Archives for May 2017

What Is a CRM and Where to Get Started

May 30, 2017 by Dabrian Marketing Group Leave a Comment

CRM may be an acronym you’ve heard floating around before – but what is it? CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management, basically it’s how you can keep track of data on past, present, and potential future customers and log interactions with them whether it’s through, emails, phone calls, mailings and so on.

Why would you want to have that information? With information like that you can manage how to regain former customers, retain customers, and gain new ones. You’re probably starting to see that a CRM is an integral tool for sales and marketing for businesses and in fact it is.

You could start a CRM system by collecting and entering customer and potential customer information into something like an excel sheet but that can become tedious work that wouldn’t be very helpful in the long run. Fortunately, there are a ton of CRM systems out there that can help.

There are a few helpful things to keep in mind when picking out a CRM:

Is It Automated?

As in does it integrate with any platforms you are already using such as your email and social media? This is useful because it will save you or your employees time from having to manually enter every bit of customer information on your own.

Is It Mobile?

Can you access your customer relation information on the fly? This is helpful when you meet a new prospective customer and want to get them in the system right away or access all the information about a customer out in the field without having to log into your computer.

Is It Usable?

A major factor to consider: is the program easy to use for you and your employees? A big reason for businesses leaving their CRM to the way side is not knowing how it functions.

However, searching through all of the CRM options out there can be overwhelming in of itself. I’ve picked a few of some of the best ones out there to get you started.

SalesforceIQ CRM

One of Salesforce IQ’s features is the automatic collection of customer data such as emails, calendar events, and smartphone calls so you can spend more time focusing on the client and less time on data entry. You can also share information with other employees in order to collaborate when communicating with customers. It also creates reports to keep you on track and focused on the most promising sales. It’s mobile so you can work from anywhere and streamline your workflow.

Prosperworks

If you use G Suite then Prosperworks might be the best option for you. It was made for G Suite and seamlessly integrates with G Suite’s apps such as Google Sheets, Docs, Slides, Calendar, Inbox and Gmail and automatically syncs collected information from these apps. It will also remind you when you are not following your schedule to follow up with customers or potential customers. And whenever you update your Google contact information, it will roll over to your CRM.

Hubspot CRM

Hubspot has a great dashboard to gain visibility into what’s going on in your CRM to keep everything organized. You can also swiftly sort customers by a number of filters to keep track of what’s happening. Hubspot also syncs information across several platforms for email, social media, and phone calls. One of the best things about this platform is that it’s free!

Do you use a CRM platform? If so – which one? What are some of the benefits and pitfalls you’ve experienced with a CRM platform? Let us know in the comments.

5 Plumbing Marketing Ideas to Grow Your Business

May 22, 2017 by Daniel Laws 19 Comments

Within 5 miles of our office, there are 12 plumbers. All of which appear in the local search results, but none of them clearly differentiate themselves from the others. While plumbers may be experts when it comes to fixing broken pipes and unclogging drains, many fall short of marketing their business to allow their customers to find them. Get your plumbing business flowing in the right direction with these 5 marketing strategies.

#1 - Tighten The Bolts of Your Brand

You can’t fix a plumbing issue without tools, and you can’t build a business without a brand. The building and foundation of your brand is essential for success and local awareness. Define your plumbing company by clearly stating what makes your organization different and create a unique value proposition that will be the foundation for your plumbing marketing. Your brand must be consistent everywhere – from print to digital marketing. Brand guidelines, a set of standards for the design of documentation, signage, and any other form of other brand identifiers, will help to bring consistency.

#2 - Local SEO: Be the “Local Plumber Near Me”

When it comes to search engine rankings, every business strives to be #1. What many don’t realize is that due to Google’s personalized algorithm, the top organic search results (for service related searches) tend to be businesses listed on Google maps.

To ensure your spot in the local pack, the content on your website should be specific to your service region and consistently show your name, address, and phone (NAP). In addition to on your site, this information should also be listed on your Google My Business. You should also include all of the services you offer within the region. This will help you to dominate in mobile searches and acquire positive reviews that will help you to stand out from the crowd.

You’re an Expert? Prove it With Plumbing Videos

Videos are an effective plumbing marketing tool because they can be placed on your website, local listings, social media, paid search, and more. Videos are a great way to engage your audience and provide relevant information. Create simple “how to fix” videos for minor issues, such as a clogged sink. You want to provide your customers with tips they can do themselves, without giving away everything and the kitchen sink.This will establish yourself as an plumbing expert and build your audience’s trust. Building their trust will improve new customer acquisition, extend brand reach and visibility via social sharing, link earning, and word of mouth, and increase your current customers’ willingness to give positive reviews and testimonials.

Target Your Customers With Paid Search Campaigns

When I search “plumber near me”, I see about 4 different plumbing companies running paid search campaign which appear before the maps and organic search. Paid search can be specific to your service region, banners, videos, text, gmail and mobile. It allows your company to be present when consumers are searching for your services. With remarketing, you stay top of mind as they make a purchasing decision.

Measure Campaigns and Adjust Your Plumbing Marketing

Just as you would test a pipe after fixing it, you need to make sure your marketing efforts are working. Invest in the measurement of marketing campaigns to reallocate budget to successful campaigns. Just putting Google Analytics on your website isn’t going to collect the necessary information. Most of the time, consumers are going to call you so you’ll need call tracking connected to Google Analytics and your marketing efforts. Look at the entire customer process and what marketing tactics impacted the decision. This will give you more context to make budgeting decisions.

Have a leak in your plumbing marketing strategy? Let us know in the comments below, or contact us today! For more information, subscribe to our newsletter.

How SEO Can Help Your Local Business Compete With Bigger Brands

May 15, 2017 by Dabrian Marketing Group Leave a Comment

In the story of David and Goliath, David (not very big) is faced with the daunting task of killing Goliath (the name speaks for itself). With an effective strategy and persistence, David accomplishes this feat over his much more powerful adversary.

In today’s economy, your local business probably feels a lot like David: small and up against much larger foes such as national brands. But, fear not! With a well-thought-out SEO strategy, combined with hard work and dedication to the tactics listed below, your small business can walk amongst the giants.

Local SEO: David Has Home Field Advantage

If you’re going to battle, you’d ideally want it to be in an area you’re familiar with. The same is true for your small business. If you’re going to compete with bigger businesses, you have to do it in your local market. While bigger companies surely carry more notoriety, local SEO will prevent your business from going unnoticed.

When it comes to Local SEO, there are two tactics you need to cover: on-site and off-site.

Tactic #1 - On-Site

On-site local SEO is essentially optimizing your website (hence “on-site”) from a local perspective. To do so, I suggest covering the following:

Include Your NAP (name, address, and phone number) on every page of your site.
Create localized content.
Include local signals within your tags, titles, descriptions, and headers whenever possible, while sounding natural.
Add schema tags to your website.

Tactic #2 - Off-Site

Off-site local SEO deals with factors that influence your website’s performance that are not directly on your website. A huge factor for visibility within search engines is local listings. Being identified or “listed” accurately and consistently within local listings will send local signals about your business to search engines. This will allow you to appear higher in the search engines in your geographic area.

For example, when I conduct a Google search in Reading, Pa for “Italian Restaurant,” local restaurants appear as opposed to bigger chains.

On top of that, these local listings appear above the organic search results. That means that if you’re listed in them, you could be the first thing your searchers see.

Tactic #3 - Local Link Earning: Get The Crowd Cheering For You

When you’re in a competition, positive support from those around you can help. The same applies in the digital realm. In order to gain recognition and increase reach and visibility within the local market, you’ll need to place a heavy emphasis on local link earning (also known as link building). Link earning is a crucial part of any SEO campaign; but, the strategy is different for local businesses.

As opposed to going after major brands and influencers to obtain links like national brands do, local businesses should target the influencers within their community. These include:

Local Chambers
Local Online Directories
Local News Stations
Other Local Business
Local Bloggers

Tactic #4 - Social Media: There’s Strength in Numbers

Social Media has continued to grow in popularity and influence in digital marketing. For SEO, specifically, a social media presence is now an important ranking factor. Search engines want to see you engaged with your audience, having an active conversation, and disseminating relevant content.

As opposed to other digital marketing tactics, Social media is not all about metrics – it’s about relationships. This is where most big bands miss the mark. Many major companies are more concerned with just having high-level brand accounts that all speak the same (non-personalized) message.

You know your local audience better than the big brands, so speak to it! Craft messages they’ll relate to and connect with other local accounts. The more locals that share your social posts and the more local accounts that engage with you, the more buzz you’ll generate within your area. This will help boost your local positioning within search results, too.

Local businesses tend to stick together, so it shouldn’t be difficult to gain support from others. You know what they say: “The more Davids, the better.”

Moral of This Local SEO Story:

With an effective SEO strategy intact, combined with a dedicated team, your small business can go toe-to-toe with the Goliaths of your industry. Oh yeah, and that all Davids are bound to be successful.

What are the biggest issues your small businesses face? Let us know in the comments below! To set up a consultation, contact us today!

By: David McDowell

Your Business Technology as Marketing – Mike Sutton, Guest Blogger

May 9, 2017 by Dabrian Marketing Group Leave a Comment

Check out this educational guest-blog post and video from Mike Sutton at TS Tech.

Would you go out to a business mixer or shoot a promo video in a dingy old shirt? Of course not, because you know your appearance sends a message about your professionalism and competence.

But what about your operations process? Or your technology infrastructure?

Everything you do sends signals to your market and the people around you. Sometimes, like with your marketing and sales messaging, those signals are carefully crafted and intentional. But other times, they are not as closely managed.

When you communicate, it’s not just the content, but also the timing, style, and medium that signals your professionalism, responsiveness, and attention to detail. Consistency and clarity in your follow-ups say a lot about your quality and competence as a service provider. Your efficiency shines through when you can address inquiries quickly and accurately the first time.

Your internal operations process and technology integration can have a huge impact on your ability to do these things. I’m going to touch on three areas where your operations and technology act as marketing for your company.

Client Touch Points

Do you have a way to easily and consistently follow up with clients and prospects that serves to keep them informed, feel connected to the process, and helps to effectively manage expectations? Automated status updates to clients and follow-up reminders to you triggered by relevant events and timing can reinforce the appearance that you are responsive and competent. This kind of effective communication will add value and build relationships and trust in a way that can’t be matched.

High Quality Integrated Experience

If your ordering, customer service, billing, and delivery systems are properly integrated, it will not only make your life easier, but it will impress and satisfy your client’s desire for ease, convenience, and accuracy. Proper integration reduces mistakes and workload. This will not only make you more profitable, it will help you keep costs down and retain clients.

Efficiency Is a Win-Win

Technology is a resource multiplier. By properly equipping your team and integrating your systems you will be able to do more for a bigger market with fewer people. You keep costs down and deliver a high quality product or service. And your clients get fast, reliable, consistently good service. This creates a loyal fanbase and good word-of-mouth marketing.

Business Technology Is a Tool

When effectively implemented, technology will improve quality, productivity, consistency, and efficiency in a way that supports your strategic vision, goals, and objectives. If it’s your goal to be a budget solution provider, the efficiency of properly integrating your systems will be invaluable. If you desire to be a best-in-class provider and a price leader, leveraging your technology to deliver a top-notch, fully integrated client experience while maximizing quality and profitability will be invaluable to your organization.

The bottom line is that what you do and how you do it will deliver more impact than what you say, so make sure that your actions match your words. If you’re out there saying you’re the best in your industry, your infrastructure and process had better back that up.

If you’re looking for additional ideas on how to digitally transform your business, please check out my 20-minute video presentation on Digital Transformation for your business. I share over a dozen case studies and ideas to digitally transform your business that I’ve either used personally or with my clients to increase market share, expand to new markets, or maximize profit, revenue, and opportunity. You can find the video at tst.io/dabrian.

DaBrian Marketing Redesigns Grove Dental Group’s Website

May 2, 2017 by Dabrian Marketing Group Leave a Comment

Visitors to Grove Dental Group’s new website benefit from improved usability as well as enhanced accessibility to research and register for dental services.

March, 2017 (Reading, PA) – In coordination with managing their digital marketing to reach new patients, DaBrian Marketing Group noticed that Grove Dental Group’s website needed a new layout and structure to rank higher on search engines and improve usability.
The website’s new design and architecture improves both the business’ visibility on search engines and allows customers to easily learn about Grove Dental’s services. This involved organizing the content of Grove Dental’s former website into an updated structure. This enhanced the indexability and significantly improved the value of Grove Dental’s content to search engines. Overall, users on major search engines, such as Google and Bing, are now more likely to find and visit Grove Dental’s website.

Visitors to Grove Dental’s website also experience an increase in speed when they navigate through pages. The new, simplified design decreases the time that is required for each page to fully load. After a visitor finds the service in which he or she is interested, a newly created registration form allows that person to immediately contact Grove Dental’s staff and schedule appointments. DaBrian Marketing Group placed these registration forms on the new website to expedite people’s next step from learning about Grove Dental to actually requesting their services.

Megan Link, Director of Projects, Marketing, & Financial Operations at Grove Dental expresses excitement over the improved capabilities of the website and DaBrian Marketing Group’s services:

“Partnering with DaBrian was a no brainer for us and we couldn’t be more pleased with the service they provide. DaBrian is like your best friend, always has your back and looks out for your best interest. They are really an extension of our team, and the transition was smooth and effortless on our part. Our new website is living proof of my statement. They knew when to ask questions about what we wanted, but really I had very little to do with the new website other than giving the final a-ok. I recommend DaBrian to any business looking to change their online appearance.”

Grove Dental’s precise branded guidelines made the redesign of their website a simple project without complications. Grove Dental concretely identifies its brand – from the personnel’s attitude and level of patient-engagement to the overall mission of the company. This allowed DaBrian Marketing Group to create a layout and structure that effectively communicates Grove Dental’s digital brand to potential patients. This redesigned website complements the organic (search engine optimization or SEO) and paid (pay per click or PPC) search engine marketing efforts as well as the social media marketing efforts that DaBrian Marketing Group continues to perform for Grove Dental.

Visit Grove Dental Group’s website to experience the latest web design project by DaBrian Marketing Group.

About DaBrian Marketing Group, LLC
Founded in 2008, DaBrian Marketing Group, LLC is a full-service digital marketing agency, focused on providing original and strategic digital marketing solutions for businesses, that want to create digital awareness, increase return on investment (ROI), and identify insights that not only will help achieve goals but will also help to increase your business’s efficiencies. DaBrian Marketing Group’s services include email marketing, digital branding, search engine optimization (SEO), Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising, web design, web analytics, social media marketing, and more. Company headquarters is centrally located at 500 Penn Street, Suite 201, Reading, Pennsylvania 19602. For more information about DaBrian Marketing Group, visit dabrianmarketing.com or call 610.743.5602.

Humanizing B2B Marketing for Better ROAS

May 1, 2017 by Daniel Laws Leave a Comment

A core component of producing a humanized or relatable B2B marketing strategy is to first measure that strategy, correctly. Recently, business-to-business (B2B) marketing has focused on content marketing, marketing automation, and social media management to grow a business’ return on investment (ROI). While measuring ROI is an effective way to measure success, it’s about time we shift our mindset to think more about return on ad spend (ROAS).

Focusing on the the individual advertising tactics rather than the strategy as a whole allows you to more precisely analyze the results of your marketing efforts – including advertising campaigns. This also helps you to humanize our B2B marketing initiatives by understanding exactly what kind of marketing efforts work. These include behavior-based tactics such as:

Responsive web designs
Unique and helpful content
Consistent interactions on social media
Personalized and attentive client relationships.

Although you’re prospecting another business rather than an individual (B2C), we cannot forget the fact that the decision-makers are still “normal” customers. How are you going to speak to them to build the relationship between their company and yours?

Commit to Responsive Web Design

When we envision a person in upper management, we typically see them sitting at his or her desk all day long. This is never the case. Business decision-makers are on the move and will most likely visit your website through a mobile phone to find more information about you.

Your website must be mobile friendly in order for them to clearly review your products or services and understand how your business is different from the competition. The mobile experience must quickly provide that information. It must be easily read by the most popular smartphones of your target audience. In fact: 62% of B2B marketers planned to invest in responsive web design in 2016. Invest now to be ahead of your competitors in the rest of 2017.

Attract New Customers with Unique Content

Craft your copywriting, design, and imagery to appeal to your potential customers while enforcing your brand on every page. Not only must the content be written in the most common languages of your target audience, but it must also be accessible with Google and Bing.

To market your written content and business, it’s recommended to assist your content marketing efforts with SEO and Paid Search (PPC) advertising to increase awareness of products and services. Follow the SEO best practices and work with a Google AdWords partner for optimal results.

Socialize with Business to Business Customers

Friends, family, and customers all use social media for leisure and business purposes. With the growth of social media management, potential customers are looking for your business to provide helpful information about your industry along with being someone they can talk to. Socializing with them provides you with an opportunity to demonstrate expertise and reinforce your brand’s value.

Dedicate time to sharing content on your personal and business social media accounts. This will prove your expertise and help you to stay top-of-mind. You can also advertise products and services on targeted social media networks. Facebook and LinkedIn ads have shown the best value for B2B social marketers.

Nurture Individual Accounts with Account-Based Marketing (ABM)

Lastly, marketing automation can create consistent interactions with potential customers and provide you with the ability to nurture existing clients when executed appropriately. Take a look at this annual trends report from Econsultancy and Adobe for quantitative evidence.

For example, the use of account-based marketing brings several departments together to keep your current business while obtaining new prospects simultaneously. ABM is a business-to-business strategy to drive collaboration between business marketing and sales teams by focusing on building individual client accounts to drive revenue. Pardot and Marketo have templates to help you to nurture individual accounts and grow your revenues.

Your Business is Made Up of Hard-Working Humans. Show It.

There are many tactics to attract new customers for any business, no matter if you’re B2B or B2C. It’s just important to keep in mind that when marketing to other companies, there is still an actual person on the other end, not just another business. Be relatable to the people at those other companies and understand their behavior and motivations to see profits on your own end.