Over the last ten years I have talked to hundreds of CEOs of small and medium-sized businesses about what works and what doesn’t in building a repeatable lead stream for their business and a marketing engine that delivers measurable business results.  I started to keep track of what CEOs were telling me and devised a list of the attributes of marketing programs that succeed. 

Last year I developed a list called “The 11 Must-Have’s for Your 2011 Marketing Plan”. I believe that those “Must Have’s” still hold true more than ever, so if you have not read that or delivered on this for your business, you should start here.

This year we would like to build on the list from 2011 and explain the most important tactics we see for 2012. If you deliver them for your business, you will add significant kick to your sales and marketing program.

1. Figure Out Google+.

Google is not going away any time soon and while you might just think it’s another social media site, it’s not. Google+ could have significant value to how you communicate with your customers because it’s a tool that’s been designed for business as opposed to a site that has been developed for socializing, trying to figure out how to work for business (Facebook ). The way you connect and build groups in Google+ and interact, could be an important, cost effective tool for achieving #2 on our list.

2. Stop Broadcasting and Start Engaging.

Just broadcasting information is not going work next year. The fight to get heard is more competitive than ever so you have to figure out how to interact and work with your community whether its customers, people in the industry or people tracking your business progress. You need to understand how to build that community with tools on the back of your website for posting comments or communicating as a group with online meetings, or enhanced podcasts or webinars or shared content. It’s not about quantity, it’s about the group interacting and communicating. Stop broadcasting. Start engaging.

3. Improve your E-mail Marketing Program.

New e-mail legislation coming in April 2012 in Canada means three things:

a. You must have an e-mail marketing tool that clearly allows people to opt out and contact you if they are disgruntled about your emails. You can no longer get away with using Outlook or a CRM system that does not comply with anti-spam laws. It’s no longer an option – it’s the law.

b. People have to agree to receive e-mail from you. Don’t purchase lists. Don’t scrape addresses off websites. If someone has not opted-in to your e-mail program they don’t want to hear from you. This is bad news for people who spam and sell lists. This is great news for people who send valuable content to an Opt-in List. Make your emails valuable and wanted as opposed to deleted and unread.

c. Broadcasting product information will likely force Opt-out quickly. Re-read item #2 above.

4. Use Offline to Drive People Online.

Advertising, trade shows and other forms of marketing that are referred to as offline tactics, all drive people back to your website whether you like it or not. See our post on October 14, 2011 about the 11.2 pieces of data people are looking at online before they make a decision to buy anything and call you. It’s okay if you want to use advertising in the local paper to promote your business but instead of including a phone number, just include the link to a web page and offer something of value people can download to give you their e-mail address (so you can start solving #3 on our list).

5. Look at your Website and Google Analytics Every Day.

There is gold sitting there about what people are looking at and how people are interacting with your company. Just because they have not called you does not mean they are not checking out if they want to do business with you. Use your data to improve your marketing and don’t orphan your website. You should be adjusting content every week.

Maybe these suggestions seem obvious but you would be surprised how many companies ignore the basics. Don’t be one of them. These five strategies alone will add significant kick to your 2012 marketing plan.

Happy kick-starting your 2012 marketing plan!

Marie Wiese is founder of Marketing CoPilot, www.marketingcopilot.com and the author of the eBook, “Why marketing fails... and what you can do about it!” Marketing CoPilot provides outsourced marketing services to business owners that want to create a two-way dialogue with past, current and future customers. Marie is a 20 year veteran of the B2B marketing world, past Chair of the York Technology Alliance in the greater Toronto region and a workshop leader at Regional Innovation Centres (RICs) in Ontario where she teaches early stage companies how to build online lead generation engines that deliver measurable business results.

Over the last ten years I have talked to hundred of CEO's of small and medium sized businesses about what works and what doesn't in building a repeatable lead stream for their business and a marketing engine that delivers measurable business results. I started to keep track of what CEO's were telling me and devised a list of the attributes of marketing programs that succeed. My last post was about what makes a great website. Today we tackle the topic of tactics you should be using to drive customers to your business.

One of the great things about Google, is that it leveled the playing field for small companies that were trying to compete against Goliath. Now that the Internet and a website have become the marketing tool of choice, small companies can look big online and do things just as quickly and effectively as their larger conterparts. It just requires sound strategy not deep pockets to effectively compete.

Do you know what your competition is doing to get customers?

This week, Forrester Research issued a great report that could provide you with some clues and answers about where you should place your emphasis in the coming years with respect to marketing spend and tactics. While the data is US-based, it provides a good bench mark for what your competition is likely doing and provides a guide to the popularity of new marketing tactics and the changing nature of marketing activities.

Here is the most important thing you should be paying attention to: the time your customer is spending on the Internet has eclipsed the time they spend watching television. As a result:

1. Traditional marketing tactics such as advertising, radio and TV are waning in popularity and results.
2. The search bar continues to be the tool of choice for consumers when researching or choosing a product or service.

Here are some suggestions to ensure you are not getting out-marketed in the coming year:

1. Plan your budget based on what your customers are doing, not on past spend. Look where customers are hanging out online and how they need to get and stay engaged with your business. Don't just look at budgets past. Every year you should assess what is creating enagement and decide if you are spending too much or too little to acquire a customer that becomes truly engaged with you over the long term.  Online tactics can help you achieve this in a more powerful way than traditional media ever has. Spend your time and money on what matters to your customer. (Emphasized in point 3).
2. Use your data. Too many business owners ignore the obvious information right under their noses that they could be using to plan their next marketing activity. Trends on a website or webpage with respect to visitors, time on page and overall interaction is a good indication about whether people care. If they don't care because they spend no time on the content or it's too complicated to figure out, you can bet they won't do anything with your business as a result. No one is running out to buy something after receiving a poorly written e-mail or spending more than five minutes on a website trying to figure out what you do. The data that lies hidden inside your website or e-mail analytics are good indications of whether your programs are working and what your next campaign should be.
3. It's not about promotions or daily deals. Yes, Groupon is popular but in the coming months it will be proven that only a small percentage of the marketplace cares about 20% off or free gift with purchase. Today's precious commodity is time. People care less about saving a dollar and more about saving an hour. If your marketing is educational, intuitive and easy to understand, you save your customers precious time in understanding how something works or their choices. Value-added content or simple-to-use is what people want most today.  People want it to be easy. Help them save time in a real way and customers will follow.
4. E-mail is still king. I am amazed at the number of businesses that still don't have a decent e-mail marketing platform or program for their business. E-mail is what connects the universe online and one of the best investments your company can make is to invest in a program that allows people to engage with your business ongoing. New e-mail compliance laws coming into Canada in April 2012, will make it harder for spammers to annoy us but also give responsibility to companies to ensure their e-mail lists allow people to opt-in. Business owners should be working right now on creating, true, opt-in lists of people they can interact with online (not spam) regularly.

It might be easy to think that with the popularity of online marketing finally taking hold in the small business community, that your competition must be on top of it. You'd be surprised at the number of businesses I encounter that have ignored the simplest of activities that could be producing huge competitive advantage for their business: communicating simply and often online so that people want to hear from you. Layer on the ease of use and cost-effectiveness of today's online tools and you'll be out-marketing your competition in no time.

Marie Wiese is founder of Marketing CoPilot, and the author of the eBook, Why Marketing Fails... and what you can do about it!" Marketing CoPilot provides outsourced marketing services to business owners that want to create a two-way dialogue with past, current and future customers. Marie is a 20 year veteran of the B-2-B marketing world, past chair of the York Technology Alliance in Toronto and a workshop leader at the Regional Innovation Centres (RIC's) in Ontario where she teaches early stage companies how to build online lead generation engines that deliver measurable business results.

Over the last ten years I have talked to hundreds of CEOs of small and medium-sized businesses about what works and what doesn’t in building a repeatable lead stream for their business and a marketing engine that delivers measurable business results.  I started to keep track of what CEOs were telling me and devised a list of the attributes of marketing programs that succeed.  My last post addressed why a website is so important to the future of your business. Today we address how redoing your website can challenge your business model.

We are currently in the process of launching new online strategies for three companies that sell business solutions to other businesses. Their current websites are typical brochure-ware, meaning there is lots of detail about what the company does, but very little detail with respect to why it matters to the business processes of their customers. 

We have worked through their respective value propositions and mapped the buying process of their customers. We have designed the home page to reflect the buying process and carefully placed the value proposition in the main eye-tracking area of the site as we do using landing page optimization techniques. I have detailed elements of this process in previous blog posts. But a curious thing has happened. While we were taking care of all of the technical aspects of a website, we discovered that:

• Creating a website forces business owners to re-evaluate their business models.

In this post and ones in the coming weeks, we are going use these three companies as examples of how business models can change as result of redoing websites and creating online business strategies.

As these three companies sat down to write copy from the perspective of their customers and how their customers buy their products and services, they have come to realize that what they are selling has little differentiation in the marketplace, is highly commoditized in the industry and the actual product is not something someone is searching for in a search engine. Therefore, people searching will never find them and if they do, they won’t understand what they would be buying.

In other words, their business models no longer work in this new era of search. Bolting online tactics to an old model is no longer enough.
If this sounds familiar, read on:

1. Your company sells complex solutions versus “off the shelf”.
2. You don’t sell your products online using an eCommerce engine.
3. You have been in business for 10+ years and have a well established client base.
4. You recognize the value and impact a good website and web presence has on your business.

Don’t read on if you still believe...

“But my customers don’t go on the web to make purchasing decisions.”

Oh, but they do and this is why paying close attention to your web presence forces you to evaluate your business model. (See my last post on the way people are buying anything today and the 11.2 pieces of data they are using to make their decisions). In a world of infinite customer choice and the ability to learn about anything using a search engine, the way you position your company and communicate about it lets you break away from what everyone else in your sector is doing and changes what you sell and how you sell it.

When you start to build a new website for your business, you will likely be faced with these types of questions and challenges:

1. How to do I present the context of what I do and why it matters without jumping to features and functions and product details?
2. How would I navigate a potential buyer through the story?
3. What are prospective customers seeking that would get them to my site in the first place?
4. What are they going to find when they get there that sets my company apart?

Answers to these questions impact your business model.  Take a look at these examples:

Example A: Sells training courses. If you are a big company, you hire them to help train your managers. But this is a cluttered, highly commoditized space.  Now the way they discuss, package and sell their product has to change. Just taking course listings and dumping it on the website, isn’t going to tell the right story. How they tie together courses to create leadership solutions changes the story and the model.

Example B: Sells point of sale systems for retailers. Again, this is a highly commoditized industry ranging from selling cash registers to highly sophisticated systems that track what, how, when and where a customer buys in a retail outlet. If you do a search on “POS Systems”, an infinite number of search results are returned. For this client, just listing a series of products on the website is no longer an option. They are really in the business of selling retail intelligence and their site and sales process needs to reflect this change in the actual value of their solutions on their website and keyword strategy.

Example C: Sells audio visual equipment, another competitive space full of people who sell and set up equipment. This client needs to use their website to sell the vision of what a company is trying to achieve when they buy audio visual equipment - a collaborative ecosystem for their employees. This means their business model changes. It’s no longer just about recommending equipment and setting it up. It needs to be about selling the value of achieving business goals and outcomes.

Stay tuned as we follow their journey from concept to real website and how it transforms their business.

Marie Wiese is founder of Marketing CoPilot, www.marketingcopilot.com and the author of the eBook, “Why marketing fails... and what you can do about it!” Marketing CoPilot provides outsourced marketing services to business owners that want to create a two-way dialogue with past, current and future customers. Marie is a 20 year veteran of the B2B marketing world, past Chair of the York Technology Alliance in the greater Toronto region and a workshop leader at Regional Innovation Centres (RICs) in Ontario where she teaches early stage companies how to build online lead generation engines that deliver measurable business results.

Over the last ten years I have talked to hundreds of CEOs of small and medium-sized businesses about what works and what doesn’t in building a repeatable lead stream for their business and a marketing engine that delivers measurable business results.  I started to keep track of what CEOs were telling me and devised a list of the attributes of marketing programs that succeed.  My last post was about making the ask – how to use your website to start the buying process. Today we tackle the value of your website.

If you canvassed ten business owners, eight out of ten would have a website or some form of business marker on the web. Few people today would disagree that the most powerful way to reach an audience is online. Whether you sell to consumers or other businesses, the people who buy from you expect to be able to look up your company in a Google search bar.

But if you asked those same eight business owners how much time, money and resources they dedicate to their website, the answer would be varied. One might say they update something online every day via social media or a well organized blog strategy.  More than a couple will likely say they haven’t touched their website in over a year and have not done much with since the original investment in building it.

Statistically, 98% of buyers, whether shopping for themselves or shopping for their business, start their search online. So if your website is now your receptionist, marketing engine, sales rep and customer service support desk all rolled into one, what is the real value of your website?

I pose this question because I hear a lot of groaning and grumbling from business owners when discussing the cost of building and maintaining a website.

So what is the real value of a website?

Assuming your website at the very least contains:

• A representation of your brand
• A description of your company
• A way to contact your company
• A detailed explanation of why you should buy from your company and not the competition

Assign a value of $10,000 if you have all of the above.

• add $30,000 if your site provides a way to interact with your company such as a download, form, quote tool or mechanism other than a number to call
• add $20,000 if your site uses email marketing to push out content such as press releases, blogs or newsletters to alert people to new product or services at your company
• add $40,000 if you are actively alerting people via social media, group couponing, directories, portals or other places online on a weekly basis.

TOTAL = $100,000

Here’s the Rationale:

1. If you were to hire a designer to build you a glossy 20 page, eight by ten corporate brochure complete with copy writing, photography, printed 1,000 and distributed them across the geographic territory you serve monthly, you would likely pay much more than $10,000. But your website is performing that same function and working much harder for you from a distribution perspective. The average website receives 1,000 visitors per month and is open for those visitors 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Brochures, flyers and pamphlets cannot compare to the reach of today’s website.
2. Using your website as a way to contact your company and interact with your business is the equivalent of a full time receptionist and part time sales rep. Offering sophisticated ways to connect with your company online including tracking and analyzing content popularity and time on page, is an excellent way to gage how well people understand your company and what you do.
3. If you are also using your website and web presence as a way to push out content and connect with unknown prospects looking for your products or services, you are building a lead generation engine for your business that would cost much more to build and provide lower ROI. Telemarketing, direct mail, print advertising and other traditional forms of marketing cost much more in terms time, money and resources and are producing poorer results across the board.
4. If you are finding other places on the web to go and actively network online and drive traffic back to your website, this is the equivalent of about three people in your company out annually networking and trying to connect with prospects. The real cost of this effort is one that doesn’t get tracked at many companies but it’s costly and doesn’t help the business scale.

You need to look at your website as an employee: an employee who is there 24 hours a day, seven days a week and working hard for you. How much would you invest in an employee like this?

Even if you are a business that doesn’t have sales reps, support staff or marketing material, there is still a hard cost to keeping your doors open and selling something. The things you are doing today to support the sale of your product or service can be supported more effectively with a well organized website and detailed online strategy.

If you are a business with more than one million dollars in sales, you should be spending at least 5% of your annual revenue on the resources and costs associated with an online strategy for your business. You may have to stop doing other things with respect to sales and marketing but over the long run, I guarantee the results will be better and the return on investment greater.

In the next couple of posts will be providing the framework to help you design your online strategy, but if you haven’t already done so, take inventory of your current approach of selling to customers and interacting with them. Create a realistic budget of the costs associated with finding customers, getting them into the sales cycle and supporting them after they have bought from you. Think about how any of these activities get supported through your website and if you have invested the right amount of time, money and resources.

Whether you like it or not, today’s reality is that people are looking for you online. You can ignore this business fact or you can think about the real value of your website… pure gold.

Marie Wiese is founder of Marketing CoPilot, www.marketingcopilot.com and the author of the eBook, “Why marketing fails... and what you can do about it!” Marketing CoPilot designs and delivers online strategies that help companies find customers and keep customers. Marie is a 20 year veteran of the B2B marketing world, past Chair of the York Technology Alliance in the greater Toronto region and a workshop leader at Regional Innovation Centres (RICs) in Ontario where she teaches early stage companies how to build online lead generation engines that deliver measurable business results.

Over the last ten years I have talked to hundreds of CEOs of small and medium-sized businesses about what works and what doesn’t in building a repeatable lead stream for their business and a marketing engine that delivers measurable business results.  I started to keep track of what CEOs were telling me and devised a list of the attributes of marketing programs that succeed.  My last post talked about singular focus as the cornerstone of a marketing program that succeeds in helping you deliver business results. Following on this theme, the next attribute of a marketing plan that works is building a strong brand around that focus.

For many small business owners, it seems there is no word that frustrates them more than when marketers use the word “brand”. The word gets tossed around like the penultimate marketing goal. Business owners seem to feel that how you develop a brand is cloaked in secrecy, and being a brand expert is part of a special sect in the marketing world.

I firmly believe your brand, (otherwise known as the way you communicate your business in the market place) is the single most powerful tool in the small business arsenal. But let me take a moment and break it down for people in terms of what it really means for your business and why you should leverage your brand everywhere in everything you do.

The Definition of Brand

A strong brand strategy gives you a major edge in an increasingly competitive market.  Your brand is your promise to:

• Your clients
• Your staff
• The industry you serve

It tells them what they can expect from your products and services and it differentiates your offering from your competitors. Your brand is derived from who you are, who you want to be and who people perceive you to be.

Here’s where people get branding wrong:

1. Your brand is not a logo. It’s the tone, manner, visual image and the overall presentation of your business to the marketplace.
2. Your brand should be a reflection of your clients and the attributes of your ideal customer.
3. Your brand is not about you or what you think is cool, pretty or good. It should be about how well prospects will immediately connect with your company and see themselves reflected in the way you present yourself.

Here’s the only thing that matters….It is measured by what people think of you and who they perceive you to be.

To make a brand successful, you have to incorporate a lot of things. Take a moment and think about your brand in these terms:

• Uniqueness – Does your name, logo, colors, tone, etc. set you apart in the marketplace?
• Recognition – Is the logo and name easy to recognize and explain what you do?
• Memorable – Does the name and logo grab your attention? Is it easy to remember?
• Descriptive Value – How well does it convey what the organization does and its services?
• Visual Tone - Is the tonality of the logo appropriate for the target audience?
• Adaptability – Can the logo be extended to multiple applications? Can it be easily produced in a variety of sizes and contexts?
• Timelessness – Is the name and logo able to transcend trends? Is it able to portray the company into the future as it evolves and expands?
• Associations – Can the logo be associated with ideas and objects that work with the identity as the company evolves?

Brand Objectives

Brand objectives should be universal for any company. If you are not achieving the following objectives, you are spending time and money on the wrong activities that will not drive value to your business.  Branding should:

1.    Accelerate sales success.
2.    Clarify and differentiate your message and positioning in an increasingly competitive marketplace.
3.    Communicate why you are the best solution in the marketplace for your target market.

Brand Personality

Your brand personality should represent the user of your product or service (not the personality of the people in your company). It needs to evoke emotion and create a reaction when prospects look at your marketing material.  Brand personality addresses:

• Corporate Goals (practical goals) of the end user.  “Here is what I “get” when I am done working with this company”.
• Personal Goals (emotional goals) of the end user.  “I think I could work with these people; they share my values and I could learn from them”.

Defining Your Brand

It’s really important that as you work towards leveraging the strength of your brand in your marketing program that you put edges around it. We can all think of brands that stick out in our mind and we have lots of really poor ones, no doubt. Here’s a quick example of how you might define your brand:

The “should be” column is a direct reflection of your customer. The “should not be” column could be a reflection of your competition. Whatever edges you choose, pick some and start developing a brand for your business. It speaks volumes in attracting the right customers to your business and is one of the best investments you will ever make.

Marie Wiese of Marketing CoPilot can be found online at www.marketingcopilot.com and is the author of the eBook, “Why marketing fails... and what you can do about it!” “Brand” is Chapter 4 of the eBook. You can follow her on Twitter @mariewiese. Marketing CoPilot fills the marketing void for companies committed to building marketing that works. Marie is a 20 year veteran of the B2B marketing world and is currently the Chair of the Board of the York Technology Alliance in the greater Toronto region where she gets to interact with all types of businesses every day.

Over the last ten years I have talked to hundreds of CEOs of small and medium-sized businesses in the Business-to-Business (B2B) sector about what works and what doesn’t in building a repeatable lead stream for their business and a marketing engine that delivers measurable business results.  I started to keep track of what CEOs were telling me and devised a list of the attributes of marketing programs that succeed.  My last post talked about the importance of customer understanding and how this information gets used to build marketing programs that succeed.  Today’s post is about the value of strong web presence for your business.

Paul Timoteo of Car Cost Canada started his business in 1999 but didn’t gain significant market share until he decided to harness the power of an online strategy for his business. Today, he has 28 full time employees and 130,000 paid subscribers. It’s a pretty savvy business model in a cluttered and competitive market segment.  His advice to other entrepreneurs with respect to a strong web presence is timely.

“We were enjoying steady growth but about four years ago I figured we could be better if I could just figure out this whole Internet thing.”

What grade would you give your web presence? Does it support your business objectives? Would it pass or fail as a consistent lead generation engine that delivers measurable business results?

There has never been a better time than right now to take stock. Your current website and web presence do not have to fail but in order for it to pass, you need to view it as more than a corporate bookmark on the web.

We have developed a quick scorecard to help you assess your corporate web presence.

Score the following statements on a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being “poor/never” and 10 being “always/outstanding”.

1. I have Google Analytics (or another analytics package) running on my site and check it weekly to understand who is coming to my website, what they view and how long they stay.
2. I update my website weekly with new content that is optimized for the keywords I know my customers are searching on.
3. I spend the same time on my web presence than I do on other sales and marketing activities in my business like trade shows, networking, telemarketing or sales prospecting.
4. I have signed up for at least one social media tool like Linked In and use it weekly with respect to updating my profile and seeing who is connecting with me and looking at my profile.
5. I have made a 12 month commitment to building my web presence and realize that, like all things that deliver measurable results, doing something once will not pay off. Web presence activities are part of our monthly execution plan.

20 or less – Total up the numbers from each answer and if you scored less than 20, you are likely not harnessing the power of what a strong web presence can do for your business.

20-30 - You are getting it but you should dig deeper into what people are doing on your website to understand how to align the buying process of your potential customers with how they interact with you online.

30-40 - You are venturing into rock star territory and have likely realized that a strong web presence for your business does much more than just generate leads. It helps you to nurture relationships in a much better way than traditional marketing tactics and you have likely found new business opportunities via the web.

40 or higher – Your business has taken off. You can’t keep up with the demand.

The questions on the scorecard are important and align with the following reasons:

1. There is data available to you via free tools like Google Analytics that can help you make informed business decisions. Let’s say you are wondering about where your web traffic comes from and whether you're getting found for phrases on the web that prospects who don’t know you would use to find you. This is a whole pool of potential customers that you would never have access to otherwise.
2. Search engines and human beings both love new content. Search engines like it because it gives them something to crawl and something to rank. Humans like it because they want fresh ideas and to work with companies that are current and timely. If the last press release on your site was posted in June 2009, take it down and drive on.  No one wants to read anything on the web that is three years old (unless you are an historical reference on Wikipedia).
3. 98% of people searching for a solution to a business problem start their search on a search engine. Forget all of the other marketing tactics and build your web presence. This is a no-brainer.
4. People like to people watch. This is what social media is about and it’s free. At the very least, a business owner should leverage Linked In. Its professional, a great source of information and its personal. Know who is out there to connect with and see who is looking for you.
5. Time, commitment and execution are the most important ingredient to harnessing a web presence for your business. It didn’t take a week for your telemarketing strategy to pay off back in 1999 and a sales rep in most industries takes at least 12 months to ramp up. You have to view your website and web presence in exactly the same way.

A good marketing program is all about consistency and execution. Always has been – always will.

Marie Wiese of Marketing CoPilot can be found online at www.marketingcopilot.com and is the author of the eBook, “Why marketing fails... and what you can do about it!” You can follow her on Twitter @mariewiese. Marketing CoPilot fills the marketing void for companies committed to building marketing that works. Marie is a 20 year veteran of the B2B marketing world and is currently the Chair of the Board of the York Technology Alliance in the greater Toronto region where she gets to interact with all types of businesses every day.

Over the last ten years I have talked to hundreds of CEOs of small and medium-sized businesses in the Business-to-Business (B2B) sector about what works and what doesn’t in building a repeatable lead stream for their business and a marketing engine that delivers measurable business results. For a long time I kept hearing about:

• Tactics that failed
  
• Marketing managers that failed
  
• Websites that failed
  

So I started to keep track of what CEOs were telling me and devised a list of the attributes of marketing programs that succeed. TelusTalksBusiness has been kind enough to give me a 12 part series to discuss each of the attributes and offer a field guide to help entrepreneurs tackle the marketing within their businesses.

Over the coming weeks we will be discussing via this blog post:

• The importance of a strong value proposition for your business
  
• How to map your customer’s buying process to marketing tactics
  
• How to build an online engine that delivers leads to your company
  
• How to budget for marketing in your business and get the right leadership
  

Why is marketing of vital importance to today’s small business owner?

Look around you. No matter the size of your business, big or small, new or old, competition is fierce and instantaneous. Companies that fail to answer the question, “why should I buy from you? in a clear and compelling way, find their market share getting smaller and smaller and new business harder to come by.

The ground has shifted significantly for companies trying to grow and compete. As marketing tactics have become more complex, the average CEO has gotten more confused and frustrated. The trap is thinking this is because of the complexity of online marketing and new online tools. Don’t fall into this trap! While complexity is due in part to clutter, confusion and an overabundance of choice, which the internet has produced, the real reason marketing fails is because CEOs and marketing professionals don’t take the time to understand the foundation of marketing success.

The first step to creating marketing programs that succeed, is a compelling and clearly stated value proposition. A value proposition is your deal closer. It explains to people why they should buy from you. The clearer you make the statement, the easier it is for someone to make the decision. If you would like to get a jump start on figuring this out for your business, we invite you to download Chapter of One of the eBook Why marketing fails... and what you can do about it. In this chapter we review how to look at your product or service from the perspective of your customer and how to identify value statements for the sales and marketing dialogue that is the foundation for marketing success.

Maybe your story sounds like this?

Back in 1999, I was working for a software company that had raised a lot of money from venture capitalists to build out their business plan and attempt to achieve spectacular revenue results that would please shareholders and create an exit strategy for the founders. As vice president of marketing, I had a budget, a working product and paying customers to work with, but the marketing plan we executed in support of the business plan was a bomb.

What went wrong?

Aside from the perfect storm of bad market conditions, there were some fundamentals missing in the business:

1. Lack of value proposition – we didn’t document why our customers were buying
2. Lack of focus – we were trying to be all things to all people to make a sale
3. Lack of brand – customers didn’t see themselves reflected in the way we presented ourselves in the market
4. Lack of consistency – we’d try something once and then drop it
5. Lack of delivery of repeatable value – every customer project was complex and customized, so it was tough to scale

As a result, our marketing program did not deliver measurable business results. In 2002, I walked away from the experience determined to do something about. I studied the problem, talked to lots of CEO’s and began testing. Stay tuned in the coming weeks as we go step by step through developing the marketing foundation for your business that will take you through any economy and help you grow your business.

Marie Wiese of Marketing CoPilot can be found online at www.marketingcopilot.com. You can follow her on Twitter @mariewiese. Marketing CoPilot fills the marketing void for companies committed to building marketing that works. Marie is a 20 year veteran of the B2B marketing world and is currently the Chair of the Board of the York Technology Alliance in the greater Toronto region where she gets to interact with small and medium sized businesses every day.

Last month, Telus talked to business customers from at a series of events celebrating Small Business Month and held a contest in which participants were offered the opportunity to have some of their  biggest business challenges addressed by leading business consultants. They’ve asked me to answer today’s winning question that comes from Ava Hughes in Calgary, Alberta, the owner/operator of Toastee Tote (www.toasteetote.com): “How do I draw potential customers to my newly launched website?”

Anyone who has built a website for their company knows how much work it takes to launch a new site. Unfortunately, once the site is “live”, your work has really only just started. Unlike Field of Dreams, if you build it, they don’t automatically come. That’s the bad news.

Here’s the good news….

With a little planning, testing and sweat equity, there have never been better tools and techniques to drive potential new customers to your website and your business. We work with clients everyday to build online strategies that can be consistently executed on a monthly basis to get results.

Here is our proven methodology.

1. Create messages and themes that your customers care about that you can share online.
   
2. Develop an online strategy to push out content via social media, blogs, press releases, email marketing, etc.
   
3. Build a monthly, process-oriented RoadMap that allows you to push customer centric content to the marketplace to track and measure the results.
   

Result: When you create rich content that you share via email marketing, blogs, social media, or other online tactics, you create something for Google to find and index on a weekly basis. When Google finds this content and returns it in a search return when someone searches for your business product or service, you are going to be found. The closer you are to Page One, the better your chances of people clicking on your website and going to see what it’s all about.

Simply put, organic search engine optimization, as opposed to paid advertising is clicked on 70% of the time by customers versus 30% for paid advertising. You need a strong search engine strategy to support your website. To do that requires content that search engines can find and content that people care about. I have created a simple Roadmap to get you started.

If you want a simple RoadMap to help with you this process, go to our website and download the guide to developing a Web Presence RaodMap for your business. http://www.marketingcopilot.com/about/web-presence-roadmap-form/.  This workbook will help you develop your own picture for your business.

Marie Wiese of Marketing CoPilot can be found online at www.marketingcopilot.com, @mariewiese or www.linkedin.com/in/managedmarketingservices. Marketing CoPilot builds integrated marketing processes tied to strategic business goals and measured in their contribution to business results. Marie is a 20 year veteran of the B2B marketing world and is currently the Chair of the Board of the York Technology Alliance in the greater Toronto region where she gets to interact with small and medium sized businesses every day.

Share your tricks of the trade or best advice in how to drive viewers to your website by leaving a comment.