All are free or can be scaled to your budget;

• Mail Chimp – Email Marketing
• Highrise – Customer Relationship Software (CRM)
• Basecamp (or Minivan iPhone App)
• Google Analytics
• Wufoo – Form Builder

Mail Chimp

Business email marketing at it’s best. What we particularly like about this monkey boy marketing tool is the analytics components. You can also see who opens what email and what links they click. That is priceless information.

Google Analytics

This is a web analytics solution that gives you rich insights into your website traffic and marketing effectiveness. If you don’t track the traffic and hotspots on your website, you’re dead. Learn to set up goals and funnels too!

Highrise CRM

You need to track your sales enquiries and know what stage they are at. This is also the place to note down key information they gave you through initial meetings or phone calls so you can make sure you provide them with what they need. Your database is gold and Highrise uses simple tags that ensure you split your database for appropriate marketing activities. This is better than the machine gun spray, likely to fall on deaf ears.

Wufoo Forms

Grow your marketing list and capture important contact information for marketing your products, services and events.  This form feeds straight into your Highrise CRM.

Basecamp

We always have a hive of activity around our marketing campaigns, with multiple people with various skills sets involved at different stages.   Managing a project often has loads of intricate steps. Before every project, we step through the process, including assigning tasks and setting important milestone and to-do lists.

Do you have sales or marketing services that you use from the Cloud? Share it with our readers below…

image via flickr by aussiegall

Despite all the talk about having a niche, many businesses still operate without one. Your must have something that sets you apart from anyone else either in product, distribution or promotion at all times. Doing this type of regular activity, protects your business from competing on price.

Now do not over think this. It does not have to be a new invention. It can simply be a new feature added to one of your current offerings. This is strategy to the core!

So below are three methods of uncovering your niche:

1. Call your top 6 clients.

They know what they want and need. Take detailed notes during the conversations and follow up on a least one idea that comes out in the conversation within a month. Keep the client involved in the progress too!

2. Do a ‘documented’ competitive analysis.

In a 3 column table, the headings should read ‘Unique Differences’ /’Risk Low -1 High -5′/ ‘Action’. List your competitors unique differences, the level of risk to your business and the actions you will take to combat them. Do a separate table for each client and review for possible feature combinations and brainstorm.

3. Compare against leaders in other industries.

If you are an IT company compare your product offering to a business in the restaurant industry or any category killer for that matter. It sounds odd, but list out all of your product or services for both you and them next to each other. You will be surprised how quickly a new offering idea can come to you and how creatively satisfying this can be.

Do this every quarter or half year and also pop it in your business plan.

If this is the first time you have done this, it will be a much needed reality check. I get to do this for clients all the time and it is quite scary how long they operate without a niche and wonder why is always comes down to price.

It is also advisable to have somebody outside of your business do this on your behalf and provide a report back to you. Business ‘owners’ and ‘founders’ in particular make ill judgements about the products or services and they never know that they are doing it

A recent trip to my beloved KikkiK last weekend appealed to a sentiment not often felt when hauling my 3 youngsters through a shopping centre – Peace. Normally running errands for this mother of 3 is nothing short of a nightmare.

According to Australian Bureau of Statistics, the 2007 birth rate was the largest recorded in history (ABS 2009). That was 19,400 more babies than the previous year. There is a mountain of mothers pushing around record numbers of three years.

Research has shown that women are the primary decision makers for consumer goods in 85% of households, and women make 75% of decisions about buying new homes, and 81% of the decisions about groceries.

I am not referring to ‘Parental Yielding’ (Berey & Pollay 1970) which is a term given when parents give into the child’s repeated and persistent requests. What I am saying is that even if the child’s nagging is not a direct influence in the purchase decision, making a visit to your business effortless for her will resonate long after she leaves the store.

However aside from the obvious products that families with small children need to purchase such as nappies or suitable cereal, many other businesses could benefit from catering for this portion of the population. What I am really trying to say is ‘ease of use’ for families. The moment we come through the door at Kikki.K, the shop assistant addressed my kids as if Brad & Angelina had just walked in the door. I was completely at ease while browsing and I bought a number of items because I had the time to flick through everything and fall in love. You can see my daughter in the picture above. She is a Kikki.K girl too!
Just look at iconic global brands MacDonald’s or Ikea. I would pay for Ikea’s momentary childcare – but it just so happens to be free. Businesses should incorporate such elements into their marketing plan now.

I would love to hear other brands that cater well for young families or how others can innovate in the comments section below.

How much do you spend on Yellow Pages advertising each year? More importantly, are you getting a return to justify that cost? If you are not reviewing your Yellow Pages ad results, you may be shovelling hard-earned dollars down the drain. News Flash: My Yellow Pages go straight into the recycling bin. I don’t even let them in the house. My 9 year old will never ever know what they are.

Here are some flaws:

1. Expensive. Depending on its size and location, an ad can cost around $7,000 per year. Add in extra for designing a customised ad per letter or bold font. It takes a lot of clients just to break even at those costs. I know a business who spent well over $20k a year.

2. Clutter. Where does your ad live? Depending on the size of your market, right next to dozens, perhaps even hundreds of your competitors. I said your competitors!

3. Lack of Engagement. In today’s world, it takes a variety of messages to reach your audience and motivate them to contact you. There is nothing personable about an ad in the Yellow Pages.

4. Difficult to measure. Yellow Pages ads don’t allow you to test different marketing approaches. Once you place an ad, you have to wait a year to test a new headline or message. And unless a client says they found you through the phone directory, you have no way of knowing the effectiveness of your ad.

5. Reach the wrong market. Find out who actually reads the Yellow Pages. Are they actually the people who would buy your product or service?

Did I say never use Yellow Pages ads? No – a well designed Yellow Pages ads certainly have a place in ‘some’ marketing programs. However – If you went through the global financial crisis and the only thing you left in your marketing plan was your Yellow Pages ad – you have a problem. Advertising and marketing are not the same. You would be totally surprised as to what half of that Yellow Pages budget could achieve elsewhere!

1) Why did you engage us in the first place or what was it about our message, sales representative, brochure, website that attracted you?
2) What do we do well or what keeps you coming back for more?
3) What could we do better?
4) Where did your last provider let you down?
5) If you were in our industry- What would you do or what would you change? Seeing your industry from an outsider’s point of view is priceless.
I have also used a website called Survey Monkey that shoots out easy to build surveys on your behalf for free. Be prepared though, the answers come back anonymous and can be quite brutal. Keep in mind – it just might save your business.

Just created a new website? Do a survey monkey blast to your favourite clients. Give them an incentive like a voucher to their favourite store. Give them a call beforehand so it doesn’t get lost in the spam rinse.
Most importantly, you will learn everything you need to know for your next strategy session and you clients will feel the love.

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Website Design: Every business needs a website these days. There are brilliant free options out there now, but learning every trick in the book is very time consuming. Bringing in a web designer to handle set up and marketing services for maintenance can free up time. Google also loves fresh content for its website rankings.

Blogging: While I believe you should be in control of your social media avenues, engaging a freelance writer to broaden your ideas/thoughts and broadcast them is better than never getting the words out at all. Choose somebody with experience within your industry.

Media Contacts & Press Releases: A marketing specialist can research and compile a list of specific media contacts, write a press release and email out releases along with follow up phones calls.

Social Networking: Providing regular, valuable content to your followers is key to making the most out of your social network sites. A marketing service can keep all your profiles up to date and respond to comments on your blog for maximum traction.

Assessing Advertising: Can’t get around to placing that ad or now what suits your niche? Marketing services can compare price, calculate reach and return on investment in a nice little report.

Marketing Research: All business projects should entail some degree of market research to maximise its success – though firms will often skip over it and wander why things don’t work out how they planned. Marketing services can interview members of your target market and source industry research you otherwise don’t have access too. New product innovations or often born in this space.

SEO: Outsourcing your search engine optimisation to a SEO specialist is a must and can ensure that your website ranks well for your niche. The cost is often less then you think.

Database Management: If you rely on a database of existing and past customers — or you’ve built a database of individuals you think could become future clients — you may want to have it updated. A Marketing service can update all the contact information and get the name of the correct personal.

Event Organisation: When it comes to planning an event, it’s worth bringing in a professional event organiser. Invitations, registrations and meal planning are just a couple of the related tasks and all are incredible time suckers. There is nothing glamorous about it. Even if you only do one event a year, an event organiser can handle all of the details.

Newsletter Management: Newsletters are a great way to stay front if mind and in touch with your existing clients, but companies struggle to find the time to create them. All parts of a newsletter can be outsourced. You may even consider outsourcing your internal newsletter.

Article Writing: Distributing articles about your company’s niche, linking to your site, and citing you as an expert, can help market your company online. You can engage a writer to create just a few such articles or a large batch, just as you might hire a freelance writer for another project.

Marketing Audit: Many marketing firms offer services that assess your marketing efforts. They are designed to highlight gaps in your current marketing and deliver a roadmap. You may be spending unnecessary time and money on things that are just never going to make an impact.

Customer Feedback: Conducting surveys or interviewing with your clients and compiling results are best outsourced, otherwise you are in danger of setting up and proving your own hypothesis and missing what you really need to hear. Consider doing this after every major implementation or project or all at least once on a larger scale.

Marketing Materials: Business cards, brochure ware, and other marketing materials are a necessity for most businesses, but contacting a graphic designer is only the start. A marketing specialist can also assess its purpose, relevance of images, copy and distribution to maximise the impact and save it from being placed in the bin.