As a business owner, do you avoid creating an online marketing campaign because you don’t quite know where to start?

Do you wonder how you’ll reach your target audience in the online community?

While marketing online with content offers, blogs, and social media may either be foreign or uncomfortable for you, we’re here to tell you why you can’t ignore it any longer!

Making the switch from traditional marketing methods: billboards, cold calls, and advertisements (outbound marketing), to digital and inbound marketing will save you time and money! Let inbound marketing experts from The Whole Brain Group assist you in navigating through key marketing channels to enhance your business and bring in new leads by showing you how to utilize inbound marketing techniques and practices:

• Creating compelling content for all stages of the buying cycle
• Getting found by people who need your products and services
• Developing visitors in to leads and nurturing relationships
• Converting qualified leads to customers
• Analyzing and adjusting your marketing efforts for optimal success

Attend our free Donuts and Inbound Marketing Workshop to learn how to funnel your inbound marketing into sales! Click on the link below to register!

Donuts and Inbound Marketing Workshop

Date: Friday, May 24, 2013

Time: 9:00 a.m. – 10:30 a.m.

Where: The Whole Brain Group – 109 E. Ann St. Ann Arbor

We will provide the donuts and knowledge. All you need to do is register in advance.

Whether you run a large corporation or own a small mom-and-pop shop, having a style guide is a key to business success. It acts as your company’s style bible, creating a cohesive identity that guarantees a consistent look and feel for your brand as you create new marketing materials.

What’s In A Style Guide?

A style guide, also known as an identity guide, sets out the design specifications for the conveyance of your company’s overall brand appearance and messaging. You can include every attribute that’s important to the integrity of your brand.

Depending on the size of your organization, a style guide may include any or all of these uniformity standards:

• Logo – description, font types, colors, and configuration.
• Logo – appropriate use on websites, publications, and other documents.
• Logo – inappropriate uses.
• Detailed color palette.
• Specified typography, approved weights, headers, subheads, body copy, and lists.
• Definitive patterns or graphic elements.
• Specific iconography and its appropriate use.
• Tone of voice, tag lines, keyword usage, etc.

Do You Have A Style Guide?

If you don’t, get started on one today! It will help you save time and money in the long run.

Make sure that your style guide is well-documented and easily accessible to all members of your organization. Introducing a style guide will not only enforce consistent branding throughout the company, it will also help you maintain the integrity of your brand as your business grows and evolves. Your sales and marketing team will certainly thank you for making their job easier!

Next Steps:

• Take a sneak peak at some style guides used by popular brand-name companies on Logo Design Love
• Get help creating a style guide from our design experts

White Arbor Bridal & Formals, a small wedding boutique located in Saline, Michigan, offers a one-stop shopping venue for every bride’s special day!

Specializing in exquisite one-on-one customer service, White Arbor prides itself on making a bride feel right at home. They carry several lines of high-end designer gowns, ensuring that their competitively priced collection will have a dress to fit every style, size, and budget.

Client Goals:

Owner Diana Holding wanted to refresh the design of her White Arbor website with a new and attractive user-friendly interface for her visitors.

Because White Arbor Bridal & Formals orders new dresses throughout the year, she was looking for an eye-catching image gallery in which to display her wide variety of bridal gowns.  The gallery also had to be easy to manage, and the website had to include a form management system that would allow brides to request appointments with her staff.

Ms. Holding chose to collaborate with The Whole Brain Group to create a new website that fit her requirements!

Smart Marketing Solution:

The Whole Brain Group constructed the new website in WordPress, an open source content management system that allows a site visitor to quickly search the White Arbor image gallery of designer dresses. When she finds the bridal gown of her dreams, she can use the new contact form to request an appointment for a fitting or for a consultation with a member of the White Arbor staff.

Since it was essential that a bride be able to connect with several different bridal networks from White Arbor Bridal & Formals, the new design displays prominent social icons throughout the website.

A new blog was also included to give site visitors an up-to-date list of events and promotions taking place within the store.

The Result:

Visit www.whitearborbridal.com

At The Whole Brain Group, we’re always looking for new tools to make managing our work a breeze, and our latest favorite tool is called Smartsheet! Smartsheet is a great project management tool that encourages collaboration with advanced features tailored to project teams. We like to describe it as “spreadsheets on steroids”.

We had previously used Basecamp for many years to manage our projects, but as we started working with more retainer clients we found that the tool just wasn’t working for us anymore. With Basecamp we had to go into each client project to view our individual to-dos, and it was tough to track tasks that were “in progress” since Basecamp only thought of tasks as Complete or Incomplete. Finally, because we have a lot of repeating tasks on retainer projects, it became tedious to set up the same tasks and due dates every month.

With Smartsheet, we’re now able to create workspaces for each client, and add our WBG-designed spreadsheets to manage project to-dos. The project managers love this tool because they are able to manage multiple projects and tasks and easily follow up with each team member on the project. Each Whole Brainer has a custom report that includes all of their to-dos in one place, and it’s emailed to us daily so we can stay on top of our tasks.

Smartsheet Features

While there are many things to love about Smartsheet, we’ll list our top 5 below. You’ll have to check out Smartsheet for yourself to discover other fantastic ways to use the tool.

1. Custom reporting across multiple projects

2. Ability to set alerts and reminders

3. Integration with Google Apps and Box.com

4. Branded workspaces for each client

5. Collaboration between team members

If you are trying to manage retainer clients with Basecamp and have experienced the same frustrations, give Smartsheet a try! The company offers a free 30-day trial period – no credit card required. Make sure you check out the helpful Smartsheet templates – they gave us a lot of great ideas to keep us organized and on track.

Next Steps

If you found this post helpful, you may want to check out the posts about our other favorite smart tools:

• Sprout Social: Social media management and reporting
• The Resumator: Job posting and applicant tracking system
• Harvest: Time tracking, invoicing, and project budget management
• Bidsketch: Proposal creation and collaboration

If you have a successful inbound marketing strategy in place, chances are pretty good that you’re starting to get more leads than you know what to do with. Bottom of the funnel leads are no-brainers: you should always follow up with people who call you, or who submit a web form to request a consultation or a price. But what do you do with all the people who have downloaded your eBooks and checklists? Your contact database or customer relationship management (CRM) system may be full of people who are on the verge of buying, and just need a little nudge from your sales team to convert them into paying customers.

So how do you distinguish the window shoppers from the people who could really turn into customers if you just pay a little attention to them? Without a method of filtering and organizing your leads (aka Lead Scoring), it can be difficult to figure out where to focus your sales team’s time and energy.

What Is Lead Scoring?

Lead scoring is the practice of grading leads on a defined set of criteria to make sure you spend your valuable sales time following up with the best leads. Lead scoring algorithms can get pretty complicated, so it’s best to start with a simple formula and refine it as you go.

Three Factors To Consider In An Initial Lead Scoring Formula

1) Visit Frequency And Engagement Level: You can tell a lot about a person and what stage of the sales funnel they’re in by tracking their engagement level. If you pick up trends like the same lead visiting different product sections on your website, chances are that lead is looking to gain more information, and ultimately has a need for what you have to offer. If someone has only been to your page once to download a checklist, but never came back, they probably aren’t a good lead to follow up on. For example, you might assign 5 points to people who have spent more than 2 minutes on your site, and 10 points to people who have spent more than 5 minutes on your site.

2) Ideal Customer Characteristics: When building out your initial marketing and sales strategies, you defined an ideal customer profile. Make sure that profile is in mind when you begin scoring leads. You could have a VP of Purchasing who has downloaded every content piece you have to offer, but she’s in an industry that has nothing to do with the service you offer. Is it an opportunity to expand into a new industry? Maybe. Odds are though, you may want to pay more attention to the leads in your target industries instead. To get started, look at the characteristics you defined in your ideal customer profile, then assign more points to the people who match elements of that profile.

3) Job Title Or Role: Scoring your lead’s job title or role at their company is important to B2B companies. If you’ve collected contact information and data about a company vice president and an intern, you have to ask yourself where your time should be best spent, and assign more points to leads and job titles with more decision-making power. For example, you might score a CEO as a 10, a VP of Purchasing as an 8, and an intern as a 0 (sorry, interns!!).

How To Manage And Calculate Your Lead Scoring Formula

So now that you have a lead scoring formula, where do you actually track and calculate this lead score? If you’re using a marketing automation tool like Hubspot, lead scoring functionality is built right in, and takes just a few minutes to set up. But if you want to go old school, the simplest way is to export all of your contacts from your Customer Relationship Management system to Excel and build a formula. You probably won’t be able to score based on things like time on site or which pages a particular person visited, since those things are only tracked if you’re using a tool like Hubpsot. However, you should still be able to get a baseline score from which to work.

Refining Your Lead Scoring Formula

Start following up with leads who score high using this initial formula, and determine whether high-scoring leads are receptive to follow up by your sales team. If not, you may need to refine your scoring – maybe time on site is less important than you thought, or there’s some other factor you need to include that you didn’t originally consider. You may also find that you need to start collecting more information on contact forms, so your filtering and scoring can be more accurate. Observe your results, refine your formula, and evolve your tactics!

Ultimately, scoring your leads will result in higher sales team productivity and closing rates. By using the three characteristics listed above, you’ll be able to quickly determine which leads equate to a higher probability of making a sale. You can also use lead scoring to work with your marketing department to make sure the content they’re developing is attracting the lead quality your sales team needs.

Next Steps

• Get help creating an inbound lead scoring strategy
• Learn more about connecting your sales goals with your marketing goals

Client Overview:

Revex, the award-winning Michigan export firm, provides multiple levels of export services from marketing and sales consulting to full export management. For over 40 years the team’s accumulated knowledge and contacts have provided a unique ability to design and implement global export strategies to manufacturing clients. Revex currently manages distribution in over 50 countries, which helps their clients pursue integrated strategic opportunities anywhere in the world. Revex is a recipient of the prestigious President’s “E” Award, which recognizes excellence in increasing United States exports.

Client Goals:

Smart Marketing Solution:

Before:

After:

Be sure to visit the Revex website!

Are you ready for a website redesign? Download our 7 Steps to Website Redesign Heaven!

Sales and marketing go hand in hand. Without effective marketing, there are no prospects to sell your product to. Without sales people to convert those prospects into customers, marketing efforts are wasted.

In a small company, sales and marketing functions are often the responsibility of one or two people with blended roles so the communication of goals and priorities is often simpler and clearer. But as an organization grows and teams begin to form, the lines of communication often begin to break down. It’s not uncommon for marketing teams to have very little knowledge of the sales process, and for sales teams to be clueless about the effort required to generate the leads they are following up on.

Before you get started with creating a marketing strategy, it’s important to involve your sales team. Among other things, you need to make sure your marketing activities are designed to:

• attract and educate prospects that are easier to sell to
• increase the efficiency of your sales process
• generate enough qualified leads to support your growth goals
• improve close rates

Here are three things your marketing team can give your sales team to help them achieve their goals:

1. More educated prospects

Questions for your sales team: What information do you find yourself repeating to prospects? What questions do you hear over and over?

Answers from your marketing team: Make a list of the questions and topics, then create a series of blog posts to answer each question. After you have a few written, start building an FAQ page that summarizes all of the questions in one place, and links to your blog posts for answers. Consider compiling them into a downloadable eBook or tip sheet that can be posted on your website and also be used by your sales team to educate potential customers. Before long, your sales team will be spending their valuable time nurturing relationships and closing sales instead of answering the same questions over and over.

2. More qualified prospects

Questions for your sales team: What are the characteristics of our ideal customer? What makes one prospect more qualified than another?

Answers from your marketing team: Work together to create an ideal customer profile that clearly defines the types of people you are trying to attract. Use this profile as your “north star” any time you implement new strategies or create new content. Make sure your branding and messaging is designed to attract the right people to your business, and that you are giving them the information they need at each stage of the buying cycle. As you focus your marketing efforts more on education, your sales team will spend more time talking to sophisticated buyers who are ready to purchase.

3. Differentiation from your competition

Questions for your sales team: What factors cause us to lose customers to our competition? What makes our products and services better than those of our competitors?

Answers from your marketing team:  Look at what your competitors are doing – is everyone talking about their low prices, great service, and high quality? Talk to your customers – why did they choose your company over a competitor? Create materials that specifically address your competitive advantage, and make sure your messaging is unique. Think about creating an eBook that addresses “The Acme Corporation Difference” or create a tip sheet that talks about the “Top 10 Reasons our Widgets Will Blow Your Mind”.  Your sales team can then use these materials to educate prospects about why they’ll love doing business with you instead of your competition.

In the end, your marketing and sales teams have the same objective: to attract the right clients to use and purchase your services. It’s up to these two teams to communicate with each other to address problems on either end. From the sales team’s perspective, making the sale should be easy if the marketing team accurately represents the company and attracts the right types of clients, while maintaining a competitive edge in the market. If both teams are able to be successful, then your company, in turn, will be successful.

Next Steps for Creating an Integrated Sales & Marketing Strategy:

• Create an ideal customer profile for your business
• Learn to analyze your competition
• Learn to define the stages of your sales & marketing funnel
• Find out how inbound marketing can bring you more qualified prospects

When you were young, you probably had at least one thing that made you stand out from your peers. Perhaps you were picked for the varsity basketball team because you could run faster than anyone else in your middle school. Maybe you always got the lead in your class musicals because you were the only soprano with perfect pitch. Or were you just exceptionally cute for your age?

Whatever attribute, skill, or talent made you a special kid, the pool of competitors was small and about all you had to do to win the race was show up at the starting line. But then came that day – that day when you realized you weren’t the only one with a running game or a beautiful voice. Talk about a wake-up call!

Competitor Analysis

The requirements for adult success are a bit more complicated than just showing up. If you run a business, you’ve already learned this lesson. Now you need to do something about it! And that something is a competitor analysis. Knowing who your competitors are and what they’re doing is key to building a successful business and staying ahead of the other companies in your market.

Your first job is to identify the top five rivals for your customer base. Then you have to compile as much information as you can about each one of them:

• Background information
• Number of employees
• Products and services
• Client list
• Revenue and pricing
• Social media presence
• Online marketing techniques

As you’re conducting this competitor analysis, be sure to note what your competitors are doing well. Do they use a specific kind of marketing technique that would work for you? What features and functions of their website and online marketing  are designed to attract customers? What types of content are they posting on their Facebook wall? How are their followers responding?

After you’ve cataloged your competitors’ strengths, compile a list of their weaknesses, and look for opportunities to differentiate yourself by offering content or services that nobody else in your market has tried yet.

How Did You Measure Up?

When you’ve finished, ask the same set of questions about your own business from the viewpoint of an outsider. Call a few customers and partners and ask them to honestly evaluate your online marketing, products and services, and ask them why they chose to work with you! What they tell you may be spot on with your self-assessment, or they may surprise you by highlighting things you never considered to be important to a customer’s decision- making process.

Finally, compare your self-analysis with the data you’ve gathered about your five key competitors. The results may delight you, or give you a wake-up call that you need to take your marketing to the next level! Whatever the outcome, the exercise will strengthen you for the race ahead.

Next Steps:

• No time to do this yourself? We can help you complete a competitor analysis as part of our inbound marketing strategy process.

In Marketing Budget Part 1 we emphasized the importance of setting your budget goals and discussed ways of allocating your marketing dollars accordingly. That’s the plan.

Implementing A Marketing Budget Plan

Once you’ve developed a plan that supports your company’s goals, you need to implement it. And to guarantee a successful implementation, you need a team of qualified marketers, designers, and technical experts. There are a number of options available to you in creating such a team:

In-House Marketing Team. To execute a complex marketing plan, you need people who possess skills in copywriting, coding, design, social media, Pay Per Click (PPC), and Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Hiring specialists can be expensive. Benefits, training, and equipment alone could easily cost up to $500K per year. While this expense may make sense as an investment for a large corporation, for most smaller businesses it isn’t an option.

Freelance Team. Finding qualified freelancers can be difficult. And, because they work on a demand basis for several clients at a time, they may not be as available (or as reliable) as you need them to be.

Freelance employees can be a good choice for individual projects. However, when you’re trying to bring a long-term, complex marketing plan to completion, you’re likely to experience a series of frustrating stops and starts on the project. This may necessitate hiring extra people to cover all the roles necessary to execute the plan. Costs can also be difficult to estimate because most freelancers work on a time and materials basis.

Virtual Marketing Team. Contracting a marketing firm like The Whole Brain Group has several benefits:

Services of top-notch marketing experts without incurring the costs of hiring, training, and managing several in-house employees.
Accountability from a team that wants to succeed and prove the value of its marketing services.
Predictable costs because your marketing expenses are based on a monthly retainer fee.

Hiring a Virtual Marketing Team typically involves an investment of $60K – $150K per year, significantly less than the cost of an in-house marketing department.

Hybrid Team. Create a small in-house marketing team that’s dedicated to one or two key tasks. Supplement their skills by retaining an agency team to round out your marketing efforts. Be sure that everyone is clear on their roles and responsibilities, agrees on metrics, and is committed to a shared vision for success. This can be a very effective approach to implementing a solid marketing plan!

Next Steps:

• Is this too much for you to tackle on your own? We can help you with strategy, budgeting, planning, and implementation!
• Need to go back to Marketing Budget Part 1? No problem!

We’re sure you’ve heard it before. It’s a phrase that everyone hates hearing: “You have to spend money to make money.” But many people struggle to figure out how much money they have to spend to make the amount of money they want to make!

In this two-part series, we’ll take you through the process of developing a plan for a marketing strategy and budget that will support your company goals. In Part 2 we’ll tell you how to implement the plan.

Start With A Marketing Strategy

When calculating your marketing budget, make sure you start by aligning your marketing goals with your company’s strategic goals and vision for growth. If you plan to grow by 20%, but only want to invest enough in marketing to get new business cards for everyone in your company, you’re probably going to be disappointed with the results of your investment!

It’s important to develop a written marketing strategy that is agreed upon by the executive team, the sales team, and the marketing team. Make sure everyone is driving their activities in the same direction.

Setting Your Marketing Budget

Once you’ve aligned your company goals with your marketing goals, you’ll need to identify your marketing budget so you can develop a more detailed marketing plan to support your strategy.

Lean Plan: 1 – 2% of your top-line revenue. Engage and retain current customers with simple tools and strategies. This is ideal for companies that are looking to maintain their market position, and don’t have ambitious growth goals.

Target Plan: 3 – 4% of your top-line revenue. Attract new prospects and retain current customers with advanced tools and strategies. This is ideal for companies that are looking to increase their market share and have moderate growth goals (10 – 15% annual growth).

Stretch Plan: 5% or more of your top-line revenue.  Accelerate your results by applying more resources focused on driving leads, conversion, and sales. Use complex marketing strategies and cutting-edge tools. Ideal for companies who have ambitious plans to grow and increase market share (20% or more annual growth).

Allocating Your Marketing Budget Dollars

Armed with your goals and a budget, you can now get into the nitty-gritty of developing a tactical plan to transform your marketing dreams into reality! The complexity of your plan will depend on the marketing budget you have identified, but you should also consider including tactical plans related to SEO, Social Media, Paid Advertising, Content Offers, Blogging, Email Marketing, Lead Conversion and Nurturing, Integration with Sales Activities, Trade Shows, and Print/Traditional Advertising.

Determine how much of your marketing budget should be allocated to each aspect of your plan. The chart below is based on a 2011 survey of over 900 companies. It displays the percentage of their marketing budget that was allocated to each area of their marketing plan. You may decide to spend more or less based on what your direct competitors are spending, what industry you are in, and your specific goals.

Watch for our next post, Marketing Budget Part 2: Implement Your Plan!

Next Steps:

• Is this too much for you to tackle on your own? We can help you with strategy, budgeting, planning, and implementation!