B2B Archives - Page 11 of 20 - Creative Agency Secrets

Step 5: Relationship development

16 June, 2016/0 Comments/in B2B, Sales, Strategy /by Rebecca Caroe

This fifth step is where the hard work, diligence and persistence pay off in your search for success in new business development.

People buy from people they know, like and trust and so having an active relationship with prospects who remember your name when they want to and can get in touch with you easily when they want to is very important.

How memorable is your business?

People are forgetful. What are the ways that prospects use to remember your business?

I know people save the newsletters that I mail out. I find people write replies to Newsletters that I sent months ago and the reason is that they keep them “just in case” they need to get in touch again. Many businesses do not use a business database and this is a shortcoming.

There are many ways to stay in touch with people and it’s beneficial, as your mailing list grows, for you to have some that are semi-automated and do not require a lot of your time in order to fulfil.

Good examples of these are autoresponders and newsletters. We also use social media as a way of staying in front of people we have a set-and-forget process of feeding RSS feeds through to our social media profiles so that we can appear to stay ahead of the news and on top of new developments even though we are not actually watching social media every hour of the day!

Staying memorable

Every business owner should have some form of regular networking in their diary. This could be as simple as a trade professional membership group, your chamber of commerce, or some specialist group for your area of expertise. Meeting people regularly is a very good way of staying front of mind. But beware, these people must be your prospects, not your competitors!

One way to find out if you are doing well in your relationship development is to track the number of new people we put into the business database. I collect business cards from as many people as I can who I think maybe of potential future interest to the business. This includes suppliers as well as prospective clients.

How and where do you get business cards? And what do you do with them?

It is important to have a careful plan to stay in touch with new people you meet. Some of them you want to spend time with and have a slowly developing individual relationship, others you can use mass communication. When planning your marketing, you need to think through these processes and organise all the communications necessary.

I have two special face-to-face relationship development techniques which I use. One is my circle of influence. The other is unhurried conversations.

A circle of influence is a small group of people who regularly feed new work through to us. These are people in parallel businesses whose services precede ours in the business service cycle. I meet with them on a quarterly basis or speak to them on the phone and they send us new enquiries and we are also able to reciprocate work back to them.

Unhurried conversations work on a slightly different format. It is a social event in the evening where I gather a group of interesting people around our board table for some afterwork drinks and nibbles. We use a format whereby only one person may speak any time. This forces everyone to listen carefully to what is being said. There is no agenda. The conversation takes whatever direction it wants to go. Learn more about the unhurried conversations format at this website. It is interesting that in this busy age of connected people and individuals so many people value a slower pace of talk, chat and interaction. Working at the slower pace allows my guests to take their time in thinking and considering whether they might work with us.

In summary – formalise all methods of building relationships between the business staff and prospective customers.

How to Get Leads from your Business Website

10 June, 2016/0 Comments/in B2B, B2C, Lead Generation /by Rebecca Caroe

This speech was given to the Grey Lynn Business Association on 10th June 2016. It includes tips on testing how your website is working, 12 ways to make local marketing work including inbound and outbound marketing tactics.

How to Get Leads to your Business Website from Rebecca Caroe

Case Study: zero to local hero for manufacturer

20 May, 2016/0 Comments/in Advertising, B2B, B2C, Data, Digital media, Marketing /by Rebecca Caroe

Auckland manufacturing firm, Cabjaks makes kitchen cabinets. They worked with Creative Agency Secrets for 3 months to improve their keyword natural search results, SEM and on-site keyword SEO.

Cabjaks Manufacturing kitchen cabinets

Summary of outcomes: Adwords results

In January when we started they sold a small amount of goods based on clicks from Adwords.

By March the revenues from Adwords clicks were up by 413%.
April is performing even better.

Cabjaks is becoming a strong brand on Google properties too

There have been 6 Five Star reviews in March (the previous one was September 2015).
We are now on page 6 of local search (up from 20+) and importantly a competitor is falling off the second page.
The YouTube optimisation has gained a 13% increase in views.
And Analytics confirms a 12% increase in website visitors over the past 30 days.

A “zero to hero” response in just three months demonstrates the success of our work with this manufacturing brand.

Step four: Profile raising for new business

19 May, 2016/0 Comments/in B2B, Sales, Strategy /by Rebecca Caroe

Getting well-known for what you do is a very long-term process. But this should not deter you because it’s relatively easy nowadays to become known for a specific skill or product.

Becoming famous for being good at what you do in a public forum takes a few simple steps, repeated.

The goal of this step in the new business development process reinforces prospects’ decision-making when they come to select someone to do work for them or with them. If they can find out about you independently, and online they are far, far more likely to hire you then if they cannot find out about you.

Where is your brand findable in public?

So let’s have a look at the different places where a stranger could find out about you and your business and the things that you do.

Do you write articles?
Have you been mentioned in the news?
What about public speaking?
Have you ever been to a conference?
Do you ever speak or present at business events like BNI, the Chamber of Commerce or Local Business / Professional Membership Associations?
What about running workshops or webinars?
Do you host events at your own premises?
Could you invite clients and prospects to learn more about your skill and expertise in a face-to-face environment?

Here are some of the things that you could do to improve your “find-ability”.

Business awards Does your industry run annual awards and could you enter? Many parts of New Zealand have local Westpac Business Awards happening every year. This not only adds to your internal feelgood factor for the team by entering, but it also gives you handy PR and some external credibility if you get through to the final stages.

What about opinion formers? There are always people who are prepared to stand up and talk about your industry; could they quote you? These people may be journalists but often nowadays they might be bloggers or podcasters.

Networking is important for most businesses particularly if you want to win clients locally. Having actually met someone is a very strong and easy way of building trust. Find out where your local networking opportunities are. This may be the Chamber of Commerce, local meetup groups or BNI.

I do recommend you check out the website meetup.com because a lot of good events are run and publicised through there. You can search by location to filter. And also, look at Eventbrite for your country. You will see that Creative Agency Secrets does a lot of Eventbrite work and we find the people actually search this site and sign up to our events.

Members of your staff also talk about your company and it’s important that every time they mention your firm you want it to be positive and also consistent. It’s important that you, the business owner, are not the only ambassador for the business. Can you enthuse them?

Conferences, trade shows and exhibitions are another good place where you can get better-known. You could run a trade stand or you could just attend and see who else is there and talk to the other people you meet. If you’re able to get onto the conference speaking platform as a speech-giver then of course it’s a very good way to put your message across in a subtle manner and showcase your expertise. Do your research locally – are there conferences running and can you get a copy of the full attendees list if you are a speaker? This gives you an opportunity to get in touch with people after the event as well.

Read the other posts from this series here!

Step three: New business pipeline

2 May, 2016/0 Comments/in B2B, Sales, Strategy /by Rebecca Caroe

How well are you doing at winning new customers and prospects? Is it very important because your percentage success rate at winning opportunities has a direct impact on the number of opportunities that you convert paying customers.

Even a small improvement in your success rate will help you to make more money.

Step 3 in our Methodology is all about the steps prospects go through before they decide to buy from you.

Recent new business success

Let’s start by doing an analysis of your recent business successes. Go to your accounts software and print out a list of all of the invoices you have raised over the last six months. Make a note of the total sums payable by each individual and rank than by size so that you have the largest paying customers at the top of the page.

Now let’s have a look at some of the history of each of these customers or clients.

How did you first get to know them?
What dates did they first get in touch with you?
What was the first opportunity they discussed?
What was the final proposal to put to them? Was there a difference from 3 above?
Who led the discussions?

Now let’s do the exact same thing for your existing prospects. You should have a list somewhere of all of the prospective new clients with whom you’re in discussion at the moment. Print that list out and answer the same questions as you did with your previous clients. Below is a form that you can use to fill out which may help you to order your thoughts for these.

Where does business come from?

Within your list of prospects may be some which are not yet concluded. Write down what’s the next step is towards bringing them closer to having a discussion with you and making a decision to buy.

How many biz dev stages are there?

A new business pipeline may have many steps, frequently there are common steps which all prospects go through. Usually for a B2B business they start with initial discussions, and you refine your offer and what the customer wants to buy, and you had a price and discussed whether they are prepared to pay for it, then you negotiate and then you either win or lose the business. It is a pretty standard sales funnel.

For B2C businesses the products are standardised and the steps have fewer reviews and revisions.

See if you can Identify what stage each of your current opportunities are at. Note: I put into an opportunity any discussion which has the potential to become new work – but I set it at a very early stage to reflect this.

Look for patterns in the data

What causes you to win business and what makes the sales funnel longer or shorter? Try to identify the causes of positive and negative situations in your sales funnel. These are areas to focus on – the ones which deliver faster revenues are worth focusing on.

If you have lost some opportunities recently, one tip I recommend is to ask a neutral third party to ring these people up and find out why you didn’t win the business. People will often be more honest than speaking to someone who does not work for the business. This can give you great insight.

Next time we’ll be looking at your business and brand profile and how to raise your profile.

Read the other posts from this series here!

How to get your first co-working members?

26 April, 2016/1 Comment/in B2B, Case Studies, Local Marketing /by Rebecca Caroe

We have just opened a coworking space and although we are getting good traffic to the website we are struggling converting paid members, both online and offline. Any tips from those who have started coworking spaces on how you signed up your first 10 or 20 members?

The answer is the same for any new product or service being launched.

I have been a coworking user for 3 years (not an operator). Local Marketing by Experience is what you need to do. By this I mean get visitors to the space and pitch them when they are there…

My advice is this

offer the space as a meeting venue for Meetups locally. Get people visiting the space through meetups and ask the organiser to allow you to pitch all attendees about the available space and “special rates” for their members.
Research highly networked people you know and ask them to help you publicise on social platforms. Ask them to occupy the space free of charge on the condition that they use your space to host their meetings – so they bring people in.
Offer the space short term for the use of local business incubator (they typically run Lean Canvas startup programs for 8 – 12 weeks). This gets visitors in the space and it looks busy… again, you achieve the objective of getting people in and using the space and used to visiting.
Review your pricing. Find out why visitors choose to go elsewhere and if it’s price – adjust accordingly.
Review your offer. Can you offer Co (collaboration) and Working (shared workspace)? Most only offer workspace. My advice is to proactively manage the collaboration part. How can you introduce workers to each other, now can you facilitate them winning new customers in your space, how can you leverage your networks to help them win business… .
Coworking space

How can you use your platform to help them sell more? If you do this, people will want to use your platform for their business because it grows as a result of the collaboration and the working together. And the condition for that is to pay you to occupy your workspace…. problem solved.

Although all these tactics can work, my view is that the last one gives the most opportunity – but it takes work and is possibly hardest to deliver on quickly.

This is in answer to a question on Clarity.fm

7 Tools to Improve Your SEO

12 April, 2016/0 Comments/in B2B, Marketing, SEO /by Emelie Tillack

Improving the SEO for your business is very important. When potential customers search for your products and services you obviously want to appear as high in the search engine rankings as possible. In order to do so, your SEO has to be better than your competitors. Google and other search engines will rank what they think is relevant to what is searched for. Therefore, you have to make sure Google thinks your business is relevant to rank. The higher ranking you get on Google, the more likely you will be to drive more traffic to your website. So, what do you do and where do you start?

BrightLocal’s 7 SEO tools

BrightLocal is a company that specializes in SEO tools that help businesses grow through the effective use of search marketing. Today, BrightLocal have more than 20,000 customers worldwide using their 7 SEO tools.

1. Local Search Rank Checker

The first tool is the Local Search Rank Checker. It tracks your ranking on search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo and it covers both organic and local search rankings. You have the opportunity to set up this tool to run a report automatically every month or week and you can compare your result to previous reports. Decide what settings will work best for your business. Finally, the report is also available for you to download. Keep track on your ranking and make sure it goes up!

2. Local SEO Check-up

The Local SEO Check-up tool provides a fast and comprehensive audit of a business’ local SEO set-up. It’s a complete local SEO audit tool that runs more than 300 automatic SEO checks. It enables you to speed up your SEO audits and it only takes 5 minutes to set up! You get a clear and accurate report within 15 minutes which you can share directly with clients and prospects. The things this tool checks includes: inbound links, domain authority, your presence on the most important local directories, social media, and Google Places.

3. Google+ Local Wizard

You use Google+ Local Wizard to quickly analyze you Google+ optimization and benchmark your business against your top 10 local competitors. You can also see your ranking on Google+ for your key terms.

4. CitationTracker

CitationTracker is a tool that helps you find, track and manage your local citations. A citation is a listing for your business on a third party site, for example; on a review site like Yelp. By using this tool you will get help with your citations in four different ways. It will help you find existing citations, locate old and incorrect citations, spy on your competitors citations and track the change you make to your current citations. You can also find new citations by locating your top 5 competitors and list your business on the same site!

5. CitationBurst

The CitationBurst tool helps you if you don’t want to go through the labours of manual citation building yourself. CitationBurst will do it for you! It gives you the chance to submit to multiple directories at one time and help to generate listings on local, general and niche directory sites. Pick what sites you want to submit to and CitationBurst will complete the submissions for you within 14 days.

6. ReviewFlow

What ReviewFlow does is that it locates and monitors online reviews on important directories and reviews sites. Using this tool makes it possible to find existing reviews and track all new reviews you receive. ReviewFlow keeps track on all major review sites such as Google+, Yelp and Tripadvisor. By collecting reviews from all sites the report makes it easier for you to read and comment your reviews. You can schedule the report to update monthly, weekly or even daily.

7. ReviewBiz

The final tool is ReviewBiz. It gives you the opportunity of adding a ReviewBiz badge to your website. Create and customize your button and copy paste the code onto your website. By doing that, your clients can easily click-through to a review site of your choice to read and add reviews about your business. Positive reviews will boost your local ranking!

Image credit: pixabay.com

Step One: State Your Business

11 April, 2016/0 Comments/in B2B, Marketing /by Rebecca Caroe

This section is all about explaining in as few words as possible what’s your business does, what product or service it makes, and who you sell it to.

One way of describing this is an elevator pitch. Let me give you an example my business creative agency secrets, has the strapline “marketing success unlocked”.

That is the quick version of what it is that we do. We offer marketing success to people who previously found this a problem that they could not resolve. You notice that this actually is also incorporated into our logo which is two things, a C. A. S. initials and also a padlock which is open. Thanks to Ross Murray who is our wonderful graphic designer, he designed this for us and it was a great moment when we saw what he had created and how well it aligned with what our business does. You can contact Ross and Angela Murray at www.redspark.co.nz

We then have a longer version of our elevator pitch.

A marketing agency specialising in execution marketing for small and medium businesses.

And of course we have an even longer version, you can read this on our website in the about us page.

How do you describe your business?

Here are some ways that you can help to think through the different options

What’s the company history?
Who are the key personnel?
Who are you trying to sell to, your target customers?
Do you have some specific objectives of the business, this may be to grow it, to sell it, to create an income for yourself, to be a social enterprise? There are many more
Who are your competitors, what is unique, special or different about you?
What’s your track record? In previous businesses and in this current one. What sort of clients have you helped?
Do you have case studies? Are they well known? How did they reflect on your business?

Write down longhand the answers to all of these questions.

You may have some other questions that you think are particularly relevant to yourself. From this, you want to try and build 3 separate statements about your organisation.

The first one needs to be the equivalent of a strapline to go alongside the company name and logo. Here are some examples from clients

SD Talent, best practice human resource management for your team, outsourced.

Crossfire, trusted fire engineering.

Baucher Consulting Ltd, better tax stories for you: a better tax system for everyone.

Read the other posts from this series here!

Google my business. Do you know how to test your website is working correctly?

7 April, 2016/0 Comments/in B2B, B2C, Digital media /by Rebecca Caroe

There are only five things that you want a business website to do.

get found natural search
answer questions
bring in enquiries
get prospects to reveal their identity
showcase expertise

What this means is that an effective website should be shortcutting the amount of time it takes to get a new customer.

Three tests to do now

So how can you tell if your current website is performing? Here are 3 tests you can run which are free and will take you around five minutes to do.

Hubspot Grader – Hubspot has a website grader tool which can easily appraise your current website using publicly available information. This is not perfect but it gives you a score out of 100 and then explains where your website could be improved. Remember this is a marketing tool designed to sell the Hubspot service. https://website.grader.com/

WooRank – This is a Chrome Browser extension which does a similar job to Hubspot and can be used to double check your own website in a similar manner. I find it very useful. https://www.woorank.com/en/p/developers

Google Page Analytics. If you have Google analytics installed on your website and you are logged into the service you can open up your own website and using the Page Analytics chrome extension appraise exactly the % of people who have clicked on each hyperlink. I like to start with the homepage and to see which links are performing well.

This was what told me that many home page sliders are not working well for our clients. And has led me to recommend discontinuing using them. Go check yours out.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/page-analytics-by-google/

What about Search?

Now let us have a look at how are your website displays in natural search on Google.

Firstly Google looks at four aspects of your site: Words, Pictures, Video and Maps. Of course having all of these is the best way to be – but if you only have one, you should plan to add others.

Search for your business by name in your local Google. You should see a listing on the left hand side of the page and a map and logo listing on the right hand side which includes a Google Streetview if you have an address listed. Here is an example of one of them.

Natural Search Listing on Google

If the information is incorrect. It is urgent that you correct it.

I was searching for a Real Estate agent recently and got given the wrong office phone number from my search. You can imagine how annoying that must be!

Change how your business displays in Search

You can edit the display listings on Google search by registering your website in Google My Business. https://www.google.co.nz/business/ You must get verified before you can do the edits but it is very simple.

In the tool you can link your Google analytics account, maps, YouTube account, reviews and G+. This means that Google has an accurate, integrated record of everything your business adds. You can see how important this is as Google dominates search in New Zealand.

Tips for editing your business description

The first 3 lines are the most important part and so you must put both a short description of your organisation, one line about your services or products, and how to contact you. This last should be a hyperlink so you can send visitors to the correct page on your website.

Getting Search to give you insights

Google analytics is your friend because once you have an Analytics account you also get a Search Console account. This was formerly called Google Webmaster Tools. By associating the two accounts you can then help your analytics to display additional useful information. It’s very important to have a sitemap and then you can display insights inside your analytics account for your marketing team.

In the old days Google allowed you to see what search terms were being used that brought visitors to your website. They stopped doing this because it cut into their advertising revenue. Now you can see search phrases and the number of times your website has been displayed for each phrase. It is less specific then before but it still gives you a good general idea. In our e-book how to Get My Website Working For Me we explain how to edit the six pages that Google displays underneath your business name.

You should consider which of these six pages is the most important and the order in which you want to display them. You can “Demote” a page so that Google displays an alternative. For example you should have your contact us page on the listing but you may choose not to have a list of clients.

Setting the page priority levels is done using your site map this determines the hierarchy of pages. However you may have several pages at the same level on the ‘family tree’. You can switch these around inside Google Search Console based on your needs as I explained above.

So how did your business website perform in your tests?

These simple tools will give you the means to demonstrate to budget holders the importance of prioritising your website improvements and how it displays in search.

Improving your local SEO is an important part of your business marketing. It’s all part of Getting your website working hard for your business [there’s a free ebook telling you how].

Read more blog posts about Profile Raising by clicking the icon below. It’s one of the steps in our 8 Step Methodology