Small Business Marketing Memo: Embrace Local SEO

Photo by Marcela Palma via Flickr under Creative Commons license

It is well past the dawn of a new day and if you have been hiding under a rock to avoid the monumental shift in how target audiences find your business, come on out, it will be okay, embrace the new normal of local search. Now, more than ever, local SEO (search engine optimization) matters and given the changing algorithms, data collection structures and listing vendors, it’s one strategy that small businesses can ill-afford to disregard. We would like to add a few bonus points to our monthly focus on boosting your online visibility and a previous post on the topic to maximize your search marketing momentum.

Scott Langdon composed an excellent article that includes eight suggestions to improve businesses’ local search position. In How Local SEO Works and Why It Matters for Small Businesses, the article presents, in non-techie speak, the whys and hows to make search a priority. Here are a few highlights.

Local search is a way for search engines to offer the most relevant results to users, which are calculated according to location data. After all, if you’re looking for a flower shop, you’re going to want to find one nearby, right?

It’s also a great tool for small businesses because the competition is smaller — you’re only competing for position with other businesses in the same location. The better visibility you have on a SERP (search engine results page), the more likely that someone will click and convert.

Here are eight tried and tested tips to help improve your businesses’ local search position right away:

1. Claim your business. Creating a local page is as easy as visiting Google’s dedicated site and signing in. You will be prompted to type in the name of your business, but be aware that your business may already exist in local search — even if you weren’t the one who added it. What you’ll need to do, then, is claim it.

2. Categorize your pages. Pay special attention to how you categorize your business. During the process of creating or claiming your page, you will be asked to select a primary category, which is the most important category you will choose.

3. Be consistent. Make sure that your business is listed consistently across the web. This means that your name, address and phone number (often called NAP data) need to be the same when it comes to your local accounts, directory listings and any other mentions of your business.

If your business has been listed somewhere on the web unknowingly, you’ll need to track down that listing and claim it so that you can edit all of the information to be consistent (or contact whoever is in charge to get the information changed.) Something as simple as a hyphen or a missing suite number can change everything. You can find unclaimed listings by doing a search or using tools like Yext or Localeze.

For the remaining five tips, read the original article at Entreprenuer.com.

Listen to Chris Gregory, a certified SEO Master, SEO Mentor, All Business.com expert and guest on The Marketing Mojo Show, explain what is, perhaps, the most important small businesses search tactic in this LGK Marketing Memo audio clip.

What tools do you use to optimize your local SEO? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments section of this post or vote in our latest poll.

For daily marketing communications news, subscribe to LGK’s free, online, MarCom Digest. Maximize your momentum!

Design Points to Maximize Your Marketing Momentum

Photo Credit: Glassholic/Flickr under Creative Commons license

Many of us hear it repeatedly to think like a customer, client or user and to focus on experiences and personas to develop a strategy, content and messaging. Well, the same is true for design and we’d like to add a few bonus points to our quarterly focus on this topic.

Kristen Ewald puts together an excellent post on experience design to help guide the development of your design objectives.

User experiences matter to even the smallest of enterprises. Think about all of the customers who visit your retail store, get help from a sales rep, order a service, set up a product, access your website from a mobile device, or contact tech support. Their interactions with your company or brand often determine whether or not they choose to do business with you again.

Design should not be thought of as a “nice to have.” It has become a business imperative and a competitive differentiator. With each touch point, a customer has a good or a bad experience. The overall experience it creates is your brand.

Experience strategy is in many ways quickly overtaking the role played in the past by brand strategy. Today brands can say whatever they want about “this is who we are,” but if the experience they create with their products and services is not in line with the expectation they have set, they may not succeed.

Read the original article at Intuit Small Business Blog.

Listen to award-winning designer and design firm owner, Bernadette Rivell Daniels of Identity Brand + Design, on the importance of design in this LGK Marketing Memo.

Download the Marketing Assets Toolkit, which includes a checklist of marketing materials and collateral that require design TLC.

What guides your design strategy? Price, personal tastes, buyer personas? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments section of this post.

For daily marketing communications news, subscribe to LGK’s free, online, MarCom Digest. Maximize your momentum!

Inventory Your Marketing Assets to Maximize Your Momentum

Photo Credit: AJC1/Flickr under Creative Commons license

Every company – sole proprietorships, mom and pops, startups and corporate giants- has them: marketing assets. All content and related materials, from the obvious to the obscure, used to educate, inform or generate interest in the company are marketing assets. The Marketing Assets Toolkit is a complimentary guide to identify and evaluate the various components, their continuity and effectiveness. It will prove useful as a preliminary step in creating a set of guidelines and standards to promote and present the company to internal and external audiences.

So what are you waiting for? We have done the work of listing many assets and evaluation criteria to start your inventory process and maximize your marketing momentum. Select the image below for download instructions.

LGK’s Stream Pick to Maximize Your Marketing Momentum: Iconic Retailer Meets Real-time

Who says you cannot learn a lesson from an icon, one many consider the great success story of American commerce? From a week of trending (and non-trending) events, people, places and hash tags (check out Hootsuite’s Top USA Twitter Trends of the Week, Vol. 89), we selected a post on Sears, the once dominant iconic retailer, for a bit of insight to maximize your marketing momentum.

Sears starts corporate blog amid rise in unfavorable public and media sentiment. The story via @adage http://t.co/MOtH2CevF8

— LGK Marketing CC (@LGKMarketing) January 23, 2014

Sears (formerly Sears, Roebuck & Co.) has survived longer than most since its mail order heyday; however, the retailer finds itself in the social vortex of real-time engagement. Declining sales, widespread and mounting sentiment on its merchandise and store conditions have not been favorable to the 121-year-old brand. In the midst of a blizzard of negative online comments, as reported by Advertising Age, the company launched a corporate blog. The timing, they claim, was purely coincidental.

There are a few takeaways that immediately come to mind:

• Launch a blog for the right reasons: engagement, transparency, information, education, reputation, not as a platform to hard sell or plead your case in the court of public opinion.
• Your corporate identity is not your corporate reputation. Identity is how you define yourself; reputation is how others perceive you. A periodic image and reputation assessment can help you define areas of strengths, weaknesses and steps for improvement.
• Corporate reputation, built over time, can be destroyed in seconds. Be ready and have a plan in place for threats and events that may have a negative reputation impact.
• Be proactive and responsive. Build relationships, listen to your customers and clients and engage in social dialogue. [In all fairness, according to the Ad Age article, Sears launched a customer-centric campaign, Shop Your Way, four years ago. It has done little to offset the recent backlash.]
• Develop brand advocates internally (employees, management) and externally (customers).
• Toot your horn. Leverage advertising and marketing, including public relations, efforts to create long-term and favorable impressions.

For additional insight, check out this article on reputation management for small businesses on Forbes.com and this LGK YouTube playlist video pick on reputation repair from the Reputation Institute.

Do you have any takeaways to add from our stream pick? What marketing lessons can we learn? Comment below or visit us on LinkedIn, Twitter , Facebook, G+ and share!

For daily marketing communications news, subscribe to LGK’s free, online, MarCom Digest. Maximize your momentum!

Confessions of a Former Twirl Girl and 4 Lessons about Marketing

Photo credit: Wystan/Flickr under Creative Commons license

A Face in the Crowd is a 1957 film classic that strikes a chord with many in the entertainment, media and marketing professions. It is the story of a hobo who becomes a media icon with an inflated ego and a false sense of fame and power. It features an all-star cast, legendary director and captivating signature sequences. That’s Hollywood, always a signature sequence – think the Deer Hunter’s wedding scene, Gone with the Wind’s Atlanta Depot burning scene, The Godfather’s baptism scene. I cannot count how many times I’ve seen A Face in the Crowd, but watching it again was like being hit over the head with a silver stick. There it was: an “aha” moment and squad full of marketing insight from a four-minute baton twirling scene. Small businesses, too, can learn a lot from twirling a baton. Here are four signature lessons and references to maximize your marketing momentum.

1. Focus
Many business owners know what they want but do not have a plan, which is a recipe for disaster. A plan, whether or not it is in the form of a list or comprehensive document, holds you accountable and keeps you focused on using time wisely and spending marketing dollars most efficiently. Read LGK’s entire post on marketing focus, which includes five suggestions, here.

2. Agility
The digital era requires companies to move with quickness, fluidness and nimbleness, combining all facets of the operation (e.g., marketing, technology, sales, production, etc.) to meet customer expectations and the needs of the business. Being agile is also about being collaborative, customer-centric and responsive. We have to be able to chew gum and talk at the same time or in drill team terms, toss the stick in the air, turn and catch it without missing a beat. Here’s a post from CMO.com which profiles four brands’ use of agile marketing.

3. Precision
It is tempting to indulge in the smorgasbord of marketing channels and opportunities, but marketing with precision is a well-coordinated drill – a process – to connect customer insight with efforts and ultimately results. According to an excellent overview of precision marketing on marketingsherpa.com, a successful application includes sending the right message to the right person at the right time in the right channel. Read this overview to sharpen your strategy.

4. Timing
It is pretty obvious here. Try throwing a baton in the air with no sense of control – it drops. The same is true for marketing. Timing is everything, from plan development, implementation, execution and evaluation. It is central to your success and vital to optimizing exposure and customer engagement. Here are five tips to create a timely marketing strategy via marketingthink.com’s Gerry Moran.

So there you have it, a purely professional, yet somewhat self-serving and hopefully helpful post linking a silver stick to marketing insight – that is what happens over a long holiday weekend. In the spirit of full disclosure, I am an unabashed classic film buff and former “Twirl Girl” who served as captain of her high school squad.

LGK’s GB O’Brien (Former High School Twirl Girl)

Have any childhood confessions and marketing insight to share? Feel free to reveal your thoughts in the comments section of this post. In the meantime, here’s that mesmerizing signature sequence from A Face in the Crowd.

GB O’Brien
Principal, LGK

For daily marketing communications news, subscribe to LGK’s free, online, MarCom Digest. Maximize your momentum!

Bah Humbug, No Ordinary Year-end Marketing Post

‘Tis the time of the year when we’re bombarded with endless lists of tops and bottoms, best and worst, reviews and predictions. With all due respect to the authors, distributors and repurposers – present company included, see LGK’s The Year in Tweets:  2013 Cyber Chatter -we have three tips of wisdom to maximize your momentum now and forever more.

• As simple as it sounds and as simple as it is, by all means, make a plan! Refrain from jumping on the latest marketing trend, tactic or platform without knowing what you want to achieve, how you’re going to get there (time, manpower and budget) and how you want to be perceived by those ultimately responsible for boosting your business and bottom line.
• Do a SELFex (self examination), not a SELFIE. You have to look back to leap forward. Be flexible, make adjustments and tweak – not Twerk (there, we said it) – when necessary.
• Do your marketing thing. Do it well, do it often. Remember that marketing is a process and to be a contender, you have to be “all-in,” focused from conception to delivery to return on investment.

On behalf of the LGK team, I thank you for visiting our blog and wish you the very best in the year to come.

GB O’Brien
Principal

For daily marketing communications news online, subscribe to LGK’s free MarCom Digest. Maximize your momentum!

Share the #SmallBizSat Love with Non-retailers Too

It’s a fact. Many small businesses do not sell gifts, gadgets or widgets. Rather, most sell services and/or a combination of services and merchandise. These non-retail companies are just as worthy of today’s celebration of Small Business Saturday.

So carry on, shop small and spend big. But take a moment to acknowledge the small non-retailer. Give a nod to the companies that solve problems with their expertise, talent, skill and insight. All of the service providers in between and alike, from the plumber to electrician, the exterminator to landscaper, salon stylist to nail tech, handyman to mechanic, visiting nurse to chiropractor, newspaper carrier to newsstand operator, bookkeeper to business consultant, appreciate your continued patronage.

In the spirit of full disclosure, LGK Marketing Communications Collective (LGK) is a non-retail business consultant, a woman owned minority small business that provides outsourced marketing communications services. LGK sweats the marketing details for many small to medium-sized businesses so that they can do what they do best. If you own or operate a small to medium-sized business, visit our website to sign-up for the Marketing Score, a free self-analysis of your marketing efforts and potential. This tool is but one of many benefits of working with a small business.

On behalf of LGK and the millions of small business non-retailers, thank you for your support, consideration, encouragement and engagement. Happy Small Business Saturday and season’s greetings!

For daily marketing communications news, subscribe to LGK’s free, online, MarCom Digest. Maximize your momentum!

Be a Marketing Contender: Commit!

There’s a thespian in every marketer and a marketer in every thespian. Whether or not you agree, the real contenders of stage, screen and marketing share this trait in common: the ability to commit. It’s a skill that won the late Marlon Brando an Oscar and one that many businesses and organizations invest in to deliver long-term profitable relationships with their customers, clients and members.

Just as Brando so powerfully committed to a character struggling between his conscience and an environment of corruption in this classic scene from On the Waterfront, marketing contenders are in it to win it. They have an active commitment versus a passing interest. This includes having a plan, budget, strategy and tactics. Marketing contenders are all-in and focused from conception to delivery to return on investment – we could use the long-haul versus cheap thrill analogy here. They are not the cut and run type. Instead, marketing takes center stage, day in and day out, sometimes 24/7. These stalwarts create value, information and engagement that organically grow product or service, company and brand appreciation. Are you a marketing contender or merely a marketing “could ‘a been” a contender?

Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness.
W.H. Murray, Scottish mountaineer and writer

For daily marketing communications news, subscribe to LGK’s free, online, MarCom Digest. Maximize your momentum!

Classic Rules of Marketing and Sales – The 10 Laws of Sales Success

The worlds of sales and marketing have changed. In fact they have collided and connected – thank goodness. So, today, let’s revisit the classics to supercharge our strategies. Old rules still have a place in the new realities of engagement as we endeavor to attract, reach and convert the masses.

We stumbled upon “The 10 Laws of Sales Success” by Len Foley, a sales management trainer and co-author of the book, Your Successful Sales Career, in a July 2005 post on Entrepreneur.com (visit this link to read the full article). Whatever your business type and focus, whether or not you go for the low-hanging fruit or reach for the stars, integrating one or more of these timeless tactics may be the shot in the arm your strategy needs.

#1: Keep your mouth shut and your ears open.
#2: Sell with questions, not answers.
#3: Pretend you’re on a first date with your prospect.
#4: Speak to your prospect just as you speak to your family or friends.
#5: Pay close attention to what your prospect isn’t saying.
#6: If you’re asked a question, answer it briefly and then move on.
#7: Only after you’ve correctly assessed the needs of your prospect do you mention anything about what you’re offering.
#8: Refrain from delivering a three-hour product seminar.
#9: Ask the prospect if there are any barriers to them taking the next logical step.
#10: Invite your prospect to take some kind of action.

And since we’re getting a little nostalgic, in this clip from the AMC television series Mad Men, lead character Don Draper takes the family-friend approach to another level, which demonstrates another classic trait that will transcend through the ages: emotion.

For daily marketing communications news, subscribe to LGK’s free, online, MarCom Digest. Maximize your momentum!

LGK Marketing Communications Collective Celebrates its 4 Year Anniversary

Experienced Media Professionals Turned Dream into Reality Circa 2009

Happy Anniversary to LGK!

(Boynton Beach, FL/Washington, DC – October 9, 2013) – LGK Marketing Communications Collective, Inc. (LGK), a collaborative group of communications specialists, celebrates its 4 year anniversary, succeeding during a period that experienced great changes in the national economy and tremendous advances in strategic marketing. Formed in 2009 by Gay O’Brien and Leisa Chester Weir, LGK operates from Boynton Beach, FL and Washington, DC. “In the midst of a recession, with hopes for a swift recovery and armed with more than 40 collective years of marketing experience, it was the worst of times and best of times – to reverse the words of Charles Dickens – to hang the LGK shingle,” states Weir.

LGK launched as a virtual marketing communications practice to serve clients throughout the country by assembling veteran marketing and creative talent commensurate with project objectives. With a minimum of overhead costs and a maximum of professional expertise and focused attention, LGK provides greater economies of scale for organizations that demand sound strategic counsel and outstanding tactical results. As the marketing landscape shifts from outbound to inbound and a combination of both to grow customers and profits, many businesses find LGK’s structure a perfect fit.

“The growth of multiple channels to distribute marketing messages and to reach target audiences requires experienced skill sets in content development and execution, marketing and project management. That’s why more than 40 percent of B2B and B2C companies outsource their marketing to companies such as LGK,” states O’Brien. “LGK works as a seamless team for businesses of all types and sizes, including traditional advertising and public relations agencies seeking multicultural subcontractor partnerships. Our flexibility and responsiveness makes it possible for our clients to improve the quality of their marketing, save money, focus on their core business and maximize their momentum.”

Started as a dream during a brainstorming session at a weekend getaway of broadcast marketing professionals, LGK is a reality, well positioned for the future. LGK’s clients represent a diversity of industry sectors, including entertainment, food, health care, literature, nonprofit, personal services, real estate, retail, risk management and sports. Service offerings have included content publishing, distribution and analysis; social media management, website and blog development; public relations, reputation management, video and audio production and more. “We’ve been able to deliver results for our clients and to say that we’re excited about the next four years is an understatement,” says Weir. “We look forward to continuing to provide clients with marketing solutions that produce a return on investment.”

LGK is registered with the federal government as a minority and women-owned contractor, with the Small Business Administration as a women-owned small business (WOSB), and designated by the state of Florida as an African-American and women-owned business. LGK also serves as an Executive Advisory Corps marketing consultant for member agencies of NonProfits First in Palm Beach County, FL.

About LGK Marketing Communications Collective, Inc.
LGK Marketing Communications Collective, Inc. (LGK) is a female owned marketing communications practice with offices in Boynton Beach, FL and Washington, DC . Founded in 2009, LGK specializes in content development and execution, marketing and project management. For more information, contact Leisa Chester Weir via email: leisa@lgkmarketingcc.com or telephone: 1-877-545-5622, visit www.lgkmarketingcc.com and engage:

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