5 Ways To Spring Clean Your Business

Spring clean your marketing.

Spring is the time for rebirth, and we’re not talking just about your closet at home. It’s also the perfect time to put to rest what is no longer benefiting your business and instill fresh, new habits. In other words? It’s time to spring clean your business.

5 Ways To Spring Clean Your Business

Bring the cleaning supplies to your office with these 5 ways to spring clean your business:

1. Clean Up Your Marketing Strategy

Your marketing strategy from the winter months probably won’t have the same effect as your spring and summer marketing campaigns. Think about what clean and fresh things you can bring to the table. Marketing especially is an ever growing and developing strategy, and it’s important to revisit quite often. You can clean it up by…

  • Revisiting your brand
  • Researching marketing trends
  • Take note of what your customers interact with the most on social media
  • Upgrading your email marketing

2. Dust Off Your Website

Keeping your website up to date is a crucial part of your spring cleaning process. Check out our previous blog on the importance of a good website and keep reading to find out how you can clean it up.

Your business has probably grown or changed a lot since last spring. If you don’t regularly update your website, now is the perfect time to do so. If you switched up your brand, you can weave your business’ new image throughout the website by updating the logo, colors, and even text fonts. You can also boost your SEO by updating your website’s content.

3. Deep Clean Your Business Goals

Just like anything, your business can change and develop quite a bit over time. This is a great time to evaluate your progress. Review your past goals: have you met your goals? What can you do to reach them? If your business’ targets seem out of reach or unrealistic, there’s nothing wrong with re-crafting them. Not only should you establish your business’ goals, but you should also make an action plan on how you can reach them.

4. Declutter the Office

Your spring cleaning doesn’t just have to happen online – physically clean up your space! For some, this might be the most fun part, and for others, the worst part. Invite everyone in the office to clean their space and shared spaces. From organizing folders and paperwork to dusting off the shelves or cleaning out the coffee pot, cleaning your office will allow for more space, both mentally and physically. Feel free to make it fun and turn on some music everyone can enjoy while they clean!

5. Organize Your Social Media Accounts

What does your online presence look like? If you don’t frequently post on your social media accounts, there’s a good chance that they don’t properly reflect your business’ brand and philosophy. After taking the time to clean up your marketing strategy and business goals, you can update your social media platforms accordingly. This is the perfect time to tighten any loose ends and make sure your online presence is a positive reflection of your business.

It can be difficult to get the motivation, but Paragon Marketing Group can give you the push you need to spring clean your business! We have the right people and resources to help meet all of your marketing needs. You bring the fresh, new ideas, and we’ll bring the cleaning supplies! (262)443-9092

What to Know About Marketing

What to know about marketing.

“Marketing” is a big, broad umbrella term that we’ve all heard, but what is marketing really all about and how can it benefit your business? Chances are you’re using a bunch of marketing techniques without realizing it!
Marketing, as a general meaning, is “the total of activities involved in the transfer of goods from the producer or seller to the consumer or buyer, including advertising, shipping, storing, and selling.” (Dictionary.com) This means that, yes, marketing is just the simple act of selling your product or services, but there is a lot more that can be done to promote and advertise your business.

Digital Marketing

This is probably the most important form of marketing, especially in the modern, digital age. Digital marketing includes:

  • Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Check out our blog about it here
  • Social Media posts and outreach. Check out our blog for tips and tricks on how to use it
  • Video marketing. Here’s a master list of all the different ways to incorporate video into your online marketing
  • Email and text message marketing. This is great to use when promoting an event or new product

There’s so much that goes into digital marketing, the possibilities are endless! If you’re not sure where to start with marketing, online is the place to begin. It’s a great way to not only promote your products and services, but it’s a great way to communicate directly with your customers.

Unique, High-Quality Service

While this one may seem obvious, the quality of your product is a great way to sell to customers and it’s the best way to stand out from competitors! Marketing your product becomes a lot easier if you and your customers understand the high quality value of it. Further, this extends to the unique face of your business. Not only do you want people to benefit from your services, but they want to get to know the unique personality of you.

Targeting Customers

This is another important aspect to understand about marketing. The best way to market your business, no matter the platform or medium, is to know who you’re selling your products to. Using Facebook or Instagram business account allows you to track the demographics of your consumers. Once you have those findings, take a look back at your posts and see which ones they interact with most, or if you’re just getting started, play around with a couple of different marketing techniques (email, social media, video, etc.) and see which one attracts the most people and go from there!

Branding

The face of your business is the first thing people see! From language to video style to the colors used in your logo, they should all be coherent and work together. This is a great marketing strategy because your consumers will become familiar with your work and find a sense of comfort when they see your posts, leading them to wanting to see your content more and more. Check out our blog on branding to get a more in depth idea of what it is.

 

Marketing can be intimidating, especially when you’re starting out, but these are great places to dip your toes into. Once you get the hang of it, you’ll be diving into the world of marketing in no time. Make sure to check out our linked blog posts to help you on your journey!

What is SEO and How Can Your Business Use It?

Online marketing is an important factor to the growth of any business nowadays, especially through search engines. You have PPC, which are Pay-Per-Click ads and SEO, which is Search Engine Optimization, or in other words, real and organic clicks. Sure, PPC is a great option for your company, but did you know that organic results are 8.5x more likely to be clicked on than paid search results?

SEO can be intimidating and difficult to understand, but we’ve broken it down into simple terms. SEO is a process of optimization for your website to accumulate and receive real, organic, and unpaid clicks from search engine results. When a user searches for certain keywords or topics, search engines scan through websites to figure out which ones are easiest to navigate through, read, and understand.

So, how can your business most efficiently take advantage of and use SEO?

The first thing you can do is make changes and improvements to your website where needed. Search engines file through many different things on your website like your title page, subheadings, internal links, and body content. By making improvements to these things, search engines can better understand what your business is about, dive deeper into understanding your business with internal links, and better find keywords and phrases to match the user’s search.

As mentioned before, keywords and phrases are also important to content marketing. The more content you create around certain keywords, the higher your page will rank on search engine result pages. This can also be carried over to voice searching. Voice search is the new way people are using their search engines, and you should take advantage of it! It’s said by ComScore that by 2020, 50% of all searches will be voice searches. When speaking, people are typically more conversational, so your website’s content should match that to better enforce keywords and phrases.

Content marketing isn’t only useful to your customers, but can help out search engines, too. It’s important to have plenty of content, like blog posts, videos, and social media posts to rank your page higher in search results. How is this helpful? Well, let’s say you posted a few blogs and a video on how to use camera drones. Users googling “how to use camera drone” will want to spend more time on your site because there are a lot of tools you have provided for them to navigate through.

Stay relevant! It’s important to consistently add to your site because search engines and users love good content. If you’re in a rut for ideas for a blog post or visual content, take an old post and rewrite it to make it more up-to-date and fresh. Don’t post something just because your site’s due for an update. Take time to search for quality content that people want to read about; quality content makes for a trusted relationship between you and your users.
SEO can be a long process, but by taking the time to really up your content with keywords and videos, and staying active on your site and socials, you’re sure to bring in new and organic traffic.

6 steps to retail marketing

This is a view of a mall from the top floor.

Marketing in the retail world can be a lot of fun. It also can be very time consuming and monotonous. However, without marketing in the retail world, you will not maintain or grow. Retail has an attrition rate and it doesn’t matter how long you have been in business or how great of a reputation you have, there still has to be marketing. You have to replace the people you lose yearly or you might as well shut your doors right now. How do you do this, is the question and how do you do it well?

1. It all starts with building a brand. You have to have a brand recognition or you will not grow. When people think of the typical products you sell, you want your name to come to mind first. In marketing, there is a rule called the rule of seven. Now, some marketers will say it is the rule of 10 or a rule of 5, regardless, it is still important that you follow it. A person must see your brand 7 times before they start thinking about you for a certain product. How those 7 times is achieved can be hard, however, the rest of this blog explains a few tricks.

2. How you are found is important and that is where listings come into the equation. There are literally hundreds of sites that your business should be listed on depending on exactly what your product is. Personally, I believe that if you are listed properly on the top sites then the rest will follow over time. What people do not realize is that everything HAS to be exactly the same across all of your online listings, right down to the dot in the same place.

3. Social media marketing is going to give you the most bang for your buck. Depending on your demographic you will utilize Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or LinkedIn. Anyone of these 4 are going to be important, however, the two most important are going to be Facebook and Twitter. The most important thing with these platforms is to not post just 1 time per week about your store and expect people to flock in. You have to post regularly and you have to not only educate the consumer about you but also about your products.

4. You have to create a personalized experience. Just as we talked about social being important well, so is mobile marketing. It is said that 58% of people will look on cell phones before they look for your store on a desktop or laptop. With the world of artificial intelligence growing it is very important to learn new ways to use personalized mobile marketing in order to attract new clients.

5. Reward programs are becoming very popular. Create an awards program through email marketing and offer a free product for being a member of your newsletter program. Once you start getting emails from consumers, do not miss a single month of sending newsletters out. I would suggest that you send out an email at a minimum of bi-weekly. One can be a newsletter talking about anything new that you have done and the other can be an offer of the month for members of the group.

6. People will come in and spend more if they know you are supporting the community. Your local chamber of commerce or business group will have a list of events that are community-based in order to help you find a great charity or event to support. Once you find one, offer your support or sponsorship then market about your contribution. Millennials today want to know that you support a charity or local event. They will remember that and come back to you because of it.

Having a retail establishment is a very exciting and fun thing. In today’s world, you have a great opportunity to provide a great location for people to get what you need. The more people that know who you are, the better. With the digital world, you have a great opportunity to tell the world about you! Have fun with it but remember to be respectful and responsible. You will be successful with these suggestions.

How does the new Facebook update affect the Small Business owner?

First, let’s talk about why we are asking this question. Mark Zuckerberg sent out a Facebook post saying “One of our big focus areas for 2018 is making sure the time we all spend on Facebook is time well spent.” Further down the post he states, “Based on this, we’re making a major change to how we build Facebook. I’m changing the goal I give our product teams from focusing on helping you find relevant content to helping you have more meaningful interactions.”

After research and reading the blog on the subject, it comes down to this! News feed is limited in size, therefore, Facebook will be showing more posts from friends, family members and updates that spark some kind of conversation. What does this mean for business pages? It means that you will NOT be seen in the news feed unless you spark conversation. The fact of the matter is posts that generate conversation will show higher.

What does this mean for you as a small business owner or marketer? It is more important now than ever to get people to talk to you. You have to make the posts more attractive, give them a “wow” or a reason to comment on your post. Without creating the “wow” or the conversation then you WILL see your traffic decline.

Can you guess what the number one type of post to get comments is? Ok, here are some choices, A. pictures, B. video, C. reviews, D. text. If you answered B then you are correct and congratulations, as you have been paying attention to our previous blogs and videos. Video is once again being pointed out as a huge growth possibility in 2018. Now, can you do a good video on your phone? Well sure you can, however, as we have said before, remember that what you show on video is a representation of your company. Therefore, if you want to represent your company in that way, then feel free.

So, the long and short answer—think about what you are posting. Is it relevant to not only you but to your audience? Will it create a conversation? Always think “Will I want to see this?”

Why Do I Need Video?

In today’s day and age people are very visual in nature. I know that at my house my kids are watching videos all the time. What amazes me even more is that I talk to people who say they are too busy to talk or to decide or even to go to the bathroom. However, those same people message me and say “Did you see the video on youtube? Wow, it was amazing”. Then I look at the video and it was the latest fails of the week. This is the world we live in now! People do not have the time to do as much as the world moves quickly but they can always watch the latest video.

Here is where reality crosses with marketing. We get calls everyday about video because that is what we do. Everybody wants to make a video that goes viral to promote their company. Did you know that less than 1% of videos go viral? To say that anybody has the secret sauce to make a video viral would be a lie. Not to mention, is the best representation of your company really a viral video? Viral videos are silly or show what not to do a lot of times. However, if you can get a 6 second video ad during the pre-roll of a viral video, it makes a lot of sense. The key to it is making the most out of 6 seconds. That we can do!

Having a video on the homepage of you website increases conversions by 80%. This statistic varies based on who you look up the statistic with; however, there is one common theme. Video gives you more conversions than words. Think about how many conversions you currently have from your site. Now think of how much your website costs you per lead. Who wouldn’t want the cost per lead to go down and the amount of leads to go up?

What do we record? You are not looking to be the next viral video so stop thinking it. You are wanting to show why someone HAS to have you as their vendor of choice for the project they have or why they have to buy the product they want from you. You do not have to reinvent the wheel but you do have to tell them why you! I have said it many times. Know the why of what you do. Why do people come to you? Why do people need you? Why do you exist as a company? If you answer those questions in a 15–30 second video then you can watch your leads roll. Do not try to shove 50 years into 30 seconds. It will not show well at all. Show the why now! I believe that there’s a place for history videos, bio videos and product videos, however, that place is not on your homepage. Furthermore, you should absolutely have those videos as well. Those videos should be throughout your website and they should all link to your Youtube page therefore fulfilling one requirement of content marketing.

So in short, should you have video as part of your overall strategy? YES, for sure and definitely!

It’s Time to Start Thinking about Budgeting

This is vector art of a content marketing strategist.

It is the middle of August and it seems very strange to be thinking about 2018. You are still finishing up vacations and the kids are on their way back to school. The question is how long do you want to wait? In today’s business world marketing budgets take longer to prepare, especially when Content Marketing is the largest growth possibility in 2018. If your business is grossing  more than 5 million in revenue, according to the Small Business Association, your company should be spending 8% to 10% of the total gross revenue in order to grow. If less than $5 million in gross revenue, a company should be spending 10% to 12%. It is further suggested that in 2018 a company spends ⅓ of this on Digital and ⅔ on traditional marketing avenues.

 

The real question is how do you use it? Where do you spend it? What do you spend it on? The answer is Content Marketing! I know what you are thinking, “You are nuts, that is against all marketing principles and that puts all of my eggs in one basket.” I would agree with you unless we are talking about Content Marketing.   

 

Content Marketing is a marketing art that combines both Traditional marketing and non-traditional marketing. I like to explain it as a spider web, You have your Mooring threads, these we would explain as Traditional and non-traditional marketing, these connect to your anchor point which is your business. Your frame threads are your different avenues, TV, Radio, Newspaper, social media, digital advertising and many other avenues. Your radials are your different possibilities in your categories which include items like ABC, CBS, Facebook, Instagram, Journal Sentinel, google in our local Milwaukee market. Finally you have the most important element and that is the Viscid thread. The Viscid thread ties it all together and create the foundation for the success of the web. That is the part that creates the personal touch for the consumer all leading them to the Hub of the web which is your website, your location, a phone call or email.

 

Imagine you are watching TV. Then you see an ad that shows you what is possible with a certain laundry detergent. Then you look on Youtube and see a different story for the same company that shows the same story in a different way. Then you look on Facebook and see an ad for the same product telling the story of the Laundry detergent. Now imagine you are in the store trying to pick out a laundry detergent. You are most likely to relate to the story they provided and get the detergent that you saw in all those advertisements. That is Content Marketing!

 

We believe that “Your success is our Success” It is what makes us different. It is what makes us Paragon.