Category: Press Release

Earlier this week, I was sitting at my desk with this email arrived from Feedspot:

Subject: 10|20 Marketing featured in Feedspot Top 45 Canadian Small Business Blogs

Hi Mark,

My name is Anuj Agarwal. I’m the Founder of Feedspot.

I would like to personally congratulate you as your blog 10|20 Marketing has been selected by our panel as one of the Top 45 Canadian Small Business Blogs on the web.

I personally give you a high-five and want to thank you for your contribution to this world. Our list is the most comprehensive list of Top 45 Canadian Small Business Blogs on the internet, and I’m honoured to have you as part of this!

Please let me know.

Best,

Anuj

How exciting is that? When we clicked through to the list, it turned out that our blog was 19th in this top 45, up there with Salesforce’s small business blog, and ahead of even Sage Accounting and Staples Canada’s blog. Quite the company we keep!

Feedspot bills itself as the “Internet’s Largest Human Curated Database of Bloggers and Podcasts.” They claim that their Media Contact Database can provide marketers with access to 250k active Bloggers, Podcasters and YouTubers in 1500 niche categories. Buying lists allows in your niche allows businesses to “you can focus on running your campaign.”

Pricing generally runs to USD$1 per lead, with custom pricing available for lists of 300+ influencers. 

When we asked Anuj to elaborate on what the criteria are for making this list, he replied:

The Feedspot editorial team extensively searched on Google, and social media websites to find the best Canadian Small Business Blogs and ranked them based on several factors:

1. 1. Blog content quality
   2. Post consistency
   3. Age of the blog
   4. The average number of shares on social sites for your blog posts
   5. Traffic to your blog and more.

And if you keep posting quality content regularly and get more shares on social sites, your rank will improve with time for sure.

It’s a challenge we accept and take head-on. Just look at our recent series for Small Business Owners. Or our discussion about the importance of dashboarding marketing results. And we have other series planned as well. So look for us to scale to the summit of this list over time! 

Thank you, Anuj and Feedspot, for finding us and welcoming our blog to your list. It’s greatly appreciated!

 

And just like that, it’s been five years for 10|20 Marketing. Five years of helping clients optimize their local presence. Five years of generating leads for B2B and B2C companies. Five years of growth – and fun.

While the last two years have been spent operating throughout the pandemic, we’ve watched our clients’ resilience and fight – which inspired us to play our part to help them through it. 

What started as an agency focussed on helping local businesses optimize their local presence has grown into a company that helps with more strategy and services – all at below market value rates. 

Specialists and Services

How have we grown? In two ways mostly. 

First, as we gained trust among our clients, we started getting requests to help them in other areas. Domains such as paid media management, social media marketing and website design and development are among them. So we went out to look for senior specialists who know their area of expertise like the back of their hands. People who also understand how to work with clients properly. So our team is made up of responsive experts our clients trust with projects, budgets and driving results. 

Five years later, we’re proud to say that these specialists are now a regular part of our service offering. 

Second, what started as a relationship with SweetIQ (now Uberall) has turned into multiple partnerships and agreements with other software providers. The idea? Use our agency’s buying power to deliver services our clients wouldn’t otherwise be able to access on their own. 

We’re still with Uberall for local listing management, but rather than offer just ten directories in our base package, we now include 40. And we offer that at not a penny more.

In addition, our recent agreement with Review Robin – check out our launch offers – gives business owners the opportunity to get more positive reviews for their Google listing, Facebook page or other review platforms. And we can also help clients show off their ratings with a fantastic little widget for their website – for just $19 a month. 

And we’re also now exploring low-cost ways to offer copywriting for content, including blog posts, business articles, guides, case studies, white papers, or maybe even e-books. We ask for a brief, and we’ll take it from there. 

A Personal Thought

The year ahead looks like an exciting one. And we’re equally excited about the next five too. If we outline our goals moving forward, what would they be? Actually, it’s quite simple. We’re always looking to build partnerships and grow our network. Which means that 10|20 Marketing is committed to:

• Bringing in new high-value, low-cost software services to benefit our clients;
• Growing our network of specialists to continue offering senior expertise across new disciplines;
• Building stronger relationships with our clients as we continue to deliver leads to their physical and online locations. 

On a personal level, I remember someone once telling me that you won’t know what your business is until it’s at least five years old. And I remember thinking that was wise advice. But now that we’ve reached this milestone, I can honestly say that I’m happy with where our business has landed. But I’m also happy to know it’ll evolve some more. Being defined is good. But being open to that definition changing is probably wiser. 

So how about we just take it five years at a time?

Review Robin review marketing software is now available via 10|20 Marketing

If you’ve been a part of our community for a while, you’ll know two things about us:

• We believe reviews and review marketing are essential pieces of the marketing puzzle for small businesses
• And 10|20 Marketing is a big supporter of all local businesses!

We’re so thrilled to announce that we’ve joined forces with Review Robin as an agency partner to make it easier for local businesses to get more reviews and get more visibility.

Review Robin allows us at 10|20 Marketing to help small businesses manage their reviews on popular review sites like Google, Facebook, Yellow Pages, and the Better Business Bureau. In other words, Review Robin helps us help you manage your online reputation even more seamlessly, something that can make or break your business.

“In less than 10 minutes a week, you can control your online reputation by sending simple follow-up review requests to your customers,” explained Julia McLaughlin, Co-Founder of Review Robin. 

“Review requests are sent via email or text message. The platform allows business owners to effortlessly collect reviews from customers who had a positive experience and privately manage unhappy customers to help prevent negative reviews from being posted publicly.”

Why are Reviews and Review Management Important?

“Everyone is shopping online every day,” said Julia. “When they’re looking, reviews are one of the first things they are influenced by.”

As we’ve reported before:

• 88 percent of consumers trust online reviews just as much as personal recommendations, and
• 90 percent of consumers read online reviews before visiting a business
• 10% of all website traffic is a result of online reviews

“Reviews are a powerful way to positively influence your next customer and allow you to build trust and credibility, and ultimately stand apart from your competitors online,” added Julia.

Review Robin doesn’t just help you generate more reviews; it also helps you manage your responses. Review Robin sends a simple “Thumbs Up” or “Thumbs Down” option to your customers. A Thumb Up will prompt them to leave positive feedback that gets publicly shared.

A Thumbs Down, however, would prompt them to privately share their negative feedback with you, allowing you to respond. Responding will enable you to hopefully resolve the issue at hand and set the tone for potential customers, demonstrating your business’s level of customer service.

Key points to remember for when you respond to reviews

When responding to negative feedback from a customer, keep in mind these four pointers from Julia:

• Remain coolheaded
• Do not be defensive
• Remember: The Customer is Always Right
• Volunteer to take the conversation offline

Once resolved, you may even be able to prompt the customer to leave you a positive review!

Ultimately, successful review management is about creating confidence in potential customers while acknowledging current ones and keeping them informed. 10|20 Marketing is thrilled to add Review Robin’s software to our lineup of service offerings, so we can continue to help local and small businesses across North America grow with affordable marketing services.

“Reviews is a numbers game. First, you have to follow up with all of your customers and ask for a review – and you have to make it simple for them.”

Send us a message today if you’re ready to start taking leads and turning them into returning customers. We’re here to help; and happy to get you set up with easy review management right away.

Well, here’s something we can all celebrate! Recent research by Zoho highlights Canadian business growth in 2021 and optimism for 2022, as current investments in digital transformations are paving the way for Canadian companies to build successful hybrid work models. 

The results of new research by Zoho Corporation are in our hands – and they reveal a surprising amount of growth among Canadian businesses in 2021. Despite the pandemic and the challenges it presented, most respondents indicated they experienced year-over-year growth in 2021.

The survey queried 501 business owners across Canada, and 72.5% had year-over-year growth in 2021. Even more said they had high hopes for the future, with 82.6 % stating they had optimism for growth in 2022.

“The pandemic has greatly accelerated digital transformation for many Canadian businesses, and they see fantastic returns on their investments. In addition, the innovative technologies they are embracing have enabled them to manage a distributed workforce like never before, which sets these businesses up for a new future of work,” said Chandrashekar LSP, evangelist for Zoho in Canada. “As business leaders and entrepreneurs continue to drive digitization and automation within their organizations, it is vital they determine how to best support their team with the tools they need, and collaboration and productivity tools like those from Zoho will be a key part of that.”

Key Survey Findings

The following are key findings from the survey, which should interest businesses of all sizes across Canada:

• 72.5% of Canadian businesses say their business is growing compared to 2020:
  • The Greater Toronto Area (GTA) leading the pack at 77.6%, 
  • Montreal lags at 66.7%,
  • And Calgary came in last at only 59.3%.
• 82.6% of Canadian businesses are optimistic about the next 12 months
  • That optimism is significantly less pronounced in Calgary, with only 67.9% stating optimism for 2022. 
• 66.3% of businesses say they are at the intermediate to advanced level of fully digitizing/automating their interactions, indicating a solid acceleration in digital transformations.
• Business apps are popular among Canadian businesses, with 56.9% of respondents using 1-40 apps and another 7.6% using more than 40 apps.
• 64.9% said low-code apps improve speed-to-market, and another 62.2% plan to use a low-code tool to build more apps.
• While 40% say they’ll maintain a work-from-home or hybrid model in the future, 33.3% of respondents overall said they’re unsure about where their employees will ultimately work. 
  • In Montreal, 50% of those surveyed plan on having employees return to the office full-time.
• Almost 1-in-5 people surveyed have relocated since the beginning of the pandemic.

“While some businesses struggled with the disruption of the pandemic, as we now see, a majority of entrepreneurs and business leaders continue to succeed in large part due to their use of innovative technology designed to improve productivity and collaboration,” said LSP. “Focusing their investments on apps that resolve operational challenges – including digitization and retention challenges – while delivering real-time insights for business decisions will be a critical step to their continued success as we further navigate through the pandemic.

Report Methodology

Conducted in October 2021 by Zoho Survey, this study contacted 501 individuals across Canada. Participants of the study included a range of business leaders from manager roles to the C-level at small and large enterprises across various industries.

About Zoho

With 50+ apps in nearly every major business category, including sales, marketing, customer support, accounting and back-office operations, and an array of productivity and collaboration tools, Zoho Corporation is one of the world’s most prolific technology companies. 

Zoho is privately held and profitable, with more than 10,000 employees. Zoho is headquartered in Austin, Texas, with international headquarters in Chennai, India. Additional offices are in the United States, India, Japan, China, Canada, Singapore, Mexico, Australia, the Netherlands, Brazil, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. For more information, please visit www.zoho.com/