Top tips for marketing Tradesmen

7 August, 2014/0 Comments/in B2B, B2C, Data, Direct Marketing, Email, Marketing ideas /by Rebecca Caroe

Are you a tradesman – plumber, electrician, carpenter, builder – and want to do some marketing to get more customers? We had a meeting today with a new client and talked about marketing.

Tradesmen [Image credit: http://internet-and-computers.com]

The 3 Marketing Tools a Tradesman business needs

There are lots of choices in marketing, but for a tradesman’s business, there are actually only 3 marketing tools they need

Business cards
A website
A mailing list (email or postal)

Let’s run through these and how to use them

Tradesman’s business cards

Cheap to design and print, these are your number 1 marketing tool when you first start. They should have accurate information about how to contact you printed in large type with a recognisable business name.

How tradesmen use business cards

Hand two to every customer. One to keep and one to give to a friend.

Keep them in your wallet, in the car glove box and hand them out liberally especially if you go to a social function or belong to a networking group or business meeting group.

A tradesman’s business website

When you’ve enough cash, buy a website. A simple 5 page site is all you need to start off.

How tradesmen use a website

It needs to have

a header that says your company name and phone number,
a home page that describes your business and the geographic area in which you work,
a page with your full contact details,
a page to describe your specialist skill,
a page of customer testimonials,
a page about you and your team.

A tradesman’s mailing list

Once you’ve been working for a while, you will send out invoices to get clients paying you. This is your chance to start to grow a mailing list. This is useful because your past clients may refer you to future clients, and sending out mailshots or newsletters serves as a reminder to people about your services, and how to contact you.

How a tradesman uses a mailing list

Keep a record of every customer name, business name, address, telephone and email when you raise an invoice. If you use an accounting software programme, it’ll save these details for you.

When you get a phone call or email enquiry for a new job, save the contact details. Check on the phone that you have spelled their name correctly – this is particularly important for email addresses because one wrong letter and the message won’t arrive.

When you do a job quote, save the contact details.

Every month collate all these lists into one place (preferably electronic). Save the file with an obvious name e.g. August 2014 Mailing List. Then send out a short message to the whole list using specialist email sending software like MailChimp/AWeber/FeedBlitz. DO NOT USE your email program. Ask me why not if you don’t know.

Put the date in your diary to send the newsletter every month for 1 year.

Stick to the schedule.

Send that mailing.

Even if it is short and has one photo of a job you’ve done (before and after photos are great), or a customer testimonial – it all adds up. Over time you will get to having a big list.

Say you do 10 jobs a month and meet 5 new people each month who take a card. Within 5 years you’ll have over 900 names on your list. If you do 20 jobs a month and meet 10 new people – you get to 900 names in half the time!

That is it.

There are additional marketing techniques that you can add on top of the basic 3 such as outbound mail campaigns, using recommended trades services (Builders Crack, Rated People), creating website landing pages for Yellow Pages and other directory listings, customer satisfaction surveys, freebie giveaways or seasonal special offers.

But don’t do these until you have the basic 3 covered and working well.

For tradesman marketing services, call Creative Agency Secrets – outsourced marketing for busy business owners.

WARNING: Chartered Accountant Magazine is Changing

6 August, 2014/0 Comments/in Digital media, Email, Marketing /by Creative Agency Secrets Team

We were shocked to hear that a professional NZ accounting magazine ~~is stopping its print edition and going digital only~~ has combined with its Australian counterpart. The Institute of Chartered Accountants Australia (ICAA) and the New Zealand Institute of Chartered Accountants are joining forces and as a result will be moving their regular publication “Charter Magazine” to ~~digital~~ ~~only~~ a new brand known as the “Acuity” magazine.

Additions by Andy Mclean, Publisher of Acuity magazine:

1) Contrary to what your article says, we are continuing to publish our member magazine in print.

2) Our new trans-Tasman magazine is not called Charter – it is called Acuity.

I think where you have got confused is that – having joined forces with NZICA – we have decided to stop producing Charter magazine and replace it with a brand new trans-Tasman magazine named Acuity. But there is no intention to stop printing magazines for our members. Hard copy magazines are still very popular with our members.

Just to clarify – Charter magazine had existed in print, online and as a tablet app for the past two years. Acuity will also exist in print, online and as a tablet app. There is no change in channels for our member magazine; it’s business as usual.

So what does this mean for accounting in the Australasian region? What does it say about future practices and success factors? We believe it says that accounting could benefit from going digital in a broad manner. Digital gives easier access to articles because they can be read on handheld devices as well as being found through online search. We’re hoping that, by making an accounting magazine available primarily online, it will help accounting firms visit the online space more and get familiar with it so to start using it in their own firm’s marketing. The move to digital for print magazines opens up other questions.

Is your newsletter digital?

If you’re thinking of moving your newsletter to digital, you’ll want to answer these questions first:

Will the newsletter/ magazine be readable from a mobile device (in terms of both the file being sent and the amount of content on such small screens)?
Does it fall in line with your firm’s practices and customers?
Do subscribers get email notifications when a new edition is published?

If you have a printed newsletter and want to move it to digital, answer the questions above or even get in touch with us to help you out.

Read RSS on Kindle

If you’re looking at building a blog for the website of your accounting firm, you’ll be pleased to hear that Amazon Kindle now allows Kindle editions of blog posts as well! They build directly from RSS feeds, so you’ve got another way to keep your blog readers up to date. The digital space is certainly moving in directions that accommodate marketing which are ready for any and all accounting firms to use and enhance their reach to prospects. Let us know how you feel about the change to digital for Charter Magazine, and what your Accounting firm is doing to become digitally enabled.

Need accountancy marketing help?

Creative Agency Secrets are experts in accountancy firm marketing. We can tutor you and teach you what to do if you want to do the marketing yourself. Or we can do the firm’s marketing for you.

Learn more and join our free Accountants Marketing Newsletter

Google Alerts Has Been Updated

28 July, 2014/0 Comments/in Content Marketing, Lead Generation, Marketing, Marketing ideas /by Creative Agency Secrets Team

Many content marketers rely on Google Alerts as a way of getting ideas for content, seeing what your competitors are doing online and for those vain enough – seeing what others are publishing online about you.

Google has recently “beautified” their Alert service – there’s no telling just yet whether they’ve changed anything behind the scenes.

The Old Google Alerts

Old Google Alerts

Above is a picture of what Google Alerts used to look like – functional, but not the simplistic approach Google is taking.

The New Google Alerts

The first thing you’ll see when you check out Google Alerts is the friendly and more stylised design, however the big changes come with Google’s suggestions.

The suggestions are based off who you’ve added in your circles in Google+, again this emphasises the importance Google is placing on G+. The better you utilise Google+ the better the suggestions Google will offer.

Google have also added a “Me On The Web” section – something we recommend all of our clients to do. It is always intriguing to see what others are posting about you online (if anything).

*Remember if you’re using a unique (individual) Google account to add your company or your client’s companies – Google isn’t quite clever enough to auto-suggest them at this stage.

New Google Alerts

What Does My Website Look Like On A Mobile Device?

14 July, 2014/0 Comments/in Digital media, Marketing /by Creative Agency Secrets Team

If you’re responsible for a website, you’ll know the importance of how it looks on mobile devices. While exact percentages of website visitors using mobile devices can be determined, this number can vary greatly month to month.

You might look at your website analytics and see you have only a few visitors viewing your site on a mobile device and decide that optimising your site for mobile devices is not worth the effort. But when one does view your website, what are they greeted with?

Remember, your website is often your first impression.

Remember, mobile devices being used for web browsing is rapidly growing

As there are many devices available, all with different screen sizes, how are you meant to test your website on all of them without purchasing a variety of devices or relying on friends and co-workers owning them?

How Can I See What My Site Looks Like On A Range Of Devices?

Fortunately there’s a simple solution. It’s called MobileTest.me. MobileTest Me acts as a browser based mobile emulator. It basically allows you to see how your website looks on a range of devices from your computer.

Go to http://mobiletest.me/ and select a device you’d like to test with
Enter the URL of the website you’d like to test
Hit “Go”

To view the site from another device or to change the screen orientation simply use the “Options” and “Devices” tabs in the top left of the screen.

What Can I Do If I Don’t Like What I See?

If your site isn’t responsive or doesn’t look as nice you you’d hoped there are a number of options available.

Obviously, the easiest solution is to get someone to fix it – however that can get expensive and time consuming.

If you’re on a popular platform such as WordPress you can always purchase a new theme which is responsive. The issue with this solution is that it can often be surprisingly time consuming and there is the potential for a large delay while you copy the content across to make it look consistent with the new theme.

A good short term solution is installing a free plugin such as WPTouch. WPTouch makes a mobile version of your site and only appears when viewed on a mobile device. Best of all, it is available free and only takes a minute to install (though you may want to spend time customising the colours to match your site and the icons for each menu item).

How to manage a writing team

1 July, 2014/0 Comments/in B2B, B2C, Content Marketing, Marketing /by Rebecca Caroe

I’d like to keep track of projects, editing, and version control as simply as possible. I see a zillion tools and possibilities, just want something simple and reliable.

Writing team [image credit dunlapschools.edublogs.org]

Focus on having one place for your editorial work schedule. We use teamwork.com for our project planning – but other solutions include Trello and Basecamp. Set in place working processes that force users back to the project management app for all their work. E.G. we use Teamwork as the agenda for our update meetings – it is immediately obvious if someone isn’t using it or it isn’t up to date with their status. Name and Shame works as a motivator.

Secondly, the editorial calendar (which can be a spreadsheet of monthly activities) sets out what needs to be done in advance so you can plan.

Thirdly use cloud services so there’s only one version of any document you are writing. We use Google Docs and from the fall you’ll also be able to do the same on Apple with their Yosemite update. One document, multiple users.

Fourthly, if you want to be picky – as I am, have a file naming convention on your documents. We use date followed by client name and detail of the document. Note using a YYMMDD date format means all documents sort into reverse date order easily (the US date format does not work).

How is that for starters? Get in touch if you want a 20 minute update on what you’ve chosen and I can try to spot any issues or working practices you may need to reinforce.

1 Simple Trick to Increase Reach on Facebook

30 June, 2014/0 Comments/in Marketing, Social Media /by James Cameron

Have you noticed that you’re not achieving the Facebook reach you used to get?

Have no fear, it’s not just you. Facebook constantly tweak their EdgeRank algorithm that determines what people see on their news feed. You are now seeing more promoted content as well as content that Facebook decides is more personalised to you.

Here is a handy tip to getting your posts on Facebook to reach the people who want to see the content you share.

Encourage your followers to receive notifications so they don’t miss out on the fantastic posts that you regularly make. By requesting to see notifications they are telling Facebook’s news feed algorithm that you have content that they want to see. This will make sure that your posts stop getting lost in the news feed and get the reach they deserve.

A simple way to do this is by creating a cover photo that encourages your followers to take the steps to get notifications.

Here is one we prepared earlier.

We created a photo, quite simple to do with any photo editor (we used powerpoint). Then added some simple directions for our followers to take so they can easily see our posts on their news feeds.

If you liked this trick we have some other Facebook related tips. Want to get your Twitter followers onto your Facebook page? Or Make matching Facebook profile and cover photos?

If this is all a bit too much for your skillset or you want to leave it in the hands of the pros then we can do it for you.

Google Alerts finds timely content backlinks

27 June, 2014/0 Comments/in Marketing, Marketing ideas, Social Media /by James Cameron

Google Alerts are an efficient and easy way to keep up to date on articles and other information on the internet and have it sent straight to your email. Use alerts for content curation and early awareness of breaking news topics in your niche.

There is a simple and easy way to set them up.

Go to www.google.com/alerts
Type in your search query eg. “football world cup” (see below on search query tips.)
Using result type you can pick whether you want just news, video, blog posts, discussions or books.
Select language and region to search in – useful if you only want news from your country.
Update frequency – once a week, once a day or as it happens.
Google allows you to choose whether you want to receive only the best results or all the results. We prefer to use all results so that you don’t miss out on anything that might be important.
Finally you enter in your email address and Google will send you the latest updates on whatever you want. It’s as easy as that.

Tips on how to best utilise Google Alerts

Google Alerts shows you the new content that comes up when you enter in a search query. So use a search query that is specific enough to get you the results you want. You don’t want have to waste time reading through a big list of useless articles and not find anything relevant.

Use advanced search techniques

The first tip is to use quote marks to search for phrases. From my earlier search term in step 2 above I wanted to search for the phrase “football world cup” so it is in quote marks. This gives you only the search results that have all three words in that order without any other words. If you didn’t have the quote marks then google would give you pages that contain any of the words in the search term, in any order.

Use OR to find synonyms or similar information. I could use “football world cup” OR “Fifa world cup” OR “soccer world cup”. This will give me the information I am looking for that wouldn’t necessarily come up if I only used the search term “football world cup”.

Use the minus symbol “–” to exclude a search term that you don’t want to hear about. This can be useful when you are searching for something that is quite often associated with a term that you don’t want. So in New Zealand, rugby is sometimes called “football” or “footy” and so I could exclude all mentions of rugby football.

The last tip is one of Google’s lesser known search operators, intext:. This operator forces Google to use the exact word in all the search results and not any synonyms. So I could search for intext:“football world cup” and I wouldn’t get any synonyms of football and I would get the whole search term together in the search results.

What I learned interning at Creative Agency Secrets

23 June, 2014/0 Comments/in Marketing /by James Cameron

Hi my name is James and I now work at Creative Agency Secrets, but that wasn’t always the case…

Back in March I was floating around handing my CV out left, right and center trying to find my first full time job. I had graduated from university in December and after a relaxing summer soaking up rays on the beach I set out on the quest for employment.

After a month of only small leads that didn’t turn into anything promising, I realised that it is actually quite hard to get a job without any experience. My previous work history consisted of small summer jobs and a season working on a ski field so my limited knowledge came straight from my degree. Most of the jobs that I found wanted at least a year’s experience, which I was lacking.

This lead me to looking at internships. An internship would give my CV that extra boost of experience to make me more appealing to an employer.

Enter Creative Agency Secrets.

A friend of mine had previously interned there and mentioned that they might be looking for someone as they take on interns regularly. He put me in touch with Rebecca and I got an interview. I either nailed it or they didn’t have any other options so I was offered a position as an intern!

The other intern…

When I first started at Creative Agency Secrets I wasn’t the only intern. There was another, a Swedish student called Johan. He was in New Zealand on a university exchange and was interning to get experience as part of his degree back in Sweden.

Johan helped to show me the ropes and settle into the team at Creative Agency Secrets, although it was a bit of a competition at first as I was the “new intern” invading his territory.

My internship at Creative Agency Secrets was short, it only lasted 6 weeks before I was offered a job. During these 6 weeks however I learned a great deal. I sat in on meetings with clients and learned the basic ins and outs of how the company worked. Before I knew it I was dealing with proper client work and gaining the valuable experience that I had wanted for my CV.

Some of the skills that I picked up during my 6 weeks as an intern and that I am still developing at Creative Agency Secrets include:

Using and managing social media for marketing purposes on the client’s behalf. Including the theory behind social media marketing and some technological tricks to drive traffic to your website.
Using analytics to track the effectiveness of our campaigns.
Dealing with clients using email, in person and client meetings.
Writing blog posts, for both clients and on the Creative Agency Secrets blog.
Researching and keeping up to date with the newest and most effective marketing practices.
Foosball, I have dramatically increased my foosball skills while I’ve been here thanks to the foosball table and the fierce competition that the other members of the Creative Agency Secrets team provide.

I have learnt a lot and continue to gain new skills here at Creative Agency Secrets. I have enjoyed my time here thus far and have been quickly accepted (I hope) as a valuable member of the team.

Two previous interns have also written articles about their experiences at Creative Agency Secrets. Johan the Swedish intern and Brad who worked here before my time, check them out.

Interested in becoming an intern or applying for work here? Visit the Careers page. Creative Agency Secrets’ business model includes hiring and training ‘first job’ trainees giving them marketable skills.

I’ve got a new job in business development – what do I do first?

20 June, 2014/0 Comments/in Marketing /by Rebecca Caroe

A prospect has asked us a question:

New Business Development. Image credit: [http://jimmcguirk.files.wordpress.com/]

What should be the best approach to winning customers in this new role of a business director?

My answer is short

Find out what methods worked best in the recent past. Appraise the past 2 years of new business wins (if B2B) or past 4 months (if B2C) and list all the methods and how many customers were won, what their customer value per month was. You can find out which delivers the highest volume of new customers and which delivers the highest value of new customers.
Take our new business development coaching service and we will help you write a plan for your business.

Get in touch if we can help you further.