MacDonald on Marketing

Archive for the ‘small business marketing’ Category

When you are getting started with any social media (blogging, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) one of the first there are two steps to take first:

1. Install Google Analytics to track and analyze your site’s visitors to track return on investment.  Any online (or offline) marketing you do should always be preceded with the question, “How am I going to track the ROI for this investment?”
2. Find the conversation in your marketplace, and follow it.  Identify the leading influential blogs read by your competitors and your potential customers, and keep up with what is being said.  This video tutorial introduces you to four tools — Alltop.com, Technorati.com, Google Reader and Google Alerts — that will help you find the conversation and keep up with it:

Resources:

Google Analytics: A powerful stats package for your site.

Alltop.com: Links to the most recent posts in the top blogs, organized by industries and interests.

Technorati.com: Blog directory and search engine.

Google Alerts: Email updates about what is being said about your business (or anything else).

Google Reader: Keep up with all the blogs you read in one place.

Reviewing and analyzing the volume and behavior of the visitors to your site can help you identify opportunities to save money and increase sales. The best stats tracking service I’ve found is actually free!

Google Analytics is a fantastic service that will give you detailed statistics about your website visitors. Analytics’ incredibly detailed reports will tell you just about anything you can imagine about your visitors:

• How many visitors your site is getting (and you can generate reports by date range for all statistics)
• How many page views your website receives
• Where your site visitors are geographically located
• How your visitors find your site (e.g. search engines, links from other sites)
• The bounce rate — in other words, how many visitors are viewing only the first page and then leaving your site
• The keyword phrases your visitors are using to find you in search engines
• Your visitors’ browser versions and connection speeds
• How often your visitors return, and how recently
• How deeply into your site your visitors click
• How long they spend on your site
• The typical paths users take on your site

Google Analytics can track your conversions for sales, newsletter signups and other goals of your online marketing — even providing breakdowns for different traffic sources. In other words, you can directly compare your return on investment for purchased clicks from many sources.

Using such detailed statistics can help you invest wisely in marketing. You can end ineffective campaigns and increase spending on campaigns that are giving you good ROI. You can save money by test marketing before starting larger marketing or advertising campaigns.

Google Analytics is quite easy to integrate into your website. Go to Google Analytics and either create a Google account or sign in with your existing account. Then set up a website profile for your website. You’ll receive a code snippet. This snippet should go on every page of your website right above the close body tag. Install the code, or ask your web developer to do so (at Simply Brilliant Solutions, our content management system websites have Google Analytics integration so that you can just copy the code into a box in the administrative control panel). Then, go back to the Analytics site and check to make sure that Analytics is receiving data.

Do you have experience with or comments about Google Analytics? Please chime in below!

You spend a lot of time and money to get visitors to your website, and then the majority of them will leave again without contacting you or making a purchase, never to return.  Turn some of those “not today” visitors into future customers by persuading them to join your email list.

Here are the five steps to building a healthy opt-in email marketing list for your small business:

1. Use a third-party email marketing service provider.  I prefer Aweber.com — other providers include ConstantContact.com and GetResponse.com.  Why should you pay for a third-party service?  Your website host or ISP is not really geared to handle your email newsletter needs; if you don’t use a third-party provider, you’ll find that many or even most of your subscribers do not receive your emails.  Packages start at $20 a month and it is well worth the investment.
2. Put an email collection box (the little form your visitors fill out with their name and email address) on the front page of your site, and ideally on every page.  Make it easy for your visitors to sign up to your list.
3. Make an irresistable offer to induce your visitors to subscribe.  Offer free information, a discount coupon, insider deals:  anything that will appeal to your audience.
4. Tell your visitors exactly what they are going to send them in their email.  A weekly newsletter?  Special discounts?  Recipes?  And then stick to your promise.  Give them what you promised them, and not a bunch of other stuff.
5. Send marketing emails on Wednesday.  Statistics show that emails sent between Tuesday and Thursday stand the best chance of actually being opened.

Need help getting your email list and website collection boxes set up?  Contact me at catherine@macdonaldonmarketing.com