What’s the most effective advertising for small businesses?

Well, that depends on the small business. We focus a lot on business owners or people who have several employees, so that’s who we’re going to chat about.

most effective advertising for small businesses

Honestly, it’s nothing new. The most effective advertising for small businesses is simply doing a fantastic job.

Really?

Yes.

What do you do? What do you do really well? What do you do really well that makes people come home after buying your product or receiving your service that makes them tell their friend/spouse/insert someone important here?

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Google Analytics

If you haven’t started thinking about analytics yet, check out our intro to online analytics for small businesses. Once you understand what analytics are and why you need them, we can get started on how to use them for your business. 

More Isn’t Merrier

The beauty of online marketing is that you can measure almost anything. However, just because you can measure everything doesn’t mean you should. Interpreting the results from your analytics is time consuming, and time is your most important resource!

There are lots of tools available to measure analytics for small businesses – for your website or blog we recommend using Google Analytics, which is free. To help you get started, we’ve put together a quick overview of 2 analytics to measure for each part of your inbound marketing campaign. This isn’t a complete list, however it’s a great overview to get you started. [Read more…]

This is the moment we’ve all been waiting for…graduation! Before I make a speech and get all teary, I want to take a minute and make sure we remember what we’ve learned about getting customers online.

What Have We Learned?

Well, what have you learned? Our goal is to make it easier for you to market yourself online by giving you the knowledge on what to do and how to get started. After reading our 12 Step Guide To Getting Customers Online, do you feel prepared to tackle the online marketing world? Do you know where to start? And how to maximize your time to get better results? We sure hope so.

Quick Recap For Getting Customers Online

Time is your biggest asset, so let’s have a quick recap on how to start doing online marketing:

1. Set up your website or blog and make sure it’s optimized for mobile device
2. Learn how to help people find you online using SEO for small businesses
3. Find out which words you want to rank for in Google by doing your keyword research
4. Discover how to blog as a small business, including 6 tricks to make your posts more enticing
5. Learn how to use internal, inbound and outbound links to grow your online presence
6. Brush up on the best ways to use social media, including Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest
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It’s important to create content and build relationships with customers. But it doesn’t stop there. To learn what’s working and what to improve you need to measure what you’re doing. How? Well, by using  business analytics of course! 

Why Should I Use Business Analytics?

Business analytics help fine-tune your online marketing campaign. They allow you to track the progress of every aspect of your inbound marketing efforts. By looking at the results you can discover what’s working, what isn’t and how you can improve.

Get More By Measuring 

To learn how successful your marketing efforts are, you measure your return on investment, or “ROI.” But this isn’t easy when you use traditional marketing – it’s difficult to measure how many people see your campaign, how many take action based on that campaign and how many actually become customers.

Let’s say you put up a poster at a bus station for a promotion about your yoga studio. How will you know if it works? And by that I mean, how will you measure the number of people who see your promotion? And who they are? And if they become customers.  It’s difficult to know who saw your poster, who shared the story and who attended your yoga classes because of that poster.  [Read more…]

So, you’ve learned how to use social the newest social media darling for your business in Step 9, and how to collect emails through your website and blog in Step 4, now it’s time to focus on the heart of inbound marketing: building relationships with people. A great way to do this is via email – you may have heard people call this “lead nurturing via email campaigns” which is a fancy way of saying, “getting to know someone so they build trust with you overtime.” So let’s get started.

Why Should I Use Emails For My Business?

Email is one of the most powerful ways to communicate with your customers. While social media is a great tool to share your message to the world, you have little control over who sees your messages, and it’s more difficult to adapt your message to different people. When you use email for business, you can target specific people on your email list based on a variety of factors, including when they signed up, their interests and if they’re customers yet. 

Essentially, “an email campaign” or “using emails for business” means that you send emails to people that have signed up on your site. The goal is to build relationships with potential clients – they’ve already asked to learn more, so now you can relax and chat with them over time. [Read more…]

You’ve learned how to start using Facebook for your business in Step 7. Now it’s time to check out the next social media network that you can use to grow your business – Twitter.

What’s Twitter All About? 

Twitter is a fast paced social media channel – it’s a conversation that never stops. It’s the quickest way to hear what’s going with your customers, as people tweet constantly about what they’re doing. Companies are using Twitter to answer questions, give promotions and connect with customers at events, as well as share company news, recent blogs posts and Facebook updates.

The main goal is to build relationships with people, and turn them into fans. Before you start using Twitter for your business, check out these steps to get the most out of this channel:

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We’re excited to say that Small Businesses trumped Dragons’ Den on Friday to cap off Vancouver’s Social Media Week! Chris and I presented Spokal on a live stage in CBC’s Studio 40 to some amazing entrepreneurs, including Den favourites’ Bruce Croxon (Founder of Lavalife) and Jim Treliving (True Creator of Boston Pizza), and honorary Vancouver Dragon Danny Robinson (Founder of Perch and Strutta).

Spokal was in good company. Among the 3 finalists were Kassandra and her partner Adam with a company that’s reinventing how people choose universities, and Patrick Harris, who’s trying to shake up the public transit advertising space. The event started with lessons from Bruce – “The road less traveled isn’t easy” – and Jim – “If you’re not using social media for your business now, you might never catch up,” followed by pitches from the teams.

Spokal Wins Dragons’ Den Summit!

After some deliberation, the Dragon’s awarded Spokal as the winner of the Dragon Summit, and we were presented a golden ticket to skip the audition line and appear on the Season 8 – a fun event to look forward to! Socialized does a good recap of the Dragon Summit, as seen on Twitter, and Maura (Founder of Strutta) did an interview with Guest Dragon Danny on what it was like to be a Dragon for the day. But since we all love looking behind the scenes, we thought we’d share a little secret with you… [Read more…]