Smart Marketing Tips for Small Businesses

Starting a business can be difficult. It is common for new and small business owners to find themselves in the marketing role and quickly becoming overwhelmed. But don’t worry, we’re here to help you! The basics concepts of marketing are important to every small business owner. These are not marketing costs, they are investments, and it is essential to know where to start. If you can do that, you area step ahead.

Why Marketing Is Worth the Expense

When it comes to understanding the importance of the marketing and the role it plays in the development of the business, it becomes clear why marketing should be viewed as a worthy investment. Marketing is essential to attract the attention of potential customers and clients, increase the demand for goods or services and target these potential customers. Marketing affects your sales, prices, advertising and advertising policies. When you understand the importance of marketing, you can use it to promote the ongoing transition of your services and products to the customers. This is important in making your small business successful.

Understanding Market Research

Through market research, you can determine how your product or service will adapt to different demographic characteristics. Using this information, you can determine which segment of customers is interested in a product and service, and ultimately who is likely to make a purchase from you. You can use market research to gain specific information from potential customers, such as age group, gender, location, and income level, which you should use to guide your marketing message. With the help of market research, you can create marketing plans for your small business that arenot only effective but also cost-efficient. Market research gives you the information you need in a marketing context. Market research purchases target behaviours and habits that you focus on in practice, and ultimately saves you money by avoiding costly marketing mistakes.

Creating a Marketing Budget

Determining how much of your resources you should allocate to marketing within your company can be one of the biggest challenges for businesses. It can also be a major factor that can make or break a business.

Learn From Others

Small business marketing can sometimes be a challenge. Especially in rough economic times. However, many companies are successfully using new technologies to market their small businesses. These strategies can include social media marketing, online marketing, traditional marketing and even direct mail.

Often, small business owners don’t trust their marketing plan. This happens for many reasons and can lead to frustration or giving up. Reach out to our team of marketing consultants today and learn how to grow your business and reach your ideal clients.

 

 

Event Domination – How to Dominate Your Next Event

For those of you that do tradeshows or events: this video is for you! Everyone knows that purchasing vendor space or sponsorships can be expensive. The question then becomes – how are you going to capitalize on it and make sure you get a positive return on investment? In this episode, Devin Herz, Chief Creative Consultant with DMC, shares a wealth of insight on how you can dominate your next event, including the biggest oversight most business owners make when attending an event, and how you can generate overwhelming success. It’s not rocket science BUT it does take careful planning and strategic effort in order to walk away feeling like it was time well spent in gaining the exposure your business craves.

How to Attract Potential Clients’ Attention – and Keep It!

How to Attract Potential Clients’ Attention – and Keep It!

Did you know, Americans are bombarded with an average of 4,000 advertisements a day? With all that competition for customers, how can your business even begin to stand out? By getting clear on the value your business provides, making the most of your social media presence and strategically using lead magnets, your business can effectively attract potential clients’ attention – and keep it!

Focusing on the Value Your Business Provides

A core principle in marketing is understanding your value. What motivates customers to convert and buy into your product or service? With this in mind, your marketing should focus on the problems you solve and how you’ll make your clients’ lives better. Your marketing campaigns should be aligned, from your business’s social media engagement to client email messages – all should have this concept as the central objective of your initiatives. Clearly stating your value proposition also enables your employees and management to have a clear understanding of your company’s vision and goals. Value brings in leads and turns those leads into customers! And a satisfied consumer will eagerly share things of value with their circle, helping you promote your business using the best method of all – word of mouth. By focusing on the value your business provides, you can effectively market your brand, attract potential client’s attention and place your company in front of the right people at the right time!

Take Advantage of Social Networks

While there will be some overlap between your followers, the people who follow you on Facebook likely aren’t the same people who have signed up for your company e-mails. Make the most of the content you create by looking to repurpose it and use your content across all of your social media channels. A blog post can be repurposed as an article in your newsletter; a Facebook post can be reimagined as a conversation-starting question on Twitter. By optimizing your marketing outreach across all your business’s social platforms, you are sure to engage and attract the attention of as many potential clients as possible.

Additionally, don’t underestimate the power of print advertising and direct marketing. While digital marketing has taken center stage as the most prominent form of marketing, print still packs a huge punch. Direct mail utilizes far less cognitive effort to process than digital media, which suggests it is easier to comprehend and most likely to be committed to memory. In a recent study, when asked to recall a company’s name in the advertisement they had just seen, the ability to remember was found to be 70% higher in participants who were shown a direct mail advertisement. That’s right – 75% of participants could recall the ad correctly when delivered through direct mail versus 44% for digital! So, if your business is primarily online, don’t neglect physical opportunities to attract client’s attention. From creating direct mail marketing campaigns to using eye-catching video brochures, there are countless ways to take a modern spin on print advertisement.

Consider Using Lead Magnets

Lead magnets are a fantastic way to get your customer’s attention by offering information of value in your field.  While you clearly want to avoid giving away too much of a product or service, you do want to provide something that has substantial enough value to intrigue your market. As an example, an attorney might provide a checklist to prepare for a court date with quick tips available in the form of a free PDF as an incentive for opting-in to their email list. You will then be able to continue providing your value proposition through quality content via e-mail – effectively attracting and keeping the attention of your potential clients. Other commonly used ways to increase a business’s e-mail list is by offering promo codes or discounts for electing to join.

Getting Noticed

By focusing on a few tried and true techniques, your business can stand apart and make a positive, impactful impression. Be sure to check out our other blogs for more ideas about how you can make the most of your marketing!

Understanding the Importance of Consistent Marketing

Companies will schedule brainstorm meetings, and most will leave with a strong list of ways to improve marketing efforts – but fall short on the follow through. This isn’t for lack of trying! It can be discouraging to try something new and find it didn’t work as well as you had hoped. Another common pitfall to consistent marketing is knowing what it is you need to do to elevate your marketing to get better results but finding it too challenging to maintain. Read on to learn why consistency is essential in your marketing, which areas of your marketing to focus on, and how to maintain consistent marketing for your business!

Consistency is Key

Constant marketing affects us in ways we may not readily identify. A recent Forbes article found reliable marketing “creates a pattern everyone can come to expect, and they develop a subconscious comfort level when you meet their business needs.” Essentially, placing importance upon being consistent in marketing creates a reliable and authoritative presence for your brand.

Additionally, implementing your marketing strategy consistently enables you to monitor and accurately assess your progress. By utilizing data and factual statistics about conversion rates, you can continue to improve your strategy and make strides toward scaling your business. It stands to reason that businesses who regularly have positive feedback in conversions and lead generation have consistent marketing and a clear message over a considerable period.

Where to Begin

A great place to start creating consistent marketing is to get your team on board. By openly communicating your intentions to your employees, your team will become unified and proactive about your marketing vision and goals. Once you have established your goals, begin to consider the best practices for communicating your brand’s message.

Simple Initial Steps to Improve Your Lead Generation Through Marketing Consistency:

  •  Post regularly on several social media platforms. Social management tools like Hootsuite enable you to manage multiple social networks from a single hub. Additionally, you can measure and track your social media campaigns and ROI with free-to-use tools.
  • Creating high-quality content that gets quoted, backlinked, and shared on social media. This encourages Google to identify your website as a relevant and authoritative source. It also establishes your business as a quality resource and builds trust and visibility for your brand.
  • Your consistent marketing of valuable content will lead to increased opt-ins to your e-mail, newsletter, or warm leads lists. When you send an e-mail to a contact that has previously shown interest in your brand, it is effortless marketing that reaches exactly the customer you are seeking. Consider e-mail marketing platforms like MailChimp to create unique campaigns, automate your work, and optimize your effort.

Taking Consistent Marketing a Step Further

As you continue to expand your potential customers through creating quality content, consider outsourcing certain aspects of your marketing. For many companies, outsourcing things like direct mail projects allows ample time to focus on creating content while specialized marketing agencies focus on promoting larger initiatives. Advanced outreach such as this enables your in-house marketing team to focus on daily consistent marketing tasks. You, in turn, can benefit from specialists creating and monitoring your more advanced marketing strategies.

Planning Your Next Move

By delivering a clear and consistent message, your brand will stay on the top of your client’s mind. In establishing your business as an industry leader and credible resource in solving problems, you become the brand they turn to when they need your service or product. Now is the time to get clear on your brand’s message and spread the word about how you can share value with your customers!

For more information about best practices and more ways to stay consistent in your marketing, feel free to reach out to us! Check out our other blogs for additional ideas to boost your marketing and revenue.

Your Website Should Prove Your Results

Most of the time your website is the first glimpse a potential customer will have of your business. While it’s important to highlight who you are, as well as your products and services,what customers really want to learn about is the results you can achieve for them.

There is a fine line between bragging and highlighting your successes. Here are three professional ways to incorporate results for potential clients to see:

Testimonials

There’s nothing better than having your happy, loyal clients speak about their experience. Utilizing both written and video testimonials is a great way to show potential clients firsthand the successes you’ve achieved for your clients. Testimonials will not only showcase your expertise, but they help build credibility and demonstrate that you are a trustworthy and reliable business to work with.

Case Studies

Let the numbers do the talking! Case studies are the perfect way to tell a visual story. A case study proves your successes, making your company credible, authoritative and again, trustworthy. It’s important that your case studies be structured, highlighting your client’s challenges, the goals, the strategy,and of course, the results.

Portfolio

For certain industries, this is a critical section to include on your website. If you’re in a creative business, whether it be a graphic designer, architect, landscaper, jeweler, etc., people need to see examples of your work. Your portfolio should contain crisp images showing as much detail as possible. This portion of your website should be clean, organized and easy for a potential customer to view.Visitors will be able to get a feel for your style and decide whether or not your company will be a good fit.You can also showcase results with your portfolio by pairing them with how they succeeded for the client.Here are a few examples:

  • Marketers can include campaign results, leads generated, or event tickets sold.
  • Contractors can show their work and also highlight how long it took to complete or if they came in under budget.
  • Professional Services can showcase money and time saved for their customers.

If these methods have you rethinking your current website, don’t hesitate to contact us with questions. We’re happy to offer a complimentary consultation to help analyze your current site and explain what our team of web design experts can do for you. Ready to get started? Schedule your appointment here.

A Win Win Situation: Where Marketing and Charity Come Together

We’re so excited to share our recent success stories helping our clients generate money for great causes! At DMC, we’re all about giving back to the communities we serve and we’re very proud of how our efforts have exceeded not only ours but our client’s expectations.

Page Likes and Big Giving

One of our clients, Cowen | Mask | Blanchard is very involved in their local community in South Central Texas. Every year, the area participates in The Big Give, 24 hours of online giving fueled by generous donors, creative nonprofits, social media, and the collaboration of many businesses devoted to the region.

Our team at DMC couldn’t have been more excited to help CMB’s efforts for The Big Give. We knew the best way to generate donations was to put together a Facebook ad campaign. For each new “like” to the CMB Facebook page generated by the ad campaign, CMB would donate $2 to the San Antonio Food Bank. Within just 24 hours, the ad campaign we put together generated 106 likes! Through The Big Give, we were able to donate the funds generated ($212) to the San Antonio Food Bank which serves 58,000 individuals each week!

This campaign for CMB Attorneys not only generated donations but increased page views, likes, video views, reach, and post engagement for CMB. This was an all-around win for our client, The Big Give, and the San Antonio Food Bank; we’re very proud we got to be the implementing force behind it!

Charity Challenges

One of our clients, Tardus Wealth Strategies, has been serving the country with their patented wealth system and wealth coaches to help their members achieve financial success and even become millionaires. To give back to the community where the company was founded, they asked us to help them encourage their members to raise money for Make-a-Wish Hawaii – with an overall goal of $13,000 for the year.

For our first “charity challenge,” we decided to do an email blast with a $1000 matching offer from CEO, Tanisha Souza. We created the copy, design, and blasted the email to their lists – generating an impressive $3,210 within hours – far beyond the $1000 goal for this first challenge.

Our next challenges will include a 24-hour Facebook page like the campaign from COO, Chris Souza, announced via email and accompanied by boosted Facebook posts, and a VIP membership matching campaign that encourages the regular members to meet the matching goal of the VIP group.

We love being part of marketing that makes a difference, not just for our clients but for causes we can all believe in. To learn how we can catapult your business to lasting success, contact our team for a free consultation.

A Knock-Out Success Story

We’re excited to share a recent knock-out Dynamic Marketing Consultants success story!

Over the last few months, the team at DMC has partnered with former boxing champion, Ronald “Winky” Wright. Since retiring, the former middle-weight boxing champion has taken on the Florida housing market, looking to rebuild old neighborhoods, one home at a time. Through his Champion Home Buyers brand, he’ll purchase any home for cash and give it a positive facelift, helping raise the value of properties and neighborhood aesthetic all over Florida.

“We are lucky to live in an area with so many great athletes. Being able to team up with one of them recently is an amazing opportunity for DMC. Knowing all the great things that Winky does for his community, it was an honor to help him bring his vision to reality with Champion Home Buyers. The fact that Winky and his team are in this business to help people in need also makes their projects very gratifying for us.” – Devin Herz, Founder at DMC.

Although already a celebrity in his own right, it’s no doubt that our work with Winky has helped advance his brand to the next level. Our team created a website that resonates perfectly with the champion’s culture and tone of voice. The web content is a unique mix of boxing and real estate, enticing potential clients while setting his business apart from the competition.

Along with the digital content, we’ve also created a large mix of marketing for Winky and the Champion Home Buyers team. Each marketing piece was strategically planned to maximize efficiency and drive in clientele. DMC successfully increased brand recognition in the Florida area with Champion Home Buyers door hangers, posters, flyers and much more.

This is just one example of a fully-executed marketing strategy we’ve implemented. See more success stories in our portfolio on our recently revamped website.

Are you ready to be our next success story?

Stop Bunting and Aim for the Fences!

Baseball season started up again this last weekend, and I just couldn’t help myself when I started thinking about all the times I met with business owners who insisted on bunting for their business just as a safe way to “get on base.”

But, for those who are setting their sights much higher, and trust me we meet with a lot of those business owners too, DMC is “on deck” and ready to help knock it out of the park!

Remember, in business and life in general, not every at-bat turns into a home run, but the more times you step to the plate, the more home runs you’ll hit.

To show you we’re in it to win it, the DMC team recently overhauled our entire website and I couldn’t be more proud. I’d love to hear your feedback on it to let me know if we hit the grand-slam or not.

3 Compelling Reasons Why Direct Mail Should be in Your Marketing Mix

If you have been investigating where your marketing dollars are best spent you most likely have read that direct mail marketing is a low cost high return on investment option. This article will do a good job detailing out what all the fuss is about with direct mail.  Direct mail marketing not only allows you to target your most likely of customer with the precision of a sniper rifle but it also allows you to personalize the offer. With this and the fact that you can track your marketing dollars with direct mail makes it a popular marketing option both for the small biz and the largest of corporations.

The ability to focus in and target only the most likely of customers is a huge asset to direct mail marketing. Companies of all sorts can purchase or rent lists of people with the most favorable demographics that match the existing customer base.  Income, Hobbies, Mortgage data are all available and extremely useful when developing a direct mail campaign. This type of marketing is with a precision focus as opposed to a more shotgun approach such as TV or Radio advertisements.

Personalizing the direct mail piece has shown time and time again to deliver the greatest of response rates. Mail pieces built dynamically with the information mentioned above assist in delivering a compelling offer that will be received favorably. People do not like to receive junk mail but they love receiving mail that is personalized and is relevant to them. New technologies such as variable data printing and Personalized URL’s are taking personalization to a whole new level.  Personalizing each piece of mail even with mailings in the 10’s of thousands of pieces is now simple and cost effective.

Tracking the response rate of direct mail has now become even more accurate with the advent and use of Personalized URLS (PURLs).  Direct mail offers now can contain web site links that are unique to the individual receiving the mail. Again the more personal the offer the better the response and with these tools available with direct mail this has become a very unique and responsive way to market products and services.

Utilizing direct mail along with Variable Data Printing and PURLs in your next marketing effort is certainly worth a good look. The Direct Mail experts at The Print Concierge are happy to show how you how we can work together and implement these new techniques and watch your response rates soar!

Let our team of experienced professionals rock out on your next innovative video campaign. We also provide the services for Website Development, Digital Marketing, Lead Generation Marketing and other related projects. Get started now by scheduling a free consultation.