“I was referred to you by a friend. How do we get started?” she said enthusiastically.
These words are music to the professional’s ears! The sales cycle just got reduced to a nanosecond. New business is coming through the door effortlessly. Yahoo!
Was it really that easy? Can you sit back and just enjoy the referral business walking through your door day in and day out?
Yes…and no. In the past year, I’ve watched […]
“I used to never refer people,” stated Bill Welch, owner of Northern Lights Electric, a 40-plus year resident of Sonoma. “You couldn’t trust people,” he explained. I asked him to explain how it was that in more than 40 years of business in Sonoma he felt he couldn’t trust another contractor to refer work to them? After all, according to Nielsen, ninety-two percent of consumers trust referrals from people they know. […]
Anticipation. It fuels the world!
Just like waiting for that perfect cup of coffee, every business owner has a vision of what will happen once their marketing campaign kicks in and sends a flood of new business to them.
If you’re like the zillions of coffee lovers in the world, you anticipate the aroma of percolating coffee and espresso. You know exactly how you feel when you get that warm ceramic mug in your […]
It caught your eye. A turn of phrase. A gleam in the sunlight. And voila! You were distracted by some shiny new object.
A hundred and fifty years ago we would have called it a nugget of gold, gleaming on a river bank. Today, it’s likely to be some shiny new app online. “Look what it does!” “Wouldn’t that be a great thing to offer our customers?” “Can we use that […]
The answer depends upon whether or not you have some goals and expectations for what digital marketing should bring to your business’ growth.
I am surprised when I ask this of clients and many say, “I had no idea what to expect.” Really? Why on earth would you spend money on any marketing without some expectation? But in recent survey, fully 46% of small business owners said they didn’t know if their […]
Ask them! If you’re not already collecting this data, start today!
“I don’t remember,” can be heard frequently from customers who don’t want to be bothered with answering the query.
Rather than letting them off the hook, consider the consequences of not knowing: You won’t be able to predict the growth of your business if you don’t know where it’s coming from or at what frequency. It also leaves you in the dark […]
Several months after I launch new websites, I check on their results in my page rank software as it takes upwards of 60 days for Google’s spider bots to “crawl” the site and rank its search success. When I see that most of the keyword terms we optimized the site for generate a #1 or #2 ranking in Google results (as I did for the client above), it’s like getting a nice pat […]
As a child, do you remember bugging your mom, “When’s supper gonna be ready?” Or, “Are we there yet?” Or waiting for the train to arrive (with your dad in it coming home from work)?
It seemed to take for-e-ver to arrive, didn’t it?
That’s what everyone wants to know about social media marketing: When will the customers come banging on my door in droves?
First, remember how your mom said, “A watched kettle never boils”? Or, “If […]
A recent report on Marketing Profs provided interesting statistics to see how businesses stacked up against one another on this topic. A key finding by research firm TrackMaven in the report, was the overall decline in consumer engagement. That wasn’t particularly surprising. But what got my attention was the sheer volume (or lack thereof) of work involved. And I’ve been pondering the results ever since to see how it compares with my own clients’ results. […]
I could be wrong, of course, but this TV commercial has been irritating me since it launched last September. Perhaps you’ve seen it?
https://youtu.be/OvfU1NpCJQQ
This is just one in a series of commercials, “What’s the Matter with Owen?” But here’s the short version of the story: A just-out-of-college twenty-something proudly tells his friends he landed a job programming for GE. They look disappointed and confused, inquiring why he won’t be doing the great things […]
