Whoo-hoo! Seven down and two to go in our year end marketing review so we’re ready to hit the ground running! Hope you’ve found these useful so far!

Do you regularly review the results of your marketing efforts? Is your marketing plan a living document that ebbs and flows with what is happening in your business? As a small business owner, you should try to stay aware of how your marketing is working throughout the year so you can make adjustments as the need requires.

How Did You Find Me?

Throughout the year, you should track how you acquired new clients. The easiest question to ask when someone calls you is to find out how they heard about you. If you have not been doing that, add “track marketing activities” to your goals for this year!Make it a habit to ask – you will be glad you did. If you have a contact form on your web site, add some way to capture that same information. Knowing how people found you is an important way to get a feel for how your marketing efforts are working.

Simple way to review your activities

Even if you didn’t ask for how your clients found you this year, you can still determine how your programs are working through a bit of intuition and gut feel. I know most of my clients are through referrals or through online activities. To get a better idea of where you want to put more effort and where you should abandon your efforts and use your resources more effectively, we can do a simple analysis.

Start with a list

List all the marketing activities that you used this year, including those you pay for and those you don’t. Your time is as important as money, maybe even more, so even if you don’t spend money on an activity, if it isn’t producing, you may want to use your time more effectively on something that may work better.

Count your leads

Determine how many leads you got and where they came from. Did they come through your Web site form? Did you get them through a referral? Did you make contact at a speaking opportunity or an outside event you attended?

Count your new clients

How many of your leads turned into new clients? Record all prospects and how they find you even if they don’t become a client. Getting a lead and not converting it into a client can tell you where you may need to adjust your marketing, pricing, packaging or messages to align with your ideal client. An activity that gets a lot of leads but few, if any, turn into clients needs a serious assessment before investing in that activity again. The key is to determine which activity generates quality leads that turn into paying clients.

What did it cost?

Now compare how much you spent for each marketing area with how much revenue you can attribute to it and you will quickly know if there is a return on your investment. If the marketing activity costs time, not money, put your time investment down. Try to place each new client with some marketing activity unless you personally cold call and got the client from a direct sales activity. If the client came to you, assume it came through some marketing activity.

Where should I invest?

Now that you have this information, you can measure which marketing activities produced better results than others, enabling you to continue those that work and reassign the resource (money or time) to new activities that may produce better results. You might be able to trim your marketing budget without hurting your revenue, spend some more time blogging and building relationships on social networks or finally invest in search engine marketing or pay-per-click to drive visitors to your Web site.

Take time now to understand where you should invest your marketing resources next year. You can make intelligent decisions about how to market your business if you understand where your revenue comes from.

How successful was your marketing?

This is post six in the year end marketing review series to help small business owners get ready for a wonderful new year.

Most small businesses have a Web site and some marketing materials that most likely were written a few months ago but maybe longer. Keeping your content fresh, whether it is on your Web site pages, blog or printed materials is important to establishing your credibility and a consistent brand.

Remember that your brand is everything you do and say, not just the visual image your business projects. If your marketing tools are inconsistent with what you tell people, that reflects poorly on your brand. Ensuring your content is up-to-date and your message is consistently delivered to your prospects is an important exercise that should be done at least once a quarter. The more often you review your content, the less work it will become. Doing this review once a year most likely means a lot more content needs to change.

Let the Review Begin

We’ve just determined if:

• Our target market has changed;
• Our products and service offerings were aligned with the needs of our target market;
• We know what makes us different;
• Our core marketing message helps your prospects decide why they should do business with you.

Armed with this information, it’s time to review your materials for consistency and accuracy with what you are actually providing your clients. Start with your Web site and make changes there. When you are happy with the content, then you can update your print materials (if you have any) accordingly.

As you review your content, keep the following questions in mind:

• Do I clearly identify on the home page who I work with, what I do for them and how I help them so I get my ideal client’s attention quickly?
• Are the description of my service offerings still something people can buy or have I changed the pricing and packaging and forgot to update the details on the Web site?
• Have I added a great new service or product offering to my lineup but forgot to add it to my Web site?
• Is my profile accurate or do I need to update it? What does my profile look like with respect to the one I have on LinkedIn?
• Do I make it easy for people to connect with me via my social networks?
• Do all the links on my site still work?
• Is this the year I should commit to adding a blog to my site and create a plan for providing my target market great content?

It’s easy to get caught up in the day to day activities of running your business and working on your business usually gets put aside. But your Web site content, marketing materials and consistent brand is too important to put aside and forget. I know I had to revise my Web site content to align what I was actually providing to my clients with what was described on the Web site.

What questions did I miss that we should be asking when reviewing our marketing materials for quality content?

This is post five in the year end marketing review series to help you get ready for the new year.

If you have followed the previous posts in this series, you should know if and how your ideal client profiles have changed, what makes you different and why you delight that ideal client. Now we need to look at our core marketing message that should be woven throughout all of your marketing materials. Is your marketing message the right one for your market, aligning with your ideal client’s needs and telling them why they should do business with you loud and clear?

Your clients are being bombarded with constant noise from your competition about how they will help them eliminate a pain or solve a problem. You need to be heard through all this marketing noise with a captivating message that speaks directly to the needs of your ideal client, enabling you to connect with them.

Remember – It’s What You Do …

Your core message:

• Is a short description of your business that catches your ideal client’s attention;
• Tells them how you can help solve their problem;
• Conveys what value you bring to the relationship, what makes you different and the benefit they will experience by working with you;
• Explains why they should trust you and should do business with you rather than your competition.

… Not How Do You Do It!

Just remember that your ideal clients do not care what you do or how you do it. They only care about what you can do for them and the benefits they will get by investing their money with you. They are looking for solutions such as:

• Solve a problem they are currently experiencing.
• Improve a process that is not working for them.
• Increase sales or cut costs, ultimately leading to a better bottom line.
• Find new clients or open new markets, thereby increasing revenue.
• Eliminate tasks they don’t want or don’t know how to do.

Note that all the solutions involve saving money, making more money, saving time, stop wasting time or helping them feel better about themselves. It’s not about the nifty new feature you offer or how you do something. It’s what can you do for me (or WII-FM – what’s in it for me?).

Focus your Message and Grow Your Business

Speak to your ideal client with a clear message that explains how you solve their problem. Focus on educating and informing them about the benefits of working with you rather than selling and create an image in their minds of life after they engage with you. Once you get their attention, they will listen to what you have to say. The more you understand the needs of your market, the better you can speak to them in a compelling and believable fashion.

Remember your message is the foundation of all of your marketing materials. Delivering a consistent message across all of your communication tools will help you capture the attention of those you want to do business with and help you grow your business.

How can you strengthen your message to attract your ideal client?

This is post four in the year end marketing review series to help you get ready for the new year.

Whether you discovered that your ideal client has changed or not, reviewing what makes you different is something you should be doing on a regular basis because you need to be sure that what you think makes you different continues to be true as new competitors enter the market. With so many people offering the same products and services, you must create a long term competitive advantage that keeps you ahead of your competition. Being different gets you noticed, creates value and is easily remembered.

Determining what really sets you apart from others in your field and communicating it effectively is not an easy exercise. As business owners, we think we need to have something complex and difficult in order to be valued by our clients when in reality, it may be something we find easy to do but our clients find amazing. We are taught to believe that things of value have to be hard or complex. Just because these things we do are easy for us does not mean they are easy for others. You need to become consciously aware of this value you provide and use it to your benefit.

Do you:

• Find simpler ways of doing things?
• Serve a niche market better than anyone else?
• Bring a new perspective to challenges that offer unique solutions?
• Package your services in a way that appeals to your ideal client?
• Create systems that help clients learn how to do things more effectively?

The secret to identifying your differentiation is to understand what your ideal client really wants and making sure you deliver it better than anyone else. You need to have a deep understanding of the market and competition and then determine where you can uniquely offer something that the competition does not, packaged in a way that others cannot easily copy.

Just a note: being the lowest price or offering the best service is not a unique differentiating aspect that will get the attention of your ideal client.

What do you do really well that makes you stand out?

This is post three in a series that discusses your year end marketing review to help you get ready for the new year.

In part 1, we reviewed whether we were now focusing on a new and most likely, better ideal client. Next, we reviewed our goals to be sure they aligned with your business vision. Given this information, we will evaluate all of our marketing activities to make sure everything we do will help us reach this ideal client.

Do your products and services appeal to your ideal client?

Pricing and packaging your products and services correctly for your target market is one of the more powerful marketing activities that you can do. If your ideal client has changed, you need to review your business model to be sure your offerings are aligned with their needs.

Compare your ideal client’s challenges with your offerings.

• Are you offering products and services that help your ideal client overcome some critical need?
• Have you created packages that highlight your unique differentiator?
• Do the packages (either products or services) have many benefits included to make the decision to work with you really easy?
• Are they priced to fit within their budget while maximizing your revenue?

The key to pricing and packaging is to understand your client’s needs and then create solutions that are high value and low risk. Be creative with your offerings by putting together services and information products that are value-packed and are easy to buy.

Can you eliminate the risk of working with you?

The best example of matching products and services to your ideal client is what happened in my business. Originally I offered marketing consulting services primarily to high technology companies. Through my networking activities, though, I was meeting small business owners that needed marketing help. I realized that I truly wanted to work with the small business owner to mentor them in marketing, but I was having difficulty explaining what I offered and why it was beneficial to this new ideal client. To them, hiring a marketing consultant seemed high risk and not appropriate to their small business. I continually heard, “I’d love to work with you but I can’t afford your services”. They were assuming that my services were too expensive for their budgets primarily because of the way I had priced and packaged them.

But the reality was that my pricing and packaging were not clearly aligned with their needs. What they needed was advice, education and a mentor to help them with their marketing, packaged in a way that fit into their budgets. So I made a few changes to my business model and my brand:

• Renamed by business from Vista Consulting to Masterful Marketing;
• Changed my title from marketing consultant to marketing coach and mentor;
• Created service packages (8 step program) and information products (teleclinics) with a package price, eliminating the fear that the offerings are too expensive for a small business’s budget.

These changes have resulted in a win-win for both my business and my clients. I get to help more small business owners and they get the marketing advice and services they need within their budget.

How will you adjust your offerings to appeal to your ideal client?

This is the second post in a series that discusses your year end marketing review to help you get ready for the new year.

Your goals can deal with many different elements of your business. You can have goals to drive more business from information products, generate better quality inbound leads, increase the awareness of your brand, drive more visitors to your web site or get more repeat clients. The primary purpose for setting goals is to guide your efforts and measure their success.

Regular review of your goals should be something you do more often than once a year, but now is as good a time as any to take a look. Reviewing your goals is not about looking back but about seeing if your goals are moving you forward. It is also not an exercise where you beat yourself up for not getting them done! The review is to determine which ones you accomplished and which ones you didn’t and why.

Do you have a vision for your business?

Chances are very good that those goals you did not accomplish were not aligned with the vision you have set for your business. Setting goals that help you get where you want to go makes those goals so very much more important to you and therefore, more likely to be accomplished.

And if you don’t have a vision, you should! Your vision is not just the dream about what you want your business to look like, but your beacon that inspires, gives you direction and keeps you on course. There are benefits of having a clear vision and the accompanying goals that help you get there:

• It focuses you on where to spend your time, effort and resources. It helps you assess the many opportunities that become available and make choices based on whether the opportunity gets you closer to your vision.
• When you become overwhelmed, you can look at whether what you are doing is heading you towards your vision. If it isn’t, then you need to decide whether continuing to spend time and effort on this activity is truly worth it!

Do your goals help you get to your vision?

Look at your goals for this past year and determine which ones you want to continue to strive for based on your vision and which ones just go away. For every goal you set, make sure it helps you get to where you are trying to go. Be focused on the ultimate target, set goals that will take you to your dream and you will see great things happen to your business.

What’s your vision for your business? How will you realign your goals to achieve your vision?

This post is the first in a series that will discuss your year end marketing review to help you get ready for the new year. By the end of the series, you should have the information you need to create a basic marketing plan.

During the last month of the year, I always like to take some time to review my business results and my marketing efforts over the past year so that I can adjust where necessary and be ready to hit the ground running when the new year rolls around. The following are the areas that I look at to see what stays, what goes and what needs a bit of tweaking.

• Current client profile – has it changed?
• Goals – which ones did you accomplish?
• Service or product offerings – do they need to be redefined?
• Why people hire you or pay for your services – what makes you different?
• Messages – do they still work?
• Website content and other marketing materials – are they consistent?
• Marketing activities for the past year – what worked and what didn’t?
• Online reputation or presence – do you exist?
• Action plan – what activities will you be using to market your business?

Let’s start at the beginning and work our way through the list.

Has your client profile changed?

As your business grows and matures, you start to notice changes happening that may not necessarily be planned. One of the areas that usually evolves is your client profile. Although we all do our homework about finding the right target market for our products and services, we become attracted to a particular type of client and naturally begin to focus. When this happens, everything you have read about why working with your ideal client is so very important becomes crystal clear.

This evolution shouldn’t be a surprise. Your business takes this turn when your passion for what you do and why you do it shines through everything else. You begin to truly understand what you offer, who benefits from working with you and most importantly who you like to work with. As you get a clearer perspective on your business, you begin to attract a more targeted audience, a niche so to speak, who value what you have to offer and the rest of them begin to fade. Not only do you thrive working with this client, these clients truly benefit from working with you.

What should you do?

If you find yourself working with a client that is different than those you started the year with, ask yourself:

• Why are you naturally attracting this audience? (Passion? Personality? Skills?)
• Have you focused on a particular industry within your target that just makes more sense for you?
• Had you taken for granted something that makes you different that really is important to these clients?

By becoming aware of the changes and understanding why this has happened, you can now use this knowledge to evolve your messages, content and marketing activities to ensure you speak clearly to your ideal client. As I wrote in a previous post on Law of Attraction in Marketing, knowing your ideal client helps you focus and be explicit about what makes you attractive to that market. Don’t view this as a restriction but as a liberating exercise that will ensure you develop raving fans for your business.

This evolution has happened in my business where I now focus on providing products and services for independent professionals and small business owners in the construction and home services industry.

Have you found that you have focused your target market and evolved your business? Share your stories in the comments.

I got a call from yet another SEO company trying to sell one of my clients services that will get them first page rankings in Google. Now, I’ll never call myself an expert, but I do know a thing or two about SEO. But the first rule is that there are no guarantees that anyone, regardless of how “expert” they are, can get your site on the first page of Google. There are too many factors, many of which are unknown except to Google themselves. Plus it also depends on how competitive your industry is, how long your site has been around and the quality of the inbound links you have to your site.
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