Close The Loop

Remarketing is an effort by a business to keep the lines of engagement open between them and their audiences. One of those valuable audiences to keep remarketing to is your customers. Your customers have shown awareness, interest, and buying preference for your company already. That relationship is one of the most important things to keep the engagement going. Grow your business by remarketing to your customers and attracting them to come back for more.

Brands often advertise to put a physical and tangible piece of marketing in front of their audience. Direct mail marketing can be a very effective tool for driving sales, promoting brand awareness, and winning market share from competitors. Local businesses often lean on direct mail marketing as an effective way to reach their local market with a targeted message. What determines success for direct mail marketing is being able to properly utilize the medium to reach your goals.

How do small businesses use Google Analytics 4? Many small businesses were not even familiar with Google Analytics 3/UA. All businesses have been told to shift over before July 2023 but should small businesses implement the new website analytics before then? Figuring out Google Analytics 4 is now something small businesses are going to have to do. Many business owners and marketers are already busy running their businesses and don't have time to learn a new analytics tool. Growing a small business while trying to navigate Google Analytics 4 can be difficult.

Small businesses with fewer resources can win non-branded traffic from larger brands. Winning non-branded traffic starts with identifying the right opportunities from search traffic. Opportunities might be keywords that are lower difficulty and less competitive, better content and page experiences or being able to increase engagement and conversions from pages. There are two mediums within search traffic that have non-branded keywords: PPC search (paid), and organic search (earned). Within each of these two mediums, there also exists short-tail and long-tail non-branded keyword phrases. Everything searched for is based on demand and as a brand of any size, you have to work within the demand of non-branded traffic.

The first week into management and you have probably found yourself wanting to motivate and change the attitudes and behaviors of your employees. Changing the behaviors of your employees can be a difficult task. The best managers rely on feedback to change the behavior and attitudes of their employees. The truth is many employees do not change simply because you ask them to. Managing employees comes with the territory of being a leader. One of the best ways to change employee behavior so that it sustains is to use praise.

Every year marketing innovations rise and with it comes new ways for businesses to grow. The tough part is trying to predict where marketing is going to go in the future. Even a few months into next year could see changes. Experts seem to be weighing in that the future of marketing is being shaped by the recent pandemic and consumer privacy laws. So what are the latest trends that are already shaping the marketing industry? The latest trends shaping the marketing industry for 2023 will impact how your business generates revenue.

Every business needs a competitive edge. Using data, operational efficiency, automation, and marketing into the right channels a business can gain a significant competitive edge. Understanding how a business is generating a consistent flow of revenue serves the business better in the long run. Improving the marketing strategy starts with looking at the data you have. There are only a few ways to increase the flow of revenue and every business leader should be looking at these inside their business. We are joined by Jon Torrey from Searchlight Digital to talk about revenue flow.

Marketing incrementality is not marketing attribution. Marketing incrementality is measuring beyond attribution using experimentation. The conversion or lift that would NOT have occurred without marketing's influence is marketing incrementality. Businesses of all sizes can measure marketing attribution and incrementality using the data they have. The better a business is at understanding and taking action on marketing incrementality the better off they are at growing revenue.

What can small and medium businesses do to avoid the risks of an economic recession? An economic recession impacts businesses small and large, local and global, and can completely redefine the market. Preparing for an economic slowdown with recession strategies ensures that your business can weather the storm. Strategies that worked in past recessions might not work tomorrow. Businesses that move too slowly in solving recession-based issues might not survive. Businesses that thrive in an economic recession can grow larger and faster than ever.

Video is a powerful medium to grow a small business. However, many small businesses don't understand how to implement video into their marketing strategies. Many small businesses struggle to justify the costs of producing videos. Should a business get its own equipment, hire a videographer, and put in the effort it might require making videos? Are people even consuming the videos and then becoming customers for businesses? Navigating video marketing for a small business is tricky. If a business can identify ways to use video in their marketing strategy the opportunities are out there. We explore all this with David Feinman on the episode.

Let's create, is a special episode format designed to walk you through the steps to building something important for your business. A business listening to this podcast episode should be able to create a successful lead generation advertisement by the end. You should also feel inspired to create an ad that generates leads. Generating leads is a very difficult conversion goal to accomplish for the right ROI. Let's go over some recommendations that businesses can use to generate leads from their advertisements.

In-Person events are some of the best ways to learn and network. Getting the most value out of an in-person event takes some additional work. You can learn trends, strategies, and ideas, and save years of learning it yourself from the education provided by speakers at events. You can meet and connect with other people that share your business struggles, meet those who have succeeded, and you can increase your professional network. In some circles, in-person events are looked at as essential to keep up with the industry. While you might feel like you are fish in a sea of sharks looking to sell their products – going to an event offers too many opportunities to pass up.

Finding the best agency for your small business is not easy. When interviewing an agency there are a lot of considerations to look for. A marketing agency that sticks to one tactic is often looked at as a vendor-type relationship while an agency that supports the entire business plan is much more strategic. Your business could benefit from evaluating the relationship you have with your marketing agency.

Within the marketing community of Reddit a user posted this question, ‘What is the best marketing advice you've ever received?' and some of the answers that other users provided are worth considering. Learning from others saves time, helps us improve marketing campaigns, and can prevent problems. The crowdsourced marketing advice from Reddit could help grow your business.

Remote employees are here to stay. For many companies, having remote employees is completely new. Remote work presents challenges for managers who oversee these types of employees. The better managers are at managing productivity, communication, and social aspects of remote employees the more successful they will be. For employees they have to manage the isolation, the lack of supervision, and the ever present distractions from working at home. Recent studies confirm that productivity for remote employees is very high. The better managers can support their teams of remote employees the more productive everyone will be.

One very important part of website design is the accessibility and usability of a website. The website must be designed so that people can find the value in the pages. Some people have disabilities or limitations that make it more difficult for them to read, hear, understand, navigate, or interact with a website. Building a website that is more accessible for everyone enhances the profitability of that website.

As a local business owner, it is important to utilize the marketing resources you must successfully reach your customers. Local businesses have a geographic footprint where their target market resides. Smaller businesses, must stretch their limited resources and make sure their marketing is driving the right local customers. Digital marketing offers local businesses the opportunity to engage with their customers when they are researching and buying online.

Understanding your marketing results is key to spending your money wiser. But understanding marketing analytics is one of the most challenging aspects for businesses. Marketers, leaders, and agencies or consultants struggle to interpret marketing analytics so it is easier to understand. This causes businesses to rely on other forms of data instead. Worse, businesses could be avoiding data altogether because they don't trust the information they are getting. Making marketing analytics easy is critical to growing a business.

You have to measure marketing. The business needs to see if marketing costs are being recouped by its contribution to revenue. The return on investment for marketing is calculated based on the investment and the results of sales from marketing efforts. Ad platforms have this accurately available to help businesses understand when they make a profit. Businesses spending money on marketing to generate leads can find out their ROI.

How do business owners create a business that they can one day exit from? There are characteristics of a business that set some businesses apart as a better buy. Exit strategies provide the business with a goal that guides the everyday leadership decisions. Preparing a business to exit, to pass it on to family, to pass it on to employees, and grow it with investment is worth considering from the beginning. Create a business that the owner can one day exit from with confidence.

When someone utters, “Google Analytics” many business owners flinch in pain. There are a ton of benefits for businesses in Google Analytics. One of the easiest ways to get the most out of Google Analytics is to focus on some specific reports. A report in Google Analytics is a collection of data that aims to answer a specific set of questions. Whether or not you are an expert – you can find tremendous value in reviewing some of our favorite Google Analytics reports.

The story of how a business that found itself facing bankruptcy and turned itself around to become a successful business is very inspiring. Marcus Sheridan became obsessed with the customer with a philosophy that helped him pave the way for success. In the age of online research, even the smallest companies have to figure out how to answer their customer questions and deliver value ahead of time using content.

Companies need to take customer service seriously. Consumers can go from wanting to do repeat business with you to telling everyone they know never to do business with you. Great customer service can create loyal repeat customers that drive sales for your business. Poor customer service drives your potential customers right to your competitors (who are more than happy to oblige). Customer service isn't just being nice, showing up on time, and making sure customers are satisfied. Customer service that leads to sales is about delivering a great experience every time.

Content is the vehicle that marketing uses to engage with consumers. The better the content is at satisfying the wants and needs of consumers the better off the business will be. The goal with content is to make it valuable and relevant across the various types of formats. Most smaller businesses see content creation as a daunting task.

A customer relationship management platform is a broad classification for any tool that helps a business organize their interactions with their consumers. Platforms have evolved heavily over the past several decades. The primary value of a CRM for a business is to help the business turn process into profit. When under-utilized it can easily work against the business. The goal with any CRM is to get greater value out of the platform than its investment. There are a lot of ways that businesses can get value out of a CRM.

Most businesses are under the impression that their business will take off and life will get easier when it does. The reality is that businesses of all sizes face growing pains. They struggle to continue to keep growing at an expected pace. Growing pains cause issues for leaders who are struggling to meet shareholder demands. Balancing all the challenges present in a business makes it difficult for a leader to wear all the hats as a business scales. People face the challenges of a growing business differently. Being able to conquer growing pains shows them the opportunities they are.

Franchising offers a different path for businesses that want to expand and grow their businesses. Once a business is successful it can utilize the franchise model to grow to more locations. A franchise is a different type of business and finding success running one involves a different strategy. You can empower location managers and you get to reap the rewards of not having to develop them yourself. The loss of complete control over the business can be difficult. The goal of a successful franchise is to grow profits by scaling locations on the back of a turnkey business that can be run on its own.

DNI stands for Dynamic Number Insertion. DNI is an online call tracking technology. DNI tracks the digital sources of traffic that drove phone calls from a website. DNI isn't click tracking. Using DNI a marketer gets to see the campaigns, the channels, the variations of ads, and the keywords that are driving actual phone calls for a business. Similar to other types of conversions (forms, chats, texts), a phone call is unique because it has to ring, it has to be picked up, and then a disposition of what happened places that call as a ‘good' or ‘bad' lead for the business. Dynamic number insertion (DNI) unlocks the attribution of phone calls that lead to ROI for a business.

After hiring is all said and done that new employee joins the ranks of your company. Before they can start completing the tasks you need them to do, they need to be onboarded. Onboarding a new employee is a process that arms them with the knowledge and confidence they need to be successful in their role. Onboarding provides instruction, guidance, and a lot of repetition so that the new employee understands the processes, values, and culture of the everyday. There are a lot of different onboarding formats but the goal is always the same – help new employees land on their feet so they can find success.

Generally, we talk about wanting to make everything in marketing scale. Once we have proven that a marketing strategy works, we want to crank it all the way up. Scalable marketing campaigns are designed to make use of scalable inputs, using reliable processes, to generate tons of value. Unscalable marketing is often looked down upon or purposely ignored. So why would we want to invest in unscalable marketing strategies? Can a business use unscalable marketing to generate profit? The answer lies in the simple fact that not everything we do in marketing can be scalable. The marketing activities that are unscalable present valuable opportunities for businesses.

Have you ever gotten hung up wondering if you are doing the right things as a business leader? Most leaders have someone in mind as an example of a great business leader. You might even have wondered what characteristics make up a great leader. On the other hand, maybe you simply look at what makes a bad leader and stay away from those traits. Stronger leadership in a company drives results. A leader's ability to consistently turn their limited resources into value for the company is a powerful measure of success. A great leader is responsible for the success and the failings of their team.

Companies of all sizes want their marketing dollars to go a long way. Paid search marketing campaigns target the keywords that people are using to search online. When they type in keywords that match with keywords you are bidding on there is a chance they could see your advertisement at the top of the search results. We all know that having your brand positioned at the top of relevant search results increases traffic to your website. More traffic means more business for you. In many cases, the most business you can stretch out of an advertising budget is with a branded paid search campaign.

Small and medium-sized businesses are often seen as the best example of businesses that forge connections with consumers. However, as some businesses grow, they lose sight of the value of connecting with consumers. Building connections with consumers is like a steady long-term relationship. Businesses of all sizes that can incorporate an array of consumer touchpoints will build value for themselves. Consumers who align with the values of the business and believe in the business will buy from that business. How well a business connects with its consumers defines how successful it will be in acquiring and retaining them as clients.

Part 2 - The conclusion of whether the pursuit of more data yields more deals or being more intuitive-driven leads to more deals. At the end of the day, profit is usually king, and being too granular can be very distracting. More data is usually asked for by marketing, support, product, and sales leadership. Sales just want more deals and asking them to do more data gathering activities limits their selling activities. Every team wants more profit, so the goal is the same. The debate centers around which path is best for the teams and for the organization to get there. Does being more data-driven lead to more deals or does being more intuitive-driven lead to more deals?

Part 1 - For sales organizations, one of the more divisive topics is whether the pursuit of more data yields more deals. At the end of the data, profit is usually king. More data is usually asked for by marketing, support, product, and sales leadership. Sales just want more deals and asking them to do more data gathering activities limits their selling activities. Every team wants more profit, so the goal is the same. The debate centers around which path is best for the teams and for the organization to get there. Does being more data-driven lead to more deals or does being more intuitive-driven lead to more deals?

A growing business promoting their phone number is likely to generate inbound calls. Inbound conversations are the consumer wanting to interact with your business. Those conversations can lead to sales, appointments, support, hiring, and so much more. The more inbound conversations that are coming into the business the more coverage that a business needs. Coverage means making sure those calls are properly handled. Before a conversation happens, a business needs to consider how many hoops a caller must go through to contact their business. Every business needs to prepare its call handlers with training to ensure that every inbound call is handled with care. Fielding inbound calls are an intimate 1-on-1 interaction with the consumer that contributes to the success of a growing business.

It's hard to imagine a successful business being hurt by its own website but it happens. A website that delivers a poor experience might sour a relationship before it has even started. Once someone has done their research and lands on your website the last thing you want them to do is leave. A website that takes forever to load can easily be killing your conversion rates. A slow-loading website has a detrimental impact on the entire marketing plan. A well put-together website, with quality user experience, highly relevant and valuable content, and quick loading pages is an SEO ranking force to be reckoned with.

Scaling the growth of a business is not a simple task. To scale a business, you must have a repeatable, scalable, and expandable model of how your business is going to grow. Your business has to grow like a weed to sustain against all the disruption you will face. Many businesses find a way to survive but are unable to thrive. Scaling can be slow, growth can be slow, but it does mean progress. Stu Heinecke joins the episode to discuss the topic. Every business wants to grow and we can learn a lot from the lessons of how plants and weeds thrive.

Marketing provides the potential to help a business grow. That growth can come slowly or scale substantially with the help of a living breathing marketing plan. The strategy behind a marketing plan balances the speed of growth with the capabilities and resources a business has. Since every business is different, the marketing plan should be individual to your business. The marketing plan should always include long-term growth goals that can be broken down into short-term objectives. Those objectives are just a pipedream unless they have predictable results, action plans, measurement, and reachable timelines. A plan is not set in stone; the business should be flexible in adjusting the marketing plan based on learnings that happen over time. Scalable growth comes when the business figures out how to deliver more value out of the same amount of effort.

Every business needs to be able to be found. Reviews, listing sites, SEO, word of mouth, and marketing all help a business get found by its consumers. A review is unique in that it helps the business establish credibility and trust. Leaving responses to reviews goes a long way towards positively impacting buying behavior. Responding to reviews shows consumers who are reading reviews that you care and that you are honoring your business' core values. The better that a local business can be at serving their consumers the happier their consumers will be and the more likely those consumers will return and will tell their friends and family. Getting more reviews opens the door to more revenue, higher ratings in reviews attract more consumers, and responding to the reviews a business gets online leads to establishing a stronger brand presence online.

A website screams credibility, it communicates the value proposition and enables visitors to explore your company offerings. A website attracts more consumers and helps promote what your company does, why should the visitor care about your brand, and why should that visitor do something about it right now. In addition, a website is where most marketing channels funnel traffic and consumers through. Building a better website does require that the business takes time to consider the purpose of the website to their brand and to their goals. A better website can rank higher organically, can ensure consumers have a great experience browsing your website, and can ultimately generate more revenue at the end of the day.

Email is one of the most powerful and influential channels in marketing. Email marketing is a complex risks and rewards channel to manage for businesses. When done right, email marketing fosters engagements, generates sales, and develops stronger relationships with their audiences. If abused, email marketing can sink a company, can ruin the reputation of its brand, and can corrupt the sales pipeline for years to come. Email marketing does not need to be difficult because there are some simple rules to follow. The power and value of email marketing are on the list. The better a business can be at reaching their ideal audiences with relevant messaging the more successful they will be at email marketing.

One of the most frustrating and costly mistakes a business can make is losing a potential sale. Sales are lost by even the most experienced reps for lots of reasons. Even after the appointment is set and the deal seems guaranteed... a sale can get away from you. Every marketing dollar, every sales dollar, and every operational cost associated with that prospect is lost when that sale is lost. Turning more appointments into sales is by far the best place for a business to take control within the sales pipeline. The uncomfortable truth is learning how many lost sales are a result of mishandling the sales process.

Part of every business is the routine of hiring, interviewing, and onboarding new employees. When a role becomes open your business needs to fill that role quickly and with the best possible candidate. Roles that stay open too long can easily limit the growth of a business. Skipping a hiring process in favor of speed could easily mean hiring the wrong candidates. A business needs to find candidates who have the right culture and the right fit for the position they are hiring for. Those employees might end up staying for years or helping shape the future of the company, so it is important to start that relationship off on the right foot.

A lot of business owners wonder if it will hurt them to spend the required time it takes to build a social presence. Social media channels are just one of many channels to reach your audiences. Social media today can help you achieve a variety of business goals. Any business can improve the relationships they have with current and prospective consumers using social media. There are a lot of ways to use social media and not every social network offers the same benefits to every type of business. At the end of the day, the business that figures out which platform helps them connect with their desired audience and who curates relevant content into that channel will reap the benefits of a social media strategy.

Businesses work hard to generate phone calls. Phone calls are a highly intimate conversation that a business has. Businesses book appointments over the phone, sell products and services over the phone and coordinate many revenue-generating activities through phone calls. A phone conversation is a special moment for the business to interact with its prospects that sets the stage for whether or not that person will show up or purchase in the future. Tragically, bookable phone call opportunities get missed all the time. The better a business understands the value of every phone call the better that business will be at generating revenue from the phone.

Businesses work hard to establish themselves so their consumers can easily find them. The methods that consumers use to find businesses are shifting towards online discovery in virtually every industry. How consistent your brand establishes itself across online and offline listings impacts current and future consumer acquisition. Consumers trust organizations that communicate trust through consistent listings of their name, address, and phone number (NAP). Additionally, online search providers like Google take notice. The better your business is at keeping its information consistent and keeping consumer experiences high… the better chance it will have of ranking higher online for SEO and of driving more revenue.

Every business wanting to drive more traffic to its website can benefit from implementing UTM parameters. UTM parameters are essential for quantifying and refining marketing campaigns. It becomes much easier to justify marketing expenditures when you can prove which channels are boosting quality traffic to your website. When a business can drive higher quality visitors to their website, in higher quantities, from the insights provided by UTM parameters; it becomes a no-brainer why a business should bother adding UTM parameters. UTM parameters are worth the time to add, they are easier to manage than most businesses think, and they add tons of potential value down the road.

Every business with call handlers needs to be able to manage them so they can be successful. Call handlers provide an essential function for a business as they are on the front lines answering the phone calls. A successful business will pay close attention to how they handle their 1-to-1 customer interactions. When a manager can onboard, train, and reward the right behavior from their call handlers they will be more successful and those call handlers will want to stay with the business longer.

Every business needs a degree of awareness with its prospective customers to generate sales. Whatever a business offers – they need their customers to be aware of them to have a chance at being in the 'decision set.' A customer always chooses what to buy from a limited set of options (aka the decision set). If a business is not an option for a customer – that business does not have a chance of that sale. Even the smallest businesses have a chance of knocking off the bigger companies because they can tailor their brand better to their audience using brand awareness.

Every business needs to be able to transform leads and move them down the funnel. Appointment-based businesses transform their leads into scheduled appointments. Turning more leads into appointments is critically important because those fuel downstream appointment shows and sales. Leads come in all temperatures and readiness so the ability to turn leads into appointments is complicated and difficult. Focus on where your business has control and where it does not. You want to set firm appointments where people actually want to show up and do.