This transcript has been simplified for easier reading.
It seems only fitting that since it’s November and we’re about 20 days away from Small Business Saturday, it’s time to look at for ourselves as business owners, ‘How do we formulate a plan and get it put together to be able to have a successful Small Business Saturday?’
So I want to talk about the focus of how your Small Business Saturday marketing should work and, Tara, you’d mentioned since most of your business is e-commerce, this should be really effective for you today since I advocate ideally for using digital marketing one because it’s extremely cost effective, but second, because it allows you to super specific target who your customers are so it’s not just throwing out money and budget about your business to everywhere you’re allowed to focus your efforts on the places that you’re going to find the people who purchase your products or services.
Consumers are seeking products or services near them, and this has been really interesting to see how that statistic has held up through the pandemic in 2020 and now this year. Prior to COVID, approximately 80% of searches on Google for products or services were from customers looking for things specifically in their area, so we knew that customers were looking to fulfill an immediate need. That seems to have increased through the last year.
Now, with that said, more people are willing to purchase products through a website and have them shipped as they were prior to COVID, but they are still trying to keep the priority on patronizing the businesses in their local community.
And at the same time, digital marketing allows you to engage with your existing customers. So, these are the people that are going to be most likely to purchase your products or services again after they’ve already had a great experience and at the same time digital marketing creates lasting brand recognition for those of us with a longer buying cycle.
For businesses it’s about being able to reinforce your message of what are you good at. Are you passionate about providing your products to your customers?
You have to consider the long-term brand recognition that you’re establishing for your business, not just for Small Business Saturday, but throughout the entire year. So, the first thing we’re going to talk about in digital online marketing here is your search engine directory listing.
How many of you have picked up your smartphone and searched for a product or service nearby?
There are primarily 3 search engines that all of those searches are accomplished on regardless of what platform you’re using.
Google is by far the number one provider of searches; Bing is second; and Apple maps for those of you who use an iPhone.
So, these are the three directories that we’re going to focus on now. It’s important to say that for Apple Maps, if you’re working out of your home and you don’t want to share your home address with people who are looking up your business online. Apple Maps just does not have an option for service area only without a published address.
So if you have a physical brick and mortar location that your customers can either visit; or a headquarters office that you don’t mind being found online, then yes, Apple Maps is for you and you should definitely fill out that profile listing for your business.
Next, we’ll talk about Bing, so Bing is the default search engine for Windows PC. If you’ve just purchased a brand-new Windows PC today and you used Microsoft Edge to browse the Internet, that means that you’re using Bing to conduct all of your searches, so make sure you’ve created your business listing there and that you’ve updated your business images, your contact information, any special hours that you have coming up.
If you’re going to be closed for Thanksgiving, make sure that you’ve entered in there specifically the holiday that your business hours are impacted. At the same time, for Small Business Saturday, if you’re opening early and staying open later, make sure you specify that as well, because both Bing and Google will tell the person viewing the search result if your business is open right now. A good example of that is if you’re trying to find something at a local, like a Hardware store, and you pull up your listings for hardware stores in the area. If they’re getting ready to close soon, it’ll actually tell you ‘closes in 25 minutes or 30 minutes’. Make sure that if your business hours are different from your regular scheduled hours, that you observe that you’re marking it in there.
Now moving on to Google, which is by far the largest of the three search engines we’re talking about here, there are a lot of things to unpack inside of that.
Just like Apple and Bing, Google offers a business listing. Google allows you to take it a step further and plug a lot of actions into it. So, in addition to being able to specify the standard information, your phone number, your website and email address, what your business hours are, any special hours.
You can also add tags for the products or services that you provide. You could also add action links, so if you take appointments online so Jeanette since as a tax preparer your customers are able to schedule an appointment through your website, you can plug that link right into your Google business listing and on the front end what that shows the customer looking at there.
Google search result is they can click book appointment and it’ll take them exactly to where you have the online calendar set up for them. You can also replicate this action for restaurants, so if you want customers to be able to place an order for pick up or delivery through your Google listing, you can specify that in there. You can also add images and videos of your business so as human beings we are visual people we love to see what the product or service looks like when we’re searching for a local restaurant, we want to see pictures of the delicious food that that business can provide, so make sure that you’re adding images of your products, your services, so make sure that you’re sharing out images of those products anywhere that you could stage it into the real life that your customers are likely to be in.
For example, a social gathering since we’re coming into the holiday party season, so that would be a good opportunity. Take a snapshot of your products with somebody enjoying themselves in that type of environment, just ways to help the customer visualize how your products and services are going to work.
It is important to note all three search engines do require verification in some way, shape, or form. So for example, Google and Bing will send you a postcard in the mail that you have to click with a verified code. If your business isn’t already on Google and Bing today, you need to start it immediately because it takes about five days to get the postcard in the mail. Your business listing will not be visible until you have completed that verification process.
Now, for Apple Maps, it’s a little different. They can do text or phone verification in most cases and not always subject to receiving a postcard in the mail, their community seems a lot more admin moderated, So what that means is once you submit your listing to Apple, it’s likely going to end up in an Apple employee queue to look and compare and make sure that that is a legitimate listing that’s been added there.
So first thing all around, make sure your directory listings are up to date. Make sure your holiday hours are added in there. Make sure that the next step for your customers is set up on Google and make sure that you are checking that on a regular basis and keeping it updated.
So next, let’s talk about your website so your website is the 2nd place that your prospective customers are likely to land, assuming they’ve searched for your products or services or your business name, or they found you on social media, which we’ll talk about in our next slide here in just a moment, your goal for.
All of those outreach activities is to bring the customer into your website, assuming it’s not to just get them directly in the door of your business. So, those of you without a brick-and-mortar location, the website really is that next step for all of your customers.
Your website has to have SSL (Secure Socket Layer). It is an encryption protocol that keeps your visitors information protected if they are, for example, making a purchase through your website or filling out a contact form it secures that information from the point of entry for the visitor all the way to you receiving it in the place that you’ve designated it.
Google does Ding websites that do not have SSL now. Earlier this year, Google Chrome by default started warning people when a website was not secure. You’d get that red padlock on the screen telling you the site was insecure. So, if you’ve ever seen that screen, that’s likely what’s happened is that your browser, by default is telling you now when a website is not secure.
Now, how do you recognize if a website is secure? The easiest way to look in the address bar if you see HTTPS, the website is secure. For most web browsers, you’ll also see something to the effect of a padlock, and if you hover over it or click on it, it would tell you secured and it will give you some more information about the security settings for that website.
If you are accepting payment for your products or services through your website, you have to have an SSL for your website. Most payment processors now will not function on a website that is not secure.
Next, make sure you’ve connected your website to Google Analytics for traffic reporting, so it’s one thing to look at how many people are visiting your website. It’s great to see that number continue to grow as you promote your website in more and more places.
But what are those visitors doing when they get to your website? Are they actually looking at one page and then moving on to the next page and completing the process of making a purchase or scheduling an appointment? Or are they just looking at one page and leaving without effective analytics for your website?
You have no way to understand that without having the data, and the more that you look at your analytics and study it and look at how that customer journey goes, you could continue to improve your website in a way that speaks to that visitor.
They arrive at your homepage, where do they go next? How can you make your website more intuitive so that it actually takes the visitor through that journey from prospect to customer?
Next, if you sell products, you have to sell them online. This one is pretty self-explanatory. Prior to COVID, online selling was an important component for small businesses to be able to reach a larger audience. But even now, today here in our local community, you’re still seeing a lot more people who could just easily walk into a business and purchase those products doing so through the website.
There’s a couple of other advantages to talk about here to why selling online is important. You only have specific hours that you could work. Everybody needs to eat, sleep, spend time with family, your website doesn’t. It’s always there. Customers can always make a purchase and that purchase could then be waiting for you to fulfill when you get back into the office the next morning.
That is an important thing to point out there, it has no established business hours. You’re allowing your customers to buy on their terms. And let’s be honest, who here has ever sat online at midnight and purchased something?
It’s just easy to do sometimes. Maybe that’s the only time of day that you have to yourself to go and do your shopping. You have to really put yourself in the shoes of who your customers are and where they are in time, in place, and emotional mindset when they go to make the purchase. So, you have to have your products available on your website.
Next, make sure your website is optimized for fast loading, so if you are using a lot of images and video on your website, you need to have a content distribution network configured. For example, jetpack.
If you’re using WordPress, what that does is those images technically, load on a separate server than the server of your website. The easiest way for anyone to recognize it without any real technical understanding is that if as you Scroll down the page, you’ll see images load as you scroll. Most content distribution networks will serve images as the customers are viewing them. The text of the website loads pretty quick and the images follow shortly after that say usual pretty good sign that that website is using some kind of content distribution.
It’s especially important for those of you selling products on your website where each product may have five or more images just to show all of the cool things about that product, so make sure that you’re using some kind of content distribution and that your web hosting has enough resources to be able to accommodate many people visiting your website at the same time.
So I briefly mentioned a few moments ago before we talked about the website why we need to focus on bringing people into it, social media is one of those additional ways that we’re driving traffic into our website.
When it comes to looking at which social media networks you should be participating in, you should look at the two to three that have the highest saturation of your ideal prospect. Great example here, Instagram is especially popular with younger female consumers, not necessarily those over 40 or 50.
Facebook, for example, is the highest saturation of just about all consumer groups, so they have the majority of everybody from. Age is 18 all the way through 65.
LinkedIn is an exceptional network for those trying to build their professional career. You’ll see a lot of people with above average education above average income. Things like that.
So, look at the demographics of each social media network out there and just choose the two to three. that have the most of your ideal prospects.
I’ll throw another example out there, Pinterest. Pinterest is an exceptional social media network for product focused and art centered businesses. Because Pinterest’s format is images, it allows users to pin those things to their own boards. It is just an excellent way to keep your content out there in front of people, pretty much indefinitely.
Also, for those two to three social media networks that you’re on, make sure that you have the same username on all of them. So, for example, facebook.com/inspiresmallbiz twitter.com/inspiresmallbiz.
Anywhere that you’re online, make sure that you have the same username. It will make it much cleaner to be able to advertise your social media networks on something like a business card, because then you could use something like the at symbol and then your username rather than having to duplicate it for each network.
Also by default Facebook’s username system is really messy. You’ll get one word dash, second word dash, third word, dash weird sequence of numbers. Nobody is going to remember that URL.
Make sure when you get your profile set up on Facebook that you choose your username right away, but make sure that that same username is available on every network that you are on before you start changing it so it just makes it a lot easier to promote your social media.
Make sure that your contact information and bio and your graphics are consistent across every platform for, for example, here YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, they all have cover images, but none of them are the same dimensions. They all have their own kind of crazy size that is an ideal fit for each of those networks. So, this is where it’s really worth a little bit of time in graphic design to make sure that you’re designing an image that meets those specs criteria. Let’s say for example, if you’ve put your logo in the cover image that you’re using, if you’re using the correct specs of that image, it means that your logo will show up exactly where you want it once it’s loaded to your profile.
Now a good example of how to do that is YouTube. YouTube has by far the largest cover image size specs of any of the networks out there. However, most people are always only going to see about the middle 5 to 10% of the image, so you want to make sure that when you sit down to create that image that if you’re putting your logo in there so that it looks the same as each profile.
Next you can look at automating your content. Once your information is there and your graphics are straightened out, you can connect on an automation app such as Hootsuite, If This Ten That (IFTTT) or SocialPilot so that you can schedule your content well in advance, so come Wednesday afternoon at 2:00 PM when your customers are active on social media, you’re not having to drop everything and go share a post to them. You could sit down at a time that fits your calendar and put those posts in there to post at the time you want them to go out later.
Other good examples of automation is if your website is built on WordPress and you blog frequently, you can hook that up to automatically share your blog posts out as well, which takes an additional few minutes out of your day that you don’t have to give to putting your content out there.
So next, let’s talk about email marketing. Email marketing is by far the highest return on investment of just about any of the digital marketing methods out there. Yes, anyone could pay for Google ads or Facebook ads, but there’s really no guarantee that you’re actually building any kind of meaningful connection with visitors. By the time you have their email address, they’re either already a customer or they’re well on their way to becoming a customer.
You have to use email to keep your existing customers coming back and you can do that by sharing news updates and special offers because returning customers are always the easiest group that you’re going to have to market to. They have a real-life experience of how good your product or service is, how you’re going to provide them exceptional service to make sure that they leave your business happy, so they’re the easiest group to convince to come back and purchase from you again.
And rather than having to spend budget on marketing to win them over again, you could use a slight incentive to bring them back sooner. For example, a birthday offer that could provide a special discount to them, letting people know today that your Small Business Saturday offer is coming up if you haven’t seen a regular customer in a while, you can send them a we miss you discount.
Just ways that can bring those people back to your business because they’ve already completed that journey once, there’s always that potential to get them to do it again.
Next, you want to make sure that your email marketing and your website are connected to one another. The reason you want to do that is to make sure that you’re thanking your customers for purchasing your products and asking them for reviews.
Once they purchase the product, set it up to send an immediate thank you; and then about two weeks later send an additional email asking them to review the product, because now they’ve hopefully received it and have had enough time to sit down and get to know the product. Customers aren’t likely to leave a review unless you ask them, so make sure you’re asking people who have had a good experience to leave that review.
Never, ever, under any circumstances buy emails. It’s just really, really bad ethics, and at the same time there’s no guarantee one that those emails are even any good coming out the gate. I’ll share a story with you. I have a client who a few years ago purchased 10,000 emails from a company that says they sell email lists. We tested their campaign. 65% of those emails were crap out of the gate. They bounced. They did not go anywhere.
Sending emails to addresses that did not signup for your list will get your domain flagged with all the email providers as spam. So, it’s just easier to not spend the money on buying lists. It’s never going to result in a positive move for your business. There’s just nothing to accomplish with it.
If you’re determined to spend money on email marketing, I just highly recommend paying for an advanced plan of one of the established email marketing providers, for example, MailChimp.
If you’re just getting started, it would allow you some Additional flexibility which would allow you to build more intelligent campaigns to the emails from people that you know and have done business with you, or have expressed interest. That’s not to say that you attend a network event and you meet some really cool people if you ask them Is it OK if I put you in my email list and they tell you yes, then absolutely put their email address in it because it’s someone that you’ve met that you’ve connected with and they’re going to recognize your name when they see it pop up in their inbox.
Once your email domain or email address gets flagged as spam by the email providers, it’s almost impossible to get it out of that hole. Gmail, Hotmail, AOL and Yahoo all of them keep a database because they have millions of accounts hosted there of patterns of which email addresses are sending tons of email to their customers.
If they notice that you’re sending a large quantity of emails to a lot of addresses that they don’t frequently see other communication with, they’re more likely to flag it as spam, and that’s how you get your message lost in someone promotions folder or just to subscribe, a subscriber never becomes active, that might be why.
And next you have to respect every single unsubscribe request that you get. You can actually get in a lot of trouble legally if you do not. Under U.S. law, every email that you send out through an email marketing system must include your business name, your address and an unsubscribe link.
That unsubscribe link if you’re using MailChimp, Constant Contact or any of the other platforms takes care of that pretty well for you out of the box. you put the link in the email and the software is able to register an email address is opted out and it will prevent you from sending further email messages to that person. Just make sure that when you switch over from one platform to another, so let’s say two years from now you decide to change which email marketing service you’re using, make sure that you keep those unsubscribed emails.
So many people worry that when contacts unsubscribe from their email lists that their email marketing just isn’t working, think of it this way, they’ve just given you a definitive answer. So that means that you can spend your time, energy, efforts and future ideas on people who are still interested in your products. An unsubscribed email contact is the modern-day equivalent to cold calling a contact them, declining your offer of products or services. It just means move on to the next person. Don’t let it be personal against yourself for having someone unsubscribed, it just means they gave you a definitive answer that you no longer have to waste your efforts.
So next, let’s talk about how to get your Small Business Saturday offer out there early. We’ve talked about the digital components for promoting your business, so I want to point out most large retailers leak their Holiday offers out early in November.We’re going to start seeing a lot of junk hit our mailboxes. Both the USPS and our email about who’s offering the best price on a TV, a blender or a microwave this year, so why can’t your business do the same thing for the products or services you provide?
You have to plan in advance to know what your sale is going to be so you can put the word out early. That allows you to stay on top of mind because people are starting to look at now who they’re buying what for this holiday season.
So if you put the word out early that your products or services are going to be at an incredible price for Small Business Saturday, that means they could put it in their list and it’s one of the few times in the year that the average customer really does any long-term strategy with their shopping plans.
They have a plan to they know who they’re buying, what for and come the day that the sales start, they’re going to immediately take action on it so, make sure that you’re using every available channel to you, your email, your social, your online directory listings, and your website to advertise what those offers are and when it begins now.
It’s also important to say that Small Business Saturday is just one day but that doesn’t mean that you can’t start your special even earlier than that if you wanted to, you could start Black Friday. You could start Thanksgiving Day. It is completely up to you as the owner of your business, to determine when that sale starts.
Now, one case for starting your Small Business Saturday sale early is that it allows you to compete with the larger retailers that typically begin their promotions on Friday or Thanksgiving Day.
And once again, make sure you’re giving your best customers the earliest access to it, so the people that buy from your business over and over again make sure that they know first before anyone else what that offer is, and even maybe a narrow window that they could claim it before the rest of the general public.
That creates an element of exclusivity between the customer and your business, which helps form an even stronger bond that customer has with your brand, which will continue to build into more sales over time.
Since business is always about the long term game, it’s not just about what you can do for your customers today, it’s how can you continue to add value for them over a long period of time.
If you sell gift cards, this is the best time of year to advertise it, because maybe the person buying the gift doesn’t know the exact taste of the person they’re buying the gift for, but they know that they would love your product. So if you sell gift cards, make sure you’re advertising it.
So, let’s talk about the holidays that are coming up here. This is a quick rundown of the 2021 holiday shopping season.
- Thanksgiving is November 25th
- Black Friday is November 26th
- Small Business Saturday is November 27th
- Cyber Monday is November 29th
- Giving Tuesday is November 30th
- Christmas Eve is Friday, December 24th
It is by no means a complete list of all the holidays going on, so many of the practiced religions in the United States have holidays coming up through the next couple of months, so look at those as well, especially if you notice that you have a majority or a large percentage of your customers who observe it, because that’s also an opportunity for you there to get involved and just make them feel like you’re marketing directly to them.
So with that, if you’re confused about how to build your small business strategy for the holiday shopping season, schedule a free 30 minute strategy call to hash out what you should offer for Small Business Saturday, as well as putting a framework together on how you can get that message out there to your customers. Click here to schedule.
