Practical Marketing -- A Five-Step Marketing Program for Small Biz with YP

Thank you for joining our 2014 Small Business Week webinar Practical A Five Step Marketing Program for Small Biz. My name is Eddie and I'll be moderating today's session. At this time, I would like to formally begin today's conference and introduce Standest Stinnett from score.

Thanks, Eddie. Hello everyone, My name is Candice Bennett and I'm the Marketing Manager at scora. In just a moment we'll begin today's presentation, but before we do, I'd like to chat with you about how you can get free advice on marketing or any other business topic or challenge. SCORE is America's Small Business Resource. We offer free advice to those that want to start, grow, or even exit their small business. We also offer free and low cost workshops online and in communities across the nation. Was formed in 1964 as a resource partner of the US Small Business Administration. Since then we've helped over 10 million people in pursuit of their business goals. We're proud to join the SBA in celebrating this year's Small Business Week. And we're also celebrating our 50th anniversary. That's 50 years of helping aspiring and existing entrepreneurs succeed. Since 2009 alone, we've helped over 200,000 businesses. Strength helps more than 230,000 businesses increase revenue and helps create over 250,000 jobs. That's success that our mentors and small business clients are certainly proud of and we're eager to work with you to increase those numbers in the future. So how do we achieve this success? Score offers over 300 chapters with over 11,000 volunteers across the nation, providing free mentoring and local educational workshops. We also offer free mentoring and a variety of business tools on score.org. If you have a question about writing a business plan, getting started on social media, analyzing financial ratios, or developing a marketing plan, our mentors are here to help. Our volunteers are successful business owners or executives that have walked in your shoes and are willing to share their knowledge to help you avoid common pitfalls and achieve your goals. And it's all for free. In addition to our free mentoring and online and local workshops, you can find a host of free online templates and resources created by our experts and our corporate partners. These resources provide the latest information on trends affecting the small business landscape. You can also learn from your peers in local business roundtables. The greatest benefit of working with SCORE is that you don't have to go it alone. We've got a network of experts ready to help online or in a chapter near you. As you're listening to today's presentation. I encourage you to jot down a few questions, then visit www.score.org to connect with a mentor that can help you apply the ideas presented to your business. We hope you enjoyed today's presentation and the rest of Small Business Week. Thank you so much for your attention. Now I'd like to turn things back over to Eddie.

Thank you very much, Candice. I would now like to introduce our featured presenter for today's webinar, Tina Stock. Tina, please go ahead.

Thanks, Eddie. And welcome everybody to Practical Marketing. Thank you so much for taking time out of your day to join us. My name is Tina Stock. I'm Executive Director of Content Marketing with YP and many of you may know YP from our history, the Yellow Pages company. But times have changed and so have we. Today we are North America's largest local search media and advertising company. We are actually number three in the mobile search ad industry, just behind Facebook and Google. Our website and app are used by nearly 70 million visitors each month. We generate over 40 billion impressions on the YP local ad network and we help over 575,000 local businesses with their marketing. All of this is powered by our proprietary technology platform. So obviously we have come a long way, but what hasn't changed is our commitment to helping local businesses and communities grow and our respect for what it takes to run a small business. We know that you all are busy juggling multiple responsibilities and you don't have time or money to waste on activities that aren't going to improve your bottom line. So in the next 40 minutes, I'm going to walk you through a five step marketing program designed specifically for small business owners. The five activities we're going to cover are intended to build on each other and work with each other, but ultimately use these activities in the order that makes the most sense for you. If you're new to marketing, this is going to give you a checklist of things that you can do immediately to grow your business. And if you're an experienced marketer, this can help you to refocus your efforts. Now, we are going to go through this fast. I want to make sure and leave time at the end of the webinar for questions. But my experience is at the end of the webinar we're not going to be able to get to all the questions that are submitted. So what we do plan to do is to publish and answer all of your questions on the Practical Answers section of our website@ads.yp.com and then the webinar is going to be published for on demand reviewing, I think both by SBA, but definitely by yp. So buckle your seatbelts, hang on, and let's get started. And step one. And often the hardest step in any marketing program is figuring out where to start. So in order to help you as a business owner get started, we've developed two exercises. These exercises should take you less than an hour and they only require a pen and paper. The first one is defining your ideal customer. And this really helps you to focus your marketing activities where you're going to get the biggest reward. And the second is developing a 60 second business story, basically giving customers a compelling reason to do business with you. So what do we mean by ideal customer? Well, this is the person who not only wants to do business with you, but with whom you want to do business. Ultimately, defining your ideal customer helps your bottom line by focusing your marketing activities on reaching your most profitable customer group. And it's as simple as identifying five to 10 descriptive terms that paint a picture of this ideal profitable customer. In order to make it fast, we suggest that you pull terms from these four demographic, location, interest and life events. Demographics. It's just basically determining if your ideal customer is male or female in a specific income bracket or age group. Now, I know that there's always going to be exceptions to any rule, but. But again, the goal of this exercise is to improve your focus. So look for patterns and the usual suspects and ignore the exceptions. The second thing to look at is location. Does your ideal customer live in a specific area or proximity to your business? For instance, if you sell widgets on Etsy, then your ideal customer could be located anywhere. But if you're a dentist, then your ideal customer is probably within 10 miles of your business. The third bucket is interests. Do your ideal customers share certain hobbies or join the same clubs? If you are a home remodeling contractor, then your ideal customer probably looks a little bit like me. I read home magazines, I watch home shows, I attend home and garden events. And according to my husband, I am the cause of our never ending home remodeling project. So I'm probably your ideal customer. And then the last bucket is life events. Is there a common life event or a trigger that causes the need for your service? The reality is getting married drives a lot of businesses business to florists and tax time drives business for tax consultants. For many of you, the terms that you select for this bucket will have the most impact on your focus. And so there you have it. Four buckets to help you think of five to ten descriptive terms for your ideal customer. So here's an example of an ideal customer for a fictitious business that we're going to call Susie's Garden Shop. Her ideal customer is probably a woman between the age of 30 and 50 with a family income over 75,000 who lives within 20 miles of her shop and enjoys gardening and buys gardening supplies every spring. So there you can see how, just using these four buckets, we came up with six descriptive terms that Susie, the Garden Shop owner, could use to focus her marketing efforts on her ideal, most profitable customer. But defining your ideal customer is really only half of getting started. You also need to talk about your business in a way that's going to make the ideal customer want to do business with you. My guess is if all of us were sitting at an event and took the time to listen to other business owners introducing themselves, we'd see two ends of the business story spectrum. On the one end of the spectrum are business owners who spend a lot of time talking about the awesomeness of their business, but they never actually tell you what they do. On the other end of the spectrum are business owners who give you a few fast facts about the business, but they don't say anything that's compelling or or makes them want to do business with you. The goal of this exercise is to give you a business story that you can tell in 60 seconds or less. And like all good stories, it includes some drama and has a happy ending. So what you see here in light gray is an example of a four stage story arc. What you see is in light gray, the beginning or the introduction to the hero, the complication, climax and resolution. This is a standard story template that people use. In black is how this arc can be applied to telling the story of your business. What do you do? What problem do you solve? The climax is how is your business different than other businesses out there? And then the resolution is basically, how is your customer's life different as a result of doing business with you? Basically, what is their happily ever after? So let me walk you through an example of how Susie would be able to tell her business story. So in this example, she starts with I have a garden shop. The goal of this phrase is just to be very as simple and concrete as possible. Avoid the temptation of trying to make it sound too vague or too sexy because the next three sentences are really where you're going to take the simple, concrete truth and give it some meaning. The next point is what problem do you solve? And this is where you Focus on the one problem that you solve better than anyone else in your market. Now, you might feel like you solved such a problem, and the reality is you might solve multiple problems, but the goal here again is focus. So you want to focus on the one thing that matters most to the person to whom you're talking about. That leads us to the third point, which is where you differentiate yourself from your competitors. In the example of Susie, the garden shop owner, she sells specialty plants that her primary competitor, the big box store in her area, doesn't carry. The reality is, for many of you, the key difference between doing business with you versus your competitor is going to be you. Your personality, your years in the community, your community relationships. So the goal here is to find something that sets you apart and include it in your business story. And this leads to the happily ever after. How is your customer's life different after having done business with you? And there you have a 60 second business story. I am Susie. I have a garden shop that sells specialty and exotic plants that are not available in big box stores so that my customers can have the garden of their dreams. And that is step number one. Define your ideal customer. This ensures you focus your marketing activities where you are going to get the biggest reward. And then exercise two, where you develop your 60 second business story. This helps you to tell your ideal customer about your business in a way that is going to make them want to do business with you. But just knowing who your ideal customer is and knowing what you want to say to them is not going to be enough. And this is when we get to step two, where you get your business online. You need to get your business online so that your ideal customer can find you and learn about your business. The reality is, 97% of Internet users search for local businesses online. So it's a given. Your business has to be there. But being online is more than just having a website because those consumers are using multiple screens, including smartphones and tablets. So your website really needs to be responsive. Your website obviously needs to be optimized for search engines, but you also have to account for the fact that consumers go to multiple sites to find your local business. Obviously, as I said, they are going to search engines like Google and Bing. That's why your website is so important. But they are also going to local search sites like yt.com, review sites like Yelp and social sites like Facebook. And on these sites they find what's called a business listing, meaning your business name, phone number, and often your business address. When a consumer looks on one of these sites, your listing may not be there, but your competitors may, or your listing may be there, but it could be inaccurate since many of these publishers are getting information about your business directly from a phone company. That's why it's very important that you ensure your business information is accurate. And, and it's published everywhere that consumers are looking. In fact, YEXT estimates that missing and inaccurate information costs businesses over $10 billion every year. So as I said, getting online is more than just getting a website. It's also having a website that's responsive to mobile screens, optimized for search engines, and making sure that you have control of your business listings. So the first thing that you can do when you think about this step of getting online is to make sure you have control of your business listings. Now, at the very least, consider controlling your business listing across the top five. Google, Facebook, yp.com, yahoo and Yelp. All you need to do is to go to each one of these sites and search for your business by name. Most of these publishers, or in fact all of these publishers, will give you the opportunity to claim your business listing if it exists or add it if it's missing. And most of them are going to give you the opportunity to add additional content about your business. And this really helps consumers choose to do business with you. So it's important to add that additional information. Controlling your business listing on the top five sites is going to take you a little bit of time the first time around, but totally worth the investment. Again, this is all about improving your bottom line. But once these top five sites are done, there are still dozens and possibly hundreds of additional sites where your business listing could also be pub. You can take the time, narrow it down to the ones where you think your ideal customer looks, or you can take advantage of some of the listing management tools that are available for small businesses. Listing management tools are especially useful for the ongoing maintenance of your business listing because things do change. It's the Internet change often you want to stay on top of it. So getting your business listed is an easy and free way to get your business online and make sure that potential customers can find you. The second point here though is you want to make sure that you do have a website and that it is responsive for mobile screens. According to a recent survey, we understood that 60% of shoppers with tablets or smartphones report performing local searches on their device within the past week. So what's the bottom line impact to you about a mobile optimized website? Well, it makes it Easy for the consumers to contact you once they find you. A mobile optimized website is literally optimized for ease of use on a small screen. So here's a quick test that you can do to see if your website is mobile responsive. Go to the browser on your desktop or your laptop. You can open up Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Fox, whatever is your browser of choice. Go to your website and then zoom out until you are looking at your website at like 27 to 33% of normal size. Every browser is a little bit different, so you will have to figure out where that zoom opportunity is. If your website looks exactly as it did at 100%, it's just a smaller version, then likely your website is not mobile responsive. However, if your website changed a little bit, if it moved into a new order or the content moved around, then yes, your website is likely to be mobile responsive. If your website is not mobile responsive, talk to your webmaster about getting it updated. You definitely do not want to miss out on the opportunity to be contacted by consumers who find you on their mobile devices. And then the third and most obvious opportunity is to optimize your website for search engines. Bottom line, I'm not going to be able to teach you SEO in five minutes. And the reality is many of you on this call are probably too busy to invest a lot of time into doing this for yourself. You'll end up outsourcing it. But what I can do is give you a three step checklist that you can use to determine if your website is optimized. Is it optimized accurately and is it optimized for effectiveness? So to determine if your website is optimized, ask yourself, can Google find your website? You can answer this question by literally going to Google and in the search results bar type site and then the URL of your company, adsolutions, yp.com, bobsplumbing.com whatever the URL is that you're wanting to look at, again you're typing site URL. When you look at the results, you're going to see really two results. You'll see one result that says Google doesn't find anything. In that case, if your website doesn't show up, you are kind of screwed. That means that Google doesn't even know that your website exists. There is work that needs to be done if your website does show up. What you are going to look for is to see how many pages does Google think you have? How many of your pages are findable? Now it is going to be an approximate Number, it is not going to be exact, but if you are within like a 10% difference, if you have 50 pages and Google finds 45, you are pretty good. If it's over a 20% difference, then you know that you definitely have some work to optimize your website so that Google can find all of the pages of your website. The second thing you wanted to do is to determine if your website is optimized accurately. Meaning, does Google think your site is relevant for the terms that your ideal customer is going to use to find you or your type of business? And you can get an easy answer to this question by simply thinking about the words, terms or phrases that your ideal customer is going to use when searching for your business and compare these words to the words and the terms on your website. Obviously, the first place on your website to look at is that visible content on your site. But you also want to look at the meta tags and the title tags. Again, the goal here is not to teach SEO in five minutes. So if you are unfamiliar with the terms of meta tags or title tags, then you can do a little bit of research or you can talk to an SEL provider. The bottom line, you want to make sure that all of the terms that matter, all the terms that describe your business and all the terms that your small business customer is going to be looking for are on that site and that they match across all of the different areas where content is included. If they can find you, then yes, Google has decided that your site is relevant and you will be included in those search results. But being included as number 1000 isn't really going to help you grow your business. And this is where you want to make sure that your site is optimized to effectively get you to the top of the results. In order to determine if your site is optimized effectively, you need to ask yourself, does Google think your site is important? Now, the answer to this question, that's kind of that secret sauce of Google or all search engines. But the two things that you can look at is, number one, how unique is your content. And the second thing is how many other sites reference your content. This is that term backlink that we all hear so often. Trying to become important for terms such as plumber or forest is very difficult. There are thousands of people who make very good careers helping businesses become important for these types of general terms. But the one term that you should really be considered important for is your business name. Meaning if somebody is looking for your business by name, your business should really be on page one. And this is where your business listing, again, both on your website and off your website, can impact your chances for success. So in step one, we got you started by defining your ideal customer, developing your business story. And in step two, we got you online and made it easy for people to find you. And this moves us along to step three of the practical marketing framework, which is get leads. Sometimes just being online isn't enough. You are getting customers, but not at the volume or really need to grow your business. And this is when investing in advertising makes a lot of sense. If you do it smart, meaning invest in advertising with the goal of getting high quality leads, not just impressions or traffic to your website. So what do we mean by leads? Leads are when people contact you or give you the opportunity to contact them. So here I'm going to give you a five point smart advertising model that you can apply to any of your marketing activities to help you get leads for your business that you ultimately can turn into more customers. And it just so happens these five points do spell the word smart. So the first thing is start small. If you've never advertised, all you need is a credit card and a computer and you can start a small advertising campaign today. Don't let budget or experience be a deterrent to you. If you are serious about growing your business, this is something that you can do immediately if you've been advertising. This concept of starting small refers to an attitude of experimentation and testing. It's always wise to go into any new thing with a small budget and make sure that it works well for you. But small doesn't necessarily mean short. It's not about time. It's actually better to have a small budget over a longer duration of time than a large budget for a short amount of time. I'm not going to tell you where to spend your advertising dollars because ultimately that depends on where you are most likely to find your ideal customer. For instance, if you know that your ideal customer is local, then you want to consider local advertising. But if you know that your ideal customer is on Facebook, then consider Facebook ads. Again, the concept here is to think about doing it small and then the next step, which is to make it measurable. The foundation of smart advertising is making decisions based on data and facts. Ultimately, every business, whether you're large or small, has to decide where to invest your marketing dollars. And measurable data makes your decision making process very smart. The easiest and most ubiquitous way to measure the effectiveness of your advertising is to either measure impressions, clicks or traffic to your website, or to measure leads, impressions simply mean views, meaning how many people saw my business name or message as a result of this advertising. For instance, if you sponsor a little league team, you can actually calculate the volume of impressions that you get by determining how many people went to the game times the number of games that they attended. And that tells you how many impressions your business received. Five people going to 10 games equals 50 impressions. The second effective way of measuring is clicks, meaning how many people clicked on your ad and visited your website. Obviously, this is only applicable to digital advertising, but again, it's a very smart way to measure the effectiveness of the advertising. The third way, and what we highly recommend, is to actually measure leads, meaning how many people contacted you or gave you the opportunity to contact them as a result of the advertising. Ultimately, what you want to do is to make sure that anything that you spend your money on is going to be measurable because this helps you to make smart decisions as you determine how you're going to improve in the future. Now, obviously we recommend measuring leads, since those are the closest aligned to an actual purchase. But to get a lead, you usually need to include some type of action in your advertising that is trackable. So an example of action is giving people the opportunity to redeem a coupon or have a discount, inviting people to attend a free workshop at your location, having people book an appointment online or just have them give you a call. Ultimately, you know what type of action you are going to value most. You know the lead type that matters the most to you, whether it is a walk, a phone call, an online registration. So it is smart to customize your actions to your business needs. The fourth point is to make anything you do reproducible. And by this I mean really focus on developing one extremely smart ad campaign that can work across any media. Instead of trying to come up with creative things to do for email, something creative on display, something creative to do in search. Really kind of turn your thinking about marketing away from the platform and the media and start thinking about it as what's my message? What's the action? And then promote that wherever your ideal customer goes. So let me give you an example from a friend of mine. Here's her 62nd business story. She owns a bakery supply shop that gets decorating classes and sells these amazing custom frostings that you really cannot buy anyplace else. These classes, her supplies, these frostings help you to make these unbelievably delicious and beautiful cakes for your friends and family. One of her key actions is giving away one free cake decorating class. And this Action is brilliant for her business because number one, it gets you into her store. That's the thing that she values highly. She's pretty confident if you come in the store, you're going to buy something. And the second thing is that action is something that makes you familiar with how easy cake making can be if you have the right tools, which she sells. So again, she doesn't question which message to include in her ads or what terms to target in her SEM campaigns, what to put in her yellow page ads. Everything she does revolves around this message of her message of being a bakery supply shop and this offer of one free cake decorating class. And honestly, this approach is going to work for most businesses. One campaign across multiple media instead of multiple campaigns, multiple media and a lot of confusion. The last point is again, to think contacts, not just traffic. So yeah, if you have an E commerce business, then traffic really does matter to you. But if you fit into the profile of most small businesses, then what you actually want is a contact, meaning the name, phone number, home address or email address of your ideal customer. In that sense, you're paying once for the ad, but you're benefiting multiple times from this contact information. Now, most of the actions that you're going to include in your advertising give you an opportunity to capture that contact information. Meaning when someone redeems a coupon, simply ask them for an address so you can mail future coupons to them. Or when someone attends an event, get the email address so you can invite them to the next event. Or ask them to follow you on Facebook to keep in touch. Now, when you get this contact information, please be kind. Don't use the information to spam people. Literally. Use it very judiciously. Provide value to the people that have given you permission to contact them. But again, this gives you a very, very smart lead. So step four is getting leads for your business by marketing smart starting, small measure everything. Include some kind of action in all of your programs. Focus on one brilliant campaign across multiple media instead of a bunch of campaigns. And try to include the opportunity to get contact information in everything that you do. Ultimately, if you're spending more than a couple hundred dollars per month or spending a lot of time managing this advertising, you may want to consider outsourcing it because campaign management is easily outsourced. But turning a customer into fans, that's really something that only you as the business owner can do. And that does lead us into step four, which is getting fans for your business. So in step one, we got you started by defining your ideal customer Developing your business story in step two, you got online and you made it easy for people to find you. In step three, you got leads for your business that you ultimately were able to turn into even more customers for your business. Which then leads to Step four Getting fans. Fans are simply the customers who choose to do business with you over and over again and and they recommend your business to other people. Now, general wisdom claims that it's more expensive to get a new customer than to keep an existing customer, so getting customers and turning them into fans is an economical way to grow your business. Here are three very practical ways to turn customers into fans. First one is share your story. Why is this? Well, because that old adage of out of sight, out of mind is actually true. Your customers may eventually forget about you or forget why they chose to do business with you unless you make it a point to keep in touch. Again, I'm not going to tell you which social platform to join or if you should mail newsletters. Ultimately, you should go where your ideal customer hangs out and you should share in a manner that they value. But I will give you three tips for what you can share. So the first tip of course is pictures. My sister in law has a beauty salon in San Diego and one day on her Facebook page she shared a picture of a cat that had wandered into the salon. It's just a little picture that she had taken on her iPhone and posted it. That picture got a lot of likes basically on Facebook alike. It's the way that somebody shares your story with their friends and the reason it got so much attention was it contained a kitty cat. Those are always popular on social sites. So ultimately pictures are more about the subject than the technical quality. Especially nowadays when having a beautiful picture about something that's happening near your office or near your location or really having a beautiful picture is as easy as using Instagram and an iPhone. So pictures are a great thing to share on social media sites. The other thing to consider is other people's content. Is there someone who you enjoy reading their articles or you think that your customers would enjoy the information that this other person is sharing? Well then share that content with your audience. The main thing to remember is to give credit to whom credit is due. This usually means just link back to the site where you got the content or reference the person in your post. And the last thing to consider as far as what to share is share local information. Reality is good social sharing really isn't just about you and your business. It should really be about your customer and how Your business fits into their life. Many of you on this webinar are extremely important in your local community. You support little league teams. You volunteer at local shelters and attend local events. Your customers are also local. So you have the opportunity to share community information that really will set you apart from some of the larger companies that are out there. So the goal here is again, share your story and keep your business top of mind. The second thing that you can consider is to reward loyalty. If you are a retail or a restaurant business, there are a lot of ways that you can manage or develop loyalty programs. One of the most popular loyalty programs is this concept of a volume discount. Basically, buy three, you get the fourth one free. Many businesses simply offer punch cards. This is really easy. It's easy to set up, it's easy to manage. And really it's easy to manage because it's up to the customer to manage it, not you. But if you're serious about leveraging your marketing dollars, you may want to consider a digital solution for managing the volume, such as Belly or Perka. Not only because they help you to reward the customer for multiple purchases, but they also help you to gather that contact information. Again, that's something that's so valuable in a way of not only getting new customers, but helping you contact with your existing customers. The second thing is to look at membership perks or tie ins. So one of my favorite examples from our local community is how our community theater and the local coffee shop are working together. If you go to the coffee shop and buy coffee, you can then go to the theater, show your receipt from the coffee shop, and get a discount off the theater ticket. You can then take the theater ticket back to the coffee shop and get a discount on the coffee. So these two businesses are working together to drive loyalty and repeat business. I bet there are many opportunities like this in your community where you can partner with another business to drive loyalty and repeat business. But what do you do if you have one of those done and run types of businesses like a plumber? I mean, it is kind of hard as a plumber to give volume discounts. In that case, you are really going to want to focus your efforts on making it easy to refer. So the fastest way to leverage this tactic for growth is simply ask. Ask your customer if they know of anyone who may be looking for the service you provide and ask them to recommend your business. Usually if someone really likes your business, they're going to have no problem verbally committing to recommending your business to friends and family. An easy way to enable references is to ask your customer to rate or review your business on local and social referral sites. At yp, we know that not all reviews are fair or real. So we've recently begun giving consumers the ability to my book their favorite business and share this with a friend. But ultimately we know that peer recommendations influence purchase decisions. So you want your best customers out there recommending and sharing information about your business. Another practical way to do it is just have shareable content. So bottom line, when someone asks one of your customers for a recommendation, you want the customer to be able to quickly find your business and give them something that they can share forward to a friend. So blog posts, articles, coupons, these are all great things that you can publish online that your customers can send to their friends as part of a referral. And so there you have three practical ways that you can turn customers into fans. Share, keep your business top of mind. Reward loyalty, and then make it easy for customers to refer you to your business. So literally, if you do one thing today, take 20 minutes and determine where you want your fans to post reviews about your business and remind your customers to review, rate or share or my book your business. And this leads us to step number five. I'm going to touch just briefly on a couple of overarching principles for how to make your marketing investment work better for you. And honestly, if you think of marketing as an investment, then you do need to plan on a regular basis to assess where you are versus where you want to be, just like you do with any other investment program. So in our framework, we're going to look at two levers that you can pull. First of all, how can you optimize or improve what you're currently doing? And how should you approach the opportunity to do new activities? The key to this analysis to this step is the ability to measure the source of your leads. So remember how we recommended measuring the effectiveness of your advertising by measuring leads, not impressions or traffic. Well then in order to optimize your spend, you need to measure the source of these leads. So here are three very simple tools that you can use to track the source of your leads. And the fastest is literally just ask. Keep a pencil and paper next to your foundation. Keep this information in all of your forms. Ask everybody how they heard about you. The pro to this approach is literally there's no prep, there's no technology, no big time investment. You can start doing this tomorrow morning. The negative to this or the cons of this is that it can be inconsistent. It is hard sometimes for businesses to keep track on a regular basis. And there is what we call an attribution error, meaning the consumer might tell you what they heard, what they remember about you, or how they heard about you, but they may remember it wrong. They're not trying to be misleading, they just can't remember it accurately. So if you really want better data, then you want to consider call tracking lines. Especially if you're a service provider or you do offline advertising like radio, magazines or yellow pages. Call tracking lines are simply phone numbers that you order from your phone company, that you publish or put in your ads, but that forward to your regular business line. And if you use a different call tracking line on every ad, then at the end of the month, you can simply look at your phone bill and determine what ads delivered the most calls. Now, the most practical way of tracking your digital programs are to use tracking tags. So tracking tags or digital tags are similar in concept to call tracking lines in the fact that you are getting a fake URL, a fake phone call, a fake phone number, a fake URL that forwards to your real website, and that information is captured in a report. So in this instance, digital tags are simply structured URLs that you publish in your ad that forward to your regular URL, your regular homepage, or your regular page that you're promoting. Landing page Instead of calling the phone company to order the tag, you use a tool like Google Tag Manager to create the tag. And instead of looking at a phone bill, you look in your web analytics tool. So again, conceptually, these are very much the same, but the execution of these are very different. Now, Google has a couple of great tutorials that can help you learn how to make tags. And then they also provide both a free tag management system and a web analytics system. So obviously this is a little bit more complicated than the other two options. So again, you may choose to outsource it, or you may choose to take the time to actually dive in and learn how to make this work. But once you're tracking your marketing programs, you can make smart decisions on how to optimize your marketing spend. And that's where we get to this concept of optimizing your marketing spend by either improving what you're currently doing, or adding new media, new campaigns, or more money. So optimizing a program can be a little bit of what we call a chicken versus an egg dilemma. On the one hand, as a smart business owner who is tracking your advertising, you now have some great data to help you make decisions about what's working, what's not working. Using this information, you can increase what's working and decrease what's not. If you're running two ads, you can see which ad is delivering the most phone calls or which ad is delivering the most sign up for your events. You can take money from the ad that isn't working and invest it in the ad that is working. When you look at your web analytics, you can see what pages people visit the most and you can make more of that type of content. And when you look at your Facebook report, you can see which post got the most likes. And yeah, it probably did include a picture of a cute animal and you can make more of these types of posts. But on the other hand, data doesn't always help you to determine what new things you should do. And in those instances, you really have to come up with an idea of what might work based on what your peers are doing, what experts in the field recommend, and then again start small and measure everything to help you inform your decision. Once you've committed to this step of getting better, meaning you have the ability to track the source of your leads and you use data to make decisions on how to improve, then you really have the final point of an extremely practical marketing program. And there you have it. Two exercises to help you get started Defining your ideal customer and developing a business story. We gave you three tips to help you get online and make it easy for people to find you and do business with you. We gave you a 5.0 smart advertising construct that helps you to get leads for your business that you can turn into even more customers. And then we showed you three effective ways to turn customers into fans. And remember, take some time to determine how you want your ideal customers to recommend your business. And then we showed you how to use data to help you optimize your marketing programs and create tests for new programs. This five step framework whether you are just starting out or you have been marketing your business for many years. So we ask that you try practical marketing and let us know how it works. So we have some time here to give you to answer some questions. The recording for this presentation will be posted on SBA's YouTube channel within the next couple of days and this recording will also be available at yp. So again, I know we went fast. I won't even say if we went fast. I know I went fast. So after it's published, if you want to take the time to go back and listen to it, parse this out, kind of break it down into its individual steps. Those will be two Places that you can go get information and start practicing this yourself. Now, we're going to take a little bit of time, answer some questions, and as I said, I pretty much guarantee that we are not going to be able to answer all the questions by the end of our time. We've only got about 14 minutes here. But what we will do is all of the questions are going to be captured. We will document them at our practical answers@adsolutions.yp.com and provide answers there. We will contact all of you with a little email, letting you know when those are available. So the first question that we have here is, is there a free way, as in no cost way, not free way, as in fast road, to update your business listing on the top five sites? And the answer is, yes, it is absolutely 100% free for you to go to Google, to go to yp.com, to go to Yelp and to claim that listing and make sure that it's accurate. Again, if your listing isn't there, most of us give you the ability to publish the listing. There's a huge benefit to you to make sure that your listing is there. Because again, your customers, your future customers, those ideal customers you want to do business with, are looking at all these different sites at different times for different needs, and you want to make sure that your business is there. There is no cost to getting this done. You could do this literally this afternoon. So I highly recommend if you do nothing else today, step back and go to these five top sites, claim your free listing, and then consider where else do you think your listing should be published? So the next question is, what one thing can we do right now to move our marketing plan forward? I'll give you three things. And obviously this is going to be so different for everybody. I mean, that's kind of not a generic question, but that's a broad question. There are so many ways to answer it. But if I was going to tell my best friend what are the things that they should do, I would say, number one, get your free listing everywhere that it can be. There's no cost to you. There's a bit of time. Again, there's tools available for you. If you want to make this even more efficient, do that immediately. Second thing is start making it so that all of your programs are measurable, that you're tracking everything. There's just no way that you can get better without having things trackable. So we gave you a couple of quick tools you can do to track. At the very least, ask again. This is the beauty of this type of program is that so much of this is as simple as asking people to refer your business, asking people how they found out about your business, and then taking the time to share information about your business and again claim your listing. So I know that's more than one, but hopefully that will help you to focus. And we highly recommend look at these five steps. Think about how have you defined your ideal customer? How have you defined your business? Are you online? Are you getting leads, are you turning customers into fans? And are you tracking everything? So the next question was, can you talk more about Beli or Perka for, for digital loyalty marketing, what is it, how much, et cetera. So I'm going to actually ask that you go visit their sites. They both have great information as far as how their tools work. There's a lot of other sites out there. So if you're comfortable with Google or Bing or whatever your search engine is of record, just go there and type loyalty programs. You're going to get back a number of different opportunities. All of these are the type of things that you can literally load on your iPad. Have an iPad next to your cash register and the consumer is able to log in, put in a phone number, keep track of stuff. Again, this is kind of a more sophisticated way of managing those old punch cards. The punch cards still work because they do reward customer for loyalty. They reward them for coming back multiple times. But the benefit of using one of these digital solutions is that it also gives you that contact information and it gives you the ability to help the customer manage it. Because I'm always losing cards. I don't know about you guys, but that's always one of the risks there. And again, you want to make sure that they're always thinking about you when they are ready to make that next purchase. So again, go to a search engine, see what other options are there. You'll see the website for both Belly and PCCA and check them out. So can we give you more information on sharing your story? I need an example. So sharing your story. Ultimately, I think there's two steps that go to this. Number one, make sure that you've got a really clean, easy to repeat story. We shared this concept last year with this small group of businesses and invited them to go to our Facebook page, share their story and get feedback on it. We've had a lot of response with that because it is kind of a different concept to actually think about turning your business story into that you can repeat that, you can say quickly that people can react to and have an emotional connection to. But once you have that story, then it's literally getting the story out to the people that care about it. So that's where social media can really help you. You can put information about your business on Facebook, you can use Twitter, you can use LinkedIn, whatever, again, is the social channel that makes the most sense for your customers. And for many of you, your customers aren't necessarily on a specific social channel. They're not hanging out on Pinterest. And so you have to think of other ways to share in a way that makes sense to them. So the example that I'll give you here is my tax guy. Absolutely adore him. He's a great tax guy. And every three months he sends us a newsletter that just reminds us of things that are happening that we should be aware of as we're getting ready for the next year tax time. It's a very simple way for him to keep in contact with us. It's a printed, mailed thing. To me. It's as old school as it comes, but I absolutely adore it. So it's not a case of sharing requires you to go social. Social is a great way to do it. Social helps you to actually grow your business as well. But it's more about sharing the things that matter to your customers in the way that they are going to appreciate getting it. So let me give you another one. Another question here is I have an online business. If I do business listings and they ask for address and I don't have a physical address, how do I list my business? So here's the trick that most of you can use. Most of the sites that ask for your business listing will ask you to put in an address, but they usually give you the option to not show consumers the address. So you can literally put in your home address, put in whatever is the telephone number that you're using, and then just simply omit your address. I think that's the term that most of us use. Don't show it, omit the address. Again, you need to go to each site, see what the different options are. But that's the way that most of us recognize the fact that you can be a local business, but you're a local business that doesn't have people come to your location. You're going to their location. So they really don't care if you're a plumber, like where your plumbing shop is located. They just care that as a plumber you're willing to go to their location. So again, if you have an Online business. And you're going and you're claiming or submitting your business listings. Most of the sites are going to ask you to give an address, but then they'll also give you the ability to omit the address from the consumer so it doesn't affect the consumer's decisions. Got about five more minutes and we've got a handful more questions. So again, I'll go through these quickly. Thank you for asking. These are great questions. So can you ask customers to post your business on their own Facebook page and for them to post your business elsewhere? So here's kind of the best way to think about Facebook. You want two things on Facebook. You want people to like your business. Basically, when they like your business, that means that they are open to receive updates about your business. When they see an update about your business, it's going to show up in their personal feed. They'll be reading, oh, here's what my nephew did. Ah, here's what my mom did. Ah, here's what my friend did. Oh, here's information about my favorite business. When they like that, then your information is shared with their friends. So it's kind of this concept of referring, but a little bit different because this is very much about how the social platforms work. So again, what you're asking people to do on Facebook is to follow you, and then you're giving them information that they can like, that they can say, oh, this is awesome, and that they can send to their friends. If you want them to share information about your business elsewhere. Again, you need to look at different platforms, figure out how it makes sense. Sometimes the best thing is literally just ask them to give you a verbal recommendation of your business and publish that on your website. And that way you have that kind of information about how businesses can share or refer your business to their friends. Does Facebook offer marketing programs or analytic tools? And are these worth it for small businesses? And how do you budget? Awesome questions. I know that Facebook is out providing additional training for small businesses, and I recommend that you take the time to read through their recommendations. But here's how I look at Facebook, and this would be my recommendation to you. Facebook primarily is a communications channel, so it's an awesome way for you to have an ongoing communication to share with your customer base. So if you think about email or if you think about newsletters, or you think about, hey, I just feel like picking up a phone call and chatting with my best customers. That's how you think about Facebook. It's a great communication tool. Facebook gives you the ability to see how many people have liked your, how many people have shared your post. But there are other tools that Facebook allows, and one that I think many of you are aware of is advertising on Facebook or doing a sponsored post on Facebook. Both of those give you the ability to share information about your business outside of the community that you've created. And again, the decision to advertise on Facebook, to spend money on Facebook, as opposed to just the free service that you get, has to be taken through the same filter that you're going to take. Everything which is, are your ideal customers there? If you don't know that your ideal customers are on Facebook, then it's probably not a good decision. If you know that your ideal customers are there, go for it. At the very least, always look at it as an opportunity to experiment, do something small and track what occurs. And then the best way to track is to make sure that you had in that Facebook ad or in that Facebook post some type of action that when somebody took the action, you were able to measure. So again, driving leads and then use that information, capture that contact information and continue to spend time communicating with that prospect going forward. So again, I can't make a recommendation for your business because I don't know your business well enough. But I highly recommend use it as a communication channel. If you choose to advertise, do the same thing that you would do anyplace else. And I think we have time for one more question and then we're done. So the question that we're going to do is can you explain the site thing to see if you're on Google again? Yes, I can give you that one real quick. So literally go to Google in the search bar, instead of typing in the keywords that you would normally type in, type in the word site, S, I, t, e, colon and then your website URL. So in that search bar, instead of typing in piza or typing in florist in San Gabriel, you're going to type in site your business URL. Then you're going to hit search. Google is going to go look for your website again. You're going to get two different actions. Either Google is going to come back and say, don't know what you're talking about, or it's going to bring back your website pages. You want it to bring back your website pages and you want it to bring back all of your website pages. So that's what you're looking for. We are at the end of our time. This has been great. Thank you so much for giving us the opportunity to share with you our practical marketing framework. We will be posting these questions and the answers on our Practical Answers site@adsolutions.yp.com, and the webinar will be available both at the YouTube channel and at adsolutions.yp.com thank you and have a great day.

Thank you very much.

Tina.

Thank you, Candice, and thanks to all in the audience for joining us today. This concludes our webinar. You may now disconnect.