Business Coaching

Tracking progress with online marketing is easier with these tools.

After finding online marketing opportunities, like we said yesterday, you’ll need to track your “wins.” This can be a confusing and daunting thing to do, too…unless you know the tools that can track your leads for you.

Google Analytics helps yet again! It tracks referrals from the company’s social Media profiles. And twinfluence and Twitalyzer are Twitter-specific tools that measure how influential and
far-reaching the company’s Twitter presence is.

Klout tracks the impact of your posted content and links, including which audiences are exposed to the content and how they interact with it.

Translate the information about results and figure out the positive financial impact on your
business. Key performance indicators can come in various forms, like new revenue generated, a good amount of time and money saved, or a good financial return on investment.

Armed with this information, hopefully it will become clear how much social Media marketing is helping your business…or how much more you need to work at it in order to make a positive financial impact on your business! If you want to find out what needs work in your business quickly, take our Business Health Check.

As with traditional marketing, it’s all about opportunities. When you find opportunities to sell your products and services, you don’t shy away, do you? You take advantage! The same with online marketing – find opportunities to get the word out about what you’re promoting. However, with online marketing, it can be trickier. Where do you find these opportunities? And with social Media sites like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, sure, you might have 500+ followers/friends, but do they really care about what you’re promoting?

If you’re lost in terms of online marketing, you need to be able to first find opportunities which you can expand upon in terms of marketing. Don’t know how to start? The following tools will at least give you a good idea of what’s being said about your company or industry online, and where users spend their time:

• Google Alerts (http://www.google.com/alerts) emails you whenever a chosen
keyword (e.g., company or product name, CEO name, campaign tagline,
industry term, etc.) is mentioned in any form of online content.
• Google Blog Search (http://blogsearch.google.com/) scans the blogosphere
for any keyword or phrase you type in.
• Twitter Search (http://search.twitter.com/) scans all Twitter posts for your
selected keyword or phrase.
• SiteVolume (http://www.sitevolume.com/) reports how often keywords or
phrases appear on Twitter, Digg, MySpace, YouTube and Flickr.
• SocialMention (http://www.socialmention.com/) enables you to search
keywords and phrases by specific channel category (blogs, images, news,
video, etc.), or as a whole, and to receive email alerts when a new mention
is posted.
• Socialcast (http://www.socialcast.com/) offers real-time analytics on microblogging
and other social activities and identifies individual users’ level of
activity. Unlike most tools, it also can quantify the value of “lurkers” who
aren’t visibly posting comments, but by how often they frequent a site.

Take note of what’s being said about your company or whatever keywords you search, whether it’s positive, negative or neutral; what people
are passing along to friends; and if there are any particular needs or customer
segments that aren’t served. These are all opportunities for marketing…

As if you didn’t know that already. Heck, it’s been changing. But just so you know, it will continue to change.

According to an article in the Marketing Watchdog Journal, with social Media marketing picking up the pace, marketing and PR will converge, measuring and ROI will increase in importance, and CEOs are paying more attention to what’s being said about their brand to ensure their marketing efforts and customer service efforts are both promoting the company.

Read the full article here, and see what changes you might need to make at your own company’s marketing department.

Social Media gurus don't look like this guy.

In this day and age, with social Media marketing taking off like wildfire, social media consultants and gurus are popping up just about everywhere, ensuring that if you hire them, they’ll make your social media presence well-known faster than you could do it yourself.

But how credible are these “gurus”?

If you’re considering hiring one of these consultants to help you out, a piece of advice: check out their experience and make sure they have evidence that they helped increase sales for a company with their social media expertise. Because the trend of people branding themselves as “social media gurus” is not slowing down; The WhatsNextBlog first examined Twitter bios in May 2009 and found 4,487 people claiming to be social media experts. This month they examined Twitter bios again, and found 16,000 claiming expertise.

It’s true that social media marketing will help with business coaching, and also with business coaching clients. But with 16,000 experts online, be careful who you trust – and more importantly, who you pay to market your company.

13-year-old Leanna Archer of Leanna's Inc.

How young is too young to start a company?

ActionCOACH Founder Brad Sugars was just 21 when he founded ActionCOACH, and a few short years later, he was “financially retired.”

So if someone’s got a great idea and they’ve got the will and means to start a business, who’s to say they can’t? Is there such a thing as being “too young” to start a business?

If you answered yes, tell that to 13-year-old Leanna Archer, CEO and Founder of her own hair and body product company, Leanna’s Inc.

When she was just eight years old, Leanna kept receiving compliments on her hair, which was styled with pomade made from her great-grandmother’s recipe. Leanna, obviously savvy, saw the potential for a business – selling her great-grandmother’s pomade. She tested demand by filling empty Gerber baby food jars with her grandmother’s pomade and giving them out to classmates – then received several requests for more from her classmates and their parents.

Leanne’s Inc. has increased its product line (her company now also sells shampoo, conditioner and shea butter body lotion in addition to pomade and hair products), ships 30 to 50 orders on average per day, and made $100,000 in revenue in 2007. She even set up her own foundation to help underprivileged children in Haiti.

Running a successful business since she was eight…most people wouldn’t believe it. But when you have a good idea that fills a demand and a solid business plan, all it takes is great execution and hard work to keep your company successful.

Everyone’s talking about how blogging can expand a business’ reach further. Most business owners over the age of 35 are skeptical.

Well, it won’t get you instant success, but truth is, a business that consistently updates its own blog with info about the company and issues in its industry are more well-known businesses because of it.

For example, Google has a blog where it writes from time to time about ideas and concepts the site is thinking about unveiling (the latest is something called “Living Stories“), updates to its browser, Google Chrome, complete with screen shots, warnings of scams using Google’s name…the list goes on and on. When you’re as big as Google and have a lot going on, there’s a lot to blog about. Not that they need the SEO rankings, but a blog does help with SEO, and make users’ experience better by providing how-tos and useful information.

Want a lesser known example than Google? Coudal Partners, an advertising agency in Chicago, has a blog on its home page. Some people might wonder why they’d have a blog linking to interesting yet random articles and discussing various issues on the company’s home page. But not only does it make them stand out, fresh content helps their SEO ranking and the variety of creative topics their employees blog about show they get creative inspiration from just about everywhere at any place in the world (a post of theirs links to “Subway Architecture“. Cool stuff. ).

If your business starts its own blog, not only is it a great social Media tool that provides networking by way of commenting on other blogs, people commenting on yours and leaving links to your/their blogs, it can also spread the word about your company by doing the following:

Increasing your site’s SEO (if you don’t know what these three letters mean, they stand for “search engine optimization”): SEO is something that is hugely important to businesses. Whenever someone searches an online engine for a keyword relating to your business, you want your business to be at the top of the page. It can be used to gain search engine traffic for given keywords or search terms. Your blog offers the opportunity to promote your Web site for hundreds or even thousands of different keywords.

Search engines particularly like promoting blogs because they offer a large amount of content that is updated and added to on a regular basis.

Easy Access to Company news and Info: However, be careful you don’t blog in press release style – if a blog is all praise for the company, it doesn’t sound genuine. Blog about company news and info that is useful and interesting, just like Coudal Partners and Google. People would always rather read genuine, high-quality content instead of filler information, too.

Expanding your Reach: A blog is a great way to find new potential customers. Write about the niche your business caters to in the market, and anything interesting within that niche, and people looking for anything related to your business could find your blog in a search. Keep in mind that updating information on the blogs and blogging regularly can keep people coming back to your blog for information and could become customers, too. Regular content is imperative to the success of any blog. This content needs to be informative, accurate, and written in a way that will appeal to your visitors.

Creating Fun and Familiarity: Faceless corporate blogs aren’t that fun to read. Why? Besides being dry and boring, they also don’t feel very inviting. Going back to our point about high-quality content, familiarity is very important with content – if the reader can’t relate to it or feels it’s just a higher up writing from a press release, the reader won’t take it to heart. Keep this in mind, and make it work for your company by designating a person (not necessarily the CEO) or a team to do the blogging. If you read Google’s blog, you’ll see that even their posts have a bit of personality to them. It’s easy to do.

All in all, a blog on your company’s site might be worth looking in to – hey, it’s good enough for Google – and it may be the extra piece your company needs to separate it from the competition.

Becky Stockbridge is the Founder and president of iBec Creative.

It’s a tough year for young people looking for jobs.

This is making some of those people skip the job market altogether and start their own businesses.

Statistics show most start-up businesses fail within a few years. Combine that with little to no job experience and most college grads or young people are against the odds when starting their own businesses.

But despite the odds, some do end up pulling through.

BusinessWeek.com recently came out with their fifth annual Top 25 Entrepreneurs Under 25 list. Among the recipients, iBec Creative Founder and Creative Director Becky Stockbridge was on the list.

Stockbridge first formed her company, a website and traditional design services company, in May 2006, right after she graduated the University of Southern Maine. There were a lot of elements involved, and she soon hired a business coach, Jim Lyon, to help her sort everything out.

She never expected to get recognized by BusinessWeek by hiring a business coach – she just wanted to run a successful business efficiently.

“My top expectation with getting a coach was having someone that I could talk to about all of the questions that I regularly had about the business,” Stockbridge said. “It is nice to have another person that knows your business really well.”

The number one thing that coaching has taught her, she said, is the importance of measuring.

“One of the first things Jim helped me out with was measuring my leads, referrals, proposals and closes per week,” she said. “As soon as I started doing that, my numbers immediately started improving because I was able to track where I was.”

Stockbridge is convinced that business coaching helped iBec Creative get to where it is.

“I will always have a business coach for my company – it has been a huge help in getting me where I am today and in helping me stay focused on my vision for the future.“

Marketing and advertising is very important in business – you want your company stuck in potential customers’ heads, and still stuck there for repeat business.

Derren Brown is a hypnotist, and he plays a trick on two men who work in a big London advertising agency.

You’ll see in the video the great lengths Brown went to put a subliminal message in both their minds – which, unfortunately, we all can’t do – but it proves how the power of advertising and having something everywhere that relates to your company really is powerful.