Word of mouth marketing is considered by many to be the most desired form of marketing. The trust, referrals, and overall brand-building buzz that’s garnered by customers spreading the good word to prospects are worth its weight in gold. Some products, services, and experiences naturally produce chatter, but there are certain things that any company can do to stimulate word of mouth and cash in on the buzz.

Here are six ways to get your customers talking about you and your organization:

1) Ask them – The best word of mouth starts with “word of listen.” Call your customers up and ask them why they buy, why they stick around, and why they tell their friends about you. You might be a bit surprised by their answers. Hint: it’s usually not the stuff you have in your new marketing brochure. You stand a far greater chance of attracting the right customers and the right buzz if you really understand what your current customers value about doing business with you. This goes for online and social media listening as well – what are they saying in Slack channels, blog comments, on LinkedIn, or Twitter?

2) Teach them – Sometimes great word of mouth just happens, but sometimes you’ve got to help it along. One way to do this is to make sure you are teaching your customers how to spot an ideal client, what a prospect in need might say when looking for your products, and how to properly and concisely describe how your company is different. Of course, in today’s hyper-social media world you should also be teaching your happiest customers how to write reviews on Yelp, Google My Business, Facebook Ratings and Reviews, Insider Pages, and CitySearch-type rating sites.

3) Star them – Letting a customer testimonial or success story go uncaptured or untold is downright criminal in WOM circles. Today you can easily record customer testimonials on an iPhone or Android or you can start doing video interviews over Zoom to record their success stories. These “real life” bits of content are gold and turn your featured customers into talking referral billboards for your brand. Want to take this idea up a notch? Hold a customer party and film a dozen or so at one time in a great atmosphere – this alone will get your customers talking.

4) Include them – People like to be asked what they think, it’s just human nature, but it’s also a great way to get some sound advice. Create a round table discussion group made up of select customers and charge them with advising you once a quarter or so on new marketing and business initiatives. (Reward them for this in some way as well.) This can include advising on everything from a product extension to the look and feel of your website redesign. Members of your marketing round table will become natural ambassadors for the brand. (You can do this with simple video chat meetings – Zoom or GoogleMeet)

5) Video them – People are more likely to respond t0 a personalized video over a generic one any day. People’s email inboxes and newsfeeds are flooded with businesses trying to sell to them so much so that it’s hard to stand out in all of the noise today. One-to-one video is a highly effective way to stand out in the crowd. You can use a tool like Loom to send a prospect a quick personalized message about something you saw on their website, invite a lead to sign up for an event you’re having that you think would be valuable to them, or follow up with a potential client with a personalized video instead of an email.

6) Surprise them – I like to think I saved the best for last – few things get people talking faster than surprising them. This can include doing something that was out of the blue and much appreciated to just giving them more than they bargained for. I remember a PR firm that was pitching me some business and the account rep showed up to meet with an apple pie (I’m still talking about it.) I once worked with a financial planner that hired a mobile auto detail firm to detail his customer’s cars during their annual review – that created some buzz.

The bottom line of course is that you’ve got to do good work, do something that somebody appreciates, and create an experience worth talking about, but then, prime the pump and leverage all that greatness.

Far too often businesses of all sizes leave the official job of marketing to, well, the marketing department, which is frequently known as the owner of the business or top salesperson turned into the marketing person. 

But, here’s a little newsflash – marketing is everybody’s job. Anyone associated with your business that comes into contact with a prospect or customer is performing a marketing function. It’s not just the people with marketing in their titles. So the question is – are these people prepared to carry out that function well?

Marketing isn’t just a new ad campaign, an email series, or this month’s current promotion. It is so much deeper than that. Marketing needs to permeate every aspect of your business and be a part of every person’s job description, from the admin department to the managing partners and so on. That’s why internal marketing and official marketing training is so important. 

What’s internal marketing?

If you think that the people outside of your marketing department understand what the marketing team does and why it matters to your business, you’re wrong. 

Internal marketing is essentially promoting your company’s goals, vision, products, and services to your own employees. Customers’ feelings and attitudes toward a company are based on far more than just the products or services you offer, but the overall experience they have with your business. And your entire organization is included in that experience.

The ultimate goal of internal marketing is to ensure that your employees can provide value to prospects or customers because they understand and believe in your company’s brand, goals and vision. And perhaps, you can teach them what they can do to help.

I believe that one of the smartest things any business can do is create and perform official marketing training for everyone in the business. Again, this goes for delivery people, administrative people, and finance-related people (especially finance-related people).

I’ve outlined an example of what should be included in an internal marketing training program that you can use for your own company.

Guide your internal marketing training program with this outline

Once a quarter at a minimum (and with every new hire that joins the company) conduct an all-hands brand meeting.

This internal seminar can and should include training and examples on things like:

• Why you named your company what we did – attach this to your personal story
• What colors, images, fonts are official and why – create a simple style manual of standards to share with everyone
• Your core marketing message and why – help everyone connect their position to the message
• The way you want the brand to be thought of in the market – your goal, your one word of association
• Benefits of your products and services – demo them and present them just like you would to a customer
• Description of your ideal customer – use photos and success stories of real customers
• Your current lead generation activities – show off ads, landing pages, run radio spots – sell them on the campaign
• Your lead conversion process – everyone should know the next step when a prospect calls
• Key marketing metrics – sales generated, leads generated, referrals generated, PR generated, social media growth
• Your marketing calendar – show everyone you have a plan for the future

In addition, I would help everyone write or rewrite some aspect of their position to include a direct relationship to the marketing function they perform. 

For example, an administrative person who primarily answers the phone might have the directive to answer the phone and route calls to the proper person, but in a marketing world, that person’s directive is to answer the phone and act as the very first impression and representation of the brand. Now, could that change that person’s role in a powerful way, I’ve seen it happen.

Then take it up a notch and create marketing scorecards for everyone. Simply list all the marketing-related ways that every position in your organization can score marketing points throughout the day and turn it into a game. ie – asking for and getting a referral, turning a customer complaint into a win, writing a blog post, participating in a social network, sending a hand-written thank you note, giving a referral, making a contact at a Chamber event. Challenge everyone to score X amount of marketing points each week and create an award program as part of your marketing workshops.

Getting marketing understanding and buy-in from your entire team makes them feel more empowered to act on behalf of the brand and better ambassadors wherever they encounter prospects and customers. Think about it – if you have two marketers out of a ten-person company, what would you rather: two people or an entire team of ten promoting your company’s work to the rest of the world?

One of the ways to create goodwill, positive buzz, and happy customers is to exceed expectations. Responding proactively to problems is, in my opinion, one of the easiest ways to exceed the expectations available.

Problems happen, that’s a fact. You can choose to respond to customer challenges, problems, let downs, screw-ups, and mistakes in one of two ways. You can ignore them and create the kind of friction that drags your trust into the ground or you can respond in such an over-the-top, out of control, nobody does that kind of way that can turn problems into gold mines. If you want to exceed expectations, choose the latter!

For the longest time, Nordstrom had a policy that granted refunds with no receipt, no time limit, no questions asked. A variation of that policy still remains today. This policy is often an example given whenever someone talks about customer service. But it’s really a signature response to a customer problem, and it’s become something that creates incredible word of mouth for them.

Creating what I call your signature response to problem-solving takes a little thought, planning, implementation, and even training, but it can become a very valuable tool for your organization. I’ve mapped out four things you can do to quickly, proactively, and creatively address customer problems with a signature response of your own. 

1. Invite and reward customer feedback

The first step to making problem-solving a core marketing system is to encourage your customers to tell you when something’s not right. This may sound like a simple thing, but there is plenty of research that suggests somewhere near 90% of your customers experiencing an issue will simply go away quietly unhappy.

You should clearly state in all your marketing copy that you welcome feedback and won’t rest until your customer is thrilled. Spell out guarantees, return policies, and make it very obvious how to get in touch with you via phone, mail, live chat, web, or email. You should also build satisfaction surveys, results reviews, and even random phone follow-ups into your standard operating procedures.

Of course, it’s not enough to just ask for feedback and then send it down a black hole; you’ve got to respond.

2. Create a response

In order to get the full impact with this idea, you need to design the manner in which you will automatically respond in order to solve a customer problem. Some of this can and should be handled through clearly spelled out, no strings attached, guarantees, and return policies, but you need to add some flair as well. Adding some creativity in this step is how you turn a response into a signature response. For example, does the CEO show-up with a bouquet of flowers, does the customer immediately receive a month of service free and a dedicated service rep to help guide them through the challenge, do you do whatever it takes to make it right?

The key here is to do something that gets the customer the result they are after but also offers a little ‘wow’ that they can’t help but notice because it was unexpected.

Occasionally, we receive notes from customers who have purchased one of our products but feel it isn’t what they thought it would and want to return it. We cheerfully refund their purchase price, but instead of asking them to return it, we ask that they make it a gift to another business owner. It’s a pretty simple thing on our part, but it really creates a warm response each time we offer it.

3. Act quickly

Speed matters in problem-solving – especially in a technology-filled world that caters to and sustains our desires of instant gratification. You need to act quickly. A fast response time makes customers feel that their concerns are important. In a study by CMO Council, the most important attribute of a good customer experience, according to the customers themselves, is a fast response time.

Zappos is well known for its incredible customer support. They have live chat, email, phone, and social support available 24/7. Customers expect their problems to be solved and fast – it’s another prime example of a signature response they designed for themselves.

4. Empower your team to fix the problem

Another really important piece of the problem-solving puzzle is blame. When you make a mistake, admit it, and move to fix it. When your customer makes a mistake, well, move to fix it. There’s no gain in getting the customer to admit they were wrong, even when they are. One of my favorite business expressions said to my staff in my best dad voice is: Fix the problem, not the blame.

The way to make sure that your signature response to problems is actually delivered as designed is to empower your staff to fix the problem, not the blame!

Let them know that while you have a set of policies designed to make their life simple and your business profitable, they can do what it takes to make the customer happy. Now, if that makes you more than a little nervous that you will be taken advantage of then perhaps you need to refine whom you are attracting as customers. There will always be people who try to take advantage of your willingness to please, but the key lies in setting the proper expectations upfront in all of your marketing messages.

Saving a deal gone bad by reacting in a way that is generally unexpected is how you create positive buzz and customers for life.

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When you first start your business, you’re wearing every hat—you’re overseeing every single aspect of the company:

Accounting, check. 

Sales outreach, add it to your to-do list.

Administrative work, it’s not going to do itself.

And let’s not forget, you’re the full-time Marketing director, too.

Your list of roles and responsibilities goes on. And these things add up quickly. Most entrepreneurs suffer from the belief that they can do it all. But eventually, there will come a time when you’ll have to admit that doing everything yourself is no longer effective. 

So that’s why we’ve created the last guide you’ll ever need to help you find and hire someone you can trust to take some work off of your plate.

Signs that it’s time to hire someone to help you

1. When you just can’t seem to find enough time 

When you’re spread too thin tending to every other aspect of your business, your days start to get longer and longer. Your to-do list becomes more than just a list—it becomes pages. And things start to get put on the back burner—like your marketing efforts.

2. When you’re constantly fixing mistakes and putting out fires

When you’re strapped for time and in a hurry, the quality of your work suffers. Mistakes happen—and you’re busy fixing things instead of creating. 

Marketing mistakes can cost your business a lot of lost revenue. When this happens, it’s time to take a step back and look for additional help.

3. When you find yourself doing repetitive tasks

As the business owner, your attention should be focused on leading, pitching your products/services, and managing your big picture operations. 

If you’re finding yourself working on a laundry list of repetitive tasks like social media scheduling, managing clients, or preparing marketing reports, it’s time to bring in help to allow you to focus on the big picture.

4. When you lack consistency in your marketing efforts

If you want your campaigns to produce results, your marketing needs constant attention and consistent effort. Writing a random blog post every couple of months, sending a one-off email promoting a new product, or following a content calendar sometimes—isn’t going to cut it. 

You can’t expect the garden to grow if you don’t water it.

If you can relate to any of these telltale signs, it’s time to bring in someone who can tend to marketing your business, regularly—like a Marketing Manager. The job is too important to do in your spare time.

What a Marketing Manager does

A Marketing Manager helps with daily marketing activities and initiatives of a company. 

They work on building brand awareness, managing social media, planning and implementing marketing campaigns, creating content for SEO and traffic growth, tracking and analyzing performance data, and the list goes on. 

To be sure you’re hiring the right person for the job, you need to know what to look for in a Marketing Manager. 

What a typical day looks like for a Marketing Manager

Each day can be different, but some of the most common activities you can delegate to a Manager are things like

• Creating content for publishing on your blog
• Managing and engaging with social media accounts
• Writing newsletters to send out to your list
• Designing collateral and assets for social media
• Writing landing page copy to support promotional campaign

These are a few things that may take up the day for a Marketing Manager. They often wear many different hats and usually have a long list of responsibilities. 

The skills to look for when you’re hiring a Marketing Manager

These are the 6 core skills you should look for when you’re hiring someone in-house to help with marketing. 

1. Creativity—they’re creative. They use out-of-the-box thinking to ideate and develop strategies on how to drive growth for your business.

2. Writing—they’ll be responsible for creating a lot of content. It’s imperative they understand how to write for audiences in a way that captures their attention and connects with them on a deeper level.

3. Research—they’re investigators. They need solid research skills to keep up with new trends in the industry as it relates to your business’ target audience.

4. Omni-channel and social savvy—they’re a versatile marketer. They understand that the customer journey isn’t linear. They should know how to implement marketing tactics and strategies across all marketing channels: email, social, paid, SEO, and content.

5. Critical thinking—they’re inquisitive and analytical. They should be able to understand and leverage data to guide marketing decisions and the overall strategy.

6. Project management—they’re a project management pro. They should know how to juggle and manage multiple projects and initiatives at once.

What a job description for a Marketing Manager position should include

The job itself varies based on the needs of your company. Here’s an example job description including the core responsibilities and qualifications you should include in your Marketing Manager job post:

Responsibilities:

• Research and analyze customers’ behavior and insights, consumer trends, market analysis, and marketing best practices to build successful strategies
• Plan, create, and implement strategic marketing campaigns that align with company goals
• Organize promotional assets and campaigns for new products/services launches
• Set up and maintain tracking systems for online marketing activities
• Write content for campaigns across various channels such as social media, email, and blog
• Manage all online channels of production, including website, social media pages, email campaigns, and responses
• Create, maintain and strengthen the organization’s overall brand through all media avenues
• Create and distribute content on key channels to reach new audiences

Requirements:

• Proven work experience in digital marketing and knowledge of content management, creative writing, advertising concepts and vendor negotiations
• Demonstrable experience with social media marketing, email marketing, advertising campaigns, marketing databases and analytics, and SEO/SEM
• Knowledge of traditional marketing tools
• Critical thinker with strong problem-solving and research proficiencies
• Solid knowledge of website and marketing analytics tools
• Highly creative with experience in identifying target audiences and planning digital campaigns that engage, inform, and motivate
• Knowledge of various Content Management Systems (CMS)
• Solid organizational skills and detail oriented
• Ability to work under pressure and meet deadlines
• Superb written and verbal communication skills
• Ability to simplify complex information into a user-friendly format

Find world-class marketing candidates by looking in these places

Luckily, there are many places where marketers hang out. Social media, networking sites, job boards—since most marketers have an online presence, there are a lot of places you can look to find talent. Here’s a few places to start:

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a great place to start. You can post your job there as well as source for candidates based on their title.

Freelancer sites

Upwork and Fiverr are sites that are dedicated to hiring talent and finding jobs. You can browse profiles and reach out to folks to invite them to apply for your open job. People can also find your job posting and apply on their own.

Facebook groups

There are many Facebook groups that are made up of people with specific skill sets (e.g. Content Marketers, The Copywriter Club, Remote Marketing Jobs). People often add posts about jobs to groups, and these kinds of posts typically get a ton of engagement.

Job boards

Larger job boards like Indeed, CareerBuilder, or Monster have a plethora of candidates with all levels of experience. There are also marketing job boards you can check out like VentureBeat, CrunchBoard, or Mashable.

Interview questions to ask marketing job candidates

You should ask questions that give the candidate an opportunity to show how they think about and work on problems. 

What’s an example of a lead-generating campaign you’d be excited to work on here?

This question gives the candidate an opportunity for on-the-spot brainstorming. It highlights what they know about your company and if they did any interview prep prior.

Share an example of a challenge you faced at one of your previous employers.

How a person responds when the going gets tough or when they’re caught in a difficult situation is important. This question hones in on how they handle those situations. 

Quickly onboard your new Marketing Manager with these 3 steps

If you want to get your Marketing Manager productive quickly, here are a few things you can do to set them up for success:

1. Give them access to your marketing tech stack—you want to be able to manage the tasks and projects your Manager is working on. Giving them access to the programs and tools your team uses is important for transparency and accountability.
2. Integrate them with your team—most people work best where they feel ‘part of the team’. They’ll communicate better with you and your team. This is especially important for marketing roles where collaboration is key.
3. Get them to interview a few of your best customers—a quick way for your new team member to learn about your business quickly is to learn directly from your audience and have them interview your customers.

Two things are almost always in short supply for small business owners: time and money. Is it worth it to spend money on a Marketing Manager if it frees up your time and contributes to the growth of your business? 

The answer is most likely yes. By hiring a Marketing Manager, you get to take some things off of your plate and focus on the big picture. Not only do you get some of your time back, but now you have someone whose job’s main purpose is to focus on efforts that will grow your business. Pick the right one, and your return on investment should outweigh the initial cost.

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Every year for the last 20 or so, I’ve wrapped up the year with my predictions for trends in the coming year.

I’m usually spot on too. But that’s really more of a testament to the fact that trends tend to creep up on us rather than overwhelm us. So, they’re not that hard to spot if you’re paying attention.

Add to that that a trend has usually long since “tipped” in the main by the time it’s honestly something that small business owners need to heed. Think social media, mobile marketing, or heaven forbid AI.

Ah, but then 2020 happened, and anything that might have crept up on anyone pretty much arrived untethered and proud. Trends accelerated and became fact more than a trend – Zoom anyone? A new behavior that may have taken years to take hold is now instantly second nature.

It’s going to take a new level of insight to curate this year’s trends. The trick this year lies in the ability to spot the behavior that may emerge from the change, or the forced trends if you will. For example, is business travel is going to take a long time to recover? Are large conferences on hold for a while? Will people come to expect 15 virtual meetings even in the office?

So, what do we make of any of this?

I suspect you can count on many pundits simply regurgitating the already worn line about marketers using this moment to become more human. That business will be more about people and less about whatever it was about before COVID.

But don’t be fooled into thinking that a) doing the same thing you were doing in a different format is an innovation and b) that anything in your industry will look precisely the same again.

This year the friction around change went to zero because there was no choice. Expect some people to try and crawl back to what they knew and still others to re-evaluate and restart everything.

I think a lot of business soul searching has occurred, but let’s not oversimplify its result. Because we were forced to deal with change that we don’t fully understand, it has led to some introspection. But where we’ll land is, frankly, anyone’s guess and leads me to my first trend.

1) Paying attention becomes a survival mechanism

In 2021, as in most years, businesses will thrive and survive due to many factors, but next year those who best discover the shift of the moment will be more equipped to evolve with their customers.

2020 showed us just how fast everything could change and simultaneously how fast we can respond and then change and re-respond. This is the commercial version of present moment mindfulness, I suppose.

Don’t take anything for granted; something that feels like momentum may be a bandage for the moment’s feeling. Talk to your customers as much as you can, not because they can tell you what they want or need because they can tell you how they feel.

Expect fear to be feeling number one for most of the year. Tune your strategic thinking to finding ways to be the light in the dark.

2) Everything gets smaller

From a practical standpoint, we’ve already seen this. Conferences, meetings, gatherings of any sort contracted, and we will all need to relearn how to gather again, no matter how much we think we crave it.

Expect a push for less content, shorter videos, more intimate launches, mini-courses, 142-page books instead of the classic 284 pages.

This trend will be driven by people’s desire for something that feels more personal than the market’s design to get smaller.

Design, a true barometer of change, has already moved in this direction. Take note of the larger headline fonts, muted color splashes of retro illustrations, and more white space on web pages. 

Smaller also means less complex, and you can expect that to play out in a large dollop of nostalgia. Visions of families riding around their neighborhoods on bikes during 2020 sparked an emotional desire for simplicity.

3) AI gets practical

Almost every trend article you encounter this year will talk about AI in some fashion. While I mention it here as a trend, I do so for some of the practical things it now brings rather than the futuristic promise of the technology it implies.

Without getting too techie about the workings, the mid-2020 roll-out of Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 or GPT-3 made AI a useful tool for many applications.

No longer confined to those pesky bots on website help desks, AI is now being embedded in our basic typing functions. Maybe you’ve noticed that the application keeps suggesting finishes to your sentences as you compose an email in Gmail.

This isn’t simply a feature added by Google; this is AI at work powering routine tasks.

This fall, I wrote my latest book, The Ultimate Marketing Engine (HarperCollins Leadership Sept 2021), entirely in Google Docs. I was amazed how often the suggested AI helped me write better or at least easier sentences from a simple suggested start.

Look in 2021 for a host of tools, services, and websites aimed at making writing easier. Tools like HeadLime and MarketMuse will change how content is created.

AI applications can already write an article based on a handful of fed keywords. Now, is this award-winning prose? Well, no, but is that blog post you paid someone $15 to write near as good as AI – probably not. AI writers can get you 80% of the way there, and then you, the brilliant content strategist that you are, can spend your energy on making it sparkle and getting it read by others.

This will shake up the content creation, social posting, and freelance industries dramatically.

4) Talent investment is back in style

Most large businesses understand the competitive nature of attracting and retaining their best people. Therefore, they often invest heavily in recruiting and employee branding initiatives.

Small businesses rarely can afford outlandish perks to attract talent, but one trend that I think will grow in small business is talent development.

Even if revenue is down and budgets are tight, I predict that small business owners will see the wisdom of creating training and mentoring opportunities to level-up, develop, and, let’s face it, send a clear signal that their people are an important piece of their success.

This has always been an important topic, but I think we’ll see a return to a fundamental commitment to employee engagement around things like profit and skill development that will not be limited to big biz only.

If you have training for skills, mindset, and even personal development, small business is a great target market right now.

5) Video gets personal again

I said this last year, so that’s the again part.

Video will continue to grow as a content medium and act as a bridge to a couple of other trends. Most notably, the acts of paying attention and getting smaller.

I think video, think of it as asynchronous virtual content, will take another big leap and bounce from the Zoom screens we are in front of to the more personal 1 to 1 platforms for sales, technical support even as a form of commenting and collaborating.

Expect the use of tools such as Loom and BombBomb to continue to grow. I mean, face it, who wants to read that 4 paragraph email when they can close their eyes and click play.

6) UX and SEO get attached at the hip

 A few years ago, it was fashionable to talk about the marriage of content and SEO. Now that content is basically online air; it’s sort of passe to talk about the concept as two.

But there’s a newish player making waves this year – UX or user experience. UX isn’t really new as a concept. I mean, navigation and content structure are UX. So is site speed and security. However, with its mobile-first point of view, Google is going to raise the SEO bar another notch next year.

Three words you better come to terms with for 2021 – core web vitals.

This isn’t a technical post, so you’re just going to have to research this one on your own but suffice it to say that sites that load slowly or don’t provide what Google thinks is a great mobile user experience are going to suffer in the SEO game. 

The typical mum Google has gone as far as to publicly claim that in 2021 they plan to combine core web vitals with other ranking signals. 

My go-to source for education on anything SEO related is my friend Brian Dean at BackLinko. You can find high-quality stuff here – especially when it comes to learning more about core web vitals.

You can see what Google thinks of your core web vitals right now in Google Search Console.

7) Coaching ranks swell

During 2020 some people found that corporate jobs weren’t so stable or fun anymore. Some were laid off and started that coaching or consulting business they had longed to start, while others took the pause as a moment to reconsider their life path in general.

My final prediction is that the number of people who decide to start coaching businesses and those who decide now is the time to get a coach will explode next year.

I think 2021 will be a year of recovery and personal development and, in some cases, one of changing priorities.

This crystal ball stuff is fun, but more than anything, stay curious this coming year, and you may indeed discover a new and exciting chapter in business and life because the only thing that I know for certain is that change is gonna keep coming.

You can also listen to my 2021 Small Business Trends podcast version here

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In order to do anything meaningful, you have to know where you’re going and how you’re going to get there. The saying ”failing to plan is planning to fail” couldn’t be more true. If you want your business to be successful, you have to have a game plan.

But where do you start? And how do you create an action plan that sets you up for success? We’ve mapped out the steps for you. Follow these 9 easy steps to craft a winning marketing plan of your own. 

1. Create a strategy before tactics

Start with strategy.

Steer clear from falling for the hot, new marketing tactic of the week. The key element in making your marketing effective? A strategy-first approach.

You need to build your strategy before you even think about the tactics. Ask yourself these questions:

• Are you trying to sell to anyone and everyone?
• Are you struggling to stand out from your competition?
• Are you unsure of what tactics make sense for you right now? 

These are strategy problems and can only be addressed with strategy solutions. 

You need to know your big picture business goals. Once you have those defined, then you put together the tactics it will take to make that strategy come to life. Use this ultimate marketing strategy plan for small businesses to get you started.

2. Research your current customers

Talk to your people. You can learn SO much from your customers. They shape your business, your core messages, your products or services, the list goes on.

Knowing your customers can uncover the best ways on how to attract, reach, and better serve the right people. Start by asking your customers these 5 questions.

3. Research your entire digital competition

Research is a common theme here.

Conducting competitive research is a way to grow and evolve your business. But it’s not just researching companies you consider to be your direct competitors—you need to take a look at your entire digital competition.

Ask yourself these questions:

• What terms are my competitors ranking for that I should be?
• What content are they putting out on their blog?
• What kind of ads are they creating?
• Where is my competition showing up that I’m not?

This kind of research gives you insight into:

• New ways to serve your customers
• Why other sites are ranking higher than yours
• The type of content you need to be creating
• Data you can use to spot new opportunities
• New opportunities to gain customers

4. Promise to solve a problem

Nobody wants what you sell. People want their problems solved. Solving people’s problems is the golden ticket for your marketing efforts.

People buy better versions of themselves, not things. They want what they believe will help them feel good about themselves, achieve something higher, get relief from some level of pain or discomfort, avoid a sticky situation, or prepare themselves for the future.

It’s your job as a business owner to understand the problems people are trying to solve and match your offers to those very specific problems. Very few people in the world want the things, the services, and the solutions businesses sell.

You need to have an approach that is focused on a very specific type of customer, with a very specific need or problem, and a promise to solve that problem in a very specific way.

5. Map out the customer journey with the Marketing Hourglass

The customer journey isn’t linear. It’s our job to help guide buyers as they travel down the often-crooked path. The way that people buy today has changed so dramatically that instead of creating demand, we need to organize behavior.

A traditional marketing funnel might have the stages such as Awareness, Consideration, and Purchase. But the thing that the traditional marketing funnel neglects to address is that when it comes to lead and referral generation, a happy customer is your most powerful asset.

This is why Duct Tape Marketing follows the Marketing Hourglass approach. It consists of seven connected stages: 

• Know—one of the best ways to become known is through organic search. Start using content to spark interest.
• Like—once someone knows your business, you need to nurture your leads during this phase by demonstrating your expertise, sharing knowledge, and giving them useful resources.
• Trust—people buy from organizations they trust. Get your customers involved in content creation. This is where customer generated videos, case studies, stories, and social media are a major playing piece.
• Try—this stage is where the audition happens. It’s where you need to really deliver more than anyone. Consider doing a free or low-cost version of what you sell.
• Buy—time to show real results and keep the experience high in this stage. Think about how you orient new customers, exceed their expectations, and surprise them. The complete customer experience is measured by the end result, not what you did to get the sale.
• Repeat—the best way to get repeat business is to make sure your clients receive and understand the value of doing business with you. 
• Refer—turn happy customers into referral customers. Create a remarkable experience with your customers that exceeds their expectations so they are compelled to share your business with others.

Every business has these stages, but many aren’t addressing them all. You need to figure out what the journey is like for your ideal customer or people who are looking for the solutions you offer.

Use the Marketing Hourglass framework to map your customer journey. Then, the next step in the marketing action plan is to strategically use different types of content at the various stages of the hourglass.

6. Use content as the voice of strategy

Content creation is the hardest job a marketer has to do, but when you plan your content with your hourglass in mind, it’s the highest payoff work you can do.

Content has grown beyond just being a tactic—it touches all aspects of your marketing and your business. It powers the entire customer journey.

Your audience expects to be able to find information about any product, service, or challenge they face simply by doing a Google search. And if you aren’t showing up, you won’t be found. There’s a pretty good change they won’t move forward with you because you lack credibility in their eyes. People go with solutions they feel they can trust. 

You must use content as your voice of strategy, and the best way to do this is to produce content that focuses on education and building trust at every stage of the customer journey.

7. Develop a list of quarterly priorities and live by the calendar

As a small business owner, you know there’s always plenty to do and never enough time in the day. But marketing needs to be viewed as a habit that’s ingrained in your daily routine. 

Planning for what needs to be done and when—is how you can stay focused on the activities that will give you the highest ROI. Start by creating a list of the highest impact items you need to fix or implement for each quarter. 

Then, live by the calendar. If you don’t schedule it, odds are it won’t happen.

Something that has worked extremely well for many business owners—who have been trained by the Duct Tape Marketing system—is adding monthly themes around your foundational marketing projects, breaking them up, and spreading them out over the course of the year. If you commit to an annual calendar, you’re more likely to follow it on a consistent basis.

8. Measure what matters

There are so many things you can measure: sales metrics, social metrics, content metrics, conversion metrics, growth metrics, the list goes on. And one of the hardest things is determining what you should be measuring. 

But you can’t measure what’s easy—you have to measure what matters. You can start by doing these 4 things:

1. Create metrics that serve your priority objectives—whether it’s your goal to increase customers by X or grow your audience by X, you need to define what metrics make sense for the goals that you’ve set.
2. Establish target goals for each objective—figure out how you’re going to gather the data you need to gauge whether or not you are on the right track.
3. Select the tools you’ll use to track your progress—dashboards are an everyday reality for marketers. As a business owner, you need to be able to see what’s happening day to day.
4. Use your results to make improvements—when you’re measuring the right things, you’ll start to see trends, why something happened, and what you might be able to do to make improvements.

9. Get a marketing action plan built for you systematically instead

Building a plan and taking control of your marketing can be daunting. But it isn’t that hard with the right system. Especially when you use a proven approach.

With Duct Tape Marketing’s Certified Marketing Manager Program, we take that burden right out of your hands. We’ve taken the very marketing system that has now been installed in thousands of small businesses and turned it into a hybrid coaching and training program designed to help you accomplish two very important things: create a marketing action plan for you AND learn how to implement it. You can schedule a free one-on-one coaching session here.

Running your business without a fully fleshed out marketing plan is like driving without a map. Maybe… just maybe you make it to your destination, but you might find yourself taking quite a few detours along the way. 

Save yourself a lot of trial and error by following these 9 steps.

Having high visibility in a search engine’s organic results is critical to your business’ online success. 

People use search engines to find solutions to their problems. And if your product or service isn’t visibly ranking in search as a solution to their problem, that’s a massive missed opportunity for your business.

So what can you do to improve your rankings and where do you even start? 

Start by focusing on optimizing your on-page SEO. On-page SEO is one of the most important processes you can use to achieve higher rankings organically and start showing up in front of your target audience. 

Because the search landscape is constantly changing and evolving, it’s imperative you make sure your on-page SEO knowledge is up to date. Here are five critical on-page SEO factors that every business should be thinking about.

1. Content

Focus on your H1 headings and H2 subheadings

You need to use H1 and H2 tags. These help Google understand the structure of your page. Your headline should become an H1 heading. Your sub-points should be H2 headings, and bullet points can help organize information under each subcategory. 

While this strategy for organizing content makes it easier for readers to skim and settle on the information they’re looking for, it also helps Google to better understand your content.

Use your target keywords at the beginning of your pages

An old-school on-page SEO tactic that still works today is to use your target keywords in the first 100 words of your article or page. Google puts more weight on the terms that show up early on your page—it helps Google understand what your page is about.

2. Page Speed

Slow pages are a no-go. Page speed has been cited consistently as one of the leading SEO ranking factors for years. Slow loading sites provide a bad user experience. Search engines prefer sites that are going to show users the answers to what they’re looking for as fast as possible.

You can improve your site speed by reducing your number of redirects, compressing files, implementing website caching, reducing your page size, removing third party scripts, and many other steps that can speed up load time. 

3. Mobile Friendliness

Today, we live in a mobile-first world. More people use mobile devices than desktops to browse the web. And because of that, Google has made it clear that your pages need to be mobile-friendly. 

Google has a mobile-first index. On pages where content is not easily accessible for users on mobile, it’s unlikely that you’re going rank high in search results.

Google takes into consideration what the user’s experience is when they land on your site. Your site needs to:

• Be responsive and automatically resize to fit whatever device your visitor is using
• Use large fonts for enhance readability on a small screen
• Have easy navigation—that means having accessible menus is a must

If you have any doubts whether or not your site is mobile-friendly, you can use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Testing tool to see how your site stacks up. 

4. Domain names, extensions and URLs 

Your URL helps Google understand what your page is all about. And having the right kind of URL can improve your organic CTR.

URLs

Using the right kind of URL is important—every URL on your website should be short, sweet, and keyword-rich. It needs to be a URL that Google’s bots can easily reach and crawl. But the theme here is: keep things simple. Keep the URLs as short as possible, write them in plain english, avoiding number or letter sequences that might only mean something to your team, and use relevant keywords tastefully—don’t just throw in keywords just for the sake of it.

Domain names and extensions

Domain names and extensions do impact on SEO—however, the approach has changed over the years. The major factor that leads to website ranking is hosting valuable content and getting valuable backlinks from authoritative sources. But when you add a keyword-rich domain name and relevant domain extension, it’s icing on the cake.

Let’s take a look at this example. 

Say we have Website A with the domain name and extension of www.plywoodstore-london.com and Website B with the domain name and extension of www.londonply.store. Both can rank just as well as the other. However, the latter will garner more trust and will help the business get more on-topic backlinks for the keyword search of ‘London plywood store’. 

Your domain extension is an opportunity to communicate what you do—coming up with your domain name gives you the opportunity to be uniquely relevant to your business, and you can get creative while boosting your SEO ranking. 

Consider choosing a domain name based on your business type. Here are a few ideas:

• If you’re in technology or IT, you could go with .TECH
• If you’re in retail or eCommerce, .STORE could be a good choice
• If you’re a journalist or publisher, try .PRESS
• If you’re building your personal brand, then you can use .ONLINE

5. Internal and external links

The web is built on links—so links are a crucial SEO ranking signal. A well-optimized page will include both internal and external links.

Internal links

Including internal links to other pages with relevant content can help Google to better understand how all of your content is related. When you include internal links, make sure the anchor text has keywords in it. This can boost your rankings with search engines.

External links

Some people hesitate to include external links for the fear that doing so will just drive traffic away. This isn’t the case. You want to show that you’re creating quality content for your website visitors. When you link to other relevant, authoritative sites in your niche, it creates a better user experience and is good for SEO.

If you have a business with an online presence, on-page SEO has to be a focus to compete and stay relevant today in search. Thinking about SEO on each page individually instead of just collectively as a whole gives you the greatest chance at standing out in SERPs on multiple pages.

This blog post is brought to you by .store.

Have you ever tried to find a domain name and been given  the message, “Sorry, that domain name is already taken!”? You are not alone! But with .store, a new domain extension for eCommerce and online stores, you will get the domain you want!

What’s more, www.yourbusinessname.store, instantly tells people your website is a “store” and lets your brand do the marketing for you! So, go ahead
and get the perfect, memorable website URL for your online store at www.get.store​.​