Instead of searching online, consumers and business buyers who have a need are connecting to people they trust and asking for referral sources. This is why it’s *more important than ever* to be connected.

As I was writing this post I was trying to come up with a punchy headline, and it occurred me that maybe I ought to write a headline that would appeal to the Ebenezer Scrooge in all of us. I too, was resistant to the social media bandwagon at first, I admit it… I didn’t get it.

One this is undeniable though–there are 500 million Facebook users and counting.  

So if you’re a small business owner these days, while you’re counting your pennies and watching every expenditure, you’re also wondering “how do I leverage my network and tap into my market that’s on Facebook?”

To illustrate how this works, I’m using 3 Facebook plugins that illustrate how you can quickly and easily ”Like” my Facebook Page.  Is that self-serving of me? Yes–absolutely! But I’m also helping you, so it’s a win-win!

3 Social Plugins to help you Build your Facebook Page

Like Box - The Like Box you to attract and gain “Likes” from your website. The Like Box enables users to see how many users already like your Facebook page (including their friends), read recent posts from the page, and like the page with one click (I am using the “Like Box” in the right sidebar of this website under Measurable Marketing Tips).

Like Button – The Like button lets a user share your content with their friends on Facebook. When the user clicks the Like button on your site, a story appears in the user’s friends’ News Feed with a link back to your website.

Share Button - The Share Button is the easiest way to allow your content to be shared on Facebook. If you click this button it will share this post with all your friends.

Share

Ok, so hopefully you’ll see how easy this is to get people to “like” you–even if you are an old Scrooge.

Happy Facebooking, and “God Bless us everyone.”

Note: I’ve included links to the code for each of these buttons, so you can forward this post to your web developer, and put the button you’d like on your website.  Or if you don’t have a web developer, please feel free to contact me. I’d be glad to help.

It is a Marketer’s dream… You can connect with more than 500 million potential customers, you can choose your audience by location, age and interests… all with easy-to-target, self-reported demographics that are up-to-date and accurate.

If you own a business, or are responsible for marketing one, you’re right to think about creating a Facebook Page (formerly a Fan Page) and build community around your business. And you’re right to think about using a drawing, contest, or sweepstakes to grow your Fan base.

Be aware of the rules and regulations

Facebook has grown so much so quickly there’s still confusion about what you can and cannot do.

For example, it is against Facebook’s promotional guidelines to post this offer on the wall of your fan page:

“Like us and Win a $250 Shopping Spree (or some other prize)”

Potential problems with this offer:

• You can not administer a promotion on your wall (without an approved 3rd party application)
• You need to get Facebook’s approval prior to running a promotion on your wall
• You can’t use Facebook to communicate with the winner

The big distinction that Facebook makes in their promotional guidelines is between publicizing and administering a promotion on Facebook (this applies to contests & sweepstakes only):

• Publicizing a promotion means that you promote, advertise or reference a promotion in Facebook, but you do not collect entries or draw or notify winners in Facebook.
• Administering a promotion means you both publicize it and collect entries in Facebook.

These guidelines have been a boon to 3rd party applications like Wildfire, Involver, FanBase that help Marketers administer promotions through Facebook, but on the 3rd party-application page (which is technically outside Facebook). These applications require users “Like you” as a condition of entry, and then have a an entry form that’s not “on” Facebook, so it conforms to all the rules. But many of these solutions can be expensive… a minimum of $750-$1,000/month and up–making it cost-prohibitive to many small businesses.

The Solution? Use Facebook to promote, not administer, your drawing, contest, or sweepstakes

Publicizing  your promotion does not need Facebook approval, and does not need an approved 3rd-party application to run it.

You can use Facebook freely to promote, advertise or reference your promotion, but you don’t collect entries or notify winners in Facebook. 

Next Post: “3 Easy Ways to Get People to Like You“

Infusionsoft is simply the most powerful CRM/Marketing Automation tool for small business. There’s nothing better.

It’s like Salesforce.com + ExactTarget + 1ShoppingCart all-in-one.

And for two seats at $299/month, plus $59/month per additional seat, the price cannot be beat.  

You will not find a better all-in-one CRM/Marketing Automation System.  It includes:  (1) CRM (2) Autoresponders (3) Web forms (4) Order forms (5) Sales force automation (6) Shopping cart (7) Affiliate marketing management, and (8) lots, lots more, and what’s best, you can get it all without spending tens of thousands of dollars, or cobbling together other systems that do parts of what Infusionsoft can do (like Salesforce.com + ExactTarget + 1ShoppingCart, which you’d probably spend 5 figures putting it all together anyway).

If you’re looking for a CRM or Marketing Automation System for your Small Business, but haven’t been able to decide which one is best for you, here are 5 good reasons to get off the fence:

5 Reasons to get off the fence

If you’re shopping for an online CRM, and are sitting on the fence, here are 5 really cool, unique features that should make you want to sign up today:

1. Tags — Known as “custom taxonomies” or “tags”, these became popular with WordPress, and “Tag Clouds”, this is an alternate method of classifying information so it can be easily found, and it’s also great for segmenting your list “to get the right message to the right person at the right time.”
2. Marketing/Action Sequences — You can easily add/change a record’s status based on actions/ conditions, or example: A prospect buys “Product B” from you, you can change the record’s status from prospect to client, add a tag indicating that they’ve purchased “Product B”, and initiate the “Upsell marketing sequence of emails for Product B.”
3. Trackable Links — You can send an email with a link that says “Yes, have someone call me!”, and if someone someone click the link you can start an action sequence, for example, create a task, and assign it round-robin for a salesperson to follow up, followed up by another specialized sequence of emails.
4. Infusionsoft API — It’s one of the very few systems that allows you to tap directly into your database via an API, which gives you virtually unlimited ability to tie it into your operations.
5. Subscriptions and Recurring Payments – You can create order forms that accept credit cards and spread payments out over a period of time “just like a big company.”  After you’ve sold something, you can concentrate on delivering the goods–as far as getting paid is concerned you can “set it and forget it.”

Ultimately, the biggest reason why small business owners love Infusionsoft (and why I love it) is because it helps them make more money, while at the same time increasing their productivity so they don’t have to add more staff. Which means greater profitability–more money to the bottom line.

The Infusionsoft organization and culture is really a wonder to behold; and everyone–the upper management down to the troops working the line–should be praised for the culture they’ve created. They practice what they preach and are absolutely committed to customer delight. As the company who was first-to-market in the Marketing Automation Category, Infusionsoft is on an upwards trajectory, and are continually coming up with product enhancements that make the system easier to use and manage.

Does the Shopping Cart need some work? Admittedly. But the product management team is working on it. You’ve heard it here, and I guarantee they won’t disappoint.

Right now Infusionsoft is running the Double Your Sales Guarantee with a Free Trial. Simply click here to do it now.

So why aren’t companies more adventurous when it comes to trying new things?

It’s the “I hate brocolli” syndrome of marketing and business.

If you ask the average CEO, “What’s the rationale for the way you’re currently marketing your services?”  Many say: “It’s what we’ve always done.”

The sad truth is that many companies are engaging in the same old tried marketing tactics rooted in strategies that were developed eons ago (a.k.a. 2007).  They’re wasting money on tactics that are not rooted in any real, current strategy – or based on the realities of today’s marketplace.

How to get higher response rates and higher conversions

 Any Direct Marketing old timer will tell you that the secret to getting and maintaining high response rates and higher conversions is: “Test. Test. Test.”

In fact, there are some who say that  30% of your budget should be set aside for testing.

If you’re testing new ideas agains the old ones it’s the only way to know for sure that you’re marketing is continually improving. 

Apply the principles of continual improvement to your marketing. In Direct Mail it’s called “A/B Splits and Multivariate Testing.” In Google Web Optimizer it’s called “Marketing Experiments.”

Test everything. Test in order of importantance. Your offer, your keywords on your pay-per-click ads, your landing pages.

Or if you don’t really want new and better results, you can just keep doing what you’re doing — what you’ve always done.

When Warren Buffet speaks, people listen.

Recently I happened to catch Warren Buffet on TV talking about how leaders should set business priorities.

Buffet was saying that you should run your business like it’s a family business–one that you are going to hold onto for 100 years, and the #1 thing you should think about is how to build a sustainable competitive advantage, like building “like a moat around your castle.”

If you look back to medieval times, moats were excavated around castles as part of the defensive system–an obstacle immediately outside the walls–and usually they were filled with water.

A good moat made it difficult for your enemy to access your walls with siege weapons, such as towers and battering rams, which needed to be brought up against a wall to work effectively. A water-filled moat made it impossible for your enemy to dig tunnels under your fortifications in order to effect a collapse of the defenses. A good moat protected your castle and everything in it.

The wider your moat, the longer you can protect your profits. The deeper your moat, the more profitable you are.

“Understanding your customers” is key to building a good moat

If you’ve followed him for any time, you also know that Warren Buffet invests primarily in companies that “understand their customers.” To me this means companies that make Marketing a priority in their strategic plan…, not just the 4 P’s (Product, Place,  Price, and Promotion), but also RSPT (Research, Segmentation, Positioning, and Targeting).

In essence, applying the Fundamental Principles of Direct Marketing not just to your Marketing but to all your Operations.

One of the best ways to protect your profits and build higher margins, the key to a successful business, is to continally work to understand and serve your growing customer base. The way you do this is by mastering the Fundamentals of Acquiring and Managing Customers:

1. Find a suspect (on a good list or use of demographics)
2. Convert the suspect to a prospect (a lead),
3. Convert that prospect into a customer (an account),
4. Convert into a regular customer or multibuyer (someone who has purchased from you 3 times or more), and
5. Convert that regular customer into an advocate for your business who provides you a testimonial and a stream of referrals.

Literally all the things you can do to protect your profits and increase your margins derive from “understanding your customers, managing this fundamental process, and managing it well, i.e, all of the traditional methods of creating a competitive advantage: (1) Product Differentiation (2) Branding and Positioning (3) Pricing Strategies (4) Locking in customers, and (5) Locking out competitors derive from making great offers, establishing a real relationship with your customers, and being responsive.

“Understanding your customer” is the equivalent of protecting future revenue streams, and forms the basis of value. It’s the modern-day equivalent of building a good moat.

With this perspective, what are the competitive threats in your environment, i.e., the towers and battering rams that could impact your profitability? And what are you going today, this week, next month, next year to ”build your moat and protect your relationship with your customers?”

That’s a great way to go through your entire budget fast with zero results.

The trick to getting higher higher response on pay-per-click ads is to create a separate landing page for each of your top keywords in three easy (but time-consuming) steps.

3 Easy Steps to Better Pay-Per-Click Results

1. First, discover which keywords are driving the most traffic. If you have 100 keywords in your campaign, chances are that 20% of them are driving 80% of the traffic (or more like 10% of the keywords are driving 90% of the traffic). Turn off the non-performing keywords.
2. Second, create a separate landing page for each logical grouping of the remaining 10 or 20 keywords. Make sure that the headline and the offer of the landing page matches the ad to reduce your bounce rates and increase your conversions.
3. Third, and this is something many people forget to do, but is to filter out the negative keywords to fight the “My Simon effect (people looking for something for nothing: “free, cheap, affordable, and low cost”).

How to Get Great Leads
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A successful pay-per-click campaign requires a process similar to that used traditional marketing.

The process involves strategic planning, creative development, results analysis, and mindful execution.

Your success (or failure) is dependent on the critical analysis and thinking that your efforts, as well as the reassessment of the results following each set of efforts.

Starting with how you generate inquiries through the challenging hand-off and follow-up by your sales force, and most importantly how you measure the results, this ”discipline” sees more wasted money, more missed opportunities, and more downright mistakes than any other area in business-to-business (B2B) marketing and sales.

Now that some of the more traditional direct mail disciplines (multivariate testing, A/B splits) are being used on the Internet (web design, email marketing, search engine marketing, pay-per-click advertising, landing page optimization, social media, web 2.0), it has made the the demand generation and management process more complex and more difficult than ever. 

Why Lead Generation is so important

But this really presents businesses the greatest opportunity for three reasons:

1. There is always room for improvement – And, the return on investment from improving your lead generation program is usually well worth the the time and effort. 
2. You can build a competitive advantage – in most industries your competition is probably managing their lead generation and nurturing process at the same level you are, or worse.  Your efforts can help you develop a competitive advantage and win market share from your competitors. 
3. You can make more effective use of your budget–when you measure your results, you can put your money where it’s working the best, and align your budget to achieve strategic objectives.

The purpose of this series of blog posts is to outline a solid process, and offer some tips and techniques that, when applied to your business’s sales and marketing process, it will turn your lead generation program from mediocre into a source of pride for your organization.

Next: “B2B Lead Generation and Nurturing: An Overview“

How do you get your prospects to engage with you? Top search engine rankings are nice, but it really doesn’t matter if you’re not converting traffic into inquiries, and inquries into sales.

Here’s the secret: “It’s not about you.”

Most websites are guilty of the biggest strategic copywriting blunder

People like to talk about themselves. And they love people who empathize with them, and who show they’re good listeners. On the flip side, people do not like braggarts, and people, ironically, who focus only on themselves.

If you focus on your prospects: their problems, their worries, their desires. And if you show show them in your content that you can help them solve their problems, alleviate their worries…, and help them achieve their desires, then your customers will love you.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t have a profile company profile listing your qualifications, but telling your prospects on a constant basis why they should pick you can be boring.

Focus on your customers and prospects

So in your website copy you should:

1. Focus on your prospect’s problems
2. Present a solution to the problem
3. Illustrate how you can solve the problem

What’s the problem? > There is a solution to the problem > You are the solution

Be a good listener

If your customers and prospects feel like you really care about them, then they are going to like you. And if they like you, they are more likely to contact you, to purchase from you, and to continue doing business with you.

So show you care by listening and focusing on your customers and prospects rather than yourself. You are the one who will benefit the most.

Everyone’s looking for results. Is there a sure-way method to find them?

Many companies think they’re practicing “Direct Marketing” without taking the time to measure and report the results… they enjoy the results, but they don’t try to figure out how they could do better. Like Direct Marketing, Lean Marketing is targeted, personalized, measurable, but most importantly, it’s improveable.

As consumers, We’ve all seen successful examples of Direct Marketing. You go to your mailbox, open your mail, and there’s a letter that stands out — it comes from a real person directly to you with an offer designed to delight you and make you want to respond.

As marketers, if you use Direct Marketing regularly, you know that for every $1.00 you spend you can get $20 back, or $24.00, or whatever. Predictable return on investment helps you with your budgeting, your cash management, and your profitability.

Quality Marketing

Lean Marketing is Direct Marketing with a commitment towards improvement, it’s Quality Management or Continual Improvement applied to Marketing, which can be illustrated by the PDCA Cycle that was popularized by Edward Deming, who is widely recognized as the forefather of improving design (and thus service), product quality, testing, and sales.

The PDCA cycle is designed to be used as a dynamic model. The completion of one turn of the cycle flows into the beginning of the next, creating a “virtuous circle of continual improvement”. The process can always be reanalyzed and a new test of improvement can begin. 

PDCA Cycle

PLAN: Establish the processes needed to achieve an acceptable response rate and a cost-per-acquistion of new customer.

DO: Implement the processes

CHECK: Monitor and measure the processes and report the results

ACT: Take action to test new ideas and maintain and continually improve the response rate and the cost-per-acquistion of new customer.

By testing new ideas, i.e., New offers, new creative strategies, new package formats, you’ll continue to make improvements… and in the process you’ll acquire new customers, sell them more, get them to refer others to you, and ultimately you’ll be a stronger and more profitable company.

By monitoring and measuring the processes and reporting the results, you’re able to quickly see what’s working and what’s not working, which will then allow you to align your budget with achieving your company’s strategic objectives.

And that is why Lean Marketing is so powerful.

It’s Direct Marketing the way it’s meant to be practiced.

Customer Winbacks

Emphatically “Yes”!

There are lots of reasons, other than the economy, why you are losing customers.

Customers could’ve been frustrated by delays, or aggravated by one bad experience. They could be annoyed by lack of response from you, or seduced away by your competition.

The point is: “If you are losing customers—do you know why?”

There’s a big difference between customers who are gone and customers you can win back. Unfortunately, most sales managers and salespeople don’t make that distinction.

And many executives neglect to direct their managers to ferret out the reasons why customers are defecting. Why? In the rush to get new business—we ignore lost business—even though in many cases the closing ratio for winning back lost customers can be much higher than the ratio for new business. And the reasons for customer defection are vitally important.

A customer win-back program is valuable for three main reasons (1) you win back “lost” revenue (2) you can uncover potential weaknesses in your organization, and (3) you can discover potential threats from the competition.

4 Steps to Winback Success

Here are some ideas for creating your own customer win-back program:

1. Put a senior manager or director in charge
You can’t expect a junion person to handle this job. A senior manager or executive is truly representing and speaking for the company. Priority number one is to visit the client in a face-to-face meeting, and get to the root of ‘what went wrong’. Listen intently, take notes, use your active listening skills to show the client you’re listening to them.

2. Track your losses and your win-backs
You need to establish a system for identifying lost business and recovered business. Is a lost customer someone who hasn’t bought from you in a month, in six-months, in a year? It’s different from business to business. But if you’re not measuring your lost customers, you’re not managing your customers very well. Identifying which customers who’s active and who’s inactive is vital for establishing and running a successful win-back program.

3. Re-establish the lines of communication
Your might ask for a meeting with top management, send a personalized letter from the CEO, or ask for a new new needs-analysis meeting. This all flows from the first face-to-face meeting where you discover the problem and refine your approach.

4. Document Your Successes
Customer Win-backs is a process—and with practice it should be a repeatable one. It may take you ten steps instead of the previous three, but once you’ve won back several customers, you’ll begin to see patterns that you can use to reduce customer attrition. The whole process should help you garner valuable information to help you run your business better.

Next time you speak with your customer ask: “What result are you looking for in (the next period of time) that will make you continue to do business with us?” Knowing these expectations makes your life much easier and increases your chances of retaining that client.

Winning back customers is not for the meek of heart. There may be some confrontation, and you will undoubtedly hear things you don’t want to hear. However, it’s hard to correct a problem you’re not willing to discuss. At the very least you’ll discover the weaknesses in your organization that caused your customers to defect in the first place.

Moving forward it would be wise to recall Ben Franklin’s aphorism that “An Ounce of Prevention is worth a Pound of Cure.” Manage your customer’s expectations at the beginning of the relationship, not the end.

Happy Win-backs!