Marketing isn’t simply placing an ad in a circular, sending out a brilliant piece of direct mail, or cold-calling clients about your product or service. While those are great things to be doing for your small business, embracing your marketing as a total communication strategy is even more effective.

Here’s why:

Convincing your patrons to respond has become a little more time-intensive. They’re not so eager to just act on a good tag line. They want to know who they’re doing business with, and they need to know they can trust you.

Trust is an interesting bird. No one really knows they can trust anybody. What you need to know is how to manage perceived trust. Perceived trust isn’t established easily or overnight, it takes a lot of effort and persistence, and you guessed it – performance.

The only way, and I do mean the only way, to gain an advantage in marketing is through communication with your clients and potential customers. That’s why a strong web presence is so important.

How does communication strategy relate to your online presence?

Marketing is all about strategy, but adding the component of communication ups the game. The only way to be effective – and by that I mean not work 24 / 7 and still do a great job for your clients – is to come up with a strategy that gets people talking.

You need to learn how to be effective in these areas:

• YouTube
• Twitter
• Facebook Business Pages
• Blogging
• Commenting on industry blogs
• Article marketing
• Networking socially
• Online press release

Effectively using ALL of these media is completely impossible without the discipline a strategy provides. Use an egg timer and Excel, schedule your email posts and status updates – know what time is going where, and track everything from passwords to returned responses.

All your direct response mail, advertisements, and trade show event marketing improves when people know who you represent, what they can expect from your company, and ultimately – what they can expect from you.

And that starts with the trust that an online marketing communication strategy helped you build.

What do you think? When you leave us your comments, our CommentLuv plugin pulls your latest blog post into your response for our viewers. We love to hear from you!

Related Post: Your Small Business Should be Blogging

Business blogging will really benefit your company, that is – unless you forget that your blog should be addressing your reader’s needs. If your blog is working for you, you know what those needs are. Going outside those lines can take you out of an inbox very quickly!

Your readers come to expect something from you, but it’s very easy to get off-task and forget what your blog strategy was working towards. It’s not wrong to add some humorous posts or even some cynicism or thoughtful words occasionally, but keep a clear eye on your goals. A business blog isn’t a journal, but it is a casual communication starter that should encourage your readers to excel at something they wanted to know more about regarding your industry or niche.

Read more at the Express Marketing Memo.

Your blog isn’t under the same scrutiny as your other, more direct marketing methods. A blog is more of a place where your readers and potential customers can learn more about you before they purchase, as well as interact with you after the sale. A blog is designed for two-way communication, and that means it should be written more conversationally than articles, for example.

That being said, we can’t just post garbage and expect a decent reputation. Basic rules still hold true. If you want your business to be taken seriously, you’ll have to spend a little time making sure you don’t appear to be unlearned or unskilled, without much to offer. All it takes is a little – and I do mean a little – common knowledge, reference material, and proofreading. If in doubt that a sentence reads correctly, wait a day and read it out loud. Errors in grammar are often found there.

If you don’t care, your readers will notice. It’s almost a respect issue. If you have problems in this area, hire someone to help you write or edit. Don’t neglect this detail.

Here are a few things to remember before you post.

Read the rest of this post in The Richardson Copywriter.

Exact Target reports that Twitter users are more likely to post regularly to blogs, more likely to post product and service reviews, and more likely to share coupons on coupon sites. We’re also more likely to write articles, post videos, contribute to wiki’s, and comment on other people’s blogs. This rings true for me, because as a Twitter user, I like to find interesting or educational tidbits that I can share with my readers.

I found the statistics above on Andy Beal’s Marketing Pilgrim, a site I follow in Google Reader. They could have just as easily come from a short post and link on Twitter. Either way, I’m sharing with you here, and I’ll share this information on Twitter and our Zero To Sixty Marketing Facebook page, and a variety of other sites. Other people do the same thing, and that’s how online content gains wings.

What does this have to do with your local business? Give us something to talk about! Post your in-store specials to Twitter, offer recipes, how-to articles, tip sheets, etc. If it relates to your product or service or offers something of value, share it on Twitter, Facebook, and directly on your blog. Doing so multiplies your message and provides more opportunity for your readers to expand your reach. Get it right, and it’s free viral promotion for your business.

Are you on Twitter? Let’s connect! Just click the link or look for @ShariV. Please include your Twitter address in your comments, below.

Why should your small business be blogging? Your interaction with viewers, or lack thereof, may be the only thing holding you back from more sales. While the importance of a website is crucial in our tech-crazy era, a website that has the ability to update information through blogging will outperform in sales when compared to a company website that doesn’t. There are other ways to add updated material continually to your site, and many have value, but a blog adds something more.

Your blog allows your viewers to get to know you. Over time, if they like what they’re reading, they’ll continue to return to the blog posts and begin to comment and share your material, most likely online. The more frequently your company name and message are mentioned online, the better. And when someone decides to link back to you, you’re rewarded with a level of authority from Google that will start to move you up the page. Good stuff, right?

Read more about why your small business should be blogging on The Richardson Copywriter.

Image Credit: svilen001 on stock.xchng

Gerald Voigt, co-founder of Zero To Sixty Marketing LLC and owner of Hawkeye’s Hobbies and Images by Hawkeye, lends his thought-provoking perspective to marketing in the micro to small business arena. In this post he describes some negative tendencies to be recognized and avoided by companies offering B to B services.

The customer is never wrong.

Well that may be true, but it doesn’t necessarily mean each customer is right, for you. Recently I was approached by a prospective client who was asking for assistance with marketing his business. I listened to him explain everything that he felt was wrong with all aspects relating to his business and its operations, mostly external. This lit the master caution light in my mind. Sure, there are those clients who just don’t start out running their businesses very well, and they struggle along the way. Some crash immediately after takeoff, yet some manage to get a little air, but no significant altitude.

Read more from this post on:

Express Marketing Memo

Just like you, we’re constantly on the lookout for ways to work smarter, not harder. Sometimes … okay most of the time … that means something needs to change; and today’s change is how we do the Inside Line.

Strategy by HikingArtist.com on flickr

In addition to the Inside Line, each of our team members has an active online presence for their unique business. We have unique blogs, Facebook business pages, online portfolios and videos. We’re walking the talk – doing the things we advise you to do everyday – because these things work. Of course, and thankfully, we’re also busy with client work.

Here’s where the working smarter part comes in: Rather than writing (or attempting to) write an additional two posts per week on Inside Line, what if we called attention to this mountain of content we’re producing elsewhere? Inside Line will still focus on small business marketing tips, but now you’ll see more from the design, photography, and copywriting perspective unique to each of our businesses.

If you read this blog in an RSS feed reader, you’ll notice more frequent updates – hopefully now on a daily basis. But if you’ve subscribed via our newsletter sign-up form to receive updates by email, you’ll receive updates only once per week. We’ll compile four or five articles before sending it via email.

This idea dovetails nicely with the topic of the latest post on The Richardson Copywriter, by Zero To Sixty Marketing team member, Susan Hamilton. She calls attention to the difference between the online presence of your website and a website marketing strategy. Read more on The Richardson Copywriter.

Is your business a piece of a larger puzzle? If you are one cog in an industry wheel, are you taking advantage of the momentum being sent your way by your neighboring cogs? Or are you skipping a beat … ?

Listen, there isn’t a company out there that can’t benefit from another, especially within the same niche or interconnected business. Those businesses can very easily cross-promote each other to the benefit of the consumer. When you look for ways to engage your customer in related offerings, you actually provide a service. They thought they would have to go elsewhere for that information, but there it was – and you provided it.

For example, an organic grocery store does well to have brochures and catalogs for a local retailer in organic clothing lines at point of sale locations. The consumer who “thinks organic” will love to have this information handy to them. In the same way, an organic fashion retailer who displays the weekly fliers from the neighborhood organic grocery has just become a resource to the consumer as well. Being that resource helps you stay valuable to your client.

Another example would be a model airplane builder and a niche paint provider for that plane. Gerald Voigt’s credibility in the area of niche paint for model airplanes has catapulted him in his career, primarily because of the value that information provides his audience in the hobby industry. He’s built his business on the relationships he’s cultivated within the hobby world through the product offerings those businesses provide.

If you’re not currently embracing a business relationship with “benefits”, you should be. I almost hate to say it because it is so over-used in the marketing industry, but becoming a valuable resource to your clients really will prove to benefit your business, too.

What like business relationships have you begun to develop? Tell us about them! If you’re having trouble figuring out what businesses might be a good fit, leave your questions in the comments section, or send us an email – we’ll be happy to share some ideas with you.

Do you make it a practice to ask each of your clients or customers how they found you? This is actually one of the easiest ways to discern which of your approaches were more effective than others. Unless you’re simply sitting there waiting for business to drop from the sky, you’re using multiple avenues to let people know you exist.

• Company website
• Brochures / fliers
• Print ads
• Social media promotion
• Telemarketing

Learning which of those tactics are truly beneficial will help you avoid wasting time.

If you’re not asking customers how they heard about you, how are you tracking your results from those efforts? There are many ways to gauge your ROI, but the easiest is to simply ask.

Asking the question starts a conversation and enables you to find out much more.

• What appealed to them?
• Was there any info they would have appreciated finding that wasn’t available?
• How could your message be improved to truly meet their needs?

If you’re not asking your customers where they heard about you, and what they heard about you that caused them to contact you, you’re missing out on valuable information. You’re also missing out on great ice-breaking conversation that endears them to you because you cared enough to ask.

Do you ask?

When was the last time you updated your small business website? This week? this month? this year? If it wasn’t this week, it’s been too long and it’s time to give your website a little attention.

Every small business website needs attention in five distinct areas:

1. Is your website working properly? Check to be sure that all your pages load and that your links send visitors to the pages you intended. If you link to Flickr images or YouTube videos, realize that these media may be removed at any time and without warning, leaving you with broken links.
2. How’s your website design? Does it need to be refreshed? Most websites begin to show their age after about two years. This doesn’t automatically mean that a complete redesign is necessary. Many times a simple change to one or two elements on your site is enough to give it a fresh, new look.
3. When was your last content update? By ‘content,’ I’m referring to high quality information shared through blog posts, articles, FAQ’s, video or audio messages. If you’re an artist, when was your last image shared with your viewers?
4. Frequent content updates are important for three reasons:
   • It gives your viewers a reason to return to and engage with you on your website.
   • Frequently updated content is indexed more often by Google, meaning that it helps you attain better placement on the search engine results page.
   • It makes it easier for your customers and other website visitors to refer you.
5. Can your updated content be easily shared? Links are the currency of today’s online marketplace. Make it easy for your viewers to share a link to your content with their friends and neighbors. This can be as simple as adding a ’share this’ plugin to your blog or a Facebook badge to any page of your website.
6. Is your site secure? Websites can be hacked and links inserted that will direct your viewers to unsavory sites. This topic deserves an entire post of its own, but for now, I’ll direct your attention to an excellent resource: the Securi blog, where you can learn more than you ever wanted to know about threats and solutions to your website’s security.

Related Off-Site Article: Google indexing and high quality content

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