Marketing is an investment in your business. Creating and implementing an inbound marketing plan can increase your visibility and strengthen your expert reputation. Small businesses regularly face many challenges when it comes to marketing. As the business owner, you are tasked with hiring the right people, increasing sales, making payroll, filing taxes and providing quality customer service. Then there’s marketing! You know you need to market your business to become or remain visible to your target audience. But like most small businesses, there are more pressing priorit ..read more

Today’s climate has every business looking at ways to change how they market their business. But many business owners are looking for simple marketing ideas that will work for their home services business without a huge investment. Some will require an investment in your online presence. But other valuable marketing ideas are about building relationships. This is especially true for home services businesses. Homeowners need quality landscapers, electricians, plumbers, HVAC services and remodelers. When they need them, they will go online to find one. But homeowners also want to get referrals ..read more

Inbound marketing is something that most small business owners have heard of but few implement. For those who add inbound marketing to their marketing plan, they experience a more cost effective and successful form of lead generation. To be successful with inbound marketing, you need to plan your strategy around search, content and social media specifically for your business. In this post, let’s get into more detail about how you can use inbound marketing to improve lead generation for your business. What is inbound marketing? Inbound marketing is a better way to do lead generation. It is co ..read more

Small business owners really don’t need one more thing to think about when it comes to online marketing. To add anything else to our already overflowing plates will make us ineffective. But small businesses, regardless of their industry, should add a blog as the central component of their content marketing activities. Creating relevant content for your target audience and optimizing it for search engine visibility is too important to ignore. Optimizing Your Web Content For the sake of simplicity, let’s view search engine optimization as two components: What you do on your website to help se ..read more

When you start an online search, you usually have some specific reason to do so. Your goal may be to find educational information for something you are working on. Or you are researching and comparing products to ultimately make a purchase. You could also just want a quick answer to a question or directions to a store or restaurant. In all cases, your search has a particular intent. But when you enter your search query and you get back the results, do they help you? Are the answers aligned with the meaning behind your search? Or are the results giving you answers to something other than what ..read more

You finally have a powerful website that you are proud to show off, with messages that clearly explain how you help your clients and the value you provide. Now you need to increase website traffic in order to gain visibility, grow your email list and attract your ideal client. Just because you’ve built it, doesn’t mean they will come. Getting traffic is hard and doesn’t happen without you doing something to make it happen. Click to Tweet The following 10 marketing strategies will help drive traffic to your website and turn it into a powerful hub for your web presence. 1. Optimize your ..read more

Small business owners tend to view their businesses very tactically. Taking an objective view of your business from both an internal and external perspective can uncover a host of opportunities while highlighting potential threats. A SWOT analysis can help you evaluate your small business and the surrounding business environment that can affect its overall success. If you have not done a SWOT analysis for your business, it may be a good time to go through this exercise. Reviewing your business using a SWOT analysis is important to do prior to conducting your regular marketing review. The res ..read more

If someone is willing to invest in your business, what do you promise to do that provides value to them that matters? This promise needs to be based on something you do that is uniquely different from your competition. This is your value proposition and it needs to identify the best reason for your ideal client to buy what you sell. What is a value proposition? A value proposition is the value you promise to deliver to customers after they buy from you. It describes the benefits your customers can expect from your products or services. Your value proposition is a concise statement that tells ..read more

A service bundling strategy is a marketing tactic that involves offering multiple, complementary services as a package for a single price. You may wish to include other options in your packages such as information products or access via email or phone for questions to increase the value to the client. Usually the price is a discounted sum of the pieces. But many small businesses avoid creating a service bundling strategy because they fear undercharging and losing money. But the trade-off between what you charge for a service and what your ideal client thinks it’s worth is a careful balancing ..read more

Keyword cannibalization is a major search engine optimization issue. And many small businesses don’t realize that they may have this problem. They go about writing content that targets specific keywords important to their business. But over time, their websites have a lot of content that targets the same keyword phrases. The result is your content competes with itself for rankings. What is keyword cannibalization? The goal of search engine optimization is to enable search engines to understand the content on a website and serve up the best results for a search query. Keyword cannibaliza ..read more