search engines, their display networks and social media sites deliver the right ads to the right people on the web or on their smart phone.

Does the return warrant the spend?

Online advertising is ideal for marketers who want to pay for performance.  You should try it with or without a marketing firm behind you. It’s cost effective to start a campaign. We’ve found that small campaigns grow. As you run your strategy out, you’ll notice that it becomes time consuming.

With multiple campaigns and hundreds, thousands or even millions of keywords being analyzed. Paid search and online advertising can quickly become unruly when you have other work to do. Managing the keyword research, competitive bid auctions, quality scores, retargeting, extensions, demographics, landing pages, and analytics will often grow into a real job of it’s own.

This is a job that must be done because the return warrants the spend. You’ll need a partner to help when you can’t afford not to show up on the first page your client is on.

Choosing Online Advertising Firm

Digital and online agencies will often provide Paid Search or PPC Management services. There seem to be a growing number of them. Some good some bad. Print companies are buying or making ad agencies to keep afloat. TV, Radio, Newspaper and other Media companies are expanding to include the service as well. Advertisements from “Experts” are everywhere including your email.

So how to choose? Finding a reputable company isn’t time consuming. Listen to what each provider is telling you. Where are they? Will they know your market or just plug in stock content and cookie cutter campaigns. Make sure that they are qualified to do the work and not trying to sell you services you don’t need. Remember, cookie cutter solutions get companies in trouble and if the firm has a core competency in another field, they have to feed that machine.

What does your gut tell you? Is the budget appropriate to the results expected? Are you expecting to work with an online advertising firm but being pulled toward a tactic or marketing platform that doesn’t make sense for your clients? Did they check to see if online advertising would provide you with sufficient return? How are their references?

What do we do?

Holistic Online Advertising, HOA, is an organic marketing process our Paid Search and Display Advertising specialists implement to gain deep understanding of your perspective. We perform extensive campaign, keyword and competitive research to ensure that the people just like your best customers are engaging with your ads on their mobile smart phones, desktops, laptops, & tablets. The expertise we bring will help you with research, campaign setup, platform management, & ongoing research to ensure the best results from the money you spend.  We’ll help you enhance:

  1. Search Engine marketing on Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search providers relevant to your industry
  2. Display and PPC campaigns across all ad networks and relevant social media.
  3. Implement best practices and fully utilize tools like retargeting, extensions and enhanced campaigns
  4. Create effective landing pages and web sites using Search Engine Optimization, SEO, best practices.

HOA is a natural way to create consumer-centric campaigns for paid media marketing. HOA enables marketers driven by data and results to engage and convert their target audiences and meet business goals.  HOA allows marketers to engage the consumer throughout the consumer buying cycle.

If you are interested in discussing how Real Big Marketing is able to enhance your program, please send us a note, or give us a call for a free consultation (517) 358-6794. We appreciate the opportunity to support you.

Web Hosting

Written by

Just some of our hosting partners:

Why do you need web hosting?

Who controls where my site resides?  Will the server be fast enough?  Is there enough storage?  Your website needs a place to call home.  The content must be stored and maintained on a server managed by an outside provider and the equipment and services they provide is called web hosting. Depending on the content, purpose, and size of your website, you will need different levels of service from your hosting provider.  It can be a challenge to determine exactly what will fit your needs and budget.

What are the benefits of one web hosting company over another, and how do you choose?

Which web hosting provider can expand their service as your company grows?  How can you judge which company will give your domain and content management system the power that it needs?  Each web hosting company has it’s own unique strengths and services offered.  Some companies excel at mass data storage, others at expedient customer service and extreme backup protection.  It is important to select the right hosting provider and it is all dependent on your needs.  Not only are your current needs important, you must also consider the future of your business and which services you might require later down the road.

What role does Real Big Marketing play?

We come in and evaluate your needs.  Sometimes, clients will have a pre-existing web site that needs to be rebuilt and transferred to a different web hosting provider.  Other times, a client may not want to have to deal with the company.  No matter what your needs, we can help you.  We know the strengths of each company and can make sure to set you up with the appropriate level of service for your business.  We will connect you with the right provider and make sure that you are well taken care of.