If you’re a smaller residential service company, chances are you create your own fliers and marketing materials. It’s likely you create your own business cards and order your invoices and time cards from a company that also offers t-shirts, baseball caps, and embroidered name tag button-down shirts. It’s affordable. You get to have the appearance of a legitimate company and no one selling you pricey services and telling you how your message needs to sound to your clients. Certainly, these things are important for you to stay in control of your costs and your reputation.

Or is it?

If it’s all you’ve got, think again. All of those things do agree with your service van that you’re in business, but does it say, “I’m the only one who will treat you fairly and you should deal with me because I can give you the best service and product, guaranteed.”

Whether you realize it or not, the time you spend coming up with ways to cut marketing costs may very well be the slow death of your company. You may not agree, but if I’m right, ‘lone-wolf’ marketing is far more expensive than using a professional with an eye for detail and a flair for the right words and strategies.

There are many cost-saving methods of getting your message to your potential clients. This blog is dedicated to teaching small companies how to market effectively at reduced costs. Don’t get the idea, however, that you’re better off with a half-hearted, single-minded approach. No, what we advocate is that you learn new, aggressive strategies being used by professionals now with the understanding we impart to you through this blog, and have the polishing done by experts who care about your holistic success. Do what you can do well, outsource the rest.

The difference is clearly financial – but it’s more than that. Consider what Dan Kennedy teaches in No B.S. Time Management for Entrepreneurs (NO BS): if you are in business to be a restaurant owner, caterer, pool service owner, electrician, or plumber, your services doing that are what make your business valuable. Although necessary, the time you spend marketing brings less value to your company than doing what you get paid to do. You will get more bang for your buck when you hire someone to help you bring that quality to the table. Each part of your business should be handled by the people who handle that part most effectively.

Say you’re a florist, for example. You own a brick and mortar shop on the corner and business between holidays is slow. Maybe you employ three others who do various things, like delivery, floral arrangements, and bookkeeping. Between all of your employees and yourself, you’re capable of handling large volumes of business because each can play a part in floral arrangement as well, as long as the finished product is inspected, approved, and re-arranged as necessary by the experts who know this stuff.

Stay with me here.

In another instance, an electrical service has been in business for almost two decades. You hire the electricians who go out on the job, you estimate the large projects, oversee and troubleshoot, and ultimately hold the responsibility for the job being done correctly. Say you manage a team of six, each with their own service vans. You’ve probably got an office manager and receptionist who handle the phones, scheduling, and payroll.

In each of these scenarios, each member of the team brings value to their position. Each player has a financial value in the company and a direct interest in their particular part. They get paid first. Overall company performance and income for the business owner is based on everything above that overhead.

Is the best use of company dollars to pay the delivery driver to answer the phones, or the florist to make deliveries? The best way to utilize electrical technicians isn’t to schedule team members, or do the payroll. Your company makes more when you can charge hourly for skilled work on the job, right? Of course. The right people need to be bringing the money in. It wouldn’t pay the bills to spend company money like that.

What is your dollar value per hour? What do you have to bring in for your company to show profit? If you are doing all of your own marketing, you’re not making money doing what you do best. Time is money. If marketing is what you do best, why not do that for a living? If you only promote your company with limited skill-set, and not for a living, aren’t you short-changing yourself?

There are plenty of things you can do for yourself, don’t get me wrong, but pay for the professional advice and outsource the things that may be taking away from your bottom line. Those same hours are worth more when the right people are on the right job. In the long run, you DO pay for marketing, and you may be paying far more than you can afford when it doesn’t bring in the desired results. Go through our Do-It-Yourself pages, check out our Small Business Acceleration Packages, and look at our Services page for a la carte options our company provides to augment or overhaul your current strategy. Need more information? Call or email us today and see how we can help you get the most out of your marketing dollar.

It may sound tacky to ask, but who is your best customer? Are you better off marketing to your existing customer base or to potential new customers? They’re both critical to the growth of your business, but where is your best dime spent?

Believe it or not, if you’ve done your job right, your previous customers are a walking, talking, and breathing advertisement! Getting them on board with your new projects first is the smartest way to grow your business. Marketing to new clients (prospecting) is important too. But the cost of converting a previous customer is far less expensive and much farther reaching. When they’re happy, they tell their friends, co-workers, and even family members. You can’t buy that kind of credibility!

How Do You Retain Your Customers?

Communication is the key. It is critical to stay in front of your customers 25, even 30 times a year! I’m not talking about spamming, I’m talking about relationship building. I’m encouraging you to remember to make your best offer to your previous clients first, and give everyone opportunities for feedback.

Every company offers specials, combined deals, or even reduced bulk rate products or services during strategic marketing periods. If you’re not, realize that successful businesses are. Don’t sell yourself short (you can’t afford to work for nothing), but if you aren’t currently doing this, take a good hard look at your offer and see where you can spearhead choice ideas to get them in front of your customers in an affordable fashion. Maybe that only means altering your payment schedule. Whatever that means for you, don’t miss out on the advantage that specials can make to your bottom line.

If you’re an email subscriber to Inside Line, you are a viewer who comes to us through the services of AWeber. In the Do-It-Yourself section of our Web site navigation, you can learn how to take advantage of this easy to learn method of getting your name in front of your clients on a regular basis. This is one of the most effective ways to reach your previous clients and new prospects at the same time. AWeber provides a sign up box for your subscriber and then you use one of several template forms to broadcast an e-mail special, regular newsletter, birthday message, or tips that are useful to your readers.

AWeber takes the subscriber information and sends out an ‘opt-in’ message that gives you permission to reach them via e-mail. You create the thank you messages, the content, and schedule when they go out. Everything else is automated and several different messages can be scheduled at the same time to different lists. Your readers also have the ability to ‘opt-out’ whenever they wish. If you want more detail in your template or one that is not offered, we can do that for you for a small fee. We custom built the Inside Line.

Okay, HOW Do You Stay In Touch With Them That Often?

• Blog updates 2-3 times a week
• Weekly newsletters
• Quarterly promotions
• Birthday messages
• Thank you messages for purchases made
• Customer service surveys
• Social media presence
• E-book offers

How are you retaining your customers?

Photo Credit: Jungle Jim’s International Market on Flickr

Related Pages: DIY Email Marketing

Last September 2008, Zero To Sixty Marketing LLC was launched. We had been talking this business concept for some time, and by the time we set up our website, well…let’s just say it was knowingly less than optimal! The idea, of course, was to run on the ‘under construction’ clause on the home page while we managed the work already coming in. We figured we’d get back to our own appearance as soon as we had the chance. Guess what? Time passed, the prior contracts took center stage, and before we knew it, a year had passed.

Zero To Sixty Marketing isn’t just about how fast your company can get to the top of the food chain, it’s about making sure that when you get there, you can operate within a budget you can afford, with systems in place that keep your motor and transmission running smoothly, and at top performance due to quality standards. This ain’t no Pinto! Being around forever torn up and abused in someone’s driveway is NOT our mission for you! We want you to be a clean, mean, driving machine-shiny and thoroughly operational under the hood while your exterior shows the world that your company is head and shoulders above the rest. That’s not a fast thing, it’s a quality thing, and we’re proud to be able to offer you exceptional value for your exceptional appearance.

We’ve been giving you the nuts and bolts breakdown of SEO, and we want to make sure you have access to some of the easiest keyword research tools out there. We’ve been using Wordtracker for several years now, but I’ve only recently started using this tool myself. A couple of years ago I had tried it and thought it difficult, but then again I had very little working knowledge about how to use the tool, and they’ve improved the experience for the researcher (you) by leaps and bounds. Anyone can figure this out.

First, make sure you take the tour. I don’t remember taking the tour, if they offered one on my first try years ago, but I’ve taken the tour since then and now think that it’s very helpful and can’t imagine trying to use it without taking the tour. I like things spelled out.

Wordtracker Tour

Very basically, there are four steps that you’ll be walked through in more detail:

• Enter a keyword (one you’ve chosen off of the list we worked on in the last post)
• Find the actual search traffic volume for your keyword
• Evaluate competition for the word
• Export results, and
• Research again from your list

While you’re there, take a look at some of the blogposts in the Wordtracker Academy. I thought Lyndon Antcliff’s post on social media was a really great breakdown for any business owner.

Using Market Samurai Keyword Research Tools

Another keyword research tool is Market Samurai. The 30 Day Challenge kicked off on August 1, but you can still get in. Shari and I have both taken the 30 Day Challenge, consisting of video tutorials and introductory versions of several Internet marketing venues, and have come away inspired and empowered. Neither of us has been able to complete it, however, and it’s pretty time intensive alongside a busy work schedule. We just keep going back! Give it a try, tell us what you think.

With this tool, you have access to every level of SEO information; link strategy comparisons of your competition, and a rank tracker tool that does exactly that, tracks your rank and so on. Complete introductory information is available with this system as well.

I don’t want to give too much away with either of these tools because I’d really like to see your unbiased comments on both.

In our next posts, we’re going to show you where and how to use these keywords that by now are excellent choices. Was this post helpful? Have you used Wordtracker.com or Market Samurai? Tell us what you think of these tools in the comments below!

We’re all familiar with the Bob Dylan tune. That is especially true when it comes to your marketing dollar. The times we are experiencing now require rethinking everything we have held to be true in the past. Today’s marketing is very different than it was even three years ago, and no one today has money to throw into anything that will not produce.

That being said, what are you doing with your marketing dollar? Have you cut your overhead to balance out lower demand in today’s economy, or cut your productivity? You probably know you have to market differently, but how? What is the systemic difference between a fully functioning, income producing company, and a company having trouble paying its bills?

The Difference Lies in What Your Target Market is Doing, and Where.

That may seem like an oversimplification, but often the answers are right under our noses. Our culture is a strange mix of social/anti-social behavior. Statistically, today’s parent is less likely to know his next door neighbor or the parents of his children’s friends, yet they would probably consider themselves to be social if they were involved with any one of the number of social media outlets that exist online today. If a service or product is great, or even if it is less than desired, people will be talking about it online.

While it is still somewhat common to expect your customers to look for you in a phone book, they are much more likely to look for your product offerings online. Online they can compare services, standards, and often, they will check out peer reviews of the company they’re interested in hiring. Don’t underestimate the power here.

Today’s marketplace is largely online. Whether or not you’re hanging out online, the odds are good that your customers are.

• What does your online presence say about you?

• Is it presenting your company and services in the best possible light?

• Are you reaching your target market?

• How would you know?

Now more than ever, small businesses that expect to compete and survive need to know how to compete effectively. That’s going to take asking these questions, and answering them.

We’d love to hear what you’re doing differently.  How are you adapting to the changes this year?

Image Credit: vwcamp by intomwetrust2 on flickr