Category: Small Business Tips

A high-performing landing page is essential for driving conversions and achieving your business goals. It’s where you make your first impression and persuade visitors to take the desired action – signing up for a newsletter, downloading an eBook, or making a purchase. This post will explore the five key elements of a successful landing page that can increase conversions and drive results.

Compelling Headline

The headline is the first thing visitors will see when they land on your page. It should be clear, concise, and attention-grabbing to encourage users to stay and explore further. A strong headline communicates the value proposition of your offer and sets the tone for the rest of the page. To optimize your headline, make sure it speaks directly to your target audience, highlights the benefits of your offer, and creates a sense of urgency or curiosity.

Engaging and Persuasive Copy

The copy on your landing page should be engaging, easy to read, and persuasive. It’s essential to focus on the benefits of your offer rather than just listing features. Use clear, concise language and break up long paragraphs with bullets or numbered lists to make the information more digestible. Address potential objections and questions your visitors might have, and consider using testimonials or case studies to build trust and credibility.

Visually Appealing Design

An aesthetically pleasing design can significantly impact your landing page’s performance. A clean, professional look with plenty of white space helps visitors focus on your offer and message. Choose images and visuals that support your copy and enhance your brand identity. Ensure your page is mobile-responsive and loads quickly, as slow loading times can lead to higher bounce rates and lower conversions.

Clear and Compelling Calls-to-Action (CTAs)

Your call-to-action (CTA) is the element that encourages your visitors to take the desired action. It should be prominent, visually distinct, and easy to find on the page. Use action-oriented language that creates a sense of urgency and emphasizes the value of your offer. For example, instead of using a generic CTA like “Submit,” opt for something more specific and enticing, such as “Get My Free eBook Now!” A/B test different CTA colours, placement, and text to determine what works best for your audience.

Streamlined User Experience

A seamless user experience keeps visitors engaged and guides them toward conversion. Your landing page should be easy to navigate, with a clear and logical flow. Ensure any forms are as short as possible, asking only for essential information to minimize friction. Additionally, ensure that external links are limited, as they can distract visitors from your primary goal. Finally, analyze your page’s performance using heatmaps and user recordings to identify areas of improvement and optimize your user experience.

So you want a high-performing landing page?

A high-performing landing page is critical to driving conversions and achieving your business objectives. By incorporating compelling headlines, persuasive copy, visually appealing design, clear calls-to-action, and a streamlined user experience, you can create a landing page that captures your visitors’ attention and encourages them to take action. By continually testing and optimizing these essential elements, you’ll be well on your way to maximizing your landing page’s performance and driving results for your business.

Looking for help developing landing pages? Ask us for a free consultation, and we’ll be sure to answer all of your questions.

Demystifying Google Analytics: Essential Metrics for Small Business Owners. This post helps readers understand the key metrics available via Google Analytics and explains what to look for to assess the effectiveness of your website. 

Google Analytics is a powerful tool that provides invaluable insights into your website’s performance and user behaviour. However, so much data available can be overwhelming for small business owners new to the platform. This beginner-friendly guide will focus on the most important metrics and reports to help small business owners understand and utilize Google Analytics effectively.

Users and Sessions

Users represent the number of unique visitors to your website, while sessions represent the total number of visits, including repeat visits from the same user. These metrics provide a basic understanding of your website’s overall traffic and can help you gauge the effectiveness of your marketing efforts in attracting new and returning visitors.

Bounce Rate

Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page sessions where users leave your website without interacting with it further. A high bounce rate may indicate that your content could be more engaging and relevant to your visitors or that your website has usability issues. Analyzing your bounce rate can help you identify areas of improvement to keep visitors engaged and encourage them to explore your site further.

Average Session Duration

Average session duration is the average time users spend on your website per session. This metric can help you understand your visitors’ engagement with your content. A longer average session duration typically indicates that users find your content valuable and spend more time exploring your site.

Pages Per Session

Pages per session is the average number of pages users view during a single session. This metric explains how effectively your website encourages users to navigate and consume your content. More pages per session indicate that users are engaged and interested in exploring your site further.

Traffic Channels

The traffic channels report in Google Analytics shows your website traffic sources, such as organic search, paid search, direct, referral, and social. This information can help you understand which marketing channels drive the most traffic and conversions, allowing you to optimize your marketing efforts accordingly.

Conversion Rate

Conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who complete a desired action on your website, such as purchasing or signing up for a newsletter. By setting up goals in Google Analytics, you can track the conversion rate for specific actions and identify areas of improvement to boost your overall website performance.

Behaviour Flow

The behaviour flow report visually represents how users navigate through your website, from the pages they enter to the pages they exit from. This report can help you identify potential bottlenecks or areas of confusion in your website’s navigation, allowing you to optimize your site structure and improve user experience.

Demystifying Google Analytics

Understanding and utilizing Google Analytics can be a game-changer for small business owners looking to improve their website’s performance and drive better results. You can gain valuable insights into your website’s performance and user behaviour by focusing on essential metrics such as users, bounce rate, average session duration, and conversion rate. By regularly monitoring and analyzing these metrics, you can make data-driven decisions to optimize your website and marketing efforts for maximum success.

Are you looking to gain more clarity with Google Analytics? Ask us for a free consultation, and we’ll be sure to answer all of your questions.

If you’re a small business owner and still need to begin using social media to grow your business, there is no better time than now.

Small businesses can certainly benefit from the power of a social media marketing strategy. In 2021, over 4.26 billion people used social media worldwide, and this total is still growing.

But growing your business with social media is much more than just creating an account on one platform and posting every so often. To impact your business’s success with social media, you must thoughtfully leverage social media. With a strategic and holistic social media marketing approach, you can drive leads, email marketing signups, brand awareness, engagement, and so much more.

So if you want to grow your business using social media, check out these helpful tips.

Drive and Nurture Leads

Not only can you drive leads with social media, but when done strategically, you can drive quality leads for your small business. You must have a clear brand image/voice to make this happen. When you have a clear brand image/voice, you can create content that’s relevant to your brand. Doing this will attract social media engagers that align with your brand. From here, continue to produce content that your audience will enjoy. Doing so should be simple if you commit to a clear brand image/voice. Include a call to action in your content, and before you know it, you’ve just brought in a ton of quality leads for your business.

Social media is also a great way to target leads for your email marketing campaigns and should be a part of every business owner’s marketing strategy. Email marketing allows you to share messages and important information with your audience that are hard to get across via social media. The great thing about social media is that it can attract leads to your email marketing contact list. Doing so will allow you to harness the full potential of both strategies.

As you build your social media audience, encourage your followers to subscribe to your emails with a CTA or even an incentive. An excellent way to do this is to take a valuable excerpt from one of your email newsletters and share it on your social media page. Let your audience know that social media is one of many places where they’ll receive valuable information from your business. Of course, you can also apply this thinking the other way. For example, include excerpts or essential updates from your social media in an email and encourage subscribers to give your business a follow.

Remember, getting people to opt-in to your email list is a big win, as they’re permitting you to reach them more personally.

Brand Awareness and Engagement

Social media is a great way to boost brand awareness for your business. With a solid social presence, you have more chances of reaching potential customers via social media. And the more people interact with your brand on social media, the more your brand awareness increases.

Increase brand awareness with social media by using your page to announce upcoming events, new product or service launches and important news about your business.

As you build awareness, watch for an increase in engagement. The more your audience engages with your brand, the more trust and loyalty you create, which is crucial for increasing sales. Essentially, the better your engagement, the more sales will grow.

So, how can you use social media to improve engagement? First, you have to play a long game. To enhance engagement levels from social media, you need to have a clear brand voice/image. You also have to post consistently.

And make sure to engage back with your customers! Respond to their comments, answer all direct messages and even ask for feedback!

Drive Traffic

You can also use social media to drive traffic to your blog, website or in-person business location. For example, add specific calls-to-action to your social media posts, encouraging your audience to check out your blog or website. And if you’re hosting an in-store event or promotion, post consistently about it on social media!

And remember, your Google Business Profile (Google My Business) listing is also a social network. So remember to share your content on your Google listing too!

Need Help Growing Your Business With Social Media?

10|20 Marketing can help. Our team of experts will put together a solid social media strategy for your business that’ll help you bring in great leads, more traffic and ultimately, more sales. We can also manage your social media pages for you. Ready to get started? Contact us today!

It’s no secret that your small business needs to invest in marketing strategies to keep up with the competition, generate leads and raise brand awareness. There are different routes your business can take with a marketing strategy, whether that be social media marketing, email marketing, search-based marketing, billboards, magazine ads or one of many other marketing strategies. But before you start with all these strategies, your business needs to answer an important question: How much should your small business marketing budget be?

Creating a small business budget for marketing is an essential first step to successfully growing your small business. However, you shouldn’t blindly throw money into a marketing campaign and hope it works. Your business needs to have a strategy. A plan will make developing an appropriate marketing budget for your business easier.

So how can you get started creating a budget for marketing that aligns with a good marketing strategy for your business? There are a few elements to consider, but these tips will help you get started:

Research Your Industry

A good rule of thumb for determining what to spend on your small business marketing budget is to look at what others in your industry are doing.

A BDC 2019 survey of Canadian businesses found that “Canadian small business marketing costs average just over $30,000 a year, while those with 20 to 49 employees spend twice that amount. Companies with 50 or more employees tend to have marketing budgets above $100,000.”

It’s important to understand that the BDC survey isn’t saying what your business should spend; this is just an average across Canadian companies. Research what other businesses in your specific industry are spending to gauge what an appropriate marketing budget would be for your small business.

Follow the Percentage of Revenue Rule of Thumb

Another way to scope what your small business marketing budget should be is through the percentage of revenue rule of thumb. A common practice across B2B companies is that you should consider spending 2% to 5% of revenue on marketing. However, for B2C companies, the percentage of revenue spent on marketing is typically between 5% and 10%. And 20-25% may be more reasonable for young companies just starting.

Your business should increase or decrease this percentage depending on your strategy and ROI.

Create a Strategy-Centric Budget

Having a good marketing strategy in place will help you avoid blindly throwing your budget away on marketing efforts that may or may not be effective. These four tips for setting up a marketing strategy can help create a more thoughtful marketing budget.

1. Start Small. If this is your first marketing effort, there’s no need to go all out. Stay away from the five-figure television or radio ads before and concentrate on building a manageable marketing strategy that works. Digital marketing is a great place to start. Digital marketing is known for having a high ROI and works as both an excellent long-term and short-term strategy.
2. Set goals. What is your objective with your marketing efforts? For example, do you want to generate leads, convert leads, increase total sales, or drive more in-person traffic? Establishing clear goals will allow you to determine how much of your campaign to dedicate to a specific effort. From here, you can measure your goals and see how your strategy performs to determine if you should increase or decrease your money spent on that specific marketing effort.
3. Track results. Track. Track. Track. Tracking results is the only way to see if you’re spending the right amount on marketing.
4. Adjust Your Budget as Needed. If something is working, and bringing a high ROI, dedicate more of your budget to that specific marketing strategy. Feel free to adjust your budget as you learn more about what’s working or not.

Create a Strong Strategy for Your Budget

The number one driving factor behind your small business marketing budget should be a strategy that works. Need help gauging what you should be spending on marketing based on your business’ marketing goals? Contact one of our digital marketing experts today for a free marketing consultation!

As a small business owner, you’re probably always looking for ways to connect with your audience. Building connection and trust with your audience are vital for businesses – specifically small businesses – because it builds brand loyalty. Email marketing is a great way to do this, and it’s something every small business should utilize in its marketing strategy!

We know that search marketing, social media marketing, content marketing and other popular digital marketing strategies are excellent tools for small businesses. But one of the oldest forms of digital marketing is email marketing. Businesses everywhere have used email for decades – for a good reason – because it works!

If you want a direct way to connect with your audience, raise brand awareness and educate your audience on your business’ upcoming events, offers and more, email marketing will be your small business’s best friend.

So how can small businesses get started with email marketing and use it to make an impact?

In our recent episode of A Little Marketing, we spoke with guest expert Erin Cafferty on the ins and outs of email marketing for small businesses.

In this episode, “Nurturing Your Audience with Email Marketing,” Erin discusses how small businesses can use email marketing to impact their audience.

Email marketing expert Erin Cafferty discusses best practices and how to get started.

Know Your Audience

You’ll need a contact list when you start an email marketing strategy for your small business. Having this list is the first step to identifying your audience. Depending on your industry, there are a few different ways you can build up this list. For example, if you have in-person customers who shop at your store, you can ask for their email when they make a purchase. Or you can allow customers to opt-in to emails when they visit your website. If you’re trying to convert, another approach you could take is offering a free trial and getting the lead’s email that way.

However you build your email contact list, know who the audience is on the receiving end of the email. Your email marketing strategy approach should differ depending on who your audience is.

“You must know where your audience is in the buying process,” Erin says.

Knowing who is on the other end of your email and where they are in the buying process will be the difference between sending newsletter-style emails and sales emails. If you want to nurture that connection and relationship with your audience, then newsletters or educational content are the way to go. On the other hand, if you’re trying to convert, then sales emails are the better route.

Erin says, “If your audience reads newsletters, that’s the place to be. If your audience is swiping delete on sales emails, that’s not the place to be. It’s important to understand the intricacies of what your audience is doing daily.” If you need clarification on what your audience wants from an email, then an email analytic tool can help you figure this out.

Make Connections and Build Relationships

Email marketing is powerful because it’s a direct way to nurture your relationship with your audience. When you send a customer or lead an email, you’re building upon your relationship while educating them on who your business is and what your business can do for them.

“Connection is my main goal . . . people have to feel a connection to the brand itself before they consider buying anything from you,” Erin says.

Use Email to Stand Out

Since an email goes directly to your intended audience, it’s a great chance to get your message across. But to get your audience to pay attention, you need to stand out. The email notification is your chance to do this. Since it’s a singular notification, you still need to compete with mass amounts of emails in the customer’s inbox. Have a strong subject line and intro to your email that stands out. So how can you do that?

“Instead of doing what everyone else is doing . . . I try to do the opposite. If your email looks like everyone else’s, there’s no incentive to click on it,” says Erin.

Want to learn how to set up an email marketing strategy for your small business? Check out our podcast with guest expert Erin right here! Or contact our team of digital marketing experts at 10|20 Marketing and find out how we can set up an email marketing strategy to bring your small business more leads, sales and traffic!

For business owners, your sales strategy is just as important as your marketing strategy. Especially in the online space, the two go hand-in-hand. That’s why it’s important to understand Business Sales 101!

We recently spoke with Sales Expert Meghan Lamle on our podcast, A Little Marketing. She shared with us some of her secrets to sales success.

So if you want to learn more about Business Sales 101 or need tips on how to level up your business’s sales strategy, watch our podcast, “A Little Marketing,” with Meghan Lamle. And, below are 11 tips that every salesperson should use to become a better seller.

Sales expert Meghan Lamle walks Nikki Gillingham and me through her thoughts on Business Sales 101. 

1. Sales is Communication

Forget all the old-school ideas around sales, such as “what to say” or “how to close.” The key to sales is communication. When you get better at communicating and executing a point so that a customer understands you, you’ll sell better. So speak in a way that’s interesting and easy to understand.

2. Your Relationship with Your Clients is Everything

As a salesperson, you must build relationships with clients. So often, sellers focus on attracting new customers. But don’t neglect building relationships with current clients! If someone enjoys doing business with you, they will want to do it again and again. Relationships with clients are how you build trust. Your clients need to trust you, which comes from helping them solve problems. Provide your clients with solutions, and you will gain their trust.

3. Tap Into Human Behavior

Sales Principles are rooted in human behaviour: fear and pleasure. Understanding this allows you to see where the client is coming from so that you don’t necessarily have to rely on scripts. Learn how to incorporate either fear or pleasure into your sales – this is how you get your client to close.

4. Know Your Clients

When speaking with a client, don’t be afraid to take notes. Remembering essential details about a client will help you build upon that relationship in the future.

5. Listen

Much selling is listening. Listen intentionally and let your clients feel heard. Listening is much more powerful than any “magic sales phrase” ever could be.

6. Build Your Sales Team Up

If you’re a sales leader, it is so vital that you’re building your sales team up, not breaking them down. As salespeople, rejection is a part of the job, but humans are not designed to hear no over and over. So if you’re not building your team up positively, you will not have a strong sales team.

8. Pay Attention to Detail

Pay attention to detail if you want to start a conversation with a potential client. Either notice what they’re seeing and build upon that or point out something personal about them that will help you create a sales conversation. Likewise, notice what others aren’t, and do your best to make the initial discussion unique.

9. Analyze the Sales Strategies that Work

When something works – explore it more profoundly. Ask: why does this work? Then, take that why and incorporate it further into your strategies.

10. Dollars Aren’t the Only Way to Measure Sales Success

If you want to measure your success as a salesperson or your sales team’s success, don’t just look at the dollar metrics. Success is often measurable by the sales cycle: How long from when an initial client conversation starts to close. You can also gauge sales success by confidence. A good salesperson can confidently explain what they do to anyone.

11. Sales and Marketing Go Hand-in-Hand

Marketing and sales aren’t a hand-off process anymore. With all the information that audiences constantly consume, these processes have evolved to become parallel. Therefore, your marketing team must collaborate with your sales team and vice versa. Because while a customer is gaining marketing information, they’re also entering the sales process. Marketing helps sales, and sales help marketing – it’s a crossover.

We love to talk abut sales! So if you like to discuss business sales 101 with us, do not hesitate to reach out!