There are many people who offer online marketing services. There are also many people who call themselves online marketing experts because they know how to:

• Build a WordPress website
• Implement search engine optimization (SEO)
• Set up your Google Places page and other local business listings
• Develop an AdWords campaign
• Send out an email marketing campaign
• Create a Facebook Business Page with the new iFrames landing tabs

All good stuff and important. But do these experts know marketing? Can they help you determine:

• Which online marketing components are the best options for your business?
• Who your target market is and how to best reach them?
• How your customers search for your products and services?
• What strategies (see diagram) are needed and which activities will be the most practical and successful given your time and resource constraints?

Anyone who calls themselves an online marketing expert must ask (and get the answers to) these five online marketing strategy questions before providing a proposal for services.

1. Do you have a marketing plan and is online marketing included?

Every business needs a marketing plan. It should be concise, focused and easily amended as your business evolves. Online and social media marketing are simply executing marketing activities using the Internet and social media platforms as a channel of communication. If you have a marketing plan but online and social media activities are not part of it, you should update your plan to include these strategies before you execute the tactics.

2. What is the goal of your online marketing?

Understanding what you are trying to accomplish with your online marketing can guide the activities so that you achieve results. Do you want to:

• Drive quality inbound leads
• Build your mailing list
• Develop your expert reputation
• Cultivate relationships for the future
• Increase brand awareness

Without knowing the answers to this question, you can’t select the right activities to ensure you achieve your goal. Make sure the person implementing your online marketing knows the answer to this as well.

3. Who are your target customers?

Selecting the right online marketing tools is only accomplished when you know where your customers can be found online. Creating a Facebook Page for your business does you little good if your target market spends little time on Facebook. Is there some benefit of having a Facebook Page for your business? Yes, but it may not be the first thing you work on given your limited resources and time. You may be better off spending your time on creating a LinkedIn group that discusses the challenges your target market faces, creating visibility for you and a valuable forum for them. But the only way to determine the priorities of your action plan is to truly understand the needs of your ideal client.

4. What keyword phrases would these target customers use to find you?

Understanding how your target market searches online for your products or services helps you develop your top keyword phrase list for all of your marketing efforts. If you don’t have your top keyword phrase list defined, how will they provide search engine optimization across your website and your other web properties?

5. What are your resources, both time and money?

There are many things we can do to market our businesses online, but the action plan must be in line with your resources. You must know how much time you can spend personally verses what you will need to outsource in order to succeed. If you are expected to blog 3 times a week and spend an hour a day on your social media activities, make sure you can devote that time or have the budget to hire a resource to manage your online marketing. Marketing your business is a balancing act between working on your business and in your business.

Strategy before Tactics

I’m all for small business owners hiring someone to help them achieve their online visibility, but executing tactics before you understand what you want to accomplish and how may cost your small business time, money and results. Many of these online marketing experts are great at execution, but lack the skills and experience to help you develop your online strategy. So before you sign that contract, ensure you have a plan first.

What other things must you know before you engage an online marketing tactics?

©2012 Masterful Marketing. All Rights Reserved.

5 Online Marketing Strategy Questions That Must Be Answered is an original post from Debra Murphy, Small Business Marketing Coach: Masterful Marketing - Marketing in the New Media World. If you enjoyed this post, be sure to follow Debra on Twitter, Facebook or Google+.

Planning Your Road to Success

One of the things I do for my clients is simplify marketing so it eliminates confusion and enables the business owner to focus on what is important. But there is always a part of marketing that stresses many small business owners – i.e. determining their mission, goals, strategies and tactics. These concepts are important in order to develop a plan that focuses you on what is important to help you succeed.

Mission vs. Vision

Mission (purpose) = defines why you are in business and what you are doing now.

Example:
Masterful Marketing partners with small business owners as their trusted marketing advisor to help them achieve success by learning, incorporating and executing marketing strategies and programs that take their business from mediocre to marvelous.

Vision = defines what you want your business to be or be known for. It’s useful to develop a 1, 3 and 5 year vision to ensure you can progress to where you want to be through well defined measurable steps:

Example:
One year: By December 30, 2010, Masterful Marketing will be offering quality information products in addition to coaching services that make up 20% of the overall revenue for the company.

Three year: By December 30, 2013, Masterful Marketing will be recognized as one of the top three marketing brands for small businesses in the United States.

Goals

Goals are well-defined, targeted statements that give you clarity, direction and focus. It is important for the small business owner to define what you need to do to achieve your vision in measurable and realistic terms. If a marketing goal is to “increase visibility for your Website”, then you need to include by when and specific criteria with which you can measure your results. Ideally, you should have only 2 or 3 goals that you want to work towards in a 3-6 month timeframe. Any more than that, you risk taking on too much and achieving nothing.

A common approach to developing your goals is to use the formula for the five characteristics of well developed goals – S.M.A.R.T.

• Specific -  What exactly are you trying to accomplish? The more specific you can be, the more likely the goal will be accomplished.
• Measurable – How do you know if you are successful? Answer the questions “How much?”, “How Many?”, and “By When?”
• Attainable – Is this realistic based on the resources you have or can acquire to achieve them or a major obstacle to success? The best goals should encourage you to reach, but not so far as to involve unavailable resources or unrealistic expectations.
• Relevant – Will this goal help you reach your vision? Setting goals that do not align themselves with your ultimate outcome will divert your attention from those that help you get where you want to go.
• Timely – What is the deadline for this effort? Without having specific time frames associated with each goal, you most likely will not achieve them because the day to day interruptions will take over.

Example:
By December 2010, create, launch and sell via the Internet 25 copies of an information product that simplifies developing a marketing plan for small businesses.

Strategies and Tactics

Probably the most confusing concept is how to determine strategies verses tactics. Previously, I wrote about Traditional vs. New Media Channels and the five categories of marketing strategies that are available within each channel – advertising, direct marketing, events, public relations and word of mouth.

When determining how you will achieve your goals, your plan should define which strategies you will include on each channel and the activities you need to be doing regularly that will lead you toward those goals.

Example:
Implement Internet marketing activities to launch the product into the market including public relations, advertising, events and word of mouth: The tactics (activities) that will help me achieve my goal include:

• Build my email list by offering a free marketing plan template;
• Develop the pricing and packaging strategy for the new information product;
• Develop a press release to announce the product and submit to the online media outlets;
• Create a blog post describing the new program and feed it to all social media channels;
• Develop an email announcement to send to my list;
• Develop a Facebook Business Page and announce the availability to my fans;
• Offer a free one hour tele-clinic that creates value and introduces the program to your target audience

It’s useful to include your tactics on a calendar with deadlines so you get the activities underway or completed in time to achieve your goals.

Stay Focused

As small business owners, we all want to do many different things believing that more is better. In marketing, you are better off selecting one to three of your most important goals and work towards achieving them. Having too many goals will only set you up for failure and disappointment. Figure out what’s important to you to accomplish in the next 3 to 6 months and go for it. Otherwise, you will be constantly distracted and won’t accomplish anything.

How are you defining your goals, strategies and tactics? What are you trying to achieve by the end of this year?

©2012 Masterful Marketing. All Rights Reserved.

Mission, Vision, Goals, Strategies and Tactics is an original post from Debra Murphy, Small Business Marketing Coach: Masterful Marketing - Marketing in the New Media World. If you enjoyed this post, be sure to follow Debra on Twitter, Facebook or Google+.

We just returned from our vacation in Aruba. We’ve been there many times and own a timeshare at the Marriott Surf Club. We go to just get away and relax – no site seeing, no golf – just reading, sunning, swimming and oh, yes a bit of gambling at night for entertainment.

Of course, no great trip would be complete without a marketing experience blog post upon my return!

We went for dinner at the Sunset Grill at the Radisson Hotel, our usual spot for our anniversary. In response to a joke by the waiter about the dangers of the extremely large steak knife, I mentioned it was our anniversary so my husband need not worry about the size of the knife.

As usual we had a wonderful dinner, but without warning, out came the waiter with this fantastic dessert prepared just for us! Warm chocolate souffle with ice cream was heavenly, but the preparation, presentation and surprise was just the best.

Having a wonderful, romantic dinner was what we expected when we went to the Sunset Grill. This surprise by the waiter not only exceeded our expectations, it made the experience much more memorable.

Marketing Tip

Surprise your customers with something that they don’t expect to make their every experience with you pleasantly memorable. A dessert really didn’t cost a lot but the impression it made on us was quite extensive. Quality service is always appreciated although sometimes expected. But a surprise bonus, such as this totally unexpected, wonderful dessert, goes a long way towards developing or solidifying your long-term relationships with your valued customers and strengthening your brand in their eyes.

What small surprise can you give your valued customers and clients to make their experience with you memorable?

©2012 Masterful Marketing. All Rights Reserved.

Surprise – The Secret to Exceeding Expectations is an original post from Debra Murphy, Small Business Marketing Coach: Masterful Marketing - Marketing in the New Media World. If you enjoyed this post, be sure to follow Debra on Twitter, Facebook or Google+.

You search the web for “marketing plan small business” and you get terrifying results ranging from marketing plan templates that are too cumbersome for small business owners to articles such as the one from Microsoft called 5 easy steps to create a marketing plan where the 5 steps they list are 1) position your product; 2) tap your braintrust; 3) listen to your customers; 4) draft the plan and 5) track results.

Hm, thanks for the help.

Then you wonder why small business owners run for the hills when they hear the term “marketing plan” and never really grasp what they need to do to attract new customers and clients and grow their businesses. And although I’d love to give you a magic 5 steps to a winning marketing plan, it just doesn’t work that way.

So what is really important to know?

• Your vision for the business
• Who wants to buy your products or services
• Your competition
• Your differentiator (why should I buy from you?)
• Products and/or services and how you will price and package them
• Your message
• Your brand identity and image

I call this the foundation information – you have to have a good grasp of this for your business. But, if you have this information, you are half way there.

Now you need your goals – specific, measureable, attainable, relevant and timely (S.M.A.R.T.) - to give you a path to success. For every goal, what strategy, tactics and supporting materials do I need to achieve that goal?

The following example shows the hierarchy of the thought process you can go through.

Marketing Plan Goal Strategy Hierarchy

• Goal: Increase the number of qualified inbound opportunities per quarter to 50.
• Strategy: Create an online presence that projects my expertise and helps those searching find my web site.
• Tactics:
  • Begin blogging;
  • Write a monthly article for distribution via the blog, other sites, email newsletter;
  • Build an opt-in email list;
• Tools/activities needed:
  • Develop a WordPress site and blog incorporating my brand identity;
  • Develop a list of articles to be written and write one a month;
  • Create a free tool that your target would appreciate and give it away to encourage people to sign up for your mailing list.

Remember, each goal may have multiple strategies with several tactics that require different materials and tools. Once you’ve laid out all of your goals, strategies, tactics and materials with their associated resources and budget, you can then decide what you can do accomplish each month based on your time and budget.

Want more help? Download my complimentary marketing plan and budget spreadsheet template by signing up for my email list. You can find the signup form in the sidebar of Masterful Marketing or on my Facebook Business Page.

©2012 Masterful Marketing. All Rights Reserved.

Small Business Marketing Plan is an original post from Debra Murphy, Small Business Marketing Coach: Masterful Marketing - Marketing in the New Media World. If you enjoyed this post, be sure to follow Debra on Twitter, Facebook or Google+.

Why are business owners gun shy about selecting a target market?

Photo courtesy of viZZZual.com on Flickr

You can’t appeal to everyone, so why do business owners continually drive themselves crazy trying to work with clients they just don’t connect with? When you identify people or businesses that you just love to work with, you enjoy your work more and you can focus on providing greater value. But I realize going through this exercise is painful because you still believe that doing so will limit your ability to grow your business and you will “leave money on the table”.

Every business owner goes through this thought process (including me when I started my business) until we realize that targeting enables us to:

• Attract the audience you truly wish to work with (and know when to turn away the client from hell!).
• Develop messages that speak clearly to that specific audience.
• Make choices that help you better market your products or services when faced with limited marketing resources.

The Law of Attraction Marketing

The Law of Attraction is the belief that you attract into your life what you think about. Your dominant thoughts will find a way to become reality. Using the Law of Attraction in your marketing efforts makes you a magnet for those you want to work with and likewise who find value in working with you.

But something else happens when you focus your thoughts and efforts on attracting your ideal client — you begin to attract others that are outside of that target because they like what they hear and want to be part of your success. Knowing your market intimately results in:

• Clearer messages
• More valuable offerings
• More effective marketing
• More prospects coming to you, even those you may not consider within your target market

You may choose to not work with a particular market because you don’t have the experience or knowledge of their market, but that is a business choice. Those are decisions you can make as the opportunities arise.

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.

Have you identified who you want to work with and keep them in the forefront of your thoughts? What’s holding you back if you have not?

©2012 Masterful Marketing. All Rights Reserved.

Law of Attraction in Marketing is an original post from Debra Murphy, Small Business Marketing Coach: Masterful Marketing - Marketing in the New Media World. If you enjoyed this post, be sure to follow Debra on Twitter, Facebook or Google+.

Will the Change Help or Hurt?

A former client of mine that I’ve worked with for quite a while decided to update their brand. They had talked with me about it while I was there helping them out as they looked to hire a VP of Marketing. They had recently received VC funding and they were planning some much needed expansion of the marketing organization. My assumption was that they would refresh the image but keep the fundamental style, as after four years, their brand had an awareness in the computer security market.

Rapid7 - Original Logo

As you can see, the new logo is quite different from the original. Don’t get me wrong – I don’t dislike the new logo. But my first impression is that they took a distinctive logo and changed it into something that looks very similar to other high technology company images. The original logo was created to project speed and agility and among a sea of vendors on web sites and trade show signs, the logo stood out and was noticed.

Of course, I may not be too objective as I was involved with the original logo design. But you tell me if you think changing their logo will help them or not.

Rapid7 Updated Logo

And it’s ok if you like the new better than the old. I’m looking for opinion about changing your brand drastically and whether this change is for the best. There are definitely times where companies need to do so, but this company was doing well, have a great reputation and are growing rapidly – all reasons why not to change.

So let’s start this conversation. Give me your opinion on the new brand.

©2012 Masterful Marketing. All Rights Reserved.

Updating Your Brand is an original post from Debra Murphy, Small Business Marketing Coach: Masterful Marketing - Marketing in the New Media World. If you enjoyed this post, be sure to follow Debra on Twitter, Facebook or Google+.

We’re two weeks into the New Year and I bet many people have already broken one of their New Year’s resolutions! Personally I stopped “resolving” to do things a long a time ago because for me, resolutions only resulted in some type of failure.

However, setting proper goals and aligning them with where you want your business to be in 3 – 5 years can help you achieve things you probably never thought you could.

Make sure your goals are S.M.A.R.T.:

• S – Specific about what you want to achieve;
• M – Measurable so you can track your progress;
• A- Achievable;
• R – Relevant to the target market you wish to influence;
• T – Time-based, usually a short period of time (no more than a year).

Keep in mind the following tips:

• Set no more than 3 goals at a time – Limit yourself to those that you truly want to achieve. We all have a lot of things to get done, but goals should make you reach to achieve, but if you set too many goals, you’ll put too much of a burden on yourself to achieve them.
• Write them down – I use a chart (download a template) to create the plan for achieving my goals. Fill in the goal, the actions and the dates you will accomplish each action to get you there. Then print it and keep it visible to you.
• Now, follow Chris Brogan’s advice on converting your goals into a keyword equivalent and keep focused on those words for the year.

Now I’ll share my goals with you via the following video clip.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMBV9JIL9u8

©2012 Masterful Marketing. All Rights Reserved.

Resolve to Achieve Your Goals is an original post from Debra Murphy, Small Business Marketing Coach: Masterful Marketing - Marketing in the New Media World. If you enjoyed this post, be sure to follow Debra on Twitter, Facebook or Google+.

Marketing your business has four stages: plan, execute, track and measure.

Four Stages of the Marketing Execution Process

If you haven’t had a marketing plan in the past, we’ll start with a review of last year so we can see how you did. Can you directly attribute revenue to your marketing activities? If so, which ones gave you the highest return? Don’t know? That’s ok – we’re looking forward to the New Year, not into the past. From this point on you will plan, execute, track and measure on a regular basis so that there are no more year end surprises.

Create a simple plan for your business

Having a great marketing plan is critical to its success. You absolutely must do it before you begin marketing. It’s not difficult or time consuming to write a marketing plan – just a few hours is all you need. Register for a simple worksheet to help you get started. If you download this worksheet, I’d appreciate your feedback in the comments section.

Execute the activities consistently

A great marketing plan is done to guide you in your marketing activities. The plan helps you understand how each activity works in synergy with your other marketing activities and it ensures you give a consistent message throughout. But the real key to success in marketing is the ability to execute the plan, working each activity until you have attracted more clients than you can handle. I’ve seen many businesses put together a plan but then don’t follow through with the plan, wasting so much time and missing real opportunities to build a successful business.

Develop a system for tracking marketing effectiveness

Determine now how you will track sales against the activities. Make sure you always ask how someone find you. Put it on your web site as part of the contact form. Have your office manager ask everyone who calls. Use the online tracking mechanisms available with Google Adwords and Yahoo Search. Knowing what’s working and what’s not will help you make budget decisions when you get an opportunity and you need to “find” some money in the marketing budget.

Measure

Review at least quarterly to see how your activities are working. I wrote a more lengthy post on this subject a few weeks ago so I won’t go into great detail. However, it’s important enough to remind you to be aware of where and how you spend your marketing dollar.

Continuous Cycle

Make a resolution this year to plan, execute, track and measure on a regular basis. You’ll find that your marketing becomes more effective and you can make adjustments along the way. Being flexible with your plan helps you take advantage of opportunities without wondering how you will fit it into your budget.

©2012 Masterful Marketing. All Rights Reserved.

Marketing Execution – Plan, Execute, Track, Measure is an original post from Debra Murphy, Small Business Marketing Coach: Masterful Marketing - Marketing in the New Media World. If you enjoyed this post, be sure to follow Debra on Twitter, Facebook or Google+.

I recently had the pleasure of wrestling a new client’s domain name and web site from their current developer. It is not a pleasant experience but when you ask the developer to make changes and nine weeks later they haven’t even returned a phone call, something has to be done.

But even more disconcerting is when I find out that the domain name is registered under the web developer’s name.

Your domain name is a business asset. To have anyone else hold that name in their possession is a disaster waiting to happen. But many business owners don’t realize the value of those domain names. Keep in mind that if I wanted to buy your business sometime in the future, one of the assets I want is your domain name.

Another thing that concerned me about this situation is that when I initiated the transfer of the domain name to a registrar in the business owner’s name, the web developer told the owner that doing that would mean he would relinquish control of the domain to the registrar. Mis-information like this really annoys me. Are they uninformed or just lying?

Please remember that when you want a web presence, work with someone who understands marketing and business to help you through the process. I’ve sent this message out before and I’m repeating it again because of the importance of being in control of your marketing tools. Today, with marketing depending so heavily on the web, you cannot take chances on someone else being in control of your domain name.

©2012 Masterful Marketing. All Rights Reserved.

Domain Names = Business Asset is an original post from Debra Murphy, Small Business Marketing Coach: Masterful Marketing - Marketing in the New Media World. If you enjoyed this post, be sure to follow Debra on Twitter, Facebook or Google+.

Introducing your business to a prospect can make many small business owners break out in a cold sweat. When they ask the dreaded question, “So what makes you different from the others?”, you hesitate, stutter, or worse, look like the proverbial deer in the headlights. And on top of that, the totally sweaty, pasty look just doesn’t do anything for great first impressions.

Being able to answer that question comfortably with your true differentiating factors clearly stated can boost your confidence and build confidence about your expertise in the person you are speaking with. Differentiation makes your business memorable and credible. You want a prospect to be able to quickly understand what you do and what sets you apart from your competitors.

The secret to creating your differentiation is understanding what your Ideal Client really wants and making sure you deliver it better than anyone else. Don’t be fooled – this exercise is not easy to do. It takes a lot of thought, brainstorming and sometimes some trial and error to see what works.

Take some time to really think about the following and come up with a list of things you do really well. Don’t underestimate anything because something that you do that is so simple may be just the key to your differentiator:

• What do your clients really appreciate about your service?
• Why are long term clients still with you?
• What was one of the nicest things a client ever said about how you conduct business?

The challenge for service businesses is to clearly identify what you do best in a way that is visible to your target. Consultants, accountants, financial planners, coaches, designers, web developers and the like appear to all be the same: they offer the same services for about the same price. Stand out by really understanding what you do best and exploit it. Or come up with something unique that adds value over your competition that you can offer.

• Create offers that are too hard to ignore – Can you package your services to add so much value that people just have to have it?
• Be known as the expert in your discipline - Author articles, books and other information products;
• Offer benefits that are free for you but add value or convenience for your prospects  – Provide access to you via Instant Messaging or Email 24×7.

A note of caution: Try not to differentiate on price. Who really wants to be the cheapest? People flock to buy higher priced products, stay at five star hotels or buy brand names. Why? Because top of the line projects value. You get what you pay for is a statement based in reality. Cheaper can evoke perceptions of lower quality, less breadth of knowledge, or a less stable business environment. Figure out a better way to differentiate.

©2012 Masterful Marketing. All Rights Reserved.

What Makes Your Business Different? is an original post from Debra Murphy, Small Business Marketing Coach: Masterful Marketing - Marketing in the New Media World. If you enjoyed this post, be sure to follow Debra on Twitter, Facebook or Google+.