More Than A Few Words

The weekly marketing podcast, More than a Few Words is hosted by Lorraine Ball and features conversations with professionals from around the world.  Look Before You Leap Question to ask before you start your business. These days, lots of people are thinking about starting their own businesses, but they are not quite sure where to start.  Too often they focus all their energy on the product, service, or technology assuming the market will love it.  Krishna suggests they need to evaluate the market potential by asking questions about your idea client, the potential size of the market, who the competitors are and how you are going to deliver it to the marketplace. Next look at the numbers.  What are you projected costs?  Can you charge enough to generate a profit?  And finally, ask yourself, why you want to start a business?  Do you want to make a million dollars in the next 12 months, build this company to sell to a private equity company, use this as one step toward your retirement? Different objectives will l

The marketing minute is a shorter version of the popular More than a Few Words podcast.  Instead of a conversation with a marketing professional, host Lorraine Ball shares a quick tip to start you on your day as a business owner. What's important to you as a company? What do you value? It's natural in a small business for the values of a company to be driven by the owner, but if your employees don't embrace those values, your company won't reflect them. Start with a brainstorm session to clarify your values, everyone in the company shares what they think the company is about, and they share the characteristics that they would like to see. You may end up with a pretty long list and the trick is to revise it and revise it until you come up with just a few phrases that really capture the essence of your organization. To be effective, the values can't be just buzzwords and each value should have a short definition of what that value means to you. You'll know you have the right values for your organization if th

The weekly marketing podcast, More than a Few Words is hosted by Lorraine Ball and features conversations with professionals from around the world.    So often small businesses make their web copy and marketing information so flat and so generic, prospective customers have a hard time finding a reason to hire them.  To make your company stand out and encourage prospects to choose you, your brand must have a little bit of personality. Every company has something in the culture, values, beliefs, or methodology, that makes them unique.  The more you can laser in on what makes you unique, the easier it is for people to connect with you.  Don’t be afraid of a strong personality.  Instead of trying to keep everyone happy, accept that you may alienate some people.  But Danielle thinks that’s ok. Because the people who connect with you are more likely to be excited and passionate about working with you. You can bring a little personality into your content by writing as if you're writing to a close friend. This remove

The marketing minute is a shorter version of the popular More than a Few Words podcast.  Instead of a conversation with a marketing professional, host Lorraine Ball shares a quick tip to start you on your day as a business owner. The introduction of the first iPhone a decade ago started us down a path from which there is no return. Today, most websites see about half of their traffic coming from mobile devices and we expect that trend to continue.  As a result, websites are being built with a mobile first mentality. If you're thinking about building your first website or redesigning an existing one, here are a few things to keep in mind to create that mobile friendly design. The first is vertical hierarchy. On a mobile screen, one thing has to come to the top so we're seeing a lot of longer pages with one key idea on each page. Vertical hierarchy allows us to shift to minimalist design, which eliminates clutter which helps to focus the visitors' attention on that most important piece of information on your

The weekly marketing podcast, More than a Few Words is hosted by Lorraine Ball and features conversations with professionals from around the world.  These days, we're not doing a lot of face to face interactions with customers or coworkers, but we still need to communicate.  I sat down with the Story Guy, Geoffrey Klein to talk about the best way for businesses to  engage an audience of prospective customers with storytelling. He believes if you want people to remember and understand what you're talking about, the best way to do that is to create a narrative or story to share that message. Forget about the facts and figures and make your product or service come to life with real stories of real people and how the benefited from working with you.   About Geoffrey Klein Geoffrey Klein, the Story Guy, is a TEDx Speaker, Adjunct Professor, and Content Producer who helps people and organizations communicate more effectively through the power of story and visual communication (graphics, video, animation). Geoffrey’

The marketing minute is a shorter version of the popular More than a Few Words podcast.  Instead of a conversation with a marketing professional, host Lorraine Ball shares a quick tip to start you on your day as a business owner.   One of the most interesting statistics to come out of our annual Small Business digital marketing survey was the fact that although most companies have blogs, they are actually blogging less often. This is really sad because blogging is one of the most powerful things you can do to compete with larger companies. But the question is, where do your ideas come from? And honestly, you can find great content ideas everywhere. Start by looking at what you already have. Read your literature, read your brochures, and see what information you can pull from that to create new blog posts. Listen to your constituents, your employees, and your competitors and see what they're talking about. Keep a running list of frequently asked questions and industry trends and regulations. Start building tha

The weekly marketing podcast, More than a Few Words is hosted by Lorraine Ball and features conversations with professionals from around the world.    We are living in a relationship centric era.  Long gone are the days of mass marketing. Successful businesses must develop real relationships with their customers ,and deliver relevant, personalized and authentic communication if they want to stand out. How did we get here?  Two decades ago we were living in more of a product centric era, where businesses would would market and sell products based on the various features they could kind of cram into the product.  Sales people were trained to "sell the benefits of the bells and whistles.  Companies believed it was these features which set them apart. Eventually companies realized, people don't really care about how many bells and whistles are on your product or service.  They care about what your product or service can do for them.  The shift led to the customer centric era when marketing was focused on getting

Often when I talk to business owners about their Google Analytics, they focus a lot of attention on how many people came to their website, how many unique visitors, and what their bounce rate was. They miss  some of the most valuable information in Google Analytics, which is where your traffic is coming from. This data is the most actionable of all the information in your analytics. If your direct traffic is low, for example, that tells you that you need to be spending more time in offline activities, attending networking events, conferences, and trade shows handing out copies of your business card or handing out flyers with links to your website. If your organic traffic numbers are low, that means you need to be creating more content for your website. If your referrals are low, you need to spend time creating some inbound links to your website. If you want to improve the performance of your website tomorrow look at your traffic sources today. If you’d like help building a plan to do this, drop us a note at r

The weekly marketing podcast, More than a Few Words is hosted by Lorraine Ball and features conversations with professionals from around the world.   As more and more people are working from home, physical networking is less popular.  As a result, they are trying to do more on LinkedIn. Unfortunately,  many of them are doing it wrong. LinkedIn coach Tara Fitness says the first thing to do is get your profile right.  Get a professional looking head shot.  You wouldn't show up for an in person networking event in a t-shirt and sneakers, treat your LinkedIn picture  like your uniform.  Clean up headline.  No one is looking for a CEO, they want to know what you can do for them, so transform your headline into something compelling for the reader.  Write a compelling about section which really describes who you are and what you can do for others.    About our guest Tara Fitness is a digital marketer specializing in Email Marketing and LinkedIn Lead Generation for B2B brands. She is currently studying a Master of C

If you want to run a direct mail campaign, you can buy a mailing list. There are reputable sources for addresses and phone numbers of local homeowners and businesses. And the lists are relatively current, and you can target them down to a single postal route. And that’s a great strategy for direct mail. There are several reasons why this doesn’t work for email. The most important reason is that email lists need to be permission based and those are simply not available to purchase. Unwanted direct mail simply gets tossed in the trash, but the risk of an unsolicited email is that a spam complaint is filed. If you’d like to know more about building a permission based list, check out our blog at roundpeg.biz.

The weekly marketing podcast, More than a Few Words is hosted by Lorraine Ball and features conversations with professionals from around the world. In the old days we talked about advertising vs pr.  Now we refer to paid media vs earned media.  Regardless of what you call it, there is a tremendous opportunity to get your message in front of prospective custers is you know how to tell your story.  Let's start with the difference between Advertising and PR.With advertising you are able to communicate with your audience with a message that you control. You can pick the date and time of your advertisement, you pick the vehicle you want it delivered in, whether it's a newspaper, online television or radio, and you pick the calendar items to go with it. In contrast, there is a filter when it comes to public relations.  That filer is the editor of the newspaper or blog  or the producer of the TV news show or podcast. They decide when or if they will invite you for an interview or run your story. While you would like

Why should I buy from you in a cluttered marketplace with many companies all claiming be able to solve a problem that a customer has? How do you answer that question in a way that convinces customers that you’re the right company to work with? The roots of that answer really lie in a great position statement. This is not advertising copy, but a clear definition of who your company is and how you approach the business. There are three elements in a position statement: a description of who your customer is, what problem do you solve, and what makes you uniquely qualified to offer that solution? When you put those three pieces together into a simple statement, you have the beginning of great marketing. 

The weekly marketing podcast, More than a Few Words is hosted by Lorraine Ball and features conversations with professionals from around the world.    Everyone talks about SEO as if it was some magic formula, that only a few specialized magicians can handle. But the truth is anyone who owns a website can take small steps to improve their SEO and gain the attention of search engines. Guest Jon Tromans suggests the best place to start is with the person who's actually using your website.  Think about the journey they take as you lead them through your website toward a sale. The words on the page must answer their questions and solve their problems.  Most people make the mistake of trying to write for the search spiders, the robot intelligence behind Google.  But what Google wants is for you to write for the real human being who's searching on Google. Imagine your have a bricks and mortar store and a customer walks through the front door.  As they start talking to you about your products and your services you ca

The marketing minute is a shorter version of the popular More than a Few Words podcast.  Instead of a conversation with a marketing professional, host Lorraine Ball shares a quick tip to start you on your day as a business owner. Once upon a time marketers ran television commercials and put ads in newspapers and simply waited for the phone to ring. But that was a long time ago. So long ago in fact, that it seems like a fairy tale; an expensive fairy tale. Today, consumers fast forward through television ads, change the station on their radio and scroll by on social media. They don’t want to be interrupted by your marketing. Consumers are looking for information as they prepare to make a purchasing decision. They’re looking for general information about trends and features. They are investigating your company personnel and looking for examples of how your product is being used and what people think about your business. This is where content marketing comes in, making up for the fact that consumers do not watch

The weekly marketing podcast, More than a Few Words is hosted by Lorraine Ball and features conversations with professionals from around the world.    Creating great marketing content takes a while It is important, but if you're not careful, it can take over so much of your time that you don't have any time left to run your business. Our guest, Elizabeth Pampalone shares the secret to creating a year's worth of content in a week through a process she calls Absolute Marketing. The system actually consists of five, the five pillars of marketing, branding, websites, social media, blogging, and email marketing. Start with a solid brand, defining who your audience is and how you want to present yourself. This may include standardizing colors, fonts and messages, such as your mission statement, vision statement, and tagline all lay the foundation for your brand. If you know your audience, colors, fonts, and message, then social media is going to be much much easier to create. Now you are ready to start creating con

Did you know that 57% of all purchase decisions are actually made before a customer ever talks to a supplier. The marketing minute is a shorter version of the popular More than a Few Words podcast.  Instead of a conversation with a marketing professional, host Lorraine Ball shares a quick tip to start you on your day as a business owner. More than half of the people who pick up the telephone to talk to you have already made up their mind.  That's good news for the people that are calling. The question is how do you get more people to call you? And how do these people make up their mind before they ever talk to you?  The answer?  They're going to your website and the websites of your competitors. They're looking for answers to the questions they have about your product and your service. Prospective customers are looking for FAQs and how-to guides. videos and comparison charts. If they find that information at two in the morning when they are looking online, they're more likely to pick up the telephone and call

More than a Few Words,  a weekly marketing podcast, hosted by Lorraine Ball features conversations with professionals from around the world.  This week,  Shane Barker joined us for a conversation about email engagement, getting readers excited to hear from you.  Do you remember when it was fun and exciting to get an email? That was a long time ago. These days, our inboxes are filled, and there's a real fatigue. As a marketer, your challenge is to break through the clutter, and get people excited about your email. Shane had a few great tips on how to do just that.  Have a clear purpose for each email Design campaigns for mobile consumption Add an element of fun to the campaign Ask questions and incorporate the answers from your readers into future campaigns Don't be afraid to clean out your list, and drop people who really aren't interested.   

These days, it seems like everyone is talking about content marketing. But what is it really? The marketing minute is a shorter version of the popular More than a Few Words podcast.  Instead of a conversation with a marketing professional, host Lorraine Ball shares a quick tip to start you on your day as a business owner. Content marketing is a strategic marketing process of using content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience. It's focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to ultimately drive customer action. There are several  really important words in that definition. Strategic:  With content marketing you don't just start writing blog posts and taking pictures willy nilly, you  create a plan which outlines your goals and what you're going to do with the content and what kind of content you want to deliver. You start by figuring out who your audience is and  where are they going to be.  You also need to think about the action you want them to take  after they

More than a Few Words,  a weekly marketing podcast, hosted by Lorraine Ball features conversations with professionals from around the world.  This week, our guest Colin Gray talks about the challenges business owners face when it comes to creating content.    it's not hard usually, to convince people that content is a good idea, whether it's a podcast, whether it's a blog, a video channel.  The hard part is getting them to stick to the routine, because it is the consistency that really builds your audience. People are always fine for the first month, maybe even two months, but then then novelty wears off .  The trick is finding a way to create a regular process of creating content. Building the routine starts with a plan.  Think of one topic, and then start breaking it down into smaller and smaller bites.  Instead of trying to write one post that coves everything you know on a topic write five related posts addressing different aspects of the same topic. When it comes to the tools, simpler is better.  Look fo

The marketing minute is a shorter version of the popular More than a Few Words podcast.  Instead of a conversation with a marketing professional, host Lorraine Ball shares a quick tip to start you on your day as a business owner. These days, it seems like everyone is talking about content marketing. But what is it really? If you watch late night television, you've probably seen infomercials for some random product. In the wee hours of the morning you find yourself watching with interest the demonstration of the  Jack LaLane power juicer.  And as cheesy as the infomercial might be, the format works. People buy Snuggies and Shamwow. How do these companies keep you watching essentially the same message for 20 or 30 minutes? It boils down to four elements.  And these elements will  work in your marketing too. Reliance on repetition.  The  same value proposition is presented multiple times throughout the program. Informal down to earth presentation style Real people supporting the proposition with testimonials. An