Create Your Holiday Online Review Strategy Now

What? Don’t look at me like that. I know it’s not even fully mid-October yet, but do you know what’s right around the corner? Everything! Halloween is just a couple weeks away and serves as the warning shot for the official holiday season. Naturally, as savvy business owners, you want to make sure you’re taking full advantage of the madness that’s about to hit. And that means creating a holiday review strategy that will let you prime your reviews and testimonials for 2012.

Things are about to get super busy, right? Why not put the increased traffic and eyeballs to good use and ramp up your customer reviews and testimonials for 2012?

Here are a few suggestions to help you.

1. Create Holiday Incentives

If you’re not already in the habit of providing incentives to customers who offer you site testimonials or reviews, start now. No, you can’t promise someone a discount if they leave you a positive review on Yelp, but you can throw a comment card in with their purchase and offer a discount or promotional item for filling it out and bringing it back completed. Or, if the incentive part makes you nervous, just add in a note saying you’d appreciate it if they left their feedback for your business on whatever online review site you’re trying to promote. Sure, there’s the potential that they’ll leave a negative review, but it’s more likely that they won’t. And if they do, then you have an opportunity to fix it that you didn’t have before.

2. Conquer Mobile

eMarketer recently referenced a survey performed by PayPal and Ipsos to see what percentage of people planned to use a mobile device (smartphone or tablet) to make a holiday purchase this year. According to their results, 46 percent of users said they would.

That represents a huge increase from the 2010 ForeSee survey which had that number at just 17 percent. As a small business owner, this is something you must consider. It means you want to make it as easy as possible for consumers to make a mobile commerce purchase, but it also means you want to be encouraging customers to leave FourSquare tips, to check in on their devices, to leave reviews on Yelp while they’re still in your store, etc. Not only do you want to capture the people who are already making mobile purchases at your business, but you want to convert the ones still on the fence, as well.

3. Hold a Holiday Event

It’s party season. Why not take advantage of that and hold an in-store get-together where you celebrate your success over the past year, while also providing customers a great opportunity to go public with their love of your company? You can promote the event as a holiday thank-you to your loyal customers and let them know they may also be featured in promotional materials for your website. Once they’re there, ask for their feedback, take photos, get video interviews and ask for permission to use it on your website or in promotional materials. Let them know you’re only asking them because of how much you value them as customers. You may be surprised how eager they are to support your brand.

4. Hold a “Why Do You Love Us?” Contest

Contest marketing is a great way to build some brand buzz and fill the testimonial reservoir by creating an incentive for participation. Again, you can’t give customers free stuff in exchange for good reviews, but you can take advantage of the season’s playfulness by asking customers to participate in some kind of brand-related challenge. Maybe it’s a video contest where you ask customers to explain what they love most about your brand or to submit the best photo of your product in use. Not only are you allowing people to share their love for your brand, but you also get some great content to put on your site and add to your testimonials.

5. Ask

I know it sounds awful, but sometimes the best review strategy of all is simply finding new ways to make asking for a review part of your sales process. Take inventory of everything you’re doing to solicit customer reviews and identify holes. Some places you should be asking but maybe aren’t include:

• Company newsletters
• At the register
• In shipping orders
• On your blog

As business owners, we’re sometimes leery of asking customers to leave reviews because it feels like solicitation. We must remind ourselves that leaving reviews isn’t yet a natural act for most people. And until it is, we need to remind people to do it.

Above are just a few ways small business owners can ramp up their online review process during the holiday season. Will you make reviews a priority this year?

About the Author

Lisa Barone is Co-Founder and Chief Branding Officer at Outspoken Media, Inc., an SEO consulting firm that specializes in providing clients with online reputation management, social media services, and other Internet services.

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Cut Through the Hype: How to Create a Successful Marketing Plan

It’s easy to get overwhelmed by the clutter of new tools and information available to small business marketers today. I’m sure at some point a small business will hear the following, whether at a conference, on a webinar or in a white paper:

• “You should blog!”
• “Are you on Twitter?”
• “What’s your SEO and PPC strategy?”
• “Are you doing email marketing?”
• “You need a Facebook fan page!”
• “Have you started automating your marketing and sales funnel?”

Cutting through all the hype to see what really works for your small business can be a challenge. When you focus all your effort on tools and tactics but don’t have a clear strategy behind your actions, some serious holes in your marketing and sales funnel will start to surface in three main areas. For example:

1. Lost traffic: How much traffic came to your website today and left without giving you their information? How will you ever follow up? This is a painful reality for many small businesses. Think of how much revenue your business is missing out on because you’re not capturing the traffic you spend big bucks to get.

2. Lost leads: Did you know only 10 percent of leads are ready to buy now? What about the warm and cold leads? More often than not, they get lost in the shuffle and are eventually forgotten forever. Many small businesses would love to follow up on every lead, but with limited resources, that can be a challenge. So, the goal is to close the leads that are hot now in order to drive immediate sales and to have a nurturing system in place for not-ready-to-buy-yet leads.

3. Lost customers: If customers feel indifferent about your product or service, they’re more likely to leave you for the competition. You pay all this money to get customers just so they can leave you for the competition down the road. Ouch!

If you’re experiencing any of the pains I describe above, than keep reading to discover the remedy.

Make a Plan

Let’s start by identifying your business goals. Next, map out what your current customer lifecycle looks like, and what your “perfect” customer lifecycle looks like. I find almost every small business can break its lifecycle into seven stages.

1. Attract Traffic
2. Capture Leads
3. Nurture Prospects
4. Convert Sales
5. Deliver and Satisfy
6. Upsell Customers
7. Get Referrals

Call me old school, but I find it helpful if the business maps these seven stages out on a whiteboard. Start filling in the tools and tactics your business is using to push leads through to the next stage. In following this process, the inefficiencies in your system will become glaringly obvious. You’ll start to see where you’re losing leads and sales, when you’re missing out on referrals or even worse, at what point your customers are leaving you for the competition.

Now that the framework is in place, I want to give you some foolproof strategies you can use in these seven stages.

Attracting Traffic Strategies

Putting up a website doesn’t create traffic.  You need to become a content machine. Write blog posts, create white papers, post videos and host webinars — and give them all away. The strategy here is to pull leads into your funnel with highly valuable content.

Don’t underestimate the power of social media. Monitor what people are saying about your brand or industry and use it as an opportunity to engage in meaningful discussions. Also, share your content on your social channels.

If you have a network of partners or brand advocates, reward them for referring business your way.

Lastly, have a SEO and PPC strategy in place so when people search online for your type of business, they find you easily.

Lead Capture Strategies

I’m going to say this once and only once: “Sign up for my monthly newsletter” is not a lead capture strategy—at least not an effective one. Capturing leads goes hand-and-hand with becoming a content machine. Give away free reports or a video series that is packed with education. You can try running a contest or hosting an online event like a webinar as well. Just make sure you are getting permission from customers to follow up. Set expectations right from the beginning on what you’ll be sending them and get them to opt-in so they don’t feel bombarded.

Lead Nurture Strategies

Segment your follow-up based on the behaviors and interests of your leads. For example, I suggest segmenting your content into three groups: new leads, hot leads and cold leads. You should also be paying close attention to how you got the lead in the first place. Did they watch a webinar on “Copywriting Tips for Small Businesses” or did they sign up for a demo or consultation? The content you provide to these three audiences is likely going to be very different because the prospects are at different stages of the buying cycle.

Sales Conversion Strategies

As a small business with limited time and resources, relying solely on your sales team can sometimes be a death sentence. Try automating some of your prospect follow-up. By doing so, you are able to monitor their level of interest by looking at behaviors like email open rates, report downloads and other interactions. You know that someone who has opened every email, watched every webinar and requested a free consultation is probably a prospect that’s ready to be handed off to sales to close the deal. Automating some of the communications helps ensure the quality of leads going to sales is high, resulting in better and quicker conversions.

Upsell and Referral Strategies

Small businesses are guilty of basking in the success of closing the sale and overlooking the fact that there are huge opportunities to upsell and get referrals. Here are a few different upsell strategies:

• Checkout upsell
• Post-purchase upsell
• Product-specific upsell
• Product-specific cross-sell

You’ve invested time and money in converting leads into customers and wowing your customers with your service. Now ask for referrals! Give them a free product or a discount for referring a friend. We all know some of the best leads can come from referrals.

If you follow even some of the tips in this article, I have no doubt that you can create a strategic marketing plan that cuts through the clutter and delivers the results you want to achieve.  Here are a few extra tips for creating a small business marketing plan from a previously recorded webinar.  It’s a valuable resource for getting results from your plan in 3 simple steps.

About the Author

Tyler Garns, Director of Marketing for Infusionsoft, has over 10 years of experience in the field and is a recognized expert in Internet marketing. Tyler focuses on building the Infusionsoft brand via marketing, communications and social media. Tyler blogs at the Infusionsoft Blog.

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Create Hollywood-Level Videos With Avid Studio: A Review

In late 2010, there were more than 3.7 billion searches on YouTube, which is widely regarded as the second largest search engine on the planet (and is owned by the largest). This should put video high on your small business marketing list, and this review of Avid Studio can help you create a professional video.

With today’s top quality and affordable video cameras, or even a Flip cam or the one on your iPhone, you can capture decent video footage and turn it into a marketing piece for your company. Last year I wrote about Avid’s Pinnacle Studio product line and how easy it is to use. I was already a Pinnacle Studio user and the company gave me a demo and sent me a review copy for this post.

This review is for a business owner who is especially creative or has a team of people who want to create more sophisticated videos.  Avid Studio is a Hollywood-level production tool, but with a fairly intuitive dashboard built for high-end home use. Can you get by with a lower-level package? Absolutely. But if you have wanted to do more in your small business video work and create a movie-quality experience, then you’ll want to take a close look at Avid Studio.

If you are already producing videos and need help optimizing them, you’ll want to read ReelSEO by Mark Robertson, which has excellent, helpful content on video search engine optimization.

What I really like:

• One of my favorite features is the ability to manage all kinds of media—videos, photos and audio files—in the powerful, integrated library. Let me explain: Typically, if you need to edit a photo or short video or audio clip, you have to go into another editing program. But Avid Studio built one into this version so you can work from the same software throughout. That’s a big time-saver.
• This means you can correct and edit your assets in the library or on the timeline with built-in media editing tools—no additional applications required.
• If you’ve done any video editing, it is often difficult to do picture-in-picture (those videos where you see a little box of someone talking but the main screen is showing you a slide or something else).  It’s simple in Avid, and you can also add multi-layer effects from the timeline editor directly (which is where you do most of your editing).
• Avid comes with some serious extra content and tools, like the Red Giant plug-in package, if you want to really jazz up your videos with special effects.
• Last, Avid knew that previous Pinnacle Studio users might want some help, so they created a comprehensive collection of how-to videos from Class on Demand that comes with your purchase.

What I’d like to see:

• An easier way to get to the timeline itself. I think there’s a way to customize the dashboard tabs and get straight there, but it was not the default. That’s what I’m used to in Pinnacle and I think that would be the same for other previous users.
• I’m nitpicking here, but I’d like to see a visual, button-style list of different formats to save the video. For example, you can save as Blu-Ray, iPhone or iPod, and other popular formats from the File, Save As settings. They have a large “Web” button that lets you quickly pick YouTube (MPEG-4 format), but if you don’t know the upload format it takes a bit of thinking.

If you’ve tapped all the features in Pinnacle Studio or other common editing tools, then you’ll want to upgrade to or purchase Avid Studio. It has tools that the Hollywood professionals use and allows a lot of powerful editing in a fast package. Overall, I’m a new fan and gladly learning the ropes with Avid Studio for my marketing needs.

Learn more about Avid Studio.

About the Author

TJ publishes Tech Biz Talk, a site that reviews business apps of all types and provides how-to posts and tutorials. Share your application or service at his Facebook page and share details about your company/app in the comments below. TJ actively studies all searching for new apps to write about. Learn more about TJ.

 

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