010: Checking for Leaks in Your Marketing Bucket
Taking Back Joy Podcast • Episode #010:
Checking for Leaks in Your Marketing Bucket
Have you reached a point in your business marketing where you feel like you've done all the things and you're not actually seeing the kinds of results you'd like? You feel like you've tipped all this energy in and you’re hearing crickets?
I want to walk you through a free audit you can do on your business to check for leaks in your marketing pipeline. And when I say marketing, this is an all-encompassing check from your logo up! This is about stepping outside the bubble and giving ourselves the space to interact with your business as if you were a new or potential customer.
I'm going to ask you to look at your business with fresh eyes, to become a customer in your own business from start to finish, as a really good way to check for any leaks in your customer acquisition bucket.
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Show Notes: Links & resources mentioned in this episode
Business Directories - Yellow Pages, Yelp, White Pages
Episode Transcript
Download: Episode Synopsis (PDF) | Episode Content (PDF)
Synopsis
Meredith Paige 00:01
Are you running a small business in a regional or rural area? And you starting to wonder when this marketing thing is supposed to get fun?
Meredith Paige 00:00
Have you reached a point in your business marketing where you feel like you've done all the things and you're not actually seeing the kinds of results you'd like? You feel like you've tipped all this energy in and your hearing crickets?
Meredith Paige 00:27
I want to walk you through a free audit you can do on your business to check for leaks in your marketing pipeline. And when I say marketing, this is an all-encompassing, from your logo up! This is about stepping outside the bubble and giving ourselves the space to interact with your business as if you were a new or potential customer.
Meredith Paige 01:00
I'm going to ask you to look at your business with fresh eyes, to become a customer in your own business from start to finish, as a really good way to check for any leaks in your customer acquisition bucket.
Meredith Paige 01:12
Ready? Let's get started.
Episode Content
Meredith Paige 00:00
So I've worked with a lot of small business owners by this point, mostly in regional and rural areas and a big issue that a lot of them tend to come to me with is that they say, Meredith, I feel like I'm trying all these different things and it doesn't seem to be working!' And a lot of them reach that point where they have tipped a lot of energy into their marketing and it doesn't feel like it's getting any traction. And so they don't want to tip anymore massive amounts of energy, time or finances in. They've just reached the point where they need to know if what they're doing to this point is on the money before continuing on.
Meredith Paige 00:46
So what can be a really good, free and relatively fast thing to do is what I would refer to as a pipeline audit. And what that means, and it's really tricky when you start because the idea is that you want to look at your entire business with fresh eyes. So you almost want to be your own mystery customer or mystery shopper. I remember from my hospitality days, we'd get mystery shoppers come in. And they would be given a checklist of things that they were asked to notice, pay attention to and give feedback on as they move throughout the club. That'd be everything from 'how did you find the parking lot'', 'was the parking lot well maintained', 'how did you find the reception staff', 'were they polite/helpful/answered your questions', all the way through from entering the building to exiting the building. And then we would receive that form and we would be able to see any kind of kinks in the pipeline, where we could do better, where we could maybe offer some more training to the staff, even things like a section of the carpark that they parked into had gone a little bit by the way and required maintenance.
Meredith Paige 02:03
So it's another really good principle that I've pulled from my days in hospitality. And it really does have broad appeal for a lot of small businesses. And it's something you can do yourself. So if you've got a bricks and mortar business, what you can actually do is just imagine you are a new customer and you're seeing your business with fresh eyes and go through this exact same process. We'll start with the bricks and mortar side of things first, because then we can move to the digital aspect which all businesses should have. So we'll kick things off with the bricks and mortar. Just take a moment because this is the other half of the hard bit of this exercise. There's no judgement here, guys, because I'm exactly the same as you. Anytime I get a scrap of free time, it gets thrown into like admin or reconciling Xero. We don't actually allow ourselves much time to just sit with our businesses and think about them from multiple angles. So this is going to involve you pumping the brakes for a second, taking a breath, taking a moment, and just actually looking at your business.
Meredith Paige 03:14
So stand outside the shop front, what do you notice? Is your signage, fresh and clean? Is the facade of the building clean? What's the overwhelming impression you get of the premises? Is it clear from the outside to the passer by what your business actually does and what you're actually there for? Is your purpose and intention clear from the street? So if the right customer or the person most likely to do business with you is walking past, would you catch their attention? Would you be sort of saying hey, I'm here, you've got a problem, I can fix it. Is it really obvious what you do from the street? And the next thing you want to do is ask a friend that's never visited you at your shop before to go in and just test your staff. If you have if you have like a small team, get someone to walk in and just take notice of how long it takes them to be noticed by your team, how they noticed how they're served, things like that. Get someone you really trust, give them a few pointers that you want them to be mindful of get them to go through the new customer sort of flow, even if they do sort of browse and then leave, ask a few questions and leave. Get them to test your staff for you just to see if there's anything going on on the customer service end of things that needs tweaking. And they sometimes can be really good and identify maybe if a staff member is going through something and they've been hiding it from you because they want you to think everything's fine, but they're actually sort of really struggling with something maybe it could be something personally it could be maybe an aspect of the business that they don't want to admit they need a bit more training on. This isn't about catching anyone out. This is about identifying leaks in the bucket.
Meredith Paige 04:58
We talked about this in the digital space all the time, but very, very rarely do we actually go to the effort of doing this in a physical sense. So get someone to go through the customer experience in your business, see how knowledgeable you start come across, see how helpful and proactive they are. Do they wait for the customer to approach them? Ask your friend to be brutally honest with you as well - think about the time of day, think about how many staff you have on and are your staff actually able to be as attentive to your customers as you would like. And then think about is there other kinds of resources and materials you can provide your staff with, to maybe kind of lighten the load with answering questions. Can you have cheat sheets at the point of sale for different products, promotions and things like that. So they come across as incredibly knowledgeable and confident when a customer walks into your shop.
Meredith Paige 05:46
Another thing you can do is actually get someone to call your business and just see how your team answering the phone, what their phone manners are, like how long it takes them to answer the phone, things like that. So these are all the physical aspects of your business that you can just give yourself the time to look at with fresh eyes and even going into premises and looking at it and going okay, are the products arranged in a way that's logical? Is the signage clear and logical? Is there things available to my potential customers they can take home with them like flyers and information, downloads and leaflets and things like that? Do I have extra information? Do I have something I can give my customers to encourage them to come back like a loyalty card or a discount or refer a friend? Do I have something on here that informs my customers and encourages them to come back and or spread the word. So these are all really good things you can be looking at and thinking about when you're trying to look at your business with fresh eyes.
Meredith Paige 06:42
So that covers all our physical elements stuff to the business, this can also actually apply to look at any if you've got any vehicles that have vehicle signage, maybe also give them a once over to make sure they're kind of putting your business in the best possible light when they're out there on the street. You can also look at things street level signage (after checking in with landlords and local council) which is actually another good really good way of making sure you're drawing attention to your business on street level. If you can get temporary signs like the teardrop flags and things like that. They're always really good to be taken to shows and events. So they can have like a dual purpose. If you think about the kind of product you're investing in if you make sure it's temporary and not fixed so it's not going to be dangerous or blow away. But you can take it with you if a trade show opportunity comes up or if like a pop up standard or local market comes up. So try to be versatile on what you invest in as well.
Meredith Paige 07:35
So now let's look at the digital elements of our businesses. And this again, can be a good opportunity to rope in a friend or maybe a customer you've known for a long time, who you have a really good relationship with and who would be honest with you, though, we're going to give you feedback. So now's a really good opportunity to see how easy it is to find you online. So first things first, let's jump into Google. So let's think about all the different words that people would be using to find someone like you. Now it's important to think geographically if your business is geographically constrained, so it might be a landscaper, Sydney, or it might be dentist Penrith. So getting inside the head of potential customers and just thinking about like, what are the words they're most likely to use to try and find someone like me? Popping those into Google and then seeing what comes up? Where do you come up in the grand scheme of things? Are you visible somewhere on the first page?
Meredith Paige 08:28
I'm not going to go into Google ads and everything right now. But there are opportunities to pay for higher rankings in Google. You'll notice a lot of the time those those listings are flagged as ads. However, that is a auction style ad strategy. So once you start paying for those, you may very quickly find yourself in a bidding war that can become quite expensive, depending on what your competitors are doing, and what's going on in your local industry. So for the moment, we're just focusing on the things you can do for free. So does your website crop up or does reference to your business crop up on the first page of Google? Not only is a website, a fantastic resource, because it is like the point you can be funnelling people to online. You can also make sure it's chock full of all these keywords that people would be using to find you. But in really useful helpful ways like with blog articles, and tips and tricks and things like that.
Meredith Paige 09:21
But there are other ways you can also, I would say stack the deck, in terms of doing well in Google search results. And these are things like directory listings. So a lot of these are also free so this is things like Yellow Pages, White Pages, Yelp, checkout all the top directories you can always find and again, just google search done you know business directories Australia or business directories New South Wales or business directories Victoria. And that will generally bring up a list of all the different business directories and maybe just allocate a bit of time for setting up a free profile in each of these. Because again, that's just going to give you more opportunities to be online, occupying space in a Google search results and then those listings can link back to your website and funnel back in and they're back on the right track.
Meredith Paige 10:04
So that can be another really good way of making sure it's very easy for you to be found. When you're sending that listing up, make, make sure you're thinking about all the words that people will be using to find you. So again, mentioning specific suburbs, if you have a very specific geographic reach, a specific type of product, or maybe it's a specific customer like it could be for mums for dads for, you know, 20 to 30 year olds, something like that. Anything that you feel like would be a word or a phrase that those you're those most likely to do business with you would be using to find someone like you make sure those words appear in your directory listing, whether it's the listing itself, so rather than writing ABC veterinary hospital, right, ABC Veterinary Hospital, Penrith so that is also in the name of your listing. So you're also going to be triggering results for VET hospital, Penrith. So outside Google itself is in like the search engine itself.
Meredith Paige 10:57
Google Maps is also one of the most commonly used search tools to find businesses near us. So you also want to make sure you have a good listing on Google Maps. And this involves setting up a Google My Business account. Now there's a little bit of a process involved here, it's not super complicated, but there are a number of steps you need to take. So setting up a listing on maps, involves actually, if you've got a listing on there, you can claim it otherwise, you can set up a new one. And what Google will typically do is they'll either put an automatic call through to your shop, if you have a physical listing. Or if you're say work from home business, you can mask your physical address, but they will need to send you a postcard just to confirm that the person receiving that phone call or receiving that postcard is in fact, the owner of that business. It just stops, competitors making like other people's lives hard by claiming their listings and messing with them basically online. So getting a Google My Business account will be really good. Another way, it's just to put more eggs in the Google basket. And then you're also going to be appearing in map search results.
Meredith Paige 11:59
So then all that should then link back to your website. So this is where I'm going to get back on my website soapbox. It's it's a really important piece of infrastructure that is all about you. It's your message your brand, who you are and what makes you unique. You're not competing with notifications, and pings and dings and pop ups and all that stuff. It is all about you. Which is why it super critical to be directing traffic as much as possible to your website. And then making sure your website is optimised to get people into your business like buy this book now, try this, come and try this, here's a reason to do business with me.
Meredith Paige 12:35
But before we get to that, let's also talk about social media. So key ones, obviously being Facebook and Instagram, you may have others. But it's always important to make sure that all your contact details are up to date, making sure that you have your website link in your bio, or in your link in Facebook. And using a post as an opportunity to encourage people to do business with you. 'If you feel like this is for you, head over to the website and book an appointment', 'if you'd like to come in and try this, head over and make a booking' etc. So not all your social content should be geared to this but a lot of your social media content should be trying to drive traffic to your website as a 'ready to do business with me? Here's what you need to do next!'.
Meredith Paige 13:16
Give your social media profiles a once over as well. Taking it a step further back, try and search for yourself on social media or again, get your trusted friend or long term customer do this for you. Try and find out how easy it is to find your business either on Facebook or Instagram, and then have a look at the profile and see if's super clear what I do, what I value and what I have to offer? How people can do business with me and where they need to go next? IE website phone call, things like that. Looking at your external platforms critically, from that angle may also produce some flags for things that you can tweak and optimise.
Meredith Paige 14:08
So then when they get to your website (again, you might be sensing a theme) is it obvious what you do? Who you serve, the value you offer? And what they can do to get started? Does that hit them right between the eyes the minute they hit your website? Not how long you've been in the area, not anything like thinking about not inclusions and features but benefits. So inclusions and features are just ways we get people over the line. What are the benefits of working with you? What do people stand to gain by working with you because when someone hits your website, the story is about them. It's not about you, which sounds counterintuitive, but your website really is about those most likely to do business with you and how you can help them get the result they're after. That could be anything from plumbing to landscaping to hair cut to ignite out for dinner, but it's about what will they get out of their relationship with you. This isn't about your website being your biography. It's how your business can meet the needs of the person visiting that website.
Meredith Paige 15:12
And then, is it super easy and clear to see what the next step is towards doing business with you? Do you have a big fat book now find out more Get Started button somewhere on the page that lives on every single page, typically at the top in your main navigation. But is it very clear, quick and easy for them to move further down the pipeline to doing business with you. As a final step, I would actually encourage you to make contact with your business via your website. I've seen it happen a number of times where the contact form on a website has, for whatever reason, it's not working or the inbox it's going to isn't the right one and no one anywhere at any point time tested that to make sure the information was flowing through. So if it's like a booking form, or an inquiry form, send yourself a message and make sure it hits your inbox on the other side. You would hate to be sort of thinking that this was all up and running as per normal and it was actually a big gaping hole in your customer pipeline.
Meredith Paige 16:09
So go right from where-to-go, google yourself, land on the web page, go to the booking section, make the booking, or send the inquiry or send the email and make sure it spits out the other side, on whoever's monitoring that inbox. Hopefully all these tips have given you a really good way to kind of look at your business with fresh eyes from a whole number of angles and just go from start to finish and experience your business as a new customer would.
Meredith Paige 16:35
Again, there's no judgement here, guys, I've done this myself, where I've gone to my website, sometimes with fresh eyes and gone, oh, gosh, how long have I left that, therefore? Or how long has that page been there for? I didn't do that anymore! So again, when we're in the bubble, and we're running around like headless chooks, and it's just get as much done, as quickly as possible and get to the finish line.
Meredith Paige 16:55
We often don't afford ourselves the opportunity to stop and look and give what we're doing a really critical eye to see whether it could be done better, could be done differently, or sets up some stuff simply out of date. You may have outdated staff profiles on your website, your prices might need updating, phone numbers might no longer be working. So these are really good things to just every so often stop, pump the brakes and give everything a really good once over to make sure there's no leaks in your customer bucket. And that the flow from potential customer to paying customer is as smooth and logical and efficient as possible.
Meredith Paige 17:34
I really hope this has been of help for you guys today. I go through this process with a lot of my new clients and I'm always thrilled that we can make some really, easy and quick optimizations straight off the bat. So if you'd love to work with me, we can chat about optimising your marketing and checking for leaks in your customer bucket, feel free to head on over to my website. I'd love to hear more from you.
Meredith Paige 17:56
Have a really good week and I'll see you next time!
