By Julee Klein, Marketing Consultant & President
10 Tips for Providing a Positive User Experience on Your Small Business Website
Have you ever gone into a brick-and-mortar store and been frustrated by the experience? Maybe the aisles were too narrow or the line at the checkstand was too long. Or perhaps the music was too loud or the staff just unhelpful. As shoppers, we understand that these negative customer experiences impact sales. But as small businesses are we looking at our web presence in the same light? If not, we should and here's why.
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By Julee Klein, Marketing Consultant & President
Turns out blog posts are good for business.
Last year's statistics on blogging are pretty compelling. Blog posts continue to be among the top performing web pages for both business-to-business (B2B) companies and those businesses that target consumers (B2C).
Don't take our word for it. Review the blogging statistics infographic from Gate 39 Media, a financial services marketing and technology agency . It's worth a look. And be sure to review the additional resources and tips below the infographic on how to get your small business blog started.
By Julee Klein, Marketing Consultant & President Looking for opportunities to connect with your email subscribers in February 2019?According to Marketing Sherpa, 61 percent of email subscribers would like to receive promotional emails every week, and 38 percent would like to receive them more frequently. Although we question if those statistics should be applied to every industry, we do think that small business marketers should be communicating with their customers and subscribers at least once per month. By emailing your communities once a month you'll stay top-of-mind, be able to communicate special offers and sales, and better nurture your customer relationships. Here are some ideas from Constant Contact on how to spread the love all month long:
By Julee Klein, Marketing Consultant & President What do you do if your social following has plateaued or dropped off?We have a lot of empathy for our small business clients who are struggling to make an impact on social media. It can be a challenge to devote time and resources to managing your social channels. It can be even harder to continue to tread that social water if you're not seeing results in the way of an increase in followers or engagements. But if your primary focus on social media is worrying about content ideas and what to post, you may be missing out on opportunities to engage your followers and grow your communities. Here are six things you should be doing on social media besides posting your own content to help you be more a efficient and effective social media marketer:
By Julee Klein, Marketing Consultant & President
How to Raise Prices without Losing Customers
If you've been in business for awhile, eventually you face the reality that at some point in time you will need to raise your prices. Usually external forces are at play - either your suppliers have raised theirs or other costs of doing business have increased. Clearly, this is not the most pleasant aspect of small business ownership, but a reality nonetheless.
So how do you go about raising your prices without risking sales volume and loyal customers? ValPak offers some valuable insights and data points to consider:
By Julee Klein, Marketing Consultant & President
3 Amazing (and Free) Small Business Marketing Automations
Artificial intelligence and marketing automations are not just for enterprise and Fortune 500 companies. There are several time- and cost-saving applications that can help small businesses run more efficiently and scale some of their marketing operations.
While not a complete list by any stretch, here’s a look at our three favorite, free, marketing automation “hacks” for small business owners.
By Julee Klein, Marketing Consultant & President
The Impact of Halloween on Local Small Business Retailers
Halloween has always been great for small business and larger retailers and this year is will be scarily similar. Americans plan to spend $87 on average per person on the holiday according to the National Retail Federation. The organization also claims that Americans are expected to spend $9.0 billion in total, slightly down on last year's $9.1 billion. And according to Statista, "45 percent of Americans will shop at a discount store this year while just under a quarter will make their Halloween purchases online. When it comes to how people will celebrate, 70 percent will hand out candy, 50 percent will decorate and 48 percent will dress in costume."
Take a look at Halloween shopping stats presented as fun-sized eye-candy by Statista:
By Julee Klein, Marketing Consultant & President Use this list of November holidays, themes, ideas, and stats to inspire your email marketing campaigns all month long.We're finding that a lot of small business owners are inclined to wait until after Thanksgiving to really promote their holiday activities and events. But did you know that each year about 40 percent of consumers begin their holiday shopping before Halloween.? Yes! And according to the National Retail Federation, this number is growing each year. And likewise, this same retail organization reports that "20 to 40 percent of all sales for small and mid-sized retailers take place within the last two months of the year."
Guest post by Aljaz Fajmut, Nightwatch CEO 5 Reasons Why Your Cross-Channel Promotion is FailingCross-channel promotion has become pretty important. It’s totally changed the game when it comes to finding and reaching new customers, and it lets us strengthen our presence and engage with multiple communities.
The problem is that implementing an effective cross-channel promotional campaign isn’t easy. The good news is that, once you know what mistakes you’re making, rectifying them and getting back on track is easy. Let’s take a look at why your cross-channel promotion is failing — and what you need to do fix it.
By Julee Klein, Marketing Consultant & President
55 SEO Statistics About Small-Business Websites
We see it alot. The small business with a neglected web presence where updates to content on the site are made from time-to-time to include new products or services, or add or remove a team member, but a real content audit and review for search engine optimization (SEO) is rarely considered. Sadly, SEO is probably the single most important marketing tactic small businesses can adopt. If you're a small business serving your local community, wouldn't you want to show up as a top result when potential new customers are looking for your products or services online?
If you're not yet convinced that SEO is worth the investment of time and budget, consider this slew of stats collected by the folks at Milkwhale: |
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