Think about holding an appreciation event for your existing customers. This could be quite simple, such as an invitation to a Friday afternoon BBQ. After all, who doesn’t want to get out of the office a little early on a Friday afternoon? Hold it at a nearby park, have all your employees attend. Not only will your customers appreciate your invitation, it gives you an invaluable opportunity to network in a non-threatening atmosphere while people are relaxed.

You could even go one step further and hand address an invitation to them versus sending out a blanket email to everyone. The convenience of email is indisputable, but the resonance that a hand addressed invitation brings with it will outlast any email you will ever send. After all, when did you last get a hand addressed piece of mail? Do you recall the feeling you had when you received it and the anticipation with which you opened it? Don’t reserve hand addressing just for family occasions, extend that out to your most valued customers – an extension of your business family.

If you’re looking for more marketing tips ‘n tricks, we publish them monthly in our newsletter. Visit www.ThePartnerMarketingGroup.com, or opt into our monthly newsletter by texting the letters TPMG to 22828. Be sure to sign up so you can be on the receiving end of useful marketing information and yes, we do hand address our Holiday cards to show our customers that we do want to take the time with them.

Useful social data tools for your business   Spare me! No more about social media, please! Well, it’s here to stay, so rather than fight it, let’s get some real value out of it. Recently, Scott Gerber and members of the Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) identified their favorite social media tools to gain customer insight. Consider AddThis, which make it easy to add social network share buttons to your site. But what’s better is it comes with weekly emails with data about which products or services were shared or used most and more. You’ll find 10 very useful recommendations from the YEC in all!

Simple, powerful ways to make your hours ‘work harder’   Chris Brogan, in Entrepreneur magazine, offers some quick, simple ways to leverage your time. Consider his rule of thirds—spend 1/3 of your day prospecting, 1/3 on necessary business tasks, and 1/3 on supporting your existing customers. Most people, says Brogan, focus on one or two of these three essential areas and underserve the rest. Check out his article for more valuable tips and webtools to put more balance and impact in your day.

Hungry for free online marketing resources?   Marketing strategist Barbara Findlay Schenck serves up 10 shouldn’t-be-without web resources to know and use, including Hubspot grader tools to help you measure website marketing effectiveness; MailChimp for a small-scale (2,000 opt-ins/12,000 sends monthly) email marketing tool; and its primate neighbor, SurveyMonkey, a polling tool with free packages that permit you to survey up to 100 customers a month with up to 10 questions. Learn more about these and seven other potent resources ready to go to work for your business.

For more marketing tips, visit www.ThePartnerMarketingGroup.com, or opt into our monthly newsletter by texting the letters TPMG to 22828.

Taking an interesting angle to a sometimes (Okay, I’ll say it) BORING topic such as accounting software is easier said than done. The one thing holding writers back? Fear! Come on, you can admit it. The easy way is to go that generic and boring route, but approaching it with some creativity is risky and even worse, it makes things a bit more personal. But this personal and creative approach to writing copy will entice people to keep reading. Readers will perceive your sense of humor and sense of self, and if you’re tactful and honest, there’s really nothing to be afraid of! Readers will respond with more interest resulting in more loyalty toward pursuing a business relationship with your company.

And worst case scenario- If they don’t like what they see, then what have you really lost? Someone who prefers to read boring and stale information about accounting software? Trust me; there aren’t many of those out there!

Please share your writing fears with me by commenting below or emailing me at Bethany@thepartnermarketinggroup.com. Although I don’t have a degree in Psychology, I do have one in English Communications so will hopefully steer you in the right direction.

For more marketing tips, visit www.ThePartnerMarketingGroup.com, or opt into our monthly newsletter by texting the letters TPMG to 22828.

1. You need to have 3 recommendations in order to have a complete profile. Through the recommendation tool, send an email to customers, colleagues or vendors that you have worked with. Once they have written a recommendation for you, you will have a chance to review it before posting it to your profile.
2. Be sure to add Skills & Expertise regularly to your profile. This is a newer feature to LinkedIn and it is also a tool that will make your profile more searchable. Think of these skills as “keywords” on your profile. Simply select as many skills as you like to represent what you do, what community you work in, and where you have expertise.
3.  Add your company website, blog links and Twitter link to your profile. You are entitled to have 3 website links on your personal profile and a link to your Twitter account if you have one. These can create some good inbound links for your company and blogs that you are participating in, not to mention bring more awareness on how to stay connected to you.

Keep in mind that completing your profile is not something you should only do once. You need to make a note on your calendar to take a look at your profile and update it on a monthly basis. Making small updates such as adding recommendations, adding skills, or updating your summary can keep your profile from going stale. LinkedIn is a great business tool where your business contacts go to find out more about you – what are you showing them?

For more marketing tips, visit www.ThePartnerMarketingGroup.com, or opt into our monthly newsletter by texting the letters TPMG to 22828.

The same logic can be applied to the how you market your solution in the cloud. Too many companies focus on selling the “Cloud” without focusing on what problem they are trying to solve with it. The focus shouldn’t be about buzzwords and technology. While it is necessary to educate customers when making a decision about your solution, they are more concerned with solving a problem with the best method for them than to understand every nuance of the technology. The focus you should keep when marketing your solution is using the “Cloud” simply as the means for delivery. That way your customers are less likely to get lost in the nitty-gritty of the architecture and deployment.

When you focus on understanding the need of the customer and design a unique solution that suits their needs rather than a one size fits all, then you can explain the value of the solution and the services they are getting. If you both focus on the supporting infrastructure, this value ends up being missed.

Here are a few strategies to follow for marketing the solution, not the technology:

• Highlight the success of implementing the solution(s) and what it can do, not the fact that it is in the cloud.
• Educate customers about the cloud as a secondary element of your solution not the primary focus. This will help them to make an informed decision.
• Listen to the problem of the customer and propose a solution to fix, not a technology.

For more marketing tips, visit www.thepartnermarketinggroup.com, or opt into our monthly newsletter by texting the letters TPMG to 22828.

• Survey your Customers: How do people interact with you online and how do you in-turn interact with them? Are you active on social media? If so, it may be good to run a poll with your customers and/or prospects to learn more about what they’re looking for online. Think outside your internal box and imagine how your website can answer questions before they’re asked or provide resources that are needed daily. This can really set your website apart from your competitors.
• Research Current Mobile Usage: On Google Analytics, you can see who accesses your site through mobile devices as well as what pages are viewed. Use this information to help format your site for those mobile users. One thing is for sure, mobile devices are not going away anytime soon.
• Stabilize your Visual Components: Visual components are extremely important on your website, but if you’re all over the board and don’t have pictures or media that align with your copy, then you risk confusing website visitors and forcing them away. Before you start your website project, it’s also important to define what type of components you want to focus on, such as infographics, typography, links, video, imagery, and photography.

The Partner Marketing Group can help you refresh your website through fresh website copy and/or by leveraging our virtual webmaster services. Please contact us with your questions.

For more marketing tips, visit www.thepartnermarketinggroup.com, or opt into our monthly newsletter by texting the letters TPMG to 22828.

• 79% use sign-up forms to grow lists
• 71% provide unsubscribe links in their newsletters
• 72% use a confirmed opt-in subscription model

Through the use of sign up forms and including appropriate subscription links for opting in or out of email correspondence business are reaching their target audience more effectively.  A large portion of the respondents in this report indicate that their emails are reaching their audience with very little complaints of spam.

• High Deliverability (62%)
• Low Complaint Ratio (69%)

One of the areas that still need attention is in the list development and maintenance. This report is showing that most businesses are doing little to reach out to inactive subscribers only 36% are re-engaging past subscribers. It also shows that only 38% of the companies are purging outdated contacts that they haven’t opened an email in the past 6 months from their list.

Email Marketing isn’t about having a large email list and peppering it with non-targeted information. It is about growing your list by though sign up forms, social media sharing and other relationship building activities. By adding the right contacts instead of just any contacts you will get a better response from your email marketing campaigns by reaching the appropriate audience with the correct message.  As an exercise look through this report and see how you would answer the questions. You may be surprised at the information that you find.

For more marketing tips, visit www.thepartnermarketinggroup.com, or opt into our monthly newsletter by texting the letters TPMG to 22828.

Firstly understand who you are creating the content for. The individuals who are searching for information are probably not your target audience but are clearly influential consumers of the information you make available. They’ve been delegated the task of discovery and it is your job to provide them the information they are looking for.

To start with you content needs to be educational in nature and non-threatening, i.e. do not put it behind a huge form that requires a lot of information. In fact, give it away and then build trust with that prospect by providing additional pieces of educational information for them to consume and share.

Where do you start with what you need to create? You probably have a lot of it already created.

• Identify what you already have inside your company by doing a content audit.
• Identify how old the content is and whether or not it is still relevant.
• Determine if you can refresh it quickly or whether it needs to head to the recycle bin.
• Refresh your content:
  • make it shorter and to the point
  • provide a voice over
  • include social sharing so it can be shared with others
  • optimize it for both your audience and the search engines

I recently heard in a webcasts that search engines are caching websites every 3 weeks on average. Whether or not that is correct it is important to remember that producing relevant, optimized content on a regular basis will keep you in front of the prospects you are trying to reach.

For more marketing tips, visit www.thepartnermarketinggroup.com, or opt into our monthly newsletter by texting the letters TPMG to 22828.

1. Local Websites: First thing is first, you need to make sure your website speaks to the locality of your business. Optimize with geographic keywords and make sure to include name, address, and physical address on every page.
2. Mobile Accessibility: Mobile users impact local search engine ratings because searches are made locally, as they’re on the go. Make sure to tailor your website and/or web parts for mobile users, making it easy for them to access the information they need.
3. Local Search Registrations: Sign up for the big wigs- Google, Yahoo, and Bing, but don’t forget the little guys. The more places you’re registered, the higher your local search ranking will go.
4. Tracking and Reporting: Online analytics can help you accurately track and report on your local web strategy. Don’t forget to also track phone calls within this effort.

The Partner Marketing Group can help you achieve higher Search Engine Optimization through fresh website copy and/or by leveraging our virtual webmaster services. Please contact us with your questions.

For more marketing tips, visit www.thepartnermarketinggroup.com, or opt into our monthly newsletter by texting the letters TPMG to 22828.

The post How to Master the Design of Compelling Calls-to-Action gives 8 examples like:

• Size – The size of the action item should be relevant to the content around it.
• Shape – Don’t limit yourself to squared off buttons.

After you look at that blog post you may be asking yourself “how I can take advantage of CTAs?” Since you are already familiar with your own content you may overlook certain opportunities to add in a call-to-action. Get a fresh set of eyes, such as another team member, to look at your marketing efforts to give you direction on where you could add in CTAs.

For more marketing tips, visit www.ThePartnerMarketingGroup.com, or opt into our monthly newsletter by texting the letters TPMG to 22828.