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When to send e-mail

If you’re planning on using email for your next marketing campaign, you’re on the right track!

Here are some great reasons to send an email to your list of customers and prospects (you do have a list of your customer/prospect emails, don’t you? If not, call me, we’ll figure that out together) so you can claim some of that valuable real estate known as the “referral center of the brain” - I totally made that up just now, but it makes sense, doesn’t it?

• New employee on board. Send out an email with a bio and what the new employee does. Be excited about your new acquisition.
• New product or service being offered. Sure you’re going to tell all your customers from here on out that you have a new product or service…but you also want to tell all the people who may not know and won’t call you as a brand new prospect.
• Launch of a new campaign. Changing your branding? Changing your style? Let people know!

if you’ve got a new product, service, or the launch of a new campaign (a sale, for example) a good number of emails to send is four. Yes, four. You can send more if necessary, and less if you forgot…but people get so much email these days that to create a little enthusiasm youshould let them know the following…

• During the “beta” phase. If you have a list of customers and are planning on rolling out something new…ask them for advice! Your current customers can give you feedback and ideas regarding a new product or service. Heck, you could have a contest for a slogan for a seasonal event if you’d like. You’re generating interest here, make it interesting!
• Pre-Launch. Let your list know your timetable, when you expect launch to happen. Let them know you’re thinking of them. Touch base .
• Launch. Toot your horn, tell everyone you DID it! Share your excitement and enthusiasm and, who knows, they may have a friend or two that will be interested as well…
• Post-Launch. Check in and say hello. Let your list know how the launch went, thank them for their help in your success….a nice way to wrap up the series and make your customer feel like they matter to your organization as a person!

Keeping in contact with your customers is vital. You don’t want them to forget who you are! The key is to be in contact in a friendly, not sales-y, way that makes them think, if only for a second, you were sending email to no one but them. Make people feel special and they will refer your company.

It really is that simple.

What does an SEO do?

This is a good one!

I found a forum post over on SitePoint and the question asked by a coder is “If I hire someone to do “SEO” what exactly are they doing?”

As most of you know, I bristle when I hear someone use the term SEO (search engine optimization) because it’s an acronym that makes people think in terms of “CIA” or some other clandestine - very very secret - operation.

My favorite response on the thread (after someone says they cannot reveal what they do, at least without a Non Disclosure Agreement) is that you can say what you do, but it’s how you do it that makes you worth paying for. (That’s totally paraphrased, but it makes sense, doesn’t it?)

If you call me, and ask me how I get your site (and you) noticed by search engines, I’ll tell you exactly what I do to make that happen. I provide a marketing plan in outline form, we discuss it. I’m so full-disclosure it’s not even funny.

But ask an SEO specialist what they do…you can hear the crickets in the silence that follows. (In my experience.) Ok, that’s not entirely true. They say the words “keywords” and “linkbacks” and generally do it in such a way that you feel you can’t ask further questions because it would just be too complicated for you to understand.

Yeah, you can start your own business, deal with networking, scheduling, accounting, and goodness knows what else…but you won’t be able to understand keywords. Maybe you don’t have time to care - that’s ok! But you can certainly understand it. You ARE smart enough.

So if you’re one of the people who’s curious about what an SEO professional does, check out the main post over at SitePoint and let me know via a comment what YOU think about the whole thing.

Five free ways to start marketing online.

Money or Time?

I’m a big fan of the phrase "It’s an AND world" - sure it’s a little clunky, but it’s simple and true. People find themselves in situations where they feel they have to make a choice, but they could really have both if they just planned accordingly.

In the case of money and time, you could feasibly work with AND as your word, but most people find that they are lacking in either money or time. Your marketing is going to reflect that. You can have wicked effective marketing on not a lot of budget, you just have to spend more time.

Because no time AND no money….equals no business. No one wants that option!

If you have money and no time, well, that’s why we’re here. It doesn’t take a whole lot of money to see great results from your marketing plan. It takes us about five hours to come up with a customized marketing plan for your business.

Really, if you think about it, that’s not very much time at all to have a great plan that will get you real results.

Some quick suggestions if you’re short on money but can carve out some time to get your message out:

1. Forums. Find where your people are and let them get to know you. People love doing business with people they like and trust. Be that person.
2. Wikipedia. If you haven’t gone there yet, you should visit. You should also add an entry about yourself, your company, and anything else you are an expert on. People read Wikipedia every day…you should represent yourself!
3. Become an expertly by becoming a guest. Radio? TV? How about YouTube and Podcasts? If you’re going on no money and no publicity agent, you should consider finding podcasters that have listeners and seeing if you can be a guest on their podcast! Offer a special or a discount to their listeners to make it more appealing.
4. Post comments on the blogs of others. Don’t have the time or money to put up a blog? Show people you know what you’re talking about on an already popular blog. You can put in a link to your site and they can visit you from where they read your comment.
5. Remember, they’re humans. When you post a comment or a reply in a blog or forum, please take care to actually answer questions. Do not respond to a question with "Check out our website and hire us for that answer!" People will think you’re a jerk. You can give a vague answer, but give some kind of information that makes the person think you actually care. (Actual caring and not fake caring helps tremendously!)

So there you go. Five quick things you can do on a no money budget. I hope this helps if you haven’t started. You cannot just have a website out there and think people are going to find it.

A website is like a beautiful menu. If people don’t know about the restaurant, they’ll never see it.

Article Marketing for the Beginner

I thought everyone had heard of article marketing, but over the last few events I’ve attended there have been more than a couple blank looks. This is good for you because it means your competitors aren’t all doing the same thing.

First thing first. Write an article. You cannot use an article for marketing if you haven’t written one yet. Write it about your business, but don’t make it a sales piece. Try to pick something interesting about your company. In lieu of something interesting, ask your receptionist what the most asked question is when people call. Write it on something your customer would want to know.

For example, if I was writing an article for Marketing Curve, a good topic would be (wait for it, you’ll never guess) article marketing. You have to keep in mind that in the article you need to focus on the "give" and NOT sell your services. Make it helpful, make it relevant, make it readable. Do not make it 700 words long, for goodness sake. Make it around 400 words and use lists and bullets where appropriate to make your information more digestable for the masses.

Then, write a few sentences about how amazing your company is. Example time!

Jennifer Gniadecki is the owner of Marketing Curve, a relationship marketing company specializing in creating customized internet marketing plans for small businesses.She can be reached at jennifer@marketingcurve.com or (708) 957-1479. Make the call, you’ll be glad you did.

(You may have noticed that each one of those links goes somewhere different. Take them to where on your site they’ll be most likely to WANT to end up based on what they click! It keeps people happy once they’ve arrived to your site.)

That’s called your resource box, and it’s very important stuff. That’s your "take" at the end of the article.

You see, once you put your article out there, it can be reproduced or used for free by anyone. The trade off is they cannot reprint it without putting your resource box at the bottom. TaDum! Free marketing! Also, I hope that makes it crystal clear why it needs to be a good, interesting article. So people will want to use it in a newsletter, on their blog, as an email to their list. So many ways it can be used.

Oh, and don’t forget to make the title good. Take the main idea of the article and use that in the title. You want the title to include words that someone would actually search for to find your article. If you have a keyword…the title is the place it needs to show up.

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