LinkedIn Marketing

Approximately 81% of small and medium-size businesses use social media, and 94% of those use social media for marketing purposes. But how many of those brands are using social media to directly acquire business? If ever there was a social media platform that helps you directly get business, it’s LinkedIn, the social network designed around business.

Twitter and Facebook may have bigger numbers, but LinkedIn is the place businesses go to do business. And that works to your advantage…if you know how to use LinkedIn. It requires that you change your mindset from how platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram are used. The tactics are more personal, and require some thought and effort (really Twitter and Facebook do to, but that’s another podcast episode).

In this episode of Power to the Small Business, Josh Turner of LinkedSelling joins us to give us beginning, intermediate, and advanced tactics to acquire business through LinkedIn. For complete show notes and links, see LinkedIn Marketing Solutions on my blog.

Featured Segment Expert: Josh Turner – Founder of LinkedSelling
Host: Jay Ehret of TheMarketingSpot.com


(email subscribers and feed service readers click here to listen to the podcast: LinkedIn Marketing)
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Do You Need Responsive Website Design?

The most effective website gives every visitor what they want. But consider this: even if you have everything they want, your visitors still might not see it. There is an assault of devices accessing the content on your website: desktop PC’s, laptops, tablets of all shapes and sizes, smartphones galore. All have different screen sizes. How can your website handle those screens? Not very well, in most cases.

multiple devices access your website

Photo credit by londoncyclist on Flickr

It’s time to respond, with responsive website design. Responsive website design is your answer to the device assault on your website. What is it and is it for you? Responsive website design makes your website content universally accessible across a number of devices, in an optimized format for that device. Sounds like magic. But is it?

In this episode of the Power to the Small Business marketing podcast, we ask an expert web developer to weigh in on this hot new trend in website design. Cory Webb is an web developer, author and Joomla specialist, and he joins host Jay Ehret to discuss the pros & cons of responsive web design, content management systems, and how to hire a responsive design web developer to create your website.

Guest: Cory Webb – Web Developer, Joomla Expert
Host: Jay Ehret of TheMarketingSpot.com

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Responsive Website Design Cheat Sheet

Responsive Website Design – An approach to website design that takes your existing website content and makes it accessible to all devices accessing your website.

CSS: Cascading Style Sheets – A programming language used by developers to design the look and feel of a website.

Javascript – A programming language used by developers to make websites more interactive.

CMS: Content Management System – Software on your website server that allows you to create, publish, and edit content on your website. The three major CMS platforms are WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal.

Show Notes

Tips to hire a responsive website developer:

  1. Look for developers who have a lot of front end development experience.
    – HTML, CSS, media queries
  2. Look for developers who are familiar with the popular frameworks:
  3. Look for examples of responsive designs the developer has done.
  4. If they try to sell you a template, ask to see what your site, or others, look like with that template.
  5. Examine the examples across multiple devices.

Selected Podcast Quotes on Responsive Website Design

“Whether you do a mobile website or responsive website, you probably should do something. Because it really makes you look bad to the customer if you are not paying attention to those details.”

“A website is the most efficient and effective way to communicate with your customers.”
~ Cory Webb

Show Links:

Cory Webb responsive website designCory Webb on Twitter

WordPress
Joomla
Drupal

What Great Brands Do

In a company built around a brand, it’s up to the business owner or CEO to understand the difference between the the business and the brand. There is none. That’s the big idea that underpins Denise Lee Yohn’s new book: What Great Brands Do.

What Great Brands Do Author Denise Lee Yohn

Branding is not a marketing function. It is a business function. According to Yohn, brand building cannot be delegated to the marketing department. Instead your brand must be “operationalized,” meaning, you use your brand as a guide and compass for all activities of your core business operations.

In this episode of Power to the Small Business, What Great Brands Do author Denise Lee Yohn discusses her new book and her seven brand-building principles. It is a book that will help you get a grip on how your brand and your business are connected. And Yohn asserts that if you make your brand your business, you can have both: a great brand and a great business. Press the play button on the player below and get started.


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Show Notes – What Great Brands Do

Brand: The central organizing idea of your business.

  • A brand is a bundle of values and attributes that define the value you deliver to people through doing business, that forms the basis of your company’s relationships with all your stakeholders.
  • Your brand is what your company does and how you do it.
  • Your brand is not what you say you are, it’s what you do.

Selected Podcast Quotes from Denise Lee Yohn

“Marketing and advertising only play a very small role in shaping brand perception.”

“Great brands don’t delineate between their brands and their businesses. They’re one and they same.”

“It takes an enlightened leader or team of people to realize that there is a lack of alignment between what they’re saying and what they’re doing and at the same time, have the aspiration to have a great brand.”

~ Denise Lee Yohn on Power to the Small Business

What Great Brands Do Show Links:

The Book: What Great Brands Do
The Tools: Branding Worksheets and Templates
On Twitter: Denise Lee Yohn
Denise on the Podcast: Marketers Roundtable Discussion of Current Issues

If you liked this podcast, you might also be interested in these episodes:

The Keys to Transformational Branding
Branding Lessons from the U.S. Marines
Small Business Branding Clinic

A Radical Approach to Marketing with Gareth Kay

Are you are a radical marketer? Do you even want to be one? According to Gareth Kay of Zeus Jones, being radical is about solving the problem at its root cause; getting at the real, fundamental problem. And sometimes most times, that does not include throwing ads at the problem.

Gareth Kay of Zeus Jones talks radical marketing

Gareth Kay of Zeus Jones

Some sobering stats for the creative marketer:

  • Only 8% of Americans see a real difference in the advertising of competing brands.
  • Most Americans would be happy if four out of five brands disappeared tomorrow.
  • 5% of Americans believe that brands make a noticeable, positive contribution to their lives.

Brands are not as different or as creative as they believe. Kay thinks this is because of our narcissistic, creative approach to marketing. The different approach, he suggests, is a radical, hacker approach. One where marketers are no longer confined to their silo, but instead have a seat at the operations table where they can solve problems rather than create ads.

Guest: Gareth Kay of Zeus Jones
H
ost: Jay Ehret of TheMarketingSpot.com

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Show Notes – A Radical Approach to Marketing

Radical Marketing: Solving problems at their root cause, by focusing on the fundamental problem.

Gareth Kay’s Radicalist Manifesto

  1. Be obsessed with the outcome we create rather than the output we make.“Be more obsessed with making hacks rather than making ads.” A hack is the most ingenious and effective solution to a problem.”
  2. Leave the quest for perfection behind. Experiment, put it out in the world, and then learn.
    “We don’t go on because we’re ready. We go on because it’s 11:30.”
    ~ Lorne Michaels, Producer of Saturday Night Live
  3. Make sure you put people first.
    Not just consumers, but real human beings. Think about people’s lives: What are they like? What are some of the things they love and find painful? What is the role your brand can play in making life just a little better?

Selected Quotes from Gareth Kay

“I really think that perhaps a better definition of a CMO would be Chief Growth Officer.  So really their job is to think about how they can best grow a business, and how can they do that through creating demand.”

“There’s a risk of ‘short-termism’ and really focusing on quarterly results, rather than building what should happen in the long term,  and is perhaps damaging to brand building.”

“We’ve hit the innovator’s dilemma. We are finding imaginative new ways to do what we’ve always done before, rather than looking for new ways to apply our skills and talents to generate real, new commercial ideas.”

Show Links:

Watch Gareth’s presentation at BOLO 2013: A Time For True Radicals (opens video in new tab)
Gareth Kay Opens San Francisco Office of Zeus Jones
Gareth Kay on Twitter

BOLO Digital Marketing Conference

Phenomenal Experience Design Creates Customer Stories

Your brand is part of your customers’ lives. The only question is: Are you a meaningful part of your customers’ lives? To the degree that you determines the frequency and impact of stories told about your business. Welcome to the world of phenomenology in experience design.

experience design and customer story telling

People are wired to share stories about meaningful experiences. It’s the fuel for word of mouth. But how are these stories born? Brian Clark of GMD Studios says it happens when you choose to put the audience, instead of the object, at the center of your work. Translation: Put the customer, instead of your product, at the center of your business.

I met Brian Clark at the BOLO Digital Marketing Conference last month in Scottsdale, and his presentation on Phenomenal Work really drove home the connection between storytelling, phenomenal experiences and word of mouth. In this episode of the Power to the Small Business internet show, Brian joins me to help us find those remarkable and out out-of-the ordinary things that create customer stories.

Guest: Brian Clark, CEO of GMD Studios
Host: Jay Ehret of TheMarketingSpot.com

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Show Notes – Phenomenal Experience Design

Phenomenology: The study of consciousness and the things we experience.

How to get customers to tell stories about your business:

  1. Enable your employees to become story tellers.
  2. Look at your customers and see what meaningful experiences they’re already having, and amplify them.
  3. Write stories that tell what you have in common with customers.

Takeaways:

  1. Shift the data you’re using away from the brand to the customer to make marketing decisions.
  2. Does this already exist? Listen to what people are saying in the various channels and then ask yourself: “How do I make that more meaningful?”

Selected Quotes from the Show

“It’s when our work is actually experienced by someone that it fully flushes out to what it is.”

“Our brands are there as part of someone’s life, and part of a story they’re going to tell other people.”

“We use stories as proxies for our own experience.”

“Meaningfulness has no upper end.  You can always create an experience that’s more meaningful than the one you have.”
~ Brian Clark, GMD Studios

Show Links

Audi Heist Links
Audi: Art of the H3ist
A New Kind of Car Chase (Bloomberg BusinessWeek)

Phenomenal Work on Tumblr

Download Brian’s Presentation from BOLO 2013 (Look under documents)
Phenomenal Work

Two Sides of Search Engine Marketing

Every brand, every business, and every agency is either doing Search Engine Marketing or thinking about it. How can you not? 90% of adults use search engines, and 54% of them do daily. Thinking about it is easy, doing it effectively, is a little tougher.

search engine marketing podcast featuring bing ads

In this episode of Power to the Small Business, we give you two looks at search marketing: from the product side and the agency side. Two different guests will share the keys to search marketing success and tips on how to be more effective with your BingAds and Google AdWords campaigns.

Guests:
John Gangon, Bing Ads Evangelist
Joe Kerschbaum, Client Strategis at 3Q Digital

Host: Jay Ehret, Dean of Marketing Know-How at TheMarketingSpot.com
Length: 33 minutes


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Show Notes

HOW TO APPROACH SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING

    1. Get educated on what SEM is and how it works.
    2. Determine how SEM will work in your overall marketing strategy and your business.
    3. Review your website for
      1. A killer user experience
      2. Focus on conversions
      3. Proper tracking tools to gauge success of SEM

TOP 3 TIPS FOR SUCCESS ON BING ADS

      1. Always make sure you thinking about what your customers are searching for and what messages will connect with that search. Then test 2-4 with those messages.
      2. Use negative keywords to eliminate search queries for which you do not want to show.
      3. Spend time thinking about how you group your keywords. Use 10-20 keywords in an adgroup, with 2-4 ads.

LANDING PAGES

Do the four-second landing page test. Go to a friend or family member and show them the page. Within four seconds, shut the screen off, and ask them the question “What should you do?” after seeing that page? If they don’t know what they should do, how will your customer know?

Selected Quotes from the Show

“In the big picture of search marketing, I think that you do not have to be a search expert, but you really have to know your customers and you have to know your options available.”
~ John Gagnon, Bing Ads

“Search is so powerful and critical because what it allows you to do is reach customers when they are actively looking for your product.”
~ John Gagnon, Bing Ads

“We find in general, across the board with clients, that (Bing Ads) CPC’s tend to be lower, click-through rates tend to be a little bit higher, and CPA’S are a little bit lower, and ROI is better.”
~ Joseph Kerschbaum, 3Q Digital

“We can talk all day about keywords, ads and your bidding strategies, those are all important, but it all boils down to your website and your landing pages.”
~ Joseph Kerschbaum, 3Q Digital

Show Links

Bolo Digital Marketing Conference
Bing Ads

John Gagnon on ClickZ
John Gagnon on Search Engine Watch

Joe Kerschbaum
Joe Kerschbaum on Search Engine Watch
3Q Digital

Inspiring Word of Mouth With The Passion Conversation

Passion can go one way, but a conversation must go both ways. When it comes to word of mouth, If you want your customers to be passionate about you, then you have to reciprocate initiate. John Moore and Geno Smith take it up a notch in their new book: The Passion Conversation (co-authored with Robbin Phillips and Greg Cordell), saying that if you want passionate buzz about your business, you first have to love your customers.

right click to see Passion Conversation book by Brains on Fire

How far are you willing to go for your customers? And do you really care about them outside of their purchase from you? The more you care, the more love you show, the more passionate word of mouth your customers are willing to give in return. But where to start?

In this episode of Power to the Small Business, John Moore and Geno Church of Brains on Fire take a passionate dive into the business/customer relationship. They answer the tough questions and give practical examples of how it’s done.


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Selected Quotes from the Show

“A brand isn’t worthy of receiving love before they start showing love.”
~ John Moore

“If we have a better understanding of why people share and talk about what we do,  instead of (the conversation) being artificial, it’s authentic.”
~ Geno Church

“If a brand is to really make a connection and to spark word of mouth, they must speak to the customer like a friend.”
~ John Moore

“Doing business right, and purposeful, is going to be profitable.”
~ Geno Church

Show Resources

Buy the Book: The Passion Conversation
Brains On Fire
John Moore
Geno Church
Bolo Digital Marketing Conference

Counterintuitive Marketing – When Not to Trust Your Gut

Thanks to neuromarketing, we can discard some of our most cherished beliefs. And thanks to Roger Dooley we can get a handle on marketing that doesn’t seem to make sense.

Roger Dooley author  of Brainfluence podcast

You don’t get customers. You just can’t. But don’t worry, customers don’t get customers either. That’s why we have things like behavioral economics and neuromarketing. If you’ve been flying by the seat of your intuition, perhaps it’s time for a marketing gut check. Roger Dooley has categorized and compiled 100 marketing tips based on how customers behave, not how you think they might behave. And some of revelations in Brainfluence will hit you right in your gut.

In this episode of Power to the Small Business, Roger Dooley, author of Brainfluence, will discuss some of the most counterintuitive advice from his book. It just may change the way you market, and cause you to question why you’ve been doing what you’ve been doing.

Guest: Roger Dooley, neuromarketing consultant and author of Brainfluence
Host: Jay Ehret, Dean of Marketing Know-How at TheMarketingSpot.com


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Selected Roger Dooley Quotes from the Show

“Introducing a product you don’t expect to sell can actually increase sales of other products in the line.”

Give somebody a lot of choices, and they start doing comparisons and end up just getting all muddled and just giving up.”

“We don’t like to think hard, and when we can make a decision based on emotion, it’s easier for us. And often, we’re even happier with the result when we do things that way.”

~ Roger Dooley

Show Resources

Roger Dooley’s Neuroscience Marketing Blog
Roger Dooley’s Forbes Blog

Free marketing coaching session with Jay Ehret

Belief in Your Business

How do I become a successful business? Show me the steps! Maybe it’s not the steps you really need. Maybe what’s missing is belief: yours and your customers’.

right click to see The Business of Belief by Tom Asacker

Businesses continue to sell their brand using the attention strategy: trying to capture people’s attention in a crowded marketplace. A strategy that mostly fails. You know it’s time for a new strategy, but do you believe? In his short, powerful book, The Business of Belief, Tom Asacker explores the motivation behind how you run a business, and why customers would want to buy from you.

In this episode of Power to the Small Business, we snag Asacker for a discussion on desires, beliefs and how to approach business decisions with your true passion.

Guest: Tom Asacker – Entrepreneur, Consultant, Author
Host: Jay Ehret – Dean of Marketing Know-How, TheMarketingSpot.com
Length: 26 minutes


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Selected Tom Asacker Quotes from the Show

“Belief is what drives people’s actions, not their understanding.”

“We are somehow drawn by this notion that people are rational actors. Like computers; we’re thinking machines. But that Idea could not be further from the truth.”

“I think every CEO, every business owner, should employ a court jester, someone who can just tell him the truth, because the people in the kingdom aren’t going to tell him.”

“There’s a big difference between what people say they want, what they rationalize to themselves and other people, and what they really want. That’s the business’s job to figure that out and then create and deliver that unexpressed desire.”

~ Tom Asacker

Show Resources

Tom Asacker’s Website: The Business of Belief
Purchase the Book: The Business of Belief

Free Fundamentals of Branding Recorded Webinar: Branding 101
Free Fundamentals of Marketing Recorded Webinar: Marketing 101

Who’s Spoiling Your Customer?

Hopefully it’s you. Because you are not being judged against your competition, you are being judged against every other experience your customer receives. Your customer experience is either exceptional or bust.

download pictures to see this photo[For feed readers and email subscribers, click here to see the podcast player: Who’s Spoiling Your Customer?]

The customer experience is the number one factor of customer loyalty. While products and processes are important, the experience customers receive may be more important.

In this episode of Power to the Small Business, Lior Arussy, President of Strativity Group, a customer experience consulting firm, joins host Jay Ehret to discuss how customers choose a business and why they would choose you. It takes an exceptional customer experience to win customer loyalty.

Guest: LIor Arussy, President of Strativity Group
Host:
Jay Ehret, Dean of Marketing Know-How at TheMarketingSpot.com
Length: 18 minutes


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Selected Quotes from the Show:

“The customer is coming with the best of the world experiences they’ve had, and they’re saying “Why can’t you do that?”


“We live in a world where it’s exceptional, or it’s a bust.”


“Any branding effort is attempting to create an emotional connection. All we are saying with the customer experience is: Fulfill it!”

“Uneventful is not a place to be. That’s not a differentiation. Uneventful means you didn’t harass me, (not) ‘I love you.’ Totally different type of emotion, and totally different price point you can charge.”

~ Lior Arussy – Strativity Group

Resources to Build Your Exceptional Customer Experience

Links to articles, webinars and tools:
Strativity Knowledge Center
(download reports, white papers, and tools)

The Customer Experience Map Tool – Includes free downloadable tool and tutorial

Free Customer Experience Design Webinar – Recorded and ready to watch