Posts Tagged ‘marketing’
How a Cultural Pendulum Becomes an Entrepreneur’s Advantage
Friday, November 9th, 2012
When we find ways to level the playing field for small businesses and entrepreneurs, we share them.
The slowest of the herd get eaten.
The view for the middle of the pack never changes.
But those at the front eat first and best.
The Reality
There is no perfect crystal ball, but information does exist that can give us a competitive advantage. We don’t need perfect foresight, just better information sooner than our competitors. Relying on trends and patterns identified exclusively for a slice of society, such as stock markets or fashion, may provide minor insight into what we should do now and what we should plan to do in the future, but isolating a piece of society to forecast the future may be severely limited in value.
The Challenge
The challenge is to identify patterns so we don’t fight trends we can’t control. We must find ways to harness the natural energy within markets so that our businesses benefit from motions we cannot control but can be leveraged to our advantage.
Waves oscillate. Capital markets oscillate. People, populations and political winds oscillate. Oscillation is a given within both nature and man. When we tune our businesses to the right oscillations, we compete and serve our customers more effectively.
The Approach
If you could identify a pattern that has held up for thousands of years, that oscillates with regularity and integrates broad cultural trends to show how humankind collectively swings like a pendulum back and forth between a “We” mindset and a “Me” mindset, would you have an advantage over your competition?
If you had information that enabled you to target belief systems, worldviews and attitudes instead of simply age groups or other narrow demographics, would you have an advantage over your competition?
Yes.
The Solution
When we find ways to level the playing field for small businesses and entrepreneurs, we share them.
Pendulum is a program you should seriously consider.
Entrepreneurs need a better way to figure out what people need now and will need in the future, not what they needed yesterday.
Entrepreneurs need to know what marketing angle will be most effective in reaching people.
Entrepreneurs must avoid investing in marketing that may have been previously successful but will likely flop now and in the future.
Patterns have emerged through the oscillation of our culture over time. Pendulum has uncovered a tantalizingly interesting pattern that can benefit us and our customers, which is why we have decided to share this with you while exploring it ourselves.
History, if you will listen to her voice, may stutter sometimes, but she is a brilliant teacher.
Rank #1 on Google
Wednesday, July 18th, 2012How Your Business Can Reach the First Page of a Google Search
In this article, we explain search engine ranking strategies and recommend a service that can help you dramatically boost your ranking.
What does a #1 rank on the first page of a search result on Google mean to you?
The first link in a search result means 90% of the traffic goes to your site. Being #2 means traffic drops to 58%. The tenth search result gets 12% of the traffic. Falling to the second page of search results means less than 10% of the traffic, and forget about any attention after page 2. Most entrepreneurs don’t have primetime advertising budgets, but getting ranked #1 in a Google search can be affordable and will vault your business, brand and revenues.
While Google constantly changes their ranking algorithms, the single largest factor in determining your web page’s rank is still something called “backlinks”. This simply means that someone has provided a link to your web page from their web page. More backlinks to your page suggest to Google that your content is valuable and interesting.
So, how can you get more backlinks to your site?
There’s a whole service industry built around helping web sites improve their ranking. It’s commonly called “search engine optimization” or “SEO”.
Like most promotional strategies, there are right ways and wrong ways to do this. There are services called “link farms” that will, for a fee, create links back to your web pages. Most of these services are tantamount to “link spam”, and Google may penalize you for lots of junky links and actually remove your page from search results.
The right way to do this is, of course, create quality content and be active in social media. We also found a great service that can dramatically and rapidly improve your ranking by helping you build quality backlinks in a way that won’t cause Google to penalize you.
With 5 years of research and 20 patent claims, a company called Blog Distributor has emerged as a wonderful resource for startups and small businesses that want to boost their Google search rank. We have witnessed this service help companies that didn’t even show up in the first dozen pages of the results (ranking lower than 120th) to #1 in as few as two months for the cost of a couple ads in a local newspaper, but far greater impact. Of course, if your chosen search phrase is popular, it may take a bit longer and cost a bit more.
ActSeed has arranged a deal with Blog Distributor to offer a free consultation for ranking your web page. This is available to entrepreneurs, small business owners, SEO firms, PR firms and social media firms. This is valuable to all. Just complete the form below and we’ll help arrange the consultation.
How to Find More Customers
Wednesday, April 25th, 2012Three Things You Must Do to Attract People to Your Business
One of the greatest challenges for a young business is getting customer traction. This rarely happens overnight; however, it won’t cost a fortune or take forever when you apply these three practices:
1. Optimize the message. Make sure the message is clear. The content of the press release, the tweet, the Facebook post must be concise and to the point. We live in an era of multi-media, so the message can also have embedded video and photos. The old way of doing press releases is dead. Press releases are also searchable by keyword phrases. Make sure your press and social media is written so reporters and media professionals can find you.
2. Open a dialogue. Make sure you can listen to your customers as well as you can talk to them. Gone are the days when you use your mouth, but not your ears. When you write a press release, tweet or post a blog or Facebook entry, you need to give your audience the opportunity to reply AND you must have a way to collect those replies. Using your mouth and ears must be followed by using your brain to evolve your message and your business.
3. Be consistent. Be constant. Be patient. One tweet or press release won’t do anything. One thousand tweets or ten press releases in one day won’t either. A steady flow of information reinforces your message and steadily reminds your customers about your business. Trust isn’t built on a one night stand. Trust is built over time, so understand that you must commit time and discipline to your PR and social media activity.
We constantly hear from fellow entrepreneurs who want a winning PR and social media strategy, but they don’t believe they have the time or the money. Well, it doesn’t have to cost thousands of dollars each month or take half of each day to get results.
We found a solution.
We found a solution we like so well that we partnered with them to bring it to you. A company called Vocus, based in Maryland, has created a suite of PR and marketing tools just for startups and small businesses.
From a single dashboard, we can
- Create press releases and deliver them to thousands of reporters and journalists,
- Track activity in our Twitter and Facebook accounts, and receive suggestions for engaging our audience, and
- Receive inquiries from journalists and bloggers who are looking to write stories that could feature us.
Using Vocus, our followers and interaction have increased on Twitter and Facebook and we’re spending much less time while getting better results. Vocus is easy enough to use that you can be completely new to PR or social media and become proficient within a day. Vocus also has great white papers, guides and webinars to educate you on the latest trends and strategies in public relations and social media.
Check it out. They have given us a deal to share with the ActSeed community, and you can see it firsthand in a really compelling personalized demo by clicking here.
Q&A: Pricing for a Startup
Wednesday, November 30th, 2011
Question:
How can a start-up business figure out what to price their service? I started an online/app advertising company for bars and restaurants. I need to figure out what to charge these businesses to be listed after their free trial is up at the end of the year.
Answer:
Pricing a new product is a common challenge of many startups; we completely empathize with your situation.
First, you may want to extend your free trial for an extra month or so if you don’t feel you have the right pricing strategy.
Now, to figure out your ideal pricing strategy, have you done any test marketing or “voice of the customer” / focus group type events? Polls? Do you have a large base of free trial users? If so, you might tap some of them for an open discussion in return for an extended free use period.
We also suggest some paid adword activity with varying “calls to action” at different price points to see what the pull is. This can be done on Facebook or Google. You can also test marketing messages this way. If you can spend some money on a direct email to a list that fits your industry, it’s also a way to test pricing in the message to see how many click-throughs you receive.
As we’re not experts on pricing, we recommend two good books (click on each title below to find each book) that address pricing as part of startup marketing:
Marketing That Works (Wharton School Publishing)
and
Real Time Marketing for Business Growth
Ask your own question to the ActSeed team here: http://actseed.com/contact-us/
An Innovative Guide to Nearly Every Aspect of Marketing for New & Emerging Companies
Tuesday, July 6th, 2010A highly recommended, workbook-style, practical yet innovative guide to nearly every aspect of marketing, pricing, and measurement for new and emerging companies. This book provides advice, examples, insight from industry leaders, and easy to use templates for key marketing, channel, and planning deliverables.
Monique Reece is a creative subject matter expert, and her integration of social media as a component of market development is current and relevant. Her presentation of the PRAISE methodology is easy to understand, explain, and implement across the organization.
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