• What worked before?
• What small thing can we change to try and hopefully make it better?
  • That worked! Keep doing it!
  • That didn’t work – go back to the start!
• We’re only showing the boss what worked.

Essentially, the “proven” method is — throw everything at the wall, see what sticks and hope we get lucky. And if you’re really lucky, you’re considered an expert at predicting things. Luck is not a successful business strategy in any other industry, so why is it acceptable for sales and marketing?

And why are we still doing it this way when there are powerful analytical tools that are free to use? A tool that gives you insight into hundreds of business data points. How many people visited your website? Who are they, with detailed demographics? Where did they come from? How long did they stay? Did they visit from a laptop, tablet, or cell phone?

Which pages got the most traffic – and why? How engaged were the visitors? Did they finish reading the blog? For how long did they watch your video ? Did they download anything? Was there an action that led them to your sales funnel? Did they find you on Google, from a direct mailer, a commercial, a billboard?

Actual real-time analysis of your marketing and sales efforts.

Why would you want to keep guessing?

A Learning Curve

Yes, I get it, there’s a bit of a work up front to get everything organized. But you’re entrepreneurs and small business owners, right? If you just wanted to focus solely on sales, you could work for someone else. But you want to change the world – at least most entrepreneurs I talk to do. And the best way to do that is by knowing your efforts are working.

That requires measurement. And the beauty is you don’t have to make educated guesses – or if you start there, it’s quick and easy to see if that guess was right. Remember back in high school, you were taught the scientific method, Hegelian dialectic, to be specific. You start with a hypothesis – find a counter antithesis – compare them and get synthesis – the best answer. And then repeat the process.

With Google Analytics, you can plug those variables in and let them analyze the immense amounts of data to give you the answers you need. It’s the ultimate strategic shortcut. Access to more information than you need – but giving you a true picture of who’s finding your business/website and why. You can even do a lifetime value calculation within the tool – showing which potential customers are worth investing in.

Setting the Goal Posts

I’m not going to take the time to explain how to set up Google Analytics. Alphabet has their own tutorial for that. What we’re going to walk through is something that should probably be done on paper first anyway.

Google Analytics has immense amounts of information you can delve into. But numbers on a page can quickly become overwhelming if you don’t know what they mean. So the learning curve for Google Analytics starts with pen and paper.

You need to break down your sales process to the basest level. The goal for just about everyone is more sales – i.e., more conversions from visits to sales, right? But what is each step of that process? What are the tiers or hierarchy of the funnel? How can you tell when a customer is ready to buy? What does it look like when they need more information? What behavior signifies another increment deeper into the process that leads to conversion?

And the really exciting part is, as I’ve mentioned already, this isn’t guesswork. You start with a premise – this is the behavior that means they’re ready to buy. So you track that goal in Google Analytics. And very quickly you can see if it’s actually true – or is there another step you missed or didn’t even know about before?

You see, Google Analytics can not only track your marketing, sales and site performance. It can also help you hone it down to the most precise measurements possible. Suddenly, you have a clearer picture of the best customer you can serve, and how to catch their attention.

This doesn’t take the place of solid strategy, but rather makes the whole process easier to implement and track.

Added Value

Want to know which topics are of interest to your ideal targeted customer? Look at the Google Analytics. Take an article that’s an overview and take a deeper dive. Much like the sales conversion breakdown, you can strip down popular topics to the bare bones and make 3-4 posts out of one subject.

Expand or combine your most popular posts into a lead magnet that potential customers can download. In one step, you show added value, convenience and credibility. Or do an email blast, highlighting the most pertinent information of your popular posts, with a link back to read more.

Don’t be afraid to repeat topics and material either. Blog posts usually have a limited life, and newer is automatically perceived as better by many. So cycle through your top posts every once in a while. It’s only going to make you look more useful to Google bots and therefore to customers when it rises to the top.

You can also add updated or additional material to a post that is evergreen and keeps getting traffic. It’s a fantastic way to keep older material relevant and, again, build credibility.

These are just a few tips for using Google Analytics to your best advantage. There are likely countless ways you can discover and set goals specific to your business that Google Analytics can track.

If you’d like more information on how to build that initial strategic “guesswork,” help creating buyer personas that match your ideal customers, or need expertly written, curated blog posts specific to your business, please reach out. We’ve built our business helping small businesses find and market to their audience.

Let’s Grow The Dream together!

Even before the iPhone emerged, carriers had started experimenting with texting, charging a small fee. As we crested into 2008, more than 78-million text votes were received – at 20-cents a vote. And the following year, that record was broken with nearly 180-million votes cast.

It’s hard to believe, as ubiquitous as texting is now, that carriers once charged 5-30-cents per text for several years.  Now people under 35 are more likely to text than call for any reason. And for those under 25, many will text each other, even while they’re in the same room.

I talked last week about how the chemicals in our brains are now attuned to give us pleasure or pain when we see or ignore a notification. A study at the end of 2019 showed that most people check their phones 96 times per day – or around every 10 minutes. And text messages – or SMS messages as they’re now called – are opened 98% of the time! Most within THREE MINUTES. Compare that to emails. An email opened by 20-25% of your list is considered a success.

So it should be no surprise that the fastest growing form of digital marketing – and the only one companies are spending heavily on – is SMS Marketing.

A Text in Time

SMS Marketing is mass texting clients, customers and contacts as a way to promote your business’s products and services, as well as to build customer loyalty. Everything we once relied on email to do, can now be done, often more effectively, with text: engage your audience, build relationships, boost sales, build excitement, and collect and nurture leads. You can even install a widget on your website to collect numbers and interact, text-like, with people on the site. It’s no wonder Facebook Messenger wants to be able to coopt your texts.

You can track click through rates, conversions and other Key Performance Indicators with Google Analytics. People who give you their number tend to be more highly engaged. So click-thru rates tend to be considerably higher than emails (up to 35%!).

Often, consumers provide their own sense of urgency because they know if they don’t respond now, they might forget as the text gets buried in other messages throughout the day. And because it’s on their phone, you can reach them just about any time, anywhere.

Adding Text-ure

You can also build relationships and rapport with message-ees by using texts to share your story. Just like you do with certain content blog or social media posts, SMS is another way to show people who you are. Try to keep messages around the size of a tweet, though. More than 140-250 characters can be harder to read and easier to dismiss. You can always encapsulate the essence of a blog post and send it with the link to read more. Images can also be sent in SMS messages. They’re a great way to briefly remind customers of who you are or what you sell.

But don’t forget that it’s a two-way street. Using texts and being responsive to customer questions and complaints has been shown to increase sales by 31%. Anything that increases sales is nothing to look down on these days.

iPhones do now have the option to block or ignore a number. But nobody’s calling AT&T or T-Mobile and reporting spam, hampering your efforts to reach others. And while unsubscribes do happen – texting “STOP” drops the customer’s number – in most industries, this happens less than three percent of the time.

Clarifying the Message

Just like any other form of digital marketing, SMS Marketing works best when you’re targeting your texting. As powerful as SMS’s can be, they aren’t a shortcut to connection without strategy. You still have to do your homework.

Knowing your ideal customers’ demographics and psychographics are essential. Why they’re most likely to buy, what they’re searching for, answer the questions they’re asking. When done well, with a highly targeted strategic approach, texting can almost feel psychic to the receiver.

Unlike retargeting, which potentially shows the buyer things they’ve already got, a solid buyer profile allows you to send answers in the moment they’re likely to be thinking about the questions. And even if you miss it, you can immediately reply to a question text with the answers they need.

If you need help figuring out a strategic approach or building a truly in depth profile of your ideal buyer, please reach out. We’ve built our business by helping and teaching entrepreneurs and small business owners how to build theirs.

Let’s Grow the Dream together!

However it happened, you have a problem. Your warmest, most connected clients – are now ice cold. So how do you warm them back up?

How about we start with what NOT to do…

COVID-19 Microwave Outreach

You could try this approach – It seems everybody and his brother who ever had your email for whatever purpose over the years decided that NOW was the time to reconnect. After all, they’re bored, you’re probably bored, we’re all stuck at home – let’s let people know we’re thinking of them. We’re cleaning for them. We’re hoping they’ll come back when we re-open. Hey, we’re re-opening! Hey, we had to scale back. Etc…

In case you missed it, there was an onslaught of similar email messaging that went out from every company out there. And sure, getting one or two from someone I don’t recall doing business with is fine. But some companies were sending emails every week. One grocery store chain I frequent was sending messages almost daily for the first month. And they all said almost the exact same thing.

There was such a uniformity of messages that people speculated that one advertising agency was handling all of the Coronavirus re-outreach. One digital marketer even compiled a supercut of all the advertising and how it mirrors each other.

You might think that now, over 5 months into the global pandemic and systematic shut down of 75% of all businesses, it’s too late to get into the game. It’s not. But there is a better way to go. A few ways, in fact.

Back to Basics

One really good approach to reconnecting with past clients is to be up front and honest. Send out a “Hello! We’re still here!” email that is short and sweet. Remind them who you are, what you do and ask if they want to stay on your mailing list. This can be very effective, but really only works once, maybe twice before it gets irritating. If you’re not ready to recommit to the regular connection, then think twice. This isn’t something on a whim – it’s your reputation at stake.

Include in the email a bonus – or set up your CRM to automatically redirect them to an added value download for recommitting to you as you recommit to them. Make it a truly worthy asset that will reinforce your value and brand. Stick with win-win materials, don’t just send them a sales piece disguised as a value.

Also, I know you want to reconnect with as many customers as you can at one time and really up your game. But… focus first on your ideal customers, and personalize your message as much as possible. Most CRM’s and email blast programs have customizable features. Make sure you use them. The more personal and specific the email the client gets, the more they will feel that you value them and their business.   

You’ve Got Mail!

Growing up in the 70’s, every so often a curious card would show up in our mail from some local business. It may have come from a company my family did business with, like the local bank, or even from companies we weren’t aware existed. You opened the envelope and inside was a nice, often blank card with a newspaper clipping that featured you!

To be clear, I’m not saying these companies created fake newspaper clippings like the ads in Parade or The Enquirer. These were legit stories that ran in the small town newspapers. It was a great way for businesses to say, hey, we’re part of the community – we even noticed you in the paper!

Businesses would often mail their entire client lists Christmas cards and an individual’s birthday cards. Back before Facebook and Google monetized it, we were happy to share this data for a card or coupon every year.

Imagine the impact of a hand written card or signed newsletter that comes from a postal carrier and not through your Gmail filters.

Now, I’m not saying send postal mail to all of your past clients. But I’m not saying don’t do it either. Depending on the size of your list, you can whittle it down to an affordable level. Here’s a hint: focus on your ideal customers first. You know how to find them, right?

Dig Your Well Before You Drink from It

All of these approaches take for granted that you’ve already established a relationship with the person you’re reaching out to. Community is a huge get in this modern world, and while content is still king, relationships are the envoys that bring people to your content.

It’s bad enough that you’re reaching out, apologetically, to the people and companies you used to do business with. Trying these techniques with people you don’t know? That’s likely a waste of your time and resources – and we’re trying to make the most of those two precious commodities, remember?

I don’t recommend buying leads. Even ones that are qualified are usually not as specific and granular as the profiles you’ve created of your ideal customer. You don’t have profiles of your ideal customers? Well, it’s a good thing you’re here.

Grow the Dream has built our business helping other small businesses grow their dreams with strategic marketing. The key factor in our approach is the ideal customer. We create custom profiles for our clients that show them exactly the type of person they should be doing business with. Some companies take it and run, others hire us long-term to manage their content blogs, social media and email blasts.

Whatever your budget and goals, we have a program that will work for you, and we’re always building new classes and educational materials to help our clients maximize their marketing strategy. If you’d like to find out just what we can do for you, reach out and we’ll give you a free 25 minute business appraisal and game plan for moving forward. I promise it will be worth your time.

So while economic pundits went on and on about debt spending, Bob Iger felt it was worth the $4-Billion to buy Lucasfilm; $4.24-Billion to acquire Marvel; and $71.3 Billion to take over competing studio FOX. It’s hard to believe now that Disney was the one begging for a seat at the table back in 1948 when FOX & Paramount owned most of the movie business, from production to theater chains.

No, Bob Iger didn’t think his company was too big to fail. He counted the cost and knew that combining those three entities, along with his own studio and their step-sister Pixar, would generate enough income – in the theme parks alone – to justify it within ten years.

Of course, he didn’t plan on a pandemic deeply cutting into the profits. But the company is stable enough to endure this time relying on other income, like Disney+, which outperformed their biggest expectations even before people were stuck with streaming-only entertainment. And they still have $12-billion a year in toy sales to soften the blow.

There’s Always a Price Tag

Before we dive in, let me clarify a couple things. Every customer has a cost. At the bare minimum, it’s the expense of generating the product or service you offer. So the raw materials and manufacturing to create a widget is a set cost. Every customer who buys that widget must, generally, cover those expenses. Preferably with a margin for profit. If your service is more intangible, like writing a blog or rebuilding a website, the minimum cost would be for the labor – or the value of your time if you’re a sole proprietor.

In addition to that, you want to account for the expenses that brought that customer to you. Even if they’re just a walk-in, you had to pay for that space they entered. For the sign above the door or in the window, alerting them it wasn’t just a vacant room.

But we’re not talking about just one customer who buys one thing. As we discussed last week, there is much more to consider. Are your targeted customers looking for long-term solutions (a weekly blog post for years) or short term fixes (a luxury ride to the airport). And are they likely to be repeat customers (a termite inspection before you buy a home, and then contracting for quarterly treatments after it’s bought).

We need to also calculate the cost of keeping an existing customer (up to 5x less once established) and keeping the company name top of mind for later purchase decisions. As Grow the Dream has taught for years, you cannot rely on any marketing unless you have a measurable metric to determine its effectiveness. So we must calculate the basic expenditures, giving us a baseline from which to begin our measurements.

The 400 Blows

You’re probably familiar with that age old adage, “it takes 100 No’s to get a Yes.” And even though we’re aware that it’s part hyperbole, like the 10,000 hours rule, there is also a measurable metric truth to it. Not only must you take into account the cost of making a sale, you must also factor in the cost of all the attempts to make the sale that failed.

I mean, if you’re really up and running properly, you have sales clearing, and dozens or even hundreds of other not-yet-sales bouncing around in some part of the sales funnel you’ve built. Yes, time is also a factor. Time is money in foldable form. And we’re looking at the cost of all of the resources required to generate a customer sale.

In an ideal world, you would know how much is required to get one average sale, down to the second and the penny. You should also know the profit from each sale. Averages are good for this, because the more data you have, the tighter your calculations will be for both. With that info, you can calculate how many customers you need to have to break even, pull ahead and properly cultivate and grow your business.

To take that one step further, we want to look at the cost of acquiring and keeping your ideal customer. Averages are great, but the closer we are to the center of the target, the more valuable that client is to us. Your ideal customer may cost less in the long run than one a little to the left or the right, metaphorically speaking.

So those averages become one benchmark – always pressing to the higher standard of the ideal customer.

What Price Glory?

In an ideal situation, we would have as much data and detail as possible. Of course, we are seldom in an ideal situation, and, as the saying goes, if we wait for perfect conditions, we’ll never start. The great thing about a strategic marketing approach is that it’s a living document. We start with what we know, and build onto that. As we learn more, we adapt and develop it, with each iteration becoming more precise and, hopefully, actionable.

But we do have to start somewhere., so consider these elements that should be accounted for. Be as specific as you can. Barring that, try to have an estimation, at least, for the value of these resources and expenses starting out. If you’re starting completely from scratch, there are some good resources to make more educated guesses. I recommend Hubspot, Neil Patel, The Futur and business periodicals like Inc, Forbes, Fast Company and Entrepreneur.

Remember to consider the individual cost of things like your marketing costs. Online, print ads, direct mailers, search engine ads, social media – anything that brings people in. The expense of building your own website (even if you do it yourself). Renting or buying a building location or store front – even a mall kiosk or flea market table.

What are your follow-up costs? Do you need a newsletter? How about a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. If you start with a cheaper one, will it scale as you grow, or is that an expense to budget down the line. Or will you try and keep your own contact database? At the very least, the free version of MailChimp will keep you from getting dinged for spam.

Play For Today

Will you be offering classes or webinars? These can be both an expenditure and a source of income. You can use these purely for marketing purposes. Or you can leverage income from ongoing classes and extra-informative one-off’s. We’ve done both at Grow the Dream – in fact, it was a significant part of our business model in the past.

How will you leverage organic search traffic? It’s no secret that we believe developing a solid content blog is a crucial part of gaining this Google attention. Will you write it yourself? Will you contract it out? Even if you shift the focus of your topics once you’ve targeted your ideal customer,  starting with something is better than nothing.

You’ll need to identify and track where conversions happen on your site and in your various forms of attracting customers. Remember, if you don’t measure it, you can’t manage it. So make sure you have the means in place to identify where each customer came from. This is another area where you’ll plan for everything, but as you develop your marketing strategy, you’ll spend more on the most profitable areas of influence – the sources where most of your ideal customers come from.

The Conversation

Remember, a transaction or conversion is every time something of value is exchanged. So while sales are the ultimate indicator of success, knowledge of how every transaction happens is invaluable. Every time a visitor gives you their email in exchange for a lead magnet, you have started the chain of yesses.

It could start earlier, with finding you on Google, or a link from another website. You need to track it all. But not just that first step – even after they’ve found you or returned, keep track of where sales happen. The decision to put something in a cart – real or virtual – is another yes. Reading an entire article, especially one as long as this, is a time investment and another yes.

Filling out the contact form, agreeing to a brief sales call, signing up for an event. Keep track of it all.

While the City Sleeps

One thing often neglected in these calculations is connection. Do your sales require a certain level of touch? A convincing face to face interaction? Will automation do the trick or will it just serve to chase potential customers away? Is there an acceptable balance of machine-generated communication? Consider the cost of both using and rejecting automation.

Don’t neglect salary expenses, even if you’re a solopreneur. You need to pay yourself a reasonable sum for your time and expertise, otherwise you won’t have a business for long, especially if you have a significant other and/or children you’re responsible for. And don’t forget to line item any freelancers, independent contractors or lease expenditures.

This is not the time to skimp – be honest and if you err, err on the side of higher expenses, not lower.

Also, make sure you calculate a positive value for retaining customers. Just like the expense of keeping them around, you should track their continued value. This becomes especially important if you offer monthly, quarterly or annual products that can renew like gym memberships or Netflix.

This will also come into play heavily next week, when I break down the lifetime value of each customer. I hope you’ll join me. If you have quick questions or need clarifications, pop them in the comments. For longer, more specific questions, or to get more information on how we can help you grow your business, please reach out!

In 2015, when Marty McFly & Doc Brown are trying to retrieve past Jennifer from her future home, future Marty is having a conference call on a giant screen. On the bottom is a running, news-ticker-style feed that lists the person’s name, neighborhood, family arrangement, favorite foods, colors, and more. Then, after future Marty gets done, his Asian boss pops up – he was secretly listening the whole time!

Of course, the movie doesn’t show Google or Facebook – they were still years away from even being conceived of when the film debuted in 1989. But the ongoing stream of data – that, we can all comprehend.

I Struck a Data Mine!

Most of us nowadays understand how valuable that data is. Even if your job doesn’t involve sales and marketing, we’ve all had the experience of searching for something in an online setting and suddenly seeing it everywhere we look.

Since this is a blog about sales and marketing techniques, I’m going to assume you’ve at least heard of retargeting and remarketing. Technically, one deals specifically with email. But people use the terms almost interchangeably, so we won’t worry about that for the moment. Retargeting is the attempt to move someone further down the sales funnel to buyer, by reminding them that they’re interested in your product or service.

The only problem is, it happens so often and so ubiquitously, people feel like they’re being stalked by their browser history. And they’re not wrong. Cookies, the tiny text messages originally used to help sites remember that you’d already been there, are now a driving force for marketing messages.

What’s Remarkable About Remarketing

Trying to recapture or convert a sale is nothing new. Salesmen have done it for years. Even telemarketers know that the best calls to make are the ones to people who have bought before. Anytime you can warm up a cold market or inch your prospective buyer one step closer to actually buying, that’s an advantage.

I wasn’t able to find any newer numbers, but back in 2013, studies showed that some 96% of the first time visitors to your website would never return. They were only researching, comparing prices, or just stumbled onto it by accident. Or maybe not so accidentally.

When Grow the Dream started, we helped our clients see and take advantage of just that. Discarding old methods of SEO and keyword bombing, instead we focused on finding your ideal customer. Then answering the questions they were asking that would bring them to your door in your content blog. Of course, the purpose wasn’t to trick people into coming to your site, but providing them value. Value offered free of charge with the hope the prospective client would stay, build trust, and eventually buy there.

We were also some of the first people to talk about Lead Magnets – additional value for your prospective customers that they get in exchange for their email address. The key being once you had their email, you could easily remind them of – remarket them – your product or service, and continue to build trust by providing additional free value or saving offers in newsletters.

That was the “birth” of remarketing. Remarketing became retargeting when companies started looking for a way to stand out from the increasing noise on the Internet.

The Death of Pepsi

There’s an old anecdote I learned in my college advertising classes. The facts may not be completely accurate – the full true story has been lost to time – but it illustrates my point, so I’m going to share it here.

Back in 1931, Pepsi-Cola was collapsing into bankruptcy. Inventor Caleb Bradham was not a savvy businessman, and the assets of the company were sold to candy maker Charles Guth. By this time, Coca Cola dominated the burgeoning soft drink business. Between advertising efforts and revolutionary packaging (6-pack anyone?), Coke had no competitor.

They were a household name.

So they stopped advertising.

Guth had originally bought the Pepsi recipe because Coke wouldn’t cut him a cheaper deal on the syrup for the soda fountains at his 200+ candy stores. But since he also owned a bottling company… he accelerated advertising, capitalizing on the cheaper rates offered by the newly born FM radio stations. And in just two years, Pepsi became a multi-million dollar company.

Although Pepsi never toppled Coke’s dominance of the soda world, they proved their value – and the value of advertising. Now Coke advertising is everywhere, from store shelves to billboards to sponsorships. If you ask a Coke advertising executive, they’ll tell you that there’s no way to pinpoint where the decision is made to buy a Coke. They have no way to measure the impact of the advertisements. So they spend Billions of dollars every year to promote their products.

And they’re not alone. Budweiser always has 7-10 new advertising campaigns at the ready. When sales dip even a little – it’s time for a new promotion.

Tracking Your Progress

Thankfully, for those of us who don’t have billions to spend promoting our products and services, retargeting provides a better way. A more personalized approach. Except when that approach feels creepy.

And that’s not my term. A 2021 study of Customer Experience trends by InMoment found that 75 percent of respondents said they find most forms of personalization that brands use to be at least somewhat creepy.

Many complained that they felt like they were always being watched. Like Big Brother was there, keeping an eye on them. One respondent pointed out that it could be frustrating if she had been shopping for gifts and suddenly those gift ideas started popping up randomly on other sites.

And then there’s the Dad who found out his underage daughter was pregnant thanks to coupons sent as from Target as a remarketing effort. That’s not the kind of publicity you want.

Some 49% of the people interviewed said the reminders bothered them, but wouldn’t do anything. However, almost a quarter of those folks would shop around or stop using the brand. More than 20% would tell others how creepy it was. And almost 10% would complain or post negative comments on social media about the creepy experience.

And the study concluded that if people dislike the way their information is saved or shared their interest in buying from you drops.

That’s going the wrong way in the sales funnel.

Rethinking Retargeting

Clearly, we need better methods of retargeting, especially as new laws get passed, like GDPR and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), which allows consumers to opt-out of almost any data collection.

I’ve got three ways to go about retargeting – or rather reengaging – your customers and potential customers without making them feel uncomfortable, stalked or pissed off. And they all come down to strategy.

Selective Retargeting

Neil Patel points out that people who don’t convert on your products or services usually fall into one of two camps:

1. They don’t want to pay you money – yet.
2. They don’t know how your product or service can help them.

The beauty of having all of the data at our fingertips is that we no longer need to take a scattershot approach to marketing or retargeting. We know where on your website people have gone, and we know how long and how often they’ve visited those pages or posts.

So we use that to specifically target them.

Which post or landing page did the prospective client stay on the longest? While we can’t actually read their minds yet, we can create a specific retargeted ad. An image or inline ad that is designed to help them make the decision they’re considering easier. Based on the information on the pages where they spent the most time.

The other specific retargeting we can do is creating an idea in their minds- an idea that shows the value of your product or service.

If you’re a food business, share a recipe that uses one or more of the items they’ve lingered on. A pest control business can offer a free inspection for whatever is plaguing clients. If you’re a florist, an image that explains the meaning behind rose colors in relationships. You can also be seasonal – the most affordable corsages for Prom that won’t look cheap.

These retargeting ads are specific and help the prospective buyer make the decision he or she is considering. It’s not just popping a red car on every website they visit from here to eternity (or they clear their Internet cache). Explore the custom audiences

Warming Up Cold Contacts

While this doesn’t qualify as a new approach, it may be one you haven’t considered. You’ve probably gotten one or two emails from businesses using Constant Contact or MailChimp asking if you’re still interested, pointing out that you haven’t been opening their emails in a while.

While that’s kind of a cheap way of getting back on a past client’s radar, while boosting the open rate, it’s effective. So are “We Miss You!” subject headers.

But even more important than that is reminding customers who haven’t purchased from you in a while that you’re still out there. You’re still offering the service or product that they bought (or considered enough to sign up for your email blasts).

This is one of those cases where automation makes everything easier.

At worst, these people will unsubscribe, dropping off your list while they still remember why they were interested and not screaming SPAM! And, really, what’s the point of sending out special sales or promotions to customers that never see them?

But there’s another value to your email list you may not be aware of. Facebook Business Manager has a feature called “Custom Audiences.” The tool lets you upload your existing email subscriber list and then matches it to their users. And because Facebook knows almost as much as God about you, they can connect your customers even if they used a different email address.

Conversion rates for existing customers are extremely high. After all, you’ve already shown value, built trust, and established a connection. And hopefully provided an excellent product or service.

If you want to get really specific, you can double down and use Facebook’s data and custom audiences to tailor ads to the people who are *really* interested. There’s even talk that Facebook might eventually target specific individuals with or without emails to help.

Targeting Instead of Retargeting

Remember all that stuff about knowing your ideal customer? With our strategic approach to business marketing, we want you to learn as much as possible about the customers that are the most valuable to you that you can provide the most value to.

You can do this by knowing your customers, sending out surveys, even using the Facebook Insights and Google Ad tools. The more information you have about your ideal customer, the stronger and more specific your marketing approach can be.

A nice side effect to that is you know where your customers go to shop, read the news, research, learn about their hobbies and interests, and explore. So you can anticipate them.

Much like writing a content blog that answers the questions they’re asking, you can place ads on sites and even in print publications that they are likely to see. You can sponsor their local sports teams and athletic complexes. You can support the causes they care about. Just like Coke and Pepsi, but on a much smaller scale, you can remind them of your name, product and service in their everyday lives.

For more than 10 years, Grow the Dream has taught small businesses and entrepreneurs how to strategically market themselves, both online and off. We also assist those busy business owners who don’t have the time to do it themselves with strategic analysis, including specific customer profiles, best social media practices and creating content, both blog articles and videos to make you stand out online.

If you’d like help getting more attention for your business, please reach out. We’d love to help!

When Leonardo DaVinci designed the first humanoid robot in the 15^th century, he was also looking to make life easier. But when the first automatons appeared in popular fiction some 400 years later, they captured the fears of the industrial age, and despite the work of Isaac Asimov and others, the term automation is more readily associated with Terminator and Skynet than R2D2 and C3PO.

In reality, automation is neither Robocop nor Tom Servo. At least not yet. But it can be an invaluable resource for your small business, allowing it to grow and compete with much larger companies by streamlining a lot of the mundane and repeatable tasks, freeing you and your few employees to focus on the vision and true purpose of your company.

The Automation Advantage

Automation makes it possible for businesses of all sizes to compete on a level playing field, with no wasting valuable time and effort doing mundane tasks while others get ahead. Or to put it more succinctly, automation makes it possible for you to guide your business, while some of  the business guides itself.

Small businesses are uniquely positioned to take advantage of automation. Not only that, but small businesses that automate have a clear strategic advantage over those that don’t. Anything that can save you time and/or money is going to be an advantage you need to, well, take advantage of.

It may be tempting to stay hands-on, guiding every aspect of your business so that you can guarantee everything is perfect – or at least as perfect as you are. But according to HubSpot, 64-percent of entrepreneurs began to see benefits six months after implementing automation techniques.

Properly implemented automation sets you apart  — allowing your small businesses to focus on a more personal approach to clients than a larger business can afford.

There are tools that automate emails, deliver Lead Magnets, manage some social media interactions, manage  your customer database and their travel through the sales funnel, invoice, resolve some customer concerns, train new employees, even simplify your sales pitch and increase necessary communication. By utilizing them, you can get more accomplished each day – more of those tasks that require a human touch.

If you’re ever looking to expand, you can start the process now, by creating systems utilizing these tools, so that when you do bring new staff on board, everything is in place to give them a running start. And it’ll also ensure that things are done exactly the way you want them to be done every time, regardless of who your client is working with face to face.

Successfully implemented automation will allow you to meet more customers, use your creativity to resolve issues, create revolutionary new products, and build on teamwork within your business. You can also go home at night to your family and make it your focus while your business runs in the background.

Or, you know, you could copy and paste a few hundred more emails instead. It’s up to you.

Managing Customer Relationships

Let’s start with one of the most valuable automation tools for small businesses — CRM, or Customer Relations Management system.

While some CRM systems can be pricey at first, the value to your small business is almost incalculably great. There are lots of options out there, but Infusionsoft is the one we recommend most often, because it can literally do almost anything.

Well-constructed and implemented CRM can take your customer from first blush, all the way through to completed sale, and even on the road to becoming an evangelist for your company.

In almost every article, I mention the need to know your ideal customer and what their needs are. CRM will help streamline that process – showing you where leads come from (which also gives you a metric for evaluating marketing efforts), constructing the ideal sales funnel, eliminating ‘clogs’ by targeting where the sales slowdown occurs, and keeping track of every single customer interaction you or your team has EVER had.

Your goal should be to automate your business so you can focus on what you love.

A good CRM also integrates with your other tools, automated or not, like WordPress, MailChimp, Aweber and Shopify.

Fair warning though,  a good, well-built CRM system takes some time to learn the platform and how to utilize it best. We loved our experience with Infusionsoft so much, we became an Infusionsoft Certified Partner and we offer hands-on small business training on how to set up and make the most of all of the Infusionsoft tools.

Maximize Your Marketing Efforts

An amazing 66% of companies that are outgrowing their competitors use marketing automation. And according to Gleanster, nearly 80-percent of the top-performing companies have invested at least 2 years into marketing automation.

Automation allows you to consistently maintain the same message across all your marketing efforts. No more mixed messages, dropped balls or customers getting preferential treatment because they do or don’t know someone.

Targeted, personalized marketing feels different than standardized email newsletters. There’s a place for them too, which I’ll discuss in a moment, but the more individualized your marketing feels, the more your customers are going to feel like you value their specific business. That’s where integrating a good CRM helps.

You can even automate the referral process and the sometimes daunting task of asking happy customers for positive feedback.

Email And More

One of the top 5 customer complaints, according to Reputation Management, is a lack of good communication, or no communication at all. Think about it in your own life. How many times have you been too busy to answer the phone or a text message right away, only to realize, hours later, that you completely forgot about it. Too many of those, and you won’t have a business anymore.

Automation, on the other hand, can send an instant, if sometimes annoying, response to the customer. It can even suggest solutions to the customer’s problem instantaneously.  And it can remind you to follow up, which you should try to always do within 24 hours.

One caveat – do take the time to actually read your customer email if the automated system couldn’t resolve the problem on its own. There are few things that make me angrier than taking the time to construct an email explaining what my issue is and what I already tried to do to resolve it, only to get a canned “personalized” answer that doesn’t deal with the problem at all. Automation isn’t quite up to par for that yet.

Engaged customers lead to improved satisfaction and retention, as well as increased sales!

Whether you’re in between or in the midst of customer interaction, keeping in regular contact with them is essential. They traded their email to you in exchange for valuable information, usually a laser-focused Lead Magnet. So keep the communication going. Give them even more valuable free information – emphasis on the valuable. If you constantly send emails that are just “look what we did,” or identical “limited” sales, they’ll quickly click the unsubscribe button.

Even if they haven’t bought in a while, unless they’ve asked to be taken off your mailing list, keep them supplied with great information that they can use. That way, when they do need you again, it’ll be easier for them to reach back out.

Certain tools like MailChimp also allow you to automate an email response when someone abandons their cart or visits your website, but doesn’t buy.

There are hundreds of other little ways that automation systems can be integrated with your small business to free up time for you to focus on what really matters. As your small business grows, there are more opportunities as well, for finance, mileage tracking, hiring, compliance, and shipping.

For now, start with the tools that will give you the most value and efficiency the fastest – CRM and marketing. Then you’ll have time to expand and worry about those other automated tools.

There was only one problem…

Okay, Make That Two

Considering most small business owners have been in this position, you’ve probably already guessed what that problem was. As we all know, the two most valuable resources for building your small business are almost always the ones that are in shortest supply: Time and Money.

Yes, you have the same number of hours in a day as everyone else, but when you’re just getting started, you lack the ability to leverage other hours. That means, even though you have your 24 hours, you have to divide that time between several very pressing priorities, including sleep and family relationships.

It will come as no surprise to you that I’m going to suggest that we apply some strategy to the situation. After all, our company is based on implementing and teaching Strategic Marketing Solutions.

We know there are dozens, if not hundreds, of ‘voices’ in your head, reminding you that you need to do this or that right away. But to really manage things, it would behoove you to take a few days to a week and map out how to best tackle all of those concerns.

After all, what good are free resources if you never have time to use or even look at them?

Think of it this way – time and money should be working FOR you, not the other way around. By strategizing and prioritizing, you’re able to eliminate to-do lists and focus on what is really important. You’ll also have a clear justification for ignoring (temporarily) minor problems that arise, instead of rushing to put out fires that may die down on their own.

Remember to schedule time for family, for critical tasks that must be completed each day, and for researching & learning new skills. Leave a little flexibility, but the more detailed and specific you make your schedule, the clearer and more focused you will be and the faster you can start to see your goals come to fruition.

This list, while extensive, is by no means comprehensive. There are countless other resources you’ll likely be able to find online for the various areas I’ve outlined, but I’ve tried to stick with the ones that we have used here at Grow the Dream and can recommend, and those I’ve seen clients use to some success.

Pre-Launch Business Planning

Typically, most small business owners will have already done this work prior to finding this article, but for those of you still in the planning stages, or looking to find financing for your business’s expansion, this will help to get you started.

• SBA.gov – The Small Business Administration is an invaluable government resource to get your business journey started and continued. They provide everything from loans, to free classes and training, to finding mentors to help you and your business succeed, and so much more. It’s the first stop I recommend all new business owners make, even when they’re still at their survival job.
• Bplans.com – This wonderful site provides sample business plans, representing nearly every industry—from caterers to construction companies and beyond. I recommend taking advantage of their examples to tailor the advice and pre-planning work you’ll do with the SBA.
• Enloop – Taking your cue from the above resources, Enloop allows you to easily create a professional looking business plan complete with 3-year financial forecast reporting. And they’ll score that plan for free as you work and develop it. Your first business plan is free, with affordable subscription rates for additional plans and added features.

Content Blog Publishing & Web Design:

One of the most powerful tools you can have in this day and age is a business website – one with a regularly updated content blog. And while there are lots of different ‘free’ (often ad supported) website builders out there, few are as powerful, optimized and easy to use as…

• WordPress.org – An open source blogging tool and so much more. 31% of all websites across the world utilize WordPress for their primary website design. It’s so popular that many hosting companies have it as an easy install in their back office infrastructure. It’s fast, easy to use and get started with and has an incredibly powerful behind the scenes algorithm that will literally launch your site into the top search engine results. If you download and install it yourself, make sure you’re using the .org version Yes, the .com doesn’t require you to provide hosting, but it lacks the bells and whistles you’re going to want to use. Which brings us to…
• WP Engine – Our top choice for your managed WordPress hosting. WP Engine’s basic plan starts at $35 a month, but it’s super fast, incredibly secure – with CDN and SSL included – and can handle up to 25,000 visits and 50 GB bandwidth use per month. It’s also easy to upgrade as you grow and expand and offers additional tools for marketing optimization. And there is a crucial benefit of WP Engine – DAILY website backups. And you can force an additional backup at any time. No more lost data!
• Namecheap Shared Hosting – This is a great solution if you’re on a tight budget or extremely risk averse when getting started. Namecheap can get you a domain name, WhoIs Guard, and hosting for as low as $3/month. Their top end is less than $10. They aren’t as integrated as WP Engine, and they only backup your site twice a week, but it’s a great deal for the beginner. And you can always port your site over to WP Engine or another hosting service with minor effort.

Once you have WordPress installed, you’ll see that there are literally thousands of plug-ins and add-ons you can take advantage of – many of them free – to customize your users experience. But there are three free ones right off the bat that you should activate as soon as you log in to your Admin page.

• Askimet – One thing you’ll run into as soon as you launch your blog are countless comments from hacker sites, trying to use your blog to propagate their spam and viruses. You likely won’t have time to deal with them, and this is the solution. Akismet is a comment spam filtering service. Akismet utilizes a learning algorithm to spot and isolate blog comment and pingback spam. Even though Akismet comes pre-installed, it is not activated by default. Once you activate it, though, all those spam comments and pseudo-links will be shuttled off your site into a virtual ‘holding area’ where you never have to look at them again.
• Jetpack – While Jetpack doesn’t come automatically installed, I highly recommend it. Jetpack is the ultimate toolkit for WordPress. It gives you everything you need to design, secure, and grow your site in one bundle. Jetpack adds secure logins and protection from brute force attacks, automatic social sharing, and can increase your site’s load times. It also comes with free themes, image tools, and rich content.
• Yoast SEO – Even though WordPress is already well-built for Search Engine Ranking, there is always room to improve, especially when humans are involved. The Yoast SEO plugin helps you to optimize your website for search engines in two ways.
  • If you insist on keyword SEO (we recommend long tail and strategically targeted blog posts), Yoast can make sure your posts have those keywords.
  • Yoast also evaluates and recommends tips to improve the readability of your posts and pages, such as making sure your page is broken up into readable chunks, you’re not using too much passive voice, utilizing transition words and writing at your users’ typical reading level.
• ConvertPlug – It used to be rather difficult to build an offer or “don’t go” pop-up within your WordPress install. You had to know a bit about coding and languages, etc., and it was frustrating for many business owners. That all changed with ConvertPlug. Now for only $21, you can build a fully functional popup for your website, all within WordPress. This isn’t as critical as the above plugins, but it is a good one to have.
• Grammarly – Grammarly automatically detects grammar, spelling, punctuation, word choice, and style mistakes in your writing. And not just your blog posts. Grammarly can be installed in most web browsers and works within Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIN, WordPress and Microsoft Office. No more spelling errors, typos or misused grammar.
• Co Schedule’s Headline Analyzer – This site does exactly what it promises, evaluating your headline to see what works or doesn’t. For example, this post has one of our more generic headlines. It earned a 58. Why is this important? Because the headline is the first thing everyone sees. When my sister worked in advertising, she would generate no less than 100 headlines for every ad she generated. It’s estimated that five times as many people read the headline as click through to the article. If you want people to read your article and visit your site, you need a great headline
• Hemingway App – The Hemingway App is similar to the readability score you’ll find in Yoast. But it goes a little further – identifying superfluous words (yes, I see the irony), hard-to-read sentences, and passive voice.

Email Marketing

Once you start getting customers – or even visitors – coming to your site, you’ll need a way to keep in contact with them. Of course, we recommend you use a laser-targeted Lead Magnet to offer in trade for their email, but even if they just sign up for your mailing list, that’s an important contact to keep track of and communicate with.

• MailChimp – MailChimp started as an email marketing service, and that’s still its best feature. Build custom emails from scratch or using a variety of pre-built templates to keep in contact with your clients, and potential clients. It’s free until you top 2000 subscribers or 12000 emails sent in a month. You can upload a CSV customer list, or import from a bunch of other platforms to build your list. MailChimp tracks each email, how many opens it got as well as click-throughs, invaluable information for evaluating your strategies. And you can also use MailChimp for remarketing. One client I worked for would periodically send special deals to their most active customers to bolster responses. Send an email right away, or schedule it for later. With a paid account, you can sync the email to the users’ time zone, send in batches, and reach out to customers who clicked away from your site with unbought stuff in their cart.
• Aweber – Aweber provides many of the same tools as MailChimp, for a small cost. But it also specializes in e-mail autoresponders. You can automatically send follow up messages to your subscribers after a set amount of days and at whatever day of the week and time you choose, and build and integrate signup forms as well. The sign up forms can also be coded into your website. And you can test drive it all for just $1.

“Virtual” Assistance

Just because you’re going it alone, or with a small team, you don’t have to settle. These apps and tools will help you appear larger and function more efficiently, providing lots of leverage for growth.

• Grasshopper – There’s not much more offputting for a client than trying to call your office and getting your cell phone or just a generic message – or worse, some random number comes up that they can’t call back. The Grasshopper Virtual Phone System fixes that. It can provide a local or toll free number, unlimited extensions, live call forwarding, on hold music, and name directory. And it shows your business name on caller ID when you’re calling out. Need to receive a fax? Give them the Grasshopper number and you’ll get an email with the document. You may be a solopreneur, but you’ll give off the impression of being a Fortune 500 company. Prices run from $30 to $90 a month. And they might even waive the $25 setup fee.
• Evernote – Evernote is a cloud-based software service designed for creating, organizing and storing various media files. Whether it’s a text document, a photo, a video, an audio file or even a web page, Evernote keeps all of your stuff stored up in the cloud – so you can add to your notes and access them from your computer, your tablet, or your phone, all synchronized.
• Slack – Slack is an all-in-one collaboration hub that allows you to connect your team(s), unify systems, and drive business forward through extensive communication tools. Slack stands for “Searchable Log of All Conversation and Knowledge,” and it’s search feature is one of the best benefits, especially if your email inbox is as full and old as mine. While I personally prefer BaseCamp, it’s a little pricier for small business owners just starting out, and this is an article about free low-cost tools. Slack, on the other hand, provides ample tools for most small to medium sized businesses for free.
• Due – Due focuses on a complete payment solution that includes time tracking, online invoicing, digital wallet and credit card processing. It’s great for freelancers as well as small business, allowing them to track time spent on projects and port it into an integrated invoice and billing system.
• Google Tools – I could do a whole post (and I might someday!) just on the wide variety of tools that Google offers, mostly free of charge, to help you organize your life and business, grow your client base, utilize better advertising, etc., etc. If you haven’t already, check out Google Calendar, Google Drive, Google Docs, Google Sheets, Google Ad Words, Google Analytics, Google My Business, and of course, Gmail. For even more powerful tools, at a reasonable price, check out G Suite.
• Trello – Trello is basically the Pinterest for Business Planning and work tracking. Trello organizes your projects into boards for easier collaboration. This is great if you have a virtual office team, because everyone can see what’s being worked on at what stage on the ‘white boards’
• Airtable – Airtable is a spreadsheet-database hybrid, with the features of a database but applied to a spreadsheet. This tool helps you organize information in truly elegant ways. While it does boast a paid service, the free version is plenty powerful enough to be valuable.
• Dropbox – Before Google Drive, we all relied on Dropbox. It’s a cloud-based, virtual file cabinet for all sorts of media files that can be accessed, edited and shared, based on the permissions you set.

Social Media Management

There’s almost no cheaper way to spread the word about your business and build a following than through the popular social media platforms. But that can easily get overwhelming without help and, again, you only have so much time in your day. These tools can help:

• Buffer – Buffer allows you to schedule social media posts across a variety of social media platforms, without having to pay a penny – although there are more features if you upgrade. You can add one profile from each social media channel, and schedule posts across all of them at once. If you’re only managing a few social profiles and want to stick to a small budget, Buffer might be right for you. Once you’ve really started to expand, you can upgrade to…
• Hootsuite – If you’re working with a large team or multiple client companies and websites, HootSuite is probably your best option. While it started primarily as a Twitter scheduling app, it has expanded far beyond that now. Just like Buffer, you can schedule posts across many social media platforms, as well as many profiles. Hootsuite also provides analytical tools so you can see how your posts are being received and spread – an essential metric to track. It also starts free with options to upgrade for as low as $19/month.

Building Graphics:

Images are what makes your content and website stand out among the crowd. But if you can’t afford to have a graphic designer on retainer or absorb the cost and learning curve of the Adobe Creative Suite, these tools can definitely assist.

• Canva – Canva is a tool that makes it possible to design anything and publish anywhere. It utilizes a user-friendly drag and drop tool and thousands of customizable templates to create everything from blog graphics to business card, resume and letterhead designs. And you can even get feedback and collaboration from other Canva users.
• Pablo – Pablo was built by Buffer to help people create and share more dynamic, visual social media posts. You pick an image, a font, type in your post and voila! In under 30 seconds, you’ve got a pretty post that you can download or connect right into Buffer to schedule or post.
• GIMP – GIMP is an open source, open access graphics manipulation program that’s free and purports to be similar in style and scope to Adobe’s Photoshop. Honestly, as a long-term Photoshop user, I’ve found GIMP to be much less intuitive and a lot more of a learning tool to use. To be honest, neither one is easy to use, so tread carefully before jumping into this particular rabbit hole. Also, Adobe now offers limited access on their Creative Cloud subscription service, starting at $13/month.
• HongKiat.com – In addition to providing several free vectors and templates to build infographics, HongKiat also has lots of inspiration, tutorials and guides. If you want to use these valuable visual information slides, this is the place to start.
• Visme.co – For $20/month, Visme gives you tools to build and download infographics, more detailed PowerPoint or Keynote presentation slides, web banners, demos and even animations.
• Visual.ly – Their service is not free, but their portfolio is – if you can’t afford to have them build your graphics and infographics, they’re still a great source of inspiration for the ones you’ll build yourself.

Free Images:

So where do you get all the wonderful pictures for blog posts, quote backgrounds and banners? You may be tempted to just do a Google Image Search, but that’s a good way to ‘accidentally’ use someone’s image without permission and find yourself on the wrong end of a cease and desist case. Try these instead:

• FreeImages – Once known as Stock.XCHNG, Free Images is the free site that runs parallel to GettyImages – the largest provider of official images in the world. Free Images boasts over 2-million users that contribute their images for free use with permission and/or attribution. Just pay attention to the details on any photo you’re interested in.
• Scx.hu – Now in partnership with Adobe, this is the other side of Stock Exchange. This site specializes in more stock photography while Free Images is more broad.
• Wikimedia Commons – with proper attribution, you can download and use any of the 48-Million images made available through Wikipedia’s creative commons use license.
• Flickr – This user generated photo sharing site has a huge array of images available for free with or without attribution. Check out the creative commons section of Flickr and read the usage terms to make sure your photo usage is on the up and up.
• Pixabay – If you’re feeling bored by the typical line up of free stock images online, Pixabay is a great resource to shake things up. The images here have a slightly more more indie feel compared to the more generic vibe of traditional stock images.
•  Unsplash – Unsplash boasts stock images that don’t feel like stock images. They’re updated every 10 days. Their collection of free to use, no attribution images may establish a personal connection with your audience that typical stock images can’t quite reach.

Video Editing Tools

Video used to cost a considerable amount of money and needed to be planned out well in advance. Not so anymore. Check out our series of Best Practices for Shooting Video, then use these resources to edit and shape.

• Blender – The Blender Project is a free, open source 3D and video editing creation suite. Be warned, this one comes with a bit of a learning curve. But if you want to create 3D images or even experiment with simple CGI, it has all the toys – modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing and motion tracking.
• Wideo – This online video creation tool enables you to create, edit, and share compelling videos at no cost. Create animated videos with images, objects, movement, shapes, text, and audio.Perfect for simple and short video clips.
• Wirewax – For a simpler approach to video editing, check out Wirewax. The free version allows you to work on videos up to 10 minutes in length.

Marketing & Analysis

In addition to GoogleAnalytics and Facebook Audience Insights, there are a few stand alone tools that can help you analyze your marketing efforts as well as hone your ideal customer profile.

• SurveyMonkey – SurveyMonkey provides free, customizable surveys to help you drill down on anything. Plus, you can upgrade to get more extensive data analysis, sample selection, bias elimination, and data representation tools. It’s a great way to not only see if you’re on track with your content, but if there are aspects of your perfect client you’ve missed.
• BuzzSumo – Among its many uses, BuzzSumo can help you find blogging or social media influencers in your niche. You can use it to expand your list of content blog post topics. But you can also find potential guest bloggers or marketing partners you can work with to expand both of your businesses.

While you may be the only person working at your small business at the moment, there’s no need for despair or panic. Utilize these tools to look and act like a bigger fish in your pond. There are always creative ways to expand your business and reach. Take these suggestions and create your own success, on your terms.

Maybe you’re not getting the response you were expecting. Or you spot a logjam in the funnel at some point. Or something else is happening. For some reason, the website visitors are not turning into the paying customers you were expecting. Luckily, with software like Infusionsoft you can pinpoint exactly where the process is succeeding and failing. But the question remains…

Why is it failing?

One thing we’ve found over the years at Grow the Dream is that sometimes as small business owners, we focus too closely on the end result and not enough on the process of getting there. And that’s no surprise. As a small business owner or solopreneur, you don’t have a huge marketing department, or advertising group, or sometimes even an office manager to keep track of some of the smaller issues.

If you’ve followed our recommended marketing approach – key word strategy – you know where to begin – with your strategic work: determining your ideal customers, the questions they’re asking that you can answer and how to answer those questions in a way that they ‘hear’ and gain value from the answers, even before they start paying you. A crucial part of the strategic work, though, is on-going testing. This isn’t ‘set it and forget it’ marketing any more than it’s ‘cookie cutter’ or ‘one size fits all’ marketing. So once you’ve established a starting point, A/B testing is a great way to refine and develop your focus to reach more of your perfect customers.

It may help to think of online marketing as a cross country road trip to your small business success.

Your initial strategic work has helped you map out a route to your perfect customer. But no route may be the perfect, or only, one, and, in doing your strategic work, you may have also found some side paths, shortcuts or alternate routes that also seem to lead to your ideal customer. Some of them may be minor route adjustments and some more extensive. There may be an alternate route that can get you there a little quicker, but speed isn’t always your goal. What if a different path could provide free accommodations, with friends or family? Or, to really stretch the analogy, lets you check out the world’s biggest rubber band ball? If those things are important to you – or, rather, your ideal customer, how do you choose the best overall route?

The Key is A/B Testing

Much like a map legend, A/B, or split testing takes a portion of your audience and exposes it to an alternative – whether it’s a different landing page, a different email headline, a different call to action, a different offer for your products or services, or even just an adjusted color scheme.

You can either test two options on similarly sized samples simultaneously, or you can test a new approach on the entirety of a group, comparing it with the results of the initial campaign under similar circumstances.

Although I recommend that everyone start small with A/B testing, the beauty of it is that it’s never truly done, and split testing should become not an occasional adventure, but a regular journey you take with your online marketing materials, always looking to improve your impact and narrow your focus.

A/B testing helps you do one of two things, which are themselves intricately linked – it improves how you approach your ideal customer, by gaining a better understanding of who your ideal customer is and what they truly want.

We want to better understand the customer, so we can better serve the customer.

Let’s start with how you approach your ideal customer.

There are six key factors to taking a complete stranger who found your company on Google to making a sale and beyond. Each one can be improved and developed using A/B testing, with one exception.

Motivation

Unfortunately, so far there is no way that marketers have found to increase motivation. Your prospects either have it or they don’t. And when we try to encourage an unmotivated buyer into making a purchase, we come off as the slimy, pushy used car salesman everyone loves to hate, no matter how innocuous our approach. But a good thing to remember, is if the person found your website by searching for the key terms you are marketing, there’s a good chance they’re at least somewhat motivated to buy. So we want to cement the beginnings of that relationship as quickly as we can.

The best way to do that? Find a way to:

Increase Perceived Value

This is where the beauty of the Lead Magnet comes into play. By offering something of true worth to a prospective customer long before they start paying you, you are raising the perceived value of your company. If the content of the Lead Magnet is also relevant, it raises your profile in the eyes of the prospective buyer.

If your Lead Magnet lacks value, relevancy and urgency, the prospective customer will perceive your business as less worthy. Even the exchange of an email or the time to fill out a simple form should be rewarded with a benefit, so as to keep increasing their perception of your value.

But don’t stop there. Build value to:

Raise Customer Incentive

Keep building and reinforcing your business’ perceived value by offering better incentives as the prospect inches their way down your sales funnel to becoming a customer. The more incentives you offer that are of value to the prospect, the easier they will move, and the less you’ll have to worry about the other side of the sales equation:

Reduce Customer Friction

Friction is defined as psychological resistance to something in the sales process – whether it’s obvious or in the prospect’s subconscious. Sometimes it’s cost, but more often there is just something about purchasing from you that elicits fear for whatever reason.

The easier you make it for the customer to purchase, while continuing to build credibility, the more likely they are to convert to a sale down the line. Because you never know what can get you to:

Reduce Customer Anxiety

As much as we like think of ourselves as businesses, the fact is, even if your product or service is B2B, you’re still selling to a person within that business. And people have irrational fears. You’ve heard this before – we buy based on an emotional reaction, then justify our decisions.

So there’s not always a clear cut way to reduce anxiety, because even the customer might not know why they’re reacting that way. They’re trusting their gut without recognizing that multiple factors that have nothing to do with this sale are affecting their judgement.

But if you can overcome the anxiety and friction, you’ll be able to:

Increase Rate of Conversion

While this is our bottom line, we have to remember that’s not our customers’ goal. While it’s difficult sometimes, the best way to increase conversions from prospect to sale and then to evangelist, is to put ourselves in our customer’s shoes to master the first five marketing and sales factors.

So at this point, you’re probably wondering ‘Why the Marketing 101 lesson?’

The more you learn

about your ideal customer,

the more you can test

and refine.

For one, it never hurts to review the basics. And… Each of these five factors is a sign post on your road trip that can lead to a new path, a worthy detour or an actual shortcut. Plus, by digging down into each factor and how you can adjust it with A/B testing, you’ll be learning more about how your ideal client thinks, reacts and makes decisions.

Everything Can Be Tested

• Branding
  • While you will want to try and keep your branding as consistent as possible, it’s okay to veer off your main focus to test both the branding and how it works in each piece of your marketing.
• Email/Newsletter blasts
  • Headline & subheading/Subject line
  • Personalization
  • Contents
  • Call to Action
• Website
  • Design
    • Functionality
    • Ease of navigation
    • Ease of getting assistance
    • Value to customer up front
  •  Copy
    • Value to customer up front
  • Landing Pages
    • Headline/subject line
    • Copy
  • Testimonials?
  • Mobile traffic vs. desktop traffic
• Blog Posts
  • Headlines
  • Graphics
  • Copy
  • Voice
• PPC
• Lead Magnets
• Telephone Call Scripts
• Social Media Ads

I know that all of that might seem overwhelming at first, but the good news is that you don’t have to tackle it all at once. In fact, you can’t. And if you want to do it right, you shouldn’t!

Test One Thing at a Time

Remember what I said about small and large changes? To truly get in deep and get effective results from A/B Testing, you can only make one change at a time. How else can you measure the impact of each test and sample results? Even small or subtle changes can make a difference in the long run.

Go For the Greatest Impact

It’s sometimes crazy what some businesses discover while split testing. Even to the point of slightly changing the punctuation – a comma instead of a semicolon (true story) – can alter conversion rates.

However, you have to start somewhere, so test the bigger, more apparently impactful things first, then work your way down to the smaller stuff.

Know what you want to test and why

This might seem obvious, but you wouldn’t believe how often even larger businesses leap into A/B testing, having no idea what they’re testing or why. Another good reason for the Marketing 101 lesson.

Know your desired outcome

Yes, converting a prospect to a sale is the primary goal, and the ultimate indicator of the success of a split test, unless you’re testing why there’s a traffic jam on the third level of your sales funnel. While conversions are the ultimate goal, you need to get the prospects moving again to accomplish that. So always be clear on what you hope will change in the process that will ultimately lead to a successful outcome for whichever piece you’re testing.

Create your hypothesis, but don’t be married to it

By the same token, you should start each A/B test with a desired outcome and a theory of why whatever it is you’re testing could be improved. However, you HAVE to trust the data. Don’t try to fudge or manipulate it to fit the conclusion that you’re hoping for – you’ll only cost yourself results in the long run.

Use a large enough sample

While there’s no numeric indicator of how sizable your sample needs to be to get an accurate measure, it does have to be significant. Otherwise, how can you be sure that the testing is giving you the correct results? A good rule of thumb would be to test at least half of your regular visitors, email subscribers, etc.

If you finish the test with too few prospects, you might confuse results with random chance. To truly learn from the test, you need the high level of confidence that comes with statistical validity – you want to make sure your sample group is a true representation of what would happen if instead of testing, you launched the change for your entire audience.

Timing is Everything

Along with making sure you have a large enough sample, it’s important that you let the test continue until you have sufficient data. Don’t get impatient and end the test early. Let it run its course so you can accurately judge the difference between plan A and plan B.

Some marketers recommend ending on the same day you started, so an A/B test that started on a Tuesday will last two weeks – 15 days, to also end on a Tuesday.

Also, you’ll want to run the test when it’s reasonable to assume that you will actually get a sample to test.

Document, measure, adjust and repeat

Just like shampoo instructions, Split Testing is a process that grows value with repetition. Like any other marketing effort, you need to track its effectiveness, with measurable metrics. Keep track of each test, what was changed and the final result. Also keep track of when you are doing it – weekdays, weekends, what month, what stage of the sales cycle.

You want to be a connoisseur of data, so that you fully understand what it means and what steps to take next, whether to test some more, implement the changes, or just leave it alone.

Never stop… Testing

Really, A/B testing is never really complete, because there are always more things to test, more ways to narrow your focus and find the best route to your ideal customer, and let the marketing take you there.

In the end, even if you discover that the best route to go is the one you were already on, exploring the side paths and shortcuts will help broaden your creativity – leaving you with more options to draw from in the future. And a better understanding of the customer you’re hoping to serve.

I certainly never gave it a second thought, other than building my virtual bookshelf in my limited spare time.

But here’s the thing – we were wrong. In fact, in many cases, ignoring Pinterest in favor of Instagram, Twitter or even Facebook could be costing you thousands of customers and sales. Don’t believe me? Let’s break it down.

The Big Boom

Since Pinterest transitioned from invitation only to open to the public in 2012, its user base has multiplied more than 20 times, to over 200-million monthly users, making it not only one of the top social networking sites, but the fastest growing standalone site. And no, it’s not just for the ladies!

Yes, 80% of all Pinterest users are women, with 68% of women aged 25 to 54 dropping in at least monthly. But the fastest growing demographic on the platform is men, accounting for 40% of new users. In fact, the number of men on the platform has nearly doubled every year for the past 3 years (as of May 2018).

Here’s another startling statistic – in the fast paced world of social media, where a single Tweet can disappear in seconds in the news feed flood, content on Pinterest lasts hundreds of times longer than content on any other platform. In fact, it’s not unusual for a pin to go viral as many as 10 weeks after it’s pinned, due to its unique algorithm.

A recent study concluded that Pinterest pins are 100 times more spreadable than a tweet, and the half-life of a pin is 1,6000x longer than a Facebook post. Yes, you read that right.

And, Pinterest users are twice as likely to feel that their time on the platform is not wasted, but a good investment.

A Customized Catalog

Because people go to Pinterest specifically for inspiration – and not just for their wedding or remodel – Pinterest influences U.S. social media users’ purchasing decisions more than any other platform other than Facebook. In fact, people specifically look for new products to try on the site.

On average, each pin on Pinterest is worth around 78-cents in sales, drives 2 site visits and 6 page views and is repinned around 10 times. That may not seem like much, but considering every one of millions of pins, for a business, those numbers can add up quickly.

Another plus? Promotional material is far more readily accepted and expected on Pinterest than anywhere else. Nearly 95% of users plan purchases on Pinterest, both significant and mundane. At least half of Pinterest users report buying something first seen in a promotional pin. More than two-thirds of Pinners claim to have discovered a new brand or product on Pinterest. And more than half of Pinterest’s users check their saved Pins while out shopping in brick-and-mortar stores. Because of this, it’s one of the top mobile apps in the United States.

Getting Down to Pins and Boards

Before I dive into the strategy, there are probably a few of you who’ve never really spent much time on Pinterest. So let me take a moment to do a quick primer on how the platform works.

For lack of a better explanation, Pinterest is the virtual equivalent of a cork board or Creative Memories® photo page, which is probably one of the reasons it connected so well with its early audience. But rather than just one cork board, like the one you had in college, or the one in your kitchen next to the fridge, Pinterest is unlimited space on multiple boards.

Boards

Users pick a topic or theme for each Board. Boards keep your various ideas organized and easy to find. And while Pinterest does have a news feed feature, the Boards are where most users live. And, again, you can have as many boards as you want, with as many pins as you want on each.

By default, most Boards are public, but you can have up to 3 Secret Boards that only you can see, which will come in handy later.

Pins

The Pin is the basic unit of Pinterest. It’s more or less the same thing as a tweet on Twitter or a post on Facebook. BUT, like Instagram, Pins are entirely visual – they will always have an image or video component.

All pins are vertical, with the same width and an unlimited length. When creating your own Pins, the largest you should shoot for is 736×1102 pixels. This allows most users to see the majority of each image on their computer. However, since 80% of Pinterest users access their boards on the mobile app, you should shoot for something a little smaller – 600 x 900 pixels is ideal. And if your image is taller than 1560 pixels, it will get cut off.

Re-Pinning

So like Facebook, everyone has their own ‘page’ of Boards. But typically, pins are encountered individually during searches, that then lead back to their home board. And just like retweeting another user, you can grab a pin from someone else’s board and plop it on one of yours. That’s called Saving a Pin or Repinning. You can also just like it, but that is far less common – if a user is interested in a pin they see, they almost always just repin it to one of their boards.

The pin now exists on both (or more) boards, all linked back to the original board, which is how they proliferate across the platform and one of the reasons they can last forever and even go viral a couple of months later.

What Are We Waiting For?

It’s very easy to get started on Pinterest. You simply need an email address and a profile photo, and you can start creating boards. For best results, use the same profile photo you use on all of your social media platforms. The optimal profile image size for Pinterest is 165 x 165 pixels.

When naming your Board, keep in mind you have only 20 characters. Keep it simple, and use clear, compelling language to convey what will be pinned to the board. Then click the little pencil icon, and you can enter a more detailed description, including your company name and link.

HubSpot recommends that small business owners start with at least 12 boards. Right now, just start with one, play around with it, get the feel for how the platform works. Then you can create the other boards, with some of the strategic suggestions I’ll offer a little further down in this article.

Add “SAVE” Buttons to Your Website

The first step in your Pinterest marketing strategy is to add “Save” buttons to the products on your website. Don’t forget, people use Pinterest for inspiration – and shopping. Similar to creating a Lead Magnet and trading it for an email, allowing someone to Pin something from your website onto their own Pinterest Boards creates a bond. Remember, only 2% of people who visit your website “won’t buy the first time they hit it. They’re just doing research or window shopping.”

Can you see why being able to pin something to their favorite future decision-making hub would be of interest to you? Sure, they still might not buy, but if it’s down to a choice between a couple of option, and your competitor allows them to literally save a link to their website to their virtual notepad, which one of you do you think they’ll remember?

Just this step alone, even if you did nothing else on Pinterest, could easily double or triple your prospect retention rate and increase your closed sales.

Don’t lose their business, begin a relationship. Increase the odds that the 70% who might typically forget about your site will come back. In fact, according to Pinterest’s business experts, having the Pinterest click to save button on your site will quintuple the amount of content Pinterest users save from your site.

And don’t forget, by pinning it, a link to your business is now on their public Pinterest board. Do you remember the little IZOD alligators? That’s essentially what you’ve become. Your prospective client is now helping you advertise your business even before they buy!

If you’re using WordPress – and, seriously, why wouldn’t you? – download and install the Pinterest Pin It Hover button plugin.

It’s (Almost) All About the Visuals

Just like Instagram, Pinterest is an image-oriented site, so make sure your visuals are the best you can find or create. Vertical images are your best bet, since they obviously give you more real estate to work with. You can use some text in the image, but not too much. Lighter images are repinned 20 times more often than darker ones. And images without faces get repinned 23% more often than those with faces. Most importantly, your photos should be well-lit, in-focus and well-composed.

But don’t take my word for it. Pinterest did a study of 50,000 promoted pins on their site and found that lifestyle images outperformed product images by a HUGE margin. For example, fashion and style pins that showed products being utilized in real life saw 30 percent more clickthroughs and an incredible 170% higher checkout rates than those that solely showed the product.

But MY Business Isn’t About Fashion or Style!

One of the first questions we ask our new clients at Grow the Dream is, ‘what does your business really sell?’ Sure, Starbucks sells coffee, but what do they really market that causes folks like me to leave my home office to buy their cafe latte, when I have a perfectly good coffee machine just a few feet away?

The same question applies to your business. What do you market to your customers, really? What kind of peace of mind are you bringing them – or what improvement in their lives can they expect if they use your product or service?

At Grow the Dream, we offer training and support in marketing strategy and business automation. But what we market is the freedom of a business lifestyle that allows you to get more done at work, making the world a better place through your business, spending more time with your family, changing the world through loving them and giving back to the community.

It’s Not All About the Visuals

Great visuals alone do not guarantee the serious engagement that you want to generate for your business. In addition to the visual element, Pinterest pins also offer a description field. Make the most of it by telling pinners exactly when they will get if they click through to the linked content your website.

Make sure each pin has a link back to your site. Every single one. If you’re still doing old fashioned SEO, make sure you use your keywords, but please try and slip them into the description organically. Even better, if you’ve done the strategic work we recommend, you will know who your customers are and what they are asking about. Use the description to let them know they’ll find the answers when they click through, even if it isn’t linking to an article that tells them 5 ways to do whatever. More on those specific types of posts in a moment.

Always Be Pinning

Okay, maybe not always, but like most social media marketing, you need to be consistent. Pinterest itself recommends pinning at least one original pin per day during its peak hours. Other social media experts recommend between 5 and 30 per day, but that includes repinning from other boards. Unfortunately, these need to be stretched out, which obviously will take some planning and finding a balance.

Another thing to consider is when your target audience is actively on Pinterest. Start with what you’ve learned from your strategic work, then take advantage of Pinterest’s Analytics tool, which I’ll go over towards the end. I will also go over another option that can create activity on your boards without your having to go “hands-on” constantly.

According to Pinterest, the peak times to post are evenings and weekends. SocialFresh narrows it down to 2-4 PM EST, and 8PM – 1AM EST, while HubSpot’s research targets Saturday morning as the perfect posting time.

Because of the longevity of pins on Pinterest, the platform recommends you start a campaign that coincides with an upcoming holiday, season or event about 45 days prior to the actual event.

Before you get too stressed about finding time to locate and repin 5-30 pins per day, Pinterest itself has developed a couple of useful tools that businesses can take advantage of.

Pinterest Secret Weapon #1 – Secret Boards

As I mentioned earlier, each Pinterest user can have up to 3 Secret Boards that are only visible and accessible to the account owner. These are a godsend for the small business owner with limited time.

Set aside a little time every morning or evening to search and stack up your 5-30 posts for the day – including an original one, if at all possible. But instead of posting them on the appropriately themed board, you pin them all to a secret board. Then just set a couple of timers to remind you to pull them off the secret board and repin them to whichever “live” board you desire.

Pinterest Secret Weapon #2 – Rich Pins

Rich Pins are enhanced Pins that use metadata from your site to provide extra information about what Pinners will find when they click on a Pin. That may sound confusing, but it’s extremely helpful and can boost traffic to your site rapidly.

There are 5 different ‘styles’ of Rich Pins. You can use all or only a few, depending on what kinds of things you post on your site:

• Article pins include the headline, author, date published, story description and link. They also specifically indicate that the link points to an article, and include a call-to-action button that says “Read it.” Perfect for your content blog posts that answer those pressing questions your target client is asking.
• Product pins include real-time pricing, availability and where to buy
• Recipe pins include ingredients, cooking times and serving info
• Movie pins include ratings, cast members and reviews
• Place pins include an address, phone number and map

Rich Pins are full of valuable, real-time, traffic-generating information. Fortune 500 companies like Apple and GM are using them, and major names such as Target & Walmart that take advantage of Rich Pins report an 82% jump in their repinning ROI.

Without question, Rich Pins are the best direct strategy for growing your sales in the Pinterest sphere.
And most small businesses aren’t even using them yet!

Treading the Boards

“Diversity of Pin” is the 8th most important factor that users considered when they were debating whether or not to follow an account. So you can’t just post one or two boards and hope for the best. While you don’t need a lot of followers to get a return on Pinterest, just like other social media sites, the more followers you have, the wider your reach is going to grow.

If you just have a few boards, or if they’re all about your products and services, you’re just hurting yourself. Throw in a few other boards to give added value, just like you would do on your site. Making the boards thematic helps to build interest as well.

Remember the 12 boards I mentioned earlier as a recommendation? Here’s how to break them down:

• 5 things your audience loves (that best represent your business)
• 5 things your audience has a hard time finding (be a resource)
• 2 things your audience can’t live without

These aren’t the only boards you can have, and you can diversify within these designations a bit too, with, say, an inspirational quotes board, or an adventurous lifestyle board, if that fits your brand. And don’t forget to create a board to highlight your positive feedback from customers.

The three main factors that Pinterest users take into consideration when they consider whether to follow or not are:

1. How many accounts you are following and/or are following you
2. How many pins you have
3. How many boards you have

You’ll also want to capitalize on your Rich Pins. For example, make a board for all of your content blog posts, one for product pricing, one for recipes, one for special events and seasonal sales. If your product or service has a DIY component, make a separate board for those posts.

Rotate your most popular boards (you’ll be able to see which ones in analytics) and your content blog post board at the top. This keeps a positive image in visitors’ minds. A quick heads up – Pinterest penalizes Pins with broken links, so make sure all of your Pinned links are correct and up to date.

Another out of the box idea – do a board specifically to highlight your clients, colleagues and friends. You’ll be paying it forward, building a community and possibly connecting your clients with people they can help and be helped by. It’s a win-win-win!

Pinterest Secret Weapon #3 – Open Boards

In the spirit of true Web 2.0, Pinterest has the option to create what they call an Open Board. This is a board you control and moderate, but is ‘open’ to let users – like your customers and associates – contribute pins to the board. Reach out to your brand evangelists and your employees as well to contribute to these group boards. All it takes is an email.

No one but you can change the board name or description, and you have the power to override any pins you don’t want there. But it’s another great way to keep your boards active and updated on a regular, consistent basis. And, again, it builds community.

It’s a SOCIAL Network

Speaking of community… Pinterest is not meant just be a billboard for your products and services. If you want to have other users engage with your pins and boards, guess what? You need to engage with theirs as well.

Not only will leaving comments on other people’s pins build engagement, it also puts your brand name on their board, giving you more visibility.

Seek out and actively engage with pins that are related to your business or your ideal customers wants and needs. By the same token, find and follow boards and comment on pins from relevant but non-competitive brands in your industry. They’ll likely follow you back and you might build a relationship where you can refer customers that they can serve better and vice-versa.

Don’t limit it to your industry. Especially when you are first getting started, follow some of the more popular, successful brands on Pinterest, like Urban Outfitters. See what they pin, how they engage their followers, what boards they have. It’s like a virtual Pinterest apprenticeship! (Oh, and once again, commenting on their pins exposes you to their followers as well – you never know what could come of it!)

What Are Your Influences?

Speaking of exposure, Pinterest is another place where connecting with social media influencers can be a great boon to your business. Behave appropriately – start by following their boards, repinning their pins, and leaving engaging comments on their pins.

When it feels right, you can initiate a bigger collaboration, by casually asking if they will post on a board of yours, or offer to contribute to one of their boards. The more familiar you are with their audience and content when asking, the better chance you’ll have of exploding your reach even further.

Meanwhile, Back on Your Boards…

Just like you respond to tweets, Facebook posts, and Instagram comments, engage with your followers directly by answering their questions and responding to their comments. And don’t just use an auto-responder, canned message. Actually engage with users and increase your customer service perception by addressing them by name. And answer them promptly. Show you care.

Another way to quickly and significantly increase the engagement on your pins is to add a ‘Call to Pin.’ Like any call to action, it encourages people to do something – like “Repin to your own inspiration board.” By adding a call to pin to your description, you can see up to 80% more engagement.

Connect Your Other Social Media

You don’t have to build a new audience for each social networking platform. Pinterest makes it easy to connect your Twitter and Facebook accounts, and by doing so, it will add Twitter and Facebook buttons to your Pinterest account.

You can also share your Pinterest pins to the other social media accounts, encouraging your existing followers to connect with you there as well. One unfortunate caveat at present – you can’t connect your Facebook business page to Pinterest, just your personal profile.

Don’t forget to add Pinterest to your newsletters too. Even if it’s just updating the settings and adding the proper link for a Pinterest button on your MailChimp, Constant Contact or AWeber mailings, don’t neglect any opportunity to raise the profile of your business.

Analyze This!

Pinterest Analytics operates very similarly to Google Analytics. You’ll see what types of content perform best on the network, which pins are the most popular, which boards they get repinned to, and which ones drive the most traffic to your site. You’ll also see what devices people are on when they repin your material, and how effective the Save/Pin It buttons on your website are.

Just like with any strategy, it’s going to be ineffective if you don’t know what your key performance indicators are, so use Pinterest Analytics to track that.

You’ll also get information about the demographics and interests of people who interact with your Pins, which you can start to incorporate into your target customer profile. If you see Pins that diverge radically from your ideal client, you’ll know to limit the time you spend working on pins like that. Of course, you’ll still leave those boards and pins up, you just spend more time on pins more relevant to your target customer.

Pinterest Secret Weapon #4 – Promoted Pins

I mentioned earlier that promoted pins, aka, Pinterest Ads, are more readily accepted than similar posts on other platforms. Promoted Pins are marked with the word “Promoted” beneath the pin. If you click on the ellipses/more icon, you’ll get a pop up identifying who paid for the ad.

In spite of that, Promoted Pins perform just as well, and often better than organic Pins. Internal Pinterest data actually shows that advertisers get about a 30% bump in earned media (free promotion) during the campaign, and an astonishing average of 20 percent more organic clicks in the month following the launch of a Pinterest ad campaign.

Clearly, Pinterest is a vital tool for any small business with even a casual visual element, especially since lifestyle is the biggest seller on Pinterest. Take a little time to set it up, adjust to the learning curve – Pinterest has a whole training platform just for business users – be consistent, make sure all your links work, and watch your traffic start to exponentially grow.

You know that 98% of the traffic that comes to your website won’t buy the first time they hit it. They’re just doing research or window shopping.

The fact is, on average, 70% of the people who visit your website will never be back. So how do you engage with potential online customers who are “just looking”?

You start by not being average. And that starts with a Lead Magnet.

A Lead Magnet is something you offer a potential customer that has sufficient value to them that they’ll trade their email to get their hands on it.

A Lead Magnet is also a great way to create an unforgettable first impression. The point of a Lead Magnet is to increase the number of targeted, qualified leads that you can build relationships with that will lead to sales.

Targeted, qualified leads.

For nearly 20 years, we’ve taught our small business clients how to strategically locate these leads. It starts with discovering your ideal customer – the customer at the center of your hypothetical bullseye who needs your product or services the most and will exchange the most money for it – or buy multiple times.

Your marketing strategy begins and ends in one place: the customer. Who is your best prospect? How much can you possibly know about them? As narrowly as possible, identify the common traits that your very best buyers share with one another.

How does this connect to Lead Magnets? Glad you asked.

The best Lead Magnet for your business – the one you need to develop should solve a specific problem, with a specific solution for a specific group of your potential customers.

Your Lead Magnet must be consumed by the prospect for it to have an impact.

Therefore, your Lead Magnet must be something that they want or need and can take advantage of right now. If they’re not seeing the value within 5-10 minutes, you’ve likely already lost them. And the more specific you are about the benefit of your lead magnet, the better it will convert leads.

It seems counterintuitive, but instead of trying to figure out how to offer a broader solution, or one that is just like everyone else’s, look for ways to eliminate the people who aren’t your target customer. Being ultra-specific is the best way to capture a specific audience. And that’s what you want – targeted, qualified leads.

But, what if…

Now I’m sure you might be saying, “But I have multiple ideal customers—we offer many different things.”

While I could dispute that with you, all I’ll say for now is that you’ll be most effective if you select one stream of incoming customers and focus on that first. Establish yourself in a niche, then expand as needed and able. When that happens, you can utilize specific landing pages with their own highly specific Lead Magnets to bring those customers into your fold. We’ll go into that in another post. For now:

What Kind of a Lead Magnet Should I Create?

• Reports and guides are among the most common types of Lead Magnets, which is actually an argument against using them. Remember, you aren’t average – you don’t want to do what everyone else is doing, and if you do use a report or guide, it has to be super-specific and brief.
• If your ideal client is just getting started, offering them a toolkit or resource list can an effective Lead Magnet. Promote it as a starter kit, a glossary of terms they need to know to not look amateur, or templates for WordPress, PhotoShop, or any similar software system.
• 1-page “cheat sheets,” infographics, and handouts are great as Lead Magnets, especially if they cut straight to the point. You can also frame them as checklists, success blueprints, or shortcut mind maps.
• Also, any of the above can be translated into a video, if you have the equipment and knowledge. Video also helps build almost instant rapport with the potential client, increasing the effectiveness of your Lead Magnet.

What’s the Next Step?

The best Lead Magnet will be of value to your best customer. That’s why they’ll give you their email address. And once you have that email address, you can take advantage of the Lead Magnet’s benefit to you – an opportunity to build a relationship with a potential customer.

The best Lead Magnet will not just solve a problem, but if truly effective, will change the state of mind of your prospect so they are primed to do business with your company.

But all that’s worthless without follow-up.

Remember the 70% that don’t ever darken your online door again? By creating and offering the best Lead Magnet you can, it can cut that percentage down significantly. But only if you engage with that potential customer beyond the Lead Magnet.

This is where automated systems like Infusionsoft and MailChimp really shine. If you’ve done your strategic work, one of the things you learned about your ideal customer is how often they have problems you can solve, and how often they like to be contacted.

Build a Relationship

So you construct a campaign in Infusionsoft that periodically reinforces your burgeoning relationship. The first step for many is a quick Thank You for downloading the Lead Magnet, reminding them where they got it from, and encouraging feedback on the Lead Magnet itself – why not let them help you make it better? You can also set up an alternate campaign branch to reach out if they forget to download the Lead Magnet.

Either way, by continuing to engage the prospect with information that is of value to them, they are far more likely – if they are your target customer – to be among the 30%+ that will return to your website to buy.

By the way, don’t abuse this relationship. I recently had an experience with a company that was taking advantage of their email list by sending out multiple emails every day for 6 weeks. At the same time, they weren’t monitoring their inbox for customer service. As a result, they ruined their relationship with hundreds of existing buyers, the exact opposite of their intention.

Building – or rebuilding – a client base is difficult. We all know the aphorism about people only buying from people they know, like, and trust. By creating and implementing the best Lead Magnet for your ideal customer, you can start building that bridge of trust.

Follow-up, both automated and personal, reinforces that bond. That’s a good thing. Because here’s another percentage for you – studies say that prospects who don’t buy right away, but are engaged with the by company account for around 50% of online sales income.

Now do you see the value of a Lead Magnet?