Review your website
A quick glance at your website isn’t what we mean. Step outside of your current bottle as owner or manager of your business and truly look at your website as a customer would. Would YOU do business with YOU based on your experience? Check your site on multiple devices…using the office computer isn’t enough because most searches now begin on mobile devices. Is it optimized for mobile? Again, looking at your website as an average customer would, what would you do with the information you see? Are you asking visitors to do something? Are you converting visitors to leads or sales? By and large, a customer already has reached the point of purchase by the time they start reviewing various websites. Most of us don’t randomly start searching for things we don’t intend to buy. A car dealer website is usually the last place a customer will visit before taking a test drive, so are you asking them to? Can you find your website? Start by NOT searching for yourself, but the products and services you supply. Do a review of where you stand relative to your competitors. For a free report on how your site does versus your competition, use the free SEO search tool provided on the Maudience website. Caution…you may be frightened out of your mind.
Review your current marketing
Begin today and collect all of your bills related to marketing over the past three months at minimum. A full year would be best. What are you paying for that you don’t really see a return on investment? Include everything that you spend money on that has your name on something…including those little pens you hand out at the front counter. You may be surprised…you may be horrified…you may be paying bills for the sake of paying them rather than paying for them because they work. Once you collect your marketing spending, compare it to what you expected to pay when you planned it. Review your marketing for the message it relays as well. What are you saying to your customer? Are you shouting into the wind or whispering into their ear? A business owner can completely turn around their effectiveness when they cast their message into the mirror of their customers. If your message is all about you and what you do…cancel it and turn the mirror on your customer. What are the problems they’re having that you can solve with your products and services? That’s what your message should be about. To understand clearly what kind of a budget process you should have for your marketing and advertising, contact Maudience for a free review and consultation.
Educate your employees
Nothing hurts a marketing and advertising campaign more than a lack of understanding on behalf of your employees. Time and time again, we run across businesses who say their latest sale didn’t have the response they expected. One of the main factors of its failure may be that your employees weren’t clear on the details. A restaurant that has an oversupply of a certain kind of soup will pass that information onto the servers as something to “push”…they go into great detail about how good the soup is, what it tastes like, what’s in it, etc. Servers then pass that information onto each and every dining customer and pretty soon, there’s no soup left. If you don’t allow your floor sales people in on the good news, you can’t expect they’ll pass on that good news to your customers.
