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 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 why marketing is of vital importance to today’s small business owner.  Today’s post is about understanding your customer and why they buy from you.

Thank goodness for all of the small business owners who are helping fuel the Canadian economy. These heroes start with a vision. An entrepreneur somewhere wants to fix a problem or offer a solution and the journey begins.  Over time, this journey hits the usual speed bumps:

• Selling the vision of the product or service
• Finding Customers
• Growing the business
• Keeping customers

The typical early stage company relies on sales wins to build their customer base. As the business lifecycle evolves, the marketplace provides feedback about the product or service and the business grows.

Then a strange thing happens!

A gap starts to develop between what a company thinks it does and what a customer perceives the value to be of the product or service. We call this the Marketing Void. The marketing void occurs because many companies fail to understand why and how their customers buy from them. In turn, they push out marketing tactics that don’t deliver measurable business results because the marketing tactics are not aligned with the buying process of the customer. When you really understand how and why your customer buys from you, you the close the gap between what you do and what your customers believe your value to be.

Marketing programs fail because potential customers are confused about why they should buy from you. This happens because we spend too much time talking about what we do and no enough time explaining in our marketing content and tactics about how we help solve problems.

To fix this, we need to walk through and document, step-by-step, what a prospective customer is thinking and doing when they seek a solution to a problem. In order to do this, we first need to identify our ideal customer and map their buying process.

An ongoing customer scorecard is a great way to track your customers over time. It can be as simple as the customer scorecard in the book, or more complicated with additional metrics you deem appropriate to your business. The idea being that you can start to draw similarities between your best customers, the problems they are trying to fix and can you use this information to create content and tactics to attract more good customers like them.

But the fundamental questions a business should be asking themselves every day is this:

• Why do customers buy from us versus our competitors?
• How do they buy our product or service?

The answers to both of these questions create the foundation for marketing programs that deliver measurable business results. Knowing the steps that a customer is taking to make a decision to buy a product or service like yours is the cornerstone of your marketing success.

Many companies struggle with these questions because they confuse Buying with Selling. To truly understand your customer, you must look at the buying process which is about them. Your selling process is about you. To do this properly, a business needs to focus on the customer.

Here are three important steps to help you document the buying process:

1. Remove the assumptions. Don’t assume you know why a customer initiated their search – ask them (and ask them what they searched on in Google).
   
2. Remove the product bias. Don’t map the process based on what your product or service does. Map it based on the problem you are solving.
   
3. Forget about competitors. Think instead of alternatives. How else could a potential customer solve this problem and how does my product or service address that? By thinking through alternatives, you will be better positioned to describe your ultimate value.
   

Intimate customer understanding is what separates a good marketing program from one that delivers minimal business results.

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.

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.

Small Business matters. This month we’ve reached out to various Canadian small businesses to share their experiences and insight and offer practical advice to the other businesses that make up the TELUS Talks Business community.

Today we talk to Marie Wiese, founder of Marketing CoPilot Inc. and Chair of the York Technology Alliance.

As a business owner, what are the business challenges that keep you up at night?

Finding new business and cash flow issues keep me up at night. Many businesses struggle with how to build lead generation into their business processes and since I do this for living, helping business owners build online strategies to drive lead generation, it is always top of mind for me.  If you aren’t selling, everything else in the business becomes more complicated including cash flow. The trick is to build a marketing engine that provides a steady stream of new business to even out the peaks and valleys. I am always looking at ways to accomplish this for myself and my clients.

Are you incorporating social media into your business communication?  If so, how?

Absolutely. Any business today that does not educate itself to take advantage of social media is going to miss out. It matters to my business in two ways: I use it to create a community around best practices in marketing and I am currently tracking solutions for small business to see how they can leverage it for brand development and lead generation.

How will you measure the success of your social media initiatives?

Before you can measure anything, you need to be clear on what the outcomes are you want from various online activities. Many companies complain that their websites don’t generate leads for the business. But in looking at the website you’ll discover a poorly articulated value proposition or no clear call to action other than a “contact us” button, so driving traffic to a website from social media efforts is a lost opportunity. You need to determine who you want to engage, what you want to say and then track how they are engaging with the story you tell. There are lots of mechanisms you can add to your website to tell if it’s working or not. But don’t get caught in thinking it’s about volume. Thousands of followers on Twitter means nothing if they are not part of the community you are trying to reach. Set your goals around who, what, when and why and measure that.

Quite a few businesses struggle with building their customer base and attracting new customers with limited funds and resources.  What is your advice to these businesses?

There are three things you need to invest in as business owner: 1. A clearly defined value proposition so the market knows why to buy from you and not your competitor. 2. An active online strategy which includes more than just a website. 3. Consistent execution. Many business owners under spend on marketing because they see it as a collection of tactics that return poor ROI. If you build it as a process in your business by following the three steps I listed, you will see amazing returns, usually within three to six months.

Have you used technology to grow your business? If so, how?

Everything we do for clients starting with the upfront consulting, used to be a manual exercise. Then we sat down and defined the process and identified where and how we could use technology to make what we do more efficient and add more value for our customers. What we uncovered was amazing. Now everything can be tracked and measured in a system: we use Freshbooks to track hours and invoicing; Basecamp for project management which we can open up to clients and let them see what is happening with a project; we use Constant Contactfor email marketing, a great self service product; we use an SEO platform, gShift Labsto help track and adjust organic search engine optimization activities and Google Analytics to closely monitor website activity. There is a product for everything these days and if you aren’t harnessing technology to optimize the processes in your business, and knitting it all together, you won’t be able to grow your business.

What is your greatest success as a business in 2010? How did you make it happen?

My greatest success in 2010 was being named Chair of the York Technology Alliance(YTA). I have been a volunteer with this organization for over five years and I strongly believe that the technology sector is the key to Canada’s future. But as an industry, it is still relatively new and fragmented. Helping the tech community in Toronto rally together to create an ecosystem to foster growth has been incredibly fulfilling for me. I made it happen because I got involved and dedicated my time. The organization has grown substantially in the last five years due to all the board volunteers who share the vision of a strong tech sector for Canada. I am proud to lead that group.

Pretend you’re considering starting a new business next year. If you could talk to yourself before embarking on this new business given today’s environment and what you know from experience, what are two things you’d advise?

There are two themes I would pursue in any new business venture: scarcity and being remarkable. There are a million ways to solve a business problem today. Competition is fierce and instantaneous. Author Seth Godin puts it well when he says, “If you're creating a business, figure out what contribution you make and what you offer that your competitors can't. Scarcity creates value”. Once you figure out what creates scarcity and not just a “me too” product or service, figure out how to do it in a way that is remarkable and that no one else is doing. People will tell other people about you and you will never have a lead generation (sales) problem in your business.

Many small businesses struggle to maintain work/life balance.  Is this a priority for your company and if so, how are you managing it?

One of the decisions we made in our business was to not take formal office space. With today’s great online tools and technologies, our philosophy is to find the very best people for the job regardless of where they are located. Not having a formal office means you aren’t investing in something that does not contribute to the bottom line, it forces you to put processes in place to manage people to the work that needs to be done and it lets people be more flexible in their personal life. Having homes offices means our kids see us before they leave for school in the morning, it eliminates a lot of commuting hours and reduces our corporate carbon footprint.

What are the things you do to motivate your team and keep them focussed on the business goals?

Our team is motivated by coming up with new ways to do something. In every new client project we take on, I give the team the opportunity to bring forward something new they have seen or a book they have read that has an interesting spin on the business problem we are solving. We don’t take the manufacturing approach to building marketing programs for clients. And although we are big on process and milestones, each project has a new twist that someone gets to try out.

What are your goals for your business in 2011?

We have three very distinct goals for 2011:

1. Building the Marketing CoPilot Community – we believe that a partnership approach to building a business is the way of the future. We are building a community of businesses, consultants, current clients, past clients, friends and colleagues to help inspire people to harness the power and simplify the process of marketing for their business.
   
2. Launch our Montreal office – we want to recreate our community in Montreal and serve clients in both French and English
   
3. Add more services to our Virtual Marketing Manager product – there are lots of new marketing tools coming out and we want to be able to offer new online products to clients to generate better results
   

Thank you. Please give our readers a quick overview of your business. (Name, location, size, services provided etc.) If you would like to provide contact information or a website address for your business that would appear with your survey answers, please do so.

Marketing CoPilot can be found online at www.marketingcopilot.comwhere you can subscribe to our blog to get practical marketing solutions for your business. Marketing CoPilot builds integrated marketing processes tied to strategic business goals and measured in their contribution to business results. Our service, Virtual Marketing Manageracts as an outsourced marketing department that designs and executes online strategies in such areas as search engine optimization, email marketing and content development. You can connect with founder, Marie Wiese on LinkedIn http://ca.linkedin.com/in/virtualmarketingmanagement