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Social Media Basics

While optimization sounds uber-technical, the truth of the matter is optimizing your social media profile is easy. It only takes a few minutes and you can actually implement some optimizations the moment you create your account. But before I give you some tips on how you can optimize your social media profile, here’s what optimization is and here’s why you need to do it: optimization is basically making something (such as a design or system) as functional and effective as possible; and consequently, optimizing your social media or website will help you gain the clients you seek, and therefore, help you achieve your goal – profit. So how can you optimize your social media profile? Upload branded cover photos and images. Social media isn’t social media without images. Use this need by making sure that you upload your logo, and any other images that relate to your brand. Not only does this enhance your social media account visually, it also helps inform people about your business and offerings. Follow other companies and people who are in the same field as you are. While some may be your direct competitors, this strategy will help you get exposure to people looking for your specific product or service. Link to your other social media accounts. The beauty of social media is that not only does it connect people, it connects yourself to yourself – meaning, you can inform people of your other social media accounts through one particular profile. This will help expose your business to a bigger audience (yes, while some people are on Facebook, others prefer to be on Instagram instead), and help grow your client base. Link to your website. Your website should contain anything and everything about your business and industry. While your social media should be brief and direct to the point, you should add in more information to your website. Even if you don’t post an entire blog entry on your social media profile, you can still inform your audience about it by placing a link of the said post on your profile. Fill out as much of the profile fields as possible. Inform people about your business and offerings as much as you can. Leaving out fields on your social media profile will make it seem like you are disinterested to promote your business or to educate and interact with your followers and potential new customers. Also, do remember to always add your contact information (mobile number, email address or contact numbers) so that people can get in touch with you should they have questions about your company or should they want to employ your business. Use the same keywords and tone in all your social media profiles. Create an image and reputation for your company by being consistent in your tone and use of keywords. Being consistent will make old clients comfortable, and will make new customers more likely to understand you and what you stand for right away. Consistency does away with confusion. Just remember this will help you to start your social media profiles but once you start you always need to be updating your content and constantly giving your followers a reason to continue to follow your pages. Feel free to contact us for visit our social media page at www.dmdmarketing.ca

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Grow your business with SEO

SEO. Search Engine Optimization. You’ve heard of the term before. People have told you to utilize it. They’ve told you it will do wonders for your business. If you’re in business today, SEO is as necessary as capital, they’ve said. First of all, what exactly is SEO? SEO is a technique or process that is utilized online which affects the visibility of a website in a search engine’s unpaid results (often called “organic” or “natural” results). So how exactly can SEO help grow and expose your business? 1.When you search for a new product or service where do you start? Google No matter what your industry is, when someone is in need of a new product or service in Canada we either run searches online or go by referrals from friends. 2.Organic traffic is free. Of course while it would be great if you could write and do SEO yourself, or even get the said services for free, remember that organic traffic that results from searches is free. Costs you need to pay SEO specialists and writers are up-front, but the great thing is well-written and meaty content can definitely drive search results for quite some time – long after they’ve been written and published on your website (do note though that Google loves fresh content). 3.SEO will lead people to your site, and creating content that is targeted to a particular audience instantly makes you an authority. Having an online presence gives you the opportunity to speak to your audience and let them know that you are the absolute authority in your field. They will trust you and they will continue trusting you as long as your content remains true to your business, industry and image. So when the time comes that they need your business or want your product, your customers will definitely be calling. 4.SEO builds your relationship and increases your engagement with your customers. While anyone can create nonsensical content just to bring people to their website through SEO, content that is meaty and relevant will get people to read, stay and want to do business with you. Content is there to entice customers, to help them get to know you and what you’re about, and ultimately to trust you and like you enough to employ your services or buy your products. 5.SEO and its effects last far longer than any other traditional advertising campaign. Don’t get me wrong – advertising campaigns continue to be extremely useful in exposing your company and growing your business. However, they only last for the duration with which they were meant to last – after which, you’re going to have to think of the next campaign you want to launch. On the other hand, natural searches continue indefinitely – sometimes, even without much continuous effort from your end.   So remember that businesses today do require SEO if they want to grow and expose themselves to new visitors and potential clientele. The more visible a company is online, the more meaty and relevant content it produces, the more click and more business it can potentially gain. For more information feel free to visit our search engine optimization page.

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Why small business owners should focus on sales, not advertising

Did you know that small businesses constitute 98% of all employer businesses in Canada? Small businesses are the lifeblood of the economy in our country. A multitude of new businesses open their doors every day, yet only about half last longer than 2 years. As you know, there are many pitfalls for the business owner on his path to success. The cornerstones of a successful business include a product/service that is needed in the community and an effective lead generation and selling strategies. As you might have noticed, I did not include “advertising” in that list. While advertising solutions can be an important part of generating new business, small businesses are better served to focus their often scarce resources on generating leads and selling directly to them.   Advertising vs. Lead Generation General advertising works well for big, established companies with an already known brand, target a broad demographic. But what about a small business that is just starting out? Let’s say that you want to put an ad in Readers Digest with the idea that you will reach all of its 500,000 subscribers. Will your ad actually reach all 500,000? It won’t reach the people that read this magazine but fall outside of your targeted demographic and it won’t reach people that scroll through ads looking for a specific article. You will also be sharing the magazine ad space with your competitors, putting you in a disadvantage. When a client comes to us for marketing help with their small business, we usually point them to digital marketing solutions. One of these solutions is Lead Generation strategy.   Lead generation allows you to spend your hard earned dollars on advertising your product to your targeted consumer with a laser point precision. It begins with collecting emails from your leads. Then, you proceed to build that relationship and trust with your prospects. You nurture them through email campaigns; you provide value and answers to their questions. You inject humor, vulnerability and personality into your emails. All this helps your consumer to identify with your brand and feel that you are truly on their side rather than just trying to wrangle their hard earned cash from them. Another bonus is that the cost of lead generation campaigns is a fraction of the price of advertising in media. Yet, you are much better positioned to get a bigger return per dollar spent when you target specifically your customer and not every person that reads that magazine or watches this TV channel. We hope that we convinced you to look into the marketing strategies you employ for your small business and reconsider spending heavily on advertising. Instead, you should focus on sales and lead generation. Here at DMD Marketing, we focus on providing marketing solutions to small businesses and will be happy to answer any questions.

You can always view our blogs and find out more about us at www.DMDMarketing.ca

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Where are your leads coming from?

In today's market is has never been easier to track everything that your advertising is doing. If you have a website you should register for Google analytics, this way you can find out how well your website is performing. How many of your visitors are clicking one page and leaving? How many are engaged trying to found more content? It is easy to track and can let you know what you need to do to expand your business.

Besides just your website the same can be said about your advertising. You can find out easily where your leads are coming from and come up with a plan to attack that area instead of leaving it to a guessing game.

Time to ask yourself, where do my leads come from and what can we do to capitalize on this market.

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SEO

Every day I walk down the street and I see vinyl banners that state to call us for SEO, I get about 3 emails a day from individuals asking what is my SEO plan. The problem I have from being in this business is that I do not believe SEO is worth it and I also don’t believe just because you have a website you need to pay hundreds of dollars a month for SEO.

Personally I never felt that SEO is worth is due to the fact that it takes approximately 1 year before you see results and then you have to keep putting into it otherwise you may drop to page two or three which only 10% of us look at. If you think about how much advertising you can do in a a course of a year for that same amount and how much business that will generate for you instead of doing SEO.

My main problem with it as well is how is it that everyone who has a Hotmail or Gmail account is an expert? SEO is the biggest buyer beware there is. On top of that what if your industry has more than 10 competitors how are you going to get on the first page? Especially if the idea is that everyone has to have SEO, you may be on the first page but maybe these experts had to put you on a search string that is getting a fraction of the traffic.

Don’t get me wrong, we all know that majority of us start at Google but is this worth what you would be putting in?  Especially now that over half of us start our search on our mobile devices and we are now searching differently.

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Small business owners need to focus on gaining customers

As majority of you know, in Canada over 50% of small businesses do not last five years. Over my years of experience working with small businesses we have found several reasons for this. Number one mistake is that majority of small owners would rather try to find investors instead of customers.

This is becoming a growing concern as recent research has shown that most Canadians are not loyal to one supplier as they often will shop for the best price or ask others who they use and give them a chance. Question has to be asked is what if your business loses one of your key customers?

The one benefit small businesses in Canada is that Canadians will always spend a bit more for a local Canadian owned supplier. Recent data from TD Bank also mentioned that 71% of Canadians want to find small businesses in search results while 65% look to make payments or shop online.

The bottom line is that your small business is in business for a reason and you need to get that message out to all potential customers.