Stephen D. Gross

We had the opportunity, this past week, to interview several severely frustrated potential small business clients who were looking for a quick website disaster relief strategy.  The degree of frustration inherent in today’s small business owners seems to be rising at epic proportions during the last 3-6 months.

What is the cause of their frustrations?  Website failure to produce.

More and more we are confronted by small business owners who look to us for website or web presence disaster relief.  Although we are always happy and willing to assist them, the ability for us to do so has become drastically hampered by the impressions and failures left by the previous internet website design and/or marketing company.

Case in point is Kelli (not her real name).  Kelli spent over an hour hammering us with “what-if” and “how-come” questions regarding her Internet strategy.  She claimed to have spent thousands and thousands of dollars over the past 2 years for web design and online marketing.  Unfortunately, as she said, her small business has had little if any return on the investment.

After listening for over an hour, and with Kelli still on the phone, we decided to run a quick real time analysis on her website and ask a few questions about her strategy.  YIKES, not good!!

As is normally the case these days, Kelli had a low-cost individual website designer develop a website for her business.  In addition, nobody considered pre-design criteria like keyword analysis, content analysis, value proposition, competitive analysis, and goals and objectives.  To make matters worse, she has employed two separate website design firms and has attempted at least 3 different online marketing strategies.

Fortunately, Kelli’s website and past marketing efforts have created a strong enough base to allow for some fairly quick and financially painless changes or modification to get things turned around.  Unfortunately, sooner than later, she will be forced to discard most of the past work in order to make room for the much needed long term changes.  These changes will be required to allow her to reach her long term goals and objectives.

So how do you stop this from happening to you, again.  Make sure you only work with a website or web presence company that fully understands the need for pre-design and marketing (not advertising) analysis.  This analysis must include the design of the online destination (website) as well as intended marketing efforts.  Failure to do so could translate into a disaster relief effort, or worse yet, a business failure.

Do you have a disaster story?  Leave a comment.

Interview and content provided by Brookstone Marketing Group

Now that the first decade of this century is over, small businesses are waking up to find themselves in a quandary trying to decide on traditional marketing versus online marketing and the means to finance either one.

Traditional Media Advertising and Marketing is often times out of the financial reach for most small business owners.  Even if they have the resources, small business owners get caught up in the need to justify and ensure a return on the investment of their time and hard earned dollars.  Traditional Media firms normally require an up front payment plus a long-term commitment before launching any campaign.  In addition, the charge for creative work is passed on as an addition expense to the media buying small business owner.

Internet or Online Marketing, more often than not, follows the same routine as Traditional Media firms in terms of financing the campaign and charging for creative.  The difference is that Online Marketing is typically far less expensive, much faster to launch, and easier to track and justify.  However, many online pay-per-click campaigns are launched by inexperienced marketing agents, and thus cost, and at times exhaust, their clients available budgets before a payback can be achieved.

Enter Social and Content Marketing.  These forms of Online Marketing can be seem elusive and untrackable for the small business owner.  Many times, the small business owners lack of understanding of the philosophy behind authority, trust, and communication keeps them from participating and committing financial resources towards this form of marketing.

Small business owners are looking for a low cost of entry solution for marketing for 2010.  The Internet can and will offer a pay-as-you-go alternative to the old fashion no-risk traditional media firm financial model.

Small Business owners seem poised and ready to commit the necessary dollars to get their business growing again.  However, they will only do so if the marketing channel is proven and offers a high opportunity for success and/or has some assurances built-in for controlling and tracking the marketing expenditures.

Brookstone Marketing Group has now released a marketing campaign that fits such a requirement, PayGo Marketing.  For more information concerning PayGo Online Marketing release click here.

What is your struggle with online marketing?  Leave a comment.

PayGo Online Marketing is a campaign offered by Brookstone Marketing Group.

So what is all the magic about the number 37?

Very simply stated, the number 37, in our opinion, is the root of success for almost all sales and marketing.  Every web designer, content writer, and marketing guru should know and understand the power of this number!

Ok, so what the heck is the magic in 37?  Did it originate from some super-duper magic show in Las Vegas?  HA!  Not really.

It really should be shown as 3-7.  These two numbers are somewhat separate in terms of how they perform their magic.  You probably use these numbers everyday without knowing it.

Had enough?  Give up yet?

The first explanation concerns the use of getting the buyers attention and making them sticky.  In other words, getting them to return to your website.  So here are the forms of magic:

You have no more than 3 seconds to gain the customer’s attention on your website, page, content, offering, and/or pricing.  Additionally, you have no more than 7 seconds to verify their decision to commit their attention and gain their trust. That’s right, you only have a maximum of 10 seconds to gain their attention and prove they made the right decision to commit their time.

Secondly, during these economic times and under non-emergency conditions, its takes an average of 3 visits to your website, etc. to get the customer to believe in your offering.  It may take as many as 7 visits for the customer to take the action you want them to take.

The “Marketing 37″ concept has been applied, in many different forms, throughout marketing history.  No the magic is not in pasting this number throughout your website (duh).  The real magic is using and applying these two “Marketing 37″ concepts to drastically increase your conversion ratio.  Understanding the need to grab the customers attention, get them coming back, and having them apply the actions you desire is really what the magic is all about.

What is your conversion ratios?  Leave a comment.

Visit Brookstone Marketing Group for more information

One of the little known but highly recognized facts concerning a quality online presence is the effect on employee or staff attitudes and loyalty.

Did you know that the average age of an Internet searcher is over 35 years of age?  Did you also know that the age cycle is growing in both age directions?

To first analyze this phenomena you should first ask yourself these questions.  How good is the website presence of the company you work for or own?  Are they using the most up-to-date practices?  Would you promote the presence of your company to your friends?

In our experience, regarding small businesses, we have found that over 90% of small businesses have an online presence so poor that their staff is either not positively impressed enough to promote their own company website or are so unimpressed that it makes a negative impact on their impression and workplace attitudes.

The fact is that the average age of staffing for small business is under the age (less than 30) of the non-internet world.  In other words, the staff doesn’t remember or hasn’t been alive on this planet long enough to experience life without the use of the internet.

Most small business owners are older than their staff and therefore have trouble relating to an age group that depends on the Internet almost exclusively for information and knowledge.  Conversely, the staff looks upon the small business owner as a fossil and somewhat outdated if the business has a poor online presence.

In conclusion, over 90% of small businesses fail to make a good impression on their staff, can potentially foster a negative attitude, and fail to reap the benefits of word of mouth trust and marketing factors when they ignore their own online presence.

What is your opinion?  Leave a comment.

Please visit Brookstone Marketing Group for more information.

While it is very common for online businesses to neglect the opportunity for additional revenue by simply providing an 800# on their website, these same companies further neglect to understand the real power in this simple but sometime difficult to implement strategy.

Our experiences have proven that a visible telephone number shown on the header of a website can not only increase revenue by as much as 100%, it can also provide a tremendous positive effect on authority and trust values.  Many online researchers and consumers alike believe that an 800# provides a sense of security with their decision to purchase.

Obviously providing an 800# alone will not reach the intended goals of doing so.  A business must then implement a system to answer and take the appropriate action as requested and shown in the eyes of the caller. Developing proper telephany expertise in sales and customer service is a must.

Telephone Systems must be researched and implemented.   The following questions must, at a bare minimum, be addressed:

- Does the system provide ACD, Multiple Voicemail, Transfer, Groups, multiple methods of Call Distribution, and DID numbers?

- Does the system have CRM capabilities and what systems will it integrate with?

- Does the system provide variable methods of reporting; by employee, phone number, time and day, group, area code, and department?

- Does the system provide import/export and data support to integrate with outside reporting systems?

Finally, it is wise to understand what type of business you are involved in.  Do you sell a need based product or service?  Or, maybe you sell a more emotional or decision based product or service?  The payback and profitability for purchasing a system and hiring a staff for support may well rest on the answer to these questions.

Do you have a telephone sales story?  Leave a comment.

Provided on behalf of Brookstone Marketing Group

Without a doubt the world of content creation has finally reached its Internet maturity.  Just like Branding, content is the fingerprint of your image and authority.

What is content?  The answer is practically everything that is written and/or read by a viewer and a search engine.  Content includes product descriptions & specs, instructions, FAQ’s, title tags, Ads, Blogs, Forums, Press releases, Articles, and many other forms of electronic display.

Read more…

Learn more from Brookstone Marketing Group

The top seminar question these days is: how does someone decide on a strategy for Internet Marketing if you don’t have a starting point?

The answer is somewhat difficult to answer.  Brookstone has identified over 15 marketing channels available within the online marketing environment.  Picking which one or better yet which ones are best suited for your business requires more knowledge and experience than a typical small business owner possesses.

The easiest general marketing channels to understand are Social Media Marketing, Pay-Per-Click, and of course SEO (Search Engine Optimization) or Free Listings.  Of these three, generally speaking, Social Media Marketing requires the least amount of expense.

PPC can absorb anyone’s budget very rapidly if not monitored on a daily basis.  In addition, the knowledge required for success in combining the affects of keywords, Ad copy, page quality, content relativity, and ad positioning can be a somewhat daunting task for the beginner.  PPC can provide a very rapid increase in revenue and profits if performed wisely.

SEO requires a lot of patience and skill to get your listing anywhere near visible.  Getting your listing on the front page often requires a lot of testing and many months of waiting.  The end result can be very lucrative if your listing appears on the front page and top listing.

Social Marketing has the lowest cost of entry for both cost and time.  A beginner can usually make some impact on their customer leads within days.  However, the avid Social Marketer knows how to employ a solid overall strategy to optimize the results in a very big way.

The best social marketing strategy includes reciprocity, a commitment to scheduled postings, the ability to listen, transparency, community, and above all honesty.  Failure to include, at the very least, these main criteria can drastically damage your results and possibly your reputation

To get additional information click here: Brookstone Marketing Group

.

The questions surrounding how to apply and what to say when using Social Media Marketing are growing exponentially. Many would see this as a signal of failure for people to understand in general the whole concept of community participation, branding and Internet sales.  However, I see it as a very strong indication of how the new phenomena of social marketing is gathering its well-deserved attention.

It has been recorded in history that any major change in society and/or business may take as long as 7-10 years to fully be understood and mature.  Over 50% of the US population continued to ride horses for an estimated 15 years after the first car was deemed road worthy — not to mention the fact that the roads weren’t fully modernized for over 30 years.

Social Media Marketing has only been in real world existence for roughly 1-2 years and we are already experiencing a tidal wave of small business interest.

The idea of having a real-time method to brand your business and at the same time promote a special event or product launch is not an easy concept to mentally digest. We are all accustomed to traditional means of separating sales from marketing and marketing from advertising.

A branding or marketing campaign will take at least 3 months to get any meaningful data right? Wrong!  The Internet allows a business the opportunity to bundle Sales, Marketing and Advertising in a cohesive fashion.  This cohesion tremendously advances the time element of the campaign and permits almost real-time feedback.  The best advantage is the low cost of entry into the marketplace.

The single biggest issue, for this new way of marketing and advertising, going forward is trying to tear down the linear thinking process involved with traditional marketing.  Thinking outside the box will provide the small business owner the opportunity to vastly broaden their scope of potential customer base.  Instead of thinking of directly targeting people who ride bicycles, if you sell bicycles, a business owner might begin a social media campaign centered on low impact ways of exercising or maybe even how to get to work without spending money on gas.

The real advantages with using Social Media Marketing aren’t found with identifying one target market and hammering on it until its dead.  The answer is to apply both horizontal and vertical approaches to marketing penetration and use the information gained to further advance the growth of your business.

Visit our website for more information: Brookstone Marketing Group

Success starts with a beginning!

One of the most common questions we receive from prospects is how to use the Internet to get new customer leads flowing without exhausting their valuable time. The answer is very simple; let the Internet perform the heavy lifting by setting up an online automated lead capture campaign.

A lot of the prospect hesitancy apparent with this approach is the “need for greed” or “control everything” old style of sales tactics. The need to have ones hands in everything worked a lot better when the Internet wasn’t yet mature and money was flowing like a fire hoes.

In today’s competitive environment the ultimate goal is make every possible use of your available time.  Outsourcing the common daily and weekly tasks associated with lead nurturing not only frees up valuable time but actually increases closing ratios by as much as 4-10 times.

An automated lead capture campaign is the beginning of this valuable sales funnel tool.  Our email drip marketing campaigns are designed to use the leads obtained from online marketing and nurture them into a future customer buying decision.  No muss, no fuss.  You are free to run your business or take some vacation time…

It really is as simple as it sounds.  Devote as little as 1 hour per month with the Brookstone team and let our system do the rest. The best part comes when your website jingles, your phone rings, and your door swings with new customers.

Our online campaigns are designed to combine the tremendous powers of the Internet with your existing or new website, online sales page, telephone, and many other forms of traditional advertising.  Our sales representatives are ready to assist you today to determine the right campaign to rapidly increase your sales leads.

Visit Brookstone Marketing Group for help today!

I recently had a discussion with one of our Independent Sales Representatives about the many styles of sales approaches used by the most successful career minded sales professionals.  It became very apparent that we all seem to forget “why” we are doing things and get too caught up in the “how”.   Can you imagine if we approached all things in the same manner?

For instance, what if we constantly examined “how” TV spokespersons do their job and instead of relying on the “why”.  ”Why” allows us to listen and understand their intent and message.  The “How” would bog us down with unimportant useless facts about what type of camera, microphone, etc. they were using to broadcast their message.

The same holds true in the everyday lives of professional sales people.  The urge and habit seems to be to get caught up in the “how” instead of focusing on the “why”.  For Brookstone, the habit would be to talk to customers about how PPC, Social Marketing, Blogging and more actually works.  We get caught in the never ending loop of trying to over-educate the customer on how things work.

Obviously the lesson here is to remind ourselves that our real goal is to not spend hours on end trying to teach and therefore convince the customer that our products and services really work.  Doing so can come across as a lack of confidence in our own products and campaigns we have to offer.  Concentrating on the “why” we do what we do and “why” the customer should make the decision to employ us for their advertising and marketing will reap them and us far greater rewards.

The “why” allows us to share and convey the benefits of working with Brookstone.  The “why” is what we concentrate on when we raise our children, get gas in our car, mow the lawn, or even drink coffee.  The “how” in life may be more suited for biologist, scientists, and geologists.

Finally, using the “why” allows us to accept failure, get past no’s, and react positively to negative influence.  So if we all keep track of the “why” more often we will stay extremely positive, well balanced, and reap the benefits of successful accomplishment of our everyday goals.