Tips, thoughts and topics on marketing for small to medium-sized businesses in Michigan and throughout the world. Contributions by Chris Slocumb, Casey Frushour, as well as other members of the Clarity Quest team.
Debbie Weil just posted a great free transcript covering her advice on writing a great business blog. It has excellent advice on writing copy for blogs, how often to blog, and moderating comments. I found her opinions on the future of blogging very valuable.
Also, it's interesting she recommends that everyone has a Facebook account -something I've been recommending to business clients over the past 6 months.
According to our surveys, if you're like many of your colleagues, the answer is no. Go-to-Market Strategies recently released the results of a survey showing that 42% of marketing budgets fall below the 5% of revenue mark. In fact, only 36% of companies felt they spent enough to be successful by their own standards.
Determining the correct amount to spend on marketing is an often perplexing task for small to medium-sized companies. The correct way to start is by formulating a marketing plan - ideally for a one-year timeframe. With a marketing plan that outlines your firm's goals and and a simple budget spreadsheet you'll be able to track and measure effectiveness of each campaign. You'll also be able to quickly visualize if you are putting your eggs in just a few baskets instead of taking advantage of integrated marketing. For example, if you are spending 90% of your budget on advertising and none on public relations, you are missing the great "bang for the buck" of PR.
We advise clients to put together the platinum plan based on about 15% of revenue. That way certain campaigns or tactics are not left off the plan upfront due to "budgetary reasons". Then prioritize campaigns and only execute the ones within a comfortable budget for you. Ideally your company should be spending 5-8% of PROJECTED revenue, not last years' numbers.
If you have a LinkedIn profile, you can enter up to 3 website URL addresses. If you select "Other" as a category you can choose any term you want for the link name. For example, I choose "Michigan Marketing Firm" for our company and linked the phrase back to our page which is optimized for that term. LinkedIn does not have a "no nofollow" on their links, so Google and other search engines still count them as quality backlinks.
There's a great blog post on Essential Keystrokes about driving traffic to your blog by linking to stories on major news websites such as CNN. Basically, the service Sphere.com connects traditional news media stories with posts in the blogosphere.
Ann Arbor SPARK hosts Everything You Wanted to Know about Feedburner, Blogs and RSS Feeds this Tuesday night December 4th from 5:30pm-7pm at the Ann Arbor Google offices. The session will be lead by Brent Hill who is the Team Manager in the Global Media Solutions division at Google.
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