In my last post, I listed some key points to think about when updating or launching a website. Today’s post talks about a topic that every business owner needs to think about: marketing yourself in today’s challenging economy. Too often, whether a business is large or small, the first response is to cut back on advertising costs and wait out the recession. Here are some practical tips for how to keep customers coming and with them, income flowing.

1. Focus on quality first. Try your best to ensure that customers will love what you deliver, whether that’s a product or a service. Otherwise, your marketing efforts will be in vain.
2. Keep wooing your current customers. They may have needs you haven’t yet discovered, so stay in touch and find out if there is more you can offer them. Landing a new customer costs 10 times as much as servicing an existing one.
3. Conversely, some customers may not be worth pursuing. Why give your time and emotion to customers who make unreasonable demands, are never satisfied with your pricing and make up only a small part of your business? Center your efforts on those who are already fans … and help them grow to another level.
4. Know your competitors better than they know you, and then distinguish yourself with advantages they don’t offer.
5. Give to get. Offering as much as you can for free—whether it’s industry tips, time and cost-saving tricks, consulting or pertinent white papers—will help build a sense of expertise and trust with prospective customers. They will see you as the go-to expert when it comes time to purchase your goods or services.
6. Your website is your most important marketing asset, but your customers have to find you online. In addition to using search engine optimization (SEO) and pay-per-click advertising, drive customers to your site with a well-orchestrated, integrated campaign. The campaign could include email; online or direct mail; radio and TV; outdoor advertising; and blogging and other social media outlets such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.
7. As much as possible, don’t let your short-term response to the economic downturn deter you from your long-term marketing and growth goals. Hunkering down and slashing marketing costs are not effective strategies for riding out an uncertain economy. Winning new customers is the only hope for success, so keep on promoting your business. This doesn’t necessarily mean spending more money. Instead, the ultimate performance of a marketing campaign or program flows from correct targeting. If you target with the right message, you’ll realize increased success.
8. Don’t think in terms of selling your services. Instead, think of solving your customers’ problems—today’s customers don’t want to be sold to. If you can’t fix or alleviate a customer’s nagging problem or situation, why would they want your products or services?
9. Be open to change. Advertising that may have worked last year, or even last quarter, may not work in today’s rapidly changing economic climate.
10. You can create your own PR. Writing frequent local press releases is free advertising. There are also sites such as www.pr.com and www.prweb.com, which for a nominal fee will assure your press release gets dispersed to all major search engines.
11. Remember, consistency is key. It’s more effective to reach customers with frequent, targeted marketing initiatives than to blow your budget on one massive “Wow” effort.
12. There is no magic trick that will alter the current economic climate. One thing is certain: Doing nothing will produce nothing, and doing little will produce little!

It’s time to update your website, or perhaps you are launching your first-ever site. You’ve got so many options for web providers—from companies selling template solutions for under $300 to high-end experts. As your most important marketing asset, your website needs careful thought and reasoned strategy. Choose carefully whom you will entrust your all-important online marketing to.

Here are a few important considerations to keep in mind:

1. Since most of your traffic will arrive via your homepage, it should clearly and concisely communicate exactly who you are and what you do, all within a few seconds.
2. But some of your visitors will come to your site via sub pages, so be sure you have full contact information on every page.
3. Your visitors are impatient. You can’t say everything about your company and services. But you need to define your key points with the goal of prompting a personal contact with your company. Include multiple calls-to-action within your site copy.
4. Have defined site goals and determine in advance how you are going to measure success (drive sales, raise awareness, create buzz, engage and educate).
5. Cut out the jargon and advertising “happy talk.” Communicate as straightforwardly as possible. Imagine your potential customer is sitting across the table from you.
6. Search engine optimization (SEO) is not an end in itself. It’s no good to be ranked #1 on Google if your site isn’t compelling. You’ll have lots of short visits with no conversions. Content is king!
7. Have your site built with a Content Management System (CMS). This allows non-technical people to keep your site updated with current content without having to rely on an outside web company. And keeping your site updated will help with your Google ranking, since Google loves new content!
8. People love to look. Consider communicating a complex concept through an interesting graphic, video or animation.
9. Lay aside your personal preferences for the good of your site (you may love the color pink, but it’s not right for your construction company’s site).
10. Appoint a few people from within your company to manage the project, and give them the authority to make decisions. Committees kill creativity.
11. Your website has to be true to who you are (your brand). Customers expect that your company will be truthfully reflected through all your marketing touch points, and especially with personal face-to-face contact.
12. Nowadays it’s important to assure your site reads well on mobile devices like the iPhone and Blackberry.

Until recently, if you called my home phone number, you’d hear a cheerful message recorded by me announcing that you’d reached “Monica Getz, your Mary Kay Beauty Consultant.” Yup, that’s me. Used to working from home as a proofreader and editor for the years I was raising my two daughters, I was particularly attracted to the “independent” part of the “Independent Beauty Consultant” label when I signed up to sell cosmetics in January of 2002.

I admit, I was one of those “not in a million years” types of women when it came to the idea of selling Mary Kay. It wasn’t that I was averse to the idea of selling. And I wasn’t opposed to either makeup in general or Mary Kay cosmetics in particular. It was just the idea of me selling makeup that gave me pause. Read the rest of this entry »

Most of the emails I get offer webinars, white papers and services promising to help me create better email campaigns, develop more effective social media and search engine strategies and offer superior online tracking methods. Recently there has been an emphasis on the rapidly growing necessity for developing phone apps. All of these urgent offers promise to help me realize greater marketing ROI (gosh, am I sick of that term). Read the rest of this entry »

In this tough economy, many companies who have managed their own advertising in-house or relied on word of mouth are now fighting for survival. They have discovered that what has worked in the past is not going to sustain them now. They have to compete for every customer like never before, and that often means turning to an advertising agency for the first time. Here are some suggestions of what you should look for when choosing an agency to represent you. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday we had a project management consultant come to our office to discuss providing services to analyze and help improve our company’s web design processes. But this post isn’t about that …

Instead, it’s about being who you say you are (or “show” you are, in the case of a website). During her visit, the consultant mentioned that her experience when she walked in our door and met our staff was the same as what she encountered in her visit to our Hile Design website (and fortunately for us, she liked what she saw in both places). That was music to my ears, and was one of the main goals of our most recent website redesign. Before starting the project, I reviewed a lot of other agency websites, and quite frankly, many of them began to look and sound eerily similar. For us, it was very important that we not only present our business services and design portfolio (all advertising agencies do that), but that we also communicate the culture (informal) and personality (friendly and creative) of our company to our site visitors. Read the rest of this entry »

I know it’s not a good idea to check my company’s Google Analytics web stats every day, but I can’t help myself. I’m forever curious about who’s coming to the site, from where, and what they are looking at. When we generate a new company promotion I like to see the corresponding spikes in site traffic.

For us, the good news is that our traffic has doubled since we launched our updated site last January. Visitors are staying longer and viewing more of our work. Statistics show they are most interested in who we are, whom we work for and what services we provide, pretty much in that order. All in all, we’re happy with the site. And yet… Read the rest of this entry »

Click on the thumbnails to see a larger image. Production notes can be found at the bottom of the page.

When I was in graduate school in the mid-1970s, I began illustrating to supplement my poverty-level student income. Because of my fine arts background I moonlighted as a magazine illustrator—secretly, since we fine arts students thought creating commercial artwork was prostitution. Even though we studied art history, somehow we missed the fact that all the greatest artists from Leonardo to Velasquez were, in effect, commercial artists working for paying patrons (usually the church or rich noblemen). After graduation and a few years of living abroad, I decided to become an illustrator full-time. Needing to earn a living trumped my grad school snootiness. Read the rest of this entry »