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+.

Most small business marketing is done online where first impressions, relevant content and social media integration are key requirements for achieving visibility, which ultimately should result in quality inbound leads. Your website, which is the hub of your online presence, needs to be created on a platform that makes it easy for you to maintain, add new content and keep it fresh for your ideal clients. WordPress is the website platform of choice because it enables small businesses to achieve a quality, professional web presence that is easy and cost-effective to update and maintain.

What makes WordPress easy to use and maintain is the inclusion of WordPress plugins, created by a network of developers, that extend the basic WordPress platform with complex functionality without custom development. The following are three WordPress plugins that extend the platform to include features critical to your online marketing:

• WordPress SEO
• Fast Secure Contact Form
• LTW (Less than Web) Testimonials

What do these plugins have to do with marketing?

• You need to optimize your site to be found
• You need a strong call-to-action on each page of your site with an associated form to encourage people to contact you (inbound leads are the best)
• You want prospects to see reviews from your very happy customers on your website (and other review sites too)

Let’s take a look at them in a bit more detail.

WordPress SEO

Why have a website or blog if you can’t be found? WordPress SEO is a very powerful plug-in that makes it easy to add on-page SEO components in order to achieve visibility in the search results. There are other very good SEO plugins available for WordPress, but WordPress SEO includes many features that eliminate the need for multiple plugins. Some of the more notable features:

• Import SEO settings from other plugins
• Add a post title and meta description to each post or page. The input box (which I’ve positioned directly below the edit window) shows you what your search result will look like. Then it guides you through the steps needed for strong on-page SEO (see the screenshot below)


Click to enlarge

• Select a focus keyword and get a list of related keywords for use in the page or post
• Add breadcrumbs to your single posts and pages to help visitors understand your site and enable search engines to more easily determine its structure
• Create an XML sitemap that is used by Google and other search engines to better index your site
• Clean up the <head> section of your blog and eliminate unnecessary code if you choose

There are many more advanced features that you can add later once you are comfortable with the basics, but you don’t have to be an expert to utilize this plugin and create a better optimized website.

Fast Secure Contact Form for WordPress

Fast Secure Contact Form is an easy to use plugin that allows you to configure your forms as needed for the various calls to action you want to include on your website. For the more complex forms, you do need a little bit of CSS knowledge.

• Create a simple form out of the box that allows your visitors to send you an email through the form. I don’t recommend putting any email addresses on your websites anymore to prevent spam. It also integrates Askimet and Captcha to block all common spammer tactics so you can find your real leads from your website.
• Duplicate settings across other forms with a single click, allowing you to just modify those areas that are different. Eliminates having to start from scratch for each form.
• Use the same form on multiple pages and when you receive an email from the form, the page that the visitor sent the email is listed in the email.
• Export your forms and import them on another server. This is a life saver when going live with a website and moving from a test server. It’s also useful for backing up your forms in the event you need to rebuild your website.
• Modify the CSS and make your form visually attractive.

As with the WordPress SEO plugin, you can start simple and grow into the more advanced features as you get more familiar with the plugin.

Less Than Web Testimonials

Adding client testimonials to your website regularly is an important feature that many small business owners can’t do because they aren’t able to edit the page where they exist. With WordPress and LTW Testimonials plugin, that problem and more have been eliminated.

• Create unique groups of testimonials so you can feature them on the appropriate pages of your website. This is a great feature for companies that have multiple products or services.
• Access the form CSS and html from within the plugin dashboard ensuring your testimonials support your theme’s look and feel.
• Include an image to associate with the testimonial. Enables you to display a client logo or picture along with the testimonial (available on both the page and the widget).
• Display a random testimonial in the sidebar widget each time the page is refreshed.
• Link to the actual testimonial from the “more” link in the widget rather than just the page.

Entering testimonials into your website is simple and will encourage you to request new ones from your best clients.

Let me know if you have tried these WordPress plugins and if so, what do you think of them?

©2012 Masterful Marketing. All Rights Reserved.

Three WordPress Plugins for More Effective Online 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+.

Here are my top 10 marketing tips for small businesses that will help you gain more visibility with your target customer.

1. Create a vision and set realistic goals for your business. What’s that have to do with marketing, you ask? Knowing your vision will help you make decisions on what types of activities you will need to get where you’d like to go. Goals break the process into smaller pieces to allow you to get there one step at a time. Without a vision and a set of goals, you may make some decisions that lead you nowhere.
2. Know what makes you different and make sure you are able to communicate it clearly. Most of the time, it’s not something complicated. In fact, many of us overlook our key strength because it seems too simple to us. Once you identify what it is, clearly communicate why this is of value to your ideal client. Stay focused and develop your expert reputation around this unique skill.
3. Understand your ideal client intimately and know what keeps them awake at night. If you know your ideal client well, you will be able to create the content they need and the services that will attract them to you. This knowledge will also help you avoid tactics that won’t work, wasting time and money with little to no return.
4. Develop your list of keywords and use them strategically throughout all of your online properties. Knowing how people search for what you have to offer is critical to your online visibility. Do your research and make it a habit to use these phrases throughout all of your online profiles to help the search engines index your material more effectively.
5. Create a top notch WordPress website for your business. As the center of your online presence, your website/blog is the most important marketing tool you have. Don’t risk your image with a website that is poorly developed and hard to maintain. A WordPress website enables you to easily add new, relevant content that your audience needs.
6. Be generous with your knowledge. Give away valuable content that will attract prospects to you. Write an ebook, develop a white paper or write in your blog regularly. This content demonstrates your capabilities, builds your reputation as an expert and will help people decide whether you can help them solve their challenges.
7. Be consistent with your brand. Think through what you want all of your web properties to look like before you create them. Start with your Website and then develop your Facebook Business Page with the same look. Create a consistent Twitter background and don’t forget to brand your email newsletter. Try to create a user name that you can use across all social media sites that is relevant to your business.
8. Create a complete local business listing in all the search engines. Add images, a keyword rich profile and point it back to your website or blog. Get happy clients to write reviews as these can be incorporated into the listing. For your Google Local Business Listing, reviews are also compiled from third-party websites. All businesses should create free listings in these local business directories to help increase traffic to your website. There are many others that can be beneficial but start here and add new ones as appropriate.
   • Google Local Business Center
   • Bing Local Business Listing
   • Yahoo! Local
9. Get involved with social media. Start with a blog and post regularly based on what makes sense for you. Then incorporate other social media activities that make sense for your business. If you target market is not on Facebook, don’t immediately set up a Facebook Page. If you want to reach the CFOs of major companies, set up a rich profile on LinkedIn. You can determine what sites will be best for your business based on mastering tip number 3.
10. Don’t be afraid of online marketing. Although it seems overwhelming at times, online marketing is a process that can be planned, tracked and measured. Create a realistic plan (and get help doing so if you need to), put activities into motion and track them to see how they work. Don’t let fear paralyze you from taking action because doing nothing is riskier than doing something not quite right.

Final piece of advice: Take a little time to learn enough about online marketing so you can tell when someone is claiming they can do something that they cannot. Seek help and guidance from someone who can walk you through the steps. However, beware of those who claim to be online experts because they know how to use Facebook or Twitter. Find a true marketing resource with years of marketing experience who is willing to connect what these tools do with how to use them for marketing.

Share your small business online marketing tips. We can all use more inspiration.

©2012 Masterful Marketing. All Rights Reserved.

10 Marketing Tips for Gaining Online Visibility 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 presented a workshop at the New England Business Brokers Association meeting about how to integrate online and social media marketing for lead generation. As professional service business owners, we build our credibility by demonstrating our expertise and knowledge of our discipline and the use of social media makes building your reputation much simpler than before.

As a small business owner, how you approach online marketing can make the difference between a successful campaign and an overwhelming exercise. Learning how to use online marketing to drive visitors to your Website and generate leads is going to impact your marketing and ultimately the success of your business.

Here is a summary of the slides:

Slide 3: Small Business Marketing – What has changed?

Social media and the Internet channel has opened up opportunities to reach more potential customers that were unavailable to most small businesses not too long ago. What has changed in the market is the ability for the customer to:

• Research service providers long before engaging in the sales process
• Obtain reviews about the service provider that may influence the purchase decision
• Acquire a perception about the business based on what they do and don’t find about you
• Engage with the business through social networks to learn more about you

Slide 4: Small Business Marketing – What has not changed?

What has not changed, however, is the need to develop a brief, but focused marketing plan to help you effectively reach your prospects.

Slide 5: Benefits of Online Marketing

• Levels the playing field
• Positions you as the expert in your industry
• Increases online exposure
• Develops relationships / grows contact list
• Encourages online WOM
• Influences purchase decisions
• Increases your reach
• Drives visitors / generate leads

Slide 6: Challenges of Online Marketing

Not understanding what you are trying to accomplish with online and social media marketing can lead to activities that are disjointed, inconsistent and totally ineffective. Online marketing requires:

• A strategy on how to approach it for your business
• A marketing system to ensure consistency
• A definition of what makes you different to stand out from the crowd
• A valuable offer (content, information) to get attention
• Understanding how to sell without selling
• A plan for how to prioritize time, energy and money for best results

Slide 7: Online Lead Generation

Acquiring leads is accomplished by doing something that gets a person to take some action, such as:

• Fills out a form on your website
• Signs up for your mailing list
• Calls you to initiate the relationship
• Likes your Facebook Business Page
• Connects with you on LinkedIn
• Takes an action based on something you do online

Slide 8: Online Lead Generation

As with all marketing activities, if you establish a goal, the strategies and tactics will be more apparent and cohesive.

Getting Started with Online Marketing

Slide 10: Do you have a Web presence?

• Evaluate your presence on the Internet by conducting a “vanity search” – search your name and business name. What is your first impression of what you find?
• Do a review your brand – name, logo, color scheme – to ensure that it is aligned with who you really are and that it is consistent across all your web properties.
• Review your website for brand consistency, fresh and relevant content and whether it is developed so that you can easily update it.
• Review your existing profiles on social networks – are they consistent and project your value?

Slide 11: Define your Internet Marketing Strategy

The hub of your online marketing strategy is a professional website and/or blog where the goal of all marketing activities is to drive visitors to your website. Do your keyword research and ensure you have a list that you use consistently.

Slide 12: Establish Your Home Base

Spend some time on ensuring your Website has been appropriately optimized. Then develop a content strategy: Know what you want to achieve and the content that will attract your ideal prospect. Take an inventory of the content you have and re-purpose for different uses. Create new when needed.

Develop a comment strategy to become visible. Develop a list building strategy that you can use to market your information products. Syndicate your content via the RSS Feeds or through Article marketing sites

Slide 13: Social Media Strategy

• Research your target audience and listen to what they have to say.
• Find out where your target hangs out online.
• Determine how you can help, educate and gain visibility.
• Identify the tactics for engaging your target audience and attract them to you.
• Create your complete and keyword rich profile that sets you apart and projects your human side.
• Integrate your valuable content – blog posts, eBook, presentations, audio, video posts, advice – to attract your target market
• Upload a quality picture that projects YOU!

Slide 14 – 21: Social Media Tools

Google Profile – Shows up when people search for your name. Provides a portal to your online identity.

Facebook Business Page – Profiles your business and enables your clients / prospects to get to know you through your content. To grow your supporters:

• Add Like Box to your blog / website
• Invite your opt-in email list to like your Facebook Page
• Start a discussion so fans can interact with each other
• Acknowledge fans when they write on your Page Wall
• Create and promote events to your fans and friends
• Incorporate your Blog posts
• Welcome new fans with a welcome tab
• Update your Page status with tips, advice and other useful information

Twitter for Business – Connect and network with people who share your industry, share your views or share quality information and ideas. Get instant access to what’s being said about you or your industry. Extend the reach of your thought leadership by communicating your blog posts and other content

LinkedIn Profile – Create a compelling, keyword rich profile. Make the full view public enabling Google, Yahoo and Bing to index. Get your vanity URL. Claim and update your company page. Marketing using LinkedIn:

• Get and give recommendations
• Join or create groups of interest, participate in discussions and display your expertise whenever possible
• Update your status with content relevant to your connections
• Participate in Questions & Answers to attract a targeted audience and make new connections.
• Share your expertise and help people
• Create & promote events
• Incorporate your blog, presentations or e-books on your profile

Slide 22: Integrating it All

• Connect LinkedIn to Twitter, Facebook to Twitter
• Use Friendfeed for integrating other networks
• Use HootSuite for a single dashboard

Slide 23: Internet Marketing System to ensure a Consistent Flow of Information

Daily:

• Update Facebook page
• Update status messages across networks
• Scan Google Reader subscriptions and share content that would be valuable to your followers (add to Friendfeed to ensure it goes out to all social networks)
• Check Google Alerts for mentions of your name and business name
• Respond to new Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook connection requests

Weekly:

• Blog once a week at a minimum
• Scan LinkedIn Q&A and answer a few questions
• Review content for new uses (presentations, videos, screencams, articles, ebooks, etc)

Monthly:

• Tweak profiles
• Check Webmaster tools
• Check Google analytics for information on traffic
• Write a recommendation for a contact in LinkedIn, request one in return
• Review Facebook Business Page, update and add new features

Slide 24: Get Connected, Get Found™

Schedule time to work on your marketing and make social media part of it. Don’t overlook any content you create that can be useful to your followers. Set your system up and work it – the value of social media on your marketing will become evident. Be realistic on what you can do with the resources you have available.

What lead generation activities do you use? How do they work?

I am available to present this and other marketing topics for your organization. Please contact me if you are interested in discussing your presentation needs.

©2012 Masterful Marketing. All Rights Reserved.

Lead Generation: What Works Today 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+.

Whatever you call it, you still need to manage it!

There’s a lot of conversation about the term personal brand. My favorite personal brand is Bono (no surprise here), but Tom Brady, Madonna, J. Lo, Manny Ramirez, Britney Spears and many other celebritites all have personal brands – some good and some not so good at times.

As small business owners in the social media world, it’s not about creating a celebrity-like image but about establishing your reputation and managing how you are perceived by others, especially those who may want to do business with you. Building and nurturing a consistent reputation for what you are good at (your differentiation) is something you should strive for to make finding your ideal client that much much easier.

And as much as some folks don’t like the term personal brand, there is a brand component to your online (and off-line for that matter) reputation that needs to be managed. When creating your online presence, develop your personal brand consistently across all of your social media profiles so that it can work to establish your credibility and authority. Here’s a checklist of things to do to help with your consistency:

Picture

For some reason, some people just don’t want to put their picture in their profile. Social networking is about developing relationships and people want to see a real person and get to know them. If you are trying to develop a relationship that results in brand loyalty for your business, use a good picture that shows your real personality.

The picture does not have to be a professionally taken picture, but it should project your professionalism. Don’t put on a business suit if you’re style is business casual and your typical client relates better to a more laid back style. Remember your brand should be the real you, not something made up because you think that’s what people want to see.

Have several pictures taken so that you can choose the best one. Use it on your blog, Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn to increase recognition of your brand across platforms. Sign up for a gravatar so that your picture shows up in comments on other blogs if that feature is supported.

Name

The name or identifier you use should be the same one for all of your social networking websites. If you want to build a professional brand reputation, don’t create something cute. Keep it relative to you and your business. If you have a common name that has most likely been taken, use a combination of your name and business name or add a middle initial if that makes sense for you. Decide before you sign up on something that you think would work across the social media universe and try to keep it consistent so you begin to be recognized.

Profile

Take advantage of LinkedIn‘s business oriented profile format to write a complete profile description using relevant keywords and then copy that description or pieces of it to all the other social networks, tailoring it to the audience. Since LinkedIn is the more business-oriented social network, they provide ample space to fully describe who you are and what you do. Setting one social network as the hub for your personal and professional information prevents you from writing something different for each network you join.

Actions

If you write a blog and update your status regularly, stay true to your discipline and expertise. Focus on how you help people and what’s in it for them. Build relationships, connect people to others that are beneficial to them, answer questions in your area of expertise and did I mention focus? I’m stressing focus because I’ve noticed recently on LinkedIn that there are people who have “best answers” to questions in 50 or more categories that are totally unrelated. Can they really be experts in that many diverse categories? Did they really answer them all or had someone else answer the questions for them (if so, not very transparent)? What is their strength? Who are they marketing to? Being a Jack of all trades and a master at none comes to mind. Pick your targets and focus on your strengths. It will draw people to you who need your expertise.

When you are participating in social media, you are establishing your reputation whether you know it or not. Make it a conscious effort and nurture the personal brand that is truly you.

How well do you manage your online reputation? Share your tips and tricks in the comments below.

U2 photo credit Phil Romans.

©2012 Masterful Marketing. All Rights Reserved.

Personal Brand or Online Reputation 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+.

According to a survey of 1800 people in the baby boomer generation (born in 1946 through 1964) by ThirdAge/JWT Boom, people over age 40 participate heavily in word-of-mouth and value personal recommendations and expert opinions, but they have not embraced social networking or blogs despite being heavy users of other online services. Given that this generation is 78 million strong, controls more than 83% of consumer spending and that spending will increase $800 billion to over $4.6 trillion by 2015, I think this survey would be of interest to most marketers.

Being a boomer myself, I have to say I don’t resemble that remark! I’ve always liked being a bit different than the rest – having majored in computer science long before computers were in vogue. And in the social media space, I’m definitely ahead of most of my colleagues and friends. Did I ever mention how much I just love iTunes? 

But the information in this survey comes as no surprise based on my anecdotal observations. Most of them look at me funny when I bring up social media topics, how it relates to marketing and whether they use Twitter, have a Facebook page or do they blog. Actually I never talk about this stuff with with my friends, but my 15 year old niece though her aunt was pretty cool having a Facebook page!

The major findings of the study indicate that Boomers:

Connect and interact with others in their communities around shared interests and common issues, but they use more traditional web communications tools, such as email, to keep in touch.

Participate in trusted online communities and share opinions about brands. They’re also open to traditional marketing and e-marketing, as long as the message is coming from a source or brand they know and trust.

Were most likely to trust a Web site’s content if the site corresponded to a trusted brand or featured credible expertise.

Participate in viral or word-of-mouth marketing as much as or more than younger age groups.

The following chart indicates where the Boomers have no interest in spending their time:

The good news is that this generation can be reached online using the more traditional Internet marketing activities. What this says to me as a marketer is that you need to continue to mix traditional and new media marketing into your marketing plans. Unless your ideal client is firmly entrenched into the 45 year+ crowd (and there are definitely businesses targeting that demographic), your plan must include a multi-channel marketing mix across all traditional and new media. This online marketing mix will guarantee the broadest reach to your set of ideal clients.

©2012 Masterful Marketing. All Rights Reserved.

Baby Boomers Not Interested in Social Media 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+.