I love small business marketing and I love my husband who has moved to Denver for a job transfer. So I have been flying back and forth to the Denver Airport to visit him and try and find a house to buy in the Denver area (we have an offer in – again – so fingers crossed people). What I noticed about the weather here compared to Clearwater Florida, where I am moving from, is that it is C-O-L-D. The people are generally nicer and they have snow boots.

I also noticed that real estate in Colorado is also different from real estate in Florida. They get a different commission than I am used to, they have fewer listings than agents carry in Florida and they have snow boots on when they show houses.

So what does this have to do with marketing you ask? We KNOW real estate is local but so is marketing! If you are in Cleveland, which is a very depressed area right now, you may have to market WAY harder in order to get the same results you got in the past. You may have to do more face-to-face sales pitches to close a client. If you are in Denver, where they say the economy is more solid, you can focus on gaining market share. Do LOTS of marketing to take over the market before the national economy rebounds!!!

While it is not fair that you have to work harder in Cleveland than Denver, make sure you match your efforts to your expected results, not just what worked in the past!

and don’t forget to wear your snow boots!

Related posts:

1. Small Business Advice – Doing what you love AND…other stuff
2. Small Business Marketing – Success Is HARD!
3. How to Choose the Right Keywords for Your Small Business

Small Business Advice – Anyone who knows me well knows I LOVE talking about marketing, reading about marketing, teaching marketing classes, blah, blah, blah. On the weekends I frequently spend time researching new marketing ideas, planning for new projects and doing lots of other TOTALLY fun things. This weekend I ALSO spent 7 hours fixing my blogs, optimizing them for SEO, picking keywords, etc. I hate doing that! A friend called me during hour 7 and asked what was wrong, I sounded that glum!

I also spent 6 hours this weekend working on a design project for a great client (www.Managemy401k.com). The owner is a businessman and marketer who is commited to executing a comprehensive marketing plan for 2009 – that makes me SO happy! BUT he needs design help first, so I am doing that for him as part of the whole plan. That is not my favorite part, but it is something that must be done in order for him to succeed.

So what does that have to do with you? You are a Realtor, or retail store owner, or a craftsman, or a Mary Kay Lady. Well…I am sure that you picked your profession because you love part of it. I know Realtors who have battled through 2 years of hardship with no end in sight, just because they love helping people and selling real estate. I know beauty consultants who like to make people feel good about themselves by making them pretty.

EVERY small business owner (and employee) has stuff the don’t like to do. Stuff that they put off as long as humanly possible before starting and then only do scratching and clawing through each step with horror and gloom. What if you did those things first? Got them out of the way sooner rather than later? OR What if you found someone else to do it instead? Kept the parts of the business that you like and ditch the rest!

Related posts:

1. Airports, Snow Boots and Your Small Business Marketing Message
2. Do you love your small business
3. Weird Stuff….Small Business Owners Who Don’t Want More Business

So I am on a mission this morning to analyze our stats, see what we are doing right and what we could be doing better. I am going to check Marketing Artfully and see how that traffic is, check our Thrive Client Contact System website, and see how I can generate more hard leads for our websites. I am NOT going to do this in any organized fashion as I am a free spirit who can’t be constrained by logic or orderly-ness (even though that would make life SO much easier!)

The Thrive Contact System is a partnership between Mary Dado of Business Writing, Ink. and myself. We send out monthly marketing information for small businesses to send out to their clients, generating new business, increasing their name recognition and encouraging repeat sales and referrals. This great material includes newsletters, call scripts and emails. We have been managing the Thrive Client Contact Program for Realtors for about 6 months but expanded our offerings and branded the program Thrive just last month. The Thrive site has been live since November 16, 2008 (less than 30 days). 

 Let’s start with some overall statistics. On November 20th we had our best day ever with 26 visitors. There are some days that we have had none due to the utter lack of initiative on the part of the chief marketing officer (sigh). I will review what was so special about November 20th later. We have had 116 total visitors (I screen my IP address out) and they have had 436 pageviews with 3.76 pages per visit.

What does that mean?

The content we have is great! They are looking around once I get them there. This activity has translated into about 3 leads and 2 sales to date. Because we have an affordable entry level price and reoccurring billing, that translates to estimate of about $600 of income over the course of the next year. I am okay with that for now! Let’s see what the good, the bad and the ugly things are!

The good

On November 20th we sent out an email to 195 people from our database, had 99 people open it and 19 people came to the site as a result of that. WOW – over 50% open response and about a 20% click through rate, I am pleased with that! How did that happen? I sent a really good message, with interesting content to targeted group of our clients, sphere and prospects. If I had used a bought list those numbers would have been very different. We also provide great content EVERY time we send an email to our database so they are more apt to open something we send. I think this a problem many marketers have, they want to get SOMETHING out so they are willing to just send anything instead of making sure each communication is valuable in itself.

The bad

So why so few actual leads? Using analytic tools, we will try and infer what the problem might be and how we may be able to fix it!

If we look our pageviews, you can see that we have had 29 people go to the sign up now page. 29 people and only 3 leads – arggg. So what to do – I added a line to the top of the page that they could sign up OR request more information. It could be that they are worried that by filling out the form that they are going to be obligated to pay. While I would like them to be ready to pull the trigger, I am also happy with someone to add to my database as a prospect and then set them up on a drip campaign that we have to tell more about the Thrive program. Hopefully this will increase the number of leads that we receive!

I DO have to say that we have a flaw in our system – neither Mary or I like to call people so we tend to answer by email. I sometimes wonder if we called those people whether our conversion rate would be better (you think?) We have two fabulous women who we are going to have coming on as sales people so that should help with the whole non-communicating thing!!!

Finally, back to the good things – we are number one on google for Client Contact Program AND got click through from it already!!! We are on page 2 for “small business lead generating” due to a post that I wrote about (ironically enough) “Small Business Lead Generating – Why you can’t do it!“.

Stay tuned for tomorrow’s exciting episode – “Generate more website traffic – how the heck do I do THAT?”

No related posts.

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