4 Steps to Marketing Success

Hi, my name is Elizabeth Pampalone, and I wanted to talk to you today about marketing. Mark Missigman asked me to do a blog for him and I thought, I'm much better at speaking than I am at writing. So I am an entrepreneur. I'm a website designer by trade, and I've owned several companies over the years. I wanted to share about marketing and how I use that to help other small business owners in the North Florida area, and around the world. I have people that come to Jacksonville, Florida where I live to work with me because I do websites a little differently than everyone else. I actually build websites in one day. This week actually I have some people coming from Ohio, from Texas all over the place just to see me and do their website in one day.

So, I have a couple of things that I feel like are really important to your business. If you are a small business owner, or you were thinking about becoming a business owner, here are just a few things that you would want to do to diversify your marketing. I know there's a lot of people that say, "all you need to do is start with a Facebook page", or "all you need to do is start with an Instagram account" and in some cases that can be true. But in most cases, especially for service-based entrepreneurs, you really want to make sure that you are diversifying how you're marketing so that you're not trying to put all your eggs in one basket, and expecting that to give you all of your return. So the first thing I believe that every business should have is a brand. You might say "how can I do that if I'm doing multilevel marketing? Or maybe I'm working for a company that's already existing."

Or you're just maybe doing affiliate sales, because that's really big right now. Even if you're doing just one of those things. Or maybe you just say, "well I'm too small to have a brand. I don't really need a logo. My name is my logo, or I have a photo of my dog and that's my logo." Those things aren't really going to help you to be recognized as a solid foundation for the future. By brand I mean not just a pretty logo, your brand is so much more than that. It really is the feeling and the idea that a person gets when they just see your logo. Now, the logo is that trigger point. It's something that's visual, something that people can remember, but it's not necessarily the whole brand itself. So when you're thinking about starting a business or if you have a business already, and you don't have a brand, you really want to focus on that and see if you can get that piece completed. It's going to help you be recognizable to other people. It's going to help you to solidify your colors, your fonts, and all those little pieces that can really get annoying and varied in the future as you move forward with your business. And you want to be consistent, people love consistency. It helps them to realize that you are consistent and that you are going to do what you say you're going to do.

The second thing that I believe every business owner should have is a website. You want to have the brand first because that gives you the essence of your business. The feeling, the emotion, what you do for people, but in a visual format. Your website, now you might think, "well, I don't need a website. I have a website. I mean, I have a Facebook page, I have a Twitter, I have a whatever, Instagram", you still need a website and here's why. How many times have people asked you, or they will if you don't have a business yet? People are going to ask you things like, "Hey I saw that so-and-so got that information from you. Can I have that information?" Or, "where is your pricing?" Or "can I get a one-sheet from you?" They're going to ask you for information. "How does that work? Where can I get this information later after we have this phone call, or this conversation?" So, you're going to have all these questions that come up over and over. And it's going to be really, tiring for you to sit and repeat that all over and over. So what happens is when you have a conversation with someone or you're looking into a lead, and you're getting to know a lead, you want to make sure that they have this information available to them after you talk to them. In a format that's going to be easy for them to access, and easy for them to share with others. So maybe you do some work for them, they say that's great. Maybe they never even saw your website and they hired you on the spot. Perfect. Then hey want to tell their friends, this person did my pavers, or this person helped me with my website. Whatever it is. Then you're going to want that to be shareable with the world so that they can share it for you and kind of become your sales ambassadors. So your website is an important piece that a lot of people try and skip over and they don't really think it's important to every business, but it really is. And it can save you a lot of time. Your website should work for you. It shouldn't take away from your time. It should not make you work harder, it should work for you.

The third thing that I think every business owner should have in their marketing plan and their diversification of their marketing is an email list. Now, an email list is going to be important because when you have that website, you've got a space to say, hey put your email in here and I'm going to contact you later on. People do this, a lot of people do this. It's kind of insane. You think to yourself, I've never done that, but I bet you have, bet you they gave you something like, here's a how-to sheet on something, or here's a checklist on something. When they say, I'm going to give you this freebie, and you're like, sure here's my email if it's free. And that's what you're selling, is you're selling your email address for that freebie that you're getting. And so now you can use this as a business owner on your side of things, and you can actually go ahead and make a freebie. I do this with all my clients that come through our branding process. I help them make a freebie that they can give away on their website so that they can get those email addresses in return. This is a great way for you to connect with customers and people later on so that you are staying in contact with them, but you're not over annoying them or bombarding them. And also unlike social media, you actually have a direct connection with that person rather than it being some indirect connection where they may or may not check Facebook or Instagram every single day.

The fourth thing, we're on number four is networking. And I'm not talking internet networking, I'm not talking going on Facebook and answering questions in forums. I'm not talking about going on Reddit and doing all kinds of things. I am talking in person, good old fashioned rubbing elbows with the community networking. And I love this method so much, because it has brought me so much success it's ridiculous. So, it's very, very effective. And sometimes it seems like it takes time to get it rolling, to get it moving. But I will tell you this, the returns are incredible. So you want to make sure that you've got this as part of your plan. You don't want to neglect this. And you might think, well, I don't live in an area where networking is going to be effective for me. Or there aren't any groups around where I am. Oh my gosh, I can almost entirely bet you that there are. Even within, let's say, a 30-minute radius of where you live, or where you work, or whatever your central location is. There's about probably over 100 groups within your radius of 30 minutes from your house. And I'm not just saying that. I mean, I am giving ... This is scientifically proven. And I can tell you exactly where that would be unless you live in somewhere Montana, or Utah, or something that's really ... Where you have tons of land around you and it takes 30 minutes to get to the Walmart. So otherwise, even if you live somewhere that's a rural area, I bet you there are networking events you just don't even know about them. So one of the ways you can actually access a lot of these events .. There's probably a lot of events you had no idea were happening every week or every month. And that would be meetup.com. So if you're not familiar with meetup.com, you should go check it out. It is a free service. And as a small business owner, you can actually run a group. I know Mark is starting a group, which is so exciting. And you can run a group to bring people to you. So that you can educate them, and help them, and train them, and potentially have them as clients. Or you can actually go to these groups and find out these groups. A lot of them are free. A lot of them include food, you go to have lunch with people. Maybe you pay for your lunch, but you don't have to pay a meeting fee or anything like that. Some of them have meeting fees. It just depends on the group. But they are so, so effective. I actually did a little exercise, a little experiment for a whole year. I networked three times a day for one year. Isn't that insane? That was me, and I'm crazy, but it totally worked. It helped me to become well known in my community. And in my area in Northeast Florida, we have 3,500 events a month. A month. Isn't that insane. You could go to something, breakfast, lunch, and dinner, which I've done, breakfast, lunch, and dinner every single day for an entire month and still never get to all of them.

So, I want to encourage you to look back at your marketing, and if you're not doing any marketing, here's a plan for you. It's a very, very simple plan.

1. Make sure you have a good solid brand.

2. Make sure that you have a website that backs that brand up, that is really giving you that oomph behind all of that pretty stuff you've got going on. You've got all that education and that information that you want to share with people on your website. And that it's organized well. You probably want to work with a pro on this, I'm just saying because sometimes we don't organize things well when it's in our head. Even myself. And so, it takes someone else to look at it and go, I think you should change that a little bit.

3. Email is so important. Connecting with those people directly, building that list. You probably already have a list. Did you know that you can pull your list from your CRM, from your actual email account, you could just pull those people. You can pull ... And you could send them an email and say, are you interested in connecting with me on my email list and kind of test it out. So that a bunch of people may unsubscribe, that's fine. But you can kind of say, hey, if you want to stay on this list, do nothing. If you want to get off this list, here's a big old button you can do it. But anyway, so that's email. You want to make sure you try and gather all those email addresses that you have. You probably have a ton you didn't even realize. And put them all into your email marketing system.

4. In-person networking. Don't forget to check out meetup.com. And make sure that you are going out there, and putting yourself out there. I know it's really hard to do that sometimes, and creating a pitch is going to help a lot. So if you want to go online and look for some videos, I mean, I've done videos before on how to create your perfect pitch. It doesn't have to be long. I even have a freebie that you can download that's about creating your perfect pitch. It's kind of like a mad lib. You just fill in the blank, which is really fun. But you can create a pitch that's less than 15 seconds long, that really gets across what you're trying to say without being cheesy, or sounding weird, or going on forever like I'm doing right now.

I want to thank you so much for watching this video and reading this blog, so to speak. My name is Elizabeth Pampalone, and I am the Jacksonville Queen of Networking, or just the Queen of Networking, however, you'd like to say it, and I'm also the web design chick with a Website in a Day. Thank you so much for watching, if you have any questions about what I do or marketing, let me know!

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