Measureable Marketing

Optimizing Your Google Business Listing

Google Business Listing, Marketing Technology, Measureable Marketing, Pop up Retail, video marketing

I am in the middle of building a marketing strategy to increase revenue for a health and wellness center for a Doctor of Naturopathic medicine in Middlesex County, New Jersey.  He has outstanding patient testimonials, has transformed people’s lives with his seven-week detoxification cleanse and a growing base of 15 five star Google reviews.

I strongly believe that his practice will continue to build on word-of-mouth recommendations and friend and family referrals, however he has to be prepared for potential patients who will do their due diligence. They will Google him and his practice.  So of course the marketing plan I am creating for him recommends that he polish up his Google Business Listing.

How do you optimize a Google Business Listing in 2019?

With 30 second videos of course.

google-video1-ss-1920-800x450.png

Last January 2018, Google started testing videos on business listings.

Here are the video guidelines. . . 

Google says that once you upload your video it can take up to 24 hours for it to display, but some may upload in minutes.

I am recommending a 30 second video for each one of the doctor’s services (my client) that include quick testimonials from patients.

  • Video one – The doctor asking his top three questions for his initial consultation and health assessment (with a patient).
  • Video two –  The doctor surrounded by foods to detoxify the body while discussing the benefits of his seven-week cleanse.

Ideas for your local listing. . .

After you’ve decided what video you want to upload to your Google Business listing, make sure the video follows these guidelines:

  • Google My Business Video Max Duration: 30 seconds
  • Google My Business Video Max File size: 100 MB
  • Google My Business Video Min Resolution: 720p

What Kind of Google My Business Videos Should You Create?

  • Customers enjoying your delicious, healthy meals.
  • What goes on during a complimentary consultation. 
  • Live music and happy hour fun.

Think about the misconceptions that customers and clients have about your business.

Maybe they think –

  • Your clothing is too pricey.
  • Your meals are loaded with butter.
  • You don’t offer any vegan or gluten-free options.
  • You don’t take their health insurance.
  • You never have live music.

Make sure to address those misconceptions in your video.

Need help marketing your business. Reach out via comments here or drop me a line at hello@mj.works

 

6 Rules to Make Sure Your Marketing Messages Don’t Smell Like Spam

Email Marketing, marketing demographics, Marketing in the Moment, Marketing Mavens, Marketing Strategy, Measureable Marketing, Uncatergorized
Nobody wants to spam their customers, but most do it anyway.  Spam isn’t just about the quantity of emails and marketing you do you. It’s also about the quality.

Rule 1

Make a promise to yourself to never underestimate the intelligence of your customer or client. People are much smarter than you give them credit for and every time you send them an email or lead them down a drip campaign that smells like spam, you lose any form of trust that you were hoping to get.
When you are building a business, trust is everything.

Follow these surefire ways to build trust with your future customers.

Rule 2

Marketing messages that over promise and under deliver and sound too good to be true not only smell like spam, they taste like it too.  Keep your claims and benefits realistic and believable.

Rule 3

So don’t use unnecessary words to describe your product or service. It’s better to describe what your offer is in a more clear and precise way than to add on adjectives that lose their meaning. Another benefit of writing concise copy – it can be read and understood faster and easier.

Rule 4

Speaking of wasting another’s time, that is exactly what spamming does. If your email or landing page copy takes more than a minute to read or watch you have wasted everyone’s time. Get to the point as soon as you can. People are smarter than you think and don’t enjoy being lead down a long, boring sales funnel.

Rule 5

Especially if you are trying to put a squeeze on their decision making. People are on to your tactics and they aren’t going to buy into your limited time only offer. Knock it off. If they are looking for what you are selling and you have a superior product, they’ll buy it. No need to put the squeeze play on. It’s a total turn off.

Rule 6

Please price your products competitively. The more time it takes to understand how much you want for that product or service you are selling the more frustrated your customer will become. Be upfront and make sure your price is sensitive to competitive pricing. If it’s higher, be prepared to explain why and if it’s too low, you risk looking like a cheaper and lower value offer.

Would you like me to review your marketing messages? Drop me a link at hello@mj.works  – I am happy to connect.

 

The Best Way to Begin Building Your Business

brand management, branding on mobile phones, Marketing Metrics, marketing muscle, Measureable Marketing, memorable logos, Uncatergorized

Essentially there are four elements of marketing that you must get right in order to drive sales and begin to grow.

Before you begin to market, check out your competition or products and services like yours and consider what industry standards are right now. You want to be better.

  1. Branding, which includes your business name, logo, icon and look and feel should be spot on. All it takes is a complicated name that is difficult to pronounce or spell to set you back.
  2. Your price in the market place. Are you priced competitively? Are you too low? Too high?
  3. How easy is it for clients and customers to find you? Are you giving them the easiest access to buy? Can they find you when they need you?
  4. How well are you educating them on why your brand is the best? Are you explaining the value you offer and do your customers get it?

Creating the right marketing mix begins with asking the question “Will my customers and clients find me in the right place, at the right time, w/the best price?”

How Not to Grow Your Business

Marketing Metrics, marketing muscle, marketing plans, Measureable Marketing

There are over 6.7 billion people on the planet and about 99.99% of them don’t want to give you their money. – a quote from “Ignore Everybody”.

Critical Assumptions are facts that must be true in the real world for your offering (your product or service) to be successful. Every business has critical assumptions that will define if it can survive or not. The more accurately you can identify and test these assumptions, the less risk you’ll be facing.

Yes you are very excited about building your new business and growing your new “brand”, your new start up, but be very careful and test your critical assumptions.

5 Rules to Ruling Facebook

Brand Awareness, brand reputation, Facebook insight, infiltration marketing & PR, Measureable Marketing

6a00d83451b9ea69e2019b00420565970d-500wiFacebook remains an attractive social media platform and marketing destination, first and foremost, for its  +1.28 billion monthly active users as of June 2014. Aren’t convinced?  It’s all in the numbers…

  • 802 million users log onto Facebook daily
  • 1.01 billion mobile active users
  • 29.7% of users are ages 25-24 years old (Largest Demographic)
  • High Growth Rate: 5 new profiles created each second

Source: Zephoria

FB-meme

Already on Facebook? Here’s how to own it:

1. Bylines are your Best Friend – The average time spent on an Facebook is only 20 minutes (Infodocket). Coupled with limited attention spans, content and advertisement overload, it’s critical to keep your text light. Rule of thumb: if it doesn’t fit within a 140-character tweet, start over. 

2. Timing is Everything – You can now determine your fan’s Facebook schedule. Down to the very hour. If your users are primarily on Facebook from 8-10 pm, post away. There’s now an explanation for a scarcity of likes during weekday mornings. According to Bit.ly, Thursdays and Fridays experience 18% higher engagement.

3. Get Friendly wIth Facebook’s Insights – A 7-day snapshot of what your brand’s page is doing right and what its doing wrong. A Google Analytics for Facebook. Analyze your posts reach, whose liking your page (M/F, Origin, Language), and what posts are driving customers to your page.  ldksfa

4. Be Human – Engage with your customers. With so many seamless communication methods and pathways, focus on building relationships with your customers. Know their interests and values. When they reach out to ask about a product or an event, be active and inviting in your response. Remember, this is an opportunity to acquire a life-long customer (or deter one) so, get to know them.

5.  #Hashtag –  Albeit, there’s truth in Mashable’s article “Does Facebook Really Need Hashtags?,”yet Facebook’s adoption of hashtags was a natural progression and will remain a useful tool to streamline trending topics on Facebook. While creating a more user-friendly experience for users (clickable hashtags allow users to discover what they like), the tool allows for more synergy between Facebook and social media sister Instagram. Try and keep hashtags relevant and to a minimum.

Love Branded in Times Square NYC

Brand Awareness, creative collaboration, Integrated public relations plan, marketing muscle, marketing plans, Measureable Marketing

TIMES SQUARE HEART WALK 2A client that spends absolutely zero dollars on paid for advertising anywhere in the US wanted to know my opinion on a special “deal” they received for a Times Square G-Tron (digital billboard) opportunity the other day. He received a “discount” offer for $75K USD for 15/30 second spots from Light Years Media.
The offer was for four (4) spots per hour, 96 spots per day a total of 35,040 annual spot package. The package included the video creative (with whatever my client already had prepared, which is basically a logo and product shots, and maybe a lifestyle image or two).
Yes, Times Square is a busy place and the “deal” price for a year-long campaign is sane enough, especially to be seen in a major commercial intersection between Broadway and Seventh Avenues and 42nd and 47th streets where 1.5 million people pass through each day.

The Geoffrey Tron Screen (the G-Tron) marketing collateral claims that 4.7 billion retail sales are generated annually.  Now that sounds amazing, but is it the brand on the screen that generates that revenue or every single store, restaurant, and retailer in the Times Square collectively? Very confusing and perhaps a bit misleading for my client.

While this type of marketing may seem enticing, it is important to understand that this is really about branding – getting your name out there – without expecting any real measurable data. Sure 1.5 million people per day is fantastic, but are these your people? Your customers?

Other “facts” claimed in the PDF sent to my client –
– 547.5 million people pass through Times Square each year
– 10 million viewers see live shots of Times Square on national TV each year (yeah, for a quick one second scan)
– 9 million visitors annually (once again, are these tourists your target market?)

What intrigued me even more were the little known Times Square Annual events listed in their brochure –

The Times Square “Kiss In” – which evidentially takes place every five (5) years on the anniversary marking the end of World War II

Taste of Times Square – in June is an outdoor food festival with top restaurants and the city street performers

Valentine’s Day renewal of vows which is free to everyone

The June Solstice – a gathering to find peace and tranquility (okay I can’t stop laughing) in Times Square.

A run through of NY’s Finest on St. Patrick’s Day. Enough said.

And a preview of the Best of Broadway performances – free in September.

Oh and then there’s the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, “Good Riddance” Day on December 28th in Times Square complete with a mobile shredding truck and of course New Year’s Eve for the big ball drop.

My client was rightfully concerned that their brand did not have distribution or key brand messages to support something with this type of exposure. I also recommended we cover the basics first with a more customer-centric approach.

He believed that in general this type of thing – slamming $75K down on a digital billboard – works better for a known brand to continue top of mind messaging. Agreed.

Photo in today’s post – the “heart walk” in Times Square reconstructed out of boardwalk debris left over by Hurricane Sandy.

Hero Marketing

marketing muscle, Measureable Marketing, word of mouth campaigns

 

Marketing can never substitute great products and services that people just love. Reality is, an awesome product or service will market itself. Any noise made beyond that will just support organic word-of-mouth growth.

Hero marketing begins with great product development.

Measurable Marketing and Customer Insight

Experiential Marketing, location based marketing, Marketing in the Moment, Measureable Marketing, Uncatergorized

Forget about the traditional market research model of surveys and demographics. The internet now has us measuring customer behavior in real time, closer to the actual moment of purchase.  Companies that can help your brand  discover how to give your customers what they want, when they want it –

Graph Effect  will help you find out more about your target audience than just what they give a “thumbs up”. Watch this quick tutorial on their Facebook page.

Companies such as RichRelevance, Certona, Baynote and Monetate all offer the ability to personalize information to specific audiences based on their online and in store behavior.

RichRelevance powers personalized shopping experiences for the world’s largest and most innovative retail brands, including Wal-Mart, Sears and Overstock.com.

Certona enables online retailers to personalize their entire customer experience by delivering individualized product and content recommendations in real-time, increasing average order value and revenue per visit.

Baynote equips ecommerce executives with new power to give consumers what they want, when they want it. Brands can understand buyer intent and engage consumers by offering the most relevant products and content as interactions are occurring – across chat, social, email, mobile and landing pages.

The beauty brand, L’Occitane explains how monetate has helped them integrate weekly promotions through their email campaigns and website pages.

Chief Marketing Officer Kevin Ertell,  explains how monetate works – taking data that we know about people and adjusting the customer experience along the path to purchase.

Membership Program Marketing in 2012

future of marketing, Marketing Mavens, Measureable Marketing, Uncatergorized

Sometime last month we were sitting around the conference room table with a team of executives brainstorming ideas to help their partners increase sales and customer loyalty. One of those in the room with a short-term thinking “mind-set” brought up the “fact?” that in her experience she found that customers who signed up for gym memberships would continue to pay for the membership, even if they didn’t work out at all,  for an average of 14 months after signing up.  The charge would just appear on their cards and it wasn’t until over a year later, these member customers would wake up to the fact that they were pouring money down the drain.

This “experienced” professional was proposing this membership model as a revenue driver and was asking the team to think short-term while charging customers a membership each month – on top of the service price they are already paying, with the thought that these same customers would forget they signed up and continue to pay the $9.99 a month on their cards for the year to come.

This is the same type of greed-induced strategy that got our economy where it is today. Now, it’s a good thing that customers everywhere are all the wiser and are completely aware of scams like this one proposed.

This kind of thinking also reminds us of the recurring charges that customers get stung with (and that web companies are under investigation for) which you can read about here.

Membership Programs in 2012

Your membership program has to bring real value to the table in order to even appeal to new customers and keep existing customers loyal, especially in this day and age. The real fact is, customers are too smart and watching every penny they spend. Membership program enrollment is down and there have been three major reasons for this decline – economic changes, demographic shifts, and technology.

Now, new technologies can enhance a great membership experience -from social media platforms that celebrate customers who promote your business to data mining tools that help target your customers, and help keep them coming through the doors.

If you are considering adding a membership program to your business, think about what you have to give to attract and retain customers. Consider your business model, your customer’s purchasing behavior and think along the lines of –

  • Programs that offer real value and no risks
  • Possible discounts with every purchase and no restrictions
  • Cash prizes and upgraded shipping
  • Special savings that translate to 15% to 35% off retail prices
  • Exclusive promotional offers void of black out dates and messy disclaimers
  • VIP membership events
  • First dibs on new products, appointments and services
  • Product guarantees and free offers
  • Upgrades and same product/service add ons
  • Co-marketing programs with synergistic businesses

In other words, your membership program must contain a well-defined value proposition that resonates in today’s environment.

Smart companies think like Zappos.com  and American Express –

  • Consider not charging a membership fee
  • Offer valuable services like free overnight shipping and
  • expedited returns

Once you have developed a valuable membership program you must consider how much you have to spend on spreading the word (marketing the program)- through e-mail, newsletters, in-store signage and website updates as well as social media platforms. Your employees should also be ambassadors for the program and able to relay its value to customers. This happens with proper training and real support.