Your web site is the electronic storefront or reception area of your small business and your URL is the electronic address of that website. As such, you want to put the URL in as many places as possible, to help increase the traffic and ultimately the number of visitors to your website.

photo credit: chrisdlugosz

Here are the top sixteen spots for your URL:

1. Business Cards
Place the URL in a noticeable location on your business cards. Good spots are under your logo or below your address.

2. Email
The URL should be a hot link and should be in the signature panel of your emails

3. Company Stationery
Again place the URL in a prominent spot so that it can be easily found.

4. Product Packaging
If done correctly you can place the URL in multiple spots on the product packaging.

5. Marketing Brochures & Business Article
Logo should be on the front and back covers. Can also be on the title page inside.

6. Social Media Sites
Join some of the online communities like Facebook (www.facebook.com), LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com), and Twitter (www.twitter.com) and promote your site.

7. Signage (Windows, Vehicles, Sidewalk, Sandwich Boards)
The URL should hold a prominent spot on all of these signs.

8. E-Mail Newsletter
You might consider creating an e-mail publication, perhaps monthly with a list of tips, industry updates, or new product information. This is a superb way to stay inj touch with your customers and prospects.

9. News Releases and Media Kits
Send news releases to print and Web periodicals both in your industry and in general.

10. Advertising (Yellow pages & other)
Although these are going out of fashion, you still want to be listed in them.

11. Client Surveys
Customer surveys are a good way to keep up-to-date with customer requirements. Your URL should be in a prominent place on these surveys.

12. Giveaways & Premiums
These are good promotion tools and should always have your URL in a noticeable spot.

13. Address Stamps
Don’t forget to include the URL in the old fashioned address stamp.

14. Key Directories
A link from a directory helps you increase traffic. You should submit your URL to Yahoo! Directory (dir.yahoo.com) – you’ll have to pay for this service, the Open Directory Project (www.dmoz.com), which is free and About.com and Business.com that are also paid directories.

15. Trade Organizations and Specialized Directories
Specialized industry directories and trade associations that you may belong to are ideal places to list your URL even if it costs you a fee.

16. Direct Mail Pieces
Lastly, although this is snail mail, all pieces going to customers as well as to prospects should have the URL in a place where it is readily noticeable. There should be some call to action to get the reader to link to the URL.

These sixteen spots are some of the most effective places to market your web site and consequently your business. Now is the perfect time to review your business and put in place a 2011 web site strategy.

Marketing is the most important element of your overall business strategy and you need to invest heavily in it. You need to have a well crafted marketing strategy to keep business coming through the door especially in slow times.

photo credit: esocialmediashop

Here are the 10 most critical marketing steps you need to take to help your business succeed in 2011:

1. Build a 2011 annual marketing plan within your overall business plan.

2. Create a line item in your budget specifically for advertising and marketing.

3. Conduct market research to help identify new markets and better serve your established customers

4. Dedicate time every month to plan your next promotions and build a marketing events calendar.

5. Keep track of your competitors’ advertising and marketing and compare with your own.

6. Audit your marketing tactics regularly to gauge their effectiveness.

7. When you have to cut expenses from your budget, make marketing the last to go.

8. Attend several expos and professional events and pay attention to the PR and marketing efforts of others.

9. Use social media and your web site to increase customer collaboration.

10. Use news releases to keep your prospective customers informed about your products and services and other company news.

Remember that marketing is your only source of new sales, new customers and new opportunities to grow your business.

You’ve been in business for a while and want to increase your profits and grow the business. You’ve been stressing as to whether you should concentrate on lowering your cost or increasing your revenue. Perhaps you need to be looking at the business from a totally different vantage point. Here are three keys to growing and sustaining your business and they start with your customer.

photo credit: woodleywonderworks

1. Understand Your Favorite Customer
It doesn’t matter how good your product or service is or how good you or your business is. If you don’t understand who your favorite customers are and what pain they’re suffering, you will not be able to make them satisfied. There are five variables to be considered in understanding the favorite customer: their physical location, their demographics, how they think, how they behave and the words and phrases they use when discussing your business and your product/service.

2. Build a Marketing Message
The second principle for business success is that you need a marketing message that describes clearly and concisely what your product does for that favorite customer. This message must show the customer how you will take away the pain and why he/she will be happy and contented doing business with your company. This message must be in the words that the customer relates to, the same words he/she uses when they discuss your product/service.

3. Communicate This Message To The Customer
The third principle for business success is promoting your product or service. Now you know whom you’re targeting and what your message is and since you understand all of the variables concerning your favorite customer, you can figure out how to promote your product/service. This means either directly selling to the customer or advertising or indirect selling to get the message to him/her.

Remember that the most important principle for business success is strong customer satisfaction. This requires an emphasis on marketing that permeates the entire organization. Everyone must think about selling and satisfying customers all day long.

Also remember that the core purpose of a business is not to “make a profit,” rather it is to “create and keep a customer.” Profits are the result of cost effectively creating and keeping a sufficient number of customers.

Remember that you’re in business to solve your customers’ problems with a product or service solution that you are certain will satisfy their needs and take care of the pain they are suffering from. The emphasis here is on customer not product/service or your company.

photo credit: Mashroor Nitol

Everything you do should be geared toward your prospective customers:

• You should understand your favorite customer’s demographics, geographics, behavioristics, and psychographics.
• Your marketing message should be in words the customer uses and should clearly let the customer know that you are taking care of his/her problem.
• The media that you use to relay the marketing message should be the ones the customer uses, whether it be traditional media like newspapers, TV or radio or new media like your website/blog or social media sites.

Customers are always tuned to their favorite Radio Station WIIFM “What’s In It For Me” and the theme song you should be beaming to them should always be “You,You,You.”

If you are a small business and are being counseled by your web developer, your marketing or PR agency to ignore building a website and to put your initial web investment into building a Facebook page, you are getting the wrong advice.

photo credit: sepp0

Here are 5 solid reasons why you need your own website, owned and managed by your company:

1. Social Media sites like Facebook and Twitter and all the rest are being stormed upon by marketers who use the draw of 500 million users as an excuse to convince their clients that there is potential for increasing brand awareness and pushing out content to these poor unsuspecting potential customers. What should be happening is that companies should be spending their time listening to the pitter patter on the sites and trying to understand what the customers want as opposed to trying to push more stuff out at them.

2. Let us agree that it is fairly simple to build a Facebook page, but remember that your website is the equivalent of the reception room in your company headquarters or the storefront of your retail business. Would you build a great billboard to bring clients to your uncompleted or your as yet not started storefront. Yes people will notice your Facebook page like they’ll notice the billboard and you’ll possibly get great online visibility. They’ll still want to visit your website to validate your existence and you’ll be non-existent.

3. Facebook does give you an opportunity to listen to your audience and understand what is driving them. Build your website first, then go on Facebook and learn to listen to what your potential customers are saying. This gives you another reason to further analyze and understand who your favorite customer is and you can then use this information not only to enhance your marketing message but in the process, you’ll also improve the look and feel of your existing website.

4. Facebook is cluttered with look-e-loos who are buying nothing. They are individuals who are simply socializing with their family members or peers. Don’t get carried away by the 500 million number of users. Quality and not quantity should be the driving force here. Of course you might get more traffic than you would on your web site, but how good is the traffic for generating immediate revenue.

5. To suggest that company websites will soon be inside Facebook is to suggest that you give the everyday operation of your business to someone you don’t know, you haven’t vetted and someone who has no accountability. How long do you think you’ll stay in business. Also, some of the biggest web companies have disappeared or faded into the woodwork. This can happen to Facebook. If Facebook craters or they decide to change their model, what will happen to your website. Don’t forget when Google changed their algorithm what happened to the page rank of thousands of websites and the negative impact it had on revenue generation for all those owners.

Build your website and make it the foundation or home base of your web thrust. Then use social media sites like Facebook and Twitter and all the rest of them as outposts to spread your reach outwards. A good read on this topic is Why Your Website is More Valuable Than Facebook

If you want to build a sound relationship with your best customer, you need to focus on communicating well with him or her. There are 7 caveats to good communications and here they are:
1. Context
Who is the audience and what do you want them to do?

2. Content
What single question is your communication designed to answer? Do you have the answer already or do you need to research it and if so, what information do you need?

3. Components
Can the information you need be broken into modules and what is the most fundamental chunk of information?

4. Cuts
Can you be concise and to the point? People’s attention drifts quickly.

5. Composition
How will you engage your audience and keep their attention.

6. Contrast
Can you highlight the differences that are important by using contrasts?

7. Consistency
Your audience is easily distracted so can you keep things like font, color and spacing consistent?

Here is a good example of poor communications from the very top

Getting an early start in the CRM software industry may have helped Salesforce.com to become a leader in the Hosted CRM space, but another CRM solution provider is making a statement of their own, paving the way for some intense competition in the small to mid-size business sector.

Better known for its on premise desktop CRM software, Commence Corporation has been providing contact management, sales force automation and marketing campaign management solutions to small and mid-size companies for more than two decades. The company introduced a web-based hosted version of their popular CRM software and is gaining notoriety. With an outstanding track record for performance, reliability and world-class customer service Commence is a strong competitor and becoming a favorite among smaller businesses looking for a flexible hosted CRM solution with productivity tools that are easy to use.

“Commence web CRM has an impressive and unique user interface that makes the product very easy to use and navigate” says Gary Sanders of OK! Magazine. “The product’s Home Page or Dashboard is completely customizable by individual or job function. This allows each user to create a dashboard to the way they work. The value here is that you can place the functions you use most right on the home page, such as today’s calendar and activities, e-mail, sales opportunities, leads, reminders and even an interactive sales funnel. We hadn’t seen this in any other CRM solution. This flexibility enables people to conduct 90% of their daily activities without ever leaving the Home Page and has really improved productivity.”

See the whole story at Customers Find Good Value In Commence CRM

Want to make your small business look big? You can learn a lot from Monte Enbysk, a senior editor at Microsoft Office Live, who in his article in Entrepreneur, today, points out these ten things as the answer to what customers are looking for when they visit:

1. How your business is unique
Answer the question “Who are you?” as interestingly and compellingly (and honestly) as possible. This includes writing management bios that mention your expertise, years of experience and any unique attributes or details that may set you apart from others.

2. A clear sense of what your company offers
It’s incredible how many sites you visit and you’re not sure what the company offers. Make it a priority on your home page to provide at least general information about your products and/or services, with links to specifics on a Products page.

3. Contact information, including a phone number and physical location
This may seem like a no-brainer, but many companies are purposely vague about their location. Showing a physical location, even one that no one will ever visit, comforts a customer that your business is real and legitimate. Provide a phone number that maps to that location, rather than just an 800 number, she advises.

4. Third-party validation
This means customer testimonials, client lists, case studies, awards and recognition you’ve received, positive news clippings and the like. Potential customers indeed want to know who you do business with, and what current customers have to say about their experiences. Such items “forge the underpinnings of trust,” Porter says.

Client lists are especially important if your customers are businesses. If you’ve got some big-name customers, people like to see that. But make sure you get approval from those you list as clients.

5. Secure Socket Layer (SSL)
SSL is an encryption system that helps protect the privacy of data exchanged between a customer and a website. If you have an e-commerce site that takes credit card information, customers want to know that their sensitive data is encrypted. Get SSL if you don’t have it. If you do, let customers know that and about any other safeguards you proactively take.

6. Ease of use and navigation
If people can’t find it, they can’t buy it. Keep sites “crisp, clean, and easy to navigate,” and study traffic and usage patterns to adjust the sites based on what visitors are coming for. The ability to search a site is very important. Businesses should study their search data to see if there are trends and what to make front and center.

7. Clear guidance on your processes
Let customers know, step-by-step, important things such as how to order–and where to go and what to do should something happen out of the ordinary. Customers also want to know your shipping costs and procedures and how they can get status reports. Last but not least, customers want to know how you handle complaints and problems, return procedures and whether you have a money-back guarantee.

8. An ability to give feedback
Encourage feedback about your products and services, your ordering process and your site in general, by providing a feedback mechanism–either feedback forms or e-mail links. Not every small business prefers to offer this, in some cases because of resource constraints. You might get some good stories to feature on your site or in your blog.”

9. Clear calls to action
Customers want signs or buttons in order to act, be it “Buy now” or “Sign up for our newsletter” or “Click here for more information.” But many small-business sites don’t provide calls to action or they don’t present them clearly enough.

10. Special offers and personalization
By personalizing a sale with a special offer, incentive or coupon, small businesses can gain an edge on their bigger counterparts, Porter says. This can be as simple as a hand-written thank-you note, free gift wrap services or a special offer for repeat business.

For the complete article, please go to: 10 Things Customers Want on a Website

Small businesses can learn a lot from Allen Adamson, managing director of the New York office of Landor Associates, who in his article in Forbes, today, points out that strong brands are clear about what they represent. Strong brands are strong because people know what they stand for and how they fit into their lives. If you haven’t got a clue what a brand does, or what it can do for you, no amount of sales pitching will help. What will help, as companies like Cisco, BASF and Aflac now know, is not touting routers or polymers, or even quackers, but giving consumers a clear connection between promise and purpose. And, no, while brand builders can’t control Mother Nature, they can control what people think about their brands.

For the complete article please see CMOs: Make A Connection Between Brand Promise And Purpose

Steve Strauss posted this in his column in USA Today. I think that any small business that is not maximizing its Web presence is missing a golden opportunity.

First, let’s make sure we are on the same page. When discussing Web 2.0, what we are talking about is an era where websites are more interactive, engaging, and interesting than before. They are not static, as they were, say, 10 years ago, where all you could do was read. Instead, a Web 2.0 site is one where visitors can engage with you, your business, and your site by:

• Posting comments on your blog, or articles, or chatting in a forum.

• Re-tweeting your content, sharing it on Facebook, or Digging it.

• Watching a video, listening to a podcast, or participating in a webinar.

• Taking a quiz or responding to a poll.

The essence of Web 2.0 is that it is collaborative and interactive. By creating a site that engages and interacts with people, that makes them want to stick around (hence the term “sticky site”) you give people more of a chance to create a connection with your business.
For the complete article please see Maximizing your web presence is key to building your small business