Have you got a plan?

Every business needs (amongst other plans) a marketing plan. Ideally it should come before you make the investment and before you take the risk, but if it’s too late for that, don’t wait too long to get your marketing plan together. Look at your objectives and how you will measure them. Then look at your offering: how you can communicate it to your potential clients and how you will differentiate that offering from what your competitors are offering? Identify your target market: who are they?; where are they?; why do they buy?; when do they buy?; how will you get in touch with them? Set aside a realistic budget to get your message out. There’s no point in investing thousands on your offering if you leave nothing get your message out! Keep your plan alive, keep it interesting and most importantly, keep it current.

Don’t put off ‘til tomorrow what you can do today

If you’re putting something off, there’s usually a good reason. Be honest with yourself about why you’re putting off an activity: it might be fear of rejection; lack of time or energy, but whatever the reason if it’s something important you need to do: you must stop putting it off! Set a time to do it. Prepare beforehand. Then do it! Reward yourself afterwards and appreciate the feeling of getting it done. If you’re procrastinating in many of areas of your business, it might be time to ask yourself if you’re still in the right job: a tough question, but necessary to ask sometimes.

Do you blog?

Blogging is a great way to show that you know what you’re on about; or to share information. Blog sites can be created totally free of charge. That said, the most effective way to use a blog to promote your biz is to have it integrated into your site. That way, everyone who visits your blog, visits your site too – in turn helping you climb the Google ladder. Once you’ve set up your blog, make sure it’s full of your personality – there’s few things worse than a boring blog! Make sure you blog regularly and over a long period otherwise your effort is wasted. Keep your posts relatively short and let people make comments if you can.

What percentage of your website visitors convert to leads?

In order to answer this question, you absolutely must analyse your site traffic. This is easily done and will be explained to you by your web designer. For now though, lets assume you know you have 10 visitors per day to your site, so that’s roughly 300 per month. Sounds OK, until you count the number of times your phone rings or your email has pings to tell you there’s a client (or potential client) wanting to investigate your offer further. If you have 300 visitors and 1 contact, today’s the day to ask yourself: “why?”. Look carefully at the overall image of your site; your offering; your prices; your competitors. If needs be ask friends or clients (who are prepared to be brutally honest!) what they think of your site – it’s time to take action.

Fancy putting a film on your website?

When it comes to marketing, video can be a great way to get your personality and business offering over to potential customers – but you must do it properly, otherwise you risk frightening them off! Think carefully about what you want the video to do for your business: it might be a “how to” video; it might be entertaining; it might be purely informative – either way remember it has to add value to your offering. Finally, don’t forget that YouTube is a great way of hosting your video – and might get you in front of a whole new audience at the same time!

Does your landing page do you justice?

Your landing page is the first page your visitors see when they come to your site from adverts, Google, your promotional documentation etc. The ideal is to have mind-reading landing pages that fit your customers needs so perfectly they’ll think you’re psychic! Although this is not always entirely possible, this should be your aim. If you’ve paid for an ad promising “red shoes”, don’t give your customers a landing page with "black handbags" otherwise you’ve thrown your hard earned advertising budget down the drain! Make sure your landing page delivers what it "says on the tin"!

Offer your business as a franchise

Franchising can be a highly profitable way of growing your business (although not suited to all small businesses of course!). Franchising will allow you to get to markets that would otherwise be outside your financial capabilities. The secret with this option is really good advice (legal and financial); a mind-blowing offering and top notch promotion. None of this comes cheap, or easily, but is well worth the effort if you get it right. The winning formula is to be a great leader with a vision strong enough to be passed on to others.