Every project I work on requires hosting…no brainer, huh? But selecting the appropriate host for a given project and client is more complicated that you’d think. Every client has a different set of requirements for their WordPress project. Understanding the requirements is part of our consulting process for any project we work on in order to provide the best WordPress hosting recommendations. There would be nothing worse than building a project and handing it to a client only to see it fail due to hosting requirements not being met. And I see it just as bad to hand off a simple WordPress site to a client and have them overpay for a hosting solution that is intended for much larger demands. That can cost thousands of dollars over just a couple years!

Here are some of the factors I consider when consulting with clients on hosting requirements:

Resource Demand: There are a lot of things that contribute to server resource demand, but primarily I am interested in site traffic and complex processes on the site. There are solutions to optimize for both of these demands, but hosting a website that typically received 1000 hits per month vs. 100,000 hits is significantly different.

Internal Support: Who is the primary owner of the account in the client’s organization? How much savvy do they possess for navigating the demands of different hosting platforms? I don’t like to hand a custom configured VPS hosting setup to a client who’s primary role is sales support for a company. Some hosting solutions might cost a bit more but provided more managed services to reduce the load in internal support staff.

Hosting Support: Does the host offer easy access to phone support? What hours? Are the level 1 support folks competent or reading a script? Are level 2 and 3 support folks accessible by phone? Do they treat you like an idiot every time you call? These are the concerns I have regarding different hosting company support teams. Check it out before you’re stuck waiting for you ticket to be answered with 48-72 hours when your website is down.

Additional Tools: What does the host bring to the table beyond the typical cPanel setup? Will they save money from another service or product that might need to be purchased later? Check if they include SSL certificates, CDN support, firewalls, automated updates, and how their back systems work. Do the math ahead of time to make an educated decision.

Do They Champion WordPress?: Notice I didn’t say, do they support WordPress… Working with a host that champions WordPress through additional products, support of WordPress events, and encouragement toward WordPress best practices will move you toward a higher quality experience for your site development over time.

As I discern the needs of my clients I typically end up recommending one of three primary providers I work with. Here are my best WordPress hosting recommendations:

WPEngine

I heard about WPEngine through WordCamp years ago and have continued to be impressed in all of my interactions with them. They are the best option if you experience more than 10 to 30k visits per month on your website. Performance, added tools for backup and caching, excellent support, staging site (YES!), and scalability. I’ll be honest, I don’t do command line programming and don’t want to have anything to do with server maintenance. I don’t think my clients do either, so allowing WPEngine to be the experts costs a bit more, but saves a ton of hassle. Be sure to find their coupon at the bottom of this post. UPDATE: WpEngine is offering free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates now as well, which makes them very attractive for any critical sites I work with.

SiteGround

After much research, my preferred option for my own needs is SiteGround. Their support and systems are consistently rated the highest by unbiased measurements. Over a hundred of my clients have been satisfied with their services and it’s the only name I trust for accessible, affordable, shared hosting. Siteground’s load times, features, and collaboration tools make it a slam dunk.

Namecheap

My preferred domain registration company is Namecheap.com. I prefer them for competitive pricing, great customer service, excellent UI, and they also offer additional services like hosting. This is a re-seller of Enom products, but I still think they are doing a great job. They also offer a cheaper intro price than Bluehost for basic hosting needs. I just wouldn’t use any advanced page builder plugins on their platform.

Photo by Grover_Net

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Where is your first touch with new customers?

It’s easy to think your website is the digital front door to your business, but maybe your first contact with customers is no longer through a web search, but a social media account, advertising, or email marketing. How have you ensured that your first impression is in line with your branding and marketing strategy. Those elements are much more likely to drift over time than the home page of your website. Be sure to spend appropriate time aligning your marketing channels with effective messaging and visuals before blowing up your home page.

Review your search engine presence.

It’s surprising what you can learn from a quick review of your website analytics and webmaster tools about how your site is being discovered and engaged with. From which pages are indexed to which are the most common point of entry, reviewing how your site is currently performing in search engines can help you discover content creation opportunities, and maybe even places where your strategy has wasted effort in the past. And existing website can be adjusted and expanded so much more affordably than a brand new site.

Enhance your website’s user experience.

How does a new customer move through your existing website? Is it clear and compelling? Does that come down to design or maybe you’r not offering a clear path of engagement on your current website. Adding clear calls to action, paths for user engagement based on their needs, and more compelling value statements can all be accomplished without throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Be sure to engage an outside perspective in this work and respond to your weak points accordingly.

Integrate your lead generation practices.

How do new customers engage with you? Do they call, fill out a form, email and info@ address? What happens to all of those inquiries? Too often website owners complain about their website not performing well, but their internal systems are disconnected from their actual sale pipeline. Should website inquiries go to the front desk or to sales? Is there a clear path to support from your website that doesn’t get stuck in a bottleneck? Integrating your CRM or Support Desk and tracking these results is all possible with most websites without having to rebuild.

Invest in high value media.

How engaging is your messaging? Do you have one set of messaging for your sales pitch and another on the website? Do you have engaging videos, visuals, and brand-aligned value messages on your website? Have you spent $20k on your trade show display and only $50 for stock photos? Make sure your investments in the media that appear on your website are commensurate to the cost of the original investment in the medium.

All of these ideas are just a starting point for optimizing your overall web presence, but can help save your organization from the disruption of a major re-build project when it may not be needed. Dig in, ask hard questions, and allow your teams to iterate on your web presence together to achieve greater results.

The post Optimize Your Web Presence Without Blowing it Up appeared first on FourTen Creative | Seattle, Bothell, Kirkland, Bellevue.

The truth is, WordPress maintenance is WordPress security. By keeping your website up to date and monitoring its security and backup features, you are ensuring the survival of your website content. Your hard work could be lost if you website experiences a catastrophic failure or hacking. The cost to rebuild a website is something you don’t want to risk.

So, here are four easy tips to ensure your WordPress maintenance is on track.

#1 – Log in Regularly

Many people are content to make sure their website is still showing as normal on the internet. But the truth is that your home page may be loading and showing as normal while things behind the scenes are falling apart. You may be seeing a cached version of that homepage and it’s important to log in to see admin-level notices that help you understand what is really going on in your website. Logging into your WordPress website on a regular basis is the easiest way to be sure you are seeing the notices you might be missing.

Look for available updates each time you log in and be sure to run them. Many folks are wary of running updates for fear of ‘breaking’ the website. If you are sure to have a good backup situation (see below), you should feel free to run available updates.

This is especially important due to the inconsistent nature of email delivery from web hosts. You may have set up your website to email you important notices, but would you know if it stopped functioning?

#2 – Review Site Health Feature

A newer feature of WordPress in the past few years is the Site Health feature. The WordPress Site Health feature helps identify potential problems in your hosting configuration and other WordPress files. Look for this widget on the Dashboard when logging into your WordPress website. Be sure to click the Site Health screen to explore possible recommendations that range from identifying out of date PHP versions to deleting unused old themes which could pose a security risk.

One of the most important items that will crop up is whether you are running the latest secure versions of PHP and MySQL software on your web hosting configuration. Many web hosts will allow you to keep your old versions of PHP at your own risk. But you likely aren’t tracking the release of new versions of PHP if you are a small business owner.

#3 – Automatic Plugin Updates

Another recent feature addition to WordPress is the ability to enable automatic plugin and theme updates. This is great news to keep your website as secure as possible from security exploits that inadvertently pop up in plugins and themes over time. You may not be eager to enable automatic updates for every plugin or theme in your website, but even allowing the ones you have high confidence in will help get you on the road to a well-maintained WordPress website.

#4 – Security and Backup

As we noted, WordPress maintenance is WordPress security. When you are seeking to keep your website secure, running all available updates and logging in regularly are helpful. But you also want to have good security and backup features in case anything does go wrong. There are many plugins available to solve this problem, but I prefer to know that my web host is being proactive with WordPress-specific solutions for security and backup as well.

I recommend WordFence for a good security plugin and UpDraft Plus for a good backup plugin. But, for me, hosting with Siteground has been the best solution to these concerns. Good hosting enables good maintenance. With the introduction of their new Site Tools configuration (as opposed to open source cPanel), they have integrated similar features. Be sure you understand what features your chosen solution provides and doesn’t provide so you do assume you have everything covered by one plugin when you likely need a coordinated solution.

Do you need help with WordPress maintenance?

FourTen Creative offers monthly services to keep your website up to date and secure. Need more help? We offer a plan for that as well. Get in touch!

The post Top 4 Tips for WordPress Maintenance and Avoiding WordPress Errors appeared first on FourTen Creative | Seattle, Bothell, Kirkland, Bellevue.

Here Are 7 Essential Features of School Websites

Admissions Focus

The most important focus for the home page of school websites needs to be the attraction of new students and families. In most cases, you are speaking to parents, so don’t use silly fonts or selfies. Focus on speaking to the hopes and fears of prospective families. Chances are that the choice to attend your school is a significant decision for families and you need to speak directly to their decision making process.

Consider addressing what to expect for your student, what to expect as a parent, common questions, strengths and featured programs, and above all, speak in a relational way to this audience. They are already stressed out and need to feel like your website experience will hold their hand through all of the many questions they may have.

This is where to invest your design and photography dollars as well. Be sure to hire a professional photographer to obtain excellent photos that can help students and parents alike picture themselves as part of your school community.

Current Parent Focus

Satisfying the needs of current parents with information, opportunities for connection, tools, and resources can be a full-time job for any school. Consider how you can get current families to the most important information in the fewest clicks. Creating a Current Parents section can help you speak directly to this audience and provide prioritized lists of the most frequently requested information along with the most time-relevant information like news and calendars.

Consider whether any of this content needs to be password protected without needlessly creating another account for your parents to manage. Also be fully aware of the capabilities of all of the systems you may already be running for your school beyond your website. Does your Student Information System (SIS) provide teacher pages? Don’t duplicate this on your website if you don’t have to. Whether you have an SIS, online learning platforms, an app, or email newsletters, make sure you connect all of these tools with appropriate links and leverage available integrations to reduce parent confusion.

News

News and blogs can serve multiple purposes for a school—from sharing inspirational success stories to keeping current families informed of important matters. Leveraging a WordPress blog or some other news engine will help you make needed information more accessible. Some schools will only communicate via paper or email newsletters. It is a good idea to repeat this information in a way that extends your reach with this information and makes it easier for folks to come back and find a piece of information they need.

Calendar

The life of a school is often found in its calendar. Weekly, monthly, and special events engage students and families to define the flow and spirit of a school. An organized calendar on your school website will help ensure that families have the information they need to participate in these events. Don’t make people search old emails or call the school for vital information. Publish it in an intuitive calendar format to make promoting these events as easy as possible. We recommend WordPress based calendars like The Events Calendar as well as integrating whatever SIS-powered calendar you can into your website to reduce sign-ins and clicks for your visitors.

Location & Contact Details

Whether families are visiting for an Open House or trying to call to report an absence, make sure you provide a centralized location for contact and location details. Provide common links like a Google Map to make navigation easier. Include a note about parking concerns if relevant, and make it as easy as possible for folks to visit without extra hassle.

This is a great chance to highlight the features of your facilities through photos as well. I also recommend an exterior picture of the approach to your building so people can immediately recognize what they are looking for when they visit.

Forms

Paper forms are the bane of most parents’ existence. How many times do I need to remind the school of my home address or email via a piece of paper dropped in a puddle by my child? I have kids, I get this. Make your forms as easy as possible through WordPress plugins, fillable PDF forms, or at least downloadable forms. Be aware of requirements for signatures and e-signatures in your state, and choose your tools appropriately. We swear by Gravity Forms for WordPress to make the creation and management of forms as easy as possible. We love the ability to integrate payments and even route notifications to any number of admins. And best of all, all the data gets stored in your website database to prevent loss of data.

SIS Integration

This is the big elephant in the room for many school websites. A Student Information System (SIS) is the lifeblood of any school looking to manage data well. Choosing a platform that offers integration with your website without forcing you to use a limiting, proprietary web authoring tool is so important. Most SIS platforms are acutely aware of the needs of schools for website integration, they just don’t all give the same development attention to these features. Never shy away from pushing your SIS provider on these issues as they need to hear the needs of their clients as they continue to set the roadmap for future features of their product.

The goal of SIS integration is the seamless navigation of public information and the easy login to access private information such as grades and schedules. Make sure the platform offers tuition payment options and captures prospective student data in a way that doesn’t create bottlenecks in your staff organization or lock away important information that only a webmaster has access to.

Conclusion

As you seek to improve your school website, don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater, but seek iterative approaches to add vital features your visitors are looking for. You can improve your school website over time, or recognize when you have reached the limits of a current platform once you know what goals you have for your web presence.

What other features do you think are essential to your school website? We’d love to hear as we continue to grow to serve our school customers well.

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Here are 5 simple ideas to build your marketing presence without spending a dime.

Build Marketing Content

Most business owners face a deficit of time every day. They wish they could focus more on marketing efforts, but the day-to-day operations just won’t allow it! Well, now is your chance to sit down and review your marketing content. From LinkedIn profiles, to Facebook Page About sections, to your website, blog, email drip campaigns. All of these can be tweaked and expanded with your focused time investment.

Tap Into Your Network

Everybody knows that they need to take advantage of networking, but not everyone realizes how big their network might be. Apart from your current LinkedIn connections, look back through your email accounts, your billing platforms, and old sales lead logs. Build that biggest list possible to let people know you are still in business and looking for connections. Especially in this time, people will be more willing to help you out and keep the economy moving forward in their community.

Form Partnerships

Not every partnership has to be obvious. Maybe your roofing company and a local plumber don’t work directly together, but you can leverage each other’s networks and current client base to create mutually beneficial crossover. There are many ways to strike up creative partnerships once you get your minds together. Thanks to the folks at the Bothell/Kenmore Chamber for this idea and more. Your local Chamber of Commerce also likely has lots of partnership ideas for you and other members.

Reward Referrals

Your existing and past client base possess some of the best knowledge for promoting your company. They know how great you are to work with! When you reward referrals from past clients, you also create a returning customer. It’s a win-win-win to offer service credits and create goodwill with your best word-of-mouth sales team.

Raise Your Public Profile

So you’re not in Instagram yet for your business? (Me neither.) Maybe now is the time to take that next step in putting your name, face, or business offerings out there. Maybe it’s time to join some meet-ups, attend city council meetings, serve a local non-profit. Get out there and be seen in your community and hand them your card while you’re at it. When you raise your public profile, you build goodwill and trust in you and your business. And you can contribute more to your community! Maybe serve a local food bank by promoting a food drive to your clients?

As you invest your time in marketing your business, I hope you create some no rhythms that go beyond our current break in the normal rush of business. Invest in relationships, reward loyalty, and innovate new ways to reach and serve your customers. Let us know if any of these tips work for you!

The post No Cost Marketing Ideas for Your Small Business appeared first on FourTen Creative | Seattle, Bothell, Kirkland, Bellevue.

Personally, I have worked from home for years, from a backyard office to living overseas. Returning back to the US in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis is giving me the opportunity to share what I’ve learned from my clients over the years with those needing to make more sudden changes to survive with their physical doors closed.

Below is a list of ideas that might help your business or non-profit adapt to the current climate and possibly become more adaptable in an uncertain future.

Deliver Services Online

Many businesses have a professional services model that has traditionally been delivered in person, but that might also be accessible over video conference. Many financial advisors, lawyers, accountants, and even IT professionals have gained trust with their clients through face-to-face interactions, but they might be able to continue delivery of those services online.

Recently, The School of Rock, who delivers music lessons to youth around the country, had to take their traditionally in-person music instruction model online in a matter of weeks in order to avoid losing the majority of their students. They successfully implemented a system that served their franchises around the country in avoiding closing down operations and positioned them for a more flexible and scalable model for the future.

Create Virtual Products

Many service and brick-and-mortar businesses have built their model around in-person or physical delivery of products and services. In this new reality, creating a virtual product from a traditional service can sound daunting, but this offers a new opportunity to invite customers to try a new expression of what they have come to trust you for in the past.

Swift HR Solutions in Bellevue shifted in the past few years to a model of online delivery of HR training materials and in the wake of COVID-19, were able to shift their regular in-person workshops to online delivery. Their website was built with a robust e-commerce system which enables continued sales and delivery of these virtual products.

Create Virtual Experiences

Many high-touch businesses might not be blocked to completing transactions, but greatly slowed down in engaging potential customers. Maybe product demonstrations, informational meetings, walk-arounds, test-drives, etc. are no longer accessible to your customers. Consider creating an online experience for those folks which will help them get the information and ‘feel’ of your products when they are stuck at home.

Many Real Estate Agents including Metropolitan Park in Kenmore are offering virtual open houses now to keep the flow of business continue in the midst of this crisis.

Sell Future Products

Despite best efforts, many businesses still can’t get around in-person delivery of services or products. Many of these businesses have had to freeze their operations, lay off workers, and just hit pause until current restrictions are lifted. Some of these businesses are offering gift certificates or purchase toward future services at a discount in order to create cashflow. Local businesses often depend on the patronage of other local business owners, so even a trade for future services can be helpful to the recovery from our current crisis.

Businesses like Harmony Massage in Bothell, offer online purchase of gift certificates which can be used once they are able to open their doors again.

Accept Online Payments

The simplest form of putting any business online is to allow online payments. Having worked overseas, I depend on PayPal to help me obtain payments without dealing with physical mail and check deposits. From online invoicing through services like Quickbooks Online, payments directly on your website, or adding extensions like WooCommerce to an existing WordPress site, taking payments online doesn’t need to be complicated and is likely supported by services you already use.

Wonderland Child & Family Services delivers vital support to children with developmental challenges and has a complex model of fund-raising, fee for services, and government funding. In order to make donations and payments easy, they integrated different systems on their website so the user doesn’t have to know anything other than the web address and their credit card number.

Hold an Online Fundraiser

Many non-profits have the majority of their eggs in one annual fundraiser basket. From big luncheons to golf tournaments, these organizations get much of their funds from donors who are engaged in-person as they tell moving stories of their work. With these events off-limits, some are shifting their annual events to an online-experience.

Seattle non-profit Solid Ground had their annual fundraised cancelled with very short notice and were able to pivot to a week of online experiences to make sure funds to help those experiencing homelessness and other challenges, which will be even more essential in these times, remain accessible to their organization.

Connect Online

At the very least, businesses and non-profits are seeing the opportunity and need to stay connected to their clients through this crisis. With more time available at home, many folks are spending large amounts of time on social media or engaging in online video. Organizations that are well-positioned to create online content have the opportunity to stay in the conversation. From video, to podcasts, to blogs and social media posts, maintaining your ‘tribe’ online through the crisis will help people know how the crisis is impacting their favorite businesses and how they can help.

I don’t need to show you an example of this…just open up your Facebook feed and see how many are trying new models of online engagement and advertising to stay relevant. Do any of these examples give you ideas for your business?

Keep Giving, Keep Hoping

Hopefully you have been encouraged through this crisis with a little bit more hope in humanity as we all adapt, care for others in need, and express hope for recovery rather than give in to hopelessness. Yes, the crisis will continue to impact everyone you know, but if your business or non-profit can pivot to continue delivering to your clients, you will contribute to the coming recovery and be a glimmer of hope to others waiting for relief to come.

And if you find yourself in a comfortable situation through this crisis, be sure to reach out to those around you, donate to causes, and give as much as you can to those you find in need.

Photo by Masaaki Komori at Unsplash

The post Adapting Your Small Business to New Realities appeared first on FourTen Creative | Seattle, Bothell, Kirkland, Bellevue.

1. Identify Your Audiences

Starting with ‘audience’ we want to identify the different groups of people your non-profit is speaking to. You likely have at least two audiences including those you serve and those who support your organization. In a business, this is one audience, but as a non-profit, you need to be prepared to speak to each independently. You might also find that you have additional smaller audiences like a board, volunteers, or you might want to tailor communication to different levels of givers.

For each of your audiences, you should create an Audience Persona. This means at the very least, writing down a title and description of this group of people. A more extensive exercise would include identifying the types of communication that reach these people best, the places they spend their time online, likes, dislikes, and a sample bio of your typical audience member.

2. Establish Your Channels

Once you have identified audiences, you want to know how you can best reach that audience. Do you have their email address already or not? Are they social media savvy? Are they geographically defined? Each of these questions helps you identify where to put your efforts in reaching a particular audience. For example, many people struggle with how to engage their followers on Facebook, but if you have the email addresses of these people, don’t feel bad putting your efforts on the less sexy email campaign. And if your clients don’t have access to a particular technology, maybe posters are even better for you. By the time you have a clear picture of who your audience is, identifying where to reach them becomes easier.

3. Plan Your Schedule

How often should you be reaching your audiences? Do they require daily check-ins? Do you just need to solicit donations quarterly? Or maybe you only have a yearly on-ramping for volunteers. Luckily, once your audiences and channels are clear, deciding how much and how often to communicate becomes more clear. Now, you might need to also evaluate the man-power required to handle all of this communication. Do you need a dedicated social media manager? Or maybe you need to outsource mailings? With a clear schedule, you can plan your labor and you have a better picture of the budgetary resources needed over the year.

4. Bank Your Assets

Now, having budget on-hand for your communication tasks is helpful, but what you’ll find is harder to accomplish is creating a bank of communication assets to pull from as you ram up your publishing. Whether it’s photos, videos, testimonials, stories, etc. you’ll want to start gathering and producing these assets to power your campaigns. Maybe you even need to contract a graphic designer for a few hours so you have a nice, varied, collection of visual assets.

5. Create Your Content Upstream

Once you have your assets ready to go, you will want to understand where it’s best to start creating content. As you consider the content of your communication, where does it all end up pointing? In many cases, your website will be the destination for any calls to action. Are you seeking donors, volunteers, or newsletter subscriptions? All of those pages need compelling content first. If you are telling longer stories, start with your blog and point your social media posts back at it for further reading. Just be sure you think upstream as the starting point for your high quality content.

6. Publish to Your Channels

By the time you have reached this stage, your publishing should be a paint-by-numbers exercise. You should be able to copy and paste and schedule your posts across your channels. Consider using tools like Hootsuite to schedule and manage social media posting, and learn about all of the features of your email marketing platform in order to get the most out of each tool you use.

Don’t forget that human interaction will be essential as you release this communication as well. Your social media or communications managers will need to understand when to be expecting engagement from audiences receiving key communication.

7. Measure Your Success

As soon as you have published, you enter the measure phase of your operation. Understanding what to measure goes back to how you identified your audiences. Fundraising may be measured in money raised or new donors acquired. Normal story-telling may be measured in social media reach or shares. Emails will be measured in opens and clicks.

Every communication campaign should have a measure of success in order to justify the resources that go into them. With good data, you are able to make good decisions about everything in your plan that came before.

Good luck with your promotional plans!

Photo courtesy of Carli Jean on Unsplash.com.

The post Promoting Your Non-Profit Online in 7 Steps appeared first on FourTen Creative | Seattle, Bothell, Kirkland, Bellevue.

Here are my three tips to market your small business like a pro.

1. Clarify Your Brand Message

What you say about your business matters. Do you downplay your offerings, or do you make yourself out to be bigger than you are? Small businesses often lack right-sized marketing messages because they focus on themselves, their operations, or their expertise. When defining what your business is all about, it’s important to help the potential customer envision outcomes for themselves.

Marketing guru, Donald Miller, suggests your goal should be to make your customer the hero of their story with your business. In his book, Building a Story Brand, he suggests you define who you are as a business by the journey your customers embark on with you and see yourselves only as a guide on that journey, therefore helping the customer achieve their goals.

Taking this approach to defining your brand helps you connect more immediately to the potential customer’s interest and engage them in a further conversation about how you will help them achieve those goals. Write your brand story in as few of words as possible, forming a positioning statement, elevator speech, or tagline that you can consistently use across all of your marketing communications, phone calls, and informal conversations.

The result should be more immediate connection to potential customers, greater clarity in your organization, and more confidence as you make your sales pitch.

2. Embrace Digital Tools

Digital tools help multiply your success. Your small business has likely been a success for years already and you may say that websites, social media, and email marketing don’t impact your business. But are you missing the positive impact they could be having on your bottom line? Chances are, you are missing opportunities to reach new customers if you aren’t embracing new methods of advertising and reaching out to the public.

Many of these digital tools aren’t nearly as intimidating as you may fear. The world of self-built websites, self-managed online reputation, social media, and digital advertising tools is documented extensively for easy access. My impulse is “when in doubt, Google it.” Take a similar exploratory approach to any topic you feel intimidated by with a quick search in YouTube and you will find many other folks feel the same way you do and have learned a new skill.

Still intimated? Never hesitate to seek out help from third-party firms, Craigslist contractors, or your newly graduated niece. There a many digital natives working in the new gig-economy (read: underemployed) happy to help.

3. Measure Your Impact

Good data makes for good decisions. The biggest difference between how small business owners and digital marketing professionals operate is the habits of goal setting, tracking, and reporting. These practices don’t need to be complicated—simply writing down what your target is will help you discover ways of measuring and evaluating your progress. This measurement regimen also makes it easier to delegate marketing tasks in your organization because there are understood methods of judging success. This accountability is rare in small businesses and even many digital agencies.

What are the key performance indicators (KPIs) for your business? Obviously new customers and overall revenue are the most important signs of business success. Can you draw a line from your marketing efforts to new leads, to successful sales? If not, you need to measure every step of your marketing more closely.

Digital platforms provide their own methods of tracking success from Social Media engagement to website traffic. But if you don’t define how those statistics contribute to your overall business success, you can’t really decide whether you are getting a return on your marketing investments (ROI).

I recommend leveraging a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform to track potential clients, or some other spreadsheet to attribute new sales to specific marketing campaigns or channels. How did you hear about our business? Was it that expensive print ad? Was it our pay-per-click Google AdWords campaign? Was it a word of mouth referral? Being armed with this data will help you make smarter decisions and feel confident in your marketing strategy.

Anyone can be a digital marketer, but if you consistently practice these three tips, you will continue to improve your marketing and transform your business online. Hopefully you will start to see yourself and the marketing expert in your business!

The post 3 Ways to Market Your Small Business Like a Pro appeared first on FourTen Creative | Seattle, Bothell, Kirkland, Bellevue.

We have assembled a quick list of big marketing mistakes for small businesses to avoid.

Ignore Reputation

Who has time to deal with Yelp! trolls? No one, frankly. But while you might say “I don’t count on online reviews to obtain new business”, you might be creating a bit of a self-fulfilling prophesy. If you ignore your online reviews and other online reputation indicators, you might be ensuring that you gain no new business from this rapidly growing marketing channel, especially for locally based businesses.

Internal Perspective Only

Consultants are the worst, amirite? Many businesses know that they know their business better than any external voices. But you can also become completely blind to the things that are obvious to folks outside your business, including new customers. Seeking external perspective on how your business is perceived can reveal vital data for your branding and marketing efforts.

Spend without Measuring

Everything you spend money on contributes to or counts against your bottom line. Do you know where your marketing dollars fit in that equation? It takes hard work to set up an accountable marketing budget with data to clearly evaluate the effectiveness of your efforts. You count every dollar on the way in, why not count every marketing dollar on the way out? Always work with outside partners who share this concern for accountability as well, or you’ll see a constant stream of money depleting your marketing budget every month.

Not Modernizing

“Oh yeah, we know we need to update this eventually.” These words have probably been uttered a few too many times in millions of small businesses. I agree that not every business can be on the cutting edge all of the time. But certain things like mobile friendly website, social media engagement, and secure hosting environments are not just vital to success, but without them you may see active damage come to your reputation. Don’t feel pressured to update everything at once, but establish a schedule and a plan to modernize your tools, your image, and your message.

Market Without Strategy

You may have a business strategy, but you might not have a clear marketing strategy. Without a clear marketing strategy, you might be totally missing a relevant audience for your products or services or an effective way to reach them. Forming a clear marketing strategy makes you go back to the roots of your business goals and ask, “What is the shortest route to reach our goals?” You are also then able to identify metrics to track over time to establish whether or not you have been effective. They say without a target, you are sure to miss every time. Form a strategy the you can review yearly and work that strategy through accountable methods as mentioned above.

Spending Too Little

Fear can often sabotage our marketing efforts before we even start. I am victim to this myself. I honed my marketing skills in the non-profit sector where “budget” was an imaginary unicorn for marketing. But I warn small businesses when initiating a new strategy that if they don’t put the proper spending behind it (specifically advertising efforts), you are bound to see disappointing results. Make sure you understand what a recommended minimum of spending would be for any particular marketing effort before you begin.

Spending Too Much

I can’t mention spending too little without also mentioning that throwing money at a problem doesn’t always fix it either. If you watch your metrics carefully, you will find a point of diminishing returns on many marketing efforts. Maybe there just aren’t that many potential customers in a particular neighborhood. At that point, increasing the saturation of ads or mailers won’t fix anything. It will just drain your budget. If your strategy and measurements mentioned above are solid, you will be able to throttle and limit your spending wisely to obtain maximum impact.

Conclusion

While you are not likely to make all of these makes, you are certain to make at least one of these marketing mistakes as you run your small business. It’s ok! As long as you commit to reviewing and growing your marketing efforts, you are certain to improve over time and see greater rates of growth from your work. Whether you need help with branding, web, or a real digital marketing plan, let us know.

The post 7 Big Marketing Mistakes for Small Businesses To Avoid appeared first on FourTen Creative | Seattle, Bothell, Kirkland, Bellevue.

Here is the positioning statement formula:

U (A + B )  = Y

Y = (You) Company Name, Product, or Service

A = Audience

B = Benefit

U = Uniqueness

If math scares you like it does me, don’t worry about the likeness to algebra. I’ll explain how you can take what you already know about your business to form a compelling result from this formula.

Y | Name What You Are Selling

First, are you forming this statement for a company, product, or service? This is important because its hard to sell your company and your service at the same time. You likely need multiple positioning statements for your marketing endeavors, but let’s start with your immediate task—do you need people to trust your company or the specific service you aim to offer? It’s a subtle difference at times, but thinking carefully about your organizational goals and the competitive landscape should show you the answer.

Let’s imagine we are a local contractor and construction company focusing on promoting their high-end remodels. We likely have a short-hand way of referring to what we do such as “high-end projects”, but we want to nail down our label with language that our potential customers would use to find us. How about “Luxurious Kitchen Remodels”? This helps the viewer know exactly what you represent whether your business name makes that clear or not.

A | Define Your Ideal Customer

Audience targeting is one of the many benefits of Digital Marketing today, making it easier to aim your marketing directly at your highest value customers. Whether your customers are defined geographically, psychologically, or culturally, you can define this audience as narrow or wide as you want. The goal is for someone who reads your statement to say “That’s Me!”

Who is in the market for a high-end kitchen remodel? As much as I’d like one myself, let’s imagine that empty-nesters in high-income suburbs are a likely target. Our message can be tightly focused on this audience and even tweaked for different versions of our marketing to reach other demographics as well.

B | Understand the Actual Benefits

Communicating the value of your product can be difficult because the way you see your product or service may be totally different than the way your audience sees your product or service. You must ask not what your product does, but how it impacts your ideal customer. The end result of our fictitious remodel may be more space, but the psychological impact on the customer may be a sense of order, peaces, or fulfillment in their home.

A good way to figure out the perceived benefit of your product or service is to ask your customers. Whether it’s through reviews and testimonials, surveys, focus groups, or a casual chat over coffee, you might be surprised at your true impact on customers and you want to call that out for potential future customers.

U | Discover Your Uniqueness

Once you have completed the above tasks, you may still ask yourself whether what you have makes you stand apart in the market. Chances are that no one else offers your unique blend of A and B, but maybe they do. May you are a dentist or lawyer and you have 30 other lawyers in your town. Maybe your remodel services are trying to cut through the noise of a real estate bubble. At that point, you truly have to reach inward to understand what unique selling point and more importantly, unique character your company brings to the market.

Many companies like to tout their integrity, quality, trustworthiness—but these are what we call “pay-to-play” qualities that customers expect by default from any company they would work with. Can you offer something more? Can you offer fun? Can you offer an experience that no one else can? Can you where a bright Hawaiian shirt (only if you’re a carpet salesman)

What if our construction company included a vacation or lodging package with their services to coordinate with the customer’s needs during the remodel? What if our construction company offered a bring-your-own laborer option to include the homeowner in key moments of the project so you got to help raise your own walls, pour your own foundation, or screen on the last switch-plate? All of these could help the company stand out in the market and appeal to their ideal customers.

Conclusion

Once you discover how your can bring your Audience together with your Benefits, multiply it all with your uniqueness, and there you have it, the value of You and your product to the market. Such a positioning statement gets straight to the point of who you are, what you do, and why your potential customers should care. Without such clarity, you might leave folks asking “so what” as your rattle off your mission statement or values at them.

Give this a try and let us know if you need any help along the way.

Photo by Natasha Kapur @ Unsplash

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